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Category: Asia Report

  • John Minto: Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa mosque – and the failings of media

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    The last fortnight has seen a series of brutal, deliberately provocative Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshippers at Al Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

    Needless to say, Israel had no business interfering in Muslim worship at Al Aqsa, the third holiest shrine for Muslims after Mecca and Medina, and an area which is not under their authority or control.

    Despite this, Israeli attacks on Al Aqsa have intensified in recent years as the apartheid state strives to undermine all aspects of Palestinian life in Jerusalem. It is applying ethnic cleansing in slow motion.

    Inevitably missile attacks on Israel from Gaza and Southern Lebanon followed and Israel has reveled in once again trying to portray itself to the world as the victim.

    There is an excellent 10-minute video in which former Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi more than held her own against a hostile BBC interviewer here.

    There is also an excellent podcast produced by Al Jazeera which backgrounds the increase in violence in the Middle East.


    Inside Story: What triggered the spike in violence?   Video: Al Jazeera

    Nour Odeh – Political analyst and former spokeswoman for the Palestinian National Authority.

    Uri Dromi – Founder and president of the Jerusalem Press Club and a former spokesman for the Israel government.

    Francesca Albanese – United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

    Further background on the politics around Al Aqsa is covered in this Al Jazeera podcast.

    Initially reporting here in New Zealand was reasonable and clearly identified Israel as the brutal racist aggressors attacking Palestinian civilians at worship. However, within a couple of days media reporting deteriorated dramatically with the “normal” appalling reporting taking over — painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as simply enforcing “law and order”.

    At the heart of appalling reporting for a long time has been the BBC which slavishly and consistently screws the scrum in Israel’s favour. The BBC does not report on the Middle East – it propagandises for Israel.

    Journalist Jonathan Cook describes how the BBC coverage is enabling Israeli violence and UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, called out the BBC’s awful reporting in a tweet.

    It’s not just the BBC of course. For example The New York Times has been called out for deliberately distorting the news to blame Palestinians for Al Aqsa mosque crisis.

    It’s not reporting — it’s propaganda!

    Why is BBC important for Aotearoa New Zealand?
    Unfortunately, here in Aotearoa New Zealand our media frequently and uncritically uses BBC reports to inform New Zealanders on the Middle East.

    Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand, our state broadcasters, are the worst offenders.

    For example here are two BBC stories carried by RNZ this past week here and here. They cover the deaths of three Jewish women in a terrorist attack in the occupied West Bank.

    The media should report such killings but there is no context given for the illegal Jewish-only settlements at the heart in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s military occupation across all Palestine, the daily ritual humiliation and debasement of Palestinians or its racist apartheid policies towards Palestinians — or as Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem describes it “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid”.

    Neither are there Palestinian voices in the above reports — they are typically absent from most Middle East reporting, or at best muted, compared to extensive quoting from racist Israeli leaders.

    The BBC is happy to report the “what?” but not the “why?”

    Needless to say neither Radio New Zealand, nor TVNZ, has provided any such sympathetic coverage for the many dozens of Palestinians killed by Israel this year — including at least 16 Palestinian children. To the BBC, RNZ and TVNZ, murdered Palestinian children are simply statistics.

    RNZ and TVNZ say they cannot ensure to cover all the complexities of the Middle East in every story and that people get a balanced view over time from their regular reporting.

    This is not true. Their reliance on so much systematically-biased BBC reporting, and other sources which are often not much better, tells a different story.

    For example, references to Israel as an apartheid state — something attested to by every credible human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — are always absent from any RNZ or TVNZ reporting and yet this is critical to help people understand what is going on in Palestine.

    Neither are there significant references to international law or United Nations resolutions — the tools which provide for a Middle East peace based on justice — the only peace possible.

    Unlike their reporting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RNZ and TVNZ reporting on the Middle East leaves people confused and ready to blame both sides equally for the murder and mayhem unleashed by Israel on Palestinians and Palestinian resistance to the Israeli military occupation and all that entails.

    John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article is republished from the PSNA newsletter with the author’s permission.

    "Divide and Dominate" . . . how Israel's apartheid policies and repression impact on Palestinians
    “Divide and Dominate” . . . how Israel’s apartheid policies and repression impact on Palestinians. Image: Visualising Palestine

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Al-Aqsa raid: How BBC coverage is enabling Israeli violence

    ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

    The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate and tireless campaigner against South African apartheid, once observed: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

    For decades, the BBC’s editorial policy in reporting on Israel and Palestine has consistently chosen the side of the oppressor — and all too often, not even by adopting the impartiality the corporation claims as the bedrock of its journalism.

    Instead, the British state broadcaster regularly chooses language and terminology whose effect is to deceive its audience. And it compounds such journalistic malpractice by omitting vital pieces of context when that extra information would present Israel in a bad light.

    BBC bias — which entails knee-jerk echoing of the British establishment’s support for Israel as a highly militarised ally projecting Western interests into the oil-rich Middle East – was starkly on show once again this week as the broadcaster reported on the violence at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

    Social media was full of videos showing heavily armed Israeli police storming the mosque complex during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

    Police could be seen pushing peaceful Muslim worshippers, including elderly men, off their prayer mats and forcing them to leave the site. In other scenes, police were filmed beating worshippers inside a darkened Al-Aqsa, while women could be heard screaming in protest.

    What is wrong with the British state broadcaster’s approach — and much of the rest of the Western media’s — is distilled in one short BBC headline: “Clashes erupt at contested holy site.”

    Into a sentence of just six words, the BBC manages to cram three bogusly “neutral” words, whose function is not to illuminate or even to report, but to trick the audience, as Tutu warned, into siding with the oppressor.

    Furious backlash
    Though video of the beatings was later included on the BBC’s website and the headline changed after a furious online backlash, none of the sense of unprovoked, brutal Israeli state violence, or its malevolent rationale, was captured by the BBC’s reporting.

    To call al-Aqsa a ‘contested holy site’, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting

    The “clashes” at al-Aqsa, in the BBC’s telling, presume a violent encounter between two groups: Palestinians, described by Israel and echoed by the BBC as “agitators”, on one side; and Israeli forces of law and order on the other.

    That is the context, according to the BBC, for why unarmed Palestinians at worship need to be beaten. And that message is reinforced by the broadcaster’s description of the seizure of hundreds of Palestinians at worship as “arrests” — as though an unwelcome, occupying, belligerent security force present on another people’s land is neutrally and equitably upholding the law.

    “Erupt” continues the theme. It suggests the “clashes” are a natural force, like an earthquake or volcano, over which Israeli police presumably have little, if any, control. They must simply deal with the eruption to bring it to an end.

    And the reference to the “contested” holy site of Al-Aqsa provides a spurious context legitimising Israeli state violence: police need to be at Al-Aqsa because their job is to restore calm by keeping the two sides “contesting” the site from harming each other or damaging the holy site itself.

    The BBC buttresses this idea by uncritically citing an Israeli police statement accusing Palestinians of being at Al-Aqsa to “disrupt public order and desecrate the mosque”.

    Palestinians are thus accused of desecrating their own holy site simply by worshipping there — rather than the desecration committed by Israeli police in storming al-Aqsa and violently disrupting worship.


    The History of Al-Aqsa Mosque.  Video: Middle East Eye

    Israeli provocateurs
    The BBC’s framing should be obviously preposterous to any rookie journalist in Jerusalem. It assumes that Israeli police are arbiters or mediators at Al-Aqsa, dispassionately enforcing law and order at a Muslim place of worship, rather than the truth: that for decades, the job of Israeli police has been to act as provocateurs, dispatched by a self-declared Jewish state, to undermine the long-established status quo of Muslim control over Al-Aqsa.

    Events were repeated for a second night this week when police again raided Al-Aqsa, firing rubber bullets and tear gas as thousands of Palestinians were at prayer. US statements calling for “calm” and “de-escalation” adopted the same bogus evenhandedness as the BBC.

    The mosque site is not “contested”, except in the imagination of Jewish religious extremists, some of them in the Israeli government, and the most craven kind of journalists.

    True, there are believed to be the remains of two long-destroyed Jewish temples somewhere underneath the raised mount where al-Aqsa is built. According to Jewish religious tradition, the Western Wall — credited with being a retaining wall for one of the disappeared temples – is a place of worship for Jews.

    But under that same Jewish rabbinical tradition, the plaza where Al-Aqsa is sited is strictly off-limits to Jews. The idea of Al-Aqsa complex as being “contested” is purely an invention of the Israeli state — now backed by a few extremist settler rabbis — that exploits this supposed “dispute” as the pretext to assert Jewish sovereignty over a critically important piece of occupied Palestinian territory.

    Israel’s goal — not Judaism’s — is to strip Palestinians of their most cherished national symbol, the foundation of their religious and emotional attachment to the land of their ancestors, and transfer that symbol to a state claiming to exclusively represent the Jewish people.

    To call Al-Aqsa a “contested holy site”, as the BBC does, is simply to repeat a propaganda talking point from Israel, the oppressor state, and dress it up as neutral reporting.

    ‘Equal rights’ at Al-Aqsa
    The reality is that there would have been no “clashes”, no “eruption” and no “contest” had Israeli police not chosen to storm Al-Aqsa while Palestinians were worshipping there during the holiest time of the year.

    This is not a ‘clash’. It is not a ‘conflict’. Those supposedly ‘neutral’ terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing

    There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not aggressively enforcing a permanent occupation of Palestinian land in Jerusalem, which has encroached ever more firmly on Muslim access to, and control over, the mosque complex.

    There would have been no “clashes” were Israeli police not taking orders from the latest – and most extreme – of a series of police ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir, who does not even bother to hide his view that Al-Aqsa must be under absolute Jewish sovereignty.

    There would have been no “clashes” had Israeli police not been actively assisting Jewish religious settlers and bigots to create facts on the ground over many years — facts to bolster an evolving Israeli political agenda that seeks “equal rights” at Al-Aqsa for Jewish extremists, modelled on a similar takeover by settlers of the historic Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

    And there would have been no “clashes” if Palestinians were not fully aware that, over many years, a tiny, fringe Jewish settler movement plotting to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque to build a Third Temple in its place has steadily grown, flourishing under the sponsorship of Israeli politicians and ever more sympathetic Israeli media coverage.

    Cover story for violence
    Along with the Israeli army, the paramilitary Israeli police are the main vehicle for the violent subjugation of Palestinians, as the Israeli state and its settler emissaries dispossess Palestinians, driving them into ever smaller enclaves.

    This is not a “clash”. It is not a “conflict”. Those supposedly “neutral” terms conceal what is really happening: apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

    Just as there is a consistent, discernible pattern to Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, there is a parallel, discernible pattern in the Western media’s misleading reporting on Israel and Palestine.

    Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being systematically dispossessed by Israel of their homes and farmlands so they can be herded into overcrowded, resource-starved cities.

    Palestinians in Gaza have been dispossessed of their access to the outside world, and even to other Palestinians, by an Israeli siege that encages them in an overcrowded, resourced-starved coastal enclave.

    And in the Old City of Jerusalem, Palestinians are being progressively dispossessed by Israel of access to, and control over, their central religious resource: Al-Aqsa Mosque. Their strongest source of religious and emotional attachment to Jerusalem is being actively stolen from them.

    To describe as “clashes” any of these violent state processes — carefully calibrated by Israel so they can be rationalised to outsiders as a “security response” — is to commit the very journalistic sin Tutu warned of. In fact, it is not just to side with the oppressor, but to intensify the oppression; to help provide the cover story for it.

    That point was made this week by Francesca Albanese, the UN expert on Israel’s occupation. She noted in a tweet about the BBC’s reporting of the Al-Aqsa violence: “Misleading media coverage contributes to enabling Israel’s unchecked occupation & must also be condemned/accounted for.”

    Bad journalism
    There can be reasons for bad journalism. Reporters are human and make mistakes, and they can use language unthinkingly, especially when they are under pressure or events are unexpected.

    It is an editorial choice that keeps the BBC skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals

    But that is not the problem faced by those covering Israel and Palestine. Events can be fast-moving, but they are rarely new or unpredictable. The reporter’s task should be to explain and clarify the changing forms of the same, endlessly repeating central story: of Israel’s ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, and of Palestinian resistance.

    The challenge is to make sense of Israel’s variations on a theme, whether it is dispossessing Palestinians through illegal settlement-building and expansion; army-backed settler attacks; building walls and cages for Palestinians; arbitrary arrests and night raids; the murder of Palestinians, including children and prominent figures; house demolitions; resource theft; humiliation; fostering a sense of hopelessness; or desecrating holy sites.

    No one, least of all BBC reporters, should have been taken by surprise by this week’s events at Al-Aqsa.

    The Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, when Al-Aqsa is at the heart of Islamic observance for Palestinians, coincided this year with the Jewish Passover holiday, as it did last year.

    Passover is when Jewish religious extremists hope to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque complex to make animal sacrifices, recreating some imagined golden age in Judaism. Those extremists tried again this year, as they do every year — except this year, they had a police minister in Ben Gvir, leader of the fascist Jewish Power party, who is privately sympathetic to their cause.

    Violent settler and army attacks on Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank, especially during the autumn olive harvest, are a staple of news reporting from the region, as is the intermittent bombing of Gaza or snipers shooting Palestinians protesting their mass incarceration by Israel.

    It is an endless series of repetitions that the BBC has had decades to make sense of and find better ways to report.

    It is not journalistic error or failure that is the problem. It is an editorial choice that keeps the British state broadcaster skewing its reporting in the same direction: making Israel look like a judicious actor pursuing lawful, rational goals, while Palestinian resistance is presented as tantrum-like behaviour, driven by uncontrollable, unintelligible urges that reflect hostility towards Jews rather than towards an oppressor Israeli state.

    Tail of a mouse
    Archbishop Tutu expanded on his point about siding with the oppressor. He added: “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

    This week, a conversation between Ben Gvir, the far-right, virulently anti-Arab police minister, and his police chief, Kobi Shabtai, was leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 News. Shabtai reportedly told Ben Gvir about his theory of the “Arab mind”, noting: “They murder each other. It’s in their nature. That’s the mentality of the Arabs.”

    This conclusion — convenient for a police force that has abjectly failed to solve crimes within Palestinian communities — implies that the Arab mind is so deranged, so bloodthirsty, that brutal repression of the kind seen at Al-Aqsa is all police can do to keep a bare minimum of control.

    Ben Gvir, meanwhile, believes a new “national guard” — a private militia he was recently promised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — can help him to crush Palestinian resistance. Settler street thugs, his political allies, will finally be able to put on uniforms and have official licence for their anti-Arab violence.

    This is the real context — the one that cannot be acknowledged by the BBC or other Western outlets — for the police storming of Al-Aqsa complex this week. It is the same context underpinning settlement expansion, night raids, checkpoints, the siege of Gaza, the murder of Palestinian journalists, and much, much more.

    Jewish supremacism undergirds every Israeli state action towards Palestinians, tacitly approved by Western states and their media in the service of advancing Western colonialism in the oil-rich Middle East.

    The BBC’s coverage this week, as in previous months and years, was not neutral, or even accurate. It was, as Tutu warned, a confidence trick — one meant to lull audiences into accepting Israeli violence as always justified, and Palestinian resistance as always abhorrent.

    Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This article was first published at Middle East Eye and is republished with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pacific needs to sit up and pay close attention to AUKUS, says Dame Meg Taylor

    By Koroi Hawkins, RNZ Pacific editor, and Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A Pacific elder and former secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum says Pacific leaders need to sit up and pay closer attention to AUKUS and the Indo-Pacific strategy and China’s response to them.

    Speaking from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, Dame Meg Taylor said Pacific leaders were being sidelined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.

    “The issue here is that we should have paid much more attention to the Indo-Pacific strategy as it emerged,” she said.

    “And we were not ever consulted by the countries that are party to that, including some of our own members of the Pacific Island Forum. Then the emergence of AUKUS — Pacific countries were never consulted on this either,” she said.

    US President Joe Biden (C), British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (R) and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (L) hold a press conference during the AUKUS summit on March 13, 2023, at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego California. - AUKUS is a trilateral security pact announced on September 15, 2021, for the Indo-Pacific region. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)
    Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (left), US President Joe Biden (centre) and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hold a press conference during the AUKUS summit at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego California on 13 March 2023. Image: RNZ Pacific/AFP

    Last week in San Diego, the leaders of the United States, the UK and Australia — President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese respectively — formally announced the AUKUS deal.

