epubdos : Afghanistan
SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS
Prepared for the U.S. Department of State
Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs
TO:
SCA & Staff
DATE:
Wednesday, June 12, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan
UN ‘hopeful’ about Taliban’s presence at ‘Doha III’ meeting on Afghanistan (VOA)
VOA [6/11/2024 1:38 PM, Ayaz Gul, 4032K, Neutral]
A United Nations diplomat has encouraged the Taliban to attend a conference on Afghanistan later this month, stating that it would help return much-needed global attention to the crisis-ridden country.

Malick Ceesay, the head of the Pakistan-based liaison office for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), told an unofficial dialogue between religious scholars from the two countries that the Ukraine war and Gaza hostilities had dramatically shifted the international attention from Afghanistan.

“And that’s a concern for the United Nations. We don’t want Afghanistan to be forgotten,” Ceesay said at the Tuesday meeting, hosted by the independent Center for Research and Security Studies in the Pakistani capital.

“We are hopeful that this time around, the Islamic Emirate will send its representatives (to Doha) to be able to engage with the international community in a constructive and effective manner,” the U.N. diplomat said, using the official title of the Taliban government in Kabul.

The two-day U.N. conference of special envoys on Afghanistan will commence in Doha, Qatar, on June 30. According to a U.N. spokesperson, it aims to increase international engagement with the Taliban and Afghanistan at large "in a more coherent, coordinated and structured manner.”

The meeting will be the third in the tiny Gulf nation’s capital since U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres launched the process in May 2023. He did not invite the Taliban to the first session, and Afghanistan’s de facto rulers declined an invitation to attend the second this past February.

The Taliban have publicly stated their intention to send a delegation to the "Doha III" conference, saying they have shared their conditions with the U.N. and will make a formal announcement after reviewing its “final agenda.”

While they have not revealed their conditions, the Taliban had asked the U.N. in the run-up to the second Doha meeting that their delegates would be accepted as the sole official representatives of the country, meaning that Afghan civil society representatives, women’s rights activists, and members of opposition groups would not be present.

They also sought a meeting between their delegation and the U.N. at “a very senior level.” Guterres rejected the conditions as unacceptable. The international community has not recognized the Taliban government as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers, and the country remains under U.N. sanctions.

Ceesay said Tuesday that the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s access to education and employment and a lack of inclusivity in the Taliban government continue to raise questions about the Afghan authorities’ legitimacy.

“These are all tied together. The Islamic Emirate leadership knows that this is the reason why the recognition is not coming,” he said.

The Muslim U.N. diplomat criticized the Taliban’s assertion that their treatment of women aligns with Islamic law.

“Islam never says that women should not go to school, and Islam never says that women should not go to work. Which (version of) Islam and which Quran says that? It’s not found in there,” he added.

Ceesay said that UNAMA is engaging with all Afghans to help them achieve a broad-based governance system that includes everybody.

“Islamic Emirate is doing a fairly notable job on that, but we want it to increase more so that every Afghan citizen will feel that they belong to the country and the government belongs to them, not just one-sided, 90% one ethnicity. That’s not fair,” he stated.

The conservative Taliban are ethnically Pashtun, the majority community in Afghanistan.

Ceesay said the Taliban have allowed Afghan females to work in some public offices related to passport, immigration, healthcare, and agriculture. But those concessions have been "overshadowed" due to bans on the remaining women’s access to employment and girls’ education beyond grade six, he added.

The reclusive Taliban supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who governs the country through edicts based on his harsh interpretation of Islam, has dismissed international criticism and calls for reforming his policies.

In the run-up to the third Doha conference, pro-Taliban social media activists have posted audio of a recent speech by Akhundzada in which he vowed not to budge on his stance under foreign pressure, come what may.

“Who are you to meddle in our land, system, and policies? I am not here to take your orders nor will I take a single step with you or deal with you regarding the Sharia (Islamic law),” Akhudzada said.
Their family was ripped apart at the Kabul airport. Nearly 3 years later their greatest wish has come true (CNN)
CNN [6/12/2024 5:00 AM, Natasha Chen, 22739K, Negative]
In late April, Albina Roman and her daughter landed at Los Angeles International Airport and saw the rest of their family for the first time in nearly three years.

In the terminal, 8-year-old Muhsenat ran toward her father, shaky cell phone video captured by Ahmad Roman shows. Albina and Ahmad’s youngest son, who was barely walking when he was separated from his mother in Kabul, was now 4.

“Mama!” Rahman shouted.

“They are in my hug now,” Albina Roman told CNN of the moment – after so much anxiety and heartache – she, her husband and both her sons were finally together again.

“I just cry a lot,” she went on, “and all the pain come out.”

The Roman family had separated among the throngs at the Kabul airport in August 2021, during the chaotic US withdrawal days before the Taliban reclaimed control of Afghanistan. They had momentarily lost sight of their older son, Uzair – so his parents, with Muhsenat holding her mom’s hand, had split up to look for him.

By the time he was found, Albina and her daughter had been pushed beyond the airport gates, unable to get back in. They stayed behind, while the two boys boarded a crowded cargo plane with their father – who had worked for the Afghan government and so feared for his family’s safety under the new regime – and headed to the United States.

For the next 32 months, Ahmad would struggle – first as a humanitarian parolee under US immigration rules, then after being granted indefinite asylum – to navigate a nebulous bureaucracy, working to bring his wife and daughter to the United States. All the while, Albina and Muhsenat faced a new life under the radical extremist group and tried to stay in touch with Ahmad and the boys from half a world away.

“I see my kids on camera,” the mother told CNN early last year from Afghanistan, “but I cannot touch them.”

‘You don’t have the freedom’

As a woman and a young girl suddenly living under the Taliban, Albina and Muhsenat stayed indoors as much as possible.”You’re a human, and you’re a woman, and you don’t have the freedom in a country,” the matriarch said. “You cannot study because you’re a girl. You cannot go to the park, because you’re a girl. You cannot work. It’s so hard.

“Think about those women who don’t have anyone to help them – like, they don’t have husbands, or maybe they don’t have fathers or brothers to work and bring them food or money,” she continued. “So, how could they handle?”

Albina did not take Muhsenat to the park, since there were no parks for girls. They only frequented a restaurant for women, where all service staff were female. Muhsenat went to third grade in Kabul; she only would have been allowed to continue until sixth.

Albina developed severe anxiety, she said: “I didn’t go outside for months. Because (the Taliban) took girls … Because they say, ‘Oh, your hijab is not good.’”

She covered her face for an on-camera interview for fear being recognized could cause trouble for her relatives back in Afghanistan; Albina’s father and brothers had worked for the US government for many years, she said: one as a driver transporting appliances onto the base, one as a kitchen manager, another as a security guard.

Amid the US withdrawal, they too had been on a plane headed to the US. But when they realized Albina had gotten stuck behind the airport gates with Muhsenat, they got off the plane to stay.

Having male family members who could chaperone the mother and daughter out of the house was crucial to Albina and Muhsenat’s survival these past years, said Albina, who could not go anywhere without one of them. Even a trip to the bank with her brother seemed to rouse suspicion from Taliban authorities, who repeatedly asked to check their IDs and questioned the pair’s relationship, she said.

Every few months during the first year after they were separated, Taliban officials would come by to check documents and ask for whom the family had worked in the past. After each of those visits, Albina and her kin would move out, worried they’d be singled out.

She had a constant fear someone was following her whenever she was out.

A complex and befuddling process

All that time, Ahmad – with incredible persistence – was working in Los Angeles with an attorney, as well as US Rep. Tony Cárdenas and the refugee aid organization Miry’s List, to bring his wife and daughter to him and the boys, the family explained to CNN.

Under his initial humanitarian parole status, Ahmad used the US State Department’s new form DS-4317 to apply in early 2023 for Albina and Muhsenat to join him in the United States, he said. Then around that same time – after his own asylum application was approved – he applied on their behalf via the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ form I-730.

Mom’s and daughter’s ability to leave their native country also was an issue. Ahmad at one point upgraded the internet speed in his Los Angeles apartment after friends in Afghanistan tipped him off that an online portal for passport applications soon would open; after several nights of trying – the portal spontaneously closing and reopening – he managed to get them passports, he said.

Still, Ahmad struggled with a dearth of updates on how the US applications were progressing, if at all, he told CNN. No matter how often he’d ask a case worker about his petitions, he would get very little information about the process or any expected timeline.

Delays, it turned out, had been plaguing the Citizenship and Immigration Services’ asylum application process. The government in the 18 months after the US withdrawal had adjudicated only about 1,800 asylum applications from separated Afghan families, many of them pending well past Congress’ standard 150-day deadline, according to the law firm of Kirkland and Ellis LLP and the National Immigrant Justice Center, which sued in April 2023 over the delays.It took until last July for Ahmad’s I-730 petition to be approved, just ahead of the lawsuit’s settlement in September. But even then, Ahmad’s family got little information on a timeline for next steps.

So, the former Afghanistan government worker reached out to Cárdenas.

‘Please … follow up all left-behind people’

The congressman’s office helped expedite a consular appointment for Albina and Muhsenat, Ahmad said. Even with that boost, though, it wasn’t until early April that mom and daughter, with Albina’s brother as chaperone, traveled to Pakistan for a US embassy interview, ushering in their arrival later that month at Los Angeles’ main airport.

Indeed, by late May – eight months after the federal court settlement – the US government had cleared more than 90% of the backlog of overdue asylum applications, adjudicating more than 18,000 under Operation Allies Welcome, the plaintiffs said in a statement.

Even with his own family reunited, though, Ahmad’s bureaucratic headaches over getting Albina and Muhsenat to America hadn’t ended – a reflection, perhaps, of the bureaucratic and diplomatic complexities some Afghan families still face as the US withdrawal’s third anniversary approaches.

The State Department, weeks after Albina and Muhsenat got to the US, sent Ahmad an email following up on his DS-4317 petition and asking to schedule an interview as part of that process to try to bring his wife to the United States, according to the message he shared with CNN.

While it didn’t affect his own case, the email left Ahmad irked on behalf of Afghan families still in limbo.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I have this message to the US government to please go and follow up all left-behind people who work at, who help US government in Afghanistan, … they are in danger. They don’t have food. They don’t have safety.”

For its part, the non-profit Women for Afghan Women has seen little success with the State Department’s DS-4317 reunification process for humanitarian parolees, its senior immigration attorney Sanam Ghandehari told CNN. None of the 60 families it represents has been reunited through that avenue, while the Citizenship and Immigration Services I-730 process has helped half its eligible clients. Eight unaccompanied minors it represents have yet to be reunited with relatives, she added.

The State Department in response stressed President Joe Biden and his administration “have made it clear that our commitment to our Afghan allies is enduring,” an agency spokesperson said, noting the US government has resettled more than 140,000 Afghans – including hundreds of unaccompanied minors – since August 2021. “We continue to fulfill our special obligation to the brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with our military service members, aid workers, and diplomats for two decades.”

Citizenship and Immigration Services, meanwhile, “adjudicates each Form I-730 asylee relative petition fairly, efficiently and humanely on a case-by-case basis to determine if it meets all standards and eligibility criteria required under applicable laws, regulations and policies,” its spokesperson told CNN.

“The agency is committed to breaking down barriers in the immigration system, supporting Afghan nationals in the United States, promoting policies and procedures that strengthen family reunification efforts, and upholding America’s promise as a nation of welcome and possibility with fairness, integrity and respect for all we serve.”

‘I feel safe and feel so free’

Now in Los Angeles, Albina goes to the store on her own, without any anxiety or fear.

“I feel safe and feel so free in here,” she said. “No one to watch me, no one to follow me, like say, … ‘Where are you going? What are you doing here? Why you came alone here?’”

Still, she agonizes about her relatives in Afghanistan, she said – and feels some obligation for their continuing to live under Taliban rule.
“And still, I’m worried about this. I just, I feel so bad that: Oh my god, because of me, they stay in Afghanistan,” she told CNN.

“They’re left in Afghanistan, and I come here.”

The Romans now have moved into a two-bedroom apartment that fits all five of them. Their new struggles are now similar to anyone else’s in Los Angeles: trying to afford the high cost of living. Ahmad works part-time for Miry’s List and also drives for Uber.

But challenges like these seem surmountable now that they’re together.Here in California, Muhsenat – who turned 9 earlier this month – is free to kick a soccer ball around in the park with her brothers, her mom said.

And she’s already enrolled for the fall semester at the same elementary school as her older brother, Uzair. After that, of course, she’ll be free to continue on to middle school, high school and beyond – perhaps to dental school, her latest aspiration.

“She can do anything,” Ahmad said of his daughter. “She can study, she can be journalist, a doctor, anything. And in Afghanistan, that was impossible.”
Taliban Clamps Down On Activities Of Rival Islamist Parties In Afghanistan (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [6/11/2024 11:34 AM, Abubakar Siddique, 1530K, Negative]
The Taliban government has cracked down on rival Islamist parties in Afghanistan in what is seen as an effort to prevent any future opposition to its hard-line rule.

Since banning all political parties last year, the Taliban has targeted two of its major former rivals. It shut down two Kabul-based TV stations owned by the Hezb-e Islami and Jamiat-e Islami parties, respectively.

Now, the extremist group has cracked down on Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan, closing a TV station as well as a university and seminary accused of having links with the Shi’ite political party.

The Taliban’s clampdown on political parties is part of a wider assault on dissent. After seizing power in 2021, the militants have jailed dozens of journalists, activists, and academics.

‘Relentless Crackdown’

The Taliban’s Justice Ministry on June 8 ordered the closure of Tamadon TV due to its alleged affiliation with Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan. The ministry also alleged that the station was operating on “seized land.”

Tamadon TV, which covered news and current affairs as well as Shi’ite religious programming, has denied the claims.

The station was founded in 2006 by Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, a prominent Shi’ite cleric and leader of Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan who died in 2019.

Mohammad Jawad Mohseni, the director of Tamadon TV, rejected the Taliban’s claims about the broadcaster’s political affiliations. He said Mohseni had resigned as the leader of Harakat-e Islami in 2005, a year before establishing the station.

Global and Afghan media watchdogs have condemned the closure of Tamadon TV.

“The Taliban is expanding its relentless crackdown on Afghan media and suppressing any independent voices,” said a statement by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which called on the group to “immediately and unconditionally reverse its decision.”

In April, the Taliban shut down Noor TV and Barya TV for "violating Afghan and Islamic values and journalistic principles.”

