A leading US-based human rights group said Saturday that president Pervez Musharraf’s end to the state of emergency in Pakistan would not restore real constitutional rule.
   ‘Musharraf’s so-called return to constitutional rule provides legal cover to laws that muzzle the media and lawyers and gives the army a licence to abuse,’ said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch.
   ‘A genuine restoration of Pakistan’s constitution would require Musharraf to return to the constitution and judiciary that existed before November 3.’
   The president imposed emergency rule on that day, citing a wave of Islamist violence and what he said was an interfering judiciary. He was due to lift it later on Saturday.
   Under the emergency, the constitution was suspended, thousands were jailed, lawyers who opposed the president were purged and new curbs were slapped on the media, including a ban on defaming the president or the armed forces.
   In a statement, the rights group pointed to a series of decrees issued under emergency rule, including a ban on any later challenges to the legality of the emergency and an amendment to allow the military to try civilians.
   ‘The military is Pakistan’s principal human rights abuser, yet Musharraf has changed the law so that it can play judge, jury and executioner,’ Hasan said.
   Human Rights Watch also noted what it said were the government’s ‘new powers to disbar lawyers’ who oppose the government.
   ‘Lawyers led the movement to restore constitutional rule and emerged as Musharraf’s most formidable opponents,’ said Hasan.
   ‘This is a despicable attempt to end political opposition by threatening the livelihoods of government critics.’
   The rights group said that Musharraf’s amendments ‘serve the purpose of institutionalising impunity for the military’s human rights abuses and muzzling lawyers and the media.’
   It said the United States and Britain, two of Pakistan’s key backers, should speak up against the president, a key ally in the US-led ‘war on terror’.
   
   India will continue doing
   business with Musharraf
   India’s top security official said New Delhi regards embattled Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf as an ‘elected president’ and will continue doing business with him, according to a report Saturday.
   Musharraf on Saturday lifted a nationwide state of emergency imposed last month after he was re-elected to the presidency in October.
   ‘I think as of now he is an elected president,’ national security adviser MK Narayanan told India’s private CNN-IBN news network in an interview.
   ‘... but the legitimacy of his presidentship will have to be declared properly after the new parliament approves of it with a two-thirds majority,’ Narayanan said.
   Pakistan goes to polls on January 8 to elect a new parliament.
   Musharraf will be the ‘legitimate’ president after the parliament approves of his presidency, Narayanan said.
   ‘We’ve done business with him in the past and I think we will continue to do business with him,’ he said.
   India has so far reacted cautiously to developments in Pakistan, expressing ‘regret’ at Musharraf’s imposition of emergency law, under which thousands were jailed, judges sacked and the media curbed.
   Musharraf’s critics say the credibility of the January 8 election was compromised after he sacked judges who could have heard legal challenges to his election as president.

Five ethnic Indians held under a Malaysian law that allows detention without trial should be charged in court immediately to avoid the risk of rights abuse, Malaysian opposition figure Anwar Ibrahim said on Friday.
   Authorities have said the activists, members of a group that staged a massive anti-government protest last month, were detained on Thursday for up to two years on the grounds that their actions had threatened national security.
   The group, the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) alarmed the government by bringing more than 10,000 ethnic Indians onto the streets of the capital to complain of racial discrimination.
   Anwar, a former deputy prime minister who was once himself locked up under the colonial-era law originally designed to fight communists, said the legislation was easy to abuse.
   ‘We are, as a principle, against the Internal Security Act and the use of the Act against anyone,’ he told reporters.
   ‘We have evidence, we have experience of the abuse of the Act against political personalities and civil society leaders throughout the years after independence.’
   Anwar was himself beaten by the then police chief during his own detention under the Act in 1998, for leading anti-government protests demanding political reform in the wake of being sacked by former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.
   The deputy prime minister, Najib Razak, said the government had been very patient with the Hindraf group, and acted only after having given it a sufficient chance to conform to the law.
   ‘The public wanted the government to take a stern action much earlier but we were very patient and tolerant,’ state news agency Bernama quoted Najib as saying. ‘When the ISA was invoked, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone.’
   Thursday’s arrests aimed to curb the political space for debates on economic policy, corruption and other social challenges, Amnesty International said in a statement.
   ‘We assert that the ISA is the biggest symbol of torture and injustice in Malaysia and we hereby call on the executive to abolish the Act,’ the rights group added.

