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Pakistan Accuses India Of Major Bombing Campaign
By Jack Redden
10-16-1
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider
accused India on Tuesday of being behind many of the 100 unexplained
bombs that explode across his country each year.
Haider rejected Indian charges that Pakistan was
exporting "terrorism" across their frontier by backing militants
fighting Indian control of its part of the disputed Himalayan region
of Kashmir.
"In the last two years this present government has been following a
policy to control extremists, to control terrorism because we are
also victims of terrorism -- there are 100 bomb blasts in Pakistan
every year," Haider said in an interview with Reuters Television.
"Our information -- and we have evidence in some cases, not all -- is
that these explosions take place sponsored from outside and you know
which country I am meaning," he said, referring to neighbouring
India.
There are frequent bomb attacks inside Pakistan, most of them
apparently targeting the poorest, most crowded areas of cities. No
one ever claims responsibility and no arrests are announced.
Haider spoke after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who urged both sides in the 54-year-old Kashmir dispute --
the focus of their hostility -- to show restraint.
The United States is anxious not to have that intractable conflict
reappear while it is focused on bombing Afghanistan's Taliban rulers
for sheltering Osama bin Laden, the key suspect behind the September
11 attacks on New York and Washington.
"Already one war is going on and I think both sides are being asked
for restraint," Haider said of his meeting with Powell. "He said both
sides have to restrain."
INDIA ACTING TOUGHER
New Delhi appeared to adopt a tougher line on Kashmir at the start of
Powell's visit to the region. On Monday night, just after Powell
landed in Islamabad, Indian troops in Kashmir shelled Pakistani
positions for the first time in about a year.
Exchanges of fire continued on Tuesday, and Defence Minister George
Fernandes said India would act ruthlessly against militants
infiltrating from Pakistan's section of Kashmir.
Haider repeated the Pakistani position that it is the local Muslim
population that is waging the war of resistance to Indian rule that
has taken more than 30,000 lives -- by the lowest estimate -- since
1989.
He accused India of trying to stoke sectarian violence in Pakistan
that has alarmed the government in recent months.
At least five people were killed and nine wounded last Thursday in an
attack on a Shi'ite Muslim mosque in Pakistan's port city of Karachi,
police and witnesses said.
"I'm sure some of these killings, especially what happened in Karachi
in the last week ... we also know that there are agents of foreign
powers who are fomenting trouble at this time," Haider said.
Hundreds of people have been killed in recent years in tit-for-tat
sectarian violence between armed militants from Pakistan's minority
Shi'ite and majority Sunni branches of Islam. In August Musharraf
banned two rival Islamic militant groups.
Copyright � 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
*****
India Says It Will Be Ruthless With Kashmir Intruders
10-16-1
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India vowed on Tuesday to act ruthlessly
against infiltrators into Kashmir from Pakistan.
Defence Minister George Fernandes said Indian firing across the
military Line of Control, which divides the two countries in the
Himalayan region, on Monday was ordered in response to intrusions and
would continue.
"It is punitive action and will continue," Fernandes told a news
conference, his first since being reinstated as defence minister
after more than six months out of the cabinet.
"India will be ruthless in dealing with infiltration and against the
kind of methods used by them, including laying mines, killing
civilians with IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or suicide
exercises like the one we experienced at the Jammu and Kashmir
assembly," he said.
He was referring to the October 1 suicide bomb attack on the
legislature in Srinagar, summer capital of the insurgency-torn state
of Jammu and Kashmir, in which 38 people were killed. India accused a
Pakistan-based militant group of carrying out the attack.
Copyright � 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
*****
Jihad Against US Recruitment
Drives Sweeps Pakistan Area
By Tom Heneghan
10-16-1
PESHAWAR (Reuters) - Historic clan ties and religious zeal have
fueled a recruitment drive among untrained young men in Pakistan's
tribal areas eager to face off with the best troops from the world's
only superpower, tribal sources say.
The recruitment in the often-lawless tribal belt is fueled by anger
among thousands of men anxious to wage a jihad or holy war if U.S.
ground troops invade neighboring Afghanistan, they said.
"They're willing to go and fight. When Mullah Omar calls, they will
be ready," said Sabir Afridi, a trader in a smugglers' market from
the Afridi tribe, the largest in Pakistan's Khyber Pass area.