Jamiat-e Islami owned Noor TV, while Hezb-e Islami ran Barya. The stations ran Islamic programs.

Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan, Jamiat-e Islami, and Hezb-e Islami were all factions of the mujahedin, the Islamist groups that battled the Taliban for control of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Prominent mujahedin figures received prominent roles in the new political order that emerged after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 toppled the Taliban’s first regime.

‘Narrow-Minded Policies’

On the same day that it ordered the closure of Tamadon TV, the Taliban also announced that it was shutting down Khatam-al Nabyeen University and its madrasah, or Islamic seminary. The same allegations were made against the educational institutions.

“Political parties are abolished in the country,” Barakat Rasuli, a spokesman for the Taliban’s Justice Ministry, wrote on X. “Their media outlets do not have the right to operate.”

“The buildings [of all three] are built on usurped land,” Rasuli added. “This why we have stopped their activities and shut down their offices.”

The TV station, university, and seminary are all part of a sprawling complex in west Kabul, where members of the Shi’ite minority reside. Like Tamadon TV, the university and madrasah were established by Mohseni in 2006.

Mohseni was believed to have ties with neighboring Iran, where he lived for years during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tehran allegedly helped fund the Khatam-al Nabyeen University and seminary as part of its efforts to build influence in the country.

Afghanistan’s Shi’ite community have been increasingly marginalized under the rule of the Taliban, a Sunni militant group.

The Taliban has prevented members of the Shi’ite community, which makes up around 15 percent of the population, from publicly marking important religious festivals and restricted the teaching of Shi’ite jurisprudence in universities in Afghanistan.

Sami Yousafzai, a veteran Afghan journalist and commentator, said the militant group’s closure of Tamadon TV as well as Khatam-al Nabyeen University and seminary "shows the Taliban’s religious bias and its narrow-minded policies."

"They are against anyone who doesn’t follow their ideology, [including] followers of Islamist groups such as Hezb-e Islami, Jamiat-e Islami, or Harakat-e Islami Afghanistan," Yousafzai added.
Al Qaeda chief invites foreign fighters to train in Afghanistan, target West: ‘Safe haven for terrorists’ (FOX News)
FOX News [6/11/2024 8:04 AM, Chris Massaro, 48215K, Neutral]
Al Qaeda’s leader in Afghanistan, Saif al-Adl, issued a call to foreign fighters around the world to migrate to Afghanistan and join the ranks of the jihadi terror group.

A new report in the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Long War Journal highlights the call from al-Adl and is so far the clearest indication from al Qaeda for foreigners to come to Afghanistan since the Taliban regained control of Kabul in 2021.

Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, told Fox News Digital that this message officially pronounces Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists.

"Al Qaeda is firmly ensconced in Afghanistan, and has established training camps in 10 provinces, as well as religious schools, safe houses, a weapons depot, and a media operations center … al Qaeda is telling us it plans to use this terror infrastructure to attack the West," he warned.

The terror group has established these terrorist training camps across Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, including in Panjshir, once the center of anti-Taliban resistance. The United Nations estimates al Qaeda has around 600 members in its ranks, but Roggio believes that the official estimates of their strength over the years have been consistently low.

"Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and safe haven within Afghanistan gives the terror group the opportunity to capitalize on Adl’s call for its supporters to migrate to the country," Roggio and co-author Caleb Weiss wrote in their report.

Adl recently released a pamphlet titled "This is Gaza: A War of Existence, Not a War of Borders," which exploits the anger over Israel’s war in Gaza to encourage people to gain training, experience, and knowledge about how to carry out attacks against "Zionist" and Western targets.

Adl’s pamphlet states "the continuation of the genocide in Gaza calls for the Islamic peoples to strike all Zionist interests (both Western and Jewish) in all Islamic lands." The appropriate response, according to Adl’s vision, are tragedies such as the 9/11 and Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, taking the fight to the enemy. The report also notes that Adl praises and encourages homegrown terrorism within Western countries which act as a deterrent force in domestic territories.

The reality that al Qaeda is championing Afghanistan as a ground to stage terrorist attacks on the West over 20 years after 9/11 is not a surprise to many observers of the region.

"The fact that al Qaeda leaders are now calling for foreign fighters to come to Afghanistan substantially increases the odds of foreign fighters heading there. This development will be unsurprising for hawks who warned about the dangers of withdrawing from Afghanistan," Max Abrahms, terrorism expert and professor of political science at Northeastern University, told Fox News Digital.

Adl envisions Afghanistan as a model for Muslims around the world to settle in and holds up the Taliban as a model of Islamic governance for future Islamic states to emulate. Many observers and policymakers assessed that al Qaeda’s focus would remain on local affairs in Afghanistan and other countries the group operated in. The latest call from Adl contradicts these claims and shows that al Qaeda is looking beyond Afghanistan’s borders with ambitions to target the West.

A United Nations report in February 2023 noted that Adl became al Qaeda’s third emir, replacing Ayman al-Zawahiri, who succeeded Usama bin Laden and was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2022. Adl’s leadership differs from bin Laden and Zawahiri as he served in the Egyptian army, bringing with him more military experience than his predecessors. He left Egypt to join the mujahideen and fight off the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He later went on to join al Qaeda after it was established in 1988 and helped plot major international terrorist attacks, including the suicide bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The 2020 Doha Agreement, negotiated under former President Trump and implemented by President Biden, laid the groundwork for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces in exchange for a pledge from the Taliban to prevent any terrorist organization from using Afghan soil to threaten or attack the United States or its allies. It was never clear at the time whether the Taliban would ever formally sever its longstanding ties with al Qaeda.

A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the U.S. will "continue to push the Taliban to fulfill all their counterterrorism commitments and ensure that terrorist attacks are not launched from Afghan soil." If the Taliban fail to fulfill their commitments, the U.S. also retains an over-the-horizon capabilities to address threats, as demonstrated with the strike that killed al-Zawahiri in 2022, the State Department spokesperson said.

According to multiple United Nations Monitoring reports, "the Taliban and Al-Qaeda remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties" and that their "relationship remains strong" as of 2024.

The U.S. Intelligence Community Annual Threat Assessment states that while al Qaeda has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan, its "regional affiliates on the African continent and Yemen will sustain the global network as the group maintains its strategic intent to target the United States and U.S. citizens."
Pakistan
Muggings, Murders and Mob Justice: Violent Crime Roars Back in Karachi (New York Times)
New York Times [6/12/2024 12:02 AM, Zia ur-Rehman, 831K, Neutral]
The terrifying stories are sprawled across local newspapers and recounted in hushed tones at tea stalls and bus stands: another day, another brutal death during an armed robbery in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

Last Wednesday, a car mechanic was shot dead by muggers trying to steal his phone. The day before, robbers in two separate incidents killed a secondhand shoe seller who refused to hand over his phone and a businessman who had just withdrawn cash from a bank. A few days earlier, robbers killed a 27-year-old mechanical engineer, stealing his phone, cash and motorcycle.

Across Karachi, Pakistan’s economic powerhouse, the rate of violent crime has soared. That has created a sense that no place is safe in this metropolis of 20 million people, and led many to worry that the city is returning to its violent, chaotic past. The country’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, has called for a “large-scale operation” against the street criminals.

“The fear of mugging hangs over you every time you step outside,” said Shamim Ali, 43, a factory worker who said he was mugged twice in recent months. “Criminals operate with brazenness in broad daylight.”

The number of reported homicides, extortion attempts and motorcycle thefts has nearly doubled this year compared with the same period last year, according to the government-backed Citizen-Police Liaison Committee. At least 58 people were killed in muggings in the first five months of 2024, nearly double the number in that period in 2023, police records show. Rights activists say the true toll of violent crime is most likely higher, as many victims are hesitant to report cases.

A major driver of the jump in crime, experts and police officials said, is Pakistan’s economic crash, its worst in decades, with soaring debt, widening trade deficits and record inflation. Another contributor: record-breaking floods in 2022 and other natural disasters that have sent tens of thousands of farmers to the city looking for work. Few have found it.

The sense of desperation among the city’s poorest has deepened as the economic collapse and population surge have strained the local government’s already limited capacity to provide basic services like water and sanitation, activists said.

The rising crime is the result of “systemic injustices and the state’s failure to take responsibility,” said Qazi Khizer, vice chair of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “Decades of neglect to the city have created a pressure cooker ready to explode,” he added.

The despair has breathed new life into the city’s criminal gangs, which have found recruits among the ballooning youth population, police officials said. Some of the muggings-turned-murders have also been linked to militant groups that have resurged elsewhere in the country in recent years, said Raja Umar Khattab, a senior official in the Karachi police’s counterterrorism department.

Mr. Ali, the factory worker who has been the victim of two recent muggings, said the latest had happened one day around 9 a.m. at his usual breakfast spot in a lower-income neighborhood. As he was having a cup of tea, four armed robbers barged inside.

“Hand over your phones and wallets, now!” the thieves yelled, warning the patrons not to resist, according to Mr. Ali. Within minutes, the robbers had taken valuables from the two dozen people there.

The surge in violence has knocked the city back in time to around a decade ago, when armed wings of political parties, Taliban militants and criminal gangs controlled large swaths of the city, their turf battles frequently spilling out onto the streets. TV news broadcasts were filled with reports of murders each night. Family members checked in with one another every day to make sure they had returned from work alive. Others barely left their homes.

A paramilitary-led operation starting in 2013 to flush out the militants restored order. Murders plummeted from around 3,100 in 2012 to 508 in 2020, according to police data.

Now, though, fear — and outrage — have returned. “The government seems to have abandoned Karachi’s residents to the mercy of robbers,” said Syed Akhtar Hussain, 70. His 38-year-old son, Syed Ali Rehbar, was fatally shot in January by robbers who accosted him while he was delivering food for a ride-hailing app.

One recent afternoon at a bustling tea stall along a main road in Karachi, dozens of taxi drivers, businessmen and university students nursed their steaming cups and chatted beneath shade trees. Nearly everyone kept a wary eye on the street, suspicious that any motorcyclist passing by could be a robber in disguise.

“Before 2014, our worries were ethnic violence and stray bullets from gang wars,” said Muhammad Zaheer, a 33-year-old computer trader. “The security operation brought peace for a few years, but now, the fear is different. Street criminals wouldn’t hesitate to kill if you resist giving up your phone.”

Social media has only added to the collective anxiety. Every day, new videos circulate showing robbers brazenly snatching valuables in broad daylight on busy streets, at restaurants, at traffic lights, at barbershops, even at mosques.

As public anger has risen, political leaders have scrambled for solutions. Officials have floated regulations to control the sale of secondhand phones and motorcycles — items frequently targeted in muggings. The city’s mayor, Murtaza Wahab, has promised to install thousands of surveillance cameras. Others, including the provincial governor and certain political parties and business associations, have called for a more heavy-handed approach, including military intervention and the issuance of firearms licenses so residents can protect themselves.

Last month, Mr. Zardari, the country’s president, directed the provincial government to launch an operation against street criminals in Karachi, but no such action has begun. Experts warn that a crackdown could exacerbate the problem.

“Historically, pressure on police to deliver quick results leads to violent, coercive practices like staged encounter killings, custodial torture, arbitrary detentions and shoot-to-kill policies,” said Zoha Waseem, a Pakistani policing expert at the University of Warwick in Britain. “A policing response is not a long-term solution,” she added.

Public trust in the police — already frayed by years of corruption and inefficiency — has plummeted after scores of officers were implicated in street crimes. In January alone, more than 55 Karachi police officers faced suspensions over suspicions that they had been involved in criminal groups or taken kickbacks from them.

Some residents are taking matters into their own hands, leading to a worrisome rise in vigilante justice.

Last Wednesday, a mob, enraged by a robbery, chased down two fleeing men, killing one and injuring the other. The day before, a mob lynched another man suspected of robbery. Three days before that, the police narrowly saved three robbery suspects from a lynching.

“Simmering public frustration is dangerously normalizing mob violence,” said Muhammad Nafees, an expert on crime and violence associated with the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies. “These mobs deliver punishment based on mere suspicion, putting both the innocent and the guilty at risk.”
Pakistani army kills 11 militants in raid in the northwest following bombing that killed 7 soldiers (AP)
AP [6/11/2024 8:18 AM, Staff, 31180K, Negative]
Pakistani security forces raided a militant hideout, killing 11 in an overnight operation in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in the restive northwest, authorities said on Tuesday.

The intelligence-based raid was in retaliation to Sunday’s roadside bombing that killed seven soldiers in the same Lakki Marwat district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan, the military said in a statement.

It added the operation is still ongoing “to eliminate any other terrorist found in the area” and that security forces were “determined to wipe out the menace of terrorism” in Pakistan.

No one has claimed Sunday’s attack, however, blame is likely to fall on Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, an ally of the Afghan Taliban but is a separate group. It has stepped up its assaults in the region since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

Pakistani officials often accuse Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers of giving shelter to TTP fighters, a charge that Kabul repeatedly denies. Pakistani Taliban says it is not using Afghan soil for attacks in Pakistan.
Pakistan to unveil budget with eye to winning new IMF bailout (Reuters)
Reuters [6/12/2024 1:03 AM, Gibran Peshimam and Ariba Shahid, 5.2M, Neutral]
Pakistan’s coalition government will present on Wednesday its budget for the fiscal year to June 2025 that analysts expect to set ambitious fiscal targets as it looks to strengthen the case for a new bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund.

The budget comes a day after the government said economic growth of 2.4% expected in the current year would miss a target of 3.5%, although revenues were up 30% over last year, and the fiscal and current account deficits were under control.

While Pakistan is expected to stick to fiscal prudence under a new IMF programme, growth is expected to stay constrained, said Abid Suleri of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute think tank.

"Many of the measures taken to achieve fiscal sustainability will impact growth negatively, at least in the near future," he added.

Pakistan is in talks with the IMF for a loan estimated to range from $6 billion to $8 billion, as it seeks to avert a default for an economy growing at the slowest pace in the region.

But a recent economic uptick, following stabilisation measures and falling inflation, as well as Monday’s interest rate cut by the central bank, has made the government optimistic about prospects for growth.

The key policy rate could fall further this year and economic growth would continue to rise, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, set to present his first budget, told reporters on Tuesday.

Markets will watch the budget for a target for proceeds from privatisation, as Pakistan looks to make its first major sale in nearly two decades with the disposal of a stake in its national airline, kicking off a series of such moves.

But concerns remain about the government’s ability to pursue reform, since it is vulnerable to the quirks of coalition politics in the face of rising public pressure against inflationary reform measures.

