• L’aide économique américaine à la #France, 1940-1953. Relecture du plan Marshall, par Jacques Sapir
    https://www.les-crises.fr/l-aide-economique-americaine-a-la-france-1940-1953-relecture-du-plan-mars

    La question de « l’aide » américaine à la France et généralement aux puissances européennes dans les années 1940-1950 est un sujet passionnant mais aussi d’une brûlante actualité au regard de la politique américaine vis-à-vis des pays européens depuis maintenant plusieurs années, et en particulier dans le cadre des opérations militaires en Ukraine. Cette question […]

    #Articles #États-Unis #Europe #Russeurope_en_Exil #Union_européenne #Articles,_États-Unis,_Europe,_France,_Russeurope_en_Exil,_Union_européenne

  • Etats-Unis : le gouverneur du Texas signe une loi criminalisant l’entrée illégale de migrants
    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/12/19/etats-unis-le-gouverneur-du-texas-signe-une-loi-criminalisant-l-entree-illeg

    Etats-Unis : le gouverneur du Texas signe une loi criminalisant l’entrée illégale de migrants
    Le Monde avec AFP
    Le gouverneur du Texas, le républicain Greg Abbott, a signé lundi 19 décembre une loi controversée criminalisant l’entrée illégale dans cet Etat américain du Sud, frontalier du Mexique, une prérogative en principe réservée aux autorités fédérales. Ce partisan déclaré de Donald Trump, qui accuse l’administration du président démocrate Joe Biden d’« inaction délibérée » face à l’immigration clandestine, a symboliquement signé cette loi à Brownswille, devant un pan du mur à la frontière avec le Mexique, projet phare de l’ex-président républicain. La loi « crée une infraction pénale d’entrée illégale au Texas à partir d’un pays étranger », et prévoit jusqu’à vingt ans de prison en cas de récidive, a précisé le gouverneur.
    Lire aussi : Article réservé à nos abonnés A Ciudad Juarez, malgré le mur et les barbelés, les migrants passent toujours aux Etats-Unis
    Le texte, censé entrer en vigueur en mars, donne aussi aux autorités de l’Etat le pouvoir d’arrêter les migrants et de les expulser vers le Mexique, une compétence d’ordre fédéral, ce qui augure de recours en justice sur sa constitutionnalité. Le gouvernement mexicain avait réagi au vote de cette loi, le 15 novembre, en « rejetant catégoriquement toute mesure qui habilite les autorités locales ou d’un Etat à arrêter et renvoyer des citoyens mexicains ou étrangers au Mexique », selon un communiqué de son ministère des affaires étrangères. M. Trump, en campagne pour reprendre la Maison Blanche, et M. Abbott accusent le président américain, Joe Biden, de fermer les yeux sur l’immigration illégale à la frontière sud, principalement composée de ressortissants de pays d’Amérique latine qui disent fuir la pauvreté et la violence.
    Le Monde avec AFP

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#etatsunis#mexique#frontiere#immigrationillegale#ameriquelatine#pauvrete#violence#sante

  • When the Coast Guard Intercepts Unaccompanied Kids

    A Haitian boy arrived on Florida’s maritime border. His next five days detained at sea illuminate the crisis facing children traveling to the U.S. alone and the crews forced to send them back.

    Tcherry’s mother could see that her 10-year-old son was not being taken care of. When he appeared on their video calls, his clothes were dirty. She asked who in the house was washing his shirts, the white Nike T-shirt and the yellow one with a handprint that he wore in rotation. He said nobody was, but he had tried his best to wash them by hand in the tub. His hair, which was buzzed short when he lived with his grandmother in Haiti, had now grown long and matted. He had already been thin, but by January, after three months in the smuggler’s house, he was beginning to look gaunt. Tcherry told his mother that there was not enough food. He said he felt “empty inside.”

    More strangers, most of them Haitian like Tcherry, continued to arrive at the house in the Bahamas on their way to the United States. One day police officers came with guns, and Tcherry hid in a corner; they left when a man gave them money. The next time he and his mother talked, Tcherry lowered his bright, wide-set eyes and spoke to her in a quieter voice. “It was like he was hiding,” his mother, Stephania LaFortune, says. “He was scared.” Tcherry told her he didn’t want to spend another night on the thin mattress in the front room with scuffed pink walls. She assured him it would be over soon. A boat would take him to Florida, and then he would join her in Canada, where she was applying for asylum. LaFortune texted Tcherry photos of the city where she lived. The leaves had turned brown and fallen from the trees. Still, she was there, and that’s where Tcherry wanted to be. He waited another week, then two, then three.

    Tcherry didn’t laugh or play for months on end, until one day in February, when two sisters, both Haitian citizens, were delivered to the house. One was a 4-year-old named Beana. She wore a pink shirt and cried a lot. The other, Claire, was 8. She had a round face and a burn on her hand; she said that at the last house they’d stayed in, a girl threw hot oil on her. Claire did everything for her sister, helping her eat, bathe and use the bathroom. Like Tcherry, the girls were traveling to join their mother, who was working at a Michigan auto plant on a temporary legal status that did not allow her to bring her children from abroad. Their clothes were as dirty as his. Sometimes Tcherry and Claire watched videos on his phone. They talked about their mothers. “I am thinking about you,” Tcherry said in a message to his mother in early February. “It has been a long time.”

    Finally, nearly four months after Tcherry arrived at the house, one of the men in charge of the smuggling operation woke him and the two girls early in the morning. “He told us to get ready,” Tcherry recalls. With nothing but the clothes they wore, no breakfast or ID, they were loaded into a van and were dropped off at a trash-lined canal just outside Freeport, Bahamas. In the muck and garbage, more than 50 people stood waiting as a boat motored toward them. “Not a good boat,” Tcherry told me, “a raggedy boat.” But nobody complained. The 40-foot vessel tilted from the weight as people climbed aboard and pushed into the two dank cabins, sitting shoulder to shoulder or standing because there was no more space. Tcherry felt the boat speeding up, taking them out to sea.

    For almost 12 hours they traveled west, packed together in cabins that now smelled of vomit and urine. In the lower cabin, a baby was crying incessantly. A heavily pregnant woman offered up the last of her package of cookies to the child’s mother to help soothe the infant. Tcherry was thirsty and exhausted. Not far from him, he heard a woman say that the children’s parents must be wicked for sending them alone into the sea.

    The passengers had been promised they would reach U.S. shores hours earlier. People were starting to panic, sure that they were lost, when passengers sitting near the windows saw lights, at first flickering and then bright — the lights of cars and buildings. “That is Florida,” a young man said as the boat sped toward shore. Tcherry pulled on his sneakers. “If I make it,” he thought, “I will spend Christmas with my family.”

    But as quickly as the lights of Florida came into view, police lights burst upon them. A siren wailed. People screamed, a helicopter circled overhead and an officer on a sheriff’s boat pointed a long gun toward them. Uniformed men climbed on board, yelled orders and handed out life jackets. The group of 54 people was transferred to a small Coast Guard cutter. As the sun rose over Florida just beyond them, a man with a tattoo on his arm of a hand making the sign of the benediction began recording a video on his phone. “As you can see, we are in Miami,” he said. “As you can see, we are on a boat with a bunch of small children.” He intended to send the video to relatives waiting for him on land, and he urged them to contact lawyers. But his phone was confiscated, and the video was never sent.

    The Coast Guard frames its operations in the sea as lifesaving work: Crews rescue people from boats at risk of capsizing and pull them from the water. But the agency, which is an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, also operates as a maritime border patrol, its ships as floating holding facilities. Since the summer of 2021, the Coast Guard has detained more than 27,000 people, a number larger than in any similar period in nearly three decades. On a single day in January, the agency’s fleet of ships off the Florida coast collectively held more than 1,000 people. The public has no way of knowing what happens on board. Unlike at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is closely monitored by advocates, the courts and the press, immigration enforcement at sea takes place out of public view.

    The Coast Guard routinely denies journalists’ requests to witness immigration patrols, but in early March, I learned that several days earlier, a boat carrying dozens of Haitians had been stopped so close to land that they were first chased down by the Palm Beach County sheriff’s marine unit. Among them were three unaccompanied children: two young sisters and a 10-year-old boy. In the months afterward, I obtained a trove of internal Coast Guard documents, including emails and a database of the agency’s immigration interdictions, and I tracked down Tcherry, Claire and Beana and 18 people traveling with them. Many of them told me about the five days they spent detained on Coast Guard ships — an experience, one man said, “that will remain a scar in each person’s mind.”

    People intercepted at sea, even in U.S. waters, have fewer rights than those who come by land. “Asylum does not apply at sea,” a Coast Guard spokesperson told me. Even people who are fleeing violence, rape and death, who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled. To try to get through, people held on Coast Guard ships have occasionally taken to harming themselves — swallowing sharp objects, stabbing themselves with smuggled knives — in the hope that they’ll be rushed to emergency rooms on land where they can try to claim asylum.

    The restrictions, combined with the nearly 30-year spike in maritime migration, created a crisis for the Coast Guard too, leading to what one senior Coast Guard official described in an internal email in February as “war-fighting levels of stress and fatigue.” Coast Guard crew members described to me their distress at having to reject desperate person after desperate person, but the worst part of the job, several said, was turning away the children who were traveling alone. From July 2021 to September 2023, the number of children without parents or guardians held by the Coast Guard spiked, a nearly tenfold increase over the prior two years. Most of them were Haitian. “The hardest ones for me are the unaccompanied minors,” one crew member told me. “They’re put on this boat to try to come to America, and they have no one.”

    The treatment of children is perhaps the starkest difference between immigration policy on land and at sea. At land borders, unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada cannot simply be turned back. They are assigned government caseworkers and are often placed in shelters, then with family members, on track to gain legal status. That system has its own serious failings, but the principle is that children must be protected. Not so at sea. U.S. courts have not determined what protections should extend to minors held on U.S. ships, even those detained well within U.S. waters. The Coast Guard says that its crew members screen children to identify “human-trafficking indicators and protection concerns including fear of return.” A spokesperson told me that “migrants who indicate a fear of return receive further screening” by Homeland Security officials.

    But of the almost 500 unaccompanied children held on the agency’s cutters in the Caribbean and the Straits of Florida between July 2021 and early September 2023, five were allowed into the U.S. because federal agencies believed they would face persecution at home, even amid escalating violence in Haiti, including the documented murder and rape of children. One other child was medically evacuated to a hospital in Florida, and six were brought to land for reasons that the internal Coast Guard records do not explain. The rest were delivered back to the countries they left, and it’s often unclear where they go once they return. Some have nowhere to stay and no one to take care of them. On occasion, they are so young that they don’t know the names of their parents or the country where they were born. One official from an agency involved in processing people delivered by the U.S. Coast Guard to Haiti told me “it is an open secret” that the process can be dangerously inconsistent. “Children leave the port,” the official said, “and what happens to them after they leave, no one knows.”

    Stephania LaFortune had not wanted to send her 10-year-old son on a boat by himself. She knew firsthand how perilous the journey could be. In May 2021, before the boat she had boarded made it to a Florida beach, some of the passengers jumped into the water to wade through the heavy waves. “They almost drowned,” she told me when I met her in Toronto. LaFortune waited on the beached vessel until U.S. Border Patrol officials came to detain her. In detention, she claimed asylum and was soon released. For months, she searched for other ways to bring Tcherry to her, but LaFortune ultimately determined she had no alternative.

