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Category: Afghanistan

  • Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia

    Ana Segovia (Mexico), Huapango Torero (‘Huapango Bullfighter’), 2019.

    The skin is the largest organ of the human body. It covers our entire surface, at some points only as thin as a piece of paper and at other points about half as thick as a credit card. The skin, which protects us from all manner of germs and other harmful elements, is fragile and unable to defend humans from the dangerous weapons we have made over time. The ancient blunt axe will break the skin with a heavy blow, while a 2000-pound MK-84 ‘dumb bomb’ made by General Dynamics will not only obliterate the skin, but the entire human body.

    Despite a 24 May order from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Israeli military continues to bomb the southern part of Gaza, particularly the city of Rafah. In blatant disregard of the ICJ’s order, on 27 May Israel struck a tent city in Rafah and murdered forty-five civilians. US President Joe Biden said on 9 March that an Israeli attack on Rafah would be his ‘red line’, but – even after this tent massacre – the Biden administration has insisted that no such line has been violated.

    At a press conference on 28 May, communications advisor to the US National Security Agency John Kirby was asked how the US would respond if a strike by the US armed forces killed forty-five civilians and injured two hundred others. Kirby responded: ‘We have conducted airstrikes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where tragically we caused civilian casualties. We did the same thing’. To defend Israel’s latest massacre, Washington has chosen to make a startling admission. Given that the ICJ has ruled that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza, could it be said that the US is guilty of the same in Iraq and Afghanistan?

    Ficre Ghebreyesus (Eritrea), Map/Quilt, 1999.

    In 2006, the International Criminal Court (ICC) began to assess the possibility of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, in 2014 and 2017, respectively, opened formal investigations into crimes committed in both countries. However, neither Israel nor the United States are signatories to the 2002 Rome Statute, which established the ICC. Rather than sign the statute, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act – known informally as the ‘Hague Invasion Act’ – which legally authorises the US government to ‘use all means necessary’ to protect its troops from ICC prosecutors. Since Article 98 of the Rome Statute does not require states to turn over wanted personnel to a third party if they have signed an immunity agreement with that party, the US government has encouraged states to sign ‘Article 98 agreements’ to give its troops immunity from prosecution. Still, this did not deter ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (who held the post from 2012–2021) from studying evidence and issuing a preliminary report in 2016 on war crimes in Afghanistan.

    Afghanistan joined the ICC in 2003, giving the ICC and Bensouda jurisdiction to conduct their investigation. Even though it signed an Article 98 agreement with Afghanistan in 2002, the US government fervently attacked the ICC’s investigation and warned Bensouda and her family that they would face personal repercussions if she continued with the investigation. In April 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s entry visa. Days later, a panel of ICC judges ruled against Bensouda’s request to proceed with a war crimes investigation in Afghanistan, stating that such an investigation would ‘not serve the interests of justice’.

    Staff at the ICC were dismayed by the court’s decision and eager to challenge it but could not get support from the justices. In June 2019, Bensouda filed a request to appeal the ICC’s decision not to pursue the investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan. Bensouda’s appeal was joined by various groups from Afghanistan, including the Afghan Victims’ Families Association and the Afghanistan Forensic Science Organisation. In September 2019, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC ruled that the appeal could go forward.

    Dawn Okoro (Nigeria), Doing It, 2017.

    The US government was enraged. On 11 June 2020, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13928, which authorised his government to freeze ICC officials’ assets and ban them and their families from entering the United States. In September 2020, the US imposed sanctions on Bensouda, a national of Gambia, and senior ICC diplomat Phakiso Mochochoko, a national of Lesotho. The American Bar Association condemned these sanctions, but they were not revoked.

    The US government eventually repealed the sanctions in April 2021, after Bensouda left her post and was replaced by the British lawyer Karim Khan in February 2021. In September 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said that while his office would continue to investigate war crimes by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Afghanistan, it would ‘deprioritise other aspects of this investigation’. This awkward phrasing simply meant that the ICC would no longer investigate war crimes committed by the United States and its allies from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The ICC had been sufficiently brought to heel.

    Alexander Nikolaev, also known as Usto Mumin (Soviet Union), Friendship, Love, Eternity, 1928.

    Prosecutor Khan again demonstrated his partial application of justice and fealty to the Global North ruling elites when he rushed into the conflict in Ukraine and began an investigation into war crimes by Russia just four days after its invasion in February 2022. Within a year, Khan would apply for warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, which were issued in March 2023. Specifically, they were charged with colluding to abduct children from Ukrainian orphanages and children’s care homes and take them to Russia, where – it was alleged – these children were ‘given for adoption’. Ukraine, Khan said, ‘is a crime scene’.

    Khan would use no such words when it came to Israel’s murderous assault on Palestinians in Gaza. Even after more than 15,000 Palestinian children had been killed (rather than ‘adopted’ from a war zone), Khan failed to pursue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his military subordinates. When Khan visited Israel in November–December 2023, he warned about ‘excesses’ but suggested that since ‘Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders’, they could prevent any horrendous violations of international humanitarian law.

    Ayoub Emdadian (Iran), The Sapling of Liberty, 1973.

    By May 2024, the sheer scale of Israel’s brutality in Gaza finally forced the ICC to take up the issue. The orders from the ICJ, the outrage expressed by numerous governments of the Global South, and the cascading protests in country after country together motivated the ICC to act. On 20 May, Khan held a press conference where he said that he filed applications for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, and Ismail Haniyeh and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his head of military, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said that the ICC accusations against Netanyahu and Gallant are ‘baseless’ and that Israel will not comply with any ICC warrant. For decades now, Israel – like the United States – has rejected any attempt to apply international humanitarian law to its actions. The ‘rules-based international order’ has always provided immunity for the United States and its close allies, an immunity whose hypocrisy has increasingly been revealed. It is this double-standard that has provoked the collapse of the US-driven world order.

    Buried within Khan’s press statement is an interesting fragment: ‘I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence the officials of this Court must cease immediately’. Eight days later, on 20 May, The Guardian – in collaboration with other periodicals – published an investigation that revealed Israel’s use of ‘intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear, and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries’. Yossi Cohen, the former head of Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, personally harassed and threatened Bensouda (Khan’s predecessor), warning her, ‘You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family’. Furthermore, The Guardian noted that ‘Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members’. ‘Took an interest’ is a euphemistic way of saying gathered information on her family – including through a sting operation against her husband Philip Bensouda – to blackmail and frighten her. These are clichéd mafia tactics.


    Hamed Abdalla (Egypt), Conscience du sol (‘The Consciousness of the Earth’), 1956.

    As I followed these stories of the blood and law, I read the poems of Chechnya-born Jazra Khaleed, writing in Greek in Athens. His poem ‘Black Lips’ stopped me in my tracks, the last stanzas powerful and bleak:

    Come let me make you human,
    you, Your Honor, who wipe guilt from your beard
    you, esteemed journalist, who tout death
    you, philanthropic lady, who pat children’s heads without bending down
    and you who read this poem, licking your finger—
    To all of you I offer my body for genuflection
    Believe me
    one day you will adore me like Christ

    But I’m sorry for you sir—
    I do not negotiate with chartered accountants of words
    with art critics who eat from my hand
    You may, if you desire, wash my feet
    Don’t take it personally

    Why do I need bullets if there are so many words
    prepared to die for me?

    Which words are slowly dying? Justice, perhaps, or even humanitarianism? So many words are thrown about to assuage the guilty and to confuse the innocent. But these words cannot muffle other words, words that describe horrors and that demand redress.

    Words are important. So are people, such as Gustavo Cortiñas, who was arrested by the Argentinian military dictatorship on 15 April 1977, never to be seen again. He became one of the 30,000 people whom the military killed between 1976 and 1983. On April 30, two weeks after Gustavo was arrested, his mother, Nora Cortiñas (or Norita, as she was lovingly known), joined other mothers of the disappeared to protest in front of the government house Casa Rosada, at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the first in what became a regular feature.

    Norita was a co-founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which courageously shattered the wall of misleading words that tumbled out of the mouths of the military Junta. Though her son was never found, Norita found her voice looking for him – a voice that was heard at every protest for justice and spoke with great feeling about the pain in the world until the weeks leading up to her death on 31 May. ‘We say no to the annexation of Palestine’, she said in a video message in 2020. ‘We oppose any measure that tends to erase the identity and existence of the Palestinian people’.

    Norita leaves us with her precious words:

    Many years from now, I would like to be remembered as a woman who gave her all so that we could have a more dignified life… I would like to be remembered with that cry that I always say and that means everything I feel inside me, that means the hope that someday that other possible world will exist. A world for everyone. So, I would like to be remembered with a smile and for shouting loudly: venceremos, venceremos, venceremos! We will win, we will win, we will win!

  • See also “What is the Rules-Based Order?“
    • The post Their Rules-Based International Order Is the Rule of the Mafia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Human rights defender’s profile: Elham Kohistani, from Afghanistan

    On 3 June 2024, ISHR published Human rights defender’s story: Elham Kohistani, from Afghanistan

    Elham Kohistani is a human rights defender from Afghanistan. Having witnessed successive governments trample human rights in her country since her childhood, she has dedicated her life to fighting for the basic rights of women and girls.

    In an interview with ISHR, Elham spoke about her hopes for the future of Afghanistan, urging the international community to continue supporting human rights defenders in the long term to achieve peace and prosperity.

    Stand in solidarity with Elham and other women human rights defenders (WHRDs) from Afghanistan: join us in our campaign to push for UN experts and States to explicitly and publicly recognise the situation in Afghanistan as a form of gender apartheid and the need for an accountability mechanism to address gross human rights violations against women.

    https://ishr.ch/defender-stories/human-rights-defenders-story-elham-kohistani-from-afghanistan

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Britain’s Century Long Opium Trafficking and China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949)

    For the Chinese, the trauma of the Century of Humiliation continues as a blunt reminder of their past defeat and neo-colonial servitude, as well as a reminder of the West’s self-righteous hypocrisy and arrogance.

    In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and wreaked havoc on both, just as they were to on the Americas and Africa. For India and China, Britain was the chief culprit, relying on state-sponsored drug-running backed by industrialized military power. The British Empire was the world’s largest producer and exporter of opium—the main product of global trade after the gradual decline of the slave trade from Africa. Their “civilization” brought the Century of Humiliation to China, which only ended with the popular revolution led by Mao Zedong. This historic trauma and the struggle to overcome it and re-establish their country is etched in the minds of the Chinese today.

    Before the British brought their “culture,” 25% of the world trade originated in India. By the time they left it was less than 1%. British India’s opium dealing was for the large part of the 19th Century the second-most important source of revenue for colonial India. Their “opium industry was one of the largest enterprises on the subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year – a similar output to Afghanistan’s notorious opium industry [during the US occupation], which supplies the global market for heroin.” Opium accounted for about 17-20% of British India revenues.

    In the early 1700s, China produced 35% of the world GDP. Until 1800 half the books in the world were printed in Chinese. The country considered itself self-sufficient, not seeking any products from other countries. Foreign countries bought Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, having to pay in gold and silver. Consequently, the balance of trade was unfavorable to the British for almost two centuries, like the situation the US and Europe face with China today.

    This trade slowly depleted Western reserves. Eventually, 30,865 tons of silver flowed into China, mostly from Britain. Britain turned to state sponsored drug smuggling as a solution, and by 1826 the smuggling from India had reversed the flow of silver. Thus began one of the longest and continuous international crimes of modern times, second to the African slave trade, under the supervision of the British crown.

    (The just formed United States was already smuggling opium into China by 1784. The US first multi-millionaire John Jacob Astor grew rich dealing opium to China, as did FDR’s grandfather, Warren Delano, Jr.)

    The British East India Company was key to this opium smuggling. Soon after Britain conquered Bengal in 1757, George III granted the East India Company a monopoly on producing and exporting Indian opium. Eventually its Opium Agency employed some 2500 clerks working in 100 offices around India.

    Britain taxed away 50% of the value of Indian peasants’ food crops to push them out of agriculture into growing opium. This soon led to the Bengal famine of 1770, when ten million, a third of the Bengali population, starved to death. Britain took no action to aid them, as they did almost a century later with their orchestrated famine in Ireland. Another famine hit India in 1783, and again Britain did nothing as 11 million starved. Between 1760-1943, “As per British sources, more than 85 million Indians died in these famines which were in reality genocides done by the British Raj.”

    At its peak in the mid-19th century, the British state-sponsored export of opium accounted for roughly 15% of total colonial revenue in India and 31% of India’s exports. The massive revenues from this drug money solidified India as a substantial financial base for England’s later world conquests.

    In 1729, the Chinese emperor declared the import of opium illegal. At the time it amounted to 200 chests a year, each 135 pounds, a total of 14 tons. The emperor in 1799 reissued the prohibition in harsher terms, given imports had leaped to 4,500 chests (320 tons). Yet by 1830 it rose to 1100 tons, and by 1838, just before the British provoked the First Opium War (1839-1842), it climbed to 40,000 chests (2800 tons).

    A chest of opium cost only £2 to produce in India but it sold for £10 [over $1,000 in today’s prices] in China, nearly an £8 profit per chest.

    About 40,000 chests supplied 2.1 million addicts in a Chinese population of 350 million. China was losing over 4000 tons of silver annually. Addicts were mostly men, twenty to fifty-five years old, which should have been their most productive years. Smoking opium gradually spread to different groups of people: government officials, merchants, intelligentsia, women, servants, soldiers, and monks.

    Just before the First Opium War the Chinese “drug czar,” Lin Zexu, wrote to Queen Victoria, “Where is your conscience? I have heard that the smoking of opium is very strictly forbidden by your country; this is because the harm caused by opium is clearly understood. Since it is not permitted to do harm to your own country, then even less should you let it be passed on to the harm of other countries.” In standard imperialist arrogance, Britain ignored the letter and challenged the very legality of China’s sovereign decision to prohibit opium imports.

    Britain provoked this First Opium War in retaliation for China seizing and destroying 1300 tons of opium held by British drug dealers off Canton (now Guangzhou). This had a value equal to one-sixth of the British empire’s military budget. British Foreign Secretary Palmerston demanded an apology, compensation for the opium, a treaty to prevent Chinese action against British drug-running, and opening additional ports to “foreign trade,” their euphemism for drug dealing.

    The British India Gazette reported on the sack of one Chinese city during the war:

    A more complete pillage could not be conceived than took place. Every house was broken open, every drawer and box ransacked, the streets strewn with fragments of furniture, pictures, tables, chairs, grain of all sorts — the whole set off by the dead or the living bodies of those who had been unable to leave the city from the wounds received from our merciless guns… The plunder ceased only when there was nothing to take or destroy.

    Once Britain defeated China, the Treaty of Nanking gave Hong Kong to the British, which quickly became the center of opium drug-dealing, soon providing the colony most of its revenue. The treaty also allowed the British to export unlimited amounts of opium.

