Comment & Briefs

No other recent visit to India has been so eagerly awaited as that of Pushpa Kumar Dahal, alias Prachanda, the Maoist revolutionary turned democrat and Prime Minister of ‘New Nepal’. His party received a thumping mandate from the electorate in the last elections and but for the fact that 50 per cent of the seats were to be filled up by proportional representation, it could have easily crossed the half way mark in the constituent assembly. Thus, under the existing electoral procedure, the Maoists were forced to bank on other political parties to form a government.

The recent suicide attack on Mariott Hotel in Islamabad has once again focussed international attention on Pakistan. Violence in Pakistan is now moving from the periphery to the heartland. The level of violence has been rising continuously for the last few months. Drawing upon media reports, an attempt is made here to analyse violence in Pakistan during August 2008.

On September 13, five serial bombs shattered the weekend peace across several popular market complexes in New Delhi, killing 30 innocent civilians and injuring nearly 90. An elusive outfit calling itself “Indian Mujahideen” (IM) claimed responsibility for the bombings via an email sent to national media houses 10 minutes after the first blast at Karol Bagh.

Georgia was a constituent republic of the former USSR. In 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the independence of Georgia. In turn, the autonomous regions of Georgia, namely South Ossetia and Abkhazia, attempted to break away from Georgia, resulting in civil strife in the early Nineties. These conflicts were settled with Russian involvement with the United Nations Mission in Georgia deploying in a peacekeeping role in Abkhazia and a Russian peacekeeping force deploying under a Joint Control Commission in South Ossetia.

Will Taiwan ever participate in the United Nations? Pessimist views have started flowing after the rejection of Taiwan’s fresh bid for ‘meaningful participation in international agencies’ at the UN on September 18, 2008. This proposal was submitted by sixteen “diplomatic allies” of Taiwan to the UN Secretariat on August 14, 2008. Blocking Taiwan’s new attempt, a UN subcommittee decided that it would not let the 63rd UN General Assembly (UNGA) consider their request for permission to join ‘UN activities’.

The military commander most associated with executing President George Bush’s ‘troop surge’ in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, handed over command of US forces to Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno on September 16, after completing nearly 18 months of duty at the helm. He had taken over from the then commander Gen. George Casey in early February 2007, at a time when rising American and Iraqi civilian casualties threatened to engulf the whole region with its attendant negative consequences.

The year 2008 has witnessed yet another disastrous flood in North Bihar. Floods in Bihar have been almost an annual phenomenon. Though the capacity of the river flow was well below the danger line this time around, the situation was in fact aggravated by a breach in the Eastern embankment. Estimates indicate that around thirty lakh people have been displaced and their livelihoods devastated in sixteen districts of north-eastern Bihar. At the same time, around 50,000 people have been affected in Sunsari district of Nepal.

Let the fact speak for itself. China was not happy about India gaining the waiver in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and it played the role of a spoiler till such time it could. The Indian Government now feels betrayed. Perhaps India expected China’s reciprocity in exchange for its gracious support for the successful tour of the Olympic Torch. Indeed, it was naiveté that led India to believe Chinese rhetoric.

The Russian military blitzkrieg to counter the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s dispatch of his Israeli and US trained and equipped forces to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia on August 7, 2008 took many by surprise. Moscow brazenly took the war straight into the Georgian heartland routing the Georgian forces in South Ossetia and expelling them from the other main Georgian separatist region of Abkhazia.

After prolonged political and diplomatic negotiations between Iraq and the United States, President George Bush announced on September 9 the decision to withdraw around 8000 troops by the end of February 2009. The withdrawal would be done in a phased manner - a Marine battalion by November 2008 and an Army brigade by February 2009.