Inspector David Christoffersen said initially pro-Palestinian supporters were protesting lawfully. However, they decided to block the roadway, entrance and exit to the port.
“The group was warned they were obstructing the roadway and port operations and asked to move, however, they refused to do so.
“Six arrests were made, five for obstruction and one for disorderly behaviour,” Christoffersen said.
He said OC spray “was deployed on one occasion” and one officer was assaulted, suffering a split lip but not requiring medical attention.
‘Excessive force’ accusation
Some of the protesters have accused police of using excessive force to break up the demonstration.
Videos sent to RNZ show a man with raised arms tackled to the ground by an officer, while another shows police pushing back the protesters. Others said officers used headlocks and chokeholds, and one woman said a chunk of her hair was yanked out.
Protester Lillian Murray said about 40 officers were there. One protester, an elderly Muslim woman, was yanked up off the ground and shoved very excessively for any force that she could ever offer back”, Murray said.
“All of a sudden I feel a small but significant tuft of my own hair being yanked from the back of my head, and my leather bag with metal bindings was yanked backwards so hard that the bindings broke and the bag broke off my back.”
Police said the protesters were warned they were obstructing the port operations, but refused to move.
Murray said despite police warnings to move, she believed the protest was for the greater good.
“There’s perhaps the law and then there’s what’s well relationally, we’re small enough in Aotearoa for there to be a different track cut between police and protesters, a different way of being.
‘Reminiscent of Springbok tour protests’
“What I saw today was reminiscent on a smaller scale of videos that I’ve seen from the police brutality during the Springbok tour protests.”
The protest lasted for four hours, ending at 6pm.
Protesters were also asking workers to go on strike as a show of support for Palestinians.
Some port workers tooted their horns in support of the protesters. Others watched while the protesters tried to enlist their support.
A truck driver waiting in the carpark said he had been held up for three hours while trying to bring his truck into the port. He said many other trucks had also had their movements held up.
Christofferson said police had given the protesters some advice on holding their demonstration legally at a nearby site, however, this was ignored.
“This behaviour is unacceptable as it disrupts the operations of a busy workplace and puts those in the area at risk.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations or RICO Act has had a long and sordid history as a tool of state repression in the United States. Originally intended to dismantle large organized crime groups like the Mafia, this set of laws criminalizing membership in organizations engaged in “racketeering activity” has been applied to groups as diverse as the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, Donald Trump, and Atlanta elementary schoolteachers.
By levying trumped up charges and attempting to hold the entire movement culpable for specific actions, proponents of Cop City had hoped to divide and conquer by separating the more militant segments of the movement from their broader base of support. But thanks to the steadfast solidarity of the Stop Cop City movement, this has so far been unsuccessful.
As the first 61 RICO defendants are arraigned, the movement holds its breath. Public support is needed now more than ever. There’s still time to join the Block Cop City gathering in Atlanta from Nov 10 through 13, or organize an autonomous solidarity action near you.
Bruce Praet is a well-known name in law enforcement, especially across California. He co-founded a company called Lexipol that contracts with more than 95% of police departments in the state and offers its clients trainings and ready-made policies.
In one of Praet’s training webinars, posted online, he offers a piece of advice that policing experts have called inhumane. It’s aimed at protecting officers and their departments from lawsuits.
After police kill someone, they are supposed to notify the family. Praet advises officers to use that interaction as an opportunity. Instead of delivering the news of the death immediately, he suggests first asking about the person who was killed to get as much information as possible.
Reporter Brian Howey started looking into this advice when he was with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He found that officers have been using this tactic across California, and the information families disclosed before they knew their relative was killed affected their lawsuits later. In this hour, Howey interviews families that have been on the receiving end of this controversial policing tactic, explaining their experience and the lasting impact. Howey travels to Santa Ana, where he meets a City Council member leading an effort to end Lexipol’s contract in his city. And in a parking lot near Fresno, Howey tracks down Praet and tries to interview him about the consequences of his advice.
In April, as the Atlanta Police Foundation erected high fences with razor wire around the site of the planned Public Safety Training Center dubbed “Cop City,” Atlanta organizer Jaye C. began photographing the construction, poking her camera through the chain link fence, documenting as 33 acres of forest became part of a barren expanse. In March, police chased, tasered and arrested activists on…
Exclusive: Fraser Sampson says law is not keeping up with AI advances as police retain 3m images of innocent people
Britain is an “omni-surveillance” society with police forces in the “extraordinary” position of holding more than 3m custody photographs of innocent people more than a decade after being told to destroy them, the independent surveillance watchdog has said.
Fraser Sampson, who will end his term as the Home Office’s biometrics and surveillance commissioner this month, said there “isn’t much not being watched by somebody” in the UK and that the regulatory framework was “inconsistent, incomplete and in some areas incoherent”.
Exclusive: Human rights groups voice alarm as letter to headteachers reveals plan for more visible patrols
Metropolitan police officers have been instructed to increase intelligence-gathering activities at London schools in response to the Israel-Hamas war, ramping up concerns among human rights groups about the surveillance of children.
Officers were briefed to “increase their visible patrols” at schools and engage with school staff in order to obtain information about “community tensions”, according to a letter sent to headteachers.
Human rights campaigners say the Pegasus initiative wrongly criminalises people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people
Some of Britain’s biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury’s, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people.
A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers – also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark – saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will “amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system”.
A well-known Vietnamese human rights lawyer and his family have arrived in the United States a year after they were stopped by police from boarding a flight to New York.
Vo An Don landed at Washington’s Dulles International Airport on Thursday with his wife and three children. He told Radio Free Asia that they were able to leave Vietnam without any obstacles.
“Arriving in a country of freedom made me very happy,” he said. “Everything went very well as the International Organization for Migration supported and created favorable conditions for us.”
Don represented defendants in high-profile, politically sensitive cases, including blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, also known as Mother Mushroom, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison in June 2017 for “spreading propaganda against the state.”
Last year, he told RFA that he and his family had decided to seek asylum in the United States because they were suffering harassment by authorities in his home province of Phu Yen and economic hardship since he could no longer work as a lawyer.
The Washington-based International Organization for Migration secured funding for the family’s airfare, but authorities at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City wouldn’t allow them to board their flight in September 2022.
Airport police told him he would need to contact immigration authorities in Phu Yen for an explanation of why he was barred from traveling overseas.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit last month to Hanoi paved the way for police to allow him to travel, Don posted on Facebook. Just before Biden arrived, police advised Don that the exit ban on him and his family had been lifted, he wrote.
“The truth is they wanted me to stay in Vietnam as a hostage for negotiations with the U.S. until they got what they wanted,” he wrote. “Then they let me go as a human rights gift.”
