LONDON [MENL] -- Egypt's military has been examining the prospect of procuring unmanned aerial vehicles from China.
Western defense sources said Egypt's air force and army have been briefed by the Chinese government on its newly-developed UAVs. The sources said the Chinese UAVs were being offered to Egypt at less than half of the price of a comparative Western system.
The marketing effort has been undertaken by China National Aero Technology Import and Export Corp. CATIC has also marketed fighter-jets and trainers to Egypt's air force. Cairo has been coproducing China's K-8 air trainer in a project meant to procure 80 such platforms for the Egyptian Air Force.
The sources said Egypt was one of several African and Middle East countries targeted by CATIC in efforts to develop a UAV clientele. Other countries included Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The militaries of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have also been briefed by CATIC.
The relationship between China and al Qaeda surfaces once again now in India. Often connected, as seen in Egypt and the WTC tragedy, China and al Qaeda work toward what seems to be the same end or endeavor. #msg-4344375
India is getting on board the National Missile Defense this would be see as a threat to both neighboring China and al Qaeda.
Note: Indicating that the Indo-US strategic partnership is blooming, the United States has offered to sell its Patriot missile defence system to India. Highly placed sources say the offer was made during the discussions between US and Indian officials on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
The Patriot is an air-defence system which can defeat both attack aircraft and tactical ballistic missiles. Sources say the sale of the Patriot may be linked to India getting on board the National Missile Defence (NMD) as it can also be integrated into the broader NMD framework. – October 16, 2004 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1246681/posts
Moscow, October 22: Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov on Friday termed as "untrue" reports that India would lease for 10 years a nuclear submarine from Russia. http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=37566
Director general of Tripura police G M Srivastava, however, implicated Chinese intelligence, too, in the growing militancy in the region. He said: "It is really a matter of serious concern that several anti-India forces of China, Myanmar, Pakistan and Bangladesh are trying hard to create unrest in northeastern states by using the fundamentalists and separatist forces of the region."
Al-Qaeda and its associates now have a sizable presence in Bangladesh. It serves as a focal point or umbrella organization for a worldwide network that includes many Islamic extremist groups such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which has bases in India's northeastern states also. Concerning the operatives from China, Srivastava said: "Their presence is in the field but they are very discreet kind of operatives so it is very difficult to get direct evidence against China but there are a number of circumstantial evidences which indicate their involvement." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FJ23Df02.html
It is not only in Nepal that China is keeping the pressure on India, it is in all her neighbourhood. #msg-4196244
The pressure that China exerts reaches far beyond India and her near abroad into the whole of the world arena where China as in this incident is flanked by al Qaeda. Long supported by China, al Qaeda shares many of the same areas of operation, objectives and works in much the same manner to their conclusion. This seems more and more to me a partnership.
-Am
A new dimension in India's northeast woes
"It is really a matter of serious concern that several anti-India forces of China, Myanmar, Pakistan and Bangladesh are trying hard to create unrest in northeastern states by using the fundamentalists and separatist forces of the region."
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - New Delhi and Washington are finally waking up to the strange phenomenon taking place in India's troubled northeast. An upper-caste Hindu militant secessionist organization of the northeastern state of Assam - the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) - has reportedly taken up formal membership with the Pakistan-based Muttahida (United) Jihad Council (MJC) after years of dallying with the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Directorate General of Field Intelligence (DGFI) of Bangladesh.
The MJC is an umbrella organization of various outfits engaged in militant operations in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Its most prominent member group is the dreaded Hizbul Mujahideen, headed by Syed Salahuddin.
For the first time, several world leaders, including United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, and the United States have publicly focused their attention on India's turbulent northeast and its insurgent violence. US Ambassador to India David C Mulford offered the help of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) members after the serial blasts on October 2 that killed scores of people. In a letter to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, Mulford said, "Should you find it helpful, the FBI would be pleased to provide technical support for your investigation."
Though Gogoi welcomed the offer, it was criticized by leftist as well as Hindu-right politicians and sections of the media as interfering in India's internal matters, an infringement of sovereignty and at the very least "unmindful of the established procedures for diplomatic conduct in the host country", which clearly specify that all communication between an envoy and a state government must be routed through the Ministry of External Affairs. However, a realization is now dawning that this offer is probably an indication of the United States' recognition of a global and Islamist dimension to the terrorism in India's northeast.
Indicating that the government of India is not only aware of the foreign dimension of the terror-bombings in Assam and Nagaland, but it is also willing to take some concrete action, the normally reticent Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee put the blame for these terrorist acts squarely on the ISI of Pakistan. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, too, has now voiced his concern over "some insurgent groups" taking "shelter" in Bangladesh. The chief ministers of Assam and Tripura have been demanding that Bangladesh be persuaded to take the kind of robust action against the insurgents based on its territory that Bhutan took last year. Indeed, part of the reason for this latest concentration of militants in Bangladesh and Myanmar is that they lost their sanctuaries in Bhutan.
Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has linked the attacks to the ULFA regrouping after being flushed out of Bhutan last year. He said: "The Bhutanese military offensive against ULFA and NDFB [National Democratic Front of Bodoland] inside the kingdom in December last year has not helped us. The rebels appear to have simply relocated their camps." He is pushing New Delhi to focus on Bangladesh and Myanmar, where he insists ULFA and NDFB have bases and safe houses. "As we see now, the root of the problem lies in these two countries. Unless the rebels are uprooted from there, violent attacks are bound to go on," Gogoi said.
Director general of Tripura police G M Srivastava, however, implicated Chinese intelligence, too, in the growing militancy in the region. He said: "It is really a matter of serious concern that several anti-India forces of China, Myanmar, Pakistan and Bangladesh are trying hard to create unrest in northeastern states by using the fundamentalists and separatist forces of the region."
Stressing the need for strong diplomatic pressure on Dhaka to contain these forces, he said: "We have got the photographs of training camps in Dhaka where cadres of Indian insurgent groups are also being trained by operatives of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network."
Al-Qaeda and its associates now have a sizable presence in Bangladesh. It serves as a focal point or umbrella organization for a worldwide network that includes many Islamic extremist groups such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which has bases in India's northeastern states also. Concerning the operatives from China, Srivastava said: "Their presence is in the field but they are very discreet kind of operatives so it is very difficult to get direct evidence against China but there are a number of circumstantial evidences which indicate their involvement."
The chief minister's view is seconded by Khagen Sharma, inspector general of the Assam police intelligence wing. "In Bangladesh, the ULFA is in the care of Pakistan's ISI. In Myanmar, across Arunachal Pradesh, the ULFA is being provided logistical support by the Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland," said Sharma.
Bangladesh, however, has consistently denied the presence of any such sanctuaries and training camps. Indeed, senior Bangladeshi journalist Enayetullah Khan claimed that India's external intelligence arm, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), has much deeper penetration, network and wherewithal in Bangladesh to "beat the ISI hollow as far as moles and operatives and also clandestine training are concerned".
New Delhi has on several occasions furnished detailed lists of rebel camps inside Bangladesh to authorities there. The last such list of 195 camps was handed over to visiting Bangladesh Rifles chief Major-General Jehangir Alam Choudhuri by his Border Security Force counterpart Ajai Raj Sharma in New Delhi last month. According to this list, two militant groups of the Indian state of Tripura alone are running training camps in the Bangladeshi districts of Moulvi Bazar, Habibganj, Comilla, Rangamati, Khagracherry, Chittagong and Cox's Bazar. The list, however, merely invited a derisive rejection from Dhaka. On checking the provided coordinates, they said one training camp on the list would have to be within a Bangladesh Rifles cantonment and another at sea.
New Delhi has asked the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India's domestic intelligence agency, to confirm the recent move of ULFA to take up the membership of the Jihad Council with "concrete evidence". It has also asked the IB to carry out a "special survey" of the entire northeastern region, focusing on detailed information on insurgent groups, their hierarchy, location of training camps and funding. The security agencies had recently reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs that the ULFA had accepted membership of the MJC for logistics support.
ULFA is the biggest among scores of terrorist organizations operating in the troubled northeast of India that borders Bangladesh, China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Nepal.
Though the Indian security agencies have long known about ULFA's links with Pakistani and Bangladeshi intelligence, and have been warning the government for at least 18 months, they received word of ULFA's jihadi links in September after certain seizures made from the hideouts of a slain ULFA militant. A grenade found from militant Lachit Rava, who was killed in an encounter at Jerdoba in East Garo Hill district in Meghalaya, India, on September 14, was similar to those used by militants during the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2002. The Pakistani army is also known to use such explosives. The discovery that northeastern militants are now using programmable time-delay devices made in Pakistan is considered particularly significant. The seizures made during subsequent raids further proved the banned outfit's close links with Pakistan-based jihadi groups.
Although the IB has already confirmed these reports, a senior Home Ministry official told Asia Times Online the government now wants the information to be backed by evidence so that the matter can be taken up at the diplomatic level. In view of similar reports about other organizations, the government wants to deal with the problem more comprehensively and has ordered the preparation of a complete profile of about 108 banned groups in the region.
Terrorist attacks in different parts of India's northeast, including serial bomb blasts and gun attacks in Assam and Nagaland, killed more than 80 people and wounded 200 in a span of just 72 hours beginning on October 2, the day India remembers the apostle of non-violence, the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
The outlawed ULFA, fighting for a "sovereign, socialist Assam" since its inception in 1979, and the NDFB, pushing an armed campaign for a separate Bodo homeland since 1986, have claimed responsibility for some of the attacks.
