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| Taliban leave
legacy of smashed statues KABUL, Dec 2: A pile of masonry in a dusty storeroom of Afghanistan’s national museum is all that is left of ...more Bangladesh Parliament DHAKA, Dec 2: The Parliament today, amidst opposition boycott, passed a bill seeking to withdraw special.....more Sri Lanka rejects COLOMBO, Dec 2: Hardening its stance against the LTTE in the final lap before Wednesday’s ......more No mercy for top Taliban, QUETTA, (PAKISTAN), Dec 2: The top dozen or so commanders around Taliban leader...more |
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Anti-India
flavour at core of Maoist struggle in Nepal NEW DELHI, Dec 2: The Maoists in Nepal may have bombed a Coca-Cola plant last week, but a distinct anti-India flavour runs through the killer....more Pak-India ties should ISLAMABAD, Dec 2: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Asif Ali Zardari has said that relations between.........more Nepal’s Maoist rebels KATHMANDU, Dec 2: Nepal’s Maoists, who have broken a truce and revived civil strife.....more Afghan school system KABUL, Dec 2: Gul Ghutai was a resistance fighter under the Taliban and her weapon was....more |
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Taliban leave legacy of smashed statues KABUL, Dec 2: A pile of masonry in a dusty storeroom of Afghanistan’s national museum is all that is left of several ancient statues. Two millennia old, they were hacked to pieces by the Taliban’s religious police in just two days. Scarred by Mujahideen rockets in the early 1990s and systematically vandalised by the hardline Islamic Taliban, the museum sits among the wreckage of western Kabul, a sorry testament to two decades of war. But, museum officials said yesterday, not everything in the museum has been left at the mercy of the succession of men with guns who have rampaged through its gloomy corridors —some exhibits are in a secret store. Most of the Buddhist statues, though, are lost for good. "We can repair some of them, others have been reduced to dust," said Rahmatullah, the Museum’s Director, who like many Afghans uses only one name. The leader of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, issued an edict in February ordering the destruction of all statues and drawings of animate objects. Shortly afterwards, ten members of the feared religious police and nine Taliban officials arrived at the museum with hammers and axes and set to work on the collection. Their two-day wrecking spree was a smaller-scale version of the Taliban’s destruction to world outrage of two colossal statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan in Central Afghanistan. "There were more than 10,000 exhibits here, but not all of them have been preserved because ignorant people came and destroyed them," said Yahya, who has worked in the museum since 1992. "We don’t know exactly how much has been destroyed, but estimate about 2,000 items." The museum reopened this week, days after the Northern Alliance swept into the Afghan capital on the heels of Taliban forces retreating from punishing US air strikes. One of the museum’s prize exhibits was a collection of 627 gold coins from the bactrian period in the third century BC. The coins, found near the northern city of Kunduz in 1946, were engraved with detailed busts of kings. They were originally displayed in the museum but have not been seen for years, fuelling speculation they were looted. The bactrian coins are particularly valuable because not much is known about the period, which started after Alexander the great died in 323 BC and his Afghan empire crumbled. Graeco-bactrian art is thought to have developed independently in eastern Persia and Northern Afghanistan, before the intensification of silk route trade which brought with it other influences. Following reports that the coins were looted by Mujahideen fighters in 1992, a UN official is said to have been shown them, but since then their whereabouts have been a secret. Officials at the museum are tight-lipped about the coins. "When the Taliban tried to steal things, we hid them," said Nurullah, another museum official. "They are still hidden." He said the hidden articles included a 2,000-year-old golden deer, but declined to elaborate. Not everything in the museum is broken, looted or in a secret store room. A large stone tablet in cursive greek script still stands in the foyer, the oldest known lengthy inscription in the Kushan language — spoken by the clan of nomads that succeeded the bactrian dynasties. The tablet, at least, perhaps justifies the new handpainted banner hanging over the entrance. It says: "A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive." (REUTERS) |
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Bangladesh Parliament passes security bill DHAKA, Dec 2: The Parliament today, amidst opposition boycott, passed a bill seeking to withdraw special state security for former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her sister Sheikh Rehana, the two surviving daughters of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Law and Justice Minister Barrister Moudud Ahmed piloted the Father of the Nation Family-members Security (Repeal) Bill, 2001 for consideration of the house at 1138 local time and it was passed by a voice vote without any discussion at 1225 local time. The main opposition Awami League called an eight-hour strike in Dhaka city today protesting the Government’s move to withdraw security to Sheikh Hasina. The Awami League Government, which was voted out of power this October, had enacted the law on June 20 during the last session of the Parliament. The law gave Sheikh Hasina and her sister special security by the Special