Tapping under-taxed sectors such as agriculture and retail for additional revenues would prompt protests by farmers and small traders, while spending cuts in discretionary funds for MPs have already squeezed alliances and party loyalties.

The budget will be in line with IMF requirements, said economist Sakib Sherani, but cautioned, "However, the real problem will be adherence to fiscal austerity and prudence and containment of populism."
India
Canada Shares More Information With India On Sikh Murder Case (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [6/11/2024 10:56 AM, Sudhi Ranjan Sen and Brian Platt, 27296K, Negative]
Canada and India have increased their security exchanges in recent months over the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, including visits to India by senior Canadian officials to share a robust set of evidence on the case, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

But diplomatic relations between the two countries remain in a deep freeze ahead of the Group of Seven leaders summit in Italy this week, where both Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in attendance.

David Vigneault, head of Canada’s intelligence agency, visited India twice in the first few months of this year, sharing telephone numbers and other evidence related to the murder of Nijjar, said Indian officials asking not to be named because the discussions are private.

The intelligence chief was followed by more Canadian officials and discussions between the two sides, the people said, without giving further details of the conversations.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs didn’t respond to a request for comment on the visit of the Canadian security officials and the discussions between the two sides. An official with Global Affairs Canada confirmed that Vigneault had traveled to India but declined to give details on the nature or substance of the meetings.

Nijjar, an Indian-born Canadian citizen who advocated for a separate Sikh homeland known as Khalistan, had been designated a terrorist under Indian laws. He was assassinated in Surrey, British Columbia, in June 2023.

A few months later, Trudeau publicly alleged that his government had credible evidence the Indian government had orchestrated the killing. In May, Canadian police arrested four Indian nationals on murder charges linked to Nijjar’s death.

So far, India has refused to launch a formal investigation to probe the involvement of Indians and its intelligence agencies. Instead, Modi’s government reacted furiously to Trudeau’s allegation, forcing Canada to downsize its diplomatic presence in India and temporarily suspending visa services to Canadians.

At a media briefing in early May, the Indian foreign ministry repeated New Delhi’s charge that Canada had not taken India’s concerns on the issue of Sikh separatism seriously. India has “long maintained that separatists, extremists and those advocating violence have been given political space in Canada,” Randhir Jaiswal, spokesperson for India’s External Affairs Ministry, told reporters.

By contrast, India has launched a probe on similar allegations made by the US on a thwarted assassination attempt of a US-based Sikh leader also declared a terrorist under Indian laws.

Despite the increased contact among security agencies, Trudeau’s government has not seen any indication Modi is ready to improve diplomatic ties, said Canadian government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Trudeau has repeatedly called on Modi to work with his government in investigating all the circumstances around Nijjar’s killing.

A sign of how far apart the two countries remain was evident in the recent public exchanges between their leaders. After Modi was reelected on June 4, Trudeau posted a statement on X congratulating him for the victory and said Canada “stands ready to work with India to advance the relationship between our nations’ people — anchored to human rights, diversity and the rule of law.”

Modi responded four days later, saying he looks forward to working with Canada “based on mutual understanding and respect for each others’ concerns.”
India eyes oil deals with nations including Russia, minister says (Reuters)
Reuters [6/11/2024 7:34 AM, Nidhi Verma, 42991K, Neutral]
Indian Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday announced that state-run Bharat Petroleum Corp (BPCL.NS) plans to build a new refinery and the nation is looking at signing more oil import deals with countries including Russia at discounted rates.

Puri, who took charge of the ministry for a second time on Tuesday, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to provide energy at affordable rates to customers to cushion them from the volatile oil markets.

India, the world’s third biggest oil importer and consumer, emerged as the biggest buyer of Russian sea-borne oil, snapping up barrels sold at a discount as Western companies halted purchases after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

"We are a longstanding partner of Russian federation. We have had discussion with the Russians on long-term deals," Puri said.

"I am confident that both our private and public sector players will sign long-term deals with countries where they see benefit in doing so," he said, when asked if Indian state-run companies are looking at signing such deals with Russia.

While private refiners Reliance Industries (RELI.NS) and Nayara Energy have signed an annual import deal with Russia, state refiner Indian Oil Corp (IOC.NS) has not yet renewed its deal.

Nayara Energy, majority owned by Russian entities, has also signed an annual crude supply deal with a trader to buy about 8-10 million barrels each month at a discount of $3-3.50 per barrel linked to the Dubai marker in 2024.

Indian state refiners BPCL and Hindustan Petroleum Corp (HPCL.NS) are also looking at signing term deals with Russia.

Puri said the location and capacity of a new refinery planned by BPCL have not yet been finalised.

He said India wants to raise its oil output which has been stagnant for years. State-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC.NS) has floated a tender seeking technical tie-ups with global oil majors to boost output its western offshore Mumbai High Field, he said.

Output from the Mumbai High Field has been declining since 2018. Having hit a peak of 471,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 1984-85, it produced an average 134,000 bpd in the fiscal year to March 2024.
India to remain fastest growing big economy in 2024, World Bank says (Nikkei Asia)
Nikkei Asia [6/11/2024 9:30 AM, Jack Stone Truitt, 2042K, Neutral]
India, despite a projected slowdown this year, will continue to be the world’s fastest-growing large economy, according to the World Bank’s latest Global Economic Prospects report.

The world’s most populous nation is forecast to expand 6.6% this year, down from 8.2% in 2023, on the back of strong domestic demand and a surge in investment. India’s growth is propelling South Asia to be the fastest-growing region, the World Bank said in the report published Tuesday.

Global economic growth will hold steady at 2.6% in 2024 after three straight years of decline, in what appears to be a "final approach for a ‘soft landing.’" But overall risks facing the world’s economy are tilted toward the negative.

The East Asia and Pacific region -- which includes China, South Korea, ASEAN nations and Pacific island nations -- is expected to slow to 4% this year from 4.2%. China’s growth rate is projected to drop to 4.8% from 5.2%.

China’s ongoing property sector slump, weak retail sales and poor business sentiment are hurting investment as policy uncertainty both domestically and internationally scares off investors. A worse than expected downturn in China could spill over into global commodity price volatility should Chinese demand for energy and other commodities weaken. Economies with strong trade ties to China could be especially vulnerable.

Indonesia and Vietnam will be bright spots among major economies in the region with growth projections at 5% and 5.5%, respectively.

Among advanced economies, Japan’s sluggish consumption growth, slowing exports and a stabilizing tourism sector are set to cause its economy to grow at 0.7% in 2024 compared to 1.9% last year. Though stable, the projected growth remains well below levels in the decade before the pandemic and "insufficient" for reaching key worldwide development goals, the World Bank said.

In the U.S., November’s presidential election has the potential to escalate geopolitical tensions, fragment trade, and hamper Asia-Pacific economies. The global lender said the protectionist trade policies of former U.S. President Donald Trump could be an issue should he win the race.

"U.S. companies appear to be shifting some operations from China to other countries. This trend may accelerate as the expectations of swift resolutions of trade tensions have declined over the past year," World Bank deputy chief economist Ayhan Kose said. "Recent trade tensions have led to shifts in trade patterns and trade flows."

The U.S. will be the standout advanced economy as it is projected to hold steady at 2.5% growth for the second year in a row in 2024, with a chance of stronger than expected growth. "U.S. dynamism, in fact, is one reason the global economy enjoys some upside potential over the next two years," the report says.

Other positive trends could include inflation -- currently projected to average 3.5% this year -- coming down faster than expected

Nevertheless, interest rates are expected to remain high worldwide as the "higher for longer" rates environment keeps global financial conditions tight, hurting developing economies the hardest.
WHO confirms a human case of avian influenza in India (Reuters)
Reuters [6/11/2024 9:28 PM, Urvi Dugar and Leroy Leo, 42991K, Negative]
The World Health Organization on Tuesday said a case of human infection with bird flu caused by the H9N2 virus was detected in a four-year-old child in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The patient was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit (ICU) of a local hospital due to persistent severe respiratory issues, high fever and abdominal cramps in February, and was discharged three months later after diagnosis and treatment, the WHO said.

The patient had exposure to poultry at home and in his surroundings, and there were no known person reporting symptoms of respiratory illness among his family and other contacts, the agency said.

Information on the vaccination status and details of antiviral treatment were not available at the time of reporting, the WHO added.

This is the second human infection of H9N2 bird flu from India, with the first in 2019, the agency said.

While the H9N2 virus typically tends to cause mild illness, the United Nations agency said that further sporadic human cases could occur as this virus is one of the most prevalent avian influenza viruses circulating in poultry in different regions.

An immediate response from the Indian health ministry was not available during late hours.
Powerful Hindu Group That Spawned Modi Party Slams His Campaign (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [6/11/2024 6:27 AM, Swati Gupta, 27296K, Neutral]
India’s powerful Hindu right-wing group that helped shape the Bharatiya Janata Party criticized the election campaign for being divisive and too reliant on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity.

The campaign lacked “decorum,” with lies being spread to sow tension between communities, Mohan Bhagwat, leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, said in a speech on Monday, his first public comments on the elections. Separately, an RSS-affiliated magazine said the poll results were a reality check

for “overconfident” BJP workers who were too dependent on Modi’s brand to win votes.

The RSS is the ideological parent of the BJP, with several of the party’s leaders, including Modi, starting their political careers as volunteers at the group. It’s instrumental to the BJP’s election campaign, providing tens of thousands of volunteers to help get voters out to the polling booths.

The comments from Bhagwat and the RSS’s mouthpiece provide the first public criticism of the BJP from within the broader family of Hindu nationalist organizations after the party lost its majority in the parliament in just-concluded elections. Tensions had been building between the RSS and the BJP after the latter’s President JP Nadda last month dismissed the RSS’s importance in galvanizing support for the political party.

During the election campaign, Modi and other BJP leaders were accused by opposition groups of using anti-Muslim language and fear-mongering to win support. India’s former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Modi’s statements on the campaign trail as “hateful.”

“There is a moral line when you are fighting elections and that line was crossed,” Bhagwat told RSS workers Monday.

Bhagwat also called for an end to ethnic violence in the northeastern state of Manipur, which has been continuing for more than a year. Opposition groups have criticized the government for not doing enough to quell the violence.

“It is a duty to deal with it on priority,” Bhagwat said.

An article in the RSS-affiliated magazine, Organiser, took issue with the BJP workers who failed to get voters to the polls and didn’t call on the RSS volunteers to do the field work, as they usually do during election campaigns.

“Since they were happy in their bubble, enjoying the glow reflected from Modiji’s aura, they were not listening to the voices on the streets,” an RSS member wrote in the magazine.

In Maharashtra state, where the BJP-led alliance lost support in the elections, the RSS article accused the BJP of “unnecessary politicking and avoidable manipulations.” It added that “in a single stroke, BJP reduced its brand value.”

Maharashtra, which houses India’s financial capital as well as the headquarters of the RSS, is due to hold state elections later his year.

Bhagwat also made a call for consensus building under the new administration.

“We need unity in the society but because injustice has been done, there is a distance between people,” he said. “There is no trust.”
India’s Modi prevails over allies in cabinet line-up (Reuters)
Reuters [6/11/2024 11:56 AM, Jatindra Dash and Krishna N. Das, 4032K, Positive]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has retained all key cabinet ministers in their portfolios in the new government, signalling that he still calls the shots despite having to rely on coalition allies for a majority in parliament.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fell well short of the majority mark on its own in the election that ended this month, but the government announced there will be no change in personnel at the four senior-most ministries - finance, home affairs, defence and foreign affairs. The party also retained other key ministries like commerce and agriculture.

Delhi was abuzz with talk of haggling by the allies for key portfolios in the lead-up to Modi taking office for a rare third straight term, and analysts said there could be some anger over the cabinet choices but no immediate fall-out.

"He has managed to prevail over his allies to keep all the important portfolios to demonstrate continuity, and they seem to have gone along," said Tarun Basu, director of the New Delhi-based Society for Policy Studies think tank.

"Despite this outward projection, there will inevitably be internal pulls and pressures within the coalition, though these may not come out in the public so quickly."

Only 5 out of the 30 cabinet seats were given to the allies, in ministries including civil aviation, food processing, steel, animal husbandry, and small and medium enterprises.

The BJP won 240 of the 543 seats in the lower house of parliament in the election. The alliance it leads won a total of 293 seats, crossing the majority mark of 272 seats.

"We believe that the distribution of seats displays continuity at its best and equitable treatment of allies, which is a big plus," PhillipCapital analyst Anjali Verma wrote in a note.

Aside from the Hindu nationalist BJP, the two main constituents of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) are two regional parties focused on getting funds for their states, Andhra Pradesh in the south and Bihar in the east.

Andhra-based Telugu Desam Party did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bihar’s Janata Dal (United) said it had given its "unconditional support to the NDA government".

"People are saying many things but we are not concerned about cabinet portfolio allocations as it’s a special prerogative of the prime minister," said spokesperson Abhishek Jha.

"(But) we are hopeful of getting something special for Bihar’s development."

The BJP said it respects its partners and their aspirations, but added that all the allies had given a free hand to Modi.

"It’s a pre-poll alliance and the plan for the next five years has been deliberated and discussed with everyone," said BJP spokesperson Syed Zafar Islam.

"The focus is to ensure there is momentum in the economy, and continuity is important. There is no condition for their support - they also want the economy to be accelerated, for lots of jobs to be created."

The leaders of the allied parties, Chandrababu Naidu of Telugu Desam and Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal, are veteran politicians who are known to have views that could be at odds with the BJP and its agenda of muscular Hinduism.

"Modi will need to moderate his positions on certain ideological issues that do not align with the views of his allies ... who are past masters in coalition politics," said Basu of Society for Policy Studies.

"These leaders ... are bound to have their pound of flesh although they may not be vocal about their differences unless they reach a stand-off point."
Extreme heat triggers novel payout for 50,000 women in India (Reuters)
Reuters [6/12/2024 1:10 AM, Simon Jessop and Katy Daigle, 5.2M, Neutral]
A group of 50,000 self-employed women in India have become the first beneficiaries of a novel insurance scheme that pays out when temperatures hit certain extremes.

As the temperature crossed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) between May 18 and May 25, the women in the states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra all received a flat $5 payment.

"This is the first time that insurance payouts and a direct cash assistance program have been combined to supplement the income of women when it’s dangerously hot," said Kathy Baughman McLeod, CEO of non-profit Climate Resilience for All, which designed the insurance scheme along with India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).

