Kyrgyzstan issues eviction notice to key US base

By LEILA SARALAYEVA and DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writers

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan – The United States was on the verge of being kicked out of its only military outpost in Russia's historic backyard after Kyrgyzstan Friday gave U.S. forces six months to vacate an air base that serves as a key supply hub for troops in Afghanistan.

The Manas base, created shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, at first served as a symbol of what seemed like a budding strategic partnership between the U.S. and Russia.

But as relations between the two countries soured in recent years, the base came to represent the renewed competition between the two former Cold War rivals.

Maj. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for the U.S. base, said he expected military officials to begin preparations for leaving.

"If they tell us that our time is up — which they've done today — then we'll start the necessary preparations to move operations," he added. "I don't know if it will take the full six months," he said.

Pakistani militants have stepped up attacks on convoys traveling the primary supply route to Afghanistan in recent months, pushing U.S. officials to secure alternative, northern routes through Central Asia. Manas was a vital link, serving as a transit point for 15,000 U.S. troops and 500 tons of cargo each month.

Kyrgyzstan's president announced the U.S. ouster from Manas shortly after Moscow promised $2.1 billion in loans and aid to the tiny, impoverished Central Asian country. Russia insists that it did not influence the decision.

Although the U.S. insists that there is time to strike a deal to keep Manas open, Washington is trying to come up with replacement routes for men and materiel moving to and from the mountains of Afghanistan.

"I continue to believe this is not a closed issue, and that there remains the potential to reopen this issue," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday. "But we are developing alternative methods of getting resupply and people into Afghanistan."

One obvious alternative could be Uzbekistan, where the U.S. had a military air base supporting the Afghan conflict in 2001-2005.

The commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, traveled to the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, earlier this week to meet with President Islam Karimov. No details of his visit were released.

On Friday U.S. Rear Admiral Mark Harnitchek said that Uzbekistan had reached a deal for cargo to be shipped across its territory.

"We have a tentative agreement with Uzbekistan on transit," he said during a visit to neighboring Tajikistan. His comments were shown on Tajik state television.

Some of the goods will be transported from Uzbekistan onward through Tajikistan, which also shares a direct border with Afghanistan, Harnitchek said.

The U.S. in August 2007 opened a $37 million bridge over the Pyandzh River, which forms most of the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

"We plan to move between 50 and 200 containers to Afghanistan through Tajikistan every week," Harnitchek said.

Washington has already reached similar agreements with Russia and Kazakhstan.

But the tentative pact with Uzbekistan was particularly important. It represented a warming of relations between U.S. officials and Uzbekistan's authoritarian president.

Karimov ordered a major U.S. air base in Uzbekistan closed in the wake of Washington's criticism of his government's deadly crackdown on anti-government protesters in the city of Andijan in 2005.

Activists fear that, in exchange for basing rights, the Obama administration could tacitly agree not to press Karimov to halt rights abuses.

Most of Karimov's opponents have been sent to jail or into exile. The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch has said that Uzbek prison authorities routinely abuse and torture prisoners.

"We have observed that in Uzbekistan, due to political and economic considerations, pressure on Karimov's government to uphold human rights has gradually decreased," said Igor Vorontsov, a Human Rights Watch researcher focusing on Uzbekistan.

"We are monitoring the situation carefully and urging the United States to take a principled position on human rights in Uzbekistan, no matter what military or other cooperation may reach," he said.

President Barack Obama announced earlier this week that he would send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to augment the 33,000 already there.

Netanyahu urges moderates to join broad government

By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM – Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to his moderate rivals Friday to join a unity government — a tricky alliance that would let the hawkish Israeli leader avoid relying on an unstable grouping of right-wingers almost sure to collide with the Obama administration and each other.

"I call on the members of all the factions ... to set politics aside and put the good of the nation at the center," Netanyahu said during a brief ceremony after President Shimon Peres tapped him to try to put together Israel's next governing coalition.

Although the election gave Netanyahu's Likud Party and other right-wing groups a majority in parliament, the prime minister-designate has a delicate task in forming a government.

Bringing moderates into a coalition would dilute the power of the nationalists who criticized the peace talks pursued by the outgoing centrist government. Netanyahu opposes sweeping territorial concessions to the Palestinians and wants to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

However, the centrist factions would produce a more stable government with international support than Netanyahu would probably get with a narrow coalition of conservatives who have their own disagreements. They have far different agendas when it comes to domestic issues, such as whether Israel should allow civil marriages.

