SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS

epubdos : Afghanistan

Prepared for the U.S. Department of State

Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs

By TechMIS
www.TechMIS.com

Mobile User Copy

TO:	SCA & Staff
DATE:	Monday, August 19, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan

Family of third American held by Taliban calls for his immediate release: ‘We are concerned’ (FOX News)

FOX News [8/18/2024 10:20 AM, Beth Bailey, 48215K]
U.S. citizen Mahmood Habibi ended his second year of detention in Afghanistan, as his Taliban captors continued to deny they hold him prisoner. Earlier this month, and for the first time, the State Department verbally countered the Taliban’s narrative that only two American citizens are in their custody.

Responding to questions sent by Fox News Digital, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in an Aug. 8 press conference that the State Department is "deeply concerned about the well-being of Americans unjustly detained in Afghanistan," naming Habibi as well as George Glezmann and Ryan Corbett.

In his press briefing, Miller explained that Glezmann and Corbett have been classified as "wrongfully detained," while Habibi is considered "unjustly detained." "We can’t make a wrongful determination because we don’t have access to certain types of information or because the situation is unclear," Miller explained.

On Aug. 10, the FBI released a statement that they too are "seeking information into the disappearance" of Habibi.

Habibi’s brother, Ahmad Shah Habibi, talked to Fox News Digital about the circumstances surrounding Mahmood’s detention. He said Mahmood traveled to Afghanistan in August 2022 for his position with Fairfax, Virginia-based ARX Communications because the Taliban had "welcomed" Afghans to return to the country and work for the future of Afghanistan.

The welcome was short-lived. On Aug. 10, the Taliban General Directorate of Intelligence arrested Habibi and 29 of his colleagues, asking them whether they had information about the July 30 drone strike in Kabul that killed al Qaeda senior leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. All but two ARX Communications personnel were later released.

Ahmad firmly denies that his brother was involved in the strike on Zawahiri. He believes that the Taliban detained his brother because Mahmood was the deputy minister of the Civil Aviation Authority for the former Afghan government, and is a U.S. citizen. Mahmood gained citizenship in 2021.

Because the Taliban do not publicly acknowledge Mahmood’s detention, he is not allowed to call family or receive wellness checks from international diplomats. Ahmad said individuals inside Afghanistan told the family that Mahmood is alive, but he was reticent to provide further details about the source of this information. "We are concerned. I am not sure about his current condition or how he is doing," Ahmad said.

Ryan Corbett, also arrested Aug. 10, 2022, and George Glezmann, arrested Dec. 5, 2022, have suffered in Taliban custody. A Senate Resolution calling for Glezmann’s immediate release states that he experiences "facial tumors, hypertension, severe malnutrition, and other medical conditions," and is facing rapid decline in his physical and mental health. A House resolution calling for Corbett’s immediate release states that he has been held in a basement cell with little access to sunlight, is fed scraps of fatty meat, and now experiences "seizures, fainting, and discolored extremities."

Unlike Habibi, Corbett and Glezmann have had sporadic access to wellness checks from Qatari diplomats, and are occasionally allowed to call their families.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid first acknowledged that the Taliban held two Americans in their prisons in March 2024, according Voice of America. Mujahid reiterated the message in July at the conclusion of controversial meetings in Doha between Taliban representatives and international leaders. Mujahid mentioned that the Taliban "also have prisoners in America, prisoners in Guantamo. We should free our prisoners in exchange for them."

Three unnamed senior Taliban leaders indicated to CBS News in July that they would consider trading three American prisoners held in Afghanistan for Guantamo Bay detainee Muhammad Rahim and two Afghans charged with drug-related offenses in U.S. prisons. By August, two officials "changed their previous statements," claiming that only two American prisoners were held, while the third "denied the [Taliban] held Habibi at all."

Last week, Mujahid told Ariana Newsthat the Taliban hold just two Americans "found guilty in Afghanistan for violating Afghan laws," and said "we don’t have anyone named Habibi in our prisons." Ariana News has likely become a mouthpiece for the Taliban since their return to power.

Rahim is the final Afghan detainee in Guantamo Bay, according to Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the FDD’s Long War Journal. Roggio told Fox News Digital that the al Qaedafacilitator is "as nasty as they come."

Roggio provided a Guantamo Bay detainee report on Rahim from March 2016 that confirmed the prisoner has "become even more deeply committed to the group’s jihadist doctrine and Islamic extremism" in prison. Rahim reportedly "continues to view the U.S. and the West as enemies, has expressed support for and praised attacks by other terrorist groups, and has said he intends to return to jihad and kill Americans."

Citing the Director of National Intelligence, Fox News reported in December that about 27% of released Guantamo detainees "have returned to the battlefield."

Fox News Digital reached out to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid, head of the Taliban political office in Doha Suhail Shaheen, and Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi for information about Habibi’s case. Shaheen said he was not aware of Habibi’s case. Balkhi and Mujahid did not respond to questions about Habibi, or about which Afghans the Taliban seeks to exchange for American captives.

In their efforts to advocate for Mahmood, Ahmad says his family has met with the State Department and White House, as well as senators and representatives from California, Virginia and New Jersey. Ahmad reports that they are all "working hard to bring [Mahmood] home."

Ahmad noted that his brother’s arrest has impacted his entire family, including his elderly parents and Mahmood’s wife, Zulhija, who was a doctor in Afghanistan. Because of the stress of advocating for Mahmood and caring for their young daughter, Zulhija has been forced to put aside studying for the medical boards that will let her practice in the U.S.

"Mahmood is in detention, but the family is like they’re all detained," Ahmad explained.

Former Afghan prosecutors hunted down, killed by Taliban 3 years after US withdrawal (FOX News)

FOX News [8/17/2024 6:00 AM, Beth Bailey, 143113K]
The three years following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan have been a deadly game of cat and mouse for employees and allies of U.S. and NATO forces left behind under Taliban rule. Among the de facto government’s targets are thousands of Afghan prosecutors trained by U.S. personnel to enforce the rule of law and prosecute terrorists.

As the Taliban rapidly gained Afghan territory in the summer of 2021, they released convicted terrorists from government jails across the country. The Taliban had been conducting deadly attacks to target Afghan prosecutors for years before taking over Kabul on Aug. 15. The newly-released prisoners were out for revenge against the prosecutors who put them behind bars.

Joe Maida IV was a former Texas prosecutor who supported the Afghan legal system’s growth inside the country between 2006 and 2013 and worked on Afghan policy at U.S. Special Operations Command and with Special Operations and Combating Terrorism at the Pentagon through 2019. He told Fox News Digital that "The Taliban continues to hunt down individuals who supported the Afghan government." In addition to military personnel, Maida says the Taliban "are seeking out terrorism prosecutors for retribution. They’re doing that by sending special teams to the provinces, but then also writing letters to the mosques to identify these individuals, who then disappear."

Saeed, who spoke to Fox News Digital on condition that he is identified by a pseudonym, is the executive director of the Afghan Prosecutors Association and was a prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office of Afghanistan. Saeed provided an Excel file the Afghan Prosecutors Association has compiled containing details about 32 prosecutors and their family members who have been killed since July 5, 2021.

Victims’ manners of death are gruesome. Most were shot, either in a public location or at their homes. Some were killed by anonymous gunmen, while others were specifically murdered by the Taliban. Two prosecutors were killed by improvised explosive devices. Others were arrested and tortured. Three victims were women. More than a third of the entries included photos of the victim after their death.

Saeed said that an additional 100 prosecutors have been injured since the U.S. withdrawal, and another 50 are believed to be "locked up in Taliban prisons and their fate is unknown."

About 1,000 of the 3,800 prosecutors believed to be in practice prior to August 2021 have fled to European countries, Saeed estimates. He said that 1,500 who remain stuck in Afghanistan are "in need of urgent assistance." Saeed believes that about 500 prosecutors fled to Pakistan, Tajikistan and Iran, where they live in "a state of despair" amid harassment and forced deportations.

Legal professionals who protected women’s rights have also seen their efforts made null and void under the Taliban. One of thousands of hidden Afghan legal professionals, Amina spoke to Fox News Digital on condition that she was referred to by a pseudonym. Amina said she was "on the verge of qualifying to be a lawyer" when the government collapsed. In 2021, Amina was working as an assistant lawyer in the Kabul courts, focusing on domestic violence cases.

According to a report by the United States Institute for Peace, divorce is no longer a legal option for women in Afghanistan, with the Taliban issuing a blanket revocation of all divorce decrees granted by the prior Afghan government in March 2023. With domestic abuse shelters closed since August 2021, women experiencing violence at the hands of their husbands are now taken to Taliban jails, where some Afghan women have reportedly been raped and even murdered by the Taliban.

Amina says she has felt personally responsible for not "doing enough to educate women about human rights." She now devotes herself to educating Afghan women online and providing mental health consultations for Afghans in crisis. "This is the time that my people need me," she explained.

Many U.S.-based attorneys have joined the fight to support Afghan prosecutors, including East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore. As a member of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA), Moore has been supporting prosecutors in their fight to remain alive in Afghanistan. Moore told Fox News Digital that the APA is in touch with "hundreds of prosecutors who are now begging for help." He estimates that about 20% of Afghan prosecutors and judges were women and are at special risk inside their country.

Unlike military translators and employees of American institutions, prosecutors did not serve the U.S. directly and are not eligible for special immigrant visas. Legislative efforts to extend access to the SIV program, including the Afghan Adjustment Act and Afghan Allies Protection Act, have not gained passage in Congress.

Some legislators have expressed concern about the vetting process for Afghan refugees. Moore explained that prosecutors "have been vetted repeatedly" and have "passed background checks that most American citizens could never pass," which informs his opinion that "there’s little to fear and much to be gained by helping these people resettle in the United States."

To help prosecutors reach safety three years after the U.S. withdrawal, Moore said the APA is raising funds to move the 1,500 prosecutors living in hiding in Afghanistan to safe third countries. The estimated cost will be around $15 million, about $10,000 per family.

There is some hope that government support for prosecutors is forthcoming. Moore said that the State Department "has been more receptive to including former prosecutors, especially women," in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Moore reported that the APA has been working on getting prosecutors’ applications ready for review.

A State Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether it is working to include prosecutors in the USRAP. The spokesperson said that the State Department "remain[s] focused on honoring our promises to these allies and are grateful to the Americans from all walks of life who have helped us welcome more than 160,000 Afghans to communities across the United States during the past three years."

Saeed was referred to the Priority-1 program within the USRAP three months ago and recently received his notification of acceptance. He now awaits his interview and at least 12–18 months of processing.

Saeed desperately longs for peace. In 2020, he was targeted for death by Talibs released from prison. After the Taliban searched his home in December 2022, he fled to Pakistan to protect himself and his family. Saeed says he still experiences "a hopeless and problematic situation" inside Pakistan, where the cost of living is high and refugees cannot work or seek education for their children.

Threats of deportation continue to loom, with Pakistan deporting thousands of Afghan refugees illegally into the country in November 2023. Though Afghans with letters verifying they have a pending application for a pathway to safety in the U.S. were meant to be protected from deportation, a source who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News Digital that in July, Pakistan deported some Afghans with USRAP referrals. A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital that they "have no comment on this specific incident."

The issue of aiding prosecutors is personal for Kevin Rardin, a career prosecutor with the Memphis District Attorney’s office, who was also a Judge Advocate in the Army Reserves. As the legal advisor to the commander of the U.S. and NATO training mission, Rardin was a mentor for his Afghan counterparts. He told Fox News Digital that "the worst days of my deployment came 13 years after I left the country, in August 2021."

"You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand that this is wrong. You just have to be a decent person with moral principles," Rardin continued. "When I was in Afghanistan, Afghans protected me. They kept me out of trouble, they introduced me to their culture. They accepted me, I ate with them. They included me. And now we just up and left. You can’t call yourself a human being and do that."

Uzbek prime minister is in Afghanistan in highest-level visit since the Taliban took power (AP)

AP [8/17/2024 10:29 AM, Staff, 31180K]
Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov arrived in Afghanistan on Saturday in the highest-level visit by a foreign official since the Taliban returned to power three years ago.

Aripov, heading a delegation, was welcomed at the Kabul airport by Abdul Salam Hanafi, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, and other senior members of the government, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce.

During his visit, he met with Taliban leaders and discussed bilateral relations and strengthening trade and business between the two countries, the statement said. Five trade and investement agreements were signed.

They are also to inaugurate an exhibition of Uzbek products, the statement said.

Earlier in the week, an Uzbek delegation held meetings with officials from the Ministry of Commerce. On Friday, Afghan media reported that a trilateral meeting among the economy ministers of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan was held in Kabul to discuss ways to enhance trade ties.

Uzbekistan and Afghanistan share a 144-kilometer (89-mile) border and recently there has been an improvement in relations between them.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021 as U.S. and NATO troops were withdrawing from the country after 20 years of war. the world has so far not recognized Afghanistan’s Taliban government. The international community has been wary of the Taliban’s harsh measures, imposed since their takeover, especially in restricting the rights of women and minorities.

Taliban-Led Government Celebrates 105th Anniversary Of Afghan Independence (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [8/18/2024 1:45 PM, Staff, 1530K]
Top officials of the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan marked 105 years of of the country’s independence on August 18 by demanding mutual respect from the international community.

Afghanistan gained its independence in August 1919 after the signing of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty, which ended British control over the country’s foreign affairs.

Afghanistan currently remains unrecognized internationally, largely because of the restrictions the Taliban-led government has placed on women since it returned to power in August 2021.

The anniversary of the signing of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty was marked at a meeting of top Taliban leaders in Kabul broadcast live by the Taliban-controlled National Radio and Television.

Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, the Taliban’s acting defense minister, told the meeting that the government wants strong relations with the world based on mutual respect but will never give in to pressure.

He also said the Taliban, which seized power after the U.S.-backed government collapsed and its leaders fled into exile, will never allow the Islamic State and other destructive groups to create chaos in Afghanistan.

"Whether they are Daesh (Islamic State) or other rebels, they should hear…that we have not surrendered to anyone’s power at any cost. By any name, we have established the Islamic system in this land. We will defend it till death and the last century."

The international community has previously expressed concern about the presence of the extremist Islamic State group in Afghanistan, while the Taliban has said it is the only group capable of ruling and establishing security in the country.

Hamid Karzai, who served as the first elected president of Afghanistan from 2004 to 2014, marked the anniversary of the signing of the treaty by calling on the Taliban to allow girls and women to attend school and university.

“I call on the caretaker Islamic government to open the doors of schools and universities in the country as soon as possible so that girls equipped with the jewels of knowledge can play their part in the development of the country alongside their brothers,” Karzai said on X. “Education and national unity are the forces that will keep the country strong.”

Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban has banned girls and women from studying beyond primary school.

The United Nations said on August 15 that at least 1.4 million girls in Afghanistan have been denied access to secondary education and this has almost wiped out two decades of steady progress for education in Afghanistan, leaving the future of an entire generation in jeopardy.

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai calls on Taliban to provide education to girls and women (The Independent)

The Independent [8/19/2024 4:31 AM, Arpan Rai, 235K, Neutral]
Former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai has reiterated his calls to the Taliban to allow girls and women back into education on the country’s 105th anniversary of independence.

“On this proud occasion and for a truly independent and self-sufficient Afghanistan, I once again ask the caretaker government to open the doors of schools as soon as possible,” Mr Karzai said.

