GBC - Gibraltar News - GBC TV and Radio Gibraltar
▻https://www.gbc.gi/news/gib-authorities-and-royal-marines-board-and-detain-supertanker-en-route-syria
Gibraltar Port and Law Enforcement agencies, assisted by a detachmentof Royal Marines, boarded and detained a super tanker carrying crude oil to Syria in the early hours of Thursday morning.
This followed information giving the Gibraltar Government reasonable grounds to believe that the vessel, the Grace 1, was acting in breach of European Union sanctions against Syria.
The operation took place overnight as the giant vessel sailed into Gibraltar waters.
The Government says it has reason to believe that the Grace 1 was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria.The refinery is the property of an entity subject to European Union sanctions against Syria.
#piraterie #gibraltar reste un atout géopolitique
en arabe : ▻https://www.raialyoum.com/index.php/%d8%b3%d9%84%d8%b7%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%ac%d8%a8%d9%84-%d8%b7%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8
où il est précisé que le navire est sous pavillon de Panama et que le pétrole serait iranien.
Why Most Syrian Refugees Want to Stay in Germany
Islamic State has been conquered and the war has ended in large parts of Syria, but most Syrian refugees living in Germany want to stay. Many fear persecution if they go back while others have already established themselves in their new home.
▻https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/most-syrian-refugees-want-to-stay-in-germany-a-1275389.html#ref=rss
#Allemagne #réfugiés #asile #migrations #réfugiés_syriens #retour_au_pays #droit_de_rester
The New York Times and its Uyghur “activist” - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/05/09/uygh-m09.html
9 May 2019 - The New York Times has furnished a case study of the way in which it functions as the conduit for the utterly hypocritical “human rights” campaigns fashioned by the CIA and the State Department to prosecute the predatory interests of US imperialism.
While turning a blind eye to the gross abuses of democratic rights by allies such as Saudi Arabia, the US has brazenly used “human rights” for decades as the pretext for wars, diplomatic intrigues and regime-change. The media is completely integrated into these operations.
Another “human rights” campaign is now underway. The New York Times is part of the mounting chorus of condemnation of China over its treatment of the Turkic-speaking, Muslim Uyghur minority in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.
In an article on May 4 entitled “In push for trade deal, Trump administration shelves sanctions over China’s crackdown on Uyghurs,” the New York Times joined in criticism of the White House, particularly by the Democrats, for failing to impose punitive measures on Beijing.
The strident denunciations of China involve unsubstantiated allegations that it is detaining millions of Uyghurs without charge or trial in what Beijing terms vocational training camps.
The New York Times reported, without qualification, the lurid claims of US officials, such as Assistant Secretary of Defence Randall Schriver, who last Friday condemned “the mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps” and boosted the commonly cited figure of up to a million to “up to three million” in detention. No evidence has been presented for either claim.
The repression of the Uyghurs is completely bound up with the far broader oppression of the working class by the Chinese capitalist elites and the Chinese Communist Party regime that defends their interests. The US campaign on the Uyghurs, however, has nothing to do with securing the democratic rights of workers, but is aimed at stirring up reactionary separatist sentiment.
The US has longstanding ties to right-wing separatist organisations based on Chinese minorities—Tibetans as well as the Uyghurs—that it helped create, fund and in some cases arm. As the US, first under President Obama and now Trump, has escalated its diplomatic, economic and military confrontation with China, the “human rights” of Uyghurs has been increasingly brought to the fore.
Washington’s aim, at the very least, is to foment separatist opposition in Xinjiang, which is a crucial source of Chinese energy and raw materials as well as being pivotal to its key Belt and Road Initiative to integrate China more closely with Eurasia. Such unrest would not only weaken China but could lead to a bloody war and the fracturing of the country. Uyghur separatists, who trained in the US network of Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, openly told Radio Free Asia last year of their intention to return to China to wage an armed insurgency.
The New York Times is completely in tune with the aims behind these intrigues—a fact that is confirmed by its promotion of Uyghur “activist” Rushan Abbas.
Last weekend’s article highlighted Abbas as the organiser of a tiny demonstration in Washington to “pressure Treasury Department officials to take action against Chinese officials involved in the Xinjiang abuses.” She told the newspaper that the Uyghur issue should be included as part of the current US-China trade talks, and declared: “They are facing indoctrination, brainwashing and the elimination of their values as Muslims.”
An article “Uyghur Americans speak against China’s internment camps” on October 18 last year cited her remarks at the right-wing think tank, the Hudson Institute, where she “spoke out” about the detention of her aunt and sister. As reported in the article: “I hope the Chinese ambassador here reads this,” she said, wiping away tears. “I will not stop. I will be everywhere and speak on this at every event from now on.”
Presented with a tearful woman speaking about her family members, very few readers would have the slightest inkling of Abbas’s background, about which the New York Times quite deliberately says nothing. Abbas is a highly connected political operator with long standing ties to the Pentagon, the State Department and US intelligence agencies at the highest level as well as top Republican Party politicians. She is a key figure in the Uyghur organisations that the US has supported and funded.
Currently, Abbas is Director of Business Development in ISI Consultants, which offers to assist “US companies to grow their businesses in Middle East and African markets.” Her credentials, according to the company website, include “over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America.”
The website also notes: “She also has extensive experience working with US government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various US intelligence agencies.” As “an active campaigner for human rights,” she “works closely with members of the US Senate, Congressional Committees, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the US Department of State and several other US government departments and agencies.”
This brief summary makes clear that Abbas is well connected in the highest levels of the state apparatus and in political circles. It also underscores the very close ties between the Uyghur organisations, in which she and her family members are prominent, and the US intelligence and security agencies.
A more extensive article and interview with Abbas appeared in the May 2019 edition of the magazine Bitter Winter, which is published by the Italian-based Center for Studies on New Religions. The magazine focuses on “religious liberty and human rights in China” and is part of a conservative, right-wing network in Europe and the United States. The journalist who interviewed Abbas, Marco Respinti, is a senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Centre for Cultural Renewal, and a board member of the Centre for European Renewal—both conservative think tanks.
The article explains that Abbas was a student activist at Xinjiang University during the 1989 protests by students and workers against the oppressive Beijing regime, but left China prior to the brutal June 4 military crackdown that killed thousands in the capital and throughout the country. At the university, she collaborated with Dolkun Isa and “has worked closely with him ever since.”
Dolkun Isa is currently president of the World Uyghur Congress, established in 2004 as an umbrella group for a plethora of Uyghur organisations. It receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy—which is one of the fronts used by the CIA and the US State Department for fomenting opposition to Washington’s rivals, including so-called colour revolutions, around the world.
Isa was the subject of an Interpol red notice after China accused him of having connections to the armed separatist group, the East Turkestan Liberation Organisation, a claim he denied. East Turkestan is the name given to Xinjiang by Uyghur separatists to denote its historic connections to Turkey. None of the Western countries in which he traveled moved to detain him and the red notice was subsequently removed, no doubt under pressure from Washington.
Bitter Winter explained that after moving to the US, Abbas cofounded the first Uyghur organisation in the United States in 1993—the California-based Tengritagh Overseas Students and Scholars Association. She also played a key role in the formation of the Uyghur American Association in 1998, which receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Last year its Uyghur Human Rights Project was awarded two NED grants totaling $320,000. Her brother Rishat Abbas was the association’s first vice-chairman and is currently the honorary chairman of the Uyghur Academy based in Turkey.
When the US Congress funded a Uyghur language service for the Washington-based Radio Free Asia, Abbas became its first reporter and news anchor, broadcasting daily to China. Radio Free Asia, like its counterpart Radio Free Europe, began its existence in the 1950s as a CIA conduit for anti-communist propaganda. It was later transferred to the US Information Agency, then the US State Department and before being incorporated as an “independent,” government-funded body. Its essential purpose as a vehicle for US disinformation and lies has not changed, however.
In a particularly revealing passage, Bitter Winter explained: “From 2002–2003, Ms. Abbas supported Operation Enduring Freedom as a language specialist at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” In the course of the interview with the magazine, Abbas attempted to explain away her involvement with the notorious prison camp by saying that she was simply acting on behalf of 22 Uyghurs who were wrongfully detained and ultimately released—after being imprisoned for between four to 11 years!
Given the denunciations of Chinese detention camps, one might expect that Abbas would have something critical to say about Guantanamo Bay, where inmates are held indefinitely without charge or trial and in many cases tortured. However, she makes no criticism of the prison or its procedures, nor for that matter of Operation Enduring Freedom—the illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq that resulted in the deaths of a million civilians.
It is clear why. Abbas is plugged into to the very top levels of the US state apparatus and political establishment in Washington. Her stints with Radio Free Asia and at Guantanamo Bay are undoubtedly not the only times that she has been directly on the payroll.
As Bitter Winter continued: “She has frequently briefed members of the US Congress and officials at the State Department on the human rights situation of the Uyghur people, and their history and culture, and arranged testimonies before Congressional committees and Human Rights Commissions.
“She provided her expertise to other federal and military agencies as well, and in 2007 she assisted during a meeting between then-President George W. Bush and Rebiya Kadeer, the world-famous moral leader of the Uyghurs, in Prague. Later that year she also briefed then First Lady Laura Bush in the White House on the Human Rights situation in Xinjiang.”
It should be noted, Rebiya Kadeer is the “the world-famous moral leader of the Uyghurs,” only in the eyes of the CIA and the US State Department who have assiduously promoted her, and of the US-funded Uyghur organisations. She was one of the wealthiest businesswomen in China who attended the National People’s Congress before her husband left for the US and began broadcasting for Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. She subsequently fled China to the US and has served as president both of the World Uyghur Congress and the American Uyghur Association.
The fact that Russan Abbas is repeatedly being featured in the New York Times is an indication that she is also being groomed to play a leading role in the mounting US propaganda offensive against China over the persecution of the Uyghurs. It is also a telling indictment of the New York Times which opens its pages to her without informing its readers of her background. Like Abbas, the paper of record is also plugged into the state apparatus and its intelligence agencies.
#Chine #Xinjiang_Weiwuer_zizhiqu #USA #impérialisme #services_secretes
新疆維吾爾自治區 / 新疆维吾尔自治区, Xīnjiāng Wéiwú’ěr zìzhìqū, englisch Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
]]>PCBS Report : 6 Million Palestinians Registered as Refugees with UNRWA in 2018
June 21, 2019 8:45 AM - Ali Salam– IMEMC News
▻https://imemc.org/article/pcbs-report-6-million-palestinians-registered-as-refugees-with-unrwa-in-2018
On June 20, 2019, the ‘International Day of Refugees’, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released a report showing that nearly half of all Palestinians throughout the world, were registered as refugees in 2018.
According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), of the 13 million Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora, 6 million are registered as refugees.
In 1948, the Palestinian Nakba began, when the land was occupied, and 800,000 indigenous people from 1,300 towns and villages were forcefully expelled from historical Palestine.
The report breaks down that 17% of the 6 million Palestinian refugees, or 1,020,000 live in the West Bank, and 25% or 1,500,000 of the total number of Palestinian refugees are in the Gaza Strip.
Jordan hosts the largest Palestinian refugee population at 39%, or 2,340,000, while Syria is home to 11% or 660,000, and finally Lebanon with 9%, or 540,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 1967, another 300,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and today, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues with home demolitions occurring on a near daily basis in and around the cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus, to name a few.
]]>The Iraqi and Syrian refugees using body-mapping to share their stories
What does it mean to flee one’s country and undertake the dangerous journey to Europe? What does it mean to suddenly lose everything and be forced to live in a different country? A new home, new school, new friends and a totally new life? To what extent does it influence family lives and the family unit as such? These are questions that a new research project, based at the University of Birmingham and funded by the British Academy, is tackling. The focus is not only on the changes occurring within refugee families, but equally on the impact of the influx of refugees on the host society.
We use art as a research method to allow Iraqi and Syrian women and men to express their thoughts and feelings, on both their refugee journey and their new lives in their host countries. Fleeing one’s country puts enormous pressure and stress on an individual, both emotionally and physically. Using the artistic technique of body mapping proved to be very useful in this project, as it allowed participants to embody the emotional and psychological pain caused by their refugee experiences through art. Holding a paint brush, painting and being taught by a renowned artist, in this instance Rachel Gadsden, were for the majority of the participants a new experience. It provided them with a feeling of pride, achievement and self-fulfilment, at a time when they needed it the most. But what are they painting? How are they expressing their experiences? How do they portray themselves? What do they say about their new lives? Do their own narratives confirm widespread notions of their ‘vulnerability’?
Decades of displacement
Saddam Hussein’s decades of authoritarian rule in Iraq, the continuous political instability caused by his fall in 2003 and the rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014 has forced over three million Iraqis to flee their country since the 1980s. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Syrians have become one of the largest groups of refugees, with more than five million civilians forced to flee to neighbouring Middle Eastern countries and to Europe. Many Iraqi and Syrian refugees have headed to Europe directly and settled in countries such as Germany or the UK, others went through multi-local trajectories of displacement in so-called ‘transit countries’ such as Jordan.
