Lords deflect ejection bid
LONDON, March 31 — The British aristocracy fired its first shot early today, in what is expected to be a lengthy, but ultimately doomed battle, to fight its ejection from the House of Lords.

Coalition govt formed in Paraguay
ASUNCION, March 31 — Paraguay’s new President has sworn in the country’s first coalition government since 1946, while his predecessor started a life in exile after being granted asylum in Brazil.

‘5 lakh people’ died in Rwanda genocide
PARIS, March 31 — The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in a 1994 genocide were motivated not by tribal hatred but by a naked desire for political survival, said a new report on the slaughter released today.

‘White House website hacked’

NATO rejects peace offer

LONDON, March 31 (Agencies) — NATO today expanded its bombing campaign on Yugoslavia and launched fresh attacks on Serbian targets after rejecting President Slobodan Milosevic’s ceasefire offer while Russia decided to despatch warships to the zone to monitor the burgeoning Kosovo crisis.

According to Russia’s NTV channel, a flotilla of seven ships including anti-submarine, missile carrying frigates, a reconnaissance vessel and escort ships of the Black Sea fleet would move to the Adriatic Sea.

"In accordance with the international law, Russia plans to send Black Sea fleet ships to the region of conflict," Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev said.

Justifying fully his decision to send the fleet, Mr Sergeyev said: "There they (the fleet) will assess the situation."

A day after US President Bill Clinton turned down the truce offer, Russia blamed the Atlantic alliance for undermining its bid to defuse the Kosovo crisis and President Boris Yeltsin insisted that Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s peace initiative had yielded "positive results".

Meanwhile, amid fresh attacks on Serb positions in Yugoslavia, the allies authorised NATO supreme commander General Wesley Clark to expand "number, type and scope" of the bombing targets to inflict "more pain" on the Yugoslav military and send a clearer message to President Milosevic to end the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

In Brussels, NATO said it had destroyed or severely damaged about 30 Yugoslav aircraft.

Nato Secretary-General Javier Solana today said in Paris that the alliance was not considering deploying ground troops in Kosovo "for the time being" despite the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

BELGRADE: NATO bombings of the Belgrade area have killed eight persons, both soldiers and civilians, and injured 22, independent local radio said on Wednesday, quoting the Yugoslav Capital’s Military Hospital Director.

Lt-Gen Aco Jovicic said those who died were brought to the hospital already dead in order to be identified according to radio B-92.

The victims came from both ranks of security forces and civilians. Twentytwo civilians, soldiers and police personnel had been admitted to the hospital, he said.

Meanwhile the USA took possession of Yugoslavia’s Embassy here several days after Belgrade announced it was severing diplomatic ties with Washington, the State Department said.

The operation took place just after midnight and a State Department security agent stood guard outside the door of the embassy early Wednesday morning.

The State Department added that its personnel also had taken possession of the Yugoslav Ambassadorial residence.

The Yugoslav diplomats in the compounds had left Washington for New York and would be returning soon to Belgrade, according to the State Department.

Kosovar leader, doctors ‘executed’

VIENNA, March 31 (AP) — The Kosovo Liberation Army, a small rebel group fighting for independence in the Serb province, is barely holding on in the wake of the massive onslaught by Serb forces, a regional rebel commander has said.

Mr Ramush Harjredinaj told Associated Press by satellite phone yesterday that the rebels have given up attacking the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and are concentrating on protecting what’s left of the ethnic Albanian community in Kosovo.

“The civilian population needs our protection, certainly the elderly, the women and children,” he said. “We have to do everything we can for the people.”

Serb forces have been massacring and hunting ethnic Albanian civilians in an effort to drive them into Albania or neighbouring areas, he stated. In the absence of international monitors and aid organisations, many doctors and pharmacists have been executed.

“It’s no longer war, it’s pure tyranny,” he declared.

NATO has said it had received reports that Mr Fehmi Agani, an ethnic Albanian negotiator at the peace talks, was executed on Sunday and that others had gone into hiding.

