In the original Hindu social structure, Dalits had the lowest social standing, and they continue to be regarded as being so impure in the majority of the states that caste Hindus view their presence as contaminating. For Christian Dalits, the situation is worse because they don't benefit from any government upliftment schemes. Credit: Umar Manzoor Shah/IPS

By Umar Manzoor Shah
KARNATAKA, May 17 2023 (IPS)

Renuka Kumari is a 45-year-old Christian woman from the Dalit community in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. She faces numerous challenges every day and hopes for a day when her struggles will end and she can lead a comfortable life.

Her husband, Subhash Kumar, sells the handmade brooms she makes from trees in the open market to earn a living. Living in makeshift hutments, Kumari’s family’s meagre income makes it difficult to make ends meet.

In the original Hindu social structure, the Dalits had the lowest social standing, and they continue to be regarded as being so impure in the majority of the states that caste Hindus view their presence as contaminating. Many Hindus consider their vocations debasing, such as dealing with leather, night soil, and other filthy work, which accounts for their unclean status in society.

Kumari has two children who study in a nearby government school, and she wants them to receive an education and eventually earn a good living. However, Kumari says that society and the government leave her family in dire straits because of their Christian faith. She believes that Dalits who practice other religions receive government grants, health and education benefits, and reservations in government jobs, but as Christians, they are overlooked.

Despite being economically disadvantaged, Kumari’s family does not qualify for government schemes. Her husband, Subhash Kumar, says that they earn no more than 5000 rupees (USD 80) a month and providing their children with a good education is challenging without government support. Dalit Christians are discriminated against and denied benefits solely because of their faith, adding to their struggles.

Background of Discrimination

After India gained independence from British rule in 1947, the government introduced significant initiatives to uplift the lower castes. These initiatives included reserving seats in various legislatures, government jobs, and enrolment in higher education institutions. The reservation system was implemented to address the historic oppression, inequality, and discrimination experienced by these communities and to provide them with representation. The aim was to fulfil the promise of equality enshrined in the country’s constitution.

On August 11, 1950, the President of India issued the Constitution (Scheduled Castes Order, which provided members of Scheduled Castes with various rights as outlined in Article 341(1) of the Indian Constitution. However, the third paragraph of the order stated that “no person who professes a religion different from Hinduism shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste”.

In 1956, Dalit Sikhs demanded inclusion in the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 and were successful in getting listed in the Presidential SC/ST Order, 1950, through an amendment to Para 3 of Article 341. Dalit Buddhists were also included through an amendment to Para 3 of Article 341 in 1990.

Christians and Muslims of Dalit origin now demand that they get social welfare benefits meant to uplift Dalit people. Both communities have been denied these benefits since 1950 because the government says their religions do not follow the ancient Hindu-caste system.

Legal angles

Nearly 14 Christian organisations in India have filed petitions in the country’s Supreme Court requesting reservations in education and employment for the 20 million Dalit Christians, who account for 75 percent of the total Christian population in India. In India, people are segregated into various castes based on birth, and 80% of the population is Hindu. Although parliament outlawed the practice of untouchability in 1955, India’s lower castes, particularly Dalits, continue to face social discrimination and exclusion.

In April this year, the Supreme Court of India requested that the federal government take a stance on granting reservation benefits in government jobs and educational institutions to Christian converts among the Dalits. The court is scheduled to hear the petition and decide on the status of Dalit Christians.

The Indian government had formed a committee to investigate the possibility of granting Scheduled Caste status to those who had converted to other religions but claimed to have belonged to the community historically. This was the second panel set up by the government after it rejected the recommendations of the first commission, which had recommended including them.

According to Tehmina Arora, a prominent Christian activist and advocate in India, it goes against the core secular values of the country to deny rights to individuals solely based on their religious beliefs. Arora emphasised that even if individuals convert to Christianity or Islam, they continue to live in the same communities that treat them as untouchables, and their circumstances do not change. Therefore, she believes people should not be denied the benefits they previously had due to their faith.

God is Our Hope

Renuka Kumari shares that she prays for her children’s success every day, hoping that God will help them excel in life. She laments that their entitlements are denied solely because they chose Christianity as their faith. She finds it ironic that they are denied government grants for this reason, causing them to live miserable lives and struggle every day to provide their children with education and a better future. Kumari’s two children, Virander and Prerna, are currently in the second and seventh grades. Sujata aspires to become a teacher one day and is passionate about mathematics. She dreams of teaching at her school, just like her favourite teacher, and is particularly fond of algebra.

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, May 8 2023 (IPS)

The World changes, though prejudices and misconceptions remain. In 1996, political scientist Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he predicted that people’s cultural and religious identities would become the primary source of conflict in a Post–Cold War World. Huntington’s allegations have been contradicted by a number of critics, among them American Palestinian professor Edward Said, who lamented their extreme cultural determinism, which omitted the dynamic interdependency and interaction of cultures. Said’s own Orientalism depicted a generalised “Western view” of Arab cultures as “static and undeveloped”, while European culture was considered to be “developed, rational, flexible, and superior.” Literature and movies have depicted Arabs as exotic men riding camels and horses through the desert, and their women as dangerously seductive objects of male desire. Eventually, the exotic men turned in to being terrorists, and/or depraved oil-rich magnates, while Muslim women were presented as veiled, enigmatic, and oppressed.

Are there no counter-images to such a one-sided view, for example an Arab film industry? Since the inception of a film industry in Europe and the US it has generally been assumed that local movie production arrived in the Middle East much later than in “the West”. As a matter of fact, already by the beginning of the 20th century both screening and production had been brought into most Arab countries. Eventually, Egyptian film production came to dominate Middle Eastern movie industry, while it established affiliated companies in Lebanon. Iraq, Jordan, Iran, Israel, and more recently the United Arab Emirates and Palestine, followed suit.

Films serve as visual entertainment for huge audiences and in a vivid manner reflect social attitudes. They thus constitute a great medium for inspiring societal change. Of course, films might serve as a means for propaganda and indoctrination, but this does not hinder them from proving helpful in making people inclined to change a status quo. There are now signs that a pervasive socio/economic change is taking place in Saudi Arabia, where a growing film industry has become part of what appears to be an overhaul of hitherto domineering ideologies

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the only nation in the world named after a dynasty. It was founded in 1932 by King Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, though the strength of The House of Saud can be traced back to 1745, when a local leader established a politico-religious alliance with the Wahhabis, a religious affinity honouring a Salafiyya interpretation of Islam, i.e. what is believed to be the faith of the “pious predecessors of the first three generations.” The House of Saud offered obedience to the Wahhabis, while promising to propagate their faith during a fierce struggle against Turkish and foreign influences.

Initially, Saudi Arabia did not refute the idea of movie theatres and allowed improvised cinemas, but all films were heavily censored and supposed to be screened privately. In 1982, Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became the fifth king of Saudi Arabia. Actively trying to base his authority on Wahhabism, he increased Government support to the conservative religious establishment; spending millions of dollars on religious education, strengthening separation of the sexes and the power of Muatawwa’ūn, a religious branch of the police.

Between 1983 and 2018 the only movie theatre to be found in the country was at a Science and Technology Centre, which only screened “educational” films. If Saudis wished to watch films it had to be via satellite, or DVD. In the meantime, Saudi Arabia grew into the largest economy in the Middle East. Its citizens benefit from free education and health care, along with subsidized food, electricity and housing. However, the economy relies overwhelmingly on oil. The country exports almost nothing else and imports almost everything. A welfare state has been built on the expectation that oil revenues would remain at historic levels, though prices are falling and oil will eventually run out. Furthermore, seventy per cent of the population is under thirty years of age and many demand increased personal freedom.

When King Fahd died in 2005 he was succeeded by King Abdullah Al Saud. Contrary to his predecessor, the new king realised that Saudi youth had to be better educated. As soon as he came to power, Abdullah implemented a scholarship program sending young Saudi men and women abroad for undergraduate and postgraduate studies. More than 70,000 Saudis began studying abroad in more than 25 countries, with the US, Great Britain, and Australia as main destinations. Educated and emancipated women also became considered as an asset for development. The King established a governmental department to promote women’s higher education and in 2011 women were allowed to vote in municipal council elections. The year after, women athletes competed in the Olympics and in 2013 domestic violence became a criminal offence.

However, still no movie production and screening were allowed in the country. The trend towards increased openness, innovation, efforts to limit religious bigotry and enlarged women’s rights continue under the current king, Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Its most visible propagator is Mohammed bin Salman, colloquially called MbS. He is Crown Prince, i.e. Salman bin Abdul-Aziz’s heir, though MbS is already the country’s Prime Minister and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

Already during King Abdullah’s reign, semi-clandestine initiatives were made by a budding movie industry. Wadja became the first feature-length film made by a female Saudi director. In 2012 it was entirely shot within the Kingdom. Written and directed by US-educated Saudi citizen Haifaa al-Mansour it told the story of a spirited 10-year old living in Riyadh. On her way to school she passed a shop window with a green bike. However, its price was high and girls riding bikes were frowned upon.

Wadja deals with feelings of school girls, though it mirrors a society where grown women are regimented as if they were still in school. Behind closed doors the beauty and wit of Wadjda’s mother were unmasked, though she seemed to be barely aware of it. Her main concern was that her husband intended to take a much younger woman as second wife. Wadjda set about to earn cash to buy the bicycle. Her target was a school prize, awarded to the student expressing most devotion in learning and reciting passages from the Quran. Wadjda feigned orthodox goodness and her efforts at memorization impressed her teacher. She won the competition, though staff and students became shocked when Wadjda announced her intention to use the prize to buy a bicycle. The headmistress was furious and against Wadjda’s will donated the prize money to charity.

Despite an apparent sentimental depiction of a little schoolgirl’s desires, Wadjda emphasized her longing for freedom and self-realization, as well as fear of emotional abandonment when her father took a second wife. It is not only a film about a young person’s awkward relationship with an authoritative society and distressed parents – her longing for a bicycle of her own actually became emblematic of an entire people’s striving for freedom.

Wadjda was shot in a country where zealous clergy forbade cinemas and with a totalitarian regime with zero-tolerance of female film directors. al-Mansour had most of the time to work from the back of a van, as she could not publicly mix with men of her crew. She generally had to communicate via walkie-talkie and watch the actors on a monitor.

Haifaa al-Mansour spent seven years on finding adequate funding. It was the Saudi Arabian billionaire businessman Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud who finally agreed to contribute. Al Waleed is a grandson of Abdul-Aziz, the first king of Saudi Arabia, and among other altruistic initiatives he financed the training of the first Saudi female commercial airline pilot, declaring that he was disposed to give “full support of Saudi ladies working in all fields.”

In November 2017, Al Waleed and other prominent Saudis were arrested during an “anti-corruption drive”. Some 200 detainees were brought to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh and subjected to coercion and abuse. Some, among them Al Waleed, were released after paying heavy fines. MbS not only attacked the old, extremely wealthy oligarchy, but also religious leaders who uphold Wahhabi doctrines. He openly declared that there are no static schools of thought, nor any infallible persons. In another statement MbS acknowledged that the Saudi state had not been “normal” for the past 30 years and that it was his intention to introduce social, religious, economic, political changes and a new educational policy, asserting a “Saudi national identity” within what he called a post-Wahhabi era.

Without interrupting or limiting his totalitarian powers MbS prohibited the Muatawwa’ūn to “stop, follow, arrest, punish, and ask people for their ID.” Muatawwa’ūn had until recently 4,000 officers, assisted by thousands of volunteers, and an additional 10,000 administrative personnel. It imposed strict segregation between the sexes, controlled that women wore the hijab, and forbade the sale of dogs and cats, as well as toys like Barbie dolls and Pokémon items.

Most of these restrictions are now abandoned. Women are allowed to drive cars and can chose not to wear the hijab. Women above 21 years can obtain passports and travel abroad without permission from their male guardians. It has become legally possible for women to independently open their own businesses and bank accounts, while mothers are authorised to retain immediate custody of their children after divorce. Women have now access to operas, concerts, cinemas and sports events.

This is part of the Government’s Saudi Vision 2030, aiming at diversifying the nation’s economy through heavy investments in non-oil sectors, including “green” technology, tourism, local expenditure and entertainment. In Riyadh, construction has begun of The Mukaab, a gigantic structure, which will include an armada of hotels, shopping malls, several cinemas and an “immersive” theatre. In the Northwest, Neom I is under construction – a high-technology megalopolis, with robotic services and even an artificial moon. The Line, a zero-carbon city stretching 170 kilometres across the desert. Qiddiya, a gigantic amusement park just outside of Riyadh. Trojena, a luxury ski resort in the Tabouk Mountains. The Red Sea Project, which is intended to be a string of luxurious hotels along the Red Sea shores.

Saudi Arabia has now 60 high-tech cinemas with approximately 500 screens in operation, as well as an increasing local production of TV entertainment. In accordance with Vision 2030 a General Entertainment Authority has been established. Its current chairman is bin Salman’s old friend Turki Al-Sheikh, known for his lyrics, sung by several Arab artists.

The film The Cello is expected to premiere in Riyadh this year. It is based on a novel by Turki Al-Sheikh that takes place in several locations, foremost in the 18th Century Italian town of Cremona, but also in present time. After being filmed in Prague, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Vienna, the movie stars world famous actor Jeremy Irons, as well as a great number of movie celebrities from Europe, Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In The Cello a young man purchases a cursed cello, built by a Cremonese master luthier, builder of string instruments, who butchered and cut up his entire family, using parts of their blood and bones to make a cello.

The cutting up of people in Turki Al-Sheikh’s The Cello might remind viewers of the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly carried out by Saudi officials in Turkey. However The Cello may have an intended, or unintentional, so called Boris Bus effect. i.e. changing the subject of the gruesome murder of a journalist into the making of a wondrous instrument. Boris Johnson managed to redirect Google searches from past embarrassing and deceitful bus ads about Brexit into a description of his hobby of making toy buses with painted, happy passengers on board.

Bin Salman’s occasionally brutal and draconic measures might be interpreted as residues from hundreds of years of despotism. They will hopefully mellow, or even disappear, if Arabian society is allowed to continue on its already beaten path towards an open and democratic society, allowing for women’s emancipation, free speech and general wellbeing. A trend already evident within the Saudi Arabian film industry, which does not shy away from controversial subjects and where almost forty per cent of crew and directors currently are women.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres briefs journalists in Doha, Qatar, on the situation in Afghanistan. 3 May 2023. Credit: UNESCO/Khava Mukhieva
 
A letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Special Representatives and Envoys for Afghanistan, and UN leadership in-and-out of Afghanistan.

By Ahmad Wali Ahmadi
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 4 2023 (IPS)

We are a group of Afghans living in the country and working across sectors including peace, civil society, humanitarian aid, human rights, media, and the private sector, and are working to promote dialogue and seek long-term solutions for our country.

This ad hoc group encompasses and reflects the work of individual Afghan men and women and organizations led by and employing women working across the aforementioned sectors at grassroots, sub-national, and national levels.

As you gathered in Doha, Qatar on May 1st and 2nd 2023 to discuss the ongoing situation in Afghanistan, we welcome your initiative to explore avenues of engagement and dialogue to resolve the impasse that the Taliban Authorities and the international community have been in over the course of the last 19 months.

Afghans are suffering from the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet worsened by a weakened economy and a lack of a framework for political dialogue. Whilst humanitarian engagement has been a necessity, we need the global community to recognize that this is neither sustainable nor optimal for alleviating the human suffering in Afghanistan.

