E-Paper PDF 7th October (KHI)

CMYK

Monday, 7 October, 2019 I 7 Safar-ul-Muzaffar, 1441 I Rs 17.00 I Vol X No 97 I 60 Pages I Karachi Edition

FATF pArTiAlly hAppy wiTh pAkisTAn g

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apg’s mutual evaluatIon report states paKIstan ‘largely but partIally’ complIed wIth 36 out of40 parameters

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IdentIfIes preventIve measures, fInancIal IntellIgence, money-launderIng and terror-fInancIng InvestIgatIons as weaKnesses

watchdog not satIsfIed wIth steps taKen agaInst terror outfIts

ISLAMABAD

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ghulam abbas

ith the Financial Action task Force (FAtF) set to decide Pakistan's fate in mid-October, its associate Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) has released an evaluation report on Pakistan's compliance with the anti-money laundering regime, saying the country “largely but partially” complied with 36 parameters, while missing out on the remaining four.

On the basis of the 228-page Mutual Evaluation Report 2019, the global watchdog for terror financing and money laundering will decide whether to retain Pakistan on the greylist or remove it based on its past year performance. the watchdog has not ruled out blacklisting the country and the meeting on October 13-18 will also consider this option. the four missed parameters are transparency & BO (beneficial owner/ownership of legal arrangements; DNFBPs (designated nonfinancial businesses and profession) customers’ due diligence; regulation and supervision of the

DNFBPs; and mutual legal assistance freezing and confiscation. the APG also stressed on risk policy, supervision of coordination, preventive measures, legal personnel arrangements, financial intelligence, money-laundering and terror-financing (tF) investigations, prosecution and confiscation, production of tF preventive measures and proliferation-financing (PF) financial sanctions as Pakistan’s weaknesses.

Furthermore, the report, while highlighting that Pakistan had only missed out on four parameters, also pointed out that its performance on international cooperation was "moderate".

On September 9 in Bangkok, Pakistan submitted detailed answers to 125 questions posed

by FAtF on moves taken by it to combat money laundering and terror financing in order to move out of the greylist.

During the Bangkok negotiations, the FAtF was apprised of measures taken by Pakistan to prevent suspicious transactions and officials were questioned about moves to restrict illegal activities and freeze the assets of proscribed organisations and groups. the APG report said that in order to avoid

blacklisting, islamabad should “adequately identify and assess” money laundering and terror-financing risks as well as risks associated with the “terrorist groups operating on its soil”.

"Pakistan should adequately identify, assess and understand its ML/tF risks, including transnational risks and risks associated with terrorist groups operating in Pakistan such as Lashkar-e-tayyiba (Let), Da’esh, Al-Qaeda, Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), Falah-i-insaniat Foundation (FiF), Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), haqqani Network (hQN), and this should be used to implement a comprehensive and coordinated riskbased approach to combating ML and tF," the report stated. it stated that Pakistan has not taken sufficient measures to fully implement UNSCR 1267 obligations against all listed individuals and entities – especially those associated with Let/ JuD, and FiF as well as the groups’ leader hafiz Saeed. the APG further said that although Pakistan has taken some enforcement actions against hawala/hundi under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act 1947, the country needs "major improvements". "Pakistan has a mixed level of technical compliance with relevant FAtF recommendations and major improvements are needed in Pakistan’s international cooperation actions against criminals and their assets,” the report stated.

“Due to the significant ML/tF risks posed by hawala/hundi, Pakistan should enhance enforcement actions against hawala/hundi under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act 1947, and undertake ML and tF investigations and prosecutions of hawala/hundi operators where appropriate,” it said. the report also said that there are "major technical shortcomings" in Pakistan's legal framework and called for "fundamental improvements" to diminish the risks of money laundering and terror financing.

"Pakistan’s legal framework on transparency of legal persons and arrangements has moderate and major technical shortcomings (respectively).

Moreover, fundamental improvements are required to Pakistan’s ability to effectively mitigate the risk of ML and tF through exploitation of those technical weaknesses," it said.

Repeated attempts were made to contact officials at the Ministry of Finance but no response was received till the filing of this report.

NAB’s not guilty, says chief STORY ON PAGE 03

one dead after quake hits mirpur, adjoining areas STORY ON PAGE 02

in today’s issue

US wants an end to Govt puts halt to JKLF India’s Kashmir lockdown march in Azad Kashmir g

authorItIes blocK muzzafarabad-srInagar hIghway wIth contaIners, barbed wIres to stop marchers from reachIng loc

STORIES ON BACK PAGE & 02

India allows Kashmiri delegation to meet detained leadership

STORY ON BACK PAGE

CMYK Monday, 7 October, 2019

02 NEWS

US wantS an end to IndIa’S KaShmIr locKdown ISLAMABAD

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STAFF REPORT

high-level United States Congressional delegation, that visited Muzaffarabad to see the ground situation in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) and “gauge public sentiment” on Sunday, said they would “continue to urge India to lift the curfew and release all prisoners as a first step” to decrease the soaring tensions in the region.

According to a statement issued by the Foreign Office, the US leaders “shared the human rights concerns” and “expressed their resolve to remain engaged for the resolution of the dispute”.

The delegation included Senators Chris Van Hollen and Maggie Hassan along with their staffers and US Chargé d’Affaires Ambassador Paul Jones, the statement added.

During their visit to the AJK, a detailed briefing on the current situation on the restive Line of Control (LOC) was given by Major General Amer.

The delegation also called on AJK President Sardar Masood Khan and Prime Minister Raja Farooq Haider.

The AJK leadership thanked the two senators for the visit and appreciated their support for the people of IOK. The US delegation was apprised of the historical background of the Kashmir dispute and the deteriorating situation in the IOK in wake of the

prolonged curfew and suppression of fundamental rights of Kashmiris on the Indian side of the region since August 5.The AJK leadership expressed hope that the delegation’s visit to the territory would allow them to understand the humanitarian crisis in IOK and will help them to explain the on-ground situation to their colleagues on Capitol Hill upon return to the United States.

It was noted that the Indian government’s policy of denial to allow neutral observers to visit IOK had exposed India’s “all is well “propaganda.

Both President Masood Khan and Prime Minister Farooq Haider urged the US senators to play their role in pressing India to resolve the Kashmir dispute in accordance with the UNSC resolu-

tions.Among other things, they also shared the vision and priorities of the AJK government, which were focused on governance, rule of law and development.The US senators said that they shared the human rights concerns and would continue to urge India to lift the curfew and release all prisoners as a first step. They also expressed their resolve to remain engaged for the resolution of the dispute.

WARREN CONCERNED OVER COMMUNICATION BLACKOUT: Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate for the US Elections 2020, on Saturday expressed concern about the recent events in occupied Kashmir, including the ongoing communications blackout.In a

One dead after quake hits Mirpur, adjoining areas MIRPUR INP

At least one person was reported dead and multiple injured after a house collapsed in Mirpur after earthquake tremors hit the city and adjoining areas on Sunday. According to details, Mirpur and adjoining areas were shaken by tremors on Sunday morning at 10:28 am for two to three seconds.

Rescue sources said that tremors in

the area resulted in a house being collapsed, which led to three being buried under the debris. Two of them were immediately shifted to a hospital for treatment while one of them succumbed to his injuries.

Meanwhile, at least three people sustained severe wounds when a twostorey building became damaged by the aftershocks of the quake in Mirpur on Saturday early morning. The injured were taken to the district headquarters

hospital for medical assistance. The locals said that the tremor jolted the area at 3:00am.

Last month, at least 40 people were killed and 800 were injured when an earthquake of 5.8 magnitude jolted several parts of the country, including Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).

According to US Geological Survey, the quake had hit 22 kilometres (14 miles) north of the city of Jhelum along

post shared on Twitter, the progressive senator said: “The US-India partnership has always been rooted in our shared democratic values. I’m concerned about recent events in [India-occupied] Kashmir, including a continued communications blackout and other restrictions.”

“The rights of the people of Kashmir must be respected,” she added on Twitter, along with an article about the situation in occupied Kashmir.Since the Indian government on August 5 repealed Article 370 of its constitution — stripping occupied Kashmir of its special status — a strict lock-down and communications blackout has suffocated the region into silence. It has now been in place for 63 days.Various American lawmakers have condemned India’s actions in occupied Kashmir.Another Democratic presidential hopeful, US Senator Bernie Sanders last month termed India’s move to annex occupied Kashmir as “unacceptable”.

Last week, trailblazing US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the blockade on communication and life-saving medical care in occupied Kashmir “must end” as she expressed support for the people of the disputed territory.

Additionally, a US Senate panel has attached an amendment to a finance bill that requires India to end its lockdown and curfew in occupied Kashmir and fully restore communications links to the occupied valley.

the boundary separating the agricultural heartland of Punjab and Kashmir.

Pakistan Meteorological Department’s earthquake centre had said the earthquake measured 5.8 on the Richter scale and its depth was at 10 kilometres.

Pakistan’s chief meteorologist Muhammad Riaz had told AFP that “the worst hit” was Mirpur in AJK. The tremors lasted for 8-10 seconds and were felt strongly. A bridge connecting Bhimber and Mirpur as well as Munda bridge, located in the former, were also damaged along with Jatlan road. Soon after the incident, Prime Minister Imran Khan had expressed grief over the losses whereas AJK prime minister had cut short his Lahore visit and rushed back home. Emergency was declared in hospitals and troops were dispatched for relief efforts.

Role of parliament must not diminish: HRCP LAHORE STAFF REPORT

The Council of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has issued the following statement on concluding its biannual meeting: ‘We are seriously concerned by the government’s recent attempts to undermine the political opposition.

There are alarming signs that the role of Parliament is receding: this is evident from the government’s attempts to rule by ordinance. The recently promulgated KP Actions (in Aid of Civil Power) Ordinance 2019 not only curtails certain fundamental rights, but it also runs contrary to democratic principles.

‘The government must take prompt steps to implement the Supreme Court’s 2014 judgment to protect the rights of religious minorities. Our reports show that Pakistan’s religious minorities remain vulnerable to faithbased discrimination and to the misuse of blasphemy laws. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s (HRCP) recent fact-finding missions reveal that the

practice of enforced disappearances is still being used as a means of coercion by state actors. There is an urgent need for legislation to criminalise enforced disappearances so that perpetrators are held accountable in a systematic and effective way. ‘The surge in recent cases of child abuse points to the increasing brutalisation of society. Children are among the most vulnerable groups, and both the state and society must take responsibility for protecting them.

‘We condemn any measures by the state to curtail freedom of expression or to fragment the media through the introduction of media tribunals.

‘We strongly urge the state to grant GilgitBaltistan provincial status and to ensure that its people have access to the same fundamental rights as other citizens of Pakistan. ‘We are perturbed by the resurgence of religious extremism in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the form of the KP government’s distribution of burqas among female students. Such moves are blatant attempts to restrict women’s freedoms and a deliberate attempt to promote Talibanisation in the province.

‘Rather than investing more in healthcare and education, the government appears to be diverting resources away from these sectors. We remind the government that the state has a constitutional duty to provide its citizens with access to education and a moral duty to take all possible steps to provide acceptable levels of healthcare across the country.

‘We are deeply alarmed by the lockdown in Kashmir by the Indian government – which has produced a human rights crisis – and the subsequent war rhetoric emanating from both sides of the border. Both India and Pakistan must recognise immediately that the people of Kashmir have the right to self-determination and that both countries have a duty to protect and promote regional peace.

‘We stand in solidarity with the global and national movement to check climate change and urge the state to heed warnings that, if it does not incorporate measures to halt irreversible damage to the environment, it is ultimately depriving future generations of the right to life.’

CMYK

US supports Pakistan’s Kashmir demand: senator MULTAN INP

United States Senator Chris Hollen said that the US was supporting Pakistan’s demand to resolve the Kashmir issue according to the wishes of Kashmiris. He stated during a meeting with Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, along with a delegation of other US senators in Multan. Mr Hollen said the world was well aware of the situation in Kashmir and President Trump had offered his role in resolving the issue. He said politicians and journalists should be allowed to visit the Indian occupied Kashmir to get first-hand information about the situation there. Mr Qureshi said Prime Minister Imran Khan has raised voice against Indian brutalities in occupied Kashmir at every international forum. He said 62 days have passed but the curfew was still imposed in occupied Kashmir where people were undergoing immense difficulties.

Pindi sees hike in street crimes RAWALPINDI STAFF REPORT

Traders and citizens expressed concerns over the surge in street crimes as at least 19 cases were reported across Rawalpindi during the last 24 hours. At least 19 cases of dacoity, mobile snatching, motorcycle and car theft were reported in a day, whereas, a citizen returned home from the United Kingdom received severe wounds due to firing of dacoits near Ayub Park. The dacoits snatched 700 pounds from the citizen, identified as 61year-old Ishtiaq, when he was travelling to Jhelum from the airport along with his son.

The wounded citizen was shifted to a nearby hospital. Also, the police officials have started an investigation into the incident.

Facebook, KP govt to train young entrepreneurs NEWS DESK The world’s biggest social networking site Facebook in collaboration with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government will train young entrepreneurs and businessmen of the province. This was decided at a meeting between Provincial Finance Minister Taimur Saleem Jhagra and Facebook delegation in Peshawar. According to details, Facebook will hold training and consultation sessions with entrepreneurs and the business community of the province and create awareness about the importance of robust online presence. The provincial Finance Minister welcomed the initiative and termed it a milestone for the technological development of the province.

He said Facebook will hold an inaugural event in Peshawar soon.

CMYK Monday, 7 October, 2019

NEWS

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‘naB to addreSS BUSIneSSmen’S concernS’ IQBAL DISMISSES BUSINESSMEN’S SAYS FOUR-MEMBER COMMITTEE SAYS FBR AND BANKING COURTS TO DEAL WITH COMPLAINTS AGAINST FORMED TO DISCUSS ISSUES INCOME TAX AND DEFAULT CASES, RESPECTIVELY; ANTI-GRAFT BODY AS ‘BASELESS’ FACED BY BUSINESS COMMUNITY DOESN’T DESIRE SAUDI-STYLE POWER LAHORE

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STAFF REPORT

AYS after businessmen approached the army chief and the prime minister with their complaints against the accountability watchdog, National Accountability Bureau (NAB) chief Javed Iqbal said the allegations leveled by the business community were “completely baseless”.

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad, Iqbal said a four-member committee has been formed as an “advisory” institution that would discuss the problems of the business community and find solutions to them.

“I want to clarify that the formation of a committee doesn’t mean that NAB is not an independent institution or that NAB is subservient,” he added.

In an assurance to the businessmen, he said: “No NAB official would tele-

phone any businessmen; if necessary a NAB director-general would send notice… In case of an unsatisfactory reply, the businessmen would not be summoned but a questionnaire will be sent.

If the response to the questionnaire remained unsatisfactory, the particular person would be summoned.”

The NAB chief said the business community’s income and sales tax-related cases would be referred to the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) and that NAB would not take suo moto action against defaulters.

“NAB acts in such cases only after the State Bank request under clause 31D,” he said, adding the action starts after the failure of a settlement between the client and the bank.

He said that “NAB has never taken unilateral action on bank default cases and that normally such cases were sent to banking courts”. Speaking about the recent complaints concerning NAB

high-handedness, he said he was shocked to learn that one individual, who had praised NAB in a letter to the chairman, had expressed his reservations about NAB in a meeting with the army chief.

Iqbal said that he would not name the businessman as he didn’t want to affect anyone’s image, but said that if the individual had reservations he should have shared them with the bureau. The NAB chairman added that not just one business tycoon, but at least three, had written letters to the bureau in which they praised it. A delegation of at least 20 businessmen, comprising heads of various private companies, had called on General Qamar Javed Bajwa at the General Headquarters to inform the top general of the economic crisis being faced by the country.

“The meetings with the army chief was aimed at addressing the burning issues being faced by the business com-

munity and the uncertainty, lack of clarity in government policies, negative growth in large scale manufacturing were the key issues to be discussed.

Addressing the businessmen at the concluding session of a series of discussions and seminars titled ‘Interplay of economy and security’ on Wednesday, Gen Bajwa had said that the aim of discussion with them was to create a better understanding, according to a statement issued by the army.

“National security is intimately linked to the economy while prosperity is a function of balance in security needs and economic growth,” he had said, assuring the businessmen of full support.

About the state of fear among the civil servants, the NAB chairman said that if bureaucracy worked within the law, sticking to the PPRA and Rules of Business, then NAB would have no problem at all. The NAB chief also clarified comments attributed to him about his re-

Fazl threatens to shut down country if hurdles faced during Azadi March PESHAWAR STAFF REPORT

Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman on Sunday warned the government of shutting down the entire country if obstacles were created in the way of his ‘Azadi March’, scheduled for October 27 in Islamabad.

Addressing party workers at a convention held to finalise arrangements for the party’s anti-government rally, Fazl termed the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government’s take on the Kashmir issue a ‘soft stance’, claiming that incum-

bent rulers had “sold the blood of Kashmiri brethren” and were now “rejoicing over it”.

“We’ve chalked out our plan for the protest and the strategy will be shared once finalised,” he announced. “Our economy is in tatters but the government is being puppeteered by foreign powers,” he further claimed and added that the government would be directly responsible for any untoward incident that might happen if an attempt to stop the march if made.

The JUI-F chief said the country would head towards its destruction if nothing was done to topple

the government.

Earlier on Saturday, Fazl had warned the government against making any arrests preceding the protest march, saying that this would only further incite the protesters. Addressing a news conference in Peshawar, he urged the establishment, bureaucracy, and police to stop backing the “illegitimate” government of Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan if they wanted to avoid mayhem in the country. “The JUI-F’s Azadi March is a war that will only end with the fall of this government,” Fazl vowed as he warned ‘those sup-

INP

porting the PTI government’ to back off or face the worst form of resistance.

The government has categorically dismissed as ‘utter fabrication’ a report published in a local weekly magazine, which claimed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman was unhappy with Prime Minister Imran Khan and called back his private jet from Canada to New York.

The article claimed that the prince was so alienated by some dimensions of the Pakistani premier’s diplomacy at UN General Assembly that he ‘snubbed Imran by ordering his private jet to disembowel the Pakistani delegation’.“It is totally false and absolutely carries no truth whatsoever,” a government spokesman said in a statement issued here on Sunday, adding the report also carried “baseless self-created theory with respect to the premier’s meetings with the leaders of Turkey and Malaysia in New York”.The magazine, in one of its editorial pieces this week, was highly critical of PM Imran’s New York trip, which it claimed also had ‘some unintended consequences’.“Inexplicably, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, was so alienated by some dimensions of the Pakistani prime minister’s diplomacy in New York – he couldn’t have been happy at the prospect of Imran Khan, Recip Tayyib Erdogan and Mahathir Mohammad planning to jointly represent the Islamic bloc, nor with Pakistan’s interlocution with Iran without his explicit approval — that he visibly snubbed Imran by ordering his private jet to disembowel the Pakistani delegation,” read the article.In today’s statement, the government spokesman clarified that Islamabad and Riyadh enjoyed ‘most cordial and brotherly relations’. “Only people with vested interests would come up with such concocted and baseless assertions,” he added.Bringing opposition politicians into the equation, the spokesperson said that “desperation of the opposition is evident by their attempt to sabotage brotherly relations enjoyed by the two Islamic countries.”He also said the article also attempted to undermine “the prime minister’s hugely successful interaction with world leaders in New York, mainly focusing on raising the plight of Kashmiris in the Indian occupied territory and his views on Islamophobia which were acclaimed worldwide and won hearts in Muslim world”. NEWS DESK

Kashmir lockdown making people vulnerable to multiple health risks: NHN APP

National Humanitarian Network (NHN) has deplored the protracted humanitarian crisis in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) due to prolonged lockdown making people extremely vulnerable to different diseases, life-threatening conditions, and other multiple health risks.