The bulk of the women, some 92%, then went on to receive an additional payout when insurance tied to the local conditions and duration of the extreme heat was triggered, with some receiving up to $19.80 each.

Insurance is increasingly seen by policymakers as a tool to help vulnerable communities receive financial support quickly after extreme weather events occur.

Total payments across the programme totalled $341,553.

The insurance was underwritten by reinsurer Swiss Re and provided locally by ICICI Lombard.
India’s fizzling monsoon could prolong heatwave in north, sources say (Reuters)
Reuters [6/12/2024 3:17 AM, Rajendra Jadhav, 5.2M, Negative]
India’s monsoon rains have lost momentum after covering western regions ahead of schedule, and their arrival in northern and central states could be delayed, extending a heatwave in the grain-growing plains, two senior weather officials told Reuters
.
Summer rains, critical to spur economic growth in Asia’s third-largest economy, usually begin in the south around June 1 before spreading nationwide by July 8, allowing farmers to plant crops such as rice, cotton, soybeans, and sugarcane.

"The monsoon has slowed down after reaching Maharashtra and may take a week to regain momentum," an official of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) told Reuters.

The monsoon arrived nearly two days ahead of schedule in the western state home to the commercial capital of Mumbai, but its progress in central and northern states will be delayed by a few days, added the official, who sought anonymity.

The lifeblood of the nearly $3.5-trillion economy, the monsoon brings nearly 70% of the rain India needs to water farms and refill reservoirs and aquifers.

In the absence of irrigation, nearly half the farmland in the world’s second-biggest producer of rice, wheat and sugar depends on the annual rains that usually run from June to September.

The maximum temperature in India’s northern states ranges between 42 degrees Celsius and 46 degrees C (108 degrees Fahrenheit to 115 degrees F), which is nearly 3 degrees C to 5 degrees C (5 degrees F and 9 degrees F) above normal, the IMD data showed.

India’s northern and eastern states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Odisha, are likely to experience days of heatwave in the next two weeks, another weather official said.

"Weather models are not indicating any early respite from the heatwave," the official said. "The delay in the monsoon’s progress will increase temperatures in the northern plains."

Both officials sought anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

India is among several parts of Asia wilting in an unusually hot summer, a trend scientists say has been worsened by human-driven climate change.

This month, the capital New Delhi recorded its highest ever temperature at 49.9 degrees C (122 degrees F) in some places, while grappling with a water shortage in heat hovering as high as 44 degrees C (112 degrees F).

Rains in central, northern and some western states are likely to fall below normal in the next two weeks, the second official said.

India has received 1% less rainfall than normal since the season began on June 1, the IMD says.
Peace eludes India’s Manipur even after defeating BJP over ethnic violence (Al Jazeera)
Al Jazeera [6/12/2024 12:00 AM, Greeshma Kuthar, 20.9M, Negative]
Thangman Guite had just finished her dinner on the night of June 6 when she received a phone call.

“They are coming, hide,” is all the 26-year-old school teacher heard.

Several other residents of Vengnuam, a village in Manipur state’s Jiribam district bordering Assam in India’s northeast, received a similar phone call.

Within minutes, Guite switched off the lights of her house and instructed about 15 villagers assembled before her home to run towards the house closest to the nearby forest. She also asked everyone to switch off their phones.

As they huddled in one of the rooms in that house, not even daring to approach the window to have a look outside, they heard voices and gunshots as at least two vehicles, allegedly carrying armed men belonging to Arambai Tenggol, a local militia, began to enter the village.

The huddled villagers ran to the forest, as quietly as they could. While hiding in darkness and fearing being discovered, Guite said she began to have flashes of all those captured and killed in the deadly ethnic violence that has gripped Manipur since May last year.

“I thought we wouldn’t [make it alive], honestly,” Guite told Al Jazeera. Within an hour, she saw smoke billowing from their village.

Early the next morning, soldiers of the Indian army, deployed to contain the violence, arrived.

As Guite made her way out of the forest and entered the village, she discovered her house was among dozens reduced to cinders. The church she prayed at every Sunday had suffered the same fate.

A 40-year-old man was missing. Residents said he had been abducted.

The incident at Vengnuam encapsulates the ethnic tensions in Manipur, where clashes between the predominantly Hindu Meitei community, who are in a majority, and the mainly Christian Kuki-Zo tribe have so far claimed more than 220 lives and displaced 67,000 others, according to the government data.

The Vengnuam attack followed tensions in Jiribam district after the decomposed body of Seigoulen Singson, a 21-year-old from the Kuki-Zo community, was discovered weeks earlier. Singson had been missing since May 14.

On June 6, two days after the main opposition Indian National Congress party trounced the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in both the parliamentary constituencies in Manipur, the dead body of 59-year-old Soibam Saratkumar Singh, a Meitei, was found by the locals after he had been missing for more than a week.

The Meitei alleged that Kuki-Zo tribals were behind the murder. Kuki-Zo leaders denied involvement, blaming the killing on rival Meitei armed groups instead.

As the news of the arson at Vengnuam spread, Meiteis living in the area feared a counterattack and requested to be moved to safety by the authorities. Within hours of their evacuation to a relief camp, Lamtai Khunou, a Meitei village, was set on fire.

According to a statement by a Kuki-Zo group, the burning of Lamtai Khunou and two other Meitei villages was termed as “retribution against Arambai Tenggol who initiated these violent acts”.

“The tribals will no longer remain silent in the face of aggression,” it said.

As of the time of filing this report, more than 1,000 people in Jiribam, belonging to both Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities had been displaced – the Kuki-Zo were evacuated to Assam by the army, and all the Meitei from the periphery areas were relocated to a relief camp.

‘Suffered under BJP rule’
As India concluded its weeks-long general election on June 4, which saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi return to power for a record third term, tensions in the remote Manipur state remain at a boil.

Critics have accused the BJP, which heads the Manipur government, of using the violence for political gains — a charge the party and state government deny. Many in the state view the BJP’s defeat in the parliamentary election as a rejection of its alleged role in the continuing violence.

Guite told Al Jazeera that exercising her franchise was important and the only way to register her discontent at the government’s failure to control the killings. She, however, added that the sense of hope generated among her Kuki-Zo tribe by the election results was lost on her after the Vengnuam incident.

On the morning of June 8, as the Indian army escorted her and other Kuki-Zo to a relief camp in neighbouring Assam state, the futility of the celebrations around the electoral changes in Manipur slowly dawned on her.

“My people have suffered under the BJP rule, who we blame for instigating this violence. The results seemed like the entire state had rejected them. It made us believe that there would be a change in heart,” she told Al Jazeera over telephone.

Manipur has long witnessed tensions between the Meiteis, who constitute about 60 percent of its population and are concentrated in the more prosperous valley areas around the state capital, Imphal, and the minority Kuki-Zo and Naga tribes who live in the hill districts surrounding the valley.

India’s constitution identifies dozens of historically marginalised tribes as eligible for the government’s affirmative action programmes. They are given quotas in educational institutions and jobs through a so-called Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. For nearly a decade now, the Meiteis have been demanding the ST status as well, amid vehement opposition by the tribes.

A local court in March 2023 recommended that the ST status should also be extended to the Meiteis. The court order – rescinded in February this year – set off a chain of events that eventually led to one of India’s worst civil wars. As tribal groups held protest marches across the hill districts, demanding the withdrawal of the court order, there were fears of a Meitei backlash.

On May 3 last year, suspected Meitei individuals torched a centenary gate built to commemorate a Kuki-Zo rebellion in 1917-1919 against the colonial British rule in the hill district of Churachandpur. The burning of the monument triggered deadly riots between the two communities across the state.

Within weeks, Meiteis residing in the hill districts were evacuated by the army to the valley. As hundreds of Kuki-Zo fled Imphal, many were lynched to death and their villages in the peripheries of the hill districts burned down. Tens of thousands were displaced, the highest internal displacement in South Asia this year, according to the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s report published in May.

Tense elections

The violence forced the authorities to hold the general election on Manipur’s two seats in two phases – April 19 and April 26. Despite massive security, several incidents of violence and alleged vote rigging were reported, forcing repolling in about a dozen booths.

On the morning of April 19, Sarah Takhelmayum*, a 21-year-old social worker from Imphal, was one of the first to cast her vote in Moirang, part of the Inner Manipur constituency.

As she returned home, she received several calls about violence at some polling booths in the area. Soon, videos of voters running away in despair, with gunshots being heard around them began circulating on social media.

Takhelmayum said her mother was adamant about casting her vote as news of alleged voter repression streamed in. On their way to the polling station in Moirang, they heard gunshots and a stream of Arambai Tenggol vehicles moving in the area. Takhelmayum said she saw men with guns threatening the people.

“By 10am, everybody was up in arms, alleging that they were being stopped from voting. The resentment against the BJP was out in the open,” said Takhelmayum.

She said it was for the first time in a year that she saw people publicly pointing fingers at the governing party for everything that was wrong in the state, especially the manner in which the Arambai Tenggol militia had been accorded impunity.

“The obvious ties they had with the ruling government became more evident in the run-up to the elections and this made people question the militia and their posturing as saviours of the Meitei,” Takhelmayum said.

“What is the purpose of using weapons inside Imphal Valley, especially during an election? Where is the Kuki-Zo here who you say you are fighting against?” she asked.

In a news conference on April 19, the Congress complained of “unprecedented mass violence and booth capturing in the valley region by armed groups”.

At least three witnesses Al Jazeera spoke to in April also claimed they saw Arambai Tenggol members forcing people to vote for the BJP in the valley districts. The BJP rejected the allegation of using Arambai Tenggol fighters to influence the vote, with its state vice president Chidananda Singh telling Al Jazeera in April that the party “always stands for free and fair elections”.

In the Inner Manipur seat, the BJP candidate and state education minister Basanta Kumar Singh was defeated by a margin of 1,09,801 votes by Bimol Akoijam of the Congress.

Will Congress win ensure peace?

However, even many Meiteis said they had not imagined the BJP could be defeated in Manipur. Takhelmayum said she was shocked when she heard about the election results.

“Even if we wanted to vote them out, we felt that we were nothing in front of the muscle power and notoriety that the BJP yields in Manipur,” she told Al Jazeera.

Biju Samom, editor at a local news outlet, said a “silent but steady resentment” had been growing against the BJP in Manipur, especially because of its failure to restore peace in the state.

“This victory marks the beginning of a new politics in Manipur where younger people, more deserving people, influenced electoral politics than the usual ‘contractors’, ‘social workers’ and corrupt retired bureaucrats, backed by their militias,” Samom said.

In the hill districts, said independent researcher Siam Thangsing, the voters, angry with forced displacement of Kuki-Zo from the valley areas, were more set on defeating the BJP than on supporting the Congress – despite the fact that seven of the 10 Kuki-Zo legislators in the Manipur assembly are from the BJP.

Congress parliamentarian Alfred Kanngam S Arthur, who defeated Timothy Zimik of the Naga People’s Front (NPF), a BJP ally, from the Outer Manipur constituency, said the results would help lift a veil on what the state has been through over the past year.

“Now that we are in parliament, people of this country will hear what is happening here from the horse’s mouth,” Alfred told Al Jazeera.

NPF president and state minister Awangbow Newmai refused to attribute the loss to the BJP government’s handling of the violence, or the alleged failure of the federal government to control the crisis.

“They have been doing everything from the beginning to control the violence, but we respect the nature of a democracy, and the mandate of the people,” Newmai told Al Jazeera. “We are working to restore normalcy in the state.”

As the BJP returns to power in New Delhi, questions are being raised on how it will deal with the Manipur crisis, including whether Chief Minister N Biren Singh will continue to stay in office.

Researcher Thangsing fears the newly-elected Congress legislators will not do much to help the Kuki-Zo community, given the party’s stand in the conflict so far.

“While the [Congress] central leadership seems to be talking about peace in Manipur, we don’t see that from the state leadership,” she said.

Congress leaders in Manipur have been accused of being silent spectators to the civil war – unlike the party’s national leadership which has repeatedly attacked the BJP for failing to stop the violence and has promised to work for a political settlement to the conflict.

“How Congress addresses this contradiction could potentially determine if they will work towards ending the conflict,” Thangsing said.
Traumatised Indians recount deadly Kashmir attack on Hindu pilgrims (Agence France-Presse)
Agence France-Presse [6/11/2024 9:27 AM, Staff, 85570K, Negative]
Gunmen in Indian-administered Kashmir who ambushed a bus of Hindu pilgrims continued firing for several minutes even after it tumbled into a ravine, killing nine, survivors said Tuesday.

The brutal attack on Sunday evening was one of the deadliest attacks in years, and the first on Hindu pilgrims in the disputed Muslim-majority since 2017, when gunmen killed seven people in the Kashmir valley in another ambush on a bus.

"Bullets first hit the tyre of the bus, and it crashed into a tree -- my head got stuck under the seat in front," said Palit Gupta, a young girl among the 33 injured in the ambush.

"My daddy brought me out as I was crying and shouting ‘save me’," she told AFP from her hospital bed.

The attack took place on Sunday evening -- around an hour before Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi was sworn in for a third term in the capital New Delhi -- as the bus returned from the popular Shivkhori shrine.

"For a moment I thought I lost my life, but then I prayed pledging I will return to the shrine if I survive", said another injured pilgrim, Devi Prasad.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947, and both claim the high-altitude territory in full.

Rebel groups have waged an insurgency since 1989, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan.

The conflict has left tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers, and rebels dead.

Police said the driver was killed at the start of the shooting, with the bus then tumbling off the road.

"The terrorists continued to fire bullets on the bus for about five minutes after it had fallen into the gorge," said Prasad Gupta, one of the pilgrims recovering in a hospital in the city of Jammu.

"Some of us were hit with bullets," he added, visibly traumatised.

"We hid...and after they thought we were dead, they fled".

Santosh Kumar Verma, a prominent bruise on his face, said one "terrorist" fired at the front of the bus, with the vehicle careering to the side.

In his account, the gunmen "continued to fire bullets for about 15 minutes" after the crash.

On Tuesday, special forces, anti-terrorism and police officers continued a large-scale manhunt around the ambush site in the southern Reasi area, deploying drones to scan the forested area from above.

Interior minister Amit Shah has said the "culprits of this dastardly attack will not be spared".

Violence and anti-India protests have drastically fallen since 2019, when Modi’s government cancelled the region’s limited autonomy.

But since then rebel groups have targeted Indians from outside the disputed territory, killing several people.

