politicalevent:parliamentary elections

  • Greek election: Voters crave return to mainstream politics
    https://apnews.com/3f6cb9737cda457282ede8e9e43417ed

    Left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called the snap poll after being trounced in May’s European parliamentary elections and several months after his coalition with a nationalist partner collapsed. It followed a grueling four years in office for Tsipras, largely defined by economic hardship and a slow recovery after Greece limped out of an international bailout.

    si c’est vrai, ça fait quand même bien chier.

  • Egypt. Arrests target political figures involved in new coalition to run in 2020 parliamentary elections | MadaMasr
    https://madamasr.com/en/2019/06/25/feature/politics/arrests-target-political-figures-involved-in-new-coalition-to-run-in-2020-

    Several political figures involved in discussions to form a new political alliance meant to stand in 2020 parliamentary elections were arrested beginning at dawn on Tuesday.

    At least eight people have been swept up in the arrest campaign, most prominently former Member of Parliament Zyad Elelaimy, journalist Hisham Fouad, Omar El-Shenety, the founder of the Multiples Group investment firm, and Hossam Moanis, the former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi’s campaign manager.

    The other four people identified by the Interior Ministry in a press release issued this morning are Mostafa Abdel Moez Abdel Sattar, Osama Abdel Aal Mohamed al-Aqbawy, Ahmed Abdel Galeel Hussein Ghoneim, and Hassan Mohamed Hussein Barbary.

    Those detained face accusations of leading a plot “to bring down the state” ahead of the June 30 anniversary. This plot — identified by the ministry as “The Plan for Hope” — was backed by 19 companies and economic entities secretly managed by Muslim Brotherhood leaders from abroad, according to the Interior Ministry.

  • Turkey’s Policy in the Balkans: More than Neo-Ottomanism

    There is a fundamental misperception with regard to Turkey’s relationship with the Balkans. Turkey is not external to the region, the way Russia is for instance. Its history and geographic location make it a part of southeast Europe. Millions of Turks have their family roots in what was once known as ‘Turkey-in-Europe.’ This includes the founder of the republic, the Salonika-born Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Ties run deep at the political, economic, and societal levels.

    All those connections have drawn Turkey to the Balkans, especially after the end of the Cold War. The notion that Turks are now coming back does not hold. Closer engagement in the region started under President Turgut Özal in the early 1990s. But back then, Turkey balanced between bilateralism and multilateralism. It invested in economic and security ties with friendly countries such as Albania, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria while adhering to NATO as its response to the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. What changed under the Justice and Development (AK) Party, notably over the past decade, is the switch to bilateralism. That is understandable given the cracks in relations between Ankara and the West. All the same, it is concerning since it is coinciding with the push against the EU and NATO by Russia, which leverages history, religious identity and anti-Western rhetoric to legitimize its actions.

    Pundits and politicians often use ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ to describe Turkey’s forays. The label can be often misleading. Yes, Turkish President Recep Erdogan praises the Ottoman Empire and its legacy, domestically and beyond Turkey’s borders. But so did his predecessors in office. Within the country, liberals and Islamist conservatives alike all rediscovered the Ottomans from the 1980s onwards in questioning the Kemalist political order. The government has been reaching out to Balkan Muslims through TIKA, the Turkish developmental agency, and the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) for decades.

    Neo-Ottomanism is therefore the packaging, not the substance. Turkey’s objective is not to recreate the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. That is far beyond the country’s resources and capacity. The region is gravitating in economic, social, institutional and political terms to the West. What we have instead is Erdogan using the Balkans to make a case that he is the leader of the wider (Sunni) Muslim community in Europe and the Middle East. The main audience is his electorate in Turkey and only secondly Muslims abroad. The pre-election rally he held in Sarajevo in the run-up to last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections is a case in point.

    But Turkish policy in the Balkans cannot be reduced to the promotion of Islamic solidarity. Erdogan’s main achievement is the fact that he has built relations with leaders from countries that are majority non-Muslim. In October 2017, for instance, he was welcomed in Serbia by President Aleksandar Vucic. The visit gave some credence to complaints by Bosniaks (Slavic Muslims) that Turkey loves to talk brotherhood in Bosnia but when it comes to investing money it goes for Serbia. Similarly, Erdogan has strong links to Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who hosted the EU-Turkey summit a year ago. Bulgaria and Serbia are interested in hosting an extension of the TurkStream gas pipeline, a joint Russo-Turkish venture. Greece’s Alexis Tsipras also received the red carpet treatment during his latest visit to Turkey where he discussed ideas on decreasing tensions in the Aegean.

    Despite its quest for strategic autonomy, Turkey is still partnering with Western institutions. In addition, Ankara has been supportive of the Prespa Agreement and newly renamed North Macedonia’s accession to NATO, its quarrels with the U.S. and other key members of the Alliance notwithstanding. Collectively, EU members Romania, Bulgaria and Greece account for the bulk of Turkish trade with southeast Europe, with the Western Balkans trailing far behind. Greece and Bulgaria see Turkey as key to stemming the flow of asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and further afield. They are highly supportive of the EU-Turkey deal on migration from March 2016, renewed last year.

    Does the authoritarian system built by Erdogan pose an ideological challenge in the Balkans? Perhaps yes. For instance, pressure on governments to close educational institutions and surrender, without due process, members of the Fethullah Gülen community, which is implicated in the coup attempt in July 2016, undermine the rule of law. At the same time, the authoritarian drift observed in the Balkans is an indigenous product. It is not imported from Vladimir Putin’s Russia nor from Turkey under its new ‘sultan’.

    https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/turkeys-policy-balkans-more-neo-ottomanism-22835

    #néo-ottomanisme #Turquie #Balkans

  • Les #gilets_jaunes vus de New York...

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    Driving was already expensive in France when in January 2018 the government of President Emmanuel Macron imposed a tax that raised the price of diesel fuel by 7.6 centimes per liter and of gasoline by 3.8 centimes (about 9 and 4 cents, respectively); further increases were planned for January 2019. The taxes were an attempt to cut carbon emissions and honor the president’s lofty promise to “Make Our Planet Great Again.”

    Priscillia Ludosky, then a thirty-two-year-old bank employee from the Seine-et-Marne department outside Paris, had no choice but to drive into the city for work every day, and the cost of her commute was mounting. “When you pay regularly for something, it really adds up fast, and the increase was enormous,” she told me recently. “There are lots of things I don’t like. But on that I pushed.” In late May 2018, she created a petition on Change.org entitled Pour une Baisse des Prix du Carburant à la Pompe! (For a reduction of fuel prices at the pump!)

    Over the summer Ludosky’s petition—which acknowledged the “entirely honorable” aim of reducing pollution while offering six alternative policy suggestions, including subsidizing electric cars and encouraging employers to allow remote work—got little attention. In the fall she tried again, convincing a radio host in Seine-et-Marne to interview her if the petition garnered 1,500 signatures. She posted that challenge on her Facebook page, and the signatures arrived in less than twenty-four hours. A local news site then shared the petition on its own Facebook page, and it went viral, eventually being signed by over 1.2 million people.

    Éric Drouet, a thirty-three-year-old truck driver and anti-Macron militant also from Seine-et-Marne, created a Facebook event for a nationwide blockade of roads on November 17 to protest the high fuel prices. Around the same time, a fifty-one-year-old self-employed hypnotherapist named Jacline Mouraud recorded herself addressing Macron for four minutes and thirty-eight seconds and posted the video on Facebook. “You have persecuted drivers since the day you took office,” she said. “This will continue for how long?” Mouraud’s invective was viewed over six million times, and the gilets jaunes—the yellow vests, named for the high-visibility vests that French drivers are required to keep in their cars and to wear in case of emergency—were born.

    Even in a country where protest is a cherished ritual of public life, the violence and vitriol of the gilets jaunes movement have stunned the government. Almost immediately it outgrew the issue of the carbon taxes and the financial burden on car-reliant French people outside major cities. In a series of Saturday demonstrations that began in mid-November and have continued for three months, a previously dormant anger has erupted. Demonstrators have beaten police officers, thrown acid in the faces of journalists, and threatened the lives of government officials. There has been violence on both sides, and the European Parliament has condemned French authorities for using “flash-ball guns” against protesters, maiming and even blinding more than a few in the crowds. But the gilets jaunes have a flair for cinematic destruction. In late November they damaged parts of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; in early January they commandeered a forklift and rammed through the heavy doors of the ministry of state—the only time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a sitting minister had to be evacuated from a government building.

    The gilets jaunes are more than a protest. This is a modern-day jacquerie, an emotional wildfire stoked in the provinces and directed against Paris and, most of all, the elite. French history since 1789 can be seen as a sequence of anti-elite movements, yet the gilets jaunes have no real precedent. Unlike the Paris Commune of 1871, this is a proletarian struggle devoid of utopian aspirations. Unlike the Poujadist movement of the mid-1950s—a confederation of shopkeepers likewise opposed to the “Americanization” of a “thieving and inhuman” state and similarly attracted to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories—the gilets jaunes include shopkeepers seemingly content to destroy shop windows. There is an aspect of carnival here: a delight in the subversion of norms, a deliberate embrace of the grotesque.

    Many have said that the gilets jaunes are merely another “populist movement,” although the term is now so broad that it is nearly meaningless. Comparisons have been made to the Britain of Brexit, the United States of Donald Trump, and especially the Italy of Cinque Stelle. But the crucial difference is that the gilets jaunes are apolitical, and militantly so. They have no official platform, no leadership hierarchy, and no reliable communications. Everyone can speak for the movement, and yet no one can. When a small faction within it fielded a list of candidates for the upcoming European parliamentary elections in May, their sharpest opposition came from within: to many gilets jaunes, the ten who had put their names forward—among them a nurse, a truck driver, and an accountant—were traitors to the cause, having dared to replicate the elite that the rest of the movement disdains.

    Concessions from the government have had little effect. Under mounting pressure, Macron was forced to abandon the carbon tax planned for 2019 in a solemn televised address in mid-December. He also launched the so-called grand débat, a three-month tour of rural France designed to give him a better grasp of the concerns of ordinary people. In some of these sessions, Macron has endured more than six hours of bitter criticisms from angry provincial mayors. But these gestures have quelled neither the protests nor the anger of those who remain in the movement. Performance is the point. During the early “acts,” as the weekly demonstrations are known, members refused to meet with French prime minister Édouard Philippe, on the grounds that he would not allow the encounter to be televised, and that sentiment has persisted. Perhaps the most telling thing about the gilets jaunes is the vest they wear: a symbol of car ownership, but more fundamentally a material demand to be seen.

    Inequality in France is less extreme than in the United States and Britain, but it is increasing. Among wealthy Western countries, the postwar French state—l’État-providence—is something of a marvel. France’s health and education systems remain almost entirely free while ranking among the best in the world. In 2017 the country’s ratio of tax revenue to gross domestic product was 46.2 percent, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—the highest redistribution level of any OECD country and a ratio that allows the state to fight poverty through a generous social protection system. Of that 46.2 percent, the French government allocated approximately 28 percent for social services.

    “The French social model is so integrated that it almost seems a natural, preexisting condition,” Alexis Spire, a sociologist of inequality at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, told me recently. A number of the gilets jaunes I met said that despite the taxes they pay, they do not feel they benefit from any social services, since they live far from urban centers. But anyone who has ever received housing assistance, a free prescription, or sixteen weeks of paid maternity leave has benefited from the social protection system. The effect of redistribution is often invisible.

    And yet the rich in France have gotten much richer. Between 1983 and 2015, the vast majority of incomes in France rose by less than one percent per year, while the richest one percent of the population saw their incomes rise by 100 percent after taxes. According to World Bank statistics, the richest 20 percent now earns nearly five times as much as the bottom 20 percent. This represents a stark shift from the Trente Glorieuses, France’s thirty-year economic boom after World War II. As the economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, between 1950 and 1983, most French incomes rose steadily by approximately 4 percent per year; the nation’s top incomes rose by only one percent.

    What has become painfully visible, however, is the extent of the country’s geographical fractures. Paris has always been the undisputed center of politics, culture, and commerce, but France was once also a country that cherished and protected its vibrant provincial life. This was la France profonde, a clichéd but genuinely existing France of tranquil stone villages and local boulangeries with lines around the block on Sundays. “Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance,” goes the beloved song by the crooner Charles Trenet. “Mon village, au clocher aux maisons sages.” These days, the maisons sages are vacant, and the country boulangeries are closed.

    The story is familiar: the arrival of large multinational megastores on the outskirts of provincial French towns and cities has threatened, and in many cases asphyxiated, local businesses.1 In the once-bustling centers of towns like Avignon, Agen, Calais, and Périgueux, there is now an eerie quiet: windows are often boarded up, and fewer and fewer people are to be found. This is the world evoked with a melancholy beauty in Nicolas Mathieu’s novel Leurs enfants après eux, which won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, in 2018.