    In 1844, France and the US forced China to sign similar unequal and unjust treaties, with the same unrestricted trading rights.

    In the wake of the First Opium War, a devastating famine hit southern China, causing mass starvation among millions of poor Chinese peasants. Soon the Taiping Rebellion against Chinese imperial rule broke out, claiming 20 million Chinese lives between 1850 and 1864. As with many later civil wars, as in Syria a decade ago, the European states financed the rebels to undermine the national government.

    Karl Marx detailed how Britain provoked the Second Opium War (1856-1860). France joined in the looting. The Times of London, propagandists for their state-sponsored drug mafia, declared, “England, with France . . . shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear, if it cannot be of love, throughout their land.”

    In October 1860 the British and French military attacked Beijing. Despite French protests, British commander Lord Elgin destroyed Yuanming Yuan, the emperor’s summer palace, in a show of contempt for the Chinese.

    The Summer Palace was the quintessential treasure house of China. No such collection of wealth and beauty had ever existed anywhere on earth. Nor would it ever again.…in some 200 fabulously decorated buildings, thirty of them imperial residences, lay riches beyond all dreams of avarice. Jewels, jade, ceremonial robes, the court treasures, bales of silk, and countless priceless artifacts represented the years of accumulated tribute placed before the Chinese emperors. There were splendid galleries of paintings and irreplaceable libraries…For three days British and French troops rampaged through the palace’s marble corridors and glittering apartments, smashing with clubs and rifle butts what they were unable to carry away.

    When the robbery and destruction was finished, they burned Yuanming Yuan to the ground. An estimated 1.5 million Chinese relics were taken away, many still filling museums and the homes of the wealthy in the West today.

    Britain and France forced China to legalize the import of opium, which reached 5000 tons by 1858, an amount surpassing global opium production in 1995. China had to agree that no Westerner could be tried in Chinese courts for crimes committed in the country, and, ironically, to legalize Christian missionary work.

    The 1881 pamphlet, Opium: England’s Coercive Policy and Its Disastrous Results in China and India, stated:

    As a specimen of how both wars were carried on, we quote the following from an English writer on the bombardment of Canton: ‘Field pieces loaded with grape were planted at the end of long, narrow streets crowded with innocent men, women and children, to mow them down like grass till the gutters flowed with their blood.’ In one scene of carnage, the Times correspondent recorded that half an army of 10,000 men were in ten minutes destroyed by the sword, or forced into the broad river. The Morning Herald asserted that ‘a more horrible or revolting crime than this bombardment of Canton has never been committed in the worst ages of barbaric darkness.’

    By the mid-1860s, Britain was in control of seven eighths of the vastly expanded opium trade into China. Opium imports from India skyrocketed to 150,000 chests (10,700 tons) in 1880. British opium earnings amounted to $2 billion a year in today’s money and accounted for nearly 15% of the British Exchequer’s tax revenue. The London Times (October 22, 1880) outrageously claimed that “the Chinese government admitted opium as a legal article of import, not under constraint, but of their own free will.” Lord Curzon, later Under Secretary for India, “denied that England had ever forced opium upon China; no historian of any repute, and no diplomatist who knew anything of the matter, would support the proposition that England coerced China in this respect.”

    China began domestic production to curtail losing more silver to imported opium. After 1858, large tracts of land were given over to opium production, and provinces turned from growing food and other necessities to opium. Eventually the Chinese were producing 35,000 tons, about 85% of the world’s supply, with 15 million addicts consuming 43,000 tons annually.

    China, now greatly weakened by the British narco state, surrendered territory to Russia equal to the combined size of France, Germany, and Spain. In 1885 France seized Chinese Southeast Asia. In 1895, Japan seized Taiwan and Chinese-controlled Korea.

    The Eight-Nation Alliance (Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary) invaded again in 1900 to crush the nationalist Boxer Rebellion. An indemnity of 20,000 tons of silver was extracted, and China reduced to a neo-colony.

    By 1906, besides British India, opium dealing also provided 16% of taxes for French Indochina, 16% for the Netherlands Indies, 20% for Siam, and 53% for British Malaya.

    That year, the British, still exporting 3500 tons to China, finally agreed to end the dirty business within ten years. The British crown had the distinction of being the biggest opium smuggler in history – a central factor in their wrecking Chinese and Indian civilizations.

    World opium production by 1995 was down to 4,200 metric tons (4,630 tons), mostly from Burma and Afghanistan. The Taliban banned it in 2000, and production fell from 3400 to only 204 tons. The 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan reversed this, and by 2008, US occupied Afghanistan was producing 90% of the world’s opium, reaching 10,000 tons in 2017. After the US was driven out in 2021, the Taliban quickly stopped opium production. The United States Institute of Peace, possibly revealing US support for narco-trafficking, pronounced, “the Taliban’s successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world” and “will have negative economic and humanitarian consequences.”

    The blight of opium on China was not resolved until the revolutionary victory in 1949 – though it continued in British Hong Kong. Mao proclaimed “China has stood up,” ending its Century of Humiliation during which at least 100 million Chinese were killed in wars and famines, with up to 35 million during the Japanese invasion from 1931-1945.

    By 1949, China had been reduced to one of the world’s poorest countries. Just 75 years ago four out of five Chinese could not read or write. But since 1981, China has lifted 853 million of its people out of poverty, has become an upper middle income country according to the World Bank, and regained its stature in the world. The West now views China as a renewed threat, again seeking to economically disable it and chop it into pieces. However, this time, the Chinese people are much better prepared to combat imperialist designs to impose a new era of humiliation on them.

    The post Britain’s Century Long Opium Trafficking and China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “America’s Monster” in Afghanistan


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Human rights defender profile: Sara Nabil from Afghanistan

    Sara Nabil is a human rights defender and artist from Afghanistan, forced into exile. She spoke to ISHR about her dream of one day seeing a ‘free democratic Afghanistan, where each human being [regardless of which] gender they are, man or woman, neutral or other genders, [would be] treated equally.’

    ‘Since the Taliban came to power, Afghanistan [has become] the only country where we see that women don’t have any kind of rights.’

    Learn more about Sara and other human rights defenders like her: https://ishr.ch/defender-stories/

    see also: https://www.dw.com/en/art-in-exile-afghan-sara-nabil-fights-for-womens-rights/a-61732508

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • UK High Court Rules Julian Assange Can Appeal US Extradition

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may appeal an extradition order to the U.S., the U.K. High Court ruled on Monday. The 52-year-old Assange faces 17 charges of espionage and one charge of computer misuse due to WikiLeaks‘ publication of classified U.S. documents nearly 15 years ago. He has spent the last five years fighting extradition in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison. “The High Court’s…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Brutal Punishment: The Sentencing of David McBride

    Sometimes, it’s best not to leave the issue of justice to the judges.  They do what they must: consult the statutes, test the rivers of power, and hope that their ruling will not be subject to appeal.  David McBride, the man who revealed that Australia’s special forces in Afghanistan had dimmed and muddied before exhaustion, committed atrocities and faced a compromised chain of command, was condemned on May 14 to a prison term of five years and eight months.

    Without McBride’s feats, there would have been no Afghan Files published by the ABC.  The Brereton Inquiry, established to investigate alleged war crimes, would most likely have never been launched.  (That notable document subsequently identified 39 instances of alleged unlawful killings of Afghan civilians by members of the special forces.)

    In an affidavit, McBride explained how he wished Australians to realise that “Afghan civilians were being murdered and that Australian military leaders were at the very least turning the other way and at worst tacitly approving this behaviour”.  Furthermore “soldiers were being improperly prosecuted as a smokescreen to cover [the leadership’s] inaction and failure to hold reprehensible conduct to account.”

    For taking and disclosing 235 documents from defence offices mainly located in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the former military lawyer was charged with five national security offences.  He also found Australia’s whistleblowing laws feeble and fundamentally useless.  The Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 (Cth) provided no immunity from prosecution, a fact aided by grave warnings from the Australian government that vital evidence would be excluded from court deliberation on national security grounds.

    Through the process, the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, could have intervened under Section 71 of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth), vesting the top legal officer in the country with powers to drop prosecutions against individuals charged with “an indictable offence against the laws of the Commonwealth”.  Dreyfus refused, arguing that such powers were only exercised in “very unusual and exceptional circumstances”.

    At trial, chief counsel Trish McDonald SC, representing the government, made the astonishing claim that McBride had an absolute duty to obey orders flowing from the oath sworn to the sovereign. No public interest test could modify such a duty, a claim that would have surprised anyone familiar with the Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the aftermath of the Second World War. “A soldier does not serve the sovereign by promising to do whatever the soldier thinks is in the public interest, even if contrary to the laws made by parliament.” To justify such a specious argument, authorities from the 19th century were consulted: “There is nothing so dangerous to the civil establishment of the state as an undisciplined or reactionary army.”

    ACT Justice David Mossop tended to agree, declaring that, “There is no aspect of duty that allows the accused to act in the public interest contrary to a lawful order”. A valiant effort was subsequently made by McBride’s counsel, Steven Odgers SC, to test the matter in the ACT Court of Appeal.  Chief Justice Lucy McCallum heard the following submission from Odgers: “His only real argument is that what he did was the right thing. There was an order: don’t disclose this stuff, but he bled, and did the right thing, to use his language, and the question is does the fact that he’s in breach of orders mean that he’s in breach of his duty, so that he’s got no defence?”  The answer from the Chief Justice was curt: Mossop’s ruling was “not obviously wrong.”

    With few options, a guilty plea was entered to three charges.  Left at the mercy of Justice Mossop, the punitive sentence shocked many of McBride’s supporters.  The judge thought McBride of “good character” but possessed by a mania “with the correctness of his own opinions”.  He suffered from a “misguided self-belief” and “was unable to operate within the legal framework that his duty required him to do”.

    The judge was cognisant of the Commonwealth’s concerns that disclosing such documents would damage Australia’s standing with “foreign partners”, making them less inclined to share information.  He also rebuked McBride for copying the documents and storing them insecurely, leaving them vulnerable to access from foreign powers.  For all that, none of the identifiable risks had eventuated, and the Australian Defence Force had “taken no steps” to investigate the matter.

    This brutal flaying of McBride largely centres on clouding his personal reasons.  In a long tradition of mistreating whistleblowers, questions are asked as to why he decided to reveal the documents to the press.  Motivation has been muddled with effect and affect. The better question, asks Peter Greste, executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, is not examining the reasons for exposing such material but the revelations they disclose.  That, he argues, is where the public interest lies.  Unfortunately, in Australia, tests of public interest all too often morph into a weapon fashioned to fanatically defend government secrecy.

    All that is left now is for McBride’s defence team to appeal on the crucial subject of duty, something so curiously rigid in Australian legal doctrine.  “We think it’s an issue of national importance, indeed international importance, that a western nation has such as a narrow definition of duty,” argued his defence lawyer, Mark Davis.

    John Kiriakou, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, was the only figure to be convicted, not of torture inflicted by his colleagues during the clownishly named War on Terror, but of exposing its practice. McBride is the only one to be convicted in the context of alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, not for their commission, but for furnishing documentation exposing them, including the connivance of a sullied leadership.  The world of whistleblowing abounds with its sick ironies.

    The post A Brutal Punishment: The Sentencing of David McBride first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Flash Flooding Kills More Than 300 in Climate-Vulnerable Afghanistan

    Severe flooding in Afghanistan over the weekend has killed more than 300 people and destroyed thousands of homes in rural villages. The flash floods — prompted by heavy rainfall — came on the heels of an extreme drought in one of the nations that is most vulnerable to the climate emergency, yet has done little to contribute to it. “They’re not net emitters of carbon,” Timothy Anderson…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Deadly Flash Floods Hit Northern Afghanistan


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Detainee protests on rise over deportations from UK to Rwanda

    Hunger strikes at detention centres as asylum seekers get ‘no answers’ from Home Office and fear removal on Gatwick or Heathrow flights

    Protests and hunger strikes among asylum seekers held in detention centres in preparation for deportation to Rwanda are increasing, the Guardian has learned.

    Approximately 55 detainees, including Afghans, Iranians and Kurds, are believed to have staged a 10-hour peaceful protest in the exercise yard at Brook House immigration removal centre, near Gatwick airport from 6pm Tuesday until 4am Wednesday.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • NZ slumps to 19th as RSF says press freedom threatened by global decline

    Pacific Media Watch

    New Zealand has slumped to an unprecedented 19th place in the annual Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index survey released today on World Press Freedom Day — May 3.

    This was a drop of six places from 13th last year when it slipped out of its usual place in the top 10.

    However, New Zealand is still the Asia-Pacific region’s leader in a part of the world that is ranked as the second “most difficult” with half of the world’s 10 “most dangerous” countries included — Myanmar (171st), North Korea (172nd), China (173rd), Vietnam (175th) and Afghanistan (178th).

    New Zealand is 20 places above Australia, which is ranked 39th.

    However, NZ is closely followed in the Index by one of the world’s newer nations, Timor-Leste (20th) — among the top 10 last year — and Samoa (22nd).

    Fiji was 44th, one place above Tonga, and Papua New Guinea had dropped to 91st. Other Pacific countries were not listed in the survey which is based on performance through 2023.

    Scandinavian countries again fill four of the world’s top countries for press freedom.

    No Asia-Pacific nation in top 15
    No country in the Asia-Pacific region is among the Index’s top 15 this year. In 2023, two journalists were murdered in the Philippines (134th), which continues to be one of the region’s most dangerous countries for media professionals.

    In the survey’s overview, the RSF researchers said press freedom around the world was being “threatened by the very people who should be its guarantors — political authorities”.

    This finding was based on the fact that, of the five indicators used to compile the ranking, it is the ‘political indicator’ that has fallen the most , registering a global average fall of 7.6 points.


    Covering the war from Gaza.    Video: RSF

    “As more than half the world’s population goes to the polls in 2024, RSF is warning of a
    worrying trend revealed by the Index — a decline in the political indicator, one of five indicators detailed,” said editorial director Anne Bocandé.

    “States and other political forces are playing a decreasing role in protecting press freedom. This disempowerment sometimes goes hand in hand with more hostile actions that undermine the role of journalists, or even instrumentalise the media through campaigns of harassment or disinformation.

    “Journalism worthy of that name is, on the contrary, a necessary condition for any democratic system and the exercise of political freedoms.”

    Record violations in Gaza
    At the international level, says the Index report, this year is notable for a “clear lack of political will on the part of the international community” to enforce the principles of protection of journalists, especially UN Security Council Resolution 2222 in 2015.

    “The war in Gaza has been marked by a record number of violations against journalists and media since October 2023. More than 100 Palestinian reporters have been killed by the Israeli Defence Forces, including at least 22 in the course of their work.”

    UNESCO yesterday awarded its Guillermo Cano world press freedom prize to all Palestinian journalists covering the war in Gaza.