Syrian and Iraqi societies are to a significant extent tribal and patriarchal in nature, with familial or community-based social networks often serving to protect their members. However, these networks may be disrupted or disappear entirely during a migration process, leaving women and children in particular in extremely vulnerable situations, unprotected by their family networks. Women, as well as children, very often find themselves in the most subservient and marginal positions, making them vulnerable to abuse and violence, inflicted either by social and religious communities or the state. Human trafficking operations have played a central role in facilitating immigration. In such circumstances, human traffickers who bring migrants across borders abuse women and children and force them into sexually exploitive occupations, or subject them to physical and sexual abuse themselves. Tackling violence against women and girls is one of the UK government’s most important goals. The UK’s aid report in 2015 highlights explicitly the challenges the UK faces regarding the conflict in Iraq and Syria and the need to support peace and stability abroad, in order to secure social and political stability in the UK. The UK government is working extensively towards implementing the ‘No One Behind Promise’, which strives to achieve gender equality, prioritise the empowerment of girls and women and end violence against them, within war zones, such as in Syria and Iraq, and during migration processes in particular.
Women are often limited to gender-specific narratives of female vulnerability within patriarchal social structures. Without neglecting the fact that women are more affected by and subject to sexual and gender-based violence, the over 150 women we talked and worked with in our projects so far have another story to tell. In our art workshops, these women used art and body-mapping to express their powerful stories of resilience, endurance and survival.
Gender roles in a time of war and instability
“I never worked with fabric, but I learnt how to produce the most amazing clothes for women’s engagement and wedding parties. I go around clothing shops in the city and try to sell them. Now I have my own network of buyers. I earn more money now than my husband used to earn. He passed away five years ago and left me with three children to feed. Yes, they call me sharmuta – a slut – because I go around male merchants in town to see whether they would buy my products. I don’t sleep with them. I only sell them my dresses. I don’t do anything wrong. Therefore, I will not stop. I cannot stop. I have children to feed. The problem is not me – the problem is their dirty thinking, only because I am a woman and a good-looking one too [laughing].”
The young Iraqi widow above was not the only female refugee in Jordan, the UK or in Germany who struggles with social stigmatisations and sexual harassment, on the way to and from work as well as in the workplace. Women’s independence is very often violently attacked, verbally and physically, in order to control women’s lives, bodies and sexuality. Refugee women’s pending legal status, their socio-economic integration and the degree of their security within the host environment change long-held values on family structures and socio-cultural expectations on gender roles. They also influence women and men’s own understanding of their roles which, in most cases, represents a shift from their traditional gender roles within their families. Women and men’s roles in family and society inevitably change in time of war and forced migration and society needs to adapt to this development. In order to achieve sustainable change in society’s perception, both men and women need to be socialised and equipped to understand these societal changes. This does not solely apply to the refugee communities, but also to the host communities, who are also influenced by the presence of these newcomers.
Through stitching fabric onto their body map paintings or adding pictures of the food they cook to sell on the canvases, women express their attempts to survive. Through art, women can portray how they see themselves: strong in enduring the hardship, without neglecting the challenges they face. “I want to show the world out there that we are not poor victims. One woman like us is better and stronger than 100 men,” as one Iraqi in Germany explains. Another Syrian in the UK emphasised women’s resilience, saying “wherever we fall we will land straight. I want to paint my head up for these politicians to know that nothing will bend us”.
Women in our art workshops see the production of their artwork and the planned art exhibitions as an opportunity to provide a different narrative on Muslim refugee women. It provided them with a space to articulate the challenges they faced, during and after their refugee journey, but also to create a bridge between the refugee communities and the host community. The artwork produced in the workshops helped to facilitate community bonding, integration and above all, as one Syrian in Jordan explains, “a better understanding of what we really are”.
▻https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/summer-showcase-2019-iraqi-syrian-refugees-body-mapping
#corps #cartographie #cartoexperiment #réfugiés #réfugiés_syriens #réfugiés_irakiens #asile #migrations #couture #femmes #genre #dessin
ping @reka
In “Behind the Lines”, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer reports from Syria on America’s role in one of the 21st century’s bloodiest conflicts.
–-> video series
–-> in-depth report
–-> podcast series
Trailer introducing ’Behind the Lines’:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIkVOfKwh3U
#Syrie #États-Unis #vidéo #podcast #rapport
▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/behind-the-lines-syria-part-one
]]>Opposition mayor bans Syrians from beach in western Turkey
Syrians have been barred from public beaches by the mayor of Mudanya, a coastal district in the western Turkish province of Bursa, who said that he would not allow Syrians disturb Turkey’s own people, Karar newspaper reported on Saturday.
Hayri Türkyılmaz from the Republican People’s Party (CHP), who was elected for a second term as Mudanya’s mayor on March 31, also attempted to ban Syrians from using beaches in 2014, Karar said.
“Nobody has the right to bother others or restrict their freedoms”, tweeted Türkyılmaz. “While our children are dying (in Syria), our mothers are crying, our economy is going downhill, we won’t tolerate our people being annoyed as they live a life of comfort”.
Turkey hosts some 3.6 million registered refugees from Syria, according to the latest United Nations figures published in May. Many in Turkey object to their presence, and the tensions have been fuelled in part by viral reports – often fake – of misdeeds by refugees, as well as inaccurate reports on the benefits offered them by the Turkish government.
Turkish news site Gazete ABC reported that a high number of Syrians had been a fixture on the beaches in Mudanya for months, likening them to an “invasion”.
The Syrians had been moved off the beaches and municipal police posted to ensure they did not return, Gazete ABC said.
“They can either conform to us or they can go back to their own country”, Türkyılmaz said.
With a reported 79 percent of Turks holding unfavourable views of the refugees, nationalist politicians have brought the issue to the agenda over recent years. This year another newly elected CHP mayor, Tanju Özcan of the north western Turkish province of Bolu, announced that he was cutting aid to Syrian refugees.
Ajouté à cette métaliste :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/773978
Syrian rebel leader’s death spurs debate about his legacy - Los Angeles Times
▻https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-syria-rebel-leader-sarout-20190611-story.html
“All those things have been projected on Sarout, making his personal story into a sort of microcosm of the Syrian war and of the way it’s also been a war over how to reimagine an incredibly murky and fluid reality as something clear-cut and political,” Aron Lund, a Syria expert at the Century Foundation think tank, said in an interview via social media.
“To me, that’s maybe the most symbolic thing of all, because that’s been the story of Syria’s opposition all along. It was never a cohesive, unitary movement, and it meant so many different things to different people.”
Portrait nuancé et éclairant de ’abd al-aset Sarout, « l’icône de la révolution syrienne ». #syrie
]]>Tension grows in Lebanon over refugees in #Beqaa
Tension remains high on Monday in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, following the forced displacement of hundreds of Syrian refugees at the weekend.
Local media reported the possibility that about 400 refugees, including many women and children, may be forcibly transferred to Syria, which is where they originally fled from the armed conflict that is still underway.
The epicentre of the refugee tension in Lebanon is in #Deir al-Ahmar in the northern Beqaa Valley.
Since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011, over a million Syrians have taken refuge in Lebanon, a country whose own population is less than four million.
Lebanese authorities have recently intensified the dismantling of refugee camps and increased pressure on the refugee community.
Lebanon did not sign the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, and since 2011 the country has considered the presence of “foreign guests” in its territory as a temporary situation.
▻http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/generalnews/2019/06/10/tension-grows-in-lebanon-over-refugees-in-beqaa_132742bf-f2d4-48a3-ad21-4b
#réfugiés #réfugiés_syriens #Liban #asile #migrations #expulsions #renvois #retour_au_pays #camps_de_réfugiés #démantèlement
U.S. and Russia trade blame over near collision in East Asian waters - Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-navy-incident-idUSKCN1T80LR
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QeNcKRkvDY
Russia and the United States blamed each other for a near collision between their warships in East Asian waters on Friday with both countries accusing one another of dangerous and unprofessional behavior.
Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Washington would lodge a formal diplomatic protest to Russia, while a senior Russian parliamentarian said such episodes could easily escalate tensions, which he said were already balanced “on a razor’s edge”.
Russia’s Pacific Fleet said that the USS Chancellorsville, a guided-missile cruiser, had come within just 50 meters (165 feet) of the Russian destroyer Admiral Vinogradov which was forced to take emergency action to avoid a collision, Russian news agencies reported.
They cited a Russian Pacific Fleet statement as saying the incident took place in the early hours of Friday morning in the eastern part of the East China Sea at a time when a group of Russian warships was on a parallel course with a U.S. naval strike group.
“The U.S guided-missile cruiser Chancellorsville suddenly changed course and cut across the path of the destroyer Admiral Vinogradov coming within 50 meters of the ship,” the statement said.
“A protest over the international radio frequency was made to the commanders of the American ship who were warned about the unacceptable nature of such actions,” it said.
The U.S. Navy rejected that version of events, saying the behavior of the Russian ship had been “unsafe and unprofessional”.
“While operating in the Philippine Sea, a Russian Destroyer ... made an unsafe maneuver against USS Chancellorsville,” U.S. Seventh Fleet spokesman Commander Clayton Doss said.
“This unsafe action forced Chancellorsville to execute all engines back full and to maneuver to avoid collision.”
He described a Russian assertion that the U.S. ship had acted dangerously as “propaganda”. The Russian destroyer came within 50 to 100 feet of the Chancellorsville, he said, putting the safety of its crew and the ship at risk.
Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Shanahan said Washington would formally protest.
“We’ll have military-to-military conversations with the Russians, and of course we’ll demarche them, but to me safety at the end of the day is the most important (part),” he told reporters outside the Pentagon.
“It will not deter us from conducting our operations.”
The incident comes days after Washington and Moscow sparred over an allegedly unsafe spy plane intercept by a Russian fighter jet near Syria.
Alexei Pushkov, a senior Russian parliamentarian, said the near naval miss and other incidents like it were dangerous.
“We’re balancing on a razor’s edge,” he wrote on social media.
Pour les Russes, ça s’est passé à l’est de la #Mer_de_Chine_orientale, pour les États-Uniens en #mer_des_Philippines
Assafir al Arabi est un journal en arabe qui traite principalement du monde arabe, depuis 1974. Il est écrit en général par des chercheurs et des acteurs engagés dans les combats de leur sociétés, et souvent illustré par des artistes arabes.
En ligne depuis 2002 (exclusivement depuis 2017), il a depuis peu aussi une page en français, avec des articles sur le Soudan, l’Algérie, la Palestine, le Liban, la Syrie, si vous voulez l’explorer :
▻http://assafirarabi.com/fr
Asia Times | Mysterious oil company a key player in Idlib | Article
▻https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/06/opinion/mysterious-oil-company-a-key-player-in-idlib
Watad, la très étrange société pétrolière active sur le marché d’Idlib, avec inévitablement la bénédiction de Daech et des Turcs...
Fuel and cooking gas are in very short supply in the parts of Syria controlled by the Assad regime. Yet in Idlib, the last rebel-held pocket of the country and currently the target of an intense military offensive, these and other essentials are not only available, but affordable. This is thanks to a company named Watad Petroleum.
But who or what is Watad? If suspicions are true, Watad – about which little is known – represents yet another way in which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an organization labeled a terrorist group by much of the world, is strengthening its grip on Idlib.
Life in this province of northwestern Syria has, without a doubt, been made easier by Watad’s presence. But with no information available publicly about who owns or runs it, there is a persistent suspicion about it.
The first that anyone had heard of Watad was in January last year, when it was granted a monopoly over the fuel market in greater Idlib, with exclusive rights to import oil and gas from Turkey and to regulate their sale, price and distribution. Ostensibly, the deal, which also eliminated any domestic competition, was struck with Idlib’s Salvation Government, but in reality it was with HTS, the de facto power in that area.
Before then, people in Idlib were reliant on motor fuel and gas transported from government-controlled areas and on crude oil brought in from northeastern Syria, which is now controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. But economic sanctions and the Turkish-led offensive to capture the predominantly Kurdish region of Afrin led to those supply lines being severed. Enter Watad Petroleum.
Some reports say the company was founded in Idlib in 2017, while others maintain it was established in early 2018 by a group of Syrian businessmen living in Turkey. What is certain is that the mysterious Watad Petroleum has become a key player in Greater Idlib.
