Maria Ressa of the Philippines, co-founder of the news website Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov of Russia, editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, will receive their prize in Oslo on Friday for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression”, reports AFP news agency.
“So far, press freedom is under threat,” Ressa told a press briefing, when asked whether the award had improved the situation in her country, which ranks 138th in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom index.
Malabanan, who was also a Reuters correspondent, had worked on the sensitive subject of the “war on drugs” in the Philippines.
“It’s like having a Damocles sword hang over your head,” Ressa said.
Toughest stories ‘at own risk’
“Now in the Philippines, the laws are there but… you tell the toughest stories at your own risk,” she added.
Ressa, whose website is highly critical of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, is herself the subject of a total of seven lawsuits in her country.
Currently on parole pending an appeal after being convicted of defamation last year, she needed to ask four courts for permission to be able to travel and collect her Nobel in person.
Sitting beside her on Thursday, Muratov, 60, concurred with his fellow recipient’s words.
“If we’re going to be foreign agents because of the Nobel Peace Prize, we will not get upset, no,” he told reporters when asked of the risk of being labelled as such by the Kremlin.
“But actually… I don’t think we will get this label. We have some other risks though,” Muratov added.
‘Foreign agent’ label
The “foreign agent” label is meant to apply to people or groups that receive funding from abroad and are involved in any kind of “political activity”.
“Foreign agent” organisations must disclose sources of funding and label publications with the tag or face fines.
Novaya Gazeta is a rare independent newspaper in a Russian media landscape that is largely under state control. It is known for its investigations into corruption and human rights abuses in Chechnya.
The troubled nation of Solomon Islands, whose Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare won a no-confidence vote 32 votes to 15 with two abstentions on Monday, has been downgraded from “open” to “narrow” in the people power under attack 2021 CIVICUS Monitor report.
While the majority of Pacific countries were rated open, of most concern was the increased use of restrictive laws that blighted the whole region the report released by the international non-profit organisation CIVICUS, a global research collaboration that rates and tracks rights in 197 countries and territories.
The People Power Under Attack 2021 report shows that civic freedoms are routinely respected in over half the countries in this region. Seven countries in the Pacific are rated “open”, the highest rating awarded by the CIVICUS Monitor.
An open rating means people are free to form associations, demonstrate in public spaces, and share information without fear of reprisals.
Concern in the report highlighted those civic rights are not respected across the region; Fiji, Nauru and Papua New Guinea remain in the “obstructed” category, meaning that restrictions of freedoms of expression, association and assembly have been raised by civil society in these countries.
Restrictions relating to media freedoms, access to information and the right to protest led to the Solomon Islands downgrade. Freedom of expression is of particular concern — in early 2021 the cabinet threatened to ban Facebook over worries about posts with “inflammatory critiques of the government”.
The government eventually backtracked after condemnation from civil society and the opposition.
Public Emergency extended Freedom of assembly have been documented in the Solomon Islands. In July, the State of Public Emergency was extended for another four months in response to covid-19, even though there were only 20 reported cases in the country.
A march in Honiara to deliver a petition to the government by people from the Malaita province was disrupted and dispersed by the police.
Accessing information is not available to the media in the pandemic as Solomon Islands does not have freedom of information legislation. Additionally, the environment towards civil society groups is becoming more hostile in the country.
For example, in late 2019 the office of the Prime Minister called for an investigation into a number of civil society groups after they called for the prime minister to step down.
“Excessive restrictions on civic freedoms imposed by the government under the guise of preventing covid-19 led to the downgrade of the Solomon Islands. Constant threats to ban Facebook and attempts to vilify civil society have also resulted in the failure of the Solomon Islands to retain a top spot in our global rights rankings,” said Josef Benedict, Asia-Pacific civic space researcher at CIVICUS.
The use of excessive restrictions against activists and critics was the leading violation in 2021 with at least seven countries having been found to have transgressed in the report.
Asia-Pacific status in latest CIVICUS report. Image: APR screenshot CIVICUS
Target on Fiji journalists, activists and critics In Fiji, provisions relating to sedition in the Public Order (Amendment) Act 2014 have been used to target journalists, activists, and government critics, while other sections of the act have been used to arbitrarily restrict peaceful protests.
The Fiji Trade Unions Congress (FTUC) was denied a permit to hold a rally in Suva, on International Labour Day, 1 May 2021 — no reason, written or verbal for the rejection was given.
The use of restrictive laws is a concern across the Pacific. New criminal defamation laws passed in Vanuatu and Tonga cast a chilling blow to freedom of expression.
In Australia, the government continues to hound whistleblowers through the courts, as seen in the case of Bernard Collaery, the lawyer of an ex-spy, who was charged with allegedly exposing Australia’s bugging of Timor-Leste.
In 2019, Australia was downgraded by the CIVICUS Monitor due to attempts to silence whistleblowers who reveal government wrongdoing, among other concerns.
New Zealand and Australia, which was downgraded in 2019, did not get off scot-free. The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association said the pandemic was not reason enough to quell peaceful assembly of protesters.
Indeed, protesters to the lockdown rules were detained this year for violating covid-19 rules.
Intimidation of Pacific activists Other civic rights violations highlighted by the CIVICUS Monitor include the harassment or intimidation of activists and critics across the Pacific, as documented in Fiji, Samoa and Papua New Guinea.
Fijian surgeon Dr Jone Hawea was detained for questioning after criticising the government’s response to covid-19 in his Facebook live videos, while Papua New Guinean lawyer Laken Lepatu Aigilo was allegedly detained and assaulted by police in April 2021 after lodging an official complaint against a politician.
“The state of civic space in the Pacific may seem relatively positive. However, over the year we have seen restrictive laws being used in several countries, including criminal defamation laws. Protests have also been denied or disrupted under the pretext of handling the pandemic, while activists have faced harassment and intimidation,” said Benedict.
However, there have been some positive developments this year. After strong civil society pressure, Tongan authorities moved swiftly to charge the alleged murderer of leading LGBTQI+ activist Polikalepo “Poli” Kefu, after his body was found on a beach near Tongatapu, Tonga’s main island
More than 20 organisations collaborate on the CIVICUS Monitor to provide an evidence base for action to improve civic space on all continents.
The Monitor has posted more than 500 civic space updates in the last year, which are analysed in People Power Under Attack 2020.
Civic space in 196 countries is categorised as either closed, repressed, obstructed, narrowed or open, based on a methodology which combines several sources of data on the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression.
Journalist and publisher Maria Ressa has called on tech and social media giants to practise “enlightened self-interest” amid a global call for platforms to step up in the fight against disinformation.
“The world that you’ve created has already shown that we must change it. I continue to appeal for enlightened self-interest,” said Ressa, chief executive and founder of Rappler, in an online lecture for the Facebook and the Big Lie series.
Ressa, a veteran journalist and Nobel Peace laureate who will be receiving the award this Friday, has been studying, reporting on, and sounding the alarm against the use of social media platforms as a means to spread lies and hate.
Platforms like Facebook, said Ressa, give the same weight on posts, whether it is a lie or a fact, in a bid to increase user engagement.
While it has meant more revenue for the platforms, it also means that posts that spark emotion — whether or not they are based on fact — gain the most traction online.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen had earlier revealed that the algorithm for instances, puts weight on “angry” reactions more than regular likes.
‘Moderate the greed’
“In the Philippines, we say ‘moderate the greed.’ [These platforms] are part of our future, that’s why we’re partners,” she explained.
The stakes are even higher in countries like the Philippines, which will be electing a new president in May 2022.
“Why we must fight disinformation. It weakens, and ultimately subverts, democracy, by undermining the factual basis of reality, by denying the standards of truth.”
“We cannot not do anything because we in the Philippines have elections on May 9. If we do not have integrity of facts, we won’t have integrity of elections,” warned Ressa.
Platforms, after all, are anything but clueless and helpless.
Facebook, for instance, put more weight on “news ecosystem quality” or NEQ after employees found that election-related information were spreading on the platform in the days following the US elections in 2021.
The NEQ, according to The New York Times, is a “secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.”
The lies asserted that the elections were rigged and that Donald Trump, then US president, was the true winner.
The ‘big lie’ persists
he “big lie,” as it has since been called, persists to this day.
Ressa said she woud be asking Facebook “behind the scenes and in front,” via Rappler’s partnerships, to turn up the NEQ locally.
Increasing the weight of the NEQ, at least in the US, meant that for a while, mainstream media accounts — The New York Times, CNN, and NPR — were more prominent on the Facebook feed than hyperpartisan pages.
“The foundational problem is that facts and lies are treated equally, which is what has poisoned the information ecosystem,” added Ressa.
Duterte, who won the 2016 elections by a wide margin in a plurality, is among the first national candidates to effectively use social media in a Philippine election.
Social media hasn’t just changed how regular citizens act and candidates campaign, it has also changed sitting leaders’ tactics.
“Leaders in the past that would take over, their first challenge is always how to unite people. Now, with social media because of the incentive schemes, we’re seeing leaders awarded if they divide,” said Ressa.
More manipulation tools
“Illiberal governments have gotten more tools to manipulate people,” she added. Rappler investigations later found that pro-Duterte networks used fake accounts to spread lies and disinformation well into his term as president.
Rappler started out as a Facebook page in mid-2011 and has since grown to be among the leading news sites in the Philippines. The news organisation faces at least seven active pending cases before different courts in the Philippines.
These are on top of online attacks over its reporting on the Duterte administration, including its bloody “war on drugs” and allegations of corruption among the President’s allies.
Ressa and a former researcher were convicted in June 2020 for a cyber libel law that hadn’t even been legislated when the article first came out.
Ressa is the first Filipino individual awardee of the Nobel Peace Prize and is the only woman in this year’s roster of laureates.
One week ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, the #HoldtheLine Coalition has called on the government of the Philippines to drop all pending cases and charges against veteran journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and grant her unrestricted permission to travel to Oslo to accept this international award.
The government of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has strongly opposed Maria Ressa’s application to travel to Oslo for the Nobel ceremony but three out of four courts have now granted her permission to fly out for the December 10 award ceremony.
While Ressa’s legal team is almost certain that the remaining court will permit her to travel this week, the #HoldtheLine Coalition is concerned that the Philippine authorities may yet attempt to undermine Ressa’s free expression and restrict her movement.
“The government’s relentless and retaliatory campaign against Ressa serves a sole purpose: to silence independent journalism and curtail the free flow of information in the country,” said the HTL steering committee.
“In keeping with its public claims of support for free expression, the Philippines should overturn its opposition to Maria Ressa’s application to travel to Oslo, and drop all remaining charges against her immediately.”
In its announcement of the prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honouring Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for their efforts to safeguard press freedom.
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.
Journalists and journalism are waging a global struggle for survival and for “truth” against fake news and alternative facts, say two Asia-Pacific media commentators.
“Without journalists who will tell it like it is no matter the consequences, the future will continue to be one of alternate facts and manipulated opinions,” Rappler executive editor Glenda Gloria told about 135 media scholars, journalists and researchers at the opening of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) in Auckland today.
“As we’ve experienced at Rappler, the battle to save journalism cannot be fought by journalists alone, and cannot be fought from our laptops alone. The battle for truth is a battle we must share — and fight — with other groups and citizens.
“Each time our freedoms are threatened, we should have no qualms engaging other democracy frontliners and participating in collective efforts to resist authoritarianism.”
However, she told the virtual conference hosted at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) she believed that journalists had the motivation and enough understanding now to “stop the tide of disinformation” that fuelled the spread of authoritarianism.
“In this environment, make no doubt: Journalism is activism,” added the award-winning investigative journalist and author who heads the digital website that has repeatedly angered Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte with its exposés.
Another keynote speaker, Dr David Robie, founding director of the Pacific Media Centre and retired professor of Pacific journalism at AUT, condemned a “surge of global information pollution”.
Disinformation damaging democracy
He outlined how disinformation was damaging democracy and encouraging authoritarianism across the Pacific, singling out Fiji and Papua New Guinea for particular criticism.
Dr Robie cited how authorities in PNG had been forced to abandon mobile health clinics and teams of health workers carrying out covid-19 vaccination and awareness programmes because of the increasingly risky attacks against them.
Professor Felix Tan … a welcome from AUT’s Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies. Image: AUT
He said much of the content used by anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists which framed the covid-19 response as a fight between the individual and the allegedly “treacherous” state had been repackaged from US and Australia vested interests.
Dr Robie said universities could do far more in the fight against disinformation and praised initiatives such as the RMIT fact-checking collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), The Conversation news and academia project, The Juncture journalism school website, and the new Monash University backed 360info wire news service.
“The challenge confronting many communication programmes and journalism schools located in universities or tertiary institutions is what to do about authoritarianism, how to tackle the strain of an ever-changing health and science agenda, the deluge of disinformation and the more rapid than predicted escalation of climate catastrophe,” he said.