Security Forces (SSF) and accommodation on the plea that they are facing potential threats by the condemned killers of their father. Defending the repeal of the law, moudud said security by SSF is only provided to the President, Prime Minister and foreign dignitaries who are considered VIPs under the original SSF ordinance. But the past Awami League Government, he said, amended some provisions of the ordinance and recognised Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana as VIPs for their life-long security and accommodation. Terming the law as unconstitutional, Moudud said all citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law as per Article 27 of the Constitution. He said this law, framed for only two persons, led to discrimination in society. The Law Minister argued that the security law was enacted not for security reason but for political purpose. He said just before transfer of power, the Awami League Government enacted the law to influence the administration, voters and election to retain its power. Questioning the necessity of such law, Moudud said since 1981 when Sheikh Hasina returned to the country, she has been in the opposition for 14 years and conducted important political activities and moved freely without any question of security. Later in 1996, she became the Prime Minister. In the last 19 years, he said, Hasina did not speak about her own security and moved freely while her sister Sheikh Rehana also travelled freely at home and abroad for the last 26 years. Why should a law be framed for only two persons? Bangladesh is not a monarchy but a Republic, he said, adding that the country’s constitution does not give any special status for only two persons or two daughters of a person. This law is unconstitutional and discriminatory, he said, adding that while in the opposition BNP filed a writ in the supreme court challenging the law. It was BNP’s commitment that if returned to power, the law would be scrapped, he noted. Maudud said it involves huge money to give SSF protection to the opposition leader and Bangladesh’s poor economy cannot afford it. Giving the budgetary expenses for providing ssf security to Sheikh Hasina he said everyday about 2.91 lakh taka is being spent for SSF security to Sheikh Hasina. Moudud, however, said that the Government would provide all necessary security for Sheikh Hasina as leader of the opposition. (UNI) |
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| Sri Lanka rejects LTTE’s call for
removing ban before talks COLOMBO, Dec 2: Hardening its stance against the LTTE in the final lap before Wednesday’s parliamentary polls, Sri Lanka has rejected the militant group’s demand for lifting ban on it before commencment of any peace talks in the future. "De-proscription can be considered only if and when the peace process has verifiably advanced to the point of irreversibility and it is clearly agreed that all discussions will take place within the parameters of a single, indivisible state of Sri Lanka," Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar said in a statement issued here last night. The minister’s statement was in response to LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran’s November 27 annual public address in which he had demanded de-proscription as a necessary pre-requisite for negotiations. "It seems incredible that LTTE would seriously expect to be de-proscribed at this point of time, in view of its abominable track record of mass terrorism and assassinations," Kadirgamar said in reference to the global mood against terror groups after the September 11 attacks in the US. The ruling People’s Alliance has already sought to convert the present poll into a referendum on the country’s unity, alleging that the opposition United National Party was plotting to concede territory to the ltte, if it won a majority in the 225-member Parliament. Prabhakaran has called the election a "competitive arena" between forces that stood for peace and "extremists" opposed to it and for the first time, appealed to Sinhalas to vote for peace and offer justice to minority Tamils. Kadirgamar described Prabhakaran’s speech as a "thinly veiled attempt to psychologically intimidiate voters, manipulate the democratic process and tilt it against the incumbent administration". "He calls upon the Sinhala people to reject `militant and racist forces’ and litters his speech with indictments of President Kumaratunga’s Government, thereby, clearly signalling his preferences and antipathies." Kadirgamar noted that Prabhakaran had not abandoned the demand for a separate state. "Those who scrutinise the speech for an abandonment of a separate state or a specific reference to autonomy will be disappointed," he said. The LTTE leader’s address referred to "Tamil aspirations" and claimed that seeking their fulfilment did not amount to "separatism or terrorism". President Chandrika Kumaratunga also joined the campaign rhetoric, accusing UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of promising to pullout the Army from the battle zone in Jaffna. "No responsible Government can allow the unconditional withdrawal of troops from a conflict area as long as the threat remains," she told the state-controlled `Sunday Observer’ in an interview published today. The UNP has denied any nexus or secret pact with the LTTE, but made it clear that ending the war was one of its priorities. (PTI) |