    “In these times of darkness and hopelessness, we wish to share a strong message of solidarity and recognition to those Palestinian journalists who are covering this crisis in such dramatic circumstances,” said Mauricio Weibel, chair of the international jury of media professionals.

    “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”

    Occupied and under constant Israeli bombardment, Palestine is ranked 157th out of 180
    countries and territories surveyed in the overall Index, but it is ranked among the last 10 with regard to security for journalists.

    Israel is also ranked low at 101st.

    Criticism of NZ
    Although the Index overview gives no detailed explanation on the decline in New Zealand’s Index ranking, it nevertheless says that the country had “retained its role as a press freedom model”.

    However, last December RSF condemned Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters in the rightwing coalition government for his “repeated verbal attacks on the media” and called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to reaffirm his government’s support for press freedom.

    “Just after taking office . . . Peters declared in an interview that he was ‘at war’ with the media. A statement that he accompanied on several occasions with accusations of corruption among media professional,” said RSF in its public statement.

    “He also portrayed a journalism support fund set up by the previous [Labour] administration as a ’55 million dollar bribe’. The politician also questioned the independence of the public broadcasters Television New Zealand (TVNZ) and Radio New Zealand (RNZ).

    “These verbal attacks would be a cause of concern for the sector if used to support a policy of restricting the right to information.”

    Cédric Alviani, RSF’s Asia-Pacific bureau director, also noted at the time: “By making irresponsible comments about journalists in a context of growing mistrust of the New Zealand public towards the media, Deputy Prime Minister Peters is sending out a worrying signal about the newly-appointed government’s attitude towards the press.

    “We call on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to reaffirm his government’s support for press freedom and to ensure that all members of his cabinet follow the same line.”

    Pacific Media Watch compiled this summary from the RSF World Press Freedom Index.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ‘They are trying to eradicate us completely’: the passion and pain of telling the stories of Afghan women

    Her family have been threatened and her team faces increasing risks in Afghanistan, but Zahra Joya knows she must keep reporting from exile

    On the nights that she manages to fall asleep, Zahra Joya always returns to Afghanistan in her dreams. On good nights she travels back to Bamyan, her home province, with its green mountains and bright blue lakes, or to her parents as they looked when she was a little girl.

    Increasingly though, her dreams are full of roadside bombs or men with guns. Some nights, memories of her last hours in Afghanistan play over and over on a loop: the panicked crowds outside Kabul airport, people being whipped and beaten, the sound of her sisters crying.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Rwanda bill clears parliament after peers abandon final battle over safety amendment – as it happened

    Bill could become law this week as end of parliamentary ping-pong in sight

    Q: Do you think you will be able to implement this without leaving the European convention of human rights?

    Sunak says he thinks he can implement this without leaving the ECHR.

    If it ever comes to a choice between our national security, securing our borders, and membership of a foreign court, I’m, of course, always going to prioritise our national security.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Dozens Dead From Flooding In Pakistan And Afghanistan


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • CPJ calls on Taliban to drop plans to restrict Facebook access in Afghanistan

    New York, April 8, 2024 – The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by reports that the Taliban plans to restrict or block access to Facebook in Afghanistan and calls on authorities not to move ahead on a measure that would further impede the free flow of information in the country.

    On April 6, Najibullah Haqqani, the Taliban’s acting Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology, announced in an interview with the independent, Kabul-based TOLOnews TV station that the group has finalized a plan to restrict or completely block access to Facebook in Afghanistan.

    Since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the group has detained journalists, shut down Afghan news websites, and restricted access to foreign media outlets.

    The Facebook pages for foreign news outlets that have been banned in Afghanistan—such as the U.S. Congress-funded broadcasters Voice of America and RFE/RL, the British public broadcaster the BBC, and the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle—however, are still accessible to readers inside the country.

    “The Taliban’s plan to restrict or block access to Facebook would be a further blow to freedom of information in Afghanistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Social media platforms, including Facebook, have helped to fill a void left by the decline of the Afghan media industry since the Taliban’s August 2021 takeover and the ensuing crackdown on press freedom. The proposed ban highlights the worsening censorship by the Taliban.”

    Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms widely used by media outlets to disseminate news and information in Afghanistan, including TOLOnews, which has over 4.5 million followers on Facebook.

    When contacted, Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid told CPJ via messaging app that “Facebook will not be banned but restrictions will be imposed on it.”


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • FINALLY: a Tory minister is being threatened with PRISON. Yes, prison.

    A UK Tory minister is on a collision course with the law over his refusal to reveal the sources of allegations that British special forces committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Johnny Mercer has been threatened with a fine or even prison if he doesn’t comply.

    Mercer, Britain’s minister for veterans, has said “multiple officers” told him about alleged murders and a subsequent cover-up during the Afghan conflict. However, he has refused to divulge their identities to a public inquiry examining whether a unit executed males of “fighting age” who posed no threat in the war-torn country between 2010 and 2013.

    Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan

    Afghan families have accused UK special forces of conducting a “campaign of murder” against civilians, while senior officers and personnel at the Ministry of Defence “sought to prevent adequate investigation”.

    As the Canary reported, one SAS soldier is said to have personally killed 35 Afghans. Legal representatives for the families claim soldiers carried out around 80 extrajudicial killings at the height of the war between 2010 and 2013.

    The Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan is scrutinising two investigations conducted by the Royal Military Police, which is responsible for the policing of army personnel. No charges were brought under Operation Northmoor, which was set up in 2014 to examine allegations of executions by special forces, including those of children. Three soldiers were referred to the Service Prosecuting Authority, but none was prosecuted.

    Now, the inquiry published a statement on Tuesday 26 March saying it had ordered Mercer to hand over the names next week or face a potential prison sentence.

    Johnny Mercer: name names or face prison

    It revealed that it had issued the MP with a Section 21 notice under Britain’s Inquiries Act 2005 on 13 March. The published order compels Johnny Mercer to provide a witness statement containing the names of the whistleblowers by 3pm on Friday 5 April.

    Failure to comply without a reasonable excuse would be “a criminal offence punishable with imprisonment and/or a fine”, the notice says.

    Signed by the probe’s chairman, Charles Haddon-Cave, it adds that the High Court in London could enforce the order through contempt of court proceedings, which “may result in imprisonment”.

    The order insists the names “will be treated in confidence” and would not be disclosed to anyone who is not a member of the inquiry’s legal team without Mercer’s consent. If he is unable to fulfil the order or believes it is unreasonable, then he has until 3 April to appeal. Mercer is expected to do so.

    He repeatedly refused to disclose the names when he gave evidence to the inquiry last month, during a series of testy exchanges with the inquiry’s counsel. Mercer also refused to reveal the name of a Special Boat Service (SBS) member who said he had been asked to carry a “drop weapon” – a weapon taken on an operation to place next to an unarmed individual.

    “The one thing you can hold on to is your integrity and I will be doing that with these individuals,” said Mercer.

    Haddon-Cave accused the minister of obstructing the inquiry, saying he had a “misguided understanding of the term integrity and an inappropriate sense of loyalty”.

    Johnny Mercer: caving in to the state

    Of course, Johnny Mercer originally dug into what went on in Afghanistan – but then caved in later on.

    As Prospect wrote:

    Mercer deserves great credit for setting out what happened [in Afghanistan] when he came to have doubts. That the explanations he received for these killings of detainees simply do not add up could not have been put in a more persuasive form than his witness statement. But ultimately his doubts led nowhere other than him telling journalists and veterans to look to the Ministry of Defence for answers—the same department that, according to him, would not even give answers to one of its own ministers.

    In other words, Mercer took things so far – and then towed the government line. Now, it seems he might have to face the consequences of his protection of the state and the army personnel that serve it.

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    Featured image via Johnny Mercer – YouTube

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Pakistan Threatens To Close Vital Afghan Trade Corridor With India

    Many parts of Ukraine were experiencing blackouts after a massive wave of Russian strikes on March 22 targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, killing at least four people, hitting the country’s largest dam, and temporarily severing a power line at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant.

    Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

    RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

    President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the assault involved 150 drones and missiles and appealed again to Ukraine’s allies to speed up deliveries of critically needed ammunition and weapons systems.

    As the full-scale invasion neared the 25-month mark, Zelenskiy aide Mykhailo Podolyak denied recent reports that the United States had demanded that its ally Kyiv stop any attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure as “fictitious information.”

    “After two years of full-scale war, no one will dictate to Ukraine the conditions for conducting this war,” Podolyak told the Dozhd TV channel. “Within the framework of international law, Ukraine can ‘degrease’ Russian instruments of war. Fuel is the main tool of warfare. Ukraine will destroy the [Russian] fuel infrastructure.”

    The Financial Times quoted anonymous sources as saying that Washington had given “repeated warnings” to Ukraine’s state security service and its military intelligence agency to stop attacking Russian oil refineries and energy infrastructure. It said officials cited such attacks’ effect on global oil prices and the risk of retaliation.

    The southern Zaporizhzhya region bore the brunt of the Russian assault that hit Ukraine’s energy infrastructure particularly hard on March 22, with at least three people killed, including a man and his 8-year-old daughter. There were at least 20 dead and injured, in all.

    Ukraine’s state hydropower company, Ukrhydroenerho, said the DniproHES hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper in Zaporizhzhya was hit by two Russian missiles that damaged HPP-2, one of the plant’s two power stations, although there was no immediate risk of a breach.

    “There is currently a fire at the dam. Emergency services are working at the site, eliminating the consequences of numerous air strikes,” Ukrhydroenerho said in a statement, adding that the situation at the dam “is under control.”

    However, Ihor Syrota, the director of national grid operator Ukrenerho, told RFE/RL that currently it was not known if power station HPP-2 could be repaired.

    Transport across the dam has been suspended after a missile struck a trolleybus, killing the 62-year-old driver. The vehicle was not carrying any passengers.

    “This night, Russia launched over 60 ‘Shahed’ drones and nearly 90 missiles of various types at Ukraine,” Zelenskiy wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

    “The world sees the Russian terrorists’ targets as clearly as possible: power plants and energy supply lines, a hydroelectric dam, ordinary residential buildings, and even a trolleybus,” Zelenskiy wrote.

    Devastation In Zaporizhzhya Following Russian Missile Attack
    Photo Gallery:

    Devastation In Zaporizhzhya Following Russian Missile Attack

    Ukrainian rescuers were combing the wreckage of homes in Zaporizhzhya following a deadly Russian missile strike on March 22.

    Ukraine’s power generating company Enerhoatom later said it has repaired a power line at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, Europe’s largest.

    “Currently, the temporarily occupied Zaporizhzhya NPP is connected to the unified energy system of Ukraine by two power transmission lines, thanks to which the plant’s own needs are fulfilled,” the state’s nuclear-energy operator wrote on Telegram.

    Besides Zaporizhzhya, strikes were also reported in the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsya, Khmelnytskiy, Kryviy Rih, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava, Odesa, and Lviv regions.

    Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, has been left completely without electricity by intense Russian strikes that also caused water shortages.

    “The occupiers carried out more than 15 strikes on energy facilities. The city is virtually completely without light,” Oleh Synyehubov, the head of Kharkiv regional military administration, wrote on Telegram.

    In the Odesa region, more than 50,000 households have been left without electricity, regional officials reported. Odesa, Ukraine’s largest Black Sea port, has been frequently attacked by Russia in recent months.

    In the Khmelnitskiy region, the local administration reported that one person had been killed and several wounded during the Russian strikes, without giving details.

    Scenes Of Destruction After Russian Strike Hits Ukrainian Residential Area
    Photo Gallery:

    Scenes Of Destruction After Russian Strike Hits Ukrainian Residential Area

    Local authorities reported one person had been killed and several wounded during Russian strikes on a residential area in Khmelnitskiy in central Ukraine. RFE/RL journalists were on the scene and captured the aftermath.

    Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko called it “the largest attack on the Ukrainian energy industry in recent times.”

    Despite the widespread damage, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said the situation remained under control, and there was no need to switch off electricity throughout the country.

    “There are problems with the electricity supply in some areas, but in general, the situation in the energy sector is under control, there is no need for blackouts throughout the country,” Shmyhal wrote on Telegram.

    Ukrenerho also said that it was receiving emergency assistance from its European Union neighbors Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Ukraine linked its power grid with that of the EU in March 2022, shortly after the start of Russia’s invasion.

    Ukraine’s air force said its air defenses downed 92 of 151 missiles and drones fired at Ukraine by Russia in the overnight attack.

    “Russian missiles have no delays, unlike aid packages for Ukraine. ‘Shahed’ drones have no indecision, unlike some politicians. It is critical to understand the cost of delays and postponed decisions,” Zelenskiy wrote, appealing to the West to do more for his country.

    “Our partners know exactly what is needed. They can definitely support us. These are necessary decisions. Life must be protected from these savages from Moscow.”

    Zelenskiy’s message came as EU leaders were wrapping up a summit in Brussels where they discussed ways to speed up ammunition and weapons deliveries for the embattled Ukrainian forces struggling to stave off an increasingly intense assault by more numerous and better-equipped Russian troops.

    A critical $60 billion military aid package from the United States, Ukraine’s main backer, remains stuck in the House of Representatives due to Republican opposition, prompting Kyiv to rely more on aid from its European allies.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NZ government urged to help evacuate Palestinians from war on Gaza

    By Katie Scotcher, RNZ News political reporter

    The New Zealand government is being urged to create a special humanitarian visa for Palestinians in Gaza with ties to this country.

    More than 30 organisations — including World Vision, Save the Children and Greenpeace — have sent an open letter to ministers, calling on them to step up support.

    They also want the government to help evacuate Palestinians with ties to New Zealand from Gaza, and provide them with resettlement assistance.

    Their appeal is backed by Palestinian New Zealander Muhammad Dahlen, whose family is living in fear in Rafah after being forced to move there from northern Gaza.

    His ex-wife and two children (who have had visitor visas since December) were now living in a garage with his mother, sisters and nieces who do not have visas.

    “There is no food, there is no power . . .  it is a really hard situation to be living in,” he told RNZ Morning Report.

    If his family could receive visas to come to New Zealand “it literally can be the difference between life and death”.

    ‘Everyone susceptible to death’
    With Israel making it clear it still intended to send ground forces into Rafah “everyone is susceptible to death and at least we would be saving some lives”.

    Dahlen said New Zealand had a tradition of accepting refugees from areas of conflict, including Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria.

    “So why is this not the same?”

    He appealed to Immigration Minister Erica Stanford and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters to intervene and approach the Egyptian government.

    “We need these people out,” he said.

    “Please give them visas; this is a first step. This is something super super difficult and huge and requires ministerial intervention.”

    Border permission needed
    At the Gaza-Egypt border potential refugees needed to gain the permission of officials from both Israel and Egypt.

    Egypt had concerns about taking in too many refugees from Gaza so the New Zealand government would need to provide assurances flights had been organised.

    If the government offered a charter flight to bring refugees to this country, “that would be amazing”.

