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India’s two main parties, Congress and the Hindu nationalist BJP, are battling to forge alliances to gain control of a key Indian state after elections produced a hung parliament.
   Leaders of the two parties were trying to woo independents in order to secure power, with Congress officials anxious to derail the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s resurgence.
   Bihar, with a population of 80 million people, is the second biggest supplier of MPs to national parliament. Political developments at state level are seen as having an impact on national politics further down the line.
   With only seven of 243 seats still to be declared Monday, Bihar’s ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal had won 73, the Lok Janshakti Party 29 and Congress 10. For a majority, a party or a coalition needs to have at least 123 seats.
   The three parties are partners at national level but bitter political compulsions and caste politics made them each go their own ways at state level in Bihar, resulting in the splitting of the vote.
   The opposition BJP benefited from the infighting to emerge with 87 seats and political analysts said it possibly could wrest power from the RJD’s president, Laloo Prasad Yadav, who has ruled Bihar for 15 years.
   The BJP has already offered chief ministership to LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan, who has so far declined to state his position in the jockeying.
   The outcome of the Bihar vote has created strains within the federal coalition but according to analysts not enough to affect stability of central government.
   Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi was to meet Yadav and Paswan separately on Monday and Tuesday in a bid to stitch up a solution that would keep out the Hindu nationalists—even if it means rule by central government, in Bihar, party sources said.
   ‘The effort will be to somehow stop the Hindu nationalists from forming the government in Bihar—even if it means not having a government for some time,’ political analyst Yashwant Deshmukh said.
   ‘If the BJP alliance is able to form a government, it will be (a big) achievement that could even make up for their defeat in parliament last year,’ Deshmukh said.
   The BJP lost national elections held last April/May to the Congress and subsequently lost state elections in October in western Maharashtra, where India’s commercial hub of Bombay is situated.
   The party has been looking for a comeback and a win in Bihar, where it has been in the opposition for 15 years, could provide that trigger, Deshmukh said.
   ‘Nothing can be better for a down and out BJP than a government in Bihar where they have been fighting Laloo Yadav for 15 years,’ Deshmukh said.
   ‘And if this happens, Yadav will go all out in blaming the Congress and the LJP for leaving him in the lurch at the polls.’
   More bad news for Congress came from the neighbouring tribal state of Jharkhand where the BJP alliance was Monday poised to return to power after a decision by Congress and the RJD to fight the elections separately and presented a divided opposition.
   The only good news for India’s long-ruling party came from the third state where elections were held in stages in February, the northern farm state of Haryana where it swept the elections, riding on the back of a solid anti-incumbency wave which decimated the ruling Indian National Lok Dal—a former ally of the BJP.
   Ruling coalition is facing its first fissures since coming to power last May after a key ally lost elections in eastern Bihar state but there is no threat of the Congress-led government falling, analysts said Monday.

Nepal’s army, which backed king Gyanendras February 1 seizure of power, is responsible for widespread enforced disappearances and rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
    In the course of their nine-year battle with Maoist rebels, ‘Nepali security forces have established themselves as one of the worlds worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances,’ the group said in a report.
   It said local human rights groups had recorded more than 1,200 disappearances in the past five years alone.
   ‘Given the scale of disappearances we have documented, the heightened role of the army after the kings seizure of power is frightening,’ said Brad Adams, Asia director of the New York-based group.
   Gyanendra a month ago sacked the government and declared emergency rule, saying the previous ruling coalition could not deal with the rebels who are fighting to establish a communist republic in the world’s only Hindu kingdom.
   Shortly after the power grab, the king made an offer of unconditional peace talks to the rebels, who had branded him a ‘national betrayer’. Security forces said the guerrillas face tough action if they refuse the call.
   ‘Maoist forces have a horrendous record of killings, torture and intimidation, but the response cant be to unleash an army that has been responsible for so many disappearances and other egregious human rights abuses,’ Adams said.
   The international community should act immediately to prevent a deepening ‘disappearances’ crisis in the wake of the royal takeover, he added.
   The 171-page report documents more than 200 enforced disappearances it says were perpetrated by Nepal’s army and police.
   The group said its research had indicated that the actual number of ‘disappearances’ may be significantly under-reported since many families feared to approach the authorities.
   In almost all cases documented in the study, witnesses claimed that individuals who ‘disappeared’ had last been seen in the custody of security forces, who had rounded them up in large scale operations, at checkpoints, on the streets or from their places of work or study.
   In many cases, particularly where the victims have been missing for years, ‘it is likely that they were the victims of extrajudicial execution while in the custody of the security forces,’ the report said, adding that only in one case had the death been officially confirmed.
   ‘Disappearances in Nepal have become an integral part of the counterinsurgency campaign, not just the aberrant actions of some bad apples in the army,’ said Adams.
   ‘Those in power—at present, the king and his new government—are responsible for ending these abuses. Thus far, instead of taking measures to end the practice, senior officials have been covering them up.’
   Human Rights Watch said the ‘overwhelming impunity enjoyed by Nepali security forces and the sweeping powers granted to them by draconian anti-terrorist legislation’ are significant factors leading to the ‘disappearances’ crisis.