‘Traded like a type of good’
A decade ago, Don represented the wife of a criminal suspect who was beaten to death by police in 2012. He also defended four Vietnamese citizens who were jailed in 2017 after sailing to Australia in search of work.
In 2017, he was stripped of his license to practice law after he posted a comment on Facebook that said lawyers in Vietnam regularly use payoffs to win cases for their clients.
On Thursday, Don and his family flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, after arriving at Dulles. They were scheduled to board another flight to Fayetteville, Arkansas, their final destination.
On Facebook, Don cited Vietnam’s Constitution, which says “citizens have the right to freedom of movement and residence inside and outside the country without any obstruction.”
Instead, authorities treat people in Vietnam “like dirt,” he wrote.
“They’re bullied and oppressed, and when they want to leave the country, they are traded like a type of good,” he wrote. “I am a human, not a pet for them to give visitors as a gift.”
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
Police in Tibet beat and detained a prominent Tibetan language advocate and entrepreneur, and shut down his shop after he posteda video of Chinese government staff refusing his request to register for a business license, two Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said.
The Oct. 17 incident left Tashi Wangchuk, a former political prisoner, with a small gash over his left eye and got him three days in detention before he was released, said a source from inside the region who declined to be identified out of fear of retribution by authorities.
Wangchuk had opened a car wash station in Yushu city and applied for a business license, but his request was denied, the Tibetan said. He recorded the incident on his cell phone and posted the video on his WeChat account.
“For that reason, he was detained and beaten by the local Chinese police,” he said.
“The local Chinese authorities have alleged Tashi Wangchuk of offending them by spreading and sharing videos of the incident on his social media,” the source from inside the region said.
Radio Free Asia could not reach Yushu City police by phone for comment.
Wangchuk’s encounter with police comes at a time when the Chinese government has intensified its efforts to suppress Tibetan culture, language and religion and to forcibly assimilate the Tibetan identity into the dominant Han-Chinese majority.
It has eroded the use of Tibetan language as medium of instruction in schools and persecuted those who advocate for its continuance.
Previous arrest, torture
Another Tibetan, who lives in exile and knows about the matter said the Yushu City Police Bureau Chief and Deputy Mayor Ye Husai were among those who brutally beat Wangchuk.
“Tashi Wangchuk never accepted that he violated any law by posting the video on his social media,” said the source, who declined to be identified for the same reason. “Instead, he was only exercising his freedom of speech.”
Chinese authorities arrested and tortured Wangchuk in 2016 because of a New York Times documentary released a year earlier in which he advocated for the use of the Tibetan language in government offices and in education.
He was held in pre-trial detention for two years, and in May 2018 was sentenced to five years in prison for “inciting separatism”
Wangchuk was released in January 2021, but remains subject to a five-year deprivation of political rights, according to PEN America, a U.S. organization that advocated for freedom of expression worldwide.
This August, a group of unidentified men in eastern Tibet attacked Wangchuk who was staying at a hotel in Darlak county after traveling there to raise awareness about the disappearance of the Tibetan language in schools, RFA reported, based on a report by London-based rights group Free Tibet.
Pema Gyal, a Tibetan researcher at Tibet Watch, a London-based advocacy and monitoring group, condemned Wangchuk’s latest beating and detention.
“Earning a livelihood remains increasingly difficult for former political prisoners who are also deprived of their political rights,” he said. “Even after their release from prison, they are subjected to constant surveillance and harassment by security officials and the crackdown has been very prominent.”
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi of RFA Tibetan. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pelbar for RFA Tibetan.
The racist cops who stopped international athletes Bianca Williams and Ricardo dos Santos have been sacked – but not for their racism. Meanwhile, someone has set up a crowdfunding page for the sacked racist cops – with ex-cops supporting it openly on X. Yet the UK is not a racist, colonialist endeavour – is it?
Mr dos Santos, 28, was stopped along with his partner and fellow Team GB star Ms Williams, 29, in their Mercedes with their three-month baby son outside their home in Maida Vale, West London, on July 4, 2020.
A police disciplinary panel found the officers’ claims of smelling marijuana when they stopped the vehicle were made-up and the pair were dismissed for gross misconduct. Three other officers involved in the arrest, which saw the couple handcuffed and searched for drugs and weapons, were cleared of any wrongdoing.
So, in case you were in any doubt:
Met police officers stopped dos Santos and Williams – because they were Black.
They lied about smelling weed – because dos Santos and Williams were Black.
Metropolitan Police officers cuffed them for 45 minutes – because they were Black.
If it walks like a racist cop… etc, etc – as dos Santos himself pointed out on Good Morning Britain (GMB):
'Its a stereotype that they have that every black person smokes.'
Two Metropolitan Police officers have been sacked after being found guilty of gross misconduct over the stop and search of two black athletes. Olympian Ricardo dos Santos and Team GB's Bianca Williams were… pic.twitter.com/Q1LS7pQTtM
Yet somehow, the police disciplinary panel concluded that racism was not a factor in the cops’ treatment of dos Santos and Williams – despite sacking them.
Fellow racists, however, thought these cops were harshly treated.
A double whammy: racism AND misogynoir all in one X post
Someone has set up a crowdfunder for the poor, white, filth. It pleads poverty and ‘think of the children’. But maybe if the sacked cops had thought of their children, they might not have been racist pigs in the first place.
Ex-cops (but likely current racists) openly admitted to donating to the crowdfunder on X:
Folks out with team of friends a couple have two MET officers in their family; we discussed the amateur dramatics of Bianca Williams & her partner Santos who fitted MET officers up by fleeing when they should have stopped; all 7 of us are making donation to the Appeal tomorrowpic.twitter.com/JZGvBTn24Q
However, aside from cementing the idea that the Met Police is a racist old boys club, this dinosaur branding Williams’ distress as “amateur dramatics” is also misogynoir in action.
Back in July, Met cops arrested a Black woman with her child for dodging a bus fare – when she actually hadn’t. When the woman rightly challenged the cops, they escalated the situation. Right-wing racists at the time blamed the Black woman for her arrest because she ‘didn’t go quietly’ – much like the ex-cop labelling Williams’ response as “amateur dramatics”. However, as one X user pointed out in July, these:
responses of ‘she should have stopped,’ ‘just cooperated,’ ‘abusive’ are… unsurprising. Those responses come from those who, from a young age, have not witnessed their loved ones manhandled without dignity, whose body does not stiffen in fear of being accused because of what their skin colour represents to others, who are not adultified… as children, who have to ensure they print a receipt for a bottle of milk to show to a uniformed person in the supermarket…
Classism: doubling-down on the racism
Of course, the bigger point here is that the institutionally racist Met Police stops, searches, cuffs, and abuses Black people day in, day out – because they are Black. Yet cops rarely face any consequences for this. It points to the classism that exists within racist, colonialist, UK society. If you’re poor and Black, then you have to suck it up when the cops are abusive and violent towards you. However, if you’re an Olympic athlete – then you have access to recourse.
