VOI - Voice of Indonesia | RRI - Radio Republik Indonesia

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan announced on Tuesday that he would begin a protest march with his supporters from the eastern city of Lahore to Pakistan's capital Islamabad on Friday to call for early elections.

Smaller protests by Khan's supporters took place last week after Pakistan's top election tribunal found Khan guilty of unlawfully selling gifts from foreign dignitaries and heads of state, removing him of his parliamentary seat.

"I have decided to launch the long march from Friday at 11.00 am from Liberty Square in Lahore to Islamabad," Khan said at press conference in Lahore on Tuesday evening. The distance between the two cities is about 380 kilometres.

"I am marching to press the government to announce elections immediately," he said, adding his supporters and party members should avoid violence.

Since being removed from office by a no-confidence vote in the legislature in April, Khan has held protests across the country calling for snap elections, but the government has said they will be held as scheduled in October or November next year.

Last week's ruling has added to the political and economic uncertainty plaguing Pakistan this year. The 70-year-old cricketer-turned-politician was accused of misusing his 2018 to 2022 premiership to buy and sell gifts in state possession that were received during visits abroad and worth more than 140 million Pakistani rupees ($634,920.63).

The Election Commission of Pakistan ruled that Khan would be removed from his seat in parliament but did not order a longer disqualification from public office, which under Pakistani law can be up to five years.

The political instability has also fuelled economic uncertainty, with international ratings agencies questioning if the current government can maintain difficult economic policies in the face of political pressure and looming elections. (Reuters)

Singapore's energy regulator will be introducing new emissions standards for new and repowered fossil fuel-fired power generation units in 2023, a minister said on Wednesday.

The Energy Market Authority (EMA) will consult with the industry in the coming months and will release details on the standards subsequently, Low Yen Ling, the minister of state for the ministry of trade and industry, said at the Singapore International Energy Week conference.

The new rules are part of the implementation of a law the city-state passed last year that allowed the EMA to set greenhouse gas emissions standards.

The measure also follows Singapore announcing plans to reduce its emissions target for 2030 to 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).

The city-state will also enhance the efficiency of its power plants "by requiring all new generation units to use the best-in-class technology available," said Low, without elaborating on the technology required.

Low also announced that Singapore and Japan signed a memorandum of cooperation (MOC) to advance energy security and transitions.

The memorandum will enhance bilateral cooperation "to promote investment across the liquefied natural gas (LNG) value chain, exploration of opportunities to support LNG procurement, and drawing on our LNG connections to establish regional supply chains of low-emissions fuels," said Low.

The new MOC builds on a previous memorandum that coordinates the use and support for natural gas supply chains with low-emission technologies like hydrogen, ammonia and carbon capture, utilisation and storage.

Last month, Japan also signed a memorandum of cooperation with Malaysian state energy firm Petronas which includes consideration of joint upstream investment, cooperation on cutting methane emissions, mutual assistance in fuel supply and the use of LNG tanks in the event of an emergency supply crunch. (Reuters)

Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will visit China at Premier Li Keqiang's invitation on Nov. 1, China's foreign ministry said on Wednesday. (Reuters)

Arumuga Lakshmi, tormented by questions about the fate of her two children, missing for years, marched through a town in northern Sri Lanka with a group of women, many holding up photographs, black flags and burning torches.

During a brutal 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and a militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Lakshmi's daughter Ranjinithervy went missing in 2004, followed three years later by her son Sivakumar.

"I just want to see my son's face," said Lakshmi, as she wiped away tears, adding that she did not know if the two, ​aged 16 and 20 when they disappeared, were dead or alive.

Thousands of people, mostly Tamils in Sri Lanka's north and east, went missing during the civil war in what were known as "enforced disappearances".

Few, if any, have been accounted for, and government officials have offered varying details of what happened to them, with many facts still unknown, despite investigative efforts.

The instances of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka rank among the world's highest, with human rights group Amnesty International estimating them to number between 60,000 and 100,000 since the late 1980s.

But the government's Office on Missing Persons (OMP), set up in 2017, said it had ​received just 14,965 civilian reports ​of disappearances from 1981 onwards.

Years after the war ended in 2009, Tamil families like Lakshmi's, and the hundreds of women who marched with her in the former LTTE stronghold of Kilinochchi in August, still seek their missing relatives - and answers.

Pressure is growing for the government to act.

In a report on Oct. 4, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said the Office, and other steps taken by the government, had fallen short of the "tangible results expected by victims and other stakeholders".

Sri Lanka says it remains committed to pursuing tangible progress on human rights through domestic institutions.

'JUST CAN'T BEAR THE PAIN'

Government employee Valantina Daniel said her 66-year-old injured mother disappeared during the war's final ​phase.

On May 17, 2009, a day before the government declared victory, Daniel handed her ​mother to authorities, believing that she would be taken to hospital, but has had no word of her since.

"I developed this sense of hatred and so I tried to kill myself," said Daniel, 51. "I've tried many times. I just can't bear the pain of this separation."

Daniel, whose younger brother also disappeared in 1999, while an older one was killed in a shelling attack that decade, wrote to the authorities about her mother’s case, which they acknowledged in 2011.

Mahesh Katundala, chairman of the Office on Missing Persons, defended the institution against criticism that it was not doing enough.

He rebutted claims that those who surrendered went missing, saying there was no evidence, and added that the majority of those who disappeared had been abducted by the LTTE or factions opposed to it.

The Office had uncovered about 50 cases of people reported missing who were living abroad, he said.

Denying claims of a genocide of Tamil civilians during the war’s final offensive in Mullivaikkal, he said the army had instead rescued 60,000 civilians.

Among its functions, the Office issues certificates of death or of absence only when they are requested, Katundala said, while compensation amounts to 200,000 rupees ($550).

However the U.N. rights agency, among others, has faulted its efforts.

"It has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways, and its current purpose is to expedite the closure of files," the body said in the October report.

An OMP spokesperson said the fuel shortages crippling the Indian Ocean island during its worst economic crisis in more than seven decades make it impossible to meet a target of 5,000 interviews by year-end.

For Daniel, the crisis pales besides the hardships of 2009, when she went from village to village with no food and just the clothes she wore, for fear of a shelling attack.

"Finding our relatives will never, ever happen," Daniel said, accusing the government of inaction. "Even now I'm living with so much pain." (Reuters)