Five rebels and an Indian air force corporal were killed in clashes since election campaigning began in the territory in April, until voting ended this month.

Two suspected rebels were also killed in a firefight with soldiers on June 3.

But the vote saw a 58.6 percent turnout, according to the election commission, a 30-percentage-point jump from the last vote in 2019 and the highest in 35 years.

India regularly accuses Pakistan of supporting and arming the rebels, a charge Islamabad denies.
Modi’s Taiwan Ties Have Rattled China (Foreign Policy)
Foreign Policy [6/11/2024 10:57 AM, Rishi Iyengar, 2014K, Positive]
In the week since he staked his claim for a third term as India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) has been replete with replies to congratulatory messages from dozens of global leaders—from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to U.S. President Joe Biden to Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, and even the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

But one post in particular raised hackles in China and eyebrows everywhere else. Taiwan’s recently elected president, Lai Ching-te, was among the first to congratulate Modi last week in a message that touted “the fast-growing” Taiwan-India partnership. Modi responded by endorsing “closer ties” between the two governments as well as a “mutually beneficial economic and technological partnership.”

China, predictably, did not take it well. “China opposes all forms of official interactions between the Taiwan authorities and countries having diplomatic relations with China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters, reiterating Beijing’s stance that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China” and adding that “China has protested to India about this.”

Modi and Lai’s interaction didn’t take place in a vacuum. India and Taiwan have been inching closer in recent years, driven largely by technologies such as semiconductor chips and mobile device manufacturing.

Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC) is building a chipmaking plant in partnership with the Indian conglomerate Tata in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, while Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn—which assembles a big chunk of the world’s iPhones—has significantly expanded its manufacturing base in India. The two governments also signed an agreement in February to bring Indian migrant workers to Taiwan to ease the island’s long-standing labor shortage.

“Some of it is India’s own technological goals, and a recognition that Taiwan is one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “It fits India’s search for like-minded partners, particularly in strategic technologies.”

Apple’s elevation of India as both a market and a manufacturing base has also played a key role, Madan added, given that the U.S. tech giant relies heavily on Taiwanese firms for components and assembly. “Apple is almost midwifing this business-to-business relationship,” she said.

On the other hand, Modi’s decision to publicly respond to Lai was unprecedented in many ways, and it was likely meant to send a subtle message to China, with whom India’s relations have dramatically frayed over the same period that its Taiwan links have deepened.

Military clashes at the India-China border in 2020—in which nearly two dozen soldiers were killed—unraveled the bonhomie that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping built during their respective first terms in office. Both countries have been building up troops and infrastructure at the border since, and India’s retaliation also included banning TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps. (Notably, Xi has not officially congratulated Modi on his victory yet—unlike after past elections.)

“That was the time when [India] realized that if China is not paying attention to our red lines, why do we have to pay attention to China’s red lines?” said Sana Hashmi—a fellow at a Taipei-based think tank called the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation—who has previously worked with the Indian and Taiwanese foreign ministries. “Over the years, we have seen China give India ample reason to focus on Taiwan,” she added.

India, like the United States and many other countries, officially adheres to a “One China” policy that recognizes the government in Beijing as China’s sole global representative—though New Delhi has not publicly reiterated that stance for more than a decade. (Modi’s reply to Lai, notably, did not include any possible trigger words, such as “Taiwan” or “president.”)

Before India’s recent weekslong national elections, in which Modi won a third term in office, there were a few tentative signs of a possible India-China rapprochement. In a meeting at last year’s BRICS summit, Modi and Xi agreed to attempt a de-escalation of the border standoff, and China’s ambassador post in New Delhi, which had sat vacant for 18 months, was finally filled in May of this year.

But Modi’s response to Lai—as calibrated as it may have been—has likely made any further engagement incredibly unlikely if not totally impossible, according to Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and Foreign Policy contributor who previously served in the Indian Army. “It’s a very clear provocation, it’s outside the norm that we have seen being established,” Singh said. “It has the potential to scuttle any path towards normalcy that many of us were seeing after Modi’s reelection.”

The manner of that reelection, which culminated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party failing to secure a majority on its own and having to rely on smaller parties to form a coalition government, could also have played a role in the Indian prime minister’s decision to antagonize Beijing by publicly engaging Taiwan. “Many people believe that this was because Modi was being seen as a much weaker leader after the election results,” Singh said, adding that for Modi, the response to Lai “was also a way of conveying strength, conveying that he’s going to stand up to China, and he’s going to be as bold and tough as he was in Modi 2.0.”

China’s reaction so far has been largely bluster—and more muted bluster than its response to Washington’s congratulatory messages to Lai on his election earlier this year. And the India-China border is already as militarized as it can be without escalating into a full-blown armed conflict that neither country is likely to want.

Despite Modi’s seemingly diminished political mandate on the domestic front, India’s foreign policy is unlikely to change significantly, perhaps illustrated by the announcement on Monday that Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar will reprise his role in Modi’s new cabinet.

That foreign policy has also been marked by a closer India-U.S. relationship, defined in large part by a mutual concern over China’s rise. India has not publicly pledged to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion—as Washington has—and it is still unclear what role, if any, New Delhi would play in such an event. But there is a growing recognition that any such conflict would impact India’s national and regional security. India’s top military official last year reportedly ordered a study of possible scenarios for a China-Taiwan conflict and what actions India might take.

“I do think there’s a greater awareness, for a number of reasons, of the impact that a Taiwan contingency would have on India and the adverse implications,” said Madan, the Brookings fellow. “I’m assuming the next stage of that discussion would be … the spectrum of things India might be willing to do or not do.”

But India’s increasing engagement with Taiwan should also be seen on its own merit rather than solely through a U.S.-China lens, according to the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation’s Hashmi. “China has played an important role, but I think the merit of engaging Taiwan is something that the [Modi government] has realized already,” she said. “What the differences with China have done is make the leadership less hesitant about talking about Taiwan.”

While Modi’s overtures to Taiwan may well be designed to provoke China, they may also be partly a function of his government’s foreign-policy doctrine of “multi-alignment,” in which India’s relationships are dictated more purely by its national interests than by external pressures or global rules-based order precedents. Modi’s message of thanks to Zelensky, for example, was followed by a similarly effusive post for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Modi has had this general attitude that ‘if I’m doing something with a country, why am I hiding it?’” Madan said, pointing out that he was the first Indian prime minister to visit both Israel and Palestine.

“I do think with China, he’d be a bit more careful, so I don’t think this would be just something of a lark. If you went to any China hand who’s calling for dialogue, they’ll probably tell you he shouldn’t have done this,” she added. “So it could be signaling, [or] it could just be Modi.”
India Deserves a Better Media (Foreign Policy – opinion)
Foreign Policy [6/11/2024 9:59 AM, Mukul Kesavan, 2014K, Positive]
For the last 10 years, India has been the site of a natural experiment. It’s as if a social scientist was testing to see how long it would take for a determined state to bring the mainstream media to heel in a large parliamentary democracy, where newspapers and broadcasters were privately and diversely owned.

The provisional answer to that question is less than a decade. In December 2022, almost nine years after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi won a majority in the general election of 2014, NDTV, the only English-language news channel that critically questioned the government’s narrative on a regular basis, was acquired by Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest man and close confidant of the prime minister. The other television channels owned variously by India’s richest billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, and many others were already so deferential that they were colloquially described as the godi, or lapdog, media.

The English-language channels and newspapers reach a sliver of India’s population, pan-Indian in their reach but paper-thin in their penetration. Their Hindi-language counterparts recycled the government’s line even more enthusiastically. A compendium of video clips from interviews with Modi is doing the rounds on social media. “Softball” doesn’t begin to describe these interviews: Modi was asked cooing questions about how he eats mangoes, whether he has a BFF to share matters of the heart with, and where his extraordinary energy comes from—the sort of things that might be asked of Taylor Swift on tour.

During this election campaign, Modi granted dozens of interviews to chosen journalists. Instead of pressing a prime minister who hasn’t held a press conference in 10 years on political matters, these journalists treated him like a pharaoh who had to be appeased with emollient offerings. Their questions were cues that encouraged Modi to reflect on his superhuman self. He needed no encouragement; it was in interviews like these that Modi spoke of his growing conviction that he wasn’t “biologically” born, that the source of his astonishing energy could not be a mortal body, that he had been directly sent by God to do His will.

When a woman reporter stepped out of the chorus line and asked Modi about the opposition’s allegation that his government was using investigative agencies to harass and even jail the BJP’s rivals, he snapped. Why was she bringing up this garbage, he asked? Didn’t she know the appropriate questions to put to a prime minister? Why didn’t she ask those making the allegations for proof?

This short way with journalists had been a long time coming. In the BBC’s documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots that erupted on Modi’s watch as chief minister, he was asked by one of the network’s reporters, after the killings, if he had any regrets. Modi owned up to a single regret: He hadn’t known how to deal with the media. By the time he was elected prime minister, he had found his method. It consisted of bypassing newspapers and broadcasters altogether. He got his message across by addressing his electorate directly, via weekly radio broadcasts carried by All India Radio, the state broadcaster, and making it clear to proprietors, editors, and journalists that critical coverage would be treated as dissent and punished.

Since newspapers are critically dependent on government advertising and no television channel wants to go the way of NDTV, the same editors and anchors who had headlined the corruption of the United Progressive Alliance government led by Manmohan Singh morphed into a chorus of tame opposition bashers. News organizations that stepped out of line were performatively punished. The BBC’s offices were raided by the income tax authorities. After Sabrina Siddiqui, one of the Wall Street Journal’s White House reporters, questioned Modi about minority rights during his U.S. visit, she was harassed by the BJP’s online troll army for days afterward.

India has never been a safe place for skeptical journalists and writers, but in the past 10 years it has become more dangerous. Gauri Lankesh, a writer and editor at a Kannada-language tabloid, was killed in a gangland-style execution in 2017. She was the fourth of four such assassinations of secular intellectuals who wrote not in English but in their mother tongues: Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M. M. Kalburgi, and Lankesh.

A scandal about the integrity of a government-administered examination board in Madhya Pradesh, a BJP-ruled state in central India, had a macabre afterlife: More than two dozen people connected to the scandal, culprits and eyewitnesses, died unnatural deaths. A journalist investigating the scandal died in 2015 in unexplained circumstances. In this context, it’s not unreasonable for journalists and news organizations to think twice before holding powerful people or institutions to account.

That said, it would be a mistake to conclude that intimidation is the whole explanation for the mainstream media’s willingness to parrot the BJP government’s talking points. Times Now, Republic TV, India Today TV, and other 24/7 news channels have pushed the government line with a ferocity that suggests a true believer’s enthusiasm for Modi’s majoritarianism. The “debates” they conducted—on the farmers’ protests, the assassinations of secessionist Sikhs abroad, the Delhi riots of 2020, cow slaughter, undocumented Muslims, the wearing of the hijab, and the implications of the Citizenship Amendment Act—were so lopsided and dismissive of the minority point of view that their anchors came across as willing foot soldiers in the government’s Hindutva project. If Modi was the chief hunter, India’s news corporations acted as native beaters, making the necessary noise to scare up prey.

It was this slavishness, made up in equal parts of fear and fascination, that led to the spectacle of four exit polls commissioned by four separate television channels getting the election wrong in the same way. All of them suggested that the BJP-led coalition would get close to, or exceed, the 400 parliamentary seats that Modi had targeted during his election campaign.

Ranged against the big beasts of print and television and the BJP’s massive online operation were a handful of mainly provincial newspapers; a miscellany of small, underfunded online news sites; and a bunch of eloquent dissidents and social media influencers. Newspapers critical of the ruling BJP were invariably headquartered in states where the BJP wasn’t dominant, such as West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. The pan-Indian giants, such as the Hindustan Times and the Times of India, centered in New Delhi and Mumbai, respectively, were timorous and self-censoring.

The small subscriber news portals like Scroll, Newslaundry, NewsClick, the Wire, Article 14, the Reporters’ Collective, and 4PM punched well above their cash-starved weight, holding the state, the courts, and the Election Commission to account both individually and collectively. Several of these digital news providers came together to launch “Project Electoral Bond,” an initiative that produced crucial news stories on the opaque electoral bond scheme hatched by the regime to hoover up corporate money for the BJP. The Caravan, an insurgent monthly magazine that produces long-form exposés of the BJP’s majoritarian apparatus, was, arguably, this government’s most trenchant critic.

Ravish Kumar, once NDTV’s principal Hindi anchor, left amid Adani’s takeover and set up a YouTube channel that has 11 million subscribers and a huge audience in the Hindi heartland. Kumar, whose journalism on NDTV is the subject of a fine full-length documentary, treats his online perch like a bully pulpit, preaching against bigotry and authoritarianism.

On X, formerly Twitter, Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha have made Alt News, India’s principal fact-checking operation, a lonely voice calling out the tsunami of bigoted misinformation generated by the BJP’s infamous IT cell. Since India is demographically a very young country, the impact of Dhruv Rathee, a young expatriate Instagrammer based in Germany with over 22 million YouTube followers and a talent for skewering the BJP, has been incalculable. This ragtag army of resistance was given a mordant edge by satirists and stand-up comics like Kunal Kamra, Shyam Rangeela, and Varun Grover, who used everything from political verse to lewd humor in the service of liberty.

It’s hard to assess what the role of the media has been in producing this election result. Given that the BJP’s electoral vote share declined by just 1 percentage point, it’s likely that the difference between the last election and this one was the discipline shown by the opposition parties, especially the Indian National Congress, in producing a common slate of candidates. These candidates could then confront Modi’s nominees without dividing the anti-BJP vote. To use a phrase beloved of Indian psephologists, the index of opposition unity queered the pitch for the BJP. It allowed the material distress caused by inflation, unemployment, and stagnant agriculture to find a unified political home.

A mainstream media less in thrall to the BJP might have helped the opposition make its pitch to the electorate more effectively, but it’s hard to say what difference that might have made. It’s indisputable, though, that independent media outfits produced powerful journalism on shoestring budgets and filled the vacuum left by establishment newspapers and television channels. As to the conduct of the latter, BJP co-founder L. K. Advani’s verdict on the abjectness of the Indian press during the Emergency between 1975 and 1977, a period when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree, can’t be bettered: “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.”
NSB
Bangladesh court indicts Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and others on charges of embezzlement (AP)
AP [6/12/2024 4:49 AM, Julhas Alam, 31180K, Negative]
A special judge’s court in Bangladesh indicted Wednesday Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and 13 others on charges in an over $2 million embezzlement case.

