HEADLINES
 

STORIES
 

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Aug 18, Islamabad -- Pakistan on Monday accused India of training terrorists to carry out acts of sabotage in Pakistani territory. Pakistan said there are 55 training camps on Indian territory and demanded New Delhi quickly dismantle them. ``Let me tell you that these camps are there. They are targeting Pakistan,' Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told reporters. ``They must be dismantled.' He did not specify where in India the camps were located. India's foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna declined to offer an immediate comment. Khan said the Indian-trained terrorists also ``fuel and fan' sectarian violence in Pakistan.

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Aug 18, New Delhi -- India's main opposition party leveled a no-confidence motion Monday against the prime minister, a move seen as largely symbolic but crucial to political alignments ahead of next year's national election. With elections in four key opposition-ruled states due later this year, the move by Sonia Gandhi's Congress party is aimed at embarrassing the Hindu nationalist-led government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The vote is expected Tuesday. Vajpayee's 19-party alliance holds 323 of the 545 seats in Parliament's powerful lower house and faces no real threat from the motion, said V.K. Malhotra, a spokesman for the governing Bharatiya Janata Party. ``The motion will be defeated, but that is not important. Political realignments are taking place and that is very significant,'' said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst and a visiting professor at Cornell University.

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Aug 18 , Karachi, Pakistan -- Uzair Paracha, a 23-year-old member of Pakistan's elite, was more American than he was Pakistani, his friends said. He almost always spoke English, not Urdu, the national language. He stayed up late at night in his parents' comfortable Karachi home watching American movies on cable television. He shuttled between Karachi and New York, attending preschool in New York City and managing a gas station there during summer breaks from college in Pakistan. "I would describe him as everybody would, as an American," said a college friend. "He had thoughts like an American, not a Pakistani."

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Narlwar, Pakistani-Indian Border -- From his resting perch under a small clump of trees, Mohammad Khalil casts an eye over the rice paddies he has worked all his life. Forty feet behind him is a line of rocks painted white, signifying where India begins. A few feet beyond is a 10-foot-high set of electrified double fences, replete with 25-foot-tall floodlights and guard posts evenly spaced along the other side. "We didn't have these things when I was a kid. That just shows how divided everything has become," muses the 42-year-old Khalil.

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Aug 18, Atlantic City -- The neon go-go girl still flashes near the deli where Mukeem Butt once worked. The streets are still studded with cash-for-gold joints. And an endless train of holiday gamblers and sunbathers continues to animate the Boardwalk. But away from the hubbub of Atlantic City's casino economy, there has been a quiet exodus. Al-Taqwah mosque does not bulge at the seams as it used to on Fridays. And behind the counters of the mom-and-pop stores lining the Boardwalk, the faces have changed. The signs are subtle, as low-key as the illegal immigrants from Pakistan who occupied little-observed nooks here - and then scattered. Mukeem Butt was among 5,000 Pakistanis nationwide to seek asylum in Canada after 9/11. Mainly, they fled New York. But New Jersey accounted for the second-largest number of refugees, nearly a thousand, according to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.

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Aug 18, Lahore, Pakistan -- It's about 100 degrees outside, under a blazing Punjabi sky, but Amr Hamza seems to be on a roll. In a rally to celebrate Pakistan's independence day last week, Mr. Hamza is calling on the faithful - about 10,000 of them, mostly members of the religious extremist party Jamaat-ud Dawa, or Society of the Call - to defend Islam against its enemies. The word he uses to describe this defense is "jihad," a term with similar historical baggage as "crusade." Hamza means it as a call to arms, in this case against Indian forces that control the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir.

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Aug 18 -- Whenever an expert touts a totally new theory, invention or miracle medicine, a healthy dose of skepticism is called for. The recent writings of Paul Craig Roberts fit the mold. He claims that two centuries of economic thought in support of free trade, dating back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, have been overturned by new developments and his own unique insights. But reality is more straightforward, and far less ominous, than he depicts. In his Aug. 6 column, "Seeking Jobs in the U.S.A.," he claims that American workers face an unprecedented threat from low-wage countries such as China and India, where an endless supply of workers can now substitute for millions of middle-class American workers at a fraction of the wage. What has changed, Mr. Roberts asserts, is the mobility of labor through the Internet. It is no longer only manufacturing jobs that are in danger, but "almost the entire range of knowledge jobs," including "stock analysts, accountants, researchers, designers, engineers, radiologists."

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Aug 18, Washington -- A new generation of mujahedin (Islamist "freedom fighters") is gearing up to take on U.S. occupation troops in Iraq, which they say is the same jihad, or holy war, their fathers' generation fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. A clandestine call to arms is already circulating in several Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries. The major difference between Afghanistan in the 1980s and Iraq in the early 21st century is that the United States and Saudi Arabia were funding the secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan whereas the Iraqi resistance is on its own. In Afghanistan, the mujahedin also enjoyed rest and recreation facilities in their privileged sanctuaries in Pakistan.

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              --- South Asian News, August 18, 2003 ---

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