A principled, pragmatic, and phased approach to engagement with the Taliban Authorities is needed to ensure the well-being of the Afghan people and to remove the roadblocks holding us back from pursuing the social and economic development of our country.

As such, we urge that you take into consideration the following:

Political track

– With the recent renewal of the UNAMA mandate, the organization needs to be supported, strengthened, and empowered as the major political entity representative of the international community present inside Afghanistan.

– The international community should work with people inside Afghanistan to develop Afghan solutions to Afghan problems. We encourage the creation of spaces to promote local peace building initiatives and dialogues that already exist and support to expand on our work.

– Wide-range consultation with Afghans living inside Afghanistan including participation in international engagements taking place on Afghanistan.

Aid track

– Ensure the effective and principled implementation of humanitarian assistance through I/NGOs and UN Agencies with routine monitoring and re-evaluation of approach, commitment of timely and effective delivery of aid, and meaningful participation of women both as humanitarians and clients.

– Expansion and flexibility in funding – local organisations have shown better capacity to negotiate humanitarian access and the ability to expand into essential non-humanitarian work. Therefore, donor agencies should consider expansion of funds to national entities as well as showing flexibility around areas of operation and expansion of programming in areas where women can work.

* Focus on funding women-led and owned organizations and explore opportunities of funding private sector to develop and expand their initiatives.

* Repurpose and replenish ARTF funding to be fit-for-purpose in the current operational context through supporting locally-led mechanisms for delivery of aid and implementation of development programming.

* Women and girls can continue to access and be active through a range of institutions such as local media, certain types of vocational institutes, cultural heritage preservation and arts programming. These spaces would benefit from investment from the international community.

* Fund initiatives tackling climate change in Afghanistan before it is too late – the effects of climate change are increasingly evident, putting millions of lives and economic livelihoods at risk.

Economic track

* While the economy is no longer in freefall and there is evidence of a low-level stabilization, external obstacles continue to have significant detrimental effects on the Afghan economy. We urge for the lifting of sanctions on financial transactions that are crippling an already struggling private sector and leads to overcompliance of the international banking system.

* Unfreezing of the Afghanistan Central Bank’s assets to improve the banking and liquidity crisis plaguing the country and restore the SWIFT system.

*Technical support to the Afghanistan Central Bank in the areas of Anti-Money Laundering, Countering Terrorist Financing, and relevant fiscal policy departments to build confidence in the banking sector and support economic activity.

Diplomatic track

* Increase the in-country diplomatic presence to ensure direct engagement and dialogue without the reliance on intermediaries.

* Establish a clear roadmap for international dialogue with the Taliban Authorities including launch of informal working groups with the Taliban Authorities on issues of common interests such as countering terrorism, illicit drugs, irregular migration, preservation of cultural heritage as trust building measures, and enhancement of access to information as a public good.

As Afghans living and working in Afghanistan, we are advocating on behalf of millions that have remained here and are suffering from a multitude of man-made crises. We urge you all to consider them when you meet this week to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.

The current approach to Afghanistan has only increased the suffering in this country. Our people are innovative, determined, pioneering and resilient – let’s work towards lifting the barriers to our progress.

Signatories

Ahmad Wali Ahmadi – Mediothek Afghanistan

Shahir Zahine – Development and Humanitarian Services for Afghanistan (DHSA)

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Young girls attend class at a UNICEF-supported school in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. April 2023. Credit: UNICEF/Mark Naftalin

By Jean-François Cautain
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 4 2023 (IPS)

I am writing from Kabul where I have been living for this past 11 months. I consider myself a friend of Afghanistan, a country full of contrasts that I know since 1986; I have lived here for a little over 12 years.

My return to Afghanistan was motivated by the desire, which I share with my wife who runs a medical NGO in Kabul, to help the Afghan population that is once again hostage to a modern “Great Game”, bringing violence and misery.

I was in Afghanistan when the Taliban first took Kabul in September 1996 after four years of armed conflict between various Afghan warlords that vied for supremacy after the departure of the Soviets in 1989. Heading a rural rehabilitation programme, I worked for 3 years under the first Taliban regime.

I was again present during the early years of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan between 2001 and 2005, working for the European Union. I remember the enthusiasm of the Afghan people. But I also remember the doubts that very quickly emerged about the viability of the project to “build a new Afghanistan”.

Today, I am extremely concerned about the isolation of Afghanistan on the international scene. It will lead to more suffering for the Afghan people and pose an increased risk to regional and international security.

In isolating Afghanistan, we are repeating mistakes made during the first Islamic Emirate, between 1996 – 2001, with the same well known dire consequences. Today, we must collectively, the international community and the Afghans, learn from past mistakes.

I do not consider myself an “expert” on Afghanistan, but the historical perspective I have on the country and the fact that I am currently living in Kabul mean that I probably have a different point of view to many of those currently being expressed from Europe and the United States.

The confrontation with Afghan poverty that I experience daily is no stranger to this discrepancy that I perceive between my vision of the situation and most of the analyses and positions expressed outside Afghanistan’s borders.

We all have to draw lessons

On 15 August 2021, 20 years of foreign military presence in Afghanistan came to an end. The US-led intervention raised great hopes in the early years. Unfortunately, this turned into a fiasco.

The international community and Afghanistan must analyse the many causes such as: the original sin of denying the defeated Taliban a seat in the first meeting aimed at the stability and reconstruction of the country (Bonn Conference 2001); too much aid leading to massive corruption, especially of certain political elites; a confusion of objectives between military operations aimed at eradicating terrorism and the (re)construction of a state.

We are just at the beginning of this necessary self-criticism from which we will have to draw lessons, but it is currently put on the backburner, or even forgotten, because of the recent developments in the country.

Since the Taliban took power, we have witnessed a widening chasm between the West and the new masters of Afghanistan. Both sides are clearly responsible for the current situation. At first, the Taliban displayed moderation when reaching out to the international community. They spoke of general amnesty, freedom of work for women, education for all, and the fight against terrorism.

The West refused to seize this extended hand. On the contrary, thanks to its dominant position on the international scene and taking advantage of the disarray caused by the return of the Taliban and the chaotic evacuation scenes at Kabul airport, the West responded by imposing conditions on the recognition of the Taliban government, the halt of development aid (40% of GNP), the freezing of the Central Bank of Afghanistan’s assets and the de facto extension of sanctions on financial transactions to the whole country.

These decisions brought the Afghan economy to its knees in a few weeks, precipitating this already poor country (48% of the population lived below the poverty line before the arrival of the Taliban – despite billions of dollars and euros poured into the country over 20 years) into an unprecedented economic crisis with unprecedented humanitarian consequences.

Today 28.3 million Afghans out of a population of around 40 million depend on humanitarian aid for their survival. And the poverty rate has reached 97%, according to the United Nations.

The Taliban also bear a great responsibility for this stalemate with decisions compromising the political and societal gains made over the past 20 years. The failure of their initial diplomatic approach with the West opened the door to the return of coercive policies that are unacceptable to the international community and to a large majority of Afghans.

Today, it is widely known that girls cannot study in secondary schools and universities, women cannot work in UN agencies and NGOs, and cannot go to parks and hammams. Political life is also minimal, with very few opportunities for dissenting voices to be heard and the media often having to censor themself.

There is a total lack of trust between the West and the Taliban. Western countries blame the Taliban for not respecting the Doha agreement by taking power by force and of having failed to keep their words by taking unacceptable decisions drastically reducing human rights, especially those of women and girls. This sad reality leads many educated Afghan families to leave the country for the sake of their daughters’ future.

For their part, many Taliban feel that the West is not sincere when it talks about peace in Afghanistan. They suspect the West, and especially the United States, of working to overthrow their government.

They point to the refusal to recognise their government, the sanctions, the freezing of the Central Bank’s assets and the military drones’ flying over the country, daily, for months. For them, the war with the West is not over, but has taken another form.

Confrontation cannot last

At a time when Western opinions are rightly outraged by the restrictions imposed on Afghan women and girls, one must also accept that the Taliban are proud to have liberated their country from an occupation led by the world’s greatest military power.

As a result, many do not understand why they have been ostracised for over 20 months. They feel that they should be “treated as equals” within the international community – which is more or less what some countries in the region are doing.

It is also important to realise, even if it is difficult to accept in some Western chancelleries, that this feeling of “liberation” is shared by a very significant percentage of the Afghan population, especially in rural areas, even if they are not all unconditional supporters of the Taliban regime.

Having driven the British out of Afghanistan in the 19th century, the Soviets in the 20th century, and now NATO in the 21st century, is part of the collective psyche of Afghans and makes many of them proud.

Yet, despite this incredibly complicated and terribly polarized context, it is imperative to continue and strengthen a direct dialogue between Western countries and the Taliban. The participants to the recent meeting convened by the UN Secretary General in Doha “agreed on the need for a strategy of engagement that allows for the stabilization of Afghanistan but also allows for addressing important concerns.”

It is only through frequent face-to-face meetings – I do not believe in e-diplomacy – driven by a constructive spirit of understanding on both sides, that progress can be made for the Afghan people.

How could dialogue start?

Increasing interaction with the Taliban does not mean recognising their government, but rather creating spaces for discussion to dispel misunderstandings, pass on messages and build relationships that go beyond mere posturing.

It means putting the human element and pragmatism back into a relationship that is essentially conflictual today, opposing great international principles against “Afghan” values.

Dialogue must start by talking about subjects where there is a possible convergence of interests between the Western countries and the Taliban. Why not the fight against international terrorism and the fight against opium production, two scourges that affect both Afghanistan and Western countries?

The Taliban, who until now have never had any agenda other than a national one, are fighting the Islamic State, which remains a real threat in many countries. They also eliminated poppy cultivation in 2001 and have been tackling it again this year.

Keeping in mind the common goal of the wellbeing of the Afghan people, positive signals must also be sent from both sides. For example, on education on the one hand, on sanctions and/or asset freezes on the other.

This sustained dialogue needs to start even if it will surely be essentially transactional at first. This will probably not be satisfactory for both parties: the first steps will be modest, but it will have the merit of unblocking a stalemate situation whose victims are primarily Afghan women and girls and the Afghan population in general.

It is also urgent to give oxygen to the local economy to allow Afghans to have their minds free of the daily, haunting, and exclusive constraint of feeding their families. Humanitarian aid is essential and must continue to be delivered whatever the obstacles.

But even more humanitarian aid will never be a substitute for a revitalised economy. The obstacles on the Afghan economy are largely in the hands of Western countries. The latter could use the lifting of sanctions on financial transactions and the gradual restitution of the assets of the Central Bank of Afghanistan as positive vectors in a dialogue with the Taliban. Only then can the Afghan people regain their voice and influence the future of their country.

The road to an Afghanistan at peace with itself, and in tune with the international community, will be long and complicated. It can only be achieved through a sincere and sustained dialogue. It is the responsibility of the Taliban, other members of Afghan society and Western countries to take the first step in this direction, for the greater benefit of Afghans.

Jean-François Cautain is a former Ambassador of the European Union.

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Afghan Women refugees undergoing sewing and embroidery training in Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Apr 10 2023 (IPS)

“I had my shop in Afghanistan but came here after the Taliban’s warning against stitching women’s clothes. Now, I am working on daily wages in a shop owned by a local tailor master,” Noor Wali, 32, told IPS.

Wali, a resident of Jalalabad province, said that a new order by the Taliban’s vice and virtue authority, male tailors, have been barred from making garments for women in Kabul.

“The order has landed the majority of the male tailors, who have no other option except to leave the country or stay idle and resort to begging,” Wali, a father of three, said.

Before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, he said it was common practice all over Afghanistan that males stitched women’s garments. The male tailors who used to make only women’s garments are the worst hit as the order has made them virtually jobless.

Sharif Gul’s story is no different from Wali’s. Gul, 41, arrived in Peshawar, located close to the Afghan border, and started work at Rs1,500 (about USD 6) per day with a local tailor. “I used to earn at least Rs6,000 (about USD 21) back home and over Rs15,000 a day (about USD 52) in Ramzan (Ramadan) because the people wear new clothes on Eid al-Fitr,” he said.

Eid al-Fitr is celebrated at the end of Ramzan-one month of fasting, and all people stitch new clothes for the festivity.

“A great loss to us. We have been appealing to the Taliban to take pity on us, but they were not receptive to our requests,” Gul said.

Tailor said the order would have a major impact on them financially as many tailor shops cater only to female customers.

Naseer Shah is another Afghan hit hard by the Taliban’s ban on sewing women’s garments. Shah, 39, who migrated to Peshawar last month along with his wife, three sons, and daughter, works as a daily wager with a Pakistani tailor.

“I earn Rs3,000 (about USD 10) a day. My income used to be around Rs10,000 (about UDS 35) during this month of Ramzan. I have been making women’s garments for more than 15 years,” he explains. Most Kabul-based workers have stopped stitching female dresses and started dealing in men’s clothing, but they receive fewer customers.

So he didn’t have to resort to begging; they moved to Pakistan, he said.

Taliban government has already banned women’s education after coming to power. A week ago, they asked women to stop working in UN offices, likely impacting women’s development, healthcare, and population control in the militia-ruled violence-stricken country.

Hussain Ahmad, 50, an Afghan tailor who migrated to Pakistan 30 years ago, told IPS that the influx of Afghan tailors has been problematic because they don’t find lucrative work here.

“We have hired three tailors who came recently after the Taliban’s ban. We have workload in Ramzan, but after Eid al-Fitr, we wouldn’t need their services, and they will be unemployed,” said Hussain, who owns a shop in Muhajir (refugee) Bazaar, in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, located near the Afghan border.

Hussain said the people feared the Taliban for their harsh punishments. “Those arriving here recall how Taliban’s police warned them if they didn’t stop taking women’s garments,” he said.

Ikramullah Shah, an economics teacher, who taught at Kabul University, told IPS that he quit his job because of the ban on women’s education.

“We are here, and my two daughters are studying in private schools here. I want to educate my daughters at any cost,” Shah said. “I have been teaching in two Afghan schools as a part-timer to earn for my family.”

Most of the women who owned dressmaking shops have stopped working after the Taliban’s instructions, he said. Some women tailors had very big shops where they had recruited male and female tailors, but now all have to close shops and work from home.

Among the refugees is Naseema Shah, an Afghan woman who says she will soon start stitching women’s dresses for women in Peshawar. Naseema, 30, is one of 20 Afghan women nearing completion of month-long training in Peshawar, supported by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Dr Samir Khan, a political analyst, told IPS that the Taliban have been facing tremendous pressure from the international community, including the UN, to change their attitude towards women, but the situation remained unchanged.

“We have been listening to news about the ban of women students, workers, and tailors sewing female dresses, which is unacceptable in a civilized society,” he said.

Taliban should do some soul-searching and try to become part of the global efforts and work for women’s development, he said.

“How can the Taliban put the war-devastated country on the path of progress when they disallow women (half of the country’s population) to work,” he said.

Pakistan is an Islamic country where women enjoy equal rights, he said.

He said that women are neither taking part in social activities nor allowed to go to school and work, which is regrettable. The past 16 months since the Taliban came to power have been tough on women.

Sajida Babi, an Afghan teacher in Peshawar that women have been at the receiving end of the Taliban’s ruthlessness. “There are strict dress codes for women who are required to wear an all-encompassing veil while in the market,” Bibi, 55, said. “In my country, women cannot go to schools or parks for entertainment, and they cannot travel without being accompanied by a man, which reminds one of the Stone Age.”

