Raja Pakse Visits Tirupathi Tomorrow

Sri Lankan president Raja Pakse is going on a tour to the religious sacred locations including the birthplace of Buddha and the Tirupathi temple in Andhra Pradesh.

Earlier, the first three day tour to Nepal to visit Buddha’s birthplace Lumbini was successfully completed. He was received with splendor by vice president Sujatha Koirala and cultural minister Mindenra Rijal.

On Friday, he unveiled the new Buddha statue constructed there and will continue his journey to Tirupathi. Under heavy security, he would be landing in Renigunda airport and go to Tirumala by car. The entire way is under tight security and he will finish off his trip to go back to Sri Lanka.


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British couple sailing yacht off Somalia kidnapped by pirates, held on cargo ship

MOGADISHU, Somalia – Paul and Rachel Chandler, a retired British couple who sailed to exotic locales aboard their 38-foot yacht, said in one of their last cheery messages they would likely be “out of touch for some time.”

After disappearing for a week, a sombre Paul Chandler is back in contact, saying by telephone Thursday that he and his wife are being held captive by gun-toting pirates who stripped their vessel of everything of value.

Despite the presence of warships and aircraft from more than a half-dozen nations, the pirates prowl the Indian Ocean off Somalia seemingly at will, pouncing on pleasure craft, fishing vessels and huge cargo ships.

With the recent end of monsoon season in East Africa, there have been a rash of attacks as pirates return to the open seas. More than 190 crew members from eight ships are being held. The latest seizure on Thursday was of a Thai fishing vessel carrying 21 Russians, two Filipinos and two Ghanians, the Seychelles coast guard said.

Paul Chandler told Britain’s ITV News in a phone call that he and his wife were being held aboard a container ship anchored a mile from the Somali coast. They apparently had been briefly taken ashore.

A fisherman told The Associated Press he saw two boats carrying eight pirates and a white couple come ashore in the village of Ceel Huur, just north of Haradhere, a notorious pirate stronghold. Dahir Dabadhahan said six luxury vehicles carrying about 30 other pirates cleared bystanders from their path.

“The pirates fired into the air, waving us to move away,” he said.

At a European Union summit in Brussels, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appealed for the couple’s release. Foreign Secretary David Miliband pledged that Britain would use “all the mechanisms at our disposal” to secure their safe return.

Chandler told ITV the pirates crept aboard his yacht at night while he was asleep.

“They kept asking for money and took everything of value on the boat,” Chandler, 59, said in the interview before the phone connection was abruptly broken off.

The British navy found the yacht – empty – in international waters earlier Thursday. Warships had been searching for the Lynn Rival since it sent out a distress signal Oct. 23.

Chandler later told the BBC in a telephone interview that he is being treated well by his captors.

“We are well, and being looked after OK,” Chandler said. “Food is OK.”

He did not appear to be able to speak freely.

Asked whether he was in Somalia, he said: “I can’t answer that,” and responding to a question about whether he had a message for British officials, he said there was “nothing I can say.”

A pirate spokesman who identified himself as Abdinor said the bandits will negotiate a ransom for the couple. The British government does not make or facilitate “substantive concessions” to hijackers, including ransom payments, the British Foreign Office said.

“We do expect a ransom demand,” Rachel Chandler’s brother, Stephen Collett, told the BBC. “The problem is they are not rich people. Most of the money is tied up with their yacht and other communications equipment, which is on board the yacht.”

Paul Chandler’s sister, Jill Marshment, pleaded for the Chandlers’ release and also said they weren’t wealthy. Even with only two aboard, the couple described the Lynn Rival as cramped. It is powered mostly by sails and has a small outboard engine.

“They are resilient people. They won’t be weeping,” Marshment said. “Instead, they’ll be thinking: ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to say?”‘

Paul Chandler has been identified in the British media as a retired construction site manager, while Rachel, 55, is described as an economist. The couple, married for 28 years, took early retirement about three years ago and have spent six-month spells at sea. They have sailed to the Greek islands, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Oman, Yemen, India, the Maldives and the Seychelles, chronicling their voyage on a Web log.

The Chandlers were well aware they have been sailing through pirate territory, according to their blog entries.

A March 2008 post reported that they “didn’t see any pirates, just a few fisherman inshore and large ships passing further offshore.” In February, they reported passing through a “high risk of piracy area,” travelling in a convoy of five yachts for protection.