“One of the answers is greater specialisation and advanced programmes rather than just relying on generalist strategies and expecting graduates to fit neatly into already configured newsroom boxes.
“The more that universities can do to equip graduates with advanced problem-solving skills, the more adept they will be at developing advanced ways of reporting on the pandemic – and other likely pandemics of the future – contesting the merchants of disinformation and reporting on the climate crisis.”
Dr Robie, who was awarded the 2015 AMIC Asian Communications prize, pioneered several student journalist projects in the region such as intensive coverage of the 2000 Fiji coup and the 2011 Pacific Islands Forum, and more recently the 2016-2018 Bearing Witness and 2020 Climate and Covid project in partnership with Internews.
Journalism Nobel Peace Prize
Glenda Gloria said her entire editorial team had been delighted when their chief executive Maria Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – along with Russian editor Dmitry Muratov. Ressa was the first Filipino Nobel laureate and “some of us started calling our office the Nobel newsroom”.
“This immense pride that we feel isn’t just because Maria is our CEO, it is that the prize went to two journalists who have faced the toughest challenges imposed by authoritarian states,” Gloria said.
“More than that, the Nobel prize puts a global spotlight on the extraordinary dangers that we journalists face today.
“To many of us in the Global South, journalism has always been considered a dangerous profession long before media watchdogs started ranking countries around the world according to the freedoms enjoyed by their press.
“And yet, despite all that we have seen and experienced, it’s no exaggeration to say that this is the most challenging period for journalism.
“At stake today is our very existence, our relevance, and our ability to speak truth to power.”
The conference was opened following a traditional mihi by AUT’s acting dean of the Faculty of Design and Communication Technologies, Professor Felix Tan, and ACMC president Professor Azman Azwan Azamati of Malaysia.
Master of ceremonies duties are being shared by AUT’s Khairiah A. Rahman, the chief conference organiser, and Dino Cantal of Trinity University of Asia.
More than 40 media and communication research papers are being presented over three days with the conference ending on Saturday afternoon.
The Committee to Protect Journalists press freedom 2021 video removed by Facebook, but still available on YouTube and Twitter. Video: CPJ (Hongkong crackdown at 32m:05s)
The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Facebook to restore a video honouring the winners of the International Press Freedom Awards (IPFA) at CPJ’s annual awards ceremony held on November 18 and streamed on social media during the event.
Less than an hour after the stream ended, Facebook notified CPJ that the video had been withheld worldwide because of a “copyright match” to a 13-second clip owned by i-Cable News, a Hong Kong-based Cantonese-language cable news channel, reports CPJ.
CPJ emailed i-Cable Communications Limited on November 24 requesting details but received no immediate reply.
The clip, featuring Jimmy Lai taking a bite from an apple, was taken from an advertisement for the now-shuttered Apple Daily dating from the 1990s when he founded the newspaper.
Currently imprisoned by Chinese authorities, Lai has become a powerful symbol of press freedom as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to gain control over Hong Kong’s media and was honoured during CPJ’s award ceremony for his work.
It is not clear if Facebook applied the action automatically, or whether i-Cable News complained in an attempt to suppress the video.
The news group, i-Cable, signed an agreement in 2018 with China Mobile Limited, a state-owned telecommunication company, allowing China Mobile to use its content for the next 20 years.
“It is beyond ironic that a platform which trumpets its commitment to freedom of speech should block a video celebrating journalists who risk their lives and liberty defending it,” CPJ deputy executive director Robert Mahoney said.
“Facebook must restore the video immediately and provide a clear and timely explanation of why it was censored in the first place.”
A lawyer at Donaldson and Callif, which vetted the IPFA video for Culture House, the production house that cut the video, told CPJ in an email that the firm was of the opinion that the clip of Lai “constitutes a fair use as used in this IPFA video”.
The full awards video — and its comments, views and share — remains unavailable to Facebook users worldwide. The IPFA video is still available on YouTube and Twitter.
CPJ contacted Facebook on November 19 and again on November 22 outlining CPJ’s concerns about the video’s removal but has yet to receive an explanation for the action by the company.
The press freedom organisation has held IPFA award ceremonies since 1991 as a way to honour at-risk journalists around the globe and highlight erosions of press freedom.
Republished from Committee to Protect Journalists.
The 2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Awards have been given to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan in the courage category, Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona in the independence category, and the Pegasus Project in the impact category.
RSF’s press freedom prizes are awarded every year to journalists or media that have made a notable contribution to the defence or promotion of freedom of the press in the world.
The 2021 awards have been given in three categories — journalistic courage, impact and independence. Six journalists and six media outlets or journalists’ organisations from a total of 11 countries were nominated.
Courage Prize
The 2021 Prize for Courage, which aims to support and salute journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have displayed courage in the practice, defence or promotion of journalism, has been awarded to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan.
Despite constant threats, this lawyer-turned-journalist covered the covid-19 outbreak in the city of Wuhan in February 2020, live-streaming video reports on social media that showed the city’s streets and hospitals, and the families of the sick.
Her reporting from the heart of the pandemic’s initial epicentre was one of the main sources of independent information about the health situation in Wuhan at the time.
After being arrested in May 2020 and held incommunicado for several months without any official reason being provided, Zhang Zhan was sentenced on 28 December 2020 to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.
In protest against this injustice and the mistreatment to which she was subjected, she went on a hunger strike that resulted in her being shackled and force-fed. Her friends and family now fear for her life, and her health has worsened dramatically in recent weeks.
Independence Prize The 2021 Prize for Independence, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have resisted financial, political, economic or religious pressure in a noteworthy manner, has been awarded to Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona.
Majdoleen Hassona
Before joining the Turkish TV channel TRT and relocating to Istanbul, this Palestinian journalist was often harassed and prosecuted by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities for her critical reporting.
While on a return visit to the West Bank in August 2019 with her fiancé (also a TRT journalist based in Turkey), she was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and was told that she was subject to a ban on leaving the territory that had been issued by Israeli intelligence “for security reasons”.
She has been stranded in the West Bank ever since but decided to resume reporting there and covered the anti-government protests in June 2021 following the death of the activist Nizar Banat.
Impact Prize The 2021 Prize for Impact, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOS that have contributed to clear improvements in journalistic freedom, independence and pluralism, or increased awareness of these issues, has been awarded to the Pegasus Project.
The Pegasus Project
The Pegasus Project is an investigation by an international consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 media outlets* in 11 different countries that was coordinated by the NGO Forbidden Stories with technical support from experts at Amnesty International’s Security Lab.
Based on a leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus, spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Pegasus Project revealed that nearly 200 journalists were targeted for spying by 11 governments — both autocratic and democratic — which had acquired licences to use Pegasus.
This investigation has made people aware of the extent of the surveillance to which journalists are exposed and has led many media outlets and RSF to file complaints and demand a moratorium on surveillance technology sales.
“For defying censorship and alerting the world to the reality of the nascent pandemic, the laureate in the ‘courage’ category is now in prison and her state of health is extremely worrying,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.
“For displaying a critical attitude and perseverance, the laureate in the ‘independence category has been unable to leave Israeli-controlled territory for the past two years.
“For having revealed the scale of the surveillance to which journalists can be subjected, some of the journalists who are laureates in the ‘impact’ category are now being prosecuted by governments.
“This, unfortunately, sums up the situation of journalism today. The RSF Award laureates embody the noblest journalistic qualities and also pay the highest price because of this. They deserve not only our admiration but also our support.”
Chaired by RSF president Pierre Haski, the jury of the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards consisted of prominent journalists and free speech defenders from across the world: Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist and Washington Post opinion columnist; Raphaëlle Bacqué, a leading French reporter for Le Monde; Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer and president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression; Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist and communication consultant; Erick Kabendera, a Tanzanian investigative reporter; Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news editor, columnist and writer; Frederik Obermaier, a German investigative journalist with Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper; and Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and founding editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Russia’s only independent TV news channel.
Previous winners of this prize, which was created in 1992, have included Russian journalist Elena Milashina (2020 Prize for Courage), Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (Netizen category prize in 2014) and the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo (Press Freedom Defender prize in 2004).
Pacific Media Watch works in association with Reporters Without Borders.
*(Aristegui Noticias, Daraj, Die Zeit, Direkt 36, Knack, Forbidden Stories, Haaretz, Le Monde, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Proceso, PBS Frontline, Radio France, Le Soir, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wire)
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
The Philippine Court of Appeals (CA) has finally granted overseas travel to Rappler CEO and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, who will be in the United States for the entire month of November to deliver a series of lectures at the Harvard Kennedy School in Boston.
Ressa filed the request on October 5, three days before the Nobel announcement was made.
The CA promulgated its decision in favour of Ressa on October 18, 10 days after the journalist was named one of the two joint winners of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Unlike past travel requests, the CA Eighth Division said the Harvard lectures were proven to be urgent and necessary.
In August 2020, the CA denied Ressa’s travel request saying that to accept the 2020 International Press Freedom Award from the National Press Club was not necessary and urgent.
In December 2020, the CA also denied a travel request from Ressa to visit her 76-year-old mother in Florida who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer two months prior to the request. The CA said then that it was also not considered a necessary and urgent travel.
For this request, the CA said Harvard’s “invitation letter shows that Ressa’s participation in the programme requires her physical presence” and that “in fact, the Harvard Kennedy School explained that the programme involves an in-person 30-day residency.”
Wish to visit her parents
Ressa also indicated in her request her wish to visit her parents in Florida within November which will coincide with the American Thanksgiving holiday, saying she had not seen them in two years.
The CA said “humanitarian reasons support Ressa’s intended travel,” adding that “certainly, one’s legitimate intention to be reunited with her/his parents cannot be doubted”.
Generally, a person under trial for bailable offences in the Philippines are easily granted their travel requests. The other courts handling Ressa’s tax and securities charges have granted her requests.
It’s the CA, which is handling her appeal for her cyber libel conviction, that’s the hardest to hurdle as conviction further restricts one’s right to travel.
“While Ressa’s conviction changes her situation and warrants the exercise of greater caution in allowing her to leave the Philippines, her undisputed compliance with the conditions imposed by the court a quo on her previous travels shows that she is not a flight risk,” said the CA, the decision penned by Associate Justice Geraldine Fiel-Macaraig, with concurrences from Associate Justices Elihu Ybañez and Angelene Mary Quimpo-Sale.
Ressa is scheduled to fly home to the Philippines in early December. To attend the Nobel awarding in Oslo on December 10, she would have to file another batch of travel requests before all the courts handling the seven cases.
The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) tried to contest this travel grant, citing among others Ressa’s alleged flight risk, but the CA did not agree.
“We cannot sustain the OSG’s opposition grounded on Ressa’s dual citizenship and alleged lack of respect for the Philippine judicial system because the same is speculative as of now,” the CA said in its October 29 denial of OSG’s motion for reconsideration.
Ressa has strong economic ties in the Philippines as she is the CEO of Rappler, an online media platform based in the country.”
Lian Buan covers justice and corruption for Rappler. This article is republished with permission.
In just a few weeks the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated sharply as millions cope without desperately needed international aid, New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis says.
Bellis is Al Jazeera’s senior producer in Afghanistan and reported on the turmoil in August as the Taliban took over the government and thousands of people tried to flee.
She has dealt with Taliban leaders for a long time, and has sensed a change in their attitudes since they first ruled the country before being toppled 20 years ago.
She had to leave the country in mid-September because the network feared for her safety and Bellis noted on Twitter that the Taliban were detaining and beating journalists trying to cover protests.
Now she has returned and told RNZ Sunday Morning that she was not worried about her safety.
“The situation here is pretty dire and there are a lot of stories still to be told and I feel invested in what’s happening here and I also just love the country. It’s a beautiful place to be with amazing people and I genuinely like being here.”
However, the country is facing an uncertain future with its population suffering more than ever now that international aid has been cut off.
UN warns of humanitarian crisis
This week the United Nations warned that Afghanistan is becoming the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and Bellis agrees.
“The Taliban took over about two months ago and I just can’t believe how quickly everything has deteriorated.
“People cannot find food, there’s no money, they can’t pay for things, employers can’t pay their workers because there’s no cash, they can’t get money out even from the ATMs.”
Millions of jobs have disappeared, half of the population does not know where their next meal is coming from and already children are dying from malnutrition, Bellis said.
All the aid agencies are appealing to the world to listen.
23 million need urgent help She is about to go out with the UN Refugee Agency whose teams are organising some aid distribution as the temperatures drop to 2 degC overnight as winter approaches. They are handing out blankets, food and some cash to thousands of the needy in camps in Kabul.
“But it’s such a Band-Aid. There is no way they can reach the number of people they need to reach — it’s like 23 million people who need that kind of assistance,” she said.
Neighbouring countries such as Pakistan and Iran were very concerned, in part because they fear a huge influx of refugees. They have closed the borders to try and keep them away.
The process of getting money and food into people’s hands had broken down, she said, with a lot of it due to United States sanctions.
