India - Pakistan Crisis

Top 126. Feb 28, 2002 8:34 AM

» JenL_2 - Re: Religious Extremist Murder

In response to message posted by mitelo:

Mitelo - You said....

I would stop at: "terrorist attacks and murder can have no justification." (pronouncing the little dot there--period.)

57, including 12 children on a train because extremists burned a mosque. My sympathies lie with the dead and their families.

Its funny how Muslims and their apologists find excuses or blatantly lie to deny their crimes. The other side is always the "most evil". Yes, every dispute has more than one side. But, Muslim propaganda, hate, and violence is a threat to me and my family and I intend to oppose it until the truth and peace have been won back.

Mitelo - I totally agree with you - there is never ever any justification for terrorists acts killing innocent people.

I was giving some background to the current violence in India. It's religious extremism - each side inflaming the other over the years till it erupts in violence and innocent people are killed....then there's payback and more innocent people are killed....and on and on.....a vicious cycle.

This from 2/28 MSNBC.com:

<img src="http://a799.ms.akamai.net/3/799/388/94a5..." width=220 height=285 align="left">Members of the Hindu nationalist group Shiv Sena shout anti-Muslim slogans in New Delhi on Thursday.

Hindu mob burns 38 Muslims

Violence in Gujarat in wake of attack on Hindu travelers

MSNBC NEWS SERVICES

AHMADABAD, India, Feb. 28 — A Hindu mob burned to death 38 Muslims, including 12 children, in their homes in this western Indian city Thursday as residents called for police help that took two hours to reach the neighborhood, a top police official said. Riots broke out across the western state of Gujarat after Muslims set fire to a train carrying Hindu nationalists on Wednesday, killing 58 people.

“WE HAVE taken out 18 bodies,” Joint Commissioner of Police M.K. Tandon told The Associated Press. He said the dead were believed to include 12 children.

He said officers saw the bodies of 12 children, and from eight to 10 adults, still lying inside the smoldering remains of six bungalows in a Muslim pocket of the Hindu-dominated Meghaninagar neighborhood.

Officers at the city police control room said they had received several phone calls from a former member of Parliament, Ehsan Jefri, who also died in the fires.

Police said they arrived two hours after the phone calls and that Fire Brigade officers were delayed by more than six hours because of blockades that Hindu mobs erected on city streets.

“This happened due to mob violence and our men could not reach there on time. This is not an excuse but it is an extremely unfortunate incident,” said Ahmadabad Police Commissioner P.C. Pandey.

In other parts of the city, police were seen standing in bunches, while mobs looted and burned Muslim owned stores, hotels and restaurants.

The police said that the former Parliament member, Jefri of the opposition Congress party, had fired his licensed revolver into the air to disperse a mob of some 200 people who had gathered around the bungalows.

The mob swelled to 2,000 and stoned the houses, then poured kerosene on them and set them on fire, said P.B. Gondya, the deputy commissioner of police.

MORE VIOLENCE

Earlier Thursday, police said that security forces shot dead at least two protesters in Ahmadabad while rioters killed at least a half dozen Muslims in overnight violence across the state.

Since the attack Wednesday, police were on alert across the country. The national government pleaded for restraint, fearful that sectarian violence could spread quickly in this nation of more than 1 billion, whose birth 54 years ago was marked by Hindu-Muslim-Sikh fighting that killed nearly a million people.

“There is a fire inside us. Our blood is boiling,” said Mangal Behn, a resident of Ahmadabad’s Hindu quarter. “What is the fault of those children who died? There is a volcano of anger.”

The Hindu groups threatened shopkeepers who had not closed in compliance with a strike call to protest Wednesday’s train attack in the town of Godhra, also in Gujarat, in which mostly Hindus were burned to death or suffocated from smoke. Fourteen children were among the dead, and 43 people were injured, 20 of them requiring hospital treatment.

50 BUILDINGS ON FIRE

On the highways, gangs of young men with sticks and iron rods halted cars to ask whether Muslims or Hindus were inside. Hindus were allowed to proceed. Roadside tea and tobacco stalls, owned by Muslims, were burned to the ground.

The Fire Brigade said 50 buildings had burned in Ahmadabad, most of them Muslim-owned.

Curfew was ordered in several parts of Ahmadabad as rioting spread across a 185-mile swathe of Gujarat, from Rajkot to Godhra, where the train fire occurred. Police were taking little action.

The state government, run by the party of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had supported the call for a shutdown.

Police said 63 people, including two municipal councilors in Godhra, had been arrested on murder charges in the train attack.

The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, a member of the prime minister’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, called the train burning an “organized terrorist attack” and said steps would be taken “so that no one dare repeat such a thing in future.”

In three towns in the state, seven Muslims were stabbed to death overnight, and curfews were ordered.

The violence began Wednesday when Muslim tea vendors and their neighbors in Godhra stoned a train carrying Hindu nationalists and set it on fire. They killed 58 people, after slogan-chanting passengers refused to pay for snacks during a five-minute halt, the rail station chief, J.K. Katija, said Thursday.