    The first time LaFortune left Tcherry, he was 3 years old. Her husband, a police cadet, had been shot in his uniform and left to die in a ditch outside Port-au-Prince, and LaFortune, fearing for her life, departed for the Bahamas. Tcherry stayed behind with his grandmother. Four years later, as violence began to flare again, Tcherry’s mother finally made good on her promise to send for him. She arranged for him to fly to the Bahamas, where she had remarried and had a baby girl. But Tcherry was in the Bahamas not even a year when LaFortune told him that she would be leaving again — not because she wanted to, she assured her sobbing son, but because she had seen how Haitians were harassed and deported, and she simply didn’t believe there was real opportunity there. Tcherry’s stepfather and his younger half sister, who were Bahamian citizens, joined LaFortune months later. She arranged for Tcherry to live with relatives, promising to send for him as soon as she could.

    LaFortune’s asylum case in Florida dragged on, so she and her husband and daughter traveled over land to Canada, where they hoped they could get legal status more quickly. While they waited for a decision in their asylum case, the relative Tcherry was staying with said he could no longer take care of a growing boy by himself. After begging others to take her son, LaFortune found a woman she knew back in Haiti who said she was planning to make the trip to Florida herself with her own children. For $3,000, the woman said, she could take Tcherry with them. LaFortune sent the money. The woman took Tcherry to the smuggler’s house and did not return for him.

    That house, and the one where Tcherry was moved next, were filled with Haitians fleeing the crisis that began in July 2021, when President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by a team of mostly Colombian mercenaries hired through a Miami-area security company. The U.S. Justice Department has accused nearly a dozen people, some based in the United States, of setting the assassination in motion. As the Haitian state crumbled, proliferating gangs, many with ties to the country’s political elite, burst from the neighborhoods they’d long controlled and began terrorizing Port-au-Prince and swaths of the rest of the country. Kidnapping, extortion, the rape of women and children, and the torching of homes and neighborhoods became routine weapons of fear. Thousands have been murdered, and in June the United Nations estimated that nearly 200,000 have been internally displaced. Haitians able to gather the resources have left however they can. Many have traveled over land to the Dominican Republic or by air to South and Central America. And thousands have boarded boats bound for the beaches of Florida.

    The people on the vessel with Tcherry had reasons, each as urgent as the next, for being there. There was a 31-year-old street vendor whose Port-au-Prince neighborhood had been taken over by gangs; she said that when she tried to flee north by bus, men with guns forced her and other women off the bus and raped them. A man from a district in the north said he’d been beaten more than once by thugs sent by a political boss he’d opposed; both times they threatened to kill him. A man who worked as a Vodou priest in Port-au-Prince said he left because he needed money for his sick daughter, and gangs were confiscating his wages. The pregnant woman who helped comfort the crying baby said she had been kidnapped and raped; she was released only after her family sold land and collected donations to pay for her ransom. Two women were traveling with their daughters, but Tcherry, Claire and Beana were the only young children traveling alone.

    Tcherry sat on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter called the Manowar along with the rest of the group, exhausted, scared and confused. Nobody had explained to him what would happen next. Crew members in blue uniforms finally gave them food, small plates of rice and beans, and began to search their belongings and run their photos and fingerprints through federal immigration and criminal databases. Tcherry and the sisters followed the orders of a crew member with blond hair, cut like the soldiers in movies Tcherry had seen, to sit in the shaded spot under the stairs to the bridge.

    On the stern of the cutter, a man in his early 30s named Peterson sat watching the children. He had crossed paths with them weeks earlier in one of the houses; seeing they were hungry, he had brought them extra slices of bread and even cut Tcherry’s hair. Claire reminded him of his own young daughter in Haiti. Peterson had not wanted to leave his child, but gangs had recently taken control of roadways not far from his home in the coastal city of Saint-Marc. He had not earned a decent wage for many months, not since he lost his job as a driver at a missionary organization. He had decided to leave for the United States so he could send money back to Haiti for his daughter, who remained behind with her mother.

    Now it occurred to Peterson that his connection to Tcherry and the girls could work to his advantage. Surely the Coast Guard wouldn’t return children to Haiti, he thought. Surely they wouldn’t separate a family. “I thought that there might be an opportunity for me to get to the U.S.,” he told me. He approached Tcherry, Claire and Beana and told them they should tell the crew he was their uncle.

    Peterson’s small kindness in the smuggler’s house had given Tcherry reason to trust him. When it came time for the blond-haired crew member, Petty Officer Timothy James, to interview the children, Peterson stood close behind. With the help of another Haitian man who spoke some English, Peterson told James that he was their uncle. James asked the children if it was true. Tcherry and Claire, both timid, their eyes lowered, said it was. Beana was too young to understand. James handed her a brown teddy bear, which the crew of the Manowar keeps on board because of the growing number of children they detain, and sent the children back to the stern.

    But no more than a couple of hours later, Peterson changed his mind. He’d noticed that the pregnant woman had been evaluated by Florida EMTs, and he moved over to offer her a deal: If she would tell the crew he was her husband and let him join her if they brought her to land, his brother in Florida, who already paid $6,000 for his place on this boat, would make sure she was compensated. “I helped her understand that that is something she could profit from,” he says. The woman agreed, and Peterson, who now needed to tell the truth about the children, divulged to a crew member that he was not their uncle. “I was just trying to help if I could,” he said.

    James crouched down beside the children again and told them not to lie. “Why did you leave your home to go to the United States,” he read off a questionnaire. “To go to my parents,” Tcherry replied. To Tcherry, the questions seemed like a good sign. He was unsure whether he could trust these crew members after the officer on the sheriff boat pointed a long gun at them the night before. “I thought they were going to shoot me,” Tcherry says. But James calmly directed the children to sit in the one shaded place on the boat, and gave them cookies and slices of apple. “He was nice,” Tcherry says — the nicest anyone had been since Peterson brought them bread in the house.

    James kept reading the form. “What will happen when you get there?” he asked. Tcherry looked up. He latched onto the words “when you get there” and took them as a promise. He asked James when they would be on land. James said the same thing he told everyone on the boat: that the decision was not up to him, that he was just doing his job. Tcherry was convinced James would send him and Claire and Beana to their mothers. He thought of the story his mother had told him about his father’s murder, his body in a ditch by the road, and of his last memory of Haiti, when he passed through a gang checkpoint on the way to the airport. “I saw bandits approaching toward us, and he had a gun pulled,” Tcherry told me. “My heart started beating fast, and I thought he was going to shoot.” He was overwhelmed with relief that he would never have to go back there.

    A boat came to bring someone to land. But it was not there to pick up Tcherry or the other children. A Coast Guard medical officer had reviewed the pregnant woman’s vitals and made a decision that because she “may go into labor at any moment,” she would be brought to a hospital in Palm Beach County accompanied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Before she was taken away, Peterson said the woman told him she would not claim to be married to him after all. She didn’t want a stranger on her baby’s birth certificate. She offered to say she was his cousin. “I knew that being the cousin would not be enough,” Peterson recalls, “and I have to say that I lost hope.”

    The pregnant woman disappeared on a small boat toward land. Those left on the stern began to talk among themselves, asking why the baby, who had barely stopped crying, and the other children had been left aboard the cutter. They said they could not keep going like this, eating only small portions of scarcely cooked and saltless rice and beans, unable to bathe and forced to urinate and defecate in a toilet seat attached to a metal box with a tube off the side of the open deck. They decided they would rise in unison and protest, and they passed the word from one to the next. At around 9 p.m., dozens of people began to yell toward the bridge demanding interpreters, lawyers or just to know what would become of them. From the bow where he stood, James heard faint yelling, and then the voice of the officer in charge over the loudspeaker. “They’re starting an uprising on the fantail,” he said. “I need you back there.”

    Timothy James came from a conservative family in a conservative little town in the mountains of North Carolina. He and his wife held handguns aloft in their wedding photos, and his first job after dropping out of college was as a sheriff’s deputy at the jail. James joined the Coast Guard in 2015. “My main goal,” he told me, “was to chase down drug runners and catch migrants” — two groups that were more or less the same, as far as he understood.

    He’d been on the job no more than a few weeks before his expectations were upended. “I had no idea what I was talking about,” he told me. There was much less “running and gunning, catching bad guys” than he’d anticipated. Instead, the people he detained would tell him their stories, sometimes with the help of Google Translate on his phone, about violence and deprivation like he had never contemplated. People described what it was like to live on $12 a month. There were children and grandmothers who could have been his own, and young men not so unlike him. They were not trying to infiltrate the country as he’d thought. They were running because “they didn’t have another option,” he says.

    James and his colleagues learned the lengths people would go to try to get to land. Since last fall, people detained on cutters have pulled jagged metal cotter pins, bolts and screws from the rigging and swallowed them, apparently trying to cause such severe injury that they’d be taken to a hospital. Last August, near the Florida Keys, three Cuban men were reported to the Coast Guard by a passing towboat operator; most likely fearing they would be brought back to Cuba, they stabbed and slashed their legs with blades and were found in puddles of blood. In January, a man plunged a five-inch buck-style knife that he’d carried onto a cutter into the side of his torso and slashed it down his rib cage. The crew taped the knife to the wound to stop him from bleeding out as he fell unconscious. Most of these people were delivered to Customs and Border Protection and rushed to hospitals on land, where they probably intended to claim asylum. By the time James began working as operations officer on the Manowar last summer, he and other crew members started every leg at sea by scouring the decks for anything that people might use to harm themselves. (According to a DHS spokesperson, “medical evacuations do not mean that migrants have a greater chance of remaining in the United States.”)

    People detained on cutters have in rare cases threatened to harm Coast Guard members or others they’re traveling with. In January, a group the Coast Guard detained pushed crew members and locked arms to stop their removal to another cutter, according to an internal record. That same month, a group of Haitians held children over the side of a boat, “threatening to throw them overboard and set them on fire” if the Coast Guard came closer. Weeks later, a group of Cubans brandished poles with nails hammered into them and tried to attack an approaching Coast Guard boat. Conflicts between crew and those they detain have escalated to the point that Coast Guard members have shot people with pepper balls and subdued others with stun maneuvers.

    James tensed as he heard the order over the loudspeaker. He thought of the crowd-control techniques he’d learned to immobilize someone, and stepped down the side walkway toward the stern. In front of him were dozens of angry men and a few women, yelling in Haitian Creole. James hesitated and then walked forcefully up to the group, his hands pulled into his sides as if he were ready to throw a punch. Instead, he took a knee. He gestured to the men around him to come join him. He spoke into a cellphone in English, and on the screen he showed them the Google Translate app: “You’ve got to tell everybody to calm down,” it read in Creole. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

    Before they could respond, five other crew members came down the stairs, plastic zip ties and batons hanging from their belts. Tcherry was sitting under the stairs, beside Claire and Beana, who had not let go of the teddy bear. “Shut up, shut up,” one of the crew told the protesters as he stepped in front of Tcherry. “One of them said he was going to pepper-spray their eyes and handcuff them,” Tcherry says. James told his colleagues to wait. The yelling in English and Creole grew louder. A man to Tcherry’s left began to scream and roll on the ground, and then he rolled partway under the handrail. A crew member grabbed the man by the back of the pants and hauled him up. James secured his wrist to a post on the deck. “Nobody’s dying on my boat today,” James said.

    Above Tcherry, another crew member stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs. He held a shotgun and cocked it. James claims that the gun was not loaded, but the threat of violence had its intended effect. The protesters stepped back and went quiet.

    James kept speaking into the phone. “What do you want?” he asked the men.

    “If we go back, we’re dead,” one man replied. They said they could not endure being on the boat much longer.

    “If it were up to me, we’d be taking you to land,” James said. “But it is not up to us.” There was a process to seek protection, he told them. “But what you’re doing now is not that process.”

    Coast Guard crews do not decide who will be offered protection and who will be sent back. Their responsibility is only to document what the agency calls “manifestation of fear” (MOF) claims. The Coast Guard instructs them to make note of such claims only when people proactively assert them or when they observe people exhibiting signs of fear, such as shaking or crying. They are not supposed to ask. That may help explain why the agency has logged only 1,900 claims from more than 27,000 people detained in this region between July 2021 and September 2023. Fewer than 300 of those came from Haitians, even though they make up about a third of people held on cutters. Officials in the Coast Guard and in U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told me that Haitians face a systemic disadvantage in making a successful claim for protection: Almost no one working on Coast Guard boats can speak or understand Creole. (The Coast Guard told me it has access to contracted Creole interpreters aboard cutters.)