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Pope Francis with a child on his shoulders - graffiti in Rome

“The Roman curia suffers from spiritual Alzheimer [and] existential schizophrenia; this is the disease of those who live a double life, the fruit of that hypocrisy typical of the mediocre and of a progressive spiritual emptiness which no doctorates or academic titles can fill. […] When appearances, the colour of our clothes and our titles of honour become the primary object in life, [it] leads us to be men and woman of deceit. […] Be careful around those who are rigid. Be careful around Christians – be they laity, priests, bishops – who present themselves as so ‘perfect’. Be careful. There’s no Spirit of God there. They lack the spirit of liberty [..] We are all sinners. But may the Lord not let us be hypocrites. Hypocrites don't know the meaning of forgiveness, joy and the love of God.”
                                                                                                                                                Pope Francis I

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Feb 8 2023 (IPS)

When the Pope Emeritus Benedict XIV/Ratzinger died on the last day of 2022 it did not cause much of a stir in the global newsfeed. Maybe a sign that religion has ceased to play a decisive role in modern society Nevertheless, religious hierarchies are still highly influential, not least for the world’s 1, 4 billion baptized Catholics, and a pope’s policies have a bearing not only on morals, but also on political and economic issues. By contrast, there are more Muslims in the world, 1.9 billion, though adherents are not so centrally controlled and supervised as Catholics and hierarchies do not have a comparable influence on global affairs.

When Benedict abdicated in 2013 he retained his papal name, continued to wear the white, papal cassock, adopted the title Pope Emeritus and moved into a monastery in the Vatican Gardens. It must have been a somewhat cumbersome presence for a new, more radical pope, particularly since Benedict became a symbol of traditional values and served as an inspiration for critics of the current papacy.

By the end of his reign, John Paul II was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and Cardinal Ratzinger was in effect running the Vatican and when he was elected Pope in 2005, his closest runner-up was Cardinal Bergoglio from Buenos Aires. What would have happened if Borgoglio, who eventually became Francis I, had been elected? Would he have been able to more effectively deal with clerical sexual abuse and Vatican corruption?

When Joseph Ratzinger became pope, he had for 27 years served John Paul II by heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), investigating and condemning birth control, acceptance of homosexuals, “gender theory” and Liberation Theology, a theological approach with a specific concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed people.

Under Cardinal Ratzinger the CDF generally overlooked an often shady economic cooperation financing Pope John Paul II’s successful battle against Communism, while covering up clerical sexual abuse and marginalizing “progressive” priests. Several Latin American liberation theologians agreed that John Paul II in several ways was an asset to the Church, though he mistreated clerics who actually believed in Jesus’s declaration that he was chosen to “bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” John Paul II and his “watchdog” Joseph Ratzinger were considered to have “armoured fists hidden in silk gloves.”

Ratzinger censured and silenced a number of leading “liberal” priests, like the Latin American Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff and the American Charles Curran, who supported same sex marriages. Both were defrocked. Under Ratzinger’s CDF rule, several clerics were excommunicated for allowing abortions, like the American nun Margaret McBride, and the ordination of women priests, among them the Argentinian priest Rómulo Braschi and the French priest Roy Bourgeois.

Ratzinger/Benedict wrote 66 books, in which a common theme was Truth, which according to him was “self-sacrificing love”, guided by principles promulgated by the Pope and implemented by the Curia, the administrative body of the Vatican:

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting one be tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

A strict adherence to Catholic Doctrine meant bringing the Church back to what Benedict XVI considered as its proper roots. If this alienated some believers, so be it. Numerous times he stated that the Church might well be healthier if it was smaller. A point of view opposed to the one expressed by Francis I:

“Changes need to be made […] Law cannot be kept in a refrigerator. Law accompanies life, and life goes on. Like morals, it is being perfected. Both the Church and society have made important changes over time on issues as slavery and the possession of atomic weapons, moral life is also progressing along the same line. Human thought and development grows and consolidates with the passage of time. Human understanding changes over time, and human consciousness deepens.”

Benedict XVI allowed the issue of human sexuality to overshadow support to environmentalism and human rights. He wanted to “purify the Church” in accordance with rules laid down in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992 and written under direction of the then Cardinal Ratzinger. The Catechism might be considered as a counterweight to “relativistic theories seeking to justify religious pluralism, while supporting decline in general moral standards.”

Pope Benedict endeavoured to reintegrate hard-core traditionalists back into the fold, maintaining and strengthening traditional qualms related to sexual conduct and abortion. He declared that modern society had diminished “the morality of sexual love to a matter of personal sentiments, feelings, [and] customs. […], isolating it from its procreative purposes.” Accordingly, “homosexual acts” were in the Catechism described as “violating natural law” and could “under no circumstances be approved.”

Papal condemnation of homosexuality may seem somewhat strange considering that it is generally estimated that the percentage of gay Catholic priests might be 30 – 60, suggesting more homosexual men (active and non-active) within the Catholic priesthood than within society at large.

In 2019, Frédéric Martel’s In the Closet of the Vatican sent shock waves through the Catholic world. Based on years of interviews and collaboration with a vast array of researchers, priests and prostitutes, Martel described the double life of priests and the hypocrisy of homophobic cardinals and bishops living with their young “assistants”. He pinpointed members of the Catholic hierarchy as “closet gays”, revealed how “de-anonymised” data from homosexual dating apps (like Grindl) listed clergy users, described exclusive homosexual coteries within the Vatican, networks of prostitutes serving priests, as well as the anguish of homosexual priests trying to come to terms with their homosexual inclinations.

According to Martel, celibacy is a main reason for homosexuality among Catholic priesthood. For a homosexual youngster a respected male community might serve as a safe haven within a homophobic society.

By burdening homosexuality with guilt, covering up sexual abuse and opaque finances the Vatican has not supported what Benedict proclaimed, namely protect and preach the Truth. Behind the majority of cases of sexual abuse there are priests and bishops who protected aggressors because of their own homosexuality and out of fear that it might be revealed in the event of a scandal. The culture of secrecy needed to maintain silence about the prevalence of homosexuality in the Church, which allowed sexual abuse to be hidden and predators to act without punishment.

Cardinal Robert Sarah stated that “Western homosexual and abortion ideologies” are of “demonic origin” and compared them to “Nazism and Islamic terrorism.” Such opinions did in 2020 not hinder Pope Emeritus Benedict from writing a book together with Sarah – From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church. Among injunctions against abortion, safe sex, and women clergy, celibacy was fervently defended as not only “a mere precept of ecclesiastical law, but as a sharing in Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross and his identity as Bridegroom of the Church.” This in contrast to Francis I, who declared:

“It is time that the Church moves away from questions that divide believers and concentrate on the real issues: the poor, migrants, poverty. We can’t only insist on questions bound up with abortion, homosexual marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. It is not possible … It isn’t necessary to go on talking about it all the time.”

The current pope is not condoning abortion, though does not elevate it above the fight against poverty, climate change and the rights of migrants, which he proclaims to be “pro-life” issues in their own right. In 2021, Francis I stated that “same-sex civil unions are good and helpful to many.” He is of the opinion that Catholic priests ought to be celibate, but adds that this rule is not an unchangeable dogma and “the door is always open” to change. Francis propagates that women ought to be ordained as deacons; allowed to do priestly tasks, except giving absolution, anointing the sick, and celebrate mass and he has recruited women to several crucial administrative positions within the Vatican. Furthermore, he ordered all dioceses to report sexual abuse of minors to the Vatican, while notifying governmental law enforcement to allow for comprehensive investigations and perpetrators being judged by common – and not by canon law.

Just hours after Benedict’s funeral on 5 January Georg Gänswein’s memoir Nothing but the Truth — My Life Beside Benedict XVI, was distributed to the press. Gänswein, who was Benedict’s faithful companion and personal secretary, writes that for the Pope Emeritus the Doctrine of the Faith was the fundament of the Church, while Francis is more inclined to highlight “pastoral care”, i.e. guidance and support focusing on a person’s welfare, social and emotional needs, rather than purely educational ones.

In 2013, Gänswein entered in the service of Benedict XIV. He was professor in Canon Law, fluent in four languages, an able tennis player, excellent downhill skier and had a pilot’s licence. He was also an outspoken conservative and often critical of Francis I.

Shortly before his abdication, Benedict XVI appointed Cardinal Gänswein archbishop and made him Prefect of the Papal Household, deciding who could have an audience with Pope Francis I, while he at the same time was responsible for Benedict’s daily schedule, communications, and private and personal audiences. The Italian edition of the magazine Vanity Fair presented Gänswein on its cover, declaring “being handsome is not a sin” and calling him “the Georg Clooney of the Vatican”. Six years before Donatella Versace used Gänswein as inspiration for her fashion show Priest Chic.

There was an air of vanity and conservatism surrounding the acolytes of Benedict. Gänswein writes that working with both popes, the active one and the ”Emeritus” was a great challenge, not only in terms of work but in terms of style. Benedict XIV was a pope of aesthetics recognising that in a debased world there remain things of beauty, embodied in a Mozart sonata, a Latin mass, an altarpiece, an embroidered cape, or the cut of a cassock. The male-oriented lifestyle magazine Esquire included Pope Benedict in a “best-dressed men list”. Gänswein states that when Pope Francis in 2022 restricted the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass “I believe it broke Pope Benedict’s heart”.

Pope Francis is now 86, not much time remains for him as sovereign of the Catholic Church. Hopefully he will be able to change the Curia by staffing it with people who share his ambition to reform the Church by navigating away from doctrinal rigidity, vanity and seclusion towards inclusion, tolerance, human rights, poverty eradication and environmentalism.

Main sources: Gänswein, Georg (2023) Nient’altro che la verità. La mia vita al fianco di Benedetto XVI. Segrate: Piemme. Martel, Frédéric (2019) In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy. London: Bloomsbury.

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It may be an election ploy but Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has captured the imagination of many Indian commentators who hail its non-sectarian message. Source: BJY/Twitter

By Mehru Jaffer
GOA, INDIA, Jan 26 2023 (IPS)

When countless supporters of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, arrive in Srinagar on January 30 to hoist the Indian flag, they would have walked 3,570 kilometres over 150 days.

The Congress Party organised the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY), a long march to counter what it calls the divisive politics of the ruling party. The exercise was to revive the idea of India as a country united in all its diversity. The BJY is led by senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, 52, who met countless citizens on the way at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not held a single press conference in the last nine years that he has been in power.

Founder and editor of The Citizen Seema Mustafa told the IPS Rahul Gandhi gained by leading the BJY.

“He has emerged as a leader of substance with courage and honesty and compassion on display. What the Congress Party has gained will only be known once Congressmen can take it all forward. Other gains and losses will come after that, but for now, the BJY has indeed cut through the prevailing atmosphere of fear and hate,” said Mustafa.

The BJY will culminate in the Himalayan region of Kashmir on January 30 but will it receive the same kind of welcome as it has in the rest of the country, is the question. For nearly half a century, the people of Kashmir have complained of Delhi’s stepmotherly attitude towards them.

Spymaster and former head of India’s Intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), AS Dulat, had a personal invitation to join the BJY. He walked for one hour with Rahul Gandhi, but Dulat did not say whether they talked about the troubled province of Kashmir.

Dulat’s latest book, A Life in the Shadows, is about Kashmir, a place he loves passionately. He was first posted to Kashmir in the late 1980s. As a former Prime Minister’s advisor on Kashmir, he understands the Kashmiri psyche and empathises with the problems in the province. Because he is seen as a problem solver and well-wisher of all the people suffering in Kashmir, including separatists, militants, and Pakistanis, he is called Mr Kashmir.

In the book, he implies that the problem of militancy is no longer about joining Pakistan or seeking independence but resistance to the harsh majoritarian policies of muscular power tactics used against the people of Kashmir by the present government in Delhi.

Rahul Gandhi greets well-wishers during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, which started in September 2022 and is due to be completed by January 30, 2023. Source: BJY/Twitter

Dulat told the media that participating in the BJY was a wonderful experience. Gandhi wrote in a letter inviting Dulat to join the march, “We listen to anyone who wants to be heard. We offer no judgment or opinion. We walk to unite every Indian regardless of their gender, caste or religion because we know they are equal citizens. We walk to fight hatred and fear.”

Dulat commented: “I think what this young man is doing is certainly something exceptional… incredible.”’ He doesn’t think that anyone will ever do it again, and nobody is going to walk so many kilometres again.

However, his walk has had its critics – with the Defence Minister Rajnath Singh accusing Gandhi of tarnishing the image of India by creating the impression that only hatred prevails in the country.

The BJY was started last September on the southern tip of the Indian peninsula in Kanyakumari, and it has marched non-stop through 12 provinces. During the march, Gandhi spent time with scores of citizens from different walks of life. After walking about 25 kilometres daily in two shifts, the Congress workers slept in makeshift accommodations at night.

Talking to IPS, a professor at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Zoya Hasan, agreed that the march had succeeded.

“If crowds are any indicator, the BJY got an enthusiastic response in all the states it traversed. This shows that there is still space in the country for inclusive politics,” Hasan said.

Many see the march as altering the country’s mood. It has brought hope into the lives of citizens who have been feeling increasingly fearful of their future and security. Largely ignored by (mainly pro-government) mainstream media, the BJY has been streaming live on social media. Watching supporters walk thousands of miles and meet hundreds of thousands of people of all faiths mingling, embracing, shaking hands and making friends has reinforced positive ideas of bonhomie and togetherness amongst citizens.

Ever since the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the mood in the nation has been grim. Apart from tackling the never-ending scourge of poverty, the country has had to deal with repeated incidents of public violence.

The BJP has been criticised for being communitarian, and commentators say this, at best, ignores and, at worst, encourages violence by citizens against each other and divides Indian society by religious affiliation.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, in an interview, Sen had told Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, that the Indian government is one of the most appalling in the world because it is communitarian in the narrowest sense of the term. It harms India by attacking Muslims and propagating the idea that Hindus form the nation.

Many consider the BJY march a success as a political protest against the alleged divisive politics of the right-wing ruling party in power.

“I joined the march and walked with Rahul Gandhi not because I am a fan of the Congress Party but because I thought the young man (Rahul Gandhi) has stood up for the right values at the right time, and I support similar values,” filmmaker Saeed Mirza said at the launch of his latest book I Know The Psychology of Rats in Goa recently.

“I believe every Indian who wants love and inclusiveness should be participating in the yatra beyond political identity. Although it is a predominately Congress-organised event, it is not exclusively a Congress event. So every Indian has been welcomed with open arms, and that is how it should be. If political pettiness comes in the way, it will be a self-defeating attitude,” said Tushar Gandhi, who joined the march last November. Tushar is Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson, and Rahul Gandhi is the great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.

The Congress Party says the objective of the BJY is to fight against the politics of fear, bigotry and prejudice and the economics of livelihood destruction, increasing unemployment and growing inequalities.

“What the yatra has achieved is way beyond what the sceptics anticipated. They have been proved wrong, and I include myself in the category. A suffocated nation was waiting for some such happening,” wrote journalist Saeed Naqvi.

Hasan adds that the BJY has refurbished the Congress’s credentials as a party of national unity and social cohesion, upholding the values of secularism, the welfare of the masses and their constitutionally granted rights. This marks an important wedge in a hyper-nationalist narrative of the ruling party’s politics.

Hasan said the impact of the BJY was that the ruling party wasn’t setting the narrative but was forced to react to the Congress Party. While only time will tell whether the march will bring electoral gains to the Congress Party in the general elections to be held in 2024, Hasan says:

“It is the necessary first step in building a politics of change.”