Hundreds of Southeast Asian migrants gathered outside the UN office in Malaysia Monday hoping to win temporary refugee status while thousands of others went into hiding ahead of a crackdown on illegal immigrants, officials said.
   Malaysia is set to launch a large-scale operation against hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants on Tuesday.
   The operation to round up, whip and deport illegal immigrants, mainly Indonesians, marks the end of an amnesty which has twice been extended at Jakarta’s request.
   Some 300 people from Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia’s Aceh province lined up Monday at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees hoping to secure UN support to remain in Malaysia.
   Zaw Aung from Myanmar said he had been in Malaysia for 10 years illegally along with his wife and two children.
   ‘With this crackdown, my friend who has been giving me shelter has told me to leave his house because he fears he may also be arrested. I have no home now. Please help me,’ he said.
   The prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, on Monday urged officials involved in the crackdown to work within the law to prevent any abuse of power.
   But his assurance failed to dampen the concerns of rights groups which say the operation is open to abuse.
   ‘There is a high potential for human abuses to occur considering the magnitude of the operation,’ the National Human Rights Society secretary general, Elizabeth Wong, said.
   Amnesty International earlier this month urged Malaysia to halt the planned deportation of illegals amid fears some could face execution or torture in their home countries.
   Migrants from Myanmar, Nepal and Aceh could be subjected to serious human rights violations if they were sent home, it said.
   Malaysia is deploying tens of thousands of volunteers and officials to hunt down the illegal immigrants.
   Some 35,000 volunteers who have received special training would be involved in the operation along with hundreds of immigration and police officials, he said.
   The crackdown would be Malaysia’s largest blitz to flush out illegal immigrants in three years. A similar nationwide sweep was carried out in 2002 following the end of a four-month amnesty programme.
   Before the recent amnesty began on October 29 last year, Malaysia estimated there were more than a million illegal workers in the country, mostly from Indonesia but also from the Philippines, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.
   Nearly 400,000, mostly Indonesians, left without facing any penalty during the first three months of the amnesty, but others have remained, clinging to jobs in the construction, plantation and service industries in the face of unemployment at home.
   Outside the Indonesian mission, hundreds of illegals were waiting for buses to transport them to Port Klang to board an Indonesian navy ship.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said he would not tolerate attacks such as last Friday’s suicide bombing in Israel and reaffirmed his commitment to finding peace.
   In an interview with Britain’s Independent newspaper published on Monday, Abbas blamed an unnamed party for sabotaging peace efforts.
   ‘We believe peace is possible now and we are ready to negotiate with Israel to reach a true and lasting peace,’ Abbas said ahead of a meeting in London on Tuesday to discuss Palestinian reforms.
   ‘As for the suicide bombing last Friday, such actions will not be tolerated by us as they are against the Palestinian interests.’
   He confirmed Israel had shared information with the Palestinian Authority in the hunt for the organisers of the Tel Aviv nightclub attack which killed four Israelis and wounded dozens more.
   The Palestinian Authority has arrested three suspects.
   Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Israel has also blamed Damascus, saying leaders of Islamic Jihad in Syria ordered the attack. Syria has denied responsibility.
   A senior Palestinian security source said over the weekend that initial investigations implicated Hizbollah.

The former US president, Bill Clinton has begun the second day of a visit to Taiwan as independence activists reacted with irritation to his support for Beijing’s ‘one China’ policy.
   Clinton has also upset China with his visit to Taiwan, during which he met the pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian, on Sunday evening and again on Monday.
   Clinton also met business leaders Sunday and reportedly told them he has no doubt China would take military action if Taiwan moves towards independence, regardless of US objections.
   ‘The ‘one China’ policy protects Taiwan,’ he was quoted by the China Times as saying, referring to Beijing’s contention that Taiwan is a part of China awaiting reunification.
   The comment upset some pro-independence groups.
   ‘It hurt Taiwan people’s feeling,’ said Su Chin-chiang, chairman of the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
   ‘He does not need to speak for the People’s Republic of China.’
   Taiwan and China have been governed separately since they split in 1949 after a civil war. But China still sees the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.
   China views Chen as a dangerous ‘splittist’ who is heading down the road towards formal independence—a move that it would see as an act of war.
   Clinton’s visit to Taiwan, coming on the heels of his trip to the mainland to promote AIDS awareness, irritated China.
   It said he should honour past US promises made to Beijing on the Taiwan question—such as abiding by the one-China policy and opposing the island’s independence.
   Clinton denied his visit marks any policy shift. ‘I sincerely stand by the one-China policy ... I sincerely hope to see peace in the Taiwan Strait. At the same time I urge them both to solve their disputes peacefully,’ he said in an interview in Tokyo.

