sri lanka – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:00:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png sri lanka – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 The World Divided https://www.radiofree.org/2025/08/01/the-world-divided/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/08/01/the-world-divided/#respond Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:00:03 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160396 An interesting news report revealed the discovery of a Russian woman and her two young daughters living in a southern India cave. Earth’s inhabitants ponder how they can escape the madness, and this woman found a simple and agreeable solution. She described a close to nature life — swimming in waterfalls, painting, and doing pottery. […]

The post The World Divided first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> An interesting news report revealed the discovery of a Russian woman and her two young daughters living in a southern India cave. Earth’s inhabitants ponder how they can escape the madness, and this woman found a simple and agreeable solution. She described a close to nature life — swimming in waterfalls, painting, and doing pottery.

The way the world is going, she and her children might be the precursor of the dwelling habits of the future generations, those who manage to survive the coming nuclear war between the rising bloc of rising nations and decaying bloc of decaying nations, the war between the BRICS and the Pricks.

The BRICS ─ Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and five new members — have no “biggest BRIC,” each Bric nation relishes its independence and the group is cemented by their distaste for the offensive Pricks. Fortunately, for the BRICS, their entourage contains China, the new superpower that encourages cooperation rather than domination and has initiated a “Belt and Road” that facilitates free trade throughout the world.

The Pricks — United States, Great Britain, and the European Union — have the United States as their power Prick, which is led by their president, the biggest Prick. In slavish obedience to genocide Israel, the U.S. identifies itself as the Super Prick. This bloc has recently featured severe discord, lack of cooperation, and inauguration of high tariffs that impede global trade. Domination is its focus. with cooperation a temporary means to enable domination.

For one simple reason, the Pricks are finding it difficult to control and use the BRICS for their personal gain ─ the BRICS have economic dominance.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
GDP PPP, Int$: 2025

Coming into 2025, the BRICS have a greater share of the economic pie, six times the population digesting the pie, and are growing in principal categories — GDP/PPP, population, and adherents at a faster rate.

The Pricks devalue the Brics by claiming they are a loose and uncoordinated confederation, unable to agree on vital issues. Brazil is accused of harassing former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro and may be subjected to sanctions; Russia is led by an irresponsible tyrant and is heavily sanctioned; India gets a pass despite the heavy-handed tactics toward its Muslim community; China is led by a despotic dictator, and South Africa is guilty of genocide toward its white population.

The Pricks pose themselves as a model of decency and decorum. They have ballot boxes and freedom of speech, which enables their citizens to elect the biggest pricks and then freely criticize their selections by vocal erections. In the U.S. the next presidential election process — fund raising, organization, public relations, the “eye on the prize”— starts shortly after a new president takes office. Winning candidates in elections expend more time and energy in gaining victory and preparing for their next victory than performing their duties during their term in office.

The economic, social, and political advancements of their principal superpowers, China for the BRICS and the United States for the Pricks, determine the success of the BRICS and the Pricks. A brief examination of each nation’s potential to rise in the firmament or descend into chaos tells the story.

The Trump administration shows the hidden failures of the United States pluralistic democracy. The past has no continuity; just the opposite, many of the legislations from previous administrations are discarded. and the country, rather than advancing to a progressed new, returns to a rejected old. One example from Understanding AI:

…. Sen. Hawley asked Donald Trump to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, an $11 billion transmission line that is supposed to carry electricity from Kansas wind farms to homes in Illinois and Indiana. The proposed line would pass through Hawley’s state of Missouri, annoying farmers whose land would be taken by eminent domain.

According to the New York Times, Hawley “explained his concerns to the president, who has repeatedly expressed his distaste for wind power, saying he would not permit any new wind projects during his administration.” Trump then called Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who agreed to cancel a federal loan guarantee for the project, throwing its viability into question.

Impulse overrides soul searching, allegiance to leader is more important than professional education and experience; rash and subjective action replaces careful thought. The America of 2025, with its decaying infrastructure, troubled inner cities, dependence on fossil fuels, continuous problems of crime, drug addiction, health care, and immigration, closely resembles the America of 2010. One big difference ─ adversity and polarization of the population has increased, Americans are at the breaking point with one another. The country, which is rich in resources, has extensive farmland, enjoys suitable and varied climates, and contains an educated and diligent population, is not well managed; it is mismanaged.

The Xi JInping administration shows the hidden success of China’s people’s democracy. The past has continuity; legislations and plans from previous administrations are massaged and enhanced, and the country, rather than remaining stagnant, advances to a new level. Soul searching from millions of cadres provides suggestions for millions of improvements. All leaders have professional education and experience; careful thought displaces rash and subjective action.

The China of 2025, with its continually increasing infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, superhighways, high speed trains, and airline routes that link every remote place in China with central cores, with modern building complexes that replace the shanty towns and provide agreeable living space for an aging population and marginalized rural farmers, with its expanded megacities that are considered technology and planning marvels, and with a unified and obedient population ─ no adversity or polarization here ─ has only a fleeting resemblance to the China of 2010.

Dubbed an engineering marvel, the highly anticipated Raffles City Chongqing project is nearly complete. CapitaLand Group

Sheltering their deficiencies, the Western democracies shift the critical analysis to public relations stunts that highlight the supposed and exaggerated deficiencies of the Chinese system. The Westerners make no effort to learn and understand the workings of China’s political, social, and economic systems. Fabrications are added to the limited “don’t care to know” and conveyed to the public as authorized knowledge. One example is the “debt trap” verbiage, applied to Chinese lending, which began during Sri Lanka’s first debt crisis and has stuck around as an effective means to vilify the PRC.

We have the falsehood. Washington Post (WAPO), “This China has a hand in Sri Lanka’s economic calamity,” analysis by Ishaan Tharoor, July 20, 2022:

One of the major players in Sri Lanka’s calamity is China. Beijing is Sri Lanka’s lone biggest creditor, accounting for some 10 percent of the country’s foreign debt. Between 2000 and 2020, it extended close to $12 billion in loans to the Sri Lankan government, largely for a slate of major infrastructure projects that turned into white elephants — including a costly port facility in the Rajapaksas’ hometown of Hambantota, which was effectively ceded to Chinese control half a decade ago after Sri Lankan authorities recognized they could no longer pay off the loans.

Examination of the Sri Lanka debt crisis exposes the mendacity and viciousness of the WAPO report. Almost every sentence is spurious; China does not engage in “debt trap diplomacy” and has been one lender who makes financial sacrifices that rescues nations from debilitating borrowing.

We have the truth. The Atlantic, “The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth,” by Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire, February 6, 2021, had already contradicted WAPO statements.

Steep payments on international sovereign bonds, which comprised nearly 40 percent of the country’s external debt, put Sirisena’s government in dire fiscal straits almost immediately. When Sirisena took office, Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.

There was also never a default. Colombo arranged a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and decided to raise much-needed dollars by leasing out the underperforming Hambantota Port to an experienced company—just as the Canadians had recommended. There was not an open tender, and the only two bids came from China Merchants and China Harbor. Sri Lanka chose China Merchants, making it the majority shareholder with a 99-year lease, and used the $1.12 billion cash infusion to bolster its foreign reserves, not to pay off China Eximbank. The China impressed on our minds is not the China that exists.

The United States moves on fumes, on the energies of its past without renewable energies for an improved future. China moves on constantly reinforced energy, all engines operating at top speed, each day becoming a new future. The Pricks know they will not be able to compete economically with the BRICS. They have a choice of consolidating and working together and maintaining reduced economies, cooperating with the Brics in mutual agreements, or, by the usual United States method, resolving the situation by military action.

The threat of military force alarms and subdues the BRICS. They may be compelled to yield much in order to save all. China, guided by its Mandate of Heaven, “a political and religious doctrine that justifies the rule of an emperor based on virtue and ability to govern,” and which it has extended to relations between all nations, might do what it did in the fifteenth century. At that time, China was, by far, the leading commercial power in the world, and huge Chinese fleets sailed the world for markets for its surplus products. After meeting the imperial powers of France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands and observing their nefarious methods in subduing the Africa and Indian peoples, stripping them of resources, and forcing upon them the products manufactured from the resources, China scuttled its fleet and went into solitary confinement.

The reason for Xi Jinping’s self-sufficiency drive is clear. Save the world from nuclear conflagration and let the rest of the world rot. Pricks always lose and always think they have won.

The post The World Divided first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/08/01/the-world-divided/feed/ 0 547289 Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role-2/#respond Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:09:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160000 China is a modern superpower, as is the US, but a qualitatively different superpower. The US uses military aggression, coups, and sanctions to impose US corporate interests worldwide. China is a peaceful power that respects national sovereignty, mutual development, and non-interference.  Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China […]

The post Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> China is a modern superpower, as is the US, but a qualitatively different superpower. The US uses military aggression, coups, and sanctions to impose US corporate interests worldwide. China is a peaceful power that respects national sovereignty, mutual development, and non-interference.

 Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China narratives that liken Chinese trade relations to Western imperial conduct, as in Sri Lanka and the Congo. Others have written of Chinese investments in the Occupied West Bank, and even criticize China for lack of aid to Cuba – clearly not issues the Western powers have problems with. 

 The US empire has at least 750 military bases in 80 countries. China has just one, in Djibouti – part of a UN mission against piracy. The US has continued wars against other countries on a non-stop basis, while China has invaded no country nor started any wars in close to half a century. The US instigated over 25 coups and coup attempts in Latin America just between 2000 and 2020. China has sponsored no coup attempts on any government. The US imposes blockades and “sanctions” warfare on at least 39 nations. China imposes no sanctions on anyone. The US regularly launches drone attacks on the people of other countries. China has launched no drone attacks on anyone. China is no imperial superpower, but a peaceful one. 

China is the outstanding example of a Third World country developing into a superpower despite the West’s centuries-long efforts to torpedo its progress. China engages in “win-win” economic relations with other nations. Its loans and investment are carried out based on equality, consensus and joint benefit, unlike the predatory behavior of the IMF and Western lending institutions. China is helping other countries of the Global South break out of the underdevelopment that colonialism and imperialism have imposed on their countries for 500 years.

Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role

 At present, over 150 countries have chosen to participate in China’s economic program called the Belt and Road Initiative. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega explained why:

The People’s Republic of China has brought progress, benefits, development to peoples who were colonized, and later became independent, but who were then subjugated under the boot of the interests of the powers that had colonized them, leaving those peoples in poverty, with people in misery, people going hungry, people in illiteracy, with infant mortality, in Africa, in Asia. And the People’s Republic of China has been developing a policy bringing benefits to developing countries, without setting any conditions… The powers that have been colonialists and neocolonialists, like the US, like Europe… have not stopped being colonialists. They still are neocolonialists. They have not stopped being criminals. They still are criminals. They still are killers. 

China’s role in helping other countries to develop has been noted by several anti-imperialist leaders. Fidel Castro rejected the notion that China was an imperial power. “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy… The role that China has been playing in the United Nations, including the Security Council, is an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Of the Chinese leader he said, “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

Present Cuban President Diaz-Canel also had high praise for Xi Jinping.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likewise said, “one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese Revolution.” Chavez considered that an alliance with China constituted a bulwark against imperialism — a “Great Wall against American hegemonism… China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.” 

 Bolivian President Arce said: “We have built bridges of trust between the two countries and maintain a very positive bilateral relationship.” Evo Morales, the former president, said Bolivia and China “maintain a relationship characterized by wide-ranging and diverse cooperation and reciprocity.” China “works in a joined-up way with other countries and benefits the peoples of the world; the opposite to what was imposed on us for decades by the US, where predatory, individualistic and competitive capitalism looted our people’s resources for the benefit of transnational corporations.” “China develops, and helps, invests, without any conditions, just to support our development. China is always ready to cooperate unconditionally.”

 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro declared, “Between China and Venezuela there is a model relationship, a model of what should be the relationship between a superpower like China, the great superpower of the 21st century, and an emerging, heroic, revolutionary and socialist country like Venezuela… China has inaugurated a new era of the emergence of non-colonialist, non-imperialist, non-hegemonic superpowers.”

 Former Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa spoke highly of Chinese aid to the Citizens Revolution. China’s assistance is “an example for Latin America and for the rest of the world.”

 Burkina Faso revolutionary President Ibrahim Traoré said Chinese aid was a “testament to a mutually beneficial partnership.”

 Even President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia recently said at the ASEAN summit, “China has consistently defended the interests of developing countries. They consistently oppose oppression, oppose imperialism, oppose colonialism, oppose apartheid, The People’s Republic of China defends liberation struggles in countries that are still oppressed by imperialism and colonialism.” 

 Recent Western Left anti-China Stories

Yet, despite the testimonies of these anti-imperialist Third World leaders, some progressives still highlight West’s anti-China narratives, such as in Sri Lanka and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Sri Lanka

The China debt-trap myth arose from Sri Lanka’s port Hambantota, that China lent money to the country to build the port, knowing Sri Lanka could not make it viable. This led Sri Lanka to default on the loans, and Beijing demanded the port as collateral. Chatham House and The Atlantic, both organs of the ruling elite, debunked this. First, the Hambantota Port project was not proposed by China, but by Sri Lanka. Second, Sri Lanka’s debt crisis resulted not from Chinese lending, but from Western loans. Third, there was no debt-for-asset swap. Rather, China leased the port for $1.1 billion, money Sri Lanka then used to pay down debts to the West. Chatham House concludes, “Sri Lanka’s debt trap was thus primarily created as a result of domestic policy decisions and was facilitated by Western lending and monetary policy, and not by the policies of the Chinese government.”

 China in Africa

Liberia’s former minister of public works, W Gyude Moore noted that under European colonialism “there has never been a continental-scale infrastructure building program for Africa’s railways, roads, ports, water filtration plants and power stations…China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.”

 At the most recent Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in 2024, 53 of the 54 African countries chose to attend. China pledged $50 billion over the next three years on top of the $40 billion already invested.

 Dee Knight took up the issue of China’s exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo propagandized in the book Cobalt Red. He drew on Isabelle Minnon’s report, “Industrial Turn-Around in Congo?” She wrote, “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization.” The West had bled Congo dry through debts that prevented its development. China brought large-scale investment on a new basis, combining financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities.

 Minion stated the result: “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” This “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies,” which just plundered the Congo. Furthermore, China cancelled $28 million in interest-free loans, and gave $17 million in support to the DRC.

 During the Covid pandemic, China announced that it also forgave 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations.  This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructured $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019.

 Chinese investments in Israel

Chinese trades with Israel, as with all other countries, to establish mutually beneficial economic relations, to counter the US goal of turning countries against China. China’s trade with Israel is qualitatively different from that of the US, Britain, France, Germany and others since China does not export weaponry to Israel used to slaughter Palestinians and peoples in surrounding countries. 

Some have written of Chinese business involvement in the occupied West Bank. The report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese (which brought US sanctions on her) substantiates one such instance. China’s role contradicts its vote in favor of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution calling for no trade or investments with Israeli operations in the occupied territories. 