Yunus, 83, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering microcredit to help impoverished people, especially women, pleaded not guilty and is out on bail for now. He told reporters that authorities were “harassing” him and other colleagues and denied being involved in any corruption.

In a packed Dahka courtroom, Special Judge in Dhaka Syed Arafat Hossain dismissed petitions seeking the charges — which centers around Yunus’ non-profit Grameen Telecom — to be dropped.

The prosecution has accused Yunus and the others of embezzling 250 million takas (about $2 million) from the workers welfare fund of Grameen Telecom, which owns 34.2% of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Grameenphone, a subsidiary of Norway’s telecom giant Telenor. They are also accused of money laundering.

Hossain, the judge, said the prosecution was able to preliminarily back their argument and proved the charges of misappropriation of funds and sending money abroad illegally, adding the trial is to start on July 15.

In January, Yunus was sentenced to six months in prison on a separate charge of violating labor laws. He was granted bail while awaiting the verdict.

Last year, more than 170 global leaders and Nobel laureates urged Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to suspend legal proceedings against Yunus. His supporters say he has been targeted because of his frosty relations with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The government has denied the allegations.
Bangladesh Taka to Hit Fresh Lows on Crawling Peg, Moody’s Says (Bloomberg)
Bloomberg [6/11/2024 8:00 PM, Ronojoy Mazumdar, 27296K, Negative]
Bangladesh’s taka is likely to fall deeper into a record-low territory as the central bank loosens its grip on the currency, according to Moody’s Ratings.

It will probably weaken another 2% to about 120 per dollar by the end of the year, said Young Kim, an analyst at the rating firm in Singapore. The currency has hit a series of record lows in recent days.

The recently introduced crawling peg system will allow the taka to move closer in value to the rate it trades in the unofficial market, he said.

A more flexible foreign-exchange regime is part of a package of policies recommended by the International Monetary Fund, which handed the nation a $4.7 billion bailout program last year. The policy shift may help Bangladesh avoid a further deterioration in its FX reserves, which Fitch Ratings cited as a key reason for downgrading the nation’s credit score deeper into junk in May.

“Most of the pressure for Bangladesh is external and was around the fixed-exchange rate that created distortion between the market and the official exchange rate,” said Kim, “That’s why they devalued taka quite significantly. Reducing that gap helps reduce some of the imbalances.”

The central bank introduced a crawling peg exchange rate system and set the mid rate at 117 taka per dollar in May, prompting a nearly 8% slide in the currency this quarter. It weakened 0.3% to 117.7 against the greenback on Tuesday to close at a new low.

Bangladesh is also slashing spending and raising taxes as it seeks to narrow the budget deficit and shore up revenues amid a steady erosion of foreign reserves. The central bank has also made interest rates market-based to curb inflationary pressure as the nation grappled with the fastest pace of price rises in seven months in May.
Bangladesh’s ‘missing billionaires’: A wealth boom and stark inequality (Al Jazeera)
Al Jazeera [6/11/2024 4:14 PM, Faisal Mahmud, 20.9M, Neutral]
Abutting the posh Gulshan Club and overlooking the serene Gulshan Lake in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a 14-storey building is nearing completion.

Construction workers clad in orange helmets and neon harness belts are detailing the finishing touches as the building’s ornate facade glistens against its monochromatic concrete and glass backbone.

This building, known simply as Three, is being constructed by the elite Bangladeshi real estate developer BTI and is arguably the most expensive residential apartment building ever built in the South Asian nation.

Aside from having the most sought-after zip code, the 12 apartments – each spanning a whole floor of more than 7,000sq-foot (650sq-metre) – are stocked with a range of modern amenities and gadgets, including biometric security systems for locks and elevators and AI-based lighting for efficiency.

All the apartments were sold even before the construction started, even with a whopping base price tag of 200 million taka or $2.5m until 2021 (the taka has since devalued, bringing the price of the apartments down to $1.8m).

Since BTI chairman Faizur Rahman Khan also bought a flat in the building, the company carefully screened the other potential owners from the more than 50 applications it received, predominantly from businessmen in the city.

Bangladesh’s rising disposable income is not unknown. Crowded shopping malls, such as Jamuna Future Park, one of the largest in South Asia, and new billboards advertising everything from packaged foods to cars and smartphones are all evidence of it.

But this BTI building, perhaps more than anything else, speaks of the growing wealth of Bangladesh’s rich, a handful of the country’s 180 million people.

A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study indicated that, while the nation’s middle-income and affluent consumer (MAC) class is expanding rapidly – predicted to reach 17 percent of the population by 2025, the country’s wealth disparity is simultaneously deepening.

It is a symptom of the nation transitioning from an “economic basket case” – as it was once called by former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – to a fast-growing economy, but one grappling with a growing divide between rich and poor.

In Bangladesh, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population now controls a disproportionate 41 percent of the nation’s total income, while the bottom 10 percent receives a meagre 1.31 percent, according to government data.

The rise of the millionaires

New York-based research firm Wealth-X identified Bangladesh as the global leader in wealth growth from 2010 to 2019.

The study (PDF) indicated a remarkable 14.3 percent annual increase in the number of individuals with a net worth exceeding $5m, surpassing Vietnam, which ranked second with a 13.2 percent growth rate.

Wealth-X’s report further forecasts Bangladesh to be among the top five fastest-growing countries for high net-worth individuals, projecting an 11.4 percent increase over the next five years.

Further illustrating the growth of Bangladesh’s wealthiest, according to Bangladesh Bank data, by the end of 2023, more than 113,586 private bank accounts held at least 10 million taka (nearly $1m), a significant increase from just 16 such accounts after the country’s independence in 1971 and 3,442 accounts in the year 2000, around the start of the country’s manufacturing and export boom which helped power many of these accounts.

This group, colloquially known as kotipotis, represents less than 1 percent of total bank accounts, yet controls a substantial 43.35 percent of total deposits, highlighting the concentration of wealth within a small segment of the population.

Economist MM Akash put it bluntly: “Bangladeshi rich people are increasingly getting wealthy while the poor are struggling for survival.”

The disparity is hard to miss. Less than 3km (about 2 miles) from the Three building, along the same Gulshan Lake, lies Korail, Dhaka’s largest slum. Spanning an area equivalent to 40 football fields, Korail is set in stark contrast to its affluent neighbour, with four to five people crammed into tiny 100sq-foot (9sq-metre) rooms.

In recent years, COVID pandemic-induced lockdowns, the Ukraine-Russia war, and the subsequent economic slowdown have pushed more Bangladeshis into poverty.

Surveys by various organisations have consistently reported a substantial rise in poor and extremely poor individuals. A post-COVID survey by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDA) revealed that approximately 51 percent of Dhaka’s impoverished residents were pushed into extreme poverty due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Akash attributed this widening gap between rich and poor not only to an unequal distribution of economic gains, but also to a development strategy that has disproportionately benefitted the ultrarich.

The country’s Eighth Five-Year Plan acknowledged policy failures contributing to persistent inequality and the lack of equitable wealth distribution.

A prime example, said Akash, is Bangladesh’s tax-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of 9 percent, well below the average of developing countries of 15 percent.

“We have a regressive direct taxation on the poor and middle class while we allow the rich to practise widespread tax evasion,” he says, adding that a significant portion of the wealthy’s assets remains untaxed.

Khondaker Golam Moazzem, research director at Dhaka-based think tank Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), also criticised successive governments for prioritising corporate interests by reducing taxes instead of taxing the wealthy.

“The irony is, here, workers are facing suppression when demanding fair wages, while at the same time, the ultra-rich are getting better benefits even after tax evasion.”

A Ministry of Finance study suggested that a staggering 45-65 percent of Bangladesh’s income remains untaxed. This is largely due to the superrich’s ability to evade taxes by registering their assets – when they do – at a much lower value than the market price.

Consequently, a significant portion of government revenue comes from indirect taxes, like VAT, which burden the poor disproportionately.

Moazzem said the poor bear a heavier tax burden than the wealthy. He also rejected the “supply-side” theory that claims tax breaks for the rich ultimately benefit everyone.

Echoing Moazzem, economist Akash also challenged the notion that a growing number of affluent individuals indicates a thriving economy – as the government sometimes tries to portray.

“This is because most of those rich people in Bangladesh do not reinvest their wealth, rather stash them in off-shore accounts to evade taxes,” he said.

Bangladesh’s billionaire conundrum

According to Oxfam’s 2023 Annual Inequality Report, the richest 1 percent globally amassed nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world combined over the past two years.

Billionaires’ wealth has skyrocketed since 2020, with the uber-rich amassing an astonishing $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth created during the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, while the remaining 99 percent shared only $16 trillion (37 percent).

This means a billionaire gained roughly $1.7m for every $1 earned by someone in the bottom 90 percent. Their fortunes have grown by an average of $2.7bn daily, further exacerbating the wealth gap.

Paradoxically, despite being the world’s 35th largest economy, there were no Bangladeshi billionaires on the annual Forbes World’s Billionaires List until this year.

Muhammad Aziz Khan, chairman of Bangladesh’s Summit Group, who made his fortune through electricity and energy trade, was the first Bangladeshi to make it to Forbes’s list.

Just to put it into context, Eswatini, an African nation with a GDP 100 times smaller than Bangladesh, has one billionaire.

Furthermore, out of the 76 countries with at least one billionaire, 40 have smaller economies than Bangladesh.

Chile, for example, has an economy roughly 78 percent the size of Bangladesh’s but boasts seven billionaires. Similarly, Cyprus has four billionaires despite its economy being just one-15th the size of Bangladesh.

Journalist Sheikh Rafi Ahmed, who reports on these “missing billionaires”, contended that many billionaires actually do exist in Bangladesh, but conceal their wealth in offshore accounts and real estate, pointing at the 11 Bangladeshis listed in the Pandora Papers for such practices. Rafi believed that substantial capital outflows and tax evasion have hindered an accurate estimation of individual wealth in Bangladesh.

“This probably explains the absence of Bangladeshi billionaires for long on global lists,” he said.

Naznin Ahmed of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) pointed to the alarming rate of capital outflow through over- and under-invoicing of imports and exports.

The magnitude of the outflow of wealth from Bangladesh, as the ultrarich take their money overseas, was so significant that a 2017 Global Financial Integrity Report ranked the country highest among least developed nations for “illicit financial flows”.

“I think Bangladesh has secret billionaires, but they just don’t keep their money here,” she said.
Nepal rolls out AI-powered ‘crystal ball’ to predict deadly landslides (South China Morning Post)
South China Morning Post [6/11/2024 5:30 PM, Bibek Bhandari, 10447K, Neutral]
As monsoon rains pounded a hillside village in Nepal’s Dolakha district in August 2018, an early warning system tested just months earlier sprang into action – sounding the alarm and helping nearly 500 people evacuate just minutes before a landslide struck.

Now, another group of scientists is piloting an artificial intelligence-powered forecasting system that aims to predict landslides with greater accuracy days, or even weeks, before they occur.

SAFE-RISCCS, short for the Spatiotemporal Analytics, Forecasting and Estimation of Risks from Climate Change Systems, is being rolled out in two regions of Nepal known for their susceptibility to devastating landslides.

The system “works like a crystal ball and fortune-teller except on steroids”, according to Antoinette Tordesillas, a professor at the University of Melbourne who is leading the project alongside scientists from the University of Florence in Italy and Nepal’s Tribhuvan University. “It is an AI tool that can forecast the risk of a landslide at a given location and future time.”

Nepal’s mountainous terrain, precarious slopes, and seismic vulnerabilities converge to make it a global hotspot for landslides, resulting in one of the world’s highest per capita death tolls from these disasters, which are commonly triggered by monsoon rainfall.

The Himalayan nation recorded 2,419 landslides between 2018 and last year, claiming 805 lives – more than any other natural hazards over those five years, according to government data, surpassing both fire and lightning.

Meteorologists have forecast heavier-than-average rains for this year’s monsoon season, which usually lasts from June to September in Nepal, increasing the risk of landslides.

SAFE-RISCCS uses satellite images of Earth and a new open-access AI tool developed at the University of Melbourne to analyse and monitor rainfall data and ground motion patterns in order to forecast landslide risks.

Tordesillas said SAFE-RISCCS had been tested in several countries, including China, where it predicted the location of the devastating 2017 landslide in Sichuan province almost a year in advance, based on images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite.

“The key is to leverage freely accessible space satellite data on rainfall and ground motion since these can deliver measurements on ground conditions without the need for site access,” she said.

Nepal has made progress with advanced warnings for floods, which helped mitigate loss of life and livelihoods during the 2021 Melamchi flood. But early warning systems for landslides remain limited, though efforts are under way to deploy them in high-risk areas.

After mapping heightened landslide risks following the country’s devastating 2015 earthquake, the Ministry of Forest and Environment’s Watershed and Landslide Management Division piloted landslide early warning systems in the central Nepal villages of Saureni and Sundrawati, where it aided evacuation efforts in 2018.

Researchers installed basic warning systems to monitor rainfall, soil moisture, and ground displacement, triggering sirens when predetermined thresholds were crossed.

Prakash Singh Thapa, an undersecretary at the division, said the pilot system had proved so effective that it was subsequently deployed in two other villages in the districts of Lalitpur and Ramechap.

The latest system installations feature more advanced instruments, delivering accurate real-time data during critical events, he said, adding that plans were in place to scale the project to additional regions.

“In a low-income country like Nepal, it takes time to build engineering structures to prevent landslides due to budget constraints,” Thapa said. “So a landslide early warning system is an immediate solution to save lives.”

The United Nations has called early warning systems “one of the best-proven and cost-effective methods for reducing disaster deaths and losses”, with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling for “all people on Earth” to be protected by such systems by 2027 as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events.

The Hindu Kush Himalayan region – spanning eight countries including Nepal, China and India – has seen increased extreme weather events in recent years due to climate change.

Early warning systems “offer a critical line of defence” against natural disasters, according to Vijay Ratan Khadgi, from the disaster risk reduction intervention team at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.

“Early warning systems play a crucial role in minimising the devastating impacts of floods, landslides, and glacial lake outburst floods across the Hindu Kush Himalayan region,” he said. “The use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and other modelling tools can aid in the development of predictions with great accuracy.”

AI is capable of enhancing Nepal’s existing forecasting system to better predict landslides, but the government should engage scientists and universities to expand research, build an institutional knowledge base and enable knowledge transfer, said Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Centre for Disaster Studies at the Institute of Engineering in Kathmandu and member of the SAFE-RISCCS research team in Nepal.