They wrote in June that another couple had recently left for Tanzania after delaying their departure “because of the Somali pirate problem.”

According to an Oct. 21 entry, the Chandlers planned to set sail the next day and be at sea for eight to 12 days, heading south toward Tanzania.

“We probably won’t have satellite phone coverage until we’re fairly close to the African coast, so we may be out of touch for some time,” they wrote.

The last message on the blog was posted Oct. 23, the day the pirates came, and cryptically read: “Please ring Sarah” – a possible reference to Rachel’s sister, who lives in the London area.

Piracy expert Nick Davies of the Merchant Maritime Warfare Center said the couple should have known better.

“They sailed into the lion’s den and they did it knowingly and they should be sternly told they have created an international scenario that was entirely avoidable,” Davies said.

Somalia has not had a functioning government for 18 years. The multimillion-dollar ransoms the pirates regularly collect are a strong lure for young gunmen in a country where nearly half the population is dependent on aid.

The high-seas hijackings have persisted despite an international armada of warships deployed by the United States, the European Union, NATO, Japan, South Korea and China to patrol the region.


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Eelam the only solution: Vaiko

In a fiery speech, MDMK general secretary Vaiko yesterday declared only an independent state of Eelam would be a permanent solution to the long sufferings of Lankan Tamils who were now lodged in refugee camps in the island nation.
Speaking at an awareness meeting organised by Lankan Tamil Protection Movement, MDMK chief said at at time when the world nations have expressed sympathy and concern for the plight of internally displaced Tamils in Sri Lanka, Chief Minister M Karunanidhi was taking part in functions that eulogise him.

He cited a reported in London-based Times that said more than 20,000 bodies of Lankan Tamils were left to rot in the open land and corpses have spread out with bones sticking out on the surface. ‘Wheres the Indian media is under duress not to report such incidents in war-torn Lanka,’ he charged. Vaiko said more than a lakh of Lankan Tamils were killed during the ethnic genocide and it was claimed in posters that a four-day visit by Tamil MPs from India to Sri Lanka had given freedom to refugees in the internally displaced camps. ‘Those who are responsible for such posters must be sent to mental asylum,’ he said.

A solution to the ethnic problem was not possible by just sending out Tamil refugees living in these camps in the island nation for they should be able to enjoy true freedom in the first place. Further, Vaiko charged the Indian government was responsible for the current plight of Lankan Tamils as they supplied military weapons and aid to the Lankan Army to defeat the LTTE. Back in Tamilnadu, 14 youths set themselves ablaze for the cause of Lankan Tamils and Karunanidhi had not expressed any condolence for them, he claimed. Rather, the Chief Minister diverted the attention of the people by undertaking a token fast, Vaiko decried.

When the Tamilnadu legislature passed a unanimous resolution for ceasefire in Lanka and a search for permanent solution to the ethnic strife, Lankan President Rajapakse during a visit to Delhi had declared that there was no question of halting the war against Tamil Tigers. Vaiko pointed out why the Chief Minister had not protested then against this remark of Rajapakse during his visit to Delhi. He charged Karunanidhi had betrayed Lankan Tamils despite the world community and the media coming together to express their condolence to the human tragedy that was taking place in Sri Lanka.

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Indonesia refuses docking of Sri Lankan refugees

Indonesian officials have refused to allow an Australian ship carrying 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers, including women and children, to dock on Bintan Island.

The ethnic Tamils were picked up by an Australian Customs Service patrol ship found more than a week ago after they were discovered drifting in a wooden boat with a broken engine.

After talks between Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a presidential spokesman said last week that the Sri Lankans would be given temporary accommodation in Indonesia.

However, the refugees were not granted approval to disembark on Bintan island, according to I Gde Widiarta, a law and human rights official in Riau Kepulauan province. The island is about 1,000 kilometres north of Jakarta and across the Singapore Strait from Singapore.

Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said talks were underway between Jakarta and local government officials.

“We are trying to convince [them] that our aim to help the 78 asylum seekers is merely based on humanitarian grounds,” Faizasyah said.

The Sri Lankans are the latest in a flood of thousands of people from war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq seeking better futures around the world.

On Oct. 17, 76 Sri Lankan Tamil migrants were found on the Ocean Lady off the coast of Vancouver Island. Authorities are investigating whether they were part of a massive, international people-smuggling operation run by an Indonesian ship captain.