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Dec 15 2022 (IPS)

During November, soldiers of the March 23 Movement (M23) have been approaching Goma in the eastern territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), close to the Rwandan border. About 180.000 people are now leaving Goma, a city with a million inhabitants. Many stakeholders are involved in the conflict and there is an apparent danger that the overall carnage that affected the Congolese eastern border areas fifteen years ago will resume. At the same time, war is ranging in Ukraine, which name likely comes from the old Slavic term for borderland.

Disputed border areas have often been hotbeds for horrific and widespread wars. World War I began with border conflicts between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia, while World War II was ignited through German allegations of Czech and Polish mistreatment of Germans living on their side of the border. Tensions are constantly brewing along borders between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, Ethiopia and Sudan, Armenia and Azerbaijan – just to mention a few border conflicts present all over the world.

Throughout history, borderlands have suffered from looting, massacres and ethnic violence, generally triggered off by incursions from neighbouring countries, causing chaos and destruction. Borderlands are generally speaking a result of clearly defined borders between European nations, established after the Westphalian Peace Agreements in 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, a conflagration between religious factions that devastated Germany, killing 30 per cent of its population.

Before mid-17th century, European borders were quite diffuse. A royal realm had its heartland, a centre from which it could expand through wars, treaties and negotiations. In medieval Europe the more or less undefined areas between different sovereignties were called marks, or marches, words deriving from an Indo-European term meaning edge. A mark/march often served as a buffer zone, more or less independently governed by a marquis/margrave.

As a result of the Westphalian Peace, national borders became demarcated by border markings and lines drawn upon maps. Such boundaries were eventually introduced to the rest of the world. In Africa, border demarcations became common after the Berlin Conference, 1884-1885, when leaders of fourteen European nations and the United States agreed upon a “partitioning” of Africa, establishing rules for amicably dividing resources among Western nations. Notably missing was any representative from Africa.

One of the proclaimed aims of the Berlin Conference was to bring “civilization” to Africa, in the form of free trade and Christianity. Accordingly could King Leopold II of Belgium, by playing the part of a beneficent monarch, succeed in convincing his counterparts that he would personally bring order, faith and prosperity to the heart of Africa. Congo was thus formally recognized as Leopold’s personal possession. An extraordinarily rich territory, with ivory, minerals, palm oil, timber and rubber, was used by Leopold to increase his personal wealth. Missionary stations and trade routes were established, while slave labour extracted the natural resources. If production targets were not met, the autochthonous population risked severe punishment, ranging from having their families held hostage in concentration camps, to torture, the severing of a hand, and eventual execution.

Between 1900 and 1930, European colonial powers completed cartographic surveys of African territories. However, surveys focused solely on land control while disregarding the impact recently established borders might have on the well-being of the original population. Local communities suffered limitations to their daily activities and nomadic practices. Traditional life, administrative structures, and economic safety were negatively affected. Furthermore, colonial rule tended to instigate conflicts. Imposed borders gradually set off hostile relations among borderland dwellers and eventually enabled post-independent governments and political elites to use such divisions for political means.

The sheer size of the territory, which eventually became the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), made its governance extremely challenging. This vast nation is about the same size as Western Europe and has 10,500 kilometres of external borders. In the middle of the country is an almost impenetrable and vast jungle area. Border control is largely non-existent, providing neighbouring countries with an opportunity to exert influence into remote peripheries. For many Congolese, it is easier to reach the capital of a neighbouring state than travelling to the capital city, Kinshasa.

As in other areas of the world, people on both sides of Congolese borders exchange goods, spouses, languages and customs. Nevertheless, in spite of all this mixture and exchange, most people living along borders generally continue to be aware of their roots in different cultural settings. Even if they might share a lingua franca, several of them tend to maintain their original language and specific customs. Border communities thus find themselves in a precarious balance, which might be upheld for centuries but also runs the risk of becoming swiftly overturned by armed attacks from national armies, warlords, or hordes of bandits and uprooted former soldiers, as well as massive influxes of refugees.

During the so called First– and Second Congo Wars, and their aftermath, approximately 5.4 million died between 1994 and 2008, deaths mainly caused by disease and malnutrition, though massacres committed by all the warring factions also killed staggering numbers of civilians. Nine African nations and around twenty-five armed groups were involved in the wars. The mayhem began in April 1994, when about 1.5 million Rwandans settled in eastern DRC. These refugees included Tutsis fleeing Hutu mass murderers, and eventually one million Hutus fleeing the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) subsequent retaliations.

The shooting down of a plane carrying Rwandan President Juevénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, served as catalyst for a genocide lasting for approximately 100 days. Between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were in Rwanda killed during well-planned attacks, ordered by an interim government. This genocide ended when the Tutsi commanded Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) gained control and took over the Rwandan Government, making approximately two million Hutus fleeing across the border into neighbouring Zaire. Estimates of the number of Hutu civilians killed in subsequent revenge massacres by the RPF range from 25,000 to 100,000.

Rwandan incursions into Zaire occurred after years of Congolese internal strife, dictatorship and economic decline. Zaire, as the country was called at the time, was in 1994 a dying State. In many areas, increasingly corrupt state authorities had in all but name collapsed, with infighting militias, warlords, and rebel groups wielding local power.

International response to the Rwandan genocide had been lame and limited, though this time international opinion reacted immediately. Massive relief support was directed to refugees in eastern Zaire. In the meantime, several, heavily armed Rwandan gėnocidaires, genocide perpetrators, organized themselves among Hutu refugees. In their attacks on Banyamulenge, a Tutsi minority who for centuries had been living in Congo, the gėnocidaires were often joined by local militia. Banyamulenge were resented by several Congolese agriculturists, who suspected them of planning to take over their land.

Currently it is the rebel group M23, which is the main aggressor. The rebel group was in 2012, according the UN, created and commanded by the Rwandan army. The Rwandan Government did in 2013 officially cease its support to M23; its members surrendered and were transferred to a refugee camp in Uganda. However, M23 reappeared in 2017, evidently with renewed Rwandan support. The Congolese mayhem is just one example of what might happen in border areas when control and peaceful interaction between neighbours collapse under the pressure of foreign interventions and enter a bloody, anarchic chaos.

Like in central Africa, Ukraine border conflicts have at several occasions triggered massacres and bloody chaos. For more than 500 years, Ukraine was divided and ruled by a variety of external powers, including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Cossack Hetmanate, Poland, the Tsardom of Russia, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany

From the beginning of the last century to 1921, millions fled Ukraine, including more than 2 million Jews. Ukrainians were killed en masse by Austrians, Poles and warring political factions, while approximately 110,000 Jews were murdered during so called pogroms. Worse was yet to come when Nazi invaders within the same areas murdered approximately 1.7 million Jews. In Nazi-occupied Ukraine, 5.7 million locals died between 1941 and 1945. And now, during Russia’s aggressive invasion, the suffering and slaughter of innocents have been resumed.

The curse of borders, between nations and people, continues to haunt us. To safeguard the future – for our earth and children – we have to learn that general well-being depends on collaboration between nations and peoples, regardless of ethnicity, gender, and ideologies. Wars, like Russia’s ruthless attack on a sovereign nation and the central African mayhem, are crimes against humanity and must be stopped through peaceful solutions. Time is running out and cannot be wasted on armed conquests and bloodshed.

Sources: Stearns, Jason K. (2011) Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York: PublicAffair and Veidlinger, Jeffrey (2021) In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. London: Picador.

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India’s new Chief Justice, Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud has significant challenges ahead as activists hope he will continue with his legacy. Credit: Subhashish Panigrahi and Charmanderrulez

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, Dec 14 2022 (IPS)

India’s new Chief Justice, Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, has a significant challenge ahead – as activists and minorities remain hopeful that he will remain true to his legacy of delivering judgments that enshrined the Constitution, especially on personal liberty.

Sanjay Kapoor, founder editor of Hardnews Magazine and political analyst told the IPS that many of the rulings by Indian courts in recent times have been deeply disturbing.

“In the name of national security, draconian laws are evoked to curb personal liberty. Journalists and activists have been arrested and locked away under anti-terror law without evidence,” said Kapoor.

He gave the example of Siddique Kappan, who has remained in jail for more than two years for unknown reasons. Kappan got bail from the Supreme Court, but anti-money laundering laws were immediately slapped upon him to ensure that he remained in prison.

Kapoor’s main concern is the undermining of courts by the government, which is sure to weaken institutions and harm democracy in India.

Meanwhile, the CJI also warned that he was not here to do miracles.

“I know that challenges are high; perhaps the expectations are also high, and I am deeply grateful for your sense of faith, but I am not here to do miracles,” Chandrachud said after his appointment.

The challenges facing the judiciary include a backlog of cases, delays in appointing Supreme Court judges, and significant inconsistencies in judicial approaches.

Soon after Chandrachud took oath on November 9, Chandrachud expressed concern over the long list of requests before the Supreme Court for bail. He said that district judges are reluctant to grant bail in a fair manner out of fear of being targeted.

Activists say that this is the same reason that media personnel, political opponents, and social activists are languishing behind bars without bail today.

Activist Teesta Setalvad was arrested in June 2021, and her bail plea was only accepted three months later when she was finally released. There are others, like student leader Umar Khalid, who has languished in jail for more than two years.

The judicial system in India is under tremendous pressure. Until last May, countless cases were pending in courts across different levels of the judiciary. Many of the cases were pending in subordinate courts, a large percent in High Courts, while a hundred thousand cases have been pending for over 30 years. Amid the rising trend of litigation, more and more people and organisations seek justice from courts today. However, there are not enough judges to hear the cases. The courts are overburdened, and the backlog of cases is intimidating.

The reluctance to grant bail to especially political opponents has only aggravated the matter. Most recently, Sanjay Raut, senior opposition party leader, said that he had lost 10 kgs while in prison. The legislature was accused of money laundering. He was in jail for 100 days before bail was granted to him in November. He was kept in a dark cell where he did not see sunlight for 15 days.

Raut said that he would not have been arrested if he had surrendered to the will of the ruling party and remained a mute spectator to the politics of the day. He wondered if only those who oppose the politics of the ruling party would continue to be arrested.

The use of the justice system as a political tool and reluctance to grant bail at the district level has clogged the higher judiciary with far too many cases.

“The reason why the higher judiciary is being flooded with bail applications is because of the reluctance of the grassroots to grant bail, and why are judges reluctant to grant bail not because they do not have the ability to understand the crime. They probably understand the crime better than many of the higher court judges because they know what crime is there at the grassroots in the districts, but there is a sense of fear that if I grant bail, will someone target me tomorrow on the ground that I granted bail in a heinous case. This sense of fear nobody talks about but, which we must confront because unless we do, we are going to render our district courts toothless and our higher courts dysfunctional,” Chandrachud said at an event hosted by the Bar Council of India last week to felicitate his appointment as the country’s 50th CJI.

The Supreme Court of India is perhaps the most powerful Court in the world. However, in recent times the judiciary has been criticised for its uneven handling of cases. It is under scrutiny over contradictions found in its functioning. The fact that a former CJI accepted a seat in the upper house of parliament soon after his retirement two years ago had raised eyebrows.

The judiciary’s perceived deference to the present government is a major concern, including the ongoing arrest of political opponents, and refusal to grant bail to those arrested is becoming the norm. On the other hand, ‘friends’ of the ruling party are allowed to get away with murder and rape.

The nation was shocked after a document was made public last October as proof that the premature release of 11 men convicted for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and the killing of her family during the 2002 Gujarat riots was approved by the home ministry despite opposition by a special court. A Communist Party of India (Marxist) member Subhashini Ali, journalist Revati Laul and Professor Roop Rekha Verma together filed a public interest litigation (PIL) against a remission granted to 11 convicts who were released on August 15, India’s 75th Independence Day celebrations this year on account of good behaviour.

Bano was gang-raped along with 14 members of her family. Her 3-year-old daughter Saleha was killed by a mob in a village in the province of Gujarat as they fled communal violence in 2002. Bano was 19 years old and five months pregnant at that time. Shobha Gupta, the lawyer for Bano has battled for years for the rape survivor to get justice. Gupta told Barkha Dutt, a senior journalist, that she is shattered and unable to face Bano. That after the release of her rapists from custody, Bano is silent and feels alone.

Dutt had interviewed Bano 20 years ago. Today she wrote in her column that an unspeakable injustice is unfolding with brazen impunity. Its legality is dodgy. Dutt said, “Let’s raise hell”.

After the men who raped Bano and killed her child were freed, they were greeted outside the prison with sweets and garlands. This is the story of a very seriously ill nation, columnist Jawed Naqvi said.

“The nation that was baying for the execution of men who raped a young woman in a bus in Delhi in 2012 seemed deaf to Bilkis’s trauma,” Naqvi wrote. The executive has turned its back on Bano. The media is disinterested and civil society has been bullied into silence at a time when principles are passe for most politicians.”

So who will give justice to citizens like Bano?

The Supreme Court?

In a plea filed by Azam Khan last July, the opposition party leader pointed out a new trend amongst the high courts to impose unnecessary bail conditions. Khan said that a high court had ordered the politician to hand over allegedly encroached land as a condition for bail. The ruling was overturned.

Seeking justice these days is tough within the courts and outside.

The 74-year-old Khan has been behind bars since early 2020. Multiple charges have been slapped on him, including corruption, theft, and land grab, in an effort to make sure that he remains behind bars on some charge or the other. However, Khan was granted interim bail last May. A few months later, he was fined and has been sentenced to three more years in prison for a hate speech made in 2019. At that time, Khan was accused of blaming the Prime Minister for creating an atmosphere in the country in which it was difficult for Muslims, the largest minority community in India, to live.

A new report published by the USA-based NGO Council on Minority Rights in India (CMRI) and released on November 20 at New Delhi’s Press Club found that by helping offenders, detaining victims, and failing to register first information reports (FIR) in some cases, law enforcement agencies play a role in furthering hate crimes.

Discussing the legal aspects of persecution, lawyer Kawalpreet Kaur said that minorities are facing the brunt of the state to varying degrees. Cases of the pogrom against Muslims during the Delhi riots have been lying in the high court for the last two years.

“Indian courts need to keep their eyes and ears open; it is not a one-off case of Afree Fatima’s house bulldozed or when the stalls of working-class Muslims were razed in Delhi despite a stay from the court,” she said.

The lawyer called it an attack by the Indian state against its minorities and a campaign of misinformation and Islamophobia witnessed every day.

The release of the CMRI report comes at a time when numerous countries and organisations are calling upon India to take stock of the plight of its religious minorities.

Six international rights groups – the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), Inter­national Dalit Solidarity Network, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have reminded New Delhi in a joint statement that it is yet to implement recommendations of a recent UN report on India which cover topics which include the protection of minorities and human rights defenders, upholding civil liberties, and more.

“The Indian government should promptly adopt and act on the recommendations that United Nations member states made at the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process on November 10,” the joint statement read.

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New York City, January 5, 2020: People marching from Manhattan to Brooklyn against the rise in antisemitism in New York. Antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in the United States in 2021. Credit: Shutterstock.

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, Dec 12 2022 (IPS)

It’s time to step up, speak out and object to antisemitism. Antisemitic remarks, behavior and events cannot continue to be swept under the rug, unethically edited for political media consumption, or ignored in hopes that they will simply go away.

Events several weeks ago as well as those from the recent past that took place at the highest political levels of an advanced developed country, the United States, are indicative of the worrisome rising trend of antisemitism in many parts of the world.

On 22 November former president Trump had dinner at his home with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and antisemite Kanye “Ye” West. The notorious event was followed by the largely silent responses of many Republican officials and leaders, including some seeking the presidential office.