 Yet China worked hard to unite the divided Palestinian resistance with the recent Beijing Declaration. China has continually denounced the US and Israel in Gaza, upholds the Palestinian right to resist occupation, and has never condemned the October 7, 2023 Hamas breakout attack. China is also a participant in the present The Hague Group calling for “concrete measures” against Israel.

 China and Cuba

Some Western leftists have criticized China for lack of support for Cuba, suffering under a now worsening US blockade. However, China is working to build 55 solar installation complexes there this year, covering Cuba’s daytime shortfall, and another 37 by 2028, for a total of 2,000 megawatts. This aid would meet nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s present-day demand. China has long been a partner of Cuba in terms of trade and investment, participating in the Mariel Special Development Zone, and in projects in the production of medicines, biotechnology and agriculture.

 China, A Superpower that Supports Third World Development

It is a contradiction that many on the Western left are not supportive of China, given that the US rulers have long called China the primacy threat to imperialist domination. 

Recognizing the US’s continued economic and military power, if not superiority, China seeks to avoid a major destructive direct confrontation. China counters the US and Western isolation strategy by fostering a world based on cooperation with all countries, even with the US and its close allies. It focuses on obtaining essential resources for its industry and for economic self-sufficiency to fortify itself in self-defense against the US strategy to isolate it economically and politically, and on meeting countries’ desire for its cheaper goods and investments. As the Third World leaders above say, most of China’s foreign loans are not capitalist investments, but government funds that have been used to free countries from the grip of imperialism.

 That has made it impossible for the West to isolate China. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, Chinese investments in schools, roads, railroads, and other needed infrastructure are generally seen as a welcome change from the neglect and underdevelopment imposed by the imperial First World.  

 Consequently, every year China becomes more and more a world power in relation to the imperialist countries.

 China’s significance for the world lies in being a singular example of a Third World country developing despite the West’s goal to thwart its rise. This is a model for other Third World countries that seek to assert their independence of the West and make their own path.

 In this process, China, which just 75 years ago, had an illiteracy rate of 80%, has just ended poverty for 800 million people, which no capitalist group of countries ever accomplished. China has achieved the fastest growth in living standards of any country in the world. It achieved this without invading, massacring, colonizing and looting other countries, but peacefully, without threatening any other people, and in cooperation with them.

 As Daniel Ortega said:

The self-same ideologues of imperialism state that what worries them is that they see the People’s Republic of China bringing benefits to these Peoples and they feel that there they are losing the power to keep these peoples enslaved…They are upset, outraged, because the People’s Republic of China is making available billions in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. These are investments for the development of our peoples. They see that as bad for themselves, but why can’t they do the same? Why have they never brought investment with the same conditions that the People’s Republic of China is making available?

The West, with the US at its head, seeks to maintain so-called “Western civilization,” the rule of the white colonizer over the rest of the world. It regards China and Russia as the two major threats to its continued domination and seeks to disable both. China and Russia are drawn into a struggle, where their continued growth, if not existence, is at stake. The more they can neutralize the West’s goal, the more this is a victory for all the oppressed people of the world.

The post Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role-2/feed/ 0 545049 Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role/#respond Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:09:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=160000 China is a modern superpower, as is the US, but a qualitatively different superpower. The US uses military aggression, coups, and sanctions to impose US corporate interests worldwide. China is a peaceful power that respects national sovereignty, mutual development, and non-interference.  Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China […]

The post Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> China is a modern superpower, as is the US, but a qualitatively different superpower. The US uses military aggression, coups, and sanctions to impose US corporate interests worldwide. China is a peaceful power that respects national sovereignty, mutual development, and non-interference.

 Despite opposing imperialism, a tendency in the Western left is to recycle Western anti-China narratives that liken Chinese trade relations to Western imperial conduct, as in Sri Lanka and the Congo. Others have written of Chinese investments in the Occupied West Bank, and even criticize China for lack of aid to Cuba – clearly not issues the Western powers have problems with. 

 The US empire has at least 750 military bases in 80 countries. China has just one, in Djibouti – part of a UN mission against piracy. The US has continued wars against other countries on a non-stop basis, while China has invaded no country nor started any wars in close to half a century. The US instigated over 25 coups and coup attempts in Latin America just between 2000 and 2020. China has sponsored no coup attempts on any government. The US imposes blockades and “sanctions” warfare on at least 39 nations. China imposes no sanctions on anyone. The US regularly launches drone attacks on the people of other countries. China has launched no drone attacks on anyone. China is no imperial superpower, but a peaceful one. 

China is the outstanding example of a Third World country developing into a superpower despite the West’s centuries-long efforts to torpedo its progress. China engages in “win-win” economic relations with other nations. Its loans and investment are carried out based on equality, consensus and joint benefit, unlike the predatory behavior of the IMF and Western lending institutions. China is helping other countries of the Global South break out of the underdevelopment that colonialism and imperialism have imposed on their countries for 500 years.

Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role

 At present, over 150 countries have chosen to participate in China’s economic program called the Belt and Road Initiative. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega explained why:

The People’s Republic of China has brought progress, benefits, development to peoples who were colonized, and later became independent, but who were then subjugated under the boot of the interests of the powers that had colonized them, leaving those peoples in poverty, with people in misery, people going hungry, people in illiteracy, with infant mortality, in Africa, in Asia. And the People’s Republic of China has been developing a policy bringing benefits to developing countries, without setting any conditions… The powers that have been colonialists and neocolonialists, like the US, like Europe… have not stopped being colonialists. They still are neocolonialists. They have not stopped being criminals. They still are criminals. They still are killers. 

China’s role in helping other countries to develop has been noted by several anti-imperialist leaders. Fidel Castro rejected the notion that China was an imperial power. “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy… The role that China has been playing in the United Nations, including the Security Council, is an important element of balance, progress and safeguard of world peace and stability.” Of the Chinese leader he said, “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

Present Cuban President Diaz-Canel also had high praise for Xi Jinping.

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likewise said, “one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese Revolution.” Chavez considered that an alliance with China constituted a bulwark against imperialism — a “Great Wall against American hegemonism… China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.” 

 Bolivian President Arce said: “We have built bridges of trust between the two countries and maintain a very positive bilateral relationship.” Evo Morales, the former president, said Bolivia and China “maintain a relationship characterized by wide-ranging and diverse cooperation and reciprocity.” China “works in a joined-up way with other countries and benefits the peoples of the world; the opposite to what was imposed on us for decades by the US, where predatory, individualistic and competitive capitalism looted our people’s resources for the benefit of transnational corporations.” “China develops, and helps, invests, without any conditions, just to support our development. China is always ready to cooperate unconditionally.”

 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro declared, “Between China and Venezuela there is a model relationship, a model of what should be the relationship between a superpower like China, the great superpower of the 21st century, and an emerging, heroic, revolutionary and socialist country like Venezuela… China has inaugurated a new era of the emergence of non-colonialist, non-imperialist, non-hegemonic superpowers.”

 Former Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa spoke highly of Chinese aid to the Citizens Revolution. China’s assistance is “an example for Latin America and for the rest of the world.”

 Burkina Faso revolutionary President Ibrahim Traoré said Chinese aid was a “testament to a mutually beneficial partnership.”

 Even President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia recently said at the ASEAN summit, “China has consistently defended the interests of developing countries. They consistently oppose oppression, oppose imperialism, oppose colonialism, oppose apartheid, The People’s Republic of China defends liberation struggles in countries that are still oppressed by imperialism and colonialism.” 

 Recent Western Left anti-China Stories

Yet, despite the testimonies of these anti-imperialist Third World leaders, some progressives still highlight West’s anti-China narratives, such as in Sri Lanka and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Sri Lanka

The China debt-trap myth arose from Sri Lanka’s port Hambantota, that China lent money to the country to build the port, knowing Sri Lanka could not make it viable. This led Sri Lanka to default on the loans, and Beijing demanded the port as collateral. Chatham House and The Atlantic, both organs of the ruling elite, debunked this. First, the Hambantota Port project was not proposed by China, but by Sri Lanka. Second, Sri Lanka’s debt crisis resulted not from Chinese lending, but from Western loans. Third, there was no debt-for-asset swap. Rather, China leased the port for $1.1 billion, money Sri Lanka then used to pay down debts to the West. Chatham House concludes, “Sri Lanka’s debt trap was thus primarily created as a result of domestic policy decisions and was facilitated by Western lending and monetary policy, and not by the policies of the Chinese government.”

 China in Africa

Liberia’s former minister of public works, W Gyude Moore noted that under European colonialism “there has never been a continental-scale infrastructure building program for Africa’s railways, roads, ports, water filtration plants and power stations…China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries.”

 At the most recent Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in 2024, 53 of the 54 African countries chose to attend. China pledged $50 billion over the next three years on top of the $40 billion already invested.

 Dee Knight took up the issue of China’s exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo propagandized in the book Cobalt Red. He drew on Isabelle Minnon’s report, “Industrial Turn-Around in Congo?” She wrote, “China has responded to the DRC’s need to have partners who invest in industrialization.” The West had bled Congo dry through debts that prevented its development. China brought large-scale investment on a new basis, combining financing for industrial mining and public infrastructure – roads, railroads, dams, health and education facilities.

 Minion stated the result: “After decades of almost non-existent industrial production, the country became and remains the world’s leading producer of cobalt and, by 2023, became the world’s third largest producer of copper.” This “puts an end to the monopoly of certain Western countries and their large companies,” which just plundered the Congo. Furthermore, China cancelled $28 million in interest-free loans, and gave $17 million in support to the DRC.

 During the Covid pandemic, China announced that it also forgave 23 interest-free loans for 17 African nations.  This is in addition to China’s cancellation of more than $3.4 billion in debt and restructured $15 billion of debt in Africa between 2000 and 2019.

 Chinese investments in Israel

Chinese trades with Israel, as with all other countries, to establish mutually beneficial economic relations, to counter the US goal of turning countries against China. China’s trade with Israel is qualitatively different from that of the US, Britain, France, Germany and others since China does not export weaponry to Israel used to slaughter Palestinians and peoples in surrounding countries. 

Some have written of Chinese business involvement in the occupied West Bank. The report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese (which brought US sanctions on her) substantiates one such instance. China’s role contradicts its vote in favor of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution calling for no trade or investments with Israeli operations in the occupied territories. 

 Yet China worked hard to unite the divided Palestinian resistance with the recent Beijing Declaration. China has continually denounced the US and Israel in Gaza, upholds the Palestinian right to resist occupation, and has never condemned the October 7, 2023 Hamas breakout attack. China is also a participant in the present The Hague Group calling for “concrete measures” against Israel.

 China and Cuba

Some Western leftists have criticized China for lack of support for Cuba, suffering under a now worsening US blockade. However, China is working to build 55 solar installation complexes there this year, covering Cuba’s daytime shortfall, and another 37 by 2028, for a total of 2,000 megawatts. This aid would meet nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s present-day demand. China has long been a partner of Cuba in terms of trade and investment, participating in the Mariel Special Development Zone, and in projects in the production of medicines, biotechnology and agriculture.

 China, A Superpower that Supports Third World Development

It is a contradiction that many on the Western left are not supportive of China, given that the US rulers have long called China the primacy threat to imperialist domination. 

Recognizing the US’s continued economic and military power, if not superiority, China seeks to avoid a major destructive direct confrontation. China counters the US and Western isolation strategy by fostering a world based on cooperation with all countries, even with the US and its close allies. It focuses on obtaining essential resources for its industry and for economic self-sufficiency to fortify itself in self-defense against the US strategy to isolate it economically and politically, and on meeting countries’ desire for its cheaper goods and investments. As the Third World leaders above say, most of China’s foreign loans are not capitalist investments, but government funds that have been used to free countries from the grip of imperialism.

 That has made it impossible for the West to isolate China. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, Chinese investments in schools, roads, railroads, and other needed infrastructure are generally seen as a welcome change from the neglect and underdevelopment imposed by the imperial First World.  

 Consequently, every year China becomes more and more a world power in relation to the imperialist countries.

 China’s significance for the world lies in being a singular example of a Third World country developing despite the West’s goal to thwart its rise. This is a model for other Third World countries that seek to assert their independence of the West and make their own path.

 In this process, China, which just 75 years ago, had an illiteracy rate of 80%, has just ended poverty for 800 million people, which no capitalist group of countries ever accomplished. China has achieved the fastest growth in living standards of any country in the world. It achieved this without invading, massacring, colonizing and looting other countries, but peacefully, without threatening any other people, and in cooperation with them.

 As Daniel Ortega said:

The self-same ideologues of imperialism state that what worries them is that they see the People’s Republic of China bringing benefits to these Peoples and they feel that there they are losing the power to keep these peoples enslaved…They are upset, outraged, because the People’s Republic of China is making available billions in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. These are investments for the development of our peoples. They see that as bad for themselves, but why can’t they do the same? Why have they never brought investment with the same conditions that the People’s Republic of China is making available?

The West, with the US at its head, seeks to maintain so-called “Western civilization,” the rule of the white colonizer over the rest of the world. It regards China and Russia as the two major threats to its continued domination and seeks to disable both. China and Russia are drawn into a struggle, where their continued growth, if not existence, is at stake. The more they can neutralize the West’s goal, the more this is a victory for all the oppressed people of the world.

The post Revolutionary Third World Leaders Praise China’s World Role first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/18/revolutionary-third-world-leaders-praise-chinas-world-role/feed/ 0 545048 Presidential Marxism: AKD and the Sri Lankan Elections https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/01/presidential-marxism-akd-and-the-sri-lankan-elections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/01/presidential-marxism-akd-and-the-sri-lankan-elections/#respond Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:28:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=153938 Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes.  The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri […]

The post Presidential Marxism: AKD and the Sri Lankan Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes.  The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri Lankan independence in 1948.

AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons.  He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real estate and aristocratic privilege. The fall of the Rajapaksa family, propelled by mass protests against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s misrule in 2022, showed that the public had, at least for the time, tired of that tradition.

Not only is the new president outside the traditional orbit of rule and favour; he heads a political grouping known as the National People’s Power (NPP), a colourfully motley combination of trade unions, civil society members, women’s groups and students.  But the throbbing core of the group is the Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP), which boasts a mere three members in the 225-member parliament.

The resume of the JVP is colourfully cluttered and, in keeping with Sri Lankan political history, spattered with its fair share of blood.  It was founded in 1965 in the mould of a Marxist-Leninist party and led by Rohana Wijeweera.  It mounted, without success, two insurrections – in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989.  On both occasions, thousands died in the violence that followed, including Wijeweera and many party leaders, adding to the enormous toll that would follow in the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

It is also worth noting that the seduction of Marxism, just to add a level of complexity to matters, was not confined to the JVP.  The Tamil resistance had itself found it appealing.  A assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency from March 1986 offers the casual remark that “all major insurgent organizations claim allegiance to Marxism” with the qualification that “most active groups are motivated principally by ethnic rivalry with the majority Sinhalese.”  None had a clear political program “other than gaining Columbo’s recognition for a traditional homeland and a Tamil right to self-determination.”