Tension had been building for five years in Godhra and other towns in Gujarat, said police chief Raju Bhargava. Hindu nationalists travel by train across Gujarat to and from a religious site in Ayodhya, in northern Uttar Pradesh state, where the World Hindu Council vows to build a temple to the Hindu god Rama on the ruins of the 16th century Muslim mosque that Hindus tore down in 1992. In subsequent nationwide riots, 2,000 people died.

Bhargava said the Hindu activists often refused to pay for food taken from Muslim vendors at the stations, and brandished sticks as they shouted slogans, causing resentment and anger to build up.

The Hindu Council rejected the prime minister’s plea Wednesday to help keep peace by dropping the plan to erect the Rama temple, beginning March 15, in defiance of court orders. Vajpayee has strongly supported the temple construction, but said the government opposes it being done by force.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Another sad case of Man's Inhumanity to Man in the name of God.

...Jen

-- posted by JenL_2

Top 127. Feb 28, 2002 8:59 AM

» mitelo - Re: Re: Religious Extremist Murder

In response to message posted by JenL_2:

I hope we don't get to the point where we have to respond this way to Muslim terror, but it could happen.

When the extensive worldwide Muslim terror organizations are seen for what they are, it is not hard to hold that group responsible for the cycles of violence that involve Muslims. Jen, you and others have posted an incredible amount of documentation of Muslim terror organizations around the world that are not seen with any other religion. They are very special when it comes to planned and sporadic violence and death.

-- posted by mitelo

Top 128. Feb 28, 2002 9:31 AM

» JenL_2 - Re: Religious Extremist Murder

In response to message posted by mitelo:

Mitelo - IMHO - regardless of what religion they are.....extremists are extremists.....terrorists are terrorists.....terrorist acts including the killing of innocent people are wrong....

an editorial from 2/28 India Express:

Flashpoint at Godhra

Get the VHP out of Ayodhya: Gujarat attack underlines this

The Narendra Modi government in Gujarat must ensure the perpetrators of the sordid attack on passengers of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra are immediately brought to book. There can be no provocation, no possible reason, for such an act of wanton violence.

But this is also the moment to acknowledge that Wednesday’s black morning at Godhra demands more. Even as the government in Gujarat reaches out to all those who lost their loved ones, and rushes succour to those who suffered injuries in the hellish ordeal, this is a challenge not for the Narendra Modi government alone. What happened at Godhra also flings a challenge at the NDA government at the Centre and at all of us who have a stake in our life together as a nation. The onus is on each of us to contain the fallout of the violence at Godhra, and to counter it with sobriety.

The attack on the ‘Ram sevaks’ returning from Ayodhya comes at a very precarious moment. On February 24, after a prolonged period of threat-making, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad inaugurated the countdown to March 15, the appointed date for temple construction to begin at Ayodhya. Ever since, responsible entities and institutions — including this newspaper — have been warning that tensions may be inexorably building up, that the VHP may have stoked something that could spin out of its — and the government’s — control. It has been pointed out that the VHP’s programme threatens the rule of law, not just on and after March 14, and not merely within the narrow confines of the disputed area at Ayodhya. The slogans-and-trishuls gathering at Ayodhya threaten the often fragile peace between communities in other parts of the country as well. Many cautioned that the VHP’s hate-filled campaign could provide latitude to other practitioners of a similarly bad and bigoted politics. The ghastly violence at Godhra would appear to be the embodiment of the worst of those fears coming true.

But the nightmare cannot continue. The situation in and around Godhra must be calmed; the local administration must ensure there is no room for rumours and fear-mongering in a state that has, in the all too recent past, seemed especially vulnerable to communal tensions. At the same time, the Centre must call an immediate halt to the VHP’s exertions at Ayodhya. ‘‘I appeal to the VHP to postpone their agitation and help the government in the maintenance of peace and brotherhood in the country,’’ said Prime Minister Vajpayee after the attack in Gujarat. This is not enough. The time to appeal to the VHP is long past. The VHP-sponsored assemblage of sadhus and sants must be instantly, summarily dispersed. Its paraphernalia must be firmly, even forcibly, packed off from Ayodhya and its leading lights told that they can no longer force their way into a matter that must be decided either by the courts or by consensus. The crime at Godhra has brought home the fact that the maintenance of ‘rule of law’ demands more than a legal framework. It demands a constant and alert commitment and watchfulness, from the government as well as its citizens.

The Indian government is arresting the guilty parties and trying to calm both sides - both the Hindu and the Muslim extremists - and are trying to find a solution to the Ayodhya dispute, which seems to be a flashpoint, before the whole country erupts in violence.

From what I've been reading, part of the problem in India has been the increasing political influence of Hindu fundamentalism, which has caused a backlash from the Muslim fundamentalists....and of course anytime there are Muslims feeling like victims....as we've seen.....the al Qaida are right there to capitalize on the opportunity.....Jen

-- posted by JenL_2

Top 129. Feb 28, 2002 11:46 AM

» BPyles - Gunmen try to free Pearl kidnap suspect

Gunmen Try to Free WSJ Kidnap Suspect

By Afzal Nadeem
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2002; 1:21 PM

KARACHI, Pakistan -- Gunmen ambushed a police bus Thursday in an unsuccessful bid to Free prisoners from three banned Muslim groups, one of which is suspected of involvement in the kidnap-slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

A policeman and a prisoner were killed, and eight other people were wounded, but none of the
estimated 20 prisoners aboard the bus escaped. The gunmen fled.