The repeated behavior and words of the former president, including his troubling response to the Charlottesville tragedy in 2017, and the tepid reactions to antisemitism by most of his supporters legitimizes the animosity expressed toward Jewish Americans.

Such behavior and remarks cannot be excused as being insignificant instances that have been blown out of proportion by the news media. Nor can they be simply deflected, diminished or explained away with references to irrelevant overseas diversions.

The former president and his various enablers have minimized, dismissed and legitimized antisemitism events in the United States, including harassment, threats, vandalism, assaults, killings and bombings. The failures to address the antisemitism facing America are inexcusable, disgraceful and dangerous.

The Jewish population of the United States is a relatively small proportion of the country. In 2022 Jewish Americans are estimated to represent slightly more than two percent of America’s population of 333 million inhabitants. In contrast, the largest religious group, Christians, is close to two-thirds of country’s population (Figure 1)

Source: PEW Research.

Despite Jewish Americans representing a relatively small proportion of the U.S. population, the number of reported antisemitic incidents involving assault, harassment and vandalism reached an all-time high in 2021 of 2,717, or more than seven incidents per day and nearly triple the level in 2015 (Figure 2).

Source: Anti-Defamation League.

The reprehensible incidents of the recent past took place in various places across the United States, including in places of worship, community centers, schools and colleges. The motivations for the antisemitism were not always evident as they typically lacked an identifiable ideology or belief system.

One notable exception, however, is the “great replacement” theory being promoted by U.S. white supremacist groups. They believe in the conspiracy that white Christians are being intentionally replaced in the population by individuals of other races through immigration and other means.

That great replacement, they believe, is leading to white Christians no longer being the dominant majority in America. In their various demonstrations and gatherings, including the Charlottesville event in 2017, the neo-Nazi marchers often chant out such hateful antisemitic nonsense as ”Jews will not replace us”.

The former president and his various enablers have minimized, dismissed and legitimized antisemitism events in the United States, including harassment, threats, vandalism, assaults, killings and bombings. The failures to address the antisemitism facing America are inexcusable, disgraceful and dangerous

In the American Jewish Committee’s “The State of Antisemitism in America 2021” report, an estimated 60 percent of U.S. adults indicated that antisemitism is a problem for the country. However, approximately one-quarter of the respondents felt that antisemitism wasn’t a problem for the country.

In contrast, some 90 percent of Jewish Americans in the report indicated that antisemitism is a problem for the country and approximately three-quarters of Jewish Americans felt that there is more antisemitism in the country today than there was about five years ago. A majority of Jewish Americans, 53 percent, reported feeling personally less safe than they did in 2015.

Contributing to antisemitism is the apparent self-induced amnesia among some extremist groups regarding the methodical persecution followed by the horrendous events that were committed against Europe’s Jews approximately eight decades ago. That amnesia is easily dispelled by a viewing of the illuminating Ken Burns’ documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust”. The Holocaust resulted in the murder of approximately six million European Jews, or roughly 63 percent of Europe’s Jewish population at the time.

Sadly, antisemitism was also evident in America’s refugee policy with respect to European Jews seeking asylum from their harrowing persecution in Nazi Germany.

Perhaps the most memorable single event reflecting its ignoble refugee policy in the past is the refusal of the U.S. government in 1939 to grant entry to about 900 Jewish refugees seeking asylum aboard the USS St. Louis that had reached Miami, Florida. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where nearly one third of the passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

In addition, America too often has chosen to ignore its troubling antisemitic past and the many popular figures who were openly antisemitic in their public attacks on the character and patriotism of Jewish Americans. Among those ignoble figures are Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Charles Coughlin, Fritz Kuhn, Coco Chanel and Louis Farrakhan.

Furthermore, besides facing educational quotas at major universities in the 1920s, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, Jewish Americans experienced discrimination among the major professions and restrictions on residential housing. They were also denied membership to most clubs, camps, resorts and associations, with some hotel advertisements explicitly excluding Jewish Americans.

While that recent tragic history remains beyond doubt, many of America’s antisemitic white supremacists, including Fuentes and West, continue to deny the existence of the Holocaust, express hateful rhetoric and discriminate against Jewish Americans. They attempt to negate the historical facts of the Nazi genocide, promote the false claim that the Holocaust was invented or greatly exaggerated in order to promote the Jewish interests, and display the Nazi swastika flag and make the “Heil Hitler” gesture.

Antisemitism also fueled vocal criticism and opposition to many U.S. political leaders in the past who attempted to address the discrimination against Jewish Americans. For example, at conference of some 20,000 people in New York City in 1939, Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund, mocked President Franklin Roosevelt as “Frank D. Rosenfeld”, referred to the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”, and declared Jews to be enemies of the United States.

Some current U.S. political leaders, including some eagerly seeking to become president, continue to dismiss or ignore antisemitism. When confronted with offensive behavior and words such as the former president’s recent dining with two notorious antisemites, the initial reluctance verging on muteness of many political leaders to express outrage only contributes to antisemitism.

No matter the place, occasion or time, the U.S. electorate cannot tolerate or support those who promote, permit or condone antisemitism. In particular, U.S. elected and appointed government officials must be held accountable for their words and deeds.

An encouraging development in the U.S. was a letter recently signed by more than one hundred members of Congress to President Biden calling for a unified national strategy to monitor and combat antisemitism in the country. The letter also recognized that rising antisemitism is endangering people in Jewish communities both in the U.S. and abroad

Another encouraging development aimed at recognizing the rise of antisemitism was the 2022 Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism. More than 25 mayors from around the world and dozens of local government officials participated in the two-day Summit held in Athens, Greece, from 30 November to 1 December.

The Summit highlighted the significant problem of rising antisemitism worldwide and presented strategies and solutions to address it. Various countries around the world have reported a rise in antisemitic incidents between 2020 and 2021. In addition to the rise of incidents of approximately one-third in the United States, higher percentage rises were reported in Australia, Canada and France (Figure 3).

Source: Antisemitism Worldwide Report 2021.

The Mayors Summit also provided a framework for exchange of ideas and cooperation between cities. The meeting also emphasized the particular role of mayors in creating inclusive societies for their cities.

Finally, recalling the tragic lessons of the recent past and troubled by today’s rising antisemitism, it’s time for everyone to speak out and denounce the hate, discrimination and violence. Tolerating antisemitism is categorically wrong and poses a serious moral threat to the world in the 21st century.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division and author of numerous publications on population issues, including his recent book, “Births, Deaths, Migrations and Other Important Population Matters.”

In 2019, when the President-elect of the European Union (EU) Ursula von der Leyen had presented a list for her soon-to-be European Commission, and on that list was a portfolio called “Protecting the European way of life”, a lot of noise was made questioning what that meant. “Protection” was later changed to the “Promotion” of the European Way of Life. It’s been over three years since this very controversial, much debated and widely criticised portfolio as many continue to question what uniquely is the ‘European way of life’?

Shada Islam

“The European way of life, for many it’s about being christian and about being white. So anyone who doesn’t fall into those categories is seen as not belonging to Europe,” says Shada Islam, Brussels based specialist on European Union affairs.

“There are about 50 million people of colour, European of colour across the European Union, that’s a huge number of people, not just a small minority, and that means, migrants are part of that & refugees are part of that. The narrative of Europe is so out of date and out of touch with the reality of the diverse and multicultural Europe that there is today,” says Islam.

Over the years Europe has seen an increase in securitization of the migration, severe pushback and disturbing patterns of threat, intimidation, violence and humiliation at the borders leading to human rights violations, the closure of borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, growing Islamophobia, racism and the rise of right-wing in Europe, all leading up to being very strong indicators of the continuously growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has created one of the biggest refugee crises of the modern times. Just a month into the war, more than 3.7 million Ukrainians fled to neighbouring countries seeking safety, protection and assistance – this is known to be the sixth-largest refugee outflow over the past 60- plus years. While most European countries have displayed an exceptionally generous stance on arriving refugees, unlike the 2015 refugee crisis when the EU called for detaining arriving refugees for up to 18 months.

Islam says while Europe has opened its arms, homes, schools and hospitals to millions of Ukrainian refugees, migration policies continue to remain hardened by European leaders against refugees especially from the Middle East and Africa. “It’s a sense of compassion, empathy and solidarity that we see towards refugees from Ukraine, but why can’t we show that to people fleeing wars, hunger and climate change from other parts of the world? Why are they kept in camps, why are they pushed back from Frontext, our border control. Why can’t they be welcomed with the same sense of compassion and empathy,” Islam says.

Earlier in March, in response to the Ukrainian crisis, the government of Bulgaria took the first steps to welcome Ukrainian refugees. At a time of one of the worst humanitarian catastrophe, this move by Bulgaria was most welcomed by all, however many human rights activists raised questions of discrimination and double standards when Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, “these are not the refugees we are used to. This is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unclear past. None of the European countries are worried about them,”.

In February 2022, the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border had worsened with reports of migrants staying in a camp being forced out, pushed back by security forces with water cannons and tear gas.

According to this report in 2021 thousands of people fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and other areas tried to enter the European Union through Lithuania, Latvia and Poland from neighbouring Belarus. The situation at the borders had become critical during the winter months, with hundreds of people stranded for weeks in freezing conditions. According to Polish border guards, 977 attempts to cross the border were recorded in April 2022 and nearly 4280 since the beginning of 2022, far fewer than November 2021 when between 3000 – 4000 migrants had gathered along the border in just a few days. All at a time when the European Union had promised to accept everyone coming from Ukraine.

In Italy, life was tough for asylum seekers, as most were denied refugee status, barred from legal employment and regularly faced discrimination. In the lead-up to the recent elections, there were reports of several violent attacks against asylum seekers and migrants, including the killing of Alika Ogorchukwu, a Nigerian man living in Italy had sent shockwaves across the country and sparked a set of debates on racism.

Earlier in November, the Italian government refused to allow about 250 people to disembark from two non-governmental rescue ships docked in Catania. Human Rights organisations called out the move by the Italian government that gave the directive to the rescue ships to take them back to international waters stating it put people at risk and violated Italy’s human rights obligations.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been quiet vocal about his anti-refugee views and stance, when he refused to take in refugees in 2018 and calling them “Muslim invaders”. His most recent comments said that countries “are no longer nations” if different races mix.

The current refugee crisis clearly highlights what the problem really is – it’s accepting the unavoidable gap between the inclusive logic of universal human rights and Europe’s prerogative to exclude those whom it believes to be outsiders. Despite international laws and obligations, or the very concept of political asylum, “Europe has displayed the arbitrariness of its borders, both internal and external”. Creating a system that others individuals based on colour, race, and religious background, it continues to reinforce the bias towards human lives.

People who flee their country of origin, flee for a reason, either due to armed conflicts, economic distress, war or political instability, and International law guarantees to each person fleeing persecution the right to request asylum in a safe country. Asylum laws differ in each European state because the EU considers immigration law a matter of national sovereignty. Except what we see being used for people fleeing and reaching out to European countries are terms like “invasion”, “flooding” and “besieging”.

Integration and inclusivity is a mind set, a long term process that requires accommodation from all sides. Refugee social integration is also in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16, which includes integration into the economic, health, educational and social context. How Europe tackles its racism, discrimination and asks itself uncomfortable questions, including it’s legacy of colonialism and participation in the Atlantic Slave trade, will take it one step closer to creating a more racially diverse and inclusive Europe – which “lives up to its ideals and values”.

“Europe needs foreign labour, Europe needs the talents of all its citizens, we are going into a recession, an economic slowdown, and we need all hands on the deck. If you are going showing so much discrimination at home, you are hardly in a position as the EU to stand on the global stage and talk about human rights, and the rights of women and ethnic minorities. You are losing your geopolitical influence and edge that you could have in this very complicated world,” says Islam.

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A young child receives vaccine drops in Pakistan, but the region has experienced an upsurgence of cases because of vaccine refusal. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Nov 29 2022 (IPS)

Vaccine refusal is impacting the eradication of polio in Pakistan.

Pakistan has vaccinated about 35 million children during its door-to-door campaign, but about 500,000 remained unvaccinated due to refusal by their parents, Jawad Khan Polio officer in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, recorded in 2022 so far.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, has reported all 20 polio cases. North Waziristan has detected 17 infections, Lakki Marwat 2 and South Waziristan 1.

Khan says that hesitancy against vaccination is not a new trend, as Pakistan has been facing this problem since the start of the polio-eradication campaign in the 90s.

Of the 17 cases reported in militancy-riddled North Waziristan, 12 were not vaccinated, while five were partially immunized.

Muhammad Shah, whose son was diagnosed with the polio virus in August, told IPS that he had been opposing vaccination because this wasn’t allowed in Islam.

“Our religion Islam says that no medication is permissible before the occurrence of any ailment; therefore, our people defy vaccination to fulfill their religious obligations,” he said. Shah, a religious preacher, says his son will soon recover from the paralysis.

He says he was unrepentant in refusing vaccination of his child and would continue to thwart efforts by vaccinators to inoculate the toddler.

North Waziristan district, located near Afghanistan’s border, has many militants who staunchly oppose vaccination.

“It was the hub of the polio virus till 2014 when militants ruled the area illegitimately as there was a complete ban on all sorts of immunization. The Taliban militants were evicted through a military operation in 2014, and parents started vaccinating their kids,” Sajjad Ahmed, a senior health worker, said.

According to him, polio vaccinations have decreased with the emergence of militancy in the area.

“In the last three months, three persons, including two policemen and one health worker, have been killed by unknown assailants during a polio drive in North Waziristan,” he said.

People are afraid to take part in the campaign due to fear of reprisals by Taliban militants, he said.

Dr Rafiq Khan, associated with polio immunization in the region, told IPS that parents refuse vaccination, arguing that it was a US and Western plot to render recipients impotent and cut the population of Muslims – a baseless argument.

“Alleged Taliban have killed about 70 vaccinators and policemen since 2012. Government deploys 25,000 policemen in each three-day campaign to ensure the safety of workers,” he said.

Khan said that militants are pressuring the people against vaccination, due to which parents weren’t willing to administer jabs to their kids below five years.

“We are also facing fake finger marking of kids. As a standard procedure, our vaccinators mark the thumb of the vaccine recipients with indelible ink so that we know how many children have been immunized,” he said.

However, the parents ask the vaccinators to mark their kids’ fingers without vaccination, he said. In this way, parents deceive the government.

“Now, we have started convincing the parents through community elders and religious scholars to create demand for vaccination,” he said.

The government has enlisted the services of religious scholars to do away with refusals against poliomyelitis.

Maulana Amir Haq, a pro-vaccination cleric, told IPS that they had been holding awareness sessions with people telling them vaccination is allowed in Islam.

“It is the responsibility of the parents to safeguard their kids against diseases and vaccination aimed to prevent the crippling ailments. There, parents should fulfill their religious duty and inoculate their sons and daughters,” he said.

He said that laboratory reports confirm vaccines given to Pakistan’s children are safe and don’t contain any ingredient to sterilise the recipients. The situation is changing because we now reach hardcore refusal cases and vaccinate them.

Federal Health Minister Abdul Qadir Patel said that it is crucial to understand that the only protection from polio is vaccination, and parents should protect their children against disability through free immunization.

“We want to wipe out the virus and safeguard not only our own kids but all around the world,” he told IPS.

Polio will keep haunting us until we interrupt transmission, Federal Health Secretary Dr. Muhammad Fakhre Alam said.

