Zardari ‘can quit’ politics
KARACHI, May 2 — The jailed husband of former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto has said he is ready to quit politics and even sacrifice his life to salvage his wife’s political future.

Ocalan’s trial from May 31
ANKARA, May 2 — A Turkish security court has ordered Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan’s trial to begin May 31 on the prison island where he has been held since his capture.

Suu Kyi assails turncoat MPs
YANGON, May 2 — Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar opposition has furiously turned on a group of its MPs, branding them “lackeys” of the junta after they called for talks with the party’s bitter enemies in the military.

Jackson gets 3 US PoWs freed

LIPOVAC (Croatia), May 2 (Reuters) — Three US soldiers were handed over by Belgrade to American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson today. They later reached Croatia on their way to a US army base in Germany.

Witnesses saw the servicemen, captured by the Yugoslav army 32 days ago along the Serbian border with Macedonia, walking past the Croatian border post at Lipovac, raising their hands in the air and singing “free at last, free at last”.

“It was a wonderful feeling, a relief from all the stress and the feelings we’ve been having in captivity,” one of the men, Christopher Stone (25) told reporters after crossing the border.

Rev Jackson, who secured their unconditional release in talks with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said: “This was a diplomatic gesture which requires a diplomatic response”.

The group boarded a bus and, escorted by Croatian military police and embassy vehicles, left for the capital Zagreb from where they will be flown to Germany for reunion with their families.

NATO today welcomed the release of the three men — Steven Gonzales (22) of Huntsville, Texas; Andrew Ramirez (24) of Los Angeles; and Stone of Smiths Creek, Michigan — but it made clear that the campaign against Yugoslavia would continue till Belgrade met the Alliances demands in full.

PARIS, (PTI): NATO finds itself in a precarious situation as its air strikes have only strengthened President Slobodan Milosevic’s political future instead of yielding any concrete results in halting violence in Kosovo.

“We all know President Milosevic is not an angel but NATO bombings have brought Serbs around Milosevic and even his adversaries are solidly behind him. Win or lose, he will go down in history as a martyr,” Ljubica, a Serbian journalist, told PTI over the phone from Belgrade.

With no concrete proposals for peace emerging either from Belgrade or from Brussels, both sides are now digging in for a drawn out conflict. However, many Serbs fear that unless some international mediation halts NATO’s strike from destroying Yugoslavia, it would be a catastrophe for their nation.

Two years ago, Serbs were demonstrating violently in the streets of Belgrade demanding Mr Milosevic’s resignation. There was talk that even the Yugoslavian army could desert him. But by not compromising on Kosovo, Mr Milosevic has not only rejuvenated Serbian pride, but strengthened his position.

Even moderate Serbs were forced to support him after NATO’s failure to contain ‘collateral damage’, a term used for civilian casualties during air attacks. The latest was according to Yugoslavian officials, a missile attack on a bridge near Kosovo capital of Pristina last night killing 60 civilians and injuring many others.

Last night’s incident was not an isolated incident. At least 75 Kosovars were killed when an F-16 fired a missile against a civilian convoy in southern Kosovo last month. Earlier a passenger train in Grdelica, near Belgrade, was bombed killing 16 civilians.

The southern Serbian town of Surdulica bore the brunt of NATO attacks last week when a stray laser guided bomb rammed into a residential area killing over 20 civilians.

Civilian casualties has not deterred president Milosevic who accepts only to an international peace mission in Kosovo and not for a NATO force. Military strategists of NATO, who thought three days of bombing would bring Milosevic in line, are now wondering what this bombing campaign could achieve.

Despite 37 days of intense and sustained bombing the morale of Yugoslavian forces still seem to be high and they are conducting their operations without much difficulty in Kosovo.

NATO’s supreme commander General Wesley Clark a few days ago admitted to the fact that air raids have failed to deter the Yugoslavian army. “They have been reinforced in the last three or four days and there’s an influx of newly mobilised reserves to replace combat casualties,” he said in Brussels.

Some NATO member states are opposed to the creation of a separate state for Kosovars fearing it would open a pandora’s box in the already volatile Balkan region. Kosovo representatives have openly expressed their desire to become part of Albania once they achieve independence.

A ‘greater Albania’ would be a nightmare for Macedonia, where 25 per cent of the population are ethnic Albanians. Macedonians fear that the next unrest could be in their country and unlike Yugoslavia their small armed forces cannot control any rebellion.

