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Undemocratic governments that dominate the Arab world must change their ways swiftly, or face either disastrous internal conflict or reforms imposed by outside powers, a UN report warned Tuesday.
   The highly critical report by the UN Development Programme warned of a regression of basic human freedoms in Arab countries, charging that repression was stifling the opportunity for an overall ‘Arab renaissance’.
   Governments often used religion as a cloak for repression, even though there was a wealth of references to individual freedoms and good governance in Arab religious and cultural heritage, the ‘Arab Human Development Report 2004’ said.
   Oscar Fernandez, of the UNDP’s Arab section, said despite the different systems of government in the region, they all shared the characteristic of limiting freedoms and fundamental rights.
   ‘The source of these limits is the anti-democratic character of the regimes in power and their appeal to tradition and tribalism,’ Fernandez told journalists.
   The concentration of power in the hands of the state—monarchies, military dictatorships, or unchallenged civilian presidents elected for life—had created a ’black hole’ where ‘nothing moves and nothing escapes’, according to the report by a team of mainly Arab scholars and experts.
   Although most Arab countries have constitutions proclaiming democratic principles including the separation of powers, freedom of opinion, popular expression and an independent judiciary, authorities largely pay lip service to those pledges, the authors said.
   ‘In the end it’s not a question of values, it’s a question of honesty or dishonesty in their application,’ said Mohamed Cherfi, a Tunisian academic and member of the report’s supervisory board.
   ‘There are too many lies in these statements, or too many declarations that are not applied: therein lies the origin of the evil,’ he told journalists.
   The UNDP said corruption had become instutionalised throughout the region in government and business, while clans dominated public life.
   The report urged Arab regimes to address ‘a chronic crisis of legitimacy’, warning that people were feeling alienated and some would turn to violence or fundamentalism.
   ‘If the repressive situation in Arab countries today continues, intensified societal conflict is likely to follow, it said.
   Arab countries faced three choices, according to the UNDP report.
   They could maintain the status quo, but face ‘impending disaster’ with violent upheaval and shifts in power, or gradually accommodate external reform provided it involved ‘respect for Arab ownership and leadership’.
   However, the ideal was dubbed ‘Izdihar’—a ‘peaceful negotiation on the redistribution of power in Arab countries’ that safeguarded freedoms, allowed ‘effective’ participation and included all religious and political groups.

Efforts by Nepal’s ousted politicians to restore democracy will be put to the test from Wednesday when three days of protests are planned against the king Gyanendra’s sacking of the government and imposition of emergency rule.
   Ex-prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, the president of the Nepali Congress (Democratic), who was released from house arrest last month, tried Monday to meet the general secretary of the Nepal Communist Party-United Marxist and Leninist Madhav Kumar Nepal.
   Nepal has been under house arrest along with several of his senior party colleagues since the February 1 royal power grab.
   Security guards kept Nepal inside his house and Deuba failed to meet him, but he vowed to pursue his efforts and to consult across the political spectrum.
   Police forcefully removed journalists at the scene, tearing up notebooks and erasing video recordings.
   The king dismissed his four-party coalition government for failing to hold general elections and to tame the Maoist insurgency that has claimed more than 11,000 lives since 1996.
   On Sunday, the Nepali Congress president, Girija Prasad Koirala, also a former prime minister, and Deuba held talks for the first time since the royal takeover.
   They agreed to set up a joint mechanism to re-unite the two parties, a party source said.
   Deuba’s party split from the Nepali Congress in May 2002 after the king dissolved the 205-member elected parliament on his own recommendation.
   Securitymen arrested the vice president of the Nepal Student Union, Pradip Poudel, and student leader Dharma Khanal when they tried to meet Koirala.
   Koirala, 82, Saturday used his first day of freedom after two months of house arrest to demand the king restore democracy immediately if he wanted to defeat the Maoist insurgency.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, on Monday criticised corruption by both the country’s administration and humanitarian groups, saying none of the aid donated by foreign countries was being distributed fairly.
   ‘I don’t think that the money that has been given to Afghanistan has reached the Afghan coutryside in a proper manner,’ Karzai said at the opening of a conference of major donors.
   ‘We must make sure that corruption in administration, corruption in private sector and corruption in NGOs (non governmental organisations) is handled, in order to respect the donors’ taxpayers’ money.’
   Karzai’s comments came a day after he appointed a committee of local and foreign members to study a draft law aimed at controlling aid agencies, and amid a perception by many Afghans that the groups are wasting money.
   ‘This money is earned by your people. Your people work hard, and we must respect their hard work and the money they send to us and spend it properly,’ Karzai said.