On August 31, a 16-year-old boy was diagnosed positive for polio in Waziristan, which shows how robust Pakistan’s virus detection network is because it highlights that we can identify polio cases in children outside the usually expected age, he said.

National Emergency Operations Centre Coordinator for polio, Dr Shahzad Baig, expressed concerns about the spread of wild poliovirus as millions of people in the country are displaced by recent floods.

“The scale of the current calamity is absolutely devastating. As part of the polio programme, our network of health workers is here to support in every way we can, but I am deeply concerned about the virus gaining a foothold as millions of people leave their homes and look for refuge elsewhere,” he said.

The province of Balochistan and parts of southern Punjab, and 23 districts of Sindh were unable to hold a vaccination drive as floods swept away homes and villages around the country. Despite the extreme climatic conditions, polio teams reached children in all accessible areas, he said.

Neighbouring Afghanistan is facing the same problems; however, it has detected only two cases this year.

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A flooded village in Matiari, in the Sindh province of Pakistan. Credit: UNICEF/Asad Zaidi

By Mariz Tadros
BRIGHTON, UK, Nov 14 2022 (IPS)

Climate change reductionism – assuming the causes and the redress for those suffering the worst impacts of extreme weather lies with climate change alone – undermines the rights of religiously marginalised persons, but broadening whose rights are being advocated for in climate change can offer redress.

As COP27 negotiations continue, we must be alive to the widespread discrimination behind why some face more devastation than others, and pursue climate justice policies sensitive to the religiously marginalised and to the freedom of religion or belief (Forb).

Climate change and religion

In response to the devastating floods in Pakistan, a top political leader in the Sindh province of Pakistan attributed the destruction caused as a punishment by God, and added that the situation will improve if the people turn away from their sins.

This is just one example of how across the globe now power holders are weaponising religion to cover up unaccountable governance. But power holders’ use of religion to cover up for their failures only worsens the situation for the vulnerable, many of whom happen to be religious minorities.

Sindh province has one of the largest concentrations of people living in extreme poverty in Pakistan, and one of the highest religious minority populations (Hindu and Christian), in the country. This religious minority population also happen to be among the poorest, especially since they belong to the scheduled castes.

Secretary-General António Guterres (right, back to camera) along with Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan visit the National Flood Response and Coordination Centre in Islamabad. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Like other Pakistanis in Sindh, the religiously marginalised poor have lost everything due to the unprecedented monsoon floods but they experience an added vulnerability: systemic discrimination on account of their religious identity.

This is manifest in their exclusion from large scale poverty alleviation programmes as found in recent research. This underlying vulnerability and discrimination is why it is wrong to attribute the devastation that religiously ‘otherised’ people experience in the face of natural disasters to climate change alone.

Climate change reductionism

A recent report by the UK’s International Development Committee argues that climate change is also a driver of religious discrimination and mass atrocities because of competition to control natural resources and wealth in conditions of scarcity.

The recognition the report gives to the interconnections between environmental, political, economic and social phenomena is very much welcome, but attributing the causes of atrocities or religious cleansing to climate change alone is anathema to the protection of persons’ freedom of religion or belief.

Climate change reductionism in this way assumes the causes – and therefore redress – of all evils lie with climate.

As Rigg and Mason suggest, climate science reductionism omits the role that structural factors such as “market forces, discriminatory policies, state corruption and inefficiency, and historical marginality play in people’s lived experience”.

Climate change may in some circumstances accentuate the impact of religious inequalities but we need to press on for accountability of power holders who deliberately exclude and ‘otherise’ those who are different through their discourses, policies and practices.

Religious and cultural beliefs benefiting the environment

In the name of countering climate change, we should also never pit sustainability against inclusivity in development policies and practices. Highlighted by an Amnesty International warning ahead of COP27, there are risks from climate protection strategies that exclude indigenous people, whose norms and beliefs are held sacred, even if it is not termed “religion”.

Research from the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development (CREID) showed how the Uganda Wildlife Authority forbade indigenous people access to particular territories containing religious shrines, out of the belief that they were destroying the flora and fauna.

When the Bamba and Bakonjo people of Uganda were allowed to practice some of the religious and customary knowledge, this actually led to greater protection of the biodiversity and integrity of the habitat.

This shows that when people experience intertwining inequalities, including marginalisation based religion or belief, it’s not only that they become vulnerable to prejudice, but opportunities for building resilience to the effects of climate change are missed.

This does not mean that all expressions of people’s religious practices or beliefs are conducive to preserving the environment, we know this is not the case. However, another example can be found in the Middle East where extreme weather events have wreaked havoc on crops.

Here, the Copts – the largest religious minority in the region – have developed a system of how the land is to be harvested to remove social stigma and make sure that no one – Muslim or Copt- goes without.

While we know a multitude of measures are needed to minimize the impact of climate change on crops, the benefits of adapting the knowledge and heritage practices of those whose religious heritage has been side-lined are for everyone- not just the members of the religious minority.

So, whether it is powerful leaders wrongly weaponizing religion in order to avoid accountability and when climate change-related disasters strike, discrimination against religious minorities driving greater vulnerability to its impacts, or beliefs and knowledges of the land – prejudice against the religiously marginalized actually has a great deal to do with climate change.

Therefore, during this month’s COP27 climate summit (which concludes November 18) , freedom of religion or belief must be considered in policies to redress climate inequalities if we are serious about going beyond climate change reductionism and truly advancing climate justice.

Professor Mariz Tadros is Research Fellow at Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Director of CREID

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The 7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Nov 9 2022 (IPS)

In this year’s COP 27 two-weeklong summit in Egypt, which concludes November 18, a rough count indicates there will be 40 different sessions organised by, for, and about, religious engagements in/on climate change and related issues. This is likely the highest number of events by and around religious actors, organised at a COP event.

The reason? Religions, religious engagement, interfaith, etc., are the flavour of our geopolitical times. For better or worse.

His Holiness Pope Francis and His Eminence the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar were just addressing a major conference in Bahrain on East-West relations, with the King of Bahrain. After also putting in a similar appearance and speaking together with the President of Kazakhstan, in September. Both countries were hosting major international meetings of religious leaders, in the fanciest of hotels, convened from many corners of the world, replete with lavish food banquets and generous hospitality and care for their every need.

I should know, as I am a most grateful recipient, albeit not a religious leader, but an aspiring servant to religious multilateralism. But I run ahead of myself here.

In convening, countries appear to be competing with Saudi Arabia, which hosted such a seminal gathering (in May 2022, bringing together Buddhist and Hindu faith leaders, for the first time, as equals with their Muslim, Christian and Jewish brethren), as well as with the UAE, Qatar, and Oman, who are also hosting international gatherings of religious leaders this very month.

This year alone, there have been over 50 meetings of religious actors, that is more than 2 per month, and this is not a comprehensive tally.

Each of these major and rather expensive conferences, provides a platform not unlike the UN General Assembly, where each leader gets his (for invariably they are mostly men) time to speak, often eloquently, about their own faith tradition.

Each of these speeches regales with how diligent the efforts of faith/community/organisations are, to secure peace and human dignity for all people. As they remind of the spiritual wisdom each faith upholds, they also speak of past and upcoming initiatives, meant to safeguard dignity for all. Sometimes they also remember to speak about the planet and our responsibility to save it.

As someone who spent decades serving at the United Nations and in diverse international academic and development organisations, and now listening to the religious actors speaking, I find myself asking the same question: if each of these governments, and now these religious bodies, are working so hard and serving so amazingly, why is our world the way it is?

Why are so many governments and peoples and communities at war with one another inside and outside nation-state boundaries? Why are we listening to hate speech from every type of mouth and all types of platforms given ample media attention? Why are arms and drugs the biggest industries?

Why are the rich getting richer and the poor poorer while our planet becomes more bare and parched in one part, and flooded to death, in another? Why is violence of all kinds, inside families and within all communities, a pandemic? Why are medicines, and now even values, a commodity to trade power and privilege with?

Why is nuclear war back on the agenda of consciousness and politics? In short, why do we hate/fear one another one another so much, and so deeply?

Because what ails our multilateral system, in spite of the speeches (and efforts) of political leaders (in and out of electoral times for those fortunate enough to have genuine elections of their national leaders), and now also in spite of the speeches and works of religious actors, is fundamentally the same: each to his own. Multilateral – as an adjective defined by the Oxford Dictionary, where “three or more groups, nations, etc. take part”, is an endangered species.

The United Nations, the premier multilateral entity of 193 governments, is struggling to strengthen multilateralism, yet not necessarily by looking internally at its own behemoth infrastructures, or culture. Ever seen an organogramme of the United Nations system? One should. It is a universe of wonder where every human and non-human thought and action appears to have a dedicated office or structure of some sort.

But before we point fingers at the political multilaterals (who are remarkably good at either ignoring faith communities, or using them to the hilt, or both), we need to ask ourselves, how often do we see or hear of “three or more” religious institutions (not of the same faith) working together to actually deliver needs to diverse peoples around the world?

The answer is, that beyond the speeches, the lavish meetings and innumerable projects, multilateral religious collaboration (where money and efforts from many and diverse are pooled to serve, together, the needs of all, regardless of gender, national, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation) remains rare.

Please do not misunderstand: religious institutions are working to serve hundreds of millions of people on every area of need, humanitarian and development – and now also political. Just as Indigenous Peoples are the original carers of all nature, religious leaders and institutions are the original carers for myriad human needs.

There is plenty of evidence about this. HIV and AIDS, Ebola and the Covid pandemic highlighted how critical religiously managed health infrastructure is to communities – rich and poor. A glance at the education sectors, psycho-social care, migrants and displaced peoples, and other humanitarian areas of need, will show clearly that religious institutions still serve many, widely, and in the remotest areas.

So, it is not a dearth of service to humanity that diverse faith actors need to come to terms with. It is the famine of multireligious collaborative services – as in giving and doing together. At Religions for Peace, for over half a century of supporting interreligious platforms serve the common good in over 95 countries, we live the challenges of multi religious collaboration, on peace mediation, food and human security, migration and displacement, education, gender and women’s empowerment, and trying to save together, the world’s remaining rainforests, through, among other efforts, the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative.

We know that even within the realms of religion, the manner of dealing with these challenges tends to mirror prevailing colonial mindsets, with tendencies to give prominence to one religion, insistence on singular branding, and jockeying for more political influence and financial resourcing.

More and more faith leaders – young and older – are (rightfully) expecting financial remuneration for their time and energies spent in international work, thus slowly but surely reversing a trend of volunteerism that used to uniquely characterise religious service and giving.

Just as governments are failing to systematically work together as inhabitants and leaders of one planet, and just as too many civil society groups and corporations compete for branding and ‘market share’, so too, do religious organisations.

Some religious entities are replicating a secular catastrophic practice of seeking to build other/new/different/more ‘specialised’ entities and initiatives, rather than shoulder the heavy cross of seeking to work together in spite of the damning challenges (both puns intended). In so doing, many of these religious actors are effectively dispersing efforts.

One of the many lessons of failed multilateralism is that more, or different, or new and/or specialised, may well be the well-intentioned road to hell.

When it comes to actually investing in one another’s work so that they are speaking as one and serving together, many religious leaders and leaders of religious organisations will smile, say some nice words, and move on to the next sermon/meeting/international conference, or nevertheless doggedly pursue their own special/unique initiative(s).

Such that we have now so many religious initiatives, dominated by one or a bilateral religious partnership, or two and a half (relatively tokenistic representation of another faith), working on the same challenges, facing all of humanity.

What ails multilateralism is not the absence of resources, tools, values, the clarity of the crisis, or even the will and creativity to serve. Multilateralism fails when some want only their values, truths, communities, nations, cultures, security needs, and/or specific institutions, to prevail.

And with the failure of multilateralism is a failure of common humanity, and planetary survival.

Prof. Azza Karam is Secretary General, Religions for Peace

IPS UN Bureau

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The Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. June 2022. Credit: CIAT/Neil Palmer

By Alon Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Nov 9 2022 (IPS)

The electoral defeat of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is a triumph for everyone who is concerned about the peril of climate change. Bolsonaro’s well-deserved defeat could help save the Amazon rainforest, which has been ravaged under his criminal rule, and the process of reversing the looming climate change catastrophe can begin

Righting the Wrong

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil represents a historic chance to begin undoing some of the great harm that was inflicted on Brazil’s Amazon rainforest over the last four years.

Since taking office in January 2019, Bolsonaro has ravaged the earth for short-sighted gains, turning back environmental regulations that any thinking human being would wish to preserve in the face of such unprecedented global degradation.

Bolsonaro systematically dismantled environmental protections so that those who could not care less about the environment would be free to clear the land and turn it into pastures without any accountability. The unfolding crisis of the Amazon is a catastrophe for climate change, biodiversity, Indigenous people of the region, and the untold wonders that human science has yet to understand.

A 2020 study published in the journal Nature has shown that if the systematic destruction of the Brazilian Amazon continues unabated, much of it could become an arid savannah, or even “dry scrubland,” within decades given the rate of deforestation, largely due to deliberate and illegal fires that are meant to permanently convert forest into pastureland.

With the devastation of the rainforests has also come the devastation of those Indigenous people whose homelands and livelihood are being destroyed by deforestation.

Just imagine, between August 2020 and July 2021 over 5,000 square miles of rainforest were lost in the Brazilian Amazon – that is an area larger than the land area of Connecticut. In fact, under Bolsonaro the rate of destruction reached a ten-year high, as his administration turned a blind eye to illegal logging, the deforestation of Indigenous land, and, as Amnesty International notes, the “violence against those living on and seeking to defend their territories.”

Under Bolsonaro’s reckless and corrupt rule, his government deliberately “weakened environmental law enforcement agencies, undermining their ability to effectively sanction environmental crime or detect exports of illegal timber,” as Human Rights Watch describes. Fines for illegal logging in the Brazilian Amazon were suspended by presidential decree at the beginning of October 2019.

Illegal seizures of land on Reserves and Indigenous territories in Brazil’s Amazon became routine, as Bolsonaro slashed the budget of agencies that protected the jungle from unauthorized clearing.

Criminal organizations, aptly called “rainforest mafias,” allow cattle ranchers to operate with impunity, and according to the US State Department possess the “logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to protect their interests.”

It is hard to fathom the sheer scale of destruction that was wreaked by Bolsonaro upon the Amazon. Such rampant deforestation is tragic on many levels — it is destroying habitats and countless species being pushed to the brink of extinction when we are already in the midst of a mass extinction of this planet’s animals, insects, and plants.

It is hastening the onslaught of climate change when we are already facing the dire effects of a warming planet. And it is obliterating the lands of Indigenous people who have already suffered and been persecuted and murdered for decades.

To be sure, the extent of devastation of the rainforest under Bolsonaro was so enormous that we can barely begin to comprehend the loss to humanity, to science, and to our knowledge of undiscovered plants and animals that hold the answers to questions of which we have not even dreamt. This is a shameful loss to the entire world and to generations hence.

The Bolsonaro government failed miserably to act as a responsible custodian of the Amazon and Pantanal (the world’s largest tropical wetland located mostly within Brazil, which along with the Amazon has some of the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystems) — instead it helped in every way it can to hasten this unimaginable devastation.

Dr Michelle Kalamandeen, a tropical ecologist on the Amazon rainforest, observed that “When a forest is lost, it is gone forever. Recovery may occur but never 100% recovery.”

We must bring this travesty to a halt. By this wanton and dismally short-sighted decimation of the rainforests we are depriving humanity of knowledge which could alter medicine, improve our lives and transform the world, from the way we build our cities to the ways we make our homes.

