position:minister

  • Jordan releases memorandum about violations against Al-Aqsa
    July 22, 2018 5:15 P.M. (Updated: July 22, 2018 5:19 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=780479

    AMMAN (Ma’an) —Jordanian Minister of State for Media Affairs, Jumana Ghneimat, condemned in the strongest terms the ongoing Israeli violations and provocations against Al-Aqsa Mosque/ Al Haram al-Sharif, especially the provocative incursions of extremists and settlers that took place today into the courtyards of the holy site.

    Ghneimat, who is also the Government Spokesperson, said according to “Official News Agency Petra” "those condemned and rejected" practices, which are conducted under protection of the Israeli police, violate the sanctity of this holy place, provoke sentiments of worshipers and Muslims all over the world, and constitute a violation of Israel’s obligations as an occupying power under int’l and int’l humanitarian laws.

    The minister affirmed those practices also breach all int’l norms and charters, which stress the need to respect the places of worship for all religions. (...)

  • Two SOMO researchers denied entry into Israel on arbitrary grounds - SOMO - July 21, 2018
    https://www.somo.nl/two-somo-researchers-denied-entry-israel-arbitrary-grounds

    On Friday 20 July, two researchers of SOMO were denied access into Israel at Ben Gurion airport (Tel Aviv). The stated reason for the denial of entry was their alleged Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activism. SOMO finds this decision, issued by the Israeli Minister of Interior, and the treatment of the researchers subsequent to their denial of entry, to be both incomprehensible and unacceptable.

    #expulsion #Israël

  • Israeli minister planned eviction of West Bank Bedouin 40 years ago, document reveals
    Now agriculture minister, then settler activist, Uri Ariel was already planning in the 1970s the eviction of Bedouin living east of Jerusalem that is taking place now in Khan al-Ahmar
    Amira Hass Jul 12, 2018 2:57 AM
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-document-reveals-the-eviction-of-bedouin-was-planned-40-years-ago-

    Forty years ago Uri Ariel, now agriculture minister, was already planning the eviction of Bedouin living east of Jerusalem. This emerges from a document signed by him titled, “A proposal to plan the Ma’aleh Adumim region and establish the community settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim B.”

    The document outlines a plan to turn some 100,000 to 120,000 dunams (25,000 to 30,000 acres) of Palestinian land into an area of Jewish settlement and develop it as a “Jewish corridor,” as he put it, from the coast to the Jordan River. In fact, a large part of the plan has been executed, except for the eviction of all the area’s Bedouin.

    Now the Civil Administration and the police are expediting the demolition of the homes of the Jahalin in Khan al-Ahmar. This is one of approximately 25 Bedouin communities in the area that have become a flagship of the Bedouin resistance in the West Bank’s Area C against the efforts by the Israeli occupation to uproot them, gather them in a few compounds adjacent to Area A, and impose a semi-urban lifestyle on them.

    The boundaries of the area that Ariel sets for his plan are the Palestinian villages of Hizme, Anata, Al-Azariya and Abu Dis to the west, the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley to the east, Wadi Qelt to the north and the Kidron Valley and Horkania Valley to the south. “In the area there are many Bedouin involved in the cultivation of land,” he writes, contrary to the claims voiced today by settlers that the Bedouin only recently popped up and “took over” the land.

    But Ariel has a solution: “Since the area is used by the military and a large part of the industry there serves the defense establishment, the area must be closed to Bedouin settlement and evacuated.”

    This document, exposed here for the first time, was found by Dr. Yaron Ovadia in the Kfar Adumim archives when he was doing research for a book he’s writing about the Judean Desert. Ovadia wrote his doctorate about the Jahalin tribe.

    “Since [the area] is unsettled, it is now possible to plan it entirely,” Ariel wrote, about an area that constituted the land reserves for construction, industry, agriculture and grazing for the Palestinian towns and villages east of Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Ramallah. “Arab urban/rural settlement is spreading at an amazing pace along the route from Jerusalem eastward, and this linear spread must be stopped immediately.”

    His solutions: to build urban neighborhoods that will become part of Jerusalem and to “administratively close the area of the Arab villages by means of an appropriate plan.” This administrative closure by an appropriate plan can be discerned in the reality perpetuated by the Interim Agreement of 1995, which artificially divided the West Bank into Areas A and B, to be administered by the Palestinians, and Area C, which covers 60 percent of the West Bank, to be administered by Israel. That’s how Palestinian enclaves were created with limited development potential within a large Jewish expanse.

    Ariel’s plan was apparently written between late 1978 and the beginning of 1979, and he said that as far as he recalls, it was submitted to Brig. Gen. Avraham Tamir, the IDF’s head of planning. “We have been living for three years in the existing settlement at Mishor Adumim,” writes Ariel, referring to a settlement nucleus that was established in 1975 and was portrayed as a work camp near the Mishor Adumim industrial zone. Even before Ma’aleh Adumim was officially inaugurated, Ariel was proposing to build “Ma’aleh Adumim B,” i.e., Kfar Adumim, which was established in September 1979.

    Some Jahalin families were indeed evicted from their homes in 1977 and 1980. In 1994, expulsion orders were issued against dozens more, and they were evicted in the late 1990s, with the approval of the High Court of Justice. But thousands of Bedouin and their flocks remained in the area, albeit under increasingly difficult conditions as firing zones, settlements and roads reduced their grazing areas and their access to water. From the early 2000s the Civil Administration has been planning to evacuate the Bedouin and forcibly resettle them in permanent townships.

    It’s tempting to present Ariel’s 40-year-old suggestions as an example of the personal and political determination that characterizes many religious Zionist activists and was facilitated by the Likud electoral victory in 1977. But it was Yitzhak Rabin’s first government that decided to build a 4,500-dunam industrial zone for Jerusalem in Khan al-Amar. In 1975 it expropriated a huge area of 30,000 dunams from the Palestinian towns and villages in the area and built a settlement there disguised as a work camp for employees of the industrial zone.

    In a study (“The Hidden Agenda,” 2009) written by Nir Shalev for the nonprofit associations Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights and B’tselem, he notes that the Housing and Construction Ministry’s Jerusalem district director when Ma’aleh Adumim was first being built in 1975 said that the objective behind it was political – “to block the entrance way to Jerusalem from a Jordanian threat.” But since the objective was political, it was clear that he wasn’t referring to a military threat, but to demographic growth that would require additional construction.

    The planning for Ma’aleh Adumim actually began in Golda Meir’s time in the early 1970s; at the time, minister Israel Galili advised Davar reporter Hagai Eshed that it would be best if the press didn’t deal with this “exciting and interesting” issue, “because it could cause damage.” Both the Meir and Rabin governments considered the planned settlement to be part of metropolitan Jerusalem. Moreover, during Rabin’s second government, the period of the Oslo Accords, Bedouin were evicted, in the spirit of Ariel’s proposal.

    Perhaps the most crucial move was actually made in 1971, when under that same government of Meir, Galili and Moshe Dayan, military order No. 418 was issued, which made drastic changes to the planning apparatus in the West Bank. The order removed the rights of Palestinian local councils to plan and build. As explained in another study by Bimkom (“The Prohibted Zone,” 2008) this prepared the legal infrastructure for the separate planning systems – the miserly, restrictive system for the Palestinians and the generous, encouraging one for the settlements. This distorted planning system refused to take into account the longtime Bedouin communities that had been expelled from the Negev and had been living in the area long before the settlements were built.

    The settlement part of Ariel’s proposal succeeded because it was merely a link in a chain of plans and ideas had already been discussed when the Labor Alignment was still in power, and which were advanced by a bureaucratic infrastructure that had been in place even before 1948. Today, under a government in which Ariel’s Habayit Hayehudi party is so powerful, the open expulsion of Bedouin is possible. But the expulsion of Palestinians in general is hardly a Habayit Hayehudi invention.

  • A National Open Science Plan for France
    http://lille1tv.univ-lille1.fr/videos/video.aspx?id=927123e7-0e22-4d47-9734-bfd1dffc5b73

    Before being appointed as the Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, Frédérique Vidal had been the President of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (UNS) since 2012.

    She holds a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, a post-graduate degree from the Institut Pasteur and a doctorate from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis where she became a lecturer in 1995. Since 2004, Frédérique Vidal has been a professor of biochemistry, molecular and cell biology at the UNS.

    In addition, she was Associate Dean of the Department of Life Sciences from 2007 to 2009 and was appointed Research Assessor to the Dean of the Faculty and then Dean of the Department in 2009.

    Previously, she was responsible for internships before becoming the Deputy (...)

  • Saudi Arabia Still Detaining Dozens From Corruption Crackdown - WSJ
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-still-detaining-dozens-from-corruption-crackdown-1530734356

    Those still in custody include some of Saudi Arabia’s richest men, and some who once held powerful government positions until their arrests last November. Among them are Mohammed al-Amoudi, a Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire; Bakr bin Laden, the chairman of the construction giant Saudi Binladin Group; Amr al-Dabbagh, former head of Saudi Arabia’s investment agency; and Adel Fakeih, a former economy minister and once a trusted aide to Prince Mohammed.

    Also detained is a senior royal, Prince Turki bin Abdullah, who served as governor of Riyadh and is a son of the previous monarch, King Abdullah.

    [...]

    Since the Ritz was closed as a detention center and reopened as a hotel in late January, there has been nearly complete official silence on the cases of 56 suspects who didn’t agree to a settlement.

    The Saudi government wants to avoid the publicity of the Ritz episode “and will do things more quietly with any new arrests,” a person familiar with the matter said.

    #Arabie_saoudite

  • How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria

    Sunnis have been pushed out by the war. The new Syria is smaller, in ruins and more sectarian.

    A NEW Syria is emerging from the rubble of war. In Homs, which Syrians once dubbed the “capital of the revolution” against President Bashar al-Assad, the Muslim quarter and commercial district still lie in ruins, but the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street. “Groom of Heaven”, proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. In their sermons, Orthodox patriarchs praise Mr Assad for saving one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

    Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria’s victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities. Sunni civilians, once a large majority, followed. More than half of the country’s population of 22m has been displaced—6.5m inside Syria and over 6m abroad. Most are Sunnis.

    The authorities seem intent on maintaining the new demography. Four years after the government regained Homs, residents still need a security clearance to return and rebuild their homes. Few Sunnis get one. Those that do have little money to restart their lives. Some attend Christian mass, hoping for charity or a visa to the West from bishops with foreign connections. Even these Sunnis fall under suspicion. “We lived so well before,” says a Christian teacher in Homs. “But how can you live with a neighbour who overnight called you a kafir (infidel)?”

    Even in areas less touched by the war, Syria is changing. The old city of Damascus, Syria’s capital, is an architectural testament to Sunni Islam. But the Iranian-backed Shia militias that fight for Mr Assad have expanded the city’s Shia quarter into Sunni and Jewish areas. Portraits of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia, hang from Sunni mosques. Advertisements for Shia pilgrimages line the walls. In the capital’s new cafés revellers barely notice the jets overhead, bombing rebel-held suburbs. “I love those sounds,” says a Christian woman who works for the UN. Like other regime loyalists, she wants to see the “terrorists” punished.

    Mr Assad’s men captured the last rebel strongholds around Damascus in May. He now controls Syria’s spine, from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south—what French colonisers once called la Syrie utile (useful Syria). The rebels are confined to pockets along the southern and northern borders (see map). Lately the government has attacked them in the south-western province of Deraa.

    A prize of ruins

    The regime is in a celebratory mood. Though thinly spread, it has survived the war largely intact. Government departments are functioning. In areas that remained under Mr Assad’s control, electricity and water supplies are more reliable than in much of the Middle East. Officials predict that next year’s natural-gas production will surpass pre-war levels. The National Museum in Damascus, which locked up its prized antiquities for protection, is preparing to reopen to the public. The railway from Damascus to Aleppo might resume operations this summer.

    To mark national day on April 17th, the ancient citadel of Aleppo hosted a festival for the first time since the war began. Martial bands, dancing girls, children’s choirs and a Swiss opera singer (of Syrian origin) crowded onto the stage. “God, Syria and Bashar alone,” roared the flag-waving crowd, as video screens showed the battle to retake the city. Below the citadel, the ruins stretch to the horizon.

    Mr Assad (pictured) has been winning the war by garrisoning city centres, then shooting outward into rebel-held suburbs. On the highway from Damascus to Aleppo, towns and villages lie desolate. A new stratum of dead cities has joined the ones from Roman times. The regime has neither the money nor the manpower to rebuild. Before the war Syria’s economic growth approached double digits and annual GDP was $60bn. Now the economy is shrinking; GDP was $12bn last year. Estimates of the cost of reconstruction run to $250bn.

    Syrians are experienced construction workers. When Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, they helped rebuild Beirut. But no such workforce is available today. In Damascus University’s civil-engineering department, two-thirds of the lecturers have fled. “The best were first to go,” says one who stayed behind. Students followed them. Those that remain have taken to speaking Araglish, a hotch-potch of Arabic and English, as many plan futures abroad.

    Traffic flows lightly along once-jammed roads in Aleppo, despite the checkpoints. Its pre-war population of 3.2m has shrunk to under 2m. Other cities have also emptied out. Men left first, many fleeing the draft and their likely dispatch to the front. As in Europe after the first world war, Syria’s workforce is now dominated by women. They account for over three-quarters of the staff in the religious-affairs ministry, a hitherto male preserve, says the minister. There are female plumbers, taxi-drivers and bartenders.

    Millions of Syrians who stayed behind have been maimed or traumatised. Almost everyone your correspondent spoke to had buried a close relative. Psychologists warn of societal breakdown. As the war separates families, divorce rates soar. More children are begging in the streets. When the jihadists retreat, liquor stores are the first to reopen.

    Mr Assad, though, seems focused less on recovery than rewarding loyalists with property left behind by Sunnis. He has distributed thousands of empty homes to Shia militiamen. “Terrorists should forfeit their assets,” says a Christian businesswoman, who was given a plush café that belonged to the family of a Sunni defector. A new decree, called Law 10, legitimises the government’s seizure of such assets. Title-holders will forfeit their property if they fail to re-register it, a tough task for the millions who have fled the country.

    A Palestinian-like problem

    The measure has yet to be implemented, but refugees compare it to Israel’s absentees’ property laws, which allow the government to take the property of Palestinian refugees. Syrian officials, of course, bridle at such comparisons. The ruling Baath party claims to represent all of Syria’s religions and sects. The country has been led by Alawites since 1966, but Sunnis held senior positions in government, the armed forces and business. Even today many Sunnis prefer Mr Assad’s secular rule to that of Islamist rebels.

    But since pro-democracy protests erupted in March 2011, Syrians detect a more sectarian approach to policymaking. The first demonstrations attracted hundreds of thousands of people of different faiths. So the regime stoked sectarian tensions to divide the opposition. Sunnis, it warned, really wanted winner-take-all majoritarianism. Jihadists were released from prison in order to taint the uprising. As the government turned violent, so did the protesters. Sunni states, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, provided them with arms, cash and preachers. Hardliners pushed aside moderates. By the end of 2011, the protests had degenerated into a sectarian civil war.

    Early on, minorities lowered their profile to avoid being targeted. Women donned headscarves. Non-Muslim businessmen bowed to demands from Sunni employees for prayer rooms. But as the war swung their way, minorities regained their confidence. Alawite soldiers now flex arms tattooed with Imam Ali, whom they consider the first imam after the Prophet Muhammad (Sunnis see things differently). Christian women in Aleppo show their cleavage. “We would never ask about someone’s religion,” says an official in Damascus. “Sorry to say, we now do.”

    The country’s chief mufti is a Sunni, but there are fewer Sunnis serving in top posts since the revolution. Last summer Mr Assad replaced the Sunni speaker of parliament with a Christian. In January he broke with tradition by appointing an Alawite, instead of a Sunni, as defence minister.

    Officially the government welcomes the return of displaced Syrians, regardless of their religion or sect. “Those whose hands are not stained with blood will be forgiven,” says a Sunni minister. Around 21,000 families have returned to Homs in the last two years, according to its governor, Talal al-Barazi. But across the country, the number of displaced Syrians is rising. Already this year 920,000 people have left their homes, says the UN. Another 45,000 have fled the recent fighting in Deraa. Millions more may follow if the regime tries to retake other rebel enclaves.

    When the regime took Ghouta, in eastern Damascus, earlier this year its 400,000 residents were given a choice between leaving for rebel-held areas in the north or accepting a government offer of shelter. The latter was a euphemism for internment. Tens of thousands remain “captured” in camps, says the UN. “We swapped a large prison for a smaller one,” says Hamdan, who lives with his family in a camp in Adra, on the edge of Ghouta. They sleep under a tarpaulin in a schoolyard with two other families. Armed guards stand at the gates, penning more than 5,000 people inside.

    The head of the camp, a Christian officer, says inmates can leave once their security clearance is processed, but he does not know how long that will take. Returning home requires a second vetting. Trapped and powerless, Hamdan worries that the regime or its supporters will steal his harvest—and then his land. Refugees fear that they will be locked out of their homeland altogether. “We’re the new Palestinians,” says Taher Qabar, one of 350,000 Syrians camped in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

    Some argue that Mr Assad, with fewer Sunnis to fear, may relax his repressive rule. Ministers in Damascus insist that change is inevitable. They point to a change in the constitution made in 2012 that nominally allows for multiparty politics. There are a few hopeful signs. Local associations, once banned, offer vocational training to the displaced. State media remain Orwellian, but the internet is unrestricted and social-media apps allow for unfettered communication. Students in cafés openly criticise the regime. Why doesn’t Mr Assad send his son, Hafez, to the front, sneers a student who has failed his university exams to prolong his studies and avoid conscription.