By the time Dissanayake was cutting his teeth in local politics, the JVP was another beast, having been reconstituted by Somawansa Amarasinghe as an organisation keen to move into the arena of ballots rather than the field of armed struggle.  Dissanayake is very much a product of that change.  “We need to establish a new clean political culture … We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”

In a statement, Dissanayake was a picture of modest, if necessary, acknowledgment.  He praised the collective effort behind his victory, one being a consequence of the multitude.  “This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you.  Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful.  This victory belongs to all of us.”

The unavoidable issue of racial fractiousness in the country is also mentioned.  “The unity of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans is the bedrock of this new beginning.”  How the new administration navigates such traditionally poisoned waters will be a matter of interest and challenge, not least given the Sinhala nationalist rhetoric embraced by the JVP, notably towards the Tamil Tigers.

Pundits are also wondering where the new leader might position himself on foreign relations.  There is the matter of India’s unavoidably dominant role, a point that riles Dassanayake.  His preference, and a point he has repeatedly made, is self-sufficiency and economic sovereignty.  But India has a market worth US$6.7 billion whereas China, a more favoured country by the new president, comes in at US$2 billion.

On economics, a traditional, if modest program of nationalisation is being put forth by the JVP within the NPP, notably on such areas as utilities.  A wealth redistribution policy is on the table, including progressive, efficient taxation while a production model to encourage self-sufficiency, notably on important food products, is envisaged.  Greater spending is proposed in education and health care.

The issue of dealing with international lenders is particularly pressing, notably in dealing with the International Monetary Fund, which approved a US$2.9 billion bailout to the previous government on extracting the standard promises of austerity.  “We expect to discuss debt restructuring with the relevant parties and complete the process quickly and obtain the funds,” promises Dissanayake. That said, the governor of the Central Bank and the secretary to the ministry of finance, both important figures in implementing the austerity measures, have remained.

In coming to power, AKD has eschewed demagogic self-confidence.  “I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen.  There are things I know and don’t know.  My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.”  In the febrile atmosphere that is Sri Lankan politics, that admission is a humble, if realistic one.

The post Presidential Marxism: AKD and the Sri Lankan Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/10/01/presidential-marxism-akd-and-the-sri-lankan-elections/feed/ 0 495796 Baltimore bridge crash ship carrying toxic waste to Sri Lanka, says Mirror https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/baltimore-bridge-crash-ship-carrying-toxic-waste-to-sri-lanka-says-mirror/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/baltimore-bridge-crash-ship-carrying-toxic-waste-to-sri-lanka-says-mirror/#respond Tue, 02 Apr 2024 01:03:53 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=99261 Asia Pacific Report

The Singapore cargo ship Dali chartered by Maersk, which collapsed the Baltimore bridge in the United States last month, was carrying 764 tonnes of hazardous materials to Sri Lanka, reports Colombo’s Daily Mirror.

The materials were mostly corrosives, flammables, miscellaneous hazardous materials, and Class-9 hazardous materials — including explosives and lithium-ion batteries — in 56 containers.

According to the Mirror, the US National Transportation Safety Board was still “analysing the ship’s manifest to determine what was onboard” in its other 4644 containers when the ship collided with Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it, on March 26.

The e-Con e-News (ee) news agency reports that prior to Baltimore, the Dali had called at New York and Norfolk, Virginia, which has the world’s largest naval base.

Colombo was to be its next scheduled call, going around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, taking 27 days.

According to ee, Denmark’s Maersk, transporter for the US Department of War, is integral to US military logistics, carrying up to 20 percent of the world’s merchandise trade annually on a fleet of about 600 vessels, including some of the world’s largest ships.

The US Department of Homeland Security has also now deemed the waters near the crash site as “unsafe for divers”.

13 damaged containers
An “unclassified memo” from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said a US Coast Guard team was examining 13 damaged containers, “some with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and/or hazardous materials [HAZMAT] contents.

The team was also analysing the ship’s manifest to determine if any materials could “pose a health risk”.

CISA officials are also monitoring about 6.8 million litres of fuel inside the Dali for its “spill potential”.

Where exactly the toxic materials and fuel were destined for in Sri Lanka was not being reported.

Also, it is a rather long way for such Hazmat, let alone fuel, to be exported, “at least given all the media blather about ‘carbon footprint’, ‘green sustainability’ and so on”, said the Daily Mirror.

“We can expect only squeaky silence from the usual eco-freaks, who are heavily funded by the US and EU,” the newspaper commented.

“It also adds to the intrigue of how Sri Lanka was so easily blocked in 2022 from receiving more neighbourly fuel, which led to the present ‘regime change’ machinations.”


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/04/02/baltimore-bridge-crash-ship-carrying-toxic-waste-to-sri-lanka-says-mirror/feed/ 0 467489 First-ever recipients of ‘outstanding’ Asian music funding unveiled https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/02/first-ever-recipients-of-outstanding-asian-music-funding-unveiled/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/02/first-ever-recipients-of-outstanding-asian-music-funding-unveiled/#respond Sun, 02 Jul 2023 23:35:39 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=90382 By Blessen Tom, RNZ News journalist

Fifteen artists have been selected as the inaugural beneficiaries of NZ On Air’s New Music Pan-Asian funding.

The initiative, the first of its kind, aims to support the Asian music community in New Zealand.

The fund was established due to a lack of equitable representation of Asian musicians in the country’s music sector, says Teresa Patterson, head of music at NZ On Air.

“Our Music Diversity Report clearly showed the under-representation of Pan-Asian New Zealand musicians in the Aotearoa music sector,” she said.

“This is reflected in the number of funding applications we received for this focus round.”

The funding provides musicians with up to $10,000 for recording, mixing and mastering a single, some of which can be set aside for the promotion and creation of visual content to accompany the song’s release.

“We received 107 applications for 15 grants, which is outstanding,” Patterson said.

‘Wonderful range’
“The range of genre, gender and ethnicity among the applicants was wonderful. We received applications from artists who identify as Chinese, Indian, Filipino, South Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Thai and Iraqi.

“The genres varied from alternative/indie and pop to hip-hop/RnB, dance/electro and folk/country.”

Phoebe Rings members Crystal Choi, Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent, Benjamin Locke and Alex Freer.
Phoebe Rings members Crystal Choi, Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent, Benjamin Locke and Alex Freer. Image: Phoebe Rings/RNZ News

Six of the 15 songs that secured funding are bilingual, featuring Asian languages such as Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Malay and Punjabi.

Patterson believed this variety would “really help to reflect the many voices of Aotearoa New Zealand” and add to the vibrant cultural music mix experienced by local audiences.

Swap Gomez, a drummer, visual director and academic lecturer, was one of the panel members responsible for selecting the musicians for the funding. He emphasised the challenges faced by Asian musicians in New Zealand.

“What was awesome to see was so many Pan-Asian artists applying; artists we had never heard of coming out of the woodwork now that a space has been created to celebrate their work,” Gomez said.

“This is the time we can celebrate those Pan-Asian artists who have previously felt overlooked by the wider industry.

“Now there is an environment and sector where they can feel appreciated for their success in music. As a multicultural industry, developing initiatives such as this one is more crucial than ever.”

NZ On Air has announced that funding opportunities for Asian musicians will continue in the next financial year.

“The response we have had to this inaugural NZ On Air New Music Pan-Asian focus funding round has been phenomenal,” Patterson said.

“It tells us that there is a real need, so NZ On Air is excited to confirm that it will return in the new financial year.”

The full NZ On Air’s Pan-Asian New Music recipient list:

  • Amol; cool asf
  • Charlotte Avery; just before you go
  • Crystal Chen; love letter
  • hanbee; deeper
  • Hans.; Porcelain
  • Hugo Chan; bite
  • Julius Black; After You
  • LA FELIX; Waiting
  • Lauren Gin; Don’t Stop
  • Memory Foam; Moon Power
  • Phoebe Rings; 아스라이
  • RESHMA; Kuih Lapis (Layer Cake)
  • tei.; sabre
  • Terrible Sons; Thank You, Thank You
  • Valere; Lily’s March

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/02/first-ever-recipients-of-outstanding-asian-music-funding-unveiled/feed/ 0 408997 Rise in NZ disinformation, conspiracy theories prompts calls for election protections https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/08/rise-in-nz-disinformation-conspiracy-theories-prompts-calls-for-election-protections/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/08/rise-in-nz-disinformation-conspiracy-theories-prompts-calls-for-election-protections/#respond Sat, 08 Apr 2023 14:22:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=86858 By Russell Palmer, RNZ News digital political journalist

Unprecedented levels of disinformation will only get worse this election in Aotearoa New Zealand, but systems set up to deal with it during the pandemic have all been shut down, Disinformation Project researcher Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa has warned.

He says the levels of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse this past week or two are worse than anything he has seen during the past two years of the pandemic — including during the Parliament protest — but he is not aware of any public work to counteract it.

“There is no policy, there’s no framework, there’s no real regulatory mechanism, there’s no best practice, and there’s no legal oversight,” Dr Hattotuwa told RNZ News.

He says urgent action should be taken, and could include legislation, community-based initiatives, or a stronger focus on the recommendations of the 15 March 2019 mosque attacks inquiry.

Highest levels of disinformation, conspiratorialism seen yet
Dr Hattotuwa said details of the project’s analysis of violence and content from the past week — centred on the visit by British activist Posie Parker — were so confronting he could not share it.

“I don’t want to alarm listeners, but I think that the Disinformation Project — with evidence and in a sober reflection and analysis of what we are looking at — the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share, because the BSA (Broadcasting Standards Authority) guidelines won’t allow it.

Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa
Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, research fellow from The Disinformation Project . . . “I don’t want to alarm listeners, but . . . the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share.” Image: RNZ News

“The fear is very much … particularly speaking as a Sri Lankan who has come from and studied for doctoral research offline consequences of online harm, that I’m seeing now in Aotearoa New Zealand what I studied and I thought I had left behind back in Sri Lanka.”

The new levels of vitriol were unlike anything seen since the project’s daily study began in 2021, and included a rise in targeting of politicians specifically by far-right and neo-Nazi groups, he said.

But — as the SIS noted in its latest report this week — the lines were becoming increasingly blurred between those more ideologically motivated groups, and the newer ones using disinformation and targeting authorities and government.

“You know, distinction without a difference,” he said. “The Disinformation Project is not in the business of looking at the far right and neo-Nazis — that’s a specialised domain that we don’t consider ourselves to be experts in — what we do is to look at disinformation.

“Now to find that you have neo-Nazis, the far-right, anti-semitic signatures — content, presentations and engagement — that colours that discourse is profoundly worrying because you would want to have a really clear distinction.

No Telegram ‘guardrail’
“There is no guardrail on Telegram against any of this, it’s one click away. And so there’s a whole range of worries and concerns we have … because we can’t easily delineate anymore between what would have earlier been very easy categorisation.”

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said she had been subjected to increasing levels of abuse in recent weeks with a particular far-right flavour.

“The online stuff is particularly worrying but no matter who it’s directed towards we’ve got to remember that can also branch out into actual violence if we don’t keep a handle on it,” she said.

“Strong community connection in real life is what holds off the far-right extremism that we’ve seen around the world … we also want the election to be run where every politician takes responsibility for a humane election dialogue that focuses on the issues, that doesn’t drum up extra hate towards any other politician or any other candidate.”

James Shaw & Marama Davidson
Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson . . . Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ News

Limited protection as election nears
Dr Hattotuwa said it was particularly worrying considering the lack of tools in New Zealand to deal with disinformation and conspiratorialism.

“Every institutional mechanism and framework that was established during the pandemic to deal with disinformation has now been dissolved. There is nothing that I know in the public domain of what the government is doing with regards to disinformation,” Dr Hattotuwa said.

“The government is on the backfoot in an election year — I can understand in terms of realpolitik, but there is no investment.”

He believed the problem would only get worse as the election neared.

“The anger, the antagonism is driven by a distrust in government that is going to be instrumentalised to ever greater degrees in the future, around public consultative processing, referenda and electoral moments.

“The worry and the fear is, as has been noted by the Green Party, that the election campaigning is not going to be like anything that the country has ever experienced … that there will be offline consequences because of the online instigation and incitement.

“It’s really going to give pause to, I hope, the way that parties consider their campaign. Because the worry is — in a high trust society in New Zealand — you kind of have the expectation that you can go out and meet the constituency … I know that many others are thinking that this is now not something that you can take for granted.”

Possible countermeasures
Dr Hattotuwa said countermeasures could include legislation, security-sector reform, community-based action, or a stronger focus on implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCOI) into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques.

“There are a lot of recommendations in the RCOI that, you know, are being just cosmetically dealt with. And there are a lot of things that are not even on the government’s radar. So there’s a whole spectrum of issues there that I think really call for meaningful conversations and investment where it’s needed.”

National’s campaign chair Chris Bishop said the party did not have any specific campaign preparations under way in relation to disinformation, but would be willing to work with the government on measures to counteract it.

“If the goverment thinks we should be taking them then we’d be happy to sit down and have a conversation about it,” he said.

“Obviously we condemn violent rhetoric and very sadly MPs and candidates in the past few years have been subject to more of that including threats made to their physical wellbeing and we condemn that and we want to try to avoid that as much as possible.”

Labour’s campaign chair Megan Woods did not respond to requests for comment.

Ardern’s rhetoric not translating to policy
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke during her valedictory farewell speech in Parliament on Wednesday about the loss of the ability to “engage in good robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully”.

“While there were a myriad of reasons, one was because so much of the information swirling around was false. I could physically see how entrenched it was for some people.”

Jacinda Ardern gives her valedictory speech to a packed debating chamber at Parliament.
Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gives her valedictory speech. Image: Phil Smith/RNZ News

Ardern is set to take up an unpaid role at the Christchurch Call, which was set up after the terror attacks and has a focus on targeting online proliferation of dis- and mis-information and the spread of hateful rhetoric.

Dr Hattotuwa said Ardern had led the world in her own rhetoric around the problem, but real action now needed to be taken.

“Let me be very clear, PM Ardern was a global leader in articulating the harm that disinformation has on democracy — at NATO, at Harvard, and then at the UN last year. There has been no translation into policy around that which she articulated publicly, so I think that needs to occur.

“I mean, when people say that they’re going to go and vent their frustration it might mean with a placard, it might mean with a gun.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/08/rise-in-nz-disinformation-conspiracy-theories-prompts-calls-for-election-protections/feed/ 0 386357 ‘A Sigh of Relief’ as Hundreds of Rohingya Refugees Rescued After Harrowing Sea Journeys https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/28/a-sigh-of-relief-as-hundreds-of-rohingya-refugees-rescued-after-harrowing-sea-journeys/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/28/a-sigh-of-relief-as-hundreds-of-rohingya-refugees-rescued-after-harrowing-sea-journeys/#respond Wed, 28 Dec 2022 20:59:52 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/news/rohingya-aceh

The rescue of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by fishers and local authorities in Indonesia's Aceh province was praised Tuesday as "an act of humanity" by United Nations officials, while relatives of around 180 Rohingya on another vessel that's been missing for weeks feared that all aboard had perished.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that "Indonesia has helped to save 472 people in the past six weeks from four boats, showing its commitment and respect of basic humanitarian principles for people who face persecution and conflict."

