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Last Updated: Oct 24th, 2006 - 17:24:11 |
TOKYO - A divided world remembered the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks Monday, with allies promising to fight fanaticism, critics saying U.S. policies had fanned more violence and a militant leader promising "new events."
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi warned that terrorism remains as big a threat as ever, while Australia's leader promised that the values of liberty and religious freedom would in the end emerge victorious.
U.S. and Philippine troops fighting Islamic extremists in the jungles of Southeast Asia prayed for peace and safety.
But al-Qaida reportedly released a video paying tribute to the planning of the attacks on New York and Washington, which killed nearly 3,000 people, while the terror network's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, called on Muslims to fight the U.S.
Hardline lawmakers in Pakistan, a key U.S. ally, blamed the five-year U.S. counterattack for "destroying peace in the entire world."
Monday's outpouring of emotion reflects an international landscape vastly changed since terrorists hijacked four airliners in 2001, crashing two into New York's World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and another into a Pennsylvania field.
The attacks claimed 2,973 lives, stunned the world, and unleashed the U.S. military's wrath in Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Sunday, President Bush and his wife, Laura, stood in somber silence after laying wreaths where the World Trade Center's twin towers once soared. He later pledged "renewed resolve" to remember the lessons of Sept. 11.
Halfway around the globe, Australian Prime Minister John Howard echoed the determination at a ceremony Monday held at the U.S. Embassy in Canberra, saying "terrorism is the enemy of all people of good will."
Howard branded the Sept. 11 strike "an attack on the values that the entire world holds in common" and promised that the ideals of liberty and freedom of religion and speech "will in the end triumph."
Koizumi, in Finland for an Asia-Europe Meeting, was quoted by a Japanese official as saying that terrorism "continued to be as much of a threat as ever to mankind," Kyodo News agency reported.
At the summit, he proposed hosting a conference of senior officials and experts on terrorism in 2007, Kyodo said.
In the southern Philippines, where U.S.-backed government troops have been battling al-Qaida-linked militants, American and Filipino soldiers were to mark the anniversary with a quiet ceremony, including prayers.
The Philippines has been the target of a string of attacks, including a 2004 bombing blamed on the al-Qaida-linked group Abu Sayyaf that gutted a ferry in Manila, killing 116 people.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who won the country's first post-Taliban election in 2004, expressed the appreciation of the Afghan people to the U.S. for the "sacrifices of your sons and daughters" in rebuilding his country.
But on the streets in the capital, Kabul, many Afghans grumbled that they had not seen much improvement.
Some 20,000 U.S. forces are fighting al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, about the same number of NATO troops, a resurgent Taliban resistance has shaken the country, while corruption has stymied development.
A videotape posted on the Internet, purportedly by al-Qaida, showed previously unseen footage of a smiling Osama bin Laden and other commanders in a mountain camp apparently planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Your leaders are hiding from you the true extent of the disaster," al-Qaida's al-Zawahri said, according to a separate video aired on CNN, which appeared to be new. "And the days are pregnant and giving birth to new events, with Allah's permission and guidance."
A lawmaker from a conservative religious alliance in Pakistan branded the attacks "sad events" but said Washington's counter-terror strategy destroyed "peace in the entire world."
"America made unjustified aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq," said Liaqat Baluch, a senior figure in Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal or United Action Forum, an opposition alliance of six Islamic groups that made sharp gains in 2002 parliamentary elections, mainly on opposition to the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.
Newspapers in the capital, Islamabad, ran bleak-toned opinion columns and editorials criticizing Western anti-terror policies and attitudes.
"It is clear that the policy of force, force and more force, has failed. The results are now out: The 'war on terror' has proven to be an error," Mowahid Hussain Shah wrote in The Nation newspaper.
In Indonesia, which has been hit by a string of deadly terrorist attacks blamed on al-Qaida militants since the Sept. 11 attacks, 100 Muslim students held prayers of peace late Sunday, saying no religion justified such violence.
But Irfan Awwas, chairman of the Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia and an Islamic hard-liner, said the U.S. government "has divided Muslims across the globe as either those who support or oppose America."
Other critics doubted Washington's tactics, if not their objective.
New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said the security crackdown that followed the Sept. 11 attacks had failed to make the world safer, and that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had created a new haven for attackers.
China, accused of using an anti-terror campaign to crack down on peaceful dissent, issued no official statement on the anniversary. But government-linked scholars said the Iraq invasion has been a painful and ultimately unsuccessful diversion, while American foreign policies continue to alienate many in the Muslim world.
"The way the United States wrongly reacted to the incident — especially in the form of the Iraqi War — has had the bigger impact on the world," Yuan Peng, deputy director of Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said in an editorial in the People's Daily newspaper.
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