    A decade ago Mr Assad toyed with infitah (liberalisation), only for Sunni extremists to build huge mosques from which to spout their hate-speech, say his advisers. He is loth to repeat the mistake. Portraits of the president, appearing to listen keenly with a slightly oversized ear, now line Syria’s roads and hang in most offices and shops. Checkpoints, introduced as a counter-insurgency measure, control movement as never before. Men under the age of 42 are told to hand over cash or be sent to the front. So rife are the levies that diplomats speak of a “checkpoint economy”.

    Having resisted pressure to compromise when he was losing, Mr Assad sees no reason to make concessions now. He has torpedoed proposals for a political process, promoted by UN mediators and his Russian allies, that would include the Sunni opposition. At talks in Sochi in January he diluted plans for a constitutional committee, insisting that it be only consultative and based in Damascus. His advisers use the buzzwords of “reconciliation” and “amnesty” as euphemisms for surrender and security checks. He has yet to outline a plan for reconstruction.

    War, who is it good for?

    Mr Assad appears to be growing tired of his allies. Iran has resisted Russia’s call for foreign forces to leave Syria. It refuses to relinquish command of 80,000 foreign Shia militiamen. Skirmishes between the militias and Syrian troops have resulted in scores of deaths, according to researchers at King’s College in London. Having defeated Sunni Islamists, army officers say they have no wish to succumb to Shia ones. Alawites, in particular, flinch at Shia evangelising. “We don’t pray, don’t fast [during Ramadan] and drink alcohol,” says one.

    But Mr Assad still needs his backers. Though he rules most of the population, about 40% of Syria’s territory lies beyond his control. Foreign powers dominate the border areas, blocking trade corridors and the regime’s access to oilfields. In the north-west, Turkish forces provide some protection for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group linked to al-Qaeda, and other Sunni rebels. American and French officers oversee a Kurdish-led force east of the Euphrates river. Sunni rebels abutting the Golan Heights offer Israel and Jordan a buffer. In theory the territory is classified as a “de-escalation zone”. But violence in the zone is escalating again.

    New offensives by the regime risk pulling foreign powers deeper into the conflict. Turkey, Israel and America have drawn red lines around the rebels under their protection. Continuing Iranian operations in Syria “would be the end of [Mr Assad], his regime”, said Yuval Steinitz, a minister in Israel, which has bombed Iranian bases in the country. Israel may be giving the regime a green light in Deraa, in order to keep the Iranians out of the area.

    There could be worse options than war for Mr Assad. More fighting would create fresh opportunities to reward loyalists and tilt Syria’s demography to his liking. Neighbours, such as Jordan and Lebanon, and European countries might indulge the dictator rather than face a fresh wave of refugees. Above all, war delays the day Mr Assad has to face the question of how he plans to rebuild the country that he has so wantonly destroyed.


    https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/06/30/how-a-victorious-bashar-al-assad-is-changing-syria?frsc=dg%7Ce
    #Syrie #démographie #sunnites #sciites #chrétiens #religion #minorités

    • Onze ans plus tard, on continue à tenter de donner un peu de crédibilité à la fable d’une guerre entre « sunnites » et « minoritaires » quand la moindre connaissance directe de ce pays montre qu’une grande partie des « sunnites » continue, pour de bonnes ou de mauvaises raisons, mais ce sont les leurs, à soutenir leur président. Par ailleurs, tout le monde est prié désormais par les syriologues de ne se déterminer que par rapport à son origine sectaire (au contraire de ce qu’on nous affirmait du reste au début de la « révolution »)...

  • Eritrea-Etiopia – Si tratta la pace ad Addis Abeba

    Una delegazione eritrea di alto livello è arrivata in Etiopia per il primo round di negoziati di pace in vent’anni. Il ministro degli Esteri eritreo Osman Sale è stato accolto in aeroporto dal neo premier etiopico Abiy Ahmed che, ai primi di giugno, ha sorpreso il Paese dichiarando di accettare l’Accordo di pace del 2000 che poneva fine alla guerra con l’Eritrea.

    L’Accordo, nonostante la fine dei combattimenti nel 2000, non è mai stato applicato e i rapporti tra i due Paesi sono rimasti tesi. Etiopia ed Eritrea non hanno relazioni diplomatiche e negli ultimi anni ci sono stati ripetute schermaglie militari al confine.


    https://www.africarivista.it/eritrea-etiopia-si-tratta-la-pace-ad-addis-abeba/125465
    #paix #Ethiopie #Erythrée #processus_de_paix

    • Peace Deal Alone Will Not Stem Flow of Eritrean Refugees

      The detente with Ethiopia has seen Eritrea slash indefinite military conscription. Researcher Cristiano D’Orsi argues that without a breakthrough on human rights, Eritreans will still flee.

      Ethiopia and Eritrea have signed a historic agreement to end the 20-year conflict between the two countries. The breakthrough has been widely welcomed given the devastating effects the conflict has had on both countries as well as the region.

      The tension between the two countries led to Eritrea taking steps that were to have a ripple effect across the region – and the world. One in particular, the conscription of young men, has had a particularly wide impact.

      Two years before formal cross-border conflict broke out in 1998, the Eritrean government took steps to maintain a large standing army to push back against Ethiopia’s occupation of Eritrean territories. Initially, troops were supposed to assemble and train for a period of 18 months as part of their national service. But, with the breakout of war, the service, which included both military personnel and civilians, was extended. All Eritrean men between the ages of 18–50 have to serve in the army for more than 20 years.

      This policy has been given as the reason for large numbers of Eritreans fleeing the country. The impact of the policy on individuals, and families, has been severe. For example, there have been cases of multiple family members being conscripted at the same time. This denied them the right to enjoy a stable family life. Children were the most heavily affected.

      It’s virtually impossible for Eritreans to return once they have left as refugees because the Eritrean government doesn’t look kindly on repatriated returnees. Those who are forced to return to the country face persecution and human rights abuses.

      In 2017, Eritreans represented the ninth-largest refugee population in the world with 486,200 people forcibly displaced. By May 2018, Eritreans represented 5 percent of the migrants who disembarked on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

      Things look set to change, however. The latest batch of national service recruits have been told their enlistment will last no longer than 18 months. The announcement came in the midst of the dramatic thawing of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It has raised hopes that the service could be terminated altogether.

      With that said, it remains to be seen whether the end of hostilities between the two countries will ultimately stem the flow of Eritrean refugees.

      It’s virtually impossible for Eritreans to return once they have left as refugees because the Eritrean government doesn’t look kindly on repatriated returnees. Those who are forced to return to the country face persecution and human rights abuses.

      The Eritrean government’s hardline position has led to changes in refugee policies in countries like the UK. For example, in October 2016, a U.K. appellate tribunal held that Eritreans of draft age who left the country illegally would face the risk of persecution and abuse if they were involuntarily returned to Eritrea.

      This, the tribunal said, was in direct violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. As a result, the U.K.’s Home Office amended its immigration policy to conform to the tribunal’s ruling.

      Eritrean asylum seekers haven’t been welcome everywhere. For a long time they were persona non grata in Israel on the grounds that absconding national service duty was not justification for asylum. But in September 2016, an Israeli appeals court held that Eritreans must be given the chance to explain their reasons for fleeing at individual hearings, overruling an interior ministry policy that denied asylum to deserters.

      The situation is particularly tense for Eritreans in Israel because they represent the majority of African asylum seekers in the country. In fact, in May 2018, Israel and the United Nations refugee agency began negotiating a deal to repatriate African asylum seekers in western countries, with Canada as a primary destination.

      An earlier deal had fallen through after public pressure reportedly caused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to back out of it.

      Eritreans living as refugees in Ethiopia have been welcomed in Australia where they are one among eight nationalities that have access to a resettlement scheme known as the community support program. This empowers Australian individuals, community organizations and businesses to offer Eritrean refugees jobs if they have the skills, allowing them to settle permanently in the country.

      The government has always denied that conscription has anything to do with Eritreans fleeing the country. Two years ago it made it clear that it would not shorten the length of the mandatory national service.

      At the time officials said Eritreans were leaving the country because they were being enticed by certain “pull factors.” They argued, for example, that the need for low cost manpower in the West could easily be met by giving asylum to Eritreans who needed just to complain about the National Service to obtain asylum.

      But change is on the cards. After signing the peace deal with Ethiopia, Eritrea has promised to end the current conscription regime and announcing that national service duty will last no more than 18 months.

      Even so, the national service is likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future to fulfil other parts of its mandate which are reconstructing the country, strengthening the economy, and developing a joint Eritrean identity across ethnic and religious lines.

      Eritrea is still a country facing enormous human rights violations. According to the last Freedom House report, the Eritrean government has made no recent effort to address these. The report accuses the regime of continuing to perpetrate crimes against humanity.

      If Eritrea pays more attention to upholding human rights, fewer nationals will feel the need to flee. And if change comes within Eritrean borders as fast as it did with Ethiopia, a radical shift in human rights policy could be in the works.

      https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2018/08/09/peace-deal-alone-will-not-stem-flow-of-eritrean-refugees

      #asile #réfugiés

    • Eritrea has slashed conscription. Will it stem the flow of refugees?

      Ethiopia and Eritrea have signed an historic agreement to end the 20-year conflict between the two countries. The breakthrough has been widely welcomed given the devastating effects the conflict has had on both countries as well as the region.

      The tension between the two countries led to Eritrea taking steps that were to have a ripple effect across the region – and the world. One in particular, the conscription of young men, has had a particularly wide impact.

      Two years before formal cross border conflict broke out in 1998, the Eritrean government took steps to maintain a large standing army to push back against Ethiopia’s occupation of Eritrean territories. Initially, troops were supposed to assemble and train for a period of 18 months as part of their national service. But, with the breakout of war, the service, which included both military personnel and civilians, was extended. All Eritrean men between the ages of 18 – 50 have to serve in the army for more than 20 years.

      This policy has been given as the reason for large numbers of Eritreans fleeing the country. The impact of the policy on individuals, and families, has been severe. For example, there have been cases of multiple family members being conscripted at the same time. This denied them the right to enjoy a stable family life. Children were the most heavily affected.

      In 2017, Eritreans represented the ninth-largest refugee population in the world with 486,200 people forcibly displaced. By May 2018 Eritreans represented 5% of the migrants who disembarked on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

      Things look set to change, however. The latest batch of national service recruits have been told their enlistment will last no longer than 18 months. The announcement came in the midst of the dramatic thawing of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It has raised hopes that the service could be terminated altogether.

      With that said, it remains to be seen whether the end of hostilities between the two countries will ultimately stem the flow of Eritrean refugees.
      The plight of Eritrean refugees

      It’s virtually impossible for Eritreans to return once they have left as refugees because the Eritrean government doesn’t look kindly on repatriated returnees. Those who are forced to return to the country face persecution and human rights abuses.

      The Eritrean government’s hard line position has led to changes in refugee policies in countries like the UK. For example, in October 2016 a UK appellate tribunal held that Eritreans of draft age who left the country illegally would face the risk of persecution and abuse if they were involuntarily returned to Eritrea.

      This, the tribunal said, was in direct violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. As a result, the UK’s Home Office amended its immigration policy to conform to the tribunal’s ruling.

      Eritrean asylum seekers haven’t been welcome everywhere. For a long time they were persona non grata in Israel on the grounds that absconding national service duty was not justification for asylum. But in September 2016 an Israeli appeals court held that Eritreans must be given the chance to explain their reasons for fleeing at individual hearings, overruling an interior ministry policy that denied asylum to deserters.

      The situation is particularly tense for Eritreans in Israel because they represent the majority of African asylum-seekers in the country. In fact, in May 2018, Israel and the United Nations refugee agency began negotiating a deal to repatriate African asylum-seekers in western countries, with Canada as a primary destination.

      An earlier deal had fallen through after public pressure reportedly caused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to back out of it.

      Eritreans living as refugees in Ethiopia have been welcomed in Australia where they are one among eight nationalities that have access to a resettlement scheme known as the community support programme. This empowers Australian individuals, community organisations and businesses to offer Eritrean refugees jobs if they have the skills, allowing them to settle permanently in the country.
      The future

      The government has always denied that conscription has anything to do with Eritreans fleeing the country. Two years ago it made it clear that it would not shorten the length of the mandatory national service.

      At the time officials said Eritreans were leaving the country because they were being enticed by certain “pull factors”. They argued, for example, that the need for low cost manpower in the West could easily be met by giving asylum to Eritreans who needed just to complain about the National Service to obtain asylum.

      But change is on the cards. After signing the peace deal with Ethiopia, Eritrea has promised to end the current conscription regime and announcing that national service duty will last no more than 18 months.

      Even so, the national service is likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future to fulfil other parts of its mandate which are reconstructing the country, strengthening he economy, and developing a joint Eritrean identity across ethnic and religious lines.

      Eritrea is still a country facing enormous human rights violations. According to the last Freedom House report, the Eritrean government has made no recent effort to address these. The report accuses the regime of continuing to perpetrate crimes against humanity.

      If Eritrea pays more attention to upholding human rights, fewer nationals will feel the need to flee. And if change comes within Eritrean borders as fast as it did with Ethiopia, a radical shift in human rights policy could be in the works.

      https://theconversation.com/eritrea-has-slashed-conscription-will-it-stem-the-flow-of-refugees-

      #conscription #service_militaire #armée

    • Out of Eritrea: What happens after #Badme?

      On 6 June 2018, the government of Ethiopia announced that it would abide by the Algiers Agreement and 2002 Eritrea-Ethiopian Boundary Commission decision that defined the disputed border and granted the border town of Badme to Eritrea. Over the last 20 years, Badme has been central to the dispute between the two countries, following Ethiopia’s rejection of the ruling and continued occupation of the area. Ethiopia’s recently appointed Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged that the dispute over Badme had resulted in 20 years of tension between the two countries. To defend the border areas with Ethiopia, in 1994 the Eritrean government introduced mandatory military service for all adults over 18. Eritrean migrants and asylum seekers often give their reason for flight as the need to escape this mandatory national service.

      Since 2015, Eritreans have been the third largest group of people entering Europe through the Mediterranean, and have the second highestnumber of arrivals through the Central Mediterranean route to Italy. According to UNHCR, by the end of 2016, 459,390 Eritreans were registered refugees in various countries worldwide. Various sources estimate Eritrea’s population at 5 million people, meaning that approximately 10% of Eritrea’s population has sought refuge abroad by 2016.
      Mandatory military service – a driver of migration and displacement

      As data collection from the Mixed Migration Centre’s Mixed Migration Monitoring Mechanism Initiative (4Mi) shows, 95% of Eritrean refugees and migrants surveyed gave fear of conscription into national service as their main reason for flight out of Eritrea. Men and women from 18 to 40 years old are required by law to undertake national service for 18 months — including six months of military training followed by 12 months’ deployment either in military service or in other government entities including farms, construction sites, mines and ministries.
      In reality, national service for most conscripts extends beyond the 18 months and often indefinite. There are also reported cases of children under 18 years old being forcefully recruited. Even upon completion of national service, Eritreans under the age of 50 years may been enrolled in the Reserve Army with the duty to provide reserve military service and defend the country from external attacks or invasions.

      According to Human Rights Watch, conscripts are subject to military discipline and are harshly treated and earn a salary that often ranges between USD 43 – 48 per month. The length of service is unpredictable, the type of abuse inflicted on conscripts is at the whim of military commanders and the UN Commission of inquiry on human rights in Eritrea reported on the frequent sexual abuse of female conscripts. Eritrea has no provision for conscientious objection to national service and draft evaders and deserters if arrested are subjected to heavy punishment according to Amnesty International, including lengthy periods of detention, torture and other forms of inhuman treatment including rape for women. For those who escape, relatives are forced to pay fines of 50,000 Nakfa (USD 3,350) for each family member. Failure to pay the fine may result in the arrest and detention of a family member until the money is paid which further fuels flight from Eritrea for families who are unable to pay the fine.

      The government of Eritrea asserts that compulsory and indefinite national service is necessitated by continued occupation of its sovereign territories citing Ethiopia as the main threat. In its response to the UN Human Rights Council Report that criticised Eritrea for human rights violations including indefinite conscription, Eritrea stated that one of its main constraints to the fulfilment of its international and national obligations in promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms is the continued occupation of its territory by Ethiopia.

      In 2016, Eritrea’s minister for Information confirmed that indefinite national service would remain without fundamental changes even in the wake of increased flight from the country by citizens unwilling to undertake the service. The Minister went on to state that Eritrea would contemplate demobilization upon the removal of the ‘main threat’, in this case Eritrea’s hostile relationship with Ethiopia. Eritrea and Ethiopia have both traded accusations of supporting opposition/militia groups to undermine each other both locally and abroad. If the relations between the countries turn peaceful, this could potentially have an impact on Eritrean migration, out of the country and out of the region.

      In the absence of hostilities and perceived security threats from its neighbour, it is possible that Eritrea will amend – or at least be open to start a dialogue about amending – its national service (and military) policies from the current mandatory and indefinite status, which has been one of the major root causes of the movement of Eritreans out of their country and onwards towards Europe. Related questions are whether an improvement in the relations with Ethiopia could also bring an immediate or longer term improvement in the socio-economic problems that Eritrea faces, for example through expanded trade relations between the two countries? Will this change usher in an era of political stability and an easing of military burdens on the Eritrean population?
      A possible game changer?

      The border deal, if it materialises, could at some time also have serious implications for Eritrean asylum seekers in Europe. Eritreans applying for asylum have relatively high approval rates. The high recognition rate for Eritrean asylum seekers is based on the widely accepted presumptionthat Eritreans who evade or avoid national service are at risk of persecution. In 2016 for example, 93% of Eritreans who sought asylum in EU countries received a positive decision. This recognition rate was second to Syrians and ahead of Iraqis and Somalis; all countries that are in active conflict unlike Eritrea. If the government of Eritrea enacts positive policy changes regarding conscription, the likely effect could be a much lower recognition rate for Eritrean asylum seekers. It is unclear how this would affect those asylum seekers already in the system.

