Haiti: Food ''riot'' UN RESPONED WITH TEAR GAS AND RUBBER BULLETS!

Three Sri Lankan UN peacekeepers shot in Haiti

HAITI: Three UN peacekeepers from Sri Lanka were shot and wounded by unknown gunmen Wednesday as multilateral forces tried to quell food riots, UN sources told AFP Thursday.
The three soldiers were injured in the Carrefour neighborhood, which has been the scene of violent demonstrations against spiking food costs.
"The soldiers were fired upon while they were on patrol. They did not return fire and were not able to identify the shooters," said the UN mission's spokeswoman
Sophie Boutaud de la Combe.
The UN said the peacekeepers did not suffer life threatening injuries. Since the start of the food riots a week ago which have left five dead, UN installations have
been targetted by angry residents. At least five UN vehicles have been burned.
The peacekeepers have so far responded with teargas and other non-lethal weapons. Port-Au-Prince, 10 -Thursday-08, AFP (High lights ENB)

ENB பிற்குறிப்பு : நாட்டைப் பிடித்தார்கள், வயிற்றில் அடித்தார்கள், வயிற்றுப்பசிக்கு உணவு கேட்டால் கலகக்காரர்கள் என்று கண்ணீர்ப்புகை அடிக்கிறார்கள்,நீங்கள் யார் என்று கேட்டால் ஐ,நா.அமைதிப்படை என்கிறார்கள்.

UN Sponsored election in Nepal!
Nepal's Maoists gain first seats Nepal's Maoist party has gained its first seats, as results are declared after Thursday's elections.
With four constituency results confirmed, the Maoists have won two, with the country's two traditionally biggest parties gaining one each.
Trends suggest the former rebels are doing well in the mid-west, where they started their insurrection.
The Maoists, who waged a guerrilla campaign for 10 years, have not been tested at the ballot box before.
One Maoist won in a remote mountain region where his chief rival helped him by standing aside, the BBC's Charles Haviland reports from Kathmandu.
But another won within the Kathmandu urban area.
Tallies of counts in progress are being announced all the time and the rebels may also gain further seats in the capital.
Former US President Jimmy Carter, who is an election observer, has said Washington must deal with the Maoists.
Speaking to the BBC's correspondent in Kathmandu, Mr Carter said: "It's been somewhat embarrassing to me and frustrating to see the United States refuse among
all the other nations in the world, including the United Nations, to deal with the Maoists, when they did make major steps away from combat and away from
subversion into an attempt at least to play an equal role in a political society".
Significance
Mr Carter also talked about the significance of the elections:
"It's the end, I hope, of armed conflict, of revolutionary war in fact", he said.
"Secondly, it's a total transformation in the form of government from a 240-year-old Hindu monarchy to a democratic republic.
"Third, there's a transformational involvement in the future of marginalised groups. "
Nepal held its first polls since 1999 following the Maoists' decision to quit their armed struggle in 2006.
The polls are for an assembly that is expected to re-write Nepal's constitution and abolish its monarchy.
Results for Kathmandu constituency one were declared quickly because it was the only constituency which used electronic voting machines.
Election official Prakash Man Singh said that the Maoists trailed behind the Nepali Congress candidate and the UML, a centre-left party which polled more than
6,000 votes.
Surprised
The popularity of the Maoist party is being tested at the ballot for the first time in this election.
Results for all the 240 constituencies are expected over the next 10 days. Officials say that polling has been postponed in 10 constituencies.
Many Nepalis and international observers have been surprised that Thursday's nationwide elections, just two years after the end of the Maoist insurgency, took place
considerably more peacefully than past votes of the 1990s.
There were four election-related deaths in the troubled south-eastern region.
The Election Commission said there was a turnout of 60%, with polling cancelled due to malpractice in just 33 polling stations out of 21,000.
King Gyanendra seized absolute power in 2005 but was forced to give up his authoritarian rule the following year after weeks of pro-democracy protests.
He has since lost all his powers and his command of the army.
It is hoped the election will consolidate the end of the Maoist insurgency, which stopped two years ago, says the BBC's Charles Haviland in Kathmandu.