The Taliban, who took power in 2021, barred education for girls above sixth grade because they said it didn’t comply with their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. The schools were not shut for boys and men, and the regime has shown no sign of taking the steps needed to reopen classrooms and campuses for girls and women.

Unesco said at least 1.4 million girls have been deliberately denied access to secondary education since the takeover, an increase of 300,000 since its previous count in April 2023, with more girls reaching the age limit of 12 every year.

Shortly after the collapse of the Nato-led government in August 2021, the former Afghan leader said he had invited the Taliban into the city “to protect the population so that the country, the city doesn’t fall into chaos and the unwanted elements who would probably loot the country, loot shops”.

Mr Karzai was Afghanistan’s president for 13 years after the Taliban were first ousted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In April 2024, the former president had stressed the value of girls’ education during a discussion with Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran’s ambassador and special representative.

On Sunday, in his wishes, Mr Karzai said it was a great honour to have independence and that the freedom of Afghanistan must be protected. The future of the country undoubtedly depends on the education of the young generation, he said, as he asked the group to fulfil that requirement.

Mr Karzai also said education, unity, and national harmony are the strengths that keep Afghanistan strong.

However, since the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, access to primary education has also plummeted with 1.1 million fewer girls and boys attending school, latest Unesco data shows.

Afghanistan had 5.7 million girls and boys in primary school in 2022, compared with 6.8 million in 2019, the Unesco data shows.

The enrollment drop was the result of the Taliban decision to bar female teachers from teaching boys, Unesco said, but could also be explained by a lack of parental incentive to send their children to school in an increasingly tough economic environment.

“If we add the girls who were already out of school before the bans were introduced, there are now almost 2.5 million girls in the country deprived of their right to education, representing 80 per cent of Afghan school-age girls,” Unesco said.

Taliban PM On UN Sanctions List In U.A.E. For Medical Treatment (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [8/17/2024 6:40 AM, Staff, 1530K]
The Afghan Taliban’s acting prime minister, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund, who is on a UN sanctions list, is receiving medical treatment in a hospital in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), officials said. U.A.E. President Muhammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan visited the Taliban leader "to inquire about his health," a spokeswoman for the U.A.E. Foreign Ministry said on social media, without providing many details. Akhund did not attend Taliban ceremonies in Kabul on August 14 that marked the third anniversary of the group’s return to power in Afghanistan.

Taliban and Chinese partner restart copper project, reigniting worries (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia [8/18/2024 12:00 AM, Khudai Noor Nasar, 2042K]
A copper-mining project in Afghanistan finally got off the ground last month after a delay of over 16 years, but critics worry that a lack of independent supervision could lead to widespread pollution and the destruction of historical ruins and relics uncovered at the Mes Aynak site.

Three years after the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, the government still isn’t widely recognized and the economy has tanked. World Bank figures show a 26% contraction in the real economy in the two years to April 2024. As such, the Taliban views the Mes Aynak project, contracted to state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. (MCC) since 2007, as a crucial lifeline both financially and diplomatically.

The Taliban promotes the site as containing the world’s second and Afghanistan’s largest untapped copper deposit, with an estimated 4.4 billion tons of copper ore. The government estimates that the site could yield 2.5 million tons of copper per year that would bring in revenue of $300 million to $400 million.

But Mes Aynak is rich in other ways. Located about 30 kilometers south of Kabul in Logar province, Mes Aynak lies along the ancient Silk Road and is the site of a Buddhist complex comprising over 20 ruins, including temples and over 1,000 statues. Afghanistan’s Mines and Petroleum Ministry says that signs of even more ancient Bronze Age settlements have been found beneath the copper deposits.

Until now, the Mes Aynak ruins had not been disturbed by any development, in large part due to security reasons and contractual issues between the parties. Abdul Qadeer Mutfi, a former spokesman of the Mines and Petroleum Ministry, told Nikkei Asia that the Chinese side reneged on some elements of the contract in the past that led to the delay in works.

"At that time, the Chinese company was not honoring the commitments outlined in the contract," Mutfi said. "For example, they refused to construct the agreed-upon railway line from Bamiyan (in Afghanistan) to Khyber Pass (in Pakistan)."

MCC could not be reached for comment. The Ministry of Mines and Petroleum did not respond to a request for comment.

To get a copper mine up and running, the barren site would need infrastructure and power generation means as first steps. In late July, both sides broke ground on the site to begin the construction of a road, reigniting fears that development without proper management could have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan.

Experts say that copper mining can cause severe pollution and requires large amounts of water, already scarce in this arid region.

"Processing just one ton of copper generates 200 tons of waste, which can severely pollute the earth, water and air," said Najibullah Sadid, an Afghan water resources and environmental expert in Germany.

Calling on the Chinese company to adhere to international standards of waste treatment, Sadid said: "The residents rely on groundwater, and if this waste is not properly treated, it could contaminate the water supply, eventually reaching the Logar River and affecting half of Kabul’s population."

Historians and archaeologists over the years had also called for the site to be protected, and activists even made an award-winning film about the importance of Mes Aynak. Now, some fear that the Taliban government’s lack of technical expertise could open the area to rampant exploitation.

The Chinese Embassy in Kabul issued a statement on July 25, promising to protect the cultural relics.

"The Chinese side is willing to work with Afghan side to smoothly promote the exploitation of Afghan mineral resources while ensuring effective protection of cultural relics, so as to make this project a model of investment cooperation between China and Afghanistan," it said in the statement.

Nonetheless, the lack of independent monitoring is concerning.

"There is no third party overseeing these excavations, which is a significant concern. Under the previous government, activists, political parties, and even ordinary citizens played a role in monitoring these activities," said Mutfi, the former mines ministry spokesman. "Now, there is no such oversight in place."

Some locals, however, are focusing on the positives. Sabaoon Ahmadi, a resident of the province, is eagerly awaiting the benefits of the project. "Our entire village, along with Afghans from across the country, is optimistic about this project. We believe it has the potential to significantly boost our economy," he said.

Inside the Virginia Newsroom Trying to Save Afghanistan From Tyranny (The Atlantic)

The Atlantic [8/18/2024 7:00 AM, Cora Engelbrecht, 17196K]
In late 2022, a reporter in Afghanistan received a tip that members of the Taliban had raped a mother and her four young daughters in the Panjshir Valley, just northeast of Kabul. The journalist goes by an assumed name-Sahar Aram-for fear of retribution from the Taliban, which has ruthlessly cracked down on Afghanistan’s free press. So she relayed the information some 7,000 miles beyond the group’s reach, to a quiet Virginia suburb where a pair of exiled Afghan journalists had recently launched a newsroom.

Even though it operates abroad-or perhaps because it operates abroad-Amu TV is one of the most effective chroniclers of life under Taliban rule. With one of Amu’s editors, Aram devised a plan to travel to Deh Khawak, the remote village where the tip originated. The Taliban had barred outsiders from entering the town, so Aram disguised herself from head to toe in colored fabric native to the area. Because the group had cordoned off the victims’ home, she maneuvered from neighbor to neighbor, probing for evidence. When a Taliban official sent her a voice message confirming the incident, Aram reported her findings through an encrypted portal. Soon after, Amu published the story online. Afghans around the world read Aram’s work, which apparently enraged the Taliban: They set out to find her.

She went on the run but continued reporting. Several months later, she investigated a Taliban official accused of sexual harassment. Then a group of men-which she believes was linked to the Taliban-beat her father unconscious. A judge accused Aram of defamation and ordered her arrest.

"I am not afraid to die for this work," she told me over the phone from her hiding place. "But if the Taliban are going to make an example out of me, I need to be sure the stories count."

Aram’s experience is hardly unusual. Before the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, Afghanistan’s news media had been one of the great successes of the country’s American-led, post-9/11 era. Journalism and entertainment flourished in the two-decade window that followed the Taliban’s ouster in 2001. But when the last American soldiers retreated, the industry collapsed. The Taliban threatened, beat, or imprisoned dozens of journalists. TV stations, radio channels, and publications across the country shut down under immense financial and political pressure. Hundreds of journalists fled, dozens were detained, and at least two were killed. The Taliban scrubbed music from television and radio programming, and largely banished female news anchors. TV networks replaced government exposes with shows about Islamic morality.

Three years later, the Taliban is escalating its war on journalism. The group recently imprisoned seven Amu staffers. Some have been beaten and tortured. More have been forced into hiding, as Aram has.

The story of Amu TV and its journalists offers a warning: Afghanistan’s new rulers aren’t content with the power they have. True autocracy requires impunity, which Amu and its peers can deny the Taliban-at least in part, at least for now. But arrests, abductions, and raids are making that task harder. Judging by Amu’s experience, the Taliban could soon make it impossible.

Amu’s operation depends on the scrappy ingenuity of its far-flung staff. After Kabul fell, the network’s journalists dispersed across the Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. A team in Tajikistan records musical segments. Producers dub over Turkish soap operas that have been banned in Afghanistan. Staffers in Pakistan and Iran balance their day jobs with evading local authorities. Some have applied for asylum or permanent housing and received neither.

Like other Afghan outlets whose editorial staff operate outside the country-such as Hasht e Subh, Afghanistan International, and Etilaat Roz-Amu editors assign news-gathering to reporters inside Afghanistan and then piece stories together from stations abroad. Some 100 reporters in the country, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, risk their lives to expose the Taliban’s crimes and corruption. Together with more than 50 exiled Afghan journalists, including about a dozen in Amu’s Virginia headquarters, they generate daily online news coverage and television programming.

The Taliban blocks Amu’s website in Afghanistan, as it does many other foreign outlets. But according to data its editors have gathered, about 20 million people access Amu’s digital platform each month; many use a virtual network to skirt the firewall. A license with a Luxembourg-based satellite company, SES, enables Amu to transmit its TV programs into Afghanistan, where the provider serves about 19 million people.

Perhaps the best measure of Amu’s significance, though, is the effort the Taliban has expended to intimidate it. Amu’s investigative reporting on cases of rape, corruption, and extrajudicial killings has provoked the group’s wrath. On the morning of March 12, 2023, the Taliban raided an office space Amu was using in Kabul. The intruders detained staffers, including a video editor and a video journalist, and seized mobile phones and computers, which Amu’s editors believe were used to identify people on its payroll. Last August, the Taliban abducted five more Amu journalists.

The Taliban incarcerated, beat, and tortured Amu staffers, in some cases for months. Amu’s leadership appealed to the United Nations, the U.S. embassy, and advocacy groups for help. After weeks of lobbying, Amu’s journalists were released. The newsroom has since erased all records of its official payroll and distributes funds via couriers or wire transfers to relatives of staff living abroad.

Since August 2021, at least 80 journalists in Afghanistan have been detained in retaliation for their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. "The situation is dire," Beh Lih Yi, the Asia program coordinator for the CPJ, told me. "It shows how determined [the Taliban is] to crack down on the free flow of information by targeting foreign news outlets, like Amu, that have become critical lifelines for keeping the world informed." Over the past year, the CPJ says, the Taliban has arrested at least four journalists on claims that they were working for exiled media. Every day, Lih Yi told me, the committee receives calls from Afghan reporters needing help.

When I visited Amu’s headquarters in Virginia last November, one of its co-founders, Sami Mahdi, was running late: His uncle had an interview with immigration officials that morning and needed someone to help translate. "Some days we are refugees first, then journalists," Mahdi said as he hurried into an office where dozens of colleagues from around the world waited on-screen.

Mahdi founded Amu in the fall of 2021 with a former colleague, Lotfullah Najafizada. Back in Afghanistan, the two had worked together at Tolo News, the country’s premier news network. Growing violence in the region made their lives untenable. In November 2020, three Islamic State gunmen stormed Kabul University, where Mahdi was teaching, and killed 16 of his students. Days later, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency notified him that he was a target of the Taliban’s Haqqani network. That same month, insurgents assassinated a close friend and fellow journalist. Fearing he was next, Mahdi fled Afghanistan for good on August 14, 2021, when nearly all the American soldiers had retreated. Najafizada left the same day.

Hours after Kabul fell, Najafizada got a call from a member of the Taliban, who told him the group was sending a delegation to Tolo’s offices to go on air and publicly assure the country that everything was under control. "At that moment I knew it would be impossible to work with media in the country," Najafizada told me.

Mahdi and Najafizada reunited in Turkey, where they decided that if they couldn’t freely publish the news inside Afghanistan, they would do so abroad and beam it back in. "We needed to start something from scratch," Mahdi said. "We wanted a way to access information we could trust. And we wanted something for everyone: something that would unite our exiled colleagues, preserve what we had spent our lives building, and restore a sense of normalcy for Afghans."

Soon after they settled in North America, Mahdi and Najafizada raised close to $2 million in seed money and recruited former co-workers and friends. A distant relative of Mahdi’s contributed the office space in Virginia that now serves as Amu’s newsroom. The National Endowment for Democracy and other donors keep the lights on.

The headquarters sit above a string of nondescript offices in Sterling, about 45 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. In a control room, clocks show the time in Kabul and in Turkey, where Amu operates a second studio. A wall of muted televisions flashes headlines in Pashto and Dari. Every corner of the newsroom offers a reminder of what Amu’s reporters face back home. A large painting outside Mahdi’s office incorporates the names of dozens of Afghan journalists killed over the past two decades. On the opposite wall, a corkboard displays headshots of the Taliban leadership.

For Amu’s star anchor, Nazia Hashimyar, the women’s bathroom doubles as a makeup studio. The 28-year-old doesn’t wear a head covering on-screen, even when she interviews Taliban leaders. Like many of her colleagues, Hashimyar left Kabul shortly after the takeover. She remembers the traffic that choked the city on the day it fell-the overrun tarmacs, the futile phone calls to people who might have answers about evacuation lists or news of a missing loved one.

Early that August morning, Hashimyar stood on the lawn of the presidential palace as Afghanistan’s leader, Ashraf Ghani, boarded a helicopter and fled the country. She had been working in Ghani’s communications office while moonlighting in what she called her "dream role"-hosting the evening news for Radio Television Afghanistan, the country’s public broadcaster. The Taliban removed her from her anchor job on the day it took the capital. After spending several weeks in hiding, Hashimyar returned to her office to retrieve her belongings, only to be turned away by a gunman who threatened to shoot her.

Hashimyar spent a year in a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi before she was approved to settle in the United States in September 2022. She arrived as Mahdi was looking for a female anchor to be the public face of Amu’s news coverage. The sense of safety and accomplishment that she’s found in the U.S. comes with the deep discomfort of having escaped what so many others couldn’t. "Physically I am somewhere in the suburbs of America," she told me. "But my heart and mind cannot escape Afghanistan."

Mahdi has done his best to make the newsroom a home for Hashimyar and the rest of the staff. "We needed a space to gather, to help us bridge the two worlds we are straddling between the United States and Afghanistan," he told me. He hosts parties in the office for other Afghan journalists and writers in the region. An Afghan chef a few doors down handles the catering. Every morning the newsroom gets free meals and fresh naan.

Mahdi has known for a long time what exile is like. He was 13 when the Taliban first came to power in Afghanistan. His family fled to Tajikistan, where his father oversaw a newsletter compiled by exiled writers, activists, and editors, who received dispatches via satellite phones from correspondents back home. Mahdi wouldn’t return for another five years.

"Becoming a refugee again was always my greatest fear," he told me.