      While Eritreans on the route to Europe and in particular those arriving in Italy, remain highly visible and receive most attention, many Eritreans who leave the country end up in refugee camps or Eritrean enclaves in neighbouring countries like Sudan and Ethiopia or further away in Egypt. After they flee, most Eritreans initially apply for refugee status in Ethiopia’s and Sudan’s refugee camps. As Human Rights Watch noted in 2016, the Eritrean camp population generally remains more or less stable. While many seek onward movements out of the camps, many refugees remain in the region. With these potentially new developments in Eritrea, will the Eritreans in Sudan, Ethiopia and other neighbouring countries feel encouraged or compelled to return at some, or will they perhaps be forced to return to Eritrea?
      What’s next?

      Conservative estimates in 2001 put the cost of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia at USD 2.9 billion in just the first three years. This has had an adverse effect on the economies of the two countries as well as human rights conditions. In 2013, Eritrea expressed its willingness to engage in dialogue with Ethiopia should it withdraw its army from the disputed territory which it further noted is occupied by 300,000 soldiers from both countries. Ethiopia has previously stated its willingness to surrender Badme, without in the end acting upon this promise. Should this latest promise be implemented and ties between two countries normalized, this might herald positive developments for both the economy and the human rights situation in both countries, with a potential significant impact on one of the major drivers of movement out of Eritrea.

      However, with the news that Ethiopia would move to define its borders in accordance with international arbitration, the possibilities for political stability and economic growth in Eritrea remain uncertain. On 21 June 2018, the President of Eritrea Isaias Aferwerki issued a statement saying that Eritrea would send a delegation to Addis Ababa to ‘gauge current developments… chart out a plan for continuous future action’. The possibility of resulting peace and economic partnership between the two countries could, although a long-term process, also result in economic growth on both sides of the border and increased livelihood opportunities for their citizens who routinely engage in unsafe and irregular migration for political, humanitarian and economic reasons.

      http://www.mixedmigration.org/articles/out-of-eritrea

    • Despite the peace deal with Ethiopia, Eritrean refugees are still afraid to return home

      When Samuel Berhe thinks of Eritrea, he sees the sand-colored buildings and turquoise water of Asmara’s shoreline. He sees his sister’s bar under the family home in the capital’s center that sells sweet toast and beer. He sees his father who, at 80 years old, is losing his eyesight but is still a force to be reckoned with. He thinks of his home, a place that he cannot reach.

      Berhe, like many other Eritreans, fled the country some years ago to escape mandatory national service, which the government made indefinite following the 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia. The war cost the countries an estimated 100,000 lives, while conscription created a generation of Eritrean refugees. The UNHCR said that in 2016 there were 459,000 Eritrean exiles out of an estimated population of 5.3 million.

      So, when the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a sudden peace deal in July 2018, citizens of the Horn of Africa nations rejoiced. Many took to the streets bearing the two flags. Others chose social media to express their happiness, and some even dialed up strangers, as phone lines between the nations were once again reinstated. It felt like a new era of harmony and prosperity had begun.

      But for Berhe, the moment was bittersweet.

      “I was happy because it is good for our people but I was also sad, because it doesn’t make any change for me,” he said from his home in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. “I will stay as a refugee.”

      Like many other Eritrean emigrants, Berhe fled the country illegally to escape national service. He fears that if he returns, he will wind up in jail, or worse. He does not have a passport and has not left Ethiopia since he arrived on the back of a cargo truck 13 years ago. His two daughters, Sarah, 9, and Ella, 11, for whom he is an only parent, have never seen their grandparents or their father’s homeland.

      Now that there is a direct flight, Berhe is planning on sending the girls to see their relatives. But before he considers returning, he will need some sort of guarantee from Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, who leads the ruling People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, that he will pardon those who left.

      “The people that illegally escaped, the government thinks that we are traitors,” he said. “There are many, many like me, all over the world, too afraid to go back.”

      Still, hundreds fought to board the first flights between the two capitals throughout July and August. Asmara’s and Addis Ababa’s airports became symbols of the reunification as hordes of people awaited their relatives with bouquets daily, some whom they hadn’t seen for more than two decades.

      “When I see the people at the airport, smiling, laughing, reuniting with their family, I wish to be like them. To be free. They are lucky,” Berhe said.

      Related: Chronic insomnia plagues young migrants long after they reach their destination

      Zala Mekonnen, 38, an Eritrean Canadian, who was one of the many waiting at arrivals in Addis Ababa, said she had completely given up on the idea that the two nations — formerly one country — would ever rekindle relations.

      Mekonnen, who is half Ethiopian, found the 20-year feud especially difficult as her family was separated in half. In July, her mother saw her uncle for the first time in 25 years.

      “We’re happy but hopefully he’s [Afwerki] going to let those young kids free [from conscription],” she said. “I’m hoping God will hear, because so many of them died while trying to escape. One full generation lost.”

      Related: A life of statelessness derailed this Eritrean runner’s hopes to compete in the Olympics

      Mekonnen called the peace deal with Ethiopia a crucial step towards Eritrean democracy. But Afwerki, the 72-year-old ex-rebel leader, will also have to allow multiple political parties to exist, along with freedom of religion, freedom of speech and reopening Asmara’s public university while also giving young people opportunities outside of national service.

      “The greeting that Afwerki received here in Ethiopia [following the agreement to restore relations], he didn’t deserve it,” said Mekonnen. “He should have been hung.”

      Since the rapprochement, Ethiopia’s leader, Abiy Ahmed, has reached out to exiled opposition groups, including those in Eritrea, to open up a political dialogue. The Eritrean president has not made similar efforts. But in August, his office announced that he would visit Ethiopia for a second time to discuss the issue of rebels.

      Laura Hammond, a professor of developmental studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said that it is likely Afwerki will push for Ethiopia to send Eritrean refugees seeking asylum back to Eritrea.

      “The difficulty is that, while the two countries are normalizing relations, the political situation inside Eritrea is not changing as rapidly,” Hammond said. “There are significant fears about what will happen to those who have left the country illegally, including in some cases escaping from prison or from their national service bases. They will need to be offered amnesty if they are to feel confident about returning.”

      To voice their frustrations, thousands of exiled Eritreans gathered in protest outside the UN headquarters in Geneva on Aug. 31. Amid chants of “enough is enough” and “down, down Isaias,” attendees held up placards calling for peace and democracy. The opposition website, Harnnet, wrote that while the rapprochement with Ethiopia was welcomed, regional and global politicians were showing “undeserved sympathy” to a power that continued to violate human rights.

      Sitting in front of the TV, Berhe’s two daughters sip black tea and watch a religious parade broadcast on Eritrea’s national channel. Berhe, who has temporary refugee status in Ethiopia, admits that one thing that the peace deal has changed is that the state’s broadcaster no longer airs perpetual scenes of war. For now, he is safe in Addis Ababa with his daughters, but he is eager to obtain a sponsor in the US, Europe or Australia, so that he can resettle and provide them with a secure future. He is afraid that landlocked Ethiopia might cave to pressures from the Eritrean government to return its refugees in exchange for access to the Red Sea port.

      “Meanwhile my girls say to me, ’Why don’t we go for summer holiday in Asmara?’” he laughs. “They don’t understand my problem.”


      https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-09-13/despite-peace-deal-ethiopia-eritrean-refugees-are-still-afraid-return-home

    • Etiopia: firmato ad Asmara accordo di pace fra governo e Fronte nazionale di liberazione dell’#Ogaden

      Asmara, 22 ott 09:51 - (Agenzia Nova) - Il governo dell’Etiopia e i ribelli del Fronte nazionale di liberazione dell’Ogaden (#Onlf) hanno firmato un accordo di pace nella capitale eritrea Asmara per porre fine ad una delle più antiche lotte armate in Etiopia. L’accordo, si legge in una nota del ministero degli Esteri di Addis Abeba ripresa dall’emittente “Fana”, è stato firmato da una delegazione del governo etiope guidata dal ministro degli Esteri Workneh Gebeyehu e dal presidente dell’Onlf, Mohamed Umer Usman, i quali hanno tenuto un colloquio definito “costruttivo” e hanno raggiunto un “accordo storico” che sancisce “l’inizio di un nuovo capitolo di pace e stabilità in Etiopia”. L’Onlf, gruppo separatista fondato nel 1984, è stato etichettato come organizzazione terrorista dal governo etiope fino al luglio scorso, quando il parlamento di Addis Abeba ha ratificato la decisione del governo di rimuovere i partiti in esilio – tra cui appunto l’Onlf – dalla lista delle organizzazioni terroristiche. La decisione rientra nella serie di provvedimenti annunciati dal premier Abiy Ahmed per avviare il percorso di riforme nel paese, iniziato con il rilascio di migliaia di prigionieri politici, la distensione delle relazioni con l’Eritrea e la parziale liberalizzazione dell’economia etiope.

      https://www.agenzianova.com/a/5bcd9c24083997.87051681/2142476/2018-10-22/etiopia-firmato-ad-asmara-accordo-di-pace-fra-governo-e-fronte-nazional

    • UN: No Rights Progress in Eritrea After Peace Deal With Ethiopia

      U.N. experts say Eritrea’s human rights record has not changed for the better since the government signed a peace agreement with Ethiopia last year, formally ending a two decades-long border conflict. The U.N. Human Rights Council held an interactive dialogue on the current situation in Eritrea this week.

      After a 20-year military stalemate with Ethiopia, hopes were high that the peace accord would change Eritrea’s human rights landscape for the better.

      U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore said that has not happened. She said Eritrea has missed a historic opportunity because the government has not implemented urgently needed judicial, constitutional and economic reforms.

      She said the continued use of indefinite national service remains a major human rights concern.

      “Conscripts continue to confront open-ended duration of service, far beyond the 18 months stipulated in law and often under abusive conditions, which may include the use of torture, sexual violence and forced labor,” she said.

      Gilmore urged Eritrea to bring its national service in line with the country’s international human rights obligations.

      “The peace agreement signed with Ethiopia should provide the security that the government of Eritrea has argued it needs to discontinue this national service and help shift its focus from security to development…. In the absence of promising signs of tangible human rights progress, that flow of asylum-seekers is not expected to drop,” Gilmore said.

      Human rights groups say unlimited national service forces thousands of young men to flee Eritrea every month to seek asylum in Europe. They say many lose their lives making the perilous journey across the Sahara Desert or while crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

      The head of the Eritrean delegation to the Council, Tesfamicael Gerahtu, said his country has had to adopt certain measures to counter the negative effect of the last 20 years on peace, security and development. He insists there is no human rights crisis in his country.

      He accused the Human Rights Council of exerting undue pressure on Eritrea by monitoring his country’s human rights situation and adopting detrimental resolutions. He called the actions counterproductive.

      “The honorable and productive way forward is to terminate the confrontational approach on Eritrea that has been perpetrated in the last seven years and that has not created any dividend in the promotion of human rights. And, there is no crisis that warrants a Human Rights Council agenda or special mandate on Eritrea,” Gerahtu said.

      Daniel Eyasu , head of Cooperation and International Relations of the National Youth Union and Eritrean Students, agrees there is no human rights crisis in Eritrea. He offered a positive spin on the country’s controversial national service, calling it critical for nation building.

      Unfortunately, he said, the reports of the council’s special procedures characterizing national service as modern slavery is unwarranted, unjustified and unacceptable.

      The Founder of One Day Seyoum, Vanessa Tsehaye, said the government has not changed its stripes. She said it is as repressive today as it was before the peace accord with Ethiopia was signed.

      Tsehaye’s organization works for the release of her uncle, a journalist who has been imprisoned without a trial in Eritrea since 2001 and for all people unjustly imprisoned. She said they continue to languish in prison.

      “The standoff at the border cannot justify the fact that all capable Eritreans are enlisted into the national service indefinitely. It cannot justify the fact that the country’s constitution still has not been implemented and that the parliament still has not convened since 2002. It does not justify the fact that the only university in the country has been shut down, that the free press has still not been opened and that tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned without a trial simply for expressing their opinions, practicing their religion or attempting to leave their country,” Tsehaye said.

      But delegates at the council welcomed the peace process and expressed hope it will result in better protection for the Eritrean people. But they noted the prevailing abusive conditions are not promising.

      They urged the government to reform its military service, release all political prisoners, stop the practice of arbitrary arrests, and end torture and inhumane detention conditions.

      https://www.voanews.com/a/eritrea-human-rights/4834072.html
      #processus_de_paix #droits_humains

  • “National security” cited as reason Al Jazeera nixed Israel lobby film | The Electronic Intifada
    https://electronicintifada.net/content/national-security-cited-reason-al-jazeera-nixed-israel-lobby-film/24566

    Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary into the US Israel lobby was censored by Qatar over “national security” fears, The Electronic Intifada has learned.

    These include that broadcast of the film could add to pressure for the US to pull its massive Al Udeid air base out of the Gulf state, or make a Saudi military invasion more likely.

    A source has confirmed that broadcast of The Lobby – USA was indefinitely delayed as “a matter of national security” for Qatar. The source has been briefed by a high-level individual in Doha.

    One of the Israel lobby groups whose activities are revealed in the film has been mounting a campaign to convince the US to withdraw its military forces from Qatar – which leaders in the emirate would see as a major blow to their security.

    The tiny gas-rich monarchy houses and funds satellite channel Al Jazeera.

    In April, managers at the channel were forced to deny a claim by a right-wing American Zionist group that the program has been canceled altogether.

    In October 2017, the head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit promised that the film would be aired “very soon.”

    Yet eight months later, it has yet to see the light of day.

    In March, The Electronic Intifada exclusively published the first concrete details of what is in the film.

    The film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working directly with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.

    Some of the activity revealed in the film could include US organizations acting as front operations for Israel without registering as agents of a foreign state as required by US law.

    The latest revelation over the censored film shows how seriously Qatar’s leadership is taking threats of repercussions should it air.

    Threats
    The Israel lobby groups reported on in the film could be expected to take legal action against Al Jazeera if it is broadcast.

    However, such threats alone would be unlikely to deter Al Jazeera from broadcasting the film.

    The network has a history of vigorously defending its work and it was completely vindicated over complaints about a documentary aired in January 2017 that revealed how Israel lobby groups in Britain collude with the Israeli embassy, and how the embassy interfered in British politics.

    Israel’s supporters are also pushing for the US Congress to force the network, which has a large US operation, to register as a “foreign agent” in a similar fashion to Russian channel RT.

    But the high-level individual in Doha’s claim that the film is being censored as “a matter of national security” ties the affair to even more serious threats to Qatar and bolsters the conclusion that the censorship is being ordered at the highest level of the state.

    A year ago, with the support of US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a transport and economic blockade on the country.

    Saudi rulers and their allies see Qatar as too independent of their influence and too open to relations with their regional rival Iran, and the blockade was an attempt to force it to heel.

    The Saudis and Israel accused Qatar of funding “terrorism,” and have taken measures to restrict Al Jazeera or demanded it be shut down altogether over what they perceive as the channel’s anti-Israel and anti-Saudi-monarchy biases.

    The blockade and the diplomatic assault sparked existential fears in Qatar that Saudi-led forces could go as far as to invade and install a more pliant regime in Doha.

    French newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday that the Saudi king has threatened “military action” against Qatar should it go ahead with a planned purchase of a Russian air defense missile system.

    In 2011, Saudi and Emirati forces intervened in Bahrain, another small Gulf nation, at the request of its ruling Khalifa monarchy in order to quell a popular uprising demanding democratic reforms.

    For three years, US and British-backed Saudi and Emirati forces have been waging a bloody and devastating war on Yemen to reimpose a Saudi-backed leadership on the country, clear evidence of their unprecedented readiness to directly use military force to impose their will.

    And no one in the region will have forgotten how quickly Iraqi forces were able to sweep in and take over Kuwait in August 1990.

    Air base
    The lesson of the Kuwait invasion for other small Gulf countries is that only the protection of the United States could guarantee their security from bigger neighbors.

    Qatar implemented that lesson by hosting the largest US military facility in the region, the massive Al Udeid air base.

    The Saudi-led bloc has pushed for the US to withdraw from the base and the Saudi foreign minister predicted that should the Americans pull out of Al Udeid, the regime in Doha would fall “in less than a week.”

    US warplanes operate from the Al Udeid air base near Doha, Qatar, October 2017. US Air Force Photo
    It would be a disaster from the perspective of Doha if the Israel lobby was to put its full weight behind a campaign to pull US forces out of Qatar.

    Earlier this year, an influential member of Congress and a former US defense secretary publicly discussed moving the US base out of Qatar at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

    FDD is a neoconservative Israel lobby group that happens to be one of the subjects of the undercover Al Jazeera film.

    As The Electronic Intifada revealed in March, FDD is one of the groups acting as an agent of the Israeli government even though it is not registered to do so.

    In July 2017, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer testified to Congress that it would be an “insane arrangement” to keep US forces at the Al Udeid air base while Qatar continued to support “terror.”

    It will concentrate minds in Doha that FDD was one of the lobby groups most dedicated to destroying the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program, a goal effectively achieved when the Trump administration pulled out of it last month.

    In a sign of how vulnerable Qatar feels over the issue, Doha has announced plans to upgrade the Al Udeid base in the hope, as the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes put it, “that the strategic military hub will be counted as one of the Pentagon’s permanent overseas installations.”

    The final straw?
    The cornerstone of Qatar’s effort to win back favor in Washington has been to aggressively compete with its Gulf rivals for the affections of Israel and its Washington lobby.