Three quarters of the country ran on foreign donations before the Taliban took over and that has dried up because no countries are recognising the Taliban’s legitimacy to govern.
Bellis has spoken to one senior Taliban official who said that at recent meetings between the Taliban and the US in Doha the Americans would not tell the Taliban what policies they needed to enact to unfreeze billions of dollars in funding.
“They [the Americans] are playing with millions of people’s lives.”
School problem for girls
She believes some Taliban leaders are pragmatic and would be willing to agree to high school girls being educated but are worried they will alienate their conservative base.
In the main, primary school age girls are able to attend their lessons but the problem is at secondary school level.
“If you’re a high school girl in Kabul it’s awful – sitting around thinking how did this happen. It’s really frustrating and really frustrating for everyone to watch and say this doesn’t make sense.”
An elite Taliban Badri 313 fighter guarding Kabul airport … facing threats from ISIS-K. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR
Bellis said while she feels safe at the moment, the main problem is the terrorist group, ISIS-K, who have made threats against the hotel where she is staying.
The Taliban have said they will protect guests and have placed dozens of extra guards outside.
ISIS-K is believed to only number between 1200 and 1500 yet they are a potent force with their random attacks, such as beheading members of the Taliban, whom they hate.
She believes the Taliban’s biggest worry is that ISIS will appeal to its most fundamentalist members.
ISIS attracting recruits
ISIS is also believed to be trying to attract recruits who would be trained as fighters and be paid $400 a month which is a substantial amount of money in Afghanistan.
Bellis said she feels guilty staying at a hotel with the scale of poverty and deprivation she is witnessing.
“Right outside the door people are desperate,” she said.
She visited a major maternity hospital in Kabul yesterday and the only medication available for women giving birth was paracetamol.
“Imagine going into labour and thinking, OK if anything goes wrong I’ve got paracetamol. It’s just life and death on so many levels.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
For those of you wondering what you can do to help Afghans.. this @WFP project is the gold standard.
You donate meals direct to Afghans – choosing a set number of meals or month at a time. https://t.co/qgmuaTdpfo
Indonesia’s popular tourism islands of Bali opened for tourism last week, while Thailand announced that from November 1 vaccinated travellers from 19 countries will be allowed to visit the kingdom including its tourism island of Phuket.
Both those countries’ tourism industry, which is a major revenue earner, has been devastated by more than 18 months of inactivity that have impacted on the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people.
India and Vietnam also announced plans to open the country to vaccinated foreign tourists in November, and Australia will be opening its borders for foreign travel from mid-November for the first time since March 2020.
Countries in the Asia-Pacific region — except for China — are now beginning to grapple with balancing the damage to their economies from covid-19 pandemic by beginning to treat the virus as another flu.
The media may have to play a less adversarial role if this gamble is going to succeed.
October 11 was “Freedom Day” for Australia’s most populous city Sydney when it came out of almost four months of a tough lockdown.
Ironically this is happening while the daily covid-19 infection rates are higher than the figure that triggered the lockdowns in June.
‘It’s not going away’
Yet, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet told Sky News on October 11: “we’ve got to live alongside the virus, it’s not going away, the best thing that we can do is protect our people (by better health services)”.
He added, “each time we tighten up, businesses are further disrupted, workers lose jobs, children are deprived of a proper childhood and school life”.
Singapore is coming out of lockdown when it is facing the highest rates of daily infections since the covid-19 outbreak.
Both Singapore and Australia adopted a “zero-covid” policy when the first wave of the pandemic hit, quickly closing the borders, and going into lockdown.
Both were exceptionally successful in controlling the virus and lifting the lockdowns late last year with almost zero covid-19 cases. But, when the more contagious delta virus hit both countries, fear came back forcing them back into lockdowns.
However, PM Lee told Singaporeans that lockdowns had “caused psychological and emotional strain, and mental fatigue for Singaporeans and for everyone else. Therefore, we concluded a few months ago that a “Zero covid” strategy was no longer feasible”.
‘Living with covid-19’
Thus, Singapore has changed its policy to “Living with covid-19”.
In a Facebook posting on October 10, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: “The phenomenal response from Australians to go and get vaccinated as we’ve seen those vaccination rates rise right across the country, means it’s now time that Australians are able to reclaim their lives. We’re beating covid, and we’re taking our lives back.”
On October 8, Australia’s Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said that though infection rates might still be a bit high, yet less than 1 percent of those infected were in intensive care units (ICUs).
Why didn’t political leaders take this attitude right from the beginning and continue with it? After all the fatality rate of covid-19 has not been that much higher than the seasonal flu in most countries.
True, it was perhaps more contagious according to medical opinion, but fatality rates were not that large in percentage figures.
According to the Worldometer of health statistics, there have been 237.5 million covid-19 infections up to October this year and 214.6 million have recovered fully (90.4 percent) while 4.8 million have died (just over 2 percent).
According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates, there have been between 39-56 million flu cases, about 700,000 flu hospitalisations recorded in the US during the 2019-2020 flu season up to April 2020.
They also estimate between 24,000 to 62,000 flu deaths during the season. But did the media give these figures on a daily or even a weekly basis?
New global influenza strategy
In March 2019, WHO launched a new global influenza strategy pointing out that each year there is an estimated 1 billion flu cases of which 3-5 million are severe cases, resulting in 290,000 to 650,000 influenza-related respiratory deaths.
This has been happening for many years, but, yet the global media did not create the panic scenario that accompanied covid-19.
Unfortunately, the media’s adversarial reporting culture has helped to create a fear psychosis from the very beginning of the outbreak in early 2020, which may have contributed to millions of deaths by creating anxiety among those diagnosed with covid-19.
During the peak of the delta pandemic in India, many patients died from heart attacks triggered by anxiety. Would they have died if covid-19 were treated as another flu?
In the US out of the 44 million infected with covid-19 only 1.6 percent died. In Brazil from 21.5 million infected, 2.8 percent of them died, while in India out of 34 million infected only 1.3 percent died.
But what did we see in media reports? Piles of dead bodies being burnt in India, from Brazil bodies buried in mass graves by health workers wrapped in safety gear and in the US, people being rushed into ICUs.
They are just a small fraction of those infected.
Bleak picture of sensationalism
I was the co-editor of a book just released by a British publisher that looked at how the media across the world reported the covid-19 outbreak during 2020. It paints a bleak picture of sensationalism and adversarial reporting blended with racism and politicisation.
It all started with the outbreak in Wuhan in January 2020 when the global media transmitted unverified video clips of people dropping dead in the streets and dead bodies lying in pavements. Along with the focus on “unhygienic” wet markets in China this helped to project an image of China as a threat to the world.
It contributed to the fear psychosis that was built up by the media tinged with racism and politicisation.
If we are to live with covid and other flu viruses, greater investments need to be made in public health.
In Australia, health experts are talking about boosting hospital bed and ICU capacities to deal with the new policy of living with covid, and they have also warned of a shortage of health professionals, especially to staff ICUs.
What about if the media focus on these as national security priorities? Rather than giving daily death rates and sensational stories of people dying from covid — do we give daily death rates from heart attacks or suicide?
We should start discussing more about how to create sustainable safe communities as we recover from the pandemic, and that includes better investments in public health.
We need a journalism culture that is less adversarial and more tuned into promoting cooperation and community harmony.
Kalinga Seneviratne is co-editor of COVID-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic published in August 2021 by Cambridge Scholars Publishers. IDN is the flagship agency of the Non-profit International Press Syndicate. This article is republished in partnership with IDN.
Protesting students have held demonstrations in several cities around Indonesia to mark seven years of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s administration, reports CNN Indonesia.
The protests came as President Widodo left Jakarta to officiate at the opening of a palm oil processing factory owned by the PT Jhonlin Group in South Kalimantan.
The largest demonstration was held in Jakarta on Thursday where protesters led by the National Association of University Student Executive Bodies (BEM SI) marched from the National Library to the State Palace in Central Jakarta.
The protesters were stopped at the Horse Statue because of a police blockade. However, there was no physical confrontation and the student took turns in giving speeches in front of the police blockade.
“Today, we are not here for existence, but to bring a clear substance,” said Boy, a representative from the Tanjung Karang Polytechnic during the action near the Horse Statue.
The demonstrators read out 12 demands after being prevented from approaching the State Palace.
One of the demands was that a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) be issued to annul the revisions to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) Law.
A similar action was also held in the South Sulawesi provincial capital of Makassar.
The difference was that the students in Makassar blockaded Jalan Sultan Alauddin street, detained two trucks and set fire to used tyres.
The field coordinator of the student action in Makassar, Razak Usman, criticised the government’s alleged bias in development and demanded that President Widodo make pro-people policies.
“We demand the upholding of legal supremacy, reject amendments to the constitution, reject the Omnibus Law, want Law Number 19/2019 revoked, reject simultaneous regional elections, reject the removal of fuel subsidies and urge Jokowi to resolve the handling of Covid-19,” said Usman.
Students in the Central Java provincial capital of Semarang held a long-march from the Old City area to the office of the Central Java Governor, Ganjar Pranowo.
Upon arriving at the governor’s office they took turns in giving speeches. A number of different issues were taken up, including resolving past human rights violations, the Omnibus Law on Job Creation and the weakening of the KPK.
“What has resulted from Jokowi so far? Where are his promises?,” asked action coordinator Fajar Sodiq.
“Resolving past human rights violations are not heard, the Omnibus Law oppresses the ordinary people, and now we are witnessing efforts to weaken the KPK. Where [are the results of] Jokowi’s work?”
As the students were protesting, President Widodo was visiting South Kalimantan where he officiated at the opening of a biodiesel factory, a bridge and monitored covid-19 vaccinations.
The biodiesel factory, which is located in Tanah Bumbu, is managed by the PT Jhonlin Group owned by Samsudin Andi Arsyad alias Haji Isam.
President Widodo said he appreciated the processing of palm oil into biodiesel and said he hoped that other countries would follow Jhonlin’s example in processing palm oil into biofuel.
“Downstreaming, industrialisation, must be done and we must force ourselves to do it. Because of this, I greatly respect what is being done by the PT Jhonlin Group in building a biodiesel factory”, said Widodo.
By Lenny Tristia Tambun and Novy Lumanauw in Gresik, East Java
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has laid the foundation stone for a giant smelter belonging to copper and gold mining firm Freeport Indonesia in the East Java town of Gresik.
The smelter is built on 103-hectare land at the Manyar Special Economic Zone at a cost of US$3 billion, according to government data.
Jokowi said the smelter would be able to extract 1.7 tonnes of copper from ores and 6000 tonnes of gold annually.
“The single-line smelter we are going to build will be the biggest in the world because it has a capacity of extracting 1.7 tonnes of copper a year,” the president said in a ceremony to mark the start of the construction.
Freeport Indonesia operates the giant copper and gold mine at Grasberg in Papua.
He added Indonesia had the seventh biggest copper reserves in the world after Chile, Australia, Peru, Russia, Mexico, and the United States.
“Only a few of us have knowledge about this,” he said.
Lack of processing facilities
Jokowi said that despite having mines and mineral reserves, Indonesia could not reap the fullest benefit in the metal industry due to a lack of processing facilities, in comparison to countries like Japan and Spain which have higher value-added components in their manufacturing process.
“That’s why we built the Freeport smelter here in Gresik,” the president said.
The Indonesian government has a 51 percent stake in the local unit of US mining giant Freeport McMoRan.
The construction stage alone is expected to create 40,000 jobs for locals, Jokowi said.
State-Owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir said Freeport Indonesia had been performing well since the government secured a commanding stake on December 21, 2018.
Freeport’s revenues were estimated to more than double from Rp 50 trillion last year, Thohir said.
Soaring global copper prices and increased output in Indonesia would add to the pace of the company’s growth, he added.
“The company booked a net profit of approximately Rp 10 trillion last year and we expect the figures to reach Rp 40 trillion by the end of this year,” Thohir said.
Rappler chief executive Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2021 in an unprecedented recognition of journalism’s role in today’s world.
They won the prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”, reports Rappler.
Ressa has been the target of attacks for her media organisation’s critical coverage of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration and a key leader in the global fight against disinformation.
Ressa is the first Filipino to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In the past, two Filipinos were part of international teams that won the Nobel as a group.
Franz Ontal was one of the officers of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that won the prize in 2013, while former Ateneo de Manila University president Father Jett Villarin was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won in 2007 together with former US Vice-President Al Gore.
The award-giving body also acknowledged Muratov, one of the founders and the editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Novaja Gazeta, for his decades of defending “freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions”.
Combating ‘troll factories’
Announcing the award today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said the newspaper was “the most independent newspaper in Russia,” publishing critical articles on “corruption, police violence, unlawful arrests, electoral fraud and ‘troll factories,’ to the use of Russian military forces both within and outside Russia”.
Rappler’s Maria Ressa and Russia’s Dmitry Muratov … they have won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression”. Montage: Rappler
He is the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev – who himself helped set up Novaya Gazeta with the money he received from winning the award in 1990.