The death penalty ended more lives in 2004 than at nearly any time in the last 25 years, with China accounting for most cases and China and Iran still executing children, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
   The number of death sentences passed last year also hit its highest in almost 10 years, the human rights organisation said.
   ‘This is an alarming rise in executions and the figures uncovered from China are genuinely frightening,’ the Amnesty International UK director, Kate Allen, said.
   The actual number could be much higher as many countries, including China, do not give official figures, Amnesty said.
   ‘These executions are believed to be only the tip of the iceberg, with many countries continuing to execute people in secret,’ Allen said.
   In Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, was asked about the Amnesty report at a regular news conference. Qin had no direct comment, saying only that China was ‘a country ruled by law and rules in accordance with the law.’
   Five countries – Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal and Turkey – abolished the death penalty last year, taking the total of abolitionists to 120, Amnesty said.

At least nine Islamist gunmen including two most-wanted al-Qaeda leaders have been killed in fierce fighting with security forces that raged on in the kingdom for a third day Tuesday, officials and media reports said.
   The gunbattles that erupted Sunday after Saudi security men laid siege to a house in the northern town of Al-Rass are the deadliest since a wave of deadly Islamist violence began two years ago.
   Dubai-based al-Arabiya television reported Monday that two leaders of a Saudi al-Qaeda cell on Riyadh’s list of 26 most-wanted had been killed, identifying them as Saudi Saud al-Otaibi and Moroccan Abdel Karim al-Mojati.
   Two more militants were killed on Tuesday, an interior ministry spokesman said.
   ‘During the past few hours, two armed men were killed and a third gave himself up to security forces,’ spokesman Bragadier Mansur al-Turki said.
   The latest deaths bring to at least nine the number of militants killed in three days of fighting in Al-Rass, which lies about 320 kilometres north of Riyadh. Officials had said Monday seven people were killed and another critically injured while Al-Arabiya previously reported eight dead.

About 300 university students staged a rowdy protest in downtown Cairo on Monday calling for Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, to step down and further democratic reforms.
   The protest, held on the grounds of the American University in Cairo, was the latest in a series of demonstrations aimed at increasing political freedoms in Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country, which Mubarak has ruled since 1981.
   Truckloads of police cordoned off the university during the protest, which comes ahead of planned September presidential elections in which more than one candidate — other than Mubarak — will be able to stand.
   ‘Change for Change ... Not for Bush,’ said one student banner in reference to contentious Middle East reform calls by President Bush.

An Iraqi general was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday while a series of bombs killed a civilian and a US soldier, as talks on forming a new government dragged on more than two months after historic elections.
   The commander of an interior ministry armoured brigade, the brigadier general, Jalal Mohammed Salah, was seized with an undetermined number of bodyguards in the upmarket residential district of Mansur, a ministry official said.
   In Baghdad, a US soldier was killed, and three men and a six-year-old girl wounded, in a bombing in the restive Dura district, medical sources and the US military said.
   Another two blasts around the capital killed a civilian and wounded six, security sources said.
   A Sunni cleric was gunned down in a drive-by shooting while a policeman was killed in a raid in which two suspected guerrillas were wounded and captured, security sources said.
   South of the capital, a municipal councillor in the mainly Shia city of Hilla was killed in another drive-by shooting.
   In the main northern city of Mosul, four Iraqis, one of them a child, were wounded by a roadside bomb and small arms fire aimed at a passing US military convoy.
   The heir to the deposed monarchy Sherif Ali bin Hussein, outgoing president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar, and octogenarian elder statesman have all expressed an interest in the post.
   ‘Things are going badly, people are pushing in different directions,’ said Banyan al-Jarba, an aide to Sherif Ali.
   The majority Shias and second-placed Kurds have agreed to reserve the vice presidency for the ousted Sunni Arab elite, which dominated all Iraqi governments before the 2003 invasion, in a bid to stem its support for anti-US insurgents and return it to the political mainstream.
   The International Committee of the Red Cross meanwhile demanded an investigation into a riot at the US-run Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq.