    Their belief appears to be that this lobby is so influential that winning its support can result in favorable changes to US policy.

    Qatar’s charm offensive has included junkets to Doha for such high-profile Israel supporters as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America who publicly took credit for convincing Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to veto broadcast of the documentary.

    While an all-out Saudi invasion of Qatar over a film series may seem far fetched, the thinking in Doha seems to be that broadcast of The Lobby – USA could be the final straw that antagonizes Qatar’s enemies and exposes it to further danger – especially over Al Udeid.

    With an administration in Washington that is seen as impulsive and unpredictable – it has just launched a trade war against its biggest partners Canada and the European Union – leaders in Doha may see it as foolhardy to take any chances.

    If that is the reason Al Jazeera’s film has been suppressed it is not so much a measure of any real and imminent threat Qatar faces, but rather of how successfully the lobby has convinced Arab rulers, including in Doha, that their well-being and longevity rests on cooperating with, or at least not crossing, Israel and its backers.

    Asa Winstanley is associate editor and Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

    Qatar Al Jazeera The Lobby—USA Al Udeid air base Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Donald Trump Jared Kushner Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Bahrain Iran Kuwait Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Jonathan Schanzer Morton Klein Alan Dershowitz Zionist Organization of America

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  • The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: The Israeli former minister spying for Iran: much bigger than Elie Cohen of Damascus
    http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-israeli-former-minister-spying-for.html

    Notice that intelligence successes and breakthroughs of Israeli enemies never get any coverage of hype that alleged Israeli successes get. There were some four movies and plays about Elie Cohen (whose tale was largely fictitious and whose contributions were very highly exaggerated and whose exploits were really invented by the Mossad to cover up their failures) and I doubt that there will be one movie about this Israeli spy for Iran. Notice how muted the Western coverage of the case has been. This is the biggest but certainly not the only intelligence penetration of the Israeli military-political establishment. The New York Times in its coverage today made the story about the great Mossad adventure in...arresting the guy and not in Iran’s recruitment of the former Israeli minister.

  • Some of Trump’s Biggest Donors Are Profiting Big-Time on Immigration Detention Centers | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/some-trumps-biggest-donors-are-profiting-big-time-immigration-detention-ce

    The giant retail stores being converted into detention centers and these large tent cities cropping up to house immigrants, where did they come from? As always, it is important to follow the money. This plan to lock-up asylum-seeking migrants may seem like it happened overnight, but it has been years in the making. Only weeks after Donald Trump put his filthy hand on Lincoln’s Bible and took the Oath of Office, this was the February 24, 2017, headline at CNN Money:

    The actions Donald Trump, his sycophant Stephen Miller and Minister of White Supremacy Jeff Sessions are taking today are a huge payoff to the prison lobbyists and the border security industry that spent millions helping to get Donald Trump elected. Private for-profit prison executives were furious that President Obama decided to end the practice of using private prisons. They poured everything into Donald Trump and his campaign, maxing out $250,000 donations and even helping Trump raise $100 million in sketchy, secret money for his “inauguration committee.” And it paid off, as one of the first decisions from the Trump administration was to rescind Obama’s order to phase out private prisons.

    They didn’t stop there. These groups have been spending lavishly at Trump’s private business as well. The Miami New Times noted the private prison company GEO Group was one of the newest big spenders at Trump’s Doral property in Florida.

    In March of 2017, then Homeland Security chief John Kelly told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he was considering a plan to separate families and detain them.

    “We have tremendous experience of dealing with unaccompanied minors,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.” "We turn them over to (Health and Human Services) and they do a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States."

    It didn’t take long for Kelly to publicly walk back that statement, denying he meant it would be a cruel, intentional warning or deterrent to others who might be thinking of seeking asylum in the U.S. But we can clearly see now, they’ve been plotting this for quite some time.

    [UDPATE] Bloomberg reports a Texas non-profit got a nearly $500 million contract to take care of the immigrant kids.

    The Trump administration plans to pay a Texas nonprofit nearly half a billion dollars this year to care for immigrant children who were detained crossing the U.S. border illegally, according to government data.

    The nonprofit, Southwest Key Programs Inc., is to be paid more than $458 million in fiscal 2018, according to the data — the most among the organizations, government agencies and companies that run a detention and care system for immigrant children on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services. Southwest Key has about a dozen facilities in Texas, including a site at a former WalMart Inc.store in Brownsville that has drawn attention from members of Congress and national news organizations.

    #Capitalisme_carcéral #Prédation #Conflits_intérêt

  • #Kazakhstan commemorates Stalin’s Terror · Global Voices
    https://globalvoices.org/2018/05/31/kazakhstan-commemorates-stalins-terror

    Svetlana Tynybekova was born in 1939, on the tail-end of a tidal wave of terror that ripped through the Soviet Union, sweeping up her family with it.

    Her grandfather, a Kazakh intellectual and a former minister in the Soviet government of Central Asia, had been shot as an enemy of the people. Her grandmother was languishing in the Gulag.

    “It’s unnatural, it’s inhumane, that a child should live having never met their grandmother and never see their grandfather at all,” said Tynybekova, a sprightly and alert 78-year-old, recalling her family’s past in an interview in her apartment in Astana last November.

    On May 31, Kazakhstan will hold its annual commemoration of those, like Tynybekova’s family, who were caught up by Soviet repression.

    #staline #urss #ex-urss #soviétisme

  • Raymond SACKLER Officier of the Legion of Honor - France in the United States / Embassy of France in Washington, D.C.
    https://fr.franceintheus.org/spip.php?article5052

    Dear Dr. Sackler,
    Dear Mrs. Sackler
    Distinguished guests,
    American and French friends,

    It is a great pleasure and honor for me to be here with you today on this very special occasion and I would like to express my warmest thanks to Raymond Sackler, whom we are honoring today, for welcoming us to this beautiful location.

    We are gathered here this afternoon to honor one of the most remarkable medical doctors in the field of Psychiatry and a very successful businessmanwho is also a great friend of France and an exceptional individual, Raymond Sackler.

    I would like to thank Mr. Sackler’s family and friends who have joined us here this afternoon to show their support and admiration, with a special word of appreciation to his wife Beverly, to whom I also want to pay tribute.

    Before proceeding with the ceremony, I would like to say a few words about the award I will bestow upon Mr. Sackler. The Legion of Honor was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 to reward extraordinary accomplishments and outstanding services rendered to France.
    It is France’s highest distinction and one of the most coveted in the world. And the rank of officier that I will bestow upon Raymond Sackler is truly exceptional.

    Dear Dr. Sackler,

    You have accomplished so much that it is difficult to briefly sum up all of your outstanding achievements.

    Already at a very young age, you were interested in France and French culture. You first visited France in 1939, and since then, have come to France very often, becoming a true Francophile, as evidenced throughout your professional life and philanthropic activities.

    Together with your brother Mortimer, also a medical doctor, you created a pharmaceutical laboratory in France that was and still is a great success story. Being aware of the caliber of French research in medical and pharmaceutical sciences, you chose France for their first industrial investment, co-funding Les Laboratoires SARGET (today MEDA-PHARMA). You developed this company by creating or acquiring several subsidiaries in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal.

    You were incredibly successful, bringing the “Laboratoires SARGET” from a staff of a few hundred people in 1961, when it was created, to more than two thousand in 1987, when it was sold. With your brother and family, you later created another pharmaceutical company, MUNDIPHARMA, which is still growing, creating many jobs in France, and thus significantly contributing to the rise of the pharmaceutical industry in our country.

    At the same time, you and your wife, Beverly, became patrons of a number of worthy causes: many scientific institutions, universities, and museums such as the Louvre and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux have benefited from your generosity. You also expressed a special interest in IHES, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, that is very well represented this afternoon.

    I’d like to recognize the new Chairman of the Friends of IHES, Prof. Michael Douglas, the new Director of IHES Emmanuel Ullmo and its former director Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

    If IHES is what it is today, a worldclass scientific center that is second to none, it is to a large extend thanks to you mon cher Jean-Pierre, to your talent, dedication and commitment to the Institute.

    It is also thanks to the support of many of you, Luc Hardy, and Raymond and Beverly Sackler in particular.

    Cher Raymond,

    Since 1990, you have made 3 donations to IHES, leading to the creation of 2 permanent endowments to host 2 scientists every year. You also supported the agreement between IHES and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Mathematical Sciences at Tel Aviv University. You encouraged IHES to diversify its scientific activities by making an additional donation in 2012 to create a Chair in Physics and Cosmology.

    Your long friendship and tremendous generosity toward French arts and science mirror your exceptional qualities as human beings. Your professional and social success go hand in hand with a unwavering intellectual curiosity and a strong commitment to future generations.

    You were originally named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by President Mitterrand. Your name had been proposed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Benoît d’Abboville, then French Consul in New York, who presented you with the award here in New York in 1990.

    Today, in recognition of your continued dedication and commitment to French-American cultural and scientific cooperation, the President of the French Republic has promoted you to the rank of Officier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur.

    It is my great pleasure and privilege to award you this distinction. I will now proceed in French:

    Raymond SACKLER,

    Au nom du Président de la République, je vous fais Officier dans l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur.

    #Opioides #Sackler #Légion_honneur

    • Je sais pas si on peu se fié au site de MEDA-PHARAM mais ce labo de la famille Sackler ne vent pas d’Opioides. C’est plutot des anti-verrus, spray à l’eau de mer pour nettoyé le nez et des trucs sans ordonnances.

      Mais comme le texte de la légion d’honneur qui le mentionne date de l’époque mittérand, je sais pas si les Sackler sont encore les principaux actionnaires de ce labo. MEDA-PHARAM à une adresse en belgique mais ca doit rien vouloir dire sur les actionnaires je présume.

      Pour MUNDI-PHARAM ca semble etre la partie distribution de PURDUE qui serait le fabriquant et je croi avoir lu que c’est aussi MUNDI-PHARMA qui est la branche qui donne une belle image de mécénat à la famille.

      Je savais pas que ca commencait au Bresil. Si les dealeurs peuvent faire des cocktails puissants pour pas cher avec le fentanyl il n’y a pas de raison que ca s’exporte pas un peu partout. Sutout qu’il y a aussi le #cairfentanyl qui se commande sur Tor a des labos chinois.

  • Colombia pledges to tackle impunity for activist killings
    http://news.trust.org/item/20180510164924-j3r31

    Colombia is working to prevent the killing of activists and tackle impunity, under mounting international pressure to stem the violence, a minister said on Thursday.

    Despite a 2016 government peace accord that ended a half a century of civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), activists in the country are still in the firing line, with one gunned down every five days.

    They are particularly at risk in regions vacated by rebel fighters following the peace accord, leaving a power vacuum that crime gangs have sought to fill, the United Nations has said.

    “The government recognizes that the signing of the peace accord is not peace in itself but a necessary and definitive step towards building a more just and equal society,” said Rodrigo Rivera, Colombia’s interior minister.

    “We are fighting against the impunity of homicides of human rights defenders,” he told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Thursday as it reviewed the country’s right record.

    The government has set up an elite police task force and investigation unit to dismantle criminal groups and investigate killings and attacks against activists, the minister said.

    About 4,000 at-risk activists receive protection from the government, including bodyguards, bullet-proof vests and cars, Rivera said.

    The government says 144 human rights campaigners were killed in 2016 and 2017 and 103 people have been arrested.

    But local rights groups and watchdogs say the true number of dead is higher.

    #Colombie #violences #meurtres #activisme

  • Abu Dhabi Ports Signs 30-Year Deal with MSC to Build Terminal – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/abu-dhabi-ports-signs-30-year-deal-with-msc-to-build-terminal

    Abu Dhabi Ports has signed a 30-year concession agreement with Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) to build a new container terminal at its Khalifa Port.

    Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has spent billions developing the port, which opened in 2012, as part of ongoing efforts to diversify its oil-rich economy.

    Khalifa Port is on a man-made island roughly half-way between the centres of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and about 60 kilometres (37 miles) south from Dubai’s huge Jebel Ali port.

    Construction of the new terminal will include deepening berths to make Khalifa Port capable of handling the world’s biggest bulk cargo vessels, state-owned Abu Dhabi Ports said in a statement on Monday.

    Swiss-based MSC will invest 4 billion dirhams ($1.1 billion) over the life of the concession in operational equipment which will include increasing the number of ship-to-shore cranes from 12 to 25, it said.

    We are confident that with this investment we will continue to ensure a high level of service for our customers and have the capacity to grow the scale of our operations in the UAE,” MSC’s President and Chief Executive Officer Diego Aponte said.

    Abu Dhabi Ports expects the overall capacity of Khalifa Port to increase to 8.5 million TEUs from 2.5 million TEUs in five years. ($1 = 3.6728 dirham)

  • MARE CLAUSUM
    The Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard Case
    6 November 2017.
    https://www.forensic-architecture.org/case/sea-watch

    On 6 November 2017, the rescue NGO Sea Watch (SW) and a patrol vessel of the Libyan Coast Guard (LYCG) simultaneously directed themselves towards a migrants’ boat in distress in international waters. The boat, which had departed from Tripoli a few hours earlier, carried between 130 and 150 passengers. A confrontational rescue operation ensued, and while SW was eventually able to rescue and bring to safety in Italy 59 passengers, at least 20 people died before or during these events, while 47 passengers were ultimately pulled back to Libya, where several faced grave human rights violations – including being detained, beaten, and sold to an other captor who tortured them to extract ransom from their families. The unfolding of this incident has been reconstructed in a video by Forensic Oceanography in collaboration with Forensic Architecture.

    To reconstruct the circumstances of this particular incident, however, Forensic Oceanography has produced a detailed written report which argues it is also necessary to understand the policies that shaped the behaviour of the actors involved, and the patterns of practices of which this event was only a particular instantiation. Before arriving on the scene, the LYCG liaised with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre of the Italian Coast Guard, which informed them of the presence of the boat in distress. The Ras Jadir, the very patrol vessel of the LYCG that engaged in reckless behaviour and thus contributed to the death of several passengers, was one of the four patrol boats that had been donated by Italy to the LYCG on the 15 May 2017, in presence of the Italian Minister of Interior. On board that vessel on the day of the events, 8 out of the 13 crew members had received training from the EU’s anti-smuggling operation, EUNAVFOR MED.

    Based on these elements, the Mare Clausum report argues that this particular incident is paradigmatic of the new, drastic measures that have been implemented by Italy and the EU to stem migration across the central Mediterranean. This multilevel policy of containment operates according to a two-pronged strategy which aims, on the one hand, to delegitimise, criminalise and ultimately oust rescue NGOs from the central Mediterranean; on the other, to provide material, technical and political support to the LYCG so as to enable them to intercept and pull back migrants to Libya more effectively. This undeclared operation to seal off the central Mediterranean is what we refer to as Mare Clausum.

  • The Rise and Fall Of the Watusi - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/23/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-watusi.html
    En 1964 le New York Times publie un article sur l’extermination imminente des Tutsi. C’est raconté comme une fatalité qui ne laisse pas de choix aux pauvres nègres victimes de forces plus grandes qu’eux. Dans cette optique il s’agit du destion inexorable du peuple des Tutsi arrivant à la fin de son règne sur le peuple des Hutu qui revendique ses droits. L’article contient quelques informations intéressantes déformées par la vison colonialiste de l’époque.

    ELSPETH HUXLEYFEB. 23, 1964

    FROM the miniature Republic of Rwanda in central Africa comes word of the daily slaughter of a thousand people, the possible extermin­ation of a quarter of a million men, women and children, in what has been called the bloodiest tragedy since Hitler turned on the Jews. The victims are those tall, proud and graceful warrior­aristocrats, the Tutsi, sometimes known as the Watusi.* They are being killed

    *According to the orthography of the Bantu language, “Tutsi” is the singular and “Watutsi” the plural form of the word. For the sake of simplicity. I prefer to follow the style used in United Nations reports and use “Tutsi” for both singular and plural.

    Who are the Tutsi and why is such a ghastly fate overtaking them? Is it simply African tribalism run riot, or are outside influences at work ? Can nothing be done?

    The king‐in‐exile of Rwanda, Mwamni (Monarch) Kigeri V, who has fled to the Congo, is the 41st in line of suc­cession. Every Tutsi can recite the names of his 40 predecessors but the Tutsi cannot say how many centuries ago their ancestors settled in these tumbled hills, deep valleys and vol­canic mountains separating the great

    Nor is it known just where they came from—Ethiopia perhaps; before that, possibly Asia. They are cattle folk, allied in race to such nomadic peo­ples as the Somali, Gatlla, Fulani and Masai. Driving their cattle before them, they found this remote pocket of cen­tral Africa, 1,000 miles from the In­dian Ocean. It was occupied by a race of Negro cultivators called the Hutu, who had themselves displaced the ab­original pygmy hunters, the Twa (or Batwa). First the Tutsi conquered and then ruled the Hutu. much as a ??r‐man ruling class conquered and settled

    In the latest census, the Tutsi con­stitute about 15 per cent of Rwanda’s population of between 2.5 and 3 mil­lion. Apart from a handful of Twa, the rest are Hutu. (The same figures are true of the tiny neighboring king­dom of Burundi.)

    For at least four centuries the Tutsi have kept intact their racial type by inbreeding. Once seen, these elongated men are never forgotten. Their small, narrow heads perched on top of slim and spindly bodies remind one of some of Henry Moore’s sculptures. Their average height, though well above the general norm, is no more than 5 feet 9 inches, but individuals reach more than 7 feet. The former king, Charles III Rudahagwa, was 6 feet 9 inches, and a famous dancer and high jumper—so famous his portrait was printed on the banknotes—measured 7 feet 5 inches.

