India elected to UNESCOs executive board
New Delhi, Nov 7 (NNN) : India has been elected member of the UNESCOs executive board, world heritage committee as well as the inter-governmental committee on information for all.
According to an official release, India will be represented by T N Chaturvedi, BJP Rajya Sabha member and former comptroller and auditor general.
Elections to these bodies were held at the end of the 31st session of General Conference of UNESCO in Paris.
India returned to world heritage committee after a gap of ten years and was elected to this prestigious committee in the first round of voting itself, the release said.
It noted that this was an impressive victory as election to these bodies was not on the basis of regional groups but open contest.
In the case of inter-governmental committee on information for all, India secured the maximum number of votes.
Membership to this newly formed body would enable India play a pioneering role in the creation of knowledge society and bridging the digital divide gap, the release added.
Pokhran II had made situation of Indian envoy uneviable new delhi, Nov 7 (UNI): When India exploded nuclear devices at Pokhran in May 1998, most of its heat was taken by an Indian continents away.
Naresh Chandra, then the Indian ambassador to the United States, had a "terrible time" listening to uncomfortable questions, some of which he remembered last evening.
"One of the first calls was from Henry Kissinger who inquired about my health," Chandra said at the ceremony of a new book on the Pokhran ii tests.
"I told him its not going to get any better in the coming days," Chandra, a former Cabinet Secretary, said.
The former US Secretary of State, however, replied that he "understood" the Indian point of view.
According to the former Ambassador, Kissinger then proceeded to the CNN Studios, introduced himself and said he wanted to make a statement on Indias nuclear tests.
"If I was Prime Minister Vajpayee, I would have done what he did.
And if I was President Clinton I would have done the same thing that he did," Kissinger said in the statement.
US President bill Clinton had already slapped sanctions on India.
"India would have known the US law when it exploded the device," Kissinger went on to add.
Everybody else was not like Kissinger.
Chandra talked about another occasion when he had to walk a tight rope immediately after the may 11 tests when nobody knew there would be more two days later." I was asked whether there would be more tests.
I considered the question for a while and said my government has not made any announcement, Chandra said amid thunderous applause from the audience that had security experts, diplomats and scholars.
Chandras another involvement with the tests as the man who oversaw the bureaucratic process of Indias nuclear programme also emerged at the launch of the book.
"Its no more a secret.
Ambassador Chandra oversaw the bureaucratic process of the programme," said Ashley J Tellis, author of the book Indias emerging nuclear posutre-between recessed deterrent and ready arsenal.
Tellis, the senior adviser to the US Ambassador to India, wrote the book after Patrick K Gamble, the Commander-in-Chief of US Air Forces pacific command asked the US embassy to do something of Indias nuclear programme.
"We suggested two options.
One, a study and intelligence analysis and the second, to try and understand why India took to the testing.
The air force settled for the second," tellis said.
The second option culminated in the book, which tellis wrote for rand, a division of the US Air Force.
The book, published in india by the Oxford University Press, is part of the ongoing analysis of emerging strategic trends in Asia and their implications for the US.
Tellis, whose previous books include stability in South Asia (1997), was a senior policy analyst at rand with expertise in South Asian security and defense.
The book gives a peek into the official mind behind the testing and details the strategic and geo-political factors that made India go nuclear and where it is likely to go in the next decade.
The 885-page book, priced at Rs 895, is based on interviews with important Indian political figures, government and opposition, high-ranking officials in the prime ministers office, ministry of external affairs, defence and defence research and development organisation, and senior current and retired military officials.
Oxford University Press has also launched two other books on strategic studies - Stephen P Cohens India:emerging power and protracted contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the twentieth century -and relaunched George Perkovichs Indias nuclear bomb and South Asia on a short fuse: nuclear politics and the future of global disarmament by Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik.
Cooperation between Indian, Pak varsities banned NEW DELHI, Nov 7 (UNI) Pakistan has banned any assistance or cooperation between Pakistani and Indian Educational, Professional and Research Institutions with immediate effect asking all such institutions to immediately dispense with their links with foreign counterparts.
In a directive, all such institutions have been asked "to immediately dispense with all illegal links with foreign experts and educational institutions", a DAWA report said quoting education ministry sources.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has been directed to ensure implementation of the order, both in public and private sector institutions.
The directive will be applicable on institutions, teachers, faculty members and students, as well as on exchange of papers and other material.
"It is, however, not yet clear that how exchange of information and material through internet can be restricted," a teacher remarked, when asked to comment on the directive.
The decision to this effect had been taken by the Education Ministry after some security agencies expressed apprehensions that a large number of students, academicians and staff members of different institutions had established non-permissible contacts with their peers across the border in different fields of mutual interest.
An incident was also reported to the ministry, suggesting that a student of Crop Physiology Department, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, had allegedly established illegal links with some Indian experts and organizations.
On the basis of the information, the ministry has asked the UGC to request all the public/private sector universities and educational institutions, affiliated or registered with it, to immediately disconnect all illegal links, if they had any, with foreign experts and education institutions.
The ministry has also ordered that all the material, which needed to be exchanged, should be first cleared by the Education Ministry.
Moreover, no links with any foreign expert or educational institution should be established without the prior approval of the UGC or the government.