"We feel like we got a new world today... We could see their faces again. It's really a moment of joy for all of us."

"UNHCR urges other states to follow this example. Many others did not act despite numerous pleas and appeals for help," the Geneva-based agency added. "States in the region must fulfill their legal obligations by saving people on boats in distress to avoid further misery and deaths."

Ann Maymann, the UNHCR representative in Indonesia, said in a statement that "we welcome this act of humanity by local communities and authorities in Indonesia."

"These actions help to save human lives from certain death, ending torturous ordeals for many desperate people," she added.

The Syndey Morning Heraldreports residents of Ladong, a fishing village in Aceh, rushed to help 58 Malaysia-bound Rohingya men who arrived Sunday in a rickety wooden boat, many of them severely dehydrated and starving.

The following day, 174 more starving Rohingya men, women, and children, were helped ashore by local authorities and fishers after more than a month at sea.

Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, whose 27-year-old sister Hatamonesa was aboard the boat with her 5-year-old daughter, told Pakistan's Arab News that "we feel like we got a new world today."

“We could see their faces again. It's really a moment of joy for all of us," he said of his family. Speaking of his sister, he added that "she thought that she would die in the voyage at sea."

Babar Baloch, the UNHCR regional spokesperson in Bangkok, stated that 26 people had died aboard the rescued vessel, which left Bangladesh a month ago.

"We were raising alarm about this boat in early December because we had information that it was in the regional waters at least at the end of November," he said. "So when we first got reports that it was somewhere near the coast of Thailand, we approached authorities asking them to help, then when it was moving towards Indonesia and Malaysia we did the same."

"After its engine failure and it was drifting in the sea, there were reports of this boat being spotted close to Indian waters and we approached and asked them as well and we were also in touch with authorities in Sri Lanka," Baloch continued.

"Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well."

According to the BBC, the Indian navy appears to have towed the boat into Indonesian waters after giving its desperate passengers some food and water. The boat drifted for another six days before it was allowed to land.

"Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well," Baloch said. "It is an act in support of humanity, there's no other way to describe it."

Relatives of around 180 other Rohingya who left Bangladesh on December 2 said Tuesday that they fear the overcrowded vessel has sunk in the Andaman Sea. Mohammad Noman, a resident of a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, toldThe Guardian that his sister was aboard the boat with her two daughters, who are 5 and 3 years old.

"Every day we called up the boat two or three times on the boatman's satellite phone to find out if my sister and her two daughters were all right. Since December 8, I have failed to get access to that phone," he said. "I know some other people in Cox's Bazar who made phone calls to the boat every day and stayed in contact with their relatives there. None of them has succeeded to reach the phone after December 8."

The captain of another vessel transporting Rohingya refugees said he saw the distressed boat swept up in stormy seas sometime during the second week of December.

"It was around 2:00 am when a strong wind began blowing and big waves surfaced on the sea. [Their] boat began swaying wildly, we could gauge from a flashlight they were pointing at us," he told The Guardian. "After some time, we could not see the flashlight anymore. We believe the boat drowned then."

More than a million Rohingya Muslims are crowded into squalid refugee camps in southern Bangladesh after having fled ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and other violence and repression in Rakhine state, Myanmar, which is ruled by a military dictatorship. Since 2020, thousands of Rohingya have fled the camps by sea.

Hundreds have died during the perilous journey. If the sinking of the boat with 180 aboard is confirmed, it would make 2022 the deadliest year for Rohingya at sea, according to UNHCR.

UNHCR's Baloch stressed that "countries and states in the region have international obligations to help desperate people."

"We have been calling on states to go after people smugglers and human traffickers as they are responsible for putting people on those death-trap boats, but victims have to be saved and saving human life is the most important act," he told the Morning Herald.

"The refugee issue and saving lives cannot just be left to one country, it has to be done collectively, together in the region," he added.

Tun Khin, a Rohingya activist and refugee who now heads the Burmese Rohingya Organization U.K., took aim at regional power Australia, which has been criticized for decades over its abuse of desperate seaborne asylum-seekers, nearly all of whom are sent to dirty, crowded offshore processing centers on Manus Island and Nauru to await their fate.

"Australia has too often set a shameful example for the region through its treatment of refugees," he told the Morning Herald.

"These people are facing genocide in Burma," Khin added, using the former official name of Myanmar. "It is a hopeless situation for them in Bangladesh, there is no dignity of life there."


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/28/a-sigh-of-relief-as-hundreds-of-rohingya-refugees-rescued-after-harrowing-sea-journeys/feed/ 0 360704 Sri Lankans Seek a World in Which They Can Find Laughter Together https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/sri-lankans-seek-a-world-in-which-they-can-find-laughter-together/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/sri-lankans-seek-a-world-in-which-they-can-find-laughter-together/#respond Thu, 04 Aug 2022 15:44:49 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=132165 Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka), Dream 1, 2017. On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from […]

The post Sri Lankans Seek a World in Which They Can Find Laughter Together first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka), Dream 1, 2017.

Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka), Dream 1, 2017.

On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn.

Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact. Sri Lanka’s new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama). Wickremesinghe’s ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class. In parliament, Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has only one seat – his own – which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless. This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person parliament) to back his installation in the country’s highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power – on behalf of the country’s owners – is intact.

Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.

Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.

The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March 2022, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel, and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day.

Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments. These crises – particularly in 1953 and 1971 – led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations. They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or ‘in default’ status.

Thamotharampillai Sanathanan (Sri Lanka), Jaffna, 1990–95.

Thamotharampillai Sanathanan (Sri Lanka), Jaffna, 1990–95.

Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt. In addition, over the past few decades – at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot – Sri Lanka’s elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority. The country’s 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3% to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46%) follows Israel, the world’s highest (2%), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the island’s northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society.

Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF sixteen times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMF’s executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises, and cut energy subsidies. Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more ‘reforms’, mainly along the same grain of privatisation. US Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with ‘negotiations with the IMF’. There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown.

Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Sri Lanka), Camouflage, 2004.

Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Sri Lanka), Camouflage, 2004.

These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the US-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF. Official data indicates that only 10% of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47% is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland). Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lanka’s debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out ‘debt trap diplomacy’ do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic.

Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washington’s project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washington’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. However, one reason that Wickremasinghe’s party was wiped out in the last election was the electorate’s deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the US and China, just as the old – but raw – vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed.

Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.

Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.

A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (1963–2021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjani’s hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem ‘The Dream of Peace’:

Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable
Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt
As good as new or better
Perhaps peace too can be imported – as a package deal

But can anything erase the pain wrought by war?
Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick
Human hands toiled to build that home
Sift the rubble with your curious eyes
Our children’s future went up in flames there

Can one place a value on labour lost?
Can one breathe life into lives destroyed?
Can mangled limbs be rebuilt?
Can born and unborn children’s minds be reshaped?

We died –
and dying,
We were born again
We cried
and crying,
We learned to smile again
And now –
We no longer seek the company of friends
who weep when we do.
Instead, we seek a world
in which we may find laughter together.

The post Sri Lankans Seek a World in Which They Can Find Laughter Together first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/04/sri-lankans-seek-a-world-in-which-they-can-find-laughter-together/feed/ 0 320749 Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/16/get-gota-holding-a-war-criminal-accountable/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/16/get-gota-holding-a-war-criminal-accountable/#respond Sat, 16 Jul 2022 04:04:25 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=131477 The fall and ignominious retreat of Sri Lanka’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa has enlivened one distinct possibility.  Having formally resigned as Sri Lankan President, a point made via email from Singapore, those wishing to see him account for war crimes may get their wish. There have been various efforts in train regarding a man who ruthlessly concluded […]

The post Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> The fall and ignominious retreat of Sri Lanka’s Gotabaya Rajapaksa has enlivened one distinct possibility.  Having formally resigned as Sri Lankan President, a point made via email from Singapore, those wishing to see him account for war crimes may get their wish.

There have been various efforts in train regarding a man who ruthlessly concluded his country’s civil war in an orgy of mass killing. The war itself, waged between the forces of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and the minority Tamils seeking independence, was the rotten fruit of discrimination, exclusion and ethnocratic politics heralded by the passage of the Sinhala Only Act in 1956.  That legislative instrument, implemented by Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, made Sinhalese the country’s official language while banishing Tamils from important positions of employment.

Gotabaya’s entry into Sri Lankan politics was a fraternal affair.  His brother Mahinda, on becoming president in 2005, picked him as defence secretary.  Prior to that, “Gota” worked as a computer systems administrator at Loyola School in Los Angeles, during which time he became a US citizen.

The appointment made him overseer of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).  “My job,” Gota stated in an interview posted on the Sri Lankan Defence Minister website, “was to understand the priorities, rationally organise those priorities in terms of what was really required for victory and flush out needs and requirements that had zero relevance to our objectives.”

In seeing the 26 year conflict to its conclusion in 2009, an estimate by the United Nations put the death toll of Tamil civilians at 40,000.  (The number may well be as high as 70,000).  The formal line taken by government forces was that the Tamils only had themselves to blame, being used as human shields by the guerrilla forces.

Such killings took place even as US President Barack Obama urged a cessation in “the indiscriminate shelling that has taken hundreds of innocent lives, including several hospitals.”  Hoping for some balance, Obama also urged “the Tamil Tigers to lay down their arms and let civilians go.  Their forced recruitment of civilians and their use of civilians as human shields is deplorable.”

The unabashed statement of command responsibility by the former defence secretary is also supported by the view of US Ambassador Patricia Butenis, whose frank assessment is available via a WikiLeaks cable.  According to Butenis, “responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including President [Mahinda] Rajapaksa and his brothers.”

There is also abundant prima facie evidence that Gotabaya is responsible for the execution of a number of political leaders and their families upon surrender, was responsible for bombing civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, and insisted that they would target and kill innocent civilians, if necessary, to defeat the LTTE.

His return to public life as president took place on a populist platform denigrating his opponents for not giving “priority to national security.  They were talking about ethnic reconciliation, then they were talking about human rights issues, they were talking about individual freedoms.”   These remarks to Reuters assumed force in the wake of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings by Islamist militants that caused over 250 deaths.

Over the years, Gotabaya’s resume has been weighed down with blood.  His actions did not begin and end as defence minister.  A May report by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) focused on the ex-President’s role in a number of atrocities committed in 1989.  The account focuses on the role Gotabaya played as District Military Coordinating Officer of Matale District, an area that saw brutal engagements between government forces and those of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).

Between May 1989 and January 1990, Gotabaya oversaw a rule of forced disappearances (the report accounts for 1,042 victims), torture, and killing.  A number of Sri Lankan government commissions took note of over 700 forced disappearances.

His role in the disappearances was also noted by the lengthily titled Presidential Commission into Involuntary Removals or Disappearances of Persons (Central Zone) List of Persons Whose Names Transpired as Responsible for Disappearances – Central Province – Matale District.  (In a list of 24 alleged perpetrators, Gotabaya pops up at 16.)  The tenure was also characterised by an absence of interest in preventing the commission of such crimes or investigating them, “despite complaints being made to him directly by family members of the victims”.

Civil suits have become another avenue of redress in the absence of criminal proceedings, though these have been complicated by questions of state immunity.  Ahimsa Wickrematunge, daughter of assassinated Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, is one figure seeking damages from the man she accuses of authorising the murder of her father, former editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper, in 2009.

The civil action, filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleged extra judicial killing, crimes against humanity and torture.  The action was dismissed because the plaintiff “cited no authority suggesting that Defendant’s citizenship alone should override the fact that all of the allegations against him concern actions taken in an official capacity as the Sri Lankan Secretary of Defense.”  In conclusion, the Court found for Gotabaya, as he was “entitled to common law foreign official immunity.”  There was an absence of “subject matter jurisdiction”.

Former detective with Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Nishantha Silva also argues that, as secretary of defence, Gotabaya had the means, opportunity and, in the words of his written statement for the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists, “a clear motive for killing Lasantha Wickrematunge”.

Another possibility, one as yet unexercised, is available under the War Crimes Act of 1996, which amended the Federal criminal code to enable the prosecution and punishment of US nationals for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.  Law academic Ryan Goodman, in a pertinent 2014 piece for Just Security, argues that there would be “a legal windfall for any US effort to investigate and prosecute [Gota] across international borders.  His citizenship also expands US policy space – by reducing US vulnerability to accusations of meddling if we go after one of our own.”

As politicians the world over dread the spectacle of an enraged citizenry storming the residences of president and prime minister, taking dips in their pools, sitting at their desks and eating on the lawns as public commons, a number of dedicated human rights lawyers will be readying their briefs and submissions.  Their mission: Get Gota.

The post Get Gota: Holding a War Criminal Accountable first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/16/get-gota-holding-a-war-criminal-accountable/feed/ 0 315779 Dear Times and Costly Cricket: Australia’s Sri Lankan Tour https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/dear-times-and-costly-cricket-australias-sri-lankan-tour/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/dear-times-and-costly-cricket-australias-sri-lankan-tour/#respond Tue, 07 Jun 2022 04:57:42 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=130254 For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation.  But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted.  […]

The post Dear Times and Costly Cricket: Australia’s Sri Lankan Tour first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> For a country experiencing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence in 1948, the picture of a touring team pampered and fussed over might cause consternation.  But the Australian cricket tour to Sri Lanka has only been met by praise from the country’s cricket officials, where logic is inverted, and the gaze of responsibility averted.  Not even a shortage of foreign currency, precipitating a dramatic fall in medicines and fuel, along with demonstrations that have left nine dead and 300 injured, prompted second thoughts.

A good deal of this crisis was helped by the coming to power of former defence minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa who, in turn, named his older brother, Mahinda, also a former president, prime minister.  Their 2020 election victory was thumping, decisive, and corrupting.  Graft and nepotism set in.  Quixotic decisions to cut taxes eroded state revenue.  COVID-19 began its seemingly inexorable march of infection.

Showing a developed streak of obliviousness to the developing storm around them, the Rajapaksas even went so far as to ban chemical fertilizers as part of a drive to make farmers embrace organic agriculture.  To do so during this crisis battered and bruised the country’s agrarian sector.

And what of the cricket bureaucrats?  “These are tough times for our people,” a regretful Sri Lanka Cricket Secretary Mohan De Silva told reporters in Colombo.  “We are indeed grateful to Cricket Australia and the Australian government for supporting this series despite the hardships we as a nation are facing.”

Sri Lanka Cricket, in pushing the positive message, has intimated that all income from tickets for the three Twenty20s, five one-day internationals and two Test matches will be donated to initiatives for the public welfare.  De Silva is confident that $2.5 million (AU$3.5 million) will be generated by the tour, along with incidental earnings.  “From three-wheel drivers to suppliers of food, all these stakeholders down the line will have an opportunity to earn something for one and a half months.  So, economically this will have a significant effect on this country.”