    It will see the Australian government spending nearly $US250 billion over the next three decades to acquire a fleet of US nuclear submarines with UK tech components — the majority of which will be built in Adelaide — as part of the defence and security pact.

    Its implementation will make Australia one of only seven countries in the world to have nuclear-powered submarines alongside China, France, India, Russia, the UK, and the US.

    “We believe in a world that protects freedom and respects human rights, the rule of law, the independence of sovereign states, and the rules-based international order,” the leaders said in a joint statement.

    “The steps we are announcing today will help us to advance these mutually beneficial objectives in the decades to come,” they said.

    Following the announcement, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wengbin said by going ahead with the pact the US, UK and Australia disregarded the concerns of the international community and have gone further down “the wrong path”.

    “We’ve repeatedly said that the establishment of the so-called AUKUS security partnership between the US, the UK and Australia to promote cooperation on nuclear submarines and other cutting-edge military technologies, is a typical Cold War mentality,” Wang said.

    “It will only exacerbate the arms race, undermine the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, and hurt regional peace and stability,” he said.

    The 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy is the United States’ programme to ” advance our common vision for an Indo-Pacific region that is free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.”

    Fiji prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka
    Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . Albanese assured him the nuclear submarine deal would not undermine the Treaty of Rarotonga. Image: Fiji Parliament

    The Rarotonga Treaty
    On his return from San Diego, Australia’s Albanese stopped over in Suva where he met his Fijian counterpart Sitiveni Rabuka.

    After the meeting, Rabuka told reporters he supported AUKUS and that Albanese had assured him the nuclear submarine deal would not undermine the Treaty of Rarotonga — to which Australia is a party — that declares the South Pacific a nuclear weapon free zone.

    But an Australian academic said Pacific countries cannot take Canberra at face value when it comes to AUKUS and its committment to the Rarotonga Treaty.

    Dr Matthew Fitzpatrick, a professor in international history at Flinders University in South Australia, said Pacific leaders need to hold Australia accountable to the treaty.

    “Australia and New Zealand have always differed on what that treaty extends to in the sense that for New Zealand, that means more or less that you haven’t had US vessels with nuclear arms [or nuclear powered] permitted into the ports of New Zealand, whereas in Australia, those vessels more or less have been welcomed,” he said.

    Professor Fitzpatrick said Australia had declared that it did not breach it, or it did not breach any of those treaty commitments, but the proof of the pudding would be in the eating.

    “I think it’s something that certainly nations around the Pacific should be very careful and very cautious in taking at face value, what Australia says on those treaty requirements and should ensure that they’re rigorously enforced,” Professor Fitzpatrick said.

    Parties to the Rarotonga Treaty include Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

    Notably absent are three north Pacific countries who have compacts of free association with the United States — Palau, Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.

    Dame Meg Taylor said Sitiveni Rabuka’s signal of support for AUKUS by no means reflected the positions of other leaders in the region.

    “I think the concern for us is that we in the Pacific, particularly those of us who are signatories to the Treaty of Rarotonga, have always been committed to the fact that we wanted a place to live where there was no proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    “The debate, I think that will emerge within the Pacific is ‘are nuclear submarines weapons’?”

    Self-fulfilling prophecy
    Meanwhile, a geopolitical analyst, Geoffrey Miller who writes for political website Democracy Project, said the deal could become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for conflict.

    “Indo-Pacific countries all around the region are re-arming and spending more on their militaries,” Miller said.

    Japan approved its biggest military buildup since the Second World War last year and Dr Miller said New Zealand was reviewing its defence policy which would likely lead to more spending.

    “I worry that the AUKUS deal will only make things worse,” he said.

    “The more of these kinds of power projections, and the less dialogue we have, the more likely it is that we are ultimately going to bring about this conflict that we’re all trying to avoid.

    “I think we do need to think about de-escalation even more and let’s not talk ourselves into World War III.”

    Miller said tensions had grown since Russia invaded Ukraine and analysts had changed their view on how likely China was to invade Taiwain.

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

  • Papuan liberation group calls for more ‘serious’ global efforts to end violence

    Tabloid Jubi in Jayapura

    The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has called on the international community to “pay serious attention” to the escalated violence happening in West Papua.

    Head of ULMWP’s legal and human rights bureau, Daniel Randongkir, said that since the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) — a separate movement — took New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens hostage last month, tensions in the Papuan central mountainous region had escalated.

    The New Zealand government is pressing for the negotiated peaceful release of Mehrtens but the Indonesian security forces (TNI) are preparing a military operation to free the Susi Air pilot.

    Randongkir said the TPNPB kidnapping was an effort to draw world attention to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Papua, and to ask the international community to recognise the political independence of West Papua, which has been occupied by Indonesia since May 1, 1963.

    Negotiations for the release of Mehrtens, who was captured on February 7, are ongoing but TPNPB does not want the Indonesian government to intervene in the negotiations.

    Randongkir said that in the past week, there had been armed conflict between TPNPB and TNI in Puncak Papua, Intan Jaya, Jayawijaya, and Yahukimo regencies. This showed the escalation of armed conflict in Papua.

    According to Randongkir, since 2018 more than 67,000 civilians had been displaced from conflict areas such as Intan Jaya, Nduga, Puncak, Puncak Jaya, Yahukimo, Bintang Mountains, and Maybrat regencies.

    Fled their hometowns
    They fled their hometowns to seek refuge in other areas.

    On March 16, 2023 the local government and the military began evacuating non-Papuans in Dekai, the capital of Yahukimo Regency, using military cargo planes.

    “Meanwhile, the Indigenous people of Yahukimo were not evacuated from the city of Dekai,” Randongkir said in media release.

    ULMWP said that the evacuation of non-Papuans was part of the TNI’s preparation to carry out full military operations. This had the potential to cause human rights violations.

    Past experience showed that TNI, when conducting military operations in Papua, did not pay attention to international humanitarian law.

    “They will destroy civilian facilities such as churches, schools, and health clinics, burn people’s houses, damage gardens, and kill livestock belonging to the community,” he said.

    “They will arrest civilians, even kill civilians suspected of being TPNPB members.”

    Plea for Human Rights Commissioner
    Markus Haluk, executive director of ULMWP in West Papua, said that regional organisations such as the Pacific Islands Forum and the African Caribbean Pacific bloc, have called on the United Nations Human Rights Council to immediately send the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to West Papua.

    ULMWP hoped that the international community could urge the Indonesian government to immediately stop all forms of crimes against humanity committed in West Papua, and bring about a resolution of the West Papua conflict through international mechanisms that respect humanitarian principles, Haluk said.

    Haluk added that ULMWP also called on the Melanesian, Pacific, African, Caribbean and international communities to take concrete action through prayer and solidarity actions in resolving the conflict that had been going on for the past six decades.

    This was to enable justice, peace, independence and political sovereignty of the West Papuan nation.

    Mourning for Gerardus Thommey
    RNZ Pacific reports that Papuans are mourning the death of Gerardus Thommey, a leader of the liberation movement.

    Independence movement leader Benny Wenda said Thommey was a regional commander of the West Papuan liberation movement in Merauke, and since his early 20s had been a guerilla fighter.

    He said Thommey was captured near the PNG border with four other liberation leaders and deported to Ghana, and lived the rest of his life in exile.

    Wenda said that even though he had been exiled from his land, Thommey’s commitment to a liberated West Papua never wavered.

    Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Hostage NZ pilot appears in new Papuan rebel video amid ‘don’t work here’ warning

    Asia Pacific Report

    The West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) has released a new video about New Zealand hostage pilot Philip Mehrtens and a Papuan news organisation, Jubi TV, has featured it on its website.

    The Susi Air pilot was taken hostage on February 7 after landing in a remote region near Nduga in the Central Papuan highlands.

    In the video, which was sent to RNZ Pacific, Mehrtens was instructed to read a statement saying “no foreign pilots are to work and fly” into the Papuan highlands until the West Papua is independent.

    He made another demand for West Papua independence from Indonesia later in the statement.

    Mehrtens was surrounded by more than a dozen people, some of them armed with weapons.

    RNZ Pacific has chosen not to publish the video. Other New Zealand news services, including The New Zealand Herald, have also chosen not to publish the video.

    Jubi TV item on YouTube
    However, Jubi TV produced an edited news item and published it on YouTube and its website.

    Previously, a West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) spokesperson said they were waiting for a response from the New Zealand government to negotiate the release of Mehrtens.

    A Papua independence movement leader, Benny Wenda, and church and community leaders last month called for the rebels to release Mehrtens.

    Wenda said he sympathised with the New Zealand people and Merhtens’ family but insisted the situation was a result of Indonesia’s refusal to allow the UN Human Rights Commissioner to visit Papua.


    The latest video featuring NZ hostage pilot Philip Mehrtens. Video: Jubi TV

    According to Jubi News, the head of Cartenz Peace Operation 2023, Senior Commander Faizal Ramadani, says negotiations to free Mehrtens, who is held hostage by a TPNPB faction led by Egianus Kogoya, has “not been fruitful”.

    Senior Commander Faizal Ramadani
    Senior Commander Faizal Ramadani . . . “The situation in the field is very dynamic.” Image: Alexander Loen/Jubi News

    But Commander Ramadani said that the security forces would continue the negotiation process.

    According to Commander Ramadani, efforts to negotiate the release of Mehrtens by the local government, religious leaders, and Nduga community leaders were rejected by the TPNPB.

    “We haven’t received the news directly, but we received information that there was a rejection,” said Commander Ramadani in Jayapura on Tuesday.

    “The whereabouts of Egianus’ group and Mehrtens are not yet known as the situation in the field is very dynamic,” he said.

    “But we will keep looking.”

    Republished with permission from RNZ Pacific and Jubi TV.

  • Days are numbered for iconic Filipino jeepneys – ‘kings of the road’

    COMMENTARY: By Jhoanna Ballaran in Manila

    My father has been losing sleep the past weeks over the thought of his jeepneys being forced off the road as the Philippines government implements its controversial “jeepney modernisation” programme.

    He has been a jeepney operator for the past 32 years, sustaining our family’s needs. We have relied on these iconic utility vehicles to provide food on the table, even up to now when us siblings have long graduated and found decent jobs.

    At age 69, Papa believes he can still manage his four jeeps with the help of my mom. “Kahit papaano, nakakatulong pa rin ito sa pang-araw-araw natin,” (“Somehow, it still helps us in our daily life),” he would often tell us.

    But the past weeks have been uncertain for our family with the looming government plan to phase out jeepneys, which were once touted as the Philippines’ “Kings of the Road”.

    Iconic and colourful jeepneys in a Manila street
    Iconic and colourful jeepneys in a Manila street. Image: The Philippine Daily Inquirer

    We never thought that such a day would arrive, or why a “jeep-less” Philippine society was even considered in the first place.

    Buying a P2.4 million (NZ$70,000) minibus is definitely not an option for Papa; his jeeps’ income are just enough to sustain the family’s daily needs.

    “Saan ako kukuha ng pera? Uutang? Maintenance pa lang niyan, lugi na ako” (Where do I get the money? Debt? That’s just maintenance, I’m at a loss), he says. Even so, no bank would provide him such loan at his age.

    Selling his beloved workhorses is not ideal, too. The modernisation programme has driven down the prices of jeepneys, with some selling it as junk for a measly P20,000 (NZ$600).

    Letting go of them is essentially killing his livelihood, and that of the six drivers who work with him.

    • US military jeeps left over from the Second World War were the basis for the modern jeepney — a cheap and popular mode of transport — and they became an iconic global symbol of the Philippines. The name itself is an adaptation of “jeep”.

    Jhoanna Ballaran is a Philippine journalist. This commentary was first published on her Instagram page @jhoannaballaran


    Al Jazeera’s report on Monday’s protest jeepney strike.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why a NZ pilot is a pawn in the West Papua conflict that the world ignores

    ANALYSIS: By Camellia Webb-Gannon, University of Wollongong

    “Phil Mehrtens is the nicest guy, he genuinely is — no one ever had anything bad to say about him,” says a colleague of the New Zealand pilot taken hostage last week by members of the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPN-PB) in the mountainous Nduga Regency.

    How such a nice guy became a pawn in the decades-long conflict between West Papua and the Indonesian government is a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    But it is also a symbolic and desperate attempt to attract international attention towards the West Papuan crisis.

    A joint military and police mission has so far failed to find or rescue Mehrtens, and forcing negotiations with Jakarta is a prime strategy of TPN-PB.

    As spokesperson Sebby Sambom told Australian media this week:

    “The military and police have killed too many Papuans. From our end, we also killed [people]. So it is better that we sit at the negotiation table […] Our new target are all foreigners: the US, EU, Australians and New Zealanders because they supported Indonesia to kill Papuans for 60 years.

    “Colonialism in Papua must be abolished.”

    Sambom is referring to the international complicity and silence since Indonesia annexed the former Dutch colony as it prepared for political independence in the 1960s.

    Mehrtens has become the latest foreign victim of the resulting protracted and violent struggle by West Papuans for independence.

    Violence and betrayal
    The history of the conflict can be traced back to 1962, when the US facilitated what became known as the New York Agreement, which handed West Papua over to the United Nations and then to Indonesia.

    In 1969, the UN oversaw a farcical independence referendum that effectively allowed the permanent annexation of West Papua by Indonesia. Since that time, West Papuans have been subjected to violent human rights abuses, environmental and cultural dispossession, and mass killings under Indonesian rule and mass immigration policies.

    New Zealand and Australia continue to support Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua, and maintain defence and other diplomatic ties with Jakarta. Australia has been involved in training Indonesian army and police, and is a major aid donor to Indonesia.

    Phil Mehrtens is far from the first hostage to be taken in this unequal power struggle. Nearly three decades ago, in the neighbouring district of Mapenduma, TPN-PB members kidnapped a group of environmental researchers from Europe for five months.

    Like now, the demand was that Indonesia recognise West Papuan independence. Two Indonesians with the group were killed.

    The English and Dutch hostages were ultimately rescued, but not before further tragedy occurred.

    At one point, negotiations seemed to have stalled between the West Papuan captors and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which was delivering food and supplies to the hostages and working for their release.

    Taking matters into their own hands, members of the Indonesian military commandeered a white civilian helicopter that had been used (or was similar to one used) by the ICRC. Witnesses recall seeing the ICRC emblem on the aircraft.

    When the helicopter lowered towards waiting crowds of civilians, the military opened fire.

    The ICRC denied any involvement in the resulting massacre, but the entire incident was emblematic of the times. It took place several years before the fall of former Indonesian president Suharto, when there was little hope of West Papua gaining independence from Indonesia through peaceful negotiations.

    Then, as now, the TPN-PB was searching for a way to capture the world’s attention.

    Human rights researcher pleads for West Papuan rebels to free NZ pilot

    Losing hope
    Since the early 2000s, with Suharto gone and fresh hope inspired by East Timor’s independence, Papuans — including members of the West Papuan Liberation Army — have largely been committed to fighting for independence through peaceful means.

    After several decades of wilful non-intervention by Australia and New Zealand in what they consider to be Jakarta’s affairs, that hope is flagging. It appears elements of the independence movement are again turning to desperate measures.

    In 2019, the TPN-PB killed 24 Indonesians working on a highway to connect the coast with the interior, claiming their victims were spies for the Indonesian army. They have become increasingly outspoken about their intentions to stop further Indonesian expansion in Papua at any cost.

    In turn, this triggered a hugely disproportionate counter-insurgency operation in the highlands where Phil Mehrtens was captured. It has been reported at least 60,000 people have been displaced in the Nduga Regency over the past four years as a result, and it is still not safe for them to return home.

    International engagement
    It is important to remember that the latest hostage taking, and the 1996 events, are the actions of a few. They do not reflect the commitment of the vast majority of Indigenous West Papuans to work peacefully for independence through demonstrations, social media activism, civil disobedience, diplomacy and dialogue.

    Looking forward, New Zealand, Australia and other governments close to Indonesia need to commit to serious discussions about human rights in West Papua — not only because there is a hostage involved, but because it is the right thing to do.