NHN (being a network of 140 national humanitarian organizations) in its meeting took notice of the serious humanitarian situation in IOK due to prolonged lockdown for more than 8 weeks, complete information black-out and persistent refusal of Indian Government for any independent inquiry or access to humanitarian organizations to the occupied valley, a press release said.

The NHN meeting members said they had strong reasons to believe that more than eight million people were forced to live in extremely

hazardous conditions under state-entrenched oppression. “This situation cannot continue too long and must end forthwith to avoid any further deterioration of humanitarian catastrophe facing millions people especially most vulnerable including women, children, persons with disabilities, aged and other health-risk people,” they added.

NHN membership was of the view that food, medicines, health aides and life support drugs were in short supply or inaccessible to people hence increasing risks to human lives. Unfortunately, Indian government was not paying attention to such international calls and appeals hence increasing risk for local population. This is indeed deplorable and world community must intervene instead of being silent spectator.

NHN therefore demanded Indian government to immediately lift curfew and restore normal human lives in IOK providing access to food supplies, health care, humanitarian assis-

Bilawal discusses azadi march with anP’s asfandyar wali ISLAMABAD

mBS dIdn’t SnUB Imran, SayS govt on ‘jet controverSy’

ISLAMABAD

ported desire for Saudi-style powers to eradicate corruption. Iqbal said that it would be a “very strange request” to ask for authority that is only possible in a monarchy.

“NAB has never expressed a desire to be given Saudi style power.”

tance and other life-saving support.

It also demanded that local population should be provided immediate access to healthcare, nutritional services and other essentials of life, adding, India should allow humanitarian organizations including International Committee for Red Cross (ICRC), United Nations and International Media to visit and work in the occupied valley and provide all possible assistance to those in need.

NHN had also maintained that India should hold an independent inquiry to all human rights violations and crimes against humanity under the supervision of UN agencies and independent human rights bodies.

It had also urged humanitarian organizations and human rights bodies in India and other parts of the region to intervene and provide all possible assistance needed locally and restore normalcy in valleys.

However, NHN had committed itself to all

CMYK

Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal BhuttoZardari on Sunday met Awami National Party (ANP) chief Asfandyar Wali in Islamabad. During the meeting, matters pertaining to the ongoing political situation and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Azadi March came under discussion.The meeting also discussed matters relating to Kashmir issue, Afghan peace process and regional situation. PPP leaders Farhatullah Babar, Nayyar Bukhari and Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, while ANP leaders Zahid Khan, Mian Iftikhar and Ameer Haider Hoti attended the meeting.Later, talking to media, PPP leader Farhatullah Babar said that his party had proposed to summon a meeting of the All Parties Conference (APC) and Rahbar Committee. He said that the opposition was united and the announcement regarding Azadi March had been made. The PPP leader said that the current government was the product of rigging, adding that free, fair and transparent should be held in the country.

Speaking on the occasion, ANP leader Iftikhar Hussain said that his party wants a united opposition, adding that the JUIF chief should take other opposition parties in confidence to keep the opposition united.Iftikhar said that the government wanted to create differences between the opposition parties to hide the way it had ruined the economy. The JUI-F chief has been persuading other political parties to join his antigovernment demonstration on October 27.

PtI govt’s policies benefiting common man now: dr Firdous SIALKOT APP

Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Information and Broadcasting Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan has said that the benefits of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government’s revolutionary policies have started reaching the common people now. She stated this while addressing a public meeting, held at Head Marala-Sialkot, in her electoral constituency, after distributing Health Cards among the deserving families, on Sunday. She said that 164,969 Health Cards were being distributed in Sialkot district. She said 39,998 deserving families in Daska tehsil, 42,225 in Pasrur tehsil, 18,904 in Sambrial tehsil and 63,842 poor families would be benefited through the Health Cards. She said that government has allocated Rs 118 billion for these families in Sialkot district as well. Dr Firdous said that both programmes, Ehsaas and Sehat Cards were proving the most beneficial revolutionary programmes. She said that the programmes would also help make the poor, deserving and common people part of the national progress, prosperity and development. Dr Firdous said that 10.05 million families will benefit from the Sehat Cards across Pakistan as every deserving family will get medical treatment worth Rs 720,000 each at the government hospitals through the Sehat Cards. She said Prime Minister Imran Khan intended to end inferiority complex among the low-income families by making them part of national development, progress and prosperity.

04 KARACHI

Monday, 7 October, 2019

WEATHER UPDATES MONDAY

330C 230C

TUESDAY

350C 230C

WEDNESDAY

340C 230C

THURSDAY

350C 240C

GovErNmENT fails To ClEaN karaChi

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NEWS DESK

S the Center and provincial government of Sindh led by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) engage in certain political conflicts and despite the federal government constituted a highpowered committee to work out plans to address issues being faced by the residents of Karachi, the longstanding cleanliness situation in Karachi has worsened, particularly after the onslaught of the monsoon season.

Instead of taking charge or effective responsible measures, the provincial government has turned the issue of “cleanliness of Karachi” into a nightmare for the people of the metropolis, who are left at the risks of waterborne diseases, mosquito- and fly-borne diseases, skin infections, conjunctivitis and other diseases.

Thousands of patients are suffering

from pneumonia, typhoid, dengue and diarrhea as the garbage is still being haphazardly and indiscriminately thrown on the streets – unfolding filthy and unhygienic conditions in Karachi.

What has further irked the people are gutters in various parts of the city suddenly overflowed to cause disruptions and roadblocks, and potholes in the roads and highways due to which commuters are forced to “drive very cautiously.”

Despite of the Sindh Solid Waste Management Board (SSWMB) are not discharging their responsibilities properly in removing heaps of garbage and the garbage continues to pile up along roadsides in many areas of the city.

On September 24, the Sindh government had announced a prize money of Rs100,000 for identification of garbage throwers in Karachi.

Sindh Information Minister Saeed Ghani had spoken to the media and

claimed that the issues were being ‘deliberately’ created in the metropolis.

The PPP leader had maintained that the cleanliness drive had been initiated and positive results were being produced.

He had urged citizens to record videos of those who throw garbage outside and inform the relevant authorities.

Saeed Ghani had bashed the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan for staging protest against the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board to stop it from working. “Everyone knows who blocks the sewerage system by putting sacks in it,” he commented. The provincial government has imposed a ban on throwing garbage as part of an ongoing cleanliness drive in the metropolis.

Solid waste means any garbage, refuse, sludge from a wastewater treatment plant, water supply treatment plant and air pollution control facility, or other discarded materials including solid, liquid,

Nine seminary students injured in roof collapse

Dengue spreading in Balochistan

KARACHI INP

Nine seminary students were injured when tin-made roof collapsed after strong wind lashed out the metropolis on Sunday. Rescue sources said that heavy rain followed by wind storm lashed different areas of Karachi resultantly a tin-made roof of the seminary located in Baldia Yousaf Goth suddenly came down.

Nine children were injured in the incident who were rescued and shifted to hospital for treatment. Administrator of the seminary said that all the injured children hailed from different districts of Balochistan.

Coal miner electrocuted QUETTA APP

A coal miner died due to electrocution in a coalmine at Duki area of Loralai district on Sunday. According to Levies sources, the victim identified as Nematullah Khan was working inside the coalmine when he touched an open wire of electricity and suffered electric shocks which caused his death. The body of the deceased was handed over to the heirs after completion of medico legal formalities.

Two dead, four injured in Duki DUKI INP

Two people died and four others injured in separate incidents in different localities of the district on Sunday. A labourer Nehmatullah s/o Abdul Samad was electrocuted to death after he mistakenly touch live naked while working inside a coalmine of Duki. A 2D car turned turtle due to over speeding at Sibi-Jacobabad National Highway near Dhadar. One person Dost Ali Bugti died in the incident while four others were injured who were shifted to Civil Hospital Dhadar where they were referred to Quetta.

Two killed in Thatta THATTA INP

Armed motorcyclists gunned down two people over old enmity and fled the scene on Sunday, police said. According to details, the incident took place near Dargah Satiyon in Thatta where armed motorcyclists opened fire at their rivals traveling in rickshaw. Two people were killed in firing and the assailants sped the scene after committing the murders. The bodies were shifted to hospital for postmortem and the police after registering a case against the attackers started raids for their arrest.

by the media.

The proper and safe disposal of the daily waste produced in the district is the responsibility of the DMC-West, he had said, adding that steps have been taken to ensure that no complacency or negligence be allowed.

PPP’s MNA Abdul Qadir Patel, MPA Liaqaut Askani, chairman, DMC-West, Izhar Ahmad Khan, Municipal Commissioner West, Waseem Mustafa Soomro and SSP Shaukat Ali Khatian and others were present.

MNA Abdul Qadir Patel had expressed confidence that the current campaign announced by Sindh Chief Minister would produce desired results as each and every stakeholder is being involved in it.

He had further suggested that DMCWest must take the responsibility to carry garbage to the Jam Chakro and Hub River Road landfills from parts of the district located close to mentioned landfill sites.

semi-solid or contained gaseous material resulting from industrial, commercial, mining and agricultural operations.

On September 21, a month-long “Clean and Green Karachi” campaign was announced by Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah in the district West of the metropolis.

Speaking on the occasion, Deputy Commissioner Karachi West Fayyaz Alam Solangi had said a comprehensive plan has been developed for the task and under its first phase, the backlog of waste would be collected and duly transported to the designated points.

“Then from those points the staff of Solid Waste Management Board will carry the same to landfill sites.”

"According to a careful estimate backlog of 70 thousand tonnes of garbage is scattered across the district while 1800 to 2000 tones are generated here on daily basis," he had said in reply to a question

HYDERABAD: People enjoy boating in overcast weather on the banks of River Indus near Ghulam Muhammad Barrage Jamshoro. ONLINE

QUETTA: Dengue fever is also spreading in Balochistan and four more dengue viral fever cases were reported in Quetta on Sunday. Focal Person, Fatima Jinnah General and Chest Hospital said four persons of s family from Spiny Road of the provincial capital have been tested positive with dengue virus. He further added that these persons had been to Karachi where they were infected with dengue virus.

Earlier four persons of Satellite Town and Aghburg areas of Quetta were brought to Fatima Jinnah General and Chest Hospital with high fever.

Focal Person further added that more than 3000 patients have so far been brought to different hospitals of the province on suspicion of being infected with dengue virus out of them 1700 patients have been tested positive. PPI

PTI workers being targeted to disturb Karachi’s peace: Haleem Adil KARACHI INP

President Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) Sindh chapter and parliamentary party leader in Sindh Assembly Haleem Adil Sheikh has alleged that his party workers are being targeted in Karachi to disturb peace of the megacity.

Addressing a press conference in the Insaf House, flanked by PTI Sindh general secretary Mahfooz Ursani, information secretary MPA Jamal Siddiqui and Arslan Mirza, he said enemies of peace and PTI murdered our worker Asif Haroon and we strongly condemn it. He said the culprits involved in his murder should be taken to the task.

He said in Sindh province those talking about uphold of truth is being targeted. He said we do not want the old Karachi that was infested with target killings. He said previously criminal elements tried to kidnap a coordinator of opposition leader in Sindh Assembly Firdous Shamim Naqvi. He demanded that

law enforcement agencies should arrest the killers of Asif Haroon immediately.

The PTI leader that said PPP government in Sindh has failed to maintain peace. He said a female student Misbah was murdered previous day. Law and order is worsening not only in Karachi but also in whole Sindh. He asked the police to reject political pressure and work independently.

Haleem Adil said the PPP government has given the Sindh a gift of AIDS. Children died in Thar due to diseases and malnutrition. Dog-bite vaccine was made non-available in government hospitals. He said now Bilawal Zardari is visiting whole country.

He said Bilawal should know that it is the federal government which is providing treatment facilities to poor patients of Sindh province. He said to hide its failure the PPP is trying to create new political stunts. He said Imran Khan has already said that the federal government is not taking any constitutional action in Sindh.

Criticizing JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman for his announcement to hold long march against the government, the PTI leader said Maulana is working on behest of India when he talks about waging a war in whole Pakistan. He asked why Maulana Fazlur Rehman did not wage a war when Zardari and Nawaz Sharif were looting the country. He said even Jamaat e Islami (JI) is not supporting the Maulana.

He said Imran Khan fought the case of Kashmir in excellent way. He said everyone has the right to protest but no one has a right to make disturbance. He said the parties whose leaders are in jail are supporting the Maulana. He said even Maulana Tariq Jameel is more popular than Maulana Fazl. He said presently the PTI has the mandate of people. He said we will not allow Maulana Fazl to bring students of seminaries.

Haleem Adil said Sindh government is befooling people. He said there is a vaccine making facility in Sakrand but the vaccines made there are not

being supplied to hospitals by the Sindh government. He said a probe has already begun against Azra Pechoho. He said Fazl Pechoho is responsible for corruption in dialysis machine funds for Nawabshah hospital.

He said NAB is an independent institution and it is not being run by the PTI. He said Imran Khan has said that action would be taken against all thieves and their faces would be exposed at a proper time.

Haleem Adil said the Sindh government cannot silence him. He said his assets have already been declared. He said to hold a session of Sindh assembly it costs Rs5million a day, but the sessions are being held not for lawmaking but just for production orders. He said we condemn forced sackings of journalists and a law should be made to stop sacking of media persons. He said that MQM-London is still active. He demanded of the DG Rangers to take stern action in Karachi and make the megacity free from crime.

Electric supply disrupted as rain lashes city KARACHI: The new spell of intermittent heavy and light rain has caused severe power outage in several areas of Karachi on Saturday night. According to details, the ongoing rain has tripped feeders of KElectric creating immense difficulties for the residents while it has also badly disrupted traffic on the roads. The lowlying areas including Korangi, Defence, Malir, Model Colony and Gulshan Iqbal were inundated with the rainwater.

Meanwhile, at least nine children were injured as roof of a madrassa caved in due to rain and thunderstorm in Baldia Yousaf Goth area. The teams arrived at the scene and shifted the victims to civil hospital for medical assistance. INP

Group Photo of Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi with Royal Malaysian Navy officials at Special Forces Training Centre during his official visit to Malaysia. PRESS RELEASE

CMYK

Monday, 7 October, 2019

NEWS

05

Fawad asks Ruet to apologise FoR inaccuRate saFaR moonsigHting na committee to take up issues of journalist safety, abuses in iHk ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly Standing Committee on Human Rights (HR) in its 5th meeting on Monday will take up issues of safety and security of journalists along with child protection as per the commitments made with the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies. The meeting of the committee will be chaired by Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. According to a notice issued by the National Assembly Secretariat, Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) director general (DG) will brief the committee on the prosecution of journalist Shahzaib Jillani, the secretary for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will brief the committee on human rights abuses in IoK as well as steps taken to highlight the issue before international forums and the government whereas the UN Human Rights Office will also give a briefing on human rights abuses in the disputed area. Further, the Ministry of Human Rights secretary will give a briefing on prospective capacity building that could be sponsored by the european Union (eU) through funding at federal and provincial levels. The secretary for the Ministry of Interior along with the Information Technology and Telecommunication secretary will give a briefing on the status of amending the Protection against electronic Crimes Act, 2016 in the light of the right of freedom of expression and the right of freedom of the press. The committee will then hold a discussion on issues of human rights arising out of the promulgation of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Action Ordinance in the province and the ways to address those issues. It is expected that the ‘Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Bill, 2019’ will also be presented for consideration.

Moreover, a subcommittee of the committee on human rights will inquire into the incident that happened in the jurisdiction of Police Station Qutab Pur, Multan on May 3, 2019, regarding trespass, assault and use of criminal force against the mother of a victim of police torture. The committee will also take up the illegal detention and torture of the three brothers as referred by the NA Speaker. Member of National Assembly (MNA) Shazia Marri will chair the meeting as a convener of the subcommittee. APP

City Notes M.A. NiAzi He country has not yet recovered from Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech. Kashmir has not either, it seems. The Nadrendra Modi government has though, and the initial reaction of fleeing from Kashmir is apparently over. The world too has recovered from the speech and decided to let the bigger market win.

Imran had one arrow left in his quiver, though. He can offer US President Donald Trump something neither China nor Ukraine could give him: evidence against Joe Biden. If Imran could get the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to stitch up all those of his opponents, he would not have any problem showing that Biden was busy taking bribes here, and that his son Hunter was defrauding people with a fake housing scheme. NAB only needed to be asked nicely, and it would provide approvers as well.

In the meanwhile, Imran has shown how you can defend the honour of the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) by a single speech, and free Kashmir in the bargain.

Of course, there are other things going on in Kashmir, which we will find out about later, or even never. For example, the new Indian Air Force (IAF) chief has revealed

T

FAZLUR REHMAN NOTHING BUT A PAWN FOR ZARDARI AND NAWAZ, SAYS FAWAD LAHORE

m

stAFF RePoRt

INISTeR for Science and Technology Fawad Chaudhry on Sunday sought an apology from the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee for the incorrect declaration of Safar 1 as the moon has been sighted a day earlier.

“Pictures have been released, in which the moon can be easily seen on Gwadar and Pasni,” he said. Talking to the media, Chaudhry said that the formulated Lunar calendar (Islamic Calendar) was also not followed on the occasion of eid in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) either while an apology was later made by the religious body.

The federal minister questioned why and how eyesight glasses were used by those who considered moonsighting with the help of telescope as un-Islamic while adding that “education was imperative for moving forward in the right direction”. He said that those having wisdom can understand but a certain section of the society could not be convinced.

COUNTRY’S IMPORT REDUCED TO $12BN FROM $19BN WHILE REMITTANCES AND EXPORTS CONTINUE TO INCREASE, FEDERAL MINISTER CLAIMS

Recently, the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee announced that the moon for the month of Safar was not sighted on Sunday (September 29), meaning the first of Safar would be Tuesday (October 1).

However, according to pakmoonsighting.pk there was ample evidence of moonsighting on the day. Further, Chaudhry revealed that work on five big projects was underway, especially mentioning that a biotechnology park, which would be one of the biggest in South Asia, was being established in Jhelum in addition to a herbal medicine park which would be spread over two acres of land.

He further said a decision has been made to set up a battery research group comprising a consortium of industry, universities and foreign countries. “The research centre would work on the country’s own batteries as there is a possibility that poles and wires would be replaced with batteries in the coming years,” he added.

He said, unfortunately, the water table in Islamabad and Lahore was receding rapidly but the government was conscious of the issue and working on solutions. He

said that the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) and Capital Development Authority (CDA) had been offered to begin water recharge schemes so that rainwater could be used for water refilling so that a solution is already in place once the problem starts affecting citizens. He said that waste to energy schemes would be introduced to help generate gas with the help of waste. He said the ministry was also considering to convert some 1,500 public schools onto stem schools by introducing science, technology, engineering and mathematics in 6th, 7th and 8th classes under the stem concept. The minister said that he had requested the prime minister (PM) to lift the ban on drones in the agriculture sector.

At present, Chaudhry said, the best thing in the country’s economy was that the country’s import had reduced to $12 billion from $19 billion while remittances and exports were increasing.

He eulogised the PM’s speech in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and said that the premier had made the world aware of the conse-

Candlelight vigil held in London to express solidarity with Kashmiris LONDON: Candlelight vigil and freedom walk held in London - capital of the United Kingdom - to express solidarity with the oppressed people of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IOJK) the other day, organized by British Pakistanis and Kashmiris.

The candlelight vigil-cum-freedom walk which started from Parliament Square London and marched towards Indian High Commission was attended by a large number of people from all walks of life including men, women, children, lords, councillors and representatives of different NGOs. The participants were holding candles and placards inscribing anti-India, anti-Modi, anti-Raw and pro-freedom slogans.