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No mercy for top Taliban, says Pashtun leader QUETTA, (PAKISTAN), Dec 2: The top dozen or so commanders around Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar can expect no mercy if they are captured or choose to surrender, opposition Pashtun leader Ahmed Karzai said. "Some people have no chance," he said yesterday. "If I was to give them amnesty, there would be two million other people who want to kill them. Not even the United States would be able to save them. They are the ones who did all the killing." Karzai, brother of Hamid Karzai who has been rallying royalist Pashtun tribesmen against the Taliban for weeks, told Reuters intense US bombing was under way at Kandahar airport, outside the Taliban’s last stronghold, and the road that leads southeast from the southern city to the Pakistani border. Among those Karzai named as facing certain death if captured were top Taliban commanders Hafiz Majid, who is a member of the Pashtun Noorzai tribe, and Mullah Saleh Mohammad. Most hard-core Taliban, including Government ministers, had already fled the city, he added. Karzai said his brother’s forces, who had been operating in Uruzgan province north of Kandahar, had advanced on Friday to within 40-50 km of the ancient walled city. Other ethnic Pashtun forces were believed to be around 5 km south and southwest and Kandahar airport, which is still held by the Taliban but late on Saturday was reported to have been partly captured by the opposition. He said the tribesmen were narrowing the area where the Taliban could move, rather than attacking the city directly, and encouraging demoralised Taliban fighters to switch sides. "The idea is to put pressure on them. When districts are closed off it’s very easy for individual Taliban to defect." He said a Taliban commander named Lal Mohammed, based in the Jagnaari district near Kandahar, had agreed to defect and bring his five tanks and other heavy weapons to Takhta Pul. A commander for Gul Agha Sherzai, the former Mujahideen Governor of Kandahar before the Taliban seized the city in 1994, and who is allied with Hamid Karzai, said negotiations were on-going in a bid to secure a peaceful surrender, but this was looking increasingly unlikely. "Hafiz Majid has a bad reputation so he is frightened to surrender and will decide to fight to the last," the commander, who declined to be identified, told Reuters. "Many Noorzai have been sent to him (for talks) but he is scared we will kill him." "Our chiefs may imprison them (top Taliban), but if I have the opportunity I won’t let them go because I have suffered a lot, a lot of my friends have been killed by (the Taliban) and I fled because of them," he added. The commander said he had been with Gul Agha’s forces when they captured Takhta Pul on Friday last week, and had returned to the southwestern Pakistani frontier city of Quetta this week but remained in daily contact with his comrades inside Afghanistan. The commander said Afghan Taliban following orders to fight would be granted amnesty, but foreign fighters or others fighting of their own free will would be punished. "We will forgive them if they fight on the orders of their seniors, we will let them go and give them amnesty," he said. "But foreigners like Pakistanis or Arabs, we have been advised not to let them go." (REUTERS) |
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Anti-India flavour at core of Maoist struggle in Nepal NEW DELHI, Dec 2: The Maoists in Nepal may have bombed a Coca-Cola plant last week, but a distinct anti-India flavour runs through the killer brew of their ideology round the year. The extremists, who want the world’s only Hindu kingdom to be made into a Republic, also have several other demands which run against India. The 40-point charter of demands with which the Maoists came into prominence for the first time six years ago, contains as much venom against the "big brother" as against the monarch. Abrogation of the "unequal" Indo-Nepal Treaty of 1950 tops the anti-India list which also calls for an end to the Tanakpur and Mahakali river treaties "because they are not in the interest of Nepal". The Maoists, who have come under fierce attack from the Nepalese Government which declared a state of emergency on November 26, also do not want any vehicles with Indian number plates moving on their roads. In Nepal, where some unsaid comments of bollywood hero Hrithik Roshan triggered violent anti-India protests last year, the maoists see Indian films as being "imperialist" and "expansionist". They want a check on Indian cinema and other media because they cause cultural degradation, says the latest issue of ‘Border Affairs’, a journal on India and its border states published from the Indian capital. An inquiry later found that Hrithik had not made any derogatory comments against the Nepalese, but the anti-India agenda of the Maoists could to some extent explain the spontaneous and prolonged protests. The charter also seeks regulation of entry and exit through the open Indo-Nepal border, closure of the Gorkha recruitment centre and respectable jobs for the Nepalese people within the country. Other anti-India demands in the charter listed in the article ‘Maoist movement in the Himalayan Kingdom’ by Guwahati-based security analyst Jaideep Saikia, include an end to foreign monopoly in Nepal’s industries and trade, introduction of a work permit system for non-national workers and technicians and a check on the "imperialist and expansionist infiltration in the name of NGOs." The Maoists, who want the special powers enjoyed by the Royal family to end, demand equal rights to women in property inheritance and an end to racial discrimination, untouchability and discrimination against Dalits. Maoism in Nepal, which began with the Naxal uprising in India in February 1995 on the model of the ruthless guerilla group shining path of peru, launched its ‘people’s war’ a year later and in the past five-and-a-half years extended its influence to 60 of the country’s 75 districts and boasts of 5,000 instances of armed