    This may not be enough to resolve the current crisis, but it would be a long overdue and critical step in the right direction.

    Negotiations for the release of Philip Mehrtens must be handled carefully to avoid further disproportionate responses by the Indonesian military.

    The kidnapping is not justified, but neither is Indonesia’s violence against West Papuans — or the international community’s refusal to address the violence.The Conversation

    Dr Camellia Webb-Gannon, lecturer, University of Wollongong, and author of Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonisation in West Papua. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Myanmar’s military has ‘turned whole country into a prison’

    Airstrikes ordered against civilian targets, destruction of thousands of buildings, millions displaced, nearly 3000 civilians murdered, more than 13,000 jailed, the country’s independent media banished, and the country locked in a deadly nationwide civil war. Myanmar civilians now ask what else must happen before they receive international support in line with Ukraine, writes Phil Thornton.

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Phil Thornton

    In the two years since Myanmar’s military seized power from the country’s elected lawmakers it has waged a war of terror against its citizens — members of the Civil Disobedience Movement, artists, poets, actors, politicians, health workers, student leaders, public servants, workers, and journalists.

    The military-appointed State Administration Council amended laws to punish anyone critical of its illegal coup or the military. International standards of freedoms — speech, expression, assembly, and association were “criminalised”.

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), reported as of 30 January 2023, the military killed 2901 people and arrested another 17,492 (of which 282 were children), with 13,719 people still in detention.

    One hundred and forty three people have been sentenced to death and four have been executed since the military’s coup on 1 February 2021. Of those arrested, 176 were journalists and as many as 62 are still in jail or police detention.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists ranks Myanmar as the world’s second-highest jailers of journalists. Fear of attacks, harassment, intimidation, censorship, detainment, and threats of assassination for their reporting has driven journalists and media workers underground or to try to reach safety in neighbouring countries.

    Journalist Ye Htun Oo has been arrested, tortured, received death threats, and is now forced to seek safety outside of Myanmar. Ye Htun spoke to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) of his torture, jailing and why he felt he had no choice, but to leave Myanmar for the insecurity of a journalist in exile.

    They came for me in the morning
    “I started as a journalist in 2007 but quit after two years because of the difficulty of working under the military. I continued to work, writing stories and poetry. In 2009 I restarted work as a freelance video and documentary maker.”

    Ye Htu said making money from journalism in Myanmar had never been easy.

    “I was lucky if I made 300,000 kyat a month (about NZ$460) — it was a lot of work, writing, editing, interviewing and filming.”

    Ye Htun’s hands, fingers and thin frame twist and turn as he takes time to return to the darkness of the early morning when woken by police and military knocking on his front door.

    “It was 2 am, the morning of 9 October 2021. We were all asleep. The knocking on the door was firm but gentle. I opened the door. Men from the police and the military’s special media investigation unit stood there — no uniforms. They’d come to arrest me.”

    Ye Htun links the visit of the police and army to his friend’s arrest the day before.

    “He had my number on his phone and when questioned told them I was a journalist. I hadn’t written anything for a while. The only reason they arrested me was because I was identified as a journalist — it was enough for them. The military unit has a list of journalists who they want to control, arrest, jail or contain.”

    Ye Htun explains how easy it is for journalists to be arrested.

    “When they arrest people…if they find a reference to a journalist or a phone number it’s enough to put you on their list.”

    After the coup, Ye Htun continued to report.

    “I was not being paid, moving around, staying in different places, following the protests. I was taking photos. I took a photo of citizens arresting police and it was published. This causes problems for the people in the photo. It also caused some people to regard me and journalists as informers — we were now in a hard place, not knowing what or who we could photograph. I decided to stop reporting and made the decision to move home. That’s when they came and arrested me.”

    In the early morning before sunrise, the police and military removed Ye Htun from his home and family and took him to a detention cell inside a military barracks.

    “They took all my equipment — computer, cameras, phone, and hard disks. The men who arrested and took me to the barracks left and others took over. Their tone changed. I was accused of being a PDF (People’s Defence Force militia).

    “Ye Htun describes how the ‘politeness’ of his captors soon evaporated, and the danger soon became a brutal reality. They started to beat me with kicks, fists, sticks and rubber batons. They just kept beating me, no questions. I was put in foot chains — ankle braces.”

    The beating of Ye Htun would continue for 25 days and the uncertainty and hurt still shows in his eyes, as he drags up the details he’s now determined to share.

    “I was interrogated by an army captain who ordered me to show all my articles — there was little to show. They made me kneel on small stones and beat me on the body — never the head as they said, ‘they needed it intact for me to answer their questions’”.

    Ye Htun explained it wasn’t just his assigned interrogators who beat or tortured him.

    “Drunk soldiers came regularly to spit, insult or threaten me with their guns or knives.”

    Scared, feared for his life
    Ye Htun is quick to acknowledge he was scared and feared for his life.

    “I was terrified. No one knew where I was. I knew my family would be worried. Everyone knows of people being arrested and then their dead, broken bodies, missing vital organs, being returned to grieving families.”

    After 25 days of torture, Ye Htun was transferred to a police jail.

    “They accused me of sending messages they had ‘faked’ and placed on my phone. I was sentenced to two years jail on 3rd November — I had no lawyer, no representative.”

    Ye Htun spoke to political prisoners during his time in jail and concluded many were behind bars on false charges.

    “Most political prisoners are there because of fake accusations. There’s no proper rule of law — the military has turned the whole country into a prison.”

    Ye Htun served over a year and five months of his sentence and was one of six journalists released in an amnesty from Pyay Jail on 4 January 2023.

    Not finished torturing
    Any respite Ye Htun or his family received from his release was short-lived, as it became apparent the military was not yet finished torturing him. He was forced to sign a declaration that if he was rearrested he would be expected to serve his existing sentence plus any new ones, and he received death threats.

    Soon after his release, the threats to his family were made.

    “I was messaged on Facebook and on other social media apps. The messages said, ‘don’t go out alone…keep your family and wife away from us…’ their treats continued every two or three days.”

    Ye Htun and his family have good cause to be concerned about the threats made against them. Several pro-military militias have openly declared on social media their intention against those opposed to the military’s control of the country.

    A pro-military militia, Thwe Thauk Apwe (Blood Brothers), specialise in violent killings designed to terrorise.

    Frontier Magazine reported in May 2022 that Thwe Thauk Apwe had murdered 14 members of the National League of Democracy political party in two weeks. The militia uses social media to boast of its gruesome killings and to threaten its targets — those opposed to military rule — PDF units, members of political parties, CDM members, independent media outlets and journalists.

    Ye Htun said fears for his wife and children’s safety forced him to leave Myanmar.

    “I couldn’t keep putting them at risk because I’m a journalist. I will continue to work, but I know I can’t do it in Myanmar until this military regime is removed.”

    Air strikes target civilians – where’s the UN?
    Award-winning documentary maker and artist, Sai Kyaw Khaing, dismayed at the lack of coverage by international and regional media on the impacts of Myanmar’s military aerial strikes on civilian targets, decided to make the arduous trip to the country’s northwest to find out.

    In the two years since the military regime took illegal control of the country’s political infrastructure, Myanmar is now engaged in a brutal, countrywide civil war.

    Civilian and political opposition to the military coup saw the formation of People Defence Force units under the banner of the National Unity Government established in April 2021 by members of Parliament elected at the 2020 elections and outlawed by the military after its coup.

    Thousands of young people took up arms and joined PDF units, trained by Ethnic Armed Organisations, to defend villages and civilians and fight the military regime. The regime vastly outnumbered and outmuscled the PDFs and EAOs with its military hardware — tanks, heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and fighter jets.

    Sai Kyaw contacted a number of international media outlets with his plans to travel deep inside the conflict zone to document how displaced people were coping with the airstrikes and burning of their villages and crops.

    Sai Kyaw said it was telling that he has yet to receive a single response of interest from any of the media he approached.

    “What’s happening in Myanmar is being ignored, unlike the conflict in Ukraine. Most of the international media, if they do report on Myanmar, want an ‘expert’ to front their stories, even better if it’s one of their own, a Westerner.”

    Deadly strike impact
    Sai Kyaw explains why what is happening on the ground needs to be explained — the impacts of the deadly airstrikes on the lives of unarmed villagers.

    “My objective is to talk to local people. How can they plant or harvest their crops during the intense fighting? How can they educate their kids or get medical help?

    “Thousands of houses, schools, hospitals, churches, temples, and mosques have been targeted and destroyed — how are the people managing to live?”

    Sai Kyaw put up his own money to finance his trip to a neighbouring country where he then made contact with people prepared to help him get to northwestern Myanmar, which was under intense attacks from the military regime.

    “It took four days by motorbike on unlit mountain dirt tracks that turned to deep mud when it rained. We also had to avoid numerous military checkpoints, military informers, and spies.”

    Sai Kyaw said that after reaching his destination, meeting with villagers, and witnessing their response to the constant artillery and aerial bombardments, their resilience astounded him.

    “These people rely on each other, when they’re bombed from their homes, people who still have a house rally around and offer shelter. They don’t have weapons to fight back, but they organise checkpoints managed by men and women.”

    Sai Kyaw said being unable to predict when an airstrike would happen took its toll on villagers.

    Clinics, schools bombed
    “You don’t know when they’re going to attack — day or night — clinics, schools, places of worship — are bombed. These are not military targets — they don’t care who they kill.”

    Sai Kyaw witnessed an aerial bombing and has the before and after film footage that shows the destruction. Rows of neat houses, complete with walls intact before the air strike are left after the attack with holes a car could drive through.

    “The unpredictable and indiscriminate attacks mean villagers are unable to harvest their crops or plant next season’s rice paddies.”

    Sai Kyaw is concerned that the lack of aid getting to the people in need of shelter, clothing, food, and medicine will cause a large-scale humanitarian crisis.

    “There’s no sign of international aid getting to the people. If there’s a genuine desire to help the people, international aid groups can do it by making contact with local community groups. It seems some of these big international aid donors are reluctant to move from their city bases in case they upset the military’s SAC [State Administration Council].”

    At the time of writing Sai Kyaw Khaing has yet to receive a reply from any of the international media he contacted.

    It’s the economy stupid
    A veteran Myanmar journalist, Kyaw Kyaw*, covered a wide range of stories for more than 15 years, including business, investment, and trade. He told IFJ he was concerned the ban on independent media, arrests of journalists, gags and access restrictions on sources meant many important stories went unreported.

    “The military banning of independent media is a serious threat to our freedom of speech. The military-controlled state media can’t be relied on. It’s well documented, it’s mainly no news or fake news overseen by the military’s Department of Propaganda.”

    Kyaw lists the stories that he explains are in critical need of being reported — the cost of consumer goods, the collapse of the local currency, impact on wages, lack of education and health care, brain drain as people flee the country, crops destroyed and unharvested and impact on next year’s yield.

    Kyaw is quick to add details to his list.

    “People can’t leave the country fast enough. There are more sellers than buyers of cars and houses. Crime is on the rise as workers’ real wages fall below the poverty line. Garment workers earned 4800 kyat, the minimum daily rate before the military’s coup. The kyat was around 1200 to the US dollar — about four dollars. Two years after the coup the kyat is around 2800 — workers’ daily wage has dropped to half, about US$2 a day.”

    Kyaw Kyaw’s critique is compelling as he explains the cost of everyday consumer goods and the impact on households.

    “Before the coup in 2021, rice cost a household, 32,000 kyat for around 45kg. It is now selling at 65,000 kyat and rising. Cooking oil sold at 3,000 kyat for 1.6kg now sells for over double, 8,000kyat.

    “It’s the same with fish, chicken, fuel, and medicine – family planning implants have almost doubled in cost from 25,000 kyat to now selling at 45,000 kyat.”

    Humanitarian crisis potential
    Kyaw is dismayed that the media outside the country are not covering stories that have a huge impact on people’s daily struggle to feed and care for their families and have the real potential for a massive humanitarian crisis in the near future.

    “The focus is on the revolution, tallies of dead soldiers, politics — all important, but journalists and local and international media need to report on the hidden costs of the military’s coup. Local media outlets need to find solutions to better cover these issues.”

    Kyaw stresses international governments and institutions — ASEAN, UK, US, China, and India — need to stop talking and take real steps to remove and curb the military’s destruction of the country.

    “In two years, they displaced over a million people, destroyed thousands of houses and religious buildings, attacked schools and hospitals — killing students and civilians — what is the UNSC waiting for?”

    An independent think tank, the Institute for Strategy and Policy – Myanmar, and the UN agency for refugees confirm Kyaws Kyaw’s claims.The Institute for Strategy and Policy reports “at least 28,419 homes and buildings were torched or destroyed…in the aftermath of the coup between 1 February 2021, and 15 July 2022.”

    The UN agency responsible for refugees, the UNHCR, estimates the number of displaced people in Myanmar is a staggering 1,574,400. Since the military coup and up to January 23, the number was 1,244,000 people displaced.

    While the world’s media and governments focus their attention and military aid on Ukraine, Myanmar’s people continue to ask why their plight continues to be ignored.

    Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in Southeast Asia. This article was first published by the IFJ Asia-Pacific blog and is republished with the author’s permission. Thornton is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

    *Name has been changed as requested for security concerns.

  • ‘Today, facts win, truth wins, justice wins’, says Ressa over court victory

    By Lian Buan in Manila

    The Philippines’ Court of Tax Appeals has acquitted Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Rappler Holdings Corporation (RHC) of four charges of tax evasion that were filed in 2018 by the previous Duterte government.

    The CTA 1st Division decided yesterday to acquit Ressa and RHC, Rappler’s holding company, in the Duterte government’s charge that it evaded tax payments when it raised capital through its partnership with foreign investors North Base Media (NBM) and Omidyar Network (ON).

    This involved the issuance to the two entities of Philippine Depositary Receipts or PDRs, financial instruments commonly used even among media companies like ABS-CBN and GMA Network.

    In an 80-page decision, the court ordered the acquittal of Ressa and RHC for “failure of the prosecution to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt’.

    The decision was signed by Associate Justices Catherine Manahan, Jean Marie Bacorro-Villena, and Marian Ivy Reyes-Fajardo. Presiding Justice Roman del Rosario inhibited from the proceedings but certified the decision.

    The victory ends more than four years of trial of a case filed in March 2018, two months after the Philippines’ Securities and Exchange Commission issued a closure order against Rappler on the basis of the Duterte government’s charge that it broke the law by being foreign-owned.

    Rappler is a 100 percent Filipino company, a point asserted by the company in its appeal of the SEC order at the Court of Appeals (CA).

    An emotional Ressa said after the verdict: “Today, facts win, truth wins, justice wins,” calling for freedom of detained former senator Leila de Lima and jailed journalists like Frenchie Mae Cumpio.

    De Lima will begin her seventh year in prison in February, while Cumpio will begin her fourth year also in February.


    Rappler CEO Maria Ressa talks to the media.                                        Video: Rappler

    The CTA voted 3-0 to decide the “non-taxability of the issuance of PDRs to North Base Media and Omidyar Network.” The court added, “No gain or income was realised by accused in the subject transactions.

    “Since accused is not required to pay the income tax and VAT on the PDR transactions for the taxable year 2015, the elements of Sections 254 and 255 of the 1977 NIRC as amended, are rendered nugatory and without legal support. The plaintiff therefore failed to prove the guilt of accused beyond reasonable doubt,” said the CTA decision.

    The CTA also said, “There is nothing in the wordings of the PDR instruments and the PDR subscription agreements that would show the foreign entities NBM and ON will become owners of the shares of stock of Rappler.”

    Ressa’s lawyer Francis Lim, the former president of the Philippine Stock Exchange, said that if PDRs were declared to be taxable income just to convict Ressa and Rappler, every business seeking to raise capital would be affected.

    “At the end of the day, it’s our economy, it’s our people through job generation that will benefit. Imagine if Maria was convicted, the repercussions,” said Lim.

    ‘Keep the faith’
    Lim also said: “We had no doubt this day would come. I told them keep the faith, because in our hearts we knew an acquittal would come. We trust our judiciary, everybody knew where this case came from.”

    It was former Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) commissioner Caesar Dulay, a Duterte appointee, who initiated the lightning tax probe into Rappler on January 24, 2018; he filed the criminal complaints two months later, in March, before the justice department then headed by Menardo Guevarra, another Duterte appointee.

