PAKISTAN VIOLENCE:
Rescuers are scouring the wreckage of Peshawar’s top hotel for victims after a suicide bomb killed at least seven people, the latest militant attack retaliating for a Pakistani army offensive in the Swat valley. A U.N. official said two U.N. employees, a Serbian man who worked for the U.N. refugee agency and a Philippine woman who worked for the U.N. children’s fund, were among those killed in the assault on the Pearl Continental, a hotel popular with VIPs and foreigners visiting the capital of North West Frontier Province. In Swat, aid workers are warning that government plans to allow hundreds of thousands of war-displaced Pakistanis to return home early could compromise their security and leave them without access to basic services. Around 2.5 million people have fled their homes in the Swat valley and other parts of the northwest since the Pakistani army launched an offensive more than a month ago to expel Taliban militants occupying the area.
Meanwhile, U.N. aid chief John Holmes says the United Nations is preparing for some half a million people to flee Pakistan’s northwest region of Waziristan if the government mounts a big operation against Taliban militants there. In an interview with AlertNet, he also warned that a slow response from international donors to the U.N.’s appeal is putting the humanitarian response at risk, with some aid agencies saying they can only continue their operations for a few more weeks without further funding. And Brussels-based think tank International Crisis Group warns that unless relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in Pakistan+IBk-s Northwest Frontier Province are urgently improved, the army+IBk-s offensive risks leaving the extremists the ultimate winners.
SRI LANKA CONFLICT:
Sri Lanka has sent more than 2,000 people back to their home villages in the island nation’s northwest, two years after they were displaced by the war with the Tamil Tiger separatists. The resettlement is only the second to happen since Sri Lanka’s military finished off the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and declared total victory in a 25-year war on May 18. Sri Lanka now has nearly 300,000 people living in refugee camps, and has pledged to resettle the bulk of them in six months. The United Nations stands ready to support an inquiry into abuses in Sri Lanka’s civil war, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said while addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council. And Human Rights Watch has asked the Colombo government to ensure the defeat of the Tamil Tigers does not result in new “disappearances”, unlawful killings or the jailing of government critics.
PHILIPPINES-MINDANAO CONFLICT:
The Philippines is discouraging aid agencies from distributing large amounts of food to internally displaced families on the restive southern island of Mindanao to prevent rice supplies being handed to rebels. Separately, Muslim rebels have freed a Sri Lankan aid worker held captive for nearly four months in the southern Philippines, but they continue to hold an Italian Red Cross engineer, a senior navy commander says.
AFGHAN TURMOIL:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered his government to begin work on plans to control operations by foreign troops in a bid to stop rising numbers of civilian casualties, his office says. The rising civilian death toll as Afghan and foreign troops battle a growing Taliban insurgency has become a politically explosive issue, eroding support for Karzai’s government, its foreign backers and coalition troops.
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