According to a Home Ministry official who has dealt with the northeast for several years, the government has been aware for quite some time of the ULFA and other similar organization's links to ISI and DGFI. The government analysts can even understand the necessity of such links from the secessionists' point of view; their need for arms and ammunition and other logistical and even financial support: but reports of their joining the Jihad Council has completely mystified them.
The official told Asia Times Online: "The ULFA's identification with the known Pakistani ambition of creating a 'Swadhin Asom' [Independent Sovereign Assam] that would be a full-fledged Muslim-majority state through a demographic invasion and Bangladeshi dreams of a Brihot [Greater] Bangladesh is now so complete that it has even changed its original aim of fighting and expelling Muslim infiltrators and illegal immigrants from Bangladesh to giving them membership of the organization."
No one seems to understand what an Assamese movement of upper-caste Hindus, even if militant or secessionist, some of whose leaders were educated in reputed Indian educational institutions, would gain by helping create a new and sovereign Muslim state or a Greater Bangladesh.
The ULFA has indeed changed not only its aims and objects formally but also the very definition of the word "Asamiya" (Assamese) in order to accommodate illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh. (Incidentally, the influx of Hindu Bangladeshis was never a problem as they were considered refugees fleeing discrimination and persecution in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.)
In the latest ULFA membership form the very first clause seeks to accommodate all nationalities. It says that while a member "must be a permanent resident of Assam, volunteers from other countries will be recognized conditionally". Similarly, the concept of Assamese is redefined by stating that "the Asamiya are a people of all communities, the mixture of people who are determined to work for all-round progress of Assam". Thus the concept of Assamese is no longer restricted, as earlier, to those speaking the Assamese language as their mother tongue. It obviously includes the Bangla-speaking people as well. This is further clarified a little later in a paragraph beginning with the sentence: "The contribution of the people of East Bengal [Bangladesh] origin in Assam towards increasing the state's economic output is indeed noteworthy."
Contrasting this with the ULFA's original "aims and objectives" will leave no one in doubt that it is now completely under the sway of its Pakistani and Bangladeshi masters. Its original manifesto justified its founding in 1979 as a fight against the "influx of foreigners and massive exploitation of its natural resources".
Seeking to justify its armed struggle, the ULFA manifesto says: "Especially in 1979, democratic and unarmed peaceful movement against the influx of foreigners and economic exploitation, the occupation force of India killed 700 unarmed agitators where the majority were teenage students. Though the people of Assam and leadership of the struggle have a strong stand for peaceful and amicable solution of the conflict, India has always been trying to force a military solution, thus the unarmed peaceful movement against the influx and economic exploitation transformed to an armed national liberation struggle."
It was because of this strong orientation of the ULFA against the influx of Muslim Bangladeshis that the entire Assam students' movement of 1979 and early 1980s, of which it was a product, was branded "Hindu fundamentalist" despite its original secular track. Interestingly, it now says: "We would like to state here for everybody's information that the movement led by the All Assam Students Union and Gana Sangram Parishad from 1979 to 1985 is viewed by the ULFA as one based on emotion." It now denounces the Assam movement as "one that was led by juveniles, who failed to understand that migration per se was not bad and had helped many countries like the USA to become what they are today". Nothing could mark the abdication of ULFA's original platform and history as completely as this one sentence. The ULFA is thus no longer silent on the issue of illegal Muslim immigrants, as it was during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is now making its intentions clear.
Having read these proclamations, it becomes possible for government officials to believe, though still not understand, reports that the ULFA is actually running schools in Dhaka training poor Bangladeshis to infiltrate Assam. The course they teach includes imparting some familiarity with the spoken Assamese language and a smattering of the written language, at least for them to be able to read road signs and names of shops, etc.
Another significant indication of the ISI's grip over ULFA comes from the fact that unlike in the past, it is no longer bothered about killing innocents. Regarding itself a freedom movement it used to avoid killing as much as possible for fear of backlash from the common people. But it is clear from the August 15 blast in Dhemaji - killing scores of schoolchildren - and the same message underscored by subsequent blasts, that it no longer has such scruples. This is very much in tune with ISI strategy, as seen in Kashmir, of creating maximum chaos and bleeding India through "a thousand cuts".
Meanwhile, New Delhi on Friday said it is willing to join three-way talks with Assam and separatist rebels to end violence in the state. The NDFB agreed to talks this month.
Sultan Shahin is a New Delhi-based writer.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
"Only a year ago, the BBC China - en route to Libya at the time - was found to be carrying several containers filled with the parts of sophisticated centrifuges intended for the use in the building of uranium enrichment plants.
"These were listed on the ship's manifest as 'used machine parts'," DA environment spokesperson Gareth Morgan said.