The participants on the occasion strongly condemned Modi led fascist RSS and BJP regime for perpetrating untold atrocities and gross violation of human rights and lockdown of eight million people of IOJK for the last more than two months causing a grave human crisis in the held valley. They expressed their solidarity with the oppressed Kashmiris specially families of martyrs killed by Indian troops during the last few decades in the occupied territory.

The participants strongly condemned the atrocities and genocide of Kashmiris committed by Indian occupational forces and paid glowing tributes to the brave people of IOJK.The speakers of the demonstration said, defenceless people of Indian occupied Kash-

mir were struggling peacefully to secure their birthright to self-determination granted to them by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) many decades ago. They called upon the international community including the United Kingdom to pressure India to stop the siege of eight million people of IOJK and for implementation of UNSC resolutions on Kashmir for the peaceful settlement of the dispute between Pakistan and India to avoid any war between the two nuclear-armed countries. “There should be plebiscite under the UN supervision to ascertain the political fate of Jammu and Kashmir”, they said.

They further said over 900,000 Indian troops deployed in occupied Kashmir were committing massive human rights violations. Indian authorities, they said were engaged in pressing the Kashmiris’ peaceful liberation struggle by use of brutal force and the presence of unnamed mass graves was proof of the massacre of the innocent people of occupied territory.

They further said India was using rapes, pallet guns, arrests, and fore disappearances as a weapon to crush the ongoing freedom movement and struggle for the right to self-determination of Kashmiris. The participants, on the occasion, reiterated their resolve to continue their support to the struggling people of IOJK till the peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute and complete freedom of Kashmir from Indian subjugation. APP

quences linked to the Kashmir issue.

He said that many Hurriyat leaders, including Srinagar Mayor Junaid Azim Mattu, were in jails and Modi did not even have councillor level political support in Indian occupied Kashmir (IoK). Maintaining that Pakistan had repeatedly promoted peace even though the Modi government was stubborn, the federal minister urged the UN secretary general to take practical steps for resolving the Kashmir issue.

Speaking about the country’s global image and progress in tourism and economy, some political quarters were looking to create unrest for personal gains.

“Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman just wants to create chaos in the country through Azadi March. Maulana is being used as a plea bargain chip by the opposition, he is simply playing the role of a pawn in the game of chess being played by Nawaz Sharif and Asif Ali Zardari,” he said. “Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton will arrive in the country soon. It will definitely help in projecting a positive image of the country,” he concluded.

Health authorities asked to make infectious diseases control plan ISLAMABAD: The National Institute of Health (NIH) has asked the authorities concerned and professionals at all levels for timely preparations and making plans for effective response to the epidemic-prone infectious diseases in the winter season. According to seasonal awareness and alert for epidemic-prone infectious diseases in Pakistan during winter season, the NIH said that such plans will be helpful in controlling outbreaks and reduce the associated morbidity and mortality. The NIH advised the federal, provincial and district health departments as well as other stakeholders to take keep a continuous watch on the anticipated seasonal public health threats and taking of all preventive or curative measures in this context. It said that these diseases are predicted to be on high alert during said season and asked the authorities concerned to properly read the NIH alert which contains detailed introduction of diseases, case definitions, infectious agents, modes of transmission, case management and prevention. It said that in Pakistan, the influenza activity typically starts increasing from September and reaches peak during the winter months and asked the clinicians to remain meticulous and treat all suspected cases of severe influenza appropriately. It said that Influenza is a contagious respiratory illness caused by influenza virus and it can cause mild to severe illness and an older people, young children. APP

The speech that shook the world that one of the IAF’s reactions to Pakistani resistance to the second raid after Phulwama, was to shoot down one of its own helicopters. I assume there was not a cow aboard the helicopter, even though Modi and the rest of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) must be upset that cows were not getting the best possible protection. Of course, the IAF being the IAF, maybe the result could have been roast beef.

Though Imran’s speech was so forceful, it was not exploited properly.

Perhaps that is why Pakistan’s permanent representative at the United Nations (UN) got sacked. If she had done her job properly, then the Indian occupation forces would have left Kashmir by the time Imran finished his speech. Hers was probably the biggest change in the Foreign Office (FO), but there were several more. There were also changes in the federal cabinet indicated, though that has not happened yet. The implications clear: if India does not vacate Kashmir, ministers should not be surprised if heads roll.

Meanwhile, while Imran has emerged as the expert on getting India to vacate Kashmir, we find that Adam Smith has been replaced as the ‘Father of economics’ by a member of the National Devel-

opment Council (NDC). I had assumed that businessmen had gone to General Headquarters (GHQ) to gain enlightenment, but it seems that they went to tell the chief of army staff (COAS) that there could be no compromise on paying taxes; that they would not pay, no matter what NAB did. That showed how out of it businessmen are, because the purpose of NAB is not to make businessmen pay taxes, but to provide an excuse to put wrongheaded and evil-minded persons, especially those who oppose Imran, behind bars.

We do not know the opinion of Shahzad, the Chunian muder accused, about Imran, but NAB had nothing to do with his incarceration. It seems that he had been reported missing, and the event’s gravity was increased by the fact that he had taken the family tractor with him.

Now modern technology plays a role, for his mobile phone was traced to both the murder scene and to Rahim Yar Khan. The last person to go to Rahim Yar Khan from around these parts was Salahuddin Ayyubi, whose torture on video got smartphones banned in police stations.

Well, Shehzad lived, as maybe the Rahim Yar Khan police did not have a role in his interrogation. Shehzad has done

time for sodomy before, though this time he has added murder to his repertoire.

There are a number of takeaways from this episode for serial killers and other criminals. The first is that you must not take along the family tractor, nor carry along any mobile phones. Flee by all means, but do not go to Rahim Yar Khan. Only if you are very, very lucky, will you escape alive. everybody has been referring to the previous incidents in Kasur district, while talking about Shehzad. It is sad, the country having so better sex crime capital than Kasur. Right. There is Copenhagen, Amsterdam. And Kasur. But instead of the past, let us look at what’s happened afterwards. A Child Protection Bureau employee having a First Information Report (FIR) registered against him by the head of the CPC. An eight-year-old girl criminally assaulted and killed in Faisalabad.

(Imran must be regretting having Rana Sanaullah arrested; he would have preferred the drugs charge to this.)

Imran might be more interested in the Sri Lankan tour of Pakistan. So far they have lost the ODI series in Karachi, but have one the first T20I in Lahore. They won’t be the only visitors to Pakistan. The duke and duchess of Cambridge will be

visiting too. Maybe they can be asked to help with the British courts, which have been giving decision after decision against Pakistan, the latest being the decision giving the heirs of the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Indian government £35 million that the last Nizam had given to the first Pakistani high commissioner to London.

Maybe the government should change its lawyers. Someone who will talk to the judges’ readers before the case begins. Or maybe have a video of the judge taped.

Or maybe it is just another conspiracy against Imran, like the protests in Baghdad, where 99 people had been killed, by a government trying to stamp it out. Not the best advertisement ahead of Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Azadi March, is it? And the reasons for the protest sound hauntingly familiar. Inflation. Youth unemployment. The US really should not get into the business of nation-building.

Imran has decided not to intervene, not because he’s against it, but because he cannot decide between a dharna and a speech. And that is the same reason he’s not intervening in Hong Kong, where the protests are getting slowly more violent, with the police only now, after so many weeks, using live ammo.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

06 WORLD VIEW

TRUMP’S UKRAINE NIGHTMARE IS ABOUT TO GET MUCH, MUCH WORSE REPORTS OF A SECOND, MORE FORMIDABLE WHISTLEBLOWER LOOM, AS SCRUTINY OF TRUMP’S CALLS WITH FOREIGN LEADERS CONTINUES IN EMBARRASSING DETAIL VaNity Fair

A

KEViN fiTZPATriCK

S the object of President Trump’s rage over the Ukraine scandal ricochets from representative Adam Schiff, to pharmaceutical companies and the as-yet-unnamed whistleblower, a new nightmare looms.

The New York Times reports that a second whistleblower is perhaps waiting in the wings, weighing whether to provide the “firsthand” details Trump claimed the first whistleblower could not.

According to the Times, an unnamed intelligence official with “more direct information” on Trump’s call with Ukraine president Volodymr Zelensky is considering a formal whistleblower complaint that would inevitably lead to their

testimony before Congress. Two sources briefed on the matter identified the new whistleblower as a figure interviewed by intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson to corroborate claims made by the first—that Trump effectively made military aid to Ukraine contingent on Zelensky opening an investigation into Hunter Biden’s involvement with a Ukrainian oil company, and that the White House subsequently hid the call in a top-secret database.

It is not yet clear if the second official will formalize a whistleblower complaint—thereby circumventing the White House’s ability to keep this person’s testimony under wraps—though it would seem a more credible perspective of Trump’s call could undercut arguments the original whistle-

blower had no first-hand knowledge of the incident. A second whistleblower would also bolster house Democratic investigations

into Trump’s communications with foreign leaders, which have thus far uncovered efforts with Australian, British, and potentially Ital-

ian leadership to work with attorney general William Barr to discredit the Mueller investigation.

Already, heightened scrutiny of Trump’s potentially corrupt dealings with foreign leaders has uncorked a torrent of leaks regarding his private conversations with his counterparts. On Friday night, the Washington Post reported a laundry list of gaffes and bizarre asks from Trump’s increasingly free-wheeling calls over the last few years.

Not only has the president been reported as “obsequious” and “fawning” in conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, but Trump reportedly “pestered” Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe for his aid in securing a coveted Nobel Prize, told a Saudi royal he would back their country’s admission to the G-7, rambled to Chi-

nese president Xi about chocolate cake, and repeatedly rejected thenBritish prime minister Theresa May’s intelligence-backed conclusion that the Russian government poisoned a former spy on their soil.

“There was a constant undercurrent in the Trump administration of [senior staff] who were genuinely horrified by the things they saw that were happening on these calls,” an anonymous former White House official told the Post. “Phone calls that were embarrassing, huge mistakes he made, months and months of work that were upended by one impulsive tweet.”

As to Ukraine, Trump’s attempts to portray his July 25 call with Zelensky as routine have been undermined by Thursday’s release of damning texts between Ukraine diplomat William B. Taylor Jr. and Kurt D. Volker, the State Department’s former special envoy for Ukraine, as well as Gordon D. Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union. Then there’s Trump himself, who brazenly invited investigations into the Biden family from both Ukraine and China, while standing on the White House lawn. If the leaks and whistleblower complaints go on, as they appear they will, the pressure for impeachment should only continue to build.

India and Pakistan are headed towards a crisis over Indian Held Kashmir MORE AND MORE KASHMIRIS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE LINE OF CONTROL WILL COME TO SEE THAT THEY HAVE BEEN LEFT WITH NO OPTION BUT THE PATH OF VIOLENCE

NatioNal iNterest Arif rAfiq

In August, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan pledged that he would serve as an “ambassador” for the embattled people of Indian Held Kashmir, who are besieged by close to a million Indian security forces. And on Friday, he did exactly that, using the world’s largest platform—the United Nations General Assembly— to voice their plight.

Khan excoriated Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and called on the world to prevent a potential “bloodbath” in the disputed territory, where for two months over nine hundred thousand Indian security personnel have imposed a curfew on the Muslim-majority populace. Thousands of civilians, along with hundreds of political leaders, have been arrested.

After Khan’s speech on Friday, Kashmiris took great risk to show their gratitude to the Pakistani leader, coming out on to the streets, setting off firecrackers, and calling for freedom from India. One Kashmiri man told Al Jazeera that he “felt solace” when Khan spoke, knowing that Kashmiris “are not alone.” New Delhi’s annexation and siege of Indian Held Kashmir will prove to be strategic blunders. Indian officials and the country’s compliant private media falsely claim that there is “normalcy” today in Indian Held Kashmir. They also say that the region will see even greater development and investment tomorrow.

But Modi, his advisors, and even his sycophants in the Indian media are wellaware that he has planted the seeds of long-term unrest in Indian Held Kashmir.

They are well-aware that the change in Indian Held Kashmir’s status is against the will of the Kashmiri people and their political leadership—even the increasingly discredited lot that has been proIndia. And that is why Kashmiris are caged in and more or less cut off from the world. And that is why their political leaders, who could organize protests, are in prison or under house arrest.

Permissive domestic and international environments will allow for New Delhi to continue the status quo for months. Congress has yet to hold a hearing on Kashmir. And the Trump administration has

effectively endorsed India’s annexation and false promises of development.

In a briefing on Thursday, the top U.S. diplomat for South Asia, Alice Wells, indicated that she sees the annexation as a fait accompli, though the move is opposed by most Kashmiris and violates UN resolutions on Kashmir and the India-Pakistan 1972 Simla Agreement.

But the longer the siege goes on, the deeper the resentment of Kashmiris will grow and the more pressed they will become to physically confront India. India may hope that Kashmiris tire and wave the white flag, but they see the Indian threat, at least in political terms, as existential.

India can easily lift the siege immediately. But it knows that Kashmiris will take to the streets and protest against the annexation, giving the lie to Modi’s claim that Kashmiris welcome the move. The unilateral change in Kashmir’s status, the siege, the arrests, and the abuse have all deepened local support for Kashmiri independence.

India’s detention of Kashmiri leaders will continue for months, if not years, and may prevent sustained, organized protests— at least until Kashmiris adapt. New Delhi has sought to create a leadership vacuum in Indian Held Kashmir and eventually fill it with a new set of political leaders who play within India’s updated red lines, including giving up on autonomy, let alone independence. But India’s political engineering campaign has progressed slowly. There are few takers at the moment for the role locals will see as being of an Indian stooge.

While New Delhi has created the leadership vacuum in occupied Kashmir it desired, that vacuum is now being filled by the prime minister of Pakistan, who was already well-known and revered in Kashmir.

In 1983, when India and the West Indies faced off in the first international cricket match in Indian-occupied Kashmir, the local Kashmiris booed the Indian team, shouted “Love Live Pakistan,” and held up posters of Imran Khan—then the captain of the Pakistani team. Today, as Kashmiris face great peril, that cricket star leads Pakistan the country and captains its diplomatic campaign for Kashmir.

The worsening human-rights situation in Indian Held Kashmir, however, represents a challenge for Pakistan too.

There are great expectations for Islamabad in Kashmir—expectations it may not be able to fulfill as its hands are tied.

Save for Malaysia and Turkey, Pakistan has not been able to muster diplomatic support for the Kashmiri cause. It remains capable and committed to deter India, but seeks to avoid escalation due to its own economic distress as well as the risk of a nuclearized conflict. Potential blacklisting by the Financial Action Task Force or FATF

has also reduced Pakistan’s subconventional options. In September, Khan—quite bravely—warned Pakistanis not to go to Kashmir for jihad. Pakistan has long stood by the Kashmiris, but its support for terrorist groups like Lashkar-e Taiba has tarnished the legitimate Kashmiri cause and brought great harm to Kashmiri society.

So far, Khan’s diplomatic campaign has had an impact, albeit a modest one. It has brought the Malaysians, Turks, and perhaps even the Chinese on board, helped invigorate the activism of the Kashmiri and Pakistani diasporas, and provided his government with a window of opportunity to showcase to pro-violence constituencies that diplomacy can yield better results.

But the longer the siege goes on, more and more Kashmiri on both sides of the Line of Control will see that they will be left with no option but the path of violence. The very Kashmiri leaders who participated in Indian political system, the very leaders who served as chief ministers of the region India regarded as a “state,” are now in prison. And this is the ignominious fate of those who choose to take New Delhi’s side.

Farooq Abdullah, the three-time chief minister of Indian-occupied Kashmir, has been detained since August without charge.

His son, Omar, who also served as chief minister in Indian-occupied Kashmir, is in jail. Farooq’s father and Omar’s grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, who initially sided with India at the time of partition, was imprisoned

by India for eleven years, even after serving as the region’s “prime minister.” The message for Kashmiris is clear: India sees Indian Held Kashmir as a colony and Kashmiris as a people to be colonized and coerced.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Line of Control in Pakistan’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir region, there are growing calls to come to their aid of their fellow Kashmiris besieged by India. Last month, Pakistani forces had to restrain Kashmiri protestors who wanted to reach or cross the Line of Control into Indian-occupied Kashmir.

History shows that there are local drivers of an organized insurgency in Kashmir that precedes Pakistan’s involvement. The 1947 tribal raid into Kashmir from Pakistan was preceded by pogroms that took the lives of upwards of two hundred thousand Muslims in the Jammu region, waged by the forces of the Hindu maharaja Hari Singh and the Hindutva extremist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS. In the late 1980s, before Pakistan commandeered the Kashmiri insurgency, thousands of Kashmiri refugees fled into Pakistan, organizing their own armed resistance to Indian rule.

Herein lies the risk for Islamabad: the Indian siege will continue, Pakistan’s pleas to the world on Kashmir will con-

tinue to be met with deaf ears, and it could be pressed by unsympathetic powers to restrain its own Kashmiri populace—on top of the existing pressure to clamp down on domestic Kashmir-focused militant groups. Pakistan, a party to the Kashmir dispute, may be relegated to policing its own people as India is allowed to run amok in Kashmir.

Khan certainly remembers the experience of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, whose clampdown on many of these organizations after the 9/11 and 2001 Indian parliament attacks resulted in multiple assassination attempts on him and a domestic blowback few Pakistanis could have ever imagined. Musharraf’s 2002 address on Kashmir is worth revisiting today, as the State Department is effectively boxing in Khan. As Khan makes the case for a diplomatic resolution, Wells, America’s top diplomat for South Asia, has largely played an antagonistic role.

Wells has emphasized Pakistan’s counterterrorism obligations over India’s human-rights violations. By speaking of Modi’s plans for “engagement with a new generation of political leaders,” in Kashmir, she’s endorsed New Delhi’s campaign of political reengineering, which has involved the imprisonment of the old political guard.

And, as Modi continues his siege on Kashmiris and a broader campaign to build an authoritarian, Hindu majoritarian “New India.” Wells cheered on Modi’s rally at a stadium in Houston. Indian opposition figures are warning of creeping fascism in their country, but American officials have nothing but praise for Modi.

Wells’s more combative language has been reserved not for Modi, the aggressor in this crisis, but for Khan. In a press briefing, a detailed response from Wells on the human-rights situation in Indian Held Kashmir required multiple follow-up questions from a reporter. But she went out of her way to take a swipe at Khan, cynically raising his silence on the plight of the persecuted Uighurs. Wells, a non-Muslim, suggested that there is a falseness to Khan’s expressions of concern for his fellow Muslims.

But Wells’s own statements on Kashmiri Muslims are hollow. She has called for the release of prisoners, but she knows they will not be released any time soon.

Her overeager championing of the U.S.Modi relationship at this time makes clear that she sees India, even a Hindutva India, as a vital bulwark against a rising China.

The situation in Indian Held Kashmir is a slow-motion human rights and geostrategic crisis that requires the intervention of the United States and other world powers. But Modi’s power thrust in Indian Held Kashmir is only part of a broader Hindutva agenda aimed at rendering Muslims

in territory under Indian control into second-class citizens. The indifference of successive American administrations has enabled Hindutva extremists to consolidate power in India and push forward a radical agenda without consequence.

Just this week, Modi’s consigliere, Amit Shah, proclaimed that India would evict only Muslims deemed to be illegal immigrants and not Hindus and people of other faiths of the same status. India will face difficulty in sending these Muslims to neighboring Bangladesh. Instead, it is likely to house hundreds of thousands of Muslims in detention camps indefinitely and rendered them stateless. This would be just one step in a broader Hindu nationalist campaign to disenfranchise Muslim voters, a constituency least likely to vote for them, and remain in power for the long-term. Shah, after all, proclaimed last year that his party will rule for fifty years.

While Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP’s handling of the economy has been poor, it remains deeply popular in large part due to the radicalization of the country’s Hindu majority. One major sign of that radicalization is that the country’s most popular state ruler is Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest who founded an anti-Muslim vigilante organization. Adityanath’s performance as chief minister of the Uttar Pradesh state has been poor, but his fusion of Hindu pietism and muscular Hindu nationalism appeals to the Hindu middle class.

What is happening in Indian Held Kashmir is only one part of India’s broader transformation toward becoming a “Hindu rashtra” (Hindu nation) and hegemon in South Asia. Indian officials today are now muddying India’s supposed no-first use nuclear policy. They are making aggressive statements about seizing Pakistan’s Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan regions. And they are rewriting their own history based on Hindu mythology and nationalism, not objective scholarship. New Delhi is a revisionist state in more ways than one. And it is the Muslims of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir who will bear the consequences of Hindu triumphalism.

Washington and other world powers must press New Delhi to roll back its siege of Indian Held Kashmir, release imprisoned politicians and civilians, and resume dialogue with Pakistan and a broad spectrum of Kashmiri leaders on the region’s future. The world community must demonstrate to the Kashmiris that their aspirations and grievances can be addressed through diplomatic and political processes. And Western powers that speak of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom, must take a firm stand against the Hindutva extremism that is transforming India, a nation of 1.3 billion people, before it is too late.

Arif Rafiq (@arifcrafiq) is president of Vizier Consulting, LLC, a political risk advisory company focused on the Middle East and South Asia.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

100 killed in iraq as protests enter sixth day AT LEAST 18 KILLED IN OVERNIGHT CLASHES BETWEEN PROTESTERS AND POLICE BAGHDAD

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AGENCIES

T least 18 people were killed in clashes between anti-government protesters and police in Baghdad overnight, according to police and medical sources, as the cabinet tried to appease public anger over corruption and unemployment with a new reform plan.

The scale of the protests, in which nearly 100 people have died since Tuesday, has taken the authorities by surprise. Two years after the defeat of Islamic State, security is better than it has been in years, but corruption is rampant, wrecked infrastructure has not been rebuilt and jobs remain scarce.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s 17-point plan was the result of an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday night and comes after days of offering only vague reform promises.

It includes increased subsidized

housing for the poor, stipends for the unemployed as well as training programs and small loans initiatives for unemployed youth. The families of those killed during demonstrations this week will also get payouts and care usually granted to members of the security forces killed during war. “Amid all of this, I swear to God that my only concern is for the casualties,” Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said during the cabinet meeting, according to state TV. The streets of the capital were quiet so far on Sunday. Protests have tended to gather steam later in the day.

The clashes shattered a day of relative calm on Saturday after authorities

lifted a curfew and traffic moved normally in the center of Baghdad. Hundreds of security personnel were deployed in the streets. The demonstrations began in Baghdad on Tuesday but have spread quickly spread to other cities mainly in the south. In the city of Nasiriya, where at least 18 people were killed during the week, police fired live rounds at demonstrators on Saturday.

Twenty-four people were wounded in the clashes overnight, including seven policemen, according to security, hospital and morgue sources.

Protesters also torched the headquarters of several political parties in Nasiriya, police said. These included

FOREIGN NEWS 07 the headquarters of the powerful Dawa party that dominated Iraq’s government from 2003 until 2018 elections.

Violence also broke out again in Diwaniya, another city south of Baghdad killing at least one person, police said.

FEARS AHEAD OF PILGRIMAGE: The cabinet’s new plan may not be enough to placate protesters and the politicians who’ve sided with them.

Opposition to the government among parliamentary blocs who have begun boycotting legislative meetings is already brewing, adding pressure on Abdul Mahdi and his cabinet to step down. Influential Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has a mass popular following and controls a large chunk of parliament, demanded on Friday that the government resign and snap elections be held. At least one other major parliamentary grouping allied itself with Sadr against the government.

But powerful political parties which have dominated Iraqi politics since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and toppling of dictator Saddam Hussein have not indicated they are willing to relinquish the institutions they control.

In eastern Baghdad on Friday and Saturday, police snipers shot at demonstrators and several people were wounded, Reuters reporters said.

Security services said the violence killed 8 members of the security forces and wounded more than 1,000, state television reported.

At least 95 demonstrators have died across Iraq, according to a Reuters tally based on police and medical sources. Iraq’s semi-official High Commission for Human Rights had put the toll at 99 dead since protests broke out on Tuesday.

Hong Kong youth lashed by police violence as thousands defy mask ban CENTRAL AGENCIES

Hong Kong was rocked by fresh violence Sunday as tens of thousands hit the streets to defy a ban on face masks, sparking clashes with police, street fights and vandalism across the strife-torn city.

Large crowds marched through torrential rain in peaceful but unsanctioned rallies on both sides of Victoria Harbour, condemning the government for deploying emergency powers to ban face masks at public gatherings. But violence erupted as police dispersed crowds with tear gas, and then battled hardcore protesters in multiple locations — plunging the finance hub into chaos once more.

In one incident, a taxi driver was beaten bloody in the district of Sham Shui Po after he drove into a crowd that had surrounded his car. “Two girls were hit by the car and one girl was trapped between the car and a shop,” a witness, who gave his surname as Wong, told AFP, adding the crowd managed to push the car off the wounded woman.

An AFP photographer saw volunteer medics treating both the driver and the injured women before para-

medics and police arrived. Protesters smashed up the taxi. Earlier, a crowd ransacked nearby government offices, while multiple Chinese banks and subway stations were vandalised across the city. Activists have staged three straight days of flashmob rallies and sprees of vandalism after Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam outlawed face coverings by protesters, invoking colonialera emergency powers not used for half a century.

Pro-democracy lawmakers went to the High Court Sunday morning seeking an injunction against the ban, arguing the emergency powers bypassed the legislature and contravened the city’s mini-constitution.

But a senior judge dismissed their case.

The law allows Lam — who has record-low approval ratings — to make “any regulations whatsoever” during a time of public danger. She warned she would use the powers to introduce new regulations if the unrest did not abate. The ban was welcomed by government supporters and Beijing, but opponents and protesters saw it as the start of a slippery slope, tipping the international finance hub into authoritarianism. It has done little to calm tensions or stop crowds coming out so far. “If Carrie Lam wants to de-escalate the situation, this is not the right way,” a 19-year-old pro-

tester, who gave his first name as Corey, told AFP as he marched under a forest of umbrellas on the main island.

TWO TEEN PROTESTERS SHOT: Hong Kong has been battered by 18 consecutive weekends of unrest, fanned by widespread public anger over Chinese rule and the police response to protests.

The rallies were ignited by a now-scrapped plan to allow extraditions to the mainland, which fuelled fears of an erosion of liberties promised under the 50year “one country, two systems” model China agreed to ahead of the 1997 handover by Britain.

After Beijing and local leaders took a hard stance, the demonstrations snowballed into a wider movement calling for more democratic freedoms and police accountability. Lam has refused major concessions but struggled to come up with any political solution. The worst clashes to date erupted on Tuesday as China celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule, with a teenager shot and wounded by police as he attacked an officer. A 14-year-old boy was shot and wounded Friday when a plainclothes police officer, who was surrounded by a mob of protesters throwing petrol bombs, fired his sidearm.

Bangladesh, india to expedite rohingya repatriation DHAKA AGENCIES

Bangladesh and Indian state heads agreed to expedite “safe, speedy and sustainable” Rohingya repatriation to their country of origin in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, said a joint statement released on Saturday.

“They [Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi] agreed on the need for ‘greater efforts’ to be made to facilitate their [Rohingya] return”, citing a 53-point joint statement of both premiers, United News of Bangladesh reported. Hasina is now in India on a four-day maiden tour after assuming power for the third-consecutive term while Modi hosts Hasina at the Hyderabad House in New Delhi for the first time after being elected for the second consecutive term. The joint statement includes the improvement of the security situation and socio-economic conditions in Rakhine to restore confidence among the persecuted Rohingya Muslims for the repatriation process. Earlier, several attempts of Rohingya repatriation to Myanmar from Bangladesh have failed as representatives of the persecuted community clearly said that without citizenship rights, safety guarantee and resettlement at original places in Rakhine, they will not return to Myanmar. For sustainable repatriation of Rohingya, India has completed the first project of constructing 250 houses in Rakhine and is now preparing to implement another set of socio-economic development projects in the area, the statement said. Persecuted people according to Amnesty International, more than 750,000 Rohingya refugees, mostly women, and children have fled Myanmar and crossed into Bangladesh after Myanmar forces launched a crackdown on the minority Muslim community in August 2017, pushing the number of persecuted people in Bangladesh above 1.2 million.

Since Aug. 25, 2017, nearly 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed by Myanmar’s state forces, according to a report by the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA). More than 34,000 Rohingya were also thrown into fires, while over 114,000 others were beaten, said the OIDA report, titled “Forced Migration of Rohingya: The Untold Experience.”Some 18,000 Rohingya women and girls were raped by Myanmar’s army and police and over 115,000 Rohingya homes were burned down and 113,000 others vandalized, it added.

EU divisions over Russia mount as France, Germany seek peace in Ukraine BRUSSELS AGENCIES

French and German attempts to end the conflict in east Ukraine risk increasing tensions that were already rising in the European Union over how to handle Russia and which could complicate peace efforts.

Progress at talks between Russian and Ukrainian envoys have raised hopes of convening the first international summit in three years on ending the fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

But some EU states, while welcoming a summit that would involve France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, are worried by growing talk that the EU might partially lift sanctions imposed on Moscow since its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. EU divisions over how to deal with Moscow have been growing over overtures to the Kremlin in recent months, led by Paris.

Comments by French President Emmanuel Macron have especially upset

governments in EU countries that were once Soviet satellite states or constituent republics. Alarmed by what they see as an increasingly aggressive Russian foreign policy, they reject anything that might smack of appeasement. “Are we to reward Russia because they have not done anything grotesque in the past few months?” one EU diplomat asked. In EU meetings, letters and speeches, divisions about Russia that were once under control are resurfacing, diplomats say.

The tension could make it harder for the EU to agree new sanctions if Russia intensifies what are often depicted by Western leaders as efforts by President Vladimir Putin to undermine Western institutions such as the 28-nation bloc.

The tension could also further divide the bloc - with a group of French-led, relatively Russia-friendly allies such as Italy on one side, and the Baltic states, Poland and Romania on the other. This in turn could weaken the resolve of Westernbacked governments to stand up for Ukraine, diplomats said. EU diplomats

still expect leaders of the bloc to extend sanctions on Russia’s energy, financial and defense sectors for another six months at a regular summit in December.

But while Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel say there can be no sanctions relief until Russia implements a peace deal for Ukraine agreed in 20142015, both see sanctions as impeding better relations with Moscow.

MACRON’S ‘RESET’: The measures, imposed over the annexation of Crimea and Russian support for the separatists fighting in Ukraine, require all EU governments to agree. Any friction could allow just one country, possibly Moscow’s ally Hungary, to end them. “The time has come for the German government to pressure the EU for a partial lifting of the sanctions,” German lawmaker Peter Ramsauer, whose center-right Christian Social Union (CSU) is a member of Germany’s ruling coalition, told Reuters.

Baltic states, once part of the Soviet Union, fear a Russian trap to block Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO and the

EU. The country of 42 million has borders both with Russia and countries in the EU and NATO. With Germany open to France taking a more active role on Russia, Macron unexpectedly relaunched a bid for better Russian ties in July.

Sending his defense and foreign ministers to Moscow in September and ending a four-year freeze on such high-level diplomatic visits, Macron is seeking to bring Moscow back into the fold of leading in-

dustrialised nations. Macron, who said in August that alienating Russia was “a profound strategic mistake”, wants Moscow’s help to solve the world’s most intractable crises, from Syria to North Korea.

“The geography, history and culture of Russia are fundamentally European,” Macron said on Tuesday in a speech to the Council of Europe, the continent’s main human rights forum, from which Russia was suspended after Crimea.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

08 COMMENT

Learning from Finland – I

Azadi March Repressive measures are not justified by wrongheadedness

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F the Azadi March by the JUI(F) is as much of a non-event as its opponents, which include the present government, say it is, then they should not appear as worried about it as they do. JUI(F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman upped the ante by finally announcing a definite date, October 27, for the March. he still does not have a firm commitment by either of the main opposition parties, the PML(N) or the PPP, but himself will have to provide the protesters who will provide the cannon fodder for the March.

The Maulana and the government together are painting a dire picture. While the top echelons of the KP government are making prohibitory noises, the Maulana is speaking of how the country will become a battlefield if the leaders are arrested. At the same time, he is disseminating ominous talk of ‘Plan B’ and ‘Plan C’ to be implemented in that eventuality. It seems counterproductive for either to regard the March as a quasi-military operation. That the right to protest should be given would seems self-evident for a party which was catapulted onto the national stage because of its own dharna in 2014, but that might ber the very reason that it would not want any other party using such a tactic. however, both the PTI and the JUI(F) should remember that the government did not fall because of the dharna, and it was only when there were elections that it transformed its dharna exposure into the 2018 election victory.

The JUI(F) has no guarantee of success even if its March succeeds in mobilising the sort of numbers it is tossing about. There is no guarantee that the government is in any mood of resigning. however, that provides no justification for any attempt to stifle it. Indeed, the best way of showing that its claims about the JUI(F) are true, is to allow the latitude to carry out a peaceful protest, just as it was. Not all that long ago. Maulana Fazal is depending on the government to suppress him enough to create public sympathy for him. Its best approach would be to thwart in this, by sweet reasonableness, rather than provide him ammunition for attacks by strong-arm tactics.

Polio’s comeback

School education and economy

Dr Omer JaveD

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T the time of the fall of the USSR, Finland was struggling with its deep economic growth issues, but in a few years’ time it was able to turn around its development crisis at the back of three fundamental ways that it adopted. Firstly, it introduced innovative and thorough educational reforms, which put Finland at the top of the ladder in terms of success in the field of educational performance overall, and specifically as one of the main performers in the ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ (PISA), which ‘...is the OeCD’s (Organization for economic Co-operation and Development) Programme for International Student Assessment. every three years it tests 15-year-old students from all over the world in reading, mathematics and science. The tests are designed to gauge how well the students master key subjects in order to be prepared for reallife situations in the adult world’.

The first intervention fed heavily into the second supporting factor, that is, this education

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Efforts to eliminate the disease suffer a setback

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he detection of three more cases of polio in Sindh (Karachi), Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has brought the total for the year to 72, which is the highest figure since at last 2015. In fact, the figure represents a recurrence of the dreaded disease, which was showing signs of heading towards elimination. With 54 cases in 2015 coming down to twenty, eight and twelve in succeeding years, it seemed only a matter of time before it was eliminated from Pakistan. It bears mentioning that Pakistan is among the last three countries, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, where polio still strikes. The uptick in the number of cases represents one of the worst public health failures of the present regime, for it has control of not just the federal government, but also three provincial governments, whose health departments are the front line in this conflict.

Perhaps the most damaging action by the current government has been a falling off in government insistence on vaccination. experience has shown that the main means of control of the poliovirus is by vaccinating children. Unfortunately, vaccination has become a weapon in the War on Terror, whereby clerics advance their own agenda by claiming that vaccines have been infused with various harmful effects, the most fearsome being infertility. Faced with the choice of certain infertility and the relatively remote chance of permanent crippling, parents choose the latter. Tempers have run so high that vaccinators have been killed for their temerity, and it has become necessary to have them escorted by the police.

The problem with diseases like polio is that all the hard work of working for its elimination is wasted by the kind of neglect the government has shown. The number of cases may not seem very high, but one only needs to ask the family of someone afflicted by polio to learn that the human cost of even a single case is immense, perhaps too immense for a society to afford even a single case if it can be avoided.

Dedicated to the legacy of the late Hameed Nizami

Arif Nizami Editor Aziz-ud-Din Ahmad

Umar Aziz

Asher John

Joint Editor

Executive Editor

Deputy Editor

Lahore – Ph: 042-36300938, 042-36375965

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amJeD JaaveD

NDIA’S view is that abrogation of Kashmir’s special status and Kashmiris’ hereditary proprietary rights is an internal matter. They harp on the Kashmiris’ struggle to shake off Indian yoke amounting to terrorism. And that its legislative coup d’état would be a harbinger of peace, amity, and lasting prosperity in Indian-held Kashmir.

Pakistan’s view is, unless revocation is withdrawn and curfew lifted, the situation would result in a bloodbath. What’s the truth?

TerrorisTs or freedom fighTers: Unlike Kashmir, Bangladesh was not a disputed state like Jammu And Kashmir State. It was an integral part of Pakistan. But, harboured, nurtured, trained and armed Bangladeshi ‘freedom fighters’ in India’s lexicon. Pakistan calls them ‘terrorists’. Kashmiris are not ‘terrorists’, but India is a ‘rogue state’: Let India not forget that Kashmir is a disputed state according to UN resolutions and the Simla accord. A state that flouts international treaties is called a ‘rogue state’ RAW officers’ confessions: Some Indian diplomats and RAW cover officers have made startling revelations in their books about involvement in insurgencies or terrorism in neighbouring countries. . For instance, RK Yadav, and B. Raman (The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane) make no bones about India’s involvement in Bangladesh’s insurgency.They admitted that India’s then prime minister Indira Gandhi, Parliament, RAW and armed forces acted in tandem to dismember Pakistan. Raman recalls ‘Indian parliament passed resolution on March 31, 1971 to support insurgency. Indira Gandhi had then confided to Kao that if Mujib was prevented from ruling Pakistan, she would liberate east Pakistan from the clutches of the military junta. Kao, through one R&AW agent, got hijacked a plane Fokker Friendship Ganga of Indian Airlines from Srinagar to Lahore.

India’s security czar Doval pubKarachi – Ph: 021-35381208-9

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reform allowed Finland to move from being an investment-driven economy to one that is driven by knowledge, that is, to becoming a knowledge-driven economy. The biggest way in which it was able to do was to a) establish its dominance in cellular technology through coming up with an innovate mobile phone manufactured by Nokia, which remained the top brand from the 1990s to the early 2000s, when Apple later on took over this industry through the introduction of smartphones, where Samsung joined Apple in this dominance, and b) excelling in the industry of video games by creating such global brands as ‘Angry Birds’ and ‘Clash of Clans’.

Thirdly, their change in approach to education allowed people to be better at thinking and innovating, with primary manifestations of this change seen a) in coming up with research initiatives, especially in the field of medicine and overall healthcare services, and b) in terms of artificial intelligence (AI). In 2017, Finland emerged as the first country in eU to come up with an official strategy on AI. having said that, according to Ishita Barua (a researcher at the University of Oslo), ‘Finland’s Minister of economy, Mika Lintilä, some months ago stated that the country will never have enough resources to compete with countries such as China and the USA who are leading the race to develop AI technology. But Finland could nevertheless become a leader in practical applications of AI’. This, in turn, could be a good way forward for developing countries like Pakistan as a realistic and useful way to engage in AI. In this regard, the Finnish Ministry of economic Affairs produced a reform document in 2017 on AI, ‘Finland’s age of artificial intelligence - Turning Finland into a leading country in the application of artificial intelligence: Ob-

jective and recommendations for measures’.

This can indeed be a useful learning resource for Pakistan, especially for the Ministry of education (including provincial departments) and the higher education Commission, Ministry of Planning and Development, and the Ministry of Science and Technology, to look into. hence, a good education system helped the Finns to not only perform in a very wholesome and excellent way in the classroom, but in becoming a frontrunner in ‘change management, implementation of evidence-based measures and education in artificial intelligence’ according to Ishita Barua. Therefore, it makes sense to learn from Finland in all these aspects, but above all in terms of its approach to education, especially in the way it has used this to allow people to become wholesome thinking human beings, and in using education to lower the inequality in the society. A recent speech of the PM Imran Khan at an event on education reform emphasised these two points- creating an educational environment that allows people to become ‘all-rounders’, and providing highclass uniform education to all, so that there is equality of opportunity in the society.