This would seem to be getting things the wrong way around.  On some level, this confusion is forgivable, given the poor returns from a game that was played to generally empty stadiums during the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Last December, a 50 percent capacity crowd was permitted to see the touring West Indians.

Assessments from the SLC should, however, be taken at face value.  In 2018, the International Cricket Council identified Sri Lanka as having one of the most corrupt cricketing cultures in the sporting world.  Over recent years, the board has been at war with itself, and with players whom they have, at various times, censured, punished and suspended.  Money has been appropriated; matches and pitches fixed.

Sri Lanka’s own 1996 World Cup winning captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, gives us a sense about an organisation that has governed the game with indulgent haphazardness and raging incompetence.  Last month, he was unrestrained in claiming that the cricket board, habitually filled with “thieves”, was “the most corrupt institution in the country.”

Australian cricketers, never the sharpest students of culture and their surrounds, have preferred to avoid any detailed examination of cricket officialdom in Sri Lanka.  But they have voiced some concern about the visit.  “It’s fair to say,” states chief executive officer of Cricket Australia, Todd Greenberg, “there is a level of discomfort around touring in conditions that contrast with those faced by the people of Sri Lanka, such as rising food prices, power cuts and fuel rationing.”

He was confident, however, that the players would not pipe up too much.  “Ultimately our players want to continue to play cricket and will take direction, guidance and advice from CA about tour arrangements and planning.”

Cricket Australia, in turn, had satisfied itself that touring the country would be safe.  “There is no change in the status of the tour,” CA stated in early May.  “Our head of security confirms that there are no concerns about the tour proceeding as scheduled from either side.”

That is all good for De Silva, who sees the Australians as standard bearers for peaceful reassurance and cash.  Having them tour Sri Lanka will send “a strong message to the world that Sri Lanka is safe.  Millions of people will be watching the telecast during the matches.”

The optimism is pure veneer.  While Sri Lanka Cricket markets itself as donor and provider, so far donating $2 million to the health sector to purchase vital medicines, initiatives such as the tour are glaringly sapping. The T20 matches, for instance, are billed as thrilling under-the-light affairs.  But to supply them with electricity during a time when Sri Lankans face rolling power cuts lasting for periods up to 15 hours a day, speaks of authoritative condescension.

A former manager of the Sri Lanka national team, Charith Senanayake, is not one to be too bothered by such problems.  “We have our own generators and we don’t depend on the government’s power,” he boasted last month.  “The political situation has no bearing on the game and the SLC is always apolitical.”

The cricket schedule of the Australians has, given the fuel shortages, already presented a problem.  SLC hoped that the longer matches, which will take place during the day and not require night lighting, will be played in the first part of the tour.  “Because of the fuel problem,” De Silva stated, “we had a discussion with Cricket Australia and were trying to persuade them to start with the two Tests because the two Test matches don’t need any [lights].”  Unfortunately, Australia, in fielding three touring teams, would have been unduly disrupted.  “We didn’t want to push too much because of the fact that the Australians have been very generous in their thinking.”

The thinking here is less generous than loose.  While the Australians will delight the crowds and offer succour for distraction, they will do little to shake the impression that both the government of the day and Sri Lanka Cricket share an awful lot in common, little of which is good.

The post Dear Times and Costly Cricket: Australia’s Sri Lankan Tour first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/dear-times-and-costly-cricket-australias-sri-lankan-tour/feed/ 0 304691 Election Gambit: Australia, Sri Lanka and Politicising Asylum https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/31/election-gambit-australia-sri-lanka-and-politicising-asylum/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/31/election-gambit-australia-sri-lanka-and-politicising-asylum/#respond Tue, 31 May 2022 08:23:25 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=130041 When it comes to the tawdry, hideous business of politicising the right to asylum, and the refugees who arise from it, no country does it better than Australia.  A country proud of being a pioneer in women’s rights, the secret ballot, good pay conditions and tatty hardware (the Hills Hoist remains a famous suburban monstrosity) […]

The post Election Gambit: Australia, Sri Lanka and Politicising Asylum first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> When it comes to the tawdry, hideous business of politicising the right to asylum, and the refugees who arise from it, no country does it better than Australia.  A country proud of being a pioneer in women’s rights, the secret ballot, good pay conditions and tatty hardware (the Hills Hoist remains a famous suburban monstrosity) has also been responsible for jettisoning key principles of international law.

When it comes to policy Down Under, the United Nations Refugee Convention is barely worth a mention.  Politicians are proudly ignorant of it; the courts pay lip service to the idea while preferring rigid domestic interpretations of the Migration Act; and the United Nations is simply that foreign body which makes an occasional noise about such nasties as indefinite detention.

It should therefore have come as no surprise that, in the dying days of the Morrison government, another chance to stir the electorate by demonising refugees arose – somewhat conveniently.  As voters were, quite literally, heading to the polls, the commander of the Joint Agency Task Force Operation Sovereign Borders, Rear Admiral Justin Jones, revealed that a vessel had “been intercepted in a likely attempt to illegally enter Australia from Sri Lanka.”

The Rear Admiral’s statement insisted that Australian policy on such arrivals had not changed.  “We will intercept any vessel seeking to reach Australia illegally and to safely return those on board to their point of departure or country of origin.” Shallow formalities are observed: the implausible observance of international laws, consideration of safety of all those involved “including potential illegal immigrants”.  Nothing else is deemed worthy of mention.  “In line with long standing practice, we will make no further comment.”

With only a few more hours left being Australia’s most jingoistic Defence Minister in a generation, Peter Dutton tweeted a warning, referring to the statement from Jones: “Don’t risk Australia’s national security with Labor.”  In another comment, Dutton decided to peer into the minds of those aiding the asylum process.  “People smugglers have obviously decided who is going to win the election and the boats have already started.”

The Minister for Home Affairs, Karen Andrews, was also mining the message for its demagogic potential, raising the spectre of emboldened people smugglers.  They, she squeaked, “are targeting Australia.”  The “people smuggling vessel” had been intercepted “off Christmas Island.”

Andrews might as well have been using the same language to condemn drug traffickers and their commodities which, in terms of analogy, Australian politicians have implicitly done for decades. But for the occasion, the obvious target was the opposition vying for government.  “Labor’s flip flopping on border protection risks our border security.  You can’t trust them.”

The Liberal Party’s electioneering machinery picked up on the Sri Lankan connection, bombarding voters in marginal seats with text messages about this newfound discovery.  “Keep our borders secure by voting Liberal today,” came the prompt.  As things transpired, the entire operation, from Cabinet to the distribution of phone messages, had the full approval of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Revealing the existence of ships moving on mysteriously convenient schedules (another, according to the Saturday Newspaper, was also intercepted by Sri Lankan authorities) raised two burning questions.  The first goes to the troubling relationship with Sri Lanka, which the Australian government had gone some ways to promoting as a safeguard against asylum seekers.  Canberra has tended to skirt over issues of human rights, not least those associated with that country’s long civil war.  In fact, Australian officials have done their best to encourage Colombo to prevent individuals leaving Sri Lanka with a view of heading to Australia by boat.  In 2013, 2014 and 2017, Bay-class naval vessels were gifted to the Sri Lankan Navy to aid the interception of smuggling operations.

During his time in office, Dutton has made more than the odd trip to Colombo.  In May 2015, he made a visit as then Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to discuss “continued cooperation regarding people smuggling and to further strengthen ties between our two countries.”  He duly rubbished people smugglers – they had been “cowardly and malicious” for aiding individuals to pursue their right to asylum – and praised the success of Operation Sovereign Borders.  “Since we started turning back boats there have been no known deaths at sea.”

In June 2019, he paid another visit to shore up the commitment.  It was prompted by a report that a vessel carrying 20 Sri Lankan asylum seekers had been intercepted off Australia’s north-west coast, with the possibility of six others on route.  Then, as now, Dutton could only blame his Labor opponents for somehow encouraging such journeys while reiterating the standard, draconian line.  “People are not coming here [to Australia] by boat and regardless of what people smugglers tell you, the Morrison government, under the Prime Minister and myself, will not allow those people to arrive by boat.”

The second question goes to the supposed success of Operation Sovereign Borders.  This military grade, secretive policy had supposedly “stopped the boats” and remains a favourite Coalition mantra.  But why reveal a chink in the armour, a breach in the fortress unless it was manufactured with the aid of the Sri Lankan authorities or a failure to being with?  As comedian and political commentator Dan Ilic observed in a pointed remark to Dutton: “This happened on your watch dude.”  The Sri Lankan revelation demonstrated, when it comes to such matters, mendacity oils the machine of border protection.

No side in Australian politics has been able to avoid politicising the issue of refugee and asylum arrivals via boat.  The moment Australia’s Labor government made the arrival of individuals without formal authorisation a breach of law warranting mandatory detention, the issue became a political matter.  It took the Liberal National Coalition led by Prime Minister John Howard to turn the issue into a form of feral, gonzo politics.

That form remains unforgettably marked by the use of SAS personnel against 400 individuals, rescued at sea by the Norwegian vessel, the MV Tampa, in August 2001.  In defiance of maritime conventions and in blatant disregard for human safety, the Howard government held the asylum seekers at sea off Christmas Island for almost ten days.  Those on the vessel were accused of piracy and economic opportunism.  From this barbarism issued the Pacific Solution, a tropical concentration camp system which has had a few iterations since.

Governments, both Coalition and Labor, have drawn political capital from harsh policies against unwanted naval arrivals, smearing the merits of asylum and ignoring the obligations of international refugee law.  The new Albanese government has the chance, however unlikely it is to pursue it, to extract the political and replace it with the humanitarian.

The post Election Gambit: Australia, Sri Lanka and Politicising Asylum first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/31/election-gambit-australia-sri-lanka-and-politicising-asylum/feed/ 0 303020 MEDIA ADVISORY: The People’s Tribunal Convenes in The Hague to Bring Justice to Murdered Syrian and Sri Lankan Journalists https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/10/media-advisory-the-peoples-tribunal-convenes-in-the-hague-to-bring-justice-to-murdered-syrian-and-sri-lankan-journalists/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/10/media-advisory-the-peoples-tribunal-convenes-in-the-hague-to-bring-justice-to-murdered-syrian-and-sri-lankan-journalists/#respond Tue, 10 May 2022 10:02:00 +0000 https://cpj.org/?p=191902 The Hague, May 10, 2022 – On May 12-17, the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists will convene in The Hague to hear oral arguments and witness testimony in the murder cases of two journalists, one Sri Lankan and one Syrian, whose cases have become emblematic of impunity for crimes against the press in their countries.

The two case hearings will feature testimony from experts and journalists speaking to the threats facing the press in both countries. The cases will also consider evidence and testimony in both the murder of Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, and the Syrian journalist Nabil Al-Sharbaji. Wickrematunge was a leading independent journalist known for reporting on the Sri Lankan civil war and the Rajapaksa regime, and foresaw his own death at the hands of government assassins in a posthumously published editorial. Al-Sharbaji documented protests in the Syrian city of Darayya and suffered multiple arbitrary arrests, and as a result of torture and prison conditions, died in government custody. The People’s Tribunal has officially notified the Sri Lankan and Syrian governments of the indictment and invited them to represent themselves during the hearing in order to present a defense.

The People’s Tribunals on the Murder of Journalists are a form of alternative justice organized by A Safer World for the Truth, a collaborative project between the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Free Press Unlimited (FPU). The Syria case is also being supported by the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. People’s Tribunals are designed to hold states accountable for violations of international law by building public awareness and generating a legitimate evidence record, and play an important role in empowering victims and recording their stories.

In addition to the Syria and Sri Lanka cases, the Tribunal previously heard testimony in a case in Mexico on April 25 and 26. Verdicts in all three cases are expected on June 20, 2022, in The Hague. 

WHAT: People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists – Case of Lasantha Wickrematunge (Sri Lanka) and Nabil Al-Sharbaji (Syria)

WHEN: 

Sri Lanka hearing
May 12 and 13 
09:00-17:00 CET/ 07:00-15:00 GMT

Syria hearing
May 16 and 17
09:00-17:00 CET/ 07:00-15:00 GMT

WHERE:  The Hague, the Netherlands 

RSVP: To attend in person or request the link to join via livestream (in English, Tamil/Sinhala, Arabic), email press@cpj.org 

WHO: Read about the judges
Read about the prosecutors

Witnesses will include:

  • Deputy Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, Catherine Amirfar
  • Syrian journalist, Paul Conroy
  • Journalist, lawyer and director of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, Mazen Darwish
  • Sri Lankan activist, Sandhya Eknaligoda 
  • Syrian journalist, Hala Kodmani
  • Former UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Juan Mendez

Media Contact:
press@cpj.org


This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/10/media-advisory-the-peoples-tribunal-convenes-in-the-hague-to-bring-justice-to-murdered-syrian-and-sri-lankan-journalists/feed/ 0 297492 Cost of the Ukraine War Felt in Africa, Global South https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/02/cost-of-the-ukraine-war-felt-in-africa-global-south-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/02/cost-of-the-ukraine-war-felt-in-africa-global-south-2/#respond Mon, 02 May 2022 17:51:44 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=129333 While international news headlines remain largely focused on the war in Ukraine, little attention is given to the horrific consequences of the war which are felt in many regions around the world. Even when these repercussions are discussed, disproportionate coverage is allocated to European countries, like Germany and Austria, due to their heavy reliance on […]

The post Cost of the Ukraine War Felt in Africa, Global South first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> While international news headlines remain largely focused on the war in Ukraine, little attention is given to the horrific consequences of the war which are felt in many regions around the world. Even when these repercussions are discussed, disproportionate coverage is allocated to European countries, like Germany and Austria, due to their heavy reliance on Russian energy sources.

The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere. Countries like Tunisia, Sri Lanka and Ghana and numerous others, are facing serious food shortages in the short, medium and long term.

The World Bank is warning of a “human catastrophe” as a result of a burgeoning food crisis, itself resulting from the Russia-Ukraine war. The World Bank President, David Malpass, told the BBC that his institution estimates a “huge” jump in food prices, reaching as high as 37%, which would mean that the poorest of people would be forced to “eat less and have less money for anything else such as schooling.”

This foreboding crisis is now compounding an existing global food crisis, resulting from major disruptions in the global supply chains, as a direct outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as pre-existing problems, resulting from wars and civil unrest, corruption, economic mismanagement, social inequality and more.

Even prior to the war in Ukraine, the world was already getting hungrier. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an estimated 811 million people in the world “faced hunger in 2020”, with a massive jump of 118 million compared to the previous year. Considering the continued deterioration of global economies, especially in the developing world, and the subsequent and unprecedented inflation worldwide, the number must have made several large jumps since the publishing of FAO’s report in July 2021, reporting on the previous year.

Indeed, inflation is now a global phenomenon. The consumer price index in the United States has increased by 8.5% from a year earlier, according to the financial media company, Bloomberg. In Europe, “inflation (reached) record 7.5%”, according to the latest data released by Eurostat. As troubling as these numbers are, western societies with relatively healthy economies and potential room for government subsidies, are more likely to weather the inflation storm, if compared to countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and many parts of Asia.