    Guevarra charged Ressa and RHC at the CTA in November 2018.

    The CTA’s acquittal of RHC and Ressa is expected to affect a related case that was filed by the Duterte government against the two before the Pasig City Regional Trial Court, which handles tax cases involving less than P1 million (about NZ$28,500).

    Rappler is about to wrap up its presentation of evidence for that case; the facts are identical to the four charges that the CTA junked yesterday.

    In general, an acquittal cannot be appealed against because of the right against double jeopardy.

    Three cases left
    With the junking of the four CTA cases, there remain only three active court cases against Rappler and Ressa: the appeal of Ressa and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. in their conviction for cyber libel pending at the Supreme Court, the lone tax case at the Pasig City RTC, and the appeal on the closure of Rappler pending at the CA.

    The mother case, the SEC’s closure order that is pending at the appeals court, accuses Rappler of violating the constitutional requirement that Filipino media companies must be 100 percent Filipino-owned. The alleged violation was supposedly committed when it issued PDRs to foreign investor ON.

    The court previously said that Rappler was entitled to a curing period, and that ON’s donation of the PDRs to Filipino managers had removed the problem. But the SEC in the last two days of the Duterte term in June 2022, stood firm on its order to close down Rappler — triggering another round of litigation at the appellate court which is still ongoing.

    In the CTA cases, Rappler’s lawyers said that in the last 20 years, the BIR has treated PDRs as derivatives of stock for which only documentary stamp tax was due to be paid.

    “This case exemplifies how the power of taxation can be used as a tool to cause a thousand cuts to our democracy. Rappler Inc., which has been at the forefront of providing independent journalism in the Philippines, caught the ire of the Duterte Government,” Rappler and Ressa said in a final memorandum submitted to the CTA before yesterday’s judgment.

    “As a result, and for the first time in Philippine history, the BIR classified a holding company that issued PDRs as a dealer in securities and required the payment of income tax and VAT.

    “The government’s targeted attack and investigations against Rappler Inc.’s parent company, accused Rappler Holdings Corporation and RHC’s president Maria Ressa, presents a clear example of how the law can be bent to the point that it is broken,” said Rappler’s memorandum.

    Lian Buan is a senior Rappler journalist. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Indonesian ex-graft convicts active again in political parties ‘nothing new’

    By Agus Rahmat in Jakarta

    Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) has condemned the phenomena of former corruption convicts becoming active again in political parties after serving their sentences.

    However, it says this is not a new phenomenon in the world of politics.

    ICW coordinator Agus Sunaryanto revealed several names of people who were caught up in corruption cases and who were now active again in political parties.

    He cited names such as Andi Mallarangeng from the Democrat Party, who was indicted in the Hambalang sports complex case and released from prison in 2017.

    Nazaruddin, also from the Democrat Party, was indicted in two cases — the 4.6 billion rupiah (NZ$4.65 million) bribery case involving the Wisma Atlet (Athletes Village), as well as graft and money laundering.

    The latest is former United Development Party (PPP) chairperson Muhammad Romahurmuziy (Romy) who was indicted over receiving bribes for selling posts in the Ministry of Religious Affairs in 2019.

    After being released from prison, Romahurmuziy was appointed as chairperson of the PPP’s Advisory Board.

    “So (the phenomena of ex-corruptors becoming active again in political parties) is not just happening in the PPP. The Democrats are also like that, Nazaruddin and Andi Mallarangeng for example,” Sunaryanto told journalists.

    ‘Internal problem’
    Sunaryanto said he suspected there was an “internal problem” in the political parties so that in the end they accepted former corruption convicts rejoining the party.

    He also gave a flashback over the actions by the political parties when their members were indicted in corruption cases.

    Sunaryanto said that the parties “fall over themselves publicly” in taking stern measures against corrupt members, such as dismissing them.

    But these dismissals were just a political gimmick because party members could easily rejoin after they had served their sentences.

    “I think there is a problem in the political parties. The political parties actually take good steps when [members] are declared suspects. Before, the Democrats immediately dismissed them [Nazaruddin and Mallarangeng], but then after they’re released, they come back in again. This is simply a political gimmick,” he added.

    Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was “ICW Sindir Eks Koruptor Masuk Partai Lagi: Seperti Gimmick Politik”.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • John Minto: Israel’s new leadership demands NZ reassess its Middle East policy

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    The swearing in of the extremist leadership in Israel demands the Aotearoa New Zealand government reassess its policy towards the Middle East.

    New Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his top priority is to build more illegal Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

    This policy declares the leadership’s intention to:

    “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria”. (These are the Biblical names for the occupied Palestinian West Bank)

    New Zealand has bipartisan support for UN Security Council resolution 2334 of 2016 which was promoted by the former John Key National government. It declares Israeli settlements on Palestinian land as “a flagrant violation under international law” and says all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, must “immediately and completely cease.”

    With the announcement of its intention to escalate these flagrant violations of international law, Israel is giving us the middle finger.

    If our support for international law and United Nations resolutions is to have real meaning, then our government must urgently reassess its relationship with Israel.

    The new Israeli leadership includes several extreme racists and supporters of anti-Palestinian terrorism such as Itamar Ben-Gvir as Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir has expressed support and admiration for Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish Israeli man who killed 29 Palestinians in a shooting at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994.


    Israeli protests against the most rightwing government in history. Video: France 24

    Just a few weeks before his swearing in as Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir described as a hero an Israeli soldier who shot to death a young Palestinian at point blank range — widely described as an assassination.

    We have had our own deadly terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch in which 51 New Zealanders (including six Palestinian New Zealanders) were killed. Why would we have relations with a government whose senior leadership includes Ben-Gvir who for many years had a picture of the terrorist Goldstein on his living room wall?

    Alongside Palestinian groups, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s largest and most respected human rights group, B’Tselem, have all declared Israel to be an apartheid state.

    Because the new Israeli leadership has declared its intention to accelerate its apartheid policies against Palestinians, we should suspend our relationship with Israel and finally recognise a Palestinian state.

    John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

    Disappearing Palestine
    Alongside Palestinian groups, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s largest and most respected human rights group, B’Tselem, have all declared Israel to be an apartheid state. Image: TDB

  • This is more sinister than you think – my people’s freedom is on the line

    By Veronica Koman in Sydney

    As an Indonesian lawyer living in exile in Australia, I find it deeply troubling that the changes to the Indonesian Criminal Code are seen through the lens that touchy tourists will be denied their freedom to fornicate on holiday in Bali.

    What the far-reaching amendments will actually mean is that hundreds of millions of Indonesians will not be able to criticise any government officials, including the president, police and military.

    You can be assured that the implementation of the Criminal Code will not affect the lucrative tourism industry which the Indonesian government depends on – it will affect ordinary people in what is the world’s third largest democracy.

    With just 18 out of 575 parliamentarians physically attending the plenary session, Indonesia passed the problematic revised Criminal Code last week. It’s a death knell to democracy in Indonesia.

    I live here as an exile because of my work on the armed conflict in West Papua. The United Nations has repeatedly asked Indonesia to drop the politicised charges against me. One of the six laws used against me, about “distributing fake news”, is now incorporated into the Criminal Code.

    In West Papua, any other version of events that are different to the statement of police and military, are often labelled “fake news”. In 2019, a piece from independent news agency Reuters was called a hoax by the Indonesian armed forces.

    Now, the authors of that article can be charged under the new Criminal Code which will effectively silence journalists and human rights defenders.

    Same-sex couples marginalised
    Moreover, the ban on sex outside marriage is heteronormative and effectively further marginalises same-sex couples because they can’t marry under Indonesian law.

    The law requires as little as a complaint from a relative of someone in a same sex relationship to be enforced, meaning LGBTQIA+ people would live in fear of their disapproving family members weaponising their identity against them.

    Meanwhile, technically speaking, the heteronormative cohabitation clause exempts same-sex couples. However, based on existing practice, LGBTQIA+ people would be disproportionately targeted now that people have the moral licence to do it.

    The criminal code has predictably sparked Islamophobic commentary from the international community but, for us, this is about the continued erosion of democracy under President Joko Widodo. This is about consolidated power of the oligarchs including the conservatives shrinking the civic space.

    Back when I was still able to live in my home country, it was acceptable to notify the police a day prior, or even on the day of a protest. About six years ago, police started to treat the notification as if it was a permit and made the requirements much stricter.

    The new Criminal Code makes snap protests illegal, violating international human rights law.

    Under the new code, any discussion about Marxism and Communism is illegal. Indonesia is still trapped in the past without any truth-telling about the crimes against humanity that occurred in 1965-66. At least 500,000 Communists and people accused of being communists were killed.

    Justice never served
    Justice has never been served despite time running out because the remaining survivors are getting older.

    It will be West Papuans rather than frisky Australian tourists who bear the brunt of the updated criminal code. The repression there, which I have seen first hand, is beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the country.

    Treason charges which normally carry life imprisonment are often abused to silence West Papuans. Just last week, three West Papuans were charged with treason for peacefully flying the symbol of West Papuan independence — the Morning Star flag. The new treason law comes with the death penalty.

    It’s shameful that Australia just awarded the chief of Indonesian armed forces the Order of Australia, given that his institution is the main perpetrator of human rights abuses in West Papua.

    The new Criminal Code will take effect in three years. There is a window open for the international community, including Australia, to help safeguard the world’s third largest democracy.

    Indonesians need you to raise your voice and not just because you’re worried about your trip to Bali.

    Veronica Koman is an Indonesian human rights lawyer in exile and a campaigner at Amnesty International Australia. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Amnesty condemns mass arrests of West Papuans on Human Rights Day

    Amnesty International

    Amnesty International Indonesia and Amnesty International Australia have condemned the repression used against the people in West Papua when they were commemorating Human Rights Day yesterday — December 10, which marks the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    Indonesian authorities made 116 arrests and injured at least 17 people during multiple forced dispersals of rallies in the lead up to and during December 10 in four regencies across West Papua.

    “We are appalled to hear about these mass arrests. Many were arrested when the rally had not even started,” Amnesty International Indonesia executive director Usman Hamid said.

    “This shows Indonesian authorities’ utter disregard of West Papuans’ right to peaceful assembly.

    “Criminalising them for simply peacefully exercising such right will only breed further resentment and distrust. That discriminatory treatment against them has to stop,” said Hamid.

    “People all over the globe commemorated Human Rights Day. The fact that West Papuan people could not enjoy the same right, shows that there is a human rights emergency in West Papua.”

    Amnesty International Australia national director Sam Klintworth said: “Australia needs to demand accountability from Indonesian authorities, especially as they are recipients of so much Australian aid.”

    23 arrested in Wamena
    On December 8, 23 people in Wamena were arrested for several hours when they were distributing leaflets for people to join the Human Rights Day rally.

    On December 10, forced dispersals and mass arrests took place in Wamena and Jayapura.

    In Jayapura, 56 people were arrested and at least 16 people were known to be injured during forced dispersals in multiple locations.

    In Wamena, 37 people were arrested and at least one person was injured when the multiple rallies were forcibly dispersed.

    Also on December 10, a rally in Sorong was forcibly dispersed, and the protest in Manokwari was blocked by police.

    Most of the protesters were members of the West Papua National Committee (Komite Nasional Papua Barat – KNPB), a peaceful grassroots organisation campaigning for the right to self-determination.

    Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Indonesia has ratified through Law No. 12/2005, explicitly guarantees the right of any person to hold opinions without interference.

    Freedom of peaceful assembly is also guaranteed under Article 21 of the ICCPR.

    Amnesty International does not take any position regarding political status within Indonesia, including calls for independence.

    However, the organisation believes that the right to freedom of expression includes the right to peacefully advocate for independence referenda, or other political positions.

  • Indonesia accused of using new Criminal Code to ‘colonise its own people’

    Asia Pacific Report

    Civil society organisations which make up the National Alliance for Criminal Code Reform have slammed the decision by the Indonesian government and the House of Representatives (DPR) to ratify the Draft Criminal Code (RKUHP) which is seen as still containing a number of controversial articles, reports CNN Indonesia.

    Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairperson Muhammad Isnur criticised the DPR and the government because the enactment of the law was rushed and did not involve public participation.

    According to Isnur, a number of articles in the RKUHP will take Indonesian society into a period of being “colonised” by its own government.

    “Indeed the latest version of this draft regulation was only published on November 30, 2022, and still contained a series of problematic articles which have been opposed by the public because it will carry Indonesian society into an era of being colonised by its own government,” said Isnur in a statement.

    The Civil Coalition, as conveyed by Isnur, has highlighted a number of articles in the RKUHP which are anti-democratic, perpetuate corruption, silence press freedom, obstruct academic freedom and regulate the public’s private lives.

    According to Isnur, these articles will only be “sharp below but blunt above”, meaning they will come down hard on the poor but go easy on the rich, and it would make it difficult to prosecute crimes committed by corporations against the people.

    “Once again this will be a regulation which is sharp below, blunt above, because it will be difficult to prosecute criminal corporations that violate the rights of communities and workers,” he said.

    Criminalised over ideas
    The Coalition for example highlighted Article 188 which criminalises anyone who spreads communist, Marxist or Leninist ideas, or other ideas which conflict with the state ideology of Pancasila.

    According to Isnur, the article is ambiguous because it does not contain an explanation on who has the authority to determine if an idea conflicts with Pancasila.

    According to Isnur, Article 188 has the potential to criminalise anyone, particularly government opponents, because it does not contain an explanation about which ideas conflict with Pancasila.

    “This is a rubber [catchall] article and could revive the concept of crimes of subversion as occurred in the New Order era [of former president Suharto],” he said.

    Then there are Articles 240 and 241 on insulting the government and state institutions.

    He believes that these articles also have the potential to be “rubber” articles because they do not provide a definition of an insult. He is also concerned that the articles will be used to silence criticism against the government or state institutions.

    The Coalition believes that there are still at least 14 problematic articles in the RKUHP. Aside from the spreading of communist ideas and insulting state institutions, there are several other articles such as those on morality, cohabitation and criminalising parades and protest actions.

    Law ‘confusing’
    The DPR earlier passed the RKUHP into law during a plenary meeting. A number of parties believe that the new law is confusing and contains problematic articles. These include the articles on insulting the president, makar (treason, subversion, rebellion), insulting state institutions, adultery and cohabitation and “fake news”.

    Justice and Human Rights Minister Yasonna H. Laoly has invited members of the public to challenge the law in the Constitutional Court if they feel that there are articles that conflict with the constitution.

    “So we must go through constitutional mechanisms, right. So we’re more civilised, be better at obeying the constitution, the law. So if it’s ratified into law the most correct mechanism is a judicial review,” said Laoly earlier.

    Deputy Justice and Prosperity Minister Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, meanwhile, is asking those who consider the law to be problematic or rushed to come and debate the issue with the ministry.

    “You try answering yourself, yeah, is 59 years rushed? If it is said that many oppose it, how many? What is the substance? Come and debate it with us, we’re ready and we are truly convinced that if its tested it will be rejected,” said Hiariej.

    Translated by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The original title of the article was YLBHI Kecam Pengesahan RKUHP: Masyarakat Dijajah Pemerintah Sendiri. Republished with permission.

  • Palestinian ‘executed’ at point-blank range by Israeli border police

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Yumma Patel of Mondoweiss

    A Palestinian man was shot and killed by an Israeli border police officer at point blank range on Friday evening in the northern occupied West Bank town of Huwwara in what is being described as an “execution” on social media.

    The execution was captured on video and has circulated widely on social media.

    The shooting occurred shortly before 5pm on Huwwara’s main road — a major throughway that connects dozens of villages with the city of Nablus to the north, and is used by both Palestinians and Israeli settlers.

    Earlier this year, the main road of Huwwara was the site of a days-long Israeli settler rampage targeting Palestinians and their businesses with rocks, guns, axes, and other weapons.

    Eyewitnesses to the shooting told Palestinian reporters that a scuffle ensued following an incident with an Israeli settler who was driving down the road.

    “What happened is that there was a settler car passing by. They started harassing the young [Palestinian man], so he went towards the car and tried to open the door,” one of the witnesses told a Palestinian TV crew, referring to his SUV, which was allegedly shot at by the settler.