    The expansion since the 1980s of France’s high-speed rail network has meant that the country’s major cities are all well connected to Paris. But there are many small towns where the future never arrived, where abandoned nineteenth-century train stations are now merely places for teenagers to make out, monuments of the way things used to be. In these towns, cars are the only way people can get to work. I met a fifty-five-year-old truck and taxi driver named Marco Pavan in the Franche-Comté in late November. What he told me then—about how carbon taxes can seem like sneers from the Parisian elite—has stayed with me. “Ask a Parisian—for him none of this is an issue, because he doesn’t need a car,” Pavan said. “There’s no bus or train to take us anywhere. We have to have a car.” I cited that remark in a Washington Post story I filed from Besançon; in the online comments section, many attacked the movement for what they saw as a backward anti-environmentalism—missing his point.

    Few have written as extensively as the French geographer Christophe Guilluy on la France périphérique, a term he popularized that refers both to the people and the regions left behind by an increasingly globalized economy. Since 2010, when he published Fractures françaises, Guilluy has been investigating the myths and realities of what he calls “the trompe l’oeil of a peaceful, moderate, and consensual society.” He is one of a number of left-wing French intellectuals—among them the novelist Michel Houellebecq, the historian Georges Bensoussan, and the essayist Michel Onfray—who in recent years have argued that their beloved patrie has drifted into inexorable decline, a classic critique of the French right since 1789. But Guilluy’s decline narrative is different: he is not as concerned as the others with Islamist extremism or “decadence” broadly conceived. For him, France’s decline is structural, the result of having become a place where “the social question disappears.”

    Guilluy, born in Montreuil in 1964, is something of a rarity among well-known French intellectuals: he is a product of the Paris suburbs, not of France’s storied grandes écoles. And it is clear that much of his critique is personal. As a child, Guilluy, whose family then lived in the working-class Paris neighborhood of Belleville, was forcibly relocated for a brief period to the heavily immigrant suburb of La Courneuve when their building was slated to be demolished in the midst of Paris’s urban transformation. “I saw gentrification firsthand,” he told Le Figaro in 2017. “For the natives—the natives being just as much the white worker as the young immigrant—what provoked the most problems was not the arrival of Magrebis, but that of the bobos.”

    This has long been Guilluy’s battle cry, and he has focused his intellectual energy on attacking what he sees as the hypocrisy of the bobos, or bourgeois bohemians. His public debut was a short 2001 column in Libération applying that term, coined by the columnist David Brooks, to French social life. What was happening in major urban centers across the country, he wrote then, was a “ghettoization by the top of society” that excluded people like his own family.

    Guilluy crystallized that argument in a 2014 book that won him the ear of the Élysée Palace and regular appearances on French radio. This was La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires, in which he contended that since the mid-1980s, France’s working classes have been pushed out of the major cities to rural communities—a situation that was a ticking time bomb—partly as a result of rising prices. He advanced that view further in 2016 with La Crépuscule de la France d’en haut—now translated into English as Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France—a pithy screed against France’s bobo elite and what he sees as its shameless embrace of a “neoliberal,” “Americanized society” and a hollow, feel-good creed of multicultural tolerance. In 2018, one month before the rise of the gilets jaunes, he published No Society, whose title comes from Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 comment that “there is no such thing as society.”

    In Guilluy’s view, an immigrant working class has taken the place of the “native” working class in the banlieues on the outskirts of major cities. This native class, he argues, has been scattered throughout the country and become an “unnoticed presence” that France’s elite has “made to disappear from public consciousness” in order to consolidate its grip on power. Cities are now the exclusive preserve of the elites and their servants, and what Guilluy means by “no society” is that the visible signs of class conflict in urban daily life have vanished. This is his trompe l’oeil: rich, insulated Parisians have convinced themselves that everything is fine, while those who might say otherwise are nowhere near. “The simmering discontent of rural France has never really been taken seriously,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites.

    Since November, much of the French press has declared that Guilluy essentially predicted the rise of the gilets jaunes. They seem, after all, a fulfillment of his prophecy about “the betrayal of the people” by the elites, even if he is always elusive about who exactly “the people” are. While critiques from the movement have remained a confused cloud of social media invective, Guilluy has served as its de facto interpreter.

    No Society puts into words what many in the gilets jaunes have either struggled or refused to articulate. This is the hazy middle ground between warning and threat: “The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.”

    For now, however, there is just one member of the elite whom the gilets jaunes wish would disappear, and calls for his violent overthrow continue even as the movement’s momentum subsides.

    An intense and deeply personal hatred of Macron is the only unifying cry among the gilets jaunes. Eighteen months before the uprising began, this was the man who captured the world’s imagination and who, after populist victories in Britain and the United States, had promised a French “Third Way.” Yet the Macronian romance is already over, both at home and abroad.

    To some extent, the French always turn against their presidents, but the anger Macron elicits is unique. This is less because of any particular policy than because of his demeanor and, most of all, his language. “Mr. Macron always refused to respond to us,” Muriel Gautherin, fifty-three, a podiatrist who lives in the Paris suburbs, told me at a December march on the Champs-Élysées. “It’s he who insults us, and he who should respond.” When I asked her what she found most distasteful about the French president, her answer was simple: “His words.”

    She has a point. Among Macron’s earliest actions as president was to shave five euros off the monthly stipends of France’s Aide personalisée au logement (APL), the country’s housing assistance program. Around the same time, he slashed France’s wealth tax on those with a net worth of at least €1.3 million—a holdover from the Mitterand era.

    Macron came to office with a record of unrelentingly insulting the poor. In 2014, when he was France’s economic minister, he responded to the firing of nine hundred employees (most of them women) from a Breton slaughterhouse by noting that some were “mostly illiterate.” In 2016 he was caught on camera in a heated dispute with a labor activist in the Hérault. When the activist gestured to Macron’s €1,600 suit as a symbol of his privilege, the minister said, “The best way to afford a suit is to work.” In 2018 he told a young, unemployed gardener that he could find a new job if he merely “crossed the street.”

    Yet nothing quite compares to the statement Macron made in inaugurating Station F, a startup incubator in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, housed in a converted rail depot. It is a cavernous consulate for Silicon Valley, a soaring glass campus open to all those with “big ideas” who can also pay €195 a month for a desk and can fill out an application in fluent English. (“We won’t consider any other language,” the organization’s website says.) Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have offices in it, and in a city of terrible coffee, the espresso is predictably fabulous. In June 2017 Macron delivered a speech there. “A train station,” he said, referring to the structure’s origins, “it’s a place where we encounter those who are succeeding and those who are nothing.”

    This was the moment when a large percentage of the French public learned that in the eyes of their president, they had no value. “Ceux qui ne sont rien” is a phrase that has lingered and festered. To don the yellow vest is thus to declare not only that one has value but also that one exists.

    On the whole, the gilets jaunes are not the poorest members of French society, which is not surprising. As Tocqueville remarked, revolutions are fueled not by those who suffer the most, but by those whose economic status has been improving and who then experience a sudden and unexpected fall. So it seems with the gilets jaunes: most live above the poverty line but come from the precarious ranks of the lower middle class, a group that aspires to middle-class stability and seeks to secure it through palliative consumption: certain clothing brands, the latest iPhone, the newest television.

    In mid-December Le Monde profiled a young couple in the movement from Sens in north-central France, identified only as Arnaud and Jessica. Both twenty-six, they and their four children live in a housing project on the €2,700 per month that Arnaud earns as a truck driver, including more than €1,000 in government assistance. According to statistics from France’s Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insée), this income places them right at the poverty line for a family of this size, and possibly even slightly below it. But the expenses Arnaud and Jessica told Le Monde they struggled to pay included karate lessons for their oldest son and pet supplies for their dog. Jessica, who does not work, told Le Monde, “Children are so mean to each other if they wear lesser brands. I don’t want their friends to make fun of them.” She said she had traveled to Paris for gilet jaune protests on three separate weekends—journeys that presumably cost her money.

    Readers of Le Monde—many of them educated, affluent, and pro-Macron—were quick to attack Arnaud and Jessica. But the sniping missed their point, which was that they felt a seemingly inescapable sense of humiliation, fearing ridicule everywhere from the Élysée Palace to their children’s school. They were explaining something profound about the gilets jaunes: the degree to which the movement is fueled by unfulfilled expectations. For many demonstrators, life is simply not as they believed it would be, or as they feel they deserve. There is an aspect of entitlement to the gilets jaunes, who are also protesting what the French call déclassement, the increasing elusiveness of the middle-class dream in a society in which economic growth has not kept pace with population increase. This entitlement appears to have alienated the gilets jaunes from immigrants and people of color, who are largely absent from their ranks and whose condition is often materially worse.2 “It’s not people who don’t have hope anymore, who don’t have a place to live, or who don’t have a job,” Rokhaya Diallo, a French activist for racial equality, told me recently, describing the movement. “It’s just that status they’re trying to preserve.”

    The gilets jaunes have no substantive ideas: resentment does not an ideology make. They remain a combustible vacuum, and extremist agitators on the far right and the far left have sought to capitalize on their anger. Both Marine Le Pen of the recently renamed Rassemblement National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing La France Insoumise have tried hard to channel the movement’s grassroots energy into their own political parties, but the gilets jaunes have so far resisted these entreaties. The gilets jaunes also found themselves at the center of a diplomatic spat: in early February Italy’s deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, met with two of their members on the outskirts of Paris in a jab at Macron. Two days later, France withdrew its ambassador to Rome for the first time since 1940, but the gilets jaunes have not attempted to exploit this attention for their own political gain. Instead there was infighting—a Twitter war over who had the right to represent the cause abroad and who did not.

    The intellectual void at the heart of an amorphous movement can easily fill with the hatred of an “other.” That may already be happening to the gilets jaunes. Although a careful analysis by Le Monde concluded that race and immigration were not major concerns in the two hundred most frequently shared messages on gilet jaune Facebook pages between the beginning of the movement and January 22, a number of gilets jaunes have been recorded on camera making anti-Semitic gestures, insulting a Holocaust survivor on the Paris metro, and saying that journalists “work for the Jews.” Importantly, the gilets jaunes have never collectively denounced any of these anti-Semitic incidents—a silence perhaps inevitable for a movement that eschews organization of any kind. Likewise, a thorough study conducted by the Paris-based Fondation Jean Jaurès has shown the extent to which conspiracy theories are popular in the movement: 59 percent of those surveyed who had participated in a gilet jaune demonstration said they believed that France’s political elites were encouraging immigration in order to replace them, and 50 percent said they believed in a global “Zionist” conspiracy.

    Members of the movement are often quick to point out that the gilets jaunes are not motivated by identity politics, and yet anyone who has visited one of their demonstrations is confronted with an undeniable reality. Far too much attention has been paid to the symbolism of the yellow vests and far too little to the fact that the vast majority of those who wear them are lower-middle-class whites. In what is perhaps the most ethnically diverse society in Western Europe, can the gilets jaunes truly be said to represent “the people,” as the members of the movement often claim? Priscillia Ludosky, arguably the first gilet jaune, is a black woman. “It’s complicated, that question,” she told me. “I have no response.”

    The gilets jaunes are also distinctly a minority of the French population: in a country of 67 million, as many as 282,000 have demonstrated on a single day, and that figure has consistently fallen with each passing week, down to 41,500 during “Act 14” of the protest on February 16. On two different weekends in November and December, other marches in Paris—one for women’s rights, the other against climate change—drew far bigger crowds than the gilets jaunes did. But the concerns of this minority are treated as universal by politicians, the press, and even the movement’s sharpest critics. Especially after Trump and Brexit, lower-middle-class and working-class whites command public attention even when they have no clear message.

    French citizens of color have been protesting social inequality for years without receiving any such respect. In 2005 the killing of two minority youths by French police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois ignited a string of violent uprisings against police brutality, but the government declared an official state of emergency instead of launching a grand débat. In 2009, the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique saw a huge strike against the high cost of living—a forty-four-day uprising that also targeted fuel prices and demanded an increase to the minimum wage. In 2017 an almost identical protest occurred in French Guiana, another French overseas department, where residents demonstrated against household goods that were as much as 12 percent more expensive than they were in mainland France, despite a lower minimum wage. The French government was slow to respond in both of these instances, while the concerns of the gilets jaunes have resulted in a personal apology from the president and a slew of concessions.