The attack in Karachi underscored the rising tensions in Pakistan following Pearl's killing and
President Pervez Musharraf's crackdown on Islamic militants.

Earlier Thursday, police transferred the alleged mastermind of the Pearl kidnapping, Ahmed Omar
Saeed Sheikh, to another Karachi jail after an anonymous caller threatened to blow up a police
station if he was sent to the United States for trial.

Pearl's widow, Mariane, who is seven months pregnant, left Pakistan for home on Wednesday, a
U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The French-born widow flew first to Paris, the official said.

All the prisoners on the police bus that was attacked in Karachi were arrested during the
crackdown on Muslim militants launched Jan. 12 by Musharraf. Witnesses said four gunmen ambushed the bus about a half-mile from a court where the prisoners had appeared at a hearing.

Aman Ullah, a senior police official, said the gunmen tried to free the prisoners but fled after
police reinforcements arrived.

Police said the prisoners were from three outlawed Islamic groups: Jaish-e-Mohammed, Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

Some members of Jaish-e-Mohammed, or Army of Mohammed, were believed involved in Pearl's
slaying. Jaish-e-Mohammed has also been accused by India of staging the Dec. 13 attack on the
Indian Parliament in New Delhi.

Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are militant Sunni Muslim groups believed responsible for
numerous killings of Shiite Muslims.

Pearl, South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, was abducted in Karachi on Jan. 23.
His slaying was revealed in a graphic video received last week by U.S. diplomats in Karachi.

Saeed was in custody when the tape was received. He confessed in a court hearing to involvement in Pearl's kidnapping. He later withdrew the confession, which was not made under oath.

The United States has not indicted Saeed in the Pearl case. U.S. authorities are seeking his
extradition under a 1994 warrant for the kidnapping of another American.

Pakistan's courts have ordered Saeed held at least through March 12.

Saeed "is under investigation at the moment," Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan told
an Islamabad news conference Thursday. "Let that investigation be completed."

A senior Pakistani diplomat said Wednesday that the government has "no objections" to handing
Saeed over to U.S. authorities once proceedings against him here are complete.

Musharraf, however, risks a militant backlash if he accedes to the U.S. request to surrender
Saeed.

-- posted by BPyles

The abduction of Daniel Pearl

Top 130. Mar 2, 2002 1:55 AM

» JenL_2 - Re: Pakistan's ISI & Daniel Pearl

More on Daniel Pearl

I posted this article above from 1/29 Rediff.com, and Indian Online newspaper:

(excerpt)

On January 1, 2002, a story filed by Pearl from Bahawalpur featured prominently on the front page of the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal. The headline summed it up: 'Militant Groups in Pakistan Thrive Despite Crackdown'. The sub-head read: 'Jaish-e-Mohammed Says It Is Still Operating After Police Detained Some Staff'.

The report proceeded to make several highly damaging accusations about the Pakistani government's efforts to rein in terrorism.

Jaish-e-Mohammed representatives said the police "left behind enough people to keep the office running".

When Pearl visited Bahawalpur, a "nearby Jaish-e-Mohammad regional center was still operating Thursday, its traditional recruiting day. The group's name has been painted over, but posters praising holy war are still hung inside. And a bank account that Jaish-e-Mohammad uses to solicit contributions remains open, despite a November order by Pakistan's central bank freezing the group's account."

Ordinarily, one might have dismissed this as nothing more than the standard Indian foreign office press release. But this is something more -- an independent report by a correspondent belonging to one of the most respected media groups in the United States.

Having learned what was going on in Bahawalpur so openly, it was on the cards that Daniel Pearl would try to dig a little deeper. And this possibility posed a problem for several people...

Some days ago, Pearl was seized by person or persons unknown. The kidnapping has been attributed to terrorists. An anonymous message sent to the police and the media in Pakistan accuses the journalist of being a CIA agent and promises to mete out the same "inhumane" treatment to him as to the Al Qaeda prisoners being held by the United States.

Is there more to the story of this supposed kidnapping than meets the eye?

and posted a link to this one from 2/8 LAWeekly:

The Hunt for Daniel Pearl

A letter from Pakistan

by Ali Ahmed Rind

Christina Lamb, a reporter for London’s Sunday Telegraph, is well-known in Pakistan’s sociopolitical circles. She wrote “Waiting for Allah,” an examination of the 1990s, our decade of turmoil. A few days before Kabul fell to anti-Taliban forces, she was staying at the Hotel Serena in Quetta. During the night, a half-dozen plainclothes agents forced their way into her bedroom and ordered her and a friend to leave. They spent the night in a police holding cell; in the morning, they were escorted to Islamabad and put on a plane and flown out of country.

She had been working on a story about continued Taliban influence in Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency. The message was clear to foreign journalists pouring into Pakistan to cover the ongoing war in Afghanistan: Stay away from matters sensitive to Pakistan.

It seems this message was ignored by Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal reporter who has been missing since January 23, after he sought an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gillani, head of a spiritual organization named in connection with the so-called Shoe Bomber case by U.S. authorities.