Plant and animal species inspire new technologies, new forms of architecture, new kinds of design and materiality. Yet probably less than 1 percent of rainforest trees and plants have been studied by science — though not less than 25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients. By allowing rampant deforestation to continue, we are doing ourselves and future generations untold and unconscionable harm.

Let us remember that the Amazon does not simply belong to the countries in which it happens to be found – it is not the exclusive resource of those companies that are able to exploit it, appropriate its resources, and destroy it with impunity.

The Amazon is part of our collective patrimony, a heritage beyond price which we are duty-bound to pass on to future generations, regardless of the profits that we may yield from its systematic rape.

And let us make no mistake, or mince words—the Amazon is being raped hour by hour, month by month, year by year, and the world is watching in silence as this violation is repeated daily. The time is running out for us to act in a meaningful way to stop this mindless decimation of one of the world’s greatest natural wonders.

With the election of Lula as President of Brazil, we now have a historic opportunity to support and encourage him to immediately start working on a plan to reverse Bolsonaro’s disastrous policies in three main areas: the environment, public security, and scientific discoveries.

First, President Lula should start by prohibiting deforestation, illegal logging, and land grabbing. To that end, he must stop short of nothing to pass a new law to be enshrined in the Brazilian constitution that puts an end to the systematic destruction of the rainforest. The law should include mandatory prison sentences as well as heavy fines to prevent cattle ranchers and illegal loggers from committing such crimes ever again with impunity.

Second, he must develop a comprehensive plan to protect the human rights of Indigenous communities from the criminal networks that use violence, intimidation, and terror to cow the locals into silence. He should make such a plan the center of his domestic policy while improving security and providing the necessary funding for environmental agencies to perform their tasks with zeal.

Third, President Lula should invite the global scientific community to further study the wonders of the Amazon and in partnership with them initiate scores of scientific projects from which the whole world would benefit, while preserving the glory of the Amazon as one of the central pillars in the fight against climate change.

Finally, President Biden, who understands full well the danger that climate change poses, should provide political support and financial assistance to President Lula to help him reverse some of the damage that was inflicted on the Amazon by his predecessor.

President Lula must view his rise to power and the responsibility placed on his shoulders as nothing less than a holy mission that will help save the planet from the man-made looming catastrophes of climate change.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University (NYU). He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies for over 20 years.

IPS UN Bureau

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Colosseum at the Prayer with the Pope and the representatives of the workd’s religions. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

By Elena L. Pasquini
ROME, Nov 7 2022 (IPS)

Arms are raised, stretched out towards the sky, holding white cards with the word “peace” written in different languages. A girl, a refugee from Syria, reads the Rome’s “Appeal for peace”: “With firm conviction, we say: no more war! Let’s stop all conflicts […] Let dialogue be resumed to nullify the threat of nuclear weapons.” Pope Francis singed it in front of the people gathered at the Colosseum, holding the word “peace” in their hands, as representatives of the world’s religions did as well. Shortly before, members of those different religions gathered for prayer to invoke peace in their different traditions—a prayer that is “a cry” inside the ancient amphitheater.

“This year our prayer has become a heartfelt plea, because today peace has been gravely violated, assaulted and trampled upon, and this in Europe, on the very continent that in the last century endured the horrors of the two world wars – and we are experiencing a third. Sadly, since then, wars have continued to cause bloodshed and to impoverish the earth. Yet the situation that we are presently experiencing is particularly dramatic…”, the Pontiff warned. “We are not neutral, but allied for peace, and for that reason we invoke the ius pacis as the right of all to settle conflicts without violence,” he added.

The same “raised hands” marched for peace on Saturday in Rome when around 100.000 people from different organizations called for a ceasefire in Ukraine and in all the other armed conflicts.

The prayer with the Pope was the last act of a three-day interreligious dialogue, held at the end of October in the Italian capital and introduced by the presidents of the French and Italian republics, Emmanuel Macron and Sergio Mattarella. The first convocation was in Assisi, in 1986, willed by John Paul II. Since then, it has been promoted by the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Christian community whose fundamentals are prayer, serving the poor and marginalized, and peace. For the role it has played in mediating conflicts, it has been named the “UN of Trastevere” after the city center neighborhood where it is headquartered and where the peace agreement in Mozambique was signed thirty years ago.

Flags at the rally for peace in Rome on Saturday. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

Leaders and believers of various religions and secular humanists have woven relationships, prayed, and confronted each other. They hand over a map drawn by many voices, too many to account for in the space of an article. “The cry for peace” meeting is also an invitation to “do”. It offers a map of concrete steps, things done and to do, best practices, imagination, with a key word: dialogue. “And dialogue does not make all reasons equal at all, it does not avoid the question of responsibility and never mistakes the aggressor with the attacked. Indeed, precisely because it knows them well, it can look for ways to stop the geometric and implacable logic of war, which is [escalation] if other solution are not found”, explained Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, president of the Italian Episcopal Conference.

World scenarios are made even more worrying by the risk of nuclear escalation in the Ukrainian war—a war on the doorstep of that part of Europe that has cultivated peace inside, but that has let armed conflict flourish elsewhere. “The lack of this commitment [outside Europe] let the war reach its borders, indeed—in some ways—penetrate within it, even in its deepest fibers,” said Agostino Giovagnoli, historian of the Community of Sant’Egidio. “Today war threatens Europe also because it threatens the alternative imagination which is at the basis of the European architecture. War, in fact, is banal: it does not consist only of a fight on the ground but it is also a form of ‘single thought,’” he added.

This “single thought” has changed the European attitude, according to Nico Piro, special correspondent and war journalist of the RAI, the Italian national public broadcasting company. “After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Europe as in Italy, a political monobloc in favor of [fighting] has emerged from right to left. It is standing out what I named ‘PUB’ [Pensiero Unico Bellicista], a Bellicist-Single-Thought … [It] projects a stigma on anyone who asks for peace, on anyone who has a doubt or raises a criticism of the idea that fueling the war serves to end it […],” he said. “What has peace become then? No longer a tool to stop and prevent armed conflicts but a by-product of war.”

Yet, among the many voices that met in Rome, one word resounds, whispered and then said: kairos. The “critical moment” is now. The war in Ukraine is the “wake-up call” that must be grasped, that cannot be missed, widening our view from Europe to those never-ending conflicts all over the world. Among the many lessons from Sant’Egidio’s dialogue, two should be learned to grasp that kairos: working together daily to build peace in every single life and returning to working together as a community of states, relaunching the multilateral message.

Sant’Egidio’s interreligious dialogue “The cry for peace”. Credit: Elena L. Pasquini

“Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world,” the Talmud says. Or “an entire world” as Riccardo di Segni, chief rabbi of Rome, suggested, since every human being has the potential to create “a new, unique world.” Thus, peace means recognizing the value of each single life, in sharp contrast to the logic of war, in which “the life of the enemy is no longer life. It’s not the same. [That’s] war, [which] dehumanizes everyone a priori in the name of life,” according to Mario Marazziti, member of the Sant’Egidio community. This also happens here, in Europe, where those fleeing wars, hunger, and persecution are allowed to die at sea, “dehumanized,” reduced to numbers.

Unique are the lives to be saved, but also unique are the lives of those who save and of those who build peace by “taking care.”

Gégoire Ahongbonon has a chain in his hand. He puts it around his neck and shows the heavy metal rings to the audience. There was a man chained with that same metal, naked, tied to a tree, like many others. His only fault was a psychiatric disorder. Ahongbonon saved over 70,000 people, “sentenced to death” because they were ill. He is the founder of the Association Saint Camille de Lellis that works in five countries of sub-Saharan Africa. He asked a tough question: “Are we different from them? Are we different from this person, we? […] What did they do wrong? They were born like all of us.”

Saving those lives is already making peace, eradicating the roots of violence and discrimination and planting those of peace, as Mjid Noorjehan Adbul is doing in Mozambique. She is the clinical head of the network of centers for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, opened by Sant’Egidio’s DREAM program, a program of excellence operating in 10 countries. She, a Muslim, is surprised when people ask her why she works with Catholics: “We all have the same goal,” she replies. For twenty years, she has been working to ensure health care for those who cannot afford it. In fact, she was the first one to use antiretroviral therapy in her country. “There is no peace without care,” she said, quoting Pope Francis – “care” for eradicating “the culture of waste, of indifference, of confrontation.” Ex-patients, like those “women who have experienced the stigma firsthand and put themselves at the service of other ill people,” are now helping to build a new health culture – she explained.

Saving lives, restoring hope, choosing the paths of dialogue, and designing an architecture of peaceful coexistence should also be the aim of politics. The multilateral message, legacy of the twentieth century’s “unitary tensions,” however, needs new impetus.

“Those who work for peace are realistic, not naive!” Cardinal Zuppi said. Realistic as it was Pope Bendetto XV that called for an end to the “useless slaughter” that was the First World War. He had a very clear vision of the need for a multilateral architecture, a league among nations that could guarantee lasting peace. A realistic way to design the future still seems to be the one built on a permanent, global agorà that creates space for dialogue. “No multilateralism, no survival,” argued Jeffery Sachs, a speaker at one of the fourteen forums that shaped the meeting agenda. However, the United Nations – the organization founded on the ruins of the Second World War to make the “no more war” reality – risks to be “delegitimized”. That’s something to be avoided, according to Zuppi. “… We are aware that the United Nations is a community of nations. Its every failure represents a weakening of international determination and makes us all losers,” warned Shayk Muhammad bin Abdul Karim al Issa, general secretary of the Muslim World League.

Today, however, multilateralism needs to adapt: “We need a multilateralism that is just and inclusive, with equitable representation and voice for developing countries”, said Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, Undersecretary for Africa in the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affaris and Peace operations. “At heart of [UN’s effort to adapt] is the need to engage earlier and proactively, and not to wait react to a crisis after it has escalated”, she added. A multilateralism that does not act only after a conflict breaks out, but that is able to prevent it and to build peace also by supporting “the resilience of local communities”.

The Kairos, the right moment, is now even if there is war in Ukraine and elsewhere because peace must be built even when war is raging. “How to live now?” wonder those who have seen the destruction and the ferocity of an armed conflict, like Olga Makar, who took care of Sant’Egidio school of peace in Ukraine. “This is the question every Ukrainian asks him or herself. In those first days of war, when I felt my life was broken, I found an answer: our houses are destroyed, our cities are in ruins, but our love, our solidarity, our ability to help others, our dreams cannot be destroyed”.

Words that echo in those of Pope Francis: “Let us not be infected by the perverse rationale of war; let us not fall into the trap of hatred for the enemy. Let us once more put peace at the heart of our vision for the future, as the primary goal of our personal, social and political activity at every level. Let us defuse conflicts by the weapon of dialogue”.

IPS UN Bureau

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Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

By Christine M. Sequenzia and Soraya M. Deen
LOS ANGELES / WASHINGTON DC, Oct 21 2022 (IPS)

Eleven out of 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) still sanction the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy, silencing their citizens and emboldening violence by non-state actors.

For the past 70 years, Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has condemned capital punishment for religious offenses, a global standard shared during our recent visit to the UN headquarters in New York.

As a prelude to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) high-level meetings in mid-September, we led the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Roundtable Campaign to Eliminate Blasphemy and Apostasy Laws, urging UN members to stand in strong support during two paramount resolutions calling for an end to the death penalty and extrajudicial killings.

We urge the insertion of language codifying the death penalty never being imposed as a sanction for non-violent conduct such as blasphemy and apostasy. The effort produced an encouraging response by Nigerian third committee officials who renewed their commitment to freedom of religion or belief by supporting embedded language in both the moratorium on the death penalty and a resolution on renouncing the death penalty for extrajudicial killings.

In the days that followed our visit, the world has witnessed the outrage of human rights activists and concerned global citizens with the death of Masha Amini, an Iranian Muslim woman who was arrested and subsequently died in the custody of Iranian morality police for a violation of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s compulsory hijab mandate.

Brutal cases like these will only cease when government officials in Iran, and other egregious human rights violators, listen to the cries of their people and uphold globally recognized human rights declarations. These include statutes supporting international religious freedom or belief, and the repeal of apostasy and blasphemy laws.

When most countries around the world and the majority of Muslim nations are taking concrete steps to abolish capital punishment for perceived religious offenses such as blasphemy and apostasy, some refuse to modernize their legislation, thus branding themselves as the worst violators of internationally recognized basic human rights.

This staunch obsession with upholding persecutory laws and implementing the harshest of punishments, violates religious freedoms – the right to life and the right to freedom of religion or belief. This misinterpretation of scripture is an abuse of Islam, tarnishing the image of Muslims around the world and a disregard to Gods mercy, a belief that transcends faith orientation.

The multidisciplinary and multifaith delegation from the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Campaign urged UN members, including: Luxemburg, Canada, and Sri Lanka, to raise their voices loudly in favor of embedded international religious freedom language in two resolutions which will come up for a vote during the UNGA in November.

Penholders Australia and Costa Rica are calling for a moratorium on the death penalty which is only supported by the IRF Campaign with the addition of specific language ensuring the death penalty never be imposed for non-violent conduct such as apostasy or blasphemy.

Likewise, Finland, as penholder for the UNGA resolution on extrajudicial executions, is being asked by global advocates to add language on freedom of religion or belief, emphasizing the necessity for States to take effective measures to repeal laws currently allowing the death penalty for religious offences, such as criminalization of conversion and expression of religion or belief as a preventative measure.

Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is clear – everyone has the right to freedom of religion or belief. Yet, 11 States today maintain the death penalty for apostasy and blasphemy. We raise the voices of the voiceless, such as Pakistani woman Aneeqa Ateeq who was sentenced to death for blasphemy in January 2022 after being manipulated into a religious debate online by a man who she romantically refused.

Also, an 83-year-old Somali man, Hassan Tohow Fidow, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy by an al-Shabaab militant court and subsequently horrifically executed by firing squad; and a 22-year-old Nigerian Islamic gospel singer Yahaya Sharif-Aminu who was sentenced to death for blasphemy because one of his songs allegedly praised an Imam higher than the Prophet.

As an outcome of our UN advocacy, we pray that the 11 Muslim member states—Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen– join in the common-sense repeal of the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy as a great step toward becoming civilized nations.

The majority of OIC member nations who do not sanction the death penalty for religious offenses should be regarded as examples of modernity and humanity and their path to restore and uphold basic human rights should be replicated.

The Qur’an says, “There shall be no compulsion in religion; the right way has become distinct from the wrong way.” (Qur’an 2:256). Likewise, we read passages like 18:26:, “And say, ‘The truth is from your Lord. Whoever wills – let him believe. And whoever wills – let him disbelieve,” and “whoever among you renounces their own faith and dies a disbeliever, their deeds will become void in this life and in the Hereafter (Qur’an 2:217).”

The holy book, which serves as a moral compass for the laws in OIC member nations, upholds the right to freedom of religion or belief which has been recognized by the OIC majority.

As has been recently witnessed in Iran, when civil society activates around globally recognized human rights, the world takes note. The OIC asserts its purpose “to preserve and promote the foundational Islamic values of peace, compassion, tolerance, equality, justice and human dignity” and “to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, good governance, rule of law, democracy, and accountability”.

To that end, with the passage of both critical UN resolutions, OIC members will face the controversial and politically sensitive task of calling out other OIC colleagues who continue to violate human rights by imposing the death sentence upon individuals for exercising their right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

We assert that it is a societal problem as much as it is a reflection of the deficiency of democratic values and principles.