    “So the settler cocked his weapon and shot him, and then shot at me in the jeep.”

    Police officer ‘attacked man’
    “Then the police officer came and started to attack him. Instead of moving the settler away, he kept attacking the guys, even though he was injured. The guy was trying to push the officer away and then the officer just started shooting him. He didn’t even give him a chance,” the witness continued.


    The harrowing video capturing the Israeli border police officer shooting a Palestinian in Huwwara has circulated widely on social media and sparked outrage among Palestinians. Video published by Middle East Eye

    The Border Police released an initial statement claiming the Palestinian man was shot after he attempted to stab a border police officer who was stationed in the area. The police then released another statement saying the Palestinian man “tried to enter a vehicle with an Israeli couple [inside].”

    “While trying to break through the locked door, one of the occupants — an off-duty IDF officer — shot and apparently wounded the man with his handgun,” Times of Israel quoted the second statement as saying.

    It was after being shot by the settler that the Palestinian man then allegedly went on to attempt to stab the officer, according to the border policeman’s account.

    The police also released a photo of the alleged knife, and claimed that one officer was “lightly wounded” in the alleged stabbing and was evacuated for medical treatment, while the second officer, the one who killed the Palestinian man, was also “lightly wounded”.

    No Palestinian eyewitness accounts published in the media made any mention of a knife.

    Around 20 minutes after 5 pm, the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed the man had died from his wounds.

    Though the MOH did not identify the man, Wafa News Agency identified him as 22-year-old Ammar Mefleh from the Nablus-area village of Osirin.

    ‘Execution’
    The moment the man was killed was captured in a harrowing video that is being circulated widely on social media and broadcast on Al Jazeera, amid an outcry from Palestinians, calling it an “execution.”

    The video shows him in a scuffle with an armed border police officer, whose assault rifle is strapped around his chest, along with a pistol in a holster around his waist.

    In the midst of the scuffle, the border police officer can be seen attempting to drag the Palestinian man away from a group of other Palestinian men, who are trying to pull the man out of the officer’s grasp.

    The officer puts the man in a headlock, and pulls him away from the two other men. The man then manages to free himself from the headlock, and pushes the officer away, while grabbing the officer’s assault rifle.

    In a matter of seconds, as the Palestinian man throws the officer’s assault rifle to the ground, out of both of their grasps, the officer pulls out his pistol and begins firing at the man from point-blank range, who puts his hands up and curls away from the officer.

    The officer fires four shots directly at the man, at point blank range, as shocked bystanders watch on, screaming for help. The officer then picks up his assault rifle, which was thrown some metres away on the ground.

    A second video from a different angle shows the Palestinian man lying bloodied on the ground as the officer gets on his radio to call for backup.

    Israel forces prevented medical aid
    According to local reports, Israeli forces surrounded the man’s body for around 20 minutes, preventing Palestinian medics from providing him with first aid, before Israeli troops seized his body and took him to an undisclosed location.

    The man in Huwwara is the ninth Palestinian killed by Israeli forces this week, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel in 2022 to 214.

    The Israeli military and armed forces operating in the occupied West Bank have operated under open-fire regulations that translate into what rights groups call a shoot-to-kill policy, which they say has been given a green light by Israeli officials.

    Earlier this year the army amended its open fire policy, making it even more lenient for soldiers, allowing for soldier to shoot — even kill — Palestinian stone-throwers with live ammunition, even if they are actively fleeing the scene.

    Republished with permission from Kia Ora Gaza and Mondoweiss.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • COP27: one big breakthrough but ultimately an inadequate response to the climate crisis

    ANALYSIS: By Matt McDonald, The University of Queensland

    For 30 years, developing nations have fought to establish an international fund to pay for the “loss and damage” they suffer as a result of climate change. As the COP27 climate summit in Egypt wrapped up over the weekend, they finally succeeded.

    While it’s a historic moment, the agreement of loss and damage financing left many details yet to be sorted out.

    What’s more, many critics have lamented the overall outcome of COP27, saying it falls well short of a sufficient response to the climate crisis. As Alok Sharma, president of COP26 in Glasgow, noted:

    “Friends, I said in Glasgow that the pulse of 1.5 degrees was weak. Unfortunately it remains on life support.”

    But annual conferences aren’t the only way to pursue meaningful action on climate change. Mobilisation from activists, market forces and other sources of momentum mean hope isn’t lost.

    One big breakthrough: loss and damage
    There were hopes COP27 would lead to new commitments on emissions reduction, renewed commitments for the transfer of resources to the developing world, strong signals for a transition away from fossil fuels, and the establishment of a loss and damage fund.

    By any estimation, the big breakthrough of COP27 was the agreement to establish a fund for loss and damage. This would involve wealthy nations compensating developing states for the effects of climate change, especially droughts, floods, cyclones and other disasters.

    Most analysts have been quick to point out there Is still a lot yet to clarify in terms of donors, recipients or rules of accessing this fund.

    It Is not clear where funds will actually come from, or whether countries such as China will contribute, for example. These and other details are yet to be agreed.

    We should also acknowledge the potential gaps between promises and money on the table, given the failure of developed states to deliver on US$100 billion per year of climate finance for developing states by 2020. This was committed to in Copenhagen in 2009.

    But it was a significant fight to get the issue of loss and damage on the agenda in Egypt at all. So the agreement to establish this fund is clearly a monumental outcome for developing countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change — and least responsible for it.

    It was also a win for the Egyptian hosts, who were keen to flag their sensitivity to issues confronting the developing world.

    The fund comes 30 years after the measure was first suggested by Vanuatu back in 1991.

    Not-so-good news
    The loss and damage fund will almost certainly be remembered as the marquee outcome of COP27, but other developments were less promising. Among these were various fights to retain commitments made in Paris in 2015 and Glasgow last year.

    In Paris, nations agreed to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and preferably to 1.5℃ this century, compared to pre-industrial levels. So far, the planet has warmed by 1.09℃, and emissions are at record levels.

    Temperature trajectories make it increasingly challenging for the world to limit temperature rises to 1.5℃. And the fact keeping this commitment in Egypt was a hard-won fight casts some doubt on the global commitment to mitigation.

    China in particular had questioned whether the 1.5℃ target was worth retaining, and this became a key contest in the talks.

    New Zealand Climate Change Minister James Shaw said a group of countries were undermining decisions made in previous conferences. He added this:

    “really came to the fore at this COP, and I’m afraid there was just a massive battle which ultimately neither side won.”

    Perhaps even more worrying was the absence of a renewed commitment to phase out fossil fuels, which had been flagged in Glasgow. Oil-producing countries in particular fought this.

    Instead, the final text noted only the need for a “phase down of unabated coal power”, which many viewed as inadequate for the urgency of the challenge.

    Likewise, hoped-for rules to stop greenwashing and new restrictions on carbon markets were not forthcoming.

    Both this outcome, and the failure to develop new commitments to phase out fossil fuels, arguably reflect the power of fossil fuel interests and lobbyists. COP26 President Alok Sharma captured the frustration of countries in the high-ambition coalition, saying:

    “We joined with many parties to propose a number of measures that would have contributed to [raising ambition].

    “Emissions peaking before 2025 as the science tells us is necessary. Not in this text. Clear follow through on the phase down of coal. Not in this text. Clear commitments to phase out all fossil fuels. Not in this text. And the energy text weakened in the final minutes.”

    And as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres lamented: “Our planet is still in the emergency room”.

    Beyond COP27?
    In the end, exhausted delegates signed off on an inadequate agreement, but largely avoided the backsliding that looked possible over fraught days of negotiations.

    The establishment of a fund for loss and damage is clearly an important outcome of COP27, even with details yet to be fleshed out.

    But otherwise, the negotiations can’t be seen as an unambiguously positive outcome for action on the climate crisis — especially with very little progress on mitigating emissions. And while the world dithers, the window of opportunity to respond effectively to the climate crisis continues to close.

    It’s important to note, however, that while COPs are clearly significant in the international response to the climate crisis, they are not the only game in town.

    Public mobilisation and activism, market forces, aid and development programmes, and legislation at local, state and national levels are all important sites of climate politics — and potentially, significant change.

    There are myriad examples. Take the international phenomenon of school climate strikes, or climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes’ takeover of AGL Energy. They point to the possibility of action on climate change outside formal international climate negotiations.

    So if you’re despairing at the limited progress at COP27, remember this: nations and communities determined to wean themselves off fossil fuels will do more to blunt the power of the sector than most international agreements could realistically hope to achieve.The Conversation

    Dr Matt McDonald, associate professor of international relations, The University of Queensland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • China’s influence in Myanmar could tip the scales towards war in the South China Sea

    ANALYSIS: By Htwe Htwe Thein, Curtin University

    The fate of Myanmar has major implications for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

    An undemocratic Myanmar serves no one’s interests except China, which is consolidating its economic and strategic influence in its smaller neighbour in pursuit of its two-ocean strategy.

    Since the coup China has been — by far — the main source of foreign investment in Myanmar.

    This includes US$2.5 billion in a gas-fired power plant to be built west of Myanmar’s capital, Yangon, that will be 81 percent owned and operated by Chinese companies.

    Among the dozens of infrastructure projects China is funding are high-speed rail links and dams. But its most strategically important investment is the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, encompassing oil and gas pipelines, roads and rail links costing many tens of billions of dollars.

    The corridor’s “jewel in the crown” is a deep-sea port to be built at Kyaukphyu, on Myanmar’s west coast, at an estimated cost of US$7 billion.

    This will finally give China its long-desired “back door” to the Indian Ocean.

    China's 'back door' to the Indian Ocean
    A map of China’s planned ‘back door’ to the Indian Ocean. Source: Vivekananda International Foundation

    Natural gas from Myanmar can help China reduce its dependence on imports from suppliers such as Australia. Access to the Indian Ocean will enable China to import gas and oil from the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela without ships having to pass through the contested waters of the South China Sea to Chinese ports.

    About 80 percent of China’s oil imports now move through the South China Sea via the Malacca Strait, which is just 65 kilometres wide at its narrowest point between the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia’s Sumatra.

    Overcoming this strategic vulnerability arguably makes the Kyaukphyu port and pipelines the most important element of China’s Belt and Road initiative to reshape global trade routes and assert its influence over other nations.

    Deepening relationship
    Most of China’s infrastructure investment was planned before Myanmar’s coup. But whereas other governments and foreign investors have sought to distance themselves from the junta since it overthrew Myanmar’s elected government in February 2021, China has deepened its relationship.

    China is the Myanmar regime’s most important international supporter. In April Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China would support Myanmar “no matter how the situation changes”. In May it used its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to thwart a statement expressing concern about violence and the growing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar.

    Work continues on projects associated with the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. New ventures (such as the aforementioned power station) have been approved.
    More projects are on the cards. In June, for example, China’s embassy in Myanmar announced the completion of a feasibility study to upgrade the Wan Pong port on the Lancang-Mekong River in Myanmar’s east.

    Debt trap warnings
    In 2020, before the coup, Myanmar’s auditor general Maw Than warned of growing indebtedness to China, with Chinese lenders charging higher interest payments than those from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank.

    At that time about 40 percent of Myanmar’s foreign debt of US$10 billion was owed to China. It is likely to be greater now. It will only increase the longer a military dictatorship, with few other supporters or sources of foreign money, remains in power, dragging down Myanmar’s economy.

    Efforts to restore democracy in Myanmar should therefore be seen as crucial to the long-term strategic interests of the region’s democracies, and to global peace and prosperity, given the increasing belligerence of China under Xi Jinping.

    Xi, now president for life, this month told the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for war. A compliant and indebted Myanmar with a deep-sea port controlled by Chinese interests tips the scales towards that happening.

    A democratic and independent Myanmar is a counter-strategy to this potential.

    Calls for sanctions
    Myanmar’s democracy movement wants the international community to impose tough sanctions on the junta. But few have responded.

    The United States and United Kingdom have gone furthest, banning business dealings with Myanmar military officials and state-owned or private companies controlled by the military.

    The European Union and Canada have imposed sanctions against a more limited range of individuals and economic entities.

    South Korea has suspended financing new infrastructure projects. Japan has suspended aid and postponed the launch of Myanmar’s first satellite. New Zealand has suspended political and military contact.

    Australia has suspended military cooperation (with some pre-existing restrictions on dealing with military leaders imposed following the human rights atrocities committed against the Rohingya in 2017.

    But that’s about it.

    Myanmar’s closest neighbours in the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations are still committed to a policy of dialogue and “non-interference” – though Malaysia and Indonesia are increasingly arguing for a tougher approach as the atrocities mount.

    The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project says the only country now more violent than Myanmar is Ukraine.

    Given its unique geo-strategic position, self-interest alone should be enough for the international community to take greater action.The Conversation

    Dr Htwe Htwe Thein, associate professor, Curtin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Green Party tells NZ ‘don’t hold back’ on protests over Iran crackdown

    RNZ News

    Aotearoa New Zealand’s Green Party has again urged the government to step up its condemnation of Iran.

    About 50 protesters burned headscarves and passports outside the Iranian embassy in the capital Wellington yesterday.

    There has been a wave of protest in Iran and around the world over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the “morality police” for violating Iran’s dress code.

    The government has been quiet on the issue — with recent news breaking of two New Zealanders who were held in Iran having now escaped the country safe and well.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the government had been working hard over the past several months to ensure the safe exit of travellers Topher Richwhite and his wife Bridget Thackwray.

    Greens’ foreign affairs spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said there was no longer anything stopping the government taking stronger action.

    Two protesters embrace during a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in Wellington on 28 October, 2022.
    Green Party foreign affairs spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman hugs a protester. Image: Angus Dreaver/RNZ News

    “Now there is no imagined or real impediment to us actually taking action and it is our responsibility to do that,” Ghahraman said.

    “We need to come to line with the rest of the world when action on Iran is concerned.

    Specific actions needed
    “There are these very specific actions we can take that will hurt the people most responsible for this violence and oppression.”

    Ghahraman wanted a freeze on the assets, bank accounts and travel of people supporting violence in Iran.

    Dozens of people stage a demonstration to protest the death of a 22-year-old woman under custody in Tehran Iran on September 21, 2022. Stringer / Anadolu Agency (Photo by STRINGER / ANADOLU AGENCY / Anadolu Agency via AFP)
    Protests continue in Iran . . . NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta says NZ was “appalled” by the use of force by Iranian authorities. Photo: Andalou/RNZ News

    There has been an upsurge in the protests this week, with tens of thousands taking to the streets in major cities across Iran after security forces were reported to have opened fire on protesters in Saqquez, Amini’s home city, on Wednesday.

    In a tweet, Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said Aotearoa was “appalled” by the use of force by Iranian authorities overnight.

    “Violence against women, girls or any other members of Iranian society to prevent their exercise of universal human rights is unacceptable and must end.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Academic warns of more hostage crises as ‘revolution’ unfolds in Iran

    RNZ News

    An academic says hostage diplomacy is a well-known tactic of the Iranian regime and New Zealanders should not go to the country.

    Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray are understood to have been detained for months after entering Iran.

    The New Zealand government negotiated for the safe release of the pair but has remained tight-lipped about the details.

    A senior lecturer from Massey University who was born and raised in Iran, Dr Negar Partow, said there was a pattern of this kind of action in Iran.

    However, she told RNZ Morning Report it was not necessarily naive for the couple to visit the country.

    When they arrived in July it was much quieter than what it became when the unrest started in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly.

    However, travelling in a Jeep — a US brand — might have created suspicions, she said.

    NZ not especially targeted
    The move against the New Zealanders was not especially targeted at this country, she said, with as many as 70 nations having citizens in Iranian prisons.

    “The fact that Iran entered a revolutionary phase complicated the situation and gave the Islamic Republic the opportunity to use them and to create a hostage diplomacy. This is not particular to Aotearoa. They do it all around the world,” she said.

    Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray, pictured in South Africa, recorded their round the world travels on Instagram.
    Topher Richwhite and his wife Bridget Thackwray pictured in South Africa . . . they may have attracted attention in Iran driving their US-branded Jeep, says an academic. Image: Expeditionearth.live/Instagram/RNZ

    People with dual citizenship, diplomats, activists, and human rights and environmental advocates were especially vulnerable to attention from Iranian authorities.