Pearl had been in Pakistan for about a month, working on complex stories and traveling to various nooks and crannies. He was seen in Peshawar doing his best to interview fugitive Taliban leaders who sought refuge after their regime collapsed in Afghanistan. His guides could not help, since such interviews would have been very embarrassing for Pakistan.

He also went to Bahawalpur, a small city in the southern province of Punjab, the headquarters of a banned militant outfit called Jaish-e-Muhammad. Despite a government ban on such militant activities, Jaish-e-Muhammad conducts business openly and avoids the government’s freezing of outlaw organizations’ accounts. “Police left behind enough cadres to run the office,” a Jaish-e-Muhammad worker boasted to him about outfit’s ability to keep operating despite government crackdown.

One of the suspects in Pearl’s kidnapping is Muhammad Arif, a bodyguard for Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Moulana Masood Azhar.

The word in Pakistan is that Pearl was kidnapped because he probed issues considered to be off-limits. “I am surprised as to why Pearl worked on a shoe bomber story, which was already finished after the arrest of the principle accused who is now facing trial,” said Pakistan’s interior minister Mionuddine Hyder in an interview with a local TV news channel.

A day before Pearl was kidnapped, a local journalist, Ghulam Husnain, who freelances for CNN and Time magazine, was reported missing. He was last seen at a Karachi press club. His wife, also a journalist, alerted authorities and press organizations demanded his release. It was no secret why he got in trouble. Five months earlier, he wrote the cover story for Newsline, an outspoken news magazine in Karachi, which covers activities of the Karachi-based underworld. His piece alleged connections between organized crime and the country’s powerful intelligence agencies.

He wrote that an operative of India’s underworld, Don Daud Ibrahim, lived in Karachi, and received preferential treatment from officials. Daud Ibrahim is on India’s Top 20 wanted list for questioning in connection with a series of bomb blasts in the Indian city of Mumbai in 1982 that killed more than two hundred people. India wanted him back and Pakistan denied that he lived in Pakistan.

In support of its claim, India referred to the Newsline story. Four days later, when Ghulam Husnain returned to his family, he was a broken man and refused to utter a word about his ordeal. It does not take a Sherlock Homes to figure out what might have happened to him.

“He has consented not to stand by his story on Daud Ibrahim,” one of his close friends confided, when asked about the reason behind his disappearance and return.

It’s a dreadful fact, but the press in Pakistan knows its limits. Every journalist practices strict self-censorship when dealing with matters the state considers sensitive. If a journalist dares to cross the threshold, the editor usually puts the story in the trash and advises the keen reporter to stop taking prohibited paths. Whoever dares to continue is likely to be harassed and persecuted, depending on the “severity of crime.”

I know of other journalists who have paid the price. One is the owner of the vocal English language daily The Frontier Post, Rahmat Shah Afridi. He has been in jail three years on a fabricated charge of drug possession.

A few days before his arrest, he had published a report alleging that some higher-ups in a Pakistani anti-narcotic task force were involved in the drug business.

Another is the editor of the weekly English-language paper, The Friday Times, who was arrested on a treason charge after he wrote that Pakistan was having an identity crisis.

In this atmosphere of fear and hypocrisy, Daniel Pearl tried to unveil truth. It was akin to putting one’s hands in a hornet’s nest.

On December 15, three days after President Pervaiz Musharraf vowed to curb Muslim extremism and a few hours after the Interior Ministry banned five militant organizations, the Interior Ministry’s 16-story-tall building was gutted in a mysterious fire. The ministry’s records were lost, including lists of militant groups. Civilian authorities no longer have any details of how many trained militants freely roam the streets of Pakistan. The only government agency with such records is Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which created and reared these militants in line with the state agenda. Some people in Pakistan point fingers to this agency in the Pearl case. But others insist the ISI could not afford such a mistep, given the close involvement of U.S. agencies in the region.

It’s hard to know what forces are to blame in Pearl’s disappearance. Maybe the kidnappers are out to ruin Musharraf’s political fortune, but one thing is certain, they are hurting their self-professed cause of national sovereignty of Pakistan.

Pearl’s wife, Marianne, who is six months pregnant, on Saturday sent an open letter to the Pakistani people.

“What will they get by torturing an innocent man, who is invariably a sympathizer of all neglected people? The people who are keeping Danny are crying for justice. This I know. But this I also know — they hold my husband. My husband is my life. I am six months pregnant, and he is father of my unborn child. I appeal to these people to release him.”

I suspect his kidnappers want to keep truth in chains so that their ugly faces will not be revealed to world.

I'm trying to find Pearl's 1/1/02 WSJ story, but in the meantime here's one he did in 1/9/02 WSJ....You can see from Pearl's publishing of his detailed research in the WSJ....why the Pak ISI might want to silence him....

Afghanistan provides valuable route for smugglers shipping goods to Pakistan

By DANIEL PEARL
The Wall Street Journal

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - During their five years in power in Afghanistan, the Taliban raged against modern culture and values. But the regime profited from traffic in Sony televisions, Gillette shaving cream and Marlboro cigarettes, among other products.

None of these consumer goods from the West and Asia are made in Afghanistan, and under the Taliban government, they didn't have much of a market there. Watching television, for instance, was banned.

