AN EGYPTIAN charter plane flying from the Yemeni capital Sanaa to Tunis landed at the Tunisian airport of Djerba early yesterday, after its pilot refused to comply with the request of some of the 150 Libyan passengers to proceed to Libya, in violation of the UN flight ban.
Cairo airport officials said the passengers were persuaded to disembark from the plane, but were staging a sit-in at Djerba airport as talks were held between Egyptian and Tunisian Foreign Ministry officials. An Interior Ministry official said that the MD-90 plane belonged to a private Egyptian company and had still not taken off from Djerba, about 170 km from the Libyan border, by Wednesday afternoon.
Cuts deferred
THE LEADERS of six Gulf Arab states yesterday decided to defer a decision on oil production cuts to an OPEC meeting scheduled for March.
The decision came as they prepared to end their summit with resolutions on Iran's occupation of three Gulf islands, a unified customs tariff and the eight-year-old UN sanctions on Iraq.
Jamil Al-Hojeilan, the GCC secretary- general, blamed over-production by some countries for the slump that has pushed the price of oil to less than $10 a barrel, AP reported. Officials had earlier hinted at production cuts but chose instead to call on all countries to stick to their production quotas.
Crisis making
UN ARMS experts in Iraq conducted a second day of inspections at "sensitive" sites yesterday as Baghdad charged that their work was aimed at sparking a new crisis and delaying a comprehensive review of the eight-year-old economic sanctions.
The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq said this "intense period of work" would run until around Monday.
Iraq's ruling Baath party newspaper, Al-Thawra, warned that UNSCOM chief Richard Butler was "seeking through these surprise visits to create a new pretext for the Americans to block the comprehensive review" of sanctions.
Yassin strike
THE SPIRITUAL leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, started a hunger strike yesterday.
"Sheikh Yassin has today started a hunger strike in solidarity with the [Palestinian] prisoners in Israeli jails," said Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader in Gaza. More than 3,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails are on the fifth day of a hunger strike to press for their release under the Wye River peace accord signed in Washington last October between Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Living a myth
ISRAEL lacks a "culture of human rights", the leader of Israeli rights group Betselem, Eitan Felner, said during the ceremonies held in Paris on Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
sFelner said Israelis were living in a myth by failing to recognise the rights of Palestinians. Direct violations of human rights may have diminished since the end of the Palestinian uprising, but torture was still used systematically and freedom of movement for the Palestinians has worsened.