Abraham Lauhenapessy, known as Captain Bram, was recently arrested aboard a boat carrying 255 Sri Lankan asylum seekers off the coast of western Java.

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Genocide trial begins, Karadzic fails to show up

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Radovan Karadzic’s words urging the destruction of Bosnia’s non-Serbs rang out in a courtroom Tuesday from speeches and intercepted phone calls as U.N. prosecutors opened their genocide and war crimes case against him.

The former Bosnian Serb leader boycotted his trial for the second day, despite warnings from the war crimes tribunal’s presiding judge that he could be stripped of his right to defend himself.

The trial promises to be the judicial climax of the Balkan wars of the early 1990s that left more than 100,000 people dead, most of them victims of Bosnian Serb attacks.

In his opening statement, prosecutor Alan Tieger called Karadzic the “undisputed leader” and “supreme commander” of the Serbs responsible for atrocities throughout Bosnia’s brutal four-year war.

“(Karadzic) harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to pursue his vision of an ethnically segregated Bosnia,” Tieger said.

Prosecutors allege Karadzic was the driving force behind atrocities beginning with the ethnic cleansing of towns and villages to create an ethnically pure Serb state in 1992 and culminating in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces.

Karadzic, who has submitted more than 250 motions to the court since he decided to represent himself, claims he has not had enough time to prepare for his defense, even though he was arrested more than 15 months ago and first indicted in 1995.

Judge O-Gon Kwon said he will consider imposing a lawyer to represent Karadzic if he continues to boycott proceedings.

At the end of Monday’s hearing, Kwon said if Karadzic continues his boycott when the case resumes next Monday the court will hold a hearing Tuesday to discuss its options, including assigning a defense counsel to represent Karadzic and possibly adjourning the trial to give an assigned lawyer time to prepare.

Karadzic faces 11 charges — two genocide counts and nine other war crimes and crimes against humanity. He has refused to enter any pleas, but insists he is innocent. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Tieger played video of a notorious Karadzic speech before war broke out in which the Bosnian Serb leader predicted that Muslims would disappear from Bosnia.

“By the disappearance of the Muslim people, Karadzic meant that they would be physically annihilated,” Tieger said.

He showed judges footage of skeletal Muslim prisoners behind the wire fence of a Serb-run detention camp and read from transcripts of intercepted phone conversations.

He quoted Karadzic as saying that Serb forces would turn the ethnically mixed Bosnian capital of Sarajevo into “a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die.”

Witnesses who survived the 44-month siege of Sarajevo have described living “in constant fear, day after day, for years, knowing that they or their loved ones were targets,” Tieger said, before showing judges video of a young boy fatally shot by a sniper and Bosnian Serb forces targeting mourners at a funeral.

He said Karadzic and other high-ranking Bosnian Serbs engaged in a campaign to vilify Bosnia’s Muslims and drive them out of towns and villages as war erupted in 1992. Non-Serbs in Bosnia were rounded up and incarcerated in a series of camps controlled by Karadzic’s police and army, Tieger told the tribunal’s judges.

“In the best of circumstances, detainees existed in dehumanizing conditions,” Tieger said. “In the worst, all too frequently, detainees were subjected to beatings, rape, terror and death.”

Outside the courtroom, Bosnian survivor Esnaf Moujic said hearing the prosecutor recount the beginnings of the Bosnian war was painful, even though it told him nothing he did not already know.

“It is shocking to come here,” he said. “You relive the images of how it was back in ‘92.”

He also lamented Karadzic’s absence.

“Again, it is Karadzic who is dictating what happens,” said Moujic, 42, who fled the Bosnian town of Bratunac in April 1992 with his wife and child and now lives in the Netherlands. “He decided in 1992 and again now.”

Dozens of other war survivors crowded into the courtroom’s public gallery and other rooms set aside for them at the tribunal to watch the trial. Some traveled up to 30 hours on buses across Europe just to be at the trial.

Karadzic was arrested last year in Belgrade after 13 years on the run. When he was captured he was posing as New Age healer Dr. Dragan Dabic, disguised behind thick glasses, a bushy beard and straggly gray hair.

Tieger mentioned Biljana Plavsic as one of Karadzic’s key collaborators. Earlier Tuesday, Plavsic — the only woman among the 161 people indicted by the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia — was released from a Swedish prison after serving two-thirds of an 11-year sentence for war crimes.

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