    World Vision spokesperson Rebekah Armstrong said the government had responded with immigration support in other humanitarian emergencies.

    “We provided humanitarian visas for Ukrainians when their lives were torn apart by war, and we assisted Afghans to leave and resettle in this country when the Taliban returned to power. The situation for vulnerable Palestinians is no different.

    “Palestinians are living in a perilous environment, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes; children and families starving with literally nothing to eat; and healthcare and medical treatment nearly impossible to access,” Armstrong said.

    Several hundred
    The organisations did not know exactly how many people would qualify for such a visa, but estimated it could be several hundred.

    “We know there’s around 288 Palestinian New Zealanders in New Zealand, and they have estimated that there would be around 300-400 people that are their family members that they’d like to bring here,” Armstrong said.

    “That’s a very small number and as we’ve seen, in the case of Ukraine . . . the actual number of people that have probably come here would be significantly less than that, it’s not like they’re asking for the world. I think it’s quite a conservative number myself.”

    She told Morning Report similar visas for Ukrainians and Afghans had been organised within days or weeks.

    “It would be New Zealand’s response to this catastrophic situation that is unfolding. We want to be on the right side of history and this is one way we could help.”

    She said embassies in the region would need to assist with the logistics of people leaving Gaza.

    NZ government ‘monitoring’
    Stanford said in a statement the government was monitoring the situation in Gaza.

    “The issue in Gaza is primarily a humanitarian and border issue, not a visa issue, as people are unable to leave.

    “People who have relatives in Gaza can already apply for temporary or visitors’ visas for them,” Stanford said.

    But Armstrong said: “If there is the political will, the government can do this.

    “Other countries are doing this . . .  Canada and Australia are getting people out. It’s tricky, but it’s not impossible.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Traffic Accident In Southern Afghanistan Leaves 21 Dead, 38 Injured

    Male students who enrolled in Taliban-run religious schools say that sexual and physical abuse has led some to end their pursuit of an education in Afghanistan.

    The students, all of whom were aged 10 to 17 and spoke to RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi on condition of anonymity out of fears of repercussion, described numerous instances in which they and fellow classmates were pressured to engage in sexual acts with teachers and subjected to corporal punishments.

    The reported cases took place in western and southwestern Afghanistan at Taliban-run madrasahs, part of the network of religious schools that the extremist group has expanded significantly as part of its drive to foster religious education more in keeping with its hard-line Islamist views.

    One 16-year-old student, a resident of Farah Province, described being propositioned by a teacher at the madrasah he attends.

    “One day at school a Taliban member who teaches there made an inappropriate offer, but I did not accept it,” the boy told Radio Azadi, using inexplicit language to describe sexual abuse, a culturally taboo topic in Afghanistan. “When the lessons were over, he bothered me again.”

    The boy said he reported the incidents to a “qari,” a person who has memorized the Koran and serves as a religious authority at the school, to no avail.

    “I told the qari that the teacher was doing bad things to me, and the qari told him not to do these things, that he was a teacher,” the boy said. “The teacher admitted doing it, but it had no effect. He has continued to do bad things and made sexual requests to numerous students at the school.”

    A Taliban-controlled madrasah in Afghanistan
    A Taliban-controlled madrasah in Afghanistan

    Another student in southwestern Afghanistan, a 17-year-old in the 10th grade, gave a similar account of his experience during his six months studying at a Taliban-run madrasah.

    “A Taliban member who teaches at the school proposed having a relationship with me and said some other things that I did not accept,” the boy said.

    After being refused, the teacher swore and issued threats, the boy said, adding that his fellow students have faced similar treatment.

    “He also harassed several of my classmates, and one of them left the school,” the boy said. “He told me I should not go to school anymore because the same teacher is harassing me.”

    The boy said the experience has left him “damaged” and unsure of whom he can confide in. “I can’t tell my family,” he said.

    The Taliban has come under widespread criticism for the severe restrictions it has placed on the daily lives of the Afghans since seizing power in August 2021. In its pursuit to impose its extreme interpretation of Islam, the Taliban has restored many of the draconian rules it was infamous for during its first stint in power from 1996 to 2001.

    The ban on the education of girls past the sixth grade, and the erasure of women’s role in society stand out among the measures the Taliban has taken. But other steps — including prohibitions on music and idolatry through art, and pressure against students and teachers — have affected all walks of life regardless of sex.

    Since the Taliban returned to power, many educators have left the country, while female teachers have been left at home without work due to restrictions on women’s freedom of movement and their ability to teach males.

    Meanwhile, the Taliban has steadily worked to replace secular state schools and informal madrasahs with a system of religious schooling. The system does allow for girl students, including those of university age, but critics say it falls far short of the standards of modern education for girls and boys alike and often promotes extremism.

    According to a report on Afghanistan issued by the United Nations in February, the Taliban has established 6,836 madrasahs for males and 380 for females and was expected to finalize a standardized religious curriculum in time for the new school year beginning this month.

    Afghan boys read the Koran at a madrasah in Kabul.
    Afghan boys read the Koran at a madrasah in Kabul.

    The recruitment of madrasah teachers is also in full swing, according to the report, following a decree by the Taliban’s spiritual leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada to have 100,000 new madrasah teachers in place.

    In December, Human Rights Watch gave a stinging assessment of the state of education in general, saying that in addition to the obstacles to the education of girls and women, the Taliban had “also inflicted deep harm on boys’ education” in Afghanistan.

    “Many boys were previously taught by women teachers; the Taliban has prohibited women from teaching boys, depriving women teachers of their jobs and often leaving boys with unqualified replacement male teachers or sometimes no teachers at all,” HRW said. “Parents and students said that corporal punishment, which has long been a problem at Afghan schools, has become increasingly common. The curriculum in many schools appears to be under revision to remove important school subjects and promote discrimination.”

    The rights watchdog said the circumstances had “led many boys to leave school altogether” and “left boys struggling with mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.”

    Shortly after the Taliban regained power, the United Nations highlighted the dire situation for children in Afghanistan, including exposure to sexual violence and increased risk of students dropping out of school.

    A madrasah in Kandahar
    A madrasah in Kandahar

    Difficulties in ensuring the protection of children are exacerbated, according to the UN, by the Taliban’s refusal to consider people below the age of 18 to be children, as is the international standard, instead using the onset of puberty as the basis for adulthood.

    Younger madrasah students in western and southwestern Afghanistan below or at the age of puberty said they were not spared physical abuse and sexual harassment from teachers.

    One young man who spoke to Radio Azadi said he recently learned that his young brother was being subjected to sexual abuse at a madrasah in western Afghanistan.

    The young man said his brother was being assigned extracurricular “homework by a teacher, or to put it bluntly, he was being asked for sex, [the teacher] fondled his hands and feet and kissed him.”

    As a result, the young man said he told his brother not to go to school anymore.

    Fear of sexual harassment and sexual and physical abuse were cited as a common factor leading boys in western and southwestern Afghanistan to give up their studies.

    “Some teachers harass our students and make immoral requests,” said one 14-year-old boy who also described common methods of corporal punishment at his madrasah. “They strike our faces or beat our hands and feet under the pretext of disciplining us for not learning our lessons properly.”

    Afghan boys peek out from inside a madrasah in Kandahar.
    Afghan boys peek out from inside a madrasah in Kandahar.

    The boy said many students were studying hard in fear of being taken to a special room for punishment, and that “some even drop out of school.”

    Another student, aged 10, said his teacher separated him and other students from their class to beat the soles of their feet.

    Afterward, he told Radio Azadi, he stopped going to class because he was afraid. And upon hearing about the incidents, his and his classmates’ parents “did not allow us to go to school.”

    The Taliban authorities did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations of abuse at madrasahs it has established. And efforts to speak to individuals aware of the situations at madrasahs in other areas of Afghanistan were met by refusals to comment due to fear of reprisals.

    A women’s rights activist who asked that her name not be published told Radio Azadi that families have no avenue to lodge complaints about the abuse their children encounter at Taliban-run madrasahs because they, too, would face threats.

    The activist said that not only had she been made aware of sexual harassment against both girls and boys at Taliban-run madrasahs, but the curriculum also serves to “increase the level of extremism in the country.”

    Reducing the risks of both threats, she said, would require greater oversight by the Taliban authorities and ideally, she said, a reduction in the number of madrasahs.

    Najib Amini, a civil society activist in western Afghanistan, said that for now, the onus falls on families to be aware.

    “Children are subjected to sexual abuse in madrasahs established under the Taliban regime,” Amini said. “Families have an important and essential role in this regard. If they do not want their children to be abused in schools, if they want their children to get a basic education…then they should not send their children to madrasahs under the control of the Taliban.”

    Written by Michael Scollon based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • March 8, 2024 was again International Women’s Day

    Like every year, many organisations used the occasion to focus on the role of women human rights defenders. Here a selection of this year’s actions [for earlier posts see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/international-womens-day/]:

    Global Voices has released a special coverage called Empowering voices: Women in politics, which explores the state of women’s political participation around the world. 

    Human Rights First referred to a new report reveals that WHRDs face increasing harassment and threats from a global movement against gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights. The Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation, a leading feminist women’s rights organization, released Hope and Resistance Go Together: The State of Women Human Rights Defenders 2023,  a report that found discouraging growth in harassment of WHRDs.  The foundation surveyed 458 women’s and queer rights activists and interviewed 25 activists representing WHRDs from 67 countries affected by violence or conflict.

    They found that 75% reported facing harassment for their activism, a 15% increase from two years ago, and 25% of respondents have received death threats. Most harassment comes from government authorities, but increased harassment from far-right groups and anti-gender equality actors is also driving these startling statistics. Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) across the world face resistance and violence. In 2022, at least 401 HRDs were killed for their peaceful work. But some of the obstacles facing WHRDs are distinct. https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/recognizing-women-human-rights-defenders-on-international-womens-day/

    Human Rights Watch on 7 March carried a piece by Macarena Sáez who says inter alia:

    On this International Women’s Day, we march for the one in three women who experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. We cheer for countries like Argentina, Colombia, and Ireland that value our autonomy to choose to be pregnant and have legalized access to safe abortion, while protesting that abortion is still or again illegal in many places, including US states like Alabama and Texas. At the same time, we march to honor the women who marched before us, like the Mexican women who organized the first feminist congress in 1916 to push for family law reforms and their right to vote, and the Nigerians who waged their “Women’s War” against colonization and patriarchal laws in 1929. Their struggles sadly mirror the reality of many women around the world today – especially women who belong to historically marginalized groups – who continue to rally against violence and abuse.

    Fearing the power of women’s solidarity and collective actions, governments have  stifled women’s speech through restrictions on movement, censorship, smear campaigns, and criminal prosecutions. In highly repressive contexts, like Afghanistan and Iran, women suffer arbitrary detention, and even enforced disappearance and torture, for their activism. Meanwhile, social media companies have not done enough to protect women from online violence, chilling women’s freedom of expression on and offline.    These barriers make it hard for women’s equality to become reality. Gender justice requires an enabling environment in which women can express themselves, speak and spread their political views, and participate in political and public life. Instead of repressing or tolerating the repression of women, governments should recognize our collective actions – and consequent power – and enshrine our rights in laws, policies, and practice. [https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/07/womens-voices-have-power-drive-change]

    Amnesty International on 8 March highlighted three prominent women who reveal why sexual and reproductive rights are a major human rights issue : Charlotte Bunch, USA Leila Hessini, Algeria Marge Berer, UK [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2024/03/three-prominent-women-reveal-why-sexual-and-reproductive-rights-are-a-major-human-rights-issue/]

    On 8 March 8, 2024 Almyra Luna Kamilla and Rosalind Ratana 
opined in IMHO on “Navigating the storms of repression: The resilience of young women rights defenders in Asia”

    [OPINION] Navigating the storms of repression: The resilience of young women rights defenders in Asia

    In recent years, Asia has been witnessing rising authoritarianism and shrinking civic space. Among those in the frontlines of resistance are young women human rights defenders. As we celebrate International Women’s Day, let us demand for an enabling world where women human rights defenders can continue their noble pursuits without fear of reprisals.

    In Thailand, the royal defamation law is being excessively used to silence criticisms against the monarchy. Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, economic and political mismanagement has sparked peaceful protests that are met with violence and intimidation. The fate of Asia’s political climate hangs by a thread as elections are held across many countries, including Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, South Korea, and Pakistan. Now more than ever, governments across the region are finding ways to solidify their power, putting an even tighter grip on civil society to the detriment of democracy and people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.

    Despite such challenges, many are courageously speaking out and taking collective action to reclaim power for the people. This includes young women human rights defenders – or Youth WHRDs – who are claiming space to call out human rights violations and to demand accountability from oppressive governments. [https://www.rappler.com/voices/imho/young-women-rights-defenders-asia/]

    The Alliance for Human Rights in Afghanistan (a coalition of 9 major NGOs) urgently appealed to the international community to significantly bolster its support and actively safeguard the human rights of Afghan women and girls, including Afghan women human rights defenders who face persecution for their peaceful campaigns for rights and basic freedoms.

    In 2023, the Taliban further intensified its oppressive policies toward women, girls, the LGBTIQ+ community, and religious minorities. Afghan women and girls have seen their rights and prospects increasingly curtailed, from greater enforcement of restrictions on education – including a ban on girls attending secondary schools and universities – to intensifying exclusion of women from political and public life. Women have been banned from a growing list of forms of paid employment, and economic barriers, such as the ban on women registering organisations and undergoing vocational training, have contributed to a sharp decline in women’s participation in the labour market, impeding their right to make a living. This exacerbates financial insecurity, widens gender disparities, and further confines women to the private sphere. Lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women face severe threats, including torture, sexual violence, forced marriage, and death. Victims of gender violence, including those who identify as such, lack minimal legal and practical support. Obstacles to healthcare and education have exacerbated poverty and vulnerability among women and girls. In 2023, new discriminatory restrictions imposed by the Taliban included the closure of all beauty salons, blocking women from overseas travel for study, mandating female health workers in some areas to have a male chaperone while travelling or at work, and prohibiting women from entering a famous national park.

    The oppressive environment extends to female activists, NGO leaders and journalists. Notable cases include the arrests of women’s rights activists Neda Parwani and Zholia Parsi, the enforced disappearance and subsequent discovery of Manizha Seddiqi in Taliban custody to date, the arrest of Matiullah Wesa, founder of an NGO advocating for girls’ education rights, and the arbitrary detainment of Ahmad Fahim Azimi and Seddiqullah Afghan—both dedicated girls’ education activists, among many others. Journalists reporting on the Taliban, facing arrests and threats, equally illustrate the difficulties encountered by the media, particularly women, when covering crimes against women or advocating for women’s rights. Collectively, these cases underscore the near-total denial of freedom of expression, gender equality, or any other internationally recognized right in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

    Amid this growing oppression, segregation and fear, Afghan women human rights defenders have urged the international community to exert greater pressure on the Taliban. They call on international bodies to involve Afghan women in all negotiations with the Taliban and to facilitate direct meetings between women and the de facto authorities to address their concerns. Afghan women have also stressed the importance of advocacy for women’s rights by external actors based on the voices and realities of women inside Afghanistan. They call for coordinated efforts between organisations inside and outside the country to defend the rights of Afghan women and girls.

    https://www.omct.org/en/resources/statements/afghanistan-lifting-afghan-women-from-the-shadows-into-the-light-in-the-face-of-the-taliban

    The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, called on the Taliban to release women human rights defenders as the world marks International Women’s Day.