But for decades, whoever has run Afghanistan has exacted tolls on smugglers who ship foreign-made goods through the country and then illegally move the merchandise over the border to Pakistan. The products end up in places such as Peshawar's sprawling Karkhano market, where vendors' shelves are packed with cartons of smuggled Marlboro and Dunhill cigarettes and sidewalk carts offer bright Korean fabrics. Stacks of mud-stained cartons of Sony Trinitron televisions line courtyard after courtyard.

By smuggling these items through Afghanistan, traders evade Pakistan's stiff taxes and duties on foreign goods. This allows consumers at Karkhano and other markets to enjoy large discounts compared with legally imported products.

Smuggling also effectively boosts Western and Asian manufacturers' sales volume by allowing goods to be retailed at lower prices in Pakistan, a poor nation overall, but one with 140 million inhabitants and a substantial consumer class. The manufacturers all condemn smuggling but say they can't stop it once products leave their direct control. But a close look at the behavior of one major manufacturer, Sony Corp., reveals that some company representatives appear to have tolerated smuggling as part of Sony's marketing strategy in the region.

The fees the Taliban collected on shipments of goods manufactured by Sony and other foreign companies provided one of that harsh regime's biggest sources of earnings. A United Nations study released last year estimated that "unofficial" exports from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2000 totaled $941 million, with merchandise worth another $139 million moving illegally from Afghanistan to Iran. The U.N. estimated the Taliban's annual take at $36 million. The World Bank, in a 1999 report, said it was $75 million.

The prospect of exacting similar tolls on the smuggling business helps explain why the Taliban's successors are now wrestling for control over Kandahar, Jalalabad and other cities that are important transit points on smuggling routes. United States bombing and poor security have discouraged smuggling for the last three months, but it is expected to resume as relative calm returns.

Beyond providing potential revenue to those in charge, smuggling offers employment to poor inhabitants of tribal areas along the Afghan border. That is one reason Pakistan — eager for stability in that area — has made only feeble attempts to compel vendors at Karkhano to pay taxes.

Smuggling economics are simple: A smuggled 21-inch Sony Wega TV typically costs the equivalent of about $400 in Pakistan. The same legally imported television costs the equivalent of $440, after duties and taxes. Sony receives the same payment — about $220 — from the distributor either way. Manufacturers thus have little financial incentive to crack down on smuggling.

During most of the 1990s, Sony imported few TVs through legal channels into Pakistan and assembled no sets locally, according to Sony Gulf FZE, Sony Corp.'s wholly owned subsidiary and sales office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. But that doesn't mean Sonys were unavailable. The Pakistan Electronics Manufacturers Association, a trade group that includes local TV assemblers hurt by sales of smuggled goods, found in a 1996 survey that 500,000 televisions were smuggled into the country that year. At least 70 percent, or 350,000, of them were Sonys, the survey found.

Today, Sony TVs remain one of the most prominent consumer-electronics products in Pakistani smuggled-goods markets. Sony Gulf's authorized distributor in Dubai sells sets to traders who often ship them to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. From there, some of the goods head northeast to the Afghan border near Herat, then southeast on the highway to Kandahar, on to Jalalabad, and then typically enter Pakistan illegally along the Khyber Pass near Peshawar.

Twice a month, Khalid M. Khan, a manager with Sony Gulf, visits the Karkhano market in Peshawar, which is widely known as a major retail center for smuggled goods. He says he makes the trips merely to see which models are popular and should be supplied legally by the local assembly plant in Pakistan that Sony opened in 1999. Mr. Khan acknowledges, though, that none of the locally made Sonys are sold in Karkhano. All of the TVs he sees changing hands here have been smuggled from Afghanistan, he says.

Dealers in the Karkhano market who acknowledge they sell smuggled TVs say that for years they have routinely ordered Sony products from the traders in Dubai who obtain the goods from the authorized Sony distributor there, Jumbo Electronics Co. One of the Karkhano dealers, Abdul Basir Khan, manager of Muslim Electronics, says Sony Gulf's Khalid Khan (no relation) "doesn't come here to book orders, but he gives ideas." For instance, the Sony Gulf man points out that " 'such-and-such model is available,' " Abdul Basir Khan says. The Muslim Electronics shop is filled with Sony Trinitron TVs and has a large Sony sign above the door. "Khalid usually presses us hard to dispose (of inventory) as quickly as possible," Abdul Basir Khan says.

For his part, Khalid Khan makes no apology for telling black-market dealers here that certain Sony models are available in Dubai or Singapore. "There is no harm" in this encouragement, he says. "They are making our brand popular in the country."

But he denies promoting smuggling in any way. He says that when Sony Gulf discovers traders selling through unauthorized channels, it threatens to punish them. The company has fined one trader and briefly cut off another one, he says. Smuggling hurts sales of the Sony televisions assembled in Pakistan, he says. But, he adds, smuggling is "beyond our control."

Ram Modak, a spokesman for Sony Gulf, also denies his company has knowingly shipped any goods intended for Pakistan through Afghanistan. He says, "Sony Gulf is not aware of the routes the (Dubai-based traders) use for their shipments to Pakistan." Kei Sakaguchi, a spokesman at Sony's headquarters in Tokyo, says the parent corporation has nothing to add to Mr. Modak's comments.