Amonth after visiting Amu’s headquarters in Virginia, I went to see one of its editors who had settled in the suburbs of Paris. When I arrived, Siyar Sirat was working with reporters to investigate the death of a female media personality in Kabul. The Taliban had said in a statement that she had been drunk when she fell from her apartment. On a call, Amu’s editors discussed an interview with the woman’s parents and husband that had been uploaded to YouTube that morning. The editors thought the video looked staged. It shows the woman’s family saying that she threw herself from a window after arguing with her husband. Harder to see is a man in the background, who appears to be holding a Kalashnikov.

The editors sent a female reporter to investigate further. But when she arrived on the scene, she was barred from entering the building. The neighbors she tried to talk to turned her away, insisting it was too dangerous to speak. The reporter, who goes by the name Sima, asked to be taken off the story because people were scared to cooperate.

"From where we sit, it looks like a clear cover-up," Sirat told me. "But our hands are tied: It is becoming impossible to cover such sensitive cases given the circumstances." Several weeks later, the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice arrested dozens of women and girls for not wearing proper head coverings. Sima tried to cover the story, but once again she struggled to find sources or relatives who would speak.

Amu’s Hasiba Atakpal, a 26-year-old broadcaster based in Virginia, has encountered the same problem. She worries that Afghans will soon stop talking with reporters entirely because of the Taliban’s mounting persecution of foreign media and women across the country. Before she settled in Virginia, Atakpal was a household name in Afghanistan as a correspondent for Tolo News. In August 2021, she and her film crew broadcast live in Kabul during the takeover, prompting a Taliban leader to threaten her. Atakpal left the country for her safety.

Now that she covers the Taliban from afar, she has had to transform her reporting method. Rather than investigate stories with videographers on the ground, Atakpal patches together broadcasts from WhatsApp voice notes, recorded calls, and videos from inside the country, which she combines with voice-overs. The Taliban and others continue to harass her in exile. Fake social-media accounts have impersonated Atakpal in a clear effort to undermine her credibility. Last year, after she produced an antagonistic interview with Kabul’s police spokesman, she received a message from a Taliban official demanding her family’s location. On multiple occasions, her colleagues in Afghanistan have gone missing, including a young female videographer who was recently abducted by the Taliban.

"The responsibility is crippling," Atakpal told me. "The reporters who remain, who cannot be seen, are the true heroes. More than anything, I wish I could be in their place."

Pakistan

Pakistan starts screening all travelers for mpox after WHO declares global emergency (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [8/17/2024 8:17 AM, Kamran Haider, 20643K]
Authorities in Pakistan started screening all travelers to the country for the mpox virus as a precautionary step after a positive case was detected this month.

Scanners have been put in place at all airports and at border crossings with Afghanistan, China, India, Iran to report suspected infections as part of efforts to prevent the virus from spreading in the country, Malik Mukhtar Ahmed, the prime minister’s coordinator on national health, said Saturday at a news conference in Islamabad.

"There is no point to panic," Ahmed said, adding that Pakistan has enough vaccine kits. "We don’t foresee any emergency related to the infection."

Pakistan has found 11 cases in more than a year, with the latest infection confirmed on Aug. 13 in a 34-year-old male who arrived from Saudi Arabia. One of the infected persons later died due to other illnesses, the official said.

The World Health Organization this week declared a global health emergency over the spread of a mutated strain of mpox. Pakistan is conducting genetic sequencing to determine the variant of the latest case.

Pakistan admits it cannot find mpox patient as tighter screening to be introduced at airports (The Independent)

The Independent [8/17/2024 9:01 AM, Vishwam Sankaran, 56358K]
Pakistan says it is introducing new screening at airports after confirming at least one case of mpox infection, days after the World Health Organisation declared a global emergency over the virus.

Health officials are concerned about a new deadlier strain of the virus, formerly known as monkeypox, that has spread through several African countries.

The case reported in Pakistan involves a patient who had recently returned from a Gulf country. Pakistan’s health ministry said it had yet to determine the strain of the virus.

Mpox belongs to the smallpox family of viruses but causes milder symptoms including fever, chills and body aches, with more serious cases likely to develop characteristic lesions on the face, hands, chest and genitals.

Earlier this week, the WHO warned of the "very worrying" emergence and spread of a new variant of mpox associated with a "more severe disease and higher mortality rates" than the strain behind the global mpox outbreak in 2022.

Over 17,000 mpox cases have been confirmed in Africa with more than 500 deaths this year alone, mainly among children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the outbreak began at the start of 2023.

Pakistan’s health department confirmed that one case of mpox was detected in the country’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, withdrawing a previous statement that three cases of the viral infection were detected in the region this week on arrival from the UAE.

The health ministry said it had yet to confirm if the patient is infected with the new variant known as clade 1b, with the sequencing of a sample from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa patient underway.

"Once that’s done, we will be able to say what strain this is," the health ministry said, adding that the "screening system at airports and entry points is being further strengthened".

The ministry flagged concerns that the location of the confirmed mpox patient in Pakistan is currently unknown, as he is suspected to have gone to another district after providing his samples for tests.

"When we visited his home in Mardan, it was locked from [the] outside and his neighbours told us that the family has left for Dir," the district health office (DHO) said.

"We approached our fellow colleagues of the health department in Dir district but they couldn’t trace him, even in Dir," the DHO said.

The health ministry said it was carrying out contact tracing of the patient.

The new strain emerged in a Congolese mining town last year and is spreading to other countries in Africa as well as one case confirmed in Sweden on Thursday.

Clade 1b is said to cause milder symptoms with lesions on the genitals, making it harder to spot and more likely for people to sicken others without knowing they’re infected.

"It is concerning for two main reasons," according to pox researcher Jonas Albarnaz from the Pirbright Institute.

"First, this is the first clade 1 mpox virus case outside Africa. This indicates that the extent of the international spread of clade 1 outbreak in DRC might be larger than we knew yesterday," Dr Albarnaz said.

"And second, clade 1 mpox virus is associated with a more severe disease and higher mortality rates than the clade 2 virus responsible for the international mpox outbreak in 2022."

Pakistan’s jailed ex-PM Khan seeks Oxford University chancellor role (VOA)

VOA [8/18/2024 8:44 AM, Ayaz Gul, 4032K]
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, has formally applied to run for chancellor of the University of Oxford in Britain from his prison cell, a close aide announced Sunday.

Khan served as Pakistan’s leader from 2018 until April 2022, when he was ousted through an opposition parliamentary no-confidence vote he alleges was planned by the powerful Pakistani military.

"As per Imran Khan’s instructions, his application form to Oxford University Chancellor Election 2024 has been submitted," Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

"We look forward to everyone’s support for a historic campaign," he wrote.

Khan, who remains Pakistan’s most popular politician, has been in jail since last August after becoming embroiled in a series of prosecutions and lawsuits on charges that include corruption, sedition and stoking violent anti-army protests. He rejects the allegations as baseless and claims the military is behind them.

The 71-year-old former cricket star turned prime minister has had all convictions against him before Pakistan’s February 8 national elections suspended or overturned by appellate courts because of lack of evidence, yet Khan remains incarcerated on newer charges.

The convictions also barred him from running for public office. Candidates backed by his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party emerged winners on most parliamentary seats but not enough to form the government amid allegations the vote was massively rigged to prevent PTI from sweeping the polls. This allowed military backed rival political parties to form a coalition administration with Shehbaz Sharif as the prime minister.

Khan graduated from Oxford in 1975, studying philosophy, politics, and economics. Former British prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson are also among the candidates to become the university’s chancellor.

The Convocation members, which include all university alumni who have been granted a degree, are responsible for electing the chancellor of Oxford University. Anyone seeking to run for the position must receive a nomination from at least two Convocation members to be considered eligible.

The University of Oxford website states that the Convocation will be asked to elect the new chancellor through an unprecedented online ballot during the third week of the Michaelmas term, beginning on October 28.

The new chancellor will hold the position for 10 years. The chancellorship traditionally goes to university graduates, often politicians.

The United Nations last month declared Khan’s detention arbitrary, saying there is no legal basis for keeping him in jail. Hundreds of his party workers and leaders, including women, have been jailed or being prosecuted on charges defense attorneys reject as baseless and part of the military-backed state crackdown on the party.

Khan served as the chancellor of Bradford University from 2005 to 2014.

The Pakistani military and Khan’s successors denied allegations of orchestrating his removal from power or being involved in the numerous legal challenges facing him.

Pakistan blames users for slow internet as firewall rumours grow (Reuters)

BBC [8/19/2024 3:42 AM, Kelly Ng, 65.5M, Neutral]
Pakistan has for weeks been experiencing painfully slow internet - but who, or what, is to blame is a matter for debate.

Activists say the state is building a China-style internet firewall as it looks to exert further control over the online space.

Officials have disputed these claims and instead blamed the widespread use of secure connections or VPN (virtual private networks) for the crawling speeds.

Shutting down the internet to crush dissent is a familiar move in regulators’ playbooks in Pakistan and other parts of Asia.

Since the riots sparked by former prime minister Imran Khan last year, the government has blocked social media platforms and throttled connection speeds as the battle for public support spilled over from the streets to the digital space.

The micro-blogging platform X has been blocked since the February elections due to "national security" concerns.

Mr Khan’s party supporters are big users of X and he is the most popular Pakistani on the platformn, with nearly 21 million followers.

But Minister of State for Information Technology Shaza Fatima said on Sunday that the government was not behind the recent slowdown.

She said her team has been "working tirelessly" with internet service providers and telcos to resolve the issue.

Ms Fatima said a "large population" had been using VPNs and "this strained the network, causing the internet to go slow".

She said reports that the state was behind the slow connections were "completely false".
However Ms Fatima said the government had been upgrading its systems to improve cyber security.

"It is the right of the government to [take such measures] given the cyber security attacks that this country has to go through," she said.

Activists however accuse the minister of "dodging criticism like a usual politician".

Shahzad Ahmad, director of local digital watchdog Bytes for All, told the BBC his organisation has "ample tech evident" to prove the existence of a firewall.

"It seems its purpose is to monitor online traffic... and limit dissemination [of information] in online spaces, particularly curbing political expression," Mr Ahmad said.

"Even if civil liberties don’t matter, this is now about people’s livelihood and the economy as well," said Farieha Aziz, co-founder of Bolo Bhi, a local non-profit that advocates for free speech online.
Business leaders and associations have warned that the slow connections could endanger Pakistan’s business potential.

"The imposition of the firewall has triggered a perfect storm of challenges, with prolonged internet disconnections and erratic VPN performance threatening a complete meltdown of business operations," said the Pakistan Software Houses Association.

This could cost the IT sector up to $300 million, the association said, calling it a "direct, tangible and aggressive assault on the industry’s viability".

"A mass exodus of IT companies is not just a possibility but an imminent reality if immediate and decisive action is not taken," it said.

Activists have filed a petition before the Islamabad High Court, calling for access to the internet to be declared a fundamental right under Pakistan’s constitution.

India

India PM Modi to visit Ukraine, foreign ministry says (Reuters)

Reuters [8/19/2024 2:15 AM, YP Rajesh, 5.2M, Neutral]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Ukraine, the Indian foreign ministry said on Monday, his first trip to the war-torn country since its conflict with Russia and about a month after he met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Details of the trip will be shared later in the day, the foreign ministry said. Indian media have reported that Modi is likely to visit Kyiv this month.

Western capitals have imposed sanctions on Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but friendly nations such as India and China have continued to trade with it.

India has refrained from directly blaming Russia - for what Moscow calls a special military operation - while urging the neighbours to resolve the conflict through dialogue and diplomacy.

The U.S. has raised concerns over India’s relationship with Russia, especially at a time when Washington has been seeking to strengthen ties with New Delhi as a potential counterweight to an ascendant China.

New Delhi is seeking to deepen its relationship with the West while keeping ties intact with old friend Russia.

India accuses Bangladesh’s interim leaders of failing to protect Hindus (Financial Times)

Financial Times [8/17/2024 4:31 AM, Benjamin Parkin and John Reed, 14.7M, Negative]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India has accused Bangladesh’s new government of failing to protect the country’s Hindu minority, fuelling tensions between the south Asian neighbours and key regional partners.

Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh who was toppled this month after weeks of protests, was close to New Delhi and a linchpin of India’s strategy to counter China and Islamist extremism in South Asia.

But India’s support for her increasingly autocratic government, which ordered a crackdown on student protesters that resulted in hundreds of deaths, has sparked widespread anger towards New Delhi in Bangladesh. Sheikh Hasina fled to India last week.

In the ensuing violence, minorities including Hindus were attacked in many parts of Muslim-majority Bangladesh and hundreds reportedly massed at the Indian border to seek refuge in their predominantly Hindu neighbour. About 8 per cent of Bangladesh’s 170mn-strong population is Hindu.

The attacks have caused alarm and fuelled hostility in India towards Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist. Hindu groups have called for Modi’s government to do more to protect them, with hundreds protesting in the Indian capital on Friday against the “atrocities” in Bangladesh. Modi on Thursday said that “1.4bn Indians are worried about the safety of the Hindus”.

“Indians want the security of Hindus and minorities there to be ensured,” said Modi, whose religious nationalist Bharatiya Janata party sees itself as a champion of Hindu interests.

Many in Bangladesh, however, consider reports of rampant hate crimes part of a disinformation campaign by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League, arguing that incidents appeared to be motivated by political affiliation. The secular party draws considerable support from minorities, and some attacks were against Awami League leaders who were Hindu.

The allegations are a serious complication as the countries try to mend a vital partnership. Bangladesh relies on its larger neighbour for trade and investment and New Delhi wants stability to prevent chaos spilling over its borders.

With Bangladesh’s police having gone into hiding after the former government’s collapse, there is limited hard information on the scale of violence. Bangladeshi Hindu organisations said there had been more than 200 attacks against minorities since Sheikh Hasina’s fall. Rights groups such as Amnesty International have called for investigations.

“Our homes, our shops and our temples have been vandalised,” said Kajal Ghosh, a 46-year-old Hindu pharmacist who was among dozens who gathered in Dhaka to protest against the violence this week. “People think that Hindus are supporters of the Awami League, so they tried to push us out of the country.”

Touhid Hossain, Bangladesh’s interim foreign minister, told the Financial Times that regional policy would not necessarily change under Yunus. “India is a very important neighbour to us,” he said. “We have grievances among the people about Indian conduct of Bangladesh policy, particularly in the last 10-15 years . . . It’s possible through friendly interaction between Bangladesh and India to remove these grievances.”

Hossain said alleged incidents of violence received “disproportionate publicity in India” and many “have been because of political reasons, but not communal [religious] reasons”. He said no violence was acceptable and vowed that the government was “hell bent” on taking action against perpetrators.

Sheikh Hasina’s ousting was a strategic setback to India, which considered the Awami League to be its most dependable regional partner. New Delhi helped Sheikh Hasina’s father, independence leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to break away from Pakistan in 1971.

Officials accused later governments led by rival parties such as the Bangladesh Nationalist party of being soft on China and extremism. Ties improved after Sheikh Hasina was elected in 2009, with India and its companies investing heavily to counterbalance China’s Belt and Road Initiative projects.

Mutual mistrust is now widespread. Rajot Shuvro Roy, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi Hindu student at Dhaka University who helped organise anti-Awami League protests, called the attacks on minorities “horrific” but said India was “making some hyperbole” over them. “Sheikh Hasina wants to tarnish the image of the interim government,” he said.

In India, observers fear Yunus’s interim government will be softer on Islamists and that elections will pave the way for the BNP’s return to power.

Indrani Bagchi, chief executive of the Ananta Aspen Centre, a New Delhi think-tank, said the violence was a “major issue for a BJP government”.