    If the couple had been focusing on environmental concerns that may have made them a target, she said.

    “As the Islamic Republic becomes more and more challenged and de-legitimised by this revolution, these hostage crises will increase and they will use any opportunity as a bargaining chip.”

    There have been conflicting reports on now the couple were detained.

    Dr Partow said Iran used different models, including imprisonment or being detained in a safe house and not being allowed to communicate.

    Richwhite and Thackwray would have had their passports confiscated and their cellphones removed with their Instagram posts stopping in July.

    She believed they were not put in prison.

    Tepid resoponse by NZ
    Asked about the tepid response by the New Zealand government to the unrest in Iran, she said the government was trying to do a delicate balancing act while the couple were being detained.

    Many Western governments had to resort to hostage diplomacy with Iran.

    Protesters over death of Mahsa Amini
    Exiled Iranians of the National Council of Resistance of Iran in front of the embassy of Iran in Berlin, Germany, with images of Mahsa Amini. Image: RNZ File

    While Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has warned against visiting Iran due to the potential for violence, Dr Partow said it was important to remember the violence was being perpetrated by the security agencies not the protesters.

    She said now that the couple had been freed, she was hopeful Aotearoa would take a stronger stance.

    “Yes we have been too kind but I’m hoping that as we come out of this period and everybody’s back to normal diplomacy we will take stronger action against the Islamic republic,” she said.

    “As the prime minister mentioned as well, this was a delicate diplomatic situation … we did have two New Zealanders inside Iran detained and I think that [strong criticism of Iran] would create more complications.”

    Expulsion of ambassador
    The expulsion of the ambassador, campaigning for oil embargoes, speaking out publicly to support the rights of Iranian women and human rights lobbying at the United Nations were among measures New Zealand should be considering.

    “Now that we have been the victim of hostage crisis in the Islamic Republic that should give us much more importance into the project and we should actually work on it,” she said.

    As for advice for potential visitors, she said: “Definitely not. Iran is in the middle of a revolution.”

    Ordinary citizens were not in a position to offer help to foreign tourists and it was far better that they stayed away.

    She said as the revolution approached the six-week mark, the response from authorities to the demonstrations was becoming even more violent and oppressive.

    Asked about Act’s move to block a motion calling for a unified condemnation of Iran’s oppression of women’s rights unless Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman apologised for interrupting a speech made by party leader David Seymour in the House, she said it should be remembered that the Iranian government was now killing children and this was a more important consideration.

    Deputy PM pleased couple released
    The government is remaining tight lipped about what it took to secure the release of the couple.

    Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said Iran was a dangerous place and New Zealanders should obey the travel warnings not to go there.

    Consular officials around the world did not judge New Zealanders who got into trouble —  instead they got on with the job of helping them regain their freedom.

    “I’m just pleased we’ve been able to get them out.”

    Robertson told RNZ First Up he could not comment specifically on the couple’s case — but he said it was important to understand the customs and rules of other countries — and to understand whether you should be there at all.

    He said no doubt the pair would reflect on what they have been through.

    Call for NZ govt to take strong stand
    An Iranian-Kurdish journalist now living in New Zealand said the government needed to do more regarding the actions of Iran’s government.

    Behrouz Boochani, who was granted refugee status in New Zealand in July 2020, said New Zealand should speak out loudly against the Iranian regime.

    He said the current unrest was a revolution and was a call for regime change in Iran.

    While there had been mass protests in the past, this year felt different because it involved more people and more cities.

    He said he was delighted the couple had been freed. However, the Iranian community in New Zealand had been disappointed in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the unrest in Iran to this point.

    He said since Mahsa Amini’s death another 250 people had been killed, including more than 20 children.

    “So we expect the New Zealand government to strongly condemn this violence and strongly support the protesters on the street and the people of Iran.”

    The US and Australia have criticised the Iranian government’s actions and it was time New Zealand followed suit.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • David Robie: Pacific lessons in climate crisis journalism and combating disinformation

    Mediasia Iafor

    New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.

    An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.

    In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

    The Mediasia “conversation” on Asia-Pacific issues in Kyoto, Japan. Image: Iafor screenshot APR

    He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.

    Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.

    He currently edits Asia Pacific Report and is one of the founders of the new Aotearoa New Zealand-based NGO Asia Pacific Media Network.

    In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.

    He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.

    Paying a tribute to Pacific to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”

    Challenges facing the Asia-Pacific media
    Challenges facing the Asia-Pacific media . . . La Trobe University’s Dr Nasya Bahfen and Asia Pacific Report’s Dr David Robie in conversation. Image: Iafor screenshot APR

  • Suspected gunman in Philippine broadcaster’s killing surrenders

    BenarNews

    Philippine police have announced the arrest of a suspect in the killing of a radio journalist who was known for criticising President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and his immediate predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte.

    The suspect, identified as Joel Estorial, 39, gave himself up to the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Interior Secretary Benjamin Abalos and was charged with murder two weeks after seasoned radio broadcaster Percival Mabasa (also known as Percy Lapid) was gunned down in a suburb south of Manila, officials said.

    Estorial surrendered “out of fear for personal safety following public disclosure of … CCTV footage revealing his face during the incident and naming him as [a] primary person of interest,” according to a statement from Abalos’ office.

    “This is a major breakthrough. He made an extra-judicial confession, duly assisted by counsel,” Abalos said, adding that the suspect had named three other accomplices who were subjects of “intensive follow-up operations”.

    The gun used to shoot Mabasa was recovered and “positively linked to the crime scene” by the police forensics laboratory, according to the national police.

    Estoral confessed that five others had allegedly participated in the planning and killing of the broadcaster, but he only managed to identify three.

    Mabasa, who worked for DWBL radio station, was ambushed on October 3 as he drove his car toward a gated community in Las Pinas, a suburb in southern metro Manila. He was the latest in a long line of killings targeting members of the Philippine media.

    Motive remains unknown
    However, the motive for his murder remains unknown. Abalos did not answer reporters when they asked him about this on Tuesday.

    “Just give us a few more days. We have to get the mastermind, that’s very important. The investigation is ongoing right now, there are many more details. Let’s not jeopardise them,” he said.

    The suspect in custody was presented at the press briefing, where he spoke to reporters.

    Someone from inside the country’s main prison facility, whom Estoral did not identify, had ordered a hit on Mabasa, he said. He identified two brothers and a third man as fellow accomplices in the attack.

    “I was afraid and conscience-struck for the killing of Percy Lapid,” said a handcuffed Estorial, who wore a helmet and bullet-proof vest.

    “Our arrangement was for whoever got closest to Percy would be the one to fire the fatal shot, and I was in that position. I was threatened with death if I didn’t shoot Percy at that moment, so I did,” Estorial said.

    The team was paid 550,000 pesos (US$9300) for the hit, he told reporters.

    “I hope the family forgives me. I did not want to do it, I was just forced to do so,” he said.

    Family thank police
    Mabasa’s family issued a statement Tuesday thanking the police and saying they hoped his killing would not become just another statistic among murders of Filipino journalists dating back decades.

    “We hope this development leads to the identification, arrest and prosecution of the mastermind,” the family said.

    Filipino activists light candles in memory of killed radio journalist Percival Mabasa (also known as Percy Lapid) during a demonstration in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Oct. 4, 2022. [Basilio Sepe/BenarNews]

    The Southeast Asian nation ranks among the most dangerous countries for journalists worldwide. Dozens have been killed with impunity since the dictatorship of Marcos’ late father, Ferdinand E. Marcos, more than 36 years ago.

    Mabasa’s commentaries were often bold and sharp as he sought to counter fake news spread on air as well as on social media. He had also hit out against a perceived attempt by supporters of the Marcos family to distort history and had been bitingly critical of the war on drugs by Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, which left thousands dead. During his six years in office, Duterte had said journalists were fair game if they were corrupt.

    The Duterte administration worked to close down broadcaster ABS-CBN Corp. and convict Maria Ressa, the chief executive of the news website Rappler who was later named a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, on cyber libel charges.

    Jeoffrey Maitem and Mark Navales in Cotabato City, southern Philippines, and Basilio Sepe in Manila contributed to this report.

  • Keep Maria Ressa out of jail, #HoldTheLine tells Marcos

    Pacific Media Watch

    The #HoldTheLine Coalition has urged President Marcos of the Philippines to end persecution of journalists and independent media by dropping all charges against Nobel Peace Prize co-laureate Maria Ressa and her co-accused.

    This week, the Philippine Court of Appeals rejected Ressa’s motion for a reconsideration of her 2020 conviction on a trumped-up charge of criminal cyber libel.

    This means that after a two-year struggle to overturn her conviction, all that stands between Ressa’s freedom and a lengthy prison sentence is a final appeal to the Supreme Court, and the government’s political will.

    “We call on President Marcos to show the world that he rejects the Duterte-era persecution and prosecution of journalists and independent media by immediately withdrawing all charges and cases against Ressa, her co-accused, and her Manila-based news outlet Rappler,” the #HoldTheLine Coalition steering committee said on behalf of more than 80 international organisations — including Reporters Without Borders — joining forces to defend Ressa and support independent media in the Philippines.

    “President Marcos should begin by ending his government’s opposition to Ressa’s appeal against her conviction on spurious criminal cyber libel charges, which were pursued and prosecuted by the State despite the Philippine Supreme Court’s warning that the country’s criminalisation of libel is ‘doubtful’.”

    There have been 23 individual cases opened by the state against Maria Ressa, Rappler and its employees since 2018.

    The criminal cyber libel case is one of seven ongoing cases implicating Ressa. If she is successfully prosecuted in all cases, she theoretically faces up to 100 years in jail.

    The criminal cyber libel conviction is the most urgent, with an increased sentence of up to six years and eight months handed down by the Philippine Court of Appeal in July 2022.

    Ressa now has just two weeks to file a final appeal to the Philippine Supreme Court, which could then swiftly issue a written verdict, resulting in the enforcement of her prison sentence.

    Concurrently, Rappler is also the subject of a shutdown order pursued by the Duterte administration.

    — Julie Posetti (ICFJ), Rebecca Vincent (RSF), and Gypsy Guillén Kaiser (CPJ) on behalf of the #HoldTheLine Coalition.

    The #HTL Coalition comprises more than 80 organisations around the world. This statement is issued by the #HoldTheLine Steering Committee, but it does not necessarily reflect the position of all or any individual Coalition members or organisations. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Women-led protests in Iran gather momentum – but will they be enough to bring about change?

    ANALYSIS: By Tony Walker, La Trobe University

    As protests in Iran drag on into their fourth week over the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, there are two central questions.

    The first is whether these protests involving women and girls across Iran are different from upheavals in the past, or will simply end the same way with the regime stifling a popular uprising.

    The second question is what can, and should, the outside world do about extraordinarily brave demonstrations against an ageing and ruthless regime that has shown itself to be unwilling, and possibly unable, to allow greater freedoms?

    The symbolic issue for Iran’s protest movement is a requirement, imposed by morality police, that women and girls wear the hijab, or headscarf. In reality, these protests are the result of a much wider revolt against discrimination and prejudice.

    Put simply, women are fed up with a regime that has sought to impose rigid rules on what is, and is not, permissible for women in a theocratic society whose guidelines are little changed since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

    Women are serving multi-year jail sentences for simply refusing to wear the hijab.

    Two other issues are also at play. One is the economic deprivation suffered by Iranians under the weight of persistent sanctions, rampant inflation and the continuing catastrophic decline in the value of the Iranian riyal.

    The other issue is the fact Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death sparked the protests, was a Kurd.

    The Kurds, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 84 million population, feel themselves to be a persecuted minority. Tensions between the central government in Tehran and Kurds in their homeland on the boundaries of Iraq, Syria and Turkey are endemic.


    A BBC report  on the Mahsa Amini protests.

    Another important question is where all this leaves negotiations on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA had been aimed at freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

    Former President Donald Trump recklessly abandoned the 2015 agreement in 2018.

    The Biden administration, along with its United Nations Security Council partners plus Germany, had been making progress in those negotiations, but those efforts are now stalled, if not frozen.

    The spectacle of Iranian security forces violently putting down demonstrations in cities, towns and villages across Iran will make it virtually impossible in the short term for the US and its negotiating partners to negotiate a revised JCPOA with Tehran.

    Russia’s use of Iranian-supplied “kamikaze” drones against Ukrainian targets will have further soured the atmosphere.

    How will the US and its allies respond?
    So will the US and its allies continue to tighten Iranian sanctions? And to what extent will the West seek to encourage and support protesters on the ground in Iran?

    One initiative that is already underway is helping the protest movement to circumvent regime attempts to shut down electronic communications.

    Elon Musk has announced he is activating his Starlink satellites to provide a vehicle for social media communications in Iran. Musk did the same thing in Ukraine to get around Russian attempts to shut down Ukrainian communications by taking out a European satellite system.

    However, amid the spectacle of women and girls being shot and tear-gassed on Iranian streets, the moral dilemma for the outside world is this: how far the West is prepared to go in its backing for the protesters.

    There have also been pro-government Iranian rallies in response
    Since the Iranian protests began there have also been pro-government rallies in response. Image: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/AAP

    It is one thing to express sympathy; it is another to take concrete steps to support the widespread agitation. This was also the conundrum during the Arab Spring of 2010 that brought down regimes in US-friendly countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

    It should not be forgotten, in light of contemporary events, that Iran and Russia propped up Syria’s Assad regime during the Arab Spring, saving it from a near certain end.

    In this latest period, the Middle East may not be on fire, as it was a decade or so ago, but it remains highly unstable. Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, is effectively without a government after months of violent agitation.

    The war in Yemen is threatening to spark up again, adding to uncertainties in the Gulf.

    In a geopolitical sense, Washington has to reckon with inroads Moscow has been making in relations with Gulf States, including, notably Saudi Arabia.

    The recent OPEC Plus decision to limit oil production constituted a slap to the US ahead of the mid-term elections in which fuel prices will be a potent issue.

    In other words, Washington’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is eroding, partly as a consequence of a disastrous attempt to remake the region by going to war in Iraq in 2003.

    The US’s ability to influence the Middle East now much weaker
    The US’s ability to influence the Middle East is much weaker than before it went to war in Iraq in 2003. Image: Susan Walsh/AP/AAP

    A volatile region
    Among the consequences of that misjudgement is the empowerment of Iran in conjunction with a Shia majority in Iraq. This should have been foreseen.

    So quite apart from the waves of protest in Iran, the region is a tinderbox with multiple unresolved conflicts.

    In Afghanistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, women protesters have taken the lead in recent days from their Iranian sisters and have been protesting against conservative dress codes and limitations on access to education under the Taliban.

    This returns us to the moral issue of the extent to which the outside world should support the protests. In this, the experience of the “green” rebellion of 2009 on Iran’s streets is relevant.

    Then, the Obama administration, after initially giving encouragement to the demonstrations, pulled back on the grounds it did not wish to jeopardise negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran or undermine the protests by attaching US support.

    Officials involved in the administration, who are now back in the Biden White House, believe that approach was a mistake. However, that begs the question as to what practically the US and its allies can do to stop Iran’s assault on its own women and girls.

    What if, as a consequence of Western encouragement to the demonstrators, many hundreds more die or are incarcerated?

    What is the end result, beyond indulging in the usual rhetorical exercises such as expressing “concern” and threatening to ramp up sanctions that hurt individual Iranians more than the regime itself?

    The bottom line is that irrespective of what might be the desired outcome, Iran’s regime is unlikely to crumble.

    It might be shaken, it might entertain concerns that its own revolution that replaced the Shah is in danger of being replicated, but it would be naïve to believe that a rotting 43-year-old edifice would be anything but utterly ruthless in putting an end to the demonstrations.

    This includes unrest in the oil industry, in which workers are expressing solidarity with the demonstrators. The oil worker protest will be concerning the regime, given the centrality of oil production to Iran’s economy.

    However, a powerful women’s movement has been unleashed in Iran. Over time, this movement may well force a theocratic regime to loosen restrictions on women and their participation in the political life of the country. That is the hope, but as history has shown, a ruthless regime will stop at little to re-assert its control.The Conversation

    Dr Tony Walker is a vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ressa ‘disappointed’ over failed appeal and ongoing harassment in Philippine cyber libel case

    By Jairo Bolledo in Manila

    The Philippines Court of Appeals has denied the motion for reconsideration filed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former Rappler researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. over their cyber libel case.