Vishesh L. Bhatia, director of Jumbo Electronics, says his company isn't allowed by Sony Gulf to sell goods directly in Pakistan, and it often can't control what traders do. "Duty barriers always encourage smuggling," he notes.

Minoru Kubota, Japan's ambassador to Pakistan from 1997 through early 2000, says he heard complaints from Pakistani businessmen during that period about the smuggling of Japanese goods. But he says the smuggling issue "is a business matter," not a concern of governments. "If trade shrinks, it will not benefit anyone," he adds.

Smugglers have operated across the Afghan-Pakistani border since Pakistan became independent in 1947. In the 1980s, huge amounts of United States money flooded the region, as the Central Intelligence Agency used Pakistani proxies to fund the mujahedeen resistance to Afghanistan's Soviet-backed government. Smuggling of electronics, tires, crockery and textiles gave some mujahedeen commanders a way to enrich themselves and keep supporters employed. For its part, "the government of Pakistan encouraged people to invest in this business," even supplying telephone and electricity connections for the Karkhano market, recalls Rafique Shinwari, a longtime distributor of smuggled goods in Peshawar who says he now imports only legally.

In 1994, after the Soviets had left Afghanistan and the country was divided among rival commanders, Abdul Haq, an ex-mujahedeen Afghan leader living in Peshawar, approached Sony Gulf about distributing TVs in Afghanistan. Sony Gulf's Khalid Khan says he negotiated a deal under which Mr. Haq's company, Khyber-Afghan International, began sending televisions by his family's airline from Dubai to Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. "Whatever he did (with the TVs) inside Afghanistan, we don't know," Mr. Khan says.

Black-market dealers in Pakistan say Mr. Haq's family was prominent in the cross-border television trade in the mid-1990s. Mr. Haq was killed in October trying to organize anti-Taliban forces. His nephew, Abdulrahim Zalmai, says, "The family itself was not involved by any means," in smuggling. But he says that traders in Jalalabad who bought TVs from his uncle may have smuggled them into Pakistan.

Pakistani officials say they haven't cracked down aggressively on smuggling markets such as Karkhano. "We have been working over the last two or three years to start curtailing smuggling," says Abdul Razak Dawood, Pakistan's commerce minister, but "through economic means rather than coercion."

Pakistan has been reducing import duties to diminish the price advantage of smuggled products. It has also ended duty-free access through the Pakistani port of Karachi for Afghanistan-bound goods, such as TVs, that often end up being smuggled back into Pakistan. Smugglers responded to the new obstacle in Karachi, however, simply by shipping through Iran and then across Afghanistan.

Traversing Afghanistan is by no means a simple trip. During the country's civil war in the early 1990s, various mujahedeen set up more than a dozen checkpoints along the country's major roads. Truckers had to pay small fees at each stop, and sometimes had their whole cargo expropriated by fighters or roving bandits.

The Taliban first gained prominence in Afghanistan in 1994 by eliminating most of the highway checkpoints and robberies. Afghan traders based in Dubai and Singapore poured money into the Taliban's coffers, as the regime extended its control from Herat to Jalalabad and enforced more orderly transportation, according to Pakistani officials who were also assisting the Taliban at the time.

After conquering Kabul in 1996, the Taliban simplified the fees for passage through Afghanistan, exacting a single payment determined by weight and other factors. For example, the Taliban sometimes imposed fees equivalent to roughly five-to-10 cents a kilogram, regardless of the merchandise, says one Dubai-based freight forwarder. "These guys didn't want to use calculators," he says. The 1999 World Bank study estimated that televisions valued at $367 million were smuggled into Pakistan from Afghanistan in 1997.

Traders say they quickly adjusted to the Taliban's spiritually motivated rules. To get around the ban on packages with depictions of humans or living animals, traders put boxes in larger, blank cartons or simply reminded Taliban authorities that the packages were moving on to Pakistan.

The smuggling of American-made goods was hindered in July 1999, when former President Clinton signed an antiterrorism executive order prohibiting United States companies from exporting any goods, except for humanitarian aid, to Afghanistan. But Pakistani traders say they still could obtain products smuggled from Afghanistan — such as Gillette shaving cream, Head & Shoulders shampoo and Marlboro cigarettes — if the goods came from distributors outside of the United States.

Manufacturers of these goods say they discourage any smuggling but can't always control it in distant lands. "It is obviously something we don't sponsor or endorse," says Eric Kraus, a spokesman for Gillette Co. Linda Ulrey, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble Co., maker of Head & Shoulders, says the company lacks specific information about smuggling through Afghanistan.

A spokesman for Philip Morris Cos., which makes Marlboros, says the company can't comment because it doesn't do any business in Afghanistan. British American Tobacco PLC, maker of Dunhill cigarettes, says in a written statement that it doesn't condone or encourage smuggling.

Dubai's emergence as a major trading hub has helped fuel the expansion of smuggling through Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s, many large United States, Japanese and European consumer-goods manufacturers opened operations that brought products through the duty-free zone of Jebel Ali, along the Dubai coast. Official Dubai customs records show that such "re-exports" from Dubai to Afghanistan jumped 79 percent, to $819 million, in 1996, the year the Taliban took over, compared with 1995.