A normalisation of the security situation, with many police stations reopening, should ease some of the strain. “The attacks on minority communities should die down,” said Sarbhanu Nath, a research analyst at defence intelligence group Janes.

But Sheikh Hasina’s continued presence in India is a complication. Bangladeshi authorities this week opened a murder investigation against the former prime minister for her alleged role in the police killing of a protester.

The two countries have an extradition treaty, but Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed told the FT that she has not sought asylum elsewhere and will stay in India “as long as she wants to”.

“The Indian government has always been a friend,” he said.

Observers said they expected both countries to recognise that they must re-establish trust, even if it takes time. “The stakes both in Bangladesh and India are too high for the relationship to fail or collapse,” said Constantino Xavier, a senior fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi.

“India has got this paranoia about pro-China sentiments in Bangladesh,” one diplomat said, adding: “The Indians are smart enough to see that they have to accept the reality and work with the new government.”

Indian Kashmir to Hold Legislative Election for First Time in a Decade (New York Times)

New York Times [8/16/2024 4:14 PM, Sameer Yasir, 831K, Neutral]
For the first time in a decade, Muslim-majority Kashmir in India will hold an election for its regional legislature starting next month, the country’s election commission said on Friday.

The announcement is a step toward returning some measure of self-governance to Kashmir after the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped the region of its semiautonomous status in 2019 and suspended democracy there.

In December, India’s Supreme Court ruled in a case challenging the revocation of Kashmir’s special status. While the court upheld the government’s move, it ordered that a process be undertaken to select a democratically elected government and to restore statehood for what is formally known as Jammu and Kashmir.

“Everyone we met wanted elections,” Rajiv Kumar, India’s chief election commissioner, told reporters in New Delhi, referring to a recent visit he made to the region.

Kashmir is at the heart of a long and bitter dispute between India and Pakistan. The Indian-controlled part of the region has endured decades of political unrest. Tens of thousands of militants, Indian soldiers and ordinary civilians have been killed during an insurgency.

A legislative election that would have taken place in 2019 was deferred after the federal government in New Delhi brought the region — the only one in India with a Muslim majority — under its direct control.

Iltija Mufti, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party, a local party that previously governed the region, said that holding an election was essential to restoring Kashmiris’ long suspended fundamental rights.

“Kashmir was a semiautonomous state. We had our own flag, our own constitution,” Ms. Mufti said. “None of that remains anymore. But can we concede this democratic space? I don’t think so, not even an inch.”

Still, Ms. Mufti said she believed that the federal government would try to tilt the playing field toward its preferred candidates, denying those who once governed the region a fair chance to return to power.

After the last election, in 2014, Mr. Modi’s party joined a powerful regional party dominated by Muslims to create a state government that allowed Hindu nationalists to rule the region for the first time.

That alliance broke down in 2018 after years of disagreement over how to bring some semblance of normalcy and peace to Kashmir’s blood-soaked streets. The legislature was dissolved, and as the violence intensified, India and Pakistan — nuclear-armed neighbors — moved to the brink of war.

About a year later, Mr. Modi’s government stripped Kashmir of its semiautonomy and split it into two federally administrated enclaves. To quell any possible street protests, the Indian government shut down communication systems, deployed tens of thousands of troops to the area and jailed thousands of people, including separatist leaders, human rights activists and civilians.

Since then, India has maintained a tight grip over the region, including by dismissing from their jobs many government officials suspected of opposing New Delhi’s control.

The region has been plunged into fresh turmoil, including in places that have been historically spared violence, with 50 Indian Army soldiers having been killed in clashes with militants over the past 32 months, according to local media reports.

Results from the Kashmir election will be released on Oct. 4, the election commission said, adding that more than 8.7 million people are eligible to cast ballots.

Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, a former lawmaker in Kashmir, said the growing militancy and deaths of soldiers had put pressure on the federal government, leaving it with no other option but to announce the election.

“We know it will be a less powerful assembly,” he said. “But it provides us the opportunity to express ourselves, and we can raise our voice against injustice.”

India to hold first assembly elections in Kashmir in 10 years (AP)

AP [8/16/2024 9:05 AM, Aijaz Hussain, 26386K]
India on Friday announced three-phased assembly elections in disputed Kashmir, the first in a decade and in a new political environment after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in 2019 stripped the Muslim-majority region of its semi-autonomy and downgraded it to a federally controlled territory.

Since those changes the region has remained on edge, governed by a New Delhi appointed administrator and run by bureaucrats with no democratic credentials.

The new polls will be held between Sept.18 and Oct. 1, India’s Election Commission said at a news conference in the capital, New Delhi. The vote will take place in a staggered process that allows the government to deploy tens of thousands of troops to prevent any outbreak of violence. Votes will be counted on Oct. 4.

The multi-stage voting will elect a local government — a chief minister who will serve as the region’s top official with a council of ministers — from pro-India parties participating in the elections.

However, contrary to the past, the local assembly will barely have any legislative powers with only nominal control over education and culture. Legislating laws for the region will continue to be with India’s parliament while policy decisions will be made in the capital.

Local politicians have demanded the earliest restoration of statehood so that full legislative powers could be returned to the local assembly.

Public reaction to the announcement was mixed.

“We are happy that we will finally have our election,” said Haya Javaid, a resident of Srinagar, the region’s main city.

“It would have been great if they (authorities) had also announced the restoration of statehood” for the region, said another resident Malik Zahoor.

Mohit Bhan, a spokesman for Kashmir’s People’s Democratic Party, said the announcement was “like too little, too late.” He wrote on social platform X that the region “has been reduced to a municipality” that was “once a powerful state with special status.”

“This isn’t democracy, it’s a mockery. Restoring full statehood should be the first step,” he added.

The 2024 elections will be held for 90 constituencies, excluding Ladakh. In 2022, the Indian government redrew assembly constituencies and added four seats to the Hindu-dominated Jammu and three to the overwhelmingly Muslim-majority Kashmir valley.

The former state assembly had 87 members including four from Ladakh.

The last assembly election was held in 2014 after which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party for the first time ruled the region in a coalition with the Peoples Democratic Party. In 2018, the BJP withdrew its support to the government following which the assembly was dissolved.

A year later, New Delhi divided the region into Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir while scrapping its statehood amid a massive security and communications lockdown for months.

Kashmir is divided between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan. Each administers part of the territory, but both claim the entire territory.

Militants in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir have been fighting New Delhi’s rule since 1989.

India insists the Kashmir militancy is Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan denies the charge, and most Kashmiris consider it a legitimate freedom struggle. Tens of thousands of civilians, rebels and government forces have been killed in the conflict.

Authorities say violence in the region has reduced significantly since 2019 but in recent months, there has been a sharp rise in militant attacks on government forces in parts of the Hindu-dominated Jammu area.

Kashmiri Muslim separatist leaders who challenge India’s sovereignty over the disputed region have in the past called for a boycott of the vote calling it an illegitimate exercise under military occupation.

What to know about Indian protests over a student doctor’s rape and killing (Washington Post)

Washington Post [8/17/2024 11:51 AM, Adela Suliman, 54755K]
India has been gripped by a wave of protests following the rape and killing of a female trainee doctor in Kolkata. Indian medical workers are carrying out a 24-hour national strike called by the Indian Medical Association — the country’s largest doctors group — which said that all non-emergency services would be withdrawn until Sunday morning.

Large protests have taken place across India this week, with one aid group calling the rape against the student “a tragic reminder of the pervasive violence against women in India.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bollywood stars are among those speaking out against the attack.

Here’s what to know.

The trainee doctor was ‘brutally’ raped and killed

The 31-year-old medical trainee, who has not been named by the media, was found dead in the early hours of Aug. 9 at Kolkata’s R G Kar Medical College. She had been “brutally raped and killed,” the IMA said, noting that she had been working a 36-hour shift and that “the lack of safe spaces for women” to rest was a serious problem.

The young doctor had gone to sleep on a piece of carpet in a seminar room at the college after her shift, given the lack of any dormitories or resting rooms there, her colleagues told Reuters.

Her body was found with extensive injuries and bleeding, Indian media and Reuters reported, citing a postmortem report.

An autopsy of her body has confirmed sexual assault and one person has been detained in connection with the crime, the Associated Press reported, adding that the family of the victim have alleged it was a case of a gang rape and more people were involved.

The IMA has accused college authorities and local police of delays and inadequate handling of the case. State officers investigating the crime have been made to hand the case to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation.

The protests have spread across major cities

Thousands of women have taken to the streets in major cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad in “Reclaim the Night” protests this week, decrying inadequate safety laws for women and calling for greater protections and accountability.

Activists argue that the case is emblematic of how India has failed to tackle sexual violence. “As a society and as a nation, we are failing girls and women,” Sandeep Chachra, executive director of ActionAid Association, said in an email Saturday. “The slow pace of justice often emboldens perpetrators. We need better policing and a more effective criminal justice system to deter such heinous crimes.”

The IMA, meanwhile, said the government had not adequately acknowledged “the violence on doctors and hospitals” and said security at hospitals had to be improved. It also noted that the hospital where the student had worked was “vandalized by a large crowd which destroyed various sections of the hospital” on Thursday, with the medical students who were protesting there also attacked.

“Doctors especially women are vulnerable to violence because of the nature of the profession,” the IMA said. “It is for the authorities to provide for the safety of doctors inside hospitals and campuses.”

One doctor, Richa Garg, who took part in Friday’s protests in New Delhi, told the AP that she no longer felt safe at work. “As a woman, it boils my blood,” she said. “The culprits of this crime should be found immediately … and our workplaces should be made safer.”

Modi addressed the issue on Thursday, saying: “As a society, we have to think about the atrocities being committed against our mothers, daughters and sisters.” When Modi first ran for office in 2014, women’s safety featured prominently in his outreach to female voters.

Bollywood celebrities have also spoken out, with actress Alia Bhatt writing on Instagram it was “another day of realisation that women are not safe, anywhere,” and “another horrific atrocity” that showed “nothing much has changed” since the brutal 2012 gang rape and killing of a student on a bus in New Delhi, which also sparked mass national protests.

The killing in Kolkata also drew a response from British doctors, with Britain’s Medical Association saying: “We stand in solidarity with doctors in Kolkata and across India at this upsetting time, and support their call over urgent measures to improve the safety of female doctors in the workplace, including providing secure and private spaces for doctors to use while on shift.”

Gender-based violence remains a serious problem in India

While the protests following the 2012 gang rape in New Delhi saw the country usher in landmark legal reforms, toughening penalties for crimes against women, expanding the definition of rape and setting up fast-track courts to expedite rape trials, activists in India say more still needs to be done.

“The authorities have failed to effectively enforce the law,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement. “Women and girls in India have the right to live and work without fear for their safety and to do so with dignity.”

Violent crimes against women continue to rise, according to national statistics, and high-profile rape cases continue to surface with alarming regularity, largely as a result of what many say is a culture of downplaying sexual harassment and violence — and of giving impunity to the perpetrators, The Washington Post previously reported.

“The rape and murder of the trainee doctor in Kolkata is a tragic reminder of the pervasive violence against women in India. As a nation and society, we need to reflect on how little we have achieved in making our workplaces, cities, villages, and even homes safe for women,” Chachra said.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau, a government agency, reported around 24,923 rape cases in 2012, but that had risen to 31,677 by 2021, according to ActionAid Association, which said it was in part due to “greater awareness, legal reforms, and reduced societal stigma around reporting sexual violence.”

Rashmi Mishra, director of Inspiring Indian Women, a group that champions women’s rights, called the death of the trainee doctor a “horrendous case,” but added she hoped the strikes would create pressure on the authorities to take action.

People in India are now “more awake than ever” and are “demanding justice,” she added in an email Saturday.

India’s Top Court Steps In After Doctors Strike Over Rape Case (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [8/19/2024 1:49 AM, Swati Gupta, 5.5M, Neutral]
India’s Supreme Court will begin hearings this week into the alleged rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata, which has sparked protests and a nationwide strike by doctors.

The country’s highest court said it will hear the matter using its “suo motu” powers, which allows it to hold proceedings under its own mission and without a petition being filed.

The court’s move followed the alleged rape and murder of a 31-year-old graduate trainee on Aug. 9 on the premises of a government hospital in Kolkata. Junior doctors and medical students in the city have held almost nightly vigils since then, and the country’s main doctors group called a nationwide strike over the weekend calling for justice for the victim and better security for medical workers.

The court didn’t provide details of who will be questioned during the hearings, but protesters allege the initial investigation was mishandled by local police. The federal Central Bureau of Investigation has since taken over the case.

Private and government hospitals in parts of the country shut down non-essential services for a 24-hour strike on Aug. 17. Major hospitals in Delhi, like Fortis and Apollo, joined the protest and provided only essential services, according to local media reports. Medical services continue to be disrupted in Kolkata as protests on the streets and outside hospitals grow.

The Indian Medical Association wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling for the government to declare “hospitals as safe zones with mandatory security entitlements,” such as airports. In his Independence Day speech last week, Modi called for stronger punishment against those who commit sexual crimes, although he didn’t directly refer to the Kolkata case.

Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal where Kolkata is based, has faced criticism from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party for her government’s handling of the investigation. She’s blamed political parties of “trying to foment trouble” by instigating vandalism at the hospital where the alleged rape and murder took place.

The case has drawn parallels with the gang-rape and death of a student in Delhi in 2012, which drew global attention to India’s high levels of sexual violence. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, a total of 31,516 cases of rape were registered in 2022.

Protests spread over Indian doctor’s rape and murder (Reuters)

Reuters [8/18/2024 12:32 AM, Subrata Nag Choudhury and Sunil Kataria, 2042K]
Some Indian junior doctors remained off the job on Sunday as they demanded swift justice for a colleague who was raped and murdered, despite the end of a strike called by a big doctors’ association, while some other people held street protests.

Doctors across the country have held protests, candlelight marches and refused to see non-emergency patients in the past week after the killing of the 31-year-old postgraduate student of chest medicine in the early hours of Aug. 9 in the eastern city of Kolkata.

In solidarity with the doctors, thousands of people marched in the streets of Kolkata on Sunday evening chanting "we want justice", as authorities in West Bengal state struggle to contain demonstrations against the horrific crime.

Women activists say the incident at the British colonial-era R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital has highlighted how women in India continue to suffer despite tougher laws following the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in Delhi in 2012.

"My daughter is gone but millions of sons and daughters are now with me," the father of the victim, who cannot be identified under Indian law, told reporters late on Saturday, referring to the protesting doctors. "This has given me a lot of strength and I feel we will gain something out of it."

India introduced sweeping changes to the criminal justice system, including tougher sentences, after the 2012 attack, but campaigners say little has changed and not enough has been done to deter violence against women.

A police volunteer, designated to help police personnel and their families with hospital admissions when needed, has been arrested and charged with the crime.

His mother told Reuters she was in remorse but would extend whatever support her son needs.

"I should not have given birth to my son ... it’s a huge mistake," she said at her home.

The Indian Medical Association, whose 24-hour strike ended at 6 a.m. (0030 GMT) on Sunday, told Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a letter that, as 60% of India’s doctors are women, he needed to intervene to ensure hospital staff were protected by security protocols akin to those at airports.

‘COULD STOP EMERGENCY SERVICES’

The R.G. Kar hospital has been rocked by agitation and rallies for more than a week. Police banned the assembly of five or more people around the hospital for a week from Sunday, which was defied by the protesters late in the day before they dispersed.