“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda,” the committee said in a press release.
“The Norwegian Nobel Committee is convinced that freedom of expression and freedom of information help to ensure an informed public. These rights are crucial prerequisites for democracy and protect against war and conflict.
“The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov is intended to underscore the importance of protecting and defending these fundamental rights.”
Ressa and Muratov are the latest journalists to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the world’s most prestigious political accolade.
In February, Norwegian labour leader and parliamentary representative Jonas Gahr Støre nominated Ressa, Reporters Without Borders, and the Committee to Protect Journalists for the 2021 Prize.
Symbol for thousands of journalists
“She is thus both a symbol and a representative of thousands of journalists around the world. The nomination fulfills key aspects of what is emphasized as peace-promoting in Alfred Nobel’s will.
“A free and independent press can inform about and help to limit and stop a development that leads to armed conflict and war,” Støre said in his nomination.
Skei Grande, former leader of Norway’s Liberal Party, also nominated the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rappler is one of the two verified signatories of IFCN’s Code of Principles in the Philippines – the other being Vera Files.
Here is Rappler’s statement on Friday’s announcement:
“Rappler is honoured – and astounded – by the Nobel Peace Prize Award given to our CEO Maria Ressa. It could not have come at a better time – a time when journalists and the truth are being attacked and undermined.
“We thank the Nobel for recognising all journalists both in the Philippines and in the world who continue to shine the light even in the darkest and toughest hours.
“Thank you to everyone who has been part of the daily struggle to uphold the truth and who continues to hold the line with us. Congratulations, Maria!”
Under attack The attacks against Ressa and Rappler have reached the world stage. When Duterte assumed office in 2016 and launched his signature bloody drug war, Rappler cast a harsh light on the extrajudicial killings the President himself encouraged.
In June 2020, Ressa and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. were convicted of cyber libel – a judgment Rappler regards as a failure of justice and democracy.
Ressa and Santos are out on bail, and have filed their appeal with the Court of Appeals.
This is one of at least seven active cases pending in court against Rappler as of August 10, 2021.
An award-winning documentary A Thousand Cuts, released in 2020 by Filipino-American filmmaker Ramona Diaz, outlines Rappler’s journey and the fight for press freedom in the country.
Before founding Rappler, she focused on investigating terrorism in Southeast Asia as she reported for CNN’s Manila and Jakarta bureaus.
A Rappler report with news agency coverage. Republished with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
More than 900 individuals and companies linked to the Philippines have figured in millions of files on offshore accounts leaked from finance providers, and which a broad group of journalists from 117 countries recently investigated.
An extremely small number of these accounts are tied to big businesses with legitimate sources, and whose reasons for moving and keeping their wealth overseas may be indicative of how the Philippine financial system has been slow on reforms.
The rest of the Philippine-linked accounts are mysterious at the very least.
Some individuals, who are either previously unheard of in elite circles or never found in legitimate databases, turned out to be the beneficiaries of multiple accounts. The purpose of many accounts could not be ascertained.
On a global scale, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) – leading 140 media outlets in 117 countries in this latest investigation – found that fugitives, con artists, murderers, and world leaders used offshore accounts to hide wealth and buy properties.
Details were scant to be able to identify the purpose of 259 offshore companies, while at least 282 names from the list could not be linked to registered or active companies.
While Rappler and the PCIJ do not necessarily imply that illegal transactions were done through these companies of unknown individuals, we raise questions on the purposes of keeping these offshore.
Why go offshore? It is legal for Filipinos to set up offshore accounts. These companies, however, operate in various shades of gray areas that are worthy of scrutiny from regulators.
A seasoned corporate lawyer who has wealthy clients acknowledged in an interview with Rappler and PCIJ that companies in so-called tax havens attracted both high-net worth individuals and criminals. He asked not to be named.
For one, the British Virgin Islands is an established favourable taxing jurisdiction. While the Philippines has recent laws which reduced estate and income taxes, the British Virgin Islands still has significantly lower rates.
“We have this client, she’s a matriarch, she owns shares of high value. Now, her concern is that she does not want to burden her children and grandchildren with taxes related to inheritance,” the lawyer explained.
“I think the tax could reach P30 million (NZ$900,000). What if you’re rich but not liquid? Where will you get that money just to inherit the shares?
“So I advised her to establish a trust, because, when those shares go into the trust, the trust will hold the shares for the benefit of your children…and effectively cut what could have been perpetual taxes once it goes down to the grandchildren and their children. That saves a lot of money.”
For another, the territory is very lenient when it comes to disclosure of ownership of companies.
‘Layering’ wealth
BVI companies can help in “layering” one’s wealth so as not to attract “too much” attention.
The lawyer, however, admitted that these functions operate within gray areas that corrupt individuals could abuse.
“It’s not wrong per se, but, like all other things, it can be used for bad purposes. For example, you’re a politician who got kick-backs, then you have lodged your funds here in the Philippines, it’s quite possible that the bank secrecy can be lifted during a litigation.
“But if you lodge it abroad, it would mean that the court may have to ask for cooperation from that country, that company or bank – that’s a lot of steps,” the lawyer said.
We reached out to the business executives we were able to identify on the list. They said that their offshore companies were either created for business deals or for cost and tax efficiency. Some remained dormant and were not used at all.
Moreover, corporate lawyers we spoke to pointed out that the rich have every reason to move their money out, as the Philippines’ laws “unnecessarily” taxed wealth several times over.
“While there have been reforms, the tax laws need to be improved further,” a corporate lawyer said.
Most importantly, moving assets abroad also provided some security for their legally-acquired wealth.
What’s fishy, what’s not
With the mix of the good and the bad operating within the BVI system, how does one tell which account holds dirty money?
“There really is no clear way,” said another corporate lawyer, who also wanted to remain anonymous so as not to “alarm” his high-profile clients.
“I have a client whose child was almost kidnapped because of their perceived wealth. Setting up an offshore account hides their money in a legitimate way from people who have bad intentions, while also keeping it accessible whenever they need the liquidity,” the second lawyer said.
Former Bureau of Internal Revenue Commissioner Kim Henares shared this view, saying that prominent names on the list may “not be an issue,” as these individuals could easily justify their wealth.
“But if a name does not come up on Google, but has lots of offshore accounts,” the second lawyer said, “I simply ask: What are you doing there?”
Moreover, the secrecy of the offshore system makes it impossible to distinguish which are tied to legitimate sources and which come from criminal activities.
ICIJ also pointed out that even legal transactions have to also be put into question. For instance, profits of businesses from high-tax countries are transferred to companies that only exist on paper in tax havens.
Does this put the host country like the Philippines at a disadvantage? Or are there gaps needed to be plugged in such countries and territories?
Unclear purposes
After careful investigation, Rappler and PCIJ found that the purpose of the majority of the offshore companies linked to Filipinos on the Pandora Papers are unclear.
The Philippines is not a unique case. According to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), at least $13.3 trillion is held offshore.
Who’s who on the list?
The tree map here shows that most of the individuals on the list linked to the Philippines are unknown or have scant publicly available records.
The chart was made by carefully checking each name on search engines and databases and matching them with a company. These companies are then categorised per industry.
While the majority of the companies can’t be traced to prominent Filipino personalities or firms, we were able to identify 36 offshore companies linked to conglomerates and mall operators, some of which have responded to our queries.
The names of the Sy siblings of SM Investments Corporation, for instance, showed up on the Commence list and are linked to 10 offshore companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Their companies were created sometime between 2002 and 2015.
The Gaisano family, which owns malls and retail outlets mostly in the Visayas and Mindanao, are linked to 12 companies.
The Commence list also indicated the Gatchalian family of the Wellex Group owning 10 BVI companies.
The documents were able to identify 156 Filipinos, 21 Chinese, and 9 Britons.
But the nationalities of 160 other names on the list cannot be ascertained. Almost all of these names, however, are Filipino and Chinese-sounding.
The Philippines has a long way to go.
While leaks via the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers of 2017 have prompted legislators to follow the rest of the world in lifting the bank secrecy law, the Philippines continues to keep the lid on.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE ‘PANDORA PAPERS’ PROJECT: Carmela Fonbuena, Miriam Grace A. Go, Karol Ilagan, Elyssa Lopez, Pauline Macaraeg, Ralf Rivas, Felipe Salvosa
Reported in partnership with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Republished with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it is very disturbed by the “11 journalism rules” that the Taliban announced at a meeting with news media on September 19.
The rules that Afghan journalists will now have to implement are vaguely worded, dangerous and liable to be used to persecute them, the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog said.
Working as a journalist will now mean complying strictly with the 11 rules unveiled by Qari Mohammad Yousuf Ahmadi, the interim director of the Government Media and Information Centre (GMIC).
At first blush, some of them might seem reasonable, as they include an obligation to respect “the truth” and not “distort the content of the information”, said RSF.
But in reality they were “extremely dangerous” because they opened the way to censorship and persecution.
“Decreed without any consultation with journalists, these new rules are spine-chilling because of the coercive use that can be made of them, and they bode ill for the future of journalistic independence and pluralism in Afghanistan,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.
“They establish a regulatory framework based on principles and methods that contradict the practice of journalism and leave room for oppressive interpretation, instead of providing a protective framework allowing journalists — including women — to go back to work in acceptable conditions.
‘Tyranny and persecution’ “These rules open the way to tyranny and persecution.”
The first three rules, which forbid journalists to broadcast or publish stories that are “contrary to Islam,” “insult national figures” or violate “privacy,” are loosely based on Afghanistan’s existing national media law, which also incorporated a requirement to comply with international norms, including Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The absence of this requirement in the new rules opens the door to censorship and repression, because there is no indication as to who determines, or on what basis it is determined, that a comment or a report is contrary to Islam or disrespectful to a national figure.
Three of the rules tell journalists to conform to what are understood to be ethical principles:
They must “not try to distort news content”;
They must “respect journalistic principles”; and
They “must ensure that their reporting is balanced”.
But the absence of reference to recognised international norms means that these rules can also be misused or interpreted arbitrarily.
Rules 7 and 8 facilitate a return to news control or even prior censorship, which has not existed in Afghanistan for the past 20 years.
‘Handled carefully’
They state that, “matters that have not been confirmed by officials at the time of broadcasting or publication should be treated with care” and that “matters that could have a negative impact on the public’s attitude or affect morale should be handled carefully when being broadcast or published”.
The danger of a return to news control or prior censorship is enhanced by the last two rules (10 and 11), which reveal that the GMIC has “designed a specific form to make it easier for media outlets and journalists to prepare their reports in accordance with the regulations,” and that from now on, media outlets must “prepare detailed reports in coordination with the GMIC”.
The nature of these “detailed reports” has yet to be revealed.
The ninth rule, requiring media outlets to “adhere to the principle of neutrality in what they disseminate” and “only publish the truth,” could be open to a wide range of interpretations and further exposes journalists to arbitrary reprisals.
Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao is leaving the sport that propelled him to stardom as he seeks the Philippine presidency in 2022
He is no longer fighting in the ring.
“My boxing career? My boxing career is already over,” Senator Pacquiao told actress Toni Gonzaga in Filipino on her YouTube programme Toni Talks at the weekend.
“It’s done because I’ve been in boxing for a long time and my family says that it is enough. I just continued [to box] because I’m passionate about this sport.
Pacquiao, who declared he is running for the Philippines presidency under the PDP-Laban faction of his and fellow Senator Koko Pimentel on Sunday, made it clear, however, that he was not leaving boxing altogether.
“I will just support other boxers for us to have a champion again.”
Pacquiao, boxing’s lone eight-division world champion, has long been helping Filipino boxers by way of his MP (Manny Pacquiao) Promotions headed by Sean Gibbons.
Already in the MP stable are World Boxing Organisation bantamweight champion Johnriel Casimero and International Boxing Federation super flyweight king Jerwin Ancajas.
Also in the fold is unbeaten featherweight Mark Magsayo, Tokyo Olympics bronze medalist Eumir Marcial, and world title contender Jonas Sultan.
“Panahon na upang manalo naman ang mga naaapi. Panahon na para makabangon ang bayan natin na lugmok sa kahirap. Panahon na nang isang malinis na gobyerno na kung saan ang bawat sentimo ay mapupunta sa bawat Pilipino,” said Pacquiao.
(I accept your nomination as the candidate for president of the Republic of the Philippines. It is now the time for the oppressed to win. It is now the time for our nation to rise from poverty. It is now the time for a clean government where every centavo goes to Filipinos.)
In a Pulse Asia survey conducted in June, Pacquiao ranked 5th among preferred presidential candidates for the 2022 elections. He was far behind top choices Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte, incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, and Manila Mayor Isko Moreno.
The criminalisation of activists — including those in West Papua — in 2019 and 2020 has been cited as one of the factors for the decline in the quality of democracy in Indonesia.