    Guilluy, whose analysis of la France périphérique ultimately fails to grapple significantly with France’s decidedly peripheral overseas territories, does not shy away from the question of identity. He sees a racial element to the frustrations of la France périphérique, but he does not see this as a problem. Some of the most frustrating moments in his work come when he acknowledges but refuses to interrogate white working-class behavior that seems to be racially motivated. “Public housing in outlying communities is now a last resort for workers hoping to be able to go on living near the major cities,” he writes in Twilight of the Elites, describing the recent astronomic rise in France’s urban real estate prices. “These projects, mostly occupied by immigrant renters, are avoided by white French-born workers. Barring some utterly unforeseeable turn of events, their expulsion from the largest urban centers will be irreversible.” It would not diminish Guilluy’s broader point about la France périphérique if he acknowledged that victims of structural changes can also be intolerant.

    Guilluy also regularly recycles anxieties over immigration, often from controversial theorists such as Michèle Tribalat, who is associated with the idea of le grand remplacement, the alleged “great replacement” of France’s white population by immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. In making his case about “the demographic revolution in process,” Guilluy has been accused of inflating his statistics. France, he wrote in Fractures françaises, “welcomes a little less than 200,000 legal foreigners every year.” But these claims were attacked by Patrick Weil, a leading French historian of immigration, who noted in his book Le sens de la République (2015) that Guilluy failed to consider that a large number of those 200,000 are temporary workers, students who come and go, and others of “irregular” status. Guilluy has not responded to these criticisms, and in any case his rhetoric has since grown more radical. In No Society he writes, “Multiculturalism is, intrinsically, a feeble ideology that divides and weakens.”

    Whether the gilets jaunes will eventually come to agree with him is a crucial question. Like Guilluy, they are responding to real social conditions. But if, following Guilluy’s lead, they ultimately resort to the language of race and ethnicity to explain their suffering, they will have chosen to become a different movement altogether, one in which addressing inequality was never quite the point. In some ways, they have already crossed that line.

    On the afternoon of Saturday, February 16, the prominent French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut got out of a taxi on the Boulevard Montparnasse. A crowd of gilets jaunes noticed him and began hurling anti-Semitic insults. The scene, recorded on video, was chilling: in the center of Paris, under a cloudless sky, a mob of visibly angry men surrounded a man they knew to be Jewish, called him a “dirty Zionist,” and told him, “go back to Tel Aviv.”

    Finkielkraut’s parents were Polish refugees from the Holocaust. He was born in Paris in 1949 and has become a fixture in French cultural life, a prolific author, a host of a popular weekly broadcast on France Culture, and a member of the Académie Française, the country’s most elite literary institution. In the words of Macron, who immediately responded to the attack, he “is not only an eminent man of letters but the symbol of what the Republic affords us all.” The irony is that Finkielkraut—another former leftist who believes that France has plunged into inexorable decline and ignored the dangers of multiculturalism—was one of the only Parisian intellectuals who had supported the gilets jaunes from the beginning.

    I spoke to Finkielkraut after the attack, and he explained that the gilets jaunes had seemed to him the evidence of something authentic. “I saw an invisible France, neglected and forgotten,” he said. “Wearing fluorescent yellow vests in order to be visible—of being a ‘somewhere’ as opposed to an ‘anywhere,’ as Goodhart has said—seemed to me an absolutely legitimate critique.” The British journalist David Goodhart, popular these days in French right-wing circles, is the author of The Road to Somewhere (2017), which sees populist anger as the inevitable response to the widening gulf between those “rooted” in a particular place and cosmopolitans at home anywhere. “France is not a ‘start-up nation,’” Finkielkraut told me. “It can’t be reduced to that.”

    Finkielkraut said that the attack was a sign that the reasonable critiques orginally made by the gilets jaunes had vanished, and that they had no real future. “I think the movement is in the process of degradation. It’s no longer a social movement but a sect that has closed in on itself, whose discourse is no longer rational.”

    Although the Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation into his attackers, Finkielkraut has not pressed charges. He told me that the episode, as violent as it was, did not necessarily suggest that all those who had worn yellow vests in recent months were anti-Semites or extremists. “Those who insulted me were not the nurses, the shopkeepers, or the small business owners,” he said, noting that he doubted he would have experienced the same prejudice at the roundabouts, the traffic circles across the country where gilets jaunes protesters gathered every Saturday. In a sense, these were the essence of the movement, which was an inchoate mobilization against many things, but perhaps none so much as loneliness. The roundabouts quickly became impromptu piazzas and a means, however small, of reclaiming a spirit of community that disappeared long ago in so many French towns and villages.

    In Paris, where the remaining gilets jaunes have now focused most of their energy, the weekly protests have become little more than a despicable theater filled with scenes like the attack on Finkielkraut. There is no convincing evidence that those still wearing yellow vests are troubled by the presence of bigotry in their ranks. What is more, many gilets jaunes now seem to believe that pointing out such prejudice is somehow to become part of a government-backed conspiracy to turn public opinion against them.

    Consider, for instance, a February 19 communiqué released in response to the attack on Finkielkraut from La France en Colère, one of the movement’s main online bulletins. “For many days, the government and its friends in the national media seem to have found a new technique for destabilizing public opinion and discrediting the Gilets Jaunes movement,” it begins. “We denounce the accusations and the manipulations put in place by this government adept at fake news.” But this is all the communiqué denounces; it does not address the anti-Semitic violence to which Finkielkraut was subjected, nor does it apologize to a national figure who had defended the movement when few others of his prominence dared to do the same.

    A month after our last conversation, I called Priscillia Ludosky back, to see if she had any reaction to the recent turn of events in the movement her petition had launched. She was only interested in discussing what she called the French government’s “systematic abuse to manipulate public opinion.” She also believes that a government-media conspiracy will stop at nothing to smear the cause. “If there was one person who ever said something homophobic, it was on the front page of every newspaper,” she told me.

    In the days after the attack, Finkielkraut lamented not so much the grim details of what had happened but the squandered potential of a moment that has increasingly descended into paranoid feverishness. As he told me: “This was a beautiful opportunity to reflect on who we are that’s been completely ruined.”

    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/21/low-visibility-france-gilet-jaunes

  • Finland’s basic income trial boosts happiness but not employment | Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-basic-income/finlands-basic-income-trial-boosts-happiness-but-not-employment-idUSKCN1PX0
    https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190208&t=2&i=1354502227&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF170XW

    HELSINKI (Reuters) - Finland’s basic income scheme did not spur its unemployed recipients to work more to supplement their earnings as hoped but it did help their wellbeing, researchers said on Friday as the government announced initial findings.

    The two-year trial, which ended a month ago, saw 2,000 Finns, chosen randomly from among the unemployed, become the first Europeans to be paid a regular monthly income by the state that was not reduced if they found work.

    Finland — the world’s happiest country last year, according to the United Nations — is exploring alternatives to its social security model.

    The trial was being watched closely by other governments who see a basic income as a way of encouraging the unemployed to take up often low-paid or temporary work without fear of losing their benefits. That could help reduce dependence on the state and cut welfare costs, especially as greater automation sees humans replaced in the workforce.

    Finland’s minister of health and social affairs Pirkko Mattila said the impact on employment of the monthly pay cheque of 560 euros ($635) “seems to have been minor on the grounds of the first trial year”.

    But participants in the trial were happier and healthier than the control group.

    “The basic income recipients of the test group reported better wellbeing in every way (than) the comparison group,” chief researcher Olli Kangas said.

    Chief economist for the trial Ohto Kanniainen said the low impact on employment was not a surprise, given that many jobless people have few skills or struggle with difficult life situations or health concerns.
    Owner Sini Marttinen poses for a picture at her coffee shop she founded while benefitting from Finland’s basic income scheme in Helsinki, Finland January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Philip O’Connor

    “Economists have known for a long time that with unemployed people financial incentives don’t work quite the way some people would expect them to,” he added.
    PSYCHOLOGICAL BOOST

    Sini Marttinen, 36, had been unemployed for nearly a year before “winning the lottery”, as she described the trial.

    Her basic income gave her enough confidence to open a restaurant with two friends. “I think the effect was a lot psychological,” the former IT consultant told Reuters.

    “You kind of got this idea you have two years, you have the security of 560 euros per month ... It gave me the security to start my own business.”

    Her income only rose by 50 euros a month compared to the jobless benefit she had been receiving, “but in an instant you lose the bureaucracy, the reporting”, Marttinen said.

    Mira Jaskari, 36, who briefly found a job during the trial but lost it due to poor health, said losing the basic income had left her feeling more insecure about money.

    The center-right government’s original plan was to expand the basic income scheme after two years as it tries to combat unemployment which has been persistently high for years but reached a 10-year low of 6.6 percent in December.

    That followed the imposition of benefits sanctions on unemployed people who refused work.

    The basic income has been controversial, however, with leaders of the main Finnish political parties keen to streamline the benefits system but wary of offering “money for nothing”, especially ahead of parliamentary elections due in April.
    Slideshow (2 Images)
    TAX BIND

    Prime Minister Juha Sipila’s Centre Party has proposed limiting the basic income to poor people, with sanctions if they reject a job offer, while Conservative finance minister Petteri Orpo says he favors a scheme like Britain’s Universal Credit.

    The higher taxes that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says would be needed to pay for basic income schemes might also be off-putting for voters.

    In a review of the Finnish scheme last year, the OECD warned that implementing it nationally and cost-neutrally for the state would imply significant income redistribution, especially towards couples from single people, and increase poverty.

    The researchers have acknowledged that the Finnish pilot was less than realistic because it did not include any tax claw-back once participants found work and reached a certain income level.

    Swiss voters rejected a similar scheme in 2016. Italy is due to introduce a “citizens’ wage” in April in a major overhaul of the welfare state, which will offer income support to the unemployed and poor.

    Trial participants were generally positive, however, with Tuomas Muraja, a 45-year-old journalist and author, saying the basic income had allowed him to concentrate on writing instead of form-filling or attending jobseekers’ courses.

    He said the end of the two-year trial, during which he published two books, had made it difficult again for him to accept commissions, because “I ... can earn only 300 euros per month without losing any benefits”.

    “If people are paid money freely that makes them creative, productive and welfare brings welfare,” Muraja told Reuters about his experience of the pilot.

    “If you feel free, you feel safer and then you can do whatever you want. That is my assessment.”

    ($1 = 0.8817 euros)

  • ’Cyprus is saturated’ - burgeoning migrant crisis grips island

    Smugglers increasingly take advantage of island’s partition and proximity to Middle East.

    When Rubar and Bestoon Abass embarked on their journey to Europe they had no idea that Cyprus was the continent’s easternmost state. Like most Iraqi Kurds heading west, their destination was Germany, not an EU nation barely 100 miles from war-torn Syria.

    “I had never heard of Cyprus,” said Rubar, reaching for his pregnant wife’s hand as they sat gloomily in a migrant centre run by the Catholic charity Caritas in the heart of Nicosia. “The smugglers told us it was much cheaper to get to and was still in Europe. We paid $2,000 [£1,590] for the four of us to come.”

    Cyprus is in the midst of a burgeoning migrant crisis as smuggler networks take advantage of the Mediterranean island’s partition and proximity to the Middle East. As in Greece, when Europe’s refugee crisis erupted with Syria’s descent into civil war, support groups have rushed to deal with the social ailments that have arisen with the influx.

    “Cyprus is saturated,” its interior minister, Constantinos Petrides, said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s no longer easy to absorb such flows, or handle the situation, no matter how much money we get.”

    The island has exceeded every other EU member state in asylum claims in 2018, recording the highest number per capita with almost 6,000 applications for a population of about 1 million.

    By August requests were 55% higher than for the same eight-month period in 2017, a figure itself 56% higher than that for 2016, according to the interior ministry. With the country’s asylum and reception systems vastly overstretched, alarmed officials have appealed to Brussels for help.

    “This is a European problem,” said Petrides, adding that closed borders elsewhere in the bloc were placing a disproportionate burden on small frontline states such as Cyprus. “It’s absolutely necessary to find a holistic solution … which means distributing asylum seekers through an automatic relocation mechanism to countries throughout the EU.”

    Rubar and Bestoon arrived with their two children in August. Like the ever-growing number of Syrians also heading here from overcrowded camps in Turkey and Lebanon, the couple landed in Northern Cyprus, the self-styled state acknowledged only by Ankara in the 44 years since Turkish troops invaded and seized over a third of the island’s territory.

    They then took the increasingly well-trodden route of sneaking across the dividing buffer zone into the internationally recognised Greek-controlled south. Stretching 112 miles across Cyprus, the UN-patrolled ceasefire line offers innumerable blind spots for those determined to evade detection.

    Geography’s stark reality hit, Rubar admits, when he was shown Cyprus on the world map adorning the migrant centre’s airy reception room. “If I had known I’d never have come,” said the farmer. “After all, being here we’re much nearer Baghdad than we are Berlin.”

