Pakistan and China enjoy a special friendship the copy burbled
"Pakistan and China enjoy a special friendship," the copy burbled, "... a longstanding, sustained and strategic relationship between the two neighbours which have [sic] been friction-free and time- tested" - things which could absolutely not be said of Pakistan's relationship with India.Yet Mr Vajpayee's visit is rightly seen as a historic opportunity, and the nature of the opposition to it explains why Jamaat-i-Islami today are electorally insignificant. By an odd co-incidence, China's Defence Minister General Chi Haotian is visiting Pakistan, and yesterday Dawn newspaper published a special supplement entitled "Pak-China Amity Forever" "A Model of Good Neighbourliness" ran one of the headlines. Among the people on the streets of Lahore, many said that the visit was a good thing. Yet the extremist Jamaat-i-Islami party mustered several thousand for a protest march yesterday, setting tyres on fire at city crossroads, and most shops were closed in obedience to a strike called by the Muslim extremists.
At a demonstration on the campus of Islamia University, the police fired tear gas and there were reports of injuries among demonstrating students.India and Pakistan have a very long distance to travel in their relationship. Nobody believes, however, that this lightning summit will come up with an answer to the fundamental issue that divides them - Kashmir.For all the pomp and ceremony, there were ambiguities and shadows in Pakistan's welcome to Mr Vajpayee, an edge of paranoia that is hard to dispel. It inched towards the border, preceded by folk dancers dressed in green, tangerine, crimson and gold. In the few metres of no man's land, the dancers peeled away, the bus glided into Pakistan, and a new chapter in South Asian history opened - perhaps. At a press conference scheduled for this evening it will become clear whether all the rigmarole has been in vain. It is hard to believe that the two premiers would have invested so much face in the occasion if some sort of agreement were not already in the bag. One rumour is that India and Pakistan will announce jointly that they are to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
This, it is said, would have little domestic fall-out and would hasten the normalisation of ties with the rest of the world, including the lifting of US sanctions.Other guesses include possible agreement on some of the other chronic bilateral problems such as the war on the Siachen glacier in northern Kashmir, which costs each country more pounds 600,000 a day to prosecute. THE BANDS on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border played various stirring tunes this afternoon, including Colonel Bogie, but Van Morrison's "Days Like This" would have made a nice addition to the repertoire. The sunshine was buttery, the breezes balmy, the fertile fields of the Punjab gleamed green.
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She was eventually taken from her house in Addis Ababa in August with her mother and her children, and put on a bus to the border, carrying only her handbag.In Asmara, Mrs Sebhatu has rented a restaurant, and started a new life "as a cook, a waitress and a cashier". The local administration made her compile a list of her property, then came in the middle of the night to take keys to the business premises and vehicles. After her husband was deported in July, she became "afraid of every knock on the door". Leul Sebhatu owned a Shell petrol station, a supermarket, and three commercial trucks. Now in Asmara, he has a new licence as a lawyer, but remains devastated.
"I am still an Ethiopian - a man cannot be deprived of his identity by a government."In the course of the mass deportations, Ethiopians of Eritrean origin lost millions of pounds worth of property. "It was horrible, covered with human faeces." Along with about 800 fellow inmates, the judge was eventually sent to the remote Sudan-Eritrean border Some of the old and sick had to be carried across it. He was taken to Shagoli detention camp, 30 miles outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. Ethiopians of Eritrean origin held important government and security posts.But at 5am one Sunday, seven security men came to Mr Ismail's house. The guard was woken, the dogs barked loudly, and when he opened the door, he was told to get dressed "I never thought they would come for me," he says now.
