US agrees to modify resolution on unilateral action on Iraq

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 19: Faced with global opposition to explicit authorisation of use of military force against Baghdad, the US has agreed to modify its resolution before the UN Security Council in this regard.

The new resolution, as drafted now, would delay any military action against Baghdad at least till after the weapons inspectors go in and start inspections in Iraq.

The new proposal would call on weapon inspectors to report "any failure by Iraq to comply with disarmament. Should a failure be reported, the Security Council would convene immediately "to consider the situation and the need for full compliance with all relevant council resolutions in order to restore international peace and security."

The Security Council has been deeply divided over US insistence of unilateral military action against Iraq if it did not comply with UN Security Council resolution on dismantling of its weapons of mass destruction.

The advance team of inspectors would be in Iraq within two weeks of the council resolution but it would take time to have inspectors working in full strength.

If inspectors report obstruction, the Council, under the draft, would meet immediately and decide on the next course of action. And if it decides to authorise military action, it would have to adopt a second resolution.

But even if it fails to adopt the second resolution, US diplomats say, President George W Bush could take military action as he has the authorization of the Congress. Also, the draft being considered would provide enough legal cover for the military action, they contend.

The American draft says that Iraq is already in "material breach" of the existing council resolution. The word "material breach" and "serious consequences" could be used by the US to mean that it has the authorization to strike Iraq.

Diplomats said should chief inspector Hans Blix report that the inspectors are not getting full cooperation, the US could, if it decides, take military action irrespective of the language of the first resolution and adoption of the second as being demanded by France.

Meanwhile, France and US have reported progress on the new Iraq resolution but diplomats still needed to iron out differences over wording with Paris insisting there must be no trigger for an attack on Iraq.

Paris has welcomed the new elements but wants to see the entire resolution before deciding whether to support it in the Security Council where it along with the United States, Russia, China and France, has veto power.

France had strongly opposed the American proposal that a member state could use "all necessary means" against Iraq if it obstructs inspectors and is perceived to in non-compliance with the resolution.

It wants the council to consider the situation afresh if the inspectors report non-cooperation by Iraq and adopt a second resolution to authorize the use of force.

To win support, US has dropped its provisions which would have allowed the permanent members to send their representatives with the inspectors and a military force to protect them. Blix, during a council briefing, too had opposed those provision, arguing that it would appear to erode the independence of inspectors.

Finding strong opposition, Washington agreed to drop them. (PTI)

‘Al Qaeda adapts to life on run’

WASHINGTON, Oct 19: Al Qaeda has adapted to operating on the run after losing sanctuary in Afghanistan and recent attacks show the dispersed network is still capable of conducting strikes and is seeking more targets, US intelligence officials said yesterday.

Similar to the summer of 2001, most of the threat indicators point to targets overseas, but Al Qaeda, blamed by Washington for the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, is known to be also seeking targets on US soil, officials said.

Al Qaeda had not found another safe haven like Afghanistan where a country supports its presence, but was operating in areas not fully under Government control, or underground, including inside the United States, the officials said.

"Sanctuaries are most important for training paramilitary forces. What you need to do to organise and train terrorist attacks is small splinter groups," Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. "Terrorist groups don’t need sanctuaries to be a significant threat."

CIA Director George Tenet said this week the current threat situation was as serious as the summer before last year’s Sept 11 attacks and that Al Qaeda was in an "execution phase" and intended to strike American targets overseas and on US soil.

Al Qaeda members were operating from more remote places and being careful about communications channels, including electronic, face-to-face or couriers, one official said. The location of its top leaders was known to even fewer of their followers, intelligence officials said.

"What we’re seeing is more of an encouragement to disparate lower-level cells and individuals to go ahead and do stuff as opposed to wait for the order from the cave in Afghanistan, which with major operations in the past was probably the case," the intelligence official said.

Recent attacks on US troops in Kuwait, a Bali nightclub strip frequented by foreigners and a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen pointed to a network successfully pursuing Western targets, officials said.

Al Qaeda members in US custody have said that recent tapes purported to be the voices of Osama bin Laden and his top aide, Ayman Al-Zawahri, contained phrases that may signal followers to move forward on an attack plan, an intelligence official said. "They foreshadow attacks," the official said.

"Chatter" and fragments of communication from terrorism suspects and other threat information picked up by spy agencies suggested Al Qaeda members were working hard to conduct more strikes, officials said. The bin Laden and Zawahri tapes, recently broadcast on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television, called for attacks on the US economy, viewed by intelligence officials as a call for strikes inside the United States.

The attack on the French oil tanker and a foiled plot to strike an oil target in Saudi Arabia last summer were seen as possibly intended to inflict harm on Western economies.