Based on a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), democracy in Indonesia scored its worst figure ever with a score of 6.3 and was placed 64th out of 167 countries.
Advocacy Team for Democracy (TAUD) member Teo Reffelsen said that the criminalisation of activists contributed to Indonesia’s poor record on civil freedoms.
“It has been marked by the criminalisation of expression and public opinion, through to repressive actions ridden with violence,” said Reffelsen in a media release, reports CNN Indonesia.
Between 2019 and 2020, said Reffelsen, TAUD recorded at last 10 incidents of the criminalisation of activists in Indonesia.
This included six Papuan activists — Watchdoc founder and senor journalist Dandhy Dwi Laksono, Jakarta State University (UNJ) sociologist Robertus Robet, musician Ananda Badudu, Papua Student Alliance (AMP) lawyer and human rights activist Veronica Koman and public policy activist Ravio Patra.
Also, 5198 demonstrators were arrested during the protests against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation in September and October 2019, Save Indonesia Action Coalition (KAMI) activists Syahganda Nainggolan and Jumhur Hidayat along with Banda Aceh Syiah Kuala University lecturer Saiful Mahdi.
12 cases in 2021
In 2021, TAUD recorded at last 12 cases of criminalisation of activists. Two of these cases were related to senior state officials, namely Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko and Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan.
“The criminalisation of two Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) researchers, Egi [Primayogha] and Miftah, threats of criminalisation against [rights activist] Haris Azhar from the Lokataru [Foundation] and Fatia Maulidiyanti from Kontras [Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence],” wrote Reffelsen.
Reffelsen also said they found several cases of attacks on civil freedoms in the form of doxing or attacks in digital space against people who were critical of the government such as those suffered by Ravio Patra and critical online media Tempo.co and Tirto.id.
“The [police] cyber patrols which were legitimised by an instruction by the Indonesian police chief is another example,” said Reffelsen.
Apart from civil freedoms, another factor was that it appeared as if the government lacked the involvement of public participation in policy formulation.
The enactment to revisions to the Corruption Eradication Commission Law, the Omnibus Law and other legislation were examples.
Another aspect was actions by law enforcement agencies such as the judiciary which were seen as corrupt and the lack of seriousness on the part of the government to resolve human rights violations.
“The decline in Indonesia’s democratic index is in keeping with TAUD’s findings on the ground, primarily in relation to civil freedoms which have shrunk,” said Reffelsen.
We live, to borrow a phrase, in interesting times. The pandemic aside, relations between the superpowers are tense. The sudden arrival of the new AUKUS security agreement between Australia, the US and UK simply adds to the general sense of unease internationally.
The relationship between America and China had already deteriorated under the presidency of Donald Trump and has not improved under Joe Biden.
New satellite evidence suggests China might be building between 100 and 200 silos for a new generation of nuclear intercontinental missiles.
At the same time, the US relationship with North Korea continues to smoulder, with both North and South Korea conducting missile tests designed to intimidate.
And, of course, Biden has just presided over the foreign policy disaster of withdrawal from Afghanistan. His administration needs something new with a positive spin.
Enter AUKUS, more or less out of the blue. So far, it is just a statement launched by the member countries’ leaders. It has not yet been released as a formal treaty.
Australia’s previous A$90 billion deal with the French company DCNS to build up to 12 submarines has been canned.
The Indo-Pacific pivot The new agreement speaks of “maritime democracies” and “ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order” with the objective to “deepen diplomatic, security and defence co-operation in the Indo-Pacific region”.
“Indo-Pacific region” is code for defence against China, with the partnership promising greater sharing and integration of defence technologies, cyber capabilities and “additional undersea capabilities”. Under the agreement, Australia also stands to gain nuclear-powered submarines.
To demonstrate the depth of the relationship, the agreement highlights how “for more than 70 years, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have worked together, along with other important allies and partners”.
At which point New Zealand could have expected a drum roll, too, having only just marked the 70th anniversary of the ANZUS agreement. That didn’t happen, and New Zealand was conspicuously absent from the choreographed announcement hosted by the White House.
Having remained committed to the Five Eyes security agreement and having put boots on the ground in Afghanistan for the duration, “NZ” appears to have been taken out of ANZUS and replaced with “UK”.
Ardern responds to new Australia, UK, US group, says NZ nuclear stance ‘unchanged’ https://t.co/Ot3Ehi0R92
Don’t mention the nukes The obvious first question is whether New Zealand was asked to join the new arrangement. While Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has welcomed the new partnership, she has confirmed: “We weren’t approached, nor would I expect us to be.”
That is perhaps surprising. Despite problematic comments by New Zealand’s trade minister about Australia’s dealings with China, and the foreign minister’s statement that she “felt uncomfortable” with the expanding remit of the Five Eyes, reassurances by Ardern about New Zealand’s commitment should have calmed concerns.
One has to assume, therefore, that even if New Zealand had been asked to join, it might have chosen to opt out anyway. There are three possible explanations for this:
The first involves the probable provision to Australia of nuclear-powered military submarines. Any mention of nuclear matters makes New Zealand nervous. But Australia has been at pains to reiterate its commitment to “leadership on global non-proliferation”.
Similar commitments or work-arounds could probably have been made for New Zealand within the AUKUS agreement, too, but that is now moot.
The dragon in the room
The second reason New Zealand may have declined is because the new agreement is perceived as little more than an expensive purchasing agreement for the Australian navy, wrapped up as something else.
This may be partly true. But the rewards of the relationship as stated in the initial announcement go beyond submarines and look enticing. In particular, anything that offers cutting-edge technologies and enhances the interoperability of New Zealand’s defence force with its allies would not be lightly declined.
The third explanation could lie in an assumption that this is not a new security arrangement. Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that New Zealand is not the only ally missing from the new arrangement.
Canada, the other Five Eyes member, is also not at the party. Nor are France, Germany, India and Japan. If this really was a quantum shift in strategic alliances, the group would have been wider — and more formal than a new partnership announced at a press conference.
Nonetheless, the fact that New Zealand’s supposedly extra-special relationship with Britain, Australia and America hasn’t made it part of the in-crowd will raise eyebrows.
Especially while no one likes to mention the elephant – or should that be dragon? – in the room: New Zealand’s relationship with China.
Anyone filling their lockdown downtime binge-watching the final series of US spy show Homeland might have found its fictionalised account of the US trying to get out of Afghanistan in a hurry pretty prescient.
“It’ll be Saigon all over again,” the gravelly-voiced Afghan president says as he warns the US that making peace with the Taliban will end in tears.
When the US troops left this month, it was indeed a case of “choppers at the embassy compound” once more.
And after that, getting other people out who feared the Taliban became a story all of its own.
RNZAF and NZDF forces dispatched to get out New Zealand citizens and visa holders provided the media with dramatic stories of improvised rescues.
One exclusive in the New Zealand Herald described a grandmother in a wheelchair hauled out from the crowd via a sewage filled ditch, illustrated with NZDF images and footage.
But while the government said it got about 390 people out of the country, Scoop’s Gordon Campbell pointed out authorities here have not said how many were already New Zealand citizens — or Afghan citizens or contractors whose service put them and their family members in danger.
Afghan translator Bashir Ahmad — who worked for the NZDF in Bamiyan province and came to New Zealand subsequently — told RNZ’s Morning Reporthe knew of 36 more people still stuck there.
Sticking around
Afghan channel Tolo news broadcasts the Taliban’s first press conference since they took over in Kabul. Image: RNZ screenshot
The end of 20 years of US occupation was witnessed by BBC’s veteran correspondent Lyse Doucet. She was also there in 1989 reporting for Canada’s CBC when the Soviet Union’s forces pulled out after its occupation that lasted almost a decade.
Back then she pondered how she would work when power changed hands to the Mujaheddin. Thirty-two years on, herself and others in Afghanistan — including New Zealander Charlotte Bellis who reports from Kabul for global channel Al Jazeera — are also wondering what the Taliban has in store for them.
The last time the Taliban were in charge — 1996 to 2001 — the media were heavily controlled and independent journalism was almost impossible.
Local and international media have flourished in Afghanistan after the US ousted the Taliban 20 years ago – but now their future is far from clear.
The Taliban have offered reassurances it will respect press freedoms. On August 21 they announced a committee including journalists would be created to “address the problems of the media in Kabul.”
But some have already reported harassment and confiscation of equipment. Five journalists from Etilaatroz, a daily newspaper in Kabul, were arrested and beaten by Taliban, the editor-in-chief said on Wednesday.
In the meantime, the Taliban have been getting to know reporters who are still there.
Charlotte Bellis told RNZ’s Sunday Morning she was sticking around to cover what happens next in Afghanistan and build relationships with the Taliban — and even give them advice.
“I told them … if you’re going to run the country you need to build trust and you need to be transparent and authentic – and do as much media as you can to try and reassure people that they don’t need to be scared of you,” she said.
It helps that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar where the Taliban have a political office.
Earlier this month, the Taliban’s slick spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told Charlotte Bellis they were grateful for New Zealand offering financial aid to Afghanistan.
But that money is for the UN agencies and the Red Cross and Red Crescent operations — and not an endorsement of the Taliban takeover.
“They’ve cottoned on to the fact they can use social media for propaganda,” she told Newstalk ZB.
“When journalists run these stories it implies that governments are supporting the Taliban when nothing could be further from the truth,” Clark said.
How should the media deal with an outfit which turfed the recognised government out of power — and whose real intentions are not yet known?
The Taliban’s governing cabinet named last week has several hardliners — and no women.
Will reporters really be able to report under the Taliban from now on?
‘Please, my life is in danger.’ Image: RNZ Mediawatch
Peter Greste was the BBC’s correspondent in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s when the Taliban was poised to take over the first time — and he is now the UNESCO chair in journalism at the University of Queensland.
“We need to make it abundantly clear to the Taliban that they need to stick to their promises to protect journalists and media workers — and let them continue to work. The Taliban‘s words and actions don’t always align but at the very least we need to start with that,” Greste said.
“And we need to give refuge and visas to media workers who want to get out,” he said.
“Watching the way they treat journalists is going to be an important barometer of the way they plan to operate,” said Greste, who is working with the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom to monitor abuses and to create an online “Afghan media freedom tracker”.
“There’s been an obvious gap between the spokespeople who say they are prepared to let journalists operate and women continue to work — and the troubling reports of attacks by Taliban fighters on the ground, going door-to-door looking for journalists and their families,” he said.
“We need to maintain communications with them. We need to use all the tools we can to make sure we are across where all the people are. Afghanistan’s borders are like Swiss cheese. It’s not always easy to get across — but it is possible,” he said.
Peter Greste said the translators and fixers the international journalists rely on are absolutely critical to international media.
“Good translators don’t just translate the words– but help you understand the context. To simply give refuge just to the people who have their faces in their stories and names on bylines is not fair,” Greste said.
Peter Greste, UNESCO chair of journalism at the University of Queensland, Australia … Image: RNZ Mediawatch
Greste was jailed for months in Egypt on trumped-up charges in 2014 along with local colleagues when the regime there decided it didn’t like their reporting for Al Jazeera.
It triggered a remarkable campaign in which rival media outlets banded together to demand their release under the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”.
Does he fear for journalists if the Taliban resort to old ways of handling the media?
Will we even know if they make life impossible for media and journalists outside the capital in the future?
“The country has mobile phone networks now it has social media networks. It is possible to find out what’s going on in those regions and it’s going to be difficult for the Taliban to uphold that mirage – if that’s what it is,” he said.
“I’m not prepared at this point to write them off as an workable and we need to acknowledge the realities of what just happened in Afghanistan,” he said.
When Greste first arrived in Afghanistan for the BBC in 1994 there was no reliable electricity supply even in the capital city — let alone local television like TOLO news.
Al-Jazeera news channel’s Australian journalist Peter Greste listens to the original court verdict in June. Image: RNZ Mediawatch
“One of the great successes of the last decade or two has been the flowering of local media. Western organisations and donors and Afghans have understood that having a free media is one of the most important aspects of having a functioning society,” he said.
Afghans have really taken to that with real enthusiasm. The number of outlets and journalists has been phenomenal. You can’t put that genie back in his bottle without some serious consequences,” Greste told Mediawatch.
The regime in Egypt wasn’t afraid to imprison him and his colleagues back in 2014. Does he fear for international reporters like Charlotte Bellis and her colleagues?
“Al Jazeera will have a lot of security in place to make sure the operation is protected,” Greste said.
“But of course I worry for Charlotte — and also the staff at work with her. As a foreign correspondent though, I think you enjoy more protection than most other journos locally,” Greste said.
“If my name had been Mohammed and not Peter and if I’d been Egyptian and not Australian or a foreigner there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the kind of outrage and consequences for the government,” Greste said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A mural on the eastern side of the Wirobrajan intersection in Central Java city of Yogyakarta was covered over with black paint before President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s weekend visit.
It was known that President Widodo would be passing through this stretch of road during a working visit to Yogyakarta on Saturday. The mural was painted over in Friday.
