Irandaily | No. 4390 | World

Font Size

News Cut

Move Panel

N. Korea to Test Long-Range Rocket

North Korea announced on Saturday it will launch a rocket later this month, courting certain US and UN condemnation and racking up tensions with South Korea which is just days from a presidential election.
It will be the North’s second long-range rocket launch this year following a much-hyped but failed attempt in April, AFP reported.
In a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the Korean Committee for Space Technology said the new bid would be carried out between December 10 and 22.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry condemned the planned launch as a “deeply provocative act” that defied UN resolutions and would have significant repercussions for the already isolated state.
Japan said it would work closely with the United States, South Korea and China to dissuade North Korea from going ahead with the launch, Jiji Press news agency reported, quoting government officials.
As in April, the North said it would be a purely “peaceful, scientific” mission aimed at placing a polar-orbiting earth observation satellite into orbit.
The US and its allies insist the launches are disguised tests for an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
As such they would contravene UN resolutions triggered by Pyongyang’s two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.
Saturday’s announcement ended weeks of intense speculation, based on satellite image analysis, that the North was preparing a fresh launch from its Sohae satellite launch station.
On Thursday the UN Security Council had warned Pyongyang that going ahead with another launch would be “extremely inadvisable”.
The North’s statement said scientists had analyzed April’s failure--when te rocket exploded after take-off--”and deepened the work of improving the reliability and precision of the satellite and carrier rocket”.
The April launch put a halt to the latest international effort to engage North Korea, with the United States calling off plans to deliver badly needed food assistance.
Last month, the North claimed it already possessed rockets capable of striking the US mainland.

NATO Launches New Military Base in Turkey

NATO has launched a new military base in Turkey’s western province of Izmir as the western alliance plans to deploy advanced Patriot missiles on Turkish border with Syria.
NATO’s Allied Land Command will “serve as a base for carrying out land operations when ordered by the alliance following the inspection, evaluation, preparation and standardization of NATO land forces,” Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News reported on Saturday.
“NATO has trusted Turkey at every step since its membership. Likewise, Turkey can always trust in NATO,” NATO supreme commander Adm. James Stavridis said during the opening ceremony of the military base on Friday, Press TV reported.
Speaking about the deployment of Patriot missiles in southern Turkey, NATO Allied Land Commander Gen. Frederick Ben Hodges claimed that the move is not aimed at creating “a no-fly zone or to attack.”
“The evaluation team composed of officials from the US, Germany, the Netherlands and NATO were assigned in less than a week upon Turkey’s request. I expect the evaluation team to complete their work in a few days. If the deployment of the Patriots is accepted, it will be done to protect the Turkish people,” he said.
On November 21, Turkey formally asked NATO to deploy the surface-to-air Patriot missiles on its border with Syria. In response, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance would consider the Turkish request “without delay.”
NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said on Friday that that the operational command of the missile system would be stationed at Ramstein Air Forces Command in Germany.
“I would expect that if the decision is taken it could take several weeks to deploy, rather than months,” Lungescu said. A NATO delegation visited the southeastern Turkish province of Sanliurfa to scope out possible sites for the missiles.
On November 23, Damascus censured Ankara’s plan to deploy the Patriot missiles along the Syrian border, calling it another act of provocation by the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Congo M23 Rebels Quit Goma