Roman Catholic cardinals have not yet set a date for the start of a conclave to elect a successor to Pope John Paul II, the Vatican spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, said.
   Navarro-Valls was speaking after the cardinals, who are the highest Church officials after a pope, met for the second successive day following the death of the pontiff late Saturday.
   The spokesman said 91 cardinals are now in Rome, although three played no part in Tuesday’s meeting. Under Vatican rules, a conclave must start between 15 and 20 days after a pope’s death, which would mean April 17 at the earliest. Altogether, 117 cardinals are eligible to vote.
   An estimated 100,000 mourners were lining up near the Vatican at dawn Tuesday to file past the body of Pope John Paul II at his lying-in-state in St Peter’s Basilica.
   Italian media reported that half a million people had queued up to see the body laid out before the basilica’s main altar since the public viewing began around 8:00pm the night before.
   At dawn, the huge crowd which had queued up throughout the night, stretched from the imposing basilica down the broad avenue from the Vatican to the river Tiber and crammed side-streets.
   Such was the crush of mourners that the basilica was closed for little more than an hour to allow cleaning to take place, instead of the three hours which had been scheduled.
   Thousands more, like Alessandro, 35, from Rome, arrived early Tuesday in the hope of catching a last glimpse of John Paul II before heading to work.
   ‘I came this morning early before heading to work. They’re saying there’s a two or three hour wait to see the pope’s body,’ he said.
   Ordinary people began paying their respects late Monday after a day of high ceremony during which the pope’s body was transferred from the Apostolic Palace to the altar in the centre of the massive basilica.

Three years ago Pope John Paul II summoned America’s cardinals to the Vatican for an emergency meeting on the clergy sex abuse crisis. Now that those cardinals have returned to elect his successor, abuse victims fear the lessons from their suffering may be forgotten amid the ceremonies and papal politicking. ‘It seems to me the victims offer a gift to the church,’ said Barbara Blaine, founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
   Sue Archibald, head of the victim advocacy group The Linkup, said she has little expectation that the cardinals will discuss abuse during their conclave to pick a new pope. But she held out hope that John Paul’s successor would be open to hearing from victims in a way she said.
   John Paul was not. The pope had called sexual abuse of children a crime and a sin and said there was no room in the priesthood for predators. He said the crisis had caused ‘a deep sense of sadness and shame.’

Tens of thousands of Sudanese marched through the capital Khartoum on Tuesday in response to the government’s campaign against a UN resolution referring war crime suspects to the International Criminal Court.
   Chanting slogans denouncing the United Nations and the United States, angry protesters stopped at the UN building, then the British embassy and finally the US embassy, where they shouted: ‘Down, down, USA.’
   At the UN building, they called the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, a coward and an American agent.
   The state-owned mobile phone company MobiTel had publicised the protest march through a text message sent out to many subscribers on Monday evening.
   The UN Security Council voted 11-0 last Thursday to refer alleged war crimes committed during more than two years of rebellion in the remote Darfur region to the international court in The Hague – the first such referral.
   But the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, said on Saturday that Sudan would not allow any Sudanese to be tried in courts outside the country. Other leaders and political groups close to the government have taken the same position.
   One of the demonstrators, interior decorator Ibrahim Saleh, said: ‘We refuse to have any Sudanese citizen tried outside the country. This is neo-colonialism.’
   The UN says Sudan has done little to disarm the Arab militia accused of widespread rape, killing and burning of non-Arab villages in Darfur during a two-year rebel uprising.
   More than two million people have fled their homes and tens of thousands have been killed in the Darfur fighting.