Meanwhile, the UGC has already dispatched the government instructions to its recognized educational institutions, both in the public and private sector.
About 68 registered universities or degree awarding institutions are affiliated with the UGC.
Out of this total number, 40 institutions are in the public sector.
US spared Afghanistan so as not to isolate Pak : Post NEW DELHI, Nov 7 (UNI) Not to "totally isolate" Pakistan was among reasons that kept the United States over the past five years from dubbing Afghanistan home to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network a terrorism-sponsoring state, according to an American newspaper.
Each year, the US State Department formally rebukes and imposes penalties on governments that protect and promote terrorists.
Since 1993, the list has included Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
Inclusion entails a ban on arms sales, constraints on business and a cutoff of economic aid.
But, according to the Washington Post, the land harbouring bin Laden and al Qaeda has never made the departments list of terrorist-sponsoring countries since 1996 when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan.
The omission reflects more than a decade of vexing relations between the US and Afghanistan, a period that found the state department more focused on us oil interests and womens rights than on the growing terrorist threat, the paper reported quoting experts and current and former officials.
The issue of international terrorism had no such constituency, the paper said, adding that even a bin Laden fatwa in early 1998 bidding followers to target the US and its citizens was largely ignored by US groups and businesses concentrating on Afghanistan.
The paper quoted experts as saying that the lack of coherent policy towards Afghanistan was part of a broader miscalculation by the US government and letting terrorism fuelled by anti-US rage take root in Afghanistan showed that officials underestimated the potential for danger.
Shortly after taking over as Chief of the State Departments South Asia bureau dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1997, Karl F "Rick" inderfurth went into why Afghanistan was not on the list of terrorism-sponsoring nations.
One catch was that branding the Taliban a "state sponsor" of terrorism would inadvertently have amounted to acknowledging the Taliban as the official government something the State Department had resisted doing, the paper said.
It said Washington used other methods instead, such as leaning on Pakistan to persuade the Taliban to stop harbouring bin Laden.
Pakistan had developed a close relationship with the Taliban, supplying arms and using camps in Taliban-controlled territory to train its own guerillas, the paper said.
Consequently, if Afghanistan made the list, the procedure for designating terrorist sponsors would have argued for also sanctioning Pakistan, the paper said.
"We werent prepared to totally isolate Pakistan," an unnamed US official was quoted as saying.
"The whole approach was so absurd...." the paper quoted Phil Smith, a Washington based Northern Alliance lobbyist, as saying.
"It ignored the reality that it was the Pakistani military that had helped to create and maintain the Taliban regime." The landscape was altered by the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which were quickly linked to bin Laden.
President Bill Clinton froze bin Ladens assets and prohibited US firms from doing business with him.
Thirteen days after the attacks, the US directed missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan.
Doing more, Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was quoted as saying, would have been a challenge "since we did not have the kind of support we have now for our actions on terrorism.
Back then, we were being criticised both for doing too much and for not doing enough." When the debate about adding Afghanistan to the terrorist list resurfaced at the white house, officials reasoned that they could use the threat of listing to bargain with the Taliban, a former adviser was quoted as saying.
By 1999, the United Nations imposed the first of two sets of sanctions that cut off Taliban funds and arms.
In that same year, the State Department formally named bin Ladens al Qaeda group as a "foreign terrorist organisation," froze its US assets, barred visas for its members and made it a crime to support the group.
Still, the paper said, Washington did not formally single out Afghanistan or the Taliban as terrorist sponsors.
Inderfurth and others believed that step was unnecessary because Clintons order and the un sanctions were "functional equivalent" of declaring the Taliban as a state sponsor, the paper said.
It said the actions were seen by some analysts as too little, too late.
IAEA fears terrorists might produce nukes with Pak help NEW DELHI, Nov 7 (UNI) US president George Bushs revelation that terrorists are "seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons" has been echoed by the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA), which fears that terrorists may produce a nuclear bomb with the help of Pakistani hardware.
"Pakistan could become a source of hardware for terrorists planning to build a nuclear bomb, while impoverished Russian scientists give them required technical knowhow for producing the bomb," the IAEA report said.
The US president yesterday warned that Osama bin Laden was seeking nuclear and biological weapons to intensify his campaign against Washington.
This has sent jitters among nuclear weapon nations.
The iaea has written to all nuclear powers to urgently review the safety of nuclear material in their arsenal.
The report said Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda network has sought to buy nuclear technology.
There were reports that some Pakistani scientists, including Sultan Mohammed, who was recently interrogated by intelligence agencies, were helping the outfit get nuclear weapons.
Mohammed el-Baradei, a senior official of IAEA referring to custody of Pakistans nuclear systems said , "I think they are under proper control" but "if there were a breakdown in the civil order, of course, you have worries." He said that "any such material in illicit commerce and conceivably accessible to terrorist groups is deeply troubling." He said former Soviet Union could prove a source for terrorists to make the bomb.
"When the cold war ended, thousands of highly qualified scientists and engineers involved in the Soviet Union nuclear programme were laid off or they found their income drastically reduced," he said.
These scientists could be readily available for helping terrorists build nuclear weapons, which could prove disastrous, he added.
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