UNITED NATIONS: International mediator Kofi Annan will present the UN Security Council on Thursday with a new proposal in a last-ditch effort to rescue his failing peace plan for Syria, where 15 months of violence have brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Annan and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will address the 15-nation council behind closed doors at 0030 IST. Ban and former UN chief Annan will also speak to the 193-nation General Assembly at 10:00 am, along with Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby.

The two UN meetings, which will focus on the escalating crisis in Syria, come as the Syrian opposition and Western and Gulf nations seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad increasingly see Annan’s six-point peace plan as doomed due to the Syrian government’s determination to use military force to crush an increasingly militarized opposition.

The core of Annan’s proposal, diplomats said, would be the establishment of a contact group that would bring together Russia, China, the United States, Britain, France and key regional players with influence on Syria’s government and the opposition, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Iran. By creating such a contact group, envoys said, Annan would also be trying to break the deadlock among the five permanent council members that has pitted veto powers Russia and China against the United States, Britain and France and prevented any meaningful UN action on the Syrian conflict, envoys said.

It would attempt to map out a “political transition” for Syria that would lead to Assad stepping aside and the holding of free elections, envoys said. One diplomat said the idea was “vaguely similar” to a political transition deal for Yemen that led to the president’s ouster.

The main point of Annan’s proposal, they said, is to get Russia to commit to the idea of a Syrian political transition, which remains the thrust of Annan’s six-point peace plan, which both the Syrian government and opposition said they accepted earlier this year, but have failed to implement.

“We’re trying to get the Russians to understand that if they don’t give up on Assad, they stand to lose all their interests in Syria if this thing blows up into a major regional war involving Lebanon, Iran, Saudis,” a Western diplomat told Reuters. “So far the Russians have not agreed.”

Apart from lucrative Russian arms sales to Damascus, Syria hosts Russia’s only warm water port outside the Soviet Union. While Russia has repeatedly said it is not protecting Assad, it has given no indications that it is ready to abandon him.

Last week, US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice suggested that if Russia continued to prevent the Security Council from putting pressure on Syria, states may have no choice but to consider acting outside the United Nations.

Diplomats said the West has been pushing Russia to abandon Assad in a series of recent meetings between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with their European and US counterparts. An unnamed diplomat leaked further details of Annan’s proposal to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who said that if the contact group agreed on a transition deal for Syria, it could mean Russian exile for Assad.

The Post article said another option for Assad would be to seek exile in Iran, Damascus’ other staunch ally.

Annan’s peace efforts have failed to halt the violence, as demonstrated by a recent massacre in Houla that led to the deaths of at least 108 men, women and children, most likely by the army and allied militia. (UNI)

KABUL: US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Afghanistan on Thursday for talks with military leaders amid rising violence in the war against the Taliban and a spate of deadly incidents, including a NATO air strike said to have killed 18 villagers.

Panetta said the purpose of the trip was to hear an assessment from US General John Allen, the head of NATO coalition forces in Afghanistan, about the “ability to confront these threats from the Taliban and from the Haqqanis”, a reference to the hardline, al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network.

Panetta also planned to visit troops and hold talks with the Afghan defence minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak.

Panetta said he wanted to find out about a recent increase in the numbers of attacks in Afghanistan, including some that appear to have been more organised than others seen recently.

“I think it’s important to try to make sure we are aware of the kind of attacks they are going to engage in, particularly as we go through the rest of the summer and enter the latter part of this year,” Panetta said.

The Afghanistan visit came at the end of Panetta’s week-long trip to Asia to explain a new US military strategy, announced in January, that calls for a shift in strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific region.

During a stop in New Delhi, Panetta encouraged Indian leaders to become more involved in helping Afghanistan build its economy and train its security forces as the international coalition begins to draw down forces over the next two years.

Panetta also urged India to continue working to build a better relationship with Pakistan, a long-time rival for influence in Afghanistan.

“Just as India views the relationship with Pakistan as complicated, so do we. And it is, it’s a complicated relationship, often-times frustrating, often-times difficult, but at the same time it is a necessary relationship,” he said.

Panetta said the United States was “fighting a war” against al Qaeda in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern territories, and he suggested that drone strikes targeting al Qaeda leaders in the region would continue despite Pakistan’s concerns that they violate its sovereignty.

“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America is going to defend ourselves against those who would attacks us,” he said. “And we have done just that. We have gone after their leadership and we have done it effectively.”

“We have made very clear that we are going to continue to defend ourselves,” Panetta said.