    I reiterate my appeal to the Taliban to respect all the human rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, including to education, work, freedom of movement and expression, and their cultural rights, and I urge the meaningful and equal participation of Afghan women and girls in all aspects of public life. I call on the Taliban to immediately and unconditionally release all those who have been arbitrarily detained for defending human rights, especially the rights of women and girls.”

    https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/03/afghanistan-un-expert-calls-taliban-release-women-human-rights-defenders

    On 8 March, Civil Rights Defenders presented 4 woman human rights defenders and asked them to share their message to women around the world.

    “The future is women.” – International Women’s Day 2024


    On International Women’s Day, the a group of NGOs (ALQST for Human Rights, Amnesty International, CIVICUS, European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR), Front Line Defenders, Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement, International Service for Human Rights (ISHR),MENA Rights Group, Salam for Democracy and Human Rights) renewed their call on Saudi Arabian authorities to release all women human rights defenders (WHRDs), women’s rights activists and their supporters who are detained in contravention of international human rights standards. The organisations further call on Saudi authorities to lift travel bans imposed on WHRDs and their relatives, and to abolish the male guardianship system. [https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/civil-society-reiterates-their-call-on-saudi-authorities-to-release-jailed-womens-rights-activists/]

    The President of Georgia awarded severl with mesla of honor: co-founder of “Safari” organization Babutsa Pataraia, human rights defender Ana Arganashvili, founders of “National Network for Protection from Violence”: Eliso Amirejibi and Nato Shavlakadze and founder of “Vedzeb” organization Tamar Museridze.

    https://www.interpressnews.ge/en/article/130159-in-connection-with-the-international-womens-day-the-president-awarded-five-female-human-rights-defenders-with-medals-of-honor

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Taliban Releases 84-Year-Old Austrian Man Detained In Afghanistan Last Year

    Women have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s repressive laws in Afghanistan, where the extremist group has imposed constraints on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.

    But women who are unmarried or do not have a “mahram,” or male guardian, face even tougher restrictions and have been cut off from access to health care, banned from traveling long distances, and pressured to quit their jobs.

    The Taliban’s mahram rules prohibit women from leaving their home without a male chaperone, often a husband or a close relative such as a father, brother, or uncle.

    Single and unaccompanied women, including an estimated 2 million widows, say they are essentially prisoners in their homes and unable to carry out the even the most basic of tasks.

    Among them is Nadia, a divorced woman from the northern province of Kunduz. The mother of four has no surviving male relatives.

    “These restrictions are stifling for women who now cannot do the simple things independently,” Nadia told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

    The 35-year-old said women also need to have a male escort to visit a doctor, go to government offices, or even rent a house.

    She said she had to pay a man to be her chaperone in order to meet a realtor and sign a rental agreement.

    An Afghan girl stands among widows clad in burqas.
    An Afghan girl stands among widows clad in burqas.

    Nadia also paid a man in her neighborhood around 1,000 afghanis, or $15, to accompany her to the local passport office. But the Taliban refused her passport application and ordered her to return with her father, who died years ago.

    “Even visiting the doctor is becoming impossible,” she said. “We can only plead [with the Taliban] or pray. All doors are closed to us.”

    Mahram Crackdown

    Women who violate the Taliban’s mahram requirements have been detained or arrested and are often released only after signing a pledge that they will not break the rules again in the future.

    In its latest report, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the Taliban’s notorious religious police was enforcing the rules by carrying out inspections in public spaces, offices, and education facilities as well as setting up checkpoints in cities.

    Released on January 22, the report said three female health-care workers were detained in October because they were traveling to work without a mahram.

    In December, women without male chaperones were stopped from accessing health-care facilities in the southeastern province of Paktia, the report said.

    And in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban visited a bus terminal and checked if women were traveling with a male relative, the report said.

    In late 2021, the Taliban said women seeking to travel more than 72 kilometers should not be offered transport unless they were accompanied by a close male relative.

    In another incident, the Taliban advised a woman to get married if she wanted to keep her job at a health-care facility, saying it was inappropriate for a single woman to work, the report said.

    In a report issued on January 18, the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) said the Taliban’s restrictions on single and unaccompanied women has ensured that female-led households receive less income and food.

    “Their share of employment has nearly halved, decreasing from 11 percent in 2022 to 6 percent” in 2023, the report said.

    The report noted that female-headed households typically care for more children and get paid less for their work and consume lower quantities of food.

    “Female-headed households have greater needs for humanitarian assistance and yet report more restrictions to accessing such assistance,” the report said.

    “Unaccompanied access by women to public places such as health facilities, water points, and markets has declined in the past two years,” the report added.

    ‘Deeply Insulting’

    Parisa, an unmarried woman, takes care of her elderly parents in the northeastern province of Takhar.

    With her father bedridden and her two brothers working in neighboring Iran, she has been forced to take care of the family’s needs.

    But she said she has been repeatedly harassed by the Taliban while trying to buy groceries in the local market, located some 10 kilometers away from her house.

    Afghan women wait to receive aid packages that include food, clothes, and sanitary materials, distributed by a local charity foundation in Herat, on January 15.
    Afghan women wait to receive aid packages that include food, clothes, and sanitary materials, distributed by a local charity foundation in Herat, on January 15.

    “What can women do when men in their families are forced to leave the country for work?” she told Radio Azadi, giving only her first name for security reasons.

    “I have no choice but to look after my family’s basic needs. The Taliban’s attitude is deeply insulting and extremely aggressive.”

    Parisa said she has pleaded with local Taliban leaders to relax the mahram requirements. But she said her efforts have been in vain.

    “They start abusing and threatening us whenever we try to tell them that we have to leave our houses to meet our basic needs,” she said.

    Parasto, a resident of Kabul, said the Taliban’s restrictions are preventing single women from seeking the limited health care that is available.

    “The doctors in the hospitals and clinics are reluctant to see unaccompanied women,” she told Radio Azadi.

    Parasto said the Taliban’s mounting restrictions on women, especially those who are unmarried or do not have a male guardian, have made life unbearable.

    “Single women are trying to survive without rights and opportunities,” she said.

    Written by Abubakar Siddique in Prague based on reporting by Naqiba Barakzai, Abida Spozhmai, and Khujasta Kabiri of RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Afghan Girls Banned From Contacting Media In Eastern Province

    Women have borne the brunt of the Taliban’s repressive laws in Afghanistan, where the extremist group has imposed constraints on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.

    But women who are unmarried or do not have a “mahram,” or male guardian, face even tougher restrictions and have been cut off from access to health care, banned from traveling long distances, and pressured to quit their jobs.

    The Taliban’s mahram rules prohibit women from leaving their home without a male chaperone, often a husband or a close relative such as a father, brother, or uncle.

    Single and unaccompanied women, including an estimated 2 million widows, say they are essentially prisoners in their homes and unable to carry out the even the most basic of tasks.

    Among them is Nadia, a divorced woman from the northern province of Kunduz. The mother of four has no surviving male relatives.

    “These restrictions are stifling for women who now cannot do the simple things independently,” Nadia told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

    The 35-year-old said women also need to have a male escort to visit a doctor, go to government offices, or even rent a house.

    She said she had to pay a man to be her chaperone in order to meet a realtor and sign a rental agreement.

    An Afghan girl stands among widows clad in burqas.
    An Afghan girl stands among widows clad in burqas.

    Nadia also paid a man in her neighborhood around 1,000 afghanis, or $15, to accompany her to the local passport office. But the Taliban refused her passport application and ordered her to return with her father, who died years ago.

    “Even visiting the doctor is becoming impossible,” she said. “We can only plead [with the Taliban] or pray. All doors are closed to us.”

    Mahram Crackdown

    Women who violate the Taliban’s mahram requirements have been detained or arrested and are often released only after signing a pledge that they will not break the rules again in the future.

    In its latest report, the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said the Taliban’s notorious religious police was enforcing the rules by carrying out inspections in public spaces, offices, and education facilities as well as setting up checkpoints in cities.

    Released on January 22, the report said three female health-care workers were detained in October because they were traveling to work without a mahram.

    In December, women without male chaperones were stopped from accessing health-care facilities in the southeastern province of Paktia, the report said.

    And in the southern province of Kandahar, the Taliban visited a bus terminal and checked if women were traveling with a male relative, the report said.

    In late 2021, the Taliban said women seeking to travel more than 72 kilometers should not be offered transport unless they were accompanied by a close male relative.

    In another incident, the Taliban advised a woman to get married if she wanted to keep her job at a health-care facility, saying it was inappropriate for a single woman to work, the report said.

    In a report issued on January 18, the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) said the Taliban’s restrictions on single and unaccompanied women has ensured that female-led households receive less income and food.

    “Their share of employment has nearly halved, decreasing from 11 percent in 2022 to 6 percent” in 2023, the report said.

    The report noted that female-headed households typically care for more children and get paid less for their work and consume lower quantities of food.

    “Female-headed households have greater needs for humanitarian assistance and yet report more restrictions to accessing such assistance,” the report said.

    “Unaccompanied access by women to public places such as health facilities, water points, and markets has declined in the past two years,” the report added.

    ‘Deeply Insulting’

    Parisa, an unmarried woman, takes care of her elderly parents in the northeastern province of Takhar.

    With her father bedridden and her two brothers working in neighboring Iran, she has been forced to take care of the family’s needs.

    But she said she has been repeatedly harassed by the Taliban while trying to buy groceries in the local market, located some 10 kilometers away from her house.

    Afghan women wait to receive aid packages that include food, clothes, and sanitary materials, distributed by a local charity foundation in Herat, on January 15.
    Afghan women wait to receive aid packages that include food, clothes, and sanitary materials, distributed by a local charity foundation in Herat, on January 15.

    “What can women do when men in their families are forced to leave the country for work?” she told Radio Azadi, giving only her first name for security reasons.

    “I have no choice but to look after my family’s basic needs. The Taliban’s attitude is deeply insulting and extremely aggressive.”

    Parisa said she has pleaded with local Taliban leaders to relax the mahram requirements. But she said her efforts have been in vain.

    “They start abusing and threatening us whenever we try to tell them that we have to leave our houses to meet our basic needs,” she said.

    Parasto, a resident of Kabul, said the Taliban’s restrictions are preventing single women from seeking the limited health care that is available.

    “The doctors in the hospitals and clinics are reluctant to see unaccompanied women,” she told Radio Azadi.

    Parasto said the Taliban’s mounting restrictions on women, especially those who are unmarried or do not have a male guardian, have made life unbearable.

    “Single women are trying to survive without rights and opportunities,” she said.

    Written by Abubakar Siddique in Prague based on reporting by Naqiba Barakzai, Abida Spozhmai, and Khujasta Kabiri of RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hospitals Should Be Places of Healing — Not Military Targets

    Many decades ago in Chicago, I operated the telephone switchboard at a small hospital called Forkosh Memorial. The console of coils and plugs included a mirror so operators could keep an eye on the hospital entrance, which on weekends and evenings was also monitored by an elderly, unarmed security guard named Frank. He sat at a desk near the entrance with a ledger book. Security at the hospital…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Afghanistan: Aid Cutbacks Under the Taliban Harm Health


    This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Two Afghans Detained At Guantanamo Bay For 14 Years Released By Oman, Taliban Says

    Listen to the Talking China In Eurasia podcast

    Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | YouTube

    Welcome back to the China In Eurasia Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China’s resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

    I’m RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here’s what I’m following right now.

    As Huthi rebels continue their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the deepening crisis is posing a fresh test for China’s ambitions of becoming a power broker in the Middle East – and raising questions about whether Beijing can help bring the group to bay.

    Finding Perspective: U.S. officials have been asking China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Huthis, but according to the Financial Times, American officials say that they have seen no signs of help.

    Still, Washington keeps raising the issue. In weekend meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan again asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to play a “constructive role” in stopping the attacks.

    Reuters, citing Iranian officials, reported on January 26 that Beijing urged Tehran at recent meetings to pressure the Huthis or risk jeopardizing business cooperation with China in the future.

    There are plenty of reasons to believe that China would want to bring the attacks to an end. The Huthis have disrupted global shipping, stoking fears of global inflation and even more instability in the Middle East.

    This also hurts China’s bottom line. The attacks are raising transport costs and jeopardizing the tens of billions of dollars that China has invested in nearby Egyptian ports.

    Why It Matters: The current crisis raises some complex questions for China’s ambitions in the Middle East.

    If China decides to pressure Iran, it’s unknown how much influence Tehran actually has over Yemen’s Huthis. Iran backs the group and supplies them with weapons, but it’s unclear if they can actually control and rein them in, as U.S. officials are calling for.

    But the bigger question might be whether this calculation looks the same from Beijing.

    China might be reluctant to get too involved and squander its political capital with Iran on trying to get the Huthis to stop their attacks, especially after the group has announced that it won’t attack Chinese ships transiting the Red Sea.

    Beijing is also unlikely to want to bring an end to something that’s hurting America’s interests arguably more than its own at the moment.

    U.S. officials say they’ll continue to talk with China about helping restore trade in the Red Sea, but Beijing might decide that it has more to gain by simply stepping back.

    Three More Stories From Eurasia

    1. ‘New Historical Heights’ For China And Uzbekistan

    Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev made a landmark three-day visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi, engaged with Chinese business leaders, and left with an officially upgraded relationship as the Central Asian leader increasingly looks to China for his economic future.

    The Details: As I reported here, Mirziyoev left Uzbekistan looking to usher in a new era and returned with upgraded diplomatic ties as an “all-weather” partner with China.

    The move to elevate to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from a “comprehensive strategic partnership” doesn’t come with any formal benefits, but it’s a clear sign from Mirziyoev and Xi on where they want to take the relationship between their two countries.

    Before going to China for the January 23-25 trip, Mirziyoev signed a letter praising China’s progress in fighting poverty and saying he wanted to develop a “new long-term agenda” with Beijing that will last for “decades.”

    Beyond the diplomatic upgrade, China said it was ready to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan across the new energy vehicle industry chain, as well as in major projects such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower.

    Xi and Mirzoyoev also spoke about the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, with the Chinese leader saying that work should begin as soon as possible, athough no specifics were offered and there are reportedly still key disputes over how the megaproject will be financed.

    2. The Taliban’s New Man In Beijing

    In a move that could lay the groundwork for more diplomatic engagement with China, Xi received diplomatic credentials from the Taliban’s new ambassador in Beijing on January 25.

