Sunday June 5, 04:00 PM
Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill says he will encourage China to join regional anti-terrorism efforts when he visits Beijing this week.
Citing Australia's growing cooperation with South-East Asia - such as in the ASEAN Regional Forum - Hill said China could be more involved in fighting terrorism.
"The real objective is therefore to encourage China's participation because we know that the only way to successfully combat terrorism is through cooperation," he told an Asian defence conference.
"China has significant resources that it can bring to bear," Hill said. "We need to convince them that we recognise those resources and that there is an important role that they can play.
"So that really is what I seek to do in my dialogue with the Chinese," he said.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry official at the conference said discussions with various countries were already under way.
"China firmly supports enhanced regional security cooperation," said Li Yang, a director at the ministry's Asia department. He said any suggestions China was reluctant to get involved in such cooperation were "not fair and not true".
Hill plans to visit Beijing this week, though details including exact dates haven't been released.
Philippine Defence Secretary Avelino Cruz, speaking on the same panel as Hill, said Manila already cooperates with Beijing in combating drug trafficking, so working together on anti-terror measures would be a natural next step.
Beijing already works with Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan in combating terrorism and has held joint military exercises with close ally Pakistan in north-west China's majority-Muslim region of Xinjiang.
China is deeply suspicious of US-led efforts, said Chinese scholar Xiang Lanxin, a history and politics professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
It has "never subscribed to the American conception of a war on terror", he said.
China opposed the US-led war on Iraq.
Gaza pullout protesters lock Israeli govt offices
05 Jun 2005 06:23:36 GMT
Source: Reuters
JERUSALEM, June 5 (Reuters) - Right-wing Jews sealed shut some government offices with superglue and chains early on Sunday as part of a campaign against Israel's plan to withdraw settlers from the Gaza Strip, police said.
Police arrested five 16-year-olds suspected of involvement in sealing an Education Ministry building and a courthouse in the Jerusalem area as well as a stock-trading watchdog office, police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
Israel's Channel 2 television showed a queue of people waiting outside a sealed Interior Ministry office in a Tel Aviv suburb with a pamphlet left on the door that read: "We shall not let the deportation happen!"
Israeli media reported an unidentified pro-settler group said it had sealed 150 public offices in protest at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to uproot settlements from occupied Gaza and the northern West Bank in August.
Sunday is the start of the working week in Israel.
Ben-Ruby said police had foiled an attempt to seal an office responsible for dispensing compensation to the 9,000 settlers set to be evacuated from 21 enclaves in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank.
Most of the settlers have vowed to passively resist evacuation from land they see as a biblical birthright.
Supporters, many of them far-right teenagers, have stepped up protests against the withdrawal in recent weeks by disrupting traffic with blockades of burning tyres.
Police arrested 15 Israelis for blocking the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway on Saturday night, Israel Radio said.
AlertNet news
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