That’s not to dismiss the trauma cops inflicted on dos Santos, Williams, and their child – and the trauma that will stay with them. It’s to point out that this kind of outcome – where cops are held to account – is a rarity:
Good that the officers were found guilty of gross misconduct and sacked.
However, its shameful that the Met still won't admit, that institutional racism plagues its treatment of Black adults AND children in London.https://t.co/lj5aHETkKY
As I previously wrote for the Canary, the child of the Black woman who cops abused over her bus fare will live with that experience for the rest of his life, likely with no support dealing with it:
the saddest part of this story is that the young boy was witness to cops’ treatment of his mother – and with institutional change unlikely, society will allow this cycle to repeat itself throughout his life also. If this is how police treat Black adults, how are young Black children supposed to feel safe around them? This child witnessed police brutalising his mother – and then, days later, it was revealed another Black man has died after contact with cops, also in Croydon.
StopWatch is disappointed that the intimidatory tactics of the officers who stopped Ricardo and Bianca were not fully recognised in the panel’s decision.
Although two of the officers have been found guilty of gross misconduct, the entire unit has been let off the hook for discriminatory behaviour obvious to any Black person who has been stopped in a vehicle in London.
We fear that police officers will feel emboldened to continue to perform vehicle stops in an overtly aggressive manner, especially towards Black people, many of whom know that Driving While Black carries a heightened risk of harassment and abuse from the Met.
No, the UK’s not racist. Not at all.
So, it seems that not only did the cops in the dos Santos and Williams case get away with their racism, but the Met will have learned nothing from these events. Meanwhile, racist ex-cops cry on X while others donate thousands to a cop crowdfunder. As one person pointed out:
The commitment to show compassion to lying racist Police, by certain demographics who claim the UK is not raaaayciss. Always showing their whole ass. https://t.co/LoSuUStC9d
Black people should not have to tolerate this any more. Unfortunately, as the dos Santos and Williams case has shown, and continues to show, nothing is changing any time soon. The Met is a mirror of UK society – where systemic and institutional racism dominates, while white people claim otherwise.
Cambodian authorities have arrested 30 people for illegally producing pornography, prompting an outcry over how such content has “damaged the honor” of a conservative Buddhist country increasingly at odds with its reputation as a nightlife destination.
On Tuesday night, police raided a condominium in Phnom Penh and detained several Chinese and Vietnamese nationals, as well as Cambodians, they say had set up a studio to film erotic videos.
Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Ministry of Interior spokesman Touch Sokhak said the order to raid the building in the capital’s Boeung Keng Kang district had come directly from Interior Minister Sar Sokha.
Attempts by RFA Khmer to contact the Ministry of Interior and the police for comment on the arrests went unanswered on Thursday, but National Police spokesman Chhay Kim Khoeun confirmed to local media that authorities are questioning the suspects to determine whether they will bring charges against them.
Convictions on charges of illegally producing pornography are punishable by up to a year in prison in Cambodia. Authorities have typically sent Cambodian women arrested in similar cases to the country’s Social Affairs Center for “rehabilitation.”
Ros Sotha, executive Director of the Cambodian Coalition for the Defense of Human Rights, or CHRAC, told RFA that the production of pornography has “seriously damaged the prestige of Cambodian women and degraded the national culture.”
“Cambodia is a civilized country that maintains peace of mind without being obsessed with greed, guilt, delusion and talk about sexual desire,” he said.
He expressed concern that the nation is becoming “a place for foreigners to conduct illegal business and force Cambodian women into situations that bring shame on society.”
Police in Cambodia detained several Chinese and Vietnamese nationals, as well as Cambodians, in the raid on the condominium in Phnom Penh, Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. Credit: Facebook/Ministry of Interior Spokesman Touch Sokhak
But Ros Sotha also warned against the impact pornography might have on the public.
“These sex videos can provoke people to become sexually promiscuous and possibly commit sexual crimes such as raping their children or forcing sex on others without their consent,” he said. “This is an abuse of both our culture and the law.”
He called on authorities to crack down on such crimes.
Legality vs morality
While pornography is illegal in Cambodia, the process used to define what constitutes such content is less clear and increasingly fraught, as the nation walks a fine line between upholding traditional values and billing itself as a travel destination for budget-conscious backpackers and tourists.
In March 2018, a court in Cambodia handed British national Daniel Jones a one-year suspended prison sentence for using “pornographic” photos to promote a pool party in Siem Reap – home to the country’s famed Angkor Wat temple complex – two months earlier.
In handing down the maximum sentence, Judge Um Chan Thol said Jones had “unintentionally produced pornography that affects Khmer culture.”
Authorities have also fined and deported several tourists for taking nude photos at Angkor Wat, which had implemented a ban on wearing “revealing clothing” at the site in 2016.
Translated by Yun, Samean. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Khmer.
By Aubrey Belford, Stevan Dojcinovic, Jared Savage and Kelvin Anthony in an OCCRP investigation
The operator of a Pacific-wide network of pharmacy companies, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji, was sentenced to four years prison in New Zealand in August for illegally importing millions of dollars worth of pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical of methamphetamine.
Umarji, a Fijian national, had long been a target of police in his home country but had for years escaped justice thanks to what Fijian and international law enforcement say was an unwillingness by the previous authoritarian government of Voreqe Bainimarama to seriously tackle meth and cocaine trafficking.
Fiji’s new government, which was elected last December, is now investigating donations that Umarji and his family made to the previous ruling party, as well as “potential connections” to top law enforcement officials.
Until recently, Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji was — in public at least — a pillar of Fiji’s business community.
With ownership of a Pacific-wide pharmacy network, Umarji and his family were significant donors to the party that repressively ruled the country until it lost power in elections last December. He was also a major figure in sports, serving as a vice president of the Fiji Football Association and as a committee member in soccer’s global governing body, FIFA.
And he did it all as an internationally wanted drug trafficker.
Umarji’s fall finally came in August this year, after he ended a period of self-imposed exile in India and surrendered himself to authorities in New Zealand to face years-old charges. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in prison for importing at least NZ$5-$6 million (US$2.9-3.5 million) worth of pseudoephedrine — a precursor for methamphetamine – into the country.
But behind the conviction of Umarji, 47, lies a far murkier story of impunity, a joint investigation by an Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), The Fiji Times, The New Zealand Herald and Radio New Zealand has found.
Aiyaz Mohammed Musa Umarji (right) shakes hands with Fiji Football Association President Rajesh Patel. Image: Baljeet Singh/The Fiji Times
Umarji was able to thrive for years amid a failure by senior officials of Fiji’s previous authoritarian government to confront a rise in meth and cocaine trafficking through the Pacific Island country.