    Regardless of the person’s nationality, the process is nearly always a dead end. Each person who makes a claim for protection is supposed to be referred to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer, who conducts a “credible fear” screening by phone or in person on a cutter. Between July 2021 and early September 2023, USCIS approved about 60 of the approximately 1,900 claims — around 3%. By contrast, about 60% of asylum applicants on land passed a credible-fear screening over roughly the same period. Unlike on land, people who are denied on ships have no access to courts or lawyers to appeal the decision. And the few who are approved are not sent to the United States at all. Should they choose to proceed with their claims, they are delivered to an immigration holding facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, where they are evaluated again. They’re told they should be prepared to wait for two years or more, until another country agrees to take them as refugees. Only 36 of the people with approved claims agreed to be sent to Guantánamo. The State Department says there are currently no unaccompanied minors held at the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo, but a recent federal contract document says that the facility is prepared to accept them.

    The Manowar crew had been tasked by the local Coast Guard office with logging any requests for protection. But the night after the protest had been too chaotic and exhausting for them to do so. In the morning, a larger cutter with more supplies arrived. The people detained on the Manowar would be transferred to that boat. Before they departed, James told them that anyone who intended to seek protection should seek help from the crew on the next boat. “Tell them, ‘I’m in fear for my life,’ just like you told me,” he said. “You tell whoever is processing you that specific thing.”

    But subsequent crews logged no such claims, according to records I obtained. One man told me that, in response to his plea for protection, an officer on the next boat wrote a note on a piece of paper, but nobody ever followed up. Another said that an officer told him their claims would be heard later. But there were no more interviews. “We had no opportunity,” a woman in the group says. When I asked the Coast Guard about this, a spokesperson told me the agency meticulously documents all claims. “Since we do not have a record of any of those migrants communicating that they feared for their lives if returned to Haiti, I cannot say that they made MOF claims while aboard,” he said.

    Tcherry fell asleep on the larger cutter and woke at around dawn to commotion. He saw an EMT pressing on the chest of a middle-aged woman who lay several yards away from him. She had been moaning in pain the night before. The crew member keeping watch had found her dead, her nose and mouth covered in blood. Another Haitian woman began to sing a hymn as the EMT performing CPR cried. A small boat took the woman’s body away and then returned for another man who had been complaining of pain and could not urinate. “I thought they would take us to land after the woman had died,” Tcherry says. “I thought they would let us go.” But that afternoon, he was transferred to yet another cutter that pulled away from Florida and into the high seas. Tcherry finally understood he was being sent back.

    The Coast Guard was first deployed as a maritime border-patrol agency to stop an earlier surge of migration from Haiti. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan made a deal with Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, that allowed the Coast Guard to stop and board Haitian boats and deliver those detained directly back to Haiti. They would be processed on Coast Guard cutters, far from lawyers who could review their cases. The order, advocates argued at the time, undermined U.N. refugee protections and a U.S. refugee-and-asylum law that Congress passed just the year before. “This effort to push borders into the world’s oceans was new, and it marked a perverse paradigm shift,” Jeffrey Kahn, a legal scholar at the University of California, Davis, wrote recently.

    A decade after the Reagan agreement, as Haitians again departed en masse following a military coup, the George H.W. Bush administration further buttressed the sea wall. Bush signed an order that said federal agencies had no obligation to consider asylum claims from Haitians caught in international waters, no matter the evidence of danger or persecution. Lawyers and activists protested, calling the maritime regime a wholesale abdication of human rights doctrine. But the Bush order still stands. By the mid-1990s, its reach expanded to nearly anyone of any nationality caught in the sea, whether out in international waters or a couple of hundred feet from the beach.

    Pushing migrants and refugees away from the land borders to avoid obligations under law has now become common practice. In the United States, consecutive policies under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have attempted to cast whole swaths of the land south of the border as a legal no-man’s land like the ocean. They have outsourced deterrence, detention and deportation to Mexico and Central America. Trump and Biden have sought to bar people from seeking asylum if they don’t first try to apply for protection in countries they pass through on their way to the United States. Europe, for its part, has pushed people coming by boat through the Mediterranean back to North African shores, where countries have imposed brutal regimes of deterrence.

    None of those measures have prevented the latest wave of migration from the Caribbean. In January, amid a generational spike in Haitians and Cubans held on their cutters, the Coast Guard acknowledged that crew members were reaching a breaking point. “We are in extremis,” a senior official wrote to colleagues in a widely circulated internal email in January. “I know you and your teams are pushed beyond limits.” The head of the Coast Guard for the eastern half of the United States, Vice Adm. Kevin Lunday, wrote in February to colleagues that two outside experts had told him their crews were under extreme stress similar to the levels experienced in “sustained combat operations.”

    Coast Guard members told me they had become accustomed to retrieving corpses from capsized boats, worn down by water or gnawed on by sharks. It was not uncommon to walk down a stairway or into a bunk room and come upon a crew member sobbing. Crew members waited months for mental health appointments, and the agency was talking openly about suicide prevention. “I don’t see how the current level of operations is sustainable,” Capt. Chris Cederholm, the commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector Miami, wrote to colleagues, “without the breaking of several of our people.” Some were struggling with what one former crew member called a “moral dilemma,” because they had begun to understand that the job required them to inflict suffering on others. “We hear their stories, people who say they’d rather we shoot them right here than send them back to what they’re running from,” one Coast Guard member says. “And then we send them all back.”

    Tim James told me he tried to take his mind off the job by lifting weights and frequenting a cigar bar where service members and cops go to talk about “the suck,” but he soon realized he needed more than weights or whiskey to reckon with the mounting stress, even despair. “I go home, and I feel guilty,” he told me, “because I don’t have to worry about somebody kicking in my front door, you know, I don’t have to worry about the military roaming the streets.” He sought mental health support from a new “resiliency support team” the agency created. But James had not been able to shake the memories of the children he detained, particularly one 7-year-old Haitian girl with small braids. She’d been wearing shorts and a tank top, her feet were bare and she smiled at James whenever their eyes caught. “My mom is dead,” she told James with the help of an older child who spoke a little English. “I want to go to my auntie in Miami.”

    In the girl’s belongings the crew found a piece of paper with a phone number she said was her aunt’s. After James interviewed her, they sent her unaccompanied-minor questionnaire to the district office in Florida, and they waited for instructions on what to do with her. Out on the deck, James couldn’t help hoping she’d be taken to shore, to her aunt. But late in the morning the next day, the crew received a list from an office in Washington, D.C., of the people to be sent back. The girl was on the list. James cried on the return trip to port. One of his own daughters was about the girl’s age. “I can’t imagine sending my 7-year-old little kid across an ocean that is unforgiving,” James told me, nearly in tears. “I can’t imagine what my life would be like to have to do that.”

    That was just weeks before he encountered Tcherry, Claire and Beana. So when Peterson admitted the children were alone, the news came as a blow. “It’s a pretty hard hit when you think the kids have somebody and then it turns out that they really don’t,” James told me. He could see that Tcherry thought he would be making it to shore. “To see the hope on his face and then have to kind of turn around and destroy that is tough,” James told me. He never learns what becomes of the people he transfers off his cutter: that the pregnant woman gave birth in a hospital to a healthy boy and has an asylum case pending; that the body of Guerline Tulus, the woman who died on the cutter of what the medical examiner concluded was an embolism, remains in a Miami morgue, and that authorities have not identified any next of kin. He does not know what happened to the three children after they were sent back, but many months later, he says, he still wonders about them.

    Tcherry followed Claire and Beana up a rickety ramp in the port of Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, past a seized blue and yellow cargo ship into the Haitian Coast Guard station. The ground was littered with plastic U.S. Coast Guard bracelets that previous groups of people had pulled off and thrown to the ground. Officials from the Haitian child-protection authority and the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration watched as Tcherry and the rest of the group disembarked. “They looked scared and they said they were hungry,” a veteran official at IBESR, the Haitian child-protection agency, who was working at the port that day told me. “As a Haitian, I feel humiliated,” he says, “but we can’t really do anything about it. We’ve resigned ourselves.” To him, the people the Americans offloaded in Haiti always looked half dead. “It seems to me that when those children fall in their hands, they should know how to treat them. But that’s not the case.”

    Tcherry’s throat hurt and his legs were weak. He had never felt such tiredness. He ate as much as he could from the warm plate of food the UN provided. Slumped over on a bench, he waited for his turn to use the shower in a white and blue wash shed on the edge of a fenced lot behind the Haitian Coast Guard station. The officials brought several people to a hospital and got to work figuring out what to do with the unaccompanied children.

    The U.S. Coast Guard and State Department say that the children they send back are transferred into the hands of local authorities responsible for the care of children. “When we have custodial protection of those children, we want to make sure that the necessary steps are taken,” Lt. Cmdr. John Beal, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told me, “to ensure that when we repatriate those migrants, they don’t end up in some nefarious actor’s custody or something.” But no U.S. agency would explain the actual precautions the U.S. government takes to keep children from ending up in the wrong hands, beyond initial screenings aboard cutters. Last year, the Coast Guard stopped tracking the “reception agency” in each country, because according to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. government has set up rules establishing which agencies take these children and no longer needs to track them on a case-by-case basis.

    Haitian child-protection officials in Cap-Haïtien say their agency always finds relatives to take children, though sometimes after weeks or months. But the official with one of the other agencies involved in the processing of returned and deported Haitians at the Cap-Haïtien port said this claim is simply not true. The official said that children have departed the port with adults and with older children without any agency confirming they have an actual relationship or connection. “This is a serious concern in terms of trafficking,” the official told me. IBESR said those claims were unfounded. “According to the procedure, every child who leaves the port is accompanied by someone,” the IBESR official said, adding that when possible, the agency follows up with families to make sure children arrive safely. But the agency acknowledged there are limits to the support it can provide because of a lack of resources.
    Before they left the cutter, Peterson told Tcherry and the sisters that he would take care of them until they could contact their parents, who would figure out where they needed to go. Tcherry agreed. Peterson later told me he’d thought carefully about whether he wanted to get involved in the kids’ affairs once they were off the boat. He’d talked to other adults onboard, and they all agreed that someone needed to step up, that the Haitian government was surely not to be trusted. “If I didn’t do it,” Peterson says, “they would remain with the Haitian state, with all the risks that they could’ve faced, including kidnapping.”

    Peterson told the child-protection agency that he was the children’s guardian. The officials said they would need to contact the parents to confirm, so Peterson did the only thing he could think to do: He called the man who had been his conduit to the boat out of the Bahamas. The man sent him photos of the children’s IDs and put Peterson in touch with Claire and Beana’s mother, Inose Jean, in Michigan. She screamed and cried with relief upon learning her daughters were alive. Peterson explained that he’d taken care of the girls at sea and he asked her what to do with them. She said she would call back. Two hours later, she instructed Peterson to take the girls to her friend’s house in Cap-Haïtien.

    But Peterson still had no number for Tcherry’s mother. So he told the officials that Tcherry was Claire and Beana’s cousin, and that he’d gotten the image of Tcherry’s ID from Inose Jean. At dusk, Peterson walked with the three children through the metal gate of the Haitian Coast Guard station, at once incensed and relieved that he’d been allowed to take them. “The Haitian authorities didn’t talk to the children’s mothers,” Peterson says. “There was not enough evidence to actually prove I was who I was, or to prove a relationship.” They took a taxi to Jean’s friend’s house, and Claire, who recognized the woman from years earlier, rushed into her arms.

