Possible role in conspiracy
Retd Maj Gen questioned

COLOMBO, Nov 24: A retired Major General of Sri Lankan army as been questioned by the police to prove any possible role in a conspiracy against the Government and also to establish whether he had any role behind a spate of military defeat in the Eastern parts by inspiring the armed forces to rebel against the state.

Former Army’s Chief of Staff Maj Gen Lucky Algama, one of the most controversial retired armed forces officers, has been accused of visiting Welioya in September and also allegedly conspiring with several officers against the Government.

The ongoing inquiry by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) started following a directive by the Government early this month after the military serious setbacks in the Wanni region.

He was questioned for two hours yesterday by officers of the CID at his residence and his statement recorded.

According to media reports, the CID had questioned him on a recent visit to Welioya region to distribute relief supplies to the Sinhalese living in the area. Maj Algama, the reports said, had accompanied a group of Lions Club members and there had been no ulterior motive on his part.

Investigators had repeatedly questioned him on meetings with serving officers in operational areas. He is reported to have rejected claims that he had been part of any conspiracy against the state.

"I told them the truth and I would never seek to fish in trouble waters," the retired officer has been quoted as saying to the media.

Ending more than two weeks of speculation that the retired Chief of Staff was allegedly implicated in a front-line controversy, the CID yesterday formally informed the officer that it wished to question him and record his statement.

Maj Gen Algama, who is tipped to contest on the opposition United National Party (UNP) ticket at the next general election, told a local newspaper that "it was a case of a political general failing in the battlefront and a retired general enjoying the family life being accused of causing the failure."

"Someone has given a dead rope about my visit to Welioya in September with Lions Club members that did a community project there. I merely helped him to identify certain needy areas through a serving officer," he said. The former Chief of Staff said he agreed to provide to the CID video footage of the visit that the lions had recorded to prove that it was nothing but a community service project.

He said "the tragedy was that the Government has lost sight of the common enemy Prabhakaran and now considered UNP leader and presidential candidate Ranil Wcikremesinghe as the great enemy." (UNI)

No further nationalisation of pvt property: Russian PM

MOSCOW, Nov 24: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who completes 100 days in office this week, has assured entrepreneurs that there would be no further nationalisation of private property in the country but warned that the state would be forced to intervene in enterprises where conflict surfaced between the management and workers.

Addressing the captains of trade and industry at an all-Russian meeting regarding the management of property in the state, Mr Putin said, the Government would ensure that the rights of the investors were safeguarded.

Pointing out to the upheavels of the early 90s, when state property was largely grabbed by unscrupulous ‘new class businessmen’, who brought state enterprises and land at throwaway prices in the midst of a total confusing political atmosphere following the fall of communism, Mr Putin said,"any change of ownership must be civilised."

Enunciating the new policy, he said,"the state must be impartial."

"If Russia wants to get rid of the prevailing state of national depression, it must lift the obstacles impeding economic development,"the Prime Minister stated.

Inspite of several years of privatisation of property in Russia, he said, state still remained the largest owner of enterprises. "some 13 unitary enterprises in power engineering, communications and industry are owned by the state,’he said.

Surveying the economic scene, the Russian news agency Novosti predicted that the gross domestic product is expected to grow by 8 per cent this year. According to official statistics, the industrial production in the country grew by 7.2 per cent this year. Arrears in wages of salaries and pensions have alrady been cleared. The Novosti report said.

The slow but steady improvement in the economy, Russian economic experts point out, has enabled the Government to allocate substantial funds to the defence sector. The state has allocated more than 137 billion roubles(approx five billion dollars) to the armed forces in the budget for the year 2000. (UNI)

Ahmed appointed as Pak High Commissioner to UK

LONDON, Nov 24: Pakistan has appointed Dr Akbar S Ahmed, a distinguished academician, as its new High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

The 57-year-old professor, fellow of Selwyn College at Cambridge University, was appointed yesterday.

He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at Harvard University.

The Allama Iqbal fellow at Cambridge for five years till 1993, Dr Ahmed succeeds Mian Riaz Samee, who was sacked by the military regime along with other political appointees after it assumed power in the October 12 blood less coup.

Akbar Ahmed completed in 1998 what became the "Jinnah Quartet" launched a decade ago: The `Jinnah’ film, with international stars like Christopher Lee and James Fox, a documentary `Mr Jinnah’, `The making of Pakistan’ with cafe productions, an academic book `Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic identity, the search for Saladin’, published by Routledge, London in 1997 and re-published by Oxford University Press, Karachi and a graphic novel `The Quaid, Jinnah and the story of Pakistan’, published by Oxford University Press, Karachi.

The ‘Jinnah’ won the ‘Best foreign film of the year’ Award at the Houston Film Festival in 1999.

‘The Quaid, Jinnah and the story of Pakistan’ was the winner of the President’s award in Pakistan in 1998.

Professor Ahmed is the first Pakistani to have been elected a member of the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute and has been awarded the star of excellence (Sitara-e-Imitiaz) for academic distinction by the Pakistani Government.

In 1995 he was awarded the sir percy sykes memorial medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for his work in helping mutual understanding between Islam and the West.

Ahmed was presented a gold medal by the Iqbal Academy, London, in 1997, the inaugural Allama Iqbal Award by the Pakistan Society, Cambridge University, in 1988 and a special award by the Jinnah Society, Karachi, in 1999. (PTI)

Modest heroes get journalist awards from NY Group

NEW YORK, Nov 24: A Kosovo journalist who saw the premature report of his death on television, a jailed Cuban writer, a Colombian journalist under death threats and two prominent Pakistani editors have been awarded the annual International Press Freedom Awards.

