The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Greek parties work for coalition deal
New Democracy, PASOK & Democratic Left in talks

Athens, June 19
Greek political parties meeting on Tuesday said they expected to form a coalition government soon and then seek concessions to the painful austerity measures tied to the international bailout deal keeping the country from bankruptcy.

Conservative New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras, the winner of Sunday's election, has promised to negotiate easier terms for Greece, backed by likely coalition partner Evangelos Venizelos, head of the Socialist PASOK party.

"Greece must and will have a government as soon as possible," Venizelos said after a meeting with Fotis Kouvelis, head of the small Democratic Left party as part of talks to form a cross-party government with New Democracy.

"There is a need to form a national negotiating team that will deal with revision of harsh terms of the bailout deal."

However, hopes that the government may be in place by the end of the day appeared to fade after Kouvelis, whose party opposed the bailout deal in the election campaign, said several points still needed to be negotiated and agreement might take longer.

"There will be a government, but I don't know if it will be formed by tonight. I believe we will have reached an agreement by the end of the week," he told reporters.

Earlier, a senior New Democracy official said he expected that a deal with PASOK would be reached by Tuesday. Samaras, who has three days to form a coalition before his mandate runs out, is due to hold further meetings during the day.

New Democracy and PASOK alternated in power from the fall of military rule in 1974 until last year, when Greece's economic crisis forced the arch rivals to share power in a pro-bailout national unity government.

But PASOK support has plunged this year, leaving it a distant third behind New Democracy and the leftist SYRIZA party, which wants to cancel the austerity measures in the bailout package and negotiate a new "national recovery plan".

There has been a marked shift of tone since the election as leaders of the parties that had previously broadly supported the bailout have talked openly about easing the tough conditions demanded by the European Union and International Monetary Fund.

European partners, notably from the bloc's biggest economy Germany, have held out the prospect of extending some payment deadlines but they have repeatedly insisted that the basic conditions of the deal cannot be renegotiated.

"The new government must stick to its commitments, which the country has agreed on," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a meeting of leaders from the Group of 20 major economic powers.

A senior euro zone official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the terms of the deal were "changeable" and could be "adapted", but there were different opinions in the euro area and in Greece on the scope of such changes. — Reuters

Kabul accuses Pakistan for attack on Shias

Mohammad Esaaq Aloko, Attorney General of Afghanistan, shows the picture of a suspected insurgent of the Taliban during a news conference in Kabul on Tuesday. — AFP

Kabul, June 19
Afghan authorities today said "regional spy agencies" were behind a rare suicide attack targeting Shia Muslims that killed more than 80 persons in a veiled reference to Pakistani intelligence.

Attorney General Eshaq Aloko said two men had been arrested over the December attack, which struck a crowd of worshippers on Ashura, the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, in Kabul.

President Hamid Karzai blamed Pakistani sectarian extremist outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi for the atrocity, which was unprecedented on such a holy day, and urged Islamabad to act.

Aloko said the attack was planned in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar, by "regional spy agencies" aimed at "provoking sectarian violence". "Although the Jhangvi group claimed responsibility, it was masterminded by some spy agencies in our neighbouring countries," Aloko said.

Afghans blame Pakistan for fuelling much of the violence in their country, where the Taliban are leading a 10-year insurgency against the government and 130,000 Western troops.

The prosecutor said one of those arrested came from Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, which borders Pakistan's militant-infested tribal belt, and was paid USD 100 to bring two suicide attackers to Kabul.

"One attacker blew himself up, the second fled the area," Aloko said. He said the two arrested men both confessed over the plot and the case was now closed.

The explosion happened at the entrance to a riverside shrine, where hundreds of Shiites had gathered with men whipping their bare backs as part of the traditional mourning ritual.

The Taliban denied responsibility for the attack, the deadliest in the Afghan capital in three years.

When the Sunni Taliban ruled from 1996 to the 2001 US-led invasion, minority Shiites suffered brutal persecution, but in recent years sectarian violence has been rare. Sectarian attacks are nonetheless common in neighbouring Pakistan. — AFP

Iran, world powers seek to break N-deadlock

Moscow, June 19
Iran and world powers today dug in for a second day of attritional talks in Moscow aimed at breaking an increasingly risky deadlock in the decade-long crisis over the Iranian nuclear programme.

With the United States and Israel refusing to rule out military action and Tehran facing severe economic sanctions, the price of failure in the Russian capital could be high but there was no sign of progress on the first day.

Negotiators from the six world powers asked Iran to scale back its enrichment of uranium, a process which can be used to make nuclear fuel but also the explosive core of a nuclear bomb.

But Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili responded with a five-point powerpoint presentation listing Iran's own demands, an EU official said, apparently leaving both sides talking at cross purposes. "The main stumbling block is the fact the positions of the sides are rather complicated and hard to reconcile," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying. — AFP

Pak ranks 13 in failed states index

Washington, June 19
Pakistan, a country which is run by a military obsessed with India and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pay almost no taxes, has been ranked 13th in the latest ranking of failed states.

The unique ranking compiled by the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine is topped by African countries Somalia (114.9 points), Congo (111.2), Sudan (109.4), Chad (107.6) and Zimbabwe (106.3).

Afghanistan with 106 points is ranked at number 6, followed by Haiti, Yemen, Iraq and Central African Republic.

Pakistan with 101.6 points, the magazine said, is ranked 13, a slight improvement from the previous two years.

In 2011 it was ranked 12th in the list of failed states, while in 2010 and 2009 it was ranked 10th.

"The country is run by a military obsessed with - and, for decades, invested in - the conflict with India, and by a civilian elite that steals all it can and pays almost no taxes," Robert D Kaplan, the chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, wrote for the Foreign Policy.

But despite an overbearing military, tribes "defined by a near-universal male participation in organized violence," as the late European anthropologist Ernest Gellner put it, dominate massive swaths of territory. The absence of the state makes for 20-hour daily electricity blackouts and an almost nonexistent education system in many areas," he wrote.

Explaining the reasons for Pakistan being in the list of a failed state, Kaplan said the root cause of these manifold failures, in many minds, is the very artificiality of Pakistan itself: a cartographic puzzle piece sandwiched between India and Central Asia that splits apart what the British Empire ruled as one indivisible subcontinent.

"Pakistan claims to represent the Indian subcontinent's Muslims, but more Muslims live in India and Bangladesh put together than in Pakistan. In the absence of any geographical reason for its existence, Pakistan, so the assumption goes, can fall back only on Islamic extremism as an organising principle of the state," Kaplan wrote.

"But this core assumption about what ails Pakistan is false. Pakistan, which presents more nightmare scenarios for American policymakers than perhaps any other country, does have geographical logic," he wrote.

Kaplan said only the worst African hellholes, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and Iraq rank higher than Pakistan on this year's Failed States Index. — PTI

Poor show

n The unique ranking compiled by the prestigious Foreign Policy magazine is topped by African countries Somalia (114.9 points), Congo (111.2), Sudan (109.4), Chad (107.6) and Zimbabwe (106.3)

n Afghanistan with 106 points is ranked at number 6, followed by Haiti, Yemen, Iraq and Central African Republic

n Pakistan with 101.6 points, the magazine said, is ranked 13, a slight improvement from the previous two years

n In 2011 it was ranked 12th in the list of failed states, while in 2010 and 2009 it was ranked 10th

IMF bailout fund: BRICS to contribute $75 bn

Los Cabos, June 19
India and four other countries of the five-nation BRICS bloc today gave a big boost to IMF's $430 billion bailout fund for the debt-wracked 17 nation Eurozone pledging to contribute $75 billion with New Delhi's contribution being $10 billion.

The pledge was made at an informal meeting of BRICS leaders presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ahead of the opening of the seventh G-20 Summit in this Mexican resort town. Besides India, the other nations in BRICS are China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa.

According to Indian officials, China has agreed to contribute $43 billion while the contribution from Russia and Brazil will be $10 billion each. The South African contribution is $2 billion.

All the BRICS leaders agreed that the Eurozone crisis threatened global financial and economic stability and that it was necessary to find cooperative solutions to resolve this crisis. The BRICS countries have been the new growth poles of the global economy.

The pledges for fresh contributions were made after the leaders agreed to increase resources available with the International Monetary Fund. In this context, they agreed to enhance their own contributions to the IMF.

This is with the understanding that these resources will be called upon only after existing resources, including the New Arrangements to Borrow, are substantially utilised, an official statement said. — PTI

Manmohan, Obama meet at G20

Manmohan Singh, Barack Obama in Los Cabos. — PTI

Los Cabos, June 19
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President Barack Obama had a brief informal interaction during the G20 Summit, days after the two leaders agreed to work together to address the faltering global economy and the painful Eurozone crisis.

Indian officials said Manmohan Singh and Obama met briefly as the leaders of the Group of 20 leading economies hammered out strategies to deal with the global economic slowdown and the crisis in the 17-nation Eurozone.

The two leaders share an excellent bonhomie, with the 50-year-old President often turning to the 79-year-old economist-turned-politician for advice on economic issues. Singh also had bilateral meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the host country President Felipe Calderon. — PTI