Amendment moved on U.S. aid to Pakistan *(IANS)
	An amendment has been moved in the U.S. Congress urging that the $3 billion aid package promised to Pakistan be released only after Islamabad complies with the conditions that accompany it. Representative Eni Faleomavaega (Democrat), a member of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, sponsored the amendment, Congressman Frank Pallone revealed Tuesday night at the annual gala banquet hosted by the Indian American Friendship Council. Among the conditions are that Pakistan would take steps to fight terrorism, adhere to non-proliferation goals and ensure democratic reforms. The amendment was introduced during a debate on the Foreign Aid appropriations Bill Tuesday. Speaking at the banquet, several senators and congressmen urged the Bush administration to ensure that Pakistan complied with the conditions spelt out in the aid package. Besides Pallone, Rep. Gary Ackerman, Democrat-New York, Brad Sherman, Democrat-California, Ed Royce, Republican-New Jersey, and Jim Greenwood, Republican-Pennsylvania, said Washington must be cautious about subsidising the Pakistani government.
	http://in.news.yahoo.com/030716/43/261ln.html
	Two Pakistanis shot dead in US * (ANI)
	Two Pakistani students were shot dead near Washington early Tuesday by unidentified gunmen. The local police are treating the shooting as robbery but friends say the two could have been targeted because of their race. Sair Saeed Butt, 26, and Hammad Chaudhry, 23, both from Lahore, were shot outside Butt's home in Prince George's Country, Maryland, at 3 am. Butt died in the ambulance and Chaudhry succumbed to his wounds in the hospital eight hours later. A friend, Mohammed Tayyab, told Dawn that Chaudhry had purchased a new car on Monday and was "so excited that instead of waiting for the next day, he came over to Butt at three in the morning to show him the car." While the two friends were looking at Chaudhry's car, another car came around and four or five American teenagers came out. Pointing guns at them, they ordered them to raise their hands, searched their pockets "and then simply started shooting at them, without any provocation," said an eyewitness.
	http://in.news.yahoo.com/030716/139/261j2.html

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Government efforts to crack down on terrorism contributed to an increase in reports of discrimination and harassment of Muslims in the U.S. last year, an Islamic advocacy group said Tuesday. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said its annual study found a 15 percent increase in 2002 in the number of incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment. Of special concern were registration requirements that single out students and visitors from Muslim nations, and raids on Muslim homes and businesses with no charges being filed.A Justice Department spokesman called the council's criticism "unfair" and based on "a lot of misinformation."

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July 15 -- The number of hate crimes in California dropped by nearly 27 percent during 2002, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said Tuesday, speaking before reporters at a Sikh temple in West Sacramento. California law enforcement agencies reported 1,659 hate crime incidents in 2002 -- down from 2,261 in 2001, according to an annual report compiled by the state Department of Justice. "I am pleased to see the numbers of these deplorable crimes is dropping," Lockyer said. "But even one incident is too many. Hate crimes are among the most dehumanizing of crimes, and they tear at the rich fabric of our diverse communities and state."

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France Tuesday joined a chorus of countries unwilling to send troops to Iraq, even as military analysts said some U.S. forces' morale was reaching a breaking point. French President Jacques Chirac said sending French troops to Iraq "cannot be imagined in the current context." India shocked Washington Monday by refusing to send an expected division of 17,000 troops, joining Germany and other countries that have not been identified by the Pentagon. According to a senior European diplomat in Washington, the French refusal, like those of Germany and India, was based on the lack of a United Nations mandate governing the military occupation of Iraq.

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July 15, Islamabad -- Pakistan's Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali asked for patience Tuesday as he and his Indian counterpart Atal Behari Vajpayee walk a tightrope toward peace in South Asia. Jamali said he supported the idea of a step-by-step approach to rebuild confidence between the nuclear-armed rivals -- who came close to war last year -- as long as their dispute over the Kashmir valley was not forgotten. ``For Pakistan it is very difficult to give up the original principle, the Kashmir issue, but we have to pave a way to come to the core issue,'' he told Reuters in an interview.