The mural was critical of Indonesian censorship under the Widodo administration.
Yogyakarta Mayor Haryadi Suyuti asked people not to pre-judge the removal of the mural, saying it was done as part of a routine weekly cleanup — not just because of the mural.
“We were doing a routine cleanup right, not [just] cleaning off the mural,” he told journalists.
Quoting from the Gejayan Calling (Gejayan Memanggil) Instagram account, which immortalised the mural before it was painted over, the picture was of a figure whose eyes were covered with the internet tab “404 Not Found” with the message “The regime is afraid of pictures”.
During his working visit to Yogyakarta on Friday, Widodo asked Yogyakarta Governor Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X to accelerate the covid-19 vaccination programme for the region.
The request was made during an internal meeting with the provincial and regency regional leadership coordinating forum at the Pracimasono Building at the Kepatihan complex in Danurejan.
“[We are] accelerating vaccinations in concert with the gradual reopening (of public places)”, said the Sultan following the meeting, although he said that Widodo did not give any specific vaccine targets for Yogyakarta.
“Vaccinations must be done as widely as possible even if it’s only the first dose”, he added.
Abridged translation by James Balowski for IndoLeft News. The second part of the article which was not translated detailed the covid-19 situation in Yogyakarta, vaccination rates and comments by Widodo. The original title of the article was “Jokowi Mau Lewat, Coretan Kritikan di Yogya Dihapus”.
When I arrived at my office at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji on the morning of 12 September 2001 (9/11, NY Time), I was oblivious to reality.
I had dragged myself home to bed a few hours earlier at 2am as usual, after another long day working on our students’ Wansolwara Online website providing coverage of the Fiji general election.
One day after being sworn in as the country’s fifth real (elected) prime minister, it seemed that Laisenia Qarase was playing another dirty trick on Mahendra Chaudhry’s Labour Party, which had earned the constitutional right to be included in the multi-party government supposed to lead the country back to democracy.
Stepping into my office, I encountered a colleague. He looked wild-eyed and said: “It’s the end of the world.”
Naively, I replied, thinking of the 1987 military coups, “Yes, how can legality and constitutionality be cast aside so blatantly yet again?”
“No, not Fiji politics,” he said. “That’s nothing. I mean New York. Terrorists have destroyed the financial heart of the Western world.”
It was a chilling moment, comparable to how I had felt as a 17-year-old forestry science trainee in a logging camp at Kaingaroa Forest the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — 22 November 1963.
Wansolwara newsroom
Over the next few hours, it seemed that half the Laucala campus descended on our Wansolwara newsroom to watch the latest BBC, TVNZ one and Fiji TV One coverage of the shocking and devastating tragedy.
While a handful of student journalists struggled to provide coverage of local angles — such as the tightening of security around the US Embassy in Suva and shock among the Laucala intelligentsia — most students remained glued to the TV, stunned into immobility by the suicide jetliner terrorists.
Inevitably, global jingoism and xenophobia followed, the assaults on Sikhs merely because they an “Arab look”, the attacks on mosques — in Fiji copies of the Koran were burned — and the abuse directed towards Afghan refugees were par for the course.
Freedom of speech in the United States also quickly became a casualty of this new “war on terrorism”. Columnists were fired for their critical views, television host Bill Maher was denounced by the White House, Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau dropped his “featherweight Bush” cartoons and so-called “unpatriotic” songs were dropped from radio playlists. Wrote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times:
Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practising intolerance, signalling that anyone who challenges the leaders of embattled America is cynical, political and – isn’t this the subtext? – unpatriotic.
But while much of the West lined up as political parrots alongside the United States, ready to exact a terrible vengeance, contrasting perspectives were apparent in many developing nations.
In the Pacific, for example, while people empathised with the survivors of the terrible toll — 2977 people were killed (including the 125 at the Pentagon), 19 hijackers committed murder-suicide, and more than 6000 people injured — there was often a more critical view of the consequences of American foreign policy and a sense of dread about the future.
Twin Towers reflections
Less than a week after the Twin Towers tragedy, I asked my final-year students to compile some notes recalling the circumstances of when they heard the news of the four aircraft slamming into the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and the Pentagon (one plane was taken over by the passengers and it dived into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) and their responses.
One, a mature age student from Fiji who had worked for several years as a radio journalist, said:
I was in bed and woke up about 2.30am. I have a habit of having the BBC running on radio and, half-asleep, I caught the news being broadcast. I pulled myself out of bed and tuned into BBC on Sky TV. The second plane had just hit the second tower, and I ended staying up the rest of the night to watch the unfolding events.
On his impressions, he warned about scapegoats and the media:
The relevance to us here in the Pacific is that terrorists can strike anywhere to get revenge. This conflict could evolve into war, and wars affect everyone. Americans already think Osama bin Laden is the terrorist. Where is the evidence? Americans are looking to get someone quickly, and the media is leading the way.
Another student wrote:
Good, they [US] paid dearly for trying to intervene in Muslim countries … Bin Laden is portrayed as the culprit even though it is not clear who did it. The media is portraying the whole Muslim world as responsible, but actually this is not the case.
A practical joke?
Recalled one:
I was sleeping and my mother woke me up at 6.30am to tell me the news. I was shocked and, still sleepy, I thought my mother was doing one of her practical jokes to get me out of bed … If there is World War Three, it will have a big impact on the Pacific.
America still has some form of control over various Pacific Island countries, and once again it will recruit Pacific Islanders. Pacific Islands are relatively weak and still trying to be developed. Another hiccup could send our economies t the dogs.
Yet another:
I was at home having breakfast, listening to the news on Bula 100FM. My first reaction was disbelief, horror … Ethically, there is a need to remember the people involved and the amount of bloodshed and death. It would be necessary to censor material that would be emotionally upsetting.
One student was
really surprised to see TVNZ instead of the usual Chinese CCTV. The sound was mute so I couldn’t really get what was being said. I was about to turn it off when they showed the South Tower of the World Trade Centre collapse. I thought it was a short piece from the movie Independence Day.
Sad, it may seem, but the first thing I thought about as a journalist was that reporters will have a field day … Phrases such as “historical day the world over” and “America under siege” popped up in my head as possible headlines.
I got out my notebook and began writing down the number of people estimated to have died, the extent of the damage, an excerpts from President Bush’s speech. Practically anything that involves the US also affects many people throughout the world.
Inevitably, some commentators began drawing parallels between the terrorism in New York in mid-September 2001 at one end of the continuum of hate and rogue businessman and George Speight’s brief terrorist rule in Fiji during mid-2000 at the other end.
Terrorism as a political tool
Politics associate professor Scott MacWilliam, for example, highlighted how terrorism becomes a political tool deployed by a nation state to support its foreign and domestic policy objectives. He pointed out that many of the fundamentalist groups which now carried out terrorism were “nurtured, trained, financed and incorporated” into the Western security apparatus.
One might ask what had this terrible urban graveyard created by fanaticism got to do with the South Pacific. In a sense, there is a disturbing relationship.
Politics in the region, especially at that time, was increasingly being determined by terrorism, particularly in Melanesia, and much of it by the state. And with this situation comes a greater demand on the region’s media and journalists, for more training and professionalism.
At the time of the 9/11 tragedy, Dr David Robie was head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific. This article has been extracted from a keynote speech that he made at the inaugural conference of the Pacific Islands Media Association (PIMA), “Navigating the Future”, at Auckland University of Technology on 5-6 October 2001. The full address was published by Pacific Journalism Review, No. 8.
Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September 2001 — now known as 9/11 — the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.
New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.
It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.
Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.
They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.
Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.
The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.
Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.
Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.
“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”
Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.
“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”
But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.
Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.
“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.
When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.
“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.
“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.
Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.
“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.
Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.
“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.
“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.
Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.
“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.
“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.
”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”
Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.
“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.
“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.
“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.
There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.
But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.
Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.
“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”
Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.
“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.
“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.
Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.
Since the September 11 terror attacks, there has been no hiding from the increased militarisation of the United States. Everyday life is suffused with policing and surveillance.
This ranges from the inconvenient, such as removing shoes at the airport, to the dystopian, such as local police departments equipped with decommissioned tanks too big to use on regular roads.
This process of militarisation did not begin with 9/11. The American state has always relied on force combined with the de-personalisation of its victims.
The army, after all, dispossessed First Nations peoples of their land as settlers pushed westward. Expanding the American empire to places such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Haiti also relied on force, based on racist justifications.
The military also ensured American supremacy in the wake of the Second World War. As historian Nikhil Pal Singh writes, about 8 million people were killed in US-led or sponsored wars from 1945–2019 — and this is a conservative estimate.
When Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military general, left the presidency in 1961, he famously warnedagainst the growing “military-industrial complex” in the US. His warning went unheeded and the protracted conflict in Vietnam was the result.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day in the Second World War. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The 9/11 attacks then intensified US militarisation, both at home and abroad. George W. Bush was elected in late 2000 after campaigning to reduce US foreign interventions.
The new president discovered, however, that by adopting the persona of a tough, pro-military leader, he could sweep away lingering doubts about the legitimacy of his election.
Waging war on Afghanistan within a month of the Twin Towers falling, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. War in Iraq, based on the dubious assertion of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, soon followed.
The military industrial juggernaut Investment in the military state is immense. 9/11 ushered in the federal, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, with an initial budget in 2001-02 of US$16 billion. Annual budgets for the agency peaked at US$74 billion in 2009-10 and is now around US$50 billion.
This super-department vacuumed up bureaucracies previously managed by a range of other agencies, including justice, transportation, energy, agriculture, and health and human services.
Centralising services under the banner of security has enabled gross miscarriages of justice. These include the separation of tens of thousands of children from parents at the nation’s southern border, done in the guise of protecting the country from so-called illegal immigrants.
More than 300 of the some 1000 children taken from parents during the Trump administration have still not been reunited with family.
Detainees sleep in a holding cell where mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed at the US-Mexico border. Image: The Conversation/Ross D. Franklin/AP
The post-9/11 Patriot Act also gave spying agencies paramilitary powers. The act reduced barriers between the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Agency (NSA) to permit the acquiring and sharing of Americans’ private communications.
These ranged from telephone records to web searches. All of this was justified in an atmosphere of near-hysterical and enduring anti-Muslim fervour.
Only in 2013 did most Americans realise the extent of this surveillance network. Edward Snowden, a contractor working at the NSA, leaked documents that revealed a secret US$52 billion budget for 16 spying agencies and over 100,000 employees.
Normalisation of the security state Despite the long objections of civil liberties groups and disquiet among many private citizens, especially after Snowden’s leaks, it has proven difficult to wind back the industrialised security state.
This is for two reasons: the extent of the investment, and because its targets, both domestically and internationally, are usually not white and not powerful.
Domestically, the 2015 Freedom Act renewed almost all of the Patriot Act’s provisions. Legislation in 2020 that might have stemmed some of these powers stalled in Congress.
And recent reports suggest President Joe Biden’s election has done little to alter the detention of children at the border.
Militarisation is now so commonplace that local police departments and sheriff’s offices have received some US$7 billion worth of military gear (including grenade launchers and armoured vehicles) since 1997, underwritten by federal government programmes.
Atlanta police line up in riot gear before a protest in 2014. Image: The Conversation/Curtis Compton/AP
Militarised police kill civilians at a high rate — and the targets for all aspects of policing and incarceration are disproportionately people of colour. And yet, while the sight of excessively armed police forces during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests shocked many Americans, it will take a phenomenal effort to reverse this trend. The heavy cost of the war on terror The juggernaut of the militarised state keeps the United States at war abroad, no matter if Republicans or Democrats are in power.
Since 9/11, the US “war on terror” has cost more than US$8 trillion and led to the loss of up to 929,000 lives.
The effects on countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have been devastating, and with the US involvement in Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, Mali, and Kenya included, these conflicts have resulted in the displacement of some 38 million people.
These wars have become self-perpetuating, spawning new terror threats such as the Islamic State and now perhaps ISIS-K.
Those who serve in the US forces have suffered greatly. Roughly 2.9 million living veterans served in post-9/11 conflicts abroad. Of the some 2 million deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps 36 percent are experiencing PTSD.
Training can be utterly brutal. The military may still offer opportunities, but the lives of those who serve remain expendable.
Sailor cleaning a fighter jet during aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf in 2010. Image: The Conversation/Hasan Jamali/AP
Life must be precious Towards the end of his life, Robert McNamara, the hard-nosed Ford Motor Company president and architect of the United States’ disastrous military efforts in Vietnam, came to regret deeply his part in the military-industrial juggernaut.
In his 1995 memoir, he judged his own conduct to be morally repugnant. He wrote,
We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.
As McNamara realised far too late, the solution to reversing American militarisation is straightforward. We must recognise, in the words of activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “life is precious”. That simple philosophy also underlies the call to acknowledge Black Lives Matter.