"Oil is among the things that we’ve heard from detainees that they’ve talked about, but they could also go after power plants or something else," an intelligence official said.

Nearly 3,000 terrorism suspects in 98 countries have been picked up since the Sept 11 attacks.

But key Al Qaeda leaders are still on the loose. Bin Laden and Zawahri are assumed to be alive, but even that was uncertain, officials said.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed instrumental in planning the Sept 11 attacks, especially posed a danger to US interests, officials said.

"I worry a lot about him," one intelligence official said. "He just by himself running around, organising little cells here and there, could do us a lot of damage."

Intelligence experts say it will be a long fight.

"People really don’t understand yet that you’re not going to defeat this threat, that Al Qaeda will mutate and reappear in some other form with other leaders and other groups," Cordesman said. "We’re probably talking about at least a decade of dealing with this kind of problem." (AGENCIES)

WASHINGTON, Oct 19: Despite Islamabad’s assertion that it has no role in North Korea’s clandestine nuclear programme, a senior Bush administration official has said that Pakistan, along with some other countries, indeed supplied nuclear-weapon related equipment and technology to pyongyang.

The senior official re-confirmed Pakistan’s involvement after President Pervez Musharraf, in a joint press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad in Islamabad last night, rejected as "baseless" reports that Pakistan supported North Korea’s nuclear programme, the Washington Post said today.

The paper quoted the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that Pakistan did so "in return" for North Korea’s missiles and missile technology.

US officials said that other countries, including Russia, were also involved though they did not say what they could get in return from North Korea.

What these countries provided, according to US oficials, was material that included precursor chemicals and metal suitable for building centrifuges.

The post said the US received evidence of uranium enrichment efforts in North Korea as early as two yers ago but only recently decided to confront the North Korean Government about it, according to "sources in the United States and Asia."

The secrecy of the Bush administration in revealing to lawmakers about what it knew about the North Korean missile programme and those who were helping Pyongyang has "strained" President George W Bush’s relations in Congress, the paper said.

The post said the evidence at first was "faint and circumstantial" and it was only by august of this year the administration officials felt the case was compelling and was grounds for cutting off talks with North Korea.

However, the paper said, the US told the Governments of South Korea and Japan about the nuclear progrmames much earlier than previously disclosed. When Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi went to Pyongyang on September 17, he knew of the uranium enrichment suspicionsin detail but failed to press the issue firmly in Pyongyang, it said.

The acknowledgment of long US awareness of the problem, said the post, contrasts with official expressions of surprise from Asian capitals after the Bush administration disclosed the North Korean programme this week.

According to sources in US and Asian Goverments, said the post, the only surprise was the North Korean confession.

It said according to several senators’ aides, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not mention North Korea’s covert nuclear programme in a classified briefing held in a secure chamber less than three hours before two senior administrtion officials revealed the news in a press conference.

Senate majority leader Thomas Daschle said he learned about the weapons programme from newspaper articles the next morning. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden said he was told about it two hours ahead of the press. At least 2 Republican Senators said they had earlier received briefings from Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly.

Democrats on capitol hill were critical yesterday of the 12-day gap between the admission by North Korea and the administration’s disclosure. During that time, Congress passed the Iraq resolution authorising Bush to go to war if necessary to disarm Iraq. (PTI)

Pak hits out Sinha for criticising its role in SAARC

ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: Contesting External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha’s assertion that dates for the next SAARC summit in Islamabad have not been fixed, Pakistan today accused India of putting obstacles in holding meetings of the seven-nation grouping in the past.

The Indian minister’s statement was "disingenuous to say the least," Pakistan foreign office said in a statement here.

It claimed that the SAARC Council of Ministers meeting held in Kathmandu in August this year reached a consensus to hold the 12th SAARC summit in January 2003 at Islamabad.

"Thereafter, Pakistan had proposed January 11-13 for the summit meeting within the band of 15 days agreed upon by the Council of Ministers. These specific dates were conveyed to SAARC Secretariat.

"The dates were also discussed by the SAARC Foreign Ministers in an informal meeting in New York on September 16 and it was agreed that all the members would confirm the acceptability of these dates within a week’s time i.e. by 23rd of September", it said.

"Therefore, any suggestion that no dates had been proposed and that no invitation had been received is incorrect, if not mala fide. India knows well that formal invitations are issued only after the dates have been agreed upon by all members", the statement said.