    In a 16-page decision dated October 10, the court’s fourth division denied the appeal.

    Associate Justices Roberto Quiroz, Ramon Bato Jr., and Germano Francisco Legaspi signed the ruling. They were the same justices who signed the court decision, which earlier affirmed the conviction of Ressa and Santos.

    According to the court, the arguments raised by Ressa and Santos were already resolved.

    “A careful and meticulous review of the motion for reconsideration reveals that the matters raised by the accused-appellants had already been exhaustively resolved and discussed in the assailed Decision,” the court said.

    The court also claimed Ressa’s and Santos’ conviction is not meant to curtail freedom of speech.

    “In conclusion, it [is] worthy and relevant to point out that the conviction of the accused-appellants for the crime of cyberlibel punishable under the Cybercrime Law is not geared towards the curtailment of the freedom of speech, or to produce an unseemingly chilling effect on the users of cyberspace that would possibly hinder free speech.”

    ‘Safeguard’ for free speech
    On the contrary, the court said, the purpose of the law is to “safeguard the right of free speech, and to curb, if not totally prevent, the reckless and unlawful use of the computer systems as a means of committing the traditional criminal offences…”

    In a statement, Nobel Peace laureate Ressa said she was “disappointed” but not surprised by the ruling.


    Rappler’s video report on YouTube.

    “The ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against me and Rappler continues, and the Philippines legal system is not doing enough to stop it. I am disappointed by today’s ruling but sadly not surprised,” Ressa said.

    “This is a reminder of the importance of independent journalism holding power to account. Despite these sustained attacks from all sides, we continue to focus on what we do best — journalism.”

    Santos, in a separate statement, said he still believed that the rule of law would prevail.

    “The [Appeal Court’s] decision to deny our motion is not surprising, but it’s disheartening nevertheless. As we elevate our case to the SC, our fight against intimidation and suppression of freedom continues. We still believe that the rule of law will prevail.”

    Theodore “Ted” Te, Rappler’s lawyer and former Supreme Court spokesperson, said they would now ask the Supreme Court to review and reverse Ressa’s conviction.

    “The CA decision denying the MFR [motion for reconsideration] is disappointing. It ignored basic principles of constitutional and criminal law as well as the evidence presented. Maria and Rey will elevate these issues to the SC and we will ask the SC to review the decision and to reverse the decision,” Te said in a statement.

    The decision
    The Appeal Court also explained its findings on the arguments based on:

    • Applications of the provisions of cyber libel under the cybercrime law
    • Subject article should have been classified as qualifiedly privileged” in relation to Wilfredo Keng as a public figure

    On the validity of the cybercrime law, the court cited a ruling which, according to them, decided the constitutionality of the law.

    “We find it unnecessary to dwell on the issue raised by accused-appellants since the Supreme Court, in Jose Jesus M. Disini, Jr., et al., v. The Secretary of Justice, et al. (Disini Case), 5 had already ruled on its validity and constitutionality, with finality.”

    The court also reiterated that the story in question was republished. The court said the argument that ex-post facto was applied on the theory that the correction of one letter is too unsubstantial and cannot be considered a republication is “unavailing.”

    “As settled, the determination of republication is not hinged on whether the corrections made therein were substantial or not, as what matters is that the very exact libelous article was again published on a later date,” the appeals court said.

    On the increase of penalty, the CA said the argument that Wilberto Tolentino v. People has no doctrinal value and cannot be used as a binding precedent as it was “an unsigned resolution, is misplaced.”

    That case said the “prescriptive period for the crime of cyber libel is 15 years.”

    Traditional, online publications
    The appeals court also highlighted the difference between traditional and online publications: “As it is, in the instance of libel through traditional publication, the libelous article is only released and circulated once – which is on the day when it was published.”

    Such was not the case for an online publication, the court said, where “the commission of such offence is continuous since such article remains therein in perpetuity unless taken down from all online platforms where it was published…”

    On the argument about Keng, the CA said it was insufficient to consider him a public figure: “As previously settled, the claim that Wilfredo Keng is a renowned businessman, who was connected to several companies, is insufficient to classify him as a public figure.”

    The term “public figure” in relation to libel refers more to a celebrity, it said, citing the Ciriaco “Boy” Guingguing v. Honorable Court of Appeals decision. The decision said a public figure is “anyone who has arrived at a position where public attention is focused upon him as a person.”

    It also cited the Supreme Court decision on Alfonso Yuchengco v. The Manila Chronicle Publishing Corporation, et al., which resolved the argument whether a businessman can be considered a public figure. The court said that being a known businessman did not make Keng a public figure who had attained a position that gave the public “legitimate interest in his affairs and character.”

    There was no proof, too, that “he voluntarily thrusted himself to the forefront of the particular public controversies that were raised in the defamatory article,” the CA added.

    In 2020, Manila Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 46 convicted Ressa and Santos over cyber libel charges filed by Keng. The case tested the 8-year-old Philippine cybercrime law.

    The Manila court interpreted the cyber libel law as having a 12-year proscription period, as opposed to only a year. The lower court also decided that republication was a separate offence.

    Aside from affirming the Manila court’s ruling, the CA also imposed a longer prison sentence on Ressa and Santos, originally set for six months and one day as minimum to six years as maximum.

    The appeals court added eight months and 20 days to the maximum imprisonment penalty.

    Jairo Bolledo is a Rappler journalist. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How Philippine ‘press freedom’ has been abandoned under ‘Bongbong’ Marcos

    ANALYSIS: By Danilo Arana Arao in Manila

    Upon assuming the Philippines presidency on 30 June 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr — the only son and namesake of the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos — delivered an inaugural address that did not mention press freedom.

    Press freedom also went unmentioned when he delivered his first State of the Nation Address before the joint Senate and House of Representatives on 25 July 2022.

    His silence on the issue was notable given that the former press secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who stepped down on 4 October 2022 due to health reasons, had stressed that press freedom would be guaranteed under the Marcos Jr administration and that the administration would “work closely” with news media.

    But as he pledged to protect press freedom on the campaign trail, certain journalists were pushed for getting too physically close to Marcos Jr.

    It also remains to be seen whether his representatives will continue to evade critical questions during press briefings or if Marcos Jr will be more accommodating of interview requests. The normalisation of these practices would be a death knell for press freedom in the Philippines.

    Media restrictions and abuse under Marcos Jr evoke memories of the Philippine media’s dark history under former Philippines president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law from 1972–86.

    The Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility identifies five similarities between the Marcos regime in the 1970s and the current Marcos Jr administration.

    Distribution of propaganda
    These are the distribution of propaganda through government agencies and social media, the ABS–CBN shutdown, attacks and threats against journalists, crony press and media selectivity and propaganda films.

    There are chilling similarities between the two administrations despite Marcos Jr’s promise that he would not declare martial law.

    For the current administration, “working closely” with journalists means putting them in touch with pro-Marcos Jr vloggers, content creators and influencers. Cruz-Angeles is prioritising the accreditation of pro-regime reporters to cover official functions.

    But her claim that accreditation is open to those of all political beliefs rings untrue as pro-Marcos Jr vloggers recently established a new group (upon the suggestion of Cruz-Angeles herself) to help gain government accreditation.

    Celebrity vlogger Toni Gonzaga was granted a one-on-one interview with Marcos Jr at the Malacañang Palace in September 2022, showing how the administration accommodates those who ask soft questions. That reminds many Filipinos of Marcos Jr’s non-participation in most presidential debates and interviews during the campaign, opting to accommodate events organised by his supporters.

    During the 2022 election campaign, there were times when his handlers did not invite critical journalists, asking those invited to submit questions in advance to control the flow of press briefings.

    By accrediting pro-administration, hyper-partisan non-journalists, the Marcos Jr administration gives them legitimacy as “truth seekers” even if there is evidence they proliferate disinformation. It is also a strategy to discredit critical journalists for peddling “fake news”.

    Critical journalists harassed
    Critical journalists and media organisations are harassed and intimidated under the Marcos Jr administration, just as they were under the 2016–2020 Duterte administration. Disinformation remains rampant even after the 2022 elections.

    Red-tagging — the blacklisting of journalists and media outlets critical of the government — has continued.

    Shortly after Marcos Jr assumed the presidency, the Court of Appeals upheld the “cyber libel” convictions of Nobel Prize laureate Maria Ressa and former Rappler writer Reynaldo Santos Jr.

    While these convictions appeared to carry over the selective harassment and intimidation of the vengeful Duterte administration, the chilling effect on the media is real. Those targeted become grim reminders of what can happen if journalists and news media organisations incur the ire of the powers that be.

    The date 21 September 2022 marked the 50 years since martial law was imposed. Marcos Jr repeatedly claims martial law was necessary to tackle communist and separatist threats, dismissing accusations that his father was a dictator.

    Even the funding for the planned memorial for Martial Law victims was cut by 75 percent in the 2023 National Expenditure Programme.

    Marcos Jr intends to rewrite history textbooks to include his family’s version of the truth. By silencing his critics, he can further engage in historical denialism. This is important not just to erase his father’s dictator image but to escape his family’s legal problems like the unpaid estate tax and his mother’s conviction for seven counts of graft.

    Media repression ‘normalised’
    Media repression continues to be normalised under the Marcos Jr regime. One of his allies in the House of Representatives blocked the return of ABS–CBN, whose franchise bid was denied in 2020. Rappler and its editorial staff, including Ressa, continue to face legal problems as well as the threat of closure.

    The National Telecommunications Commission blocked 27 websites accused of having communist links in June 2022. It took a court order for the online publication Bulatlat Multimedia to be unblocked, while journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio remains in detention on questionable charges after being red-tagged and subjected to death threats.

    The murder of broadcaster Percy Lapid on 3 October 2022 — the second journalist to be killed under the new administration — also reflects the dire state of press freedom in the Philippines.

    That Marcos Jr did not mention press freedom in his inaugural speech and first State of the Nation Address reflects his disregard for critical journalism.

    Although it is still early days, his efforts to whitewash the dictatorship’s dark past and continue his predecessor’s media repression indicate that his pre-election promise of a “free press” is long abandoned.

    Danilo Arana Arao is associate professor at the Department of Journalism, the University of the Philippines Diliman, special lecturer at the Department of Journalism, the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Santa Mesa, associate editor at Bulatlat Multimedia and editor at Media Asia. This article was first published in East Asia Forum.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Indonesian police asked to stop ‘intimidating witnesses’ over football stadium tragedy

    By Fika Nurul Ulya in Jakarta

    The Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) has appealed to Indonesian police chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo to stop his officers intimidating Aremania (Arema Football Club fans) and witnesses in the Kanjuruhan football stadium tragedy in which 131 people died.

    They are also asking Prabowo to order the police professionalism and security affairs division (Propam) to question police officers accused of doing this, because intimidation and obstruction are criminal acts.

    “We believe that this situation is very dangerous so the Indonesian police chief (Kapolri) must order his officers to stop acts of intimidation and twisting the facts,” said YLBHI general chairperson Muhammad Isnur in a press release last week.

    The YLBHI, the Malang Legal Aid Foundation (LBH) and the Surabaya LBH in East Java, suspect that there have been several attempts at intimidation. This suspicion is based on the complaints that have come in and monitoring by the media.

    First, there was a trader who became afraid after meeting with a journalist from a television station because earlier, another trader had been picked up by security personnel after talking to a journalist.

    Security personnel also illegally arrested and questioned a witness with the initials K after they uploaded a video of the Kanjuruhan tragedy unfolding. K was then found by a family of a victim at the Malang district police.

    Banners with the message “Fully investigate the Kanjuruhan tragedy on October 1, 2022”, which were put up on almost all of Malang’s main streets, were taken down by unknown individuals.

    There has been a narrative blaming the victims, in this case the Arema supporters at the league match on Saturday October 1.

    The police claim that these supporters could not accept defeat of their team and were drinking alcohol.

    “Yet the fact is that the Aremania who took to the field only wanted to meet with the players to encourage them. And before the match, all of them were closely guarded so it would have been impossible for alcohol to be brought into the stadium as is being said in the narrative,” said Isnur.

    The YLBHI is also asking the Witness and Victim Protection Agency (LPSK) to be proactive in picking up and protecting witnesses without waiting for a report first, due to the growing number and danger of threats.

    Isnur is also asking the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM), the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) and the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) to continue to investigate in accordance with their respective levels of authority based on prevailing legislation.

    “It’s not enough for the government just to form a TGIPF [Independent Joint Fact Finding Team], but must also ensure that this team does work independently, transparently and accountably. Aside from this, it must guarantee access for the Komnas HAM, Komnas Perempuan and the KPAI to evidence related to the incident,” he said.

    Translated by James Balowski for Indoleft News. The original title of the Komnas article was YLBHI Minta Kapolri Hentikan Aparatnya yang Intimidasi Aremania dan Saksi Kanjuruhan.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Not over: Young generations wage fight to protect Martial Law memories

    Jairo Bolledo in Manila

    Karl Patrick Suyat, 19, has no personal experience of the tyrannical rule of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. But memories of the atrocities and human rights violations committed during those dark moments have transcended time.

    The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law. But this year also saw the return of the Marcoses to power — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is now the President of the republic and spoke yesterday at the UN General Assembly.

    Despite efforts of Martial Law survivors, human rights groups, and even academics to remind the Filipino people of the abuses of the Marcos family, Marcos Jr was still able to clinch the country’s top post.

    Fueled by outrage and anguish, Suyat thought of a way to channel his energy and still fight back despite the Marcoses’ victory — he founded “Project Gunita” (remember) along with Josiah Quising and Sarah Gomez.

    Project Gunita is a network of volunteers and members of various civil society organisations that aim to defend historical truth. They particularly push back against historical denialism and protect truths about the Martial Law years.

    Through the project, the three founders and their members created a digital archive of all materials that contain information about Marcos’ Martial Law to preserve them.

    Archiving is not new since other government offices and groups like the Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation and the Human Rights Violations Victims’ Memorial Commission, under the Commission on Human Rights, have made efforts to preserve Martial Law materials.

    But Project Gunita is born out of the spirit of volunteerism and nationalism among young Filipinos.

    From old newspapers, magazines, and books — Project Gunita members seek and buy materials, and then scan them to be preserved in the archives. The project’s archiving started right after Marcos Jr’s victory.

    Dictator Ferdinand Marcos
    Dictator Ferdinand Marcos … declared Martial Law in the Philippines on 21 September 1972 as reported in the Phlippine Daily Express three days later. Image: Wikipedia

    “Having read through the history of dictatorships, from Benito Mussolini to Adolf Hitler to Ferdinand Marcos himself, lagi’t-laging ang unang hinahabol, ang unang-unang tinatarget ng mga diktador ay ‘yong mga silid-aklatan, libraries, at ‘yong mga arkibo – the archives (always, the ones being targeted first by dictators are libraries and archives),” Suyat told Rappler.

    Suyat believes that the Marcoses won’t be content with just distorting and whitewashing the atrocities of the Marcos administration. They would eventually go after the archives to erase the truth, Suyat added.

    “The only question is when, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. And I don’t want to wait until that time happens before we start to scramble around to save the archives.

    “Habang may panahon pa (while we still have time), while we can still do it, ‘di ba? (right?) Bakit hindi natin gagawin? (Why don’t we do it?).”

    Even before Marcos Jr’s victory, journalists have pointed out that his family not only revises history, but also introduces an alternative history that favours them. The Marcoses also rode on various disinformation networks to disseminate falsehoods.

    A two-part investigative story by Rappler showed how the Marcoses used social media to reclaim power and rewrite history to hide their wrongdoings.

    Passing the torch
    The personal experiences of Project Gunita founders fanned their desire to continue the fight of the generation who came before them. Suyat, who grew up in a family of Martial Law survivors, feels it is his responsibility to protect their stories.

    “I cannot allow their stories, as well as the stories of people I had gotten acquainted with later in life who are Martial Law survivors to be erased by historical denialism, that we all know is being perpetrated by the Marcos family,” Suyat told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.

    Josiah Quising, a co-founder of Project Gunita and a lawyer, believes that these stories should be preserved because true justice for Martial Law victims has yet to be attained.