    Elizabeth Kassinis, Caritas’ executive manager, said the Abbasses’ experience is not uncommon. “Many are surprised to find out where they actually are. When we tell them, they are shocked, stunned, completely speechless. Nearly all arrive expecting they’ll be within walking distance of a job in Germany.”

    Illicit crossings from the north have made Cyprus’ woes much worse. Reports have increased in recent months of irregular migrants flying into Ercan airport in the Turkish-controlled breakaway state.

    Hamstrung by politics, not least Turkey’s refusal to recognise the government in the southern part of Cyprus since its 1974 invasion of the island, authorities are unable to send them back.

    “Because of the illegal occupation in the north we’ve seen phenomena that wouldn’t happen in conditions of legality,” said Petrides. “It’s an open wound, not just for Cyprus but the entire EU.”

    With international agencies focusing almost entirely on sea arrivals, the real number of migrants on the island has been hugely underestimated, charities say. “We are a humanitarian organisation that addresses poverty, hunger and homelessness and we are seeing across-the-board increases in them all,” Kassinis said.

    A backlog of 8,000 asylum claims has amassed as authorities struggle to cope with the flows, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. “We’re talking about a process that can take up to five years and an extremely high number of people waiting for final decisions to their claims,” said Katja Saha, the agency’s representative in Nicosia.

    “It’s highly likely that the vast majority are not refugees and should not be in the asylum processing system but, that said, the lack of infrastructure and social services makes it very difficult to identify those who are vulnerable, particularly victims of trafficking and torture.”

    As numbers grow, pressure on the island’s two state-run camps has become immense and asylum seekers are expected to find private accommodation after 72 hours. For most that is nearly impossible when rent allowances are little more than €100 (£90) per person a month and employment is limited to manual work such as car washing and farm labour, Saha said.

    In Nicosia, which houses one of the camps, asylum seekers have resorted to sleeping in parks and buses and the vestibules of buildings. “For the last month I’ve been in a tent in the park with my wife and four children,” said Basin Hussain, who also fled Iraq. “The first three days were spent in the reception centre but then we were told to leave.”

    There are fears the drama being played out in the eastern Mediterranean will get a lot worse if the situation in Syria deteriorates further and war extends to Idlib, the country’s last rebel stronghold. A Turkish-Russian ceasefire deal is currently sustaining a fragile peace in the province.

    Cyprus had been spared the refugee crisis until this year as most Europe-bound asylum seekers headed for Greece and Italy instead.

    “It’s surprising, given its geographic location, that Cyprus has not been more impacted by the seven-year conflict,” said Saha. “Since the spring we’ve seen this increase in Syrians because word has spread that Lebanon and Turkey, as first asylum countries, are saturated.”

    As elsewhere in Europe the island is not immune to hostility toward the new arrivals. Far-right groups coalescing around the ultranationalist ELAM party have gained increasing popularity as the issue provides fodder for their approval ratings ahead of European parliamentary elections next year.

    “What we don’t want to do is open more and more reception centres,” said Petrides, emphasising that solidarity was now needed on Europe’s eastern edge. “It’s not the solution, either for the country or asylum seekers.”


    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/11/cyprus-the-new-entry-point-to-europe-for-refugees-and-migrants?CMP=shar
    #parcours_migratoires #routes_migratoires #Chypre #asile #migrations #réfugiés
    ping @isskein

  • #Operazione_Libero

    Nous étions exaspérés. Et nous savions qu’à présent le temps était venu de procéder à des changements. Ainsi, après le « oui » à l’initiative d’immigration de masse, nous nous sommes rassemblés entre amis et amis d’amis. Nous avons discuté, débattu et sommes arrivés à la conclusion que nous avons besoin d’un changement sur le long terme en politique, d’un nouveau #mouvement_politique.

    Le résultat du 9 février 2014 n’a été que la dernière impulsion. Depuis un moment déjà, nous nous sentons sous-représentés au sein du paysage politique de la Suisse, et nous observons les récents événements avec préoccupation. Des initiatives rétrogrades et une atmosphère d’hostilité envers le futur ont mis la Suisse sur de mauvais rails. Elles sont les étincelles qui ont mis le feu aux poudres pour Opération Libero.

    https://www.operation-libero.ch/fr/mouvement
    #Suisse #résistance #extrême_droite #politique #démocratie_directe #hostilité

    • Switzerland has been a lab for toxic rightwing politics. We took that on

      The Swiss People’s party used referendums to deploy its anti-migrant, anti-EU rhetoric. That’s where our movement started.

      Four years ago, along with some friends, I started a grassroots liberal democratic movement in Switzerland called Operation Libero. Since then, we’ve won four referendums (which under Swiss electoral law are frequent) against the rightwing populists. How did we do that? We fought tooth and nail to defend the institutions that protect our freedom and the rule of law. We believed in our goals. And we decided to never sing the populist’s song – only our own song.

      For more than two decades Switzerland has been something of a laboratory for rightwing populism. Ahead of others in Europe, the rightwing Swiss People’s party deployed a relentless anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric. It has successfully used referendums as a marketing tool for its political agenda and has become the largest political force in Switzerland.

      I am 27, and a history student. This was the political environment I grew up in. But in February 2014, my friends and I experienced a kind of Brexit shock before Brexit happened: a “mass immigration initiative” – a referendum – spearheaded by the populists put our country’s relations with the EU at risk. It was a wake-up call. A small group of us in our 20s decided we’d had enough, and it was time to do something.

      We were fed up with the passivity of Switzerland’s established parties. We were angry that traditional political forces were on the defensive in front of the populists, and that no one was speaking up for the very institutions that have made our country so successful in the last two centuries. We felt the need to get involved, to stand up proudly for Switzerland as a land of opportunity, not as an open-air museum – a country of diversity, with a positive narrative for liberal ideas.

      Our crowdfunded, volunteer-based campaigning has achieved a lot in the last four years. We defeated the Swiss People’s party in four major referendum battles: on the question of expelling foreigners who have broken the law (February 2016), on providing legal support for asylum seekers (June 2016), on naturalisation (February 2017) and on the abolition of the country’s public broadcasting (March 2018).

      Right now we’re busy campaigning in the run-up to another referendum, on 25 November, in which the populists aim to place Swiss legislation above international law – in essence a “Switzerland first” agenda. The vote could result in Switzerland’s withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. I’d like to share what we’ve learned along the way.

      To tackle rightwing populism, you have to dispense with peevishness and be very much on the offensive – you must lead the narrative. Take, for example, the 2016 referendum asking Swiss citizens whether they’d agree to have foreigners expelled on the grounds of even minor offenses, such as driving too fast twice in a 10-year period. The vote aimed at modifying the constitution to allow a system of automatic expulsions from the country, with judges given no room to consider personal hardship – an essential element of the law. These changes could have potentially targeted people born in Switzerland who had never lived in the country their parents came from.

      At the time, mainstream parties seemed exhausted, having just come out of a general election in which the Swiss People’s party had dominated the campaign. They seemed to wallow in defeatism. Survey showed the populist referendum plan might garner up to 66% of voters’ support. To be sure, this was a low start for us. But we also knew that we didn’t want to live in a country with a two-tier legal system and a judiciary hindered in its work.

      So what we did is this: we entirely avoided speaking about foreigners and criminality. Instead, we set the tone of the debate by speaking out about the rule of law and how important it is that everyone be equal before it. We moved the political battlefield and forced our adversaries to meet us there. We deliberately argued in a patriotic way, repeatedly referring to the constitution as a pillar of our liberal democracy. In this way, we removed the rightwing populist’s ability to dictate what “their” referendum was about and demonstrated that the changes being considered would affect everyone, not just “criminal foreigners” – as the populists put it.

      And it worked. As the vote drew close, the Swiss People’s party shifted away from the topic of “criminal foreigners”. They found themselves having to explain why they wanted Swiss values to be upended. This was a reversal. People took notice. After the results came out, the leader of the populist’s party conceded: “I don’t know what happened but at some point, everyone was just talking about the rule of law.”

      As the 2019 European parliamentary elections approach, the task for liberal-minded pro-Europeans is to capture the initiative and be the first to define what that election is really about. As a Swiss citizen and a stout liberal democrat, I care immensely about the EU’s fate. Next year’s vote will be about the shape and values of the continent we want to live in. It is very much about freedom and opportunities – not about migration or identity.

      Let’s not be intimidated by rightwing populists. Let them explain why they want to attack institutions and values that brought decades of peace, freedom and prosperity to Europe. Let them explain why we should dismantle that model.

      Europeans need to show pride in institutions that exist because of what we’ve learned from the past. It’s true that many citizens don’t relate to these institutions and often don’t understand what they stand for – which brings me to another crucial point: politics needs to speak directly to people’s hearts and minds. Populists don’t have a monopoly on emotions. Liberalism is based on emotions too. It is based on the profound belief that freedom and equal rights are necessary for any society to prosper as a whole.

      That’s where the battle lies. Serious democrats across Europe have a responsibility to ensure that a vast majority of citizens understand and connect emotionally to what truly protects them – liberal institutions. Now is the time to sing that song – and proudly so.

      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/15/switzerland-laboratory-far-right-politics

  • The Grand Refugee Hotel: The Sequel to My Grandfather’s Germany

    On a visit to one of Germany’s most radical refugee integration experiments, U.S. migration journalist and academic Daniela Gerson went in search of her family history and found an increasingly uneasy relationship between past and present.

    At the #Grand_Hotel_Cosmopolis, an African teenager served cappuccinos to European travelers below clocks telling the time in Kabul, Damascus, Grozny and other global centers of crisis.

    Lamin Saidy – sporting a style he described as “American proper” with tight jeans, lots of earrings and a big smile – was 13 when he fled violence in the Gambia. After he arrived in Germany as a refugee, he was told about this place, where tourists, asylum seekers and artists all share one building. The hotel is run by staff composed of a core group of resident German artists and a diverse team that includes volunteers who may be refugees like Saidy or local college students who want to join the experiment.

    Then, in the fall of 2016, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on immigration, a public artist gave a presentation on cultural integration initiatives in #Augsburg like none I had seen in more than a decade of reporting on immigration in the United States and Europe.

    The artist flashed images of the migrant job center, cafe and immigrant rights organization called Tuer an Tuer, which helped convince the city to take a stance against large institutional centers. Instead, all asylum seekers in Augsburg have been housed in residences of 100 or fewer people. She also showed photos of the colorful, boundary-bending Grand Hotel. This was Augsburg? It was definitely not the city of my imagination.

    Soon after, my mother forwarded me an invitation. In summer 2017, there was going to be a gathering of Jews from Augsburg and their families to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the synagogue. I set off, eager to explore my family’s past and to see if a city I associated with historic brutality had succeeded in building a more welcoming society as a result.
    A Welcoming Nation

    When I arrived in Munich, the Bavarian capital, I borrowed a friend’s bike and pedaled down to the vast main train station. In 2015, in what was known as the Welcoming Summer, more than 1 million asylum seekers came to Germany and the station was full of arriving migrants. There was such an outpouring of public support for them that they had to close the station to donations.

    Two years later, the backlash was mounting. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government had taken steps to slow the tide of arrivals, limiting countries from which people are eligible for asylum and speeding up deportations of people whose applications had been rejected.

    Munich’s size has helped mask the impact of the refugee influx. Augsburg, founded more than 2,000 years ago, is a different story. With a population approaching 300,000, and a popular destination for refugees and foreign laborers, it was a contender to become the first majority minority city in Germany. Now almost 50 percent residents have a “migration background.”

    After a quick train trip an hour east of Munich, I biked across Augsburg’s picture-perfect main square of churches and beer gardens, passing by women strolling in hijabs and Chechnyan kids racing in circles on scooters. And near one of the largest cathedrals, down a cobblestone street, I found the Grand Hotel Cosmopolis. On first impression, it hardly felt grand, but rather like the 1960s old-age home it once was, converted into a lively Berlin artists’ squatter house.

    In a sun-drenched garden, I joined two of the artist founders and a refugee artist for a vegetarian lunch cooked in the communal basement kitchen. As we ate, they explained that the building had been abandoned for six years when some local artists spotted it and inquired about renting it out as a temporary exhibition space. But the owners, a Protestant social enterprise, said they had already entered into negotiations with the government to house asylum seekers.

    That’s when the idea came up to merge the two concepts, and add a hotel. The artists take care of the hotel, cafe and ateliers. The social enterprise, with government support, provides housing for the migrants.