action. In seven districts, the Maoists run a parallel administration, collecting taxes and extending education and healthcare. The overground organisations of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) have spilled over to India through the Jan Pratirodh Manch of West Bengal, the Akhil Bharatiya Nepali Ekta Samaj, the Akhil Bharatiya Nepali Vidyarthi Sangh and the Akhil Nepali Vidyarthi Sangh (Krantikari), says the author. However, the Naxal Movement in India and the Maoist movement in Nepal — whose favourite slogans are ‘Long Live Marxism’ and ‘Down with King Gyanendra’s regime’ — differ. While almost all political affiliation in India — from the left to the extreme right — is united against the Naxals, the Maoists enjoy the covert support of the Nepalese political set-up. The Maoists steamrolled into the scene primarily as a result of the incongruities of the Nepalese system of governance which, despite the fact that it portrays itself as "grassroots democracy", is essentially steeled in monarchy with the 1990 constitution describing the king as the symbol of Nepalese nationality and the unity of the people, says the article. "Monarchy in its present state is not acceptable to the people as they do not have the same faith that they had before the Royal massacre in June," says the Chief Maoist Negotiator. With Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and its satellite formations becoming active in the region, the Maoists could be a source of trouble for India in the border states if the Deuba Government fails to take the armour out of the movement. (UNI) |
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Pak-India ties should not be
held hostage ISLAMABAD, Dec 2: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Asif Ali Zardari has said that relations between India and Pakistan should not be held hostage to the resolution of the Kashmir issue and called for ending the deadlock by opening up trade and free mobility of the people of the two countries. Both the countries need to move forward to develop relations through trade and people-to-people contact, he said while appearing before district and sessions court at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore on Saturday. According to the news, Zardari while holding the critics of Benazir Bhutto’s recent statement about India said the political orphans could not understand the development in the region and the politics around the globe. He said the people were well-aware that the military rulers had failed to bring normalcy between the two countries through the cricket diplomacy and the Agra summit. Their failure was largely due to lack of comprehension of the delicacies involved in diplomatic matters, he added. He said that if the Pakistan establishment gave a serious thought to Benazir’s views about the Taliban two years ago, the world in General and Pakistan in particular would have been saved from the catastrophic consequences of the Afghan policy. Zardari said the PPP leadership believed in the strength of dialogue whether it involved the domestic politics or relations with the neighbouring countries. He said the PPP would continue to fight against religious extremism as it believed in liberal, progressive and forward-looking society in Pakistan. About the PPP’s alliance with the Jamaat-e-Islami in local bodies elections, Zardari said that had he been out of prison, he would have not allowed this since contradicting ideologies could not be put together for one reason or the other. (UNI) |
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Nepal’s Maoist rebels shadowy, determined KATHMANDU, Dec 2: Nepal’s Maoists, who have broken a truce and revived civil strife, were once lawmakers who took part in the Himalayan Kingdom’s transformation into a multi-party democracy after a popular uprising a little over a decade ago. But as the kingdom, locked between giants China and India, struggled with the new system and Governments changed overnight, the euphoria melted away and disillusionment set in among the clutch of communist groups then on the political scene. In November 1995, the hardline Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) presented to then Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba who took power again in July this year, a list of 40 demands that ranged from abolition of the constitutional monarchy to severing ties with India, and gave him a fortnight to act. While the world turned its back on communism, Nepal’s Maoist uprising took off on February 13 1996 after the Government ignored their demands. Overnight, the cadres vanished from Kathmandu into remote poverty-stricken hills of Western Nepal. This week, the Government clamped an emergency across the country and ordered the Army to hunt down the Maoists after they carried out a series of coordinated attacks, including against the Royal Nepali Army for the first time. It was the second big challenge this year for nepal which endured a palace massacre in June in which a drunken Crown Prince Dipendra killed his parents King Birendra and the queen and seven others before turning the gun on himself. The Maoists who are estimated to number upwards of 5,000 are led by Prachanda, a shadowy former school-teacher, and Baburam Bhattarai, who holds a doctorate in architecture from New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, an old bastion of leftist ideology. But little else is known about the structure of the Maoists and Kathmandu’s rumour mills have been working overtime about rifts within the group in recent months. The military wing is headed by Ram Bahadur Thapa, who according to Government leaders and analysts, may have plotted last week’s attacks to torpedo peace talks begun in July. "There