Governments across the Asian region urged more cooperation against terrorists while people laid wreaths for their victims on Thursday’s second anniversary of September 11, and Australia’s leader warned the battle against terror would not end any time soon.
”This war against terrorism is likely to go on for years and nobody can regard themselves as beyond the reach of terrorism,” Australian Prime Minister John Howard told Sky News Television. ”We need to find ways of further cooperation, particularly at a police and intelligence level.”
Howard — who spoke a day after an Indonesian court sentenced the mastermind of last October’s Bali bombings to face a firing squad — welcomed the international effort to bring terrorist organisations to heel.
Bali’s nightclub blasts killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, and was the most bloody terrorist strike since the September 11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington launched by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. Authorities have blamed the Bali bombings on the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah group.
In China’s Muslim northwest, the regional Communist Party secretary seized the occasion of the September 11 anniversary to warn that separatists in the country’s Xinjiang region were getting training from international terrorists, including at ”several training camps in Pakistan.”
”We have found some training camps in Xinjiang after the September 11 incident, but not many,” he said, saying that the government’s successful efforts tto battle forces opposed to Beijing’s rule were being undermined by assistance from the terrorists abroad.
Across Japan, people paid their respects at memorials to the thousands, including 24 Japanese, who perished.
”The threat of international terrorism still remains serious,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda told reporters. ”Japan will further strengthen cooperation with other countries and continue to tackle the problem.”
Half of the Japanese who were killed worked for Fuji Bank — renamed Mizuho after a merger — which had 700 employees in offices from the 79th to 82nd floors of the World Trade Centre. Six Americans working for the bank died along with the 12 Japanese.
Yasushi Miyama, a Mizuho Financial Group spokesperson, said memorials at his company would be personal.
”People will be observing the day on an individual level. For many, it is a day of remembrance,” he said.
At Yokosuka Naval Base just south of Tokyo, United States military personnel observed a moment of silence and held a wreath-laying service and silent vigil in early morning ceremonies, said Michael Chase, a public affairs officer.
”We pause to remember the tragic loss of over 3 000 innocent men, women, and children from some 90 countries around the world,” US ambassador Howard Baker said in a statement.
Ceremonies were held in other parts of Asia.
At the US embassy in the Philippines, US charge d’affaires Joseph Mussomeli laid a wreath at the base of the mission’s flagpole, where the US flag was at half mast. Filipino soldiers played the trumpet as Mussomeli and an American soldier stood at attention.
In South Korea, police beefed up security at airports, military bases and embassies.
Although no official memorials were planned, authorities wary of possible attacks during a five-day national thanksgiving holiday added 257 police officers to the 1 243 guarding the US embassy in downtown Seoul and US military facilities across the country.
Police switched to round-the-clock patrols at the British embassy in Seoul, from once every two hours, and extra security was ordered for other embassies and diplomatic residences in the capital, according to national police agency officials quoted by Yonhap news agency.
In Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, people entering the world’s tallest buildings had their bags checked, but no extra security was in place on Thursday. A spokesperson for the Petronas Twin Towers said watchfulness has already become the norm over the past two years. — Sapa-AP