    THIS height, prized as a badge of racial purity, the Tutsi accentuated by training upward tufts of fuzzy hair shaped like crescent moons. Their leaps, bounds and whirling dances delighted tourists, as their courtesy and polished manners impressed them.

    Through the centuries, Tutsi feudal­ism survived with only minor changes. At its center was the Mwami, believed to be descended from the god of lightning, whose three children fell from heaven onto a hilltop and begat the two royal clans from which the Mwami and his queen were always chosen. Not only had the Mwami rights of life and death over his subjects but, in theory, he owned all the cattle. too — magnificent, long‐horned cattle far superior to the weedy native African bovines. Once a year, these were ceremonially presented to the Mwami in all their glory — horns sand‐polished, coats rubbed with butter, foreheads hung with beads, each beast attended by a youth in bark‐cloth robes who spoke to it softly and caught its dung on a woven straw mat.

    “Rwanda has three pillars.” ran a Tutsi saying: “God, cows and soldiers.” The cows the Mwami distributed among his subchiefs, and they down the line to lesser fry, leaving no adult Tutsi male without cows.

    Indeed, the Tutsi cannot live with­out cattle, for milk and salted butter are their staple food. (Milk is con­sumed in curds; the butter, hot and perfumed by the bark of a certain tree.) To eat foods grown in soil, though often done, is thought vaguely shame­ful, something to be carried out in private.

    THE kingdom was divided into dis­tricts and each had not one governor, but two: a land chief (umunyabutaka) and a cattle chief (umuuyamukenke). The jealousy that nearly always held these two potentates apart prompted them to spy on each other to the Mwami, who was thus able to keep his barons from threatening his own au­thority.

    Below these governors spread a net­work of hill chiefs, and under them again the heads of families. Tribute — milk and butter from the lordly Tutsi, and

    Just as, in medieval Europe, every nobleman sent his son to the king’s court to learn the arts of war, love and civil­ity, so in Rwanda and Burundi did every Tutsi father send his sons to the Mwami’s court for instruction in the use of weapons, in lore and tradition, in dancing and poetry and the art of conversation, in manly sports and in the practice of the most prized Tutsi virtue —self‐control. Ill‐temper and the least display of emotion are thought shameful and vul­gar. The ideal Tutsi male is at all times polite, dignified, amiable, sparing of idle words and a trifle supercilious.

    THESE youths, gathered in the royal compound, were formed into companies which, in turn, formed the army. Each youth owed to his company commander an allegiance which continued all his life. In turn, the commander took the youth, and subsequently the man, under his protection. Every Tutsi could appeal from his hill chief to his army com­mander, who was bound to support him in lawsuits or other troubles. (During battle, no commander could step backward, lest . his army re­treat; at no time could the

    The Hutu were both bound and protected by a system known as buhake, a form of vassalage. A Hutu wanting to enter into this relationship would present a jug of beer to a Tutsi and say: “I ask you for milk. Make me rich. Be my father, and I will be your child.” If the Tutsi agreed, he gave the applicant a cow, or several cows. This sealed the bargain­

    The Hutu then looked to his lord for protection and for such help as contributions to­ward the bride‐price he must proffer for a wife. In return, the Hutu helped from time to time in the work of his pro­tector’s household, brought oc­casional jugs of beer and held himself available for service

    The densely populated king­doms of the Tutsi lay squarely in the path of Arab slavers who for centuries pillaged throughout the central Afri­can highlands, dispatching by the hundreds of thou­sands yoked and helpless hu­man beings to the slave mar­kets of Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf. Here the explor­er Livingstone wrote despair­ingly in his diaries of coffles (caravans) of tormented cap­tives, of burnt villages, slaugh­tered children, raped women and ruined crops. But these little kingdoms, each about the size of Maryland, escaped. The disciplined, courageous Tutsi spearmen kept the Arabs out, and the Hutu safe. Feudalism worked both ways.

    Some Hutu grew rich, and even married their patrons’ daughters. Sexual morality was strict. A girl who became pregnant before marriage was either killed outright or aban­doned on an island in the mid­dle of Lake Kivu to perish, unless rescued by a man of a despised and primitive Congo tribe, to be kept as a beast of burden with no rights.

    SINCE the Tutsi never tilled the soil, their demands for labor were light. Hutu duties included attendance on the lord during his travels; carry­ing messages; helping to re­pair the master’s compound; guarding his cows. The reia­tionsiiip could be ended at any time by either party. A patron had no right to hold an unwilling “client” in his service.

    It has been said that serf­dom in Europe was destroyed by the invention of the horse

    UNTIL the First World War the kingdoms were part of German East Africa. Then Bel­gium took them over, under the name of Ruanda‐Urundi, as a trust territory, first for the League of Nations, then under the U. N. Although the Belgian educational system, based on Roman Catholic mis­sions, was conservative in out­look, and Belgian adminis­trators made no calculated attempt to undo Tutsi feudal­ism, Western ideas inevitably crept in. So did Western eco­nomic notions through the in­troduction of coffee cultiva­tion, which opened to the Hutu a road to independence, by­passing the Tutsi cattle‐based economy. And Belgian authori­ty over Tutsi notables, even over the sacred Mwami him­self, inevitably damaged their prestige. The Belgians even de­posed one obstructive Mwami. About ten years ago, the Belgians tried to persuade the Tutsi to let some of the Hutu into their complex structure of government. In Burundi, the Tutsi ruling caste realized its cuanger just in time and agreed to share some of its powers with the Hutu majority. But in Rwanda, until the day the system toppled, no Hutu was appointed by the Tatsi over­lords to a chief’s position. A tight, rigid, exclusive Tutsi aristocracy continued to rule the land.

    The Hutu grew increasingly

    WHEN order was restored, there were reckoned to be 21,­000 Tutsi refugees in Burundi, 14,000 in Tanganyika, 40,000 in Uganda and 60,000 in the Kivu province of the Con­go. The Red Cross did its best to cope in camps improvised by local governments.

    Back in Rwanda, municipal elections were held for the first time—and swept the Hutu into power. The Parmehutu —Parti d’Emancipation des Hu­tus—founded only in October 1959, emerged on top, formed a coalition government, and after some delays proclaimed a republic, to which the Bel­gians, unwilling to face a colonial war, gave recognition in terms of internal self‐gov­ernment.

    In 1962, the U.N. proclaimed Belgium’s trusteeship at an end, and, that same year, a general election held under U.N. supervision confirmed the Hutu triumph. With full in­dependence, a new chapter be­gan — the Hutu chapter.

    Rwanda and Burundi split. Burundi has the only large city, Usumbura (population: 50,000), as its capital. With a mixed Tutsi‐Hutu govern­ment, it maintains an uneasy peace. It remains a kingdom, with a Tutsi monarch. Every­one knows and likes the jovial Mwami, Mwambutsa IV, whose height is normal, whose rule

    As its President, Rwanda chose Grégoire Kayibanda, a 39‐year‐old Roman Catholic seminarist who, on the verge of ordination, chose politics in­stead. Locally educated by the Dominicans, he is a protégé of the Archbishop of Rwanda whose letter helped spark the first Hutu uprising. Faithful to his priestly training, he shuns the fleshpots, drives a Volkswagen instead of the Rolls or Mercedes generally favored by an African head of state and, suspicious of the lure of wicked cities, lives on a hilltop outside the town of Kigali, said to be the smallest capital city in the world, with some 7,000 inhabitants, a sin­gle paved street, no hotels, no telephone and a more or less permanent curfew.

    Mr. Kayibanda’s Christian and political duties, as he sees them, have fused into an im­placable resolve to destroy for­ever the last shreds of Tutsi power—if necessary by obliter­ating the entire Tutsi race. Last fall, Rwanda still held between 200,000 and 250,000 Tutsi, reinforced by refugees drifting back from the camps, full of bitterness and humilia­tion. In December, they were joined by bands of Tutsi spear­men from Burundi, who with the courage of despair, and outnumbered 10 to 1, attacked the Hutu. Many believe they were egged on by Mwami Ki­geri V, who since 1959 had been fanning Tutsi racial prideand calling for revenue.

    THE result of the attacks was to revive all the cumula­tive hatred of the Tutsi for past injustices. The winds of anti‐colonialism sweeping Af­rica do not distinguish be­tween white and black colo­nialists. The Hutu launched a ruthless war of extermina­tion that is still going on. Tut­si villages are stormed and their inhabitants clubbed or hacked to death, burned alive or herded into crocodile‐infest­ed rivers.

    What will become of the Tutsi? One urgent need is out­side help for the Urundi Gov­ernment in resettling the masses of refugees who have fled to its territory. Urundi’s mixed political set‐up is rea­sonably democratic, if not al­ways peaceful (witness the assassination of the Crown Prince by a political opponent

    In a sense the Tutsi have brought their tragic fate on themselves. They are paying now the bitter price of ostrich­ism, a stubborn refusal to move with the times. The Bourbons of Africa, they are meeting the Bourbon destiny—to be obliterated by the people they have ruled and patron­ized.

    The old relationship could survive no longer in a world, as E. M. Forster has described it, of “telegrams and anger;” a world of bogus democracy turning into one‐party states, of overheated U.N. assemblies, of press reports and dema­gogues, a world where (as in the neighboring Congo) a for­mer Minister of Education leads bands of tribesmen armed with arrows to mutilate women missionaries.

    THE elegant and long‐legged Tutsi with their dances and their epic poetry, their lyre­horned cattle and superb bas­ketwork and code of seemly behavior, had dwindled into tourist fodder. The fate of all species, institutions or individ­uais who will not, or cannot. adapt caught up with them. Those who will not bend must break.

    For the essence of the situ­ation in an Africa increasingly

    NOW, not just the white men have gone, or are going; far more importantly, the eld­ers and their authority, the whole chain of command from ancestral spirits, through the chief and his council to the obedient youth are being swept away. This hierarchy is being replaced by the “young men,” the untried, unsettled, uncer­tain, angry and confused gen­eration who, with a thin ve­neer of ill‐digested Western education, for the first time in Africa’s long history have taken over power from their fathers.

    It is a major revolution in­deed, whose first results are only just beginning to show up and whose outcome cannot be seen. There is only one safe prediction: that it will be vio­lent, unpredictable, bloody and cruel, as it is proving for the doomed Tutsi of Rwanda.

    #Ruanda #Burundi #histoire #Tutsi #Congo

  • That’s the spirit, Ms. Portman, but it’s just a start
    https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-that-s-the-spirit-ms-portman-but-it-s-just-a-start-1.6014090
    Gideon Levy Apr 22, 2018 8:24 AM

    Natalie Portman’s refusal to appear at the Genesis Prize ceremony was a huge shot in the arm. Her clarification blunted the force of the step she had taken

    Natalie Portman’s announcement of her decision to boycott the Genesis Prize ceremony was a tremendous shot in the arm. Here it is, coming from the heights of glamor, from a lover of Israel like she is, Jewish, Jewish, Hebrew-speaking, born in Israel, a citizen of Israel and a source of pride for Israel, who has a lot to lose. Not an anti-Semite or a fundamentalist, not extreme right or radical left, not Roger Waters, not even BDS. From smack in the middle, from the heart of the Jewish center: criticism of Israel, the Biblical “wounds of a friend,” even a kind of boycott.

    While “leftist” Israeli artists are scared of far-right rapper “The Shadow” and especially of their own shadow, an artist of her caliber goes and makes a clear statement about Israel. Together with a conscience, a large helping of courage is required for such a step, especially in the face of Jewish, Zionist, ruthless Hollywood, which will neither forgive Portman nor forget.

    Nor will the Israeli right wing forgive her for this: The minister of war (against the BDS movement), Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, was quick to publish a letter explaining the situation to Portman. What’s happening in Gaza is not because of us, it’s all because of Hamas. The usual propaganda of lies and nonsense, on the very day when Israeli army sharpshooters killed another 15-year-old in cold blood and the photo of Mohammed Ayoub bleeding in the sands of Gaza was made public around the world. It soon turned out that Erdan, like many others, was sure that the slaughter of protesters in Gaza was what lit the fire in Portman’s belly. But that was not the case.

    Portman’s clarification blunted the force of the step she had taken: “I chose not to attend because I did not want to appear as endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu,” she wrote. A great step forward and a small step backward. Netanyahu is indeed a problem, but he is not the problem over which Portman, as a person of good conscience and a Zionist, must make her voice heard. Netanyahu is Israel.

    Portman has come a long way, not only between her first film and her Oscar, but also between the letter she published in the Harvard Crimson 16 years ago defending Israel and denying its apartheid conditions, and the step she took on Friday.

    The change in her, which has apparently taken place in many Jews, is good news, as is her courage. But the road is still long. Portman wrote that she would not come because of “violence, corruption, inequality, and abuse of power.” Not one direct word about the original sin, the occupation.

    Neither is Portman’s protest directed to the right address. It is self-protective to blame Netanyahu for everything. Like most liberal Jews (and Israelis), Portman considers Netanyahu the root of all evil. And what about his predecessors, those who sowed the seeds of destruction and killing in Gaza and in Lebanon, who imposed a cruel closure on Gaza, who strengthened the occupation in the West Bank and tripled the number of settlers – she shakes their hands, just not Netanyahu’s?

    Portman’s media power is enormous. Friday morning her statement on Instagram already had 100,000 “likes.” The Jews breathed a sigh of relief, as did many Israelis. Portman is against BDS and against Netanyahu, but she continues to celebrate “Israeli food, books, art, cinema and dance.”

    With all respect, Ms. Portman, Israeli food, dance and cinema are also tainted by the occupation to a greater or lesser extent. We are all to blame for it. The way to end it, which is the first and essential condition for making Israel a more just country, passes through courageous steps like the one you took, but they must address the core of the inferno and not just its edges; the focus of the cancer and not just its metastases. They must become practical steps, like those the BDS movement calls for. That’s the only way to shake Israel out of its complacency.

    I humbly take my hat off to you for your courage, Ms. Portman. Your direction is the right one; without a tailwind from people like you, nothing here will change. But it’s just a start.

  • Israeli minister : Natalie Portman’s boycott of Netanyahu borders on anti-Semitism - Israel News - Haaretz.com

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israeli-minister-portman-s-netanyahu-boycott-borders-on-anti-semitism-1.601

    Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman’s decision not to accept the Genesis Prize and her statements on the matter border on anti-Semitism. Portman said she would not accept the award in the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was scheduled to speak at the award ceremony to be held in Jerusalem.
    “Natalie Portman has played into the hands of the worst of our haters and of the worst of the anti-Semites in the Middle East,” Steinitz said in an interview on Sunday with the Kan public broadcasting corporation. Portman had made a serious mistake and owes Israel an apology, the energy minister said.
    To really understand Israel and the Jewish word - subscribe to Haaretz
    “Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism. Boycotting Israel has elements of anti-Semitism,” Steinitz asserted, adding that Portman would not have boycotted China or India. Boycotting the ceremony because of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s participation practically constitutes a boycott of Israel, Steinitz asserted.

  • Indonesia Turns to Google in War on Illegal Fishing – gCaptain
    http://gcaptain.com/indonesia-turns-to-google-in-war-on-illegal-fishing

    But it’s not game over for the minister: she says local boats are still working with “global pirates” who catch fish just outside the permitted zone, which are then shipped to foreign destinations. And that’s where Google comes in.

    They still steal from us. We see it on Google fishing watch,” [Indonesia’s Fisheries Minister Susi] Pudjiastuti said, referring to Global Fishing Watch, an online mapping platform co-founded by Google. “They use Indonesian-affiliated companies and businesses and basically take their catch a few miles beyond the exclusive economic zone, where a refrigerated mothership is waiting.

    Indonesia last year became the first nation to share its Vessel Monitoring System information — government-owned data used to monitor maritime traffic — with the global monitoring platform, founded by Google, Oceana and SkyTruth, and funded by partners including the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

    Pudjiastuti’s initiative instantly made nearly 5,000 previously invisible boats viewable. She has called for other nations to follow her lead, with Peru last year committing to making its fishing data available.

    Brian Sullivan, the manager of Google Ocean and Earth Outreach, said information from Indonesia’s VMS was fed through the same algorithm used by Global Fishing Watch to produce a new set of analytics. That was then added to raw satellite imagery to produce an even more detailed footprint of fishing activities in near-real time.

    Susi reached out to us and said ’I like what you’re working on, we’d like to see how we could use that information in Indonesia,” California-based Sullivan said in a telephone interview. “She has been probably one of the most progressive ministers within fisheries for taking something that historically all governments had kept extremely close.

    By using machine learning and watching how a vessel moves, Google’s technology is able to establish patterns, and determine whether a vessel is in transit or fishing.

    A study published last month found that foreign fishing in Indonesia dropped by more than 90 percent and total fishing by 25 percent following the tough policies introduced by Pudjiastuti, which also included a ban on all foreign-owned and -made boats from fishing in Indonesia and the restriction of transfers of fish at sea.

    We know what it looks like when a vessel is broadcasting because we see that vessel’s position,” said Sullivan. “And if it then goes quiet for a while and then reappears on the other side of a marine-protected area that would be considered suspicious activity.

  • Turkey deports over 6,800 Afghan migrants

    The Turkish government has deported 6,846 Afghan refugees back to Kabul recently, according to a statement from the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate of Migration Management.

    The directorate said the migrants were deported from the eastern provinces of Erzurum, Ağrı, and the western province of İzmir on nine charter flights, as well as additional scheduled flights following the completion of deportation procedures, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on April 16.

    The undocumented migrants were reported to have entered Turkey through Iran via illegal means and were mostly captured in Erzurum.

    More migrants will be deported to Afghanistan through an additional four charter flights in the upcoming days, the directorate said.

    Turkey is a common transit country for migrants trying to reach Europe. Turkey accelerated the deportation process on April 8, following reports that nearly 20,000 undocumented Afghan migrants have arrived in the country over the past three months, an unprecedented number.