could be an internal squabble, but I am not sure," Prime Minister Deuba told reporters this week. In the beginning the rebels adopted the ideas and practices of Chairman Mao and later those of Peru’s shining path revolutionaries with their hit and run attacks across the countryside. Their message to Nepal’s impoverished 23 million people was simple: "We’ll free you of your debts, of exploitation by money-lenders, of harassment by Government and you support us," recalled a businessman in Kathmandu. The rebels attacked landlords, private enterprise and political workers with knives and crude pistols in the first phase of the terror campaign. They banned alcohol, gambling and discriminatory social practices. Later they targeted isolated and ill-equipped police posts on the hills with pipe-bombs and bombs placed inside pressure cookers for maximum impact. Most of the weapons and guerilla training came from radical left groups operating in neighbouring India, authorities say. With the police driven out of remote areas and no roads to link scattered villages in the Himalayas, the Maoists set up local Governments. Some of the areas under their control in western nepal boast of a judicial system that delivers instant judgements, a tax collection machinery and even a postal system. "There was never any attempt in the last six years to check their influence. The result is they are now spread everywhere. It will take a long time to end this problem," said political analyst Krishna Hatechhu. Nepal’s Army of more than 45,000 members includes the Gurkha soldiers famed for their fighting skills, but they have never fought a guerrilla war at home. (REUTERS) |
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Afghan school system ravaged by Taliban KABUL, Dec 2: Gul Ghutai was a resistance fighter under the Taliban and her weapon was education. For five years, the 36-year-old teacher risked beatings and imprisonment by the hardline militia, whose radical interpretation of Islam barred Afghan girls from school and kept women from most jobs. Trained before the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996, Ghutai would travel secretly from home to home in the Afghan capital to teach groups of girls. "So nobody would smell a rat, I told the children to bring a copy of the Koran and say they were going to religious instruction if the Taliban stopped them," she said. "We did teach the Koran, but we also taught maths, languages and other subjects," she said. "Since I am an open-minded woman and I am educated, I tried to struggle for the rights of woman because if I didn’t do it, the illiterate women couldn’t do it themselves." Ghutai yesterday spoke to two foreign journalists at a school in eastern Kabul where 500 teenage girls and young women learn a mix of life skills such as reading and writing along with health, sewing, embroidery and carpet-weaving. The school opened only recently following this month’s retreat from Kabul by the Taliban under withering US air strikes and sweeping ground advances by fighters of the Northern Alliance. The Afghan group that runs it also operated 51 secret schools in Kabul under the Taliban, with 81 teachers giving classes to more than 2,500 girls in private homes. "I’m glad these have gone on. It’s important for the girls," said Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the United Nations Children Fund UNICEF, who visited the school yesterday. She said UNICEF, which halted aid to the state system in Afghanistan two years ago because girls were barred from education, would continue to support home-based schools though its priority now would be assisting the formal school system. "There will be difficulties," Bellamy said. "The boys themselves in many cases haven’t got an education because the great majority of teachers in the country are women and they couldn’t work," she said. "So the education system, of all the Government systems, has probably become the least functioning." At another home-based school Bellamy visited in Western Kabul, 300 primary-age boys and girls sat cross-legged on dirty mats packed 60 to a room in single sex classes in a two-storey mud-brick house. The only equipment consists of blackboards and chalk and, at 15,000 Afghanis a month, the fees are too high for many families to afford in one of the world’s poorest countries. "When we started this centre we had 500 students, but when we asked them for fees the number dropped to 300," said Ghuti Jamshidi, one of eight women who teaches unpaid at the school. Asked by bellamy what the school needed, one young girl told her, "we need shoes and help with our fees and we need plastic sheeting and our teachers don’t get paid." After 23 years of war and three years of drought, unicef calls Afghanistan one of the worst places on the planet to be a child. One in four children die before the age of five and more than half the casualties caused by land mines and unexploded ordnance — a problem aggravated by eight weeks of US air strikes — are children. Half of all children suffer from chronic malnutrition, and literacy rates in the general population are just 25 percent for men and only five percent for women, according to UN figures. UNICEF is seeking 108 million dollars in aid for Afghan children until next march, with its priority on sheer survival through the harsh winter. Beyond that comes the massive task of recovery — including in health and education. "There’s a lot of enthusiasm among the teachers to get going again. The question is going to be the resourcing of it, paying the teachers, repairing the schools," Bellamy said. "Obviously we can’t do it all and it requires donors and requires Governments," she said. (REUTERS) |
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