In his appeal for a unity government, Netanyahu singled out "first and foremost" Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, head of the governing Kadima Party, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, chairman of the Labor Party.

Livni is the key to a broad-based government and she indicated she might be willing to come on board. But because Kadima remained Israel's largest party in the Feb. 10 election, although far short of a majority, she would certainly demand a high price: sharing the premiership with Netanyahu, who doesn't want to serve only half a term.

Livni, who led Israeli negotiators in a year of peace talks with the Palestinians, agreed to meet with Netanyahu on Sunday to discuss his unity overture. Earlier Friday, she said she would not join a hard-line government and was prepared to sit in the opposition "if necessary."

"I will not be able to serve as a cover for a lack of direction. I want to lead Israel in a way I believe in, to advance a peace process based on two states for two peoples," Livni said.

The Palestinian Authority's peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said any Israeli government that did not accept the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and continued settlement building "will not be a partner."

"We will not be in the negotiations for the sake of negotiations," Erekat said.

Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for the Islamic militant Hamas group that rules the Gaza Strip, said Netanyahu's appointment "indicates that there is no possibility for security and stability in the region in the coming period." Hamas is not party to peace talks and is shunned by Israel and Western powers as a terrorist organization.

The center-left Labor Party, like Kadima, champions the establishment of a Palestinian state, and Barak has said he would take Labor into the opposition. Should he change his mind, he would want to remain defense minister, a demand Netanyahu would be expected to meet.

While Livni insists on the need for peace efforts, she does not object to joining a government that includes Avigdor Lieberman's ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, a Netanyahu ally that wants 1 million Israeli Arabs to sign a loyalty oath to the Jewish state.

Lieberman has said he would not object to joining a government with Kadima. His secularist agenda is at odds with religious nationalist parties and gives him common ground with moderates.

Many Labor lawmakers, however, say they would not serve in a coalition with Yisrael Beiteinu because of its extremist views.

In his speech, Netanyahu did not mention by name either Yisrael Beiteinu or right-wing religious factions whose support persuaded Peres to choose Netanyahu to form the government even though Kadima led the election by winning 28 of parliament's 120 seats.

Likud, which got 27 seats, is in a better position to put together a coalition because Lieberman's party won 15 and right-wing religious parties combined took 23 — for a 65-seat bloc in parliament.

While Netanyahu owes the hard-liners his second crack at the premiership — he held the job in the late 1990s for a turbulent three years — forming a narrow coalition of nationalist and religious parties would present him an array of domestic and foreign policy headaches.

Yisrael Beiteinu wants to redraw Israel's borders to place heavy concentrations of Israeli Arabs under Palestinian jurisdiction and to require those Arabs who remained to sign a loyalty oath or lose their citizenship rights.

Those positions have not drawn any criticism from the religious parties, but Lieberman angers them with his vehement opposition to the Orthodox Jewish establishment's control of key aspects of life in Israel, such as marriage. If either party bolted a right-wing coalition in a fight over social issues, the government would fall.

The nationalist and religious parties could both cause Netanyahu problems in the international arena if the U.S. were to pressure him to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians. His first government fell apart in 1999 after Washington leaned on him to grant the Palestinians control of large parts of the biblically significant West Bank town of Hebron.

The nationalist camp's commitment to expanding West Bank settlements could put Israel at loggerheads with the U.S., the Jewish state's main ally. President Barack Obama has vowed to make ending 60 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians a priority, and his new Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, unequivocally favors a halt to all settlement building.

Hamas denies giving Kerry letter for Obama

GAZA (Reuters) – Hamas denied on Friday it had given U.S. Senator John Kerry a letter for President Barack Obama when the senator visited the Gaza Strip this week.

A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had said Hamas left a letter for Obama at a U.N. compound in Gaza where Kerry paid a call on Thursday.

"Hamas denies any such thing had happened. No letter was given to John Kerry," said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for the Islamist group.

"At the same time we stress that we are open to hold dialogue with any country and our only enemy is the Zionist occupation," Barhoum said.

Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and two U.S. Congressmen shunned Hamas during their visit to Gaza, which took place a month after a 22-day Israeli offensive in which some 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died.

Thailand, Indonesia agree on Rohingya solution

JAKARTA: Indonesia and Thailand agreed yesterday that the issue of the Myanmar Rohingya boat people should be tackled together by countries in the region, visiting Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said.

The Thai military has been criticized for pushing back about 1,000 Rohingya refugees from Thailand’s southern shores last December, leaving them at sea in boats without engines and insufficient food and water.