    The woman agreed to let Tcherry spend a night there. Peterson went to a cheap hotel with spotty electricity and a dirty pool. The man in the Bahamas finally sent Peterson Tcherry’s mother’s number. “I am the person who stood up to care for Tcherry on the boat,” Peterson told LaFortune. She collapsed onto the bed in her room, the only piece of furniture in the Toronto apartment she shared with her husband and her daughter. She had spent the last six days in a terrified daze, calling the people in the Bahamas she’d paid, begging for any news and fighting images in her mind of her son sinking into the sea. The next morning, after Tcherry woke, Peterson called LaFortune again. Tcherry looked weak and his voice was frail and hoarse. “When will I be with you, Mommy?” he asked.

    LaFortune did not for a moment consider trying to put Tcherry on another boat. She told him she would wait until she got asylum in Canada and send for him legally. But Haiti was even more dangerous for Tcherry than when he’d left. One man who was detained with Tcherry, whom I interviewed in Haiti two weeks after he returned there, said he feared he would be killed if he left Cap-Haïtien for his home in Port-au-Prince. After he ran through the roughly $50 the U.N. agency gave each of the returnees, which he used for a hotel, he did go back and was attacked on the street as he traveled to a hospital, he said, to get medicine for his daughter. He sent me photographs of gashes on his body. A second man sent me photos of a deep head wound that he suffered during an attack by the very armed men he had said he was running from. Another woman from the boat who told me she fled because she was raped says she is now “in hiding” in Port-au-Prince, living with relatives and her daughter, whom she does not allow to leave the house.

    Others on the boat have been luckier. In late 2022, the Department of Homeland Security started an unusually broad new legal-immigration program that now allows Haitians and Cubans, along with Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, to apply for two-year entry permits on humanitarian grounds from their countries, rather than traveling by land or sea first. The Department of Homeland Security says that since the program began, it has processed 30,000 people a month. More than 107,000 Haitians and 57,000 Cubans have been approved for entry, including a man who was detained with Tcherry. On Oct. 18, he stepped off a plane in Fort Lauderdale with a legal entry permit. He made it just under the wire, given the timing of his interdiction in February. In late April, DHS added a caveat to the new program: Anyone stopped at sea from then on would be ineligible to apply to the parole program. The Coast Guard says the new program and the accompanying restriction have caused the numbers of Cubans and Haitians departing on boats to fall back down to their pre-2021 level. “People have a safe and lawful alternative,” Beal, the Coast Guard’s spokesperson in Florida, told me, “so they don’t feel their only option is to take to the sea.”

    Tcherry rode a bus with Peterson over the mountains to Saint-Marc. In the stucco house on a quiet street where Peterson lived with his fiancée and her parents, Tcherry struggled to stop thinking about his experience at sea. “When I sleep, when I sit down, I want to cry,” Tcherry told me days after his arrival there. “They had us for five days. We couldn’t eat well, couldn’t sleep well. Couldn’t brush our teeth.” He thought of his body soaked from the sea spray, of the woman who died. Although Peterson assured him it was not true, Tcherry kept wondering if the officers had just thrown her body into the sea. “He is having nightmares about the boats,” Peterson told me a week after their arrival, “reliving the same moment again and again, and he starts crying.”

    LaFortune told Tcherry that she was arranging for him to travel to his grandmother in another part of the country. But it soon became clear to her that the roads were too dangerous, spotted with gang and vigilante checkpoints guarded often by men carrying AK-47s. Peterson told LaFortune that Tcherry could stay with him as long as she needed him to. But as the weeks turned to months, Tcherry felt that Peterson began to change. He said Peterson needed money, and he was asking Tcherry’s mother to send more and more. Peterson was frequently out of the house, working odd jobs, and often could not answer LaFortune’s calls. She grew worried. When she did talk to Tcherry, he was as quiet as he was in the smuggler’s house in the Bahamas.

    Two months passed. LaFortune’s asylum case was denied, and she and her husband appealed. Four more months passed. LaFortune’s husband heard news that gangs were closing in on Saint-Marc. LaFortune decided that they must move Tcherry, that it was time to risk the journey on the roads. In September, she sent an old family friend to collect him. They rode on a bus through a checkpoint where the driver paid a fee to a masked man. “I saw a man holding his gun,” Tcherry says. The man made a sign that they could pass.

    Tcherry arrived at a busy bus station in Port-au-Prince and looked for his grandmother. He saw her in a crowd and remembered her face, her high forehead and wide smile. “That is my grandma,” he said, again and again. His mutters turned to song. “That is my grandmother, tololo, tololo, that is my grandmother.” He sank into her arms. He held her hand as they boarded another bus and passed through another checkpoint, back to where he began.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/when-the-coast-guard-intercepts-unaccompanied-kids

    –—

    Reprise du #modèle_australien et son concept de l’#excision_territoriale :

    “People intercepted at sea, even in U.S. waters, have fewer rights than those who come by land. “Asylum does not apply at sea,” a Coast Guard spokesperson told me. Even people who are fleeing violence, rape and death, who on land would be likely to pass an initial asylum screening, are routinely sent back to the countries they’ve fled.”

    Excision territoriale :

    https://seenthis.net/messages/416996
    #Australie

    #droits #mer #terre #USA #Etats-Unis #asile #migrations #réfugiés #MNA #mineurs_non_accompagnés #enfants #enfance #Haïti #réfugiés_haïtiens

    via @freakonometrics

  • Au Texas, la Cour suprême suspend une autorisation d’avortement
    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/12/09/au-texas-la-cour-supreme-suspend-une-autorisation-d-avortement_6204806_3210.


    Molly Duane, avocate du Center for Reproductive Rights, qui représente Kate Cox, devant le tribunal d’Austin, le 19 juillet, dans le cadre d’une précédente affaire. SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP

    La Cour suprême de cet Etat américain très conservateur a suspendu, vendredi, la décision d’une juge qui avait autorisé, la veille, une femme de 31 ans à la grossesse très risquée à bénéficier d’un avortement.

    Le Monde avec AP et AFP

    La Cour suprême de l’Etat américain conservateur du Texas a empêché, vendredi 8 décembre, une femme à la grossesse très risquée de bénéficier d’un avortement, ont rapporté des médias américains.

    Elle avait été saisie par le procureur général Ken Paxton en vue d’empêcher Kate Cox d’avoir recours à l’interruption volontaire de grossesse (IVG). Dans une ordonnance d’une page, le tribunal a annoncé qu’il suspendait temporairement la décision, sans se prononcer sur le fond.

    Jeudi, Maya Guerra Gamble, une juge du Texas, avait autorisé cette femme de 31 ans – dont la grossesse pourrait, selon son médecin, menacer sa vie et sa fertilité – à recourir à l’IVG ; une décision remarquable dans cet Etat qui interdit l’avortement sauf très rares exceptions, une des législations les plus strictes en la matière aux Etats-Unis.
    Lire aussi : Une juge du Texas autorise une femme à la grossesse très risquée à avorter

    Kate Cox, enceinte de vingt semaines lorsqu’elle a poursuivi le Texas pour obtenir le droit d’avorter, avait eu la confirmation que son fœtus était atteint de trisomie 18, une anomalie chromosomique associée à des malformations graves. Selon ses arguments, elle présente une très forte probabilité de fausse couche ou de mortinatalité et de faibles taux de survie. En outre, les médecins lui ont déclaré que si le rythme cardiaque du fœtus s’arrêtait, déclencher l’accouchement entraînerait un risque de rupture utérine en raison de ses deux césariennes antérieures, et qu’une autre césarienne mettrait en danger sa capacité à porter un autre enfant.

    « Sans tenir compte du fond, la cour suspend administrativement la décision du tribunal de district » qui permettait à Mme Cox d’avorter, explique le Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) qui représente la jeune femme devant la justice. Le CRR est un groupe de défense de droits tels que l’avortement, situé à New York et actif sur tout le territoire américain.

    Une plainte dans le Kentucky
    « Nous espérons toujours que la cour rejettera en fin de compte la demande de l’Etat et qu’elle le fera rapidement », explique Molly Duane, l’avocate principale du CRR. Elle craint que le report de la décision de justice soit synonyme de refus. Mme Cox a besoin de « soins médicaux urgents. C’est la raison pour laquelle les gens ne devraient pas avoir à supplier [d’obtenir] des soins médicaux devant un tribunal », a-t-elle déclaré.

    « La loi texane interdit les avortements volontaires », a déclaré, de son côté, le procureur général, un républicain ultraconservateur, qui avance que les arguments de Mme Cox ne répondent pas aux critères d’une exception médicale à l’interdiction de l’avortement dans l’Etat. Il a appelé la Cour suprême du Texas à « suspendre » la décision de la juge Guerra Gamble, affirmant qu’elle avait « abusé de son pouvoir » sans « aucune preuve ».

    Dans un communiqué assorti d’une lettre adressée à des établissements hospitaliers, M. Paxton avait mis en garde, jeudi, des hôpitaux du Texas que, malgré la décision de la juge qu’il qualifie de « militante », ils pourraient faire face à des conséquences juridiques s’ils autorisaient le médecin de Mme Cox à pratiquer l’avortement.

    A l’été 2022, la Cour suprême des Etats-Unis avait cassé son arrêt Roe vs Wade, qui garantissait depuis un demi-siècle le droit fédéral des Américaines à interrompre leur grossesse. Depuis, une vingtaine d’Etats ont interdit l’avortement ou l’ont très fortement restreint, comme le Texas, qui n’autorise les IVG qu’en cas de danger de mort ou de risque de grave handicap pour la mère.

    Vendredi, une femme enceinte du Kentucky, où l’IVG est aussi interdit, a également déposé une plainte exigeant le droit à l’avortement. Contrairement au procès de Mme Cox, cette plainte cherche à obtenir le statut de recours collectif pour inclure d’autres habitantes de l’Etat qui sont (ou vont devenir) enceintes et souhaitent avorter.

    #IVG #CRR #Cour_suprême_du_Texas

  • Un commentaire de lecteur approfondi sur la guerre en #Ukraine et la destruction du concept d’#Europe par les #États-Unis

    https://lostineu.eu/hoffnung-auf-europa-schwindet-orban-bei-macron-und-die-spur-des-geldes

    Il faut à mon avis rendre hommage aux Etats-Unis. Avec la guerre en Ukraine, qu’ils ont préparée stratégiquement depuis longtemps selon le scénario de Brezinski, ils voulaient à tout prix élargir l’écart entre la Russie et le cœur de l’Europe afin d’écarter toute concurrence imminente. Ils ont aujourd’hui atteint cet objectif de manière si complète et durable que, dorénavant, plus aucune herbe ne pourra pousser entre l’Europe, et en particulier l’#Allemagne, et la #Russie. …

    • der vollständige Kommentar:

      Man muss den USA hier m.E. Respekt zollen. Mit dem Ukrainekrieg, den sie von langer Hand strategisch nach dem Drehbuch von Brezinski vorbereitet haben, wollten sie den Abstand zwischen Russland und Kerneuropa wieder vergrößern, um sich drohende Konkurrenz vom Leibe zu halten. Sie haben diese Ziel Stand heute so umfassend und nachhaltig erreicht, dass bis auf weiteres kein Gras mehr zwischen Europa und insbesondere Deutschland und Russland wachsen kann.

      Um dieses Ergebnis zu erzielen haben die USA bisher nur überschaubare Mittel aufgeboten. Fünf Milliarden Euro zur Bewerkstelligung des Maidan (nach Auskunft von Frau Nuland), ein paar Ladungen abgängiger Waffensysteme ein ein paar zig Milliarden für den Krieg und die Stützung des Staates Ukraine. Ein Teil der Waffenlieferungen der USA dürfte nicht einmal unentgeltlich erfolgt sein, sonst hätte es keiner #Lend&Lease Beschlüsse in den USA bedurft.