“We are developing science for the people,” he said. “Nepal’s government must bring together the technology and human resources – and we have both – to make the best use to save more lives.”

Tordesillas said that challenges persist despite advanced systems like SAFE-RISCCS, as landslide susceptibility depends on many factors requiring reliable, up-to-date data.

Obtaining such information can be difficult, with inadequate infrastructure like sparse communications and meteorological networks hampering timely data collection and dissemination.

“There also needs to be political will and commitment to prioritise disaster risk reduction and invest in early warning systems,” Tordesillas said. “Addressing these challenges requires coordinated efforts at the local, national and international levels from diverse groups.”
Central Asia
Eurasian citizens striving to obtain asylum in the United States reportedly face expedited removal (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [6/11/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Neutral]
Would be asylum-seekers from six Eurasian states trying to enter the US state of California are supposedly being singled out for expedited removal, according to reports published by right-wing news outlets in the United States. The countries whose citizens face expedited removal are reportedly Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Citing a “broken” immigration system, US President Joseph Biden issued a proclamation in early June to suspend “the entry of any noncitizen into the United States” trying to illegally cross the southern border with Mexico. At least two partisan news outlets that maintain openly anti-Biden editorial stances, the Washington Examiner and the New York Post, claim that the new border rules are not being enforced evenly, citing a “leaked” memo reportedly distributed to US Border Patrol agents in California.

The document cited by the outlets supposedly instructs authorities to allow would-be asylum seekers from about 100 countries at the southern California border to continue to enter the United States, where they could stay while their immigration status was determined. This instruction appears to contradict the intent of the presidential proclamation.

At the same time, the memo supposedly singles out citizens from Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for rigid enforcement of the presidential proclamation – immediate expedited removal from the United States. The reports do not provide a reason for why citizens of the six Eurasian states are targeted for expedited removal.

Neither the Examiner nor the Post published a copy of the purportedly leaked document. Its authenticity could not be independently verified. It appears the memo covers only a section of the California border with Mexico. The states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas also share long borders with Mexico.

The Mexican route appears to be popular among Uzbeks seeking illicit entry into the United States. In December 2023, the US Embassy in Uzbekistan issued a statement warning Uzbek citizens that those caught at the US-Mexican border faced long visa bans and other possible restrictions. “U.S. borders are not open to illegal migration. We urge citizens of Uzbekistan to use a safe and legal pathway to travel to the United States,” the statement said. Earlier this year, a group of 35 Uzbek nationals being detained an holding centers after being caught trying to enter the United States illegally filed a lawsuit seeking their release from custody, citing discriminatory policies, the Uzbek news outlet Daryo reported.
Unfinished Business: Alia Nazarbaeva Poses A Problem For ‘New Kazakhstan’ (Radio Free Europe)
Radio Free Europe [6/12/2024 12:11 AM, Chris Rickleton, 235K, Neutral]
Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s youngest daughter, Alia, has suffered what would have been unthinkable during her father’s long reign: a defeat in court.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean she is going to face charges in Kazakhstan anytime soon, despite growing demand.

In 2002, Nazarbaeva was in her early 20s and was just beginning her business career.

But that didn’t stop her from meeting with two successful entrepreneurs and making them an offer that they couldn’t refuse before raising the threat level when they didn’t play ball.

Such is the story being told by a pair of Kazakh businessmen who are now seeking damages from Nazarbaeva for what they call her seizure of their business, which was valued at around $170 million two decades ago.

Their colorful account -- one that implies Nazarbaeva had officers of the state at her beck and call in those days -- is so far being ignored by Kazakh law enforcement.

At the same time, Nazarbaeva’s counterattack appears to have fallen flat.

On June 7, an administrative court in the capital, Astana, threw out libel charges Nazarbaeva had filed against the businessmen in response to accusations that they aired for the first time in February.

A draw, then?

Not if the businessmen have their way.

"We have hired lawyers in Britain. We are going to take our case there and to Switzerland. We have a 350-400-page dossier full of evidence of the lawless activities of Alia Nazarbaeva," Zharqyn Qurentaev, a representative for the two men, told RFE/RL.

RFE/RL reached out to Nazarbaeva, who did not participate directly in the online libel proceedings, but received no reply by the time of publication.

Ring-Fenced Relatives?

Unlike her older sister, Darigha Nazarbaeva, and her octogenarian father, the 44-year-old Alia Nazarbaeva has not been seen in Kazakhstan since the events known as Bloody January rocked the country at the beginning of 2022.

Those events, in which at least 238 people died, remain contested and almost impossible to fully unpack.

But two things seem clear.

The protests and violence on the streets of Kazakh cities occurred in parallel with a mighty struggle at the top of the government.

Secondly, that struggle ended in current President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev’s favor, allowing him to finally emerge from the shadow of Nazarbaev, whose family dominated Kazakhstan for three decades and amassed incredible wealth in the process.

After Toqaev emerged from the crisis empowered, Nazarbaev, his relatives, and most of his in-laws relinquished positions of corporate and political leadership.

And yet for all the public clamor -- and longstanding allegations of Nazarbaev-inspired corruption -- neither the strongman nor his children have ever appeared to be in danger of standing trial.

Is that an indicator that deals were struck to protect the foremost members of the former ruling family?

Toqaev has insisted that is not the case.

But Nazarbaeva is proving a particularly stern test of that position.

The claims of Nurlan Bimurzin and Medgat Kaliev, which Bimurzin reiterated in an interview with RFE/RL this week, are shocking.

The pair allege their company, TPK Azia, came under intense pressure from state organs in 2002, at a time when it had amassed nearly 70 gas stations and six large oil depots in different parts of Kazakhstan.

After financial police sealed off the company’s depots and storage facilities that year, the men were contacted by an intermediary who suggested a face-to-face meeting with Nazarbaeva.

At the meeting, it is alleged that Nazarbaeva told the men she was aware of their problems and could solve them for a price -- 50 percent of their company.

They claim that under duress they agreed.

A copy of an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting dated September 4, 2002, and seen by RFE/RL indicates that TPK Azia’s shareholder structure was indeed altered to allow Nazarbaeva to take a 50 percent stake in the company.

That left Bimurzin and his business partner Kaliev with 25 percent each.

The document also details the size of Nazarbaeva’s investment in the company: 36,250 tenges (about $250 at the exchange rate then).

At ROP’s End

Things got nastier the following year, when Bimurzin and Kaliev say they asked Nazarbaeva to make them offers for the business in order to exit the uncomfortable arrangement.

One of those offers came from Russia’s LUKoil and stood at $161 million.

But Nazarbaeva came up with a counteroffer -- hand her the remaining half of the business.

According to Bimurzin, she suggested they do this after plainclothes officers kidnapped Bimurzin’s now-deceased father, Serik Bimurzin, and took him to see her in her office.

Nazarbaeva, Nurlan Bimurzin claims, threatened to arrange for all of their personal properties to be seized and their closest relatives jailed if they did not comply.

The men accepted the offer and, more than two decades later, most of their former assets are now controlled by Singapore-headquartered Sinoil, a company they say they have no claim against.

When Bimurzin and Kaliev first told this story, they did so at a press conference with Qurentaev and Kazakh lawmaker Ermurat Bapi.

Two months later, Qurentaev and Bimurzin held another press conference to launch a movement of people -- dubbed Victims Of Old Kazakhstan -- who claim to have suffered wrongdoing at the hands of the former president’s relatives.

But the authorities are unmoved.

Prosecutors had appeared to accept Bimurzin and Kaliev’s case, it was kicked around law enforcement until police eventually told the entrepreneurs they could not move it forward due to the statute of limitations.

Qurentaev says the frustrations his clients have encountered indicate that Kazakhstan’s system is still very much afraid of the 83-year-old man who created it: Nazarbaev.

"It is wrong to think that he doesn’t have any influence anymore," Qurentaev said. "He still has a lot of influence."

Nazarbaev has three daughters from his marriage to Sara Nazarbaeva: Darigha, Dinara, and Alia.

He has also publicly recognized two sons born to another woman, Asel Qurmanbaeva, who is some 40 years his junior.

But while Darigha Nazarbaeva held top political positions and Dinara Kulibaeva co-owns Kazakhstan’s biggest private lender, it is the youngest Nazarbaeva whose business practices have so often made headlines.

In 2005, authorities seized tens of thousands of copies of the opposition newspaper Svoboda Slova after it published the article How Alia Nazarbaeva Does Business.

The newspaper was also fined.

Since January 2022, there has been increased scrutiny over her involvement in the work of a privately owned monopolist that incurred the wrath of Kazakhs by collecting supersized utilization fees on imported vehicles.

That company -- Operator ROP -- was name-checked in a speech by Toqaev just after the unrest and was dissolved, with its functions passed onto a state-owned company.

But the now-jailed former head of ROP’s financial department testified in court last year that Nazarbaeva had earned millions of dollars from the scheme and demanded in court that she face trial.

Another former ROP employee, who headed the company’s legal department, died in jail before the trial began in what officials said was a suicide.

And Nazarbaeva was in the news again this month after a garbage-collection company tied to her by company documents managed to win a contract in one of the districts of the capital, Astana.

"Alia Nazarbaeva’s company is back in business," read the June 5 headline of the private news website Golos Naroda.
8 Tajikistanis with suspected ties to ISIS detained in US, source says (ABC News)
ABC News [6/11/2024 8:07 PM, Pierre Thomas and Jack Date, 143113K, Negative]
Eight individuals from Tajikistan with suspected ties to ISIS, who crossed into the United States from the southern border last year and this year, have been detained in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York City, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

The suspects were initially allowed to enter the U.S. after being vetted and no national security issues were uncovered, the source said.

Later, and in recent weeks, authorities uncovered derogatory information indicating ties or affiliation with ISIS and the suspects were sought and detained.

Efforts are underway to deport the suspects as currently authorities have not developed enough evidence to bring any terrorism charges.

"Over the last few days, ICE agents arrested several non-citizens pursuant to immigration authorities," the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

"The actions were carried out in close coordination with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The individuals arrested are detained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. As the FBI and DHS have recently described in public and partner bulletins, the U.S. has been in a heightened threat environment. The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security," the statement said.
Feds arrest 8 Tajik nationals in US after surveillance abroad found potential ties to terrorism, sources say (CNN)
CNN [6/12/2024 5:22 AM, Josh Campbell, 22739K, Negative]
US federal agents have arrested eight Tajikistan nationals located in the United States on immigration charges following the discovery of potential ties to terrorism, two sources familiar with the law enforcement operation told CNN Tuesday.

The arrests by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – first reported by the New York Post – included apprehensions in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia, the sources said.

One source said the eight had previously entered the US via the Southern border and were screened by US officials, and that no derogatory information in their past was identified at the time.

A second source said investigators later discovered possible links to ISIS members located overseas, which spurred the federal investigation. The method of identifying the suspects inside the US was accomplished in part by the US government’s highly sensitive targeting of the communications of ISIS members abroad, the source said.

The group had been on the radar of US officials for well over a month, but senior US officials recently decided to have the eight expelled from the country under ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations authority rather than risking having the FBI surveil them longer and wait for the potential manifestation of a possible plot, the source told CNN.

The ability to surveil certain foreign targets was the subject of intense debate in Congress earlier this year, with conservatives criticizing the US intelligence community’s sweeping powers. A two-year authorization of one particular aspect of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – known as Section 702 – finally passed both houses of Congress and was signed by the president in April before the program lapsed.

In a release Tuesday, ICE and the FBI said ICE “agents arrested several non-citizens” in coordination with the FBI’s joint terrorism task forces.

“The individuals arrested are detained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings” the release reads. “As the FBI and DHS have recently described in public and partner bulletins, the US has been in a heightened threat environment.”

Investigators do not currently believe the eight received training abroad or were purposefully sent to the US to engage in violence, one source said.

Of those arrested, a small subset is believed to have espoused concerning extremist rhetoric, according to the source, and it is unclear whether the remaining people were arrested for their mere association with the other people arrested.
Uzbekistan making push to gain World Trade Organization membership (EurasiaNet)
EurasiaNet [6/11/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Neutral]
The Uzbek government appears willing to loosen its control over the flow of information within Central Asia’s most populous nation as part of a comprehensive reform initiative to enhance its membership qualifications for the World Trade Organization.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has expressed a desire for Uzbekistan to gain WTO membership as soon as 2026. WTO membership status is granted after a lengthy negotiation process overseen on the organization’s side by what is known as a “working party.” A working party was established to consider Uzbekistan’s qualifications in 1994, but not much progress has been made toward membership since then.

WTO membership agreements are negotiated individually with each aspiring member, but all entail requirements to create a liberal trade framework, founded upon open, fair and transparent policies. Such requirements weren’t so appealing to former Uzbek leader Islam Karimov, whose regime maintained rigid control over all facets of economic and political activity in Uzbekistan. Since replacing Karimov, who died in 2016, Mirziyoyev has moved steadily to liberalize the economy.

Now, he seems ready to make the big leap towards WTO membership.

On June 3, Mirziyoyev issued a decree authorizing a broad array of economic reforms intended to bring Uzbekistan’s trade rules into closer alignment with WTO standards. Perhaps the reform with the most far-reaching ramifications for Uzbekistan is a provision to loosen the state’s iron grip on citizens’ access to information.

Since Uzbekistan gained independence following the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, rights watchdog groups have routinely ranked Uzbekistan as among the globe’s most repressive states, strictly limiting the circulation of news and information not conforming to government viewpoints. Such poor watchdog evaluations have continued under Mirziyoyev’s administration. For example, Freedom House’s most recent annual report on Internet freedom, titled Freedom of the Net 2023, ranked Uzbekistan as one of the most closed information environments in the world, keeping company with the likes of Russia, China and Iran.

Mirziyoyev’s June 3 decree could radically change Uzbekistan’s information environment. He directs the country’s Ministry of Digital Technologies to develop procedures by October 1 to enable telecom operators and Internet service providers to connect with international Internet networks. At the same time, the decree indicates the government would retain the ability to require providers to provide authorities with information about individuals’ usage and search habits. The decree also emphasizes that the liberalization of Internet access is experimental.

“Telecommunications operators with mobile and (or) wired telecommunications networks operating on the territory of the Republic of Uzbekistan, as an experiment, are granted the right to directly connect to international Internet networks for their own commercial needs, in full compliance with the requirements of operational investigative activities, information and cyber security systems,” the decree states.