And when New Zealand authorities finally issued an international warrant for his arrest, Umarji was able to flee Fiji under suspicious circumstances.
Reporters found that Umarji and his family donated at least F$70,000 (US$31,000) to the country’s former ruling party, FijiFirst, in the years after he was first put under investigation. This included F$20,000 (US$8,700) given to the party ahead of last December’s election — roughly three years after he was first charged.
The party’s general secretary, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, was Fiji’s long-serving attorney-general and justice minister at the time.
Reporters also found that the Umarji family’s business network has continued to expand despite his legal troubles, and currently operates in three Pacific countries. The newest of these pharmacy companies, in Vanuatu, was founded just last year.
Fiji’s Minister for Immigration and Home Affairs, Pio Tikoduadua, told OCCRP an investigation has been opened into how Umarji was able to flee the country.
Ships at anchor in the harbour of Fiji’s capital, Suva. Image: Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific
He said authorities are also investigating donations Umarji and his family made to FijiFirst, and any “potential connections” he may have had to top officials in the former government, including Sayed-Khaiyum and the now-suspended Police Commissioner, Sitiveni Qiliho.
“Certainly, I am deeply concerned about the potential influence of drug traffickers in Fiji, especially over officials and law enforcement,” Tikoduadua said.
“The infiltration of these criminal elements poses a significant risk to our society and institutions.”
Umarji declined a request for an interview and did not respond to follow-up questions. His Auckland lawyer, David PH Jones, said a request from reporters contained “numerous loaded questions which contain unsubstantiated assertions, a number of which have little or nothing to do with Mr Umarji’s prosecution”.
Sayed-Khaiyum and Qiliho did not respond to written questions.
‘A hub of the Pacific’ The rise in drug trafficking through Fiji is just one part of a booming trans-Pacific trade that experts and law enforcement say has become one of the world’s most profitable.
In Australia, the most recent data shows that drug seizures have more than quadrupled over the last decade, and Australians now consume 4.7 tonnes of cocaine and 8.8 tonnes of meth a year. In much smaller New Zealand, drug users strongly prefer meth to cocaine, consuming roughly 720 kilograms a year.
Consumers in both countries pay some of the highest prices on earth for cocaine and meth, much of it exported from the Americas. Lying in the vast blue expanse between the two points are the Pacific Islands.
The Pacific meth cocaine route map. Map: Edin Pasovic/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific
“Fiji is a hub of the Pacific. You’ve got the ports, you’ve got the infrastructure, and you’ve got the ability to come in and out either by [water] craft or by airplane,” said Glyn Rowland, the New Zealand Police senior liaison officer for the Pacific.
“So that really leaves Fiji quite vulnerable to be in that transit route off to New Zealand and off to Australia.”
Fiji has long been eyed by international organised crime for its strategic location close to Australia and New Zealand’s multi-billion dollar drug markets.
In the early 2000s, for example, an international police operation took apart a “super lab” in Fiji’s capital, Suva, run by Chinese gangsters with enough precursor chemicals to produce a tonne of meth.
But after early successes, Fiji in recent years went cold on the fight against hard drugs.
The previous government of Voreqe Bainimarama, who first took power in a 2006 coup, showed little interest in tackling meth and cocaine trafficking, according to current and former law enforcement officers from Fiji and the US. Despite recent signs that trafficking was increasing, the police force under Bainimarama’s hand-picked commissioner, Qiliho, seemed to overlook the problem, the officers told OCCRP.
Bainimarama did not respond to questions.
Ernie Verina, the Oceania attaché for US Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said his agency had become worried about trafficking through Fiji.
In mid-2022, HSI assigned an agent to be based in the country. But when the agent raised the issue of meth with top officials from Bainimarama’s government, he was met with total pushback, Verina said.
“Categorically, like, ‘There is no meth’,” Verina said of the Fijian response.
“That’s what they told the agent.”
A lot of influence Despite high-level denials, Fiji’s narcotics police were very much aware of the country’s drug trafficking crisis. In fact, they had long had Umarji in their sights. But he was a difficult target.
As far back as 2017, Umarji was identified as “one of the tier one” suspected traffickers in the country, said Serupepeli Neiko, the head of the Fiji Police’s Narcotics Bureau.
Umarji’s hometown of Lautoka, Fiji. Image: Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific
While the drug trade through Fiji is also the domain of transnational organised crime groups, Umarji was suspected of having carved out a niche for himself by using his network of pharmacies, Hyperchem, to legally import pseudoephedrine and divert it onto the black market, Neiko said.
In early 2017, Umarji and one of his colleagues were charged with weapons possession after scores of rifle bullets were found on his yacht, moored in his hometown of Lautoka. But the charges were “squashed in court,” Neiko said.
“So that gave a red flag to us that a [drug trafficking] case against Umarji would have been challenging as well.”
A former senior Fijian officer, who declined to be identified because he is not authorised to speak to the media, put it more bluntly: “Umarji had a lot of influence with the previous government.”
Reporters found no evidence that any senior Fijian officials intervened against investigations into Umarji. But the perception that he had influence was powerful, current and former police officers said.
Indeed, since the fall of Bainimarama’s government last year, multiple senior officials have faced charges that they abused their positions, but none have been convicted.
The suspended police commissioner, Qiliho, and the former prime minister, Bainimarama, were both acquitted by a court on October 12 of charges that they had illegally interfered in a separate police investigation.
Former Attorney-General Sayed-Khaiyum is also currently facing prosecution in another unrelated abuse of office case.
Despite becoming a top-level police target, Umarji continued to expand his influence in Fiji.
Company records show that, in 2015, he and his wife, Zaheera Cassim, opened Hyperchem companies in Fiji, Solomon Islands, and a now-defunct branch in Samoa.
In May 2017, Umarji opened a new company, Bio Pharma, in New Zealand.
Ahead of elections the following year, Umarji and his relatives donated a total of at least F$50,000 to the FijiFirst party, declarations from the Fiji Elections Office show.
Umarji also made a name for himself in soccer, getting elected a vice-president of the Fiji Football Association in December 2019.
Pills and cash By 2019, it was clear that avenues for a Fijian investigation were closed. So police in New Zealand stepped in instead. Reporters were able to reconstruct what happened next via court records and interviews.
While seconded that year to Fiji’s Transnational Crime Unit, New Zealand detective Peter Reynolds heard whispers about Umarji’s alleged criminal activity from his local colleagues. On returning to New Zealand, he decided to take things into his own hands.
Digging through police files, Reynolds found a lucky break in a case from nearly two years prior.