Some of the important initiatives with regard to improving the whole attitude and approach towards education can be a good starting point for Pakistan, as it embarks on laying out an educational reform strategy that brings equity in terms of opportunities, wholesomeness in terms of student capacities, and better understanding of life and what brings true happiness.

(To be continued...)

Dr Omer Javed holds PhD in Economics degree from the University of Barcelona, and previously worked at International Monetary Fund. He tweets @omerjaved

Kashmir shows Indian gaps India should learn from the Kashmir experience licly claims that he acted as a spy under a pseudonym in Pakistan for 11 years. In a newspaper article, titled ‘how India secretly armed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance’, on 1st September, India’s former ambassador tells about India’s secret support to Northern Alliance. he discloses India’s ambassador Bharath Raj Muthu Kumar, with consent of then foreign minister Jaswant Singh, ‘coordinated the military and medical assistance India was secretly giving to Massoud and his forces. The support involved ‘helicopters, uniforms, ordnance, mortars, small armaments, refurbished Kalashnikovs seized in Kashmir, combat and winter clothes, packaged food, medicines, and funds’. These supplied were ‘delivered circuitously with the help of other countries’ or ‘through his [Masssoud’s] brother in London, Wali Massoud’.

Then there is the Kunew lbhushan Jadhav episode: Jadhav was an Indian-Navy officer, attached to the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). his mission was to covertly carry out espionage and terrorism in Pakistan. Pakistan also alleged there were Indian markings on arms deliveries to Baloch rebels pushed by Jadhav. To India’s chagrin, India’s investigative journalists confirmed from Gazettes of India that he was commissioned in the Indian Navy in 1987.

The myTh of ‘revocaTion’s benefiTs: The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill is no panacea for the region. It has in fact exacerbated Kashmiri misery through the lockdown. The walnut and apple crops have been destroyed for want of buyers, rain, or immobility. No new jobs. The state already had over 484,901bloated jobs in 27 government departments, while Governor Satya Pal Malik announced in August 50,000 jobs to be created in three months. inTernaTional fallouT:

Islamabad – Ph: 051-2204545

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Informal discussion in a closed-door format at the Security Council led to no resolution. Yet, it is a source of concern to India. As soon as the situation becomes a threat to peace and security, P5 and the Security Council would spring into action.

China is executing several infrastructural projects in Gilgit and Baltistan bordering Ladakh and Azad Kashmir. The U.S. position its tilts in Pakistan’s favour because of Afghanistan exit. Pakistani diaspora in Britain and Sikhs may increase Pakistan’s leverage.

Nuclear Armageddon: a fair worry?: Prime minister Imran Khan warned war between the nuclear rivals could ‘have consequences for the world’ Kashmir is the flashpoint that triggered the past wars in 1948, 1965, 1971 and 1999, besides a quasi-war or military standoff in 2001-2002. even today, it remains a nuclear tinderbox. India wants the issue to remain on the backburner, but Pakistan wants early resolution.

John Thomson, in an article ‘Kashmir: the most dangerous place in the world’ has analyzed whether it is a myth or reality to perceive Kashmir as the most dangerous place in the world. he cogently argues the Kashmir issue could once again spark another Indo-Pak military confrontation with concomitant risks of a nuclear war.

Carnegie endowment for International Peace has, inter alia, pointed out that ‘avoiding nuclear war in South Asia will require political breakthroughs in India-Pakistan’.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi assures the world that India is headed for a five-trilliondollar economy. he is a Buddha incarnate, a doyen of world peace.

Some of his slogans may nevertheless be hollow.The 1996 BJP slogan was“sabko dekha baari-baari, abki baari Atal Bihari” (now it’s Bihari’s turn), in 2014 it was

Web: www.pakistantoday.com.pk

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“achchhe din aane waale hain” (good days are in the offing),In 2019, it was Modi hai to mumkin hai (If Modi is there, it’s possible), jal sey nal jal Shakti (water power), jal Jeevan (water is life ), ayushman Bharat (happy India) and swachh Bharat (clean India). .

Modi won the ‘Global Goalkeeper Award’ for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched by the government.

The world is enamoured of Modi’s reformist programmes.

A lesson of history is that only such states survive as can strike a balance between security and welfare. Garrison or warrior states vanished as if they never existed.

Client states, living on doles from powerful states, ended up as banana republics. We should at least learn from the european security experience.

Just think of what great status were empires like Austria-hungary, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden and Tsarist Russia and even the erstwhile USSR. A common feature of all strong states had been that they had strong harmonious military and civil institutions, de jure capability to defend their territory and policies that favoured the citizenry rather than dominant classes, feudal lords, industrial robber barons and others. Pakistan needs to weed tout mafias, put its economic house in order, and provide, at least, universal healthcare.

The eU experience shows how weak but intelligent states coalesced to ensure their survival by constraining the hegemon. Alternatively, they would have been on hegemon’s bandwagon in a subordinate position. India should read the writing on the wall and move toward Pakistan.

Amjed Jaaved is a freelance journalist, has served in the Pakistan government for 39 years and holds degrees in economics, business administration, and law.

He can be reached at amjedjaaved@gmail.com

Email: editorial@pakistantoday.com.pk

Monday, 7 October, 2019

COMMENT 09 Editor’s mail

Send your letters to: Letters to Editor, Pakistan Today, 4-Shaarey Fatima Jinnah, Lahore, Pakistan.

E-mail: letters@pakistantoday.com.pk Letters should be addressed to Pakistan Today exclusively

Sindh’s education challenge

Changing faces of democracy in Jammu and Kashmir The search for Kashmiriyat goes on still Dr raJkumar Singh

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hIS refusal to integrate Kashmir within the framework of Indian democracy has proved to be the single greatest obstacle to the process of Kashmir’s emotional and political integration with the rest of India. This is why the people of Jammu and Kashmir are so insistent on “freedom” which means freedom from Indian rule. It is the conviction, born of their experiences, that their collective will for democratic responsible and accountable government is incompatible with their presently coerced status as ‘an integral part of India’. It is one of the factors that has changed the social psychology of Kashmir. failure of successive governmenTs: Frustration and anger of the new generation accumulated and events began to take a new turn from the mid-1980s. In late 1986 Farooq Abdullah committed a disastrous blunder and concluded a rapprochement with the Centre, whereupon he was reinstalled as Chief Minister pending fresh elections in March 1987. In exchange he agreed to contest the elections in partnership with Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress(I). Although Farooq justified his decision in terms of the hard political reality he had come to accept, the arrangement met with widespread public hostility and contempt because it was an alliance with those who had disrespected and denied Kashmiriyat for 40 years.

The development was followed by formation of a coalition in the Valley called Muslim United Front (MUF) to fight the National Conference-Congress alliance at the polls. In an anti-climax MUF eventually won just four seats with the NC-Congress combine taking almost all the rest with the help of rigging and strong arm tactics, booth capturing, people not being allowed to vote and balantant working of the eadministration in favour of the establishment. Mass arrests of MUF activists had immediately followed the spurious election and in fact it was in prison during 1987 that the five young men formed the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). On their release they took a collective decision to go to PakistanControlled Kashmir in search of military training and weapons. Yasin Mallik, currently chairman of the JKLF, was one of them. negaTive effecTs of bad adminisTraTion: especially after 1987 all institutional channels of protest and dissent were effectively blocked and even perfectly peaceful agitations were suppressed with lethal force. The first JKLF bombing in Srinagar in late July 1988 signalled the arrival of insurgency. According to US scholar Paula R. Newberg, ‘Kashmiris came to insurgency when all politics seemed to fail, the politics of Kashmir’s traditional politicians, politics be-

tween Srinagar and Delhi, and politics between India and Pakistan. They view themselves as victims of profound corruptions that sully the meaning of politics. Indeed, most Kashmiris who developed a renewed commitment to the idea of self-determination by the late 1980 sincerely believe that they have given India’s democracy more than its fair share of chances. The vast majority of Kashmiris are apparently prepared to make considerable sacrifices in order to resist this oppression. And the reason why they seem so insistent on “Freedom” which means freedom from Indian rule, is the conviction, born of their experiences, that their collective will for democratic responsible and accountable government is incompatible with their presently coerced status as ‘an integral part of India.’

Two factors were mainly responsible for changing the social psychology in Kashmir.

One, the growing perception and public resentment at the proliferation and availability of small arms and ammunition and its use by individuals and groups with impunity.

Two, the belief that a sham democracy is a better alternative to anarchy, and a bad government is still a better option than chaos. It is a healthy development if there is an urge in initiating measures to bring an improvement in the governance of the state. Good governance, as some analyst viewed it, is the way out. To some in India better governance in Kashmir means handing the state or the Valley, to army rule. Others see it in terms of a clean development-oriented administration, with or without ‘autonomy’. In their view, all that people in Kashmir want, like people everywhere in India, is a minimum of roads, schools, dispensaries and electricity and an attentive administration. Provide these things, back them up with firm security measures and the militants would be isolated. needed a new beginning: It is true that due to over a decade of militancy, religious identities have become more pronounced and thr imposition of a unitary form of constitution on the state has suppressed all forms of

identities except those based on religion, thus the distance between Kashmiri Muslims and hindus has increased, even though they share a common language, culture and heritage. Militancy might have bruised Kashmiriyat, but it never succeeded in diluting it. however, it needs conducive social and political conditions to make this culture thrive again. Kashmir, apart from being a political problem, represents a human tragedy of epic proportions.

This task of reconciliation and healing is not one that the government alone can do. Civil society as a whole in the state, as well as in the rest of India, and especially organizations working in the field of inter-faith harmony, would have to get involved in this process which would necessarily take many years to complete. however, a “beginning” must be made without delay.

Thus the political history of India-administered Jammu and Kashmir clearly does not satisfy the minimal conditions and requirements of democratic governance. No Kashmir policy can succeed without taking into account the political and psychological urge of the people.

The controversy over whether the policy should be tough or soft, whether it should be based on nationalist or moral appeal, on realpolitik or idealpolitik is unreal and irrelevant.

What the question needs is a correct assessment, a correct diagnosis, a correct strategy. The government, despite its attempt to put democracy on the rails in Kashmir, has neither been able to convince the Kashmiris that the elections would be truly free and fair, nor create the conditions in which the various Kashmiri nationalist groups can agree to fight the election and thereby turn it into a genuine contest for power among the Kashmiris themselves. What Kashmir badly needs and sadly lacks is a “healing touch” policy - a step towards a serious, sustained and multidimensional peace process.

The government has neither been able to convince the Kashmiris that the elections would be truly free and fair, nor create the conditions in which the various Kashmiri nationalist groups can agree to fight the election and thereby turn it into a genuine contest for power among the Kashmiris themselves

Dr Rajkumar Singh is a professor and head of the Political Science Department of BnMU, Saharsa, Bihar, India, and can be reached at: rankumarsinghpg@yahoo.com

eDUCATION is one of the fundamental rights of every citizen. It is meant to be the strength of any nation but in Sindh, it is, however, totally perished. The residents of Sindh have always been confronting the deprivation of quality education.

A survey conducted and visited the government schools in Sindh. The team got shocked with the results they experienced. The reporter with the camera man were clearly showing the dismal state of education in the province. When teachers were asked questions, they were pretending and declaring the fault is of government and somewhat other individuals. Students were being captured with the ineligibility of reading and writing. Reading is far cry, they were not even able to write their own names. An 8th standard student, when the reporter asked him to write “hum Pakistani hain”, he could not write. In another school, a boy was asked to read the written word “Cat”, he could read.

Similarly, moving to another school, when a girl student shown diagram of “Volcano”, she could not bring it in imagination and asking back that does it exist?

The status of education is not hidden. This is why and how every country is moving forward with economic and strategic stability and we are about 200 years behind in case of education.

The rich would go to private schools but where do the poor go? This is as if the government has forgotten the responsibility.

The provincial government must act to ensure quality education. A personal advice, there is nothing bad in seeking guidance how Punjab and KP are developing.

ASIF MURAD UMRAnI Karachi

Ministers performance PeRIODICALLY when the federal cabinet meets, it is reported in the media that at the very outset Prime Minister Imran Khan reviews performance of the federal ministers and questions about what they are doing by and large in their respective assigned portfolios.

But nothing more than this is reported in the media about the federal ministers who are doing good work and those who are snubbed by the prime minister for not delivering and showing positive results. every other day questions are being raised in the newspapers about the education Ministry and the minister is criticised for not doing any good work to promote education sector in line with the modern times requirements and needs.

The Minister of education hails from Lahore and is also the minister of National history and Literary heritage Division under whose purview falls the National Art Gallery/ Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) which is responsible for promotion of culture, art, music, film and theatre in the country. he has reportedly not visited the National Art Gallery /PNCA so far to acquaint himself with their working which is a sad reflection of his lack of interest in art and culture.

There are, however, reports of his being interested in inducting his 77 years old lady cousin at the helm of affairs of the PNCA. The minister’s performance on the whole leaves much to be desired though his working is not reportedly questioned in the federal cabinet meetings as if he is the blue-eyed boy of the prime minister. Ministers are not supposed to be masters of their portfolios but they should at least be knowing ABC about education, art and culture or the assigned portfolios, please. Thanks.

ASMAAR BILAL Lahore

Country in shambles IT is very painful to see the country sail on a sinking ship. every segment / department of the government is deficient in its performance. The judges instead of disponing justice seem more focused on stricture against their colleagues and giving expert opinions on things they have a clue about.

The lawyers instead of sincerely fighting the cases of their clients are busy locking up judges in their chambers and flexing their muscle, acting like goons. The police are busy serving the politicians and powerful to please them to gain personal career related favours than protecting the lives and property of ordinary citizens. The government as a whole is busy in marginalising the opposition and taking personal vendetta than making laws for betterment of people. Opposition is busy using regional and ethnic cards to push back the government than pressuring it to make laws.

The economy of the country is under blight stars but the govt and oppositions members change barbs instead of creating unity. Peoples problems are not on the agenda of government or the opposition. Seventy-two years have passed and we as nation learnt nothing from our past mistakes and still follow the path of destruction.

Our politicians ought to realise that without one’s own country there can neither be government nor opposition.

Unfortunately, after loss of Mr Jinnah, and to some extent Mr Liaquat Ali Khan and Mr Bhutto, there is scarcity of true leaders who can foresee shadow of coming events and take measures to avert any unpleasant event to happen rather than start chest thumping after it has happened.

RAJA SHAFAATULLAH Islamabad

Monday, 7 October, 2019

10 FOREIGN NEWS

NorTh KoreA SAyS No TAlKS UNleSS US SToPS hoSTile PolicieS PYONGYANG

N

AGENCIES

ORTH Korea said Sunday it has “no intention” to continue nuclear talks unless the United States takes steps to end hostilities, a day after negotiations in Sweden broke down.

The discussions in Sweden followed months of stalemate following a February meeting between the North’s leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, and came after Pyongyang’s defiant test of a sea-launched ballistic missile on Wednesday. The North walked away

from the Sweden talks saying it was disappointed at the lack of “new and creative” solutions offered by Washington, although the US insisted it was willing to meet again in two weeks. But a spokesman at the North’s foreign ministry said Washington’s claims about another meeting was “ungrounded”.

“We have no intention to hold such sickening negotiations as what happened this time before the US takes a substantial step to make complete and irreversible withdrawal of the hostile policy toward the DPRK,” he said using the acronyms of the North’s official name.

In a statement carried by the North’s

Korean Central News Agency, the spokesman warned that their “dealings” may immediately end if the US sticks to its old playbook. “The fate of the future DPRK-US dialogue depends on the US attitude, and the end of this year is its deadline,” he added. In Stockholm, the nuclear-armed North’s leading negotiator, Kim Myong Gil, blamed the US for not giving up their “old attitude” which led to talks ending “without any outcome”.

But Washington called the talks “good discussions”, saying the comments

by North Korea did not reflect the content or the spirit their eight-and-a-half-hour discussion. The United States accepted

host Sweden’s invitation to resume talks in two weeks’ time, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said.

Ortagus added in a statement that the US “previewed a number of new initiatives” that would allow progress on the statement reached in Singapore at the first Trump-Kim summit last year.

The two leaders adopted a vaguely worded document on the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” at their first summit in June last year, but little progress has since been made.

On Wednesday, North Korea claimed to have entered a new phase in its defence capability with Wednesday’s test of a sub-

marine-launched ballistic missile — the most provocative since Pyongyang began dialogue with Washington in 2018.

Trump has said he sees no problem with a string of short-range missile tests conducted previously by North Korea, while insisting his personal ties with the North’s leader remain good. North Korea is banned from ballistic missile launches by the United Nations Security Council resolutions. The Security Council is expected to hold closed-door talks early next week on the latest test at the request of Britain, France and Germany, diplomats said.

Pompeo denounces 'harassment' after Democrats subpoena White House whether to lodge a formal complaint.

In a tweet late Saturday, Trump said that the first whistleblower “got my phone conversation almost completely wrong, so now word is they are going to the bench and another ‘Whistleblower’ is coming in from the Deep State, also with second hand info.”

Congressional investigators led by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff have promised a quick and expeditious inquiry, but said Friday the White House was not cooperating with their demand for documents. “The White House has refused to engage with — or even respond to — multiple requests for documents,” said a letter signed by the chairmen of the House oversight, intelligence and foreign affairs committees.

“His actions have left us with no choice but to issue this subpoena.” The committees ordered the White House to turn over requested files by October 18. The subpoena followed a demand earlier Friday for documents from Vice President Mike Pence.

Pompeo — who recently acknowledged having listened in on a key Trump-Zelensky phone call on July 25 — failed to meet a Friday subpoena deadline to turn over Ukraine-related documents, CNN reported, citing a House foreign affairs committee aide.

Meanwhile, a series of text messages between US diplomats dealing with Ukraine, made public by the congressional investigators, supported Democratic accusations that Trump had illegally sought foreign help for his reelection effort. The text messages showed that some US diplomats had doubts about Trump’s pressure on Zelensky, including allegedly freezing a $400 million military aid package. As Democrats raised their attacks on Trump, many Republicans remained quietly supportive of the president.

WASHINGTON AGENCIES

The Trump administration complained Saturday of harassment by Democratic lawmakers who issued subpoenas for documents regarding President Donald Trump’s alleged pressuring of Ukraine for political favors.

And in a key development, a potential second whistleblower was reportedly weighing whether to come forward. The latest explosive turns in the impeachment investigation against Trump came as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Democratic-led congressional committees leading the probe of having “harassed and abused” State Department employees by contacting them directly for documents rather than going through department lawyers.

“That’s harassment,” Pompeo said during a visit to Athens, “and I’m never going to let that happen to my team.” He called the impeachment drama “some silly gotcha game,” saying the matter distracts from important issues like improving lives and growing economies. The House committees issued their subpoenas — including to the White House — as evidence mounted that Trump abused his powers by attempting to withhold US military aid to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into seeking damaging information on 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Trump has alleged that Biden’s son Hunter earned “millions” from sitting on the board of directors of a Ukraine tycoon’s gas company. But no evidence has surfaced showing wrongdoing by either Biden.

The impeachment investigation saga began after an original whistleblower — reportedly a CIA analyst — filed a formal complaint to the intelligence community inspector general about Trump’s alleged pres-

suring of Zelensky. “Look, nations do this,” Pompeo said Saturday in Athens. “Nations work together and they say, ‘Boy, goodness gracious, if you can help me with X, we’ll help you achieve Y.’ This is what partnerships do. It’s win-win.”

Trump and his supporters have aggressively attacked the still-anonymous whistleblower whom Trump has denounced as “close to a spy.” But if a second whistleblower emerges, and if that person has more direct information about the events in question, as The New York Times reported late Friday, the allegations would become more difficult to shrug off.