The best chance to reverse the militarisation of the US state is policy guided by the radical proposal that life — regardless of race, gender, status, sexuality, nationality, location or age — is indeed precious.
As we reflect on how the United States has changed since 9/11, it is clear the country has moved further away from this basic premise, not closer to it.
Host Selwyn Manning with security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan on this week’s A View From Afar podcast. Video: EveningReport.nz on YouTube
A VIEW FROM AFAR:Podcast with Selwyn Manning and Paul Buchanan
In this week’s security podcast, Dr Paul G. Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning discuss:
three areas that have been relied on to protect New Zealanders from terror-style attacks;
legal measures designed to protect communities from danger and even protect individuals from themselves;
and why they failed.
The background to this episode is the tragic, terrifying, attack that were committed against unarmed innocent people at West Auckland’s LynnMall Countdown supermarket, by Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen.
The attack occurred last Friday, 3 September 2021. It ended with the hospitalisation of seven people, and, the death of Samsudeen, who was fatally shot by special tactics police officers during his attempt to kill and injure as many people as he could.
Immediately after, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the nation that the dead man was a terrorist and that she herself, the police, and the courts were all aware of how dangerous he was and had been seeking to protect New Zealand from this man.
Within days of the attacks, we learned, that Samsudeen was a troubled man with psychologists describing him as angry, capable of carrying out his threats, and displaying varying degrees of mental illness and disorder.
Refugee who sought asylum
Samsudeen was a refugee who sought asylum in New Zealand after experiencing, through his formative years civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, who, at around 20 years of age, arrived in New Zealand on a student visa and then sought political asylum.
He was eventually granted refugee status, and since then spent years in prison on various charges and convictions – largely involving the possession of terrorist propaganda seeded on the internet by Islamic State (ISIS), and, threats showing intent to commit terrorist acts against New Zealanders.
In this week’s episode, Dr Buchanan and Manning examine questions about whether this tragedy could have been prevented and considered New Zealand’s:
Security and terror laws
Deportation laws involving those with refugee status
The Mental Health Act and whether this was available to the authorities.
Dr Buchanan and Manning also analyse whether it is necessary for the New Zealand government to move to tighten New Zealand’s terrorism security laws. And, if it does, how the intended new laws compare to other Five Eyes member countries.
More information about the A View From Afar weekly podcasts on EveningReport.nz
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on the Taliban to provide immediate guarantees for the freedom and safety of women journalists in Afghanistan, where a new media landscape is emerging from which they are missing.
This is in spite of Taliban assurances that press freedom would be respected and women journalists would be allowed to keep working.
The Taliban has announced an all-male caretaker government three weeks after taking over Kabul and the move has been criticised by UN Women as sending “the wrong signal” for a promised inclusive administration.
What with incidents involving Afghan women journalists since the Taliban takeover on August 15 and orders to respect Islamic laws, an RSF investigation has established that fewer than 100 women journalists are still formally working in privately-owned radio and TV stations in the Afghan capital.
According to a survey by RSF and its partner organisation, the Centre for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists (CPAWJ), Kabul had 108 media outlets with a total of 4940 employees in 2020.
They included 1080 female employees, of whom 700 were journalists.
Of the 510 women who used to work for eight of the biggest media outlets and press groups, only 76 (including 39 journalists) are still currently working.
Disappearing from Kabul
In other words, women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital.
“Taliban respect for the fundamental right of women, including women journalists, to work and to practice their profession is a key issue,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.
“Women journalists must be able to resume working without being harassed as soon as possible, because it is their most basic right, because it is essential for their livelihood, and also because their absence from the media landscape would have the effect of silencing all Afghan women.
“We urge the Taliban leadership to provide immediate guarantees for the freedom and safety of women journalists.”
Most women journalists have been forced to stop working in the provinces, where almost all privately-owned media outlets ceased operating as the Taliban forces advanced.
A handful of these women journalists are still more or less managing to work from home, but there is no comparison with 2020, when the survey by RSF and the CPAWJ established that more than 1700 women were working for media outlets in three provinces (the provinces of Kabul, Herat and Balkh, in the east, west and north of the country).
The illusion of normality lasted only a few days. Forty-eight hours after the Taliban took control of the capital, women reporters with privately-owned TV channels such as Tolonews, Ariana News, Kabul News, Shamshad TV and Khurshid TV had dared to resume talking on the air and going out to cover events.
Media executives harassed
But media executives quickly found that they were being harassed. Nahid Bashardost, a reporter for the independent news agency Pajhwok, was beaten by Taliban while doing a report near Kabul airport on 25 August.
Other tearful women journalists described how Taliban guards stationed outside their media prevented them from going out to cover stories.
Women journalists speaking on the air in the studio are tolerated almost as little as they are reporting in the field.
A woman journalist working for a radio station in the southeastern province of Ghazni said that, two days after the Taliban took control of her province, they visited the station and warned: “You are a privately-owned radio station. You can continue, but without any woman’s voice and without music.”
It is the same in Kabul. A Taliban has replaced a female anchor at state-owned Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), who was told to “stay at home for a few days.”
Another female anchor was denied entry to the building. RTA employed 140 women journalists until mid-August.
Now, none of them dares to go back to work at the state TV channels, which are now under Taliban control.
Stay-at-home advice
Executives and editors with privately-owned media outlets that have not already decided to stop operating confirm that, under pressure, they have advised their women journalist to stay at home.
Zan TV (Dari for “Woman TV”) and Bano TV (Dari for “Mrs TV”) have ceased all activity since August 15.
These two privately owned TV channels employed 35 and 47 women journalists, respectively.
One of these journalists said: “It was the perfect job for me. I wanted to help women. Now I don’t know if I will ever be able to go back to work.”
Deprived of her job and salary, she now faces the prospect of extreme economic hardship, like many other women journalists.
Despite undertakings from Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid that women would be able to “return to work in a few days,” no measure to this effect has been announced, forcing hundreds of women journalists to stay at home, dreading an uncertain future.
On August 24, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said: “A fundamental red line will be the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls, and respect for their rights to liberty, freedom of movement, education, self-expression and employment, guided by international human rights norms.”
Afghanistan was ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index that RSF published in April.
Asia Pacific Report collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
In a seven-minute social media broadcast, President Duwa Lashi La has declared it is time to stop the military regime’s ongoing torture, detention, jailing and murder of civilians opposed to the military coup seven months ago.
President Duwa Lashi La said the NUG had moved to declare war to protect the people against “military terrorists” and the regime leader, General Min Aung Hlaing.
The NUG had taken responsibility to protect the life and the property of the people and had “launched a people’s defensive war against the military junta”, President Duwa Lashi La said in the broadcast.
He described this as a “public revolution”.
NUG President Duwa Lashi La called on all “citizens of Myanmar [to] revolt against the rule of the military terrorists led by Min Aung Hlaing”.
He urged the “People’s Defence Force to target military assets…protect lives and property of the people”.
Help the PDF plea
He also urged ethnic armed organisations to “assist and protect PDF [People’s Defence Force] and their allies [and] immediately attack Min Aung Hlaing and the military council”.
The President also spoke for the need for ethnic groups to protect and control their lands.
He urged citizens to minimise travel and to build supplies and medicines in preparation for the coming conflict.
In an interview with Karen News, Padoh Saw Ta Doh Moo, general secretary of the Karen National Union said his organisation was opposed to the military regime and would support those who were against it.
“In our policy, those who oppose the dictatorship are our friends. This means that we will work together with any organisations that oppose the military dictatorship.”
Padoh Saw Ta Doh Moo called for national unity, saying: “Our goal is to break free from the military dictatorship so that we need all the people to participate under a political leadership, taking accountability and responsibility on each role that each individual play that are in line with our political aspirations.”
Promoting federalism
In a recent short statement issued on September 3, the KNU said it would continue “its strong commitment and adherence to promoting federalism and democracy, working with any organisation against the coup and fighting any forms of dictatorship.”
The KNU statement offered its support to anti-coup protesters and those targeted by the military regime that staged a coup against the elected civilian government on February 1.
Since then, fighter jets had flown into Karen National Union-controlled areas 27 times and dropped at least 47 bombs, killing 14 civilians and wounding 28.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) confirmed as at September 6, the military had killed 1049 people, including 75 children, arrested 7904 and issued warrants for 1984 protesters.
Indonesian police have arrested two suspects in connection with an attack on the Kisor military post which killed four soldiers late last week, reports Antara news agency from Sorong.
“The suspects have admitted their involvement,” claimed the commander of the XVIII/Kasuari Regional Military Command, Major General I Nyoman Castiasa, after paying his respects for the dead soldiers on Friday.
Castiasa led a military procession to honour the soldiers before their caskets were transported to their hometowns for their funeral.
The two alleged West Papuan independence fighters have been placed under police custody for further investigation, he said.
The commander added that he did not yet know the exact number of the attackers.
Castiasa appealed to members of the community in West Papua who were still independence to end the conflict and “work together to develop” the province.
“If they are stubborn and continue their campaign of insurgency, they will be crushed,” he said.
Military post ambush
In the early hours of Thursday, the pro-independence fighters ambushed several soldiers while they were sleeping at the Kisor military post.
2nd Sergeant Amrosius, Chief Private Dirham, First Private Zul Ansari, and First Lieutenant Dirman died in the attack, according to spokesperson for the XVIII/Kasuari Regional Military Command, Lt Col Hendra Pesireron.
The bodies of three soldiers were found at the post, while another was discovered in the bush not far from the post.
Pesireron added that another soldier, First Private Ikbal, could not be found.
Police chief Inspector General Tornagogo Sihombing in West Papua province said two suspects have been apprehended, but police investigators were continuing their probe into the Kisor military post attack.
“The suspects are under police custody at South Sorong police precinct,” he said.
The assault on the Kisor military post was the latest incident in the armed uprising by Papuan nationalists.
Covid-19 pandemic
In the midst of the government’s handling of the covid-19 pandemic in Papua and West Papua, the two Melanesian provinces have been gripped with the armed independence struggle over the past few months of 2021.
In April, two teachers in Julukoma village, Beoga sub-district, Puncak district, were allegedly killed by independence fighters.
On August 22, 2021, a rebel group operating in Yahukimo district attacked several construction workers of PT Indo Mulia Baru who were involved in building a bridge on Brazza River, killing two.
Independence fighters also attacked the Indonesian Police’s Mobile Brigade (Brimob) unit when they went to the shooting site to recover the bodies, Pesireron said.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population with 270 million, has not yet determined its stance towards the Taliban leadership after seizing power in Afghanistan.
It is also the most populous Muslim country.
The Director-General for Asia Pacific and Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdul Kadir Jailani, said the same attitude was also being shown by other countries.
Indonesia’s Director-General for Asia Pacific and Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abdul Kadir Jailani … “quite warm” response in Indonesia to Taliban takeover. Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
“Why haven’t many countries taken a definitive stance, because the situation is still fluid and (the Taliban) have not yet formed a legitimate government,” said Abdul Kadir in the webinar ‘Post-Conflict Afghanistan: Fall or Rise?’ this week.
According to Jailani, Taliban officials are negotiating with a number of figures in Afghanistan in a bid to form a new government.
In addition to the formation of government, Indonesia is also still waiting for the status of the Taliban in the international community.
Jailani said a common view was needed about the status of the Taliban.
“This understanding is very important, so we can get faster information to determine our attitude towards the Taliban and its government later,” he added.
He said the Indonesian government was also careful in determining its stance because the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan received a “quite warm” and mixed reaction from within Indonesia.
Jailani stressed that Indonesia’s definitive stance would only be conveyed when the situation in Afghanistan became clearer.
The Taliban seized control of the civilian government in Afghanistan on August 15 without any resistance. A few days ago, the Taliban claimed to have pocketed a number of names of figures who would later fill the new government.
Unlike in the 1996-2001 era, the Taliban claimed to be forming an inclusive government that involved all elements and ethnicities in Afghanistan.
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis asks a key question about women’s rights in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover during spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid’s first media conference in Kabul on August 18. Video: Al Jazeera
New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who works for Al Jazeera, has been visiting Kabul International Airport – until last Monday the only access point into and out of Afghanistan.
While locals and foreign nationals alike scrambled to leave the country for the past two weeks after the Taliban takeover, Bellis says she will be sticking around for as long as she can.
Bellis tells Jim Mora she was on the New Zealand evacuation list and saw first-hand how Western nations were trying to manage the chaotic situation.
“Most days you get an email saying, ‘okay, if you’re going to try to get out today, go to the North Gate’, then you get an email saying, ‘no, it’s dangerous, go to the South Gate’, and then an email saying, ‘no, don’t go at all, it’s too dangerous, we’ll get back to you’.
“And then finally an email saying, ‘I’m sorry the mission is over, if you didn’t make it, please email us and we’ll do our best to get you out somehow’.”
The danger reached a peak on August 26 and members of the media then agreed not to return to Kabul Airport, she says.