]]> Statistiques de la conférence de presse des organisations syriennes et de la défense civile aujourd’hui sur les résultats de la récente campagne sur les zones libérées, #Idlib :
- 600 victimes
- 5 marchés populaires ciblés
- 22 installations médicales ont été détruites
- La fermeture de 55 établissements médicaux
- Utilisation de chlore à Canibiet
- 80 enfants tués
- 50 écoles ciblées
- 45 000 enfants sont sortis de l’éducation
Déplacés 307 000 plus de 50 000 familles
- 27 mosquées détruits
- Destruction de 9 fours de production du pain
- Brûler des cultures avec du Phosphore
#guerre #conflit #victimes #statistiques #chiffres #phosphore #armes_chimiques Canibiet #destruction #écoles #enfants #déscolarisation #morts #décès
Reçu d’un ami réfugié syrien qui vit à Grenoble, via whatsapp, le 01.06.2019
]]>IS fight: US-led coalition says it killed 1,300 civilians in Syria and Iraq - BBC News
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-48473979
Depuis 2014,
A UK-based monitoring group says the true toll is much higher, estimating up to nearly 13,000 civilian fatalities.
[...]
Last month, an investigation by activists concluded that more than 1,600 civilians were killed in coalition attacks on the Syrian city of Raqqa alone during a five-month campaign to oust IS in 2017.
#Etats-unis #crimes #mensonges #fake_news #civils #victimes_civiles #Irak #Syrie
]]>Congo Ebola response must be elevated to maximum level, UN told | Global development | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/may/29/congo-ebola-response-must-be-elevated-to-maximum-level-un-told
The UN has been urged by charities to ramp up Ebola prevention work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the highest level of emergency response.
Only three crises – Yemen, Syria and Mozambique – are treated as the equivalent of a level-three response, activated when agencies are unable to meet needs on the ground.
Charities including Mercy Corps and Oxfam said the same declaration should also be made in DRC, following a recent acceleration in the spread of Ebola.
Almost 2,000 cases of Ebola have been recorded since the outbreak began in August. As of Monday, 1,287 people have died from the disease.
]]>Iran building new crossing on Syria border that would let it smuggle weapons, oil, experts say | Fox News
▻https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-border-crossing-syria-smuggle-weapons-oil-experts
La contribution de Fox à l’effort de guerre US contre l’Iran....
The images, obtained exclusively by Fox News and captured earlier this week, show a new construction in the Albukamal Al-Qaim crossing.
A new construction in the Albukamal Al-Qaim crossing was seen via satellite.
The area is under the control of Pro-Iranian Shiite militias. Last summer, Iran increased its presence in the area.
According to analysts for ISI, which captures satellite data, the existing border crossing is still closed and destroyed, and the Iranians have put a lot of effort and resources into building the new one.
Iran has put significant effort into building the new crossing, analysts said.
Photos obtained by Fox News showed an Iraqi army base near the deserted post.
The existing border crossing remained closed, analysts said.
The border crossing would enable Iran to maintain land access in Syria, Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea. Regional and western sources said the Iranians are planning to use this new route for smuggling operations, including trafficking weapons and oil, to avoid the looming U.S. sanctions. Without Syrian or Iraqi supervision, Iran and its allies would have an unprecedented advantage in transferring whatever they wish, experts say.
An Iraqi army base seen near the deserted crossing.
This development sheds new light on the rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran, which escalated after President Trump canceled the temporary waivers permitting countries, including Iraq, Turkey, Japan and China, to purchase Iranian oil without violating U.S. sanctions.
]]>“CDU-Zerstörer” Rezo: Es kamen “Diskreditierung, Lügen, Trump-Wordings und keine inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung” | Telepolis
▻https://www.heise.de/tp/features/CDU-Zerstoerer-Rezo-Es-kamen-Diskreditierung-Luegen-Trump-Wordings-und-keine-i
Ce youtubeur prouve que les chrétiens-démocrates allemands sont coupables de tous les crimes et par leur incompétence et par la collaboration avec le crime organisé. Ce jeune homme est tellement populaire que la droite est obligée de réagir.
Selten hat ein politisches Video in Deutschland ein so großes Echo bei Jugendlichen gefunden: Youtuber Rezo „zerstört“ die CDU.
Les sources : ▻https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&v=4Y1lZQsyuSQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.
Hier sind alle Quellen vom CDU-Video. Hoffe es ist alles korrekt übertragen. Falls irgendwo ein Flüchtigkeitsfehler drin ist oder so, schreib mir gern auf den verschiedenen Socialmedia Plattformen :)
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[K93] ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMZiBnbJIqw
[K94] ►https://youtu.be/dGow4VDa6V0?t=243
[K95]▻https://www.capital.de/wirtschaft-politik/die-wiederentdeckung-der-handlungsfaehigkeit
[K96]▻https://web.archive.org/web/20160117141004/http://newsroom.unfccc.int/unfccc-newsroom/finale-cop21
[K97]▻https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/energiewende-merkel-legt-sich-fest-wir-werden-2038-aus-der-braunkohle-aussteigen/23948952.html
[K98] NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, The NOAA annual greenhouse gas index (AGGI), updated Spring 2018, ▻http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/aggi.html
[K99] ▻https://youtu.be/OAoPkVfeTo0?t=972
[L1]▻https://www.cdu.de/sites/default/files/media/dokumente/regierungsprogramm-2013-2017-langfassung-20130911.pdf
[L2]▻https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2014-07/bundestag-mindestlohn-entscheidung
[L3]►https://www.cdu.de/system/tdf/media/dokumente/071203-beschluss-grundsatzprogramm-6-navigierbar_1.pdf?file=1&type=field_collect
[L4]▻https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/deutschland/freiwilligendienst-geplant-bundestag-beschliesst-das-ende-der-wehrpflicht/3985968.html?ticket=ST-1588365-InGS3BXc1Q4ycXsDsZeC-ap2
[L5]►https://www.cdu.de/system/tdf/media/dokumente/071203-beschluss-grundsatzprogramm-6-navigierbar_1.pdf?file=1&type=field_collect
[L6]▻https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article13460039/Bundestag-beschliesst-Atomausstieg-bis-2022.html
[L7]►https://www.gew.de/aktuelles/detailseite/neuigkeiten/wie-deutschland-bei-der-bildung-abschneidet
[L8]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/angela-merkel-falsche-versprechungen-ueberlasse-ich-schroeder-1.309069-
[L9]▻https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/bundestagswahl-2013/tid-33778/kohl-ypsilanti-merkel-die-politik-umfaller-und-ihre-dreisteten-wahlluegen-spd-
[L10] ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PUR_WPj0JM
[L11]▻https://www.antenne.de/nachrichten/deutschland/pkw-maut-startet-oktober-2020-in-deutschland
[L12]▻https://www.pressesprecher.com/nachrichten/caspary-cdu-artikel-13-demonstranten-gekauft-402064753
[L13]▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwQxRjFT2A&t=97s
[L14]▻https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article187846390/Fridays-for-Future-Demos-Sollen-die-Schueler-bestraft-werden.html
[L15]▻https://youtu.be/5VVM4ArDFhQ?t=57
[L16]▻https://youtu.be/5VVM4ArDFhQ?t=256
[L17]▻https://youtu.be/5VVM4ArDFhQ?t=290
[L18]▻https://youtu.be/5VVM4ArDFhQ?t=302
[L19] ▻https://youtu.be/5VVM4ArDFhQ?t=336
[L20] ▻https://twitter.com/europarl_de/status/1100705082470027264?lang=de
[L21]▻https://twitter.com/c_lindner/status/1104683096107114497?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E11
[L22] ▻https://youtu.be/OAoPkVfeTo0?t=893
[L23] ▻https://www.scientists4future.org/stellungnahme
[L25] ▻https://twitter.com/tilman_s/status/1105864836892762112
[L26]▻https://youtu.be/Yd2bYRKuYfo?t=180
[L27]▻https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/koalitionsbeschluss-wehrpflicht-wird-zum-1-juli-2011-ausgesetzt/3597026.html
[L28]▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WY3wQDEWt8
[L29]▻https://www.fr.de/politik/verfolgte-retter-10973351.html
[L30]▻https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Polizisten-fordern-Cannabis-Legalisierung-article20268395.html
[L31]▻https://www.heise.de/tp/features/15-Jahre-entkriminalisierte-Drogenpolitik-in-Portugal-3224495.html
[L32]▻https://www.br.de/puls/themen/welt/drogenpolitik-portugal-102.html
[L33]▻https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/portugals-drogenpolitik-therapie-statt-gefaengnis.795.de.html?dram:a
[L34]▻https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/cannabis-bund-deutscher-kriminalbeamter-fordert-ende-des-verbots-a-1191381.h
[L35]▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Caspary#/media/File:Daniel_Caspary_2019.jpg
[L36]▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Voss#/media/File:Axel_Voss_01.JPG
[L37] ▻https://youtu.be/9GMiDy0LZQ4?t=585
[B1] ▻https://www.dw.com/de/935-l%C3%BCgen-zum-irak-krieg/a-3086399
[B2] ▻https://www.dw.com/de/irak-krieg-am-anfang-stand-die-l%C3%BCge/a-43279424
[B3] ▻https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/cdu-csu-merkel-verteidigt-irak-krieg-189806.html
[B4] ▻https://youtu.be/lxjahxsm3GU?t=145
[B5] ▻https://youtu.be/lxjahxsm3GU?t=224
[B6] ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EaEVIh9t5I&feature=youtu.be&t=114
[B7] ▻https://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/18/110/1811023.pdf
[B8]▻https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/USA-fuehren-Drohnenkrieg-von-Deutschland-aus,ramstein146.html
[B9] ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&t=300s
[B10]
[B11]▻https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/drohnen-basis-ramstein-bundesregierung-bestreitet-mitwissen-fotostrecke-1258
[B12]▻https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-05/drohnenkrieg-ramstein-jemen-opfer-klage
[B13]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/leitkolumne-ramstein-toetet-1.4378778
[B14]▻https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article122884542/15-Tote-bei-Drohnenangriff-auf-Fahrzeugkonvoi.html
[B15]▻https://qz.com/569779/drone-strikes-are-creating-hatred-towards-america-that-will-last-for-generations
[B16]▻https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/step-back-lessons-us-foreign-policy-failed-war-terror#_idTextAnchor066
[B17] ▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_terrorist_incidents
[B18] ▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genfer_Konventionen#Wichtige_Bestimmungen
[B19]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bradley-manning-zu-35-jahren-haft-verurteilt-a-917844.html
[B20] ▻https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2013-10/Drohnen-Moral-Voelkerrecht/seite-2
[B21]▻https://www.amnesty.de/allgemein/pressemitteilung/vereinigte-staaten-von-amerika-voelkerrechtswidrige-us-drohnenangriffe
[B22]▻https://netzpolitik.org/2015/live-blog-aus-dem-geheimdienst-untersuchungsausschuss-brandon-bryant-fr
[B23] ▻https://youtu.be/Y0_BxzSWdKI?t=889
[B24] ▻https://youtu.be/VMjUR_cY8g4?t=1529
[B25] ▻https://youtu.be/STqv600KN3k?t=219
[B26]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/us-drohnenkrieg-ramstein-urteil-ovg-muenster-1.4373794
[B27] ▻https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=540
[B28] ▻https://youtu.be/KdDULYzDBvg?t=213
[B29]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/us-atomwaffen-in-deutschland-die-atom-eier-von-buechel-a-1251697.html
[B30] ▻https://yougov.de/news/2015/10/01/bevolkerung-will-keine-us-atomwaffen-deutschland
[B31] ▻https://youtu.be/C4RalenYhoY?t=37
[B32]▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globale_%C3%9Cberwachungs-_und_Spionageaff%C3%A4re
[B33]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/snowden-asyl-usa-sollen-deutschland-gedroht-haben-a-1024841.html
[B34]▻https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/fuer-eine-welt-ohne-atomwaffen-479596
[B35]
[B36] ▻http://www.ruestungsexport.info/info/BuReg_2017.pdf
[B37] ▻https://www.zeit.de/2018/29/waffenexporte-bundesregierung-jemen-krieg/komplettansicht
[B38] ▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milit%C3%A4rintervention_im_Jemen_seit_2015
[B39]▻https://www.fr.de/politik/waffenexporte-saudi-arabien-deutschland-liefert-wieder-waffen-12185951.html
[B40]▻https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2019-01/ruestung-waffenexporte-deutschland-bundesregierung-katar-raketensystem-teile
[B41] ▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menschenrechte_in_Katar
[B42] ▻https://www.zeit.de/politik/2018-10/nachrichtenpodcast-was-jetzt-23-10-2018
[B43] ▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain#Menschenrechte
[B44]▻https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/weiter-waffen-fuer-jemen-krieg-mehr-ruestungsexporte-in-die-emirate/24156146.html
[B45]▻https://www.dw.com/de/human-rights-watch-die-vae-sind-kein-toleranter-staat/a-47357520
[B46]▻https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Milizen-im-Jemen-kaempfen-mit-westlichen-Waffen-article20845112.html
[B47]▻http://www.ard.de/home/die-ard/presse-kontakt/pressearchiv/_Panzer_fuer_das_Kalifat____Waffen_fuer_Bahrain_/113308/index.html
[B48]▻https://www.ipg-journal.de/rubriken/aussen-und-sicherheitspolitik/artikel/das-geschaeft-mit-der-ruestung-3437
[B49 ] ▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire
[B50]▻https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/wikileaks/moderne-kriegsfuehrung-das-collateral-murder-video-1982035.html
[B51]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/umstrittene-apache-angriffe-hoellenfeuer-aus-dem-himmel-a-724482.html
[B52] ▻https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2010-07/wikileaks-militaer-geheimvideo
[B53] ►https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc
[B54]▻https://www.google.com/search?q=ramstein&oq=ramstein&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l3j69i60j69i61j69i59.975j1j7
[B55] ▻https://youtu.be/Ses8mRjm-Ew?t=28
[B56] ▻https://youtu.be/Y0_BxzSWdKI?t=919
[B57] ▻https://youtu.be/rMHZTJQjnKc?t=112
[B58] ▻https://youtu.be/STqv600KN3k?t=470
[B59] ▻https://youtu.be/VMjUR_cY8g4?t=1468
[B60]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/nsa-ausschuss-ehemaliger-us-drohnenpilot-zwoelfjaehrige-galten-als-legi
[B61]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/prozess-in-koeln-us-drohnenkrieg-darf-ueber-ramstein-laufen-1.2495841
[B62]▻https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/drohnenangriffe-was-in-ramstein-vor-sich-geht-1.3277427
[B63]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/syrien-kampf-gegen-islamischer-staat-mehrere-zivilisten-in-baghus-getoetet-a
[B64]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/syrien-luftangriff-der-us-koalition-toetet-mindestens-43-menschen-a-1239032.