However, the possibility did not seem to deter Trump, who welcomed the idea of another whistleblower, stating on Twitter: “Keep them coming!” The Times said the second official was among those interviewed by inspector general Michael Atkinson about the allegations lodged by the original whistleblower.

The newspaper, citing two people briefed on the matter, said the second official was still pondering

Climate activists occupy Paris mall as global Extinction Rebellion protests begin PARIS AGENCIES

Second whistleblower in Trump-Ukraine scandal comes forward WASHINGTON AGENCIES

A second whistleblower, with first-hand knowledge of President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, has spoken with the intelligence community’s internal watchdog, the lawyer representing the official said on Sunday. Mark Zaid confirmed in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” that the second official, also from the U.S. intelligence community, has been interviewed by the inspector general. Zaid represents the first whistleblower who filed a complaint involving a July 25 phone call Trump held with Ukraine’s president in which he asked him to investigate a Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. The existence of the second whistleblower followed stirrings of discontent within Trump’s own Republican Party after he called on China on Friday to investigate Biden’s son, who had business dealings in China.

Republican U.S. Senators Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse and Susan Collins all have expressed concerns about Trump reaching out to foreign countries to help him in his 2020 re-election bid.

Hundreds of climate activists barricaded themselves into a Paris shopping centre on Saturday as security forces tried to remove them, ahead of a planned series of protests around the world by the Extinction Rebellion movement.

Campaigners faced off against police and some inconvenienced shoppers as they occupied part of the Italie 2 mall in southeast Paris.

They unfurled banners with slogans like “Burn capitalism not petrol” above restaurants and the window displays fashion boutiques.

The protest comes ahead of planned disruption to 60 cities around the world from Monday in a fortnight of civil disobedience, from Extinction Rebellion (XR), which is warning of an environmental “apocalypse”. As the centre tried to close up in the evening, security forces ordered the protesters to leave the area, activists told AFP. According to images broadcast on social networks, police then tried to enter the building, while protesters blocked entrances with tables and chairs.

“I am with XR to say stop this crazy system before it destroys everything,” one young woman told AFP, giving only her first name Lucie.

Other campaign groups also joined in with the Paris shopping centre demonstration, including some members of the “yellow vest” anti-government protest group.

Non-violent protests are chiefly planned by XR from Monday in Europe, North America, Australia,

but events are also set to take place in India, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Wellington.

Another protest was held in Berlin on Saturday, with campaigners setting up camp near the parliament building. “To governments of the world: we declared a climate and ecological emergency. You did not do enough. To everybody else: rebel,” XR said on its website ahead of its International Rebellion wave of activism. “You can’t count on us or Greta to do this for you,” it said, referring to teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Look inside yourself and rebel.”

Extinction Rebellion was established last year in Britain by academics and has become one of the world’s fastest-growing environmental movements.

Campaigners want the government to declare a climate and ecological emergency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, halt biodiversity loss and be led by new “citizens’ assemblies on climate and ecological justice.

CMYK

Pope blames Amazon fires on destructive 'interests' RIO AGENCIES

Pope Francis opened a synod on Sunday to champion the Amazon’s poverty-stricken and isolated indigenous communities by condemning the destructive “interests” he blamed for the fires that devastated the region. The three-week synod, or assembly, is to unite 184 bishops, including 113 from the nine countries of the pan-Amazon region, including Brazil. Brazil is home to 60 percent of the world’s largest rainforest, which is vital for the planet but is suffering from its worst outbreak of fires in years.

The fires, mostly caused by humans with the goal of clearing land for farming and cattle ranching, are having a grievous effect on the forest. Representatives of indigenious peoples, some with their heads adorned with coloured feathers, also gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to hear the pope’s inaugural mass. “The fire set by interests that destroy, like the fire that recently devastated Amazonia, is not the fire of the Gospel,” the pontiff said in his homily. “The fire of God is warmth that attracts and gathers into unity. It is fed by sharing, not by profits. “The fire that destroys, on the other hand, blazes up when people want to promote only their own ideas, form their own group, wipe out differences in the attempt to make everyone and everything uniform.” The working document for the synod denounced in scathing terms social injustices and crimes, including murders, and suggested a Church action plan. “Listen to the cry of ‘Mother Earth’, assaulted and seriously wounded by the economic model of predatory and ecocidal development… which kills and plunders, destroys and devastates, expels and discards,” the 80-page document said.

The run-up to the synod saw some 260 events held in the Amazon region involving 80,000 people, in a bid to give the local populations a voice in the document. Among those attending the synod as an observer was Sister Laura Vincuna, a missionary trying to protect the territories of the Caripuna indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon. “Help us defend our motherland, we have no other home!” she said on Saturday. “Earth, water, forest: without these three elements nobody can do anything”. Jose Luiz Cassupe, a member of an indigenous community from Brazil’s Ronodia state, said the Brazilian government “did not keep its word”. “We are asking the world for help because we are very worried about the new mining exploration policy in the Amazon,” he told AFP, wearing a headdress of indigo blue feathers.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

BUSINESS 11

Govt releases rs132bn for varioUs old and new ProJects Under PsdP 2019-20

CORPORATE CORNER

ISLAMABAD

J. has opened a new and bigger store at Dolmen Mall, Clifton.

The store launch was celebrated with a grand opening ceremony and the ribbon cutting was done by the honorable Governor of Sindh, Mr. Imran Ismail. PRESS RELEASE

Shell Pakistan holds a ceremony to commemorates its journey through decades with Pakistan. P R E S S R E L E A S E

t

APP

HE federal government has so far released Rs132.945 billion for various ongoing and new social sector uplift projects under its Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) 2019-20, as against the total allocation of Rs701 billion.

Under its development programme, the government has released an amount of Rs55.949 billion for federal ministries, Rs29.712 billion for corporations and Rs8.003 billion for special areas, according to data released by the Ministry of Planning, Develop-

ment and Reform.

Out of these allocations, the government released Rs26.78 billion for security enhancement in the country for which the government had allocated Rs32.5 billion during the year 2019-20.

An amount of Rs12 billion has also been released for the merged areas of erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) under the government's 10 years development programme.

Similarly, for Higher Education Commission, the government released an amount of Rs5.739 billion out of its total allocation of Rs29 billion while Rs4.891 billion were released for Pakistan Atomic En-

FBR asked to collect FED from steel units running in specialised areas ISLAMABAD GHULAM ABBAS

Omer Ayub holds Meeting at SNGPL Head Office in Lahore. P R E S S R E L E A S E

Govt asked to pass on benefit of reduced oil prices to people ISLAMABAD INP

The Pakistan Economy Watch (PEW) on Sunday said the government should not pocket benefit of reduced oil prices in the international market and pass on the relief to the masses.

The masses facing an unprecedented price hike deserve some relief, therefore, petroleum prices should be reduced in line with the recommendations of OGRA, it said. Every government claims that oil prices are linked to the international market but when prices slide the benefit is not passed on to the masses. Rather, the government silently increases levy which keeps prices intact but increase the income of the government, said Dr. Murtaza Mughal, President PEW. Oil prices are coming down but the government increased electricity tariff twice in two days putting additional burden of around Rs 125 billion on masses which is amazing, he said. Dr. Murtaza Mughal said that the electricity sector will continue to show heavy losses even if the price of electricity is doubled because it is infected with corruption and inefficiency while the government seems not interested in reforms. No steps have been taken to contain corruption or losses in the power sector while privatization of the ailing power sector is not a priority for the government, he added. He noted that circular debt is the outcome of incompetence and corruption in the power sector while the government finds it easy to finance the power sector mismanagement by putting the burden on the masses. Actual line losses in the power sector came in at 18.3 percent for which honest consumers who are paying their bills regularly are penalized.

ergy Commission for which the government had allocated Rs24.45 billion in the development budget.

For National Highway Authority, the government has released Rs27.228 billion against its allocations of Rs154.96 billion.

Under annual development agenda, the government also released Rs2.7 billion for Railways Division out of total allocation of Rs16 billion, Rs1.969 billion for Interior Division, and Rs2.234 billion for National Health Services, Regulations, and Coordination Division.

SUPARCO received Rs624.649 million out of its total allocation of Rs6.033 billion

The steel industry has asked the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) to collect taxes from steel units located in former federally and provincially administered tribal areas and from steel units in sugar mills located across the country.

Through a letter, a copy of which is available with Pakistan Today, Pakistan Association of Large Steel Producers (PALSP) has lodged a complaint to the FBR asking the tax collecting body to recover Federal Excise Duty (FED) from steel units that were established in certain specialised areas.

The letter to the chairman FBR said that FED should be recovered from steel units established in former Fata, various areas of Pata, subsidiary units in the sugar mills and those units that were running at self-generated basis.

“According to our market intelligence, unfortunately, FED is not being recovered from the steel units in FATA/PATA and it is creating unhealthy competition in the market and creating serious problems for units paying taxes and duties ethically,” the letter to the FBR said.

The letter further states that “In the federal budget 2019, the government levied FED on steel furnaces and re-rolling mills w.e.f., 1-7-

2019 and the levy was extended to FATA/PATA steel units as well. The FED on steel units running in sugar mills & steel units running on selfgenerated power, were also subject to an independent metering panel system under lock and key of LTU.” “Unhealthy competition has been created in the markets of certain areas due to non-recovery of FED from such units,” the PALSP letter read.

FBR had sought information regarding inputs in production of steel and the supply on month-wise basis from the start of the current fiscal year.

However the PALSP letter to the chairman FBR has highlighted that the officials have not made any recovery of FED from eight steel units operating in sugar mills and four furnaces at self power generation units in Multan and Hyderabad and few units in old Fata areas.

“In FATA/PATA area even the registration process has not been done so far by the concerned FBR authorities, while in the case of steel units running in sugar mills and self-power generation, no independent and exclusive metering panel system has been installed so far,” the letter read.

The letter also states that immediate measures should be taken and the steel manufacturing body asked FBR to share with the association the revenue collected from the two most sensitive areas.

whereas Revenue Division received Rs333.648 million out of total allocation of Rs 1.9 billion.

The Cabinet Division also received Rs7.997 billion for which an amount of Rs39.986 billion has been allocated for the year 2019-20.

The government has also released Rs4.933 billion for Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) block and other projects out of its allocations of Rs27.26 billion and Rs3.070 billion for Gilgit Baltistan region.

The Planning Commission of Pakistan releases 20 percent of the funds each in the first two quarters while 30 percent each in the last two quarters.

Pakistan, Japan agree to sign MoU on manpower export ISLAMABAD APP

Pakistan and Japan have agreed on signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for export skilled labor from Pakistan to Japan.

Japan has decided to open the labor market in 14 different sectors, including construction, nursing care, agriculture, manufacturing and light engineering and other sectors, Minister and Deputy Head of Mission, Embassy of Japan in Pakistan Yusuke Shindo told APP here on Sunday. The senior diplomat expected that the MoU could be signed between the two countries during next month (November). He said that Japan intended to attract up to 500,000 blue-collar workers from all over the world to Japan over five years by 2025 and further enhance this by 2030. This law, which took effect in April of this year, creates two new categories of visas for blue-collar workers in 14 sectors as Japan faces a labor crunch. Yusuke Shindo said that Japan has opened its doors for foreign workers of different countries to undertake a policy initiative to alleviate problems caused by its rapidly growing old population. He also praised the Pakistani workers who were working in Japan, saying that they were more skilled and working with full commitment and honesty.

Hike in licence renewal fee, uncompetitive environment to ruin radio’s future ISLAMABAD STAFF REPORT

About 200 private radio networks risk closure as their owners have been asked by the regulatory authority to pay the renewal fee at par with the latest bid in concerned districts without fulfilling its responsibility to act against illegal frequencies operating in the market.

A recent Supreme Court ruling, overriding a Lahore High Court decision accommodating the concerns of the Pakistan Broadcasters Association (PBA), has allowed PEMRA to collect the license renewal fee as per its own formula, which the radio owners have termed unjust.

“We are confronting difficult circumstances not only due to economic slowdown but also due

to the reason that PEMRA has failed to act against 70 illegal frequencies operating across Pakistan,” said the spokesperson of the Pakistan Broadcasters Association (PBA) Najib Ahmad.

He also said that since these illegal radio networks are being operated by public institutions on commercial basis, business prospects of legal networks are doomed.

“If I go by the new license renewal formula I will have to pay one million rupees for my Islamabad based network per month, though the situation varies in other districts,” Najib says wondering how he can compete in a market where illegal radio networks are operating with coverage more vast than his own.

The PBA through a writ petition filed by late Asma Jahahngir in Supreme Court in 2016 had

sought ban on the illegal networks by PEMRA to ensure competitive environment but the case remains unheard till today.

“We expect PEMRA to fulfill its responsibility as a regulator, which is to ensure competitive environment, before indulging in money-minting practices,” Najib said, adding that in case the renewal fee falls too heavy on the owners, the future of this sector is doomed given the poor returns and uncompetitive environment.

It is worth mentioning that the PEMRA has not conducted market study so far and has not undertaken any mentionable project for up-gradation and capacity building of the radio sector to attract new investors, which makes license bidding process subject to manipulation by the vested interests.

Emerging opportunities for Pakistan following US-China trade war BEIJING INP

Economic experts have hinted at emerging trade and business opportunities for Pakistan following the ongoing US-China trade war. According to Nomura Securities strategists, Pakistan could potentially be the third most fortunate beneficiary in this feud, says a report published in China Economic Net. Abdul Razzak Dawood, adviser to the prime minister, has also reported to have given a similar statement. “The trade war between China and the United States is getting bigger and bigger by the day… and the demand for goods is not declining (in the US market).”

“Pakistan needs to explore ways so that it can benefit from this war,” the advisor said. These controversial claims; however, have certain assumptions attached to them. There are three possible ways that Pakistan can turn one of the greatest economic feuds into its favor and establish itself in the international market as a key player in world economics.

First of all, the high tariffs on the Chinese products in the US make Pakistani exports more competitive in the US market.

It has always been very difficult to compete with Chinese products in the international market because of their low production costs due to cheap labor and economies of scale of Chinese firms.

However, the high tariffs have made

these “cheap” Chinese products more expensive for the US buyers. Higher prices have led to a decrease in their demand.

This has left a gap that can be potentially filled by alternative sellers in the US market such as Pakistan.

Ehsan Malik, Pakistan Business Council’s (PBC) CEO, has also had a say on this. “The China-US trade war has put Pakistan in an advantageous position and we have become more competitive than China in some areas like textiles.”

It offers an opportunity for Pakistan to boost its exports to the United States as well as revive the closed manufacturing capacity (mostly in Punjab),” says CEO PBC. Engineering, textile, surgical tools, sportswear, plastics, footwear, fishery,

packaging, pharma, kitchenware, furniture and jewelry are some of the types of Chinese products that have been subjected to the high US tariffs.

Out of these many Chinese products, Pakistan has the capacity to produce a substantial amount of these products as exports for the US market. Of course, the production of items from each of these categories will depend on the availability of resources to Pakistani industries. For example, Pakistan has a flourishing industry for sportswear products.

The tariff war between China and the US could lead to potential industrial growth and inflow of foreign investment into Pakistan. Ehsan Malik is reported to have said that the Chinese manufacturers

can ward off punitive tariffs on their exports to the United States by relocating their labor-intensive industries to Pakistan.

The US has put tariffs on Chinese products, I.e. products produced in China.

Moving industries to Pakistan will be a trend in this case because of the recent economic goodwill established by CPEC. Such inflow of foreign investment would boost the economic growth of Pakistan as the national income of the country will increase. These huge sums of foreign investment could lead to the establishment of Special Economic Zones in Pakistan.

Establishment of these new industries will be closely linked to foreign investments in improving the infrastructure of the country to make long term production cost less.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

12 BUSINESS

KHUsro baKHtiar vows early coMPletion of cPec ProJects ISLAMABAD

economy has achieved stabilisation, is now moving to growth phase: Hammad azhar MONITORING REPORT Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Hammad Azhar, in a press conference on Sunday, said that the economy has achieved stabilisation and is now moving to the growth phase.

The federal minister said when the PTI government came into power it inherited a massive debt and had to fulfill immediate commitments of more than 10billion dollars in loan repayments and interest.

He said that tough economic decisions are showing positive impacts and that the foreign exchange reserves are now stable and the rupee value is stabilizing.

The minister said prices had to be increased in the power sector due to huge circular debt.

He said that Prime Minister Imran Khan's vision is to introduce a social safety net for the poorest of the poor in the country. He said Ehsaas program launched by PTI government is a major plan for poverty reduction and is a role model for the world to emulate.

Hammad Azhar said that the Sehat Insaaf Cards are part of Ehsaas program that will provide health facility to every deserving family without any discrimination.

one more gas thief sentenced to 5 year imprisonment

APP

f

EDERAL Minister Ministry of Planning Development and Reform Makhdoom Khusro Bakhtiar vowed for on time completion of all China Pakistan energy projects including energy, Infrastructure and Gwadar port for development and prosperity.

He said that current CPEC project is continuing their work on the all major project including eastern and western corridor all complete in given time. He said the country has gone throw the economic stability, “We want to achieve the strong foundation for sustainable economic growth and over the year economy growth would on string foundation, he said while addressing the press conference in Press Information Department (PID) here Sunday.

The Minister said that CPEC play huge role for Pakistan’s economic stability and the upcoming new phase of the country’s economic growth in next couple of years will enhance the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth to 5 percent. Khusro said Prime Minister Imran Khan’s upcoming visit to China would further bolster bilateral trade and economic ties between the two friendly neighbors.

He said during the visit expansion of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) framework including cooperation in agriculture, industrial and socioeconomic sectors would be discussed.

Khusro Bakhtyar said China was a close and strategic partner of Pakistan and bilateral partnership between the two countries would continue to touch new heights in future. It is in this backdrop that Prime Minister Imran Khan is visiting China to further promote bilateral trade and commerce exchange, he said.

FBR transfers customs officer for writing to Hafeez Shiekh about abolishment of internal audit directorates ISLAMABAD SHAHZAD PARACHA

SSGC has intensified its anti-gas theft operations in Sindh and Balochistan, as part of its Operation Grift campaign. In the latest round of raids conducted by Security Services and Counter Gas Theft Operations (SS and CGTO) and Customer Relations Departments teams, a number of registered and unregistered customers were caught involved in underground and overhead theft from main supply lines in localities in Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur and Larkana and Quetta. The teams removed clamps, confiscated rubber pipes, filed cases and raised claims against the theft cases.

Gas Utility Court in Quetta has sentenced gas theft accused Haris Khan to 5 year imprisonment and Rs100,000. A number of miscreants were also arrested in Karachi and Larkana and will now undergo trial. The Company’s Joint load survey team comprising of the representatives of Measurement, Sales and SS & CGTO department have been regularly carrying out detailed inspection of a number of industries to check for any violation of Gas Sales Agreements and meter size. Since 2018, SSGC has detected 121,975 theft cases that have helped to save gas volume of 9,800 MMCFD (Rs6,335 million in monetary terms). More than 20 individuals have so far been convicted with more than 380 trials in progress in gas utility courts. PRESS RELEASE

The Minster said that during the Prime Minster's visit to the China, both side will deliberate on agriculture and live stock cooperation to see more prospects for future.

He said CPEC offers enormous potential to boost national economy and reduce poverty and adding that the pace of projects under the CPEC had accelerated after the incumbent government came into power.

He said that 43, 00 MW of new electricity project was in pipe line and currently, 2500 MG power project are underway to be completed in given period of time. The government has all focused on prime project of Gwadar port and the matter for providing of 300 MG electricity in city has also been resolved, he said.

He said that Gwadar master plan was also been approved in this government by the coop-

eration of provincial Baluchistan government.

The Minister said that now 19 Chinese companies are ready for investment in Gwadar in different sector, which also would enhance the cooperation between both sides.