Embedding international religious freedom language in both resolutions calling for the repeal of the death penalty will be strengthened with the strong support of the 46 OIC nations and other human rights champion nations in the days ahead.

We are encouraged by Saudi Arabian scholar, Dr. Mohammad Al-Issa of the Muslim World Alliance, who travels the world sharing the unanimously approved Charter of Makkah – a document affirming differences among people and beliefs as part of God’s will and wisdom.

Our collective voice must be unwavering in its call and commitment to repeal the death penalty for blasphemy and apostasy as a primary step towards upholding theologies of love and compassion, building toward human flourishing.

Dr. Christine M. Sequenzia, MDiv is co-chair IRF Campaign to Eliminate Blasphemy and Apostasy Laws; Soraya M. Deen, Esq. is lawyer, community organizer, founder, Muslim Women Speakers, and co-chair International Religious Freedom (IRF) Women’s Working Group

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The American author Sue Monk Kidd’s award-winning novel The Book of Longings has a sensational beginning, despite the simplicity of the phraseology: It starts: “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus bin Joseph of Nazareth”. It would be impossible for anyone not to swallow this bait with enormous curiosity, and follow through with reading what is well and truly a ‘page-turner’. The book is crafted to be breezy and exciting, necessary perhaps to better deliver its message. This historical work of fiction was the subject of discussion at a recent seminar organized by the Dhaka -based ‘The Reading Circle’. The event was held in a ‘hybrid’ format, an experiment of the Circle in consonance with the evolving practices of the Covid era. There was a core of participants in Dhaka, and other members joining in from London, Paris, and Singapore. Chaired by Professor Razia Khan, the list of speakers and commentators included Niaz Zaman, Nusrat Huq, Tanveerul Haque, Ameenah Ahmed, Shahruk Rahman, Asfa Husain, Nazmun Nahar, Sarazeen Ahana and myself. The following essay is based on my remarks made on the occasion.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

That is mainly because her work is not about faith, but about feminism. She has a theme, and despite the biblical backdrop, it is not theology. It is one that has been a center of aspiration of half of humanity through ages, of women in a world dominated by men. It is a simple one, but historically has been one of the most difficult goals of humanity to achieve. It is that women should have the equal rights and opportunities as men. Just as it should, in deference to its importance at this time and age,this topic had featured time and again in the Reading Circle’s discussions . It was reflected in the yearnings of Briseis when the Circle read Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Or in the passionate writings of Virginia Woolf when it discussed her A Room of One’s Own. And now in the longings of Ana in Sue Monk Kidd’s book. I would like to refer in this connection to a recent part-autobiographical tome by Glennon Doyle entitled “Untamed“. Having felt like a caged animal much of her life, Glennon Doyle has written about how she had learnt to break society’s rules, upend expectations, and rebuild her emotions and life. She was inspired by a Cheetah in a zoo!

Ana represents a prototype different from many others of her sex, though there is indeed a lot of Ana in a lot of women. She is wild, free spirited and untamed. She is intensely modern, a ‘woke’ person by contemporary standards, entertaining radical ideas about societal change. She even tries to shun motherhood, believed then, as now, to be a blessed state for every woman. She tries it by secretly using herbal contraceptives, which would be unthinkable in Nazareth, particularly in a household all Christendom was to worship as the ‘Holy Family’. She is extremely worldly, and not at all spiritual. Her prayer inscribed in an incantation bowl gifted to her by an aunt, is not about any kind of redemption from sin. Instead, she seeks blessings for the ‘largeness’ in her, a very individualistic longing, and seemingly Un-Christian. She is by no means a Mary Sue, the perfect woman in literature, one without failings or flaws. And yet the author shows Jesus as bestowing on her love, empathy, and understanding. And who can be more Christian in spirit than the Nazarene himself? So, is Sue Monk Kidd seeking to obtain for Ana’s behavior the highest possible social sanction?

Now for the character in the book of Jesus himself. The characterization of Jesus must have been the most difficult challenge to our writer. In Biblical terms, Jesus’ ministry to spread ‘the Word’ did not really begin till he was thirty. But in Christian belief emanating from the New Testament he was already divine when born, recognized by the three Magis who came to worship him with gifts at his birth! In the novel, Mary hardly behaves like the keeper of what would be the greatest secret on earth. She provides no clue as to Jesus’ divinity, remains totally mum about her experience at the Annunciation. This was (it’s not in the book but in the Bible) when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and announced the incarnation of baby-Christ in her womb, stating “Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee!” and a startled Mary, quickly regaining composure, responded ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord’!

Some Church-oriented critics of the book, who, while admiring the work of fiction, have opined that a Christian reader to better appreciate the book should be well-grounded in the Bible, otherwise he or she would be apt to misunderstand the essence of the contents. Be that as it may, Jesus here comes through, not as a leader of the Alpha- Male type like the mighty Achilles of the Trojan wars, but a Beta-male, compassionate and forgiving, who leads by kindness. He believes the kingdom of God will come by acts of love, rather than by the power of the sword.

This view is not at all shared by Judas, the betrayer of Christ, a complex personality in the book in which he is the adopted brother of Ana, apart from being a friend and later, disciple of Jesus. In the Biblical narration Judas gives Jesus away to his captors ‘for thirty pieces of silver’. In this book he is pictured as a political firebrand, a zealot who thinks for the Kingdom of God to come, the Romans must be driven away from Palestine, if need be, by the sword. He views Jesus’ mild ways as an impediment to his objective, and hence takes steps to remove him. There also have been interpretations of Judas, in some revisionist thinking, as someone who helps Christ fulfill his destiny by dying in the cross for the sins of man. Carl Trueman in his epochal work “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” has noted that radical thinkers and writers have driven the rapidly changing cultural mores in the Christian ethos with their ideas in recent times. Perhaps our writer can be seen as one such.

Sue Monk Kidd’s deference to tradition, however, is reflected in the way she depicts Mary, the mother of Jesus. Kidd shows Mary to be pious and pristine, truly without fault, as a woman, a mother, or even as a mother -in-law! Possibly the author uses a modicum of circumspection by not pushing the envelope too far. For me a tad surprising was that, perhaps being an American and not English, the author barely mentions a character, without developing it at all, who later emerges as a prime figure in English perceptions. It is Joseph of Arimathea who appears in this book only at Christ’s entombment. English literary tradition has it that Joseph of Arimathea had hosted the boychild Christ in the Mendip mountains in Somerset, which I had the occasion to visit.

This myth of the boy-Christ’s visit to England of course seeks to fill the void in our knowledge of Jesus’s life during his boyhood and youth, just as our author does in her book. The poet Blake highlights it in his New Jerusalem, England’s unofficial National Anthem when he rhetorically asks: “Did those feet in ancient times tread upon England’s mountains green?“. Since then, Jerusalem in English has become a metaphor for ‘heaven’, a blissful state in which many Britishers would like to see their country to be!

However, the message of our author lay, not in theology nor in history but in a somewhat fanciful response of our author to feminist intellectual and, at times, emotional urges. If Jesus had a wife, she would be the most silenced person on earth! Sue Monk Kidd only sought to give her a voice. This is indeed also the voice of everywoman, everywhere, and in every age!

Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury is the Honorary Fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies, NUS. He is a former Foreign Advisor (Foreign Minister) of Bangladesh and President and Distinguished Fellow of Cosmos Foundation. The views addressed in the article are his own. He can be reached at: isasiac @nus.edu.sg

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving Prime Minister of Japan, has died. It was a murder caused by a personal grudge rather than political terrorism. And it was not a direct grudge against Mr. Abe. A religious group had supported Mr. Abe, and a murderer with a grudge against the religious group killed him. Murders targeting politicians are often related to political messages or claims. This is a very unique case in that the murder was committed out of a personal grudge, not against the individual for what he did, but against the organization that supported the individual.

Osamu Kusumoto

As for Prime Minister Abe’s political achievements, he has just passed away, and I believe that there are many aspects of his life that we can only wait for history to judge.

Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, former prime minister of Japan, understood that Japan’s prewar population growth caused poverty and that poverty and population pressure were major factors in World War II. Together with General Draper, the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense, and others, he worked to stabilize the world’s population problem and established the first bipartisan parliamentary group, the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population (JPFP), to address the issue of the population to achieve world peace.

Abe’s father, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, was also involved in population politics, serving as the third president of the JPFP. Late Shinzo Abe himself attended a meeting of the International Parliamentarians Meeting on Population and Social Development in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1995, when he had just become a member of Parliament, held in conjunction with the World Summit on Social Development.

I was involved in that conference as the Japanese secretariat and worked with Mr. Abe for about a week. I was impressed by Mr. Abe’s cheerful personality and proactive thinking. Mr. Abe is well known for his loving wife, and I saw this in Copenhagen, which made me smile.

As I said at the beginning, we will have to wait for history to judge Mr. Abe’s political achievements. However, in my close contact with him and watching his actions, I felt that he had inherited the political philosophy of his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, from his father, Shintaro Abe.

Japan was defeated in World War II and had to realize the reconstruction of its devastated land. One of those who took charge of this was my grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. For the politicians in charge of politics, the various political decisions of the time can only be said to be the result of the best decisions made under the conditions given at that time. It is the job of historians to weigh the pros and cons of such decisions, but I believe that Mr. Abe witnessed and understood the background of the political decisions that his grandfather and father were forced to make as they ran the country.

Seventy-seven years after its defeat in World War II, Japan has not yet escaped the effects of the war, as evidenced by the application of the UN’s “enemy clause. As a result, from the perspective of international common sense, I think there is room for debate as to whether Japan is in an adequate situation as a nation-state in the international community.

During his tenure as prime minister, Mr. Abe has focused on diplomacy. He actively engaged in what is known as “globe-trotting diplomacy,” traveling around the world and maintaining close contact with world leaders. Although Abe’s political beliefs were often described as right-wing, he also repeatedly communicated closely with the leaders of the former communist bloc.

What is clear from these actions of Mr. Abe is that he wanted to make termination of Japan’s postwar period situation. I understand that this is not a matter of left-wing and right-wing, and conservatism or liberalism, but rather a desire to remove the fetters of defeat and create a normal country.

I feel that he had a passionate desire to create a Japan that is respected by the world, as stipulated in the Constitution.

He lost his life at a very young age as a politician. I believe that he was a rare politician who was able to pursue his political ideals, including the environment in which he was blessed to grow up. I sincerely regret his death and pray for his soul.

Osamu Kusumoto, Ph.D Lecturer, Nihon University
Founder, Global Advisors for Sustainable Development (GAfSD)

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"While there is no singular cure for hate speech, my wish is for young people to stand up and fight against it." Credit: University of the West Indies (UWI)

By Isheba Cornwall
MONA, Jamaica, Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

Hate speech is a phenomenon that can be defined as threatening speech or writing expressing prejudice towards a specific group, primarily based on race, religion, or sexual orientation.

As a black undergraduate student from Jamaica, especially being a part of Generation Z, I have experienced countless attacks in the form of hate speech. This phenomenon has grown immensely over the years, taking different shapes and forms. One major reason for this is the advancement of technology, and more so the creation of new media or social media.

However, what is interesting is that the same platforms used to immortalize hate speech can also be used to combat it in creative ways. We must realize that we are an unhappy generation of young people.

Because of the contrasting beliefs and viewpoints that we have surrounding identity, we are constantly struggling to embrace each other’s uniqueness. Sadness consumes us and acts as a catalyst for hate speech. Which, if left untreated, catapults into violent behaviors.

We are often unimpressed by the power of language and uninterested in how our speech can cause harm. Many reasons come to mind when I think about why the contagious disease of hatred continues to spread.

One main reason is the lack of education, which stems from being socialized in a way that glorifies hate and celebrates violence. This is not an idea based on mere observation but rather the reality for many Caribbean people — including myself— who were raised in vulnerable communities.

The sad truth is, the individuals tasked with taking care of us were themselves brought up in toxic environments that failed to teach them how to properly engage with other people, especially those who may be different from them.

Therefore, the need to voice any dissatisfaction was almost always done in a way that exudes hate. This is what they learned. And indeed, this is what they know.

It is like a full circle: older generations teach us, their children, to express hate, and so the cycle of hate continues. Although there are many ways to combat this viewpoint that promotes hate speech, including via institutions of socialization such as schools and churches, other stakeholders have a role, including the media. They are needed to grow a community of emotionally intelligent and understanding people.

From a Caribbean perspective, hatred spreads because of negative stereotypes emerging from our history, for example, through colonization. Negative stereotypes see some groups or individuals as being different or inferior to others.

For example, a lighter-skinned individual is given a job over a dark-skinned woman like me. Or a man is given more pay than my friend who is a woman who is equally qualified.

Harmful stereotyping fuels hate speech and appears when we see the idea that one group is superior and another inferior. This has pitted us against each other, and to reinforce this, we take to social media and spew hateful comments to individuals hailing from groups viewed as “less than.”

Unfortunately, this way of thinking has been embedded in our minds and without the desire to unlearn these tendencies, hate speech — and ultimately violence — will persist.

Hate speech is one of those problems that can influence society and develop into something worse. Hateful phrases and casual racist comments — the language used to highlight our distaste for something, or someone, are all-powerful, impactful, and dangerous.

Especially when many people believe them. Hate speech, if left to flourish, can lead to grave acts of violence on a large scale. And it is no secret that hate speech contributes to hate crime.

Therefore, we need innovative and creative ways to combat hate speech. I believe that both traditional and new media can provide support. For instance, by conceptualizing and creating educational, fun, and engaging programs on television and radio for young people.

But to convince youth, they must believe that whoever is sharing this information with them understands their circumstances and that the story told to them is relevant to their lives.

With cultivation theory in mind—a theory that suggests that individuals who mostly consume television programs are more likely to perceive the real world in a way most commonly depicted in television messages, we could argue that constantly showcasing programs that show acts of hate speech as unacceptable, could have a positive impact on viewers which can influence their behavior.

With the rise of social media, the transmission of information is as fast as the speed of light, and sadly hate speech, or cyberhate, follows closely behind. There has never been a time that I have been scrolling on social media that I did not come across some offensive speech. It is alarming that a single person does not engage in hate speech; rather it is often a large group of individuals—perhaps due to misconceptions and misinformation.

Creative campaigns via social media platforms can also help to combat the problem. This will not solve the issue; however, social media can be used to fight hate speech through “counter-speech.”

That is sharing easily digestible content focused on inclusivity, equality, and diversity. Imagine funny videos teaching youth how to respectfully disagree with each other, or ‘live’ sessions with influencers speaking about their experiences with hate speech.

Live sessions with influencers utilizing humor and creative campaigns would be pretty powerful nowadays and could also make a very accurate statement so loud that young people would be forced to listen and pay attention to it.

A lot more can be done, for instance, by creating codes of conduct that would somehow influence online behavior. The ultimate goal would be to educate youth so that they want to be respectful and not indulge in hate speech.

I can see and imagine a society filled with love, peace, and understanding. While there is no singular cure for hate speech, my wish is for young people to stand up and fight against it so that this disease will have no place in our society.

We must rethink and redefine our ideas about identity, gender, and race. And those working together to create new pressure points to tackle hate speech need to listen to the voices of young people.

The author is a social media strategist, radio host and producer, and undergraduate student of the Integrated Marketing Communication program in the Caribbean School of Media and Communication at the Mona Campus in Jamaica of the University of the West Indies, a member institution of the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI).

To learn more about the issues and the work the United Nations is doing to counter hate speech, visit Hate Speech | United Nations. Please join the #NoToHate campaign to counter hate speech (feel free to use assets available here)

Source