On Wednesday, Afghan officials and villagers said 18 people, including women and children, had been killed in a NATO air strike in Afghanistan’s southeast. NATO officials said they were looking into the reports of civilian casualties.

On Wednesday, two suicide bombers killed 20 civilians outside a major NATO base in the south, the bloodiest attack in weeks since the Taliban launched a spring offensive. (UNI)

New York: A group of eight Muslims has filed a federal lawsuit against the New York City Police Department demanding that it bring an end to its surveillance practice initiated in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of spying on mosques and businesses managed by the community.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in New Jersey near here, is the first major legal challenge to NYPD’s spy operations. The eight plaintiffs claim that NYPD’s surveillance, which has been carried on for years, of Muslim businesses and mosques throughout the Northeast denigrated the Islamic faith, violated the constitutional rights of countless Muslim- Americans and was discriminatory in nature. (PTI)

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is likely to call elections from October onwards, giving him more time to try to win over voters with another round of cash handouts and a generous budget, senior government sources with knowledge of the issue told Reuters.

Delaying elections from a widely anticipated June date signals Najib’s concern that the ruling National Front may struggle to regain its two-thirds majority in parliament as the trade-reliant economy’s growth slows from the euro zone debt fallout.

About 821 million dollar was allocated to poorer households earlier this year, leading the opposition to accuse the government of vote-buying ahead of what could be the most fiercely contested polls since Malaysia gained independence in 1957.

The new handout under consideration would be distributed to over 5 million households ahead of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr in August, the sources said.The sources said Najib was looking to tap higher government revenue collections to present a generous budget to voters.

“This is a risky election and the prime minister does not want to take any chances. He has to prove to the people that the government will be there for them. So he has to balance his reforms with social economic help,” he said.

A senior official in the United Malay National Organisation (UMNO), which dominates the Barisan Nasional (BN) ruling coalition, confirmed that October onwards was now the most likely date for the polls.

“After September is what we have been told for the timing of the elections,” the official told Reuters. (UNI)

JERUSALEM: An Israeli court upheld today the planned deportation of South Sudanese deemed to have entered Israel illegally, though government pledges of wider crackdowns on African migrants remained in question.

Rejecting a petition by human rights groups that had delayed the Interior Ministry’s April 1 deportation order, Jerusalem District Court ruled the state was not obligated to extend de facto asylum to the estimated 1,500 migrants from South Sudan.

The petitioners had not proven that deportees would face “risk to life or exposure to serious damage”, the court said, finding in favour of assessments by Israeli diplomats in South Sudan, which declared independence last year after decades of fighting with northern neighbour Sudan.

The bulk of some 60,000 Africans who have crossed into Israel through its porous desert border with Egypt are from Sudan, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation that does not recognise the Jewish state, and from war-ravaged Eritrea.

The rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees in the migrants a big economic and demographic threat to Israel’s already ethnically strained population of 7.8 million.

But while Israel says the vast majority of them came illegally to work, humanitarian agencies argue many of the Africans should be considered as refugees with asylum rights.

William Tall, Israel representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the Jerusalem court’s support for the Interior Ministry’s removal of “collective protection” status for the South Sudanese appeared to be in line with the formal end of their country’s war with Sudan.

“We have been assured by the government that they (South Sudanese) still enjoy the individual opportunity to apply for asylum,” Tall told Reuters, nothing that continued territorial disputes between Khartoum and Juba may still justify refugee claims.

While the Jerusalem court case was heard, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said he had ordered immigration inspectors to start detaining the South Sudanese and prepare their deportation.

A ministry spokeswoman, Sabine Haddad, said today that there had been no round-ups yet, but that the 1,500 migrants would now be “processed” for deportation “in the near future”.

Another official said Israel had assigned 11 clerks to vet any refugee claims, many of which could be complicated by some applicants’ lack of documentation. The official predicted that processing of the South Sudanese would take several weeks.

Government officials in Juba were not immediately available for comment. Tall said that between 800 and 900 South Sudanese have voluntarily returned from Israel in recent years, despite the lack of reliable, scheduled flights between the countries.

Israel Radio quoted Yishai, who heads a party runs by rabbis in Netanyahu’s coalition, as saying he hoped today’s ruling would be “the first in a series of measures that would allow for the deportation of all citizens of Eritrea and north Sudan”.

But an official briefed on Israel’s planning said the government was “in no position to deport all of these people. Eritrea and Sudan are completely different situations.” (Reuters)