For industrial growth, the industrial sector of Pakistan needs cheap energy sources for provide competitiveness to the local industry to increase country’s exports, he expressed.

The minister said that on recent relocation of Chinese industrial Units, the government has evolved strategy for completing the Special Economic Zones on priority basis to provide conducive business environment to the foreign investors. He said that CPEC authority also been approved by the cabinet to expedite the work on the all major projects of national significance.

He said next areas of focus for the government is transfer of technology and human resource, where China gives us better option as they have expertise in reverse engineering and capacity building of workers. He said the government also wants to increase the production of steel at local level and in this regard further cooperation has also sought from China.

Khusro Bahktiar said that our government would follow the Chinese model for poverty alleviation at larger scale and added, “We want to follow the Chinese strategy as they alleviated the 700 million people from poverty in past few decades".

He said the government has also planned to initiate the project of 30 new hospitals in and institutional up gradation in the country.

The Minister said that mega project of CPEC was joint venture between the China and Pakistan which provide not only connectivity within region but also connect Pakistan with Central Asian States and Russia.

Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) has transferred a senior Customs officer for writing a letter to Advisor to Prime Minister on Finance and Revenue Hafeez Shiekh on abolishment of internal audit directorates.

Notification available with this scribe shows that Dr Akhtar Hussain, a BS-20 officer of Pak-

istan Customs service has been transferred from Director Directorate of Internal Audit (Customs) Lahore to Collector (Collectorate of Customs (Adjudication)) Faisalabad.

Dr Akhar Hussain had filed a complaint with Advisor to PM on Finance and Revenue Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh and FBR Chairman Shabbar Zaidi regarding the abolishment of the internal audit.

He alleged that the decision has taken away from the Customs Internal Audit its capacity to

detect custom officers’ corruption.

He also said that the Directorate of Internal Audit Karachi has been abolished to shelter the customs officers who are normally responsible for 90 percent of corruption that takes take place throughout the country in a year.

“The Lahore directorate has been abolished for various reasons including gold scam, all directed towards protecting the corruption from audit detections,” he added.

PIAF asks govt to include major chambers, bodies in businessmen committee LAHORE INP

Like the whole business community, the Pakistan Industrial & Traders Association Front (PIAF) has also appreciated the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Army Staff for holding meetings with businessmen on financial matters, but with it stressing the need for taking all stakeholders onboard including leading chambers and industrial associations.

PIAF Chairman Mian Nauman

Kabir, in a statement issued here on Sunday, said that the few top business tycoons met recently with Imran Khan and army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa where no representative of any chamber, trade and industrial bodies were present, which represent the SMEs, constituting nearly 90 percent of all the enterprises in Pakistan, employing 80 percent of the nonagricultural labour force; and share of which in the annual GDP is around 40 percent.

He said that the government called only the large enterprises and

ignored the small and medium enterprises’ representatives, who are actually constrained by financial and other resources. He said PIAF strongly believes that SME sector is the backbone of any economy.

PIAF chief said that in a country like Pakistan where more than 60% of the population is rural based it is very important to enhance the capacities of rural centric SMEs to help them scale and contribute to the overall economic growth.

Mian Nauman Kabir asked the government to create an enabling en-

vironment as per the objectives of the business community, which was imperative for national development.

He said the PIAF was ready to fully cooperate with the government so that the country could overcome economic and financial problems.

He lamented that the government does not go beyond verbal assurances, as its words do not match its actions. He appreciated the sincerity, responsiveness and commitment of the Prime Minister but expressed disappointment over the situation, as nothing works on ground.

Iran will use every means possible to export its oil DUBAI AGENCIES

Iran will not succumb to U.S. pressure and will use every possible way to export its oil, Iranian Oil Ministry’s website SHANA quoted Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh as saying on Sunday.

Iran’s crude oil exports were reduced by more than 80% when the United States re-imposed sanctions on the country last November after President Donald Trump pulled out of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

“We will use every possible way to

export our oil and we will not succumb to America’s pressure because exporting oil is Iran’s legitimate right,” Zanganeh said.

In response, Iran has gradually scaled back its commitments to the 2015 nuclear deal, under which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in return for lifting most international sanctions.

The increasing U.S. pressure on Iran has scared away foreign investors from doing business in the country.

Last year, China’s National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) replaced French oil company Total as the operator of Phase 11 project at South Pars gas field after the

French company ended its participation rather than violate U.S. sanctions.

But late last year, CNPC suspended investment in the field in response to U.S. pressure.

“China’s CNPC has totally pulled out of the South Pars Phase 11 development and Iran’s Petropars company will carry out the job,” SHANA quoted Zanganeh as saying.

Iran has the world’s second-largest reserves of natural gas, but it has not yet become a major exporter because of international sanctions imposed on the country for decades.

SHANA also quoted Zanganeh saying that Iran wanted to improve ties with Gulf Arab countries.

“We want to be friends with all regional countries ... they must not regard us as their enemy ... Our mutual enemy is outside the Middle East.”

Iran and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly clashed at meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over oil output policies. Tensions between the two countries flared after Saudi Arabia blamed Iran for an attack on Saudi oil facilities on Sept. 14., a charge Tehran denies.

“We have no dispute with Saudi Arabia

... I have no problem to meet with Saudi Arabia’s oil minister,” Zanganeh said.

Separately, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation (AEOI) reiterated on Sunday that the country would reduce its commitments under the deal further if the European parties to the pact did not meet promises to shield Iran’s economy from U.S. sanctions.

“We will go ahead with our plans to decrease our commitments to the nuclear deal if other parties fail to keep their promises,” the Students News Agency ISNA quoted AEOI’s spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi as saying.

Moving aWay froM the MainstreaM turkey

W

By Rohama Riaz

henever we decide to travel, the first thing we google is “What to visit”. This directs us to the number of mainstream places that are visited by almost every tourist in a short span of time. This kind of hunt will only lead you to spots full of tourists with no fresh air and a little time and space to explore the surroundings.

My initial intent was only to go to the highflying famous places but I was fortunate enough to drop my eyes on these beautiful areas that are still to be fully discovered by many tourists around the world.

RED & ROSE VALLEY – CAPPADOCIA Right after we landed in Cappadocia, we checked into our hotel and started getting ready for the ATV ride. We were lucky enough to miss that ride for some reasons and we ended up driving to this beautiful place called Red & Rose Valley. Despite the fact that the place gives lovey-dovey vibes, still, I had the best time having a company of three girls.

Red and Rose Valley in Cappadocia has got its name from the pinkish red-colored rock that changes its shades throughout different times of the day. The aura surrounding the caves, the swings covered with flowers and the smell of the cold coffee just make it a perfect spot to spend a sunset.

OLUDENIZ 6 ISLAND BOAT TRIP-BUTTERFLY VALLEY After having a sleepless night and zero energy, we had a boat trip early in the morning. The trip had 6 stops at different islands where swim lovers can just jump, dive in and have some great time under water. Though I had no grip at swimming, the boat trip was one of the best things I opted for. The great crowd, great music, and beautiful landscape added a great value to the boat journey. The best stop was indeed the butterfly valley which is a calm place filled with butterflies and apricots being the best destination of exceptional natural beauty.

SELIMIYE MOSQUE – KONYA There is a small ratio of people who actually like to visit Konya for the reason of it being dry, a little more conservative and a dull city. Although historical places never gain my attention, this mosque in Konya had an impact that no other place did. This is located next to Mevlana Museum and is a fine example of the Ottoman style of the mosque from the great period of Ottoman architecture.

ALACATI STREETS – IZMIR You can easily lose track of time and get lost in the labyrinth of these colorful streets packed with beautiful buildings, antique doors, and trendy eateries and cafes. Walking down the road, conversing with the lovely strangers and having a great meal, we knew it would be our happy place for the next 2-3 hours. Away from the tourists’ eyes, this place is still a relaxing destination for well established Turkish people.

PRINCESS ISLANDSISTANBUL Princess’ islands are the cluster of 9 islands altogether famous for their mild climates, lush vegetation, and ornate Ottoman Houses. This secluded island is away from the hassle of traffic pollution. Bicycles and carts are the prominent modes of conveyance. Cycling through the roads with hanging vibrant flowers and colorful houses with cats peeking out of them was a sight clearly a treat to the eyes. This island is famous for its Gelato ice-cream and some lavish cafes. Life is simple, calm and green.

This is the place where you can move away from the bustle of Istanbul to have a peaceful time. Flower head crowns are a must have when you enter this princessly place.

A cow-bison hybrid is called a “beefalo” You can even buy its meat in at least 21 states.

Don’t miss these other random facts about your favorite foods.

Johnny Appleseed’s fruits weren’t for eating Yes, there was a real John Chapman who planted thousands of apple trees on U.S. soil. But the apples on those trees were much more bitter than the ones you’d find in the supermarket today.

“Johnny Appleseed” didn’t expect his fruits to be eaten whole, but rather made into hard apple cider.

Scotland has 421 words for “snow” Yes—421! That’s too many fun facts about snow.

Some examples: sneesl (to start raining or snowing); feefle (to swirl); flinkdrinkin (a light snow). Don’t miss these other 11 random interesting facts about snow.

Aries: It is a simple irony that the voice of dissent can be as vital to a group discussion as is the chorus of those in agreement.

Taurus: A reinvention can make as grand a splash as anything brand spanking new today.

Gemini: Disruptions to routine could upset some of the creatures of habit in your daily social circle, at work or home today. But truth be told, you enjoy the excitement of an occasional surprise.

Cancer: The urge to indulge in some high quality me-time hits home today, whether it comes on gracefully or like a bull in a china shop.

Leo: An impulsive friend or associate may take happy-go-lucky to new heights today, but that does not mean you should break your stride.

Virgo: When something is worth doing, it is indeed worth doing well. If a test run does not go precisely as planned, remind yourself .

Libra: The truth is the unusual takes some getting used to and it might require a little extra time to get your bearings today.

Scorpio: Enthusiasm is a game changer today. Valuing your privacy as you do, there are understandably times when you do not welcome a knock on your door or the ring of your phone.

Sagittarius: An antsy restlessness might creep up on you now if you spend too much time living in your head.

Capricorn: An emotional tie to a cherished possession is what makes it a treasure, not its dollar value.

Aquarius: Your self-possessed demeanor shines with healthy confidence today. Charm naturally radiates from your aura, but you also can wield it deliberately like a custom-made tool that enables you to get much accomplished.

Pisces: You sensitive Fish are constantly growing in your ability to perceive subtle signs in nature and in the psychic atmosphere.

CMYK

Monday, 7 October, 2019

14 SPORTS

ReiNa saves laTe peNalTy as sTRuggliNg aC MilaN beaT geNOa MILAN

g

AGENCIES

OALkEEPER Pepe Reina saved an injury-time penalty as AC Milan earned a 2-1 comeback win over fellow strugglers Genoa on Saturday in which both teams finished with 10 men.

Reina had made a nightmare start as he deputised for Gianluigi Donnarumma who pulled out sick before kick-off. Spaniard Reina misjudged Dane Lasse Schone's long-range freekick allowing Genoa to take the lead just before the break.

But Theo Hernandez pulled Milan level after 51 minutes and Franck kessie added a second from the spot six minutes later, before Reina kept out a Schone penalty four minutes into injury time. Marco Giampaolo's Milan future had been hanging in the balance after the former European giants hit an 81year low with just two wins in their opening six games. Tensions were high in Genoa, where the hosts are also in difficulty, with two red cards also handed out to players on the bench.

The three points ensured Milan avoided a fourth consecutive defeat and moved them up five places to 11th position after seven games.

"The pressure was great and we

were drowning in the first half," said Giampaolo. "I asked that they play the best game of their lives and they gave it everything. "I wanted the team to come out head-on after the break, without bleeding in front of the sharks."

Reina did well to deny Lukas Lerager early, before his blunder which allowed former Ajax midfielder Schone to score his first Genoa goal.

Giampaolo made a double substitution after the break with Lucas Paqueta and Rafael Leao both coming off the bench. And the changes paid off with Paqueta setting up Hernandez who

made a break down the left to equalise after 51 minutes. kessie scored the winner from the spot after defender Davide Biraschi received his marching orders for handling in the area to deny Leao.

Milan also went a man down when Davide Calabria picked up a second yellow card on 79 minutes, setting up a dramatic finale in which Reina atoned for his earlier mistake.

"I'm quite cool-headed in these situations," said Giampaolo.

"I was unconvinced there was a foul, but Reina has so much personality that I had faith in him, that he redeemed

himself by parrying the penalty."

Genoa remain 19th just ahead of Giampaolo's former club Sampdoria, who crashed to their sixth defeat in seven games, falling 2-0 at Verona to leave new coach Eusebio Di Francesco's future in doubt.

Centre-back Marash kumbulla headed in after nine minutes with Nicola Murru nodding into his own net to give mid-table Verona just their second win this season. Sampdoria president Massimo Ferrero said the club would now meet to see what course to take.

"We're stunned, the performance today was clear for everyone to see," said Ferrero. "Tomorrow we'll see if we can find a solution, what is best for Sampdoria. "There's still a bit of Marco Giampaolo in this team and not enough Di Francesco."

Giampaolo guided Sampdoria to a ninth-place finish last season before moving to Milan. Ten-man SPAL beat Parma thanks to Andrea Petagna's firsthalf strike in the Emilia-Romagna derby. Gabriel Strefezza set up Petagna before being sent off on 70 minutes for a second yellow card. Antonio Conte's Inter Milan will play his former club Juventus in this weekend's top-of-thetable clash at the San Siro on Sunday.

Inter have won all six matches this term and hold a two-point lead over the defending champions.

Osaka beats world number one Barty to win China Open

BEIJING AGENCIES

Naomi Osaka won a second tournament on the spin as she fought back from a set down to defeat world number one Ashleigh Barty in the China Open final on Sunday.

The Japanese two-time Grand Slam champion emerged victorious after 110 minutes in chilly Beijing, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2. On Saturday, after defeating holder Caroline Wozniacki in the semi-finals, the 21-year-old called her own serve "confusing".

And so it was in the sixth game when Osaka conjured up a double fault, then an ace, then another double fault against Australia's Barty. The world number four, victorious in her home Pan Pacific Open last month, was broken when she planted a forehand into the net.

The former number one appeared mildly uncomfortable with her shoulder, touching it and rotating it between points. Barty, 23, who had strapping down her left calf, wrapped up the first set in 34 minutes and frustration was creeping in for the Australian Open champion Osaka.

But much of the crowd in Beijing was pro-Osaka and they were cheering when she broke Barty to move 4-2 up on the way to winning the second set.

"Basically I was telling myself to keep fighting even though my attitude was really trash. This is a final, I'm really privileged to be here in the first place, so keep fighting.” Osaka was in control now and broke Barty -- who five years ago took a rest from tennis and played cricket -- in the first game of the deciding set on the way to victory. This was a third title of 2019 for Osaka and fifth in her short career.

Fresh injury setback for Man City's Mendy LONDON: Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy has suffered a fresh injury blow after he was ruled out of Sunday's game against Wolves with a hamstring problem. Mendy, 25, has endured a frustrating series of injuries since joining City from Monaco in 2017 and missed the start of the current campaign with a knee issue. In a statement posted on their website, City said "the French full-back is expected to return to action following the international break". Mendy made just eight appearances for City in 2017-18 due to knee surgery and a similar problem limited him to 15 last term. The left-back has played four times for the Premier League champions this season. Former Juventus defender Joao Cancelo was selected in Mendy's position for Wolves' visit to the Etihad Stadium. AGENCIES

Novak Djokovic takes Japan Open with eye on Tokyo Olympics TOKYO: World number one Novak Djokovic clinched the Japan Open on Sunday, dispelling concerns about the shoulder injury that forced him out of the US Open. The Serbian star crushed Australian qualifier John Millman 6-3, 6-2 to mark his 10th win in a tournament main draw debut.

Djokovic, playing in his first Japanese competition, dominated throughout the week, never losing a single set to claim the trophy at the Ariake Colosseum, a venue for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Beaming Djokovic, the winner of 16 Grand Slams, now goes to the Shanghai Masters, where he is the top seed. "I didn't drop a set, so I played a fantastic tournament. Everything is positive in my experience on and off the court, the way I feel and motivated for Shanghai, going there with great confidence," he said. "I am hoping I can finish the season in this style," added Djokovic, who was competing for the first time since pulling out of the US Open due to a left shoulder injury. The triumph in Tokyo has boosted his confidence going into the Olympics too. "Considering that Olympic Games are high always on my list of goals and priorities and wishes, I wanted to feel the surface and see and experience how it feels playing on this court," Djokovic said. "I am very glad now, seeing and experiencing how I play (in Ariake) because I feel comfortable.

It feels great playing on this court... I am hoping that can also be the case in the Olympics." Djokovic started the Japan Open by taking part in a doubles game and switched to higher gears as the week progressed, never allowing his opponents, including world number 15 David Goffin, to pose a serious threat. In the final, Djokovic grabbed an early break in the first set to take a 3-1 lead with a series of sizzling serves and precision returns that had Millman scrambling across the baseline. AGENCIES

‘Athletics has problems but reformer Coe pivotal for solutions’ MONACO AGENCIES

Athletics could have done without the swathes of empty seats in Doha and the four-year ban for high-profile coach Alberto Salazar that exploded in the middle of the World Championships.

Despite those problems, experts are divided on the health of the sport.

International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president Sebastian Coe dismissed both the low attendance in Doha and insisted Salazar's disgrace did not "derail" the event, But the sport faces longer-term problems too, such as the ongoing Russian doping scandal, for which Coe has been credited for his firmness in dealing with Moscow.

There is also the trial of Coe's disgraced predecessor Lamine Diack, who he regrets calling the sport's spiritual leader when he was first elected in 2015, which threatens to produce a host of negative headlines.

Michael Payne, who as director of marketing at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1989-2004 is widely credited with transforming both the organisation's brand and finances through sponsorship, believes that in 63year-old Coe and his reforming zeal the sport has real hope for the future.

"The federation is lucky to have Coe as its leader –- it would be in far worse shape with anyone else," Payne told AFP. "Long-term the future for the sport is rosy. Doha is a short-term blip, the IAAF

will recover and be stronger in years to come." However, an expert with extensive knowledge of major events' bidding and hosting, who spoke on condition of anonymity, warned Coe must not lose his focus when he almost certainly becomes an IOC member next year, adding more responsibility to his already heavy burden.

"I don't think that it takes a rocket scientist to see that athletics is in very poor shape at the current time," the expert told AFP. "I only hope that Lord Coe will accelerate his reform-minded approach to the sport now he has been re-elected.

"There is a fear he may have his head turned by the wider sports political world and may not have the focus required to drive root and branch reform for a sport that is so clearly in crisis."

CMYK

Monday, 7 October, 2019

SPORTS 15

ahMeD shehzaD, uMaR akMal have My Full baCkiNg as CapTaiN: saRFaRaz LAHORE

p

AGENCIES

AkISTAN captain Sarfaraz Ahmed has come out in support of returning batsmen Ahmed Shehzad and Umar Akmal after their loss to Sri Lanka in the first T20I. Shehzad and Umar have had a mercurial past with Pakistan, for various reasons, and the revival of their careers in Lahore at the expense of Fakhar Zaman and Haris Sohail drew surprise in some corners.

Umar last played a T20 for Pakistan three years ago, while Shehzad featured in T20Is last year before he was banned for a positive dope test. Both of them made their debuts 10 years ago and though they have made several comebacks, it seemed Pakistan had closed the door on them after they were dropped by not just one head coach (Waqar Younis) but two (Mickey Arthur) On Saturday, in the T20 against Sri Lanka, Shehzad had a couple of close calls before he was bowled for 13 off 10. Umar bagged a golden duck, his ninth, and the most by a Pakistan cricketer.