Preparations for WTO membership will likely deliver some substantial shocks to Uzbek companies. Another provision in the presidential decree mandates the Trade Ministry to develop a draft bill covering the abolition of “subsidies and preferences provided to support exports.” The lifting of such state support for exporters is envisioned to go into effect January 1, 2025.

The decree authorizes several steps by January 1 to promote transparency, aiming to “ensure a healthy competitive environment in public procurement.” It also enumerates action to be taken before the end of 2024 to “bring the current customs duties, fees and costs in the republic into compliance with the requirements of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.”

To demonstrate Uzbekistan’s commitment to the reform process, Mirziyoyev ordered the creation of an interdepartmental working group to report each month on the implementation of provisions contained in the decree. It also names Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov as having “control over the implementation of the decree.”
Twitter
Afghanistan
Sara Wahedi
@SaraWahedi
[6/11/2024 5:55 PM, 79.4K followers, 27 retweets, 74 likes]
The UN special rapporteur on Afghanistan and @UN_Women released damning reports on Afghan women this week, calling it "a crime against humanity". Many countries spent 20 years in Afghanistan investing in women’s rights. Their silence is unacceptable — we must take action.

Sara Wahedi
@ZahraJoya
[6/11/2024 5:27 AM, 23.8K followers, 30 retweets, 102 likes]
I still see fresh, young forces in Afghanistan who have the courage to stand up to the Taliban. These forces include women, girls, and men. I believe they need support to overcome the oppressive narratives of the Taliban. @Diplomat_APAC https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/zahra-joya-on-the-resilience-of-afghanistans-women-in-the-face-of-patriarchy-and-pressure/

Heather Barr
@heatherbarr1
[6/11/2024 3:05 PM, 62.5K followers, 49 retweets, 72 likes]
Afghan women/girls feel forgotten by the world & @SR_Afghanistan report leaves no doubt as to seriousness of Taliban’s crimes against them. It should be a priority for every govt that professes to care about women’s rts to hold Taliban to account. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/06/11/un-expert-slams-taliban-crimes-against-afghan-women-girls

Jahanzeb Wesa
@Jahanzi12947158
[6/11/2024 4:54 AM, 2.5K followers, 2 retweets, 3 likes]
Afghan Women’s rights must also be addressed in discussions on any other aspect of the situation in Afghanistan, such as the humanitarian crisis, a political process, climate change, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, the economy & development efforts

Kate Clark
@KateClark66
[6/11/2024 7:27 AM, 31.5K followers, 9 retweets, 13 likes]
Doha III looms and @AANafgh has put together a short dossier that packs a punch, with reports on: Doha I and II, aid + international relations, including Emirate perceptions of the aid industry and what to make of accusations that the IEA diverts aid.
Pakistan
Madiha Afzal
@MadihaAfzal
[6/11/2024 4:36 PM, 42.7K followers, 2 retweets, 12 likes]
I told DW: "From Pakistan’s perspective, one question will be whether Modi, who engaged in anti-Pakistan rhetoric in the election campaign, doubles down on it or backs away from it." Nawaz’s overture may have set a different tone, but it may not last.

Madiha Afzal
@MadihaAfzal
[6/11/2024 5:35 PM, 42.7K followers, 1 like]
And of course, Shehbaz’s tone was decidedly less warm, and he is the PM.
India
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[6/11/2024 9:18 AM, 98.7M followers, 15K retweets, 108K likes]
Through the election campaign, people across India added ‘Modi Ka Parivar’ to their social media as a mark of affection towards me. I derived a lot of strength from it. The people of India have given the NDA a majority for the third consecutive time, a record of sorts, and have given us the mandate to keep working for the betterment of our nation. With the message of all of us being one family having been effectively conveyed, I would once again thank the people of India and request that you may now remove ‘Modi Ka Parivar’ from your social media properties. The display name may change, but our bond as one Parivar striving for India’s progress remains strong and unbroken.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[6/12/2024 4:00 AM, 98.7M followers, 1.6K retweets, 8.5K likes]
Attended the oath taking ceremony of the new Andhra Pradesh Government. Congratulations to Shri @ncbn Garu on becoming the Chief Minister and also to all the others who took oath as Ministers in the Government. The @JaiTDP, @JanaSenaParty and @BJP4Andhra Government is fully committed to taking AP to new heights of glory and fulfilling the aspirations of the state’s youth.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[6/12/2024 3:34 AM, 3.1M followers, 88 retweets, 1.3K likes]
Deeply honored to call on President Smt. Droupadi Murmu ji today @rashtrapatibhvn. Grateful for her continued guidance and strong support.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[6/11/2024 11:56 AM, 3.1M followers, 372 retweets, 3.4K likes]
Chaired a meeting of senior officials of #TeamMEA today, accompanied by colleagues MoS @KVSinghMPGonda & MoS @PmargheritaBJP. Discussed our vision of Vishwabandhu that is being achieved through implementing Bharat First and Vasudaiva Kutumbakam.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[6/11/2024 8:57 AM, 3.1M followers, 512 retweets, 7.4K likes]
Privileged to call on Vice President Shri Jagdeep Dhankar ji this evening. Thanked him for his many insights and continued guidance. @VPIndia

Richard Rossow
@RichardRossow
[6/11/2024 9:55 AM, 28.7K followers, 2 retweets, 7 likes]
U.S., India have $125b in goods trade over the last 12 months, down 5% year-on-year. U.S. exports dipped significantly, down 11% year-on-year.
NSB
Awami League
@albd1971
[6/11/2024 5:31 AM, 638.4K followers, 48 retweets, 127 likes]
Prime Minister #SheikhHasina has handed over 18,566 more houses to the #homeless and #landless people. A total of 266,012 landless and homeless families were rehabilitated in five phases of the #Ashrayan-2 project. Since 1997, the #AwamiLeague govt has rehabilitated 4,340,000 homeless and landless people through Ashrayan 1 and 2 projects. https://bssnews.net/news-flash/194525

Awami League
@albd1971
[6/11/2024 9:09 AM, 638.4K followers, 27 retweets, 72 likes]
#OnThisDay in 2008, #AwamiLeague President #SheikhHasina was released from jail after being incarcarated for 11 months on false accusations. She was arrested on July 16, 2007 during the 1/11-backed government. Her physical condition severely deteriorated as she didn’t receive any treatment for her injured eyes and ear. General people along with the party leaders demanded her release and treatment abroad. The demands turned into a movement and the then caretaker government was forced to release her from jail. https://albd.org/articles/news/36599 #Bangladesh

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[6/12/2024 12:12 AM, 108.6K followers, 173 retweets, 182 likes]
President Dr @MMuizzu and the First Lady launch a nationwide fundraising telethon campaign under the slogan ‘Falastheenaa Eku Dhivehin,’ which translates to ‘Maldivians in Solidarity with Palestine.’ This initiative is led by President Dr Muizzu. The telethon, organized by the Public Service Media (PSM) in collaboration with other local media, will continue until midnight tonight. PSM has placed a total of 13 donation boxes in the Greater Male’ area.

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[6/12/2024 1:05 AM, 108.6K followers, 42 retweets, 52 likes]
Vice President @HucenSembe and spouse attend the fundraising telethon campaign under the slogan ‘Falastheenaa Eku Dhivehin,’ which translates to ‘Maldivians in Solidarity with Palestine.’ This telethon will continue until midnight tonight. A total of 13 donation boxes have been placed in the Greater Male’ area.

MFA SriLanka
@MFA_SriLanka
[6/11/2024 8:30 AM, 38.2K followers, 6 retweets, 12 likes]
20 officers were recruited to the Sri Lanka Foreign Service. Foreign Secretary Aruni Wijewardane addressed the new officers on the importance of professionalism and need to acquire skills of modern diplomacy. More: https://mfa.gov.lk/new-officers-recruited/ #DiplomacyLK #lka

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[6/11/2024 4:46 AM, 5.6K followers, 10 retweets, 54 likes]
Always good to catch up with my friend Hon. Wang Yi, Chinese Foreign Minister. We agreed to continue to strengthen our bilateral relationship which is multifaceted @ChinaEmbSL @MFA_SriLanka

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[6/11/2024 6:55 AM, 5.6K followers, 3 retweets, 13 likes]
#FamilyPhoto ceremony with the Heads of delegations ahead of the "BRICS Plus" Ministerial Meeting in Nizhny Novgorod, #Russia #BRICS2024

Ranil Wickremesinghe
@RW_UNP
[6/11/2024 7:21 AM, 320.1K followers, 79 retweets, 592 likes]
I met PM Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh in New Delhi during Indian PM @narendramodi’s swearing-in ceremony. We discussed strengthening Sri Lanka-Bangladesh relations, regional cooperation, and potential investments. She pledged support for Sri Lanka’s agricultural modernisation and will direct private investors from Bangladesh to Sri Lanka. I committed to sending Sri Lankan agricultural experts to study Bangladesh’s methods. We also talked about a free trade agreement and a potential passenger ferry service between our countries. She invited me to the BIMSTEC Summit, but due to elections, PM @DCRGunawardena and FM @alisabrypc will attend representing me. She expressed satisfaction with Sri Lanka’s economic progress, and I assured a visit to Bangladesh after the elections. I also met @DrSJaishankar and congratulated him on his appointments. We discussed resuming development projects with Indian investments, India’s “Neighbourhood First” policy, and plans for an industrial zone in Trincomalee. I informed him about the new Economic Transformation Act, the Truth and Reconciliation Bill, and updates on agricultural modernisation and fishermen’s issues. He expressed plans to visit Sri Lanka soon to oversee progress and coordinate Prime Minister Modi’s visit.

Ranil Wickremesinghe
@RW_UNP
[6/11/2024 3:29 AM, 320.1K followers, 33 retweets, 260 likes]
I joined leaders from India’s neighborhood and the Indian Ocean region, reflecting India’s ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy, to attend Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony for his third consecutive term as Prime Minister on Sunday at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Prime Minister @narendramodi, wishing him success as he begins his third term, earned through the trust and confidence the Indian people have placed in him.
Central Asia
MFA Kazakhstan
@MFA_KZ
[6/11/2024 9:45 AM, 51.2K followers, 6 retweets, 3 likes]
On the sidelines of the ministerial meeting, Minister Nurtleu held bilateral discussions with the foreign ministers of Russia, Türkiye, Belarus, Iran, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia.

MFA Kazakhstan
@MFA_KZ
[6/11/2024 9:35 AM, 51.2K followers, 11 retweets, 7 likes]
Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan Participated in the Ministerial Session of the BRICS+ Dialogue http://gov.kz/memleket/entities/mfa/press/news/details/790077?lang=en

Javlon Vakhabov
@JavlonVakhabov
[6/11/2024 10:44 PM, 6K followers, 7 likes]
Began my first day in Bishkek meeting with Asein Isayev, the First Deputy Foreign Minister of Kyrgyzstan (@MFA_Kyrgyzstan). We discussed our joint efforts to reinvigorate both the bilateral relations and our engagements within the multilateral framework. As reiterated in our conversation, the border resolution has become a starting point for deepening and expanding cooperation between two countries and most importantly addressing our peoples’ urgent needs.

Asel Doolotkeldieva
@ADoolotkeldieva
[6/12/2024 1:40 AM, 14.1K followers, 1 retweet, 4 likes]
Contradictory estimations of current labor migration moves from CA to Russia. Officials say, it has decreased (as for KG: "Presently 411000 Kyrgyz citizens in Russia, compared to 587000 in 2022"). Others say, it increased since invasion. Any good analysis?

Asel Doolotkeldieva
@ADoolotkeldieva
[6/12/2024 2:08 AM, 14.1K followers, 1 like]
Another mega project on of Kambar-Ata1 hydro station is reaching a deal between KG, KAZ & UZ. If built, it will be more powerful than current Toktogul station. It’s huge step in reaching water & energy security in the region. But where the money will come?

Asel Doolotkeldieva
@ADoolotkeldieva
[6/12/2024 1:27 AM, 14.1K followers, 5 retweets, 10 likes]
This is really appalling. The Kyrgyz prosecution is asking 20 years of prison for participants of the so-called Kempir Abad water dam case. Their pre-trial detention should end in 3 days, hence prosecutors have intensified their accusations

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[6/11/2024 9:44 PM, 4.8K followers, 4 retweets, 4 likes]
Meeting with the President of the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly Dennis Francis https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15191/meeting-with-the-president-of-the-78th-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly-dennis-francis

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[6/11/2024 9:43 PM, 4.8K followers, 1 retweet, 3 likes]
Meeting with the Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) Mrs. Armida Salsia Alishahbana https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15190/meeting-with-the-executive-secretary-of-the-un-economic-and-social-commission-for-asia-and-the-pacific-unescap-mrs-armida-salsia-alishahbana

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[6/11/2024 9:41 PM, 4.8K followers, 4 retweets, 6 likes]
Meeting with the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Li Junhua https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15189/meeting-with-the-un-under-secretary-general-for-economic-and-social-affairs-li-junhua

MFA Tajikistan
@MOFA_Tajikistan
[6/11/2024 9:40 PM, 4.8K followers, 2 retweets, 2 likes]
Participation in the 3rd International Conference on the International Decade of Action "Water for Sustainable Development, 2018-2028" https://mfa.tj/en/main/view/15188/participation-in-the-3rd-international-conference-on-the-international-decade-of-action-water-for-sustainable-development-2018-2028

Furqat Sidiqov
@FurqatSidiq
[6/11/2024 1:37 PM, 1.3K followers, 1 retweet, 7 likes]
The Adviser to the President of #Uzbekistan @SMirziyoyeva met with @USTradeRep @AmbassadorTai. During the meeting, Uzbekistan’s dedication to meaningful economic reforms was highlighted, with an emphasis on the prosperity and well-being of citizens.

Saida Mirziyoyeva
@SMirziyoyeva
[6/11/2024 9:58 AM, 18.3K followers, 5 retweets, 53 likes]
We met @USTradeRep @AmbassadorTai today & emphasized that #Uzbekistan is committed to implementing economic reforms, prioritizing the well-being of our people. We intend to become a full participant in international trade and count on US to accelerate our admission to the @wto

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[6/11/2024 4:50 PM, 189.4K followers, 18 likes]
President of #Uzbekistan Shavkat #Mirziyoyev received @USTradeRep @AmbassadorTai They discussed issues of strengthening the strategic partnership and expanding trade and economic partnership. Special attention was given to #Uzbekistan’s accession to the @wto and the importance of launching a joint platform to promote industrial cooperation projects.

{End of Report}
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