The Serbian media centre in Pristina, the capital, claimed there was no evidence to support the accusations.

Few details about the KLA are known, with the group revealing little about itself. Most estimates put the number of KLA fighters at more than 10,000.

In Switzerland, a KLA spokesman said that the Serb attacks would make it difficult for Kosovo to deal with Serbia even as an autonomous region, as envisioned by a peace plan the ethnic Albanians signed.

After this, we can’t imagine life together with Serbia,” said Mr Bilall Sherifi, a delegate to the failed peace talks earlier this year at Rambouillet, France. He admitted that since the bombing began, the KLA no longer knew the whereabouts of many members of the delegation.

KUKES (Albania): More refugees joined the tens of thousands of others overwhelming Kosovo’s neighbours today as international relief agencies and governments prepared to rush supplies to ease the worsening humanitarian crisis.

The NATO estimates 118,000 refugees have reached Albania and Kosovo’s other two neighbours, Montenegro and Macedonia, as a result of a Serbian campaign against the majority ethnic Albanians in Kosovo that intensified after Allied airstrikes began last Wednesday.

Albania has received the most. Macedonia says it cannot accept any more. Already some 30,000 have found their way to Macedonia, which is 50 per cent more than it says it can handle.

Macedonian army and security forces yesterday allowed thousands of refugees to descend from a mountain where they were stranded for three days. Some arrivals said two infants, a young man and two elderly people died there.

Macedonian officials slowed others trying to flee Yugoslavia by car.

An official in Montenegro, the smaller of Yugoslavia’s two provinces, said 25,000 new refugees have been registered there in the past three days alone.

The humanitarian situation is alarming, said Mr Djordje Scepanovic, the Refugee Commissioner in the pro-Western Montenegrin government.

Nine refugees have died in the small hospital in Kukes, Albania, which is struggling to care for those in need.

Hospital Director Bajram Cenaj said some patients suffered gunshot wounds and a few had been beaten by Serb forces. Most were simply too old or weak to survive the forced journey.

We’ve helped them, but we can’t keep them here forever, Mr Cenaj said. For the moment, “we’ve stopped local people unless it’s an emergency.”

In Geneva, Kris Janowski of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said about 550,000 refugees had now left Kosovo since Serb-ethnic Albanian tensions worsened more than a year ago.

International relief agencies and governments have started rushing supplies to refugees in recent days.

A transport plane supplied by the British Government was shuttling supplies from Copenhagen, Denmark, to the Alabanian capital of Tirana, British and UN officials said.

In Brussels, the European Union released £ 10 million ($ 10.7 million). European Union Humanitarian Affairs chief Emma Bonino is to travel to the region today to assess the situation.

Lockerbie bombing
All set for handing over suspects
From Ian Black in London

ARRANGEMENTS for the surrender of two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing are on track for next week, President Nelson Mandela of South Africa told the Libyan leader, Col Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday.

The official Libyan news agency, Jana, said Mr Mandela, the key mediator in the eight-year quest to bring the perpetrators to justice, assured Colonel Gaddafi that the deal was proceeding as planned.

“[Mandela] confirmed to brother leader [Gaddafi] that things were going as desired and in accordance with the agreement with the United Nations over the Lockerbie issue,’’ Jana said.

South Africa and Saudi Arabia helped to persuade Libya to agree to extradite the two men by April 6, for trial in the Netherlands under a uniquely constituted Scottish court.

Mr Mandela, who has had a close relationship with Colonel Gaddafi since his support for the African National Congress (ANC) during the struggle against apartheid, clinched the deal when he visited Tripoli on March 19.

Arrangements for the transport of the two men have been made secretly by UN chief legal officer Hans Corell. They are expected to be flown to the Netherlands without any prior announcement. Libya is unlikely to want to trumpet their surrender, while Britain and the USA are sharply aware of the legal proprieties now that a criminal trial finally seems possible.

The suspects are expected to be arrested by the Dutch police and then extradited into the custody of Scottish officers already on stand-by in the Netherlands.