It also said that Sinha’s remarks that one country consistently tried to put obstacles in the way of the summit was "self-incriminating". "It is India that has always created obstacles in the way of SAARC summits. The delay of more than two years in the convening of the 11th SAARC summit in Kathmandu and the manner in which the sixth SAARC summit in Colombo in 1991 had to be postponed at the last moment because of Indian are cases in point", it said. (PTI)

Turkish Army denies northern Iraq troop movements

ANKARA, Oct 19: Turkey’s military today denied Turkish media reports that it had sent a large force of troops into northern Iraq, a region controlled by Kurds who have broken away from Baghdad. NATO ally Turkey, seen as a frontline player in any US-led attack against Baghdad, maintains a military presence in neighbouring Iraq’s Kurdish enclave to pursue separatists from its own Kurdish minority and to protect a small Turkmen minority, with whom turks share ethnic and linguistic ties.

"Certain press organs have reported today that 12,000 members of the Turkish armed forces entered northern Iraq. These reports are completely wrong," Turkey’s General Staff said in a statement carried by the state-run anatolian news agency.

Newspapers reported several thousand troops crossed from Sirnak province in Southeastern Turkey yesterday into areas run by Iraq’s opposition Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), with whom Ankara has traded barbs over a potential Turkish military role in Iraq in the event the United States launches a campaign.

Local sources told newsmen yesterday they saw thousands of Turkish troops with heavy artillery cross the Iraqi border, but independent verification was not possible.

Relations have soured between Ankara and KDP leader Massoud Barzani in recent weeks, with Turkey signalling it could intervene militarily if Kurds try to set up an independent state amid the turmoil a US campaign could set off in Iraq.

Turkish Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel today warned Barzani and Puk leader Jalal Talabani to "heed our warnings" on any moves to set up a new ethnic state in the West Asia.

"Those (Iraqi Kurd) communities’ welfare and security have until now been under Turkey’s safeguard. If they want it to continue like this, then they need to behave accordingly," Gurel said, in comments broadcast by Turkey’s NTV television. (AGENCIES)

Bangladesh opposition demands resignation of Govt

DHAKA, Oct 19: Former Bangladesh Prime Minister and opposition leader Sheikh Hasina today asked the Government to resign over deteriorating law and order as the Army continued its crackdown on criminals across the country.

Hasina, apeaking to a rally of 30,000 in Dhaka, said the recent deployment of the Army to combat crime represented failure by the Government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, which swept to power a year ago.

Bangladesh on Thursday deployed soldiers across the country to help police rein in runaway crime.

Law and order has deteriorated sharply in Bangladesh over the past year, despite promises by Khaleda to beat crime.

Police say crime syndicates or gangs linked to politicians are killing around 10 people every day.

"The Government of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) of Begum Khaleda Zia should resign as it has failed to run the Government and has been forced to call in the Army to combat crime," Hasina told the rally.

A spokesman for the Army told newsmen today: "Some 15,000 soldiers searching suspected hideouts have arrested some alleged criminals and recovered some 100 weapons in the last two days."

Most of the suspected criminals were directly or indirectly related to the ruling BNP, Army sources said.

Sheikh Hasina called upon the Bangladesh Army to remain neutral and to eliminate criminals regardless of political affiliation.

A four-party alliance led by the BNP won 220 seats in the 300-seat parliament in a national election in October last year, routing the Awami League.

Fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, Islami Oikya Jote and a breakaway faction of Jatiya Party are the other components of the alliance. (AGENCIES)

Pakistan will keep nuclear arms out of extremists’ hands

ISLAMABAD, Oct 19: Pakistan’s armed forces will keep their nuclear weapons out of the reach of extremists, a Cabinet Minister said today.

"Each and every resource of Pakistan, particularly the nuclear assets, is under the custody and strict vigilance of our armed forces and will never fall in the hands of extremists," said Information Minister Nisar Memon.

Memon’s comments to AP followed reports that US intelligence officials accused Pakistan of helping North Korea develop its nuclear weapons program.

"Pakistan has never indulged in such kind of activity," Memon said.

Pakistan is a key ally of the US in the war on terrorism. However, before Musharraf took power in the 1990s, Washington cut off all military and humanitarian aid to Pakistan for pursuing its nuclear weapons program despite US warnings.

Western fears that fundamentalist Islamic groups could gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons revived following the Sept 11 attacks on the United States, especially after it was disclosed that two top Pakistani nuclear scientists were detained on suspicion of sharing technical information with Osama bin Laden. They were subsequently released.

Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mehmood and Abdul Majid worked for Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission until retiring in 1999.

Both denied transferring any nuclear-related information to Afghanistan and said they only ran education programs and helped poor Afghan farmers. Mehmood claimed he talked with Bin Laden about plans ffor the rehabilitation of Afghanistan. (AP)

| home | state | national | business | editorial | advertisement | sports
| international | weather | mailbag | suggestions | search | subscribe | send mail |