The government has urged doctors to return to duty to treat rising cases of dengue and malaria while it sets up a committee to suggest measures to improve protection for healthcare professionals.

Most doctors had resumed their usual activities, IMA officials said.

"The doctors are back to their routine," said Dr. Madan Mohan Paliwal, the IMA head in the most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. "The next course of action will be decided if the government does not take any strict steps to protect doctors... and this time we could stop emergency services too."

But the All India Residents and Junior Doctors’ Joint Action Forum said on Saturday it would continue a "nationwide cease-work" with a 72-hour deadline for authorities to conduct a thorough inquiry and make arrests.

In Modi’s home state of Gujarat, more than 6,000 trainee doctors in government hospitals continued to stay away from non-emergency medical services on Sunday for a third day, although private institutes resumed regular operations.

Dr. Prabhas Ranjan Tripathy, additional medical superintendent of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the eastern city of Bhubaneswar, said junior doctors and interns had not resumed duty.

"There is a lot of pressure on others because manpower is reduced," he said.

NSB

Protester Who Faced Off Against Police Becomes Bangladesh’s ‘Tank Man’ (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal [8/17/2024 1:58 PM, Krishna Pokharel, Shan Li, and Syed Zain Al-Mahmood, 810K, Neutral]
In May, 23-year-old English major Abu Sayed was looking forward to graduating. He posted nostalgic Facebook photos of himself and his classmates at their last class, in a message dotted with colorful heart emojis.

“Praise God, after many ups and downs, uncertainty,” Sayed wrote in another post.

Two months later, his killing was captured by local journalists in videos that inflamed Bangladesh and galvanized students from around the country to participate in demonstrations that forced former prime minister Sheikh Hasina to resign Aug. 5.

A video snippet shows a solitary young man, his arms spread wide, facing a phalanx of police in riot gear outside the gates of Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur, the city in northwestern Bangladesh where he studied. Shots ring out and he stumbles, then flings his arms out once more. The cops raise their shotguns and fire.

Sayed’s death on July 16 turned a protest over recruitment for government jobs into a fight for a more democratic Bangladesh, protesters and political experts say. He has been likened to other lone protesters who faced off against authoritarian regimes—the country’s own version of Tank Man, who stood defiant at the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Beijing.

The Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus, who took over as head of an interim government formed after Hasina’s ouster, said Sayed’s death inspired other Bangladeshis to win “a second liberation.” He compared the toppling of Hasina, whose rule had become increasingly autocratic, to Bangladesh’s 1971 independence from Pakistan. Sayed was among the first demonstrators to be killed in protests that have claimed at least 500 lives since mid-July.

Protesters saw in Sayed the core of the protest movement: millions of young people with a hard-won education who nevertheless find themselves shut off from economic opportunity and a voice in Bangladesh. The country’s economy was growing but with unemployment in double-digits, many pin their hopes of a better life on a government job.

“He was initially motivated to make something of himself and help his family,” Mohammad Ibrahim Khalil, a 24-year-old sociology student who lived with Sayed, said. “But it became something bigger. There was something standing in the way, and he wanted to dismantle those barriers.”

One of nine children, Sayed was the only one of his siblings to attend university. He grew up in a mud and bamboo house surrounded by rice fields in a village near Rangpur. He completed high school on a scholarship of 48,000 taka, or about $400.

His father, Mohammad Mokbul Hossain, a farmer, sold a cow and mortgaged a piece of land to give Sayed a few hundred dollars for university. His son financed his education mostly by tutoring children, Hossain said.

“He struggled,” his father said. “He earned his own money and made his own way in the world.”

Sayed was a mild-mannered young man who never expressed an interest in politics, friends and family said. He volunteered at a youth-run charity and collected blankets to distribute to people in need during the winter.

His desk in the room he shared with another student was a mess of books, including American novelist Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” Study notes he made for tutoring classes showed how a comma or a semicolon could alter a sentence’s meaning.

Friends at Begum Rokeya University recalled seeing social-media posts from students in the capital Dhaka calling for protests, after a court in early June reinstated unpopular government job quotas, reserving nearly a third of positions for families of freedom fighters in the country’s independence struggle.

Sayed took up the cause and started a Facebook group to coordinate with other students. Many expressed fury over the quota system, which they viewed as unfair and likely to favor followers of Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009. Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who was the leader of Bangladesh’s independence struggle and the first president.

After a protest erupted at Dhaka University on July 1, Sayed rallied students at his university to demonstrate, too. In the beginning, only a few joined.

“He was fighting a lonely fight. He was just one guy and some friends,” said Khalil, the sociology student.

Soon more people turned out. The protests at Rangpur were initially peaceful, but tensions flared as the Awami League’s student wing confronted protesters. Things became more heated after Hasina made a remark on July 14 that appeared to diminish the protesters, using the word razakar, a term associated with traitors during Bangladesh’s independence struggle.

On July 16, armed police officers stopped a large group of students at the university gate. Some students began throwing stones and suddenly, without warning, the police opened fire, students said.

Sayfuzzaman Faruki, a senior Rangpur police official who is heading an inquiry into Sayed’s death, said the police official responsible for the area has been suspended since the interim government took power. The inquiry committee has analyzed footage and interviewed witnesses, and expects to make its findings public soon, he said.

The Hasina government, before it fell, suspended two policemen involved in the shooting and opened an inquiry into the death.

Most protesters scattered and ducked for cover when firing started, students who were there said. But Sayed stood at the front and shouted for people to hold their ground. A day earlier, he had posted a tribute on Facebook to a professor famed for taking bullets for his students in a protest that was a prelude to Bangladesh’s independence struggle. “Your tomb, our inspiration,” he wrote.

The video shows Sayed flinching after at least one bullet hits him. Moments later, he is crouched on the ground with his head down. Another student runs over and pulls him away.

A few protesters put Sayed into a rickshaw and tried to take him to the hospital, his friends said. But a mob of Hasina supporters, mostly from the university, attacked the rickshaw with sticks and machetes, students who were present said.

“We think they wanted to finish him off,” said 23-year-old Belal Hossain, Sayed’s classmate, who was shot in the hand at the protest.

Zannatun Nayeema Shefa, another classmate, rushed to the hospital along with a few friends.

Sayed was dead on arrival.

“There were so many holes in his body, it looked like a sieve,” Shefa said.

A few students grabbed the stretcher holding Sayed’s body and wheeled it out of the hospital for fear police might take it to conceal the cause of death. On the way, a contingent of police blocked their path, pointed guns, and loaded Sayed’s body into a truck, multiple students who were present said. The police took the body back to the hospital.

After a closed-door meeting with police, doctors emerged to declare that the cause of death was rubber bullets, Shefa and another student said.

A doctor who conducted an autopsy on Abu Sayed’s body said he found “multiple pellets” inside and that Sayed died due to “shock and internal hemorrhage.”

By then, a friend of Sayed’s had called his parents to tell them their son had been shot and killed. His mother, Mossammat Monoara Begum, said she had no inkling that Sayed had been involved in the protest movement. Someone showed her the video that had gone viral.

“I felt like people were shooting him like a bird or an animal,” she said. “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I felt a sharp pain in my chest.”

Sayed’s father, Hossain, watched the video in disbelief. “My soul left my body,” he said.

At the Rangpur hospital morgue, the body was loaded into an ambulance for the journey home, family members who gathered there said. But the police stopped the vehicle and said the family first had to agree to bury him that night, the family members said.

“They wanted to hide the body,” said Ruhul Amin, a 28-year-old cousin of Sayed.

At midnight, a local government official showed up at the family home along with several Awami League members. They too demanded that Sayed be buried that night.

Sayed’s father refused. The family had to perform last rites and read prayers from the Quran. There was no way to do that in haste.

“My son is my son, and I will decide where and when to bury him,” Hossain said.

Nur Mohammad Monju, one of the local Awami League members at the family’s house the night of the shooting, said he went only to console Sayed’s father.

Iqbal Hasan, the local official, said he was there on orders from senior officials as a government representative and didn’t pressure the family. “The body was buried in accordance with the family’s demand,” he said.

A bamboo fence encircles the spot where Sayed’s body was laid to rest. A black-and-white sign announces, “The grave of Abu Sayed, the martyr.”

As news of Sayed’s killing spread, protests surged across the country, with tens of thousands of students joining. In early August, students planned a march to Hasina’s official residence. The military told her they could no longer protect her, according to a politician. She resigned and fled to India on a Bangladesh Air Force plane.

In the weeks since, Sayed has become for many in Bangladesh the everyman hero whose death helped free the country.

The road leading to Sayed’s family home has a new sign: “First national martyr, Abu Syed road.”

His father, who lived through Bangladesh’s bloody 1971 revolution, remembers the violent partition of Pakistan and India in 1947. He said he is proud of Sayed for sacrificing his life for his country.

His mother wishes Sayed had never gotten involved in the protests.

“I’d rather have him here with me,” she said.

Bangladesh Unrest Kills More Than 600 People, UN Report Says (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [8/17/2024 5:20 AM, Arun Devnath, 27296K]
More than 600 people were killed during weeks-long violence in Bangladesh, the UN Human Rights Office said in a preliminary report.

About 400 deaths were reported from July 16 to Aug. 4, while around 250 people were said to have been killed during the new wave of protests between Aug. 5 and Aug. 6, the UN said, citing media reports and the protest movement. It did not specify the number of people killed in revenge attacks after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned on Aug. 5 and fled to neighboring India.

“There are serious and credible allegations that the security forces responded overall to both protests and subsequent violence with unnecessary and disproportionate force,” according to the UN. “The police and paramilitary forces appear to have frequently used force indiscriminately” against the peaceful protesters and those with elements of violence, it said.

Mainul Hassan, chief of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, didn’t respond to calls outside of regular busines hours.

A team will visit Dhaka next week to discuss the modalities for an investigation into human rights violations, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said in the report.

An interim government led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus has taken charge since Hasina left.

Minority groups in Bangladesh detail violence, mistreatment following government’s collapse: ‘scapegoats’ (FOX News)

FOX News [8/17/2024 11:35 AM, Peter Aitken, 48215K]
Members of minority groups in Bangladesh spoke to Fox News Digital about the violence and mistreatment they have faced following the government’s collapse earlier this month, all using false names for fear of reprisal.

Violence, even murder and the burning down of minority-owned businesses, places of worship and residences have been a major problem since the government of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was overthrown following violent protests. Bangladesh is 90% Muslim, with some Christians but mostly Hindus and Buddhists making up the rest of the population.

Sathya, a Hindu from Chittagong, told Fox News Digital that the Hasina government "wasn’t the best" towards the Hindu minority, pointing out cases of land-grabbing of Hindu homes and temples under her governance, but suggested that they faced better treatment than under other governments - "the lesser evil," but only when "we are out of options."

"Hindus have always been the scapegoats’ and were blamed whenever there was an economic crisis or other political issue that we had no control over," Sathya said. Indian outlet the Deccan Herald reported that 278 Hindu-owned locations have been ransacked since Hasina fled the country.

He claimed that if a Hindu home sat empty, squatters would intrude and start building, and the government and legal system would do little to help protect Hindu land rights. Mobs would walk in and take whatever they wanted, such as furniture, cash and food.

Even within the Muslim community, the Ahmadiya sect has faced persecution from the Sunni majority who call them "heretics," Ali, told Fox News Digital. "Our group has also been increasingly targeted just like the Hindus and other religious minorities."

A Bangladeshi citizen who now lives in the U.S., says that when he looks at his homeland, he sees "no law and order" and that "Hindus have to stay vigilant, especially at night, worried that our homes will be raided and looted."

"The government seems to not care about minorities," he said while withholding his name. "A hotline was provided for Hindus to call if they are targeted, but nobody answers the phone number provided."

"Even though the region in general is a Buddhist minority today, Buddhism originated not far from here in nearby Nepal and has had a very long history here and is one of the major world religions. We wonder why the rest of the world stays silent when we are in such a crisis,’ Rajarshi, told Fox News Digital.

He felt that the latest violence portrays that any group that is not Sunni is not safe. "What’s the use of all of us having fought for independence from Pakistan if we are told we have no place in this country now?"

While Christians make up a tiny minority of the country’s population, Fox News Digital recently reported that the organization Open Doors, which tracks discrimination of Christians worldwide, ranked Bangladesh as having "very high" persecution levels, claiming that "converts to Christianity face the most severe restrictions, discrimination and attacks."

"Religious beliefs are tied to the identity of the community, so turning from the locally dominant faith to following Jesus can result in accusations of betrayal," the group wrote on its website. "Bangladeshi converts often gather in small house churches due to the risk of attack."

Earlier this week Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on social media platform X that he had spoken with the country’s interim leader Professor Muhammad Yunus, and the duo had "exchanged views on the prevailing situation."

"Reiterated India’s support for a democratic, stable, peaceful and progressive Bangladesh," Modi wrote. "He assured protection, safety and security of Hindus and all minorities in Bangladesh."

The Washington Post reported that Modi’s government had pressured the United States to ease up on criticism of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and the Biden administration complied even putting plans for further sanctions against the Bangladeshi government on hold.

The U.S. State Department told Fox News Digital that "Our sustained engagement on democracy and human rights in Bangladesh and around the world speaks for itself," and added that "We do not comment on our private diplomatic communications."

Shaina Nana Chudasama, the spokesperson for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told Fox News Digital that the government "has made it clear we want peace at any cost, and we wish for the well-being of all Bangladeshis - both the Muslim majority and the minorities. That’s what we strive for as neighbors."

"The ups and downs in our relationship will continue. We have maintained cordial ties with Bangladesh in the past and will continue to do so no matter whoever the stakeholders in power are," the spokesperson said. "We’ve been great with the Bangladeshi refugees we have taken in so far, even though it has taken a toll on our economy.

"Our limited plea is for them to protect the Hindus and other minorities because that is of the utmost importance," the spokesperson added.

Bangladesh re-elected Hasina’s Awami League party in January, extending its rule, which had started in 2008, prompting student protests at universities that ultimately spilled out into nationwide demonstrations against the party’s rule.

Both the party and its leader have faced accusations of "iron-fisted" and authoritarian rule, with many claiming the 2014 and 2018 elections as "shams" since the opposition either boycotted or were reduced to a "hopeless minority," according to the New Yorker.

Shrinking employment and high inflation marred the Awami League’s last term, and the economic stress proved too much for many, especially a new policy that implemented a quota for civil service work thereby withholding coveted jobs in what the protesters claimed was a kleptocratic move.

Ultimately, Hasina resigned and fled to India, taking many by surprise but allowing the protesters to have the change they wanted, which included putting humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus in place as the chief adviser to the interim government ahead of fresh elections in November.

Student protesters plan to create a new party to contest the elections and end the two-party monopoly that has burdened the country for almost two decades, Reuters reported. The student groups at the center of the protest want to talk with citizens across the country before deciding on their platform and will finalize their decision in a month.

"We don’t have any other plan that could break the binary without forming a party," Tamid Chowdhury, one of the student coordinators at the center of the push to oust Hasina, told reporters.

Another student said that the "spirit of the movement was to create a new Bangladesh, one where no fascist or autocrat can return."

"To ensure that, we need structural reforms, which will definitely take some time," Nahid Islam, a protester who took up a role in Yunus’s temporary cabinet, explained.