In late 2017, an anonymous member of the public had reached out to an anti-crime hotline with a tip that a businessman, Firdos “Freddie” Dalal, had a suspicious amount of money in his home in suburban Auckland.
Acting on a warrant, police made their way inside and found NZ$726,190 in cash and 4000 boxes of Actifed, a cold and flu medicine that contains pseudoephedrine.
Umarji NZ route map. Image: Edin Pasovic, James O’Brien/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific
Known as Operation Duet, the investigation that led to Dalal’s conviction provided the information that Reynolds needed to go after Umarji. It turned out that Dalal, who owned an Auckland-based freight forwarding company, was also listed as the director of Umarji’s New Zealand company, Bio Pharma.
Reynolds soon figured out how it all worked. Using his Pacific-wide Hyperchem network, Umarji ordered Actifed pills to be delivered from abroad to his pharmacies in Fiji and Solomon Islands. The shipments were set to transit through New Zealand, where Dalal’s forwarding company was responsible for the cargo.
While the drugs sat in a restricted customs holding area, Dalal simply went inside and swapped them out for other other medicine, such as anti-fungal cream, which was then sent on to their island destinations. The purloined pseudoephedrine was sold on New Zealand’s black market.
Dalal did not respond to questions.
In just three shipments between January and October 2017, Umarji’s operation brought in an estimated 678,000 Actifed pills containing about 40.7 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, Auckland District Court would later find.
But if deciphering Umarji’s operation was straightforward, arresting him would prove anything but.
New Zealand Police filed charges against Umarji in December 2019, but Reynolds told the Auckland court that he believed they faced little chance of getting Umarji to voluntarily fly to Auckland and show up in court.
“If the summons were to be served it would likely result in Umarji fleeing [Fiji] to a country that has no extradition arrangements with New Zealand,” the detective said in an affidavit.
So New Zealand authorities decided to go through the arduous process of requesting extradition. In November 2021, a Fijian court agreed to the request, and New Zealand Police issued an Interpol red notice.
Despite all the effort, within days Fiji Police had to contact their New Zealand counterparts with an embarrassing admission: Umarji had fled the country, and was in India.
New Zealand Police’s Pacific liaison, Rowland, declined to comment on how Umarji was able to flee Fiji, but added: “The reality is, sometimes corruption isn’t about what you do. Sometimes corruption is about what you don’t do, or turn a blind eye to.”
Despite his legal troubles, Umarji remained a respectable public figure in Fiji, thanks in part to a restrictive media environment that made it difficult for reporters to look into him in detail.
In May 2021, while Umarji was still in Fiji and his extradition case was pending, he was elected to FIFA’s governance, audit and compliance committee. He kept the position even after his flight abroad later that year, and was re-elected unopposed as Fiji Football Association vice president this June. He only resigned both positions on August 7, two days before his sentencing.
FIFA and the Fiji Football Association did not respond to questions.
Umarji also made little effort to hide during his exile in India. At one stage last year, he recorded an online video testimonial for a stem cell clinic outside of Delhi where he said he was getting treatment for diabetes.
His family’s second round of donations to FijiFirst, F$20,000 ahead of last December’s elections, were similarly made while Umarji was on the run.
But the drug trafficker eventually tired of exile.
In early 2022, he first contacted his high-powered Auckland lawyer, Jones, to arrange his surrender to New Zealand Police. He pleaded guilty to the Auckland court earlier this year and was allowed to return to Fiji to sort his affairs before handing himself in for sentencing.
Hyperchem’s warehouse and office in Lautoka. Image Aubrey Belford/OCCRP/RNZ Pacific
New focus With Umarji now in prison, Fijian authorities say they are continuing to investigate his operations.
Umarji’s pharmaceutical business continues to run with his wife, Cassim, at its head. Cassim has for years been a significant public face for the businesses, including publicising its charitable work. She declined to respond to reporters’ questions.
OCCRP visited Umarji’s companies in Lautoka in late June, during the period in which he was allowed by the New Zealand court to briefly return to Fiji. Reporters found a bustling network of businesses, including a well-staffed warehouse and office on the edge of town for Hyperchem.
Reporters contacted Umarji by phone from the warehouse’s reception area, but he declined to come out for an interview and referred reporters to his lawyer.
Homeland Security Investigations’ Verina said the new government of Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has since removed roadblocks to investigating these sort of trafficking operations.
“We have started to see enforcement operations and arrests and holding individuals accountable for the methamphetamine smuggling,” Verina said.
An Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) investigation. Additional reporting by Lydia Lewis (RNZ) and George Block (New Zealand Herald). This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Vietnamese authorities have arrested a popular lingerie model known as the “Underwear Queen” on charges of “disturbing social order” after she posted photos of herself riding a motorcycle in an unsafe manner, according to state media.
Officers from the Ho Chi Minh City Police Investigation Agency on Thursday searched the home of Tran Thi Ngoc Trinh, 34, in the city’s District 7 before taking her into custody, where she admitted to violating the country’s Law on Road Traffic by driving with no hands and lying down on her motorcycle, the official Thanh Nien newspaper reported.
Police also launched legal proceedings against 36-year-old Tran Xuan Dong, who trained Ngoc Trinh how to ride motorcycles, for “counterfeiting official documents” and “disturbing social order,” the report said. He has been prohibited from leaving his residence.
According to Thanh Nien, Ngoc Trinh and Tran Xuan Dong used a high-performance motorcycle to conduct a street performance on road D15 in Ho Chi Minh City’s High-Tech Park on Oct. 6 that included “dangerous actions and objectionable positions” such as lying down and kneeling on the seat, riding hands-free, and placing both legs on one side of the vehicle.
Last month, the duo organized a gathering and motorcycle performance on Tran Bach Dang Road to perform similar stunts, which were filmed and posted to Ngoc Trinh’s social media channels. The video went viral, generating nearly 500,000 likes, 5,000 comments, 10,000 views, and 6,000 shares as of last week.
Thanh Nien cited authorities in Ho Chi Minh City as saying that the videos had negatively affected public security, order, safety, and set the wrong example of the country’s youth.
Ngoc Trinh, from the southern coastal Tra Vinh province, won the Miss Vietnam International pageant in 2011.
She began her fashion career at the age of 16, before competing in a model contest. Famous for the risque photos she posts featuring herself in lingerie, Ngoc Trinh boasts some 6 million followers on her verified Facebook account.
Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
— Hermann Goering, German military commander and Hitler’s designated successor
For those who remember the days and months that followed 9/11, there is an unnerving feeling of déjà vu about the Hamas attacks on Israel.
The same shocking images of carnage and grief dominating the news. The same disbelief that anyone could be so hateful, so monstrous, so evil as to do this to another human being. The same outpourings of support and unity from around the world. The same shared fear that this could easily have happened to us or our loved ones.