Tribesmen said Mullah Mohammad Omar, spiritual leader of the
fundamentalist Taliban movement governing Afghanistan, had asked them
not to enter the country until Washington -- now bombing Taliban
targets daily -- sends in ground forces in its "war on terror."
They added Islamic fundamentalist parties kept on a tight leash
elsewhere in Pakistan were openly running pro-Taliban recruitment and
donation drives along the edge of the North West Frontier Province,
where tribesmen claim special links with fellow Pashtun tribes across
the border.
But the big question now was how many of these cheering
untrained "jihadis" would actually go and fight and what difference
they could make when faced with crack Western commando teams backed
by the world's only superpower.
"Ninety percent of the people signing up are Afghan refugees anyway,"
said Wilayat Afridi, a local representative of the Pakistan People's
Party. "They're mostly uneducated people manipulated by the religious
parties."
The Pashtuns, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group but a minority in
Pakistan, have long ignored the 1893 Durand Line separating them.
Islamabad has cracked down on pro-Taliban fundamentalist parties in
the rest of Pakistan, but cannot stop them in the tribal lands
bordering eastern Afghanistan because tribal elders traditionally are
the supreme authority there.
ISLAMIC PARTY DRIVE
Nobody knows how many men may have signed up, and estimates have to
be taken with a grain of salt, but the movement appears to have won
thousands, perhaps a few tens of thousands, of signatories.
"At least 5,000 have signed up in the Khyber Agency alone and another
3,000 in Mohmand," said Rehmat Gul Afridi, a journalist specializing
in the tribal belt. Tribesmen often take their tribe's name as a last
name, without necessarily being related to others also using it.
Recruiting was considerably stronger in North and South Waziristan,
two of the seven agencies or districts in the poverty-stricken tribal
belt where more than three million Pakistani Pashtuns live.
Foreigners are barred from the tribal belt for reasons of security.
Leading the recruiting drive is the Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam, a
fundamentalist party whose colorful leader Fazlur Rehman was put
under house arrest early in October to halt the pro-Taliban rallies
he was holding.
Another leading religious party, Jamaat-i-Islami, and some hardline
Sunni groups have also been sponsoring rallies and opening
recruitment offices.
Donations are also accepted. In Bajaur Agency north of Peshawar,
recruiters reported they had recently collected three million rupees
$500,000, 18 lbs. of gold and jewelry as well as four truckloads of
sheep and goats to contribute to the Afghan cause.
Pakistan, now keen to keep a distance from the Taliban it once
strongly promoted, demanded customs duties on the gifts, forcing the
tribe to sell the goods and just smuggle the money into Afghanistan.
TALIBAN AND TRIBES
Saddar Khan Seerat, a Pashtun journalist from the Khyber Pass who has
worked on both sides of the border, said the tribal belt volunteers
were mostly refugees who would go and fight for their homeland.
"They're not friend of the Taliban, but they are against the United
States because it is attacking them," he said.
"Many of the men in refugee camps in Pakistan have already left. They
think that the United States will fall apart just like the Soviet
Union fell apart after losing its war in Afghanistan."
Ali Akbar Afridi, a tribal belt cloth merchant and representative of
the moderate Pakistan Muslim League party, said Pakistani Pashtun
were unlikely to rally to the Taliban side.
"No Pakistani tribals will go, even if they say at these rallies that
they will," he said. "They'll only go if they're offered money."
But the Taliban have been surprisingly stingy with their fellow
Pashtun in Pakistan, in contrast to earlier Kabul governments that
lavished funds and arms on the tribesmen in a bid for their support.
"Babrak Karmal gave every tribesman who came to Kabul a Kalashnikov
and 30,000 rupees ($500) and they reciprocated by making it hard for
the Mujahideen (holy warriors) to cross through their areas," he
said.
Karmal was Afghanistan's communist leader from 1979 to 1986, during
most of the Soviet war against the Mujahideen.
The Taliban stopped these subsidies, an important source of funds for
tribes living at subsistence levels, and now ask Pakistani Pashtun to
show identity cards while in Afghanistan -- something previously
unheard of.
