Thousands of Thai protesters besieged the prime minister’s temporary offices at an abandoned Bangkok airport Tuesday, on the second day of marches aimed at toppling the elected government.
   Yellow-clad activists took trucks, buses and cars to the old Don Mueang international airport — where premier Somchai Wongsawat set up shop after activists captured the capital’s main government offices in August.
   The show of force came a day after thousands of demonstrators descended on parliament in what they have called the ‘final battle’ against the administration, forcing lawmakers to postpone a joint session.
   ‘There are more than 10,000 of us here and we are prepared for a long siege like at Government House in central Bangkok,’ said Sawit Kaoewan, a leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy. The police confirmed the figure.
   The PAD, which is backed by the old power elite in the military, palace and bureaucracy, accuses the government of being a corrupt puppet of exiled former premier Thaksin Shinawatra , who was ousted in a 2006 coup.
   The alliance has called on the army to intervene and says it wants to change the one-man one-vote electoral system that has delivered victories for Thaksin — who is Somchai’s brother-in-law — and his allies since 2001.
   The police largely withdrew from the airport site overnight and were hardly visible on Tuesday morning, amid fears of a repeat of violent clashes during rallies on October 7 that left two dead and 500 injured.
   They waved Thai flags and rattled the anti-government movement’s signature plastic hand clappers, while most wore yellow clothes that symbolise loyalty to the country’s deeply revered king, AFP correspondents said.
   Protest leaders asked supporters not to occupy Somchai’s office itself — but some went in and out of the building to use the toilets. The PAD meanwhile set up counters to distribute free food and drinks to protesters.
   Somchai is due to fly home early Wednesday from an APEC summit in Peru, and the PAD said it was moving people to the military headquarters where he and his cabinet are expected to hold a meeting. ‘Our guerrillas will chase them,’ said Somsak Kosaisuk, another core PAD leader. ‘If tomorrow Somchai gets off the airplane and wants to hold a meeting at the armed forces headquarters, we will walk there to prevent it.’
   The government said the regular Tuesday cabinet meeting had been put back to Wednesday after the prime minister returns, but said the move had nothing to do with the protests.
   ‘They wanted to blockade the government, they want to step up pressure on us but the government still adheres to peaceful means of negotiation,’ government spokesman Nattawut Saikuar said.

Fresh warnings have been sounded of terrorists carrying out suicide attacks on ministries in the federal capital and the airport in the southern port city of Karachi during the month and security set up beefed up.
   The warnings by the intelligence agencies have been circulated by the interior ministry, which said they could be carried out as reprisals as Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign militant elements, who have suffered badly in ongoing operations by the security forces in the tribal areas.
   According to official figures, more than 1500 Taliban cadres have been killed in the army operations carried out in the Bajaur agency and Swat valley.
   The interior ministry, has warned the November would be a crucial month as terrorists have planned suicide attacks on Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport and various ministries in Islamabad.
   The terrorists have dispatched suicide bombers to Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, the sources said.
   No details about the modus operandi of the terrorists were disclosed in the information conveyed to the ministry by the intelligence agencies, the Daily Times reported today.
   The source added that the information gathering agencies have sent complete details of two would-be suicide bombers recently dispatched by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan to law enforcement agencies.
   Pakistan has witnessed a deadly wave of suicide bombings since the military carried out an operation against militants holed up in the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July last year.
   Hundreds of people, including former premier Benazir Bhutto and a serving general of the Pakistan Army, have died in the attacks. Suicide bombers have struck with high security areas like the garrison city of Rawalpindi and several cantonments.

A leading human rights group on Tuesday accused a pro-government militia in eastern Sri Lanka of being behind a worsening wave of killings and child abductions.
   Human Rights Watch accused the TMVP, made up of former members of the Tamil Tigers who switched sides in the bitter ethnic war, of at least 30 murders and 30 kidnappings in the east of the island in September and October.
   The rights watchdog said the TMVP, which emerged as dominant political force in the east after Tamil Tiger rebels were ejected from the region 18 months ago, was able to function with ‘total impunity’.
   ‘The Sri Lankan government says that the ‘liberated’ east is an example of democracy in action and a model for areas recaptured from the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam),’ said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
   ‘But killings and abductions are rife and there is total impunity for horrific abuses,’ Adams said.
   He called on Sri Lankan authorities to ‘take immediate steps to address the deteriorating human rights situation in the Eastern Province, where there has been an increase in killings and abductions in recent weeks’.
   The New York-based watchdog said it had documented 30 cases of extra-judicial killings in the east in September and October and 30 cases of the TMVP abducting children to use as child soldiers.
   ‘Far from being a reformed and responsible party ready for government, the TMVP is still actively involved in serious human rights abuses,’ Adams said of the pro-government Tamil group.
   ‘Instead of holding the group accountable, the president, Mahinda Rajapakse, government has provided unqualified
   support.’ ‘Many in the East believe that the government has given its blessing for these abuses,’ said Adams.