Now once again the drums of war are sounding on the world stage, not that they ever really stopped. Israel is preparing to invade Gaza, the Palestinians are nearing a humanitarian crisis, and the rest of the world is bracing for whatever blowback comes next.
Here in the United States, as we approach the 22nd anniversary of the USA Patriot Act on October 26, we’re still grappling with the blowback that arises from allowing one’s freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security.
Here are a few lessons that we never learned or learned too late.
Mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer. Rushed through Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, undermined civil liberties, expanded the government’s powers and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance by the government on American citizens.
Pre-emptive strikes will only lead to further blowback. Not content to wage war against Afghanistan, which served as the base for Osama bin Laden, the U.S. embarked on a pre-emptive war against Iraq in order to “stop any adversary challenging America’s military superiority and adopt a strike-first policy against terrorist threats ‘before they’re fully formed.’” We are still suffering the consequences of this failed policy, which resulted in lives lost, taxpayer dollars wasted, the fomenting of hatred against the U.S. and the further radicalization of terrorist cells.
War is costly. There are many reasons to go to war, but those who have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that have profited most from these endless military occupations and exercises. Thus far, the U.S. taxpayer has been made to shell out more than $8 trillion to wage wars abroad, including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt. That also does not include the more than hundreds of thousands of civilians killed, or the millions displaced from their homes as a result of endless drone strikes and violence.
Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not reduce acts of terrorism, but it will result in a watched, submissive, surveillance society. Not only did the USA Patriot Act normalize the government’s mass surveillance powers, but it also dramatically expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens without much of any oversight. Thus, a byproduct of this post 9/11-age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere. We have all become data collected in government files.
News cycle distractions are calibrated to ensure that you lose sight of what the government is doing. The average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state. Whether these events are critical or unimportant, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. In this way, regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions that keep the citizenry tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles also keep them tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on their freedoms.
If you stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it abides by will be the ones used to clamp down on the citizenry. Having failed to hold government officials accountable to abiding by the rule of law, the American people have found themselves saddled with a government that skirts, flouts and violates the Constitution with little consequence. Overcriminalization, asset forfeiture schemes, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, warrantless surveillance, SWAT team raids, indefinite detentions, covert agencies, and secret courts are just a few of the egregious practices carried out by a government that operates beyond the reach of the law.
Do not turn your country into a battlefield, your citizens into enemy combatants, and your law enforcement officers into extensions of the military. A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the citizenry of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead? It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, we in America now find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
As long as you remain fearful and distrustful of each other, you will be incapable of standing united against any threats posed by a power-hungry government. Early on, U.S. officials solved the problem of how to implement their authoritarian policies without incurring a citizen uprising: fear. The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers). They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being. Most of all, they want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.
Once you trade your freedom for security, the terrorists win. We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state. And in so doing, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
It took a long time to clear away the rubble from the 9/11 attacks.
A peace researcher and other pro-Palestinian supporters are calling on Auckland Museum to apologise over a furore about the “unethical” lighting of the main building in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag.
Researcher Dr Arama Rata said she wanted the museum to issue a formal apology to the community over the insensitivity over the lights incident last night.
Israeli security forces have been bombing Gaza daily for the past week with at least 2215 Palestinians killed and 8714 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Among the dead are 720 children.
The Israeli forces are poised for a massive air, sea and ground invasion of the enclave of about 2.3 million people.
The bombing is in retaliation for an attack by the Hamas military wing into southern Israel last Saturday which left 1300 people dead, including 265 soldiers, and more than 3300 wounded.
“Auckland Museum is supposed to be a welcoming place for all members of our community. Their actions tonight have caused deep divisions for people who are already hurting,” Dr Rata said.
‘Horrors of wars’
“The museum is entrusted with many of our taonga, and regularly holds exhibitions helping us to remember the horrors of wars.
“Their actions today show they have no respect for human suffering. Their actions were highly unethical.”
“We were appalled to see Auckland Museum lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag at a time when Israel is conducting slaughter — there is no other word for it — of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
“Palestinians are used to seeing such awful behaviour from Euro-centric institutions such as the museum.”
JUST IN
Auckland Museum decided to project on their building front apartheid Israel’s flag as it commits a literal genocide in Gaza,, and it got quickly surrounded by a flood of Palestine flags booing the genocidal museum pic.twitter.com/mOXsHxLfm0
According to a statement by the protest group, the museum posted on its Instagram social media account a message saying, “This evening, your museum is lit in blue and white in solidarity with Israel. Our thoughts go out to the many civilians impacted as a result of the terrorist attack a week ago today.”
An image of the main building showing the blue and white light accompanied the message.
‘Free Palestine’ call
Within hours, about 100 people had gathered outside the museum, many holding Palestine flags and chanting “free Palestine”.
Cars with Palestinian flags also drove in procession around the museum, drivers honking their horns and blaring music.
An argument developed between Palestine supporters and a small group of Israel supporters who had also gathered at the foot of the hill below the museum, holding Israeli flags.
By 9pm, the museum lights had been turned off. Later, white lights were turned back on, according to the protesters’ statement.
Palestine supporters subsequently covered the lights with red fabric.
Israel faces widespread condemnation from the international community for issuing an evacuation order for more than a million people living in northern Gaza.
On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?
At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.
During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:
1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.
2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.
3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.
4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.
5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).
6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.
7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.
8.The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.
9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.
10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.
11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.
12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.
The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.
Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.
Nicole Chase was a young mom with a daughter to support when she took a job at a local restaurant in Canton, Connecticut. She liked the work and was good at her job. But the place turned out to be more like a frat house than a quaint roadside sandwich spot. And the crude behavior kept escalating – until one day she says her boss went too far and she turned to the local police for help. What happened next would lead to a legal battle that dragged on for years. The U.S. Supreme Court would even get involved.
Reveal reporter Rachel de Leon spent years taking a close look at cases across the country in which people reported sexual assaults to police, only to find themselves investigated. In this hour, we explore one case and hear how police interrogated an alleged perpetrator, an alleged victim and each other.
De Leon’s investigation is also the subject of a documentary, “Victim/Suspect,” now streaming on Netflix.
A Suva court has acquitted the former Fijian prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama and the suspended police chief Sitiveni Qiliho.
Bainimarama was facing charges of perverting the course of justice, while Qiliho was facing charges of abuse of office.
According to local media reports, Magistrate Seini Puamau said yesterday the state had failed to establish a compelling case against the two defendants.
The magistrate found both men not guilty for attempting to stop investigations relating to a police complaint filed by the University of the South Pacific in 2020.
