Such threats are increasing tension in the run-up to the election and underlining the difficulties of

Such threats are increasing tension in the run-up to the election and underlining the difficulties of ensuring it will be free and fair.Western governments have insisted that the elections should go ahead in mid-September on the grounds that postponement could cause the Dayton settlement to unravel. Mr Milosevic’s aim appears to be a deal with Bosnian Serb leaders and the international community that would allow Mr Karadzic and Mr Mladic to slip quietly into retirement while avoiding prosecution at the UN tribunal in The Hague.However, it seems unlikely that Mr Milosevic will secure any guarantees of non-prosecution from Mr Holbrooke, since that would fly in the face of US government policy and the ex-diplomat believes firmly that the two Bosnian Serb leaders must stand trial. A makeshift mortuary was set up at the airbase, while the injured, suffering from second and third-degree burns, were ferried to nearby hospitals and specialist burns units by ambulance and helicopter.Lieutenant-General Droste, commanding officer of the Royal Dutch Air Force, said: “After, or during, the landing something went wrong – dramatically wrong.”Traffic control saw it happen but report no warning from the cockpit,” he said, adding that the plane has appeared to be functioning normally until it attempted to land.Lieutenant Droste said a team of Dutch and Belgian experts had been set up to investigate the cause of the crash.Eyewitnesses said the plane appeared to abort a landing and careered into a field.”The plane wanted to land and then took off again and flipped over with its wing clipping the grass and then there was a big flame,” one boy at the scene told Dutch television.”It was making weird manoeuvres At the start of the runway it came down and rolled over. He emphasised that he would not allow Mr Karadzic’s ruling Serb Democratic Party (SDS) to participate in the elections as long as the United Nations indicted war criminal remained the SDS leader. The postponement coincided with a trouble-shooting visit to former Yugoslavia by Richard Holbrooke, the former US diplomat, who brokered last year’s Dayton peace settlement.
US officials said Mr Holbrooke’s priority would be to “read the riot act” to Serbia’s President, Slobodan Milosevic, who is widely viewed as having enough influence to secure Mr Karadzic’s removal.Mr Milosevic’s relations with the Bosnian Serb leadership have been poor for more than three years, but he kept contact with Mr Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Ratko Mladic, also an indicted war criminal.

Robert Frowick, the US official in charge of the 14 September elections, said that he was delaying the start of the campaign until Friday to provide time for solving the Karadzic problem. About 120 people were killed and 500 injured when police tried to break up the demonstration.. International organisers yesterday postponed the start of official campaigning in Bosnia’s first post-war elections in a renewed effort to drive Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, out of politics and public life. In 1992, a stampede in the southern town of Kumbakonam during a religious holiday killed 50 people.The worst stampede recently was two years ago at a demonstration in Nagpur of tribespeople demanding job quotas. Most of them had come to thank God for the rains,” said the Ujjain commissioner, PS Tomar.”Several of them were seen dancing and singing in praise of God as they queued up in front of the temple gates,” he said.Some devotees carried on with their rituals until evening, but most of Ujjain’s residents were in shock.In the incident at Hardwar, the 21 victims were crushed to death in a stampede on an overcrowded bridge, which was being used by more than 2 million devotees who had gathered to take a dip in the Ganges river.The often frenzied worship by throngs of Hindus has led to tragedies in the past. A few were gored by bamboo and steel wires as they were thrown against a temporary barricade which had been erected around the main area of worship inside the temple.Twenty-one others, including 18 women and one child, were killed and 40 seriously injured when devotees rushed to bathe in the River Ganges at the holy northern town of Hardwar.Eyewitnesses in both towns blamed the authorities for the accident, saying precautions to prevent crowd surges were inadequate.Officials said dozens of the 200,000 devotees at Ujjain were trampled underfoot as they raced down marble steps to a temple.Thousands of devotees, mostly farmers, had gathered on Sunday night to ensure early entry into the temple.”It’s tragic. Ujjain – At least 60 people were trampled or suffocated to death and scores injured in stampedes in India early yesterday when Hindu worshippers gathered to celebrate a new moon festival.

Some 39 people, including five children, were killed and 35 injured in Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh state as a crowd of devotees tumbled over each other down a narrow staircase inside a temple complex.
Most of the victims died of suffocation. Of course, I switched the air-conditioner on, swamping the room with a rush of ear-splitting cold air. And I curled up on the bed further away and watched for movement at the top of the curtain rod. I was frightened of this thing and it was frightened of me.Only after half an hour did I realise that the bright screws on the curtain rail were its beady eyes With rapt attention, we were watching each other.. Then it is back, a miniature armoured brontosaurus face that is followed now by a long, rubbery torso, grey-green in the dim afternoon sunlight, and big sucking feet that grip the plastic air-conditioning vents. Like an old silent film, it moves in jerks.One moment, I see its head.

Then, at shutter’s speed, half its length of heavily breathing rubberiness is out of the machine.A moment later, the whole half-foot of creature is suspended on the curtain above my bed, swaying on the material, alien and disturbing, looking back at me over its fortress-like shoulder.What is it doing here? Then it scuttles out of sight into the drapery. I sit up and, five feet from my face, I see the dragon’s head of a giant lizard looking at me from the cooled bars of the machine.When I raise my hand, the head disappears for a moment. But, in the torment of midsummer heat, a roaring air-conditioner plays Catch-22 with me: to cool my empty double room I turn it on, but its tiger-like engine vibrates so loudly that sleep is impossible.When I turn to the only book beside my bed – Plain Tales from the Raj – the sweat runs down my arms and glues my fingers to the pages.Then a rustle, a kind of faint, rasping sound comes from the silent conditioner. One-third of all the children in Jalalabad hospitals are victims of joy-shooting at weddings.It doesn’t put the agencies off. There is Save and the World Food Programme, UNDCP, Medecins sans Frontieres, Madera, the International Red Cross, the Emergency Field Unit, the Sandy Gall Clinic for Orphaned Children, the Swedish Committee for Afghans, the UNHCR, and a German agronomist agency: and that’s just the first few offices signposted off the highway to Kabul.Finding the old Spin Ghar – White Mountain – Hotel is something of a relief. There are donkeys and stallions and Indian-style “velo-” rickshaws and Victorian bicycles and the occasional clapperboard shopfront – Dodge City transferred to the subcontinent.Two of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s local guerrilla commanders who turned up for their haircut at the same time last month shot dead the barber and a couple of other men before deciding who was first in the queue for a regular shave. Jalalabad is a dusty brown city of mud-and- wood houses, earthen streets and ochre walls, with the characteristic smell of charcoal and horse manure.