Election, and Maoists, Could Transform Nepal

THE NEW YORK TIMES April 9, 2008 By SOMINI SENGUPTA
KATMANDU, Nepal — With one vote on Thursday, this longtime Himalayan kingdom, wedged strategically between India and China, will have the chance to do
what few modern nations have done: refashion its entire government.
After 10 years of fighting, Nepal’s Maoist insurgents have come out of the jungle and will take part in elections to choose a special assembly to rewrite the
Constitution. That bold experiment will give this nation of 27 million an opportunity to cement peace and install a fully elected government, while most likely ending the
monarchy that has ruled Nepal for 250 years.
But it is not without risks. Their rivals accuse the Maoists of bullying their way to power in a campaign marred by violence and intimidation. The Maoists insist they do
not want to go back to war, but neither have they renounced armed struggle. Judging by the campaign, critics here and abroad say they do not trust that yesterday’s
insurgents will act as democrats in the future.
A recent campaign stop for the former insurgent leader, known by his nom de guerre, Prachanda — or “the fierce one,” in Nepali — opened with the snap-crackle of
small-gun fire blasting from a pair of scratchy speakers, punctuating a rousing revolutionary tune. “Light the lamp of love,” the lyrics went. “I go carrying the flag of
revolution and Nepal in my heart.”
United Nations monitors have said that despite an agreement among the political parties to maintain peace, “violence and intimidation by party workers continued,”
but they accused the Maoists supporters of responsibility for a majority of attacks. Rival parties have felt the sting most.
“Still there are some doubts about their intentions,” said Shekhar Koirala, who is on the central committee of the rival Nepali Congress Party. “Still, they feel they can
capture the government by sheer force. That is one big worry.”
With 10,000 polling places, about 10,000 candidates and more than 234,000 election workers to supervise the entire operation, Nepal has never had elections quite
like this before.
The Constituent Assembly will not only decide whether to abolish the monarchy, but it will also determine how the country’s ethnic groups and castes will be
represented in government and even what kind of government Nepal will have.
Nepalis will in effect cast two votes. They will choose a candidate to represent their district and separately choose a party. To ensure that women and ethnic and
caste groups have a voice, each party has had to abide by certain quotas.
The elections have been delayed twice, in part because of an armed ethnic uprising in Nepal’s southeastern plains. Though the situation is mostly calm now, a handful
of ethnic Madhesi factions there continue to threaten candidates.
“This election is part of the peace-building process,” the election commissioner, Bhojraj Pokharel, said in an interview. “This is not a normal election.”
The vote will take place two years after street protests forced King Gyanendra to cede power and brought the Maoists out of the jungle. Under a peace deal, the
rebels agreed to sequester nearly 20,000 fighters and to lock up their weapons under United Nations supervision.
As the Maoists strive to cast themselves as law-abiding leaders, word and deed reflect an awkward balancing act. Sometimes, for instance, the Maoist leader,
Prachanda, whose real name is Pushpa Kamal Dahal, says his party will “capture” the state. He salutes the guerrillas who have fought and died for the Maoist cause.
Once, he even referred to an October Revolution, which some Nepalis took as a veiled threat that his cadres would take up arms again if they did not win the vote.
Prachanda says he has not uttered the phrase since campaigning began.
On a recent morning, as hammer-and-sickle flags fluttered in the wind, Prachanda arrived at his campaign rally in a black-and-white checkered blazer. His hair was
slicked back. He could have passed for a 1940s union boss were it not for the marigold garlands that hung on him like a florid neck brace.
“I am not asking for your votes in the traditional sense,” Prachanda said, summing up the unease of a revolutionary forced to cast around like a prosaic politician. “My
representation here is symbolic. I represent thousands of martyrs.”
By Prachanda’s own admission, former members of Maoist paramilitary squads function openly as the Young Communist League. They are accused of some of the
worst excesses.
In mid-March in central Nepal, the youth cadres beat up workers of the rival Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), better known here as U.M.L.,
putting one candidate in a hospital, according to the United Nations human rights agency here.
On Tuesday another U.M.L. candidate was shot and killed, though it was not immediately clear who carried out the attack.
On Wednesday, the police shot dead at least six Maoist advocates in western Nepal, a local official said, according to Agence France-Presse.
In February, the Nepali Congress Party accused the Maoists of setting a candidate’s home on fire. As the candidate fled, a boulder was hurled at him from the top of
a hill, causing him to fall and fracture his hip.
The Maoists say their cadres have also been beaten up by the rival U.M.L. workers, who unlike the Maoists have stayed away from armed struggle and bore the
brunt of Maoist anger during the insurgency.
Pradip Nepal, a Communist Party member of Parliament, said the tactics of the young Maoists had already become a political liability for Prachanda.
“There are two types of Communists,” he said, summing up the differences with his rivals. “One is democratic, one is autocratic. Ours is a democratic party. Theirs is
not.”
Ian Martin, the chief of the United Nations Mission in Nepal, said he had urged Prachanda, 54, to rein in his young supporters. “You can’t deny a political party the
right to a youth movement,” Mr. Martin said. “But what you can insist upon is that the youth movement be peaceful and respect the norms of multiparty democracy.”
In an interview in his office here, Prachanda sought to allay fears, saying that the excesses had been tempered and that the youths were primarily engaged in directing
traffic and planting trees. He said that his party had time and again promised to abide by the election and that it had no intention of going back to war. As for the
militant language, he said it was “for public consumption,” and directed at his people.
“Because our party, our cadres have come from war, they always use the words we should have to capture, we should have to be militant, we should go ahead, we
will win,” he explained, and then he smiled. “Even in using words, we have to be more cautious.”
He maintained that his insurgency had set the agenda for the elections, which many of the other major parties had now come around to accept: principally, a federal
republic and the abolition of the monarchy.
But since then, the Maoists have added a demand, which rival parties are not so enthusiastic about: a presidential system. Their campaign slogan has been “Prachanda
for President.”
His party calls for overhauling the state and abandoning “feudal property relations” for a “capitalistic mode of production.” Prachanda promises to improve the
economy with a railroad that would link Lhasa, in Tibet, to the Indian border.
“We are fighting against feudalism, we are not fighting against capitalism,” Prachanda said in the interview. “In the phase of our socioeconomic development, it is not
possible to have a socialist revolution. We are saying that this is a bourgeois democratic revolution.
“We will create a conducive atmosphere to have more profit for the capitalist. We are not going to do anything else than that.”
Not all are convinced, like Kunda Dixit, editor of The Nepali Times, an English-language magazine. “They are talking out of all sides of their mouth,” he said.