Britain’s prince Charles told tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka he was saddened by their loss and the United Nations got ready to report on the region’s progress in recovering from the disaster.
   Charles, who arrived by helicopter in Sri Lanka’s Batticaloa region, met survivors and aid workers Monday, saying he was ‘terribly upset’ by the devastation from the tsunami that killed more than 31,000 people in the former British colony and left another 1 million homeless.
   ‘I feel awful,’ he was quoted as saying by Britain’s Press Association after meeting Red Cross volunteers.

India raised annual defence spending by a modest 7.8 per cent on Monday, which analysts said may not be enough to buy new combat planes and submarines for the world’s fourth largest military.
   In the annual budget announced on Monday, the finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, set annual military expenditure at 830 billion rupees in the year to March 2006, up from last year’s 770 billion rupees which was a spike of nearly 17 per cent over the previous year.
   ‘If you were modernising the military, you would need a steady flow of funds. It is a bit worrying that outlay on capital in the defence budget is less than last year,’ said Uday Bhaskar, who heads the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, a government-funded New Delhi think-tank.
   India, which is in the midst of a slow peace process with Pakistan, has long cited threat perceptions from Pakistan and giant neighbour China to justify its military expenditure.
   Pakistan said the nuclear rivals must resist a debilitating arms race.

The United States is considering purchasing military equipment from Taiwan as the Pentagon seeks to reduce costs by diversifying its sources of arms supplies, it was reported Monday.
   A group organised by the Comparative Testing Office of the US Department of Defence is scheduled to arrive in Taipei Saturday to evaluate the island’s capability of supplying the equipment, the United Daily News said.
   The trip will come as the US Department of Defence seeks to increase its procurement of military equipment from Asia Pacific, where the manufacturing cost is only one-third to one-fifth of that of the United States, it said.
   The group, composing of five military officers and a civilian official,  would meet Taiwanese defence and economic officials and high-tech firms in a five-day visit, the daily said, citing local defence sources.

Right-wing extremists have made 70 death threats against the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in the past three months over his plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip, according to the head of the domestic intelligence service Shin Beth.
   Avi Dichter was quoted by Israeli media as telling Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting that many of the threats referred to the fate of the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by Jewish extremist Yigal Amir in Tel Aviv nearly 10 years ago.
   ‘Yigal Amir is alive, Rabin is dead, and Sharon is also going to die,’ said one threat, while another charged that ‘the government has declared war on the Torah and Judaism.’
   Sharon told his ministers that he was not bothered by the threats, which, he said, reflected a wider ‘malaise’ in Israeli society.
   The premier, who was once seen as the ultimate champion of the settlers, revealed earlier this month that he had hired security guards to protect the grave of his late wife after extremists threatened to dig up her body.

Two top US senators called for a tougher stance against Russia, after a landmark nuclear fuel deal between Moscow and Tehran.
   Influential Senator John McCain, a former Republican presidential candidate, called for Russia’s exclusion from a G8 meeting later this year and has also introduced a Senate resolution urging the US president, George W Bush to take action to suspend Moscow from the exclusive club.
   His remarks came after this week’s meeting between Bush and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Slovakia, where the US leader expressed concern to his Russian counterpart about Moscow’s approach to democracy.
   Washington and its European allies should tell Putin, ‘Vladimir, you’re not welcome at the next G8 conference’—at least to start with,’ McCain told Fox News. ‘That has some zymology associated about it.’
   ‘We should be worried about this latest deal between Russia and Iran, because Iran does not need nuclear power, and obviously this is a regime which became much more oppressive and repressive over the last couple of years.’
   The accord Sunday between Iran and Russia on Sunday paves the way for the firing up of the country’s first atomic power station, a project the United States alleges is part of a cover for weapons development.
   ‘I think this latest step of the Russians agreement with the Iranians calls for sterner measures to be taken between ourselves and Russia,’ McCain said.
   ‘It has got to, at some point, begin to harm our relations, because we can’t stand by and allow Russia to continue to behave—it’s almost aberrational.’
   McCain said developed countries should also give Russia the cold shoulder for its failure to adhere to democratic principles.
   ‘Vladimir Putin seems to me to be acting somewhat like a spoiled child. He tried to interfere in the elections in Ukraine–He throws people in jail. He now is repressing the press. He is now appointing governors of all the provinces in Russia,’ the Arizona Republican said.
   Fellow Republican senator Lindsey Graham said Washington should ‘make a full-court press to get Russia to come to realise that a nuclear Iran is not a stabilising influence; it’s a destabilising influence.’