Bangladesh’s Yunus pledges support for Rohingya refugees, vital garment industry (Agence France-Presse)

Agence France-Presse [8/18/2024 10:56 AM, Staff, 8591K]
Bangladesh will maintain support both for its immense Rohingya refugee population and its vital garment trade, Nobel laureate and new leader Muhammad Yunus said Sunday in his first major policy address.

Yunus, 84, returned from Europe this month after a student-led revolution to take up the monumental task of steering democratic reforms in a country riven by institutional decay.

His predecessor Sheikh Hasina, 76, had suddenly fled the country days earlier by helicopter after 15 years of iron-fisted rule.

Setting out his priorities in front of diplomats and UN representatives, Yunus vowed continuity on two of the biggest policy challenges of his caretaker administration.

“Our government will continue to support the million-plus Rohingya people sheltered in Bangladesh,” Yunus said.

“We need the sustained efforts of the international community for Rohingya humanitarian operations and their eventual repatriation to their homeland, Myanmar, with safety, dignity and full rights,” he added.

Bangladesh is home to around one million Rohingya refugees.

Most of them fled neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 after a military crackdown now the subject of a genocide investigation by a United Nations court.

The weeks of unrest and mass protests that toppled Hasina also saw widespread disruption to the country’s linchpin textile industry, with suppliers shifting orders out of the country.

“We won’t tolerate any attempt to disrupt the global clothing supply chain, in which we are a key player,” Yunus said.

Bangladesh’s 3,500 garment factories account for around 85 percent of its $55 billion in annual exports.

Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in microfinance, credited with helping millions of Bangladeshis out of grinding poverty.

He took office as “chief adviser” to a caretaker administration – all fellow civilians bar two retired generals – and has said he wants to hold elections “within a few months”.

Before her ouster, Hasina’s government was accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of her political opponents.

She fled the country on August 5 to neighbouring India, her government’s biggest political patron and benefactor, when protesters swarmed into the capital Dhaka to force her out of office.

‘Hundreds were killed’

“Hundreds of thousands of our valiant students and people rose up against the brutal dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina,” Yunus said during his address, at times visibly emotional.

“She fled the country, but only after the security forces and her party’s student wing committed the worst civilian massacre since the country’s independence,” he added.

“Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured.”

More than 450 people were killed between the start of a police crackdown on student protests and her ouster three weeks later.

‘Dictatorship’

A UN fact-finding mission is expected in Bangladesh soon to probe “atrocities” committed during that time.

“We want an impartial and internationally credible investigation into the massacre,” Yunus said on Sunday.

“We will provide whatever support the UN investigators need.”

Yunus again committed to hold free and fair elections “as soon as we can complete our mandate to carry out vital reforms in our election commission, judiciary, civil administration, security forces, and media”.

“The Sheikh Hasina dictatorship destroyed every institution of the country,” he said.

He added that his administration would “make sincere efforts to promote national reconciliation”.

A quiet military coup in Bangladesh (The Hill – opinion)

The Hill [8/17/2024 8:00 AM, Brahma Chellaney, 18.8M, Neutral]
Many media accounts have credited the toppling of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government almost entirely to a student-led uprising. Unmentioned are either the army’s role in the overthrow, including packing the “Iron Lady” off to India, or the military’s return as the final arbiter in Bangladeshi national politics.

In reality, the regime change in the world’s eighth most-populous country amounts to a quiet military coup behind a civilian facade.

By installing an interim civilian government made up of only “advisers,” the coup leaders have not only forestalled U.S.-led sanctions but also helped foster a romanticized Western media narrative of a student-led “revolution” in the country.

The appointment of Muhammad Yunus as the “chief adviser,” or the head of the interim administration, has only helped mask military rule. The 84-year-old Yunus, a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit, or giving small loans to rural families to help alleviate poverty.

With the duration and scope of powers of the interim administration undefined, its advisers work essentially at the direction of the military brass, especially the army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, the power behind the throne. The advisers include two students who led the protests, a hardline Islamist leader and two retired army generals, one of them tasked with restoring law and order in the country.

To be clear, violent student-led, Islamist-backed protests against Hasina’s 15-year secular but increasingly undemocratic reign helped force her out of office. But the decisive factor that ended her rule was loss of support from the country’s powerful army. With protesters rampaging through the streets of the capital of Dhaka, the army’s refusal to enforce a government-ordered lockdown put Hasina’s own personal safety at risk, allowing the military to prevail upon her to flee the country.

No sooner had the 76-year-old Hasina departed for India aboard a military transport plane than mobs ransacked the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, looting every item that could be carried away, from paintings and furniture to fish from the pond.

Driving Hasina into exile appears not to have been a spur-of-the-moment military decision, but rather central to a well-thought-out plan for an indirect army takeover of the country. The international costs of killing a sitting prime minister in a coup, or putting her in prison without due process, were considered too high, making her forced banishment a better choice for the military brass.

Bangladesh’s decades-old cycle of political violence, after all, began with the predawn murder of Hasina’s father, the country’s charismatic founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in a 1975 army coup. President Rahman, was killed by army officers in cold blood — along with his wife, three sons and their wives — while they were asleep at Rahman’s residence. Hasina, just 28 years old then, survived because she was abroad at that time.

What followed was prolonged political turmoil that prevented democracy from taking root. Coups and countercoups resulted in extended periods of military rule in the world’s most densely populated large country.

Bangladesh has no regional adversary, yet it has maintained a relatively large military with more than 200,000 personnel. Since external defense is not a major responsibility, the military has long pursued political machinations. When not ruling directly, it has sought to wield political power through pliant civilian-led governments.

Hasina kept the military and Islamist militancy in check, until the army chief used the student-led uprising to engineer her ouster by letting mob violence go beyond the control of police and paramilitary forces. Hasina had appointed Zaman as the army chief just weeks before her downfall, taking comfort in the fact that the general was married to her cousin.

Hasina’s fall, however, triggered a near-total collapse of the state, leading to widespread looting, vandalism, revenge killings and systematic attacks on the country’s small and long-persecuted Hindu minority. But with the mission accomplished by Hasina’s departure, the army chief finally pressed his troops into action to control the situation, including letting them fire on rioting protesters.

With its focus on profit and power, the military has a long history of abuses, as well as a nexus with radical Islamists. And like the military in Pakistan, from which Bangladesh seceded in 1971 after up to three million Bengalis died in a Pakistani genocide, the Bangladeshi armed forces maintain extensive commercial business interests, extending from real estate and hotels to banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding.

After this month’s silent coup, not only will democratization become more difficult, but already-weak civilian oversight over the military could evaporate.

Yet, with a U.S.-friendly interim administration having replaced the Hasina government, which the Biden administration openly targeted over democratic backsliding, Washington has little reason to impose coup-related aid restrictions on Bangladesh.

More than two dozen coups have occurred across the world since 2009, but the U.S. failed to formally condemn about half of those military takeovers because it saw them as favorable to American interests. Washington usually calls out a coup — an action legally necessitating a cutoff of U.S. foreign assistance — when the takeover is detrimental to American power and influence in the region.

Over the years, the U.S. has maintained cozy ties with military or military-backed regimes in Bangladesh. And it views the latest regime change as a positive development. But the White House and the State Department have denied Hasina’s allegation of U.S. involvement in her overthrow.

Still, with purges and crackdowns in full swing even as the nation remains in disarray, Bangladesh faces the daunting task of restoring the rule of law and reviving an economy battered by large-scale mob violence and destruction.

Himalayan village in Nepal hit by icy floods (BBC)

BBC [8/17/2024 4:14 PM, Hafsa Khalil, 65.5M, Negative]
A Sherpa village in Nepal’s Everest region has been engulfed by icy flood waters, officials say.

Experts suspect Thame - which sits at an altitude of about 3,800m - was flooded after a glacial lake burst its banks. Scientists have warned that climate change is causing many glaciers in the Himalayas to melt at an alarming rate.

No deaths or injuries have been reported, but more than a dozen buildings including houses, a school and a health clinic have been completely destroyed by Friday’s deluge.

Thame is home to many record-holding Sherpa mountaineers and is also where Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the first person to climb Mount Everest along with explorer Edmund Hillary, hailed from.

Videos show frothy, milky waters surging through the village in floods turned brown by mud and debris.

A spokesman for the Nepalese army, Gaurav Kumar KC, told AFP about 15 homes had been swept away, while rescue teams were helping people to safety.

Local authorities say bad weather did not permit the use of helicopters during their investigation, adding they plan to fly to the mountains on Saturday morning.

While the cause of the flood is unknown, Arun Bhakta Shrestha, a climate change specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) said there are “indications” it was the result of a glacial lake outburst and they were working to confirm it.

Scientists have warned that Himalayan glaciers are melting because of climate change and creating glacial lakes, often dammed by loose rock and debris, which makes them unstable and prone to bursting their banks.

Hundreds of glacial lakes formed from glacial melt have appeared out of nowhere in the Himalayas in recent decades. According to a 2020 report by the ICIMOD, 2,070 were documented in Nepal, of which 21 were ranked “potentially dangerous”.

Sri Lankan election shines light on president’s legacy and links (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia [8/17/2024 4:14 PM, Munza Mushtaq, 2M, Neutral]
Sri Lanka’s first presidential election since an economic crisis tipped the government into turmoil two years ago will focus attention on whether the unelected incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe can hold on to his position.

United National Party’s Wickremesinghe assumed the presidency after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted in the political upheaval of 2022 and the 75-year-old now faces three main competitors -- of whom opposition leader Sajith Premadasa is the most popular -- in an election next month. A total of 39 candidates have entered the race to win the five-year term.

Whoever comes into power after the vote on Sept. 21 will not only have to oversee Sri Lanka’s economic recovery and negotiations over an International Monetary Fund bailout, but must also navigate the geopolitical landscape at a time of heightened tensions. Sri Lanka’s strategic location in the Indian Ocean means major powers like China, India and the U.S. all have vested interests in its stability.

"Our geographic location and relevance to many countries, in and outside the region, makes this election very significant," said Sri Lankan historian George I. H. Cooke. "It’s natural for them to be concerned about who will win as they would be interested to know foreign policy trends and how the situation will unfold."

For that reason, 38-year-old Namal Rajapaksa, representing the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, is expected to fail, given that members of his family presided over the worst economic meltdown in the country’s history. Namal is a descendent of the powerful Rajapaksa family, nephew of Gotabaya and son of another former president, Mahinda.

A June survey, the latest available, conducted by nonprofit research outfit Institute for Health Policy showed that Premadasa, representing the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party has support from 43% of voters. Anura Kumara Dissanayake of National People’s Power (NPP) came second with 30% support, Wickremesinghe with 20% and a generic candidate from SLPP with 7%. Rajapaksa was yet to be named as the SLPP candidate then.

Analysts say Wickremesinghe may be undone by his association with the SLPP and the Rajapaksas, who gave him their support after Gotabaya fled office during the 2022 uprising. Facing severe shortages of fuel, food and medicine, soaring prices and lengthy power cuts, Sri Lankans took to the streets to demand change.

Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ruled late last year that Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa were among 13 former leaders guilty of economic mismanagement that led to the crisis.

Since Wickremesinghe has taken the reins, Sri Lanka has sought IMF aid and the economy has again started to grow. On the negative side, the IMF reforms have also hit hard some segments of society.

Dinouk Colombage, a confidant of the incumbent and senior director of international affairs, believes voters will remember the good that Wickremesinghe has done.

"When he took over in 2022, the country’s economy had collapsed. ... In the ensuing two years, the president has successfully solved these issues and stabilized the economy," said Colombage, pointing to success in the IMF program and debt restructuring negotiations with bilateral lenders and bondholders.

Critics argue that Wickremesinghe does not have support beyond urban centers.

"The economic burdens he has imposed on large sections of the population, mostly the poor and the middle classes, and the social discontent it has produced, is likely to work against his political fortunes," said Jayadeva Uyangoda, a political science professor at the University of Colombo, referring to austerity measures under the IMF program.

Executive Director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka Jehan Perera agreed.

"The problem is the unequal division of the burden of this restoration of normalcy," Perera said. "Prices have risen threefold, but the salaries of most people have remained stagnant. This has created immense hardships to the majority of people to whom the promises of those in the opposition will give hope."

Uyangoda believes that Premadasa and Dissanayake have better chances of succeeding because of their appeal beyond elite circles and their representation of a major political shift.

Melani Gunathilaka, an activist who took part in the 2022 protests, said that Sri Lanka needs a government that can rule with transparency and is accountable. "I want a party that prioritizes the people’s wellbeing over business and elite interests," she said.

For now, both opposition parties are promising just that. Vraie Cally Balthazaar, executive committee member of the NPP, said the party will combat corruption. "This election is a chance for people to get the leadership they trust and want," she said.

The SJB called for voters not to be fooled by SLPP "propaganda." An SJB organizer, Rehan Jayawickreme, expressed strong confidence in Premadasa, saying: "We are sure Mr. Premadasa will win. It is also important for voters not to fall prey to false propaganda."

Jayawickreme was referring to the SLPP attempt to frame Gotabaya Rajapaksa as a founding father of modern Sri Lanka during the last presidential election in 2019. Yet, Sri Lankans’ reverence for the Rajapaksa family cannot be underestimated. This is why despite the Rajapaksas’ fall from grace, they still entered Namal in a race he is sure to lose, with the view that raising his profile now may help to return the family to power in the future.

Imran Furkan, CEO of Tresync, a consultancy firm focused on the Asia-Pacific, described Namal’s entry to the presidential race as an "interesting development" but believes his chances are slim due to his name and its association with the 2022 chaos. If anything, Furkan thinks that Wickremesinghe could suffer as the Rajapaksas turn their support to one of their own.

"With Namal’s candidacy, the SLPP’s efforts will focus on securing a decent performance for him. It will be interesting to see if SLPP MPs (members of parliament) currently supporting Wickremesinghe will return to support Namal Rajapaksa," he told Nikkei Asia.

Despite Sri Lankans’ desire for change, some are still pinning their hopes on Wickremesinghe.

"We didn’t have gas or fuel and had daily power cuts due to the economic collapse," said Sahan Rathnasekara, a taxi driver in Colombo. "But after Wickremesinghe took over, things improved. We must be thankful he turned our country around."

Central Asia

Schoolgirl’s ‘Sexual Slavery’ Shocks Kazakhstan, Highlights Lack Of Protections (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [8/17/2024 3:18 AM, Manshuk Asautai and Chris Rickleton, 1530K]
How could something like this happen?

That is the question being asked again and again in Kazakhstan after the mother of a 17-year-old schoolgirl revealed how her daughter was held in sexual slavery for six months as her classmates collected payments from what rights defenders claim were literally hundreds of adult "clients."

So far, the answer is far from complete.

Police investigating the horrific case in the southwestern city of Qyzylorda have warned against what they call "disinformation," objecting to the rights defenders’ portrayal of a "child mafia group" that allegedly oversaw the schoolgirl’s exploitation.

Nonetheless, as of August 15, all four minors facing charges of selling their peer for sex were under arrest just one day after activists and lawyers held an online press conference on the shocking case.

It’s not the first time Kazakh authorities have been on the back foot as a broken system of child protection -- from schools through law enforcement -- comes under fresh public scrutiny.

‘Younger And Younger Girls’ Trapped Into Sex Work

At least one of the four suspects currently in jail was a former friend of the victim, according to the victim’s mother, who spoke at the online event anonymously.

Both girls lived within a 500-meter radius of the school in Qyzylorda that they attended, and the alleged friend was said to be a regular visitor to the victim’s family home.