The UN Security Council said last week it would abide by its resolutions to suspend sanctions, imposed in 1992 and tightened in 1993, as soon as the suspects arrived. Sanctions, including an air and arms embargo and a ban on some oil equipment, can be lifted within 90 days at the recommendation of the Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan.

The USA and Britain say they have convincing evidence that Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah planted the suitcase bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, in the worst act of terrorism in British history. A total of 270 persons were killed in the air and on the ground.

If Mr Mandela is right, and Colonel Gaddafi keeps his pledge, then the surrender will be a triumph that caps seven months of often nail-biting secret diplomacy set in train by the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, who persuaded a reluctant USA to go along with an idea opposed by many of the American relatives of the Lockerbie dead.

In a dramatic policy reversal, London and Washington announced last August that the suspects — allegedly both intelligence officers — can face a panel of Scottish judges, but not a jury, at a former NATO air base near Utrecht, where a courtroom and bomb-proof underground cells have been prepared for what could be one of the most gripping criminal trials of the century.

Britain has gone to extraordinary lengths to coax Colonel Gaddafi into compliance, gambling that he will be prepared to sacrifice two junior officers in return for guarantees that senior security and intelligence chiefs will not be implicated and damage to the regime contained in return for an end to sanctions.

It has agreed that, if convicted, the two men would serve any sentence in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison, under the supervision by UN monitors on site It has given assurances that the trial was not intended to undermine the Libyan Government.
— The Guardian, London

6 ex-PMs to contest Nepal poll

KATHMANDU, March 31 (AFP) — In a stark reflection on Nepal’s troubled political history, six premiers from the past decade are among a record 2,224 candidates contesting May general elections amid death threats by Maoist rebels.

The candidates, representing 42 political parties for the two-phase elections on May 3 and 17 were approved by the Election Commission yesterday.

As Nepal prepares to form its eighth government in 10 years, Maoist extremists have urged a boycott of the elections, warning that those who take part “will have to pay with their lives.”

The Maoists, who launched a “people’s war” in 1996, want the constitutional monarchy replaced by a people’s republic.

They say polls under the present format would only return the same “corrupt and immoral politicians” to power.

In clashes between police and the insurgents over the past three years, more than 650 persons have been killed.

Since 1990, when Nepal overthrew the 30-year-old partyless panchayat system and introduced a multi-party democracy, the country has had seven governments, four of them since the Maoists launched their war.

Only the Nepali Congress (NC) party, which has ruled for seven years collectively with four governments, has been in power longer than 10 months in any term. But even the NC faces dissent within its ranks with more than 100 rebel members contesting the polls against official party candidates.

Winnie sues Mandela over house
From Chris McGreal in Johannesburg

Nelson Mandela is being sued by his former wife, Winnie, over ownership of the small Soweto home they shared briefly until he was jailed in 1963.

The lawsuit concerning the matchbox house, which some call a shrine and others a tawdry tourist attraction, is the latest public battle since the couple’s bitter divorce three years ago.

President Mandela gave the house to the Soweto Heritage Trust last year to administer as a public museum. But Mrs Madikizela-Mandela argues that her former husband was not the legal owner and that she wants to run her own museum.

Mrs Madikizela-Mandela has promoted the house in Vilakazi Street, Orlando West, as a tourist attraction in recent years. Among souvenirs sold to foreign holidaymakers who came by the bus-load were bottles of soil from the garden.

One angry neighbour protested by painting “Soweto is not a zoo” on a wall opposite the house.

When Mr Mandela moved into the house 40 years ago, blacks were not permitted to own property outside designated “homelands”. Instead, Mr Mandela had to acquire a permit to live in the house which he rented from the council.

According to his legal submissions, he remained the lessee throughout his time in prison. The council then sold Mr Mandela the property in 1997 for the equivalent of about (pounds sterling)350.

But his former wife claims the sale was illegal because it deprived her of residency rights.