India on Saturday successfully tested its surface-to-air Akash missile for the third time in as many days, defence officials said.
   The missile blasted off from the Chandipur-on-Sea testing site in Orissa state on India’s eastern coast on Saturday afternoon, officials said.
   The two earlier tests this week at the testing site 200 kilometres northeast of state capital Bhubaneswar were also described as successful.
   The 700-kilogramme Akash, whose name means ‘sky’ in Hindi, has a striking range of 27 kilometres and can carry a 55-kilogramme warhead.
   Tests of the missile are likely to continue this week as India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation finetunes the weapon for use by the Air Force, the officials said.
   The tests came days after India announced plans to increase its nuclear capability with a ballistic missile capable of hitting targets up to 6,000 kilometres away.

At least 31 suspected Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in clashes with Sri Lankan troops across the island’s embattled northern region, the defence ministry said on Saturday.
   The latest reported deaths took the number of rebels the military says it killed to at least 296 since the start of December.
   The government says only a handful of its troops have died during that period.
   The rebels were killed in separate attacks around Mannar, Jaffna and the rebel-held Wanni during a 24-hour period ending early Saturday, the military said.
   It placed its own casualties at one soldier injured. Independent verifications of casualty claims are rarely possible and journalists are not allowed to visit rebel-held areas in the north.
   Each side is known for making sharply differing claims about casualties suffered by the other.
   There was no comment from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who are fighting to carve out an independent homeland for minority Tamils in the majority Sinhalese nation.
   Tens of thousands of people have died on both sides in one of Asia’s longest-running civil wars, which erupted in 1972.

Two bombs struck the Afghan capital Saturday, one of them killing five civilians, while nine people died in new attacks in a Taliban insurgency that is in its bloodiest year so far, officials said.
   A car-bomb placed outside Kabul police headquarters tore through a busy area of the city, killing at least four civilian bystanders, officials and a witness said.
   The second bomb was remote-controlled and detonated near the city’s main jail, causing only minor damage to a military vehicle, the defence ministry said.
   The extremist Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the car-bomb, saying it was aimed at the city police who share a compound with the governor’s office and courts.
   ‘Five civilians have been killed and two police have been wounded. Some civilians have been wounded too,’ interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.
   The government ambulance service said however one of two dead bodies it evacuated was that of a policeman. Seven wounded people were also evacuated, said the regional coordinator of the Kabul Ambulance Service, Badrt-Rija Badar.

The Russian army’s chief of staff accused the West on Saturday of playing politics with European arms control and warned that the launch of US interceptor missiles could trigger a Russian missile strike.
   ‘Western states have deliberately turned an agreement on European arms control into an instrument to achieve political aims’ against Russia, Yury Baluyevksy said at a press conference broadcast on state television.
   Russia on December 12 walked away from the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty, a key Cold War agreement that limits the stationing of troops and heavy weapons from the Atlantic coast to Russia’s Ural mountains.
   Baluyevsky criticised the NATO alliance’s eastward expansion to the Russian border but said that Russia had ‘no plans for massing troops’ despite now having the freedom to do so by suspending the treaty.
   Russia said it pulled out of the CFE because of the failure of 26 NATO members to ratify the revised 1999 version of the treaty.
   NATO countries have said they will only ratify once Moscow lives up to a pledge to pull its troops out of former Soviet republics Georgia and Moldova.
   Russia’s decision to suspend adherence to the treaty has raised a storm of protest from Western governments, with NATO calling the move ‘deplorable’ and the US State Department saying Russia was ‘wrong.’ Baluyevsky also criticised US plans to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic as part of a missile defence shield aimed, Washington says, at guarding against a potential missile threat from Iran.
   US offers made to Russia in negotiations over the missile defence shield were ‘unacceptable’ and the US plans could not be interpreted in any other way than as being aimed against Russia, Baluyevsky said.
   Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Kislyak reinforced that message at the press conference, saying that results of US-Russia consultations over the shield had been ‘disappointing.’
   Baluyevsky also warned that the launch of an interceptor missile by the United States could trigger a Russian missile strike because it could be mistaken for a ballistic missile aimed at Russia.
   ‘We are talking about the possibility of a retaliatory strike being triggered by the mistaken classification of an interceptor missile launch,’ he said, adding that Russian defences were controlled by an automatic system.
   Baluyevsky’s comments came a day after Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko pledged to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that he would side with Moscow in the dispute.