Earlier this year, the then-16-year-old began spending more and more time with her friend, often staying over at her house.

The mother said she was unhappy with the amount of time her daughter was spending away from her home but chose not to stop her.

She said that it was a nude photo of her daughter that the group of three girls and one boy had deployed as leverage over her, later taking control of her phone and forcing her to sign up to a sex-work website whose name translates as "Girls" in Kazakh.

As the months went on, their exploitation of the victim reached a stage where she was sending the group the equivalent of up to $6,000 a month that had been transferred to her account by customers, keeping only enough for travel as she barely ate.

If she was late in making payments to the group they would beat her or indulge in psychological torture, her mother said.

The group was also allegedly drugging her to maximize her economic value.

Dina Smailova, the head of the NeMolchi.kz foundation, who spoke at the press event, said the men who used the victim deserved to be viewed as "pedophiles" despite the fact that she was registered as being 18 years old on the website.

"She was in fact younger and, because she has a very slight frame, she is very young-looking -- only about 14 or 15," Smailova said in an interview with RFE/RL on August 16.

The activist, who has been in direct contact with the victim, describes her as being in a state of "emotional emptiness," albeit now with access to a professional psychologist and under special state protection.

"She was asked to greet the client with a smile to remove suspicions. After the client left, she was beaten. Naturally, she has both psychological and physical trauma," Smailova said.

"What we see is a trend now toward trapping younger and younger girls into sex work," Smailova added.

"They have codes on this website to indicate that a girl is younger than 18. In one case we investigated in [Kazakhstan’s largest city] Almaty...they dyed the girls’ hair different colors so that the client would understand that they are minors," she said.

‘Fear Of Death’

Owing to the duration of her daughter’s ordeal, social media and media reactions to the tragedy have also targeted the victim’s mother, asking how she was able to live in ignorance of the extent of what was happening to her daughter until earlier this month.

After the schoolgirl was increasingly forced into a life of sexual slavery, she began to skip classes while spending nights away from her family home under the coercion of the group up until May, when she ceased going home altogether.

Smailova says that criticism is understandable but maintains that Kazakhstan’s system "exerts pressure on parents" who try to investigate their children’s problems in school.

That point was stressed by the victim’s mother at the press conference, where she said she approached the school "multiple times" beginning in March about her daughter’s changing behavior and her plummeting academic performance.

"Since I received no help from the school, only threats, I turned to the juvenile police and the local inspector. But the same thing happened. They also threatened me, saying she would be taken from us and that we’d lose our parental rights. They were completely unprofessional, scolding both her and us, pointing fingers at us," she said.

Her daughter -- who saw a counselor at school who "yelled at her" during this period -- also urged her not to complain.

But on August 6, the victim returned to her family home, which her mother said was motivated by "fear of death" after one of the girls in the group threatened to kill her if she couldn’t secure them a fresh payment of 250,000 tenges (around $520).

"One of her friends from Instagram helped bring her home. She told us everything. She was filthy and bruised all over. All the marks were visible on her skin. I will file charges against everyone who touched her -- more than 1,000 people -- everyone who brought her to hotels and saunas," the mother said.

Police in Qyzylorda on August 14 confirmed that a case had been filed against the parents of the suspects under charges of "failure to fulfill the duties of raising a minor."

A young relative of the victim, meanwhile, told RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service on condition of anonymity that the family was now seeking prosecution of one of those parents on more serious charges, believing the individual may be an accomplice.

The suspects themselves are facing charges of "encouraging a minor to engage in prostitution."

On August 16, the administration of Qyzylorda Province reported that the province’s governor had ordered the dismissal of the director and other staff at the victim’s school.

"After the press conference they began to work very actively," Smailova said of the authorities’ response.

But prior to that, the victim’s mother said she was warned by police to refrain from contacting Smailova, whose work has exposed multiple cases of officers involved in sexual misconduct and corruption and who faces charges of fraud if she ever returns to Kazakhstan.

This all creates the unfortunate impression that the authorities’ priority is to prevent information about shocking incidents from surfacing rather than preventing such incidents from happening.

Smailova argues such an approach fuels problems like sexual slavery in conservative provinces where victims often lack support networks.

Last year witnessed a tragedy in another southern Kazakh city, Turkistan, when a 17-year-old girl jumped off the sixth floor of a building after a conflict with a would-be client over her refusal to provide sexual services. She, too, had been registered on the Kazakh "Girls" website, Smailova said.

"We know the girl survived the fall, but we still don’t know how that case ended," she told RFE/RL.

RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service made attempts to contact the school in Qyzylorda and police in the region but received no reply by the time of publication.

Georgia, Kyrgyzstan face scrutiny over possible sanctions-busting (EurasiaNet)

EurasiaNet [8/17/2024 4:14 PM, Brawley Benson, 57.6K, Neutral]
Recent investigations into trade involving Georgia and Kyrgyzstan reveal indicators of sanctions-busting behavior involving Russia.

In Georgia, the investigative outlet iFact published findings of suspicious patterns in an article titled “How Georgia Facilitates Russia’s Military Supply Chain.” To compile their report, journalists posed as individuals interested in shipping so-called “dual-use” goods to Russia from Georgia. In conversations with couriers, they found that there were few barriers to sending such goods to Russia as drones and computer processors, items which can serve both a civilian and a military purpose.

The investigative journalists, who backed up their investigation by analyzing trade data, acknowledged that there are inspection protocols in place to prevent illicit goods from crossing the Georgia-Russia border. However, the report added that “actual enforcement and thoroughness of these checks can vary, as seen in our findings.” And couriers can potentially circumvent Georgian restrictions by sending goods to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and countries in Central Asia before shipping them to Russia.

Georgian government officials haven’t yet directly commented on the August 1 report. The attention of the ruling Georgia Dream party in recent weeks has been more focused on doing damage control over an August 9 OCCRP investigation into the property holdings of “Honorary Chairman” Bidzina Ivanishvili’s family in Russia.

Georgia’s Revenue Service disputed the report, saying in a statement that “this is not the first time that the union of investigative journalists has leveled false accusations against the agency, claiming that sanctioned goods are entering Georgia’s territory uncontrollably and subsequently being exported to the Russian Federation.”

In the past, Georgian Dream leaders have denied allegations that Georgia is a facilitator for shipping sanctioned goods to Russia, citing a lack of conclusive evidence. “We are absolutely transparent,” said former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili in June 2023. “I declare with full responsibility – not a single fact has been presented to us that Georgia helped anyone avoid any sanctions.”

Georgia has not joined Western nations in sanctioning Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, saying that such a move would be disastrous for the economy. But leaders often claim that the country isn’t being used for circumventing sanctions imposed by Western nations.

It’s not only the government that says concerns about sanctions-evasion are overblown. Shortly after iFact’s report, the Swiss Institute of Global Affairs published an analysis of Georgia’s trade data that drew different conclusions. “[Scrutinizing] trade data and other detailed information indicates that often cited increases in bilateral and transit trade from/through Georgia to Russia can be explained with harmless developments and that, if some sanctions circumvention should happen, it would be on a negligibly small level,” the institute said.

Even so, the organization acknowledged that dual-use goods do appear on the list of Georgian exports to Russia – “namely some mechanical and electronic components.” iFact claimed in its report that the flow of such goods indicates “legal loopholes and logistical routes” are being exploited to benefit Russia’s war effort.

“At the very least, if the government sincerely claims to enforce sanctions and does not want to become a violator country, the best way would be to publish a separate list of high-priority battlefield items and issue additional restrictions on their export,” Maximilian Hess, a sanctions expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told iFact.

“Practically, this means requiring exporters to clarify the final destination of the cargo. This is necessary to avoid the prohibited goods from reaching Russia through Georgia,” he added.

Meanwhile, a report published by RFE/RL raised questions about Kyrgyzstan’s role as a potential sanctions-buster involving goods moving between Serbia and potentially Russia.

The RFE/RL investigation found that Serbia’s trade with Kyrgyzstan has skyrocketed since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. It also revealed a massive discrepancy in trade data compiled by Serbian and Kyrgyz state agencies, suggesting that a large volume of goods shipped by Serbia to Kyrgyzstan is re-exported to a third country.

“Among the products delivered from Serbia to Kyrgyzstan, there are goods included in the sanctions list of the European Union and the United States, or, in other words, which Russia can use in the military industry,” according to the RFE/RL report.

Unadopted Turkmen Orphans Sent To Retirement Homes Despite Right To Housing (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [8/19/2024 1:01 AM, Farangis Najibullah, 235K, Negative]
Many children who grow up in Turkmenistan’s state-run orphanages end up living in retirement homes when they turn 18, says a woman who was raised in a Turkmen orphanage.

By law, the Turkmen government must provide social housing once orphans become adults and leave the state institutions.

“But in reality, that promise does not materialize,” the woman told RFE/RL.

“When the orphans turn 18, authorities often send the boys to the army and place most of the girls in retirement homes in the provinces where they were born,” she claims.

The 26-year-old woman says she was eligible by law to have a one-room apartment to begin her new life after leaving the orphanage. But instead, she got a room at a state institution for seniors in the eastern city of Turkmenabat, the capital of Lebap Province.

The woman spoke on condition of anonymity fearing retribution in authoritarian Turkmenistan, where criticism of government policies is not tolerated.

The woman says she found herself left with no social support, “unwanted and defenseless,” and unprepared for life on her own.

“Watching old people end up in the nursing home, I always thought that their fate was no different from that of orphans. To be unwanted is a very painful thing,” she said, describing how she felt when put in the retirement home.

The home provided her with a roof over her head, but she did not have access to the food that other residents at the facility received.

“I had to find a job at a local bazaar as I did not have any money for food and other basic necessities,” she told RFE/RL.

“A nurse and administration officials at the retirement home threatened me, saying: ‘If you make us angry, we’ll hand you over to police and accuse you of prostitution.’”

RFE/RL cannot independently verify the woman’s claims. Authorities in Lebap did not respond to our requests for comment.

Unprepared For Life

The secretive government in Turkmenistan doesn’t provide information about the challenges children face at orphanages or in life after leaving state institutions.

State media often publishes glossy photos of what it describes as a happy childhood in government-run orphanages that depict children taking part in school trips and concerts, or receiving gifts -- from sweets to bicycles -- sent by the country’s president.

In May, state media reported that 32 high school kids from Ashgabat and Balkanabat orphanages completed a special three-week training course on information and communication technologies.

The courses -- organized by the the UN’s children fund, UNICEF, and the Turkmen Education Ministry -- were aimed at “equipping the children with essential skills…useful for any future profession,” state media reported.

But the woman in Lebap says that most orphans don’t receive any help in preparation for their life after the orphanage.

“There are so many people who turn to crime or try to kill themselves [as they’re unable to cope with life] after leaving the orphanages,” she said.

The woman lived at the retirement for more than five years as she waited for social housing to no avail. The much-awaited apartment finally became available for her after she started dating a married official of the National Security Ministry, she said.

“I had to become his second wife. After that, he helped me get the one-room apartment I was eligible for,” she said without providing further details.

The woman said she decided to speak out about her experiences to draw the Turkmen government’s attention to the plight of orphanage children and the hardships they face as they begin living on their own.

Twitter

Afghanistan

Sara Wahedi
@SaraWahedi
[8/18/2024 4:46 AM, 80.5K followers, 37 retweets, 148 likes]
Not sure what’s happening on Dutch media about the Taliban but let me clarify: Talib leaders allowing their daughters to study abroad is because they would run away and claim asylum if they couldn’t. They are hypocrites. Education is a fundamental human right. Full stop.

Sara Wahedi
@SaraWahedi
[8/18/2024 4:08 AM, 80.5K followers, 64 retweets, 141 likes]
The journalist asks the Taliban official when Afghan women and girls can return to school. He laughs. Doesn’t answer the question. https://x.com/i/status/1825082389460357592

Sara Wahedi
@SaraWahedi
[8/18/2024 5:06 PM, 80.5K followers, 2K retweets, 3.9K likes]
Today, a Taliban court sentenced a woman to be stoned to death in Balkh province. Yesterday, a Talib leader laughed when a journalist asked when girls would return to school. The world is increasingly complicit in the systematic erasure of Afghan women.

Bilal Sarwary
@bsarwary
[8/19/2024 1:39 AM, 254.3K followers, 3 retweets, 7 likes]
Asif Faizyar, editor of Neday Balouch @nedaeybaloch , was jailed inside the Taliban police command in Herat city after he was summoned over the phone. After spending 4 days inside the basement, without his phones or access to the family, he was freed on bail. According to a source in the Federation of Journalist, Taliban police command was not happy that Neday Balocuh, Mr. Faizyar’s Afghan media outlet was reporting news before the Taliban’s police. The arrest confirms the continued crackdown against Afghan journalists and the continued stifling of the voices. The Afghan media outlet halted its operations. #Pressfreedom #Taliban

Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office
@amnestysasia
[8/18/2024 5:33 AM, 90.9K followers, 36 retweets, 65 likes]
Afghanistan’s plight under Taliban rule may have faded from global concern. But the fight for human rights continues. We must not forget. Take action and sign our petition: https://amnesty.org/en/petition/break-the-silence-end-human-rights-violations-in-afghanistan/ #EndImpunity

Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office
@amnestysasia
[8/16/2024 9:26 AM, 90.9K followers, 28 retweets, 35 likes]
Afghanistan’s civic space is shrinking as dissent is met with repression and even lethal force. The world cannot ignore the silencing of voices that cry for freedom. #EndImpunity Take action and sign our petition: https://amnesty.org/en/petition/break-the-silence-end-human-rights-violations-in-afghanistan/ #EndImpunity

Pakistan

Shehbaz Sharif
@CMShehbaz
[8/18/2024 1:24 PM, 6.7M followers, 873 retweets, 3K likes]
I commend Chief Minister Punjab Maryam Nawaz @MaryamNSharif for her historic initiative, executed under the able leadership of our Quaid, Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, to offer a 14-rupee electricity unit relief for consumers using up to 500 units! Federal Government has already given relief to consumers using up to 200 units for three months by allocating 50 billion rupees. Public service continues to be a hallmark of @pmln_org

Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[8/18/2024 5:58 PM, 3.1M followers, 17 retweets, 71 likes]
Islamabad: Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif chairs a meeting on the matters related to Power Division, Ministry of Energy.

Government of Pakistan
@GovtofPakistan
[8/18/2024 8:39 AM, 3.1M followers, 14 retweets, 77 likes]
Islamabad: Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif chairs a meeting on the measures against spread of Monkeypox virus.

Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office
@amnestysasia
[8/16/2024 8:22 AM, 90.9K followers, 2.7K retweets, 4.9K likes]
PAKISTAN: The abduction of Aun Ali Khosa, digital content creator and comedian, from his home on 15 August is alarming. More than 39 hours since he was taken away from his home in Lahore at 2 AM, his whereabouts remain unknown. Around 8 to 10 plain clothed men forcibly entered his home and seized electronic devices including his mobile, computer and digital camera. The police have refused to register a First Information Report (FIR) to start an investigation into his disappearance. Aun has been a critic of the government, and his satirical videos have critiqued the rising inflation in the country. His abduction is part of an established pattern of harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders, political activists, students, and journalists by Pakistani authorities in an attempt to silence them. @amnesty calls on the Government of Pakistan to promptly disclose Aun’s whereabouts and ensure his immediate and safe return. Further, the authorities must conduct an effective, independent and impartial investigation into his disappearance, and those suspected of criminal responsibility must be brought to justice in fair trials before an ordinary civilian court. The crackdown on digital content creators and journalists by the Pakistan authorities must end.