Much of this trading relies on the illegal hawala currency-exchange system. (Hawala means "change" in Arabic.) Black-market consumer-electronics dealers in Pakistan say that after they place orders with traders in Dubai, they pay for the goods by giving Pakistani rupees to a hawala dealer in Peshawar. The hawala dealer telephones a counterpart in Dubai, who hands over United Arab Emirates dirhams to a consumer-electronics trader in Dubai. The hawala dealers settle their accounts later, splitting the commission.

Most of the victims of Afghan smuggling receive benefits as well. The Pakistani government has lost tax revenue, but border tribes engaged in smuggling are less likely to resort to kidnapping or drug-running. Authorized Pakistani dealers of foreign goods lose sales to black-market competition, but in the capital of Islamabad, many such dealers stock smuggled and legally imported goods on the same shelves.

The biggest losers have been local manufacturers that have assembled TVs but found their products consistently undercut by smuggled goods. Several local-assembly factories stopped production in the mid-1990s.

These difficulties prompted the Pakistan Electronics Manufacturers Association to conduct its 1996 survey. The trade group found that for every TV legally imported or assembled locally, more than two were smuggled in.

Sarfrazuddin, the association's chairman, who goes by one name, says he subsequently showed Sony officials and Japanese diplomats copies of documents indicating that in 1997 Sony Gulf was promoting service guarantees that retailers could offer to buyers in Pakistan. Since at the time Sony TVs were "neither being manufactured in Pakistan nor being imported" legally, "we wonder how the guarantees" could be offered, he wrote in a July 1997 letter to the Japanese Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Faiz Rahim Khan, chief executive of Data Electronics, a Lahore, Pakistan-based company that provided service under Sony Gulf's guarantees in Pakistan until 1999, says the Sony unit routinely reimbursed his firm for repairs on TVs sold in the Middle East and used in Pakistan. "How it got there was not our concern," he says.

Sony Gulf's Mr. Modak confirms the company had an agreement in the 1990s with Data Electronics to repair Sony products in Pakistan. He also says Sony Gulf's authorized Dubai distributor, Jumbo Electronics, has offered warranties on Sony products that are good in Pakistan. He adds that Sony Gulf didn't make the Pakistan warranties available to Dubai-based traders who bought products from Jumbo.

In 1999, Sony began assembling televisions in Pakistan, contracting with a Pakistani-Korean joint-venture company. Tahir Arshad, the venture's finance manager, says smuggling of Sony TVs has been reduced in recent years. Still, the local-assembly plant is running at only half capacity, and the venture's officials are worried about whether their contract will be renewed this year. Sony Gulf declines to comment on whether it will renew the contract.

Televisions are legal again in Afghanistan, and if Sony closes down local production in Pakistan, it "can still sell" in Afghanistan, says Mr. Arshad. In fact, the late Abdul Haq's brother, Haji Abdul Qadir, is back in power in Jalalabad as provincial governor, and he is trying to revive the family's Dubai-Jalalabad air-cargo service.

Khalid Khan of Sony Gulf says he has begun scouting for authorized Sony dealers to operate in Afghanistan. One place he intends to recruit is in Peshawar, although he says that any TVs imported into Afghanistan would be sold to Afghan buyers, not smuggled into neighboring countries. Mr. Modak, the Sony Gulf spokesman, says it hasn't authorized Mr. Khan to do this recruiting.

Some dealers of smuggled goods in Karkhano say they are eager to be recruited. "If we manage to work from Afghanistan, we can export to Russia, to Iran, to other neighboring countries" — if possible, without paying taxes and duties, says Muslim Electronics's Abdul Basir Khan. "We will have a much greater market."

IMHO - Daniel Pearl's abduction and murder were carried out by a Pak Islamic extremist group, but they were doing it at the behest of someone in the Pak ISI. And the demands made were such that they could never be met.....because they never intended to release him.....he had to be silenced because he knew too much....and was willing to publish what he knew in detail in the WSJ...a world-read newspaper. I could be wrong... but I believe that the kidnappers outrageous email demands.... the comments about Pearl being a Jew.... the video showing a ritualistic execution.....even the assertions that the Al-Qaida was behind the kidnapping.....all are smokescreens to throw the U.S. off the trail of the real ringleaders - some elements in the Pak ISI.....Jen

-- posted by JenL_2

Top 131. Mar 2, 2002 12:46 PM

» BPyles - India turmoil

Not much doubt in my mind as to is behind all this, or at least who started it. Maybe India will be able to at least resolve it, which may be more than some of the other countries in turmoil.
--------------------
India earns universal infamy over riots
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA, Times of India TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ SATURDAY, MARCH 02, 2002 12:16:23 PM ]

WASHINGTON: A nation that till last week was earning encomiums across the world for its religious and cultural diversity and its steady if unspectacular resurgence is now reaping universal infamy on account of its communal bloodletting.