Thailand’s ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra said that he plans a return to politics in his homeland and said he can fix the turmoil wracking the country, as protests by his opponents drag on.
   Thaksin, who had since his removal in a coup in September 2006 professed his retirement from politics, told Arabian Business magazine that Thailand was suffering after months of anti-government protests.
   The demonstrators accuse the government of being a front for Thaksin.
   ‘The country is going down deeply. The confidence is not there. The trust amongst foreign community is not there. The poor people in rural areas are in difficulty,’ he said in extracts from the interview published on the magazine’s website on Sunday.
   ‘With me at the helm I can bring confidence quickly back to Thailand. We have to find a mechanism under which I can go back, that is why I must tell you that I will go back into politics.’
   The most recent turmoil began in Thailand in late May as opponents of Thaksin took to the streets to protest against the policies of the government elected last December and its links to the former premier.
   Thaksin is also the brother-in-law of Thai premier Somchai Wongsawat. Multi-millionaire Thaksin, who was twice elected, has spent most of his time since the coup in exile abroad and is currently believed to be in Dubai. He was sentenced in absentia last month to two years on corruption charges.
   Thaksin in the interview also criticised the British government, which revoked his visa soon after his October conviction for helping his wife purchase government-owned land while he was in power.

Security forces ambushed and killed scores of Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka on Tuesday, the defence ministry said, adding its troops were poised to take the rebels’ political capital.
   Government soldiers occupying a newly-captured bunker line from the Tiger rebels in the Jaffna peninsula carried out the ambush early Tuesday, the ministry said in a statement.
   It did not say if there were casualties among troops.
   However, the ministry said government soldiers in the northern mainland were set to take the town of Kilinochchi, the political capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
   Heavy fighting was raging along three fronts on the outskirts of Kilinochchi despite monsoon rains, the ministry said.
   ‘Soldiers are busy with strengthening the supply backbone for troops in the forward areas with loads of food, drinking water and medicine being transported there,’ the ministry said.
   ‘Troops await the next move. ‘Kilinochchi we are coming’ is their motto,’ the statement added.
   On Monday, the ministry said 27 soldiers had been killed and another 70 wounded in fighting around Kilinochchi.

Unidentified gunmen shot dead six people in two attacks Tuesday which authorities said were aimed at igniting sectarian unrest in volatile northwest Pakistan.
   The first attack in the garrison town of Kohat left three Shia Muslims dead and another two injured, and was followed by a shooting at a hotel in neighbouring Hangu district, the police and local officials said. Two Shias and one Sunni Muslim were killed in the Hangu attack and nine Sunnis were wounded, the police officer Sajjad Ahmed said.
   ‘The attacks are designed to spur sectarian violence in the region,’ Hangu district mayor Khan Afzal said. The police said the authorities have closed traffic on Hangu Kohat Road and a curfew has also been enforced in nearby Darra Adamkhel. Shias account for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s 160 million-strong, Sunni-majority population.

India told Nepal that it had ‘no objection’ to a peace process in the Himalayan country that was of ‘Nepalese origin and orientation’.
   Favouring building of political consensus for drafting the country’s first-ever Constitution, the external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said all political parties should be involved in the framing of the document.
   Mukherjee, the first high-level Indian leader to visit the land-locked country after its recent transition to democracy, held a ‘very productive’ meeting with the Nepal prime minister, Prachanda, on Tuesday during which issues of bilateral concern, including repair of the Kosi embankment and maintenance of the East West highway figured.
   ‘We have no objection in a peace process that has Nepalese origin and orientation,’ special adviser to Nepal prime minister Hira Bahadur Thapa quoted Mukherjee as telling Prachanda.