The five were honoured last night by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose executive director, Anne Cooper, said they were chosen because the "threats these journalists stand up to are ultimately threats to all of us."

They are: Baton Haxhiu, editor-in-chief of the Pristina Daily, Koha Ditore Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, in jail in Cuba for starting an independent news agency on the internet maria Cristina Cabellero, a reporter who fled death threats in Colombia and Jugnu Mohsin and Najam Sethi, a husband and wife team who publish the Friday times in Pakistan.

Haxhiu, editor-in-chief of the Pristina newspaper, has criticised every player in the Kosovo quagmire, earning him the wrath of Serbian authorities and Albanian leaders alike.

On the eve of the NATO air strikes in March, Serbian forces torched his paper’s offices, killing a guard. But NATO forces believed Haxhiu had been killed and he watched televised reports of his death as he was hiding in a basement. He then fled to Macedonia where he resumed publishing the paper to Kosovo refugees.

Now back in Kosovo, Haxhiu, an ethnic Albanian, is still a target, receiving death threats after a press agency linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army denounced him as a traitor. "To be independent in Kosovo is so dangerous," he said.

Beaten, gagged as an equal opportunity offender.

Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the well-connected husband and wife team who write, edit and publish The Friday Times in Lahore, fought to assert press freedoms, challenging ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his predecessor, Benazir Bhutto, to answer corruption charges.

Last May, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during the night by Government agents who beat him, gagged him and held him for nearly a month, his wife reported. During Sethi’s imprisonment, Mohsin put out the newspaper while organising friends to learn Sethi’s whereabouts and get him freed.

Life is easier under the Generals who seized power from Sharif last month but Sethi is not sure how long this will last. "It’s too early to say if these guys will be as good as their word. We are keeping our fingers crossed," he said.

Writing from jail in Cuba.

Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, only 25 years old, was arrested last January and spent eight months in solitary confinement as part of his four-year jail sentence for founding an independent news agency in Cyberspace, the CPJ reported.

Using the internet to circumvent censorship, he dictated stories over the phone to colleagues abroad for posting on web sites. Some were broadcast back to Cuba.

In prison, Diaz Hernandez has continued to write, although guards have confiscated his stories and threatened him with up to 20 more years of jail, the CPJ said.

A journalist from Bogota, Colombia, Maria Cristina Caballero says she walks down the streets of Cambridge, mass. Looking over her shoulder. She fled to Cambridge after finding a death threat on her answering machine last spring, not many months after four journalists had been murdered in Colombia.

Caballero says she had made enemies all around, having interviewed all sides in the conflict tearing her country apart: drug kingpins, left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary forces. She is now on leave from her job on the weekly Semana to write a book about Colombia’s civil war. (REUTERS)

AIDS deaths on rise as new millennium dawns

LONDON, Nov 24: More than 2.6 million people died from AIDS this year — the highest number since the epidemic began — and the death toll is set to rise in the new millennium, AIDS experts have warned.

UNAIDS, the UN agency charged with combating the spread of the deadly HIV virus, reported 5.6 million new infections this year, bringing the global total to 33.6 million.

"The epidemic is far from over. The crisis is actually growing," said Dr Peter Piot, the agency’s Executive Director.

"Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1981 roughly 50 million people have become infected in the world," he told a news conference to launch the agency’s annual update of the disease.

East European and Central Asian regions had the steepest HIV curve in 1999, mainly due to intravenous drug use, according to the report produced with the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Sub-Saharan Africa, home to 10 per cent of the world’s population, now houses almost 70 per cent of HIV/AIDS sufferers.

Almost 20 years after the epidemic first hit, the agency predicted worse is to come unless big efforts are made to end the stigma and complacency that surround AIDS in many countries.

Infected young, dead young

Almost half of all people with the disease were infected before they turned 25. Half will die before they reach 35. "This age factor makes AIDS uniquely threatening to children. By the end of 1999, the epidemic had left behind a cumulative total of 11.2 million AIDS orphans, defined as those having lost their mother before reaching the age of 15," according to the report.

If children are not being orphaned by the disease, many are infected themselves. An estimated 570,000 children are HIV-positive and more than 90 per cent of them were infected by their mothers at birth or through breast feeding.

Dr Piot said that in Africa, women are worst hit by the epidemic because it is more easily transmitted from men to women and in Africa girls are generally infected younger than boys.

For every 10 African men with the disease there are 12 or 13 infected women.

"Clearly, older men — who often coerce girls into sex or buy their favours with sugar-daddy gifts — are the main source of HIV for the teenage girls," the report said. The virus is expected to reduce life expectancy in Southern Africa from 59 in the early 1990s to just 45 between 2005 and 2010 — only slightly above the levels achieved in the 1950s.

"Life expectancy is going down dramatically as a result of AIDS," Dr Piot added.

Even in industrial countries where antiretroviral drugs have extended the lives of sufferers, the report details a new and misplaced complacency among gay men.

Prevention is still the best policy.

"The disease remains fatal and information from North America and Europe suggests the decline in number of deaths due to antiretroviral therapy is tapering off."

Despite the success of powerful drug cocktails in reducing hiv to undetectable levels, studies have confirmed what doctors had long suspected — it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to completely eradicate the virus in patients. (REUTERS)

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