"If you talk about previous two [domestic] seasons, they were performers and they were again performers in the PSL," Sarfaraz said after Pakistan's 64-run defeat. "We are trying our fullest to give a complete chance to those who are brought back.

There is nothing to worry. Both are experienced players and once they settle in, they will perform. So [I give] my full backing for them as a captain.

"Fakhar and Harris both have been part of the team for some time now," Sarfaraz added. "When we brought back Ahmed and Umar, we intended to make them play in their own positions. Had we played

Fakhar, then Ahmed would have been made to play at one down. Me and [coach] Misbah bhai decided to try Ahmed as an opener. With our eyes on the World Cup, if Ahmed is able to settle himself at this [opening] number, we can never find a better player like him.

"Similar with Umar Akmal. We wanted to play him in his number and hence had to drop Harris, who

we have seen and have no doubt about his ability. We played six new players in the side without thinking about winning or losing. We wanted to play them and give them confidence because for any player, making a comeback isn't really easy. You do come with performance in domestic but at the international level you take a few innings to get going."

In 2018, Pakistan had won 17 of the 19 T20s they played, including two massive winning streaks - nine matches between July and November and eight matches between January and July. The ICC rates them as the No. 1 side in the shortest format but they haven't quite shown it in 2019 with four losses in five games, including the latest to a second-string Sri Lankan side. "No team in T20 format is considered weak and we knew on the day their team is strong and they have potential," Sarfaraz said. "They played better than us. They should be given credit but I still back my team. It was a bad day for us and we didn't play good cricket. We will come back and it's going to be more exciting for the spectators as they will get to see more tough cricket.

"Plus it isn't really easy to win all games but we did win 11 [9] games in a row. This is a different time. Some players are making a comeback and it is tough. And there are few who are in the team but trying to get settled. We have all players who are match winners and on their day they can win the game for the team single-handedly."

Shami, Jadeja help India go 1-0 up in South Africa Test series

VISAKHAPATNAM AGENCIES

Mohammed Shami and Ravindra Jadeja took nine wickets between them as India outplayed South Africa, winning by 203 runs on the final day of the first Test on Sunday.

Set a daunting target of 395, the tourists were bundled out for 191 in the second session in Visakhapatnam, giving India a 1-0 lead in the three-match series.

Shami returned figures of 5-35 while Jadeja took four wickets to help current leaders India grab 40 points in the World Test Championship.

"These... of conditions are pretty ideal for him (Shami). He knows how to bowl on (these) pitches, gets reverse swing straight into play once he knows there is some help on offer," said Rohit Sharma, named man of the match for hitting two centuries in the game, which was his first as an opener.

"He has mastered that art (of reverse swing)

now, bowling with the old ball and getting it to reverse." South Africa were staring down the barrel at 70-8 but Dane Piedt (56) and debutant Senuran Muthusamy (49 not out) put on 91 runs for the ninth wicket to frustrate the Indian bowlers briefly.

Shami got last man kagiso Rabada caught behind for 18 to trigger celebrations in the Indian camp.

Sharma put India in a commanding position with a century in each innings on his debut as a Test opener -- a first by any batsman in Test history. His knocks of 176 and 127, coupled with a fine 215-run innings by Mayank Agarwal, helped India put India in a commanding position. "Once you have 500 on the board, it's difficult for the opposition. Mayank and Rohit played brilliantly," India skipper Virat kohli said. Shami took three key wickets in the morning session including that of skipper Faf du Plessis for 13 to dim South Africa's hopes of saving the game.

Jadeja soon joined forces to run through the middle order with three wickets in one over including that of overnight batsman Aiden Markram (39) with a one-handed return catch.

The Proteas resumed the day on 11 for one and soon the batting came under attack by some inspired Indian bowling on a pitch that offered variable bounce.

Off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin struck first to clean up overnight batsman Theunis de Bruyn for 10, becoming the joint-fastest to 350 wickets in his 66th Test.

Ashwin, who claimed eight wickets in the match and registered his 27th five-wicket haul on Friday, now shares the feat with Sri Lankan legend Muttiah Muralitharan.

He finished the game with eight wickets.

Shami continued with his exploits, bowling Temba Bavuma for nought on a delivery that stayed low. The veteran paceman came back in his second spell to rattle the stumps of captain du Plessis, who was leaving the incoming delivery, and Quinton de kock for zero.

The match also witnessed the most number of sixes -- 37 from four innings -- surpassing the 35 that were smashed in a game between Pakistan and New Zealand in 2014-15.

Sharma -- India's limited-overs star -- got 13 of those sixes, the most in a five-day game by one batsman, breaking Wasim Akram's record of 12 for Pakistan.

South African opener Elgar also made an impression with his 160 in his team's first innings total of 431 that appeared to bring the visitors back in the game.

"I thought up until this morning we competed really well," du Plessis said of the loss.

"On a day five pitch, things happen quicker, but it's the nature of Test cricket." The second Test will begin on October 10 in Pune.

ASHWIN JOINS FASTEST TO 350 TEST WICKETS: India's spin king Ravichandran Ashwin on Sunday joined Sri Lankan great Muttiah Muralitharan as the fastest bowler to 350 Test wickets in the first match against South Africa in Visakhapatnam.

The off-spinner bowled overnight batsman Theunis de Bruyn for 10 early in the morning session on day five to achieve the milestone in his 66th Test.

Muralitharan also took the same number of matches to claim 350 wickets. The spin legend, now 47, retired in 2010 with 800 wickets.

The 33-year-old Ashwin, who returned to the Indian XI after playing against Australia last year, claimed eight wickets in the first South Africa Test. He had bagged his 27th five-wicket haul on Friday.

In November 2017 Ashwin became the fastest bowler to reach the milestone of 300 Test wickets. He broke Australian pace ace Dennis Lillee's record by achieving the feat in just 54 matches.

CMYK

eNglaND CONsiDeR ChRis silveRwOOD as COaCh huNT NeaRs CONClusiON LONDON AGENCIES

Chris Silverwood would appear to be back in contention for the role of England's head coach, as the ECB continues to examine its options to replace Trevor Bayliss.

Silverwood has always been a strong candidate. As the team's current bowling coach, he has developed an excellent relationship with the current crop of players and has a good history as head coach having led Essex to the Championship title in 2017. But he remains somewhat nervous around the media and was, at the start of this recruitment process, seen as the next-but-one choice for the role. But with Alec Stewart, the preferred candidate for the role, having pulled out of the process in recent days, the ECB has been forced to look again. Gary kirsten, who enjoyed great success as head coach with India and South Africa, was thought to be the favourite, but is understood to have given an underwhelming presentation during his interview on Wednesday. There may also be some reservations about kirsten's initial ambivalence - he originally notified the ECB that he would only be interested if the role was split between red and white-ball coaches - and the fact his enthusiasm was revived only after he was sacked from his coaching position in the IPL. The decision ultimately lies with the director of England men's cricket, Ashley Giles. He has previously admitted he would prefer to appoint an English candidate and has referenced the importance of understanding team culture and reinforcing the sense of pride and unity inherent in representing the side.

Silverwood, as a former England player and an important figure in recent improvements in team culture, is therefore looking a stronger candidate than ever. kirsten, having taken India to a World Cup and South Africa to No. 1 in the Test rankings, remains a persuasive candidate, however, leaving Giles with a tricky decision to make over the coming days. An appointment is anticipated within a week or so. Stewart is understood to have informed the ECB last weekend that he was unable to pursue his interest in the position having decided the commitment to touring was incompatible with his family responsibilities. He remains as Surrey's director of cricket.

Monday, 7 October, 2019

NEWS

GovT puTs halT To JKlF marCh iN azad Kashmir MUZAFFARABAD

T

STAFF REPORT

HOUSAnDS of Kashmiris on the call of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) on Sunday marched towards the Line of Control (LoC) — the de facto border between Pakistan and India — but were stopped by the authorities by placing containers, barbed wires, electricity poles and mounds of earth on the road.

The rally billed as “Freedom March” is being held to protest new Delhi’s move to scrap the special status of Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) and the imposition of curfew in the territory since Aug 5. The march has been organised by JKLF, a group led by pro-independence leader Yasin Malik, who is currently in detention in occupied Kashmir.

The marchers who gathered in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Jammu Kashmir (AJK) planned to hold a sit-in near the LoC and were on their way to Chakothi. However, when they reached Jiskool on Sunday, the local administration blocked the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar highway to stop them from moving ahead.

Speaking on the matter, JKLF Spokesperson Muhammad Rafiq Dar said they were holding a peaceful demonstration to express solidarity with innocent Kashmiris who are suffering at the hands of barbaric Indian

forces. “We want to draw the attention of the international community towards the urgent need of an immediate and peaceful settlement to the longstanding Kashmir dispute,” he said, adding that they did not intend to have any kind of confrontation with the authorities because any violent situation would only serve India’s interests.

“We have to save our energies for confrontation with India,” he added.

He also urged the authorities to remove the blockades so that the marchers could reach their destination — Chakothi, a village 3 kilometres before LoC which is overlooked by Indian forces atop the mountains on the other side of the de-facto border.

He said that by sunset, when the crowd would be thinned out, they would stage a sit-in half a kilometre before the containers. “We will hold consultations for our future course of action,” he added.

Meanwhile, Divisional Commissioner Chaudhry Imtiaz, Deputy Inspector General Police Sardar Ilyas Khan, Jhelum Valley Deputy Commissioner Imran Shaheen and Superintendent Police Arshad naqvi were present on the other side of the containers. They had also invited the leaders of the march for talks.

Speaking to a local news outlet, DC Imtiaz said that they had informed the organisers of the march about a ‘serious threat’ of Indian shelling because the Indian forces would not only target the marchers

but would harm the civilian population as well. He said that they could not allow the marchers to go beyond Jiskool because there is a firing range beyond this point. “Our primary responsibility is to protect the lives of the marchers,” he added. The participants of the march started their journey from Garhi Dupatta, a small town in Muzaffarabad, on Saturday morning and were shortly joined by another caravan from Bagh. nearly two hours later, they reached Hattian Bala where they were received a warm welcome from the locals.

Continuing their march on foot, it took the participants another two hours to reach Chinari, which is about 11 kilometres away from the LoC. They stopped there for refreshments and prayers. According to the videos being shared on social media, the participants were showered with rose petals and offered food by the locals.

Later, they resumed their journey and were stopped by authorities at Jiskool, a place nearly two kilometres ahead of Chinari. A day earlier, Prime Minister Imran Khan had said that anyone crossing the LoC from AJK to provide “humanitarian aid or support for the Kashmiri struggle against aggression will play into the hands of the Indian narrative”. In a post on Twitter, the prime minister stressed that he understood the anguish of the people of Kashmir who were seeing their brethren across the LoC struggle to deal with an inhumane Indian curfew

India allows Kashmiri delegation to meet detained leadership NEWS DESK Two months after political leaders were detained in India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the state administration granted permission to a delegation from the national Conference party to meet their top two leaders on Sunday, according to a party official.

The meeting with party President Farooq Abdullah and Vice President Omar Abdullah took place in Srinagar, the state’s capital. Both were detained after the Indian government scrapped occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s special status on August 5. According to Hindustan Times, the delegation flew in early Sunday morning for the meeting. It was led by provincial head Devender Singh Rana and included former party legislators. national Conference spokesperson Madan Mantoo had told Press Trust of India (PTI) a day earlier that the Indian government granted permission after provincial head Devender Singh Rana

made a request to Satya Pal Malik, occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s governor. “If the political process has to start then mainstream leaders have to be released,” said Rana after meeting the leaders today, adding, “they are both well and in high spirits, of course they are pained by the developments in the state, particularly about the lockdown.”

Farooq Abdullah is under house detention at his residence in Srinagar, while his son Omar is held at a state guest house. The Hindustan Times further quoted nC spokesperson Madan Mantoo as saying on Saturday that the decision to hold the meeting was taken during an emergency gathering of senior officials in the Jammu region on Wednesday, “soon after restrictions on the movement of Jammu-based national Conference leaders were lifted”. Mantoo also said that the party “was anguished over the continued detention of senior leaders as also the other top leaders of the mainstream political parties”.

Hundreds of people including political leaders

AUTHORITIES BLOCK MUZZAFARABADSRINAGAR HIGHWAY WITH CONTAINERS, BARBED WIRES TO STOP MARCHERS FROM REACHING LOC JKLF SPOKESPERSON SAYS THEY DON’T WANT CONFRONTATION WITH AUTHORITIES AS IT WOULD SERVE INDIA’S INTERESTS imposed on them since two months.

“I understand the anguish of the Kashmiris in AJK seeing their fellow Kashmiris in IOK under an inhumane curfew for over 2 months. But anyone crossing the LoC from AJK to provide humanitarian aid or support for Kashmiri struggle will play into the hands of the Indian narrative,” he wrote on Twitter.

On September 12, dozens of protesters were arrested in AJK after they attempted to reach the LoC. The protesters clashed with the police near the village of Tatrinote, about 80km south of Muzaffarabad and close to the LoC. Later, the protesters held a sit-in at the site of the clashes.

District Police Chief Tahir Mahmood Qureshi had said that the protesters were not arrested for their political views but they had been arrested for acting illegally.

from Kashmir have been put under detention following the scrapping of the state’s special status. In addition to Farooq and Abdullah, former Chief Minister and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti is another prominent leader put in detention by the occupied Jammu and Kashmir administration. The occupied territory has been under a near-complete lockdown since the Indian government’s revocation of its special status. Since then, the Indian government has blocked communication access and imposed restrictions on movement to thwart any protests in the region. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have repeatedly called on India to lift restrictions and release political detainees. India said that 93 per cent of the restrictions have been eased in the conflict-ridden region, a claim that Anadolu Agency could not independently verify. From 1954 until this August 5, occupied Jammu and Kashmir had special provisions under which it enacted its own laws.

The provisions also barred outsiders from settling in or owning land in the territory. Some Kashmiri groups in the occupied territory have been fighting against Indian rule for independence or for unification with neighbouring Pakistan. According to several human rights groups, thousands of people have been killed in the conflict in the region since 1989.

Nine weeks since Kashmir lockdown The lockdown in occupied Kashmir completed nine weeks on Sunday, with all shops, main markets and educational institutions remaining closed and public transport off the road in the Kashmir valley and parts of Jammu region. Train service between Baramulla and Banihal remained suspended on the 63rd day and neither the people nor the media had access to internet services. The communications lockdown has made people concerned about their loved ones. The family of a 33-year-old suffering from cancer has no idea if he is alive and whether he is getting the required treatment. Muhammad Ayoub Pala, 60, is unsure whether his cancer-stricken son, who was arrested in August, is alive or dead. In the past nine weeks, the authorities made two efforts to reopen the schools but the students did not turn up on both occasions. Students preparing for professional courses or major examinations have also suffered a lot because of the lack of communication. Some of them, who were enrolled at coaching centres, migrated to Jammu temporarily. Life in the held territory continues to be miserable as the residents are facing severe hardships due to shortage of essential commodities. The local Jamia Masjid has not seen any Friday gathering in the past nine weeks. In certain areas, people have been able to harvest apples but in most other areas they are rotting on trees. If the authorities do not take notice of this, it can seriously damage the economy of Kashmir. NEWS DESK

Gunman shoots dead four at Kansas City bar At least four people have been killed in a shooting in Kansas City, according to US media reports.

In a tweet, the Kansas City Police Department said the shooting occurred at a bar early on Sunday morning. Reports suggest a total of nine people were shot and that the suspect remains at large. Though the information is still unconfirmed, the shooter is said to be a Hispanic male. Gun violence remains pervasive in the United States and the Kansas incident comes just a month after five people were killed and several others injured in a shooting in Texas. The suspect, a white man in his mid-30s, had hijacked a US postal truck and opened fire at random, before being shot dead by officers. That was preceded by the early August mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where many victims were Hispanic. In that case, officers arrested Patrick Crusius, 21, a white Texan, who told police that he was targeting Mexicans, according to an arrest warrant published by US media. The shooting in El Paso came hours before a gunman in Dayton, Ohio killed nine people, reigniting calls for gun control in the United States where firearms were linked to nearly 40,000 deaths in 2017. NEWS DESK

Anger grows at civilian deaths by US, Afghan forces JALALABAD AGENCIES

The workers were sleeping on the mountainside where they had spent a long day harvesting pine nuts in eastern Afghanistan. Some were in tents, others lay outside under the stars, when the U.S. airstrike tore into them.

Only hours before the Sept. 19 strike, the businessman who hired them had heard there was a drone over the mountain and called Afghanistan’s intelligence agency to remind an official his workers were there — as he’d notified the agency days earlier. “He laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry they are not going to bomb you,’” the businessman, Aziz Rahman, recalled.

Twenty workers were killed in the strike, including seven members of one family. A relative, Mohammed Hasan, angrily described body parts they found scattered on the ground, gesturing at his arm, his leg, his head. “This is not their (Americans’) first mistake,” said Hasan.

“They say ‘sorry’. What are we supposed to do with ‘sorry?’ … People now are angry. They are so angry with the foreigners, with this government.”

Increasing civilian deaths in stepped-

up U.S. airstrikes and operations by Afghan forces highlight the conundrum the U.S. military and its Afghan allies face, 18 years into the war: How to hunt down their Islamic State group and Taliban enemies, while keeping civilians safe and on their side. Complaints have also grown over abuses and killings by a CIA-trained Afghan special intelligence force known as Unit 02. In the same

province, nangarhar, members of the Unit killed four brothers during a raid on their home. The brothers’ hands were bound and they were shot in the head.

Former President Hamid Karzai, in a recent interview with The Associated Press, said he didn’t want the U.S. troops for “one more minute” if deaths of civilians continued. Some 16,000 civilians have been killed since 2009 in the war,

according to the U.n. Overall, civilian deaths are down so far this year, on track to the lowest number since 2012.

But civilian deaths caused by U.S. and Afghan government forces are rising, surpassing for the first time those caused by the Taliban and other insurgents, according to a U.n. report . It found that U.S. and Afghan forces killed 717 civilians and injured 680 in the first six months of the year, up 31% from the same period in 2018. The Taliban and IS killed 531 and wounded 1,437, down 43%. Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Washington-based Wilson Center, said that is because U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to ramp up pressure on the battlefield amid negotiations with the Taliban and has loosened rules of engagement for U.S. forces.

“In effect, the Trump administration has given its blessing to U.S. forces to use a more gloves-off approach on the battlefield that raises the risk of civilian casualties,” he said. In early September when Trump declared as “dead” a deal with the Taliban that had seemed imminent, he boasted the U.S. had “been hitting our enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years.” Earlier this week Defense Sec-

retary Mark Esper said: “We did step up our attacks on the Taliban since the talks broke down. . . we did pick up the pace considerably.” According to the U.S. Air Forces Central Command, the U.S. conducted more bombings and drone strikes in Afghanistan in August than in any previous month this year — 783, compared to 613 in July and 441 in June.

Dropping more bombs doesn’t appear to be working. The Taliban are stronger than they have been since their ouster in 2001, and IS is expanding its footprint, moving into the mountains of the northeast, according to a U.S. Department of Defense intelligence agent. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his work.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Afghan Defense Minister Asadullah Khaled disputed the U.n. report, saying “we do not have a lot of civilian casualties.” He accused the Taliban and their sympathizers of inflating numbers.

“I cannot say there are no civilian casualties from the Afghan side but there is a big difference. Taliban is killing people in the mosque, in the school, in the street, and we are trying our best,” to avoid civilian casualties, said Khaled.

Published by Arif Nizami at Plot No 66-C, 1st Floor, 21st Commercial Street, Phase-II (Extension), DHA Karachi and printed at Ibn-e-Hassan Printing Press, Hockey Stadium, Karachi. Ph: 021-35381208-9. Email: newsroom@pakistantoday.com.pk

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