    The first group of Afghan migrants, consisting of more than 200 people, left Erzurum on April 8 on a charter flight bound for Kabul, with reports following that a total of 3,000 were planned to be deported from Erzurum alone.

    The Interior Ministry on April 7 said the Afghan migrants had crossed into Turkey through Iran due to “ongoing terrorist activities and economic troubles” in Afghanistan and security forces had handed the migrants over to provincial immigration authorities

    “Following the completion of deportation procedures for illegal migrants in our other provinces, deportations will speed up and continue in the coming days,” the ministry said in a statement.

    During an official visit to Kabul on April 8, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said the Interior Ministry was conducting a productive plan to stop the inflow of illegal Afghan migrants.

    https://www.pajhwok.com/en/2018/04/17/turkey-deports-over-6800-afghan-migrants
    #réfugiés_afghans #renvois #expulsions #Afghanistan #Turquie #asile #migrations #réfugiés

    cc @i_s_ @tchaala_la @isskein

    • Turkey : Thousands of Afghans swept up in ruthless deportation drive

      At least 2,000 Afghans who fled to Turkey to escape conflict and the worst excesses of the Taliban are in detention and at imminent risk of being forced back to danger, Amnesty International said today. The Turkish authorities appear to be ramping up a deportation spree that has seen 7,100 Afghans rounded up and returned to Afghanistan since early April.

      The Turkish authorities told Amnesty International that all these returns are voluntary, and that the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR has periodic access to places of detention. However, in telephone interviews with detainees in the Düziçi container camp in southern Turkey, where at least 2,000 Afghans are believed to be held, Amnesty International heard how detainees have been pressured to sign documents written in Turkish, which they are unable to understand. These could be “voluntary repatriation forms,” which the Turkish authorities have previously used in coercive circumstances with Syrian and other refugees.

      https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/04/turkey-thousands-of-afghans-swept-up-in-ruthless-deportation-drive

    • Total of Afghans deported from Turkey to reach 10,000

      The Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu announced this week that 29,899 Afghans had crossed into Turkey since January – this compares to a total of 45,259 for the whole of 2017. The Minister said 7,100 migrants have been sent back to Afghanistan since early April and this number is likely to rise to 10,000 by the end of the week.

      https://www.ecre.org/total-of-afghans-deported-from-turkey-to-reach-10000

    • Mass Deportations of Afghans from Turkey: Thousands of migrants sent back in a deportation drive

      In a recent television appearance, the Turkish Interior Minister, Suleyman Soylu, said that 15,000 Afghans have been sent back home from Turkey. While it is likely that this number has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that in April and May of 2018, thousands of Afghan migrants were sent back on charter flights from Turkey to Kabul. This is the Turkish government’s response after a 400 per cent increase in arrivals of Afghan migrants to Turkey during the first quarter of 2018. In early April of this year, the first charter flight carrying Afghans back to Kabul flew out of Erzurum, a city in eastern Anatolia that has become the centre of these returns. AAN’s guest author Amy Pitonak visited Erzurum to find out first-hand about the situation for Afghans there.

      https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/mass-deportations-of-afghans-from-turkey

  • Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 15
    http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM15.htm

    The Marshal’s Emissaries

    So I fled from Moscow back to Berlin

    I closed the door of my Karishorst apartment behind me, went to my desk, sat down and stared miserably at the calendar. I had two more weeks of leave: what was I to do with them? Report for duty before my time was up? Some would think me mad, others would call me a careerist. Visit my friends? I would be asked too many questions which I had not the least desire to answer. I had been in a great hurry to get away from Moscow; but what I had hurried for, where I was hurrying to, I had no idea.

    In the end I decided to take a rest, and spent the next few days visiting bathing resorts, deliberately making for the most frequented spots, lying on the sand and watching the alien, carefree world all around me. At first I got a tremendous kick out of this occupation. But after a time I began to experience a mortal boredom with seeing the same packets of sandwiches and the same childish antics of grown-up people day after day.

    Ten days before my leave expired I reported to the head of the Administration for Industry, and expressed my desire to resume my duties. Alexandrov looked pleasantly surprised. “Well, did you have a good rest in Moscow?” he asked.

    “Very good!”

    “You couldn’t have turned up at a more opportune moment.” He got down to business. “Over half of our staff are on leave, and at this very moment the supreme commander has given us an urgent and responsible commission. We’ve got to collect material against the dismantling organizations to send to Moscow.”

    He spent the next half-hour discussing the tension that had arisen between the S. M. A. Department for Reparations and the Special Committee for Dismantling set up by the U. S. S. R. Council of Ministers. In order to justify the S. M. A.’s attitude we had to collect as much incriminating material as possible about the Special Committee’s activities. The Administration for Industry had been ordered to put at the supreme commander’s disposition a Special Commission consisting of several engineers.

    Officially their task was to coordinate the work of the S. M. A. and the Special Committee, but unofficially they would be charged to collect in-formation exposing the dismantlers. The commission was to make visits to all the most important industrial works in the Soviet zone.

    “If you agree, I’ll nominate you as a member of the commission,” Alexandrov said in conclusion. “Especially as you know German, for it will be necessary to make close contacts with German works directors.”

    Continual traveling and visits to factories! For the next few weeks, possibly even for months, I would be free of Moscow, and Karishorst too! I could not hope for anything better at that moment, and I readily agreed to Alexandrov’s suggestion. Next day I was appointed to the Coordination Commission, which was responsible directly to the Supreme Commander.

    So here was a Soviet citizen who had fled from Moscow, a Soviet officer who could find no peace in Karishorst, who at the same time was an emissary of the S. M. A. Supreme Commander, working for Moscow. A fortuitous coincidence? No! Rather a law of progression.

    II

    The gray automobile sped through the chilly autumn air. The road drummed monotonously under the tires. A covey of partridges flew over the bare field beside the road.

    “Let’s take a pot-shot,” Major Dubov proposed, reaching for his double-barreled gun, which was stuck behind the seat.

    “Why bother?” I answered. “In any case we’d have to hand our bag over to someone else.”

    “All the better!” the major laughed. “It might be a way of getting someone to talk. Vassily Ivanovich, to arms!”

    Our driver, Vassily, was an elderly man, a former soldier. He lowered one of the car windows, then turned off the road. The partridge’s thinking apparatus is rather restricted: it won’t let a man come anywhere near it, but you can almost drive over it in a car.

    Karlshorst lay behind us. In our pocket we had a plenipotentiary document signed by Marshal Sokolovsky, valid for the district of Thuringia, and empowering us to carry out a special commission for the S. M. A. Supreme Commander in Germany. That would be sufficient to open all doors in Thuringia. But if that failed to achieve its purpose, we had a second document ready, giving us ’full powers to check up on the fulfillment of the S. M. A. order No.... and the decree of the U. S. S. R. Council of Ministers dated... ’

    These resounding documents were chiefly intended for General Dobrovolsky, who was plenipotentiary of the Special Committee for Dismantling and also Soviet director of the Zeiss works at Jena. Although he was a hundred-per-cent civilian, and formerly had been director of a Soviet optical works, and in addition was a member of the ambiguous tribe of ’dismantlers’, he enjoyed some authority, since he held strongly entrenched positions in Moscow.

    Although Marshal Sokolovsky had issued the strict order that all members of dismantling organizations were to wear civilian dress, Dobrovolsky was behaving as though he had never heard of the order. Whenever Sokolovsky met Dobrovolsky, the marshal always addressed the general in an ironically friendly tone, using the civilian form of address, ignoring the military regulation that military men were always to be addressed by their rank.

    Apart from his childish attachment to the insignia of his rank, Dobrovolsky was also notorious for his rudeness. He had been known to throw officers down the steps when they arrived to check up on his activities, or had refused to allow them into the works at all, politely telling them: “If you don’t like it, complain to Moscow.” But in order to make a complaint it was necessary to have evidence, and that could not be obtained from the Zeiss works except through Dobrovolsky.

    So far as the Soviet Military Administration had internal enemies and antagonists at all in Germany, they were to be found mainly among the people collectively known as dismantlers. General Zorin, head of the Administration for Reparations and Deliveries, had made a number of futile attempts to work with the dismantlers, but at last he had given up all hope.

    Now all his communications with these bodies, who frequently were only five minutes away from Karlshorst, were made through Moscow, in the form of complaints, demands, and reports on failures to accomplish the reparations plan because of the dismantlers’ activities. But they only laughed and continued to search through the Soviet zone for anything that the S. M. A. had not so far succeeded in sequestrating. But even sequestration was not of much value, for the dismantlers quickly made contact with Moscow, with the result, as a rule, that an order came through to the S. M. A. to hand over the object in question to the dismantlers.

    Among the chief duties of the S. M. A. Economy Department were the securing of deliveries on reparations account and ensuring that German industry worked within the limits of the peace potential fixed under the Potsdam Agreement. The very task of reconciling these two functions was a difficult one, to put it mildly, as one can see especially when the scope of the reparations plan is borne in mind. But then a third power intervened, and so far as we were concerned it was an uncontrollable factor, for this third power - the dismantlers - was responsible directly to Moscow.

    The work of the dismantling organizations was directed by the Special Committee for Dismantling set up under the Soviet Council of Ministers, and therefore by the Council of Ministers itself, together with the ministries directly interested. The result was a kind of socialist competition: two milkmaids assiduously milking the one cow! One of the milkmaids behaved like a poacher, got as much as she could and went her way. That was the dismantlers. From the other the masters first demanded milk, then hung the half-dead cow round her neck with the demand to go on milking and milking. That was the S. M. A. No matter what happened to the cow and the two milkmaids, the masters got their milk down to the last drop.

    As soon as the Red Army crossed the German frontier special army trophy brigades were entrusted with the task of collecting and valuing the spoils of war, even to the extent of dismantling industrial plant. When it was found that these brigades could not cope with their task special dismantling organizations came more or less arbitrarily into being, and these were later coordinated under the Special Committee for Dismantling.

    Every People’s Commissariat, the chief administrations of commissariats, and even single Soviet works and factories sent their own dismantling brigades to Germany. Dismantling became all the rage. Things went so far that even the State Lenin Library in Moscow sent its own specialists to dismantle Goethe and Schiller, while the Moscow ’Dynamo’ sports stadium hurriedly sent its football team to Germany in search of a swimming pool suitable for dismantling.

    The dismantlers were given military rank on the following basis: a technician became a lieutenant, an engineer a major, a director became a colonel, and a higher ministerial official a general. The authorities that had created the dismantlers did not worry themselves unduly over this problem. But it gave the S. M. A. all the more headaches when it came to have dealings with these homemade officers. As time passed they grew more and more fond of their get-up, and the S. M. A. had no little trouble in dismantling them again.

    Major Dubov had been sent with me on this trip because he was an expert on optics and precision machines. In addition, there was the positive advantage that he and Dobrovolsky had been fellow students. While he was drawing the general into reminiscences of former days I would be free to prepare the downfall of our enemy and rival No. 1.

    In the case of the Zeiss works the conflict of interests between the S. M. A. and the Special Committee was particularly glaring. After the first spasm of dismantling in Germany, which the S. M. A. had neither the time nor the desire to prevent, economic considerations began to be thought of. From the very beginning the Special Committee had insisted that the Zeiss works be to be completely dismantled and transferred to the Soviet Union.

    From the aspect of military strategy that was sound. But there were difficulties in the way. The crux of the matter was that the industrial plant of the Zeiss works was of comparatively little value; in fact it included no machinery that did not exist in the U. S. S. R. already.

    The value of the Zeiss works inhered in its experts, starting with the ordinary workmen polishers, who had worked there all their lives and who passed on their experience from generation to generation, and ending with the engineers, who had laid down the classic formulae for optical mechanics. Without these men the whole of the Zeiss works would not have been worth a brass farthing in the Soviet Union. But to transfer the works complete with the staff would have been too difficult and too risky an undertaking.

    An attempt was made to find a compromise by proposing that Soviet workers and technical staffs should be sent to Jena to make special studies. After their return to the Soviet Union they were to take over the dismantled plant and apply the technical experience of the Zeiss works. This plan was put into operation to some extent, but inadequately. The Kremlin was very reluctant to let its children travel to foreign parts, even to occupied Germany, for they might learn other things besides the technical experience of the Zeiss works.

    The first round of dismantling proved unprofitable. The Zeiss equipment dismantled and sent to the Soviet Union made very little practical contribution to the country’s economy. Meanwhile the main works, which had thus been amputated, excelled all expectations, for it continued to turn out genuine Zeiss products to the astonishment even of General Dobrovolsky, who, after the dismantling was completed, had remained in Jena as Soviet director of the works. He was relatively little interested in this production, since it went to the S. M. A. Administration for Reparations and all the laurels fell to his sworn enemy, General Zorin.

    On the other hand, the S. M. A. was deeply interested in the works, for its production was beginning to play an important part in the reparations account. If a second round of dismantling were to occur - and Dobrovolsky was persistently pressing for it - the S. M. A. would lose a considerable contribution on that account. As the Council of Ministers would never reduce the figure set for reparations, new sources would have to be found for reparations deliveries, and as time passed this presented increasing difficulties. And now a duel began between the S. M. A. and the Special Committee. Dobrovolsky solemnly assured Moscow: “If I finally dismantle Zeiss, and it is set up in the Soviet Union, within twelve months it will be achieving a production worth a hundred million rubles.”

    The S. M. A. parried with the counter-blow: ’The first dismantled section of the Zeiss works already set up in the Soviet Union has so far achieved a deficit of fifty million rubles, and requires continual subsidies, whereas the half-dead Zeiss works in Jena is bringing us yearly reparations deliveries to the value of twenty million marks.’

    The conflict took an unexpected turn for both sides. After studying the reports of both parties Moscow ordered: ’A corresponding number of highly skilled German experts is to be drawn from the staff of the Zeiss works at Jena and its subsidiary undertakings for work in the optical industry of the Soviet Union, chiefly in the dismantled Zeiss undertakings; they are to be recruited on the basis of individual contracts and transferred to their new assignments.

    The selection of these experts and the execution of this order are entrusted to the director of the Zeiss works at Jena, Comrade Dobrovolsky. Simultaneously it is decreed that the restoration of the main undertaking Zeiss-Jena be to be forced in accordance with previous decrees. Signed: Minister for Precision Industry, by plenipotentiary powers from the Council of Ministers of the U. S. S. R.’

    So Dobrovolsky had achieved a partial success. It had been decided that the first step was to dismantle the Zeiss experts. But what was one to make of the fact that one and the same decree demanded the destruction and also the ’forced restoration’ of one and the same undertaking?

    Some days previously, in the Tagliche Rundschau I had read a nauseating letter written by one of the German specialists who had been sent to the Soviet Union on the basis of an ’individual contract’, which really meant compulsion. The happy expert hastened to inform the world that he was doing very well and was earning 10, 000 rubles a month. At this same period Marshal Sokolovsky was receiving 5, 000 rubles a month. The average Soviet engineer receives 800 to 1, 200 rubles a month.

    The deed was done: a considerable proportion of the workers and technical staff at Jena was sent to the East ’on the basis of individual contracts’. The Zeiss output fell. Dobrovolsky celebrated his victory, and sought to convince everybody of the soundness of his theory that the Zeiss works must be dismantled completely. But now Major Dubov and I were traveling to Jena as spies venturing into the enemy camp.

    “Why, old colleague, how’s things?” Major Dubov shook Dobrovolsky’s hand effusively.

    “What wind has blown you here?” The general welcomed his old comrade in a somewhat unfriendly manner. He behaved like a dictator in the works, and simultaneously like the commander of a besieged fortress. Especially when his visitors smelt of the S. M. A.

    I stepped aside and turned to study examples of Zeiss products which were attached to the wall, to give the impression that I was not in the least interested in business matters. But when Major Dubov had drawn Dobrovolsky into his private office I set to work to turn the general’s flank.

    Through a communicating door I passed from Dobrovolsky’s waiting room into the waiting room of the German director. I showed the woman secretary my documents with Marshal Sokolovsky’s signature, and expressed a wish to see the director. He was very glad to see me, and hurriedly got rid of the visitors who were with him. He was a fairly young man, a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Only recently he had been a worker in the packing department of the works. Now he was the director. Just the sort of man I wanted to get hold of. Not intelligent, but an energetic executive.

    “Well, Herr Director, tell me how things are going!” I said. I knew quite well that two feelings were struggling for mastery within him: his fear of Dobrovolsky and a feeling of professional or national duty, if such conceptions exist at all for members of the Socialist Unity Party. He must realize that the S. M. A. stood for the interests of the works, so far as its continued existence was concerned. I had no need to explain the situation to him; he knew it very well. He only wished to be assured that Dobrovolsky would not learn anything of our conversation.

    Despite his apparently quite genuine desire to spike Dobrovolsky’s guns, my talk with him did not get me very far. I thanked him for his exceptionally useless information and asked his permission to talk to the higher technical staff, ’just to elucidate certain details’. He was so forthcoming as to put his office at my disposition. A few minutes later a gaunt man in horn spectacles and a white overall came in. He was a being of a different cut. I stared at him silently, and smiled, as though he were an old acquaintance. I had already gathered information concerning the technical managers of the works. After a few preliminary remarks concerning Zeiss and its production we understood each other.

    I told him frankly that, although I was not moved by any philanthropic impulses, my object nonetheless was to free the works from Dobrovolsky’s terror regime. In this particular instance we were involuntary allies. I assured him that our conversation would be kept a dead secret. He declared himself ready to place his knowledge and experience at the disposition of the S. M. A.

    “What in your view are the bottlenecks in the work of the undertaking, Herr Doctor?” I tried to minimize the catastrophic situation by using the euphemistic word ’bottlenecks’.