The war in Ukraine has immediately impacted food supplies to many parts of the world. Russia and Ukraine combined contribute 30% of global wheat exports. Millions of tons of these exports find their way to food-import-dependent countries in the Global South – mainly the regions of South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Considering that some of these regions, comprising some of the poorest countries in the world, have already been struggling under the weight of pre-existing food crises, it is safe to say that tens of millions of people already are, or are likely to go, hungry in the coming months and years.

Another factor resulting from the war is the severe US-led western sanctions on Russia. The harm of these sanctions is likely to be felt more in other countries than in Russia itself, due to the fact that the latter is largely food and energy independent.

Although the overall size of the Russian economy is comparatively smaller than that of leading global economic powers like the US and China, its contributions to the world economy makes it absolutely critical. For example, Russia accounts for a quarter of the world’s natural gas exports, according to the World Bank, and 18% of coal and wheat exports, 14% of fertilizers and platinum shipments, and 11% of crude oil. Cutting off the world from such a massive wealth of natural resources while it is desperately trying to recover from the horrendous impact of the pandemic is equivalent to an act of economic self-mutilation.

Of course, some are likely to suffer more than others. While economic growth is estimated to shrink by a large margin – up to 50% in some cases – in countries that fuel regional and international growth such as Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia, the crisis is expected to be much more severe in countries that aim for mere economic subsistence, including many African countries.

An April report published by the humanitarian group, Oxfam, citing an alert issued by 11 international humanitarian organizations, warned that “West Africa is hit by its worst food crisis in a decade.” Currently, there are 27 million people going hungry in that region, a number that may rise to 38 million in June if nothing is done to stave off the crisis. According to the report, this number would represent “a new historic level”, as it would be an increase by more than a third compared to last year. Like other struggling regions, the massive food shortage is a result of the war in Ukraine, in addition to pre-existing problems, lead amongst them the pandemic and climate change.

While the thousands of sanctions imposed on Russia are yet to achieve any of their intended purpose, it is poor countries that are already feeling the burden of the war, sanctions and geopolitical tussle between great powers. As the west is busy dealing with its own economic woes, little heed is being paid to those suffering most. And as the world is forced to transition to a new global economic order, it will take years for small economies to successfully make that adjustment.

While it is important that we acknowledge the vast changes to the world’s geopolitical map, let us not forget that millions of people are going hungry, paying the price for a global conflict of which they are not part.

The post Cost of the Ukraine War Felt in Africa, Global South first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/02/cost-of-the-ukraine-war-felt-in-africa-global-south-2/feed/ 0 295368 9/11 killed it, but 20 years on global justice movement is poised for revival https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival-2/#respond Sat, 11 Sep 2021 11:11:13 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63404 ANALYSIS: By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September  2001 — now known as 9/11 —  the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.

New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.

Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.

They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.

Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.

The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.

Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.

Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.

“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.

“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”

But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.

Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.

“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.

When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.

“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.

“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.

Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.

“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.

Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.

“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.

“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.

Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.

“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.

“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.

”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”

Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.

“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.

“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.

There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.

But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.

Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.

“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”

Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.

“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.

“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.

Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival-2/feed/ 0 233509 9/11 killed it, but 20 years on global justice movement is poised for revival https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival/#respond Sat, 11 Sep 2021 11:11:13 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63404 ANALYSIS: By Kalinga Seneviratne in Sydney

Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September  2001 — now known as 9/11 —  the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.

New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.

Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.

They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.

Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.

The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.

Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.

Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.

“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.

“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”

But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.

Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.

“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.

When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.

“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.

“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.

Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.

“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.

Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.

“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.

“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.

Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.

“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.

“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.

”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”

Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.

“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.

“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.

There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.

But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.

Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.

“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”

Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.

“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.

“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.

Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/11/9-11-killed-it-but-20-years-on-global-justice-movement-is-poised-for-revival/feed/ 0 233508 A View From Afar: Could Auckland’s LynnMall stabbing attack have been prevented? https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/09/a-view-from-afar-could-aucklands-lynnmall-stabbing-attack-have-been-prevented/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/09/a-view-from-afar-could-aucklands-lynnmall-stabbing-attack-have-been-prevented/#respond Thu, 09 Sep 2021 20:25:30 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63319 Host Selwyn Manning with security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan on this week’s A View From Afar podcast. Video: EveningReport.nz on YouTube

A VIEW FROM AFAR: Podcast with Selwyn Manning and Paul Buchanan

In this week’s security podcast, Dr Paul G. Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning discuss:

  • three areas that have been relied on to protect New Zealanders from terror-style attacks;
  • legal measures designed to protect communities from danger and even protect individuals from themselves;
  • and why they failed.

The background to this episode is the tragic, terrifying, attack that were committed against unarmed innocent people at West Auckland’s LynnMall Countdown supermarket, by Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen.

The attack occurred last Friday, 3 September 2021. It ended with the hospitalisation of seven people, and, the death of Samsudeen, who was fatally shot by special tactics police officers during his attempt to kill and injure as many people as he could.

Immediately after, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the nation that the dead man was a terrorist and that she herself, the police, and the courts were all aware of how dangerous he was and had been seeking to protect New Zealand from this man.

Within days of the attacks, we learned, that Samsudeen was a troubled man with psychologists describing him as angry, capable of carrying out his threats, and displaying varying degrees of mental illness and disorder.

Refugee who sought asylum
Samsudeen was a refugee who sought asylum in New Zealand after experiencing, through his formative years civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, who, at around 20 years of age, arrived in New Zealand on a student visa and then sought political asylum.

He was eventually granted refugee status, and since then spent years in prison on various charges and convictions – largely involving the possession of terrorist propaganda seeded on the internet by Islamic State (ISIS), and, threats showing intent to commit terrorist acts against New Zealanders.

In this week’s episode, Dr Buchanan and Manning examine questions about whether this tragedy could have been prevented and considered New Zealand’s:

  • Security and terror laws
  • Deportation laws involving those with refugee status
  • The Mental Health Act and whether this was available to the authorities.

Dr Buchanan and Manning also analyse whether it is necessary for the New Zealand government to move to tighten New Zealand’s terrorism security laws. And, if it does, how the intended new laws compare to other Five Eyes member countries.

  • More information about the A View From Afar weekly podcasts on EveningReport.nz

Republished in partnership with EveningReport.nz


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/09/a-view-from-afar-could-aucklands-lynnmall-stabbing-attack-have-been-prevented/feed/ 0 233024 NZ Corrections found attacker ‘increasingly hostile and abusive’ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive-2/#respond Mon, 06 Sep 2021 22:00:29 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63117 By Charlotte Cook, RNZ News reporter

New Zealand’s Department of Corrections has revealed more details about the LynnMall terrorist’s violent behaviour while he was remanded in prison.

Thirty-two-year-old Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen was shot dead by police after stabbing six people inside Countdown LynnMall in West Auckland.

He had spent almost three years on remand in prison and at the time of the attack had only been out for seven weeks.

He had been living at Masjid-e-Bilal in the Auckland suburb of Glen Eden.

The Department of Correction’s National Commissioner Rachel Leota said that while in prison Samsudeen was “non-compliant, with multiple incidents of threats and abuse toward staff”.

This included numerous times when he threw urine and faeces at staff as well as threatening violence and assaulting them.

In one instance at Mt Eden Prison, Corrections said he was unlocked for exercise but began arguing with staff and his behaviour escalated and he hit two officers.

Behaviour escalated again
“When being moved to the management unit his behaviour became escalated again, with threats made toward staff. He then assaulted staff again before force was used and he was secured in a cell in the management unit,” Leota said.

For his last year behind bars Samsudeen was moved to the maximum security Auckland Prison with oversight from the Persons of Extreme Risk Directorate.

This is the same unit set up to manage Christchurch mosque attacker Brenton Tarrant.

The directorate looks after offenders identified as presenting an extreme and ongoing risk of serious harm and/ or having the capability and intent to seriously threaten the safety of prisons and the community.

Because Corrections identified Samsudeen as having “potentially violent extremist views” it got advice from the Countering Violent Extremism forum as to how to best support and rehabilitate the prisoner.

“Attempts were made to provide him with mental health support while he was in prison, however, he refused to engage. He also refused to meet with a Corrections psychologist while in prison.”

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen
Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen… “Attempts were made to provide him with mental health support while he was in prison … he refused to engage. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR

The Countering Violent Extremism forum and Corrections then decided to contact the local Muslim community.

Did not engage
The department wanted him to meet with an imam and talk about his spiritual beliefs. This happened twice, but Corrections said he did not engage in a meaningful way.

Prior to Samsudeen’s release from prison the department, police and partner agencies created a plan to keep the community and staff safe from the extreme risk that his violent extremist ideology presented – this included where he might live on release.

The terrorist told Corrections he did not have family, friends or support people able to assist him and would require help, but that he had previously lived at a mosque, although was unwilling to consider it again.

Public housing was not available because of the current demand and Samsudeen eventually said he would consider a mosque.

Leota said Corrections met with police and the Masjid-e-Bilal manager who was told the context around his charges, his risk profile and the conditions he would have when released into the community.

The mosque’s manager told Corrections he would consider it, but wanted to meet Samsudeen first.

The pair met while he was in prison and the address was approved.

Police on guard at Masjid-E-Bilal mosque in Glen Eden, west Auckland - 4 September 2021
Police on guard at Masjid-E-Bilal mosque in Glen Eden, West Auckland on Saturday. Image: Jean Bell/RNZ

Regular communication
During the seven weeks Samsudeen was in the community, Corrections said it had regular communication with the manager at Masjid-e-Bilal and his lawyer.

The department had also started an application to the High Court for strengthened restrictions due to concerns about his escalating risk.

It also looked at charging him for the lack of engagement with both a private and Corrections psychologist, but was told it was not sufficient enough to be considered a breach of his conditions.

Leota said she was confident that Community Corrections staff were using every lawful avenue available to monitor, assess, mitigate, and manage his risk.

“He was a very, very difficult person to manage, and was increasingly openly hostile and abusive toward probation staff.

“Despite this, staff continued to work hard to engage him in his sentence, and attempt to have him participate in treatment and activities aimed at reducing his risk of violence, which he consistently refused.”

Leota said she believed Community Corrections’ contact with him exceeded the minimum level for someone subject to supervision and staff worked exceptionally hard to prevent the potential for serious harm to be caused by this person.

“They, and all of us, will always ask what more could have been done to prevent the horrific offending that occurred on Friday,” Leota said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive-2/feed/ 0 232168 NZ Corrections found attacker ‘increasingly hostile and abusive’ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive/#respond Mon, 06 Sep 2021 22:00:29 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63117 By Charlotte Cook, RNZ News reporter

New Zealand’s Department of Corrections has revealed more details about the LynnMall terrorist’s violent behaviour while he was remanded in prison.

Thirty-two-year-old Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen was shot dead by police after stabbing six people inside Countdown LynnMall in West Auckland.

He had spent almost three years on remand in prison and at the time of the attack had only been out for seven weeks.

He had been living at Masjid-e-Bilal in the Auckland suburb of Glen Eden.

The Department of Correction’s National Commissioner Rachel Leota said that while in prison Samsudeen was “non-compliant, with multiple incidents of threats and abuse toward staff”.

This included numerous times when he threw urine and faeces at staff as well as threatening violence and assaulting them.

In one instance at Mt Eden Prison, Corrections said he was unlocked for exercise but began arguing with staff and his behaviour escalated and he hit two officers.

Behaviour escalated again
“When being moved to the management unit his behaviour became escalated again, with threats made toward staff. He then assaulted staff again before force was used and he was secured in a cell in the management unit,” Leota said.

For his last year behind bars Samsudeen was moved to the maximum security Auckland Prison with oversight from the Persons of Extreme Risk Directorate.

This is the same unit set up to manage Christchurch mosque attacker Brenton Tarrant.

The directorate looks after offenders identified as presenting an extreme and ongoing risk of serious harm and/ or having the capability and intent to seriously threaten the safety of prisons and the community.

Because Corrections identified Samsudeen as having “potentially violent extremist views” it got advice from the Countering Violent Extremism forum as to how to best support and rehabilitate the prisoner.

“Attempts were made to provide him with mental health support while he was in prison, however, he refused to engage. He also refused to meet with a Corrections psychologist while in prison.”

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen
Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen… “Attempts were made to provide him with mental health support while he was in prison … he refused to engage. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR

The Countering Violent Extremism forum and Corrections then decided to contact the local Muslim community.

Did not engage
The department wanted him to meet with an imam and talk about his spiritual beliefs. This happened twice, but Corrections said he did not engage in a meaningful way.

Prior to Samsudeen’s release from prison the department, police and partner agencies created a plan to keep the community and staff safe from the extreme risk that his violent extremist ideology presented – this included where he might live on release.

The terrorist told Corrections he did not have family, friends or support people able to assist him and would require help, but that he had previously lived at a mosque, although was unwilling to consider it again.

Public housing was not available because of the current demand and Samsudeen eventually said he would consider a mosque.

Leota said Corrections met with police and the Masjid-e-Bilal manager who was told the context around his charges, his risk profile and the conditions he would have when released into the community.

The mosque’s manager told Corrections he would consider it, but wanted to meet Samsudeen first.

The pair met while he was in prison and the address was approved.

Police on guard at Masjid-E-Bilal mosque in Glen Eden, west Auckland - 4 September 2021
Police on guard at Masjid-E-Bilal mosque in Glen Eden, West Auckland on Saturday. Image: Jean Bell/RNZ

Regular communication
During the seven weeks Samsudeen was in the community, Corrections said it had regular communication with the manager at Masjid-e-Bilal and his lawyer.

The department had also started an application to the High Court for strengthened restrictions due to concerns about his escalating risk.

It also looked at charging him for the lack of engagement with both a private and Corrections psychologist, but was told it was not sufficient enough to be considered a breach of his conditions.

Leota said she was confident that Community Corrections staff were using every lawful avenue available to monitor, assess, mitigate, and manage his risk.

“He was a very, very difficult person to manage, and was increasingly openly hostile and abusive toward probation staff.

“Despite this, staff continued to work hard to engage him in his sentence, and attempt to have him participate in treatment and activities aimed at reducing his risk of violence, which he consistently refused.”

Leota said she believed Community Corrections’ contact with him exceeded the minimum level for someone subject to supervision and staff worked exceptionally hard to prevent the potential for serious harm to be caused by this person.

“They, and all of us, will always ask what more could have been done to prevent the horrific offending that occurred on Friday,” Leota said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/06/nz-corrections-found-attacker-increasingly-hostile-and-abusive/feed/ 0 232167 Missed opportunities to deradicalise attacker in NZ tragedy, says criminologist https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist-2/#respond Sun, 05 Sep 2021 20:43:51 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63049 By Katie Todd, RNZ News reporter

An Australian criminologist who deemed the New Zealand shopping mall attacker “low risk” in 2018 believes there were missed opportunities to steer him away from violent extremism.