[B65]▻https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/04/syria-unprecedented-investigation-reveals-us-led-coalition-killed-more-than
[B66]Experten gehen von insgesammt 7596 getöteten Zivilisten durch die Koalition aus. UN-Experten nehmen die Airwars-Zahlen sehr ernst.“ Video daneben zeigen: ▻https://www1.wdr.de/daserste/monitor/videos/video-die-zivilen-opfer-der-anti-is-koalition-100.html
[B67]According to Airwars, 1,472 civilians had been killed by the U.S. air campaign in Iraq and Syria in March 2017 alone ▻https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-coalition-air-strikes-isis-russia-kill-more-civilians-march-middle
[B68]an einem einzigen Tag: On March 17, a U.S.-led coalition airstrike in Mosul killed more than 200
civilians▻https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-air-strike-mosul-200-civilians-killed-isis-northern-iraq-pentagon-
[B69]Hier auch gute Übersicht: ▻https://airwars.org/conflict/coalition-in-iraq-and-syria
[B70] ▻https://youtu.be/Cb485CVJKBw?t=136 bis 2:33
[B71]▻https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2018-01/waffenexporte-ruestungsexporte-deutschland-krisengebiete-rekordhoch
[B72]▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuiqnFpptYA
[B73]▻https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/trotz-exportstopp-deutsche-ruestungsgueter-fuer-400-millionen-euro-an-jemen-kriegsallianz/24153698.html
[B74]▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-12_Paveway_II#/media/File:GBU-12_xxl.jpg
Gemeinfrei, ►https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=593515
[B75]▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire#/media/File:Lockheed_Martin_Longbow_Hellfire.jpg
Gemeinfrei, ►https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=593515
[B76]▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjSYSO7-cM0
[B77]▻https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/deutschland-muss-drohneneinsaetze-der-usa-aus-ramstein-pruefen-a-1258647.htm
]]>‘How do they sleep?’ Roger Waters calls out US, UK & France over ‘faked’ Douma chemical attack — RT World News
▻https://www.rt.com/news/459638-roger-waters-douma-opcw
Citing newly leaked OPCW documents casting doubt on the April 2018 ‘chemical attack’ that triggered a bombing of Syria, rock star Roger Waters is calling out everyone who believed in the ‘murderous fairytale’ of the White Helmets.
US, UK and France launched air strikes against Syria in April last year, after an alleged chemical attack in the city of Douma, northeast of Damascus. The claims came from the White Helmets, a self-styled ‘civil defense’ organization backed by Western governments and embedded with the Islamist militants in Syria.
“The White Helmets probably murdered 34 women and children to dress the scene that sorry day in Douma,” Waters posted on his Facebook page on Thursday, next to a video of his April 2018 concert in Barcelona in which he challenged the group as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists.”
Waters added he hopes that those in the media and the governments in Paris, London and Washington that bought into the White Helmets’ “callous and murderous fairytale are suitably haunted by the indelible images of those lost innocent Syrian lives.”
Internal OPCW documents leaked earlier this week cast doubt on the organization’s final report about the Douma incident, which claimed chlorine was ‘likely’ used against civilians. Syrian and Russian soldiers that liberated the town from militants found chlorine containers and a laboratory for producing chemical weapons. Moscow has suggested that the OPCW hedged its report because it did not want to contradict the US narrative.
]]>UNRWA: 4 Palestinian children killed in attack on Syria refugee camp
May 17, 2019 11:08 A.M.
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=783467
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), on Thursday, condemned the killing of 10 Palestinian civilians, including four children, during rocket fire on the Palestinian refugee camp of Neirab near Aleppo City in Syria.
Director of UNRWA Affairs in Syria, Amanya Michael Ebye, said, “On Tuesday night, as families gathered to break their fasts for the Ramadan Iftar meal, several rockets hit the densely populated Neirab camp for Palestine refugees in Aleppo, killing at least ten civilians and wounding more than thirty.” (...)
]]>Global Report on Internal Displacement #2019
KEY FINDINGS
Internal displacement is a global challenge, but it is also heavily concentrated in a few countries and triggered by few events. 28 million new internal displacements associated with conflict and disasters across 148 countries and territories were recorded in 2018, with nine countries each accounting for more than a million.
41.3 million people were estimated to be living in internal displacement as a result of conflict and violence in 55 countries as of the end of the year, the highest figure ever recorded. Three-quarters, or 30.9 million people, were located in only ten countries.
Protracted crises, communal violence and unresolved governance challenges were the main factors behind 10.8 million new displacements associated with conflict and violence. Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Syria accounted for more than half of the global figure.
Newly emerging crises forced millions to flee, from Cameroon’s anglophone conflict to waves of violence in Nigeria’s Middle Belt region and unprecedented conflict in Ethiopia. Displacement also continued despite peace efforts in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Colombia.
Many IDPs remain unaccounted for. Figures for DRC, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen are considered underestimates, and data is scarce for Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. This prevents an accurate assessment of the true scale of internal displacement in these countries. ||Estimating returns continues to be a major challenge.
Large numbers of people reportedly returned to their areas of origin in Ethiopia, Iraq and Nigeria, to conditions which were not conducive to long-lasting reintegration. ||Urban conflict triggered large waves of displacement and has created obstacles to durable solutions. Airstrikes and shelling forced many thousands to flee in Hodeida in Yemen, Tripoli in Libya and Dara’a in Syria. In Mosul in Iraq and Marawi in the Philippines, widespread destruction and unexploded ordnance continued to prevent people from returning home.
Heightened vulnerability and exposure to sudden-onset hazards, particularly storms, resulted in 17.2 million disaster displacements in 144 countries and territories. The number of people displaced by slow-onset disasters worldwide remains unknown as only drought-related displacement is captured in some countries, and only partially.
The devastating power of extreme events highlighted again the impacts of climate change across the globe. Wildfires were a particularly visible expression of this in 2018, from the US and Australia to Greece and elsewhere in southern Europe, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, causing severe damage and preventing swift returns.
Global risk of being displaced by floods is staggeringly high and concentrated in towns and cities: more than 17 million people are at risk of being displaced by floods each year. Of these, more than 80 per cent live in urban and peri-urban areas.
An overlap of conflict and disasters repeatedly displaced people in a number of countries. Drought and conflict triggered similar numbers of displacements in Afghanistan, and extended rainy seasons displaced millions of people in areas of Nigeria and Somalia already affected by conflict. Most of the people displaced by disasters in Iraq and Syria were IDPs living in camps that were flooded.
Promising policy developments in several regions show increased attention to displacement risk. Niger became the first country to domesticate the Kampala Convention by adopting a law on internal displacement, and Kosovo recognised the importance of supporting returning refugees and IDPs, updating its policy to that end. Vanuatu produced a policy on disaster and climate-related displacement, and Fiji showed foresight in adopting new guidelines on resettlement in the context of climate change impacts.
▻https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-internal-displacement-2019-grid-2019-0
#IDPs #déplacés_internes #migrations #asile #statistiques #chiffres
Nasrallah reveals new details about ambush, killing of 12 Israeli commandos
Lebanon in 1997 and offers hints about a mysterious murder of a militant leader in Syria
Amos Harel
May 13, 2019 5:32 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-nasrallah-reveals-new-details-about-ambush-killing-of-12-israeli-c
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah revealed new details earlier this month about the disaster in September 1997, when 12 members of Israel’s elite naval commando unit were killed in southern Lebanon.
Nasrallah claims that Hezbollah had been tracking Israel’s preparations for the mission and ambushed the commandos from the Shayetet 13 unit of the Israel Defense Forces – a scenario that some Israeli sources have also suggested over the years.
Nasrallah spoke on May 2 at a memorial ceremony for Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah figure who died under mysterious circumstances three years ago in Syria, and had been involved in the 1997 incident.
Nasrallah’s remarks have been translated and analyzed in an article by Dr. Shimon Shapira, a brigadier general in the IDF reserves and an expert on Iran and Hezbollah. The article was published on the website of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a research institute.
On the night of September 4, 1997, 16 Shayetet fighters, under the command of Lt.-Col. Yossi Korakin, were tasked with laying bombs along the coastal road in Lebanon between Tyre and Sidon. After landing on the beach, an explosive device was detonated that caused serious casualties and severed the force into two. Korakin and 10 commandos were killed. Those who survived reported they were fired upon after the blast.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah addresses his supporters during a public appearance October 24, 2015
Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah addresses his supporters during a public appearance October 24, 2015\ REUTERS
The survivors and the bodies of their comrades-in-arms were evacuated by helicopter, with great effort, during which an IDF doctor was killed by Lebanese gunfire. The body of one of those killed, Sgt. Itamar Ilya, remained behind and was returned to Israel in a swap with Hezbollah nine months later.
]]>Explainer: Why the war in Syria’s Idlib escalated again - Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-security-northwest-explainer-idUSKCN1SF0P7
WHY HAS THE CONFLICT ESCALATED AGAIN?
The Russian-Turkish deal created a demilitarized zone from which jihadists were required to withdraw, effectively putting the onus on Turkey to tackle the problem while leaving the northwest within a sphere of Turkish influence.
But Russia’s patience has been wearing thin over what it views as Turkey’s failure to curb Tahrir al-Sham. Damascus, determined to recover “every inch” of Syria, has also publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo.
]]>Tiens, Trump se pose des questions sur le #Venezuela, au moins sur la stratégie suivie jusque là, avec le succès que l’on sait…
A frustrated Trump questions his administration’s Venezuela strategy - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-frustrated-trump-questions-his-administrations-venezuela-strategy/2019/05/08/ad51561a-71a7-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html
President Trump is questioning his administration’s aggressive strategy in Venezuela following the failure of a U.S.-backed effort to oust President Nicolás Maduro, complaining he was misled about how easy it would be to replace the socialist strongman with a young opposition figure, according to administration officials and White House advisers.
The president’s dissatisfaction has crystallized around national security adviser John Bolton and what Trump has groused is an interventionist stance at odds with his view that the United States should stay out of foreign quagmires.
Trump has said in recent days that Bolton wants to get him “into a war” — a comment that he has made in jest in the past but that now betrays his more serious concerns, one senior administration official said.
The administration’s policy is officially unchanged in the wake of a fizzled power play last week by U.S.-backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó. But U.S. officials have since been more cautious in their predictions of Maduro’s swift exit, while reassessing what one official described as the likelihood of a diplomatic “long haul.”
U.S. officials point to the president’s sustained commitment to the Venezuela issue, from the first weeks of his presidency as evidence that he holds a realistic view of the challenges there and does not think there is a quick fix.
But Trump has nonetheless complained over the past week that Bolton and others underestimated Maduro, according to three senior administration officials who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
Opposition leader Juan Guaidó called on Venezuelans to protest April 30 and urged the military to “keep advancing” in efforts to oust President Nicolás Maduro. (Reuters)
Trump has said that Maduro is a “tough cookie” and that aides should not have led him to believe that the Venezuelan leader could be ousted last week, when Guaidó led mass street protests that turned deadly.
]]>The Future Is Here, and It Features Hackers Getting Bombed – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/06/the-future-is-here-and-it-features-hackers-getting-bombed
Israeli armed forces responded to a Hamas cyberattack by bombing the group’s hacking headquarters.
With an airstrike on Sunday, the Israeli military provided a glimpse of the future of warfare.
After blocking a cyberattack that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said was launched by operatives working on behalf of the militant group Hamas, the IDF carried out an airstrike in Gaza targeting the building in which the hackers worked, partially destroying it. The strike appears to be the first time that a nation’s military has responded in real time to a cyberattack with physical force.