    “It would be simpler to specify the bottles!” he replied with a mournful smile. “There’s a shortage of everything. But the chief thing is that we’ve been deprived of our brains, our specialists. And that damage cannot be made good for decades.”

    He went on to paint a pitiful picture. Unlike Soviet industry, German industry depends to a particularly high extent on the cooperation of related enterprises. In the Soviet Union economic considerations were sacrificed in order to achieve autonomy in industry whether large or small, both on a national scale and in regard to individual and factories. This issue was decided not so much by economic as by military strategic factors.

    The basis of capitalist economy is that production should at least pay its way. The structure of any enterprise and its viability are governed by strictly economic calculation and an active balance. Western economists would consider it absurd that in the Soviet Union the majority of the chief and basic industrial undertakings work at a loss and are dependent on a State subsidy, which the State through its plan pumps out of light industry by over-pricing means of consumption, and from collectivized agriculture.

    “At the moment we are still working with old stocks and semi-manufactures. We are not getting any new deliveries. When these stocks are exhausted...” the technical director threw out his hands in despair. “Our former suppliers in the Soviet zone have largely ceased to exist. The promised raw materials from the Soviet Union haven’t started to come in yet. It is practically impossible to obtain anything from the western zone. We’ve already tried sending lorries over the frontier illegally, at our own risk, in order to renew commercial contacts and thus get hold of something. But that is no solution.”

    We Soviet engineers were frequently amazed at the vitality of German industry, despite all the difficulties of total warfare, the capitulation, and the dismantling process. At the capitulation, stocks of raw materials in many German works were often larger than those held by Soviet works in peacetime.

    In May and June 1945, immediately after the fall of Berlin, Soviet dismantlers hurriedly dismantled the industrial plants at Siemensstadt, the heart of the German electro-technical industry. Even then, before the Potsdam Conference, it was known that the capital of Germany was to be occupied by all the four allies. Officially this decision was taken on 5 June 1945, by inter-allied agreement. But the Western Allies’ entry into Berlin was artificially delayed for another month. The reason? Dismantling. The Soviet dismantling brigades worked feverishly day and night in the sectors of Berlin to be handed over. And they dismantled in earnest: right down to the pipes of water closets.

    A year later I visited Siemensstadt in the company of Colonel Vassiliev, who had been in charge of the dismantling operation in these works. He shook his head in astonishment. “Where on earth have they got all this new plant from? Why, we even removed the cables from the conduits!” The German directors greeted the colonel genially as an old acquaintance. “Ah, Colonel, how are things with you? Have you any orders for us?” And that without a hint of irony, simply with an eye to business.

    The Zeiss technical director continued: “We’re trying to meet and we are meeting demands so far as we can. But it is being achieved only against an ultimate exhaustion of production. This is an internal process which so far is barely perceptible; but one day it will lead to a complete standstill.”

    I asked him to draw up a report, together with an economic analysis of the state of the undertaking. I would collect these documents on my way back to Berlin. I once more assured him that his name would not appear in my report to Marshal Sokolovsky. I took the same line with two other technical managers. I had to get a general picture of the situation, though in fact there was little difference between their stories.

    During a visit to the head of the Economic Department of the Jena commandatura I learned more details of Dobrovolsky’s activities. In regard to the Zeiss works the commandatura was working for both sides. It readily helped Dobrovolsky to draw up ’individual labor contracts’ for the Zeiss specialists to be sent to the Soviet Union, and just as readily it communicated all the details of this special measure to the S. M. A. representative.

    We obtained no new information from the head of the S. M. A. Economic Department in Thuringia, but he was loud in his complaints about Dobrovolsky: “He’s sabotaging the S. M. A. work shamelessly. He doesn’t care what happens to reparations, so long as he enjoys Moscow’s favor. ’So many units of installations sent to the address of the Ministry for Precision Tool Industry.’ But he doesn’t care a damn what benefit is derived from them. And now in the Soviet Union men are being put in prison because they can’t make use of the plant.”

    That was quite true. For instance, in one German works a serial installation of a hundred specialized machine tools for the mass manufacture of a certain article was dismantled and sent to Russia. But on the way one of the special machines attracted the interest of another dismantler, and without more ado it was readdressed to a new consignee.

    When it arrived at its destination it was discovered that a little mistake had been made; it was a special machine that could not be used in that works at all. So without unnecessary fuss it was scrapped. But when the rest of the series arrived at the rightful destination and they set to work to install them, it was found that one machine was missing. Yet without it the entire series was useless. There was no hope of finding a substitute for the missing item, so the whole lot was scrapped. The total cost was charged to ’capital investments’, and several men were brought to trial for sabotage.

    Our car sped through the frosty winter air of Thuringia; Karlshorst’s emissaries drew up the balance sheet of their work. Sokolovsky would have material for another report to Moscow and for further charges against Dobrovolsky. But there would be no change in the situation. The Kremlin knows what it needs.

    Major Dubov was more interested in the purely technical aspect of the affair. One day he unexpectedly asked me: “Do you know the story of Zeiss at all?” Without waiting for my reply he went on: "It’s a very interesting and striking story. While they were still alive old Zeiss and the scientific founder of the works, Professor Ernst Abbe, transformed the enterprise into a foundation. A foundation statute strictly bound the administration; the supreme management was vested in representatives of the town’s municipal council and representatives of the works.

    The district of Thuringia appointed the foundation president. So you had a kind of voluntary socialization of the works without the disadvantages of a state capitalistic enterprise. The revenues have contributed greatly to the material and cultural prosperity of the city of Jena. And that is precisely what we in Russia came too later, only in a different form.

    “And in addition....” Major Dubov gazed out of the window and said, apparently incidentally: “In addition, under the founder’s will all the workers and employees in the works directly participate in the profits. Which is exactly what should happen in the ideal socialistic society, according to our theories. But that has existed in the Zeiss works for decades, and still exists today.”

    Our driver, Vassily Ivanovich, whose presence we tended to overlook, pushed his cap on to the back of his head and added: “Not exists, but existed... until we arrived.”

    Sommaire https://seenthis.net/messages/683905
    #anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide

  • Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine. Chapter 04
    http://g-klimov.info/klimov-pp-e/ETM04.htm

    The Rational Basis

    In the spring of 1945 one of the officers studying at the college was the victim of an extraordinary, an idiotic incident. He had just graduated from the last course of the Japanese Department, and had already been nominated to a senior post in the foreign service; in addition, he was happily married. He seemed to be on the threshold of a brilliant future. And yet...

    Two of the college buildings fronted on to the street, with a gap of some fifty yards between them. An ordinary fence blocked this gap, and General Biyasi, who took great pride in the outward appearance not only of the students but also of his buildings, ordered the old fence to be taken down and one more worthy of the college erected. When the old fence was taken down the students found they had a very convenient route through to the car-stop on the street, whereas previously it had been necessary to make a considerable detour to leave by the main door.

    As a result, all the college began to come and go through the ’new gateway’. When the general discovered what was happening he had a one-man guard posted at the gap, giving him the strict command that nobody was to be allowed to pass through. But how can one man be expected to hold a fifty-yard front against an entire college, his own comrades into the bargain? So the general sent for the guard and personally gave him a dressing-down, threatening him with the clink.

    “But what am I to do, General?” the man pleaded. “Shoot?”

    “Of course! A guard post is sacred. You know your service regulations,” General Biyasi answered.

    At the close of studies for the day a crowd of officers once more poured through the gap. The guard shouted and threatened them till he was hoarse. In vain. But in the distance the general’s tubby form was to be seen on a tour of inspection. At that very moment the ’Japanese’ captain was passing the guard, taking no notice of his shouts.

    “Halt!” the man shouted desperately.

    The captain went on his way, apparently sunken in thought.

    “Halt, or I’ll fire!” the guard roared again.

    The captain went on; but the general steadily drew closer.

    Almost frantic, the guard threw up his rifle and shot without taking aim. It was four in the afternoon, the street was crowded with people, and the man was so agitated that if he had taken deliberate aim he would almost certainly have missed. But now the captain dropped to the sidewalk with a bullet through his head. During the war he had not spent one day at the front, he had never heard the whistle of a bullet; but a few days after the war had ended he was struck down by a comrade’s deadly bullet, in a Moscow street.

    Of course nothing happened to the guard. Although the affair was really scandalous, the general sent him a message expressing his gratitude for ’exemplary performance of his duty’. In such cases the guard is free from blame. The army regulation says on this point: ’When on guard it is better to shoot someone who is innocent than to miss an enemy.’

    This incident involuntarily turned ray thoughts to reflections on fate. ’No man can avoid his destiny,’ our forefathers used to say. We don’t believe that any more; or rather, we have been taught not to believe it. Then there is more room for belief in the leader.

    At that moment I had every reason to reflect on my destiny. I had finished the college course, and was standing on the threshold of a new phase in my life. I saw clearly the crossroads that lay before me, but I saw even more clearly that once I had set out along any one of those roads there could be no turning back. At the moment I had at least some possibility of choice, so I must give ample thought to the choice.

    Recently I had heard rumors that I was being considered as a candidate for a teaching post at the college. One could not have had a more brilliant prospect. Practically speaking, that represented the finest opportunity a graduate could have. The teaching staff was in a continual state of flux, for it constituted an immediate reserve for the army General Staff, which always gave close consideration to the claims of college staff when there were special tasks to be performed abroad.

    Today one might be sent to somewhere in Europe, tomorrow to America. Truly, the chosen individual usually went as an unassuming auxiliary member of an impressive delegation, but he always had independent and responsible special commissions to execute. And on return to Moscow he reported not to the civil authorities who had sent the delegation, but to the corresponding department of the General Staff.

    Only a short time before, one of the college staff had been sent on a round tour of Czechoslovakia, Austria, and other countries of central Europe. He had gone as an ’interpreter’ for a world-famous Soviet botanist, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It is easy enough to guess what sort of plants the professor had in mind to bring home with the aid of such an ’interpreter’, and who was principal and who subordinate.

    Once attached to the college staff, one was at the starting point of many highly promising paths. The staff was very well informed on the backstairs questions of the General Staff. And personal understandings, patronage, connections, played a great part. In such a post one could always bring unobtrusive influence to bear. In a few words, membership of the college staff was the surest start to a career of which the majority of the students could only dream.

    When I first heard that I was being considered for such a prospect I had decidedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, it meant life in Moscow, mingling in the new leading circles, the broadest of possibilities, an extensive field of activity, alluring prospects. But... There was a very weighty ’but’. That road led in one direction. One glance back or aside and you were finished. If you wished to travel that road, you must be completely free from inner conflict and possess perfect faith in the rightness of what you were doing.

    Of course there are substitutes for these things: hypocrisy, careerism, lack of principle in the choice of means. I was an educational product of the Stalin era and had had ample opportunity to see that in the Soviet Union these substitutes played a fundamental role. And yet, could I be satisfied with them? I was not a naive youngster, nor was I a philanthropist: I could justify the application of dubious means in order to achieve a higher end. But before I could do so in this case I had to be perfectly sure that the final goal was beyond criticism. And, despite my own personal desires, I did not feel that surety.

    After the jubilant days of victory the atmosphere in Moscow had grown gray and monotonous. A fresh breeze was blowing in Europe; a great historical transformation was being accomplished there. College students who returned from short official journeys to the west had interesting things to report. It would do me, too, no harm to get to know the patient I would be called upon to cure.

    For me, personally, the best thing would be to be sent to one of the European occupied countries. There, in a new environment, in lands where we had gained the victory, in creative work I could recover my shaken equilibrium and return to Moscow full of confidence, full of faith. In any case, I would still be part of the General Staff Reserve.

    These reflections provided the stimulus to a conversation I had with Lieutenant-Colonel Taube.

    Professor Baron von Taube was one of Colonel Gorokhov’s deputies in the Educational Department. In the college he was regarded as a kind of museum piece, and yet, because of his extraordinary range of knowledge, and his capacities, he was irreplaceable. Despite his compromising ’von’, his name carried weight and his word was quite often of decisive significance. The students regarded him as an extremely cultivated man, a practical and observant officer and teacher, with whom one could talk openly.

    Besides Lieutenant-Colonel Taube, Major-General Ignatiev, too, had a good name in the college. In his youth he had been a page to the last tsar, and then had studied at the tsarist General Staff Academy; later he had been tsarist military attaché in Paris for many years. After the revolution he remained abroad quite a long time as an émigré, but in the ’thirties, for unknown reasons, he took the road to Canossa. His memoirs, Fifty Years in the Ranks, enjoyed a great success among the students.

    Now the former Guards officer. Count Ignatiev, was wearing a general’s uniform again, and had been appointed historian of the Red Army. Naturally, he was not trusted, and his chief task was to proclaim the Soviet regime’s tolerance towards repentant sinners. In his memoirs he gave a vague reason for his return, but in Moscow it was openly said that he had got tired of washing dishes in Paris restaurants.

    During the last year or so of the war a number of more or less well-known émigrés had returned to the Soviet Union. For instance, the once famous writer Kuprin had recently arrived in Moscow. It is said that when he walked out of the railway station he put down his case and knelt to bow his head to his native earth in sight of all the people. When he got up he found his case had vanished.

    Only recently, Belyavsky and I had heard a concert given by Alexander Vertinsky. His public appearance was quite unexpected, and most people were delighted, regarding it as confirmation of a new, liberal course in governmental policy. It is true that he could appear only at small clubs in the suburbs. But the very fact that he could appear was more important and more pleasant than his performance. A smell of morphine came from the stage, and the human wreck that walked on, accompanied by his wife, a young singer, made a wretched and sentimental impression. The past is more pleasant in memory than in its resurrection as a corpse from the grave.

    It may not have been in their minds, but the government took a clever step in letting the young generation see the old world in this form. With our own eyes, without propaganda, we clearly saw how far our world and our interests had advanced in the meantime.

    Lieutenant-Colonel Taube listened closely to my superficial arguments-naturally, I made no mention of the personal reasons leading me to ask to be sent abroad-and promised to speak in favor of the proposal to the higher authorities, while not withdrawing my candidature for the college staff.

    Besides the lieutenant-colonel, I brought influence to bear on other people who had some say in the allocation of posts to college graduates.

    Some time later I was summoned to Colonel Gorokhov. He greeted me as an old acquaintance.

    “Ah, Major Klimov! I’m glad to see you!” he began affably, as though to see me was all he wanted of life. I at once took guard. The more affable he was, the more unexpected the conversation might prove to be.

    “So you didn’t follow my advice after all. You turned your back on the Eastern Department.” He shook his head mournfully. “I wouldn’t forgive you, except that you’ve had such good reports.”

    I remained silent, waiting for him to come to the point.

    “So you would like to have the opportunity to work in perfect freedom?” came the friendly question.

    I raised my eyebrows in astonishment.

    “We were thinking of keeping you here,” he went on. “But now it’s proposed to give you an opportunity to prove yourself in a different post. I take it that this has come about not entirely with-out your intervention....”

    He looked at me ironically. No doubt he had guessed long since what part I myself had played in getting transferred from the Eastern to the Western Faculty.

    “I do not object to your being sent abroad,” he said after a brief silence. “I think you don’t, either.”

    I tried to look unconcerned. It is better for an officer of the General Staff to avoid displaying excessive curiosity.

    “You have just one defect,” he continued. “Why haven’t you yet joined the Party?”

    “I’ve been at the college only a year, Comrade Colonel,” I replied. “And one has to have the recommendation of three Party members, one of whom must have worked together with the candidate for at least two years.”

    “And before you came to the college?”

    “I’ve never had the opportunity to remain two years in one post.”

    I felt like telling the colonel frankly that I considered a man should join the Party only when he had become a leading member of society, and not in order to use his membership as a springboard for his career. The majority of the present-day ’true communists’ worked to the latter principle. It was they who made the most stir, in order to show how ’true to the Party line’ they were. But those who had achieved something by their own merits, and in con-sequence, for good or ill, had to join the Party, were usually passive and silent camp-followers.

    But could I have told him all that? It would have meant that I was myself uncertain, dubious. And if a Soviet citizen wishes to live, from the day of his birth he must believe absolutely in the infallibility of the Party line. I would have shown myself a poor student of his college if I had told the colonel such things.

    “I hope that by our next meeting you will have remedied this defect,” he said in conclusion. “Apart from that, our reports on you are excellent. Your case will be remitted to the army Personnel Department, and they will notify you of your future post.”

    After this conversation I waited to go through the usual examination by still higher instances.

    The students of our college normally had to pass very thorough-going tests, but before being appointed to a post abroad even they were customarily subjected to a questionnaire test by the Mandate Commission of the Red Army Personnel Department and the Foreign Department of the Soviet Communist Party. One could never be sufficiently on one’s guard. It was always possible that meanwhile someone or other had become ’worm-eaten’, or important changes might have occurred among his or his wife’s relations.

    One of the most unpleasant features of Soviet life is the collective responsibility of all one’s relatives. No matter how beyond reproach a man may be as a member of Soviet society, if any even of his distant relations comes into conflict with the Narcomvnudel he is automatically entered in the category of ’politically unreliable’.

    During the war there was a special category of ’unreliable’, which were not called up for military service. Many of them had to serve in labor battalions. They were not issued weapons and were kept at a safe distance from the front. They consisted mainly of people whose relatives had made too close acquaintance with the Narcomvnudel. Anyone who had personally come into contact with the Narcomvnudel or was on their black lists was rounded up and interned in the first few days of the war.

    If any ’unreliable’ offered to go as a volunteer to the front, he was arrested at once and sent to a Narcomvnudel camp. The military command knew what value to set on this kind of patriotism. The Soviet government reckoned that despite the long years of re-education, the feeling of loyalty to one’s father, or mother, and one’s own blood was stronger in the Russian soul than the husks of communist teaching.

