North Korea has been hit in the past two years by floods and droughts which have devastated the countryside, leading to reports of widespread deaths from starvation and large-scale emergency food relief from overseas.A spokesman for North Korea’s Flood Damage Rehabilitation Committee said that at the start of the year, North Korea’s total stock of grain was 167,000 tonnes for its 22 million people. ROME (Reuters) – The UN World Food Programme said yesterday that it was looking into a warning by famine-hit North Korea that it could run out of grain within two weeks. A spokesman for the Rome-based aid agency said WFP had shipments of 98,000 tonnes of grain from January to March for the 4.7 million people it has targeted. However, that leaves another 19 million North Koreans who could go hungry if Pyongyang’s warning is true.
The official Korean Central News Agency earlier said that grain rations were cut in January and February but this had not stopped a drain on supplies.

That fear remains.As one BJP enthusiast put it artlessly yesterday: “It’s time the real Indians were given an advantage over the foreigners here” – meaning not only 150 million Muslims but large and ancient minorities of Sikhs, Parsis and Christians, too.The high-water mark of rampant “cultural nationalism” was in 1992, when BJP leaders were keenly involved in the demolition of a mosque at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh which stood on a sacred Hindu site.Since then, however, and especially in the present campaign, they have moderated their language and aims, striking alliances with Sikhs, Tamils and old-fashioned Socialists. Hindu nationalists have been around for a century, and the BJP has been an increasingly formidable political force since the 1980s.If they can now form a stable government they will have a chance to demonstrate that they have the discipline and coherence to replace Congress as India’s natural party of government.As “secularism” was one of the most important pillars of independent India, the Hindutva, or “cultural nationalism”, of the BJP has always been anathema to the Indian establishment, threatening to split the nation into mutually antagonistic tribes. It is therefore safe to predict that Atal Behari Vajpayee, the BJP’s 72-year-old member for Lucknow, who led the country during those 13 days in 1996, will be sworn in for a second term as prime minister in the next couple of days.If the BJP either defies predictions and wins outright or succeeds in putting together a stable coalition government, the election of 1998 will turn out to have been a watershed. That is the tentative conclusion being drawn 12 hours after counting began yesterday morning in India’s gargantuan general election.
On present trends the BJP will, as in the election of 1996, emerge as the largest party but without an overall majority.

In 1996, it formed the government but fell 13 days later for want of coalition partners.This time it has struck unprincipled but clever deals with some regional parties, and has manifested a new determination which means it is certain to fight harder to hang on to power. SONIA GANDHI’S epic 30,000-mile campaign has saved her party, Congress, from disappearing down the electoral plughole, but the Hindu nationalist BJP and its allies have established themselves as the pre- eminent force in Indian politics. But the paradox is that Mr Milosevic and his cronies cannot afford to cede ground since Kosovo is one of the only cards they have to play to avoid political annihilation.The Albanians, meanwhile, are trapped in a paradox of their own. Its actions have not only radicalised the conflict with the Serbs, but have poisoned political debate among the Albanians whose leadership has traditionally pursued a policy of non- violence.Since the end of the war in Bosnia, Western governments have been trying to use the threat of continuing sanctions against Serbia as a lever with which to exact concessions on Kosovo and a return to some kind of autonomy.

Kosovo can have no future as an autonomous province without fruitful dialogue with Belgrade – for economic as well as political reasons. But no leader in the current climate is going to advocate dialogue.Indeed, for the past six years the Albanians have been developing a parallel power structure, organising their own schools and hospitals and pretending that the Serbs – including a 45,000-strong police force – are not there at all.. It has remained an excuse to deflect attention from Mr Milosevic’s political failings in Serbia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia, particularly since the emergence of a new armed element in the Albanian opposition known as the Kosovo Liberation Army.The KLA began openly claiming responsibility for the killing of Serbian policemen and Albanian “collaborators” last November, after months of dark rumours and conspiracy theories. The past few days have seen some of the most serious unrest since the Serbian authorities stripped Kosovo of its autonomous status in 1989, raising fears in the international community of an open armed conflict in which the Albanians, despite their overwhelmingly superior numbers, are sure to be the big losers.Kosovo was the issue on which the present Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, built his career – removing autonomy for the Albanians as a way of stirring up Serbian nationalism, as the province is home to some of the most holy sites of the Serbian Orthodox Church. “It has to be anchored in the centre.”While he battles in the “new middle”, the left flank will be defended by Oskar Lafontaine, the SPD’s party chairman, who gave up his ambition to run against Mr Kohl after being confronted with the magnitude of Mr Schroder’s victory. Time will tell whether this combination will prove to be a dream ticket or, from the SPD’s point of view, the stuff of nightmares.. SERBIAN police charged into crowds of protesting Albanians in the capital of the southern province of Kosovo yesterday, knocking down scores of people with heavy clubs and water cannon in a brutal follow- up to a spate of killings over the weekend.

Despite international appeals for calm, the Serbian authorities appeared determined to silence by force all dissent in the Albanian-majority province. The offices of the Albanian-language newspaper Koha Ditore were raided and its editor, the respected Albanian rights campaigner Vetan Suroi, was beaten up. Unconfirmed reports suggested there had also been exchanges of gunfire.
Yesterday’s demonstration in Pristina, attended by tens of thousands of people, followed a weekend of police searches and armed confrontations across the province, particularly the Drenica region, in which at least 16 Albanians and four Serb policemen were shot dead. He pledged to fight for the middle ground in politics, the same spot currently occupied by the Christian Democrats. “We’re talking about a political programme which embraces both business and social responsibility,” he declared after his triumph.