In a tweet, the IDF declared victory, saying: “We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work.”
“HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed,” the tweet added, in what appears to have been a macabre attempt at a joke using an invented file name.
For years, countries have used policy documents and strategy white papers to warn that they reserved the right to choose the method by which they respond to cyberattacks, either in kind through cyberspace or with physical force, said Catherine Lotrionte, an expert on international law and a professor at Georgetown University. Now, Israel has made those warnings concrete.
“You’ve got a physical operation against a building that was in response to an ongoing cyberattack or at least a cyberattack that Hamas was planning—that’s the interesting part,” Lotrionte said.
Key questions remain about the Israeli operation, and IDF officials declined to answer questions from Foreign Policy about the nature of the attack launched by Hamas against Israel.
In a press statement, the IDF said Hamas “attempted to establish offensive cyber capabilities within the Gaza Strip and to try and harm the Israeli cyber realm.” These “efforts were discovered in advance and thwarted,” and following the operation to thwart the cyberattack, “the IDF attacked a building from which the members of Hamas’ cyber array operated.”
The decision to bomb a Hamas hacking unit comes as armed forces are increasingly integrating cyberoperations into their militaries, and the Israeli decision to target such a unit was completely unsurprising to scholars and practitioners of cyberwarfare.
“It’s no surprise that in a digital age marked by heightened risk of cyberwarfare a nation-state engaged in a noninternational armed conflict would regard the cyber-capabilities of its adversary as valid military targets under international law,” said David Simon, a lawyer at the law firm Mayer Brown who worked on cybersecurity policy and operations as a special counsel at the U.S. Defense Department.
And even if the notion of bombing hackers appears surprising on its face, Israel was likely on solid legal footing when it did so, provided that the hackers were in fact carrying out an offensive operation on behalf of a militant group engaged in armed conflict with Israel.
Legal experts emphasized that the context of Sunday’s strike was key in understanding Israel’s calculus to carry it out. The strike came amid a renewed period of fighting that saw Palestinian militants fire hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, with Israel responding with an intense artillery and aerial barrage of Gaza.
Militaries around the world have recognized cyberspace as a domain of military operations, and that leaves hackers participating in an armed conflict in a highly exposed position. “Hackers who are engaged in military attacks are legitimate targets,” said Gary Brown, a cyberlaw professor at the National Defense University.
Militant groups such as Hamas have invested heavily in their online operations in recent years, using them as a way to poke at far more powerful, better resourced opponents. Cyberspace serves as a key way to distribute propaganda and gain intelligence about adversaries.
In one notorious example, a hacker working on behalf of the militant group Islamic Jihad pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges of hacking into the video feeds of IDF drones carrying out surveillance over Gaza.
Sunday’s bombing is not the first time hackers have been targeted in airstrikes—though it is believed to be the first time hackers engaged in an ongoing operation have been hit. In 2015, a U.S. airstrike in Syria killed the Islamic State hacker Junaid Hussain, who had become a prolific propagandist and recruiter for the group.
Hussain hacked into the personal accounts of hundreds of U.S. service members and posted their personal information online and helped recruit the men who opened fire in 2015 on a cartoon exhibition in Garland, Texas. As he ascended the ranks of the Islamic State’s leadership, he was singled out to be killed.
Hussain’s killing arguably laid the groundwork for Sunday’s strike, which experts argue sends a message to hackers engaged in offensive activity.
“It’s kind of a wake-up call for people who thought they were going to be able to engage in cyberactivity with impunity,” Brown said. “It now looks like states are willing to reach behind the lines and strike hackers.”
]]>Russia’s Payback Will Be Syria’s Reconstruction Money – Foreign Policy
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/05/russias-payback-will-be-syrias-reconstruction-money
But international donors—and Bashar al-Assad—aren’t playing along yet.
[…]
Almost four years later, with rebels having mostly abandoned calls for regime change and losing large swaths of their enclaves, Russia has achieved most of its short- and medium-term goals in Syria. A growing number of signs suggest Moscow is now shifting focus to another objective: The Kremlin would like Syria to provide it a financial windfall.
[…]
Russian analysts say Moscow had originally envisaged a sect-based power-sharing arrangement, modeled on Lebanon, between the Syrian government and several opposition groups as the political panacea for the conflict. But Russia could neither convince the regime nor the rebels to compromise and abandoned the plan. Now it has reduced its ambitions and is focused on using its leverage with Assad to agree on a constitutional committee whose members have been appointed by the regime, the opposition, and representatives of Syrian civil society.
Max Suckov, a Russia analyst, said Moscow would achieve little more in terms of a political settlement. “Russia is not very hopeful about a political settlement which satisfies all Syrian actors,” he said. “I think Russia has accepted that Syria will continue to be a centralized state, but that certainly makes it difficult to convince the EU to pay for reconstruction.”
]]>Antiquities looted in Syria and Iraq are sold on Facebook - BBC News
▻https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47628369
Private groups also discuss how to illegally excavate ancient tombs, according to research by academics.
Facebook says it has removed 49 groups following the BBC’s investigation.
The BBC has also seen evidence that antiquities are still being smuggled from Iraq and Syria into Turkey, despite a police clampdown and the retreat of the Islamic State group.
#antiquités #pillage #syrie #irak #Turquie
]]>Refugee, volunteer, prisoner: #Sarah_Mardini and Europe’s hardening line on migration
Early last August, Sarah Mardini sat on a balcony on the Greek island of Lesvos. As the sun started to fade, a summer breeze rose off the Aegean Sea. She leaned back in her chair and relaxed, while the Turkish coastline, only 16 kilometres away, formed a silhouette behind her.
Three years before, Mardini had arrived on this island from Syria – a dramatic journey that made international headlines. Now she was volunteering her time helping other refugees. She didn’t know it yet, but in a few weeks that work would land her in prison.
Mardini had crossed the narrow stretch of water from Turkey in August 2015, landing on Lesvos after fleeing her home in Damascus to escape the Syrian civil war. On the way, she almost drowned when the engine of the inflatable dinghy she was travelling in broke down.
More than 800,000 people followed a similar route from the Turkish coast to the Greek Islands that year. Almost 800 of them are now dead or missing.
As the boat Mardini was in pitched and spun, she slipped overboard and struggled to hold it steady in the violent waves. Her sister, Yusra, three years younger, soon joined. Both girls were swimmers, and their act of heroism likely saved the 18 other people on board. They eventually made it to Germany and received asylum. Yusra went on to compete in the 2016 Olympics for the first ever Refugee Olympic Team. Sarah, held back from swimming by an injury, returned to Lesvos to help other refugees.
On the balcony, Mardini, 23, was enjoying a rare moment of respite from long days spent working in the squalid Moria refugee camp. For the first time in a long time, she was looking forward to the future. After years spent between Lesvos and Berlin, she had decided to return to her university studies in Germany.
But when she went to the airport to leave, shortly after The New Humanitarian visited her, Mardini was arrested. Along with several other volunteers from Emergency Response Centre International, or ERCI, the Greek non-profit where she volunteered, Mardini was charged with belonging to a criminal organisation, people smuggling, money laundering, and espionage.
According to watchdog groups, the case against Mardini is not an isolated incident. Amnesty International says it is part of a broader trend of European governments taking a harder line on immigration and using anti-smuggling laws to de-legitimise humanitarian assistance to refugees and migrants.
Far-right Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini recently pushed through legislation that ends humanitarian protection for migrants and asylum seekers, while Italy and Greece have ramped up pressure on maritime search and rescue NGOs, forcing them to shutter operations. At the end of March, the EU ended naval patrols in the Mediterranean that had saved the lives of thousands of migrants.
In 2016, five other international volunteers were arrested on Lesvos on similar charges to Mardini. They were eventually acquitted, but dozens of other cases across Europe fit a similar pattern: from Denmark to France, people have been arrested, charged, and sometimes successfully prosecuted under anti-smuggling regulations based on actions they took to assist migrants.
Late last month, Salam Kamal-Aldeen, a Danish national who founded the rescue non-governmental organisation Team Humanity, filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights, challenging what he says is a Greek crackdown on lifesaving activities.
According to Maria Serrano, senior campaigner on migration at Amnesty International, collectively the cases have done tremendous damage in terms of public perception of humanitarian work in Europe. “The atmosphere… is very hostile for anyone that is trying to help, and this [has a] chilling effect on other people that want to help,” she said.
As for the case against Mardini and the other ERCI volunteers, Human Rights Watch concluded that the accusations are baseless. “It seems like a bad joke, and a scary one as well because of what the implications are for humanitarian activists and NGOs just trying to save people’s lives,” said Bill Van Esveld, who researched the case for HRW.
While the Lesvos prosecutor could not be reached for comment, the Greek police said in a statement after Mardini’s arrest that she and other aid workers were “active in the systematic facilitation of illegal entrance of foreigners” – a violation of the country’s Migration Code.
Mardini spent 108 days in pre-trial detention before being released on bail at the beginning of December. The case against her is still open. Her lawyer expects news on what will happen next in June or July. If convicted, Mardini could be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.
“It seems like a bad joke, and a scary one as well because of what the implications are for humanitarian activists and NGOs just trying to save people’s lives.”
Return to Lesvos
The arrest and pending trial are the latest in a series of events, starting with the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011, that have disrupted any sense of normalcy in Mardini’s life.
Even after making it to Germany in 2015, Mardini never really settled in. She was 20 years old and in an unfamiliar city. The secure world she grew up in had been destroyed, and the future felt like a blank and confusing canvas. “I missed Syria and Damascus and just this warmness in everything,” she said.
While wading through these emotions, Mardini received a Facebook message in 2016 from an ERCI volunteer. The swimming sisters from Syria who saved a boat full of refugees were an inspiration. Volunteers on Lesvos told their story to children on the island to give them hope for the future, the volunteer said, inviting Mardini to visit. “It totally touched my heart,” Mardini recalled. “Somebody saw me as a hope… and there is somebody asking for my help.”
So Mardini flew back to Lesvos in August 2016. Just one year earlier she had nearly died trying to reach the island, before enduring a journey across the Balkans that involved hiding from police officers in forests, narrowly escaping being kidnapped, sneaking across tightly controlled borders, and spending a night in police custody in a barn. Now, all it took was a flight to retrace the route.
Her first day on the island, Mardini was trained to help refugees disembark safely when their boats reached the shores. By nighttime, she was sitting on the beach watching for approaching vessels. It was past midnight, and the sea was calm. Lights from the Turkish coastline twinkled serenely across the water. After about half an hour, a walkie talkie crackled. The Greek Coast Guard had spotted a boat.
Volunteers switched on the headlights of their cars, giving the refugees something to aim for. Thin lines of silver from the reflective strips on the refugees’ life jackets glinted in the darkness, and the rumble of a motor and chatter of voices drifted across the water. As the boat came into view, volunteers yelled: “You are in Greece. You are safe. Turn the engine off.”
Mardini was in the water again, holding the boat steady, helping people disembark. When the rush of activity ended, a feeling of guilt washed over her. “I felt it was unfair that they were on a refugee boat and I’m a rescuer,” she said.
But Mardini was hooked. She spent the next two weeks assisting with boat landings and teaching swimming lessons to the kids who idolised her and her sister. Even after returning to Germany, she couldn’t stop thinking about Lesvos. “I decided to come back for one month,” she said, “and I never left.”
Moria camp
The island became the centre of Mardini’s life. She put her studies at Bard College Berlin on hold to spend more time in Greece. “I found what I love,” she explained.
Meanwhile, the situation on the Greek islands was changing. In 2017, just under 30,000 people crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece, compared to some 850,000 in 2015. There were fewer arrivals, but those who did come were spending more time in camps with dismal conditions.
“You have people who are dying and living in a four-metre tent with seven relatives. They have limited access to water. Hygiene is zero. Privacy is zero. Security: zero. Children’s rights: zero. Human rights: zero… You feel useless. You feel very useless.”
The volunteer response shifted accordingly, towards the camps, and when TNH visited Mardini she moved around the island with a sense of purpose and familiarity, joking with other volunteers and greeting refugees she knew from her work in the streets.
Much of her time was spent as a translator for ERCI’s medical team in Moria. The camp, the main one on Lesvos, was built to accommodate around 3,000 people, but by 2018 housed close to 9,000. Streams of sewage ran between tents. People were forced to stand in line for hours for food. The wait to see a doctor could take months, and conditions were causing intense psychological strain. Self-harm and suicide attempts were increasing, especially among children, and sexual and gender-based violence were commonplace.
Mardini was on the front lines. “What we do in Moria is fighting the fire,” she said. “You have people who are dying and living in a four-metre tent with seven relatives. They have limited access to water. Hygiene is zero. Privacy is zero. Security: zero. Children’s rights: zero. Human rights: zero… You feel useless. You feel very useless.”
