UN chief to present anti-terror blueprint
UN SECRETARY-General Ban Ki-moon urged Russia and the US yesterday to cooperate in rooting out terrorism and said he would unveil a comprehensive plan to fight - extremism and violence early next year.
US President Barack Obama and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev separately called on all countries to co-ordinate and thwart the Islamic State after its recent devastating attack on a Russian plane and on multiple targets in Paris.
Ban said he counted on their support to wipe out a common enemy and the UN was gathering ideas from members towards a joint counterterrorism strategy.
“All these terrorists and ideology extremists should be defeated in the name of humanity,” he said during a meeting in Malaysia with Medvedev at the annual East Asia Summit. “We need to unite. We need to show global solidarity to address the common enemy of Isil, Daesh, some other extremists and terrorist groups,” he said, referring to the Islamic State.
Obama said at the same summit that the Islamic State was “a bunch of killers with good social media” who would be thwarted by the US and its allies.
“Destroying it is not only a realistic goal, we’re going to get it done,” he said.
“We will take back land they are currently in, take out their financing, hunt down leadership, dismantle their networks, supply lines and we will destroy them.”
Obama said it “would be helpful” if Russia directed its focus on tackling the Islamic State and he hoped Moscow would agree to a leadership transition in Syria that meant its president, Bashar al-Assad, stepping down.
“The question at this point is whether Russia can make the strategic adjustment that allows them to be effective partners with us and the other 65 countries,” he said.
“Russia has not officially committed to a transition of Assad moving out … I think we’ll find out in the next few weeks whether we can bring about that change in perspective.”
Russia and Iran have been Assad’s strongest foreign supporters during Syria’s civil war. But the US, its Gulf allies and Turkey have insisted he steps down as part of any eventual peace deal.
Medvedev said countries with large Muslim populations, including Russia, should unite to fight against the Islamic State and told a meeting of Asian leaders that should be done through institutions like the UN.
“Terrorists have blown up a Russian aeroplane over the Sinai Penninsula. They’ve conducted a massacre at the heart of Europe,” he said.
“These acts are atrocious. The whole world has shuddered.”
This week British Prime Minister David Cameron would set out the case for joining air strikes against the Islamic State militants in Syria, his finance minister said yesterday, in an attempt to persuade a parliament loath to embark on another war in the Middle East. Britain is already bombing the Islamic State in Iraq, but Cameron has said he believes Britain should be doing more to fight the militants, who claimed responsibility for this month’s attacks in Paris in which 130 people died.
France has in the days since stepped up its bombing campaign against the group’s members in Syria, who are also being targeted from the air by a US-led coalition and Russia.
Cameron is keen to avoid a repeat of 2013 when he lost a crunch parliamentary vote on air strikes against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
“The prime minister will seek support across parliament for strikes against that terrorist organisation in Syria. Frankly, Britain has never been a country that stands on the sidelines and relies on others to defend us,” finance minister George Osborne told BBC television yesterday.
Britain’s Sunday newspapers reported that a vote could be held within the next two weeks. – Reuters DHAKA: Bangladesh executed two opposition leaders yesterday for war crimes committed during the 1971 war to break away from Pakistan.
Islamist opposition leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid and Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, a former politician from former premier Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party, were hanged soon after President Abdul Hamid rejected their appeals late on Saturday for clemency.
“Both of them were hanged simultaneously on two separate platforms,” a police officer said.
Mujahid, 67, of the Jamaate-Islami party, and Chowdhury, 66, were hanged at Dhaka Central Jail. The Supreme Court had previously rejected their appeals against a death sentence imposed by a special tribunal for genocide and torture of civilians during the conflict.
The Border Guard Bangladesh paramilitary force has been deployed across the country to tighten security.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh, until 1971 East Pakistan, has seen a rise in Islamist violence in recent months, with two foreigners and four secular writers and a publisher killed this year.
Mujahid was found guilty on five charges including torture and the murder of intellectuals and minority Hindus while he commanded Al Badr, an auxiliary force of the Pakistani army, during the war to break away from Pakistan.
Chowdhury was convicted in October 2013 on charges of genocide, religious persecution, abduction and torture during the war.
“While we are saddened that we have lost our father by way of a motivated and predetermined trial and where the country is gagged from speaking out, we find hope in the fact that the international community recognises the injustice and that fairness and truth shall be restored in Bangladesh,” a son of Chowdhury said. – Reuters