    Three days after the first asylum seekers moved in, it became clear to the artists this was not just a utopian experiment in aesthetics and communal living when the first deportation letter for one of its residents arrived. “Many of the artists stopped their artistic work,” one of my guides, Susa Gunzner, told me. Instead, they focused all of their energies on learning about immigration laws and how to help the refugees.

    After lunch, I toured the 12 uniquely designed hotel rooms: One was bordello hot pink, another constructed to feel like a container ship, a third had a forest growing through it. My stark room, with a long wooden bench of a bed and simple, low table, struck me as a very elegant prison cell.

    Three days after the first asylum seekers moved in, it became clear to the artists this was not just a utopian experiment in aesthetics and communal living when the first deportation letter for one of its residents arrived.

    Gunzner, who teamed up with an Iranian artist to create the room, told me it symbolized freedom. The room is a homage to a Persian woman who moved with her family to Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and later became a spy against the Nazis. Gunzner pointed out illustrations of trees on the wall from Shiraz. “We are always trying to enrich each other and find out – sometimes through very slow processes – who the other person is,” she told me.

    Left on my own, I walked downstairs to the refugee floor, and passed a half-dozen or so baby carriages crowding the stairwell. I had been warned I was only allowed to intrude if an asylum seeker invited me in. The founders of the hotel like to say they “only have guests – with and without asylum.” I was also struck by the strangeness of putting us all in one building as fellow travelers: people on holiday rubbing elbows with people who have been running for their lives.

    Not far from Augsburg, in the aftermath of World War II, my other grandparents – on my father’s side – landed in a very different type of refugee camp, set up by the United Nations and largely funded by the United States. They were Polish Jews whose families had been slaughtered in the streets and in concentration camps. They survived the war in Siberian labor camps and in Uzbek villages, where my father was born.

    In the desperate limbo of the displaced persons camp, they created a community – my grandfather took part in local governance; my father remembers a pet dog, Blackie, a synagogue and a school. What would my grandmother have said if artists lived upstairs and American tourists stayed for a week or two, temporarily sharing her first home outside Poland, the place where my father formed his first memories? Would she have appreciated the attention, or would she have felt like a monkey in the zoo?
    The Shadow of the Past

    It was not the first time that I had traveled to Germany and discovered echoes of my family’s past in my present, as I grapple with issues of migration, persecution and intolerance today as a journalist and academic.

    A decade ago, I spent a little over a year researching contemporary guest worker policies in Berlin and Bonn. Despite my last living relative who survived the Holocaust reprimanding me that Germany was no place for a nice Jewish girl, I fell for the country’s bike and cafe culture, numerous lakes and deliberate approach to its troubled history. I almost always felt welcome as a Jew. Even my neighbor who was a neo-Nazi was dating a Venezuelan and liked to come over and chat with me. Another neighbor, whose grandfather had been active in Hitler Youth, became one of my closest friends.

    Though I was sometimes disturbed by the recent stance that Germany was not a country of immigration, as well as the focus on integration – this notion some leaders interpreted as demanding that newcomers should cede their other cultural identities – I, in many ways, felt that Germany had dealt with its past in ways that could be a lesson to all nations.

    Ten years later, I visited a Germany increasingly conflicted about its moral obligations as it confronted the refugee crisis. And in Augsburg the juxtaposition of this tolerant, generous nation and the pernicious shadow of its intolerant past were in stark relief.

    I left the Grand Hotel on Sunday morning to meet other descendants of Augsburg Jews in the glorious sanctuary of the synagogue built in 1917. The descendants of those who fled the Nazis, or had the foresight or luck to leave before the war, had traveled from South Africa, Norway, Israel and across the United States. Civil leaders turned out in large numbers to pledge “never again.” It was a familiar message. But the synagogue’s attic museum reminded me how quickly a nation can shift toward hate. For the first time, it felt less like a history lesson and more like a warning that struck very close to home.

    In Augsburg, the juxtaposition of this tolerant, generous nation, and the pernicious shadow of its intolerant past were in stark relief.

    Created in 1985, the Augsburg synagogue houses the first independent museum in Germany dedicated to Jewish history. It tells the story of how there were only 1,500 Jews in Augsburg when the Nazis came, but they enjoyed comfortable local prominence. The synagogue is a clear sign of that position. Congregants built the sanctuary – one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, with its 95ft (29m) dome and an architectural style that spans from Byzantine and Oriental elements to Art Noveau – investing in what they imagined would be a vibrant future in Augsburg.

    I was struck by a slide titled “Integration through Achievement.” The museum describes the dreams of these Jews, and it reminded me of the aspirations of many of the asylum seekers I met during my stay in Augsburg. They did not want just to live free from danger, they wanted an opportunity to be productive, successful German citizens. Chillingly, the museum concludes, the local Jewish communities were “extinguished totally.”
    Looking Back, Looking Forward

    In the year since my visit to the synagogue, I have covered U.S. authorities tearing apart asylum-seeking families as part of a larger, often vicious, crackdown. While I wish I could at least point to Germany today as a model of how to do things differently, the picture is unfortunately not so black and white.

    In German elections last fall, the far-right anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party – whose senior member maintains that the country should be more positive about its Nazi past – won 13 percent of the popular vote. According to current polls, the party is on track to win around a similar proportion of votes in upcoming regional parliamentary elections in Bavaria on October 14.

    This year, the leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s sister party in Bavaria, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, pushed her to clamp down on border policy. In the eastern German city of Chemnitz, far-right protests against immigrants in recent weeks were accompanied by xenophobic tirades.

    In August Seehofer instituted the beginning of a new plan in Bavaria that could soon transform how asylum seekers are treated. In what he described as a national model, the goal is to expedite rapid deportations. Most new asylum seekers will be transported to institutions that can house more than 1,000 people, where they will not be in contact with anyone who is not an official or a lawyer or has specific permission.

    “That’s the opposite of what we tried to do in the last years, now we are going two steps back,” said Tuelay Ates-Brunner, the managing director of Tuer an Tuer. “For people who will be rejected, nobody will see them, nobody will know them.”

    “My first impression was that I felt like I was in a new world,” Saidy told me to the beat of Afro Pop on the jukebox. “The hotel is kind of incomparable.”

    The Grand Hotel is located in Augsburg, an ancient German city on Bavaria’s tourist-trod Romantic Road. It is also the place where my mother’s father was born. He was one of the first boys to have a bar mitzvah in the ornate, domed synagogue in Augsburg – just a few years before the Jews were forced to flee or perished at the hands of the Nazis.

    Nearly a century later, I went to stay at the Grand Hotel – one of Germany’s most radical refugee integration experiments.

    Like so many inherited homelands, Augsburg was a mythical place for me, formed from family memories I had never lived – portraits of stern ancestors, the men with elaborate waxy mustaches, the buxom women with beautifully tailored clothes and lace collars. My Augsburg froze when the Nazis took over.


    https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2018/10/08/the-grand-refugee-hotel-the-sequel-to-my-grandfathers-germany

    #Allemagne #hôtel #réfugiés #travail #migrations #asile

  • Despite Iran’s threats, Israeli army pushes aggressive line against Tehran in Syria

    IDF believes Iran won’t strike back before Trump’s deadline on nuclear deal, elections in Lebanon

    Amos Harel May 04, 2018
    Haaretz.com
    https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-israeli-army-chief-eisenkot-stay-forceful-in-syria-despite-iran-1.

    Both the government and the military are sticking to an aggressive policy on Iran, arguing that Israel must continue to act in any way possible to stop Iran’s military consolidation in Syria.
    To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz
    Even after the two latest airstrikes attributed to Israel in Syria, on April 9 and April 29, and despite Iran’s threats of revenge, there has been no sign of any change in Israeli policy.
    The person spearheading this activist policy in the north is Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, whose position is backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Reportedly, no cabinet minister has voiced opposition to the IDF’s stance, despite the risks it entails.
    According to the defense establishment’s analysis, Iran continues to send advanced weapons systems to Syria. But these arms are no longer necessarily slated to be passed on to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Instead, they are being used to bolster Iran’s military deployment in Syria, and may even be meant to prepare an Iranian military response against Israel.

    For now, however, Tehran seems to be debating over the nature of its promised retaliation against Israel, and even more, over its timing.
    One theory being advanced is that Tehran may be reluctant to respond prior to Lebanon’s parliamentary elections this coming Sunday and U.S. President Donald Trump’s expected announcement on May 12 as to whether his country is quitting the nuclear agreement with Iran. Israel’s announcement of the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive by Mossad agents is likely to increase Iranian leaders’ embarrassment.

  • Egypt’s SCAF and the Curious Case Against Konsowa - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

    http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/75353?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRNMk5tRmxNMlkxWVdJNSIsInQiOiI0TXVEdzY5ekl

    The Egyptian military is exploiting legal loopholes and bureaucratic mechanisms to control which military personnel can exercise their constitutional right to political participation.
    January 25, 2018
    عربيComments (+)
    On December 3, a few days after Colonel Ahmed Konsowa announced in a YouTube video that he intended to run against Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in the upcoming Egyptian presidential election, he was detained and put on a military trial for announcing his bid while still serving in the military. In an uncharacteristically prompt trial on December 19, he was sentenced to six years in prison and is now awaiting an appeal before a military court.

    Konsowa, who had previously tried to resign from the military to run in the 2015 parliamentary elections, is not the only presidential hopeful to face dire consequences for his intentions. After declaring his decision to run, Ahmed Shafik—Egypt’s former prime minister and air force pilot who ran in the 2012 presidential election—was deported from the UAE and held incommunicado for 24 hours upon his return to Egypt. Following this episode, he indicated he no longer wishes to participate. Sami Anan, the former Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, was detained on January 23 after announcing his intention to run for president, and is now accused of incitement against the military and of violating military code. Khaled Ali, a prominent lawyer, withdrew on January 24, citing the absence of a democratic process or any possibilities for competition. Sisi currently stands unchallenged.

    Military officers, though not banned from political participation, have to resign from the military before running for any office. In May 2013, the Supreme Constitutional Court upheld the constitutional right of Egyptian military and police personnel to political participation—thereby rejecting a draft law by the then Islamist-dominated Shura Council that would have denied military and police personnel their right to vote. The court’s decision made clear the difference between denying the right to vote based on “temporary and objective” conditions (such as age or mental disability) and depriving an entire group of people (such as military personnel) of a right. The law was thus rejected on basis of preventing discrimination. In addition, the court explained that exempting citizens based on the nature of their employment further impinges on the right to work, which is also protected by the Egyptian constitution.

  • EU-Turkey deal ’driving suicide and self-harm’ among refugees trapped in Greek camps

    A deal struck by the European Union to slow refugee boat crossings to Greece is driving rising rates of suicide and self-harm in squalid camps, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned.

    Asylum seekers detained on islands in the Aegean Sea have described people setting themselves on fire, hanging themselves or cutting their wrists, with a third of those on Chios witnessing a suicide.

    New research by HRW found children were among those being driven to desperation in conditions increasing the trauma already suffered in the countries they have fled.

    “The mental impact of years of conflict, exacerbated by harsh conditions on the Greek islands and the uncertainty of inhumane policies, may not be as visible as physical wounds, but is no less life-threatening,” said Emina Ćerimović, a disability rights researcher for the group.

    “The EU and Greece should take immediate action to address this silent crisis and prevent further harm.”

    Dozens of asylum seekers, including children, reported rising anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses as they wait months on end in “horrific conditions” to see whether they will be taken to the Greek mainland or deported to Turkey.

    A 26-year-old Syrian man, who has been detained on Lesbos for more than three months pending deportation, said he has attempted to kill himself.

    Bilal said he was held in a police station for two months, attempting suicide in a cell, before being taken to the notorious Moria camp.

    “All this time [at the police station] I had seen no doctor,” he said. “Then I hurt myself in the police station, and then they brought me here.”

    The camp, now used as a detention centre for asylum seekers to be transferred to Turkey, has seen deadly fires break out and had to be evacuated after tents froze in the winter.

    Migrants being held there told HRW how they were being tormented by the wait to hear their fate, with anxiety compounded by delayed and changed meetings with authorities and a lack of information and interpreters.

    Ahmad, a 20-year-old Syrian, was moved to Lesbos from Chios in May and does not know whether he will be sent back or onwards to Turkey.

    “I’m in a nervous situation,” he said. “Yesterday, an Algerian guy hurt himself [by cutting] … my feelings are dead.”

    Families are among those detained in Moria, including a Kurdish woman from Syria with four children.

    “My hope is dead since they brought me here,” Rabiha Hadji told HRW. “We saw all the terrible miseries in Syria but me and my children haven’t seen a jail [until coming to Greece].”

    Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which provides medical care on Lesbos and the island of Samos, has reported a high prevalence of depression, anxiety and psychosis, and a significant increase in suicide attempts and self-harm this year.