Landmines on Kashmir bus route defused
Indian troops Tuesday defused two powerful landmines on the highway to be used by a landmark bus service set to be launched this week to link divided Kashmir, police said. The discovery of the landmines on the heavily-patrolled highway near Palhalan comes before the Thursday start of the bus service between Indian Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani-zone. ‘’Troops detected two roadside landmines buried under soil at Palhalan which were defused later,’ a police spokesman said.
— AFP

Thai urges vigilance in Bangkok after blasts
The Thai government urged residents of the capital on Tuesday to be on the alert for signs of militant attacks following the bombing by suspected Muslim extremists of an airport in the commercial centre of the south. ‘Please help us watch out for any threat, because if it happens it will hurt every one of us,’ said the defence minister, Thammarak Israngura, in the first such appeal since separatist violence broke out in the far south 15 months ago. He said people should watch out for anything suspicious in Bangkok and inform the authorities immediately. ‘We can’t be complacent, we have to take precautions,’ Thammarak told a radio station when asked if he was worried militants, who have confined their attacks largely to the three Muslim-majority far south provinces, would strike in Bangkok.
— Reuters

N Korean bird flu different: expert
The strain of bird flu that has struck poultry in North Korea is different from the one that has killed dozens of people in Southeast Asia, a UN expert said Tuesday after visiting the North. North Korea has killed some 219,000 birds on three farms within a three-mile radius of the capital of Pyongyang, said Hans Wagner, a veterinarian for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. FAO tests confirmed those done by the North that the birds were infected with the H7 strain — not the H5 strain that jumped from animals to humans in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, Wagner said. He arrived Tuesday in Beijing from North Korea. There are nine different varieties of the H5 avian flu virus. One strain, called H5N1, jumped to humans last year in Asia, killing 48 people. Governments of 10 countries slaughtered millions of fowl in order to stop its spread.
— AP

Coal mining deaths in China up 21 pc
The number of deaths in China’s accident-plagued coal mines surged by nearly 21 per cent in the first three months of this year despite a national safety crackdown, the country’s top industrial safety official said Tuesday. Fires, cave-ins and other accidents killed 1,113 miners from January to March, up 20.8 per cent over the same period in 2004, said Li Yizhong, the minister in charge of the State Administration for Work Safety. ‘Since the fourth quarter of last year, several particularly serious accidents have occurred, arousing widespread concern of the public,’ Li said at a news conference.
— AP

Kyrgyz parliament delays Akayev quit vote
Kyrgyzstan’s parliament delayed a vote Tuesday on sealing the resignation of the toppled president, Askar Akayev, after too few deputies turned up for the vote, the deputy speaker, Bolot Shernyazov, said. ‘Since the deputies did not reach a quorum, this has been put off until Wednesday,’ he said. Just 36 of the assembly’s 69 deputies attended Tuesday’s session, which was due to confirm Akayev’s resignation, two short of a quorum–the minimum number of lawmakers who must be present for parliament’s decisions to be valid.
— AFP

US, Ukraine launch ‘strategic partnership’
The US president, George W Bush, and the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, launched ‘a new era of strategic partnership’ between their nations on Monday and Bush said he wanted Ukraine to join NATO and the World Trade Organisation. Bush gave Yushchenko the red-carpet treatment, welcoming him to the White House for the first time since the former Soviet republic went through a convulsive election dispute late last year during which Yushchenko rode popular protests to power over the pro-Moscow prime minister.
— Reuters

French voters rejecting EU
charter: poll
A majority of French voters plan to reject the European Union constitution in a referendum on May 29 but the ‘No’ camp’s lead over the ‘Yes’ campaign has narrowed, according to two opinion polls. Nine successive surveys have now shown more than 50 per cent of voters oppose the treaty, mainly due to discontent with the government’s economic and social policies, raising the prospect of France rejecting the charter and plunging the EU into crisis. A survey by the CSA polling group published on Tuesday showed 53 per cent of respondents would vote against the
constitution.
— Reuters

Annan concerned over Zimbabwe vote
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, was pleased weekend elections in Zimbabwe were relatively peaceful, but was concerned about the fairness of the vote, his spokesman said Monday. ‘The secretary general notes that parliamentary voting held in Zimbabwe on 31 March was conducted peacefully, without the violence that has marred previous elections,’ the spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said in a statement. ‘He is concerned, however, that the electoral process has not countered the sense of disadvantage felt by opposition political parties who consider the conditions were unfair. ‘He believes the government has a responsibility now to build a climate of confidence that will be essential for national unity and economic recovery in Zimbabwe,’ Eckhard said. He calls on all sides to engage in constructive dialogue in the period ahead.’ Zimbabwe’s opposition leader slammed the elections as a ‘massive fraud’ as results showed that the president, Robert Mugabe’s ruling party was closing in on his party’s early lead on Friday.
— AFP