By then, Mardini had been on Lesvos almost continuously for nine months, and it was taking a toll. She seemed to be weighed down, slipping into long moments of silence. “I’m taking in. I’m taking in. I’m taking in. But it’s going to come out at some point,” she said.
It was time for a break. Mardini had decided to return to Berlin at the end of the month to resume her studies and make an effort to invest in her life there. But she planned to remain connected to Lesvos. “I love this island… the sad thing is that it’s not nice for everybody. Others see it as just a jail.”
Investigation and Arrest
The airport on Lesvos is on the shoreline close to where Mardini helped with the boat landing her first night as a volunteer. On 21 August, when she went to check in for her flight to Berlin, she was surrounded by five Greek police officers. “They kind of circled around me, and they said that I should come with [them],” Mardini recalled.
Mardini knew that the police on Lesvos had been investigating her and some of the other volunteers from ERCI, but at first she still didn’t realise what was happening. Seven months earlier, in February 2018, she was briefly detained with a volunteer named Sean Binder, a German national. They had been driving one of ERCI’s 4X4s when police stopped them, searched the vehicle, and found Greek military license plates hidden under the civilian plates.
When Mardini was arrested at the airport, Binder turned himself in too, and the police released a statement saying they were investigating 30 people – six Greeks and 24 foreigners – for involvement in “organised migrant trafficking rings”. Two Greek nationals, including ERCI’s founder, were also arrested at the time.
While it is still not clear what the plates were doing on the vehicle, according Van Esveld from HRW, “it does seem clear… neither Sarah or Sean had any idea that these plates were [there]”.
The felony charges against Mardini and Binder were ultimately unconnected to the plates, and HRW’s Van Esveld said the police work appears to either have been appallingly shoddy or done in bad faith. HRW took the unusual step of commenting on the ongoing case because it appeared authorities were “literally just [taking] a humanitarian activity and labelling it as a crime”, he added.
Detention
After two weeks in a cell on Lesvos, Mardini was sent to a prison in Athens. On the ferry ride to the mainland, her hands were shackled. That’s when it sank in: “Ok, it’s official,” she thought. “They’re transferring me to jail.”
In prison, Mardini was locked in a cell with eight other women from 8pm to 8am. During the day, she would go to Greek classes and art classes, drink coffee with other prisoners, and watch the news.
She was able to make phone calls, and her mother, who was also granted asylum in Germany, came to visit a number of times. “The first time we saw each other we just broke down in tears,” Mardini recalled. It had been months since they’d seen each other, and now they could only speak for 20 minutes, separated by a plastic barrier.
Most of the time, Mardini just read, finishing more than 40 books, including Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which helped her come to terms with her situation. “I decided this is my life right now, and I need to get something out of it,” she explained. “I just accepted what’s going on.”
People can be held in pre-trial detention for up to 18 months in Greece. But at the beginning of December, a judge accepted Mardini’s lawyer’s request for bail. Binder was released the same day.
Lingering fear
On Lesvos, where everyone in the volunteer community knows each other, the case came as a shock. “People started to be... scared,” said Claudia Drost, a 23-year-old from the Netherlands and close friend of Mardini’s who started volunteering on the island in 2016. “There was a feeling of fear that if the police… put [Mardini] in prison, they can put anyone in prison.”
“We are standing [up] for what we are doing because we are saving people and we are helping people.”
That feeling was heightened by the knowledge that humanitarians across Europe were being charged with crimes for helping refugees and migrants.
During the height of the migration crisis in Europe, between the fall of 2015 and winter 2016, some 300 people were arrested in Denmark on charges related to helping refugees. In August 2016, French farmer Cédric Herrou was arrested for helping migrants and asylum seekers cross the French-Italian border. In October 2017, 12 people were charged with facilitating illegal migration in Belgium for letting asylum seekers stay in their homes and use their cellphones. And last June, the captain of a search and rescue boat belonging to the German NGO Mission Lifeline was arrested in Malta and charged with operating the vessel without proper registration or license.
Drost said that after Mardini was released the fear faded a bit, but still lingers. There is also a sense of defiance. “We are standing [up] for what we are doing because we are saving people and we are helping people,” Drost said.
As for Mardini, the charges have forced her to disengage from humanitarian work on Lesvos, at least until the case is over. She is back in Berlin and has started university again. “I think because I’m not in Lesvos anymore I’m just finding it very good to be here,” she said. “I’m kind of in a stable moment just to reflect about my life and what I want to do.”
But she also knows the stability could very well be fleeting. With the prospect of more time in prison hanging over her, the future is still a blank canvas. People often ask if she is optimistic about the case. “No,” she said. “In the first place, they put me in… jail.”
▻https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2019/05/02/refugee-volunteer-prisoner-sarah-mardini-and-europe-s-hardening-
#criminalisation #délit_de_solidarité #asile #migrations #solidarité #réfugiés #Grèce #Lesbos #Moria #camps_de_réfugiés #Europe
Avec une frise chronologique:
ping @reka
’Walls Often Fail; They Have Unintended Consequences’
Along the Iraq-Syria border, Iraqi patrol forces have swapped their hard tactical helmets for the warmth of beanie caps. The soldiers look out from their observation towers, across a stretch of desert into Syria.
From this concrete tower on the border, you can almost see the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has made its final stand. Over there, Syrian Democratic Forces—a Kurdish-led alliance dedicated to rooting out ISIS and backed by the US—have nearly liberated the city and its suburbs, and American troops are beginning a long-awaited drawdown. A plume of gray-white smoke breaches skyward as an artillery strike reaches the villages and towns near Deir ez-Zor. The horizon is a diaphanous blur of dark smoke.
Between us and Syria is a fence. It is about 43 miles long, and a guard tower is located every few hundred feet, manned by squadrons from the Iraqi border security forces. The roughly 10-foot-tall chain-link barrier bucks and rattles in the wind. Barbed wire unspools along the top, and about 20 feet beyond the fence, on the Syrian side, there’s a ditch to stop explosive-laden ISIS vehicles that might charge the border. Beyond the ditch is a desiccated stretch of desert now mostly cleared of booby traps.
The fence divides two villages, both called #Baghouz. The residents of Syrian Baghouz and Iraqi Baghouz once traveled freely between the towns, visiting with family and friends in a place where international borders are as hazy as the smoke between them. “It was normal for us to go to Syrian Baghouz,” says Alaa Husain, an Iraqi shepherd who has lived in this hamlet for 28 years.
Syria Latest: Day-to-Day Life in War-Weary Damascus - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-26/waiting-19-hours-for-gas-in-a-lifeless-city
Instead of a frenzy of reconstruction and the promise of revival, Syrians have found themselves fighting another battle. Weary and traumatized from the violence, they’re focused on trying to survive in a decimated economy that shows no signs of imminent revival and with no peace dividend on the horizon.
[..,]
Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, said the Trump administration is much more aggressive than under Barack Obama, using more secondary penalties that target those doing business with sanctioned individuals or companies.
In November, the U.S. Treasury Department added a network of Russian and Iranian companies to its blacklist for shipping oil to Syria and warned of significant risks for those violating the sanctions.
“It is a conscious policy of the American government to try to strangle to death the Iranian government in Tehran and the Syrian government in Damascus,” said Ford, who’s now a fellow at the Middle East Institute. “They don’t want to fight a military war with the Syrian government, but they’re perfectly willing to fight an economic war.”
Ford likened the situation in Syria to the one in Cuba after the economy collapsed in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Cuba had financial difficulties, “but the Castros are still there,” he said.
]]>Syria: At least 1,600 civilians killed by US coalition in Raqqa, probe finds | Middle East Eye
▻https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-least-1600-civilians-killed-us-coalition-raqqa-probe-finds
A US-led military coalition killed thousands of civilians in Raqqa during its “indiscriminate” bombing campaign against the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria, an investigation released on Thursday has found.
In a new joint report, the Airwars monitoring group and human rights advocate Amnesty International said the US-led coalition was responsible for the deaths of at least 1,600 civilians during its bombardment of northeastern Syria.
Both groups used open source data, which included thousands of social media posts and other material, to build a database of more than 1,600 civilians reportedly killed in coalition strikes between June to October 2017.
The organisations said they had gathered the names of more than 1,000 victims. Amnesty added that it had managed to directly verify 641 of these names on the ground in Raqqa, the eastern Syrian city IS was headquartered in.
The groups noted one incident where four families had been “wiped out in an instant” after the US-led coalition bombed a Raqqa neighbourhood on 25 September 2017.
]]>Beyond Borders : A Look at the Venezuelan Exodus (English) | The World Bank
▻http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/864341554879205879/Beyond-Borders-A-Look-at-the-Venezuelan-Exodus
Once the wealthiest country in Latin America, Venezuela is going through one of the region’s worst economic crises in recent history. It is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Migration accelerated rapidly in 2018, with some countries reporting twice as many migrants coming in as compared with a year earlier. After Syria the Venezuelan migration is the largest displacement crisis in the world. However, the Venezuelan exodus has mobilized just a fraction of the international support received by countries affected by comparable or even smaller crises. The global concessional financing facility (GCFF) is a financial intermediary fund created by World Bank specifically to help middle income countries impacted by the influx of refugees through the provision of concessional financing and improved coordination for development projects that benefit refugees and host communities. Under this mechanism, countries provide contributions to the GCFF to provide concessionality for projects that have a demonstrated objective of supporting impacted and vulnerable populations allowing benefitting countries to access affordable and more sustainable financing to address refugee crises. Two Latin American countries have approached the GCFF, expressing their interest in joining the facility as benefitting countries given the significant number of migrants and refugees they are hosting.
▻http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/864341554879205879/pdf/Beyond-Borders-A-Look-at-the-Venezuelan-Exodus.pdf
]]>Turkey’s Policy in the Balkans: More than Neo-Ottomanism
There is a fundamental misperception with regard to Turkey’s relationship with the Balkans. Turkey is not external to the region, the way Russia is for instance. Its history and geographic location make it a part of southeast Europe. Millions of Turks have their family roots in what was once known as ‘Turkey-in-Europe.’ This includes the founder of the republic, the Salonika-born Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Ties run deep at the political, economic, and societal levels.
All those connections have drawn Turkey to the Balkans, especially after the end of the Cold War. The notion that Turks are now coming back does not hold. Closer engagement in the region started under President Turgut Özal in the early 1990s. But back then, Turkey balanced between bilateralism and multilateralism. It invested in economic and security ties with friendly countries such as Albania, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria while adhering to NATO as its response to the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. What changed under the Justice and Development (AK) Party, notably over the past decade, is the switch to bilateralism. That is understandable given the cracks in relations between Ankara and the West. All the same, it is concerning since it is coinciding with the push against the EU and NATO by Russia, which leverages history, religious identity and anti-Western rhetoric to legitimize its actions.
Pundits and politicians often use ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ to describe Turkey’s forays. The label can be often misleading. Yes, Turkish President Recep Erdogan praises the Ottoman Empire and its legacy, domestically and beyond Turkey’s borders. But so did his predecessors in office. Within the country, liberals and Islamist conservatives alike all rediscovered the Ottomans from the 1980s onwards in questioning the Kemalist political order. The government has been reaching out to Balkan Muslims through TIKA, the Turkish developmental agency, and the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) for decades.
Neo-Ottomanism is therefore the packaging, not the substance. Turkey’s objective is not to recreate the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. That is far beyond the country’s resources and capacity. The region is gravitating in economic, social, institutional and political terms to the West. What we have instead is Erdogan using the Balkans to make a case that he is the leader of the wider (Sunni) Muslim community in Europe and the Middle East. The main audience is his electorate in Turkey and only secondly Muslims abroad. The pre-election rally he held in Sarajevo in the run-up to last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections is a case in point.
But Turkish policy in the Balkans cannot be reduced to the promotion of Islamic solidarity. Erdogan’s main achievement is the fact that he has built relations with leaders from countries that are majority non-Muslim. In October 2017, for instance, he was welcomed in Serbia by President Aleksandar Vucic. The visit gave some credence to complaints by Bosniaks (Slavic Muslims) that Turkey loves to talk brotherhood in Bosnia but when it comes to investing money it goes for Serbia. Similarly, Erdogan has strong links to Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who hosted the EU-Turkey summit a year ago. Bulgaria and Serbia are interested in hosting an extension of the TurkStream gas pipeline, a joint Russo-Turkish venture. Greece’s Alexis Tsipras also received the red carpet treatment during his latest visit to Turkey where he discussed ideas on decreasing tensions in the Aegean.
Despite its quest for strategic autonomy, Turkey is still partnering with Western institutions. In addition, Ankara has been supportive of the Prespa Agreement and newly renamed North Macedonia’s accession to NATO, its quarrels with the U.S. and other key members of the Alliance notwithstanding. Collectively, EU members Romania, Bulgaria and Greece account for the bulk of Turkish trade with southeast Europe, with the Western Balkans trailing far behind. Greece and Bulgaria see Turkey as key to stemming the flow of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and further afield. They are highly supportive of the EU-Turkey deal on migration from March 2016, renewed last year.