      Auf dem weg sind die USA die verhassten #Nordstream Pipelines losgeworden. Nicht nur, dass sie dafür Sündenböcke parat haben. Sie haben sogar bewirkt, dass sich unter den Regierungen Europas nicht eine einzige findet, die die richtigen Fragen stellt und den Willen zur Aufklärung aufbringt.

      Jetzt ziehen sich die USA zum bestmöglichen Zeitpunkt zurück. der Konflikt ist aktuell kaum durch Verhandlungen auflösbar. Russland hat gewonnen und wird die Bedingungen diktieren können. Das Verhältnis Russlands zu Europa ist zerrüttet. Und die richtig großen Geldausgaben stehen erst noch vor der Tür, namentlich der Wiederaufbau und die Alimentierung der Ukraine und die Sicherung einer drastisch vergrößerten und extren gefährlich gewordenen Grenze nach Russland. All dies wird Europa zu bezahlen haben. Zuzüglich der Entgelte für die US-Waffenlieferungen (Lend&Lease).

      Das Glanzstück ist aber, dass die EU ernsthaft die Aufnahme der Ukraine anstrebt, während der #Nato Beitritt schon fast abmoderiert wurde. Dadurch wird es für #Europa unmöglich, sich diesem Fass ohne Boden zu entziehen und der Graben nach Russland wird noch einmal deutlich vertieft. Und die USA können ihr Spiel über die Nato weitertreiben, ohne dafür signifikant geradestehen zu müssen.

      #Putin hat schon verlautbart, dass er sich konstruktive Politik mit den USA womöglich nach dem Krieg noch vorstellen kann, mit Europa bis auf weiteres nicht. Von daher wird es schon wieder Geschäfts der #USA mit #Russland geben, während Europa mit schmutzigen #LNG aus den USA und teurer Energie seine Wettbewerbsfähigkeit verspielt hat und seine Industrie Richtung USA verliert.

      Ich habe in meinem inzwischen nicht ganz kurzen Leben noch niemals gesehen, wie man seinen Karren mit soviel Zielstrebigkeit und Vehemenz strategisch gegen die Wand und gleichzeitig tief in den Morast fahren kann, wie es unsere #EU-Elite flankiert von unserer Bundesregierung gemacht hat.

  • Alec Karakatsanis sur X : "The first time I asked for an undocumented client to be unshackled in court to hug his family one last time before being imprisoned and deported, a lawyer from the “Department of Justice” stood up and objected “on behalf of the United States.”" / X
    https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1732763627554328657

    The first time I asked for an undocumented client to be unshackled in court to hug his family one last time before being imprisoned and deported, a lawyer from the “Department of Justice” stood up and objected “on behalf of the United States.”

    #états-unis

  • Sur les extraordinaires agissements de Karim Khan de la CPI.

    Mouin Rabbani sur X : https://twitter.com/MouinRabbani/status/1731544662454731077

    THREAD: To understand why International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan’s conduct regarding “The Situation in Palestine” is so scandalous and should disqualify him from office, a little background is necessary.

    Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute, and is not a State Party (i.e. member state) of the ICC, the global tribunal established in 2002 to hold accountable perpetrators of war crimes, crimes of aggression, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

    Of specific concern to Israel was that the Rome Statute, in Article 8.2.(b).(viii), defines as a “war crime” the “transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the occupied territory within or outside this territory”.

    This closely reflects Article 49 of the IV Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which defines such activities as a “grave breach”, the Convention’s equivalent of a war crime. Other articles, such as 7.1.(j) which defines “apartheid” as “a crime against humanity”, became a serious concern more recently, as the longstanding judgement of Palestinians on this matter was endorsed by the leading Israeli and international human rights organizations.

    The ICC is only empowered to prosecute individuals, not states. (The conduct of states is adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, a separate institution also located in The Hague).

    The Office of the ICC Prosecutor can conduct investigations into alleged violations of the Rome Statute only if either 1) a case is referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 2) requested by at least one ICC member state, or 3) initiated by the Prosecutor, provided it is authorized to move forward by a panel of ICC judges known as the “pre-trial chamber”.

    Given that the US, which like Israel refused to join the ICC, has veto powers at the Security Council, and that Palestine was not an ICC member, Israel was not particularly concerned that the ICC Prosecutor would independently seek to initiate an investigation of its conduct.

    So it sufficed with periodic tirades dismissing, demonizing, and delegitimizing the Court. That began to change in 2015 when Palestine, which has the status of Permanent Observer State at the UN, was admitted to the ICC and permitted to formally ratify the Rome Statute.

    The Palestinian leadership had for many years stalled on this and other initiatives promoting the application of international law to the Palestinians. This was, parenthetically, not out of fear of potential ICC prosecutions of Palestinians.

    Hamas, whose members are the most likely to be prosecuted if the ICC investigates Palestinian violations, in fact called for Palestine’s accession to the ICC, in both word and writing.

    In writing, because Hamas propaganda had been denouncing Abbas for promoting Palestine’s ICC application at a snail’s pace out of fear of the Israeli and Western response.

    Abbas responded by insisting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad sign a document supporting the application before it was submitted, so he could not later be accused by them of joining the Court in order to have his rivals extradited to The Hague.

    When the deed was done, Palestinians from across the political spectrum welcomed it, and stated they were prepared to see all alleged violations of the Rome Statute committed in Palestine investigated by the ICC.

    Hamas’s criticisms of Abbas may have been propaganda, but they were also correct. Israel and its US and European sponsors had from the outset made clear their opposition to Palestine seeking to join the ICC, and demanded that it desist.

    The Europeans, who unlike the US and Israel have joined the ICC, were in a particular pickle. As a European diplomat stated to me at the time: “We don’t want the Palestinians to put is in a position where we have to choose between our commitment to international law and our commitment to Israel”. In other words, they didn’t want to expose the rotten core of their rules-based international order, where the rules only apply to everyone else. When they failed to prevent Palestinian accession, Israel in particular went berserk. It began withholding Palestinian taxes it was legally obliged to transfer to the Palestinian Authority, imposed a variety of restrictions on Palestinian officials, and threatened to punish the PA in multiple additional ways. The US also made its displeasure clear, but directed the brunt of its retaliatory measures directly at the ICC.

    Washington at one imposed sanctions on Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, normally reserved for designated criminals. It was Washington’s way of informing the ICC it had no right to investigate either Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians or US conduct in Afghanistan.

    In 2002 the US had already adopted legislation known as The Hague Invasion Act, which authorizes the US military to invade The Netherlands, a fellow NATO member, and free any US citizen in ICC custody.

    Not clear how Nato’s collective defense provisions enshrined in Article 5 would operate under such circumstances….

    The Europeans, duplicitous as ever, kept confirming their support for the ICC while submitting vacuous legal arguments to the Court insisting it had no jurisdiction over Palestine.

    In doing so they came within a hair of endorsing Israel’s position that the ICC is an illegitimate body. The Dutch government for its part indicated it could not take a position on the matter because as the state that hosts the ICC,

    it was obliged to preserve its neutrality in such matters. Yet several years later it demonstratively awarded the ICC several million Euro to support its investigation of Russian conduct in Ukraine, an initiative it repeatedly and publicly endorsed.

    In the event, the Palestinians in 2015 submitted an application to the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to investigate violations of the Rome Statute in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967, beginning in 2014.

    The Court wasted years adjudicating matters of jurisdiction and competence, before finally confirming, in 2021, that it had a mandate to conduct an investigation.

    Which brings us back to the scandal known as Karim Khan. In previous functions, for example investigating the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and that by ISIS in Iraq, he developed a reputation as an attention whore of sorts.

    Didn’t achieve much by way of results, but always found his way to the television cameras. A British citizen, his candidacy as ICC Prosecutor was energetically supported by the UK government. His candidacy was also championed by the US and Israel, two non-member states opposed to the very existence of the Court. In 2021, Khan narrowly won election to a nine-year term. Unless he’s forced out, we’re stuck with him until 2030.

    Some held the forlorn hope that Khan would prioritize efforts to revive the ICC’s stature and reputation, which by the time he took office was being widely derided as the “International Caucasian Court” and “International Criminal Court for Africa”, on account of the cases it chose – and chose not to – prosecute. In protest at such biases, South Africa at one point temporarily renounced its ICC membership.

    In practice, Khan wasted no time aligning his agenda with that of his sponsors. Almost immediately, he informed the UN Security Council that he would prioritize only those cases referred to him by the Council and essentially ignore the rest.

    The ICC Palestine investigation, such as it was, effectively ceased to exist.

    Yet when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, which the UNSC could not have referred to the ICC for investigation because of Moscow’s power of veto, Khan immediately reversed course on his previous commitments.

    It took him only a week to pop up in Kiev, informing any and every journalist within a 100-mile radius that his investigation was already active. A little over a year later he indicted none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    Throughout this period, the ICC’s Palestine investigation remained non-existent.

    There was considerably less spring in his step as the latest crisis in the Middle East erupted on 7 October. It was only at the very end of October that he took the trouble to visit the region.

    Claiming he had been denied entry to the Gaza Strip, he spoke to the assembled media in Cairo, where he delivered a lengthy and impassioned denunciation of the 7 October Palestinian attacks, announced his availability to work with the Israeli authorities to prosecute those responsible for violations of the Rome Statute on that day, yet pointedly refrained from any reference to Israeli war crimes, which his predecessor Bensouda had already in 2019 announced were being committed. Rather, his message to Israel was of a more general nature: that it had clear obligations under international law and would be held accountable for (unspecified) violations.

    Khan further, and disingenuously, claimed that in 2021 he established the “first dedicated team to investigate the Palestine situation”.

    and instead denounced the violence of Israel’s settlers, as if these form an independent vigilante force rather than auxiliary militia implementing state policy.

    The reason Khan tread so lightly also reflects what appears to be the most disturbing element of his agenda.

    Pursuant to the Rome Statute the ICC only prosecutes cases where national authorities have demonstrably failed to ensure accountability. In this context, every examination of Israel’s judicial system with respect to violations of Palestinian rights,

    has concluded that it is essentially a sham, and exists to provide legal justification for such violations and/or exonerate perpetrators.

    Yet Khan emphasized that he stands “ready to engage with relevant national authorities [i.e. Israel] in line with the principle of complementarity at the heart of the Rome Statute”.

    In other words, Khan will prosecute Palestinians, and Israeli violations will be adjudicated by Israel’s court system. Both with predictable results.

    In order to keep this short, I conclude with posting an article
    @hasmikegian
    and I recently wrote for
    @PassBlue
    on why Karim Khan is not fit for purpose. I am also indebted to her for multiple insights and substantial input into this thread. https://www.passblue.com/2023/11/28/is-the-icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-fit-for-purpose

    #CPI

  • Comment les États-Unis ont alimenté la guerre de plusieurs décennies d’Israël contre les Palestiniens
    Posted on décembre 6, 2023 | Rashid Khalidi | Los Angeles Times | Traduction J.Ch. pour l’AURDIP
    https://aurdip.org/comment-les-etats-unis-ont-alimente-la-guerre-de-plusieurs-decennies-disrael

    Les chiffres biaisés de ceux qui sont morts jusqu’ici dans et autour de la Bande de Gaza – environ 1.200 Israéliens et 15.000 Palestiniens – dans la dernière phase d’un conflit plus que centenaire mettent en évidence l’énorme disparité entre ces deux côtés.

    Ces chiffres sont caractéristiques des guerres coloniales, l’un des nombreux aspects souvent occultés par les médias, comme le sont la nature et les origines de cette guerre. Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple lutte entre deux peuples souverains, tels que la France et l’Allemagne. Non, c’est la dernière guerre coloniale de l’époque moderne, menée pour établir l’hégémonie et les droits absolus d’un peuple sur un autre, comme exprimé dans la loi de 2018 « État Nation du Peuple Juif » qui stipule que le droit à l’autodétermination en Palestine « n’est réservé qu’au Peuple juif ».