The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed ‘at least 500’ suspected political opponents in the last two years, Human Rights Watch said in a report published Tuesday.
   The New York-based rights campaigners accused president Joseph Kabila’s government of ‘brutal repression,’ saying ‘about 1,000 more’ have been detained since July 2006 elections aimed at bringing democracy to the vast central African nation.
   The NGO said many of those held reported having been tortured.
   The report stated that government security forces deliberately killed or summarily executed an estimated 500 individuals mainly in north-west and southern DR Congo — away from the current conflict with rebels centred on eastern Nord-Kivu province — and that unlawful force was used to intimidate and eliminate political opponents.
   HRW found that Kabila himself set the tone and direction by giving orders to ‘crush’ or ‘neutralise’ the so-called ‘enemies of democracy,’ during the elections.
   The rebellion in eastern DR Congo stems from an unresolved conflict from the country’s 1998-2003 civil war that ended with a transitional government and the elections two years ago — but HRW says the ongoing strife there must not be allowed to detract from abuses elsewhere.
   ‘While everyone focuses on the violence in eastern Congo, government abuses against political opponents attract little attention,’ Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher in HRW’s Africa division, said in a statement.
   ‘Efforts to build a democratic Congo are being stifled not just by rebellion but also by the Kabila government’s repression.’
   Through 250 interviews with victims, witnesses and officials, HRW documented how Kabila subordinates using state security forces cracked down on perceived political opponents, especially suspected supporters of defeated presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba, and members of a political-religious group Bundu Dia Kongo in Bas Congo that favours greater provincial autonomy.
   State agents tried to cover up the killings of opponents by burying the bodies in mass graves or dumping them in the Congo river, and then blocking investigations by UN human rights staff, the 96-page HRW report said.
   Those who ended up as detainees told HRW of beatings, mock executions and the use of electric batons on their genitals and other body parts. Many claimed they were forced to sign confessions saying they were involved in coup plots against Kabila.
   ‘As they beat me with sticks and whips, the soldiers repeatedly shouted, ‘We will crush you! We will crush you!’ Then they threatened to kill me and others who opposed Kabila,’ a political party activist detained in March 2007 told HRW.
   At least 200 people are still being held in politically related cases, HRW estimated.
   The HRW report also noted that armed groups linked to Bemba and the BDK have been blamed for killing state agents and civilians, but added that the police and army response, while appropriate, was often conducted with excessive force.
   The HRW report also criticised foreign governments seeking to win favour with the Kabila government for keeping silent about increasingly repressive rule.

Syria’s bid for aid in planning a nuclear power plant poses no bomb-making risk and a Western move to block the project threatens to discredit the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA’s director said in remarks released on Tuesday.
   Major Western nations want the project shelved because Syria is under International Atomic Energy Agency investigation over US intelligence indicating it tried secretly to build a nuclear reactor designed to make plutonium for atomic bombs.
   Their push has met resistance in the IAEA’s board of governors from Russia, China and developing states who see no grounds for ‘politicising’ IAEA nuclear energy development aid without proof a country has violated non-proliferation rules.
   An IAEA report last week said a Syrian building demolished in an Israeli air raid last year bore similarities to a nuclear reactor and uranium particles, possibly remnants of pre-enriched nuclear fuel, had been found in the area.
   But it stressed the findings were preliminary and more on-site checks, and Syrian documentation to prove its denials of covert nuclear activity, were needed to draw conclusions.
   The IAEA director, Mohamed ElBaradei, said the intervention by Western powers against Syria had no legal basis and there was no way Syria could abuse the plant study for military ends.
   Denying nuclear aid due to unproven allegations ‘is not part of our lexicon, it’s not part of our statute,’ he said in remarks to a closed board meeting on Monday and released by his office on Tuesday.
   The disputed $350,000 project is a ‘technical and economic feasibility and site selection’ study for a nuclear power station in Syria. It would run from 2009 to 2011.
   ‘All the equipment that is provided is relevant to the project, and is of an innocuous nature. None of it requires any (nuclear) safeguards,’ he said referring to IAEA oversight meant to prevent diversions into nuclear bomb-making.
   ‘This project did not parachute out of the sky. We have been working with Syria since 1979 ... on different aspects of the feasibility to introducing nuclear power... Thirty years!’
   ‘You all represent governments of law and not of men. The IAEA technical cooperation program should not be subject to political considerations,’ ElBaradei said.
   He warned if the Syria project were blocked over ‘political considerations,’ the IAEA would lose credibility with developing states seeking peaceful nuclear power and it would discourage cooperation by states under investigation.