Now NATO realises that they are not countering Milosevic alone but the whole of Serbia. Will Serbs give up Kosovo? “It is impossible. Kosovo is in the blood and soul of each and every Serb. Losing Kosovo means a lifelong ignominy for the Serbs,” Ljubica said.

The house that prisoner Mandela built

QUNU (South Africa), May 2 (Reuters) — When the apartheid government released Nelson Mandela from jail in 1990, he set about building a home in the village of Qunu where he grew up and where he’ll return when he retires after elections in South Africa on June 2.

The house is not the glittering mansion built by many an African leaders in their home town, but a replica of the building where Mandela spent the last of his 27 years in jail after he was moved from the prison on Robben Island to the mainland.

In his autobiography, Mandela explains why he modelled his home on the government-built house of a senior warder at the Victor Verster Prison near Cape Town where apartheid leaders held secret talks with him in the late 1980s to negotiate the end of white-minority rule.

Mandela was accommodated alone in the house during the final months of negotiation about his release on February 11, 1990.

“The Victor Verster house was the first spacious and comfortable home I had ever stayed in, and I liked it very much. I was familiar with its dimensions so at Qunu I would not have to wander at night looking for the kitchen,” he wrote.

The one-storey red-brick building is typical of Mandela’s modesty. But it is a palace in South Africa’s poverty-stricken Eastern Cape province where most people still live in thatched mud-brick huts.

Most local children lack shoes and wear threadbare clothes their mud-brick homes are crumbling, fields are eroded by over-farming and litter blows along the village’s dirt roads.

The decay did not escape Mandela’s attention when he made his first trip home after his release from jail in 1990.

“What had endured was the warmth and simplicity of the community, which took me back to my days as a boy. But what disturbed me was that the villagers seemed as poor if not poorer than they had been then,” he wrote in his autobiography.

After five years of rule by Mandela’s African National Congress, residents do not hold their enduring poverty against their most famous son and say life has improved, Qunu now receives water, electricity and telephones for the first time.

Maoists out to disrupt elections

KATHMANDU, May 2 (ANI) — Maoist guerrillas have intensified their violent activities to disrupt the parliamentary election due to begin in Nepal tomorrow.

They ambushed a team of election officers who were on their way to a polling station in a western district yesterday.

Six people, including four police escorts, were injured in the attack. Bad weather prevented a helicopter from coming to the rescue of the victims, two of whom were in a critical condition, according to police.

Maoists have been active over the last few days and “this is an indication that they are actively campaigning to boycott the election,” the Kathmandu Post said. “At night they are campaigning to boycott the election, making door-to-door visits”.

More that 51,000 policemen and officers with standby backing from the army will oversee. The poll has been split into two phases — May 3 and May 17 — to avoid diluting security forces in remote Maoist insurgency-torn districts.

Analysts say Nepal could be heading for another bout of political instability which has hampered its economic development since 1994 elections, which produced a hung parliament and led to a string of coalitions and minority governments.

China rounds up rebels

BEIJING, May 2 (AP) — The police has detained at least 15 Chinese political activists to stop them from planning commemorations of the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations on the 10th anniversary of their violent end, a rights group said today.

The police in the city of Acheng in Heilongjiang province detained six activists from Heilongjiang and two other north-eastern provinces as they were discussing anniversary plans at a restaurant on Saturday afternoon, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said in a statement. Their whereabouts remained unknown today, it said.

In Changsha, capital of the southern province of Hunan, the police detained eight activists and told them to sign a guarantee that they would not participate in a commemoration. But they refused, the Hong Kong-based centre said.

They were all released by yesterday afternoon. But the police was watching them, it said. Three of them were also detained earlier in the week.

Zardari ‘can quit’ politics

KARACHI, May 2 (AFP) — The jailed husband of former Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto has said he is ready to quit politics and even sacrifice his life to salvage his wife’s political future.

“I have no political agenda. I have always been an assistant, I have never been a commander. I have been a soldier who is always ready to march and follow the orders,” Asif Ali Zardari told AFP yesterday.

He was interviewed here after proceedings in a murder case in which he is one of several people accused.

Zardari has been imprisoned for his alleged involvement in a conspiracy to murder Ms Bhutto’s estranged brother Mir Murtaza, who was gunned down with seven of his colleagues in a police shootout in Karachi in September 1996.