Court papers filed by Mrs Madikizela-Mandela say that the council failed to take into account that she lived in the home for many more years than her former husband, who returned to it only briefly after his release from jail, and that her children’s “navels” — umbilical cords — are buried on the property.

Mrs Madikizela-Mandela twice applied to buy the house in 1993 but was refused permission because she was not the registered tenant.

The Soweto Heritage Trust argues that she has not resided in the house for several years but lives instead at a palatial home built for the couple on Mr Mandela’s release from prison.

The case is expected to be heard later this year.
— The Guardian, London

Lords deflect ejection bid

LONDON, March 31 (AFP) — The British aristocracy fired its first shot early today, in what is expected to be a lengthy, but ultimately doomed battle, to fight its ejection from the House of Lords.

The Lords voted by 192 to 126, a majority of 66, for a critical amendment to a legislation which proposes an end to the centuries-old right for 750 barons, viscounts, earls and dukes to sit and vote in the upper chamber.

The vote of 3.50 a.m. (IST) came at the end of a marathon 30-hour debate on the House of Lords Bill.

For the vast majority of hereditary members, the debate on the Bill could be their last ever chance to speak in the chamber.

The amendment claimed the Bill “radically alters the historic composition of the House of Lords for the ruly party’s political advantage” without agreement on the future form of the House “and without making it more democratic”.

While an embarrassment for the Tony Blair government, the defeat will not prevent the legislation from continuing through Parliament.

The Lords have no constitutional power to reject the will of Blair’s Labour majority in the House of Commons. But they can delay legislation by an extended debate and disrupt the government’s tightly scheduled legislative programme, and the level of support for today’s vote signaled trouble ahead for Blair.

UK lottery to fund homeless Indian kids

LONDON, March 31 (IANS) — Britain’s national lottery has granted Rs 25 million for setting up new services to help homeless children in Indian cities.

The money will be used to fund the Child Line service launched by Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Maneka Gandhi last year.

“The funds will be used for services we are providing to support more than 30 million homeless children in eight cities,” Ms Maneka Gandhi told IANS here.

“There is a possibility that the national lottery grant will be increased,” she said, who secured the grant after discussions with managers from the lottery. The first lot of the money will be spaced over four years.

The money will be used to supplement the Indian government funding for several reforms in orphanages and other services for children, Ms Maneka Gandhi said. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are expected to be involved closely with new services for children.

The Child Line service in India is modelled partly on the service with the same name in Britain. The Child Line in Britain offers telephone counselling, with more than 100 volunteers handling up to 2,000 calls a day.

“The difference in our service is that we have to bring children in,” said Ms Maneka Gandhi. “These children often have no support at all and we try to help them to the best of our ability,” she said.

The Child Line service in Britain supported the Indian application for funds from the National Lottery. It is expected to continue fundraising efforts for services in India.

Funding from Britain’s national lottery will be used also to improve services in detention centres, many of which are “hell-holes,” Ms Maneka Gandhi said. “Some of them do not have bathrooms even,” she said.

“Too often children in such homes die or become criminals,” she said. “We are also trying to get more of these homes adopted by corporate houses,” she said. Already two centres have been adopted by multinational companies and two more are in the process of being handed over to corporate houses for funding support.

Such changes are being supported by the Indian government funding, Ms Maneka Gandhi said. The government will provide safety nets in case any private company withdraws support. The centres will be managed by NGOs, she said.

The ministry has set up new monitoring systems to oversee spending, Ms Maneka Gandhi said. “We don’t want a stich-button job,” she said. Government money was earlier handed out to NGOs, of which 60 per cent did not exist, she said. Now NGOs will monitor work done by other NGOs, she said.

Coalition govt formed in Paraguay

ASUNCION, March 31 (AFP) — Paraguay’s new President has sworn in the country’s first coalition government since 1946, while his predecessor started a life in exile after being granted asylum in Brazil.

President Luis Gonzalez Macchi yesterday named four members of the Opposition in his 10-strong Cabinet, with the remaining portfolios going to members of the ruling Colorado party, which has governed the country for 52 years.