The world media is splattering India's Hindu-Muslim blood feud on its broadcasts and news pages amid questions about its political and social stability. Suddenly, India looks like an overblown version of the many violence-wracked small states of Asia and Africa.The bloodbath in Gujarat has eclipsed the violence in Middle East, the India-Pakistan face-off, and even the Daniel Pearl murder in the western media. Almost all major newspapers and television networks have been carrying wrenching reports about the madness that has seized the normally placid if chaotic country.

The events are proving to embarrassing for Indians, Indian-Americans and Indophiles who wear the country's diversity as a badge of honour.

"It's the last thing we needed right now. We were doing so well," says Dr Naveen Shah, a founder of the American Association of Physicians from India and a Gujarat native.

The riots, following the fractured political verdict in Uttar Pradesh, has returned western experts on the region to the old theme of forecasting gloom and doom for India. "A combination of widening political cracks and increasing religious violence means India is entering another worrying time," the respected Economist wrote this week.

Even before the elections and the riots, the India-Pakistan tensions had led former Presidential candidate Steve Forbes to question India's cohesiveness. "India is not a homogenous state," Forbes argued in a March 4 comment in his magazine, warning that any attempt by the ruling coalition to wage war could result in the country coming unhinged. The comment, and the events thereafter, has come as a godsend to discredited Khalistani and Kashmiri separatist groups who had gone into hiding post 9/11 amid a universal distaste for violent movements.

They have now resurfaced to amplify India's current troubles to the western media, going as far as to urge Secretary of State Colin Powell to condemn "Hindu terrorism."

The riots have also featured on the respected television programs like Jim Lehrer News Hour with grim but largely fair commentary. "I think it (the riots) comes at a very bad time because I think India has worked to establish its identity both in the international community and with the United States as a secular, democratic, socially harmonious society and has tried to contrast itself with a theocratic, authoritarian, dysfunctional Pakistan," South Asia scholar Harold Gould said on the widely-watched News Hour.

The US media was increasingly beginning to recognise this, often referring to prominent minority achievers such as Abdul Kalam, A R Rahman, and Azim Premji. The New York Times recently carried a perceptive feature about Indian Muslims, how they had disowned the fundamentalist school, and their sense of belonging to India."This kind of violence, if it ramifies, could really undermine considerably India's entire attempt to establish what kind of a society it wants to be from this time onward," Gould said.

Richard Lariviere, an academic from University of Texas at Austin and an expert on Indian religious law and Hinduism, put the events in perspective saying communalism in India is a societal cancer in the same way that racism is a societal cancer in the United States. "From time to time there are remissions and one is even hopeful that you're curing these terrible cancers, but then some awful event rips open the new wounds," he said.

But Lariviere was critical of India's political class, which instead of choosing touch economic prescriptions to rectify the inequities in an otherwise "an enormously wealthy country," often articulated political slogans in terms of communal differences.

The Bush administration too has been sympathetic to the madness that has seized Gujarat without being judgmental. The State Department has however issued a travel advisory cautioning US nationals from traveling to Ayodhya or its surrounding areas. "Thousands of Hindu activists demanding that the government allow construction to begin at a proposed temple site in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, have converged there. Preliminary work in the area on prefabricated components of the temple has raised Hindu-Muslim tensions," the advisory said. "Due to increased tensions and the high risk of violence, US citizens are strongly urged to avoid travel to Ayodhya or its surrounding areas."

-- posted by BPyles

Top 132. Mar 2, 2002 1:10 PM

» Steven_Russell - Re: India turmoil

In response to message posted by BPyles:

Not much doubt in my mind as to is behind all this, or at least who started it. Maybe India will be able to at least resolve it, which may be more than some of the other countries in turmoil.

--------------------------------------------------

India, the home nation of one of the largest Muslim populations in the world. A democracy, in which Muslims hold elected positions of governmental power.

-- posted by Steven_Russell

Top 133. Mar 2, 2002 1:25 PM

» Kirk - Re: Re: Pakistan's ISI & Daniel Pearl

In response to message posted by JenL_2:

WOW Jen!

Good stuff. I usually don't take the time to read all the posts here but your title caught my eye and I was well rewarded for reading all you posted and highlighted.

One problem with this part of the world is the layers of corruption. I've read of people donating money to build a school in India and maybe 3 to 5% actually make it to the people after all the hands have been greased. Many go back to India themselves to oversee their donations as they can't trust people... and India is BETTER than its neighbors!

The line between the crooks and those in government for India and Pakistan is probably not much different than how closely our Enron leaders were tied to our top government officials. Some would say it is a matter of scale... but I digress... the corruption is far worse in India/Pakistan and I bet it would be like Nixon trying to pay off the Mob to get rid of the watergate reporters... rumors are Kennedy did get a few election favors from the Mob and might have led to his assination...

-- posted by Kirk

Top 134. Mar 2, 2002 1:59 PM

» JenL_2 - Re: Pakistan's ISI & Daniel Pearl

In response to message posted by Kirk:

Thanks Kirk - I just feel that in Pakistan there is an ongoing attempt at cover-up - and then to just go on business as usual. IMHO - Pak needs to stop sweeping their dirt under the carpet and instead undergo a thorough housecleaning. I hope that journalists continue investigating and exposing the truth - and the truth gets told over and over again in the media....it's the least we can do to honor the life of Daniel Pearl.

...Jen

-- posted by JenL_2