Does the authoritarian system built by Erdogan pose an ideological challenge in the Balkans? Perhaps yes. For instance, pressure on governments to close educational institutions and surrender, without due process, members of the Fethullah Gülen community, which is implicated in the coup attempt in July 2016, undermine the rule of law. At the same time, the authoritarian drift observed in the Balkans is an indigenous product. It is not imported from Vladimir Putin’s Russia nor from Turkey under its new ‘sultan’.
▻https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/turkeys-policy-balkans-more-neo-ottomanism-22835
]]>China eyes Lebanese port to launch investments in Syria, region
▻https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/03/china-lebanon-tripoli-port-investments-syria-reconstruction.html
Last December, the Chinese state-owned COSCO shipping company docked in Tripoli, inaugurating a new maritime route connecting China to the Mediterranean Sea. Located less than 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Syrian border, Tripoli benefits from a key strategic position in the eyes of investors looking for fast access to Syria’s war-damaged cities.
“China is testing Tripoli as a potential location for investment,” Tamer added. Having secured an $86 million loan from the Islamic Development Bank, the port is preparing for large-scale investment. “The Chinese won’t look at anything under half a billion,” Tamer told Al-Monitor. “If they invest in the port, it’s because of their interest in the whole region.”
Keeping its embassy in Damascus open throughout the conflict, Beijing has provided steady diplomatic support to Bashar al-Assad’s regime, vetoing most resolutions against Damascus at the UN Security Council.
(à noter le dernier paragraphe politiquement correct !)
]]>#Cheltenham will be recognised as a ’Town of Sanctuary’ for refugees
Refugees who were forced out of Syria by the civil war and who arrive in Cheltenham will be helped to integrate with the town.
Cheltenham Borough councillors unanimously backed a motion this week calling for further support to integrate refugees with local communities through basic language lessons and education opportunities.
Cheltenham will now be recognised as a ’Town of Sanctuary’ which offers places of safety to people who flee violence.
In 2015 the borough council pledged to take-in 100 refugee families by 2020 in the wake of the migrant crisis.
Councillor Peter Jeffries, cabinet member for housing, told the meeting Cheltenham has housed 25 refugees to date.
Liberal Democrat councillor Max Wilkinson, who tabled the motion, told full council members helping refugees to integrate is “a challenge our country often hasn’t worked hard enough to meet in recent years”.
Gloucestershire Association of Refugees and Asylum Seekers (GARAS) and Cheltenham Welcomes Refugees (CWR) currently work to help refugees integrate into the county.
A fund has been set up on crowdsourcing website JustGiving to help support a refugee student at the University of Gloucestershire once a year.
The fund, called The Michael Perham Sanctuary Scholarship, has so far raised more than £1,550.
▻https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/cheltenham-news/cheltenham-recognised-town-sanctuary-refugees-2688791
#villes-refuge #réfugiés #asile #migrations #solidarité #réfugiés_syriens #UK #Angleterre
Lebanon looks to hardline eastern Europe approach for Syrian refugees
Lebanon said on Wednesday it wanted to follow the example of eastern EU states that have largely rejected refugees as a way of resolving its own refugee crisis.
Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil sympathized with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia’s refusal to accept refugee distribution quotas proposed by the EU after the 2015-16 migrant crisis, when more than a million people streamed into Europe, mostly from Syria.
Populist eastern EU leaders including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Poland’s powerbroker Jaroslaw Kaczynski and Czech President Milos Zeman, among others, blasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open door” policy on accepting migrants during that period.
These countries “were acting in their national interest and decided that the redistribution of refugees among European countries is not in their national interest, although they faced EU sanctions for that,” Bassil told reporters in Prague.
“I would like this attitude to be an inspiration for Lebanon, because every state must make national interests its top priority and at this moment Lebanon’s key national interest is the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland,” he added.
Lebanon says it is hosting 1.5 million Syrians — around a quarter of its own population. Less than one million of them are registered with UN refugee agency the UNHCR.
Most of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in insecurity and depend on international aid.
The International Monetary Fund has said their presence has led to increased unemployment and a rise in poverty due to greater competition for jobs.
The influx has also put strain on Lebanese water and electrical infrastructure.
Lebanese government officials and politicians have ramped up calls for Syrians to return home, but the United Nations has consistently warned that conditions in the war-ravaged country are not suitable for such returns.
“I would like Prague or Beirut to host a meeting, an initiative of countries seeking to plan and ensure the return of Syrian refugees to their country,” said Bassil.
“This would be immensely useful for both Lebanon and Syria and in general it would be the best solution to the human, humanitarian and political crisis we have right now and which could get worse in the future,” he said.
‘Terrorism’ and antisemitism
►https://africasacountry.com/2019/03/terrorism-and-antisemitism
After all, would any elected official, in Washington or anywhere else, accept the notion that the Palestinians (or Lebanon or Syria) had the right to use force against the “terrorist threat” posed by Israel’s FLLF? Or the right to target Eitan, Ben-Gal, Dagan or Sharon for assassination (targeted killing) because of their direct role in this “terrorist” campaign? Or the right to target the kibuztim where, according to Bergman, many of the FLLF bombs were manufactured? Can one imagine a columnist in a major US newspaper claiming that civilians accidentally killed in the process should be considered mere “collateral damage,” or insisting that such uses of force should be celebrated as courageous, determined actions in the moral fight against the scourge of “terrorism” around the world?
On what basis then can Israel, the United States, or any other country claim the right to target terrorist leaders, bomb terrorist bomb making facilities or use deadly force against demonstrators because of an alleged connection to a terrorist organization?
Acknowledging that Palestinians have been the perpetrators of “terrorism” against Israel but also the victims of Israeli “terrorism” thus threatens to upend the entirety of the hegemonic discourse on “terrorism.”
]]>‘Where are you from?’ Facing fines and bureaucracy, refugee children in Jordan go undocumented
Located off the highway in the southern Amman suburbs, the Syrian embassy in Jordan almost looks like it’s made for long waits.
It’s a quiet day outside, as a group of elderly Syrians wearing traditional keffiyeh scarves sit on a patch of grass next to the sand-colored building smoking cigarettes and passing the time.
Aside from two flags attached to the roof of the embassy, the steel bars across the windows—shaped in classic Umayyad patterns—are one of the few hints of the otherwise rather anonymous building’s affiliation with Damascus.
On the wall between the counters, a large bulletin board is plastered with instructions for various civil status procedures: births, marriages and identity cards. Flyers address the “brothers and sisters of the nation” waiting quietly outside.
But not all Syrians feel welcome here.
“I feel uncomfortable going to the embassy,” says Bassam al-Karmi, a Syrian refugee in Jordan originally from Deir e-Zor.
“I can’t control my feelings and might start rambling on about politics and other things,” he explains, adding with a laugh, “I really can’t stand seeing the red [Syrian] flag, either.”
If possible, al-Karmi says, he avoids approaching the embassy. But when he had his first daughter two years ago, there was no way around it. That’s where he needed to go to register her birth—at least if he wanted her to be recognized as a Syrian national.
At last week’s international “Brussels III” donor conference, Jordan was commended for its efforts to provide Syrians with legal documentation. The civil status department of Jordan’s Ministry of Interior even maintains a presence in refugee camps, tasked with issuing official birth certificates.
But acquiring Jordanian documents is only one part of the process. Having them authenticated by the Syrian authorities is a whole other story.
According to several Syrian refugees in Jordan, bureaucratic procedures, lack of information and high costs are deterring them from registering their children’s births at the Syrian embassy—leaving thousands of Jordanian-born Syrian children without proof of nationality, and some potentially at risk of statelessness.
When Ahmad Qablan’s second son was born in 2014, one year after the family’s arrival in Jordan, he went through all the procedures and paperwork that were required of him to register them first with the Jordanian authorities and then with the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.
When his third son was born, he did the same.
Even so, years later, neither of them have Syrian documents officially proving their nationality.
A resident of a refugee camp some 70 kilometers east of the capital, Qablan would have to travel for two and a half hours each way to get Syrian birth certificates for his two sons—by submitting the papers at the Syrian embassy—only to come back again a week later to pick them up.
But the biggest obstacle to registering, he says, is the fees involved with late registration.
Even though, as a teacher, Qablan claims to have one of the highest salaries in the camp, the family is only just getting by, he says.
“Why would I go spend that money at the embassy?”
If a Syrian child is registered at the embassy later than three months after his or her birth, a $50 fine is added on top of the standard $75 registration fees. For a delay of more than a year, the fine goes up to $100.
According to al-Karmi, those costs make families postpone the procedure. But the longer they wait, the more expensive it gets. As a result, he and others around him find themselves caught in a spiral of increasing costs.
“You know the fees will increase,” he says, “but in the end people keep postponing and saying, ‘Maybe there’s another solution’.”
According to a source from the Syrian embassy, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, some refugees even choose to send family members across the border to go through the procedures in Syria itself just to save on consular fees.
Reports: ‘125,000’ Syrian refugee children born in Jordan
Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising and ensuing conflict, more than 125,000 Syrian children are estimated to have been born on Jordainan soil, according to reports in Jordanian media. However, with many children going unregistered with the Jordanian government, an accurate number can be hard to find.
UNHCR counts 107,268 children under the age of five in Jordan.
Even though the Jordanian government has issued nearly 80,000 birth certificates to Syrian children born in Jordan since 2015, experts say that the vast majority of those remain unregistered with the Syrian embassy.
One of the largest obstacles to registration, according to aid workers and Syrian refugees alike, is a lack of information about the procedures.
A former Daraa resident, Qasem a-Nizami attempted to navigate registration after the birth of his now three-month-old daughter, but he wasn’t sure of where to start.
According to a UN source speaking to Syria Direct on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, there is no coordination between UNHCR and the Syrian embassy.
However, refugees can consult UNHCR about steps they need to take to register civil status procedures in Jordan.
After asking around in his community and finally talking to the Jordanian Civil Status Department’s office in Zaatari camp, where he resides—sometimes receiving contradictory information—a-Nizami soon discovered that the procedures were much more complicated than he thought.
To get a birth certificate at the Syrian embassy, refugees need to present the passport of the mother and father as well as a Jordanian birth certificate and marriage contract validated by the embassy.
When a-Nizami got married in Syria, his town was under siege, and—like many other Syrians—the couple wasn’t able to access the government civil registries responsible for recording civil status events. Instead, the couple settled with a traditional Islamic marriage, involving a sheikh and witnesses.
Today, a-Nizami has finally registered his marriage with the Jordanian authorities and is currently waiting to get the papers.
“I can’t register my daughter until I’m finished with the trouble that I’m going through now,” he says.
‘Undocumented children’
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), having valid identity papers is crucial for refugees to access basic rights in a host country like Jordan, and children lacking a Jordanian birth certificate are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and child marriage.
“Undocumented children in Jordan cannot prove their identity, access justice and face difficulties in enjoying rights,” the NRC said in an email to Syria Direct.
The worst case scenario is that some children end up stateless—and because of Syria’s patrilineal nationality laws, this is particularly a risk for female-headed households unable to prove the nationality of the father.
But a lack of Syrian documents issued by the country’s embassy also has much more immediate consequences.
Since the Jaber-Naseeb border crossing between Syria and Jordan reopened for traffic in October after a three-year closure, at least 12,842 Syrians have made the trip across the border, according to the UNHCR.
Crossing the border, however, either requires a passport or an exit permit issued by the Syrian embassy in Jordan—neither of which can be obtained without Syrian identity documents.
For years, experts have advocated that the lack of civil documentation could be one of the most significant barriers to the return of Syrian refugees, and as governments, UN bodies and humanitarian organizations increasingly grapple with the infinitely complex question of return, the issue of civil documentation is ever more pressing.
Last week’s international “Brussels III” donor conference also underlined the need for affordable access to civil documentation for Syrians.
‘Cut from the tree of her father’
While the vast majority of Syrians in neighboring countries surveyed by UNHCR earlier this month have a hope of returning to Syria some day, less than six percent expressed intentions to return within the next year.
For al-Karmi, the hope of things changing in Syria was part of the reason why he kept postponing registration.
“I was hoping that by the time we had our first child, maybe Assad would be gone,” he explains.
And although he eventually registered his first-born daughter, the family’s youngest—who is nine months old—still only has Jordanian documents.
“For the next child we also thought, ‘Bashar will be gone by then’,” al-Karmi says. “But that didn’t happen.”
Now, he says, the family is doing what they can to make sure their daughters will grow up identifying with their Syrian roots.
“She’s been cut from the tree of her father,” he says, explaining how they’ve turned to the internet as the only way of nurturing the children’s ties to family members spread out across the globe.
“We are currently teaching her to remember the answer to, ‘Where are you from?’ and then responding, ‘I’m from Syria’,” he says.
“This is the most we can do in exile.”