The vessel was also the subject of a search by the US coast guard in Honolulu harbour, in February this year, after a crew member had indicated to officials there might be hazardous material aboard.
"Although ultimately cleared at the time, this ship needs to be treated with caution."
Note: The Chinese government utilizes the merchant fleet to support the military, and to deliver arms shipments. China’s shipbuilding industry is quickly growing to become a major force in this market. The China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) is a conglomerate that own 34 subsidiaries based in a dozen countries.
COSCO has a substantial presence at two strategically located ports in the world, Singapore and Port Said, Egypt at the entrance of the Suez Canal. There are credible reports linking COSCO to the Chinese military. The U.S. Congress’s Cox Report states, “Although presented as a commercial entity, COSCO is actually an arm of the Chinese military establishment.”
-Am
SA to probe China's grounding 20/10/2004 08:46 - (SA)
Enrico Claassen and Sapa
Port Elizabeth - The official investigation into the running aground of the freighter, BBC China, which was shipwrecked at Port Grosvenor on the Wild Coast on Sunday, is due to start on Wednesday.
According to Captain William Dernier, operations manager of the South African Maritime Safety Authority in Cape Town, an investigation team visited the ship on Monday to scrutinise the ship's bills of lading before the investigation could start.
Meanwhile, everything is in place to pump the 120 tons of oil from the ship on Wednesday.
According to Dernier, the oil was to have been transferred from the ship on Tuesday, but high winds prevented this.
He said all equipment needed to pump the oil from the hold of the ship had been put aboard on Tuesday.
According to Dernier, a small amount of oil was still leaking from the ship's stern.
He said it was estimated it would take five days to pump all the oil from the ship's hold.
nine tons of batteries
Dernier strongly denied rumours that BBC China was transporting nuclear material.
"After I had scrutinised the bills of lading regarding the ship's freight, I could not find any nuclear material on board.
"However, if there was any nuclear material on board, it would be illegal," said Dernier.
He again confirmed the only dangerous material on board was nine tons of batteries and paint products.
Carol Moses of the national department of the environment and tourism said this material did not present an immediate danger to the environment as it was well-packed.
Moses said the department would not institute an independent investigation into the accident.
She said the department had already received a copy of the freight manifest of the BBC China indicating that no nuclear material was on board.
The ship, which was on its way from Durban to Spain, ran aground on a sandbank about 21:00 on Sunday, 150m from the beach at Port Grosvenor, about 150 nautical miles from Durban.
Sixteen crew were rescued from the stranded ship under dramatic conditions by a helicopter from Durban port control.
Cape Town - There is good reason to be concerned about the cargo of the vessel BBC China, which went aground on rocks off the Wild Coast at the weekend, the Democratic Alliance warned on Monday.
"Only a year ago, the BBC China - en route to Libya at the time - was found to be carrying several containers filled with the parts of sophisticated centrifuges intended for the use in the building of uranium enrichment plants.
"These were listed on the ship's manifest as 'used machine parts'," DA environment spokesperson Gareth Morgan said.
The vessel was also the subject of a search by the US coast guard in Honolulu harbour, in February this year, after a crew member had indicated to officials there might be hazardous material aboard.
"Although ultimately cleared at the time, this ship needs to be treated with caution."
Hazardous materials
Morgan called on Environmental Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk to declare "whether there are any hazardous materials aboard the BBC China".
"There has already been a spillage of oil from the ship... but considering (the BBC China's) chequered history... the effect of the oil spill could be less significant than potential contamination of the marine environment from the contents or remnants of previous contents on the ship."
The exploits of the BBC China had featured in a major speech delivered by US President George Bush in February this year, and had formed the basis of questions put to British foreign secretary Jack Straw.
"The ship is currently off the pristine Pondoland coast in the vicinity of a recently declared Marine Protected Area.
"Apart from this being a significant local tourist destination, many locals sustain themselves from harvesting marine resources along this coast, and have the right to be assured that this ecosystem is not contaminated.
"In this National marine week, the minister would do well to consider whether ships with histories such as the BBC China's, should be travelling anywhere close to our marine protected areas," Morgan said.
Van Schalkwyk's office was not immediately available for comment.
Cargo
According to media reports earlier on Monday - quoting SA maritime safety authority head Captain Bill Dernier - the hazardous cargo aboard the BBC China comprises "small quantities of paint, batteries and bottles of compressed carbon dioxide".
Dernier said the vessel also had 58 tons of heavy fuel oil, 60 tons of gas oil and eight tons of lubrication oil on board.
It is understood the BBC China was en route to Dar-es-Salaam at the time she went aground on Saturday night.
Salvors are reportedly planning to first remove all oil from the vessel before launching an attempt to pull her off the rocks.
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