Ahamed Samsudeen was described as a high risk to the community when he was sentenced in July for possessing Islamic State propaganda — with the means and motivation to commit violent acts.

However, three years earlier, Australian National University criminologist Dr Clarke Jones told the High Court Ahamed did not appear to be violent and did not fit the profile of a young Muslim person who had been radicalised.

At the time Dr Jones suggested “a carefully designed, culturally sensitive and closely supervised intervention programme in the Auckland Muslim community”.

Now, he said, it was unclear how much rehabilitation actually took place.

“People can change, sometimes quickly, sometimes over a longer period of time. But back in 2018, we didn’t think that he was violent,” he explained.

At the time Samsudeen appeared to feel marginalised and disconnected, Dr Clarke said, like he couldn’t “get his foot up” in society.

‘Rigid life views’
“Some of the material he was reading was of concern and he had fairly rigid views around religion and around life in general. But he’d also had some experience in difficult times and was, I would argue, deeply depressed.”

On Friday, Samsudeen walked into a Countdown supermarket in LynnMall, picked up a knife and stabbed at least shoppers, leaving some of them critically injured, before he was shot dead by tactical force police tailing him.

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen
Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen as identified in New Zealand news media. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR

In the High Court in July, Samsudeen had admitted two charges of using a document for pecuniary advantage, two charges of knowingly distributing restricted material and one charge of failing to assist the police in their exercise of a search power.

Another expert was consulted — forensic psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Skipworth — who echoed Dr Clarke’ concerns.

“Dr Skipworth said that any form of home detention would tend to further exacerbate your mental health concerns, and that your successful community reintegration is likely to be assisted by cornerstones, such as stable housing, personal support, appropriate employment and medical care,” reads Justice Wylie’s sentencing notes.

Justice Wylie imposed a sentence of supervision, with special conditions, including a psychological assessment and a rehabilitation programme with a service called Just Community.

Dr Jones said he really would like to know more about what support Samsudeen was actually given in Corrections.

‘Was he responsive?’
“Was he responsive to that treatment, if he was receiving any treatment at all, or was the focus more on on the security side and the monitoring and the surveillance?”

Asked if the terrorist had enough support to “get better”, Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said there had been attempts to change the man’s mind — and none of them were successful.

But in a family statement released after the attack, Samsudeen’s brother said he sometimes listened.

“He would hang up the phone on us when we told him to forget about all of the issues he was obsessed with. Then he would call us back again himself when he realised he was wrong.

“Aathil was wrong again [on Friday]. Of course we feel very sad that he could not be saved. The prisons and the situation was hard on him and he did not have any support. He told us he was assaulted there.”

Dr Clarke said, “I would say that we haven’t got the balance right. In this case there was too much focus on the counter-terrorism or counter violent extremism narrative, rather than actually getting to the core of what was wrong with Mr Samsudeen.”

“We can always improve the way we do things to have have greater preventative sort of mechanisms within government, police and communities.”

Dr Clarke said what happened in LynnMall was a tragedy and a terrible situation.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist-2/feed/ 0 231960 Missed opportunities to deradicalise attacker in NZ tragedy, says criminologist https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist/#respond Sun, 05 Sep 2021 20:43:51 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63049 By Katie Todd, RNZ News reporter

An Australian criminologist who deemed the New Zealand shopping mall attacker “low risk” in 2018 believes there were missed opportunities to steer him away from violent extremism.

Ahamed Samsudeen was described as a high risk to the community when he was sentenced in July for possessing Islamic State propaganda — with the means and motivation to commit violent acts.

However, three years earlier, Australian National University criminologist Dr Clarke Jones told the High Court Ahamed did not appear to be violent and did not fit the profile of a young Muslim person who had been radicalised.

At the time Dr Jones suggested “a carefully designed, culturally sensitive and closely supervised intervention programme in the Auckland Muslim community”.

Now, he said, it was unclear how much rehabilitation actually took place.

“People can change, sometimes quickly, sometimes over a longer period of time. But back in 2018, we didn’t think that he was violent,” he explained.

At the time Samsudeen appeared to feel marginalised and disconnected, Dr Clarke said, like he couldn’t “get his foot up” in society.

‘Rigid life views’
“Some of the material he was reading was of concern and he had fairly rigid views around religion and around life in general. But he’d also had some experience in difficult times and was, I would argue, deeply depressed.”

On Friday, Samsudeen walked into a Countdown supermarket in LynnMall, picked up a knife and stabbed at least shoppers, leaving some of them critically injured, before he was shot dead by tactical force police tailing him.

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen
Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen as identified in New Zealand news media. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR

In the High Court in July, Samsudeen had admitted two charges of using a document for pecuniary advantage, two charges of knowingly distributing restricted material and one charge of failing to assist the police in their exercise of a search power.

Another expert was consulted — forensic psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Skipworth — who echoed Dr Clarke’ concerns.

“Dr Skipworth said that any form of home detention would tend to further exacerbate your mental health concerns, and that your successful community reintegration is likely to be assisted by cornerstones, such as stable housing, personal support, appropriate employment and medical care,” reads Justice Wylie’s sentencing notes.

Justice Wylie imposed a sentence of supervision, with special conditions, including a psychological assessment and a rehabilitation programme with a service called Just Community.

Dr Jones said he really would like to know more about what support Samsudeen was actually given in Corrections.

‘Was he responsive?’
“Was he responsive to that treatment, if he was receiving any treatment at all, or was the focus more on on the security side and the monitoring and the surveillance?”

Asked if the terrorist had enough support to “get better”, Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said there had been attempts to change the man’s mind — and none of them were successful.

But in a family statement released after the attack, Samsudeen’s brother said he sometimes listened.

“He would hang up the phone on us when we told him to forget about all of the issues he was obsessed with. Then he would call us back again himself when he realised he was wrong.

“Aathil was wrong again [on Friday]. Of course we feel very sad that he could not be saved. The prisons and the situation was hard on him and he did not have any support. He told us he was assaulted there.”

Dr Clarke said, “I would say that we haven’t got the balance right. In this case there was too much focus on the counter-terrorism or counter violent extremism narrative, rather than actually getting to the core of what was wrong with Mr Samsudeen.”

“We can always improve the way we do things to have have greater preventative sort of mechanisms within government, police and communities.”

Dr Clarke said what happened in LynnMall was a tragedy and a terrible situation.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/missed-opportunities-to-deradicalise-attacker-in-nz-tragedy-says-criminologist/feed/ 0 231959 Auckland terror attacker ‘brainwashed’ by neighbours, mother says https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/auckland-terror-attacker-brainwashed-by-neighbours-mother-says/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/auckland-terror-attacker-brainwashed-by-neighbours-mother-says/#respond Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:16:35 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=63006

The mother of Auckland’s LynnMall shopping mall terror attacker in New Zealand says he was brainwashed by neighbours from the Middle East.

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, a 32-year-old refugee originally from Sri Lanka, was shot dead by undercover police after stabbing six people inside Countdown in LynnMall on Friday.

His mother, Ismail Fareeda, has told a television channel in Sri Lanka that neighbours from Syria and Iraq radicalised Aathil Samsudeen when he was injured in a fall in Sri Lanka in 2016.

She said her son then started posting radical views on social media.

Fareeda said there was a change in her son after he had left Sri Lanka and settled in New Zealand in 2011.

She said her two other sons had reprimanded the 32-year-old over his radical views.

‘Heartbroken by this terrible act’
In a statement released via a lawyer and credited to Samsudeen’s brother, Aroos, his whānau said they were “heartbroken by this terrible act” and they wanted to send love and support to those who were hurt.

The statement said Samsudeen, who arrived in New Zealand in 2011 on a student visa, suffered from “political torture” and his mental health steadily declined over the years.

Samsudeen spent a lot of time on social media, it said.

“We saw his mental health got worse and worse during the last 10 years or so. He spent a lot of his time in prison and was always struggling with some court cases. When we heard that he was in prison in New Zealand, we thought it would do him some good but didn’t realise he would spend so much time there. He also had many problems in prison.”

Members of the wider family visited New Zealand in 2013.

“We love your country and your people and we know from what we have seen since the Christchurch attack that you are good people. We want to stand with you. We have lost Aathil. We don’t know what to do while our father is still very ill and doesn’t know about this situation.

Sri Lankan government collaboration
The Sri Lankan government was promising to work with New Zealand authorities over the supermarket stabbings, AFP reported.

It had been investigating whether Samsudeen was linked to the bombings in Colombo on Easter Sunday 2019, which killed 279 people in attacks on three churches and three hotels.

The bombings were blamed on a group that pledged allegiance to the then Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

A spokesperson for Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry said the government there condemned the senseless violence of the west Auckland attack and would cooperate with the New Zealand authorities in any way necessary.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/05/auckland-terror-attacker-brainwashed-by-neighbours-mother-says/feed/ 0 231821 Auckland terrorist’s name suppression revoked, but remains secret for now https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/auckland-terrorists-name-suppression-revoked-but-remains-secret-for-now/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/auckland-terrorists-name-suppression-revoked-but-remains-secret-for-now/#respond Fri, 03 Sep 2021 23:53:41 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=62978 By Sarah Robson, RNZ News Reporter

Name suppression for the man responsible for yesterday’s New Zealand terror attack at a west Auckland supermarket has been revoked, but his name cannot be published yet.

The High Court has given his family who live overseas at least 24 hours to seek further suppression orders.

The Sri Lankan national was shot dead by police after stabbing six people inside Countdown in LynnMall.

Suppression orders prevented details about his identity and background from being made public.

The government filed an urgent application last night to have the court orders lifted, so details about the man’s identity and background could be made public.

In a judgment last night, Justice Wylie said there was no longer any proper basis for the suppression orders.

But he said the man’s family live overseas and lawyers needed time to contact them to take instructions.

He said he could consider extending the 24-hour period if needed.

Isis propaganda
However, it can be revealed the man was sentenced in July to one year of supervision after he was found guilty by a jury in the High Court at Auckland of two charges of possessing Isis propaganda that promoted terrorism.

He was found guilty of another charge of failing to comply with a search, but he was acquitted of a third charge of possession of objectionable material and a charge of possessing a knife in a public place.

Al Jazeera reporting of the New Zealand supermarket stabbing
Al Jazeera reporting of the New Zealand supermarket stabbing. Image: AJ screenshot APR

The state had sought to charge him under the Terrorism Suppression Act, but failed after a High Court judge ruled that planning a terror attack was not an offence under the law.

Because he had already spent three years in custody awaiting trial, he did not receive a further prison term for his offending.

Despite that, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said he had been under surveillance since 2016, because of his support for a violent ideology inspired by Islamic State.

The man was being so closely monitored by a surveillance and tactical team that police shot him within 60 seconds of the attack starting.

On the radar of authorities
He arrived in New Zealand in October 2011.

He first came to the attention of authorities in 2016, when police formally warned him about posting anti-Western, pro-Isis, extremist content on the internet.

The man had also at some point told a worshipper at an Auckland mosque that he wanted to go to Syria to fight for Isis.

In a July 2020 judgment, Justice Downs said in May 2017, he had booked a one-way flight to Singapore but was arrested at Auckland Airport.

When police searched his apartment, they found a large hunting knife under the mattress on the floor and secure digital cards containing fundamentalist material, including propaganda videos and photos of the man posing with a firearm.

He was remanded in custody and in June 2018, he pleaded guilty to distributing restricted publications. In August 2018, he was sentenced to supervision, Justice Downs’ 2020 judgment said.

But the day after his sentencing, he went and bought the same model of hunting knife that police had earlier found under his mattress.

Arrested again
He was arrested again and another search found a large he had a large amount of violent Isis material, including one video about how to kill “non-Muslims”.

This time, the state sought to charge the man under the Terrorism Suppression Act, for planning a terrorist act.

But Justice Downs said that in itself was not an offence under the law.

In his decision, Justice Downs said: “Terrorism is a great evil. ‘Lone wolf’ terrorist attacks with knives and other makeshift weapons, such as cars or trucks, are far from unheard of.

“Recent events in Christchurch demonstrate New Zealand should not be complacent. Some among us are prepared to use lethal violence for ideological, political or religious causes.

“The absence of an offence of planning or preparing a terrorist act … could be an Achilles heel.”

Justice Downs said it was not for the courts to create such an offence.

“The issue is for Parliament,” he said.

A copy of Justice Downs’ judgment was provided to the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General and the Law Commission.

High Court trial
The man finally stood trial in the High Court at Auckland in May this year, on lesser charges.

A jury found him guilty of two charges of possessing Isis propaganda that promoted terrorism and one charge of failing to comply with a search.

He was acquitted of a third charge of possessing objectionable material and a charge of possessing a knife in a public place.

The man was sentenced in July.

In her sentencing notes, Justice Fitzgerald said the two publications on which he was found guilty were “nasheeds” – religious hymns.

Both were classified by the Censor as objectionable and contained Isis imagery and lyrics.

Justice Fitzgerald did not accept the explanation that he was listening to them to improve his Arabic language skills.

“Rather, I accept that the broader context to your possession of these nasheeds, which included a range of other materials relating to Isis or Isil, suggests that you have an operative interest in Isis.

“In other words, I do not accept that you might have simply stumbled across these and other Isis-related materials in your research of Islam or the historic Islamic State,” she said.

Report raised further flags
A pre-sentencing report raised further flags.

“The report writer suggests that you support the goals and methods of Isis,” Justice Fitzgerald said.

“The report writer concludes that the risk of you reoffending in a similar way to the present charges is high.

“It suggests that you have the means and motivation to commit violent acts in the community and, despite not having violently offended to date, as posing a very high risk of harm to others.”

Given he had already spent three years in custody awaiting trial, the man was sentenced to one-year supervision.

There were restrictions on his use of electronic devices, the internet and social media.

“The Police and Community Corrections clearly have concerns that you pose a not insignificant risk to the broader community,” Justice Fitzgerald said in her sentencing notes.

“I do not know whether those concerns are right and I sincerely hope that they are not, though having regard to all of the materials available to the court, I can say that they are not wholly fanciful.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/auckland-terrorists-name-suppression-revoked-but-remains-secret-for-now/feed/ 0 231609 NZ mall stabbings a terrorist attack by ‘lone wolf’, says PM Ardern https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/nz-mall-stabbings-a-terrorist-attack-by-lone-wolf-says-pm-ardern/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/nz-mall-stabbings-a-terrorist-attack-by-lone-wolf-says-pm-ardern/#respond Fri, 03 Sep 2021 06:23:44 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=62961 RNZ News

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says an attack at Auckland’s New Lynn Countdown supermarket today was a terrorist attack carried out by a violent extremist.

The prime minister and Police Commissioner Andrew Coster addressed media after the man was shot dead at a west Auckland mall this afternoon.

It is understood six people – all shoppers at the mall – have been wounded in the incident at LynnMall in New Lynn.

A St John Ambulance spokesperson said three patients in a critical condition and one patient in a serious condition had been taken to Auckland City Hospital; one patient in a moderate condition had been taken to Waitakere hospital; and one patient in a moderate condition had been taken to Middlemore Hospital.