Zimbabwe’s humanitarian crisis has reached a ‘critical level’ with cholera killing hundreds across the country, the opposition said Tuesday ahead of political talks in South Africa.
   Negotiators for president Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change are due to meet Tuesday in South Africa in a bid to revive a stalled unity accord signed two months ago.
   ‘The situation on the ground in the country has reached a critical level (meaning) that an agreement has to be reached,’ MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.
   But he warned: ‘It’s difficult to be hopeful when you are dealing with an insincere, deceitful and dishonest party like ZANU-PF.
   ‘There are also challenges around the issue of facilitation’ by former South African president and formal mediator Thabo Mbeki, Chamisa said without giving details.
   Mbeki brokered the accord signed on September 15, calling for Mugabe to remain as president while MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai takes the new post of prime minister. Tsvangirai won a first-round presidential election in March, but pulled out of the run-off accusing Mugabe’s party of orchestrating deadly attacks against his supporters.
   The unity accord was meant to end the political crisis, but the deal has stalled over disputes about how to divide control of key cabinet posts and which powers to grant the new premier.
   MDC’s chief negotiator Tendai Biti said that he had arrived in South Africa for the talks, but was still waiting to find out where the negotiations would take place.
   ‘I have no idea’ where the venue will be, he said.
   The political vacuum has exacerbated Zimbabwe’s mounting humanitarian crisis, the cholera epidemic killing nearly 300 people across the country and spilling across the border into South Africa.
   Nearly half the population is expected to need emergency food aid in January, while the economy has been shattered by the world’s highest rate of inflation, last estimated at 231 million percent in July.
   The South African president, Kgalema Motlanthe, warned Monday that unless a political deal is reached, ‘the situation will get worse and will implode or collapse altogether.’
   Zimbabwe’s powerful southern neighbour has taken a tougher line on the spiralling crisis, freezing 30 million dollars (23 million euros) in farm aid until a unity government is installed.
   Mugabe’s regime has shown no sign of relenting, and on Tuesday accused former US president Jimmy Carter and ex-UN chief Kofi Annan of plotting to overthrow the government, after rejecting their humanitarian mission to the country.

The top UN humanitarian official on Tuesday asked how long the world could fund relief efforts in Sudan’s Darfur, where aid workers are attacked almost daily after nearly six years of war.
   John Holmes, the UN emergency relief coordinator, made the remarks on his third visit to Darfur while visiting Kalma Camp, which houses around 100,000 of the 2.7 million people displaced by the fighting in western Sudan.
   The consequences of an uprising by ethnic rebels against the Sudanese government in February 2003 and the ensuing repression from the standing army and Arab militias sparked the world’s biggest humanitarian relief effort.
   ‘I think in some ways it has continued to deteriorate in the sense that there’s still displacement going on, there’s still violence. I think it’s not, in many cases, an emergency,’ Holmes told reporters.
   ‘People are reasonably well settled in these camps. Unfortunately that’s a problem in itself but people are not dying of starvation.’
   ‘The problem is that people have been in camps four or five years now, how do you tackle that problem... how long can we go on like this?’ asked the UN supremo on humanitarian aid.
   On Thursday, the United Nations launched a formal appeal for 1.56 billion dollars from donors to bankroll aid work in Sudan that is expected to cost a total of 2.2 billion dollars in 2009.
   ‘This is a billion-dollar operation to help two-thirds of the population of Darfur.

Yemeni authorities have made contact with Somali pirates who are demanding two million dollars to release a Yemeni cargo ship they seized in the Gulf of Aden, officials said on Tuesday.
   ‘The pirates are demanding a ransom of two million dollars,’ said one official, declining to be named. The vessel was on its way from Yemen’s port of Mokalla to the island of Socotra when it was seized.
   According to the defence ministry’s web site, the cargo was seized a week ago. It belongs to a Yemeni businessman and was loaded with cement and 517 tonnes of iron for a building project in Socotra. It was carrying a crew of two Yemenis, two Panamanians and three Somalis, the interior ministry said.