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> Mon., Mar. 3, 2003
FSRN
FREE SPEECH RADIO NEWS
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Today's lead stories:
Turkish Parliament Says NO to US Troops
US Spies on UN Members
Arab Summit in Egypt
Meatpackers Strike
Sri Lanka: One Year of Ceasefire
Turkish Parliament Says NO to US Troops
Under intense American pressure, Turkey's foreign minister
indicated today that his government would ask Parliament to
vote a second time on whether to allow American troops to
use the country as a base for a military attack against Iraq.
The minister, Yasar Yakis, spoke one day after lawmakers here
rejected such a plan. After a marathon meeting of senior officials,
Mr. Yakis said that his government would take a new resolution
to Parliament later this week after the government completed
an assessment of the first vote. But members of Parliament
who voted against the resolution told Free Speech Radio News
they doubt Prime Minister Abdulla Gul will submit a new request
to Parliament for fear his government would collapse. From
Ankara, Aaron Glantz has the story.
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US Spies on UN Members
Revelations emerged this weekend about just how far the
US is prepared to go in its efforts to bribe and coerce other
governments into supporting war against Iraq. A document leaked
to the London observer shows the top-secret national security
agency ordered its staff to intercept communications of delegates
to the United Nations, including members of the Security Council.
The news comes days before chief un weapons inspector Hans
Blix is scheduled to present what may be his final report
to the council before a US-led attack, and could deal a further
setback to Washington's diplomatic drive toward war. Susan
wood has more from the UN.
[top]
Arab Summit in Egypt
Controversy is rife with the alleged arrest this weekend
of senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who US
officials say masterminded the September 11 attacks. While
Pakistani authorities are said to have picked up Mohammed,
today they are denying handing him over to US authorities
saying he is being interrogated by the country's law enforcement
agencies. This as some are questioning whether the man arrested
is in fact Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, citing reports from last
October that said the same man was killed in the highly publicized
raid that lead to the arrest of another senior al-Qaeda figure,
Ramzi Binalshibh. Reports at the time said that Kuwaiti national
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed did indeed perish in the raid, but
his wife and child were taken from the apartment and handed
over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in whose
hands they remain. Meanwhile, in Egypt Arab leaders convened
for a pan-Arab summit on Saturday with Iraq being the top
subject on the one-day meeting agenda. As widely expected,
Arab royalty and leaders called on Baghdad to cooperate with
the UN and asked the US to give diplomacy a chance. And while
a United Arab Emirates proposal to ask Saddam Hussein to step
down is being widely reported as one of the outcomes of the
weekend's summit, as Oula Farawati reports from Amman, the
majority of Arab nations were not in favor of this proposal.
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Meatpackers Strike
Four hundred seventy workers at a Tyson Foods plant in Jefferson,
Wisconsin walked off the job last Friday after rejecting a
concessionary contract offer that would have drastically reduced
their quality of living. It's the first strike against Tyson
foods since it bought IBP to become the world's largest meat
processor; and as John Hamilton reports, union meatpackers
face an uphill battle as they square off against an employer
that increasingly pays poverty-level wages.
[top]
Sri Lanka: One Year of Ceasefire
Last weekend the island nation of Sri Lanka celebrated the
one year anniversary of ceasefire, after 20 years of war.
For two decades Sri Lanka has been torn apart by ethnic conflict
between the majority Singhalese Buddhists and minority Tamil
Hindus. A year of peace talks between the Sri Lankan government
and the Tamil rebel group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,
has sparked hope among many Sri Lankans that the war may be
finally over. But the fifth round of peace talks are on shaky
ground and many Sri Lankans have yet to taste the dividends
of peace. From Jaffna, Miranda Kennedy reports.
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