    A representative said poor conditions in camps were a particular risk to former prisoners and torture victims, adding: “For people who have experienced extreme violence in detention back in their countries of origin, a place surrounded by barbed wire, the presence of police, and violent clashes clearly cannot be a proper place for them.”

    Amir, a 26-year-old Iranian asylum seeker who has been detained on Lesbos since April, said conditions in Moria constantly reminded him of prison in Iran.

    “I see the fences and I remember my past,” he said.

    “During the first week I was here, I couldn’t sleep all week … I had nightmares of the torture I’ve been through in the military prison.”

    Almost 13,000 asylum seekers are currently being held on Greek islands, where 9,500 more have arrived so far this year despite the threat of deportation.

    In December, the EU and Greek authorities ended exemptions for vulnerable groups including unaccompanied children, pregnant women, disabled people and torture victims that previously protected them from detention in island camps, despite an appeal from 13 major NGOs.

    The EU is now pressuring Greece to speed up asylum decisions and deportations to Turkey, where 1,200 people had been returned between the EU-Turkey deal coming into force in March 2016 and June.

    HRW warned that while lengthy procedures were worsening refugees’ distress, “length of asylum procedures should not be reduced at the expense of the quality of the process”.

    It has documented cases with a lack of capable interpreters during vital asylum interviews, “serious gaps” in access to information and legal help and authorities prioritising migrants according to nationality.

    The practice most commonly sees Syrians fast-tracked over Afghans, Iraqis, Bangladeshis and countries with low application success rates, fuelling tensions within camps that sometimes spill over into violence.

    “Greek authorities, with EU support, should ensure asylum seekers have meaningful access to a fair and efficient asylum procedure based on individual claims, not nationality,” a spokesperson for HRW said, urging Greece to end the policy of containment on its islands and transfer asylum seekers to the mainland, where children can be enrolled in school and adults can work.

    “The EU and the Greek government should work to restore the dignity and humanity of people seeking protection, not foster conditions that cause psychological harm,” Ms Ćerimović said.

    The report is the latest damning verdict of the EU-Turkey deal, which has seen the main refugee route to Europe switch from the comparatively shorter and safer Aegean Sea to the treacherous passage between Libya and Italy.

    The agreement committed Turkey to accept the return of most asylum seekers who travelled through its territory to Greek islands, in exchange for billions of euros in aid, visa liberalisation for Turkish citizens, and revived negotiations for Turkish accession to the EU.

    Talks have since broken down over a series of rows over European nations banning Turkish referendum rallies, support for Kurdish groups in Syria and concerns over the crackdown following an attempted coup against Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    Research by Save the Children previously found the deal had dramatically reduced the number of refugees journeying over the Aegean Sea to Greece but had given people smugglers “a firmer grip on a hugely profitable business”.

    A study by Harvard University found girls as young as four had been raped in an Athens refugee camp, while asylum seekers elsewhere in the country were selling sex to raise money to be smuggled out.

    But Europol hailed “success” against people smuggling after setting up the European Migrant Smuggling Centre, identifying 17,500 suspected smugglers in 2016, intercepting messages, seizing documents and destroying boats.

    More than 100,000 migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year by sea, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh and Syria, with 2,300 dying in the attempt.

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugee-crisis-latest-asylum-seekers-greece-camps-lesbos-suicide-self

    #suicide #accord_UE-Turquie #réfugiés #asile #migrations #Grèce #camps_de_réfugiés #piège #îles #Chios #PTSD #santé_mentale #Lesbos #Lesvos #prostitution #enfants #viols #mineurs #Moria #hotspots
    cc @i_s_

    • EU/Greece: Asylum Seekers’ Silent Mental Health Crisis

      In research conducted in May and June 2017 on the island of Lesbos, Human Rights Watch documented the deteriorating mental health of asylum seekers and migrants – including incidents of self-harm, suicide attempts, aggression, anxiety, and depression – caused by the Greek policy of “containing” them on islands, often in horrifying conditions, to facilitate speedy processing and return to Turkey.

      https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/07/12/eu/greece-asylum-seekers-silent-mental-health-crisis

    • Greece : A dramatic deterioration for asylum seekers on Lesbos

      The report, A dramatic deterioration for asylum seekers on Lesbos – based on MSF medical data and the testimonies of patients – describes the recent drastic cuts in providing health care on the island, along with reductions in legal aid, and the closure of shelters and other essential services.

      http://www.msf.org/en/article/greece-dramatic-deterioration-asylum-seekers-lesbos
      #santé #rapport #santé_mentale #statistiques #chiffres #vulnérabilité

      Dans le rapport :


      http://www.msf.org/sites/msf.org/files/msf_lesbos_vulnerability_report1.pdf

    • Moria, il laboratorio della brutale intolleranza anti-migrante

      L’estate, si sa, le retate si accelerano, la repressione va avanti in silenzio. Ma Moria, sull’isola di Lesbo, costituisce forse un punto di non ritorno: il palesamento della brutalità anti-profughi, cristallizzata da mesi negli hotspot, nei campi e sui confini, ora dilagante e impunita. Calais, Ventimiglia, Moria. Non è nuovo che il campo greco dove sono intrappolati, persino da più di un anno, richiedenti asilo, vada in fiamme per la giusta ribellione di persone parcheggiate in container, tra sterpaglie, senza cure né accesso ai legali. A queste persone in fuga, l’Europa riserva, infatti, detenzione infinita e sistematica in attesa del rimpatrio in Turchia, in base all’accordo UE-Turchia, o verso i rispettivi Paesi di origine.

      http://www.huffingtonpost.it/amp/flore-murardyovanovitch/lisola-di-moria-e-il-laboratorio-della-brutale-intolleranza-an_a_2305

    • Lesvos: urla dal silenzio. Detenzione arbitraria e respingimenti illegali. Gli accordi con gli stati di transito cancellano il diritto alla vita.

      I sistemi di controllo delle frontiere si sono dimostrati in tensione sempre più forte con i doveri di soccorso e assistenza, come è apparso più evidente nelle isole greche di fronte alla costa turca e nelle acque antistanti la Tripolitania. Nell’opinione pubblica, soprattutto per effetto della campagna diffamatoria nei confronti delle ONG, portata avanti dagli organi di informazione più seguiti, si è quasi annullata la distinzione tra scafisti, intermediari, trafficanti ed organizzazioni non governative indipendenti (o presunte tali) che praticano attività di soccorso in mare e di assistenza a terra. Attività che andrebbero tutelate, e non attaccate, per difendere i diritti fondamentali della persona, a partire dal diritto alla vita.

      http://www.a-dif.org/2017/08/01/lesvos-urla-dal-silenzio-detenzione-arbitraria-e-respingimenti-illegali-gli-a

    • Trapped. Asylum Seekers in Greece

      Emina Ćerimović and photographer Zalmaï investigate the mental health crisis facing asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos.

      The psychological impact of conflict, exacerbated by harsh conditions, uncertainty and inhumane policies, is not as visible as physical injury. But it’s just as life-threatening.

      https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2017/12/21/trapped

    • Les femmes et les enfants réfugiés sont davantage exposés aux agressions sexuelles dans le climat de tensions et de surpopulation régnant dans les centres d’accueil des îles grecques

      Le HCR, l’Agence des Nations Unies pour les réfugiés, est très préoccupé par les déclarations de certains demandeurs d’asile dénonçant harcèlement et violences sexuels dans les centres d’accueil situés sur les îles grecques qui ne respectent pas les normes d’accueil requises. Le HCR se félicite toutefois des mesures prises par le gouvernement en vue de régler la question de la surpopulation et des conditions de vie désastreuses dans ces centres.

      En 2017, le HCR a reçu des informations émanant de 622 survivants de violences sexuelles et de genre sur les îles grecques de la mer Egée, dont 28% ont été subies après leur arrivée en Grèce. Les formes les plus courantes de violences dénoncées par les femmes concernaient des comportements incorrects, du harcèlement sexuel et des tentatives d’agression sexuelle.

      La situation est particulièrement inquiétante dans les centres d’accueil et d’identification de Moria (#Lesbos) et de #Vathy (#Samos) où des milliers de réfugiés continuent d’être abrités dans des hébergements inadéquats sans sécurité suffisante. Quelque 5 500 personnes séjournent dans ces centres, soit le double de la capacité prévue. Les informations faisant état de harcèlement sexuel sont particulièrement nombreuses à #Moria.

      http://www.unhcr.org/fr/news/briefing/2018/2/5a81a898a/femmes-enfants-refugies-davantage-exposes-agressions-sexuelles-climat-tension

    • Exclusive: Violence breaks out between residents of refugee camp and police on Greek island of #Samos

      Police clashed with residents from a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos on Saturday morning, an NGO has told Euronews.

      The refugees and asylum seekers were staging a protest march about living conditions in the camp but had their route blocked by police at around 7.30 am local time, a member of the NGO said.

      “There were no more than 60 to 70 people there, they were one-on-one with police,” they added.

      Police fired warning shots and used tear gas and “beat up” some of those demonstrating, according to the NGO.

      One refugee sent an image to Euronews that showed his back with two marks across it (pictured in the main image of this article).

      “Things in Samos aren’t working well, that’s why we went on the march,” he said.

      “I saw police charge at the protesters,” Jerome Fourcade, an independent photo journalist based in Samos, told Euronews.

      Around 10 NGO workers were taken in by police at the scene of the clashes at 8.30am and held for a number of hours: “They said they were verifying our ID cards,” one said.

      Fourcade was also detained by police when he tried to photograph those demonstrating.

      Authorities asked to look at his photographs, but he refused arguing that he had not been arrested so they did not have the right.

      He was released around 10.30 am once all the residents had returned to the refugee camp.

      Overcrowding is a serious issue in the Samos camp, which is designed to host a maximum of around 650 people, while there are roughly 4,000 people living there and in the “jungle” surrounding it.

      Most people have no direct access to sanitation and live in flimsy tents or shelters they built themselves, the NGO worker said.

      “They are surrounded by pests — barely a day goes by when I’m not sent a photo of someone who has found a snake in their tent or been bitten by a scorpion or a rat,” they added.

      “The camp is overflowing with garbage, it’s 26 degrees today, so it’s festering ... these are extremely inhumane conditions.”

      Police clashed with residents from a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos on Saturday morning, an NGO has told Euronews.

      The refugees and asylum seekers were staging a protest march about living conditions in the camp but had their route blocked by police at around 7.30 am local time, a member of the NGO said.

      “There were no more than 60 to 70 people there, they were one-on-one with police,” they added.
      Police stand in front of refugees and asylum seekers from Samos camp

      Police fired warning shots and used tear gas and “beat up” some of those demonstrating, according to the NGO.

      One refugee sent an image to Euronews that showed his back with two marks across it (pictured in the main image of this article).

      “Things in Samos aren’t working well, that’s why we went on the march,” he said.

      “I saw police charge at the protesters,” Jerome Fourcade, an independent photo journalist based in Samos, told Euronews.

      Around 10 NGO workers were taken in by police at the scene of the clashes at 8.30am and held for a number of hours: “They said they were verifying our ID cards,” one said.

      Fourcade was also detained by police when he tried to photograph those demonstrating.

      Authorities asked to look at his photographs, but he refused arguing that he had not been arrested so they did not have the right.

      He was released around 10.30 am once all the residents had returned to the refugee camp.
      Police stand in front of refugees and asylum seekers from Samos camp

      Overcrowding is a serious issue in the Samos camp, which is designed to host a maximum of around 650 people, while there are roughly 4,000 people living there and in the “jungle” surrounding it.

      READ MORE: Refugees on Samos live in “a huge camp of lost souls”

      Most people have no direct access to sanitation and live in flimsy tents or shelters they built themselves, the NGO worker said.

      “They are surrounded by pests — barely a day goes by when I’m not sent a photo of someone who has found a snake in their tent or been bitten by a scorpion or a rat,” they added.

      “The camp is overflowing with garbage, it’s 26 degrees today, so it’s festering ... these are extremely inhumane conditions.”
      Valerie Gauriat
      Inside Samos refugee campValerie Gauriat
      Valerie Gauriat
      Inside Samos refugee campValerie Gauriat

      This is not the first time the inhabitants of the camp have demonstrated, with three peaceful protests taking place in January along with another that turned violent, although “nothing as bad as this,” according to the NGO.

      Saturday marked the first time police used tear gas on the asylum seekers and refugees, it said.

      A police spokesman for the North Aegean islands told Euronews that a group of 100 migrants attempted to march into the city to protest about living conditions in and around the camp.

      “They were stopped by the police and there was some tension,” he added. The spokesperson is based in Lesbos and said he did not know anything about the use of tear gas or the police detentions.