"These Taliban have done nothing for us," Afridi said.
*****
Religious Leaders Threaten To Storm Islamabad, Pasni Airbase
By Moosa Kaleem
The News - Pakistan
10-16-1
KARACHI - Leaders of Pak-Afghan Defence Council threatened on Monday
to encircle Islamabad and Pasni airbase in case the government did
not withdraw support to the US against Afghanistan. Speaking at
Defence of Islamic State Conference organised by Sipah-e-Sahaba
Pakistan (SSP) at Banaras Chowk, the leaders, belonging to different
political and religious parties, urged General Pervez Musharraf to
ask the US military to leave the country immediately, otherwise they
would give a call to the masses to storm Islamabad.
They warned to give another strike call if General Musharraf and
Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider stated again that only 10 per cent
Pakistanis were opposing the government's pro-American policy. The
strike, observed against US Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit
and the US assault against Afghanistan, was enough to prove that the
whole nation condemned the policy, they maintained.
The leaders said the strike was a referendum against the government
in which the nation expressed its anguish over Powell's visit, whose
country was killing countless Arab and Afghans. They said the masses
also declared through the complete strike that they would never allow
selling the nation for a few dollars.
Leader of Sawaad-e-Azam Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan, Mufti Usman Yar Khan
said anti-Islamic forces forgot the fact while challenging the Ummah
that all Muslims were united and very well capable to fix up their
enemies. City chief of Jama'at-e-Islami, Dr Mairajul Huda Siddiqui
paid tributes to the "martyrs" of Jacobabad and announced that people
would encircle all those spots of the country which were handed over
to the US.
City chief of the JUI (F), Maulana Abdul Karim Abid said the masses
were ready to render every sacrifice and and safeguard the interests
of the country. Maulana Allah Wasaya Siddiqi of the SSP said the
attacks on innocent and unarmed Afghans proved that America was the
biggest terrorist of the world. He said the US not only wanted to
take over Pakistan's nuclear installations but was also willing to
counter opponent countries by entering the region, he added.
Other leaders and religious scholars, including Maulana Ilyas Zubair,
Maulana Abdul Haq, Dr Qasim Mahmood, Qari Zameer Akhtar Mansoori also
spoke at the meeting. Maulana Ilyas Zubair announced that a million-
man march would be held from "Osama Bin Laden Chowrangi" - the new
name of the roundabout near Shahrah-e-Quaideen to Merewether Tower on
Friday. The Bacha Khan Chowk in Banaras Colony was also renamed on
the occasion as Taliban Chowk.
Flags of a number of religious parties and Jihadi organisations waved
over the venue of the meeting. Large number of students from numerous
madaaris also attended the conference. Participants continuously
raised anti-US, pro-Afghanistan and pro-jihad slogans. Emotionally
charged protesters set ablaze a large number US and British flags
placed at the staircase attached to the platform. They also burnt
effigies of President Bush.
People wore headbands inscribed with 'Allah-o-Akbar' and carried
portraits of Osama Bin Laden while children from seminaries displayed
toy guns. The organisers announced that a large of people got
registered with the council for proceeding to Afghanistan to
participate in the holy war against the US and its allied forces.
Leaders of the Council, including Maulana Asad Thanvi, Asadullah
Bhutto, Maulana Ilyas Zubair, Maulana Abdus Samad Halejvi, Dr
Mairajul Huda and others paid rich tributes to the people for making
the strike a big success. Big protest demonstrations were held in
many areas of the city including Lyari, NIPA Chowrangi Gulshan-e-
Iqbal, Patel Para, Landhi, Korangi, SITE, Shershah and Orangi Town.
The Islami Jamiat-e-Talba (IJT) held a demonstration at Banaras
Chowk. Nazim of IJT west zone, Qasim Siddiqui said the strike had
proved the notion projected by the military government totally false
that the strikes and demonstrations were successful as those were
called on Fridays. He said that even on Monday people observed
shutter down strike and attended the protest marches and
demonstration in a great number.
Siddiqui also cautioned the government authorities to stop providing
assistance to American forces against Afghanistan otherwise they had
to bear the masses' wrath. Meanwhile, the IJT also staged a protest
demonstration at the Water Pump Chowrangi to condemn Powell's visit.
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