The foreign affairs portfolio went to Miguel Saguier, (53), leader of the opposition Authentic Liberal Radical Party and a lawyer who teaches at Catholic university here.

Paraguay’s last coalition government, in 1946, collapsed after only six months, plunging the country into a 10-month civil war.

Mr Gonzalez Macchi, (51), was sworn in on Sunday night, barely an hour after embattled leader Raul Cubas stepped down following six days of violence unleashed by the assassination of the country’s vice-president.

Officials said elections would be held within six months and that Mr Macchi would represent the coalition for the presidency with an opposition member as his running mate.

‘5 lakh people’ died in Rwanda genocide

PARIS, March 31 (Reuters) — The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in a 1994 genocide were motivated not by tribal hatred but by a naked desire for political survival, said a new report on the slaughter released today.

At least five lakh people died during the 13-weeks of killings in the Central African Nation in mid-1994, said the report of over 900 pages, entitled “Leave None To Tell The Story.”

The death toll mentioned in the report, drawn up by the Paris-based, International Federation of Human Rights Leagues and the USA-based, Human Rights Watch is well below estimates given by others, including those UN officials who spoke of up to 800,000 slaughtered.

The report is based on four years of research in Rwanda, hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents never before made public, according to its authors.

Its key finding disputes the notion that the genocide, which began on April 6, 1994, after Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by assailants, was “An explosion of rage... motivated by old tribal hatreds.”

‘White House website hacked’

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) — The Secret Service is investigating whether anti-NATO activists hacked the White House website after Internet users complained they could not access it over the weekend, the White House has said.

Wired News, an Internet news organisation, said hackers opposed to the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia claimed credit for an all-day outage at the website, http://www.whitehouse.gov, on Monday.

Misuse of N-waste
LONDON: A leading US nuclear scientist has warned of the potential misuse of nuclear wastes by rogue states such as Iran and Iraq to produce nuclear weapons and called for stronger control measures to check the trend. Mr David Albright, Head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said recently that two by-products of nuclear waste, neptunium 237 and americium 241, could be used to make nuclear weapons. — PTI

$ 81 m for smoker’s kin
PORTLAND: A Portland jury awarded $ 81 million on Tuesday to the family of a chain-smoker, who died of lung cancer in 1997. The verdict was the largest amount for punitive damages awarded to the plaintiffs ever in an individual case against a tobacco manufacturer. The smoker’s family had sued the company Phillip Morris, alleging that it continued to sell a dangerous product even after the connection between smoking and lung disease became known. The man, who died at the age of 67, had smoked cigarettes for more than 40 years. His widow and his children had described him as a nicotine addict during the trial. — DPA

Cubans turn to yoga
WASHINGTON: An increasing number of Cubans are turning to alternative forms of medicine such as China’s tai chi and yoga to remain healthy with allopathic drugs fast disappearing from the shelves due to a crippling US embargo. With one out of every five doctors across this Communist nation prescribing natural products pharmacies are well stocked with herbal and homoeopathic medicines, media reports here said. — PTI

SA signs N-treaty
UNITED NATIONS: South Africa, which announced six years ago that it had a nuclear weapons programme and has since disbanded it, made official its ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty. The South African mission delivered the paperwork to the United Nations on Tuesday, becoming the 31st party to the treaty, which bans all nuclear explosive testing. In 1993, then-President F.W. De Klerk confirmed that South Africa’s military-industrial complex had found a way to circumvent anti-apartheid sanctions and develop a nuclear capability. But Mr De Klerk said all weapons had been destroyed as the cold war ended. — AP

$ 4,23,000 raised
WASHINGTON: The India Development and Relief Fund (IDRF), a voluntary tax-exemption organisation here, has raised $ 4,23,000 to meet the long-term needs of the poorest of the poor in India. The fund headed by Dr Vinod Prakash, said in its annual report that in 1997-98 it had raised $12,000 more than the previous year (411,000) to serve the needy. — PTI