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July 15, New Delhi -- India's decision not to send troops to Iraq will not affect its ties with the United States, according to Washington, while analysts in the region also did not envisage bilateral relations suffering as a result. "We would have hoped that India would have made a different choice," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said of the decision. He reiterated that "India remains an important strategic partner" of the U.S. and that he expected the "transformation" of relations to continue. An Indian cabinet security committee decided that the country would only consider sending troops if their deployment was under a U.N. mandate, External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said in a statement.

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July 15, Colombo -- An influential Muslim political party on Tuesday demanded the right to partially govern Muslim-dominated areas in Sri Lanka's civil-war-wracked northeast — further complicating a fragile peace pact between the government and Tamil rebels. About 1.3 million of Sri Lanka's 18.6 million people are Muslims. They live mainly in the north and east of the country — the same areas where predominantly Hindu Tamil insurgents waged a 19-year battle for independence from the rest of the country, which is mostly Buddhist.

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July 16, Katmandu -- A cease-fire between the government and Maoist rebels in the past six months has helped impoverished Nepal's economy recover, the finance minister said Wednesday. Prakash Chandra Lohani said the economy is projected to have grown by 2.4 percent during the fiscal year that ended Wednesday, compared to a 0.6 percent contraction in the previous year. ``The economic growth rate has increased and the economic situation has improved because the situation of terror in the country has ended,' Lohani told reporters.

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July 15, Chicago -- A federal judge appointed an attorney Tuesday to advise an Islamic charity director who claims prosecutors are unfairly denying him credit for helping with a terrorism investigation. Judge Suzanne Conlon also set Aug. 18 for sentencing charity director Enaam Arnaout, a Syrian-born U.S. citizen accused of having close ties to Osama bin Laden. Arnaout, 41, director of Benevolence International Foundation, has pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge. Federal prosecutors say Arnaout has been dishonest and uncooperative, and they have recommended a sentence of 20 years. He acknowledges he was befriended by bin Laden in Pakistan in the 1980s but denies being an al-Qaida member or financing terrorism.

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July 16, Colombo -- The government finalized a proposal Wednesday aimed at enticing Tamil rebels to resume peace talks while European and rebel negotiators tried to find ways of avoiding sea clashes that have threatened a fragile cease-fire, officials said. The government's latest proposal attempts to satisfy rebel demands for an interim administration in the northeast that would give them political powers and control over foreign aid funds, Sri Lankan officials said on condition of anonymity. The government wants input from the Tigers before the proposal is finalized, the officials said, without giving further details.

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July 16, Quetta, Pakistan -- Police are blaming an outlawed Sunni Muslim extremist group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, for a July 4 attack that killed 50 worshippers at a Shiite mosque in southwestern Pakistan, newspapers reported Wednesday. The bloody raid by three militants in Quetta took place as an estimated 2,000 worshippers prayed inside the mosque. Two attackers were killed by security guards. A third was blown up by his own hand grenade. According to the English-language newspaper The News, police identified two of the dead attackers as Asghar and Omar, both members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

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July 16, New Yoek -- For every uniformed police officer standing sentry with a submachine gun at Rockefeller Center or the Brooklyn Bridge, there is an undercover NYPD cop working around the clock from a sprawling, secret office on the stealth side of the city's fight against terrorism. Wielding nothing more than a laptop, Mike Mirza, a Pakistani-born, Urdu-speaking detective, tries to penetrate overseas chat rooms to glean references to possible attacks, communicating with people on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, in Iraq and other hot spots. Two cubicles away, an Egyptian-reared investigator who is known as Salah monitors Al-Jazeera and other Arabic media outlets, often picking up information half a day before it makes news in America.

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Commander Mamabaidullah switches off the ignition and alights from his pickup truck onto the desert plain surrounding Spin Boldak, a chaotic Afghan town that borders Pakistan. Followed by four of his Kalashnikov-toting men, he walks briskly toward a graveyard where scores of bodies lie buried beneath mounds of dirt and clay. Mamabaidullah, who is responsible for guarding this stretch of frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, stops at the row closest to the border. With evident pride, he explains that they contain the corpses of Taliban militiamen killed by Afghan soldiers during a battle last month. These Taliban, Mamabaidullah says, had been hiding in Pakistan and returned to attack a government office in a nearby village. Officially, 40 Taliban died in the ensuing firefight, though a source present at the encounter and an official in Kabul both put the death toll, which included seven Afghan soldiers, nearer to 90. It was one of the Taliban's biggest defeats since they were toppled in December 2001. Mamabaidullah had these bodies buried here to send a message "that if anyone comes into Afghanistan to kill or make problems, they'll end up like this."