      The clashes came a day before Greeks were set to vote in both the European Parliamentary elections and the first round of the municipal elections, when mayors and regional governors are appointed.

      https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/25/exclusive-violence-breaks-out-between-residents-of-refugee-camp-and-police

    • MSF: 3 migrant children attempted suicide, 17 had injured themselves

      Children are the real victims of the Migration policy, many of them are not in position to comply with the harsh realities. According to a press release by Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Greece, in the summer months of July and August, three children attempted suicide and 17 had injured themselves. Ten of a total of 73 children referred to MSF were under the age of six, the youngest being just two.

      Vulnerable people trapped in islands pay for inhumane policies of EU-Turkey Agreement. About 24,000 men, women and children seeking protection in Europe are trapped in tragic living conditions on Greek islands, while Greek and Greek European authorities have deliberately abandoned them, the MSF said in the press release:

      The devastating crisis that affects the health of thousands of vulnerable people is the result of a problematic reception system, lack of protection mechanisms and inadequate service provision. This shows that the European Union’s policy of restricting and deterring migration management has failed.

      For over four years, Doctors Without Borders has been working in several Greek islands, but today humanitarian and medical intervention is largely a matter for voluntary organizations that replace state responsibilities. Today, Doctors Without Borders has once again been forced to scale up its activities: hundreds of medical sessions are held daily in Lesvos, Samos and Chios, while in coordination with other voluntary and non-governmental organizations Doctors Without Borders is increasing for the immigrant population and distribute basic essentials on a regular basis.

      “The situation in the Greek islands is not new. The overcrowding in refugee camps is a crisis caused by European policies and has had a huge negative impact on men, women and children for years, ”says Vassilis Stravaridis, Director General of Médecins Sans Frontières. “More than 3 years have passed since the EU-Turkey Agreement and should we consider that the Greek and European authorities are using this embarrassing failure to host refugees as a means of deterring new arrivals to Europe?”

      As arrivals from the sea have reached their highest point since 2016, Doctors Without Borders pediatric mental health teams in Lesbos have seen child referrals double in July compared to previous months. In July and August, 73 children were referred to our teams: three had attempted suicide and 17 had committed suicide. Ten of the 73 children were under the age of six, the youngest being just two.

      “More and more of these kids stop playing, see nightmares, are afraid to get out of their tent and start retiring from life,” says Kathryn Bruback, a mental health officer in Lesvos. “Some of them just stop talking. With overcrowding, violence and lack of security in the camp increasing, the situation for children is getting worse day by day. In order to prevent permanent damage, these children must leave the Moria camp immediately. “

      At the Doctors Without Borders pediatric clinic we have nearly 100 children with complex or chronic health problems, including young children with severe heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy and war injuries. They are all waiting to move to the mainland to access the specialized care they need.

      In the camp in Vathi, Samos, the situation is unbearable, according to Doctors Without Borders, where 5,000 people crowd into a place designed for 650. Most live in the “jungle”, an area outside the camp. The lack of protection and basic services raises the risk of people being subjected to new psychological trauma, with reports of incidents of harassment, sexual assault and other forms of violence increasing.

      The Greek government recently transferred nearly 1,500 vulnerable people from Lesvos. However, Doctors Without Borders believes that moving people to scenes in the mainland is not a safe or effective solution to the chronic overcrowding and its effects on human health. At least 2,500 people who are officially identified as vulnerable remain in Lesvos despite being entitled to move to a safe place for specialized care. This number does not include thousands of possibly others who have not yet been identified as vulnerable.

      Doctors Without Borders appeals to the Greek Government, the European Union and the Member States to assume their responsibilities and put an end to this unacceptable and devastating crisis, and in particular demand:

      Immediately remove children and vulnerable people from the islands and transport them to safe and appropriate accommodation in mainland Greece and / or other European countries.
      Immediately increase the number of medical staff in reception centers so that people can receive physical and mental health care.

      https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2019/09/13/msf-migrants-children-suicides

  • Morocco: China’s Gateway to Africa? | The Diplomat
    http://thediplomat.com/2017/03/morocco-chinas-gateway-to-africa

    t’s the night before Morocco’s 2016 parliamentary elections, yet all one of the kingdom’s most influential bankers wants to talk about is China. Chinese-Moroccan relations have blossomed in the last year, and Brahim Benjelloun Touimi, the director general of BCME Bank and the chairman of the Bank of Africa, hopes to benefit from the change.

    Seated inside a restaurant that was once a palace, Touimi enjoyed a traditional Moroccan stew over couscous and offered his views on China. BCME, he said, has over 500 branches in Morocco and recently opened its first full branch in Shanghai. “We are in Asia because of Africa; we opened the Shanghai branch because of Africa. Morocco can be China’s gateway into West Africa and beyond, where Moroccan companies and businessmen are already playing a leading role,“ he said.

    #maroc #chine #afrique #chinafrique #sud-sud

  • Baton Rape Case Fuels Anger over Racist Policing in France
    https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/baton-rape-case-fuels-anger-over-racist-policing-france

    n the late afternoon of February 2 this year, French police in the Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois began carrying out identity checks on a group of young men outside one of the town’s large public housing developments.

    There was nothing unusual about the operation. But it resulted in a 22-year-old man with no criminal record being forced to the ground, beaten, and anally raped with a police baton.

    The black victim, identified only as Theo L., suffered serious injuries to the rectum, requiring major emergency surgery. A police officer was subsequently charged with rape, and an investigation into the events surrounding the assault is continuing. Since the events, there have been regular protests across the country, some leading to clashes between protestors and police

    The events recall other protests that have for decades regularly shaken France’s poor suburbs, after local residents, usually young men, suffered injuries or death in incidents involving the police—notably in 1981 in Venissieux, in 1994 in Rouen, in 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois, in 2007 in Val d’Oise, in 2009 in Montreuil, to name some of the most infamous.

    These incidents have fueled the public debate about the way that the French police interact with minority communities. Reformers, including the Open Society Foundations and their partners, have argued for an end in particular to the frequent, persistent, and aggressive stop and search practices that disproportionally focus on minority groups, and which have repeatedly sparked community outrage.

    But the Theo scandal has also brought into the open an aspect of this use that some have hitherto been unwilling to address—the extent to which sexual abuse and even assault is often part of the abuse to which young people of color are subjected during police stops.

    The last time this issue was headline news was in December 2015, when 18 junior high and high school students brought a group legal complaint against the local police in the 12th Arrondissement of Paris. The complaint, filed by lawyers Slim Ben Achour and Félix de Belloy, and supported by a number of local French associations, alleged that over a two-year period police officers had repeatedly carried out body searches that amounted to sexual assault together with other forms of physical abuse and harassment, and that they had singled out for retaliation anyone who tried to complain.

    Previously, questions of sexual abuse by police had focused on individual cases, usually dismissed by the police as the work of one or two bad officers. The lawsuit, and the media attention around it, marked a first shift towards considering sexual harassment and abuse as a systemic problem that the police need to address.

    Now the Theo case has led to a further shift. Survivors of assaults, both present and past, are now speaking publicly and bravely about these humiliating and degrading experiences and demanding reform. This is a major development as this was a taboo subject that victims did not speak about for a variety of reasons: shame, fear of reactions of family and friends, a feeling of powerlessness, and fear of police reprisals.

    At the same time, there has been a gradual evolution over the past five years in public awareness of the inherent problems of police stops that single out visible minorities (known in French as controle à facies). Legal action, supported by the Open Society Justice Initiative, led to a landmark ruling from the highest administrative court in November last year that police stops based on the way someone looks or their supposed ethnic origin are illegal, increasing pressure on the police to change their practices and record keeping.

    Yet the politically powerful police unions remain opposed to any constructive reform efforts—including the principle that all stops should be properly recorded to enable a proper understanding of who is being stopped, and why.

    The depths of the problems with policing culture in France was made abundantly clear the week after the assault on Theo L. when a leader of the largest police union argued on television that a derogatory, racist term used by police to insult Theo during the encounter was “fairly acceptable.” The comment provoked wide public outcry and a rebuke from the Interior Minister.

    The importance of establishing a new relationship between the police and minority communities has been underlined by French political leaders for many years.

    However, statements have failed to translate into badly needed reforms. Instead, while protests and debates over the widespread nature of police abuse dominate the media, the French Parliament incongruously passed another security law extending police powers to use weapons and increasing penal sanctions for the offenses of “insult and rebellion,” charges regularly brought against young people reacting against identity checks and frisks.

    As France gears up for presidential and parliamentary elections this year, the issue of what constitutes truly effective policing will be bitterly contested. The case of Theo has clearly demonstrated the need for a change in the model of French policing, if there is to be any hope for building a more cooperative future for the policing of minority communities. Or, as Le Monde, the leading French establishment daily, noted: “France is the European country where the general public has least trust in the police, and where the police most disregard the public. The presidential campaign needs to include a great debate on how to defuse this formidable machine that only serves to generate discontent.”

    #france #violence #femmes #police

  • Clinton Regrets Not Rigging Palestinian Election
    http://www.palestinechronicle.com/26672-2

    A decade-old audio exposes then-Senator Hillary Clinton saying the US should have manipulated Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to prevent a Hamas victory.

    The presidential candidate lamented that the US did not “determine who was going to win.”

    “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” then-New York Senator Clinton told the Jewish Press, a New York-based weekly newspaper, several months after the January election.

    “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said.

  • Bon commentaire de Sami Attallah sur la défaite victorieuse / ou la victoire dans la défaite de Beirut Madinati (à laquelle il associe la liste de Charbel Nahas)
    Despite its Loss at the Polls Beirut Madinati Provides Hope for Change
    http://www.lcps-lebanon.org/featuredArticle.php?id=76

    Il commence par rappeler que c’est pour les partis une perte de l’ordre de 20.000 voix, ce qui est vraiment beaucoup.
    Ensuite, il souligne que si la liste l’a emporté à Achrafieh, c’est surtout l’importance du vote en sa faveur dans les zones sunnites qui est remarquable et témoigne du recul très fort des partis (et particulièrement du Courant du Futur de Hariri).

    the loss of Beirut 1 to BM was interpreted purely from a political-sectarian prism, denying that there could be a socio-economic explanation or that voters are expressing deep frustration with the performance of the political elite. Worse yet, these analysts view voters as pawns to be traded by parties in the political marketplace. However, it was the capture of 37% of Beirut 3 voters—comprising Mazraa, Mseitbeh, Ras Beirut, Zukak El Blaat, Mina El Hosn, and Ain Mreisseh—who are predominantly Sunnis and from lower income brackets that dealt a blow to Hariri, since this is a direct threat to his political base.

    Deuxièmement, il souligne l’efficacité de la gouvernance interne du mouvement et notamment le rôle très positif joué par les femmes dans la capacité à surmonter les conflits. Cela dit, c’est surtout à partir de maintenant que l’on va mesurer cette capacité à maintenir l’unité du mouvement.

    BM’s success is largely due to their ability to face the enemy within. Most civil society initiatives tend to fizzle out or implode due to the failure of members to resolve internal conflicts. Some of these conflicts arise due to competing visions and strategies but sadly many stem from egos. BM survived this challenge largely due to an internal governance structure that helped resolve conflicts through a division of labor as well as a participatory mechanism of decision-making whereby it was required that key decisions be made according to a vote. Another key factor, invisible to many, that has contributed to BM’s success is the leading role of women. As much as it is thanks to the thousands of volunteers who helped in this initiative, it is important to acknowledge women’s roles in developing BM’s program and vision, in providing legal advice throughout the process, in formulating criteria for selecting BM candidates, in communicating BM to the wider public, and in holding the vote counters accountable during very long days before the official announcement of results, among other things.

    Il insiste également sur le fait que le gouvernement est complètement dépassé par la gestion des résultats. Et c’est un problème car cela nous empêche de connaître précisément les contours de l’électorat, de savoir qui soutient qui, etc. Peut être est-ce fait exprès.

    Despite the relative successes of BM, election day demonstrated why there are still serious systemic problems with Lebanon’s voting system. While the government has finally respected the constitutional deadline and held municipal elections—which should nullify the rationale for not holding parliamentary elections due to security concerns—it has failed to effectively count votes. Despite millions of dollars invested in the electoral process over the last decade, in the last few days the system was shown to be archaic. The ru’asa aqlam (polling station chiefs) were not trained and used inefficient methods to tabulate votes. Worse yet, it was reported that some ballot boxes were transported in civilian cars, raising serious questions about the integrity of the system. Once at Biel, where the votes were aggregated, the system was so primitive that it took thirty-six hours just to count 92,000 votes. One could only speculate what would have happened had the participation rate been higher. This sheds light on larger issues that have been left unaddressed in our electoral system, leaving so much room for vote buying and vote rigging. For instance, every candidate has the right to have a mandoub (representative) present in each voting station and one mobile mandoub who can operate at three polling centers. The fact that this practice is commonly accepted and that mandubeen are paid for their full day of work, leaves ample room for vote buying. This was clearly witnessed in the notorious video shown by New TV showing citizens openly declaring they were registered as mandubeen, while in fact they effectively received money for voting for the Beirutis list. This is compounded by the fact that the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities chose not establish a supervisory committee for electoral campaigns to record violations. Also, the unwillingness of the government to use officially printed ballots, on which voters can consciously select their candidates, is an attempt to compel voters to rubber stamp parties’ decisions concerning candidates.