There were fears Bolivia could tip into civil unrest Saturday, as its four wealthiest provinces move to declare autonomy amid warnings from president Evo Morales that the army could intervene.
   Demonstrations were due to take place during the day in the eastern regions of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando in which the governors were to formally announce greater self-rule.
   Chuquisaca, the region that is home to the constitutional capital Sucre, also said it was gathering signatures on a petition with a view to calling a referendum soon on autonomy. A sixth province, Cochabamba, was wavering.
   The leaders of the regions are protesting Morales’s moves to overhaul the constitution to give himself greater powers and to redistribute much of the eastern provinces’ wealth to the poor Andean highlands.
   But the president on Friday threatened soldiers would step in if autonomy was implemented.
   ‘There are the armed forces and the Bolivian people to make sure the country will never disintegrate,’ he said.
   ‘The autonomy plans seek to divide Bolivia, but the unity of the country is not up for debate.’
   The defence minister, Walker San Miguel, has ordered the army to be ready to protect public buildings if necessary, and 400 extra police have been sent to Santa Cruz, the country’s economic heartland and opposition bastion with a population of 1.5 million. He has ruled out a state of emergency, however.

A US envoy urged feuding Lebanese politicians on Saturday to elect a new president to restore ‘dignity’ to a position vacant for three weeks, as France warned a vote set for the coming week is the ‘last chance’ to resolve the crisis.
   ‘The United States believes that it is time now to elect a new president,’ US Middle East envoy David Welch said in Beirut, ahead of a new session of parliament called for Monday after eight attempts to elect a president failed.
   ‘It is time for this process to be completed. There is no reason for any further delay,’ he said.
   ‘We believe that members of parliament must fulfil their duty... to restore dignity and respect to the most important Christian office,’ Welch said. ‘We know there are many pressures from within and from outside, but the American people and the administration will support Lebanon,’ he said.
   Lebanon has been without a president since Emile Lahoud stepped down on November 23 without a successor in place, triggering the country’s worst crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.
   The Western-backed government of prime minister Fuad Siniora has been unable to reach agreement with the Syrian- and Iranian-backed opposition on a replacement for the pro-Syrian Lahoud.Welch held a one-hour meeting with pro-opposition parliament speaker Nabih Berri, during which he said he ‘made several points to the speaker’, ahead of separate talks with Siniora and ruling majority leader Saad Hariri.

The police have launched a massive manhunt for three ‘black men’ who are suspected to have killed two doctoral students from Andhra Pradesh at a Louisiana State University apartment as the Indian consulate here established contact with the campus authorities to ascertain more details about the double homicide.
   The incident took place on Thursday night inside an apartment at the Edward Gay complex in Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
   The victims, Chandrasekhar Reddy Komma and Kiran Kumar Allam (33), were pursuing their PhD in biology and chemistry respectively. Both Indian students had been shot once in the head, according to Charles Zewe, a spokesman for the LSU System.
   Sgt Don Kelly of Baton Rouge police department said they were looking for three black men who were seen hurriedly leaving the vicinity of the apartment where the murders occurred.
   ‘The men got into a small to mid-size four-door car, possibly occupied by a fourth person (driver),’ he said, adding the car was seen leaving the complex with its headlights turned out.
   The suspects involved in the home invasion, however, have not been identified.