“Even before that, the Taliban were in charge of guarding a perimeter. They were very tense, and firing in the air a lot, and beating people. I saw them running around with machetes… quite a few people left bloodied,” she says.
“A lot of people were scared off and decided not to even try to reach the airport even those who had the correct paperwork.”
Charlotte Bellis at Kabul International Airport after the evacuation of the last US troops and following the Taliban taking control … disabled helicopters and destruction. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR
Most people heading for the airport were aware of the security issues, Bellis says, but nevertheless many were that desperate to flee.
Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis … “There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flights.” Image: RNZ/YouTube
“A lot of the alerts we got were in English that were circulated in the expat community. Whether or not that filtered down to everyday Afghans trying to get out, I don’t know,” she said.
“There was a lot of confusion about who should’ve been allowed on the flight. You can imagine Taliban fighters who may or may not speak various languages, trying to read paperwork, I mean it was just an absolute mare.”
The last frontier against Taliban forces at Kabul airport was a group of CIA-funded militia known as 01 Units which have a “terrible reputation” in Afghanistan, Bellis says.
This group was also due to leave, she says.
“[Afghan president] AshrafGhani’s brother told me that [this militia group] are essentially bounty hunters. The Americans gave them a list of names of people they wanted killed and they did it, they did night raids and killed people from their homes.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid … pledging inclusive government to rebuild Afghanistan at yesterday’s media conference. Image” Al Jazeera screenshot APR
“There’s been quite a few stories about them over the years, but they were incredibly secretive … they were running security on the north side of the airport for the last two weeks, I went down there and talked to them.”
The Taliban say Kabul Airport will continue to operate, but without air traffic controllers they have asked Turkey for “technical personnel”, Bellis says.
“But whether the Turkish airlines, Emirates, the companies that usually fly in and out, trust them enough to run the airport is another question.”
‘I will stay here for as long as I can’
An RNZAF C130 in Kabul evacuating a number of New Zealanders and Australians. Image: RNZ/ NZ Defence Force
Charlotte says that working for Al Jazeera, which is based in Qatar where negotiations with the Taliban happened, puts her in a better position than journalists working for American news services.
She has also built media relationships with the Taliban. The group have come to know her now, she says, and have even said they would help her safely evacuate if need be.
Being from New Zealand – a country the Taliban does not have major issues with – also helps, Bellis says.
She says she has told the Taliban she will keep asking questions about their actions.
“They’ve said go for it, as long as you’re objective and fair. We welcome criticism, we want to improve and if you ever have any problems, call us,” she says.
“Hopefully that all plays out and I will stay here for as long as I can.”
While the Taliban have claimed they will give women rights, Bellis was one of the first to speak up at their first press conference to ask about this.
“I’ve said to the Taliban, you’ve got a real problem here, because if you’re going to be successful in running the country you need people to trust you and you need to build that trust and you need to be transparent … I think only time will tell.”
The perception of the Taliban in the West is quite flawed, Bellis says.
“We think of them as this inhumane terrorist organisation when in fact, in the leadership at least, there are quite a lot of educated people, they’re quite rational. There’s also groups who just want to fight, then there’s also politicians who will just tell you what you want to hear.
“It depends on who ends up holding the reigns of the organisation.
“Hopefully it is some of the people who I’ve had dealings with, who are more objective, rational, willing to work with the West, and make compromises on certain things and aren’t as conservative as others.”
Challenges to governing
Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis being interviewed live on Al Jazeera … “this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.” Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR
Lack of money and the departure of skilled workers are just a couple of the obstacles facing Afghanistan now, Charlotte says, as the IMF and World Bank hold off funds,” Bellis says.
“They’ve essentially put a stop to any money coming in … this country ran on donations and has done for 20 years and now that has stopped.
“Everyone is holding their money back and saying to the Taliban you have to play ball, we’re not going to give you money and then watch you close down girls’ schools.
“But the problem is how long will it take for them to trust the Taliban? Because in the meantime people aren’t getting paid and the economy is being run into the ground.”
Meanwhile, it appears the Taliban has been building a behind-the-scenes relationship with China for a few years now, Bellis says.
“There’s been a lot of little things happening, that signalled they are ready to build a relationship together. The Chinese, even before the Taliban took over, were preparing to recognise the Taliban as a government.
“The Chinese have had the rights to minerals here for some time, but they haven’t been able to mine because of the war and security. They’ve had reason to want to see the war end.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The military’s brutality is a daily reality for all the people of Myanmar. As Myanmar’s army prepares to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops, the country’s media workers remain exposed to Covid-19 and under extreme threat, writes Phil Thornton.
Myanmar’s military leaders used its armed forces to launch its coup and take control of the country from its elected government on 1 February 2021. In protest, millions of people took to the streets.
The military responded to these protests by sending armed soldiers and police into residential areas to arrest defiant civilians, workers, students, doctors and nurses.
In March, martial law was enforced in Yangon, snipers were used, and protesters were shot on sight.
To restrict news coverage of their crimes and to impede the organisatiojn of protests, the military ordered telecommunication companies to restrict internet and mobile phone coverage. Independent media outlets had their licences withdrawn, offices were raided and trashed.
Journalists were targeted and hunted by soldiers and police. Obscure laws were added to the penal code and used to restrict freedom of speech and expression. State-controlled media published pages of arrest warrants and photographs of the wanted, including journalists.
To avoid arrest, independent journalists went underground or sought refuge with border based ethnic armed organisations.
Myanmar journalists are well aware that being “arrested” and held in detention by the military doesn’t come with respect for their legal or human rights. The military uses a wide range of obscure laws, some dating back to colonial times, to detain, intimidate and silence its critics — academics, medics, journalists, students and workers.
95 journalists arrested
Independent website, Reporting ASEAN, recorded that, as of August 18, 95 journalists had been arrested and 42 were being held in detention.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) estimated by August 29 that the military has now killed at least 1026 people, arrested 7627, issued warrants for 1984 and are still holding 6025 in detention.
Journalists Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine pictured in a newspaper clipping. Image: Global New Light of Myanmar
They want names Those arrested are taken to interrogation centres and held indefinitely without contact with family or legal representation. Torture is used to extort names and contacts from the detained to be added to the military’s long list of those to be hunted down and suppressed into silence.
One of those names on the military’s wanted list is that of journalist Nyan Linn Htet, now in hiding, after a warrant under Section 505 (a) was issued for his arrest.
Nyan Linn Htet, managing editor of Mekong News, in an interview with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) explains the impact of being hunted has had on both him and his family.
“If I’m arrested it means I lose everything. When we had to run and go into hiding, we lost our home and our possessions. You lose your income. Your equipment. You never feel safe when hiding. Living like this affects all of us. If the military does not find me, they will pressure and threaten my family with arrest.”
Nyan Linn Htet said he is still working despite the risk of arrest.
“Losing a journalist is a big loss for our struggle for democracy. We’re only doing our job as reporters, but our news coverage exposes the military and its abuses – this is why we’re the enemy.”
Despite the danger to him and his family, Nyan Linn Htet worries about the safety of those who helped him avoid arrest.
‘Caught in hiding’
“If I’m caught in hiding, the SAC (military-appointed State Administration Council) will persecute the people who gave me a place to live. I’m afraid they [the military] will arrest those who helped me.”
His fears are well founded.
Journalist and political analyst Sithu Aung Myint was high on the military’s wanted list for his political commentary and published opposition to the coup.
On Sunday, August 15, the military raided the home of his colleague, BBC freelance producer, Htet Htet Khine, and arrested both of them.
A week later, in its Sunday, August 21, edition, the military-run newspaper, Global New Light of Myanmar, said Sithu Aung Myint had been charged with sedition, spreading “fake news” and being critical of the military coup leaders and its State Administration Council under Sections 505 (a) and 124 (a) of the Penal Code.
He could be sentenced to life in jail under Section 124 (a) of the penal code.
Htet Htet Khine was arrested for giving shelter to Sithu Aung Myint, and charged under section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act for working with the recently formed National Union Government’s radio station, Federal FM.
Held in interrogation centre
Friends and colleagues of Sithu Aung Myint and Htet Htet Khine told IFJ they are concerned both journalists were held at an interrogation centre for more than a week before having access to either legal help or contact with colleagues or family.
Nyan Linn Htet told IFJ he is aware his legal and human rights will not be respected if he is arrested.
“They will not let us get legal help until they’ve got what they want from us. The military amended 505 (a) of the Penal Code to prevent giving us bail. We know they will jail us even if we have legal representation.
“We know SAC is torturing journalists because of the work we do.”
Reports by local and international humanitarian groups have detailed the severe beatings — hours of maintaining stressed positions, use of sexual violence — and killing of people while held in detention.
Nyan Linn Htet said if arrested, he knows it will come with beatings. He admits that the thought of being tortured keeps him awake at night.
“They will jail me, but only after they torture me. I will not be released until I sign a statement that I will never criticise them. I’m not afraid of being arrested, but torture scares me. There are nights when I’m too afraid to sleep.”
International media drop Myanmar He and other local journalists told the IFJ it was disappointing that international media has dropped Myanmar from its news agenda and moved on to cover other stories.
Nyan Linn Htets said despite access difficulties, the international media can use local reporters who are willing to help.
“We know the difficulties media has getting ground access to Myanmar. Covid-19 restrictions also make it impossible to legally cross borders from neighboring countries, but we are already here in the country and are capable of doing the job.”
Despite the fear of arrest and torture, he is still reporting and urged local journalists to keep doing the same.
“It’s important we use what we can to still work and report news events of interest to people. People are accessing news and information in many different ways now.”
The military, while trashing local and international laws and ignoring its constitution, is quick to use and amend laws to jail its opponents for being critical of the coup and for reporting military violence, abuse and corruption.
We have no rights
Nan Paw Gay, editor-in-chief at the Karen Information Center, says the military council has no respect for journalists or their right to publish information in the public interest.
“There is no freedom of the press. If journalists try to report news or seek information from the military’s opponents — CRPH, NUG, CDM, G-Z and PDF — the State Administration Council prosecutes them under Section 17/1 of the Illegal Association Act.
“Since the military launched its coup, sources we use have had their freedom of speech and expression made illegal and they now risk arrest for talking to us and… we can be arrested for speaking with them.
“Independent media groups have been outlawed and totally lost their right to speak freely or write about news events.”
Nan Paw Gay points out if journalists are “critical of the military, its appointed State Administration Council or its lack of a public health plan to tackle the covid-19 pandemic now ravaging the country, section 505 (a) is used to arrest journalists for spreading false news.”
Essentially torture is used to terrorise journalists, he says.
“When the military council arrests and detains journalists, the torture is both physical and psychological. Even before being detained threats are issued and then during the arrest the violence becomes real – shootings, people being kicked and dragged from homes by their hair and beaten.”
Women journalists tortured
Nan Paw Gay says women journalists are more likely to be “tortured using psychological abuse – kept in a dark room and constantly told that they will be killed tomorrow – to mess and generate fear with their thoughts. You can see the effects of the tortured on some journalists when they appear in court – shaking hands and body spasms.”
Military brutality is a daily reality for Myanmar’s people. At the time of writing, the army is preparing to deploy and reinforce its bases with hundreds of extra troops into areas of the Karen National Union-controlled territory and where anti-coup protesters, striking doctors and politicians have been offered refuge and safety.
A senior ethnic Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldier told the IFJ that army drones and helicopters have been surveying the area in recent months.
“We know they’ve sent munitions and large troop numbers to our area… last time we had drones flying over our area, they later attacked villages and our positions with airstrikes. They’re already fighting in our Brigade 5 and 1 and have started in 6 and 2.”
Since the military launched its coup on February 1, there has been at least 500 armed battles between the KNU and the military regime and 70,000 Karen civilians have been displaced and are hiding in makeshift camps as a direct result of these attacks.
Fighter jets have flown into Karen National Union-controlled areas 27 times and dropped at least 47 bombs, killing 14 civilians and wounding 28.
Burning rice stores in Myanmar. Image: KIC
Naw K’nyaw Paw, general secretary of the Karen Women Organisation, in an interview with Karen News, said villagers displaced by the Myanmar Army attacks are now in desperate need of humanitarian aid.
‘Shoot at villagers’
“They shoot at villagers if they see them on their farms, burning down their rice barns and killing the livestock left behind. The Burma Army also arrests people when they see them and use them as human shields to protect them when attacked by Karen soldiers.”
Naw K’nyaw Paw said accessing the displaced villagers is difficult, especially during the wet season.
“The only accessible way in is on foot, supplies have to be carried through jungle. Given the restrictions due to covid-19 as well as the increasing Burma Army military operations, villagers are unable to return to their homes and they will need food, clothing and medicine, especially the young and old.”
Nan Paw Gay says the military’s strategy to muzzle the media is a familiar tactic that has been used before.
“Stop international media getting access to conflict areas, shut down independent media, hunt local journalists and when there’s no one to left to report, launch attacks in ethnic regions, displacing thousands of villagers.”
Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in South East 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.