Some to the boat people, who claimed persecution in Myanmar, were rescued by the Indonesian navy off the coast of Aceh, where they told officials they were rounded up and beaten by Thai military personnel.

Abhisit, speaking after talks with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Jakarta, said the Rohingya issue is “essentially a regional problem”.

“The president and I share the same views on how we should deal with the problem and the Bali Process and various Asean forums will be used to discuss this problem,” Abhisit said.

The Bali Process, created in 2002, brings participants together to work on practical measures to help combat people-smuggling and related transnational crimes in the region.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) comprises Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
The Rohingya problem will be discussed on the sidelines of the Asean Summit in Hua Hin, Thailand, on February 27 to March 1.

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority group from northern Arakan state in Myanmar, have been denied citizenship by Myanmar’s ruling junta who claim they are migrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has also denied the Rohingya citizenship, leaving the minority group stateless, homeless and without work.

Thousands of Rohingya work illegally in Thailand and as migrant laborers in Malaysia.

Nigeria: Govt, Algeria Meet On N1.8 Trillion Saharan Gas Pipeline

The Nigerian government yesterday held talks with the Algerian government on the 4,300km long, 48-56 inches diameter Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline (TSGP), which would connect the Niger Delta in Nigeria and Niger, to existing gas transmission hubs to the European Union at El Kala or Beni Saf in Algeria's Mediterranean coast. It is expected to cost $12 billion(about N1.87 trillion naira).

The Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Alhaji Sanusi Barkindo, who led the Nigerian delegation to the meeting held at the NNPC towers Abuja, described the project as one that would have multiplier effect on the economies of the nation involved and the consumers of the product.

"The project has multiplier effects on our economies. It is a competitive project, a source of diversifying sources of energy and strengthening the global interdependency of both consumers and an avenue for producers," he noted

Barkindo stated that the project, which is already attracting the interest of consumers, participants and financiers, is strategic to the European Union (EU) and should not be bedeviled with commercial and technical issues. He therefore called for the signatures of the governments concerned with the project in all commercial and technical issues relating to it.

"The immediate challenge is to clean up the draft Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between our countries including Niger for the signatures of our three governments. All the commercial and technical issues relating to this project should be signed to the joint venture agreement," he offered.

The NNPC boss said the MoU would be the umbrella document setting in broad terms, the objective of going into the project and would demonstrate to the international community, the preparedness of the respective countries involved to pursue it to a logical conclusion.

He declared that the Nigerian Gas Master Plan would be the blue print for both the development of domestic and export gas and would provide infinite flexibility to meet the market demand of consumers. Barkindo said the project is fully in tune with the gas master plan, seeking to balance domestic and export of gas for Nigeria.

Speaking at the meeting the leader of the Algerian delegation and Chief Executive of Sonatrac, Mohammed Meziane disclosed that the project would gulp $12billion and would be completed between 2015 and 2017.He said the project was very complex one and Algeria already agreed to accelerate its development.

Source: allAfrica.
Link: http://allafrica.com/stories/200902200400.html.

I'm ready for a grand coalition, says Netanyahu

Jerusalem, Feb 20: The head of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Friday he was ready to form a coalition in Israel with the centrist Kadima party of his main rival Tzipi Livni.

Netanyahu was speaking after a meeting with President Shimon Peres in an effort to build a grand coalition. Peres was also meeting Friday with Livni, who was quoted by Haaretz newspaper as saying she did not rule out joining a Netanyahu-led coalition.

Netanyahu has the support of more of the Israeli parliament's political factions than Livni, even though Likud won one seat less in the Feb 10 general election.

Both sides have claimed the right to form a government, but Thursday Netanyahu moved closer to being able to form a government after a key faction holding the balance of power in the Knesset recommended that President Shimon Peres nominate him as premier.

The Yisrael Beteinu party's recommendation means that the former premier now can count on the support of 65 legislators, enough to form a narrow coalition.

However, Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beteinu's controversial leader, has said that Netanyahu should form a broad-based coalition.

PA gives conditional OK to Israeli change

JERUSALEM, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- The Palestinian Authority will work with the new Israeli government so long as certain conditions are met, the official PA spokesman said Friday.

Binyamin Netanyahu earlier was given the go-ahead by President Shimon Peres to form a new government as Israel's next prime minister.

"We will work with any government in Israel as long as it sticks to the two-state solution, previous agreements, the halting of settlement construction and international law," PA spokesman Abu Rodaina said from Bahrain, ynetnews reported.