    En dépit de la connexion incontestable du Judaïsme et du peuple juif à la Terre Sainte, pour les Palestiniens il s’agit d’une lutte anticoloniale. Israël a été créé en tant que projet colonial de peuplement européen – ce qu’aucun de ses premiers dirigeants n’a nié – avec l’aide indispensable de l’impérialisme britannique.

    Malgré le tissu de mythes créés pour dissimuler ces faits, ils sont vitaux pour comprendre que les Palestiniens auraient résisté à n’importe quel groupe qui aurait essayé de leur arracher leur terre, quelle que soit sa religion ou sa nationalité. Que ce groupe se soit trouvé être des Juifs avec un projet national, une profonde connexion à la même terre et une histoire de persécution et de dépossession ailleurs, culminant dans l’Holocauste, donnait à cette guerre son caractère particulièrement désespéré. Mais dans un certain sens, le schéma du conflit qui s’est déroulé au cours du siècle dernier est familier. (...)

  • Ouganda : Washington va restreindre les visas des responsables qui appliquent une loi anti-LGBT+
    https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2023/12/05/ouganda-washington-va-restreindre-les-visas-des-responsables-qui-appliquent-

    Ouganda : Washington va restreindre les visas des responsables qui appliquent une loi anti-LGBT+
    La diplomatie américaine cible les dirigeants qui répriment également les défenseurs de l’environnement, des droits humains et les journalistes.
    Le Monde avec AFP
    Les Etats-Unis ont annoncé, lundi 4 décembre, qu’ils refuseront d’accorder des visas aux responsables ougandais qui appliqueraient une loi anti-homosexualité controversée, promulguée dans le pays d’Afrique de l’Est en mai et qui comprend des sanctions allant jusqu’à la peine de mort. Le secrétaire d’Etat américain Antony Blinken a déclaré que la mesure concernerait les responsables ougandais, qu’ils soient encore en activité ou non, et les membres de leur famille, s’il s’avère qu’ils ont joué un rôle dans la « répression de membres de populations marginalisées ou vulnérables ». « Ces groupes comprennent entre autres les défenseurs de l’environnement, les défenseurs des droits humains, les journalistes, les personnes LGBTQI + et les responsables d’organisations civiles, détaille M. Blinken dans un communiqué. Une fois de plus, j’encourage vivement le gouvernement ougandais à faire des efforts pour défendre la démocratie et pour respecter et protéger les droits humains, afin que nous puissions maintenir le partenariat qui existe depuis des décennies entre nos deux pays et qui a profité aux Américains comme aux Ougandais. »Dès l’adoption de la loi, le président américain Joe Biden avait appelé à son abrogation immédiate et menacé de réduire les aides et investissements américains en Ouganda. Le texte prévoit de lourdes sanctions allant jusqu’à la prison à perpétuité, voire la peine de mort, pour les personnes ayant des relations homosexuelles et faisant la « promotion » de l’homosexualité. Incluse dans la législation ougandaise, la peine capitale n’est cependant plus appliquée depuis des années.Il y a dix ans, l’Ouganda avait annulé une autre loi qui imposait la perpétuité pour des personnes ayant eu des relations homosexuelles, après que des donateurs internationaux, dont les Etats-Unis, eurent réduit leur aide financière.
    Cette nouvelle décision en matière de visas, qui ne cite publiquement aucun nom, est une extension des restrictions imposées à l’Ouganda en raison d’irrégularités présumées lors de la présidentielle de 2021. Yoweri Museveni, président depuis 1986, avait obtenu un nouveau mandat lors de ce scrutin. Parallèlement, M. Blinken a également annoncé que les Etats-Unis refuseront de délivrer des visas à toute personne ayant compromis le processus électoral au Zimbabwe en août. Ce scrutin contesté a permis la reconduction du président Emmerson Mnangagwa, dont le parti dirige le pays depuis plus de quarante ans.

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#ouganda#etatsunis#visas#LGBT#sante#droit#vulnerabilite

  • Scholars Who Study the Middle East Are Afraid to Speak Out
    https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholars-who-study-the-middle-east-are-afraid-to-speak-out

    American college campuses have been at the center of charged political disputes in the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and the subsequent attacks by Israel on Gaza. These heated debates have focused on the pressures on university presidents to take a stand, the behavior of student groups, allegations of antisemitism, and the censorship of pro-Palestinian speech. But less attention has been paid to one group directly affected by the controversies: the scholars who work on and teach about the Middle East, who every day concentrate professionally on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

    #états-unis #démocratie #nos_valeurs #censure #liberté_d’expression #criminel

  • L’augmentation du #chiffre_d’affaires issu des ventes d’#armes du Top 100 du #SIPRI impactée par des défis de production et des carnets de commandes remplis

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des #ventes_d’armes et de services à caractère militaire par les 100 plus grandes entreprises d’#armement s’élève à 597 milliards de dollars en 2022, soit 3,5 % de moins qu’en 2021 en termes réels, alors même que la demande a fortement augmenté. C’est ce que révèlent les nouvelles données publiées aujourd’hui par le Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

    Cette diminution s’explique principalement par la baisse du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des plus grandes entreprises américaines. Le chiffre d’affaires a augmenté de manière significative en Asie, Océanie et au Moyen-Orient. Les commandes en cours et la multiplication de nouveaux contrats laissent présager que le chiffre d’affaires mondial issu des ventes d’armes pourrait augmenter de manière significative au cours des prochaines années.

    La demande en armement augmente mais la #production reste à la traîne

    L’invasion à grande échelle de l’Ukraine par la Russie et les tensions géopolitiques dans le monde ont provoqué une forte augmentation de la demande d’armes et d’équipements militaires en 2022. Cependant, malgré de nouvelles commandes, de nombreuses entreprises d’armement américaines et européennes n’ont pas pu augmenter de manière significative leur capacité de production en raison de difficultés de recrutement, de flambée des coûts et de perturbations dans les chaînes d’approvisionnement exacerbées par la #guerre_en_Ukraine. En outre, les pays ont passé de nouvelles commandes en fin d’année et en raison du décalage entre les commandes et la production, l’augmentation de la demande ne s’est pas reflétée dans le chiffre d’affaires de ces entreprises en 2022.

    « De nombreuses entreprises d’armement ont été confrontées à des obstacles pour adapter leur production en vue d’une guerre de haute intensité », souligne Dr Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, directrice du programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Toutefois, de nouveaux contrats ont été signés notamment pour des #munitions, ce qui devrait se traduire par une hausse du chiffre d’affaires en 2023 et au-delà. » Contrairement aux plus grands fournisseurs américains et européens, les entreprises d’Asie, d’Océanie et du Moyen-Orient ont vu leur chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes augmenter de manière significative en 2022, démontrant ainsi leur capacité à répondre à une demande accrue dans des délais plus courts. Cela est particulièrement vrai dans les pays où les entreprises disposent de capacités de fabrication réactives et compétitives, comme #Israël et la #Corée_du_Sud, et dans ceux où les entreprises ont tendance à s’appuyer sur des chaînes d’approvisionnement courtes.

    Aux États-Unis, le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes chute en raison de problèmes de production

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des 42 entreprises américaines du Top 100 a chuté de 7,9 % pour atteindre 302 milliards de dollars en 2022. Il représente 51 % du chiffre d’affaires total issu des ventes d’armes du Top 100. Sur les 42 entreprises américaines, 32 ont enregistré une baisse de leur chiffre d’affaires sur un an, citant le plus souvent des problèmes persistants dans la chaîne d’approvisionnement et des pénuries de main-d’œuvre résultant de la pandémie de Covid-19.

    « On constate un afflux de nouvelles commandes liées à la guerre en Ukraine et certaines grandes entreprises américaines, dont #Lockheed_Martin et #Raytheon_Technologies, ont reçu de nouvelles commandes en conséquence », précise Dr Nan Tian, chercheur principal au SIPRI. « Cependant, en raison des carnets de commandes déjà existants de ces entreprises et des difficultés à augmenter leur capacité de production, les revenus générés par ces nouvelles commandes ne se refléteront dans les comptes de l’entreprise probablement que d’ici deux à trois ans. »

    L’#Asie surpasse l’#Europe tirée par un phénomène de #modernisation_militaire

    Le chiffre d’affaire issu des ventes d’armes des 22 entreprises d’Asie et d’Océanie répertoriées dans le classement a augmenté de 3,1 % pour atteindre 134 milliards de dollars en 2022. Il s’agit de la deuxième année consécutive où le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des entreprises du Top 100 situées en Asie et en Océanie est supérieur à celui des entreprises situées en Europe.

    « La demande intérieure et l’appui sur des fournisseurs locaux ont protégé les entreprises d’armement asiatiques des perturbations dans la chaîne d’approvisionnement en 2022 », explique Xiao Liang, chercheur au programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Les entreprises en #Chine, en #Inde, au #Japon et à Taïwan ont toutes bénéficié d’investissements gouvernementaux soutenus dans le cadre des programmes de modernisation militaire. »

    Le #chiffre_d’affaires combiné des quatre entreprises sud-coréennes du Top 100 a chuté de 0,9 %, principalement en raison d’une baisse de 8,5 % enregistrée par le plus grand producteur d’armes du pays, #Hanwha_Aerospace. Deux entreprises sud-coréennes ont enregistré une augmentation de leur chiffre d’affaires, notamment #LIG_Nex1. Les entreprises sud-coréennes devraient connaître un accroissement de leur chiffre d’affaires dans les années à venir en raison d’une augmentation des commandes enregistrées après la signature d’importants contrats d’armement avec la Pologne et les Émirats arabes unis.

    Augmentation modeste du chiffre d’affaires en Europe alors que la demande liée à l’Ukraine commence à affluer

    Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes des 26 entreprises du Top 100 basées en Europe a augmenté de 0,9 % pour atteindre 121 milliards de dollars en 2022.

    « La guerre en Ukraine a entraîné une demande de matériel adapté à une guerre d’usure, comme les munitions et les véhicules blindés. De nombreux producteurs européens ont vu leur chiffre d’affaires augmenter », souligne Lorenzo Scarazzato, chercheur au programme Dépenses militaires et Production d’armes du SIPRI. « Il s’agit notamment d’entreprises basées en #Allemagne, en #Norvège et en #Pologne. Par exemple, la société polonaise #PGZ a augmenté son chiffre d’affaires de 14 %, bénéficiant du programme accéléré de modernisation militaire que le pays poursuit. »

    Les sociétés transeuropéennes #Airbus et #KNDS comptent parmi les principales sources d’augmentation du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes en Europe, en grande partie grâce aux livraisons effectuées sur des commandes de longue date.

    Les entreprises turques mènent une augmentation significative du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes au Moyen-Orient

    Le Moyen-Orient a connu la plus forte augmentation en pourcentage du chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes de toutes les régions en 2022. Les sept entreprises basées au Moyen-Orient figurant dans le Top 100 ont enregistré une augmentation substantielle. Leur chiffre d’affaires combiné de 17,9 milliards de dollars représente une augmentation de 11 % sur un an. Le chiffre d’affaires combiné des quatre entreprises turques a atteint 5,5 milliards de dollars, soit 22 % de plus qu’en 2021. Le chiffre d’affaires combiné des trois entreprises israéliennes du Top 100 a atteint 12,4 milliards de dollars en 2022, soit une augmentation de 6,5 % par rapport à 2021.