“According to their charge sheet, it was alleged that Bainimarama sometime in July 2020 as the Prime Minister directed the Police Commissioner [Qiliho] to stop the investigation into a police complaint, in the abuse of the authority of his office, which was an arbitrary act prejudicial to the rights of the University of the South Pacific which is the complainant,” fijivillage.com reported.
“It was alleged that Qiliho on the 15th of July, 2020 as the Police Commissioner directed the Director of the Criminal Investigations Department, Serupepeli Neiko and Inspector Reshmi Dass to stop investigations into the police complaint by the USP, in the abuse of the authority of his office, which was arbitrary act of prejudicial to the rights to USP.”
Thanked God, supporters
Outside the government buildings in Suva, Bainimarama and Qiliho thanked their supporters and God for their prayers.
“We want to thank the many prayers from relatives and friends that have said on our behalf,” Bainimarama told local media.
The former prime minister said the charges against them were “trumped up” and the “truth will prevail”.
Asked what his next move was, suspended commissioner Qiliho said “that’s the call of the Constitutional Offices Commission”.
“But right now I just want to extol my lord Jesus Christ, I’m going to say my prayers,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”
He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.
Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state. This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.
A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point. He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.” Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.
Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector, made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is. See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:
Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification. It was a war of aggression. Millions died as a result. And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes. The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see. Very, very easy to see.
On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:
The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future. The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.
Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.
I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth. It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework. Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all. I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional. Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues. Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?
Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons. It causes me to shake my head in amazement. When will people learn? How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex. There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.
If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns. So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order. Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework. All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.
My Known Knowns:
The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.This is The foundational event for everything that has followed. It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad. They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.
Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state. This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975. The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.
In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well. In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others. Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.
On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy. King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range. RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.
The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies. These men were war criminals of the highest order. Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war. This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.
The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.
Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush. As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election. They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981. American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.
The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.
Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia. He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children. When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”
The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state. Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States. Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.
The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.
Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state. When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St. Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc. In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq. He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America. He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia. He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.
Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.” He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister. As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.” And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.” The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.
This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign. It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty. It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state. The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.” A close study of these precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident. The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state. Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start. The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.” It is a process “to make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus. That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.
Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders. He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022. He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China. And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.
Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again. It is the support for Israeland its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed. It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.” Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration. Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor. Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.” By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well. The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.
Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns. He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.
One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things. It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.
When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course. Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.
“Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.” – Norman O. Brown
Note: If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has hailed the news that Narges Mohammadi — an Iranian journalist RSF has been defending for years — has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “fight against the oppression of women in Iran,” her courage and determination.
Persecuted by the Iranian authorities since the late 1990s for her work, and imprisoned again since November 2021, she must be freed at once, RSF declared in a statement.
“Speak to save Iran” is the title of one of the letters published by Mohammadi from Evin prison, near Tehran, where she has been serving a sentence of 10 years and 9 months in prison since 16 November 2021.
She has also been sentenced to hundreds of lashes. The maker of a documentary entitled White Torture and the author of a book of the same name, Mohammadi has never stopped denouncing the sexual violence inflicted on women prisoners in Iran.
It is this fight against the oppression of women that the Nobel Committee has just saluted by awarding the Peace Prize to this 51-year-old journalist and human rights activist, the former vice-president of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre, the Iranian human rights organisation that was created by Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who was herself awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
It is because of this fight that Mohammadi has been hounded by the Iranian authorities, who continue to persecute her in prison.
She has been denied visits and telephone calls since 12 April 2022, cutting her off from the world.
White Torture: The infamy of solitary confinement in Iran with Narges Mohammadi.
New charges
At the same time, the authorities in Evin prison have brought new charges to keep her in detention.
On August 4, her jail term was increased by a year after the publication of another of her letters about violence against fellow women detainees.
Mohammadi was awarded the RSF Prize for Courage on 12 December 2023. At the award ceremony in Paris, her two children, whom she has not seen for eight years, read one of the letters she wrote to them from prison.
“In this country, amid all the suffering, all the fears and all the hopes, and when, after years of imprisonment, I am behind bars again and I can no longer even hear the voices of my children, it is with a heart full of passion, hope and vitality, full of confidence in the achievement of freedom and justice in my country that I will spend time in prison,” she wrote.
She ended the letter with a call to keep alive “the hope of victory”.
RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said:
“It is with immense emotion that I learn that the Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded to the journalist and human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.
At Reporters Without Borders (RSF), we have been fighting for her for years, alongside her husband and her two children, and with Shirin Ebadi. The Nobel Peace Prize will obviously be decisive in obtaining her release.”
On June 7, RSF referred the unacceptable conditions in which Mohammadi is being detained to all of the relevant UN human rights bodies.
During an oral update to the UN Human Rights Council on July 5, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran expressed concern over the “continued detention of human rights defenders and lawyers defending the protesters, and at least 17 journalists”.
It is thanks to Mohammadi’s journalistic courage that the world knows what is happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s prisons, where 20 journalists are currently detained.
The state of civic space in Indonesia has been rated as “obstructed” in the latest CIVICUS Monitor report.
The civic space watchdog said that ongoing concerns include the arrest, harassment and criminalisation of human rights defenders and journalists as well as physical and digital attacks, the use of defamation laws to silence online dissent and excessive use of force by the police during protests, especially in the Papuan region.
In July 2023, the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, expressed concerns regarding the human rights situation in the West Papua region in her opening remarks during the 22nd Meeting of the 53rd Regular Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
She highlighted the harassment, arbitrary arrest and detention of Papuans, which had led to the appropriation of customary land in West Papua.
She encouraged the Indonesian government to ensure humanitarian assistance and engage in “a genuine inclusive dialogue”.
In August 2023, human rights organisations called on Indonesia to make serious commitments as the country sought membership in the UN Human Rights Council for the period 2024 to 2026.
Among the calls were to ratify international human rights instruments, especially the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED), to provide details of steps it will take to implement all of the supported recommendations from the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and to fully cooperate with the Special Procedures of the Council.
Call to respect free expression
The groups also called on the government to ensure the respect, protection and promotion of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, for clear commitments to ensure a safe and enabling environment for all human rights defenders, to find a sustainable solution for the human rights crisis in Papua and to end impunity.
In recent months, protests by communities have been met with arbitrary arrests and excessive force from the police.
The arbitrary arrests, harassment and criminalisation of Papuan activists continue, while an LGBT conference was cancelled due to harassment and threats.
Human rights defenders continue to face defamation charges, there have been harassment and threats against journalists, while a TikTok communicator was jailed for two years over a pork video.
Ongoing targeting of Papuan activists Arbitrary arrests, harassment and criminalisation of Papuan activists continue to be documented.
According to the Human Rights Monitor, on 5 July 2023, four armed plainclothes police officers arrested Viktor Makamuke, a 52-year-old activist of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), a pro-independence movement.