Rebel fighters, singing and brandishing weapons, pulled out of Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern border city of Goma on Saturday, raising hopes regional peace efforts could advance negotiations to end the insurgency.
The rebel withdrawal from Goma on Lake Kivu, a strategic hub in the country’s war-scarred eastern borderlands, was agreed in a deal brokered by presidents of the Great Lakes states under Uganda’s leadership a week ago, Reuters reported.
Goma’s fall on November 20 to the Tutsi-led M23 rebel movement which routed United Nations-backed government forces triggered a diplomatic scramble to prevent a wider escalation of the eight-month-old rebellion in the conflict-prone region.
The rebels had said they would fight to topple Congo’s President Joseph Kabila and march on the capital Kinshasa, 1,600 km (1,000 miles) to the west. UN experts accuse Rwanda and Uganda of supporting the revolt, a charge both strongly deny.
In the center of Goma, blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Uruguay in white armored vehicles watched as camouflage-clad M23 fighters scrambled on to the back of flatbed trucks with battered suitcases and other belongings before driving off.
“We are leaving today,” M23’s military chief Colonel Sultani Makenga told reporters.
Residents lined the streets leading out of the city to watch as the truckloads of singing rebels drove out, heading for previously agreed positions 20 km (13 miles) north of Goma from where M23 launched its lightning offensive two weeks ago.
On the dusty road by the UN-controlled airport, about 100 rebels trudged out of town on foot. Some of the trucks leaving Goma carried crates of captured munitions and military supplies.
Makenga, who faces a UN-imposed assets freeze and travel ban for leading the revolt, said the M23 withdrawal was in response to a request from Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
“We are leaving for peace,” Makenga said, following a brief ceremony in which a squad of around 40 M23 fighters, wearing mottled green camouflage uniforms, peaked caps and black gumboots, first paraded and then sang and danced.
If there are no hitches, a full rebel withdrawal from lakeside Goma, which lies in sight of the towering Mount Nyiragongo volcano, will provide breathing space for possible follow-up negotiations between the rebels and Kabila.
Humanitarian agencies say hundreds of people have been injured and thousands displaced by the recent fighting.
The Congolese president has said he is willing to listen to the rebels’ grievances, but there is considerable mistrust between the two sides and Kabila faces pressure from within his own army to pursue a military solution rather than talks.
“If Kabila provokes us, we will come back,” Makenga said. “If he wants peace there will be peace, if he wants war, there will be war,” he added.
Uganda’s junior foreign minister, Asuman Kiyingi, told Reuters Kampala would encourage the two sides to talk. “Now that M23 has withdrawn, it’s important that the Kinshasa government also addresses the grievances of these people (M23),” he said Goma lies at the heart of Congo’s eastern borderlands which have suffered nearly two decades of conflict stoked by long-standing ethnic and political enmities and fighting over the region’s rich resources of gold, tin, tungsten and coltan. The latter is a precious metal used to make mobile phones.

Turkey Calls for Independent Palestinian State

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called on Saturday for an “independent Palestinian state” and urged the international community not to allow Israel to undermine peace efforts in the Middle East.
Davutoglu, speaking at the opening of the Turkish-Arab Forum in Istanbul, welcomed the upgrading of the Palestinians’ status at the United Nations as a “significant step.”, AFP reported.
“Now is the time to restore permanent peace in the region,” said Davutoglu, adding that the establishment of “an independent Palestinian state” was a precondition to achieving peace.
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a resolution on Thursday recognizing Palestine as a non-member observer state, a move Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas said was part of “a last chance” for a negotiated two-state solution.
Israel and the United States have both criticized the UN vote as an obstacle to efforts to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.
“We hope that the Palestinian flag will be hoisted at the United States with full member status,” Davutoglu said.
He also criticized the Israeli aggression in Gaza which he said dragged the Middle East into new chaos. “Now is the time to show strong reactions to Israeli policies which undermine the peace process,” he said.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addressing the Turkish-Arab Forum, welcomed the UN vote about the Palestinians but said, “We must see and admit that Palestine is also a country under occupation despite the fact that it won observer state status.”
Erdogan, a vocal critic of Israeli aggression, branded Israel as a “terrorist state” and accused it of “ethnic cleansing” in the Gaza Strip, which was battered by air strikes last month.
He also called for intra-Palestinian unity to form a “state with East Beit-ul-Moqaddas as its capital”.

Call for Probe Into Police Violence in Myanmar

Buddhist monks marched in Myanmar’s two biggest cities on Saturday to protest at police violence during a crackdown on demonstrators at a copper mine, while Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and a rights group called for an official inquiry.
Activists said at least 50 people had been injured on Thursday, including more than 20 monks who had ended up in hospital, after riot police raided camps set up round the Monywa copper mine by villagers protesting against their forced eviction to make way for an expansion of the project, Reuters reported.
Police used tear gas, water cannon and, according to activists, incendiary devices that local media described as “phosphorous bombs”. Many of the injured suffered serious burns.
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at US-based Human Rights Watch, called for a speedy, impartial investigation by the government.
“A hospital ward full of horribly burned Buddhist monks and other protesters deserve to know who attacked them while they were sleeping and what the government is going to do about it,” he said.
“The crackdown ... is a fundamental test case for the government’s commitment to peaceful assembly and willingness to demand accountability for abuses,” he added.
Myanmar was ruled by a military junta for almost half a century until March 2011, but since then a quasi-civilian government under President Thein Sein has pushed through a series of political and economic reforms, leading Western states to ease sanctions.
Suu Kyi, who led the fight for democracy under the junta and is now a member of parliament, went to the Monywa area in the northwestern region of Sagaing to speak to locals on the day of the police raid.
On Friday she also called for an inquiry. Local residents say the $1 billion mine expansion entails the unlawful confiscation of more than 7,800 acres of land. They told Reuters in September that four of 26 villages at the project site had already been displaced, along with monasteries and schools.

In this paper
All the papers