The shootout came before the dismissal of Ms Bhutto as Prime Minister by presidential decree in November 1996 for alleged misrule and corruption.

“I am an ordinary member and ready to quit on the orders of Benazir and the party. I am ready to quit politics, even sacrifice my life if it helps the party or its leader,” Mr Zardari said.

“But I would never want ‘Bibi’ (Benazir Bhutto) to leave politics because she is the ray of hope for the masses here.”

Ocalan’s trial from May 31

ANKARA, May 2 (AP) — A Turkish security court has ordered Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan’s trial to begin May 31 on the prison island where he has been held since his capture.

Ocalan, the government’s no. 1 enemy, will be tried on charges of treason and separatism, punishable by hanging.

The court ruling yesterday was taken amid angry protest by people who lost loved ones in clashes with guerrillas in Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting for autonomy in the southeast since 1984.

The defence team was punched by protesters who broke through police protection, the lawyers said.

Some lawyers were punched when they walked into the courthouse, prompting the police to take the legal team downtown in armoured police cars after the hearing. But when they got out, this time the police turned on them, said one of the attorneys, Ercan Kanar.

Suu Kyi assails turncoat MPs

YANGON, May 2 (AFP) — Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar opposition has furiously turned on a group of its MPs, branding them “lackeys” of the junta after they called for talks with the party’s bitter enemies in the military.

“Three of our parliamentarians, who have vowed to fight for democracy and human rights have now become lackeys of the military,” said the statement issued by the National League for Democracy (NLD).

The three MPs, Than Tun, Tin Tun Maung and Kyi Win are longstanding NLD members elected in the party’s huge 1990 poll victory which the government never recognised.

4 die in Java clash
JAKARTA: In a clash between rival Indonesian political parties, four people have been killed, causing fears of bloodshed in the upcoming general election. The clash took place on the main island of Java, where a competition is expected over the control of voters share as the nation goes to polls on June 7. — ANI

Police port attacked
BANGKOK: A Thai outpost manned by four policemen was attacked on Sunday by about 20 armed Myanmarese men and ethnic Karens, who crossed the border in the early hours of the day. The attack took place in Thailand’s northern Mae Hong Son province, about two km from Thailand’s border with Myanmar. It was reported that the police station’s walls had been punctured with about 300 bullets and several grenades. — ANI

Blasts at synagogues
MOSCOW: There were explosions near two Moscow synagogues almost simultaneously on Saturday, though no casualties or damage to the buildings were reported, officials said. One blast ripped through a parking lot about 100 m from the choral synagogue, which is not far from the Kremlin. The parking lot is not part of the synagogue. — AP

11 drowned
HOT SPRINGS, (Arkansas): Eleven persons were killed when an amphibious tourist boat sank in a lake. Divers were searching for a twelfth victim. Police Cpl. Mike Buck said 20 persons were aboard the army-surplus boat, known as a duck because of its use on both land and water. Lake Hamilton, south of this popular tourist town, was crowded with visitors enjoying a warm spring day when the boat took on water on Saturday and sank suddenly. — AP

Quakes in Iran
TEHERAN: Iran was hit by four earthquakes in 24 hours which caused damage but left no casualties, the official Iranian news agency IRNA has reported. Two quakes, measuring 4.2 and 4.3 degrees on the Richter scale, jolted the western provincial city of Baneh on Friday night and Saturday damaging 41 rural homes. Another quake, measuring 3.6 degrees, hit the north-eastern city of Bojnurd on Saturday, Irna sai. — DPA

World’s biggest clock
BEIJING: The Guinness Book of World Records has listed a 3-m-high timepiece made by a Chinese couple as the world’s largest floor-standing clock, an official report said. Xu Jiabao and his wife Luo Xiuqin took 458 days to make the 1.35 m-wide multi-functional clock which boasts of 1,568 parts. The couple live in the rural areas of Changzhou city in east China’s Jiangsu province, where Xu runs a clock-making and repair workshop, Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday — PTI

Ship sinks: 5 dead
MANILA: The bodies of five of the 39 Filipino Fishermen who drowned when their ship sank on Thursday were recovered while 17 others remained missing, as search and rescue operations entered their third day on Sunday. Lieutenant- Commander Cicero Loma, duty officer at the coast guard’s operations centre, said fishermen have also plucked out 17 survivors from the ill-fated mv Jonathan 10. — AFP