    What You Need To Know: Mawlawi Asadullah Bilal Karimi was accepted as part of a ceremony that also received the credential letters of 42 new envoys. Karimi was named as the new ambassador to Beijing on November 24 but has now formally been received by Xi, which is another installment in the slow boil toward recognition that’s under way.

    No country formally recognizes the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, but China – along with other countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – have appointed their own envoys to Kabul and have maintained steady diplomatic engagement with the group since it returned to power in August 2021.

    Formal diplomatic recognition for the Taliban still looks to be far off, but this move highlights China’s strategy of de-facto recognition that could see other countries following its lead, paving the way for formal ties down the line.

    3. China’s Tightrope With Iran and Pakistan

    Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region, as I reported here.

    Both Islamabad and Tehran have since moved to mend fences, with their foreign ministers holding talks on January 29. But the incident put the spotlight on what China would do if two of its closest partners entered into conflict against one another.

    What It Means: The tit-for-tat strikes hit militant groups operating in each other’s territory. After a tough exchange, both countries quickly cooled their rhetoric – culminating in the recent talks held in Islamabad.

    And while Beijing has lots to lose in the event of a wider conflict between two of its allies, it appeared to remain quiet, with only a formal offer to mediate if needed.

    Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me this approach reflects how China “shies away from situations like this,” in part to protect its reputation in case it intervenes and then fails.

    Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, added that, despite Beijing’s cautious approach, China has shown a willingness to mediate when opportunity strikes, pointing to the deal it helped broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.

    “It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves,” he told me. “So [Beijing] might be relieved now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t step up if needed.”

    Across The Supercontinent

    China’s Odd Moment: What do the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s slowing economy have in common? The answer is more than you might think.

    Listen to the latest episode of the Talking China In Eurasia podcast, where we explore how China’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union is shaping the country today.

    Invite Sent. Now What? Ukraine has invited Xi to participate in a planned “peace summit” of world leaders in Switzerland, Reuters reported, in a gathering tied to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

    Blocked, But Why? China has suspended issuing visas to Lithuanian citizens. Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis confirmed the news and told Lithuanian journalists that “we have been informed about this. No further information has been provided.”

    More Hydro Plans: Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Energy and the China National Electric Engineering Company signed a memorandum of cooperation on January 24 to build a cascade of power plants and a new thermal power plant.

    One Thing To Watch

    There’s no official word, but it’s looking like veteran diplomat Liu Jianchao is the leading contender to become China’s next foreign minister.

    Wang Yi was reassigned to his old post after Qin Gang was abruptly removed as foreign minister last summer, and Wang is currently holding roles as both foreign minister and the more senior position of director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office.

    Liu has limited experience engaging with the West but served stints at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and currently heads a party agency traditionally tasked with building ties with other communist states.

    It also looks like he’s being groomed for the role. He recently completed a U.S. tour, where he met with top officials and business leaders, and has also made visits to the Middle East.

    That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

    Until next time,

    Reid Standish

    If you enjoyed this briefing and don’t want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Amnesty International Demands Release Of Afghan Educational Activists Held By Taliban

    Listen to the Talking China In Eurasia podcast

    Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | YouTube

    Welcome back to the China In Eurasia Briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China’s resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

    I’m RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here’s what I’m following right now.

    As Huthi rebels continue their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the deepening crisis is posing a fresh test for China’s ambitions of becoming a power broker in the Middle East – and raising questions about whether Beijing can help bring the group to bay.

    Finding Perspective: U.S. officials have been asking China to urge Tehran to rein in Iran-backed Huthis, but according to the Financial Times, American officials say that they have seen no signs of help.

    Still, Washington keeps raising the issue. In weekend meetings with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bangkok, U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan again asked Beijing to use its “substantial leverage with Iran” to play a “constructive role” in stopping the attacks.

    Reuters, citing Iranian officials, reported on January 26 that Beijing urged Tehran at recent meetings to pressure the Huthis or risk jeopardizing business cooperation with China in the future.

    There are plenty of reasons to believe that China would want to bring the attacks to an end. The Huthis have disrupted global shipping, stoking fears of global inflation and even more instability in the Middle East.

    This also hurts China’s bottom line. The attacks are raising transport costs and jeopardizing the tens of billions of dollars that China has invested in nearby Egyptian ports.

    Why It Matters: The current crisis raises some complex questions for China’s ambitions in the Middle East.

    If China decides to pressure Iran, it’s unknown how much influence Tehran actually has over Yemen’s Huthis. Iran backs the group and supplies them with weapons, but it’s unclear if they can actually control and rein them in, as U.S. officials are calling for.

    But the bigger question might be whether this calculation looks the same from Beijing.

    China might be reluctant to get too involved and squander its political capital with Iran on trying to get the Huthis to stop their attacks, especially after the group has announced that it won’t attack Chinese ships transiting the Red Sea.

    Beijing is also unlikely to want to bring an end to something that’s hurting America’s interests arguably more than its own at the moment.

    U.S. officials say they’ll continue to talk with China about helping restore trade in the Red Sea, but Beijing might decide that it has more to gain by simply stepping back.

    Three More Stories From Eurasia

    1. ‘New Historical Heights’ For China And Uzbekistan

    Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev made a landmark three-day visit to Beijing, where he met with Xi, engaged with Chinese business leaders, and left with an officially upgraded relationship as the Central Asian leader increasingly looks to China for his economic future.

    The Details: As I reported here, Mirziyoev left Uzbekistan looking to usher in a new era and returned with upgraded diplomatic ties as an “all-weather” partner with China.

    The move to elevate to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from a “comprehensive strategic partnership” doesn’t come with any formal benefits, but it’s a clear sign from Mirziyoev and Xi on where they want to take the relationship between their two countries.

    Before going to China for the January 23-25 trip, Mirziyoev signed a letter praising China’s progress in fighting poverty and saying he wanted to develop a “new long-term agenda” with Beijing that will last for “decades.”

    Beyond the diplomatic upgrade, China said it was ready to expand cooperation with Uzbekistan across the new energy vehicle industry chain, as well as in major projects such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower.

    Xi and Mirzoyoev also spoke about the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, with the Chinese leader saying that work should begin as soon as possible, athough no specifics were offered and there are reportedly still key disputes over how the megaproject will be financed.

    2. The Taliban’s New Man In Beijing

    In a move that could lay the groundwork for more diplomatic engagement with China, Xi received diplomatic credentials from the Taliban’s new ambassador in Beijing on January 25.

    What You Need To Know: Mawlawi Asadullah Bilal Karimi was accepted as part of a ceremony that also received the credential letters of 42 new envoys. Karimi was named as the new ambassador to Beijing on November 24 but has now formally been received by Xi, which is another installment in the slow boil toward recognition that’s under way.

    No country formally recognizes the Taliban administration in Afghanistan, but China – along with other countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan – have appointed their own envoys to Kabul and have maintained steady diplomatic engagement with the group since it returned to power in August 2021.

    Formal diplomatic recognition for the Taliban still looks to be far off, but this move highlights China’s strategy of de-facto recognition that could see other countries following its lead, paving the way for formal ties down the line.

    3. China’s Tightrope With Iran and Pakistan

    Air strikes and diplomatic sparring between Iran and Pakistan raised difficult questions for China and its influence in the region, as I reported here.

    Both Islamabad and Tehran have since moved to mend fences, with their foreign ministers holding talks on January 29. But the incident put the spotlight on what China would do if two of its closest partners entered into conflict against one another.

    What It Means: The tit-for-tat strikes hit militant groups operating in each other’s territory. After a tough exchange, both countries quickly cooled their rhetoric – culminating in the recent talks held in Islamabad.

    And while Beijing has lots to lose in the event of a wider conflict between two of its allies, it appeared to remain quiet, with only a formal offer to mediate if needed.

    Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told me this approach reflects how China “shies away from situations like this,” in part to protect its reputation in case it intervenes and then fails.

    Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute, added that, despite Beijing’s cautious approach, China has shown a willingness to mediate when opportunity strikes, pointing to the deal it helped broker between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March.

    “It looks like the Pakistanis and the Iranians had enough in their relationship to ease tensions themselves,” he told me. “So [Beijing] might be relieved now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t step up if needed.”

    Across The Supercontinent

    China’s Odd Moment: What do the fall of the Soviet Union and China’s slowing economy have in common? The answer is more than you might think.

    Listen to the latest episode of the Talking China In Eurasia podcast, where we explore how China’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union is shaping the country today.

    Invite Sent. Now What? Ukraine has invited Xi to participate in a planned “peace summit” of world leaders in Switzerland, Reuters reported, in a gathering tied to the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion.

    Blocked, But Why? China has suspended issuing visas to Lithuanian citizens. Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis confirmed the news and told Lithuanian journalists that “we have been informed about this. No further information has been provided.”

    More Hydro Plans: Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Energy and the China National Electric Engineering Company signed a memorandum of cooperation on January 24 to build a cascade of power plants and a new thermal power plant.

    One Thing To Watch

    There’s no official word, but it’s looking like veteran diplomat Liu Jianchao is the leading contender to become China’s next foreign minister.

    Wang Yi was reassigned to his old post after Qin Gang was abruptly removed as foreign minister last summer, and Wang is currently holding roles as both foreign minister and the more senior position of director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office.

    Liu has limited experience engaging with the West but served stints at the Communist Party’s anti-corruption watchdog and currently heads a party agency traditionally tasked with building ties with other communist states.

    It also looks like he’s being groomed for the role. He recently completed a U.S. tour, where he met with top officials and business leaders, and has also made visits to the Middle East.

    That’s all from me for now. Don’t forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

    Until next time,

    Reid Standish

    If you enjoyed this briefing and don’t want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your inbox every other Wednesday.


    This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 3 of 16)


    Premise

    Consider this paradox: without the Soviet Union (U.S.-designated nemesis since 1917), the United States would have never succeeded at placing the planet under its unilateral grip—often referred to by U.S. imperialists as the “new world order”. Or, rephrased differently, a world whereby the U.S. wants to rule unchallenged. This how it started: first, forget the Soviet Politburo—Mikhail Gorbachev practically annulled its role as the supreme decision-maker body of the Soviet Communist Party before proceeding to dismantle the Soviet state. In sequence, he, his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, other anti-communists in his inner circle, and the Yeltsin group were the material instruments in the downfall of the USSR thus leading to U.S. success.

    By a twist of events, with its unrelenting policy of economic, geopolitical, and military pressure to submit the new Russia to its will, the United States effectively forced it to intervene in Ukraine many years later. After 33 years from the dismantling the Soviet Union (first by Gorbachev’s contraptions of perestroika and glasnost, and then by Yeltsin’s pro-Western free-marketers), Russia is now breaking up the monstrous American order it helped create. Today, it seems that Russia have reprised its founding principles in the world arena—not as an ideologically anti-imperialist Soviet socialist republic, but as an anti-hegemonic capitalistic state.

    The process for the U.S. world control worked like this: taking advantage of Gorbachev’s dismantlement of the socialist system in Eastern Europe and his planned breakup of the USSR, the United States followed a multi-pronged strategy to assert itself as the sole judge of world affairs. The starting point was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. With the success of its two-stage war to end that occupation (Operations: Desert Shield, 1990, and Operation: Desert Storm, 1991) the United States achieved multiple objectives. Notably, it removed the USSR completely from the world scene even before it was officially dismantled, and it put Iraq and the entire Arab world under its effective control, and it tested its new world order.

    Far more important, with a considerably weakened Russia taking the seat of the USSR at the Security Council, the United States finally completed its takeover of the United Nations. Although the hyperpower is known for routinely operating out of the international norms and treaties, and has myriad methods to enforce its influence or control over foreign nations, it is a fact that whoever controls the Security Council can use its resolutions—and their ever-changing interpretations— as authorization for military interventions in the name of so-called collective international legality.

    Still, it is incorrect to say that the United States has become the omnipotent controller without considering the other three permanent members of the Security Council:  Britain, France, and China. First, aside from being the two states with a known history of imperialism and colonialism, Britain and France are NATO countries. As such, they pose no threat to U.S. authority. This leaves China. (For now, I shall briefly discuss China’s role vis-à-vis the U.S. taking control of the Security Council after the demise of the USSR, while deferring its relevance to U.S. plans in Ukraine to the upcoming parts)

    China has been rising as world power since the early 1990s onward. That being said, China’s world outlook has been consistently based on cooperation and peace among nations. China is neither an imperialist nor expansionist or interventionist state, and its claim on taking back Taiwan is historical, legal, and legitimate. That being said, China’s abstention from voting on serious issues is seriously questionable. Interpretation: China seems primarily focused on building its economic and technological structures instead of antagonizing U.S. policies that could slow its pace due to its [China] growing integration in the global capitalistic system of production. Consider the following two Western viewpoints on China’s voting practices:

    • The Australian think tank, Lowy Institute, states, “China used its UN Security Council rotating presidency in August … China did not veto any UN Security Council resolutions between 2000 and 2006.”

    Observation: but the period 2000–2006 was the post-9/11 Orwellian environment in which the United States broke all laws of the U.N. and turned the organization into its private fiefdom. Does that mean China had caved in to U.S. pressure and subscribed to its objectives? Based on its history, ideals, stated foreign policy principles, and political makeup, my answer is no. Yet, we do know that China has often been moving alongside U.S. objectives—by remaining silent on them. Examples include the U.S. 13-year blockade of and sanctions on Iraq (starting in 1990 and theoretically ending after the U.S. invasion in 2003), as well post-invasion occupation that is lasting through present by diverse ways and methods.

    • Wikipedia (Caveat: never take anything printed on this website seriously unless you verify content rigorously) stated the following on China, “From 1971 to 2011, China used its veto sparingly, preferring to abstain rather than veto resolutions not directly related to Chinese interests. China turned abstention into an “art form”, abstaining on 30% of Security Council Resolutions between 1971 and 1976. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, China has joined Russia in many double vetoes. China has not cast a lone veto since 1999.”

    Observation: by abstaining, China seems playing politics and patently taking sides with Washington on critical issues. Is china conspiring, in some form, with the U.S. for selfish reasons? Are there other reasons?

    No science is needed to prove that China is neither fearful of the United States nor subservient to it or uncertain about its own great place in the world. Simply, China favors dialogue over confrontation and patience over nervous impulses. Although such conduct may unnerve some who want to see China stand up to the hyper-imperialist bully, the fact is, China is no hurry to play its cards before the issue of Taiwan is resolved. Still, by its own problematic actions at the Security Council, China is not a dependable obstacle to U.S. plans. Of interest to the anti-imperialist front, however, is that China’s voting record on Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has left dire consequences on those nations.

    Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine: Dialectics 

    Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was calculated and consequential. It was calculated based on symmetric response to U.S. long-term planning aiming at destabilizing it. The consequentiality factor is significant. Russia’s action did not precede but followed a protracted standoff with Ukraine following U.S.-organized coup in 2014. Not only did that coup topple the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovych, but also veered Ukraine’s new rulers toward a fanatical confrontation with Russia and ethnic Russians—a sizable minority in Donbass.