    « Les entreprises du Moyen-Orient spécialisées dans des produits moins sophistiqués sur le plan technologique ont pu augmenter leur production plus rapidement afin de répondre à l’augmentation de la demande », précise Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, chercheur principal au SIPRI. « L’exemple le plus frappant est celui de #Baykar, en Turquie, producteur du #drone #Bayraktar_TB-2. Baykar est entré dans le Top 100 pour la première fois en raison de l’augmentation de son chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes de 94 %, soit le taux d’augmentation le plus rapide de toutes les entreprises du classement. »

    Autres développements notables

    - En 2022, la Chine représente la deuxième plus grande part du chiffre d’affaires par pays du Top 100, soit 18 %. Le chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes combiné des huit entreprises d’armement chinoises du Top 100 a augmenté de 2,7 % pour atteindre 108 milliards de dollars.
    - Le chiffre d’affaires issus des ventes d’armes des sept entreprises britanniques dans le Top 100 ont augmenté de 2,6 % pour atteindre 41,8 milliards de dollars, soit 7,0 % du total.
    - En raison du manque de données, seules deux entreprises russes ont été incluses dans le Top 100 pour 2022. Leur chiffre d’affaires combiné a chuté de 12 %, à 20,8 milliards de dollars. La transparence des entreprises russes continue de régresser. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une holding, sans capacité de production directe, #Rostec est incluse dans le Top 100 de 2022 en tant que mandataire des entreprises qu’elle contrôle.
    - La seule entreprise ukrainienne figurant dans le Top 100, #UkrOboronProm, a vu son chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes chuter de 10 % en termes réels, à 1,3 milliard de dollars. Bien que son chiffre d’affaires ait augmenté en termes nominaux, cela a été compensé par la forte inflation du pays.

    À l’attention des rédacteurs

    À propos de la base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement

    La base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement a été créée en 1989. À cette époque, elle excluait les données des entreprises installées en Chine, en Union soviétique et en Europe de l’Est. La version actuelle contient des données pour 2002-2022, y compris des données sur les entreprises russes. Les entreprises chinoises sont incluses à partir de 2015.
    Le « chiffre d’affaires issu des ventes d’armes » fait référence au chiffre d’affaires généré par la vente de biens et de services à caractère militaire à des clients militaires nationaux et étrangers. Sauf indication contraire, tous les changements sont exprimés en termes réels et tous les chiffres sont donnés en dollars américains constants de 2022. Les comparaisons entre 2021 et 2022 sont basées sur la liste des entreprises du classement 2022 (c’est-à-dire que la comparaison annuelle s’effectue entre le même ensemble d’entreprises). Les comparaisons à plus long terme sont basées sur des ensembles d’entreprises listées au cours de l’année respective (c’est-à-dire que la comparaison porte sur des listes différentes d’entreprises).

    La base de données du SIPRI sur l’industrie de l’armement, qui présente un ensemble de données plus détaillées pour les années 2002 à 2022, est disponible sur le site Web du SIPRI : https://www.sipri.org/databases/armsindustry

    https://www.obsarm.info/spip.php?article631

    #industrie_de_l'armement #rapport #chiffres #statistiques #USA #Etats-Unis #business #Turquie

    voir aussi :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/1029978

  • L’épave de l’#Osprey américain tombé en mer au large du Japon reste introuvable
    https://lemarin.ouest-france.fr/defense/lepave-de-losprey-americain-tombe-en-mer-au-large-du-japon-rest

    La fiabilité de l’Osprey, doté de rotors basculants lui permettant de décoller et atterrir verticalement comme un hélicoptère et de voler comme un avion, fait débat depuis longtemps en raison de nombreux accidents mortels. Fin août, trois marines américains ont été tués dans l’accident d’un Osprey dans le nord de l’Australie. En 2022, quatre autres ont péri en Norvège lorsque leur Osprey s’est écrasé lors d’exercices de l’Otan. Un engin américain du même type s’est également abîmé en mer en 2017, faisant trois morts. Et en avril 2000, 19 marines ont été tués lorsqu’un Osprey s’est écrasé en Arizona, au sud-ouest des États-Unis.

    […]

    Le Japon a suspendu les vols de ses propres Osprey depuis l’accident de mercredi et a demandé à l’armée américaine de faire pareil sur le territoire nippon, par mesure de précaution. Les États-Unis n’ont pas obtempéré jusqu’à présent. Les Osprey opèrent toujours au Japon , a déclaré jeudi 30 novembre la porte-parole adjointe du Pentagone Sabrina Singh lors d’une conférence de presse à Washington. Si l’enquête conclut que des mesures supplémentaires doivent être prises, nous le ferons, mais pour l’instant, l’enquête est en cours sur ce qui s’est passé , a-t-elle ajouté. Le ministre japonais de la Défense, Minoru Kihara, s’est dit vendredi 1er décembre préoccupé par la poursuite des vols d’Osprey malgré l’absence d’explications suffisantes en matière de sécurité .

    #états-unis

  • COP28: US touts climate #leadership as oil and gas output hits record | Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/world/cop28-us-touts-climate-leadership-oil-gas-output-hits-record-2023-12-02

    The United States, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China, has seen a surge in investment for clean energy projects ranging from solar farms to wind turbines and electric vehicle battery factories in recent years.

    But it has also grown into the globe’s biggest producer of oil and gas - the main source of climate emissions - following a technology-driven drilling boom in the sprawling Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico.

    #états-unis #foutage_de_gueule

  • Sénégal : 27 organisations de la société civile fustigent la procédure de demande de visa
    https://www.dakaractu.com/Senegal-27-organisations-de-la-societe-civile-fustigent-la-procedure-de-d

    Sénégal : 27 organisations de la société civile fustigent la procédure de demande de visa
    Au Sénégal, vingt-sept organisations de la société civile réclament la réforme de la procédure de demande de visas français, mais aussi anglais, canadiens, sud-africains ou espagnols. Dans sa parution de ce mardi 30 novembre, le quotidien Libération nous apprend que ces organisations de la société civile dénoncent une injustice dans le traitement des demandes entre les pays du Nord et ceux du Sud. Mais surtout l’externalisation de ces demandes par les États et la mise en place de véritables trafics de rendez-vous.
    Dans cette lettre adressée à cinq ambassades européennes, mais aussi à celles d’Afrique du Sud ou des États-Unis, les signataires dénoncent un véritable parcours du combattant totalement opaque pour obtenir un visa. Principale cible des attaques : la gestion des demandes de visas par des prestataires privés. Ce qui devait servir à désengorger les consulats et éviter les passe-droits et les longues files d’attente.
    Selon Marina Kabu, membre du collectif des organisations de la société civile pour la protection des droits des migrants à l’initiative de cette pétition, « un véritable trafic s’est installé, non - pas pour obtenir un visa, mais déjà pour avoir un rendez-vous au consulat pour déposer un dossier : cela peut se monnayer jusqu’à 600 euros. Combien d’universitaires, d’hommes d’affaires, de patients, d’étudiants, de parents n’ont pas pu se déplacer pour se soigner ou pour participer à des forums, parce que tout simplement nous ne pouvons pas trouver de rendez-vous », s’indigne-t-elle à la page 2 de Libé.
    Les 27 organisations signataires exigent donc la fin des prestataires privés au profit d’une procédure en ligne plus transparente et égalitaire, où le refus de visa serait motivé. Ces organisations demandent aussi la réciprocité : à savoir le même traitement pour les Européens qui souhaiteraient se rendre au Sénégal. Mouhamadou Moustapha GAYE

    #Covid-19#migration#migrant#senegal#droit#visas#consulat#espagne#france#afriquedusud#canada#etatsunis

  • Derrière l’afflux de migrants au Nicaragua, le business des vols charters
    https://www.dakaractu.com/Derriere-l-afflux-de-migrants-au-Nicaragua-le-business-des-vols-charters_

    Derrière l’afflux de migrants au Nicaragua, le business des vols charters
    Derrière l’afflux de migrants au Nicaragua, le business des vols charters
    [Privacy Badger a remplacé ce bouton LinkedIn]
    L’afflux de migrants cubains et haïtiens au Nicaragua, d’où ils tentent ensuite de rallier les Etats-Unis, a provoqué ces derniers mois une forte hausse des vols charters vers Managua, poussant Washington à imposer des sanctions à leurs opérateurs. Irma Perez, une Cubaine de 28 ans, est arrivée le 9 octobre avec sa famille à Managua à bord d’un vol charter de la compagnie mexicaine Viva Aerobus parti de Holguin, à 700 km de La Havane."Nous avons fait escale à Cancun (port mexicain) 45 minutes, sans descendre de l’avion, et de là à Managua", a-t-elle raconté à l’AFP depuis Mexico où elle s’est ensuite rendue avec son mari et son fils après avoir payé les services d’un passeur. Elle espère de là pouvoir entrer aux Etats-Unis.Plusieurs migrants cubains interrogés par l’AFP ont raconté avoir voyagé avec la même compagnie, expliquant qu’il s’agissait de vols charters, affrétés par de petites agences de voyage.Interrogée par l’AFP, Viva Aerobus n’a pas donné suite, alors que sur son site aucun vol n’est proposé pour relier Cuba au Nicaragua.Irma Perez a expliqué avoir déboursé 1.250 dollars pour son billet, autant pour son mari et 350 dollars pour son fils d’un an, sans compter les 2.100 dollars payés au passeur.
    L’apparition de vols charters pour répondre aux besoins des migrants « est un phénomène relativement nouveau », explique à l’AFP Manuel Orozco, directeur des questions migratoires au Dialogue interaméricain, un groupe de réflexion basé à Washington. Le Nicaragua, allié de La Havane, n’exige plus de visa pour les Cubains depuis novembre 2021. Depuis lors, 421.000 Cubains, un record, sont entrés de manière irrégulière aux Etats-Unis, selon des chiffres officiels américains, en grande majorité par voie terrestre depuis le Nicaragua. En parallèle et face à un afflux croissant, le Panama et le Costa Rica leur ont imposé début 2022 un visa de transit. Les vols charters ont alors augmenté de Cuba vers le Nicaragua.
    Selon un rapport du Dialogue interaméricain, une moyenne mensuelle de 50 vols charters ont atterri à Managua depuis La Havane entre janvier et octobre 2023, tandis que ce type de vols est passé de 30 en août à 130 en octobre entre Port-au-Prince et la capitale du Nicaragua.
    « Le Nicaragua a représenté un pont pour près de 100.000 personnes » migrantes depuis janvier, évalue le rapport. Manuel Orozco estime que les opérateurs de ces lignes et les autorités aéroportuaires nicaraguayennes ont fait « un calcul économique » pour un « bénéfice mutuel ».Des petites compagnies régulières se sont même intégrées à ce marché. Un comptable cubain de 37 ans a raconté avoir payé en octobre 1.800 dollars pour un vol avec Aruba Airlines, dont la page internet propose la vente de billets à travers un numéro WhatsApp. Il a voyagé depuis La Havane jusqu’à Managua avec une escale à Aruba, île néerlandaise des Caraïbes.
    Les annonces pullulent sur Facebook : « Billets disponibles Havane-Nicaragua (...) prix pour les familles, vols charters et réguliers », dit l’une d’elles.
    Début novembre, Brian Nichols, le vice-secrétaire d’Etat américain, a fait part de sa préoccupation face à l’augmentation « spectaculaire » de ces vols, et mardi Washington a annoncé restreindre les visas pour les « propriétaires, directeurs et responsables » des entreprises opérant ces vols.
    Le vice-ministre cubain des Affaires étrangères, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, a cependant récemment assuré que le nombre de vols avait baissé. « Cette situation (...) n’est plus la même », a-t-il déclaré. Fin octobre, le Mexique a à son tour annoncé imposer un visa de transit aux Cubains dans ses aéroports, rendant plus difficiles les routes des charters qui ont peu à peu diminué.Un chauffeur de taxi de Managua, qui consulte tous les jours le site de l’aéroport pour son travail, a indiqué sous anonymat à l’AFP avoir constaté que « 22 à 23 avions quotidiens avec des migrants (arrivaient) il y a quelques semaines, contre six aujourd’hui ». Malgré le programme américain « Parole » qui vise à faciliter la migration légale, l’arrivée irrégulière de Cubains et d’Haïtiens aux Etats-Unis a connu un rebond depuis août. Entre janvier et octobre, 108.000 Cubains et 165.000 Haïtiens sont ainsi arrivés de manière irrégulière dans le pays. « Le programme +Parole+ ne couvre pas la demande migratoire », constate l’expert du Dialogue interaméricain.