    During the later years of the war, owing to the great shortage of manpower some of the ’unreliable’ were taken into the regular army. Although the majority of them had had higher education and were officers on the reserve, they had to go to the front as privates.

    During the many years of the Soviet experiment the number of those who had suffered repression reached such an enormous figure that without doubt the automatically ’unreliable’ group constitutes the most important social stratum of the new Soviet society. Both sides have got to seek a way out of this complicated situation. Men want to live, and the regime needs men. But between the reconcilement of these two necessities there is an insurmountable obstacle: the questionnaire. Many of these ’unreliable’ have never seen their ’evil genius’, they have never had anything to do with him, and naturally they make no mention of him when filling up their questionnaires.

    The authorities know quite well that the questionnaire is not filled in with strict accuracy, but they often find themselves forced to ’overlook’ this inexactitude. Their terror policy has driven the Soviet rulers into a blind alley: if one accepts the Soviet classification, there are fewer immaculate and reliable citizens in the Soviet Union today than there were thirty years ago. And so, if the case is not highly important, or if there is urgent need for any particular individual, they check the details of his questionnaire less strictly. On the other hand, in important cases they trust no questionnaires whatever, nor even the opinion they have themselves formed concerning the person under consideration, so they put him under examination again and again, with hysterical distrust and a meticulous scrupulosity.

    Between three and six months elapse between the first candidature and the final appointment to a foreign post, during which period the candidate is subjected to various checks. Thus, the local Narcomvnudel in his place of residence has to check his statements relating thereto, and if it is established that some distant relative, it may be, has vanished without trace in mysterious circumstances, that in itself is sufficient to dispose of the candidate. Any circumstance not clarified is taken as a negative factor.

    I was expecting to be summoned to the Personnel Department of the General Staff; but a few days later I received the order to report to the head of the college. This was outside the normal routine, and I was rather troubled to know what lay behind it.

    Opinions concerning the head of the college, General Biyasi, were wildly contradictory. One section of the students rather suspiciously expressed great enthusiasm for his unusual ability and declared that he was a highly cultured man, that at one time he had been Soviet minister to Italy and was not only perfect in all the languages covered by the college, but could even read human hearts and discover one’s most secret thoughts. No doubt these students would climb higher up the diplomatic ladder than those who declared that the general had begun his career by selling Halva and fruits in the Tiflis market, and who considered that his only out-standing qualities were his glossy exterior and his floridly mellifluous manners and speech.

    Anybody summoned to the general’s room could never be certain of the outcome. We were always ready at any time for the greatest of surprises. For instance, only recently the entire Japanese Department, with the exception of the last course, had been reorganized for the preparation of army translators in a short course of instruction. The disillusioned would-be diplomats were assured that it was only a temporary measure, that they would all have the opportunity to continue their studies later. But meanwhile they were sitting all day grinding at Japanese military terminology. This reorganization occurred immediately after the Yalta Conference, and the rate of instruction was accelerated to such an extent that the students gave one another unequivocal glances.

    The plan clearly indicated the date by which the training had to be completed, and therefore the way the wind was blowing. For that matter, from the beginning the secret clauses of the Yalta agreement were no secret for us. We saw the point when we were informed that the members of the foreign legations would be very glad to make the acquaintance of any of us. Before that, if any one of us had ventured to exchange a few words with a foreigner in the streets of Moscow without special permission, he would have been presuming too much on the powers of his guardian angel.

    Before taking up a post abroad certain of the students were put through a special course of instruction in rules of conduct and good manners in relations with foreigners. In such courses a student would often be given individual instruction suited to the country to which he was assigned. And frequently special emphasis was laid on learning the modern dances of western countries or the art of relations with ladies, including the art of breaking hearts, which is one way of getting to diplomats’ private safes. In these courses General Biyasi had no rival as an instructor.

    After my rather gloomy reflections I was not a little surprised when he briefly informed me that by the command of higher authorities I had been posted to the staff of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany. Evidently I was regarded as so reliable and so thoroughly proved that a further check-up before my departure was superfluous.

    “We can be proud of you in every respect,” the general explained. “But don’t forget: wherever you may find yourself, you are and will remain one of us!” He put special emphasis on ’us’. “From now on you are under a different command, but we can order your recall at any moment we wish. If necessary you are fully entitled to get into contact with us over the head of your future superior officers. As you know, that is strictly forbidden in the army, but we are an exception to the rule. Your future destiny depends on how you show up in your practical work. I hope we shall meet again later...”

    The general’s words left me unusually calm. During the war I had been full of enthusiasm and ardor for all I experienced; I had definite objectives in front of me. But now I was filled only with icy calm. The same calm that I had felt in June 1941, on the outbreak of war. Then it had been due to the tense expectation of coming experiences. But now I simply could not understand why it was. Our inner world is the reflection of our surroundings. Now I was quite deliberately putting my inner world to the test. In active work, in the interplay of international interests, I would find the rational basis of our Soviet existence. One could hardly have a more suitable spot for that than Berlin.

    “I feel sure you will justify the trust the fatherland is placing in you, in sending you to the most important sector of the post-war front. The work to be done there is more important and more responsible than in war-time,” he ended, as he shook my hand. “I wish you every success, Major!”

    “Thank you, Comrade General!” I replied, looking him straight in the eyes and responding to his vigorous handshake. After all, wasn’t I going to Berlin in order to come back to Moscow a better Soviet citizen than I could be today?

    During the winter I had solved a riddle that puzzled me in regard to Genia. Her mother had returned to Moscow in January; all through the war she had worked as a doctor in front-line hospitals, in order to be near her husband. Now she had been demobilized.

    Anna Petrovna was the exact opposite of her daughter Genia. Her greatest interest in life was to talk about her husband. I needed no little patience and endurance to listen to the same story and display the same interest for the umpteenth time: how they had got married, how he was never at home because he devoted all his time to his service, how hard it was to be the wife of a professional officer.

    She gave me long descriptions of her and his parents, simple people; of his gradual advancement, and then his breathtaking career during the war. Anna Petrovna was extremely pleasant and frank. Though she was the wife of a well-known general, she was not at all conceited about his position; on the contrary, she had a partiality for telling stories about the lack of culture and the ignorance of the new aristocracy. She had a clear realization of the responsibility her husband’s high position placed on her, and she tried her utmost to keep up with the times and with him. Both outwardly and in her character she fully justified the place she held in society.

    There was a general tendency among Soviet people to regard the new aristocracy very skeptically, as a lot of upstarts. To a large extent this was because quite unknown people had come to the top during the revolution. That had been perfectly natural. Later on these same people were appointed to leading State positions, for which they were often fitted neither by their knowledge nor by their capacity for the particular job. One thing has to be granted to the leading Soviet officials, they had a restless energy and inexhaustible perseverance. As time passed the revolutionary old guard grew still older, they outlived their day, and their incapacity for- the new tasks showed up more and more obviously.

    Meanwhile new cadres of specialists were being developed in all branches of activity. They came from the masses of the people, but they had the requisite education and special professional training, and they acquired practical experience in responsible activity.

    The bureaucratic ulcer burst at the beginning of the war, and it became necessary to replace the tarnished heroes of the revolutionary period by younger leaders of the Soviet school. Inevitably, during the war years, and especially in the army, new and talented military leaders who had been vegetating unrecognized came to the forefront.

    The pre-war Party and bureaucratic aristocracy spent their days in the same luxury and magnificence that the tsarist aristocracy had formerly been reproached with. During the war, in order to save the situation, the finest members of the nation replaced them, perhaps only temporarily. Genia’s father belonged to this elite. And Anna Petrovna was unusually proud of her husband’s career. Her only regret was that it had practically put an end to their family life.

    I had not seen Genia while I was taking my State examination, and had only phoned her occasionally. But now I had my assignment to Berlin in my pocket, and I could call on her again. I hardly expected the affectionate reception she gave me; it was so demonstrative that even Anna Petrovna shook her head disapprovingly. “Don’t forget that I’m here too,” she remarked.

    “Grisha!” Genia said as she whirled me like a top round the room. “Daddy’s been home two whole weeks.... Just imagine: two whole weeks! Come and see what he’s brought me.”

    Full of pride, she showed me quite a number of presents her father had given her. Even before this, whole cases of trophies had collected in their apartment. Each time one of the staff officers traveled from the front to Moscow he brought with him presents from the general. That was common in all the officers’ families during the Red Army’s advance into East Prussia. The junior officers sent only small articles, but the seniors even sent back solid items like furniture and pianos. From the legal aspect, robbery; in the wartime language they were called trophies. And besides, everybody considered that this was only taking back from the Germans what they had taken from us.

    About this time there was a story running through Moscow about a front-line officer who sent a case of soap home to his wife. She did not stop to think about it but sold the whole lot at once in the market. A few days later she received a letter from her husband, in which he mentioned that one of the cakes of soap had a gold watch concealed in it. The story had various endings: one, that the woman hanged her-self; another, that she took to drink; a third, that she drank poison.

    A massive radio set was standing in the General’s living room. At first glance I could not decide whether it was a receiver or a transmitter. In fact he had got hold of a set perfectly fitted to his rank: it was a super-receiver, the latest model. I was about to plug it in and switch it on when Anna Petrovna raised her finger admonitorily: ’Grisha! For goodness’ sake don’t switch it in. Kolia [her husband] has strictly forbidden it."

    “But what are you afraid of?” I asked.

    “It mustn’t be touched. Not for anything, not till the ban’s raised. Even Kolia hasn’t switched it on yet.”

    What do you make of that? A month after the war had ended a victorious Soviet general did not dare to listen to the radio until the Kremlin had expressly given him permission.

    “Grisha, look at this!” Genia broke in. “A golden pistol!” She excitedly threw me something heavy in a yellow leather case.

    Thinking to find some original design of cigarette lighter, or some feminine trinket, I opened the case and took out a gleaming gilded pistol of the German ’Walter’ pattern. I noticed two lightning flashes, the sign of the S. S. And an inscription: “To S. S. General Adreas von Schonau, in the name of the Great German Reich. The Fuhrer.”

    “Now you’d better behave yourself!” Genia said as she produced a clip of cartridges. “It’s all ready for use.”

    As she threw it down, the clip slithered like a snake over the sofa cushion. I noticed the small red heads of the cartridges.

    “What an idea, to give anyone a pistol!” I said. “And you above all.”

    “Don’t get the wind up. If you behave yourself nothing will happen to you,” she reassured me. “And he brought two Opel cars back with him,” she chattered on. “The ’Admiral’ he’ll drive himself, and the ’Captain’s’ for me. So see that you turn up tomorrow morning. You must teach me to drive.”

    “But listen, Grisha, what are your plans for the future?” she asked playfully, her new toys already forgotten. With the same unconstraint with which she had handled her gold pistol she laid my head on her breast and described a large questionmark with her finger on my forehead.

    I hated to spoil her cheerful spirits. In my heart I began to feel regret that I would have to leave all this world behind the very next morning. But it had to be, and, anyway, it was not for ever.

    "Tomorrow I’m flying to Berlin. I said slowly, staring up at the ceiling. I spoke very quietly, as though I were somehow in the wrong.

    “What?” she said incredulously. “Is this another of your silly jokes?”

    “It isn’t a joke...”

    “You’re not flying anywhere. Forget it! Get that?”

    “It doesn’t depend on me.” I shrugged my shoulders helplessly.

    “My goodness! I’d like to skin you alive!” she exclaimed. “If you simply must see what it’s like abroad, go and spend an evening at the operetta. Don’t you feel any regret at going away again and leaving me behind here, with my everlasting, boring lessons?”

    She looked almost with entreaty into my eyes; they revealed more than a mere request or whim.

    “It isn’t what I want, Genia. Duty...”

    “Duty, duty!” she echoed. “I’m sick of that word.”

    All her carefree, joyful spirits were gone. Her voice was sad and earnest as she said:

    “I was so happy to think you were not a professional officer. I suppose you think I’ve had a happy home life. If you want to know the truth, I’m an orphan!”

    She suddenly sat straight up. Her face was pale; her slender fingers played nervously with the silk fringe of the cushion.

    “All my life I’ve only seen my father once a week, so to speak. We’re almost strangers to each other. Have you ever stopped to wonder why he overwhelms me with presents? He felt just as I do. First it was China, and then it was Spain, then something else. And so all my life.”

    Her voice shook, her eyes filled with tears. She lost her self-control, the words poured from her lips like a passionate complaint, like a reproach against fate.

    “My friends say I’m lucky; my father’s chest is loaded with orders. ... But I hate those orders... They’ve taken my father from me ... Every one of them means years of separation. Look at mother! Hardly has she got over her tears of joy for father being home again, alive and well, when there are more tears over something new. Often we go a whole year without a letter from him... And he, too, always says: ’Duty! Duty!’ And now you... I don’t want to live a life like my mother’s... I don’t want to live only on your letters...”

    She covered her face with her hands, her shoulders shook spasmodically. Then she buried her face in the cushion and wept bitterly, like a sick child.

    I silently stroked her hair and gazed at the sunlit roofs of the house opposite, at the blue vault of the summer sky, as though it might prompt me to an answer. What was I to do? Here at my side was the woman I loved and who loved me; and somewhere, a long way off, was duty.

    I spent the evening with Anna Petrovna in the living room. Genia had spread out her books on the dining-room table, and sat chewing her pencil; she was preparing for her finals. Anna Petrovna complained as usual about her lonely life.

    “He was offered a post in the Artillery Department; but no, he must go and stick his nose in hell again. At Konigsberg he was wounded in the head, but that isn’t enough for him. You’d think he’d got enough orders and decorations, and a high enough rank. But now he declares he’s going to be a marshal. Stalin himself told him so at the reception. And now he’s continually repeating it like a parrot.”

    The general had been urgently recalled to Moscow a few days before the capitulation of Germany. On 10 May 1945 he was present, with other high-ranking officers of the Red Army, at the Kremlin reception which the Politburo gave in celebration of the victory. Now another Lenin order decorated his broad chest, another star was added to his gold epaulettes. But Anna Petrovna was not destined to enjoy her husband’s company for long. He had been entrusted with a new, secret commission; he spent all his days in the General Staff, and whenever she asked him where he was going this time he only answered: “You’ll see when you get a letter with the field-post address.”

    She discovered where he had been sent only months later, when the war with Japan broke out. And even then she learnt it from the newspapers, which announced that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had awarded him a further distinction for special services in the struggle against Japan.

    “How can he become a marshal now the war’s over?” I asked her. “Whom will he be fighting next?”

    “I don’t know,” she sighed. “He avoids talking politics with me. He’s grown so cock-a-hoop since his last visit to the Kremlin. They’re obviously thinking something up, if they’re talking on those lines. Stalin’s the be-all and end-all of existence for him. If Stalin tells him: ’You’ll become a marshal,’ he’ll drag the marshal’s star down from heaven if necessary.”

    ’What new devilry is afoot now?’ I thought to myself. ’The Kremlin doesn’t talk idly.’ But I saw all the import of Anna Petrovna’s words only later, when sitting at the conference table in the Berlin Control Commission.

    That was my last day in Moscow. Next morning I went to the central aerodrome. It was early, a mist hung over the earth; every-thing was very still and quiet. Innumerable transport machines, all of them ’Douglases’, stretched their great wings over the out-fields. My heart was as light as the fresh morning air, as calm and still as the hoarfrosted field of the landing ground. I would be returning to Moscow in twelve months. And then the city would be even more dear to me than it was now.

    Two officers came up; evidently they were traveling with me.

    “Well, how’s things, Major?” One of them greeted me. “Off to Europe?”

    “Not a bad idea to see for yourself what old mother Europe really looks like,” the second added.

    The aerodrome came to life. Several other officers arrived, all of them assigned to the staff of the Soviet Military Administration. The S. M. A. had its own machines servicing the Berlin-Moscow route. On their return journey from Berlin to Moscow they were so heavily laden with important and urgent freight that they could hardly gain height. But from Moscow to Berlin they flew only half loaded. Our pilot waited a little longer, then shrugged his shoulders and signaled for permission to take off.

    Sommaire https://seenthis.net/messages/683905
    #anticommunisme #histoire #Berlin #occupation #guerre_froide

  • SyrianObserver.com: Assad Confiscates Properties of Absentees Through Legislation
    http://syrianobserver.com/EN/News/34055


    Apr 5th, 2018 by Al-Hal (opposition website)

    Syrian lawyer and rights activist Michel Shammas said that Decree 10 for the year 2018, which was issued by the Syrian regime’s President Bashar al-Assad, “opened the door wide for demographic change and legitimizing the confiscation of the properties of millions of displaced and expelled people.”

    Shammas said on his Facebook page that the decree had a basic aim of preventing displaced and refugees from returning to their homes. He called on all Syrians living in countries of refuge and those in contact with the authorities with whom Syrians have taken refuge to inform them of the decree which deprives refugees of their properties and will therefore prevent them from returning to Syria.

    The lawyer said that the timing of the decree’s issuance will deprive millions of refugees and displaced from establishing their ownership, as most of them are wanted by security forces, adding, “The decree must be stopped from being implemented now, because a safe and calm environment is required after the return of every refugee and displaced person to their homes and areas is ensured and they are able to exercise their rights.”

    Assad issued a decree last Monday which stipulated allowing “for the establishment of one or more organizational zone within the general organizational plans for administrative units by a decree based on the proposal of the minister of local administration and environment and the amendment of some articles of legislative Decree No. 66 for the year 2012.”

    According to experts the new decree will allow for new organizational zones to be established in any province the regime government wants, like the Khalaf al-Razi zone in Damascus, or what is known as the Marotta City project.

    #RECONSTRUCTION #réfugiés #spoliation