    Could comparing U.S. and Russian reactions to each other’s interventions shed light on the scope of their respective world policies? How does all this apply to Ukraine? First, Ukraine is not a conflict about territory, democracy, sovereignty, and all that jargon made to distract from the real issues and for the idle consumption of news. Second, to understand the war on Ukraine, we need to place Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in a historical context that —at least since the dismantlement of the USSR.

    Premise 

    The study of reactions by political states to military interventions and wars is an empirical science. By knowing who is intervening, who is approving, and who is opposing, and by observing and cataloging their conduct vis-à-vis a conflict, we can definitely identify pretexts, motives, and objectives. For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the reaction of the United States, key European countries, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan were unanimously approving—and supporting with instigation, money, weapons, and logistics. The Soviet Union on the other hand, called for dialogue, negotiation, and other ways to end the conflict.

    In the Iraq-Iran War, the U.S., Europe, and Israel wanted the war to continue so both would perish by it. Henry Kissinger the top priest of U.S. Zionism simplified the U.S. objective with these words, “The ultimate American interest in the war (is) that both should lose”. Consequently, Western weapons sales to both contenders skyrocketed—war is business. The Arab Gulf states, for example, financed and wanted Iraq to defeat Iran—its revolutionary model threatened their feudal family systems of government. They also looked for surgical ways to weaken Iraq thus stopping its calls for the unification of Arab states.

    It turned out, when the war ended after eight years without losers and winners, that U.S. and Israel’s objective evolved to defeat Iraq that had become, in the meanwhile, a regional power. The opportunity came up when Iraq, falling in the U.S. trap (April Glaspie’s deception; also read, “Wikileaks, April Glaspie, and Saddam Hussein”) invaded Kuwait consequent to oil disputes and debts from its Gulf-U.S.-instigated war with Iran. As for Iran, it became the subject of harsh American containment and sanction regimes lasting to this very date.

    Another example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the USSR, China, Arab States, and countless others only condemned but did nothing else as usual, Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, approved and sent his marines to break up the Palestinian Resistance and expel it from Lebanon, which was an Israeli primary objective.

    United States: Reaction to the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan

    When the USSR intervened in Afghanistan in 1979, that country became an American issue instantly. Cold war paradigms played a paramount role in the U.S. response. Not only did the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia’s money) invent so-called Islamist mujahedeen against the Russian “atheists” (operation Cyclone), but also created ad hoc regional “alliances’—similar to those operating in Ukraine today—to counter the Soviet intervention.

    Russia: Reaction to U.S.’s many interventions and invasions 

    When Lyndon Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic (1965), when Ronald Reagan mined the Nicaraguan ports (1981-85), and when George H.W. Bush invaded Panama (1989) and moved its president to U.S. prisons, the USSR reacted by invoking the rules of international law—albeit knowing that said law never mattered to the United States. The Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev stated that the invasion is “A flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and norms of relations among states”.

    But did he do anything to hold the U.S. accountable? Gorbachev knew well that words are cheap, and that from an American perspective such charter and norms are ready for activation only when they serve U.S. imperialist purpose. The U.S., of course, did not give a hoot to Gorbachev’s protestation—and that is the problem with Russian leaders: they avoid principled confrontation with the futile expectation that the United States would refrain from bullying Russia. One can spot this tendency when Russian leaders kept calling U.S. and European politicians “our partners” while fully knowing that the recipients are probably smirking in secret.

    Another catastrophic example is Gorbachev’s voting (alongside the United States) for the U.N. Resolution 678 to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait by January 15, 1991. According to my research, that was the first time in which a resolution came with a deadline. Meaning, the United States (and Gorbachev) were in a hurry to implement Bush’s plan for world control.

    Not only did the Gorbachev regime approve Resolution 678, but also approved all U.S. resolutions pertaining to Iraq since the day it invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The statement is important. It means that Gorbachev’s role was structurally fundamental in allowing the United States to become the de facto “chief executive officer” of world affairs. At the same time, his role was also the material instrument in turning Russia into a U.S. vassal for over two decades since the dissolution of the USSR. [After becoming a former president of a superpower, Gorbachev made a living by taking commissioned speeches at various U.S. universities and think tanks]

    From attentively reading Resolution 678, it is very clear that the objective was not about the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Decisively, it was about the disarming of Iraq for the sake of the Zionist entity in Palestine. In fact, the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991 was never meant just to end that occupation by dislodging Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It was enacted to destroy Iraq’s civilian structures and infrastructures, its army, and its nascent military industry including its nuclear capabilities.

    The point: Gorbachev as a convert from communism to capitalism closed his eyes to U.S. objectives in Iraq and the world—these were unimportant to his plan since he obviously tied a deeply altered USSR to the wheel of U.S. imperialism while thinking he and his regime still mattered. With that, he doomed future Russia to protracted hardship and the world to suffer at the hands of U.S. violent imperialists and Zionists.

    The Example of Libya: Zionist hyper-imperialist Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011. [For the record, the Jerusalem Post (top publication in the Zionist state) called Obama, “An insider’s view: Eight years watching the first Jewish US president”. (Describing Obama as Jewish is irrelevant. He was a Zionist at the service of Israel via a constructed career powered by opportunism and sycophancy) Obama’s bombing of Libya is testimony to Russia’s betrayal of just causes when that suits its calculations.

    Russia of Dmitry Medvedev (and Putin as his prime minister) explicitly accepted the U.S. plan by not vetoing UNSC 1970, and UNSC Resolution 1973 that declared the whole of Libya a No-Fly Zone. Once the resolution was passed, the U.S. (and NATO) transformed it at once into a colossal bombing of that country. (Debating whether Russian’s general conduct toward U.S. tactics was an expression of pragmatism, concession, collusion, or weakness goes beyond the scope of this work. I reported on Lavrov’s statement on the Libyan issue further down in this series.)

    As for the United States, a fascist Hillary Clinton disguised as an “intelligent diplomat” epitomized the U.S. role for government change in Libya as follows. Referring to the brutal murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Obama’s Secretary of State said, “We came, we saw, he died”. Aside from theatrically debasing Mark Anthony’s famous victory exclamation with her crazed laughter, Clinton’s “WE” confirmed the basics: Odyssey Dawn was a code name, not for a romantic beginning for Libya but for Obama’s imperialist war to conquer its oil and depose its leader.

    Two other events are significant for their long-term implications: U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Regardless of U.S. pretexts, Russia reacted to each invasion differently. In the case of Afghanistan, it sided with the United States in spite of the fact that Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban had nothing to do with the still very much suspicious attack on the United States on September 11, 2021. It is imperative to recall what Tony Blair said prior to the Anglo-American invasion. Media and public records of the British government can confirm that Blair thundered to the Taliban, “Surrender Bin Laden, or lose power”. The Taliban offered to comply if the U.S. could prove that Bin Laden was behind the attack. The U.S. never responded—it just invaded.

    In the case of Iraq, Russia, together with France and Germany, vehemently opposed the planned invasion but only within the realm of the UNSC. The U.S. and Britain invaded nevertheless. Aside from protesting, however, neither Russia nor any other country took any punitive action against the top two imperialist powers. More than that, Russia of the first Putin presidency sent neither weapons nor money to Iraq and Afghanistan to help them fight the invaders. Germany and France did the same. Was that for “solidarity” with invaders or fear from U.S. retribution?

    What is worse, Russia and China had even accepted the U.S.‑imposed U.N. resolution 1483 that crowned the United States and Britain as the occupying powers of Iraq. That acceptance is a moral, historical, and legal blunder that the passing of time will never erase. This how it should be interpreted politically: with the passing of that resolution, Russia and China had not only legalized the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq, but also lent international legitimacy to the invasion and it is false motives.

    A question: why did not the United States and Britain try to declare themselves as the occupying powers of Afghanistan? The answer is prompt: look no farther than the Zionist Israeli project to re-shape and control Iraq and other Arab countries via the United States. Accordingly, Afghanistan is not relevant to this scheme.

    To close, I’m not suggesting that interventions by any country are tolerable as long as “A” can do whatever “B” does or vice versa, or, as long as they do not stand in the way of each other. That would void the struggle for a just world system where natural states could enjoy independence and security. Rather, to address persistent questions on the current configuration of the world order, we must tackle first the issue of exclusive entitlement. That is, we like to know according to what rule Russia, China, or any other country should remain mute while the dictatorial, violent hyper-empire continues staking its claim to arrange the world according to its vision? If this rule turns out to be by means of fire, death, and printed money, then we may finally understand the miserable situation of the world today and find all possible means to end it.

    It is no small matter, but the “indispensable nation” [Madeleine Albright’s words] seems to think it deserves this exclusivity. American biblical preachers, hyper-imperialists, multi-term politicians, think tanks, proselytes of all types, military industry, and neophyte politicians seeking promotions within the system, and, before I forget, Zionist neocon empire builders often declare that the U.S. is predestined to rule over others. Biden, a self-declared Zionist has recently re-baptized the notion of U.S. ruling over others when he declared that the U.S. must lead the new world order.

    Another Subject: American ideologues of permanent wars persistently talk about what appears to be a fixed target: Ukraine must win and Russia must lose. What hides behind such frivolous theatrics? First off, why Ukraine must win and Russia must lose? Stating so because Russia intervened in Ukraine is non sequitur. The United States, Britain, France, and Israel have been punching the world with invasions for decades without anyone being able to stop them. Ineluctably, therefore, there should be fundamental reasons for wanting to see Russia lose.

    To begin, U.S. tactics to frame wars in terms of winning and losing is at the very least childish and makes no sense. Further, whereas waging wars of domination are built on a hypothetical model that ends with “we win they lose”, the resulting indoctrination paradigm is invariably translated into an ideological construct whereby winning is a sign of power and losing is a sign weakness. Again, that makes no sense. One could lose not out of weakness or could win not out of strength. In endless situations, winning or losing in any field is a function of varied dynamic and static forces leading to either outcome by default.

    In real context, the fabricated philosophy pivoting around the must-win scenario while discarding potential devastating reactions by a designated adversary is of paramount significance to understand the dangerous mindset of American politicians and war planners. As they prepare pretexts for a war by choice, they completely jump over the possibility that an opposite response could devastate them. How does the process work?

    Read Part 1 and 2.

    The post Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 3 of 16) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Toward the Abyss

    One word characterizes United States foreign policy – counterproductive.

    Major U.S. foreign policy decisions after World War II — Vietnam War, Lebanon intrusion, Somalia incursion, Afghan/Soviet War, Afghan occupation, Iraq War, support for Shah of Iran, and Libyan Wars — have been counterproductive, not resolving situations and eventually harming the American people. The one-sided relationship the United States has with Israel is another counterproductive policy that is harmful to the American public

    Persistent attention to Israel and its dubious position in the world may seem overkill, except this attention is one of the most important, mortally affecting the U.S. public. Until a complete report of fatal relations with Israel is placed on the desks of U.S. congresspersons and they act positively upon the contents, attention to the issue is incomplete and peril continues. Surveying U.S. policies that favored Israel collects a horrendous list of American fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against fortress America.

    Two questions. How have the expensive arrangements, Velcro attachments, and highly supportive measures for Israel benefitted the United States? What has Israel done for Americans, not for American politicians, but for those who vote them into office? A convenient means for obtaining the answer is to have a leading “think tank” in the United States supply the information. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which “seeks to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East and to promote the policies that secure them” has a 2012 article on the topic, “Friends with Benefits: Why the U.S.-Israeli Alliance Is Good for America,” by Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollock, Nov 7, 2012, and is a likely source. Some of its major recommendations:

    U.S.-Israeli security cooperation dates back to heights of the Cold War, when the Jewish state came to be seen in Washington as a bulwark against Soviet influence in the Middle East and a counter to Arab nationalism….Israel remains a counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism. It has prevented the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the region by thwarting Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs.

    (1) The reason the Soviet Union acquired influence in the Middle East was Washington’s refusal to sell arms to the Arab nations, while “indirectly supplying weapons to Israel via West Germany, under the terms of a 1960 secret agreement to supply Israel with $80 million worth of armaments.“ Less secret deliveries of MIM-23 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles in 1962 and M48 Patton tanks in 1965 told the Arab nations they could not collaborate with a government that armed their principal adversary and they should seek military assistance elsewhere.
    (2) Arab nationalism has developed, and developed, and developed; so, how did Israel counter Arab nationalism? Did Israel stimulate Arab nationalism?
    (3) What has Israel done to protect others as a “counterweight against radical forces in the Middle East, including political Islam and violent extremism?” The answer is nothing. Radical forces, political Islam, and violent extremism emerged immediately after Israel’s formation and grew, and grew, as Israel grew.
    (4) Iraq and Syria sought nuclear weapons to counter Israel’s nuclear weapons developments, which the U.S. could have and should have prevented. No nukes in Israel; no nukes in Syria or Iraq. Why did the U.S., dedicated to preventing nuclear proliferation, allow Israel to obtain the atomic bomb?

    Dozens of leading U.S. companies have set up technology incubators in Israel to take advantage of the country’s penchant for new ideas. In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region, having recently eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the top market there for American products.

    (1) U.S. companies have subsidiaries worldwide and hire talent in all nations. What’s significant about Israel?
    (2) “In 2011, Israel was the destination of 25 percent of all U.S. exports to the region…” Was that good? In 2022, U.S. exports to Israel were $20.0 billion and imports were $30.6 billion, adding $10.7 billion to Washington’s trade deficit, not a good economic statistic. Without Israel’s trade, the U.S. exported $83 billion in goods and services to Middle East nations and had a trade surplus of $5.3 billion, a better statistic.

    U.S. companies’ substantial cooperation with Israel on information technology has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success. At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year. If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli  researchers.

    These bites of public relations win the all-time Pinocchio award. Is The Washington Institute a legitimate “think tank” or a covert lobby?

    (1)    “Israel has been crucial to Silicon Valley’s success.” Next, we’ll hear that Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mt. Whitney.
    (2)    “At Intel’s research and development centers in Israel, engineers have designed many of the company’s most successful microprocessors, accounting for some 40 percent of the firm’s revenues last year.” Intel has 131,000 employees in 65 countries — 11,000 in Israel, 12,000 in China, and approximately 7,500 employees at its 360-acre Leixlip campus in Ireland. The company develops the processors, not the country or specific engineers; it can develop the same processors anywhere in the world and has capably developed its major microprocessors for 45 years in the good old United States of America.
    (3)    “If you’ve made a secure financial transaction on the Internet, sent an instant message, or bought something using PayPal, you can thank Israeli researchers.” Another Pinocchio award. Let’s be more accurate: “If you’ve been scammed in a financial transaction, had your messages hacked, or had someone purchase an item with your PayPal account, thank Israeli researchers.”