He was subsequently detained at the Sorong Selatan District Police Station where officers allegedly coerced and threatened Makamuke to pledge allegiance to the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI).
A week earlier, Makamuke and his friend had reportedly posted a photo in support of ULMWP full membership in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — an intergovernmental organisation composed of the four Melanesian states.
Shortly after the arrest, the police published a statement claiming that Makamuke was the commander of the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) — an armed group — in the Bomberai Region.
The Human Rights Monitor reported that members of the Yahukimo District police arbitrarily arrested six activists belonging to the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) in the town of Dekai, Yahukimo Regency, on 6 July 2023.
KNPB is a movement promoting the right to self-determination through peaceful action and is one of the most frequently targeted groups in West Papua.
The activists organised and carried out a collective cleaning activity in Dekai. The police repeatedly approached them claiming that the activists needed official permission for their activity.
Six KNPB activists arrested Subsequently, police officers arrested the six KNPB activists without a warrant or justifying the arrest. All activists were released after being interrogated for an hour.
On 8 August 2023, three students were found guilty of treason and subsequently given a 10-month prison sentence by the Jayapura District Court.
Yoseph Ernesto Matuan, Devio Tekege and Ambrosius Fransiskus Elopere were charged with treason due to their involvement in an event held at the Jayapura University of Science and Technology (USTJ) in November 2022, where they waved the Morning Star flag, a banned symbol of Papuan independence.
Their action was in protest against a planned peace dialogue proposed by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM).
According to Amnesty International Indonesia, between 2019 and 2022 there have been at least 61 cases involving 111 individuals in Papua who were charged with treason.
At least 37 supporters of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB) were arrested in relation to peaceful demonstrations to commemorate the 1962 New York Agreement in the towns Sentani, Jayapura Regency and Dekai, Yahukimo Regency, on 14 and 15 August 2023.
Allegations of police ill-treatment
There were also allegations of ill-treatment by the police.
On 2 September 2023, police officers detained Agus Kossay, Chairman of the West Papua National Coalition (KNPB); Benny Murip, KNPB Secretary in Jayapura; Ruben Wakla, member of the KNPB in the Yahukimo Regency; and Ferry Yelipele.
The four activists were subsequently detained and interrogated at the Jayapura District Police Station in Doyo Baru. Wakla and Yelipele were released on 3rd September 2023 without charge.
Police officers reportedly charged Kossay and Murip under Article 160 and Article 170 of the Indonesian Criminal Code (KUHP) for “incitement”.
Papua New Guinea’s government has appealed to the Australian Federal Police and the Singapore Police to assist PNG police to link money laundering trails.
Speaking in Parliament yesterday, Prime Minister James Marape said Australia and Singapore had been the major hub of transit for possible money laundering activities.
He wants help from police in the two countries to assist PNG police in their fight against corruption in the country.
“We are fighting corruption. For instance, we are following the footprints of the [A$1.2 billion Swiss bank] UBS money that has gone deeply rooted so our police are working on it,” he said.
“Therefore I want to encourage police in Singapore and police in Australia assist PNG police to deal with money laundered from PNG.
“I want to appeal again to the Australian police and Singaporean police to assist our police and I make this statement as the Prime Minister of this country.
“And in the case of UBS, we have made [a] deep incision, we are following the money trail, the entire loot that was looted from this country,” he said.
‘Prioritise law and order’
“I want to give commendation to the Police Commissioner, David Manning — he is not here to stop tribal fights; stopping tribal fights is the job of our members of Parliament.
“Governors you have PSIP (constituency development funds) funds so prioritise law and order using your funds, do not wait for police commissioners to come and stop tribal fights.
“PNG has been labelled a corrupt country so I don’t want to leave this label for the next 20 years so we have to make an example out of other existing corruption that has been documented and evidence are used.
“And the ICAC [Independent Commission Against Corruption] commission of inquiry has sufficient evidence for us to pursue our efforts to fight corruption.
“I will indicate to this House that we will bring to this floor of Parliament the Finance Inquiry again and other inquiries that are outstanding.
“We will revisit if they are not time bound but we will not limit the limited police capacity so that is why I appeal to Singapore police and Australia police to assist my policemen to link to the money trails,” the Prime Minister said.
“Monies do not hide, monies move from one bank account to another bank account, forensic auditors and investigators will follow the money trials and our police are working as part of the law and order conversation, focusing on our country like fighting corruption like never before,” he said.
Marape said the ICAC, Ombudsman Commission and police would work in partnership in the pursuit to address corruption in the country.
He said with the efforts to strengthening the work of the ICAC, three commissioners had been appointed while a third Ombudsman commissioner would be appointed this week.
Jeffrey Elapa is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.
The Algerian democracy advocate Ahmed Zaoui, a New Zealand citizen, has been arrested by Algerian security forces after commenting on human rights violations at a political meeting at his home.
His New Zealand lawyer Deborah Manning said Zaoui had been detained at a police station in the city of Medea since he was taken from his home at about 5.30pm on Tuesday (Algerian time).
“He was arrested at gunpoint . . . by eight men in balaclavas from the special forces and the neighbourhood was surrounded, so it was a significant operation, and he’s been taken for interrogation,” she said.
“It’s a precarious situation for anyone taken under these circumstances.”
He had not yet been charged with anything, she said.
Zaoui, who was recognised as a refugee in New Zealand 20 years ago after a protracted legal battle, entered Algeria on a New Zealand passport.
“Mr Zaoui has two homes now — he has family in Algeria and New Zealand and he was wanting to find a way to live in both worlds.
‘Constant communication’
“He returned to Algeria to be with family in recent years as the political situation appeared to be settling. He was planning to return to New Zealand later this year.”
Manning remained in “constant communication” with Zaoui’s family in Algeria.
The family was “very concerned” and was working with New Zealand consular affairs.
There was no New Zealand consulate in Algeria but Manning said she was in touch with “the relevant authorities”.
Selwyn Manning’s documentary on the Ahmed Zaoui case.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade told RNZ it was aware of reports of a New Zealander detained in Algeria but could not provide further information due to “privacy reasons”.
According to Amnesty International, about 300 people have been arrested in Algeria on charges related to freedom of speech since a law change in April cracking down on media freedom.
Zaoui, a former theology professor, stood as a candidate for the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria’s first general election in 1991.
However, the government cancelled the election and banned his party when it appeared it was on track to win the election, forcing Zaoui and others to flee the country.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
South Australia’s regulatory response to AI must not become the victim of “unsubstantiated and unwarranted” privacy concerns that could hinder important public safety work, the state’s policing agency has warned. The South Australian Police Force (SAPOL) has also talked up the technology’s potential to protect civil liberties by avoiding “random, widespread stop and search” activities…
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