    #Covid-19#migrant#migration#nicaragua#haiti#etatsunis#cuba#mexique#emigration#visas#transit#charters

  • #États-Unis : Trois étudiants palestiniens victimes d’une attaque armée
    https://www.aa.com.tr/fr/monde/%C3%A9tats-unis-trois-%C3%A9tudiants-palestiniens-victimes-d-une-attaque-arm%C3%A9e-/3065586

    Trois étudiants d’origine palestinienne ont été victimes d’une attaque armée dans l’État américain du Vermont.

    La police de Burlington a annoncé, dimanche, avoir reçu un rapport faisant état d’une attaque armée survenue hier soir, au cours de laquelle, trois étudiants ont été retrouvés blessés sur le lieu de l’incident.

    La même source a indiqué que les étudiants ont été transportés à l’hôpital, précisant que leur état de santé est stable.

    Le chef de la mission palestinienne au Royaume-Uni, Husam Zomlot, a annoncé sur son compte sur les réseaux sociaux qu’il s’agit des étudiants Hisham Awartani, Kenan Abdel Hamid et Tahseen Ahmed.

    Zomlot a déclaré que les étudiants ’’ont été pris pour cible après leur retour d’un dîner parce qu’ils portaient le #keffieh palestinien’’, notant que ’’les #crimes haineux contre les Palestiniens doivent cesser’’.

    De son côté, le Conseil des relations américano-islamiques (CAIR) a déclaré dans un communiqué qu’il offre une récompense de 10 000 dollars à toute personne fournissant des informations sur ’’le ou les auteurs du crime’’.

    Le Conseil a appelé les autorités chargées de l’application des lois fédérales et étatiques de l’État du Vermont à ouvrir une enquête à ce propos.

    • 27 novembre 2023. 06:40 GMT
      https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/11/27/israel-hamas-war-live-calls-to-extend-truce-grow-as-captives-released

      US police searching for suspect in shooting of Palestinian students

      Police in the US state of Vermont have provided new details about the shooting of three students of Palestinian descent near a university on Saturday.

      Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad said on Sunday that the students were walking to the home of one of the victim’s relatives when they were confronted by a white man armed with a handgun.

      “Without speaking, he discharged at least four rounds from the pistol and is believed to have fled,” Murad said. “All three victims were struck, two in their torsos and one in the lower extremities.”

      Murad said two of the victims were in a stable condition and the other suffered “much more serious injuries”.

      Murad said police did not yet have any information to suggest a motive for attacking the students, two of whom were wearing Palestinian keffiyeh scarves.

      “In this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime. The fact is that we don’t yet know as much as we want to right now,” Murad said. “But I urge the public to avoid making conclusions based on statements from uninvolved parties who know even less.”

  • The Problem of the Unionized War Machine
    https://jewishcurrents.org/the-problem-of-the-unionized-war-machine

    Contrairement à d’autres secteurs, celui de l’industrie de l’armement emploie beaucoup et fournit des #emplois sûrs et bien payés.

    As one anonymous local union president in the industry put it to researcher Karen Bell earlier this year, “my top priority is trying to make sure that we have work in jobs in the United States . . . I don’t make a lot of judgments on anything other than, what can you do to keep the people I represent in work? That’s my job, and to be anything other than that, it would really be a disservice to the people that are paying my salary.” Rather than questioning their role in the industry, unions have reconfirmed their relationships with weapons companies since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Last month, 1,000 IAM members in Arizona and 1,100 UAW members across the Midwest separately ratified new contracts with Raytheon and General Dynamics respectively, during a period when both companies were actively implicated in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. When the Raytheon contract deal was announced on October 22nd, one IAM leader said he was “proud to support our Raytheon members and excited for this contract’s positive impact on their lives”—a statement that highlights the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the economic interests of weapons industry workers and the anti-war, anti-genocide movement.

    #états-unis #armes

  • Guerre Israël-Palestine : ne vous y méprenez pas, Biden approuve pleinement le génocide à Gaza | Middle East Eye édition française
    https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinion-fr/guerre-israel-palestine-biden-approuve-genocide-gaza-oslo-supercherie

    Les États-Unis et la Grande-Bretagne veulent nous faire croire, du moins pendant que les Palestiniens se font massacrer jour après jour, qu’ils ont sérieusement l’intention de ressusciter le cadavre depuis longtemps refroidi de la solution à deux États. 

    Les strates de tromperie sont si nombreuses qu’il faut les décortiquer une à une.

    La première supercherie flagrante est l’insistance de Washington à ce qu’Israël évite de « réoccuper » la bande de Gaza. Blinken veut nous faire croire que l’occupation de la bande de Gaza a pris fin il y a de longues années, lorsqu’Israël a démantelé ses colonies juives en 2005 et retiré les soldats qui protégeaient les colons. 

    […]

    Le fait est que Gaza n’a pas connu un seul jour sans occupation israélienne depuis 1967. Avec le retrait de ses colons juifs il y a dix-huit ans, Israël a simplement commencé à gérer l’occupation à distance en tirant parti des nouvelles avancées en matière d’armement et de technologies de surveillance. 

    […]

    Israël ne risque pas de « réoccuper » Gaza. Il n’a jamais cessé de l’occuper. 

    Mais l’idée selon laquelle Israël et Washington ne seraient pas sur la même longueur d’onde relève d’une pure supercherie. Cette « querelle » est entièrement inventée

    Une autre supercherie repose dans l’impression que Blinken crée intentionnellement, à savoir que les États-Unis se prépareraient à une confrontation avec Israël quant à l’avenir de Gaza.

    Le Premier ministre israélien Benyamin Netanyahou a clairement fait savoir qu’il n’était pas disposé à s’asseoir à la même table que les dirigeants palestiniens, même ceux qui sont « épris de paix ». Le week-end dernier, il a une nouvelle fois déclaré qu’Israël prendrait le « contrôle sécuritaire » de l’enclave dès lors que le Hamas aurait disparu. 

    « Il n’y aura pas de Hamas », a-t-il déclaré aux Israéliens. « Il n’y aura pas d’autorité civile qui éduque les enfants à haïr Israël, à tuer les Israéliens, à anéantir l’État d’Israël. »

    Les troupes israéliennes pourront « entrer [à Gaza] quand nous le voulons pour tuer des terroristes », a-t-il ajouté. 

    De toute évidence, les commandants militaires israéliens semblent prendre ce message à cœur, affirmant être de retour à Gaza pour de bon.

    Mais l’idée selon laquelle Israël et Washington ne seraient pas sur la même longueur d’onde relève d’une pure supercherie. Cette « querelle » est entièrement inventée, conçue pour faire croire que l’administration Biden, en poussant à la négociation, prend le parti des Palestiniens contre Israël. Rien ne saurait être plus éloigné de la vérité.

    Ce #simulacre est une aubaine pour les deux parties. Les #États-Unis veulent donner l’impression qu’un jour, une fois toutes les maisons de #Gaza détruites et son nettoyage ethnique terminé, ils traîneront Netanyahou à la table des négociations à coups de pied et en hurlant. 

    En difficulté, Netanyahou peut pour sa part marquer des points auprès de la droite israélienne en affichant une attitude de défi à l’égard de l’administration Biden.

  • Une logique implacable développée par le Haaretz : c’est pour empêcher l’état sioniste d’étendre le conflit vers le Liban que les Etats-Unis ont amené des bateaux de guerre dirigés contre le Hezbollah.
    https://archive.ph/2023.11.21-134914/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-20/ty-article/.premium/u-s-to-push-israel-to-allow-gaza-offshore-gas-reserves-to-revitalize-palestinian-economy/0000018b-ed90-ddc3-afdb-fdd1ff250000

    His visit, which was first reported by Axios, further reflects growing concern in Washington that Israel is deliberately escalating tensions along the northern border, potentially leading to a broader regional war that would draw in the United States. While Israel denied this is the case, Biden has already dramatically increased U.S. force posture off the coast of Lebanon as an attempted deterrent

    • Autre sujet de l’article résumé ici :

      Clément Sénéchal ⏚ sur X : « Tandis que Biden refuse toujours d’appeler à un cessez-le-feu, son conseiller en sécurité énergétique est en visite en Israël pour discuter des gisements de gaz naturel offshore de Gaza. »
      https://twitter.com/ClemSenechal/status/1726954887316201857

      Et ici

      Hassina Mechaï (hassinamechai.bsky.social) sur X : « L’exploitation de ces immenses champs gaziers au large de Gaza sera donc discutée sans la présence d’un seul Palestinien, même si c’est prétendument pour le bien de Gaza. L’Histoire bégaie... » / X
      https://twitter.com/HassinaMechai/status/1726840685175738463

    • L’idée selon laquelle Israël et Washington ne seraient pas sur la même longueur d’onde relève d’une pure supercherie. Cette « querelle » est entièrement inventée
      https://seenthis.net/messages/1027898

      […] l’idée selon laquelle Israël et Washington ne seraient pas sur la même longueur d’onde relève d’une pure supercherie. Cette « querelle » est entièrement inventée, conçue pour faire croire que l’administration Biden, en poussant à la négociation, prend le parti des Palestiniens contre Israël. Rien ne saurait être plus éloigné de la vérité.

      Ce #simulacre est une aubaine pour les deux parties. Les #États-Unis veulent donner l’impression qu’un jour, une fois toutes les maisons de #Gaza détruites et son nettoyage ethnique terminé, ils traîneront Netanyahou à la table des négociations à coups de pied et en hurlant. 

      En difficulté, Netanyahou peut pour sa part marquer des points auprès de la droite israélienne en affichant une attitude de défi à l’égard de l’administration Biden.

    • quoi qu’il en soit des USA, c’est une bonne chose qu’ils bordent Israël pour éviter que cet État s’en prenne davantage aux populations libanaises. bouder un tel soulagement serait absurde, même si il a la sale tronche d’une présence US renforcée, même si il ne convient pas à un Hamas qui aurait préféré coaliser davantage ses alliés dans une guerre ouverte. ça convient pas non plus aux plus fafs des israéliens, et (au prix de massacres quotidiens, certes...) ça érode le temps dont dispose la vengeance israélienne avant qu’il soit impossible de ne pas changer de pied.

  • Senior US Official Appears to Endorse Collective Punishment of Gazans – Mother Jones
    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/brett-mcgurk-collective-punishment-gaza-hostages

    At a summit in Bahrain on Saturday, a US official stated that far more humanitarian aid would be allowed into Gaza if Hamas released the hostages it is holding. In doing so, Brett McGurk, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, effectively conceded that Israel is subjecting the people of Gaza to collective punishment.

    Collective punishment is a war crime.

    “A release of large numbers of hostages would result in a significant pause in fighting. A significant pause in fighting,” McGurk stated, “and a massive surge of humanitarian relief. Hundreds and hundreds of trucks on a sustained basis entering Gaza from Egypt.”

    “This is the pathway to a pause in the fighting. The release of hostages,” McGurk added. “The onus here is on Hamas. This is the path. Simply calling for ceasefire is not a path to peace.”

    Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, argued that McGurk’s words violated the laws of armed conflict.

    McGurk explained the United States would keep its disagreements with Israel private. “ We will not tell another country how to grieve or how to protect itself, ” McGurk said. “But as friends and partners, we will do our best. And offer our best advice and counsel.”

    McGurk […] is now one of the most influential advisers shaping Biden’s response to the war in Gaza .

    #Leadership #criminels #états-unis