Humanitarian agencies have condemned ‘hypocritical’ efforts to help the world’s poorest nations and claimed they receive only a fifth of global aid.
   Timed ahead of an international conference on aid in Paris, a new report calls for wide-scale reforms of how the £30 billion annual handouts are distributed.
   Jointly authored by Oxfam and Action Aid, the study accuses wealthy countries of failing to deliver on pledges to halve world poverty by 2015.
   It also claims only half of aid is spent on health, education and basic services.
   Patrick Watt, Action Aid policy officer, said: ‘Our report tells a sorry tale of muddle and hypocrisy, dithering and stalling.
   ‘The world’s poor are cast unwittingly in the role of fall guys.
   ‘If ministers in Paris fail to take the steps needed to make aid more effective, the UN’s anti-poverty targets may end up as museum pieces in the Louvers.’
   International development secretary, Hilary Benn, will attend the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference, with colleagues from other nations.
   They will assess progress on the group’s Millennium Development Goals, which aim to assist one billion people living in poverty.
   However, the report claims up to 40 per cent of all aid is tied to overpriced goods or services from the donor country.

Human Rights Watch raised a red flag Monday over the US plans to deploy a new system of remote-controlled anti-personnel mines in Iraq.
   The New York-based rights watchdog said the US Army had failed to answer critical questions regarding the potential harm the mines might pose to civilians.
   The new system, called Matrix, allows a soldier with a laptop computer to detonate Claymore mines remotely via radio signal from several kilometers away.
   While Claymores normally propel lethal fragments from 40 to 60 meters (130-200 feet) across a 60-degree arc, Human Right Watch said US Army tests indicated that the hazard range for the new system was as far as 300 meters.
   ‘A faraway blip on a laptop screen is hardly a surefire method of determining if you are about to kill an enemy combatant or an unsuspecting civilian,’ said Steve Goose, executive director of the watchdog’s arms division.
   Goose also questioned whether the mines could be inadvertently set off by civilians themselves.

N Korea accuses South of violating
sea border
North Korea’s navy on Monday accused South Korea of sending warships into its territorial waters off its western coast in ‘military provocations’. The North’s navy command said in a statement the South’s violations occurred several times on February 24, 27 and 28. ‘We warn the South Korean military authorities that their act of perpetrating military provocations... would be a foolish act of digging their own graves,’ it said. South Korea did not immediately respond to the statement. Seoul has rejected similar accusations as part of the North’s military propaganda aimed at highlighting a disputed sea border in the Yellow Sea.

Snow kills 61
in Japan
Heavy snow since December has killed 61 people across Japan, making it the deadliest winter in nearly two decades, with most of the victims elderly people who slipped shovelling snow off their roofs. The deaths, reported in nine of Japan’s 47 prefectures, are the highest since 82 people were killed in the winter to early 1986, Fire and Disaster Management Agency data showed as of the weekend. The first fatality of the season was an 82-year-old who fell nearly three meters off his snowplow in December, followed by 30 deaths each in January and February. Fifty of the 61 people killed were aged over 60, with most of them slipping from their roofs.

Five Abu Sayyaf men killed in Philippines
Five members of the al-Qaeda-linked Muslim Abu Sayyaf group were killed in a firefight Monday while 10 others surrendered to troops in the southern Philippines, officials said. Army Special Forces troops clashed with an Abu Sayyaf unit near the town of Indanan on Jolo island, leaving five of the gunmen dead and two soldiers wounded, said local military commander Brigadier-General Agustin Dema-ala. Ten Abu Sayyaf gunmen gave up their weapons to the navy in Sanga-sanga island, part of the Tawi-Tawi group near the Malaysian side of Borneo island, Commodore Rufilo Lopez said. Their names were not released. The Abu Sayyaf is a small group of Islamic militants which has been linked by Washington and Manila to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

Ten killed in Nepal bus accident
At least 10 people have been killed and 15 injured after their bus plunged into a gorge at Lekhnath Marg in western Nepal, police said Monday. ‘A bus carrying 25 passengers fell into a gorge killing three on the spot and seven others on their way to hospital,’ said a police spokesman in Kaski district where the accident occurred Sunday night. ‘Of the 15 injured, the condition of at least five is serious,’ police said. The cause of accident was not immediately known. The accident came a day after Maoist rebels lifted an indefinite transport blockade which had been in effect for two weeks. The rebels called the blockade to protest the February 1 sacking of the government by king Gyanendra, who assumed absolute power and declared emergency rule.
— AFP