    “It’s very frustrating ‘yong justice system sa Pilipinas and how, for decades, ay wala pa ring totoong hustisya sa mga nangyari during the Martial Law era,” Quising told Rappler. (It’s very frustrating, the justice system in the Philippines, and how, for decades, there has been no true justice for everything that happened during the Martial Law era.)

    On the inauguration of Marcos Jr, Martial Law survivors led by playwright Boni Ilagan pledged to continue guarding against tyranny.

    In the same event, they had a ceremonial passing of the torch, which symbolized the passing of hope and responsibility from Martial Law survivors to the younger generation.

    Suyat and Quising believe that their generation is equally responsible for guarding the country’s freedom — at least in their own way. They strongly believe that since the government is now being led by the dictator’s son, they cannot expect it to preserve the memories of Martial Law, so they have to step in.

    Preserving truths from generation to generation

    “Wala ka namang naririnig.
    ‘Di ka naman nakikinig
    Parang kuliling sa pandinig
    Kayong nagtataka
    Ha? Inosente lang ang nagtataka,”
    Inosente lang ang nagtataka by Bobby Balingit

    (You hear nothing. But you are not listening. Like a chime to the ear. You who wonder. What? Only the innocent wonder.)

    This song comes to Kris Lanot Lacaba’s mind whenever he hears people deny the atrocities of Martial Law. His father, Pete Lacaba, a poet and journalist, was tortured and arrested under the Marcos regime.

    As a son of a Martial Law survivor, Lacaba has heard stories of torture and violence straight from the victims themselves. He recalled that it was on the pavements of Camp Crame, where his father was imprisoned, that he learned how to walk.

    Even though decades have passed since those dark periods, he still vividly remembers how his father became a victim of Marcos’ oppressive rule.

    “Ang ginagawa ro’n, may dalawang kama tapos pinapahiga ‘yong tatay ko, ‘yong ulo niya sa isang kama, ‘yong paa niya sa isang kama. At ‘pag nahulog ‘yong kama niya ro’n eh gugulpihin pa siya lalo (What they did to my father was, there were two beds and they would tell my father to lie down, his head on one bed, and the other, on the other bed. If he fell, he would be beaten further),” Lacaba told Rappler.

    Aside from his father, his uncles Eman Lacaba and Leo Alto were both killed during Martial Law. It is extremely hard for Lacaba to respond to people who deny that human rights violations happened under Martial Law.

    Now that he has his own children, Lacaba passes on the stories of Martial Law to them so the memories would be preserved.

    “Mahirap eh, bilang magulang. Paano ba natin ikukuwento ito? Pa’no ba natin ipapamahagi ‘yong karanasan ng magulang nila at ng mga lolo’t lola nila?” Lacaba said. (It’s hard as a parent. How do we tell this story to the kids? How do we tell the kids about the experiences of their parents and grandparents?)

    He even thinks of ways to make the stories appropriate to his children.

    “So kinukuwento namin sa mga bata, ‘no? Hinahanapan namin ng paraan na maging appropriate sa age din nila ‘yong mga kuwento.” (So we tell the stories to my children. We find ways to make the stories appropriate to their age.)

    Aside from his kids, Lacaba says he would always accept invitations by schools and universities to share the Martial Law story of his family. He believes that in this way, he will not only share the truths he learned from his father, but get to listen to other stories, too.

    After all, Lacaba believes, conversation about Martial Law should reach everyone.

    Republished with permission.

  • Martial law brutality in ‘educational’ musical drama Katips touches raw nerve in NZ

    REVIEW: By David Robie

    Seven weeks ago the Philippines truth-telling martial law film Katips was basking in the limelight in the country’s national FAMAS academy movie awards, winning best picture and a total of six other awards.

    Last week it began a four month “world tour” of 10 countries starting in the Middle East followed by Aotearoa New Zealand today – hosted simultaneously at AUT South campus and in Wellington and Christchurch.

    The screening of Vincent Tañada’s harrowing – especially the graphic torture scenes – yet also joyful and poignant musical drama touched a raw nerve among many in the audience who shared tears and their experiences of living in fear, or in hiding, during the hate-filled Marcos dictatorship.

    The martial law denunciations, arbitrary arrests, desaparecidos (“disappeared”), brutal tortures and murders by state assassins in the 1970s made the McCarthy era red-baiting witchhunts in the US seem like Sunday School picnics.

    Amnesty International says more than 3200 people were killed, 35,000 tortured and 70,000 detained during the martial law period.

    Tañada has brushed off claims that the film has a political objective in an attempt to sabotage the leadership of the dictator’s son, Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr, who won the presidency in a landslide victory in the May elections to return the Marcos family to the Malacañang.

    He has insisted in many interviews — and he repeated this in a live exchange with the audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch — that the film is educational and his intention is to counter disinformation and to ensure history is remembered.

    Telling youth about atrocities
    Tañada, from one of the Philippines’ great political and legal families and grandson of former Senator Lorenzo Tañada, a celebrated human rights lawyer, says he wanted to tell the youth about the atrocities that happened during the imposition of martial law under Marcos.

    He wanted to tell history to those who had forgotten and those who aren’t yet aware.


    The Katips movie trailer.

    “You know, as an artist it is also our objective not just to entertain people but more important than that, we are here to educate,” he says.

    “We also want to educate the young people about the atrocities – the reality of martial law.

    “History is slowly being forgotten. We have forgotten it during the last elections and I guess we also have the responsibility to educate and let the youth know what happened during those times.”

    Katips film director and writer Vince Tañada
    Katips film director and writer Vince Tañada talking by video to New Zealand audiences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch today. Image: David Robie/APR

    It is rare that such brutal torture scenes are seen on the big screen, and before the main screening at AUT the organisers — Banyuhay Aotearoa, Migrante Aotearoa and Auckland Philippine Solidarity — showed two shorts made by the University of the Philippines and Santo Tomas University of Manila featuring martial law survivors describing their horrifying treatment  during the Marcos years to contemporary students.

    Some of the students broke down in tears while others, surprisingly, remained impassive, sometimes with an air of disbelief.

    The film evolved from the 2016 stage musical Katips: Mga Bagong Katipunero – Katips: The New Freedom Fighters, which won Aliw Awards for best musical performance that year.

    Freedom fighter love story
    In a nutshell, Katips tells the love story of Greg, a medical student and leader of the National Unions of Students in the Philippines (NUSP), who with other freedom fighting protesters stage a demonstration against martial law on a mountainside called Mendiola.

    His professor is abducted by the state Metropol police, murdered and his body dumped in a remote location.

    The protesters begin a vigil and the police brutally suppress the protest and arrest and kidnap other freedom fighters. They are subjected to atrocious torture and their bodies dumped.

    A safehouse branded “Katips House” takes in Lara, a New York actress and the daughter of the murdered professor who is visiting Manila but doesn’t yet know about the fate of her father. Lara and Greg form an unlikely relationship and their lives are thrown into upheaval when the safehouse “mother” Alet is abducted and tortured to death.

    Greg and another protester, Ka Panyong, a writer for the underground newspaper Ang Bayan, are forced to flee into the jungle for the safety and become rebels. Both get shot while on the run, but manage to survive.

    When Greg returns to Lara at the “Katips House” during the Edsa Revolution in 1986, he finds he has a son.

    The film has a stirring end featuring the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, a memorial wall to the fallen heroes struggling against martial law– a fitting antidote to the Marcoses and their crass attempts to rewrite Philippine history.

    Ironically, the same month that Katips was released in public cinemas, another film, the self-serving Maid of Malaçanang, was launched in a bid to perpetuate the Marcos myths.

    A member of the audience poses a question to Katips film director Vince Tañada on AUT South campus
    A member of the audience poses a question to Katips film director Vince Tañada on AUT South campus today. Image: David Robie/APR

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Police arrest woman in South Korea over NZ child bodies in suitcase

    RNZ News

    A woman has been arrested for the alleged murder of two young children whose remains were discovered in suitcases in Manurewa, South Auckland, last month.

    New Zealand police can now confirm that a 42-year-old woman has been arrested in South Korea.

    Counties Manukau CIB detective inspector Tofilau Fa’ amanuia Vaaelua said South Korean authorities arrested the woman today on a Korean arrest warrant on two charges of murder relating to the two young victims.

    The arrest warrant was issued by the Korean courts as a result of a request by NZ police for an arrest warrant under the extradition treaty between New Zealand and the Republic of Korea.

    He said NZ police had applied to have her extradited back to New Zealand to face the charges and had requested she remain in custody while awaiting the completion of the extradition process.

    “To have someone in custody overseas within such a short period of time has all been down to the assistance of the Korean authorities and the coordination by our NZ Police Interpol staff,” he said.

    There were a number of enquiries to be completed both in New Zealand and overseas, he added.

    Police said the children, believed to be aged between five and 10 years old, may have been hidden in the suitcases in an Auckland storage yard for several years.

    The bodies were discovered on 11 August 2022 after a Clendon Park family won an auction for abandoned goods in a storage unit, without realising what was inside.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Press freedom in jeopardy amid Indonesian authoritarianism

    ANALYSIS: By Kyle Delbyck of the TrialWatch Initiative

    Journalist Muhammad Asrul is awaiting word from Indonesia’s Supreme Court about whether he will spend further time behind bars for reporting on corruption issues. The decision will have a profound impact not only on his life but also on press freedom in Indonesia.

    The country is at a turning point following its transition at the end of the 20th century from military dictatorship to democracy.

    Many, including civil society and members of the judiciary, have sought to protect journalists — they see a free, functioning press as part of Indonesia’s future.

    Others, however, are waging a battle against independent media and freedom of speech, through prosecutions like Asrul’s and through the impending passage of a criminal code that smacks of authoritarianism. With Indonesia’s two-decade-old democratic path in real jeopardy, the next several months will be decisive.

    In 2019, Asrul penned a series of articles alleging corruption by a local political official. The same official filed a complaint with the police, who subsequently arrested and detained Asrul.

    After spending more than a month in jail as the police conducted investigations, Asrul was prosecuted under the country’s draconian Electronic Information and Transactions Law (ITE Law), which criminalises the electronic transmission of information that defames or affronts.

    At the end of 2021, a court found Asrul guilty and sentenced him to three months in prison.

    Police bypassed Press Council
    While this would be egregious enough on its own, in Asrul’s case the police chose to bypass Indonesia’s Press Council.

    The Press Council is an independent government body tasked with protecting journalists in press-related disputes. The police are supposed to coordinate with the Press Council to determine whether a case should be funnelled into the criminal justice system or resolved through mediation or other solutions outside of the courts.

    But the police did not give the council a chance to settle the complaint against Asrul, sidestepping this critical institution. Equally worrying, the court that convicted Asrul stated that the police have the power to override the Press Council in a range of situations, including where individuals offended by news articles go straight to the police instead of the council.

    The Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch initiative, where I work as a senior programme manager, monitored Asrul’s trial through its partner the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.

    This coming week, we will file an amicus brief requesting that the Supreme Court overturn Asrul’s conviction and ensure that the protections offered by Indonesia’s Press Council remain a reality for journalists throughout Indonesia.

    TrialWatch monitors trials such as Asrul’s in more than 35 countries, seeking to overturn unjust convictions against journalists and marginalised individuals and to reform the laws used to target them.

    The ITE Law is one such example. Since its enactment in 2008, the ITE Law has been a key tool in suppressing freedom of expression and press freedom in Indonesia, with prosecutions spiking in recent years.

    81 people charged
    During the first nine months of 2021, for example, at least 81 people were charged with violating the ITE Law, “most of them accused of defamation” — the provision under which Asrul was prosecuted. Those found guilty of defamation can face up to four years behind bars.

    While the ITE Law has been a darling of government officials seeking to quash legitimate criticism, it has also been deployed by businesses and other powerful actors who simply do not like what someone has posted online.

    TrialWatch recently monitored a trial in which a woman, Stella Monica, was prosecuted for Instagram complaints about acne treatment she received at a dermatology clinic. Monica was acquitted but the clinic aggressively pursued the case, subjecting her to almost two years of legal proceedings.

    This playbook for stifling speech may soon receive a boost with the revision of Indonesia’s colonial-era criminal code. In many countries, the amendment of colonial laws has been a step forward, but Indonesia’s iteration is so regressive that when a draft was published in 2019 it triggered widespread protests.

    Although the government withdrew the legislation following the protests, this year the new code was resurrected, retaining provisions from the 2019 version that endanger press freedom.

    In addition to providing for a potential jail sentence of up to three years for perceived insults to the president and vice-president, the draft code criminalises the dissemination of “incomplete” news and so-called “fake news”.

    In neighbouring countries like Cambodia, we have seen fake news provisions deployed against those who criticise the authorities.

    Attempts to hide developments
    Just how troubling these developments are is clear from the Indonesian government’s attempts to hide them. The Deputy Law and Human Rights Minister in charge of the revision process had previously pledged that the legislature would vote on the code by August 17, Indonesia’s Independence Day.

    He also stated that the authorities would not share the draft text with either civil society or the public because of the risk of disorder. After an outcry, however, the government published the draft in July and promised further consultations, still leaving civil society with scant time to deliberate and engage the government if the vote indeed takes place in the next few months.

    While passage of the code in its current form would be a triumph for government officials and corporate interests seeking to restrict critical speech, it would also be a victory for the increasingly powerful conservative Islamist parties on which President Joko Widodo has relied to maintain power.

    The draft code falls squarely on the side of conservatives in Indonesia’s roiling cultural battles, threatening jail time for sex and co-habitation before marriage, which would also functionally criminalise LGBTQ+ relationships. Another provision swells the already expansive blasphemy law, extending it to criminalise comments made on social media.

    Although the draft code reflects the reality that repressive forces are gaining ground, there is still hope that the authorities will side with those fighting for fundamental freedoms. The government has shown itself to be responsive not only to pressure from hardliners but also to pressure from pro-democracy forces.

    The withdrawal of the code after the 2019 protests and the recent sharing of the draft text are good examples. In another recent example, after enduring intense criticism about overly broad enforcement of the ITE Law, President Widodo commissioned guidelines limiting its application — in particular against journalists.

    The guidelines, which were introduced after Asrul’s case had already begun, explicitly state that in cases where a news outlet has published an article, then press regulations — not the ITE law — should apply. While enforcement has been shaky thus far, the guidelines demonstrate the power of public pressure and are an additional tool in the battle for press freedom.

    Institutional safeguards
    Other institutional safeguards are in place. Indonesia’s Press Council has a mandate that puts it on the same level as other government entities and gives it real power to protect journalists — hence the importance of Asrul’s case and the impending Supreme Court decision on the Council’s role.

    To show how significant the Press Council is we need only hop across the ocean, where press freedom advocates in Malaysia have been fighting to establish a similar mechanism for years, recognising its potential to stop the harassment of independent media.

    The courts are also making positive noises. In the face of campaigns by government officials, religious conservatives and businesses to clamp down on speech, some judges have ruled in favour of human rights protections — from the acquittal of Monica for her dermatological troubles to a recent high-profile acquittal in a blasphemy prosecution.

    What this means is that unlike in countries where the decks are stacked, with the legislature, judiciary and press co-opted by authoritarian powers, all is not lost in Indonesia. Civil society has proven that it can mobilise and that institutional levers can be pulled.

    But this upcoming period will be crucial. Buffeted by competing winds, the Indonesian government will decide whether to move forward with the current version of the new criminal code. Actors at the local level, like police and prosecutors, will decide whether to enforce — or not enforce — rights-positive guidelines and laws.

    The judiciary will consider cases with wide-ranging consequences for press freedom and freedom of speech, like that of Muhammad Asrul. And even if the criminal code is passed, it awaits a barrage of constitutional challenges, putting the judiciary in the spotlight.

    Through its TrialWatch initiative, the Clooney Foundation for Justice will continue to monitor these courtroom battles and advocate for those unjustly targeted in criminal prosecutions. With key decisions forthcoming, the fate of Asrul and many others hang in the balance.

    Kyle Delbyck is senior programme manager at the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch initiative, where she coordinates trial observations and ensuing advocacy.  Grace Hauser, TrialWatch legal fellow at the Clooney Foundation for Justice, contributed to this article. First published by Al Jazeera English, it is republished under a Creative Commons licence.