    In its one-sided presentation, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy does not show the U.S.-Israeli alliance is good for America. The Institute has not considered the other side, the harm that Israel has visited upon its most essential partner. Reality shows the U.S. government and its people have dealt with Israel in a suicidal manner and in a zero-sum game, where the U.S. is the “zero,” or actually minus, and Israel receives the sum of all the benefits.

    Recognition of Israel

    From its inception, Israel betrayed the United States and the U.S. betrayed its commitment to a just and peaceful post-WWII world. President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the new state, only 11 minutes after its declaration, did not consider its composition, signified a pardon of the excesses committed by Irgun and Haganah militias against civilian populations, and certified the exclusion of a Palestinian voice in the new government. Truman never asked who represented the 400,000 indigenous Palestinians in the declared Israeli state that was almost equal in population to the 600,000 Jews, most of whom were recent immigrants and not decidedly permanent.

    Suez Canal War

    Several years later Israel again betrayed its principal benefactor. While President Eisenhower attempted to broker a peace agreement between Egypt and France and Great Britain that would resolve the crisis emerging from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Israel held secret consultations with the British and French. Considering Nasser a threat to its security, desirous of incorporating the Sinai into its small nation, and with a plan to extend Israel to the Litani River in Lebanon, Israel devised a strategy with the two European powers that permitted its forces to invade Egypt and advance to within 10 miles of the Suez Canal. Pretending to protect the vital artery, Britain and France parachuted troops close to the canal. An enraged Eisenhower threatened all three nations with economic sanctions, which succeeded in having all three militaries withdraw their forces and relinquish control of the canal to Egypt.

    Six-Day War

    The six-day war brought the first American blood in the U.S. commitment to Israel. On June 8, 1967, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel patrolling in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, 17 nautical miles off the northern Sinai coast. The crew suffered thirty-four (34) killed and one hundred seventy-three (173) wounded. A declassified Top Secret report details the CIA version of the attack and exonerates Israel by claiming mistaken identity. This has not satisfied USS Liberty survivors, who felt Israeli pilots had many opportunities for proper identification and performed the attacks to prevent the ship from obtaining important intelligence information.

    1973 Yom Kippur War

    Next came the 1973 Yom Kippur War and an economic catastrophe for the American people. The U.S. maintained it needed Israel to offset Soviet influence in the Arab world. The combined Egyptian and Syrian attempt to retake lands lost in the 1967 war prompted the Nixon administration to use taxpayer money and supply massive shipments of weapons to the beleaguered Israel state. An excuse for providing the armaments shipments ─ Israel might use the Samson option and nuke its adversaries ─ is regarded as a manipulation to pacify opponents of the arms deliveries. The controversy is reported in Wikipedia.

    Dayan raised the nuclear topic in a cabinet meeting, warning that the country was approaching a point of “last resort.” That night, Meir authorized the assembly of thirteen 20-kiloton-of-TNT(84 TJ) tactical nuclear weapons for Jericho missiles at Sdot Micha Airbase and F-4 Phantom II aircraft at Tel Nof Airbase. They would be used if absolutely necessary to prevent total defeat, but the preparation was done in an easily detectable way, likely as a signal to the United States. Kissinger learned of the nuclear alert on the morning of 9 October. That day, President Nixon ordered the commencement of Operation Nickel Grass, an American airlift to replace all of Israel’s material losses.

    The U.S. contribution in enabling Israel to achieve a decisive victory resulted in an oil embargo that drove up oil prices, set Americans into a frantic rampage in trying to keep their cars on the road, a stagnant economy, and huge inflation, which the Federal Reserve stopped by raising interest rates to record highs and led to the 1982 recession.

    Lebanon War

    Despite a truce with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and wanting to rid Lebanon of the PLO and Syrian dominance in Lebanon affairs, Israel used a failed assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, as an excuse to invade Lebanon on June 6, 1982. Where Israel went, U.S. diplomacy was sure to follow, and the U.S. joined a multinational peacekeeping force.

    U.S. presence in Lebanon had detractors. On April 18, 1983, a car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in West Beirut, killing dozens of American foreign service workers and Lebanese civilians. On October 23, 1983,  after U.S. gunships in the Mediterranean shelled Syrian-backed Druze militias in support of the Christian government, a truck crashed through the front gates of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and exploded. Beirut barracks were destroyed and 241 marines and sailors were killed in the explosion. Soon after, President Reagan withdrew all U.S. forces from Lebanon.

    International Terrorism

    For several decades, al-Qaeda, the most prominent international terrorist organization, posed the most serious threat to America’s peace and stability. On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda associates bombed the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Africa. Twelve Americans were among the two hundred and twenty-four people who died in the terrorist actions. Three years later, the September 11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. caused 2,750 deaths in New York and 184 at the Pentagon. Forty more Americans died when one of the hijacked planes crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania. In addition, 400 police officers and firefighters perished in attempts to rescue people and extinguish the fires at the New York Trade Center.

    Where did it all start? Why, and how did master terrorist Osama bin Laden develop his plans? There is no one factor, but, in several documents, bin Landen mentions Zionist control of Middle East lands and its oppression of an Arab population as significant factors. America’s support for Israel was one of bin Laden‘s principal arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the last sentences of a “Letter to America.”

    Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

    During the 1990s, two other documents,“Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.

    [T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.

    So now they come to annihilate … this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

    Afghanistan

    The hunt for Osama bin Laden and efforts to annihilate the al-Qaeda organization led to the invasion of Afghanistan and a twenty-year clash between the U.S. and the Taliban. Result: 2,402 United States military deaths, 20,713 American service members wounded, and Taliban regaining control.

    Iraq

    It’s difficult and punishing to agree with Osama bin Laden, but he may be correct or have a perspective that needs more examination. Did Bush order the invasion of Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which any child could ascertain he could not possibly have, or did the Neocons, Israel’s voice in the administration, convince him to use Americans, their resources, and their money to rid the Middle East of Israel’s most formidable enemy? Was George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq another example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests? Other international terrorist operations emerged during the Iraq war and brought U.S. military personnel into more battles. Finally, in 2019, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the best-equipped and largest of all the terrorist factions, which caused havoc in Syria and Iraq, was defeated, and international terrorism moved out of the Middle East and into parts of Africa.

    Iran

    It is taken for granted that Iran and the United States are natural enemies, except the hostility may be manufactured and the factory might be in Tel Aviv. Iran has a government and internal problems that disturb the U.S., but so do many other nations, especially Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. maintains relations with these nations. Confrontations have occurred and are escalating and that demands toning down rather than ratcheting up, and more diplomatic confrontations to prevent the physical confrontations. Sanctions that harm Iran’s economy and people, assistance to Israel in assassinating Iranian scientists, and use of the powerful computer worm, Stuxnet, to cause mayhem in Iran’s nuclear program are counterproductive provocations. The U.S. has no specific problem with Iran that cannot be ameliorated. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and incursions into the Haram al-Sharif are problems that Iran has with Israel, and they cannot be ameliorated until the oppression stops. Cunningly, Israel has tied its problems with the Islamic State to U.S. problems with Iran and uses the U.S. to challenge Iran.

    Other

    ·         In defiance of U.S. restrictions and the U.S. supplying Israel with advanced military equipment, Israeli companies sold weapons to China without a permit.

    ·         The U.S. gives Israel the sum of $3.1 B every year to purchase advanced weapons, from which Israel became a major exporter of military equipment and has been able to compete effectively with its patron.

    ·          Israeli governments have scoffed at all U.S. entreaties to halt settlement expansion, even insulting then Vice-President Joe Biden by authorizing settlement expansion one day before Biden arrived for talks.

    ·         Two Navy SEALs are missing and assumed dead after a maritime operation to intercept weapons from Iran heading to Houthi fighters. This episode is a result of the U.S. participating in Israel’s war against Gaza.

    ·         The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has been attacking air bases housing U.S. and Iraqi troops in western Iraq “as a part of a broad resistance to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, as well as a response to Israel’s operations in Gaza.”

    Toward the Abyss

    The verdict is clear; the United States derives no benefit from its close relationship with Israel. Maybe, during the confusing Cold War, desk strategists determined the Soviets had an influence with Middle Eastern nations and thought it wise to have a place where the Pentagon would be welcome. Soviet influence disappeared after the 1979 Camp David Accords; Egypt and Israel signed a peace agreement and Soviet diplomats and military vanished from the desert sands.

    From September 11, 2001, to October 7, 2023, the U.S. continually suffered fatalities, economic havoc, international terrorism, political misalignment, hatred, and aggression against Fortress America. Why did U.S. administrations pursue a “special relationship” with Israel and find themselves victims of the “war on terror” and involved in numerous wars? The current U.S. administration, which did not use its clout to prevent the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel, has permitted Israel’s self-inflicted problems to bring the U.S. people into supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people, promoting the U.S. as the leading killer of indigenous peoples.

    It took a long time to turn the murmurs of genocide in Palestine into a forceful expression that others would accept and fearlessly repeat. Murmurs of sabotage and treason by elected government officials are being heard, but they are legal terms for crimes, and, legally, U.S. legislators’ activities may not be considered in those categories. Treachery is a better word, gaining federal office by treacherous means — pandering to those that represent the interests of a foreign power to obtain campaign funds and press coverage — and using that office to satisfy the wants of the foreign power, despite the damage done to American constituencies. Past and present U.S. executives and legislators are guilty of treachery and that word should be shouted in the halls of Congress. Sound the alarm, get them out before it is too late, and elect into office those who represent the American people and not a foreign government. MAGA – MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN.

    Aiding the genocide has put the U.S. in severe moral decline; escalating internal divisions are leading to social and political decline; and an economy that can no longer compete in the international markets, together with increasing resistance to use of the dollar, is leading to economic decline. The signs of civil strife have yet to appear and when they do they will push the U.S. off the edge of the cliff and into the abyss.

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  • Human rights in decline globally as leaders fail to uphold laws, report warns

    Human Rights Watch’s annual report highlights politicians’ double standards and ‘transactional diplomacy’ amid escalating crises

    Human rights across the world are in a parlous state as leaders shun their obligations to uphold international law, according to the annual report of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

    In its 2024 world report, HRW warns grimly of escalating human rights crises around the globe, with wartime atrocities increasing, suppression of human rights defenders on the rise, and universal human rights principles and laws being attacked and undermined by governments.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Banished from Pakistan: Islamabad Moves on Afghan Refugees

    Across the globe, refugees, always treated as the pox of public policy, continue to feature in news reports describing anguish, despair and persistent persecution.  If they are not facing barbed wire barriers in Europe, they are being conveyed, where possible, to third countries to be processed in lengthy fashion.  Policy makers fiddle and cook the legal record to justify such measures, finding fault with instruments of international protection such as the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951.

    A very dramatic example of roughing up and violence is taking place against Afghans in Pakistan, a country that, despite having a lengthy association with hosting refugees, has yet to ratify the primary Convention.  Yet in March 2023, the UNHCR noted that Pakistan hosted 1.35 million registered refugees.  The organisation praised Pakistan for its “long and commendable tradition of providing protection to refugees and asylum-seekers”, noting that the current number comprised “mainly Afghan refugees holding Proof of Registration (PoR), as well as a small number of non-Afghan refugees and asylum seekers from other countries such as Myanmar, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.”

    Such a rosy assessment detracts from the complex nature of the status of Afghans in that country, characterised by, in some cases, the absence of visas and passports, the expiration of visas and the long wait for renewals.  Then comes the tense, heavy mix of domestic politics.

    On September 15, the federal government ordered all individual Afghans residing in the country illegally to leave the country by November 1 or face deportation.  The order affects some 1.7 million Afghans residing in the country, though the figures on the undocumented vary with dizzy fluctuations.

    It is proving disastrous for those vulnerable individuals who fled a country where the Taliban has returned to power.  To date, 400,000 are said to have left Pakistan via border crossings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan, with one estimate from the International Rescue Committee suggesting that 10,000 are being returned to Afghanistan each day.  These include the whole spectrum of vulnerable persons: women, girls, human rights activists, journalists and those formerly in the employ of the previous Western-backed government.

    The picture is an ugly one indeed, complicated by Pakistan’s own domestic ills and complex relationship with Kabul.  During the course of the vacuously named Global War on Terror, Afghanistan came to be seen as a problem for Pakistani security, its refugee camps accused as being incubators for fractious Afghan militants.  Kabul, at that point yet to return to Taliban control, accused Islamabad of destabilising its own security by providing sanctuary for those very same militants.  In the aftermath of the killing of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani in September 2011, the victim of a daring suicide attack on his residency, Pakistan’s then Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, proved roundly dismissive: “We are not responsible if Afghan refugees crossed the border and entered Kabul, stayed in a guest house and attacked Professor Rabbani.”

    The latest chapter of demonisation comes on the coattails of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.  Brutal night raids by police, featuring beatings, ominous threats and detention, have become the hallmarks of the expulsion campaign.  The police forces, themselves spoiled by corruption and opportunism, are prone to pilfering property, including jewellery and livestock.

    In October, Mir Ahmad Rauf, who heads the Afghan Refugees’ Council in Pakistan reported “widespread destruction of Afghan homes in Islamabad’s B-17, Karachi, and other parts of Pakistan.”  Last month, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a statement expressing concern at “reports of increased detainment, violence, and intimidation against the Ahmadiyya and Afghan refugee communities” in the country.

    To add to this failure of protection is the status of many who, despite being Afghan, were born in Pakistan and never set foot in Afghanistan.  In 2018, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that his government would be amenable to granting citizenship to Afghans born in the country.  The promise (amenability is always contingent) was never enacted into law, and Khan is now persona non grata with Pakistan’s usurpers.

    The protective, humanitarian burden for processing claims by Afghans in other countries has also been reluctantly shared.  To return to Afghanistan spells potential repression and persecution; but to find a country in the European Union, or to seek sanctuary in the United States, Australia and others, has been nigh impossible for most.

    When asylum has been considered, it has often been done with an emphasis on prioritising the contributions of men who had performed military and security roles in the previous Western-backed Kabul administration.  There is a delicious irony to this, given the evangelical promises of US President George W. Bush to liberate the country’s women from the clutches of obscurantist fundamentalism.

    On December 1, a three-member bench of the Pakistani Supreme Court sought responses from the various arms of the government, including the apex committee led by the Prime Minister, foreign office, and army chief on their decision to expel Afghan nationals.  Given the caretaker status of the current government, which has all but outsourced foreign policy to the military, including the “Afghan issue”, legal questions can be asked.

    One of the petitioners to the court, Senator Farhatullah Babar, states that current government members are technically unelected to represent the country.  “So, the court would need to decide whether a caretaker government with such a restrictive mandate can take such a major policy decision, and in my view, this is beyond the power of the caretaker government.”  Those Afghans remaining in Pakistan can only wait.

    The post Banished from Pakistan: Islamabad Moves on Afghan Refugees first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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