Ardern revealed the terrorist was a Sri Lankan national who had arrived in New Zealand in October 2011 and he became a person of national security interest from 2016.

The reasons he was known to agencies was subject to suppression orders, but Ardern said it was her view that it was in the public interest to share as much information as possible.

The prime minister did say the terrorist held a violent ideology inspired by the Islamic State, but it would be wrong to direct any frustration at anyone other than this individual.

Personally aware
She said she was personally aware of the terrorist before today’s attack.

Ardern said it was a senseless attack and she was sorry it had happened.

“What happened today was despicable. It was carried out by an individual.”

Ardern said the individual was under constant monitoring, and he was shot and killed within 60 seconds of the attack starting.

The police team who was monitoring shot and killed him.

Commissioner Coster said the man had been under heavy surveillance because of concerns about his ideology.

He had entered the store and obtained a knife from within the store before starting the attack.

When the man approached police with the knife he was shot and killed.

Surveillance teams ‘close’
Coster said the surveillance teams were “as close as they possibly could be without compromising the surveillance”.

“I acknowledge that this situation raises questions about whether police could have done more, whether police could have intervened more quickly. I’m satisfied based on the information available to me that the staff involved did not only what we expect they would do in this situation, but did it with great courage,” he said.

“The reality is, that when you are surveilling someone on a 24/7 basis, it is not possible to be immediately next to them at all times. The staff intervened as quickly as they could and they prevented further injury in what was a terrifying situation,” Coster said.

Ardern said all legal and surveillance power had been used to try to keep people safe from this individual.

“What I can say is that we have utilised every legal and surveillance power available to us to try and keep people safe from this individual. Many agencies and people were involved and all were motivated by the same thing – trying to keep people safe.”

Police at LynnMall
Police at LynnMall today, the scene of the terrorist attack. Image: Marika Khabazi/RNZ

Coster said there had been nothing that would tell police the extent of his intentions, or that he intended to do this today.

He said the individual was very surveillance-conscious, and surveillance teams needed to maintain a distance to be effective.

intervened ‘in 60 seconds’
“There was nothing to prevent him being in the community and we were doing absolutely everything possible to monitor him and indeed the fact that we were able to intervene so quickly — in roughly 60 seconds — shows just how closely we were watching him.”

Ardern said the local Muslim community had been “nothing but helpful and supportive. It would be wrong to direct any frustration to anyone beyond this individual. That is who is culpable, that is who is responsible — no one else”.

She said his past behaviour and action did not reach the threshold to have him in in prison, which was why he was being constantly monitored.

An eyewitness told RNZ she had seen a man running around armed with a knife and heard many people screaming.

Another shopper who was in the supermarket at the time heard someone scream before shoppers started running towards the door.

Heavily armed police and ambulances remain at the scene.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/03/nz-mall-stabbings-a-terrorist-attack-by-lone-wolf-says-pm-ardern/feed/ 0 231298 New covid book exposes global media bias, racism and stigmatisation https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/29/new-covid-book-exposes-global-media-bias-racism-and-stigmatisation/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/29/new-covid-book-exposes-global-media-bias-racism-and-stigmatisation/#respond Sun, 29 Aug 2021 22:36:46 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=62690 By Krishan Dutta

While the covid-19 pandemic’s relentless cyclone continues across the globe wreaking havoc on economies and social systems, this book sheds light on the adversarial reporting culture of the media, and how it impacts on racism and politicisation driving the coverage.

It explores the global response to the covid-19 pandemic, and the role of national and international media, and governments, in the initial coverage of the developing crisis.

With specific chapters written mostly by scholars living in these countries, Covid-19, Racism and Politicization: Media in the Midst of a Pandemic examines how the media in Australia, Bangladesh, China, India, New Zealand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and the United States have responded to the pandemic, and highlights issues specific to these countries, such as racism, Sinophobia, media bias, stigmatisation of victims and conspiracy theories.

This book explores how the covid-19 coverage developed over the year 2020, with special focus given to the first six months of the year when the reporting trends were established.

The introductory chapter points out that the media deserve scrutiny for their role in the day-to-day coverage that often focused on adversarial issues and not on solutions to help address the biggest global health crisis the world has seen for more than a century.

In chapter 2, co-editor Dr Kalinga Seneviratne, former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre (AMIC) takes a comprehensive look at how the blame game developed in the international media with a heavy dose of Sinophobia, and how between March and June 2020 a global propaganda war developed.

He documents how conspiracy theories from both the US and China developed after the virus started spreading in the US and points out some interesting episodes that happened in the US in 2019 that may have vital relevance for the investigation of the origins of the virus.

Attacks on WHO
The attacks on the World Health Organisation (WHO), particularly by the former Trump administration, are well documented with a timeline of how WHO worked on investigating the virus in its early stages with information provided from China.

The chapter also discusses the racism that underpinned the propaganda war, especially from the West, which led to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s controversial call for an “independent” inquiry into the origins of the pandemic that riled China.

Researcher Kalinga Seneviratne
Co-author Kalinga Seneviratne … the book highlights pandemic issues such as racism, Sinophobia, media bias, stigmatisation of victims and conspiracy theories. Image: IDN-News

“The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacies and inequalities of the globalised world. In an information-saturated society, it has also laid bare many political economy issues especially credibility of news, dangers of misinformation, problems of politicisation, lack of media literacy, and misdirected government policy priorities,” argues co-editor Sundeep Muppidi, professor of communications at the University of Hartford in the US.

“This book explores the implications of some of these issues, and the government response, in different societies around the world in the initial periods of the pandemic.”

In chapter 3, Muppidi examines specifically the US media coverage of covid-19 and he explores the “othering” of the blame related to failures and non-performances from politicians, governments and media networks themselves.

Yun Xiao and Radika Mittal, writing about a study they have done on the coverage in The New York Times during the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, argue that unsubstantiated criticism of governance measures, lack of nuance and absence of alternative narratives is indicative of a media ideology that strengthens and embeds the process of “othering”.

Ankuran Dutta and Anupa Goswani from Gauhati University in Assam, India, analyse the coverage of the covid-19 crisis in five Indian newspapers using 10 key words. They argue that the Indian media coverage could be seen as what constitutes “Sinophobia” with some mainstream media even calling it the “Wuhan Virus”.

Historical background
They trace the historical background to India’s anti-China nationalism, and show how it has been reflected in the covid-19 coverage, especially after India became one of the world’s hotspots.

“This Sinophobia hasn’t much impacted on the government policy; rather it has tightened its nationalist sentiments promoting Indian vaccines over the Chinese.” They say the Indian media’s Sinophobia has abated after the delta variant hit India.

“The narrative concerning covid-19 has taken a sharp turn bringing out the loopholes of the government’s inability to sustain its vigilance against the virus,” he notes, adding, ‘considering the global phobia concerning the delta variant put India in a tight spot and India has to defend itself from its newfound identity of being the primary source of this seemingly untameable variant.”

Zhang Xiaoying from the Beijing Foreign Studies University and Martin Albrow from the University of Wales explain what they call the “Moral Foundation of the Cooperative Spirit” in chapter 4.

Drawing on Chinese philosophical traditions—Confucianism, Daoism and Mohism—they argue that the “cooperative spirit” enshrined in these philosophies is reflected in the Chinese media’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages. Taking examples from the Chinese media—Xinhua, China Daily, Global Times and CGTN—they emphasise that the Chinese media has promoted international cooperation rather than indulge in blame games or politicising the issue.

This chapter provides a good insight into Chinese thinking when it comes to journalism.

Chapters on Sri Lanka and New Zealand examine how positive coverage in the local media of the governments’ initially successful handling of the covid-19 pandemic has contributed to emphatic election victories for the ruling parties.

Hit on NZ media industry
David Robie, founding director of Auckland University of Technology’s Pacific Media Centre, explains in his chapter how New Zealand’s magazine sector was devastated by the pandemic lockdowns and economic downturn, although enterprising buy-outs and start-ups contributed to a recovery.

He points out that a year later, in April 2021, Media Minister Kris Faafoi, himself a former journalist, announced a NZ$50 million plan to help the media industry deal with its huge drop in income, because, as he says, Facebook and Google were instrumental in drawing advertising revenue away from local media players.

The chapter from Bangladesh offers a depressing picture of the social issues that came up as the virus spread, such as the stigmatisation and rejection of returning migrant worker who have for years provided for families back home, and how old people were abandoned by their families when they were suspected of having contacted the virus.

The chapter gives a clear illustration of how the adversarial reporting culture of the media impacts negatively on the community and its social fabrics.

But, the chapter’s author, Shameem Reza, communications lecturer at Dhaka University, says that when the second outbreak started in March 2021, he observed a shift in the media coverage of covid-19 pandemic.

Now, the stories are more about harassment and discrimination, such as migrant workers facing hurdles to access vaccine; uncertainty over confirming air tickets and flights for their return; and facing risk of losing jobs and becoming unemployed. Thus, now the media coverage particularly includes ordinary peoples’ suffering.

Reza believes that the initial stigmatisation of victims, had influenced social media coverage of harassment, and “changed agendas in the public sphere”.

Lack of skills, knowledge
The authors argue in the chapter on the Philippines that the covid-19 coverage exposed the “lack of skills and knowledge in reporting on health issues”. Said a senior newspaper editor, “in the past, whenever there were training opportunities on science or health reporting, we’d send the young reporters to give them the chance to go out of the newsroom. Now we know we should have sent editors and senior reporters.”

In the concluding chapter, Seneviratne and Muppidi discuss various social and economic issues that should be the focus of the coverage as the world recovers from the covid-19 pandemic that reflects the inequalities around the world. These include not only vaccine rollouts, but also the vulnerability of migrant labour and their rights, the plight of casual labour in the so-called “gig economy”, priority for investments on health services, the power of Big Tech and many others.

This book is an attempt to raise the voices of the “Global South” in discussing the media’s role in the coverage of the covid-19 crisis, explain Seneviratne and Muppidi, pointing out that there cannot be a return to the “normal” when that is full of inequalities that have been exposed by the pandemic.

“There are many issues that the media should be mindful of in reporting the inevitable recovery from the covid-19 pandemic in 2021 and beyond.”

Krishan Dutta is a freelance journalist writing for IDN – News (In-Depth News). An earlier version of this review was first published by IDN-News under the title “New book explores how adversarial reporting culture drives politicised covid-19 coverage and this version is republished from Pacific Journalism Review.

 


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/29/new-covid-book-exposes-global-media-bias-racism-and-stigmatisation/feed/ 0 230015 Houses of Worship Attacked With Deadly Frequency in 2019 https://www.radiofree.org/2019/12/14/houses-of-worship-attacked-with-deadly-frequency-in-2019/ https://www.radiofree.org/2019/12/14/houses-of-worship-attacked-with-deadly-frequency-in-2019/#respond Sat, 14 Dec 2019 20:03:43 +0000 https://9F1B3132-4061-4402-81DE-ECBA2FFAB05F On Dec. 1, a band of assailants opened fire on worshippers at a small-town Protestant church in Burkina Faso, an impoverished West African country where the Christian minority is increasingly a target of attacks. The victims included the pastor and several teenage boys; regional authorities attributed the attack to “unidentified armed men” who, according to witnesses, got away on motorcycles.

The slaughter merited brief reports by international news outlets, then quickly faded from the spotlight — not surprising in a year where attacks on places of worship occurred with relentless frequency. Hundreds of worshippers and many clergy were killed at churches, mosques, synagogues and temples.

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A two-week span in January illustrated the scope of this somber phenomenon. In Thailand, a group of separatist insurgents attacked a Buddhist temple, killing the abbot and one of his fellow monks. In the Philippines, two suicide attackers detonated bombs during a Mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral on the largely Muslim island of Jolo, killing 23 and wounding about 100. Three days later, an attacker hurled a grenade into a mosque in a nearby city, killing two Muslim religion teachers.

The worst was yet to come.

On March 15, a gunman allegedly fueled by anti-Muslim hatred attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people. The man arrested for the killings had earlier published a manifesto espousing a white supremacist philosophy and detailing his plans to attack the mosques.

At a national remembrance service two weeks later, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealanders had learned the stories of those impacted by the attacks — many of them recently arrived immigrants.

“They were stories of those who were born here, grew up here, or who had made New Zealand their home. Who had sought refuge or sought a better life for themselves or their families,” she said. “They will remain with us forever. They are us.”

On Easter Sunday — April 21 — bombs shattered the celebratory services at two Catholic churches and a Protestant church in Sri Lanka.

Other targets, in coordinated suicide attacks by local militants, included three luxury hotels. But Christian worshippers at the three churches — including dozens of children — accounted for a large majority of the roughly 260 people killed.

The victims at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo included 11-month-old Avon Gomez, his two older brothers and his parents.

The day’s biggest death toll — more than 100 — was at St. Sebastian’s, a Catholic church in the seaside town of Negombo. It’s known as “Little Rome” due to its abundance of churches and its role as the hub of Sri Lanka’s small Catholic community.

The attacks surprised many in the predominantly Buddhist country, where the Christian community totals about 7% of the population and has long avoided involvement in bitter ethnic and religious divides.

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Six days after Easter, more than 9,400 miles (15,000 kilometers) from Sri Lanka, a gunman opened fire inside a synagogue in Poway, California, as worshippers celebrated the last day of Passover. A 60-year-old woman was killed; an 8-year-old girl and two men, including the Chabad of Poway’s rabbi, were wounded.

Some congregation members said the slain woman, Lori Kaye, blocked the shooter by jumping in front of rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose two index fingers were injured.

The man charged with murder and attempted murder in the attack, John T. Earnest, could face the death penalty if he is convicted of murder, although prosecutors haven’t yet said whether they will pursue capital punishment.

At a court hearing in September, prosecutors played a 12-minute recording of Earnest calmly telling a 911 dispatcher that he had just shot up a synagogue to save white people from Jews.

The attack occurred exactly six months after 11 people were killed at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the deadliest assault on Jews in U.S. history.

An additional anti-Semitic bloodbath was narrowly averted in October when an armed assailant tried to blast his way into a synagogue in Halle, Germany, where scores of worshippers were attending services on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.

Unable to break through a locked door, the gunman went on a rampage in nearby streets, killing two people and wounding two others.

Authorities said the 27-year-old German man who has confessed to the attack had posted an anti-Semitic screed before the assault and broadcast the shooting live on a popular video game site.

In contrast to the Poway and Halle attacks, where authorities have identified suspects and motives, some of the worst attacks on houses of worship unfold without arrests or claims of responsibility.

In October, for example, more than 60 people were killed in a bombing during Friday prayers at a mosque in the village of Jodari in eastern Afghanistan.

No group claimed responsibility and authorities offered conflicting explanations of how the bombing was carried out.

One common element of all the attacks: Dismay that many people of faith now have reason for apprehension as they gather for worship.

“No one should have to fear going to their place of worship,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom after the Poway attack. ”No one should be targeted for practicing the tenets of their faith.”

— Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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