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July 16 -- Thanks to an unexpected vote by a House appropriations subcommittee, the Bush administration's ill-considered plan to study the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons has been at least temporarily stalled. These warheads, less powerful than those built during the cold war, would be designed to penetrate hardened underground command centers or weapons sites or for possible use in regional conflicts. The plan threatens to blur the line between nuclear and conventional arms. Instead of looking for new uses for nuclear weapons, the administration should be directing its research toward creating advanced conventional bombs capable of the same missions. Last week the subcommittee, led by David Hobson, an Ohio Republican, stripped more than $50 million from Energy Department spending requests that would have initiated design work on these new weapons and begun preparations for possible manufacturing and testing. The lawmakers said the administration was moving too swiftly toward developing new nuclear weapons while not doing enough to care for the existing stockpile and to clean up nuclear waste. Yesterday, the full Appropriations Committee included the subcommittee's cuts in the bill it is sending to the House floor.

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By Arindam Banerji, Ph.D., an Indian-American entrepreneur in Silicon valley with an expertise in geopolitics and US-India relations.

“It was recognized from the first that a campaign of genocide would be necessary to eradicate the threat: "Kill three million of them," said President (general) Yahya Khan at the February conference, "and the rest will eat out of our hands". On March 25 (1971) the genocide was launched. The university in Dacca was attacked and students exterminated in their hundreds. Death squads roamed the streets of Dacca, killing some 7,000 people in a single night. It was only the beginning. "Within a week, half the population of Dacca had fled, and at least 30,000 people had been killed. Chittagong, too, had lost half its population. All over East Pakistan people were taking flight, and it was estimated that in April some thirty million people were wandering helplessly across East Pakistan to escape the grasp of the military."
– Robert Payne, Massacre [1972]

Paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens, every decade or so, the US writes a blank check to some obscure dictator in Pakistan, and the Pakistani army happily uses this free ride to perpetrate genocide in its neighborhood. In the 70’s, we turned a blind eye while Gen. Yahya killed millions in Bangladesh, with a kill rate that would put Hitler to shame. Even after the US congress cried foul and the US ambassador to Bangladesh declared “genocide in Bangladesh”, Nixon and Kissinger praised Yahya and sent him arms to aid in the killing. In the nineties, after the Russians had left Afghanistan, the Pakistani army happily armed, fed, financed and trained a band of jihadi hoodlums, now known to us as the Taliban; of course, the Taliban directly caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians in the nineties. While the cleansing continued unabated, oil executives busily negotiated oil-pipelines with the Taliban, with nary a consequence for the Pakistanis.

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July 16 -- Don't be surprised if you've never heard of them: In this country, Moazzam Begg and Feroz Abbasi have not exactly become household names. Begg, from Birmingham, England, moved to Afghanistan with his family in June 2001 to found a school -- or so he told his parents. After 9/11, intelligence operatives allegedly found his name on an al Qaeda financial document, arrested him in Pakistan and flew him to Guantanamo Bay. Abbasi, from south London, was a member of a radical mosque who also moved to Afghanistan, supposedly to join al Qaeda's military operations. He too was arrested, and he too was flown to Guantanamo Bay. Both men are now among the first batch of Guantanamo prisoners to be tried by U.S. military tribunals. Both have also become the unlikely heroes of a rather strange piece of political theater playing itself out in the British media. I first became aware of them when a friend rang me up from London and asked, rather angrily, what the "special relationship" between Britain and America was worth, if Tony Blair couldn't even persuade his supposed best friend, George W. Bush, to let British citizens stand trial in Britain. According to British press reports, Blair has been trying for months to get the U.S. government to let Begg, Abbasi and the seven other Britons awaiting trial in Guantanamo Bay come home -- only to be rebuffed by the ungrateful, arrogant Americans. Allegedly, this will be the main item on Blair's agenda when he meets the president here tomorrow.

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              --- South Asian News, July 16, 2003 ---

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