India

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/17/2024 12:32 AM, 101.1M followers, 4.5K retweets, 16K likes]
Sharing my opening remarks at the Voice of Global South Summit. https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1dRJZdpwjBvKB

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/17/2024 2:24 AM, 101.1M followers, 4.7K retweets, 19K likes]
Delivering my closing remarks at the Voice of Global South Summit.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/16/2024 11:34 AM, 101.1M followers, 3.2K retweets, 17K likes]
Increased air connectivity is great news for tourism and commercial growth. The Cabinet today has approved new civilian enclaves at Bagdogra in West Bengal and Bihta in Bihar. This will ensure seamless travel to and from these places.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/16/2024 11:33 AM, 101.1M followers, 4.2K retweets, 18K likes]
Pune is an important economic centre of our nation and we are committed to boosting the city’s infrastructure. In this context, the Cabinet today has approved the Pune Metro Phase-1 project extension. This is great news for the city’s further development. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2046089

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/16/2024 11:31 AM, 101.1M followers, 3.4K retweets, 14K likes]
It is our constant endeavour to ensure Maharashtra gets modern infrastructure. Today, the Union Cabinet has cleared the Thane integral Ring Metro Rail Project. This is a landmark infrastructure project which will link key areas in and around Thane, as well as enhance comfort and convenience. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2046084

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/16/2024 11:28 AM, 101.1M followers, 3.2K retweets, 14K likes]
A boost for Namma Bengaluru’s infrastructure... The Metro network of the city expands with the Cabinet approving 2 new corridors, consisting 30 more stations. This will enhance the commuter experience and boost ‘Ease of Living.’ https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2046081

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[8/16/2024 6:40 AM, 101.1M followers, 12K retweets, 71K likes]
Received a telephone call from Professor Muhammad Yunus, @ChiefAdviserGoB. Exchanged views on the prevailing situation. Reiterated India’s support for a democratic, stable, peaceful and progressive Bangladesh. He assured protection, safety and security of Hindus and all minorities in Bangladesh.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[8/19/2024 2:51 AM, 3.2M followers, 87 retweets, 821 likes]
Welcome @Arzuranadeuba of Nepal on her first visit to India as Foreign Minister. Looking forward to our talks.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[8/17/2024 8:34 AM, 3.2M followers, 152 retweets, 512 likes]
Speaking to the press on conclusion of 3rd #VoiceOfGlobalSouth Summit. #VoGSS https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1mnxeADBrwRxX

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[8/17/2024 8:28 AM, 3.2M followers, 235 retweets, 1.5K likes]
Addressed the second Foreign Ministers’ Session of the 3rd #VoiceOfGlobalSouth Summit on the theme ‘Global South & Global Governance’.
Highlighted the importance of:
- Global institutions and governance architecture and the need to reform multilateralism to revive its credibility.
- Access to finance and technology to unlock the development potential of the Global South. India Stack and DPI stand out as Indian contributions.
- Need for collective initiatives to show greater willingness to act on issues of common interest. ISA, CDRI, GBA, Mission LiFE stand out as examples.
- Making inter-dependence a strength through intensifying South-South interactions to ensure that exposures and vulnerabilities are not leveraged.
Happy to note that the deliberations show increasing convergences between the Global South countries on issues so central to us. : https://mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/38172/Opening_Remarks_by_EAM_Dr_S_Jaishankar_at_the_Foreign_Ministers_SessionII_of_the_3rd_Voice_of_Global_South_Summit

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[8/17/2024 7:07 AM, 3.2M followers, 155 retweets, 1.3K likes]
Pleased to meet @DepSecStateMR Richard Verma today in Delhi. Spoke about the continuing momentum in our bilateral ties. And exchanged views on certain regional and global issues.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[8/17/2024 5:27 AM, 3.2M followers, 312 retweets, 1.9K likes]
Addressed the first Foreign Ministers’ Session of the 3rd #VoiceOfGlobalSouth Summit on the theme ‘Charting a Unique Paradigm for Global South’.
Highlighted the need for:
- Strengthening economic resilience to de-risk international economy from disruptions caused by conflicts, pandemic and climate events.
- Just Energy Transitions including access to low-cost financing and critical technologies.
- Reforming multilateralism to reflect the hopes and aspirations of the Global South.
- Democratizing digital transformations will be a key driver of economic and governance transition of the Global South.
Confident that our deliberations today will constructively supplement the upcoming Summit of the Future. : https://mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/38170/Opening_Remarks_by_EAM_Dr_S_Jaishankar_at_the_Foreign_Ministers_Session_I_of_the_3rd_Voice_of_Global_South_Summit

NSB

Awami League
@albd1971
[8/19/2024 12:40 AM, 645.2K followers, 37 retweets, 73 likes]
#Bangladesh Police have arrested a #Hindu leader of #AwamiLeague and put him on a farcical trial. Ramesh Chandra Sen, an octogenarian, was arrested from his house in #Thakurgaon who was having his dinner. Surprisingly, he hails from #MirzaFakhrul’s constituency. #HumanRights

Awami League
@albd1971
[8/18/2024 8:08 AM, 645.2K followers, 63 retweets, 176 likes]
There is a media blackout on the ongoing spree of #minority attacks by #Islamists since August 5. Even the protests staged by minorities are not covered. Under @ChiefAdviserGoB , the emergence of arson on offices, mob #violence on dissenters forced media to toe in the narrative by the government. And the government did not acknowledge attacks in 52 places, even though rights groups documented these facts #Bangladesh #BangaldeshCrisis #AllEyesOnBangladesh

Awami League
@albd1971
[8/18/2024 6:27 AM, 645.2K followers, 59 retweets, 183 likes]
Between August 4 and August 6, at least 87 activities of #AwamiLeague were beaten, hacked and burnt to death across the country by supporters of incumbent regime in #Bangladesh. The toll has risen alarmingly afterwards. Every death is regrettable and needs to be investigated but justice for these lives of Awami League leaders seem to become a far cry. #SaveBangladesh #Dhanmondi32 #15August #AttackOnAwamiLeague #HumanRights #DemocracyinPeril @UN_HRC @UNHumanRights @EUinBangladesh @SenateDems @amnesty

Fareed Zakaria
@FareedZakaria
[8/18/2024 2:51 PM, 1M followers, 205 retweets, 435 likes]
Today’s last look: The chaos in Bangladesh holds lessons for low-income countries all over the world, where bulging youth populations and economic malaise lead easily to unrest.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[8/18/2024 2:10 PM, 212.9K followers, 288 retweets, 1.1K likes]
Sheikh Hasina was ousted because her security forces killed scores of peaceful protestors, resulting in a mass movement against her that she proved unable to control. Don’t let misinformation—which continues to circulate nearly two weeks later—obscure this essential fact.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[8/18/2024 12:15 PM, 212.9K followers, 16 retweets, 162 likes]
A lesser discussed impact of Bangladesh’s recent crisis was the economic toll: An economy already facing growing strain was hit by billions in losses from violence, lockdowns & an Internet shutdown. The strain was tied to external shocks (eg Ukraine), but also structural issues.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[8/18/2024 12:15 PM, 212.9K followers, 2 retweets, 22 likes]
The lack of a diversified export base (too much reliance on RMGs) undermined the private sector, contributing to low FDI rates. But politicization of and lack of accountability in financial institutions also a problem. That’s why this news is promising: https://www.thedailystar.net/business/news/govt-form-banking-commission-soon-financial-sector-reforms-3680466

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[8/17/2024 10:56 PM, 212.9K followers, 4 retweets, 56 likes]
I’m interviewed in @DhakaTribune on the Bangladesh interim government’s main challenges, and what all the dramatic political developments in recent days could mean for the country’s economy, election prospects, and foreign policy. https://www.dhakatribune.com/webiners-and-interviews/355039/%E2%80%98big-challenge-will-be-curbing-politics-of

Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office
@amnestysasia
[8/16/2024 7:20 AM, 90.9K followers, 58 retweets, 104 likes]
Bangladesh: Today marks one month since the death of Abu Sayed, university student who was shot at while protesting in Bangladesh. It was the first death reported during the protests in July. @amnesty spoke to other students who protested throughout this 36 day protest that ended the 15 year rule of PM Sheikh Hasina.

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[8/19/2024 1:15 AM, 109.5K followers, 85 retweets, 91 likes]
President Dr. @MMuizzu attends the opening of Theveli International Conference, 2024, an annual International Conference organized by the Maldives National University. The conference takes place from 19-20 August 2024. The theme for 2024 is “Bridging boundaries: Exploring synergies across research disciplines”

Moosa Zameer
@MoosaZameer
[8/17/2024 12:07 PM, 13.8K followers, 35 retweets, 68 likes]
Delivered remarks at the Foreign Minister’s Session of the 3rd #VoiceofGlobalSouthSummit convened virtually by the Government of #India Commended the pivotal India-led initiatives during the G20 Presidency and thanked EAM @DrSJaishankar for hosting this timely discussion. Stressed the urgent need for enhanced cooperation within and beyond the Global South to fast-track the progress towards the #SDGs. Demanded urgent action on gaps in global governance, climate crisis, public debt, and called to ensure equitable access to digital tools essential to redefine the development trajectories. Recommitted to forge partnerships within the Global South to realise President Dr @MMuizzu’s bold vision of economic resilience and digital empowerment in the Maldives.

Moosa Zameer
@MoosaZameer
[8/16/2024 8:09 AM, 13.8K followers, 52 retweets, 102 likes]
An honour to be the Chief Guest at the special event hosted by the @HCIMaldives this afternoon to mark the auspicious occasion of the 78th Independence Day of India.
In my remarks:
- I extended on behalf of President Dr @MMuizzu, the Government and the People of Maldives, warm greetings and best wishes to the President @rashtrapatibhvn and Prime Minister @narendramodi and to the friendly people of India.
- Congratulated India for their remarkable journey, one of profound significance and inspiration. India has emerged as the world’s largest and most diverse democracy, that leads by example, inspiring many countries, including the Maldives.
- Reflected on the long-standing partnership between 🇲🇻 and 🇮🇳 — a partnership rooted in its people and strengthened through our active bilateral cooperation.
- Reiterated the firm commitment of President Dr Muizzu’s Government to strengthen and deepen the robust relationship between our two countries for the mutual benefit of our people.
- Thanked External Affairs Minister @DrSJaishankar for his unwavering support to enhancing our bilateral ties.
Thank you @Ambmunu for hosting such a memorable event.

Abdulla Shahid
@abdulla_shahid
[8/17/2024 5:42 AM, 118.4K followers, 76 retweets, 151 likes]
Shocked that the Government of #Maldives has decided to abandon one of the key features of the Maldivian fisheries industry - Sustainability! The decision to lift the ban on longline fisheries and allow for shark fisheries is reckless and one that will reverse gains we made during the @MDPSecretariat government. It endangers the tourism industry and our international reputation and leadership. The high bycatch, including of endangered species which are critical to our marine ecosystem, will also harm our prospects of bolstering trade. I urge the Government of Maldives to immediately reverse this ill-considered decision and work in the best interests of the people.

MOFA of Nepal
@MofaNepal
[8/18/2024 5:26 AM, 259.2K followers, 26 retweets, 90 likes]
The Hon. Foreign Minister Dr. Arzu Rana Deuba left for New Delhi today for her official visit to India at the cordial invitation of the Minister of External Affairs of India H.E. Dr. S. Jaishankar. The Hon. FM is scheduled to return home on 22 August 2024. @Arzuranadeuba

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[8/18/2024 8:50 AM, 6.1K followers, 18 likes]
Happy to join the multi party political leadership of the Rathnapura District to inaugurate the District operations office of the President Ranil Wickremasinghe today. We are together to ensure continuity and stability!

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[8/18/2024 8:25 AM, 6.1K followers, 2 retweets, 42 likes]
At the invitation of the members of the Ratnapura Bar Association, I visited new court complex and had a discussion with them about the ongoing development work and general requirements of the project.

Eran Wickramaratne
@EranWick
[8/18/2024 9:34 PM, 69K followers, 19 retweets, 38 likes]
The president claims he has resolved the debt crisis. This is inaccurate. Private creditors are yet to agree to a repaymentextension. People are under immense pressure, & mothers in low income households can’t even afford milk for their children. The economy is far from fixed.

Namal Rajapaksa
@RajapaksaNamal
[8/16/2024 10:22 AM, 437.5K followers, 4 retweets, 40 likes]
Had the pleasure of meeting the people of Thirappane and Kekirawa in the Anuradhapura district. I’m grateful for the warm welcome extended to me. #Thirappane #Kekirawa #SLPP

Central Asia

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[8/19/2024 2:19 AM, 4.9K followers, 1 retweet, 3 likes]
On the State Visit of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the Republic of Tajikistan K.K. Tokayev https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15550/on-the-state-visit-of-the-president-of-the-republic-of-kazakhstan-to-the-republic-of-tajikistan-kk-tokayev

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[8/17/2024 5:51 AM, 4.9K followers]
Participation in the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the 3rd Voice of the Global South Summit https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15546/participation-in-the-meeting-of-the-foreign-ministers-of-the-3rd-voice-of-the-global-south-summit

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[8/17/2024 2:48 AM, 4.9K followers, 5 likes]
An event dedicated to the tourism opportunities of Tajikistan was held in Islamabad https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15542/an-event-dedicated-to-the-tourism-opportunities-of-tajikistan-was-held-in-islamabad

Bakhtiyor Saidov
@FM_Saidov
[8/16/2024 7:53 AM, 4K followers, 3 retweets, 8 likes]
We had a phone conversation with the Foreign Minister of #Russia H.E. Sergey Lavrov. Uzbekistan and Russia has a rich schedule of upcoming events at different levels. @Uzbek_MFA and @MFA_Russia will be at the forefront in full realization of all the agreements achieved between our Leaders. We also covered enriching the comprehensive strategic partnership and alliance, as well as cooperation in bilateral and multilateral formats.

Javlon Vakhabov
@JavlonVakhabov
[8/17/2024 11:31 AM, 6K followers, 1 retweet, 12 likes]
Broad and insightful discussion with the esteemed and highly respected Special Representative to the @president_uz, Abdulaziz Kamilov, about his recently released article on Uzbekistan’s approaches to building a New Central Asia (https://iica.uz/en/page/novaya-tsentralnaya-aziya-vo-vneshney-politike-uzbekistana). The thoughtful analysis by this remarkably experienced and knowledgeable diplomat was followed by a live Q&A session with research fellows from @iicaintashkent. This was indeed very helpful, as we are taking the chairmanship at the Consultative Meeting of the Heads of States of Central Asia in 2025.

Javlon Vakhabov
@JavlonVakhabov
[8/17/2024 6:25 AM, 6K followers, 4 retweets, 34 likes]
Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov (@GOVuz) has just touched down in Kabul where he will meet with the Afghan government officials and attend “Made in Uzbekistan” exhibition. The first of its kind since 2021.

Mihra Rittmann
@MihraRittmann
[8/16/2024 7:16 AM, 4.5K followers, 9 retweets, 15 likes]
Another person in #Karakalpakstan (#Uzbekistan) sentenced to 3.5 yrs in prison for "insulting the president" & "threatening public safety" - https://sarpa.media/damezhanesenovacase/ @hrw wrote earlier abt how ‘insulting the president’ prosecutions violate rights -

{End of Report}

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