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BBC
World - Radio Update  Inside Edition |
| December 9 to 15, 2001 |
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| Rights & Refugees Update |
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VIDEO
NEWS
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| War News |
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<
home page menu
|
BBC
World - Radio Update Inside Edition |
| December 9 to 15, 2001 |
|
| Rights & Refugees Update |
|
| VIDEO
NEWS
|
|
| War News |
|
| Warning: Iraq | ABM Treaty Update | bin Laden Tape | |||||||||||||||||
| Human
Rights Update
UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has said she would support an international inquiry into the killing of hundreds of pro-Taliban prisoners in a northern Afghanistan fort. Afghanistan had long suffered from a "climate of no accountability", she said, stressing the need to set standards in the conflict (more).
Afghanistan is largely a country of widows with no assistance. If the future is uncertain, the recent past is an all-too-well-substantiated fact. The Taliban made Afghanistan a laboratory for the systematic oppression of women. What it did will haunt that nation and the world for years to come. Though the Taliban's restrictions against women have no force, nearly all the women wear the burka.
As Russian occupation withdrew, chaos that followed 1989 was worse for women. Afghan warlords brought terror to the urban neighborhoods and villages they laid claim to. Fighters treated women as plunder; rape became commonplace. Civil war broke out among factions of the anti-Soviet resistance. With the triumph of the Taliban in 1996, conditions were in place for a final degradation of Afghan women.
Fighting and bandits in Afghanistan continue to block adequate relief for the needy population that remain in Afghanistan. There are perhaps 3 to 4 million needy Afghanis in the country. Banditry along supply routes was also hampering operations. UN aid convoys have been ambushed and robbed, agency offices have been looted, and several journalists have been killed in apparent robberies. The UNHCR's aid efforts also suffered a setback when two of the agency's vehicles were ambushed by three armed men.
In the capital, Kabul, Afghan women are playing a key role in a one-off mission by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to distribute food to an estimated one million people too poor to feed their families. They will be distributing food coupons that will entitle a household to a 50-kilogram (110-pound) sack of wheat - enough, it is estimated, to last a month. The WFP is employing large numbers of women, who were forbidden from working during Taleban rule, to survey households in the capital's poorest areas, calculating how many people there are and how urgent their need is. It is both easier for them to gain access to households and a way of providing the women themselves with some income. More than 20 years after the Soviet Union invaded, Afghans remain the largest, single refugee group in the world. More than 3.5 million refugees reside in Pakistan and Iran alone, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
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Middle East
| Conflict Intensifies | Changing | 21st Century Struggle | ||
| Perspectives | ||||
In 1969,
Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation
Organization, a group formed in 1964 as an umbrella for a number of
Palestinian factions engaging in guerrilla warfare against Israel. |
In 691, Muslims built one of Islam's holiest shrines, the Dome of the Rock (left), on a site where the Hebrew Temple of Solomon once stood in Jerusalem. The site set the stage for centuries of conflict between Arabs and Jews. The disputed holy site is called Temple Mount by the Jews and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims. |
The
government of Israel views with grave severity the terror attacks this
evening. The government of Israel holds Chairman (Yasser) Arafat
directly responsible for attacks and in light of it resolves: 1. Chairman Arafat has made himself irrelevant as far as Israel is concerned and therefore no contacts will be maintained with him. 2. The security Cabinet approves and authorizes the military operations as presented by the Defense Minister and Army Chief of Staff at an inner Cabinet meeting this evening. 3. The Israel Defense Forces will rapidly deploy for military operations in the vicinity in the cities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza in order to carry out arrests (of terrorists) and to confiscate weapons. 4. The Defense Ministry will present at the earliest date the adjustment of method of operations against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations in light of the escalation of their attacks. 5. The government holds the Palestinian Authority and its leaders directly responsible for the miserable living conditions of the Palestinian people. The government will do whatever possible to help the civil population. The Cabinet does not imply or include in any way any directive to attack Arafat personally. |
The Israeli Cabinet cut off contact with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, saying it holds him directly responsible for an ambush in the West Bank that killed 10 and injured 30 others. The Cabinet said Israel would send its own troops to the West Bank and Gaza to arrest suspected terrorists and confiscate weapons.
The statement followed Israeli air strikes on Palestinian targets in Gaza and the West Bank late Wednesday in retaliation for the ambush of the bus by Palestinian gunmen.
(
Click) In the wake of the bus ambush, Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil
abu Rudeineh said all offices and institutions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic
Jihad will close. Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel, both claimed
responsibility for attacks during the wave of recent suicide bombings
The U.S. State Department encouraged the Palestinian Authority to move against the offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but officials said Arafat had more work to do. The Palestinian Authority issued a statement late Wednesday condemning what it called "military operations" on the bus and the two suicide bombings.
Sharon's office said Wednesday it would continue the targeted killings of terrorists on their way to carry out attacks. It also said Israel would respond to every terror act.
God Bless America
Afghan
women sit in front of the UN World Food Program (WFP) headquarters in
Kabul, waiting for a chance to get some food handouts. The WFP carried
out its first airlift of food aid into Afghanistan on November 23, the
UN agency said.
In
the 1960s and '70s, Afghanistan was a typical developing country, poor
and struggling, with a slowly expanding role for women. By 1964 they had
been granted the vote. The cities had begun to produce a small elite of
educated women, who entered the professions, wore Western skirts and
mixed comfortably with men. The Soviet invasion in 1979 was a disaster
for Afghanistan generally. But under the Russians, women's rights were
protected--even advanced to a degree that alienated some in
Afghanistan's tradition-bound society. More women were introduced into
government, given an authority. Many ruling men objected.
Babies
and infants stranded in northern Afghanistan are dying and an estimated
150,000 people are living in flimsy tents in a refugee camp near Mazar-I
Sharif, where temperatures drop below freezing every night.
Here
Putin is seen to put a stern face on his reactions.