But not everyone feels a need to raise their children to feel Syrian.
Abu Abida al-Hourani, a 28-year-old resident of Jordan’s Zaatari camp, is not even interested in registering his two-and-a-half-year-old son at the Syrian embassy.
“It’s better to belong to a country that will protect my son and make him feel safe and doesn’t deprive him of the most basic rights,” he explains.
“How am I supposed to raise my son to feel like he belongs in a country full of killing, displacement and injustice?”
▻https://syriadirect.org/news/%E2%80%98where-are-you-from%E2%80%99-facing-fines-and-bureaucracy-refug
#enfants #mineurs #enfance #Jordanie #réfugiés #réfugiés_syriens #asile #migrations #clandestinisation #certificats_de_naissance #bureaucratie #apatridie
Driven to suicide in Tunisia’s UNHCR refugee shelter
Lack of adequate care and #frustration over absence of resettlement plans prompt attempted suicides, refugees say.
Last Monday night, 16-year-old Nato* slit his wrists and was rushed to the local hospital in Medenine.
He had decided to end his life in a refugee facility run by the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, in Medenine. After running for two years, escaping Eritrea and near-certain conscription into the country’s army, making it through Sudan, Egypt and Libya, he had reached Tunisia and despair.
A few days later, Nato was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in #Sfax, 210km north of Medenine, where he was kept on lockdown and was frustrated that he was not able to communicate with anyone in the facility.
Nato’s isn’t the only story of despair among refugees in Tunisia. A female refugee was taken to hospital after drinking bleach, while a 16-year-old unaccompanied young girl tried to escape over the borders to Libya, but was stopped at Ben Gardane.
“I’m not surprised by what has happened to Nato,” a 16-year-old at the UNHCR facility told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity.
“They just keep us here without providing any support and after we ... witnessed killings of our friends. We feel completely abandoned. We don’t feel secure and protected,” he said.
The 30 to 35 unaccompanied minors living in UNHCR’s reception facility in Medenine share a room, spending their days remembering past images of violence and abuse.
“I cannot get out of my mind the picture of my friend dying after they pointed a gun at his temple. He was sitting next to me. Sometimes at night, I cannot sleep,” the 16-year-old said.
’They’re trying to hide us here’
The UNHCR facility in Medenine struggles to offer essential services to a growing number of arrivals.
According to the information given to Al Jazeera, the asylum seekers and refugees have not received medical screenings or access to psychosocial support, nor were they informed clearly of their rights in Tunisia.
“We feel they are trying to hide us here,” said Amin*. “How can we say we are safe if UNHCR is not protecting our basic rights? If we are here left without options, we will try to cross the sea.”
Amin, 19, has no vision of what his life will be. He would like to continue his education or learn a new language but, since his arrival, he has only promises and hopes, no plans.
The young people here find themselves having to take care of themselves and navigate the questions of what their future will be like, at times without even being able to reach out to their families back home for comfort.
“My parents are in Eritrea and since more than a year, I was able to speak with them only for three minutes,” said Senait*, a 15-year-old boy from Eritrea.
Aaron*, a 16-year-old boy who has been on the road for three years and three months, has not been able to call his relatives at all since his arrival in Tunisia.
“Last time I have contacted them was in 2016 while I was in Sudan. I miss them so much,” he said.
Last week, many of them participated in a peaceful demonstration, demanding medical care, support from the UNHCR and resettlement to third countries.
Refugee lives in suspension
Nato, as well as a number of refugee minors Al Jazeera spoke to, arrived in Tunisia over the Libyan border with the help of smugglers. The same is true for hundreds of refugees escaping Libya.
Tunisia registered more than 1,000 refugees and 350 asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia.
But the country has neither the capacity nor the means to host refugees, and because it doesn’t have a coherent asylum system, the refugees find themselves living a largely suspended life.
Officially, refugees are not allowed to work and, therefore, there is no formal system of protection for those that do work.
Awate*, a 24-year-old man from Eritrea, had been working for nine days in a hotel in the seaside city of Zarzis when he was arrested and brought to a police station where he was interrogated for 30 minutes.
“They told me ’why are you going to work without passport?’,” he said, adding that he has not worked since.
The UNHCR in Tunisia is pushing alternatives, which include enhancing refugees’ self-reliance and livelihood opportunities.
A month ago, a group of 32 people moved out of the reception centre with an offer of a monthly payment of 350 Tunisian dinars ($116) and help to find private accommodation. Among them, nine decided to go to the capital, Tunis. The plan is confirmed for three months, with no clarity on what happens next.
Aklilu*, a 36-year-old former child soldier from Eritrea who took up the offer, is now renting a small apartment on the main road to Djerba for 250 Tunisian dinars ($83).
“Why should I be forced to settle in a country that’s not ready to host refugees?” he said. “They are thinking of Tunisia as the final destination but there are no conditions for it. The UNHCR is not making any effort to integrate us. We don’t get any language courses or technical training.”
The Golan Heights first
Trump gave Syria and its allies a renewed pretext for possible military action
Haaretz Editorial
Mar 24, 2019
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/the-golan-heights-first-1.7046251
U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that “it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights” received an enthusiastic welcome in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who got a shot in the arm from Trump at a low point in his election campaign, welcomed this “Purim miracle.” His rival Benny Gantz, whose party’s leading lights helped push for American recognition of the Golan’s annexation, said in a statement that Trump was cementing his place in history as a true friend of Israel.
That Netanyahu and Gantz were both delighted is no surprise; the annexation of the Golan and the settlements established there enjoy widespread support in Israel. Since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Syria has refrained from any attempt to recover the Golan by force, preferring to maintain the quiet and conduct peace talks that achieved nothing. The Druze residents of the northern Golan have also accepted Israeli rule without rebelling.
The settlements on the Golan were established by the Labor Party, rather than the messianic Gush Emunim movement that settled the West Bank, and the Israelis who live there are termed “residents” rather than “settlers.” The beautiful vistas, the empty spaces and the snow on Mount Hermon are especially beloved by Israeli tourists.
>> Read more: Trump’s Golan tweet brings U.S. to Syria through the back door | Analysis ■ Trump’s declaration: What does it mean and what happens now | Explained ■ How Secret Netanyahu-Assad backchannel gave way to Israeli demand for recognition of Golan sovereignty
Nevertheless, despite the quiet and the internal consensus that sees the Golan as an inseparable part of Israel, this is occupied territory that Israel retains in violation of both international law and the principle at the basis of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 — that the acquisition of territory by war is unacceptable. Israel accepted this principle, and six prime ministers, including Netanyahu, have held talks with the Syrians on returning the Golan in exchange for peace.
The most recent talks were cut short by the outbreak of Syria’s civil war eight years ago, and the implosion on the other side of the border spurred appetites here for perpetuating the occupation with U.S. backing. During President Barack Obama’s tenure, that idea seemed hopeless. But Trump, no great fan of international laws and agreements, acceded happily to the Israeli request.
Trump’s announcement and the applause that greeted it in Jerusalem send the troubling message that Israel is no longer interested in a peace agreement. It’s true that Syria, having fallen apart, is now weak and will settle for diplomatic censure, and in any case the chance of resuming negotiations in the north is near zero. But Trump gave Syria and its allies a renewed pretext for possible military action.
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In the near term, the U.S. green light to annexing the Golan will deepen the Israeli delusion that U.S. approval is sufficient to revise the world map and contribute to erasing the 1967 lines as the relevant reference points for solving the Israeli-Arab conflict. The U.S. recognition will inevitably increase pressure from the right to annex Area C of the West Bank (which is under full Israeli control), intensifying the occupation and the bloody conflict with the Palestinians.
]]>German journalist who was held captive and gave birth in Syria speaks of her ordeal | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/21/german-journalist-who-was-held-captive-and-gave-birth-in-syria-speaks-o
C’est une bonne chose d’apprendre qu’une jeune femme et son enfant ont survécu un enlèvement en Syrie. Cette jeune allemande a voulu faire ses armes avec un reportage dans une zone de guerre.
Ses préparatifs font preuve d’une naïveté surprenante avec un résultat conséquent. Sachant qu’il y a d’autres reporters qui ont réuissi des reportages dans la même guerre et au même moment qui ne se sont pas faits kidnapper, je me demande pourquoi elle raconte son histoire et ce faisant expose aux monde entier son incompétence.
Peut-être les perspective professionelles d’une jeune diplomée en éthnologie et sciences des religions comparées l’obligent à se démarquer du reste de la meute.
Alors qu’on apprécie les actes qui font preuve d’une grande ambition, quelqu’un qui risque la vie de son enfant pour un scoop dépasse les limites du raisonnable. Qui voudrait ensuite employer et donner des responsabilité à quelqu’un qui est dépourvu de scrupules sur le plan humain et peu réfléchi dans ses démarches professionelles ?
Derrière le scoop ce cache la triste histoire de la rencontre d’une jeune femme à caractère extrême avec le monde des science qui ne permettent plus à bien des scientifiques de vivre de leur métier.
Janina Findeisen, who went to Syria when seven months pregnant, was released with her son in September 2016
Philip Oltermann in Berlin, Thu 21 Mar 2019 19.01 GMT
A German woman who was abducted in Syria and held captive for nearly a year has revealed how her kidnappers were prepared to “cut off my head in front of a live camera”, but ended up pampering her with chocolate, toys and luxury nappies after she gave birth to a baby boy while in captivity.
The journalist Janina Findeisen, who was released with her child in September 2016, has spoken for the first time about the circumstances under which she travelled to a war zone on her own when seven months pregnant, and how she managed to survive the ordeal.
In an interview published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Findeisen said she travelled to Syria in October 2015 in order to make a documentary about a schoolfriend who had turned to jihad and joined a faction of al-Qaida’s former affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra.
Her pregnancy, she said, had spurred her on rather than made her more aware of the risks. “I felt pressured – precisely because of my pregnancy. I wanted to tell this one more story before only being able to pick up work a few months after the birth. I was not aware of the fact that in that moment I was making the biggest mistake of my life.”
Using a people smuggler in Antakya, southern Turkey, to drive her across the border into Syria, Findeisen said she had only shared her travel plans with the father of her child and not taken a mobile phone or a GPS tracker with her. While conceding that other people could have stopped her from going through with her plans, Findeisen said: “In the end it was my decision, and my mistake.”
Even though her school friend had promised her in an email that she would not be harmed, Findeisen and her driver were ambushed as they tried to cross over back into Turkey. The then 27-year-old was blindfolded at gunpoint and taken to a house in a remote location.
“On the first night I really believed that the security guarantee my friend had given me meant I would soon be released. But I soon realised that my hopes were in vain,” said Findeisen, whose book My Room in the House of War is being published in Germany next month. She said she does not believe that her friend was aware of the plan to kidnap her, though members of his group were.
Asked about treatment while in captivity, Findeisen said: “There were a couple of unpleasant situations, but I fared comparatively well. But nonetheless it was clear that these weren’t nice, humane people […] They would have cut off my head in front of a live camera.”
While she was held captive, the journalist kept a diary in tiny handwriting, using food packaging after she ran out of paper. She unsuccessfully tried to get the attention of people in neighbouring houses and secretly collected tools that could become handy to facilitate an escape.
“Until the end I believed that I would be back in Germany for the birth of my child,” Findeisen told her interviewers. “It was unimaginable to me that I would give birth to my child in Syria. I ignored the reality of the situation. Until I could ignore it no more.”
Her kidnappers blackmailed a doctor to deliver her child, and the birth took place without complications. “Suddenly everything was so very far away: the war, my kidnappers, it was just my son and I. He was so teeny, so fragile, but healthy.”
After the birth, Findeisen said, her kidnappers’ treatment of her changed: “With a small child I was even more helpless than before. When my son woke at night and screamed, they asked me the next morning what was wrong.” Her abductors brought her chocolate, multivitamin juice and a teddy bear, and did not spare expenses when it came to nappies: “In Syria there are two kinds of nappies: the one kind is known as ‘Assad nappies’ and are quite flimsy. Then there are Molfix, the premium nappy brand there. They brought me those.”
Asked if she thought that her son would one day reproach her for having him in such precarious circumstances, Findeisen said: “I have thought about that a lot. When the time comes, I will face up to it.”
Findeisen, who studied ethnology and comparative religion before researching modern jihadism as a journalist, was eventually freed – not by German intelligence services, but another group of Islamists. After hearing shots outside her compound, the journalist found herself surrounded by a group of men in balaclavas who told her they would take her back to Germany.
The group Jabhat Fateh al-Sham announced in an online statement that it had freed the German woman after a sharia court ruled her kidnapping un-Islamic in the light of the security guarantee given by her friend.
Findeisen told Süddeutsche Zeitung she believed this to have been the case, and that she was not aware of the German state having paid any of the €5m (£4.3m) ransom her kidnappers had demanded.
“I got a second chance,” Findeisen said. “Not everyone who got kidnapped [in Syria] was given one.”
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