    Enfin, il souligne que BM n’est pas un mouvement né de la dernière pluie mais au contraire plonge ses racines dans vingt ans de luttes urbaines. Ce qui lui donne sa force

    In this environment, Lebanese citizens and voters must realize that BM is not a transient attempt for change. It is part of a larger movement in society that has been fighting for better livability for several years now. Even though the Hirak—made up of activists and civil society organizations who participated in protests in the summer of 2015—gave impetus to the formation of BM, it has deeper roots in individuals and groups who have been striving to change Beirut for the better for some time. BM built on previous experiences, including the campaign to hold municipal elections that took place in 1997 and many other attempts to reform laws and to lobby for policy change on municipal and urban levels. Hence, one should view BM as an accumulation of experiences and knowledge that CSOs have built and are continuing to build.

  • Scotland’s pro-independence party scores big gains in vote - The Washington Post
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/scotlands-pro-independence-party-scores-big-gains-in-vote/2016/05/06/5d8ebf3c-134a-11e6-a9b5-bf703a5a7191_story.html

    The pro-independence Scottish National Party Friday secured a third term in government with an historic third consecutive victory in the county’s parliamentary elections.

    With 92 out of 129 seats declared, the SNP had secured 58 compared to the Conservatives with 15, Labour with 11, Liberal-Democrats with four, and four for the Green Party.

    However, despite their extraordinary performance the SNP could still fail to win enough seats to form an outright majority and may have to enter into a coalition government with the pro-independence Green Party.

    SNP Party Leader Nicola Sturgeon called the results “historic.

    There are many results still to be declared but what is now beyond doubt is that the SNP has won a third consecutive Scottish Parliament election. That has never been done before in the history of the Scottish Parliament. We have tonight made history,” she said.

  • Women win big in Iran’s parliamentary elections - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
    http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/02/iran-parliamentary-elections-women-elected-double-mps.html#

    The Islamic Republic’s 10th parliamentary elections have yielded a significant victory not only for Reformists, but also for women pushing for change in Iranian society. While the final nationwide results are not expected until March 1; early numbers show twice the number of female members as in the previous parliament. Though ballots from many districts are still uncounted, it is clear that the number of women will reach at least 22. Thus far, 15 women have won seats in Parliament, and 14 of them are Reformists. These include all eight women on the Reformist-moderate “List of Hope” in Tehran, where the results are set to be finalized on Feb. 29.

  • Egypt plane crash: This attack shows that Russia is hurting Isis - Patrick Cockburn
    http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/egypt-plane-crash-this-attack-shows-that-russia-is-hurting-isis-a6725

    All attention at the moment is on the Isis bomb on a Russian plane, claimed four times by Isis though some still doubt that the group is responsible. But a much less dramatic event may have greater long-term impact on the course of the civil war in Syria and Iraq. This is the victory of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the parliamentary elections on 1 November, a victory welcomed with effusive messages by no fewer than 15 different non-Isis armed opposition groups in Syria. Prominent among those congratulating President Erdogan is the Army of Conquest, which captured much of Idlib province earlier in the year and 90 per cent of whose fighters reportedly come from al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. 

    Metin Gurcan, writing in the online magazine al-Monitor, points out that the Army of Conquest says in a statement that Erdogan and the AKP government have never abandoned their support for the Syrian revolution, despite domestic and foreign pressure. Mr Gurcan cites a well-informed Turkish authority saying many of these Syrian opposition “groups are trying to sign non-hostility pacts with Isis” – pacts that say they will not fight Isis unless attacked by them. Governments pretending to distinguish between “moderate opposition” and Isis in Syria should keep this in mind.

  • Egypt: ENI’s Zohr, a boost for political stability
    http://www.mesp.me/2015/09/06/egypt-enis-zohr-a-boost-for-political-stability-in-egypt

    Regardless if it is correct or not, the discovery of Zohr is already perceived, in Egypt and beyond, as the result of the measures taken to reform the gas sector over the past year. As such, it is a boost for President Sisi. But the reasoning goes both ways: Political stability in Egypt relies on the performance of its energy sector, and putting the energy sector back on track relies on political stability. ENI’s discovery couldn’t have come at a better time for Sisi: On 30/08, Egypt announced it will hold parliamentary elections in October and November 2015. The intense media coverage will make sure Egyptians will head to polls with two “spectacular” achievements directly attributed to Sisi in mind: the inauguration of the new Suez canal, and the discovery of Zohr.

    #Egypte #gaz

  • What’s at stake when Ethiopians vote next month?
    http://africasacountry.com/whats-at-stake-when-ethiopians-vote-next-month

    The tragic but fleeting headlines about the plight of Ethiopian migrants in Libya, Yemen and South Africa have shadowed another more consequential event: #Ethiopia’s parliamentary #elections, slated to take place.....

    #FRONT_PAGE #Politics

  • Petite cuisine politique libanaise
    Introducing Taymour | Moulahazat
    http://moulahazat.com/2015/03/20/introducing-taymour

    There’s something very important about the timing here. Jumblatt didn’t only decide to give up his seat before the parliamentary elections, he decided to give it up before we even had an elected president. And it’s not only because Jumblatt wants to finish the transition before M8 and M14 agree on a deal that is likely to isolate him in the center. We all know by now that – one way or another – the PSP always finds itself in the ruling coalition. What scares Jumblatt here is the identity of the new president. While Sleiman was an ally, the new president might not be one. The last time we had a president from the Chouf (Camille Chamoun), a civil war erupted in the mountains, and Kamal Jumblatt wasn’t reelected in 1957 (And the best part? Kamal Jumblatt was actually an ally of Chamoun when he became president). Jumblatt is aware that a president from the Chouf would gather a certain amount of influence, especially among the Christians of the district. He is also probably more than capable of handling that problem. 2015 is not 1955. He just doesn’t want the transition of power to happen in Mukhtara while a president from the Chouf is interfering from the Beiteddin palace.

    And Guess who is from the Chouf? Presidential candidate no. 1, Commander of the Army Jean Kahwaji.

    And yes, I am clearly hinting here that the upcoming transition of power in parliament might mean that Kahwaji is the most likely candidate to win right now.

    With a new Kingmaker in parliament, hopefully a new King.

  • How Poland Kept Putin Away From the Auschwitz Memorial | News | The Moscow Times
    http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/how-poland-kept-putin-away-from-the-auschwitz-memorial/514791.html

    Poland has displayed a knack for canny diplomatic dealings, at once ensuring that Putin was officially welcome at the event, while also creating an atmosphere he would be tempted to avoid.

    In the aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine’s restive east in July, the Polish government decided against issuing formal invitations, as an official invitation to Putin would have proven unpopular among voters, Reuters reported. The fallout from such a move could have proven particularly painful at the moment, with Poland slated to hold presidential and parliamentary elections later this year.
    (…)
    Last year, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum — which is co-organizing the 70th anniversary event with the International Auschwitz Council — announced that the upcoming anniversary would be devoid of politics, concentrating instead on the memories of survivors.

    Rather than sending out formal invitations, the organizers asked the embassies of European Union countries and countries that donate funds to the site who they planned to send to the event. The notice specifically mentioned that the relevant states could be represented by anyone the given country deemed appropriate.
    (…)
    Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledged during his annual news conference Wednesday that the anniversary event’s organizers had, in fact, sent a notification to the Russian Embassy in Warsaw.

    The letter said: ’You can come if you want. If you do want to, tell us who is going to show up.’ You don’t even have to respond to this type of invitation,” Lavrov said with apparent disregard.

    • La Pologne a trouvé une astuce pour éviter d’expliquer l’absence de la Russie :

      Auschwitz libéré par les Ukrainiens : cesser de se moquer de l’histoire (Moscou) | histoireetsociete
      https://histoireetsociete.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/auschwitz-libere-par-les-ukrainiens-cesser-de-se-moquer

      Le ministre polonais des Affaires étrangères Grzegorz Schetyna a déclaré mercredi sur Polskie Radio que le camp de concentration nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau fut libéré par des Ukrainiens lors d’une opération effectuée par le Premier front ukrainien. D’après le ministre, « en ce jour lointain de janvier, des soldats ukrainiens ont ouvert les portes du camp et libéré les prisonniers ».

      Selon Moscou, « il est difficile de soupçonner d’ignorance un fonctionnaire du niveau de Grzegorz Schetyna », car « tout le monde sait que le camp Auschwitz-Birkenau a été libéré par l’Armée Rouge ». Le communiqué souligne notamment que « tous les peuples ayant combattu au sein de cette armée ont fait preuve d’héroïsme ».

      « Il est aussi à noter qu’avant novembre 1943, le Premier front ukrainien s’appelait Front de Voronej et encore plus tôt, Front de Briansk », a conclu le ministère russe des Affaires étrangères.

    • Europe’s current crisis intruding on Auschwitz memorial - Jewish World News - Israel News | Haaretz
      http://www.haaretz.com/.premium-1.639023#

      The organizers of the events marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp fear the world’s attention will not be focused entirely on the victims and survivors.
      (…)
      Poland, the host government, has taken a harsh stance against Russia in the year since its invasion of Ukraine. Last month, Moscow criticized Warsaw for not inviting President Vladimir Putin to the memorial. It was a blow to the national pride of the Russians who jealously guard the memories of the Red Army liberating the camp. Poland said no official invitations were sent; the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum simply notified governments of the event.

      Matters escalated last week when Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna told an interviewer the camp was liberated by the Red Army’s First Ukrainian Front and Ukrainians. Two days later, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, Valeriy Chaliy, said “Ukrainians made up the majority of those who freed Auschwitz.

      These statements enraged the Kremlin, and not only because of the historical sleight of hand (the Ukrainian Front included soldiers from several nationalities within the Soviet Union). “Any attempt to play a card of any sort of nationalistic sentiment in this situation is totally sacrilegious and cynical”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov retorted.

    • Auschwitz : 70 ans après, un libérateur de l’Armée rouge se souvient de l’horreur - 20minutes.fr
      http://www.20minutes.fr/monde/russie/1525158-auschwitz-70-ans-apres-liberateur-armee-rouge-souvient-horreur

      Mercredi, le ministère polonais des Affaires étrangères Grzegorz Schetyna a lancé une nouvelle polémique, en affirmant qu’Auschwitz a été libéré par des Ukrainiens. Une affirmation qui, dans son agréable salon des faubourgs de Moscou, fait bondir le vétéran.

      « Un de mes camarades le plus proche était Géorgien. Il y avait des Kazakhs, des Arméniens et bien sûr des Ukrainiens, mais nous étions avant tout une armée internationale. Nous étions tous unis, nous appartenions au peuple soviétique », réagit l’ancien soldat qui, après la guerre, travailla comme ingénieur à la conception de la bombe atomique soviétique.

      « Je ne veux pas lui répondre. A vrai dire, j’ai honte pour lui », répète encore Ivan [Martynouchkine] qui, malgré tout, participera cette année encore aux commémorations de la libération d’Auschwitz, le 27 janvier.

    • La Pologne ne fait pas son travail de mémoire. Mais les archives balkaniques ont été ouvertes et deux livres sont sortis depuis. Je suis en train de travailler sur cet article.

      Mais ce n’est pas pour rien que les SS avaient construit leurs camps d’extermination en Pologne....

  • High turnout as polls close in Bahraini elections despite opposition boycott « ASHARQ AL-AWSAT
    http://www.aawsat.net/2014/11/article55338802

    Speaking to the press from a polling station, Justice Minister Sheikh Khalid Bin Ali Al Khalifa announced on Saturday that voter turnout had reached 51.5 percent for the parliamentary elections and 53.7 percent for the municipal vote.

    He said the estimates were “conservative” and that the final turnout would be confirmed once the vote was fully counted.

    He added that the call for a boycott of the poll by the opposition—led by the Shi’ite Al-Wefaq group—had only managed to prevent 16 percent of voters from casting their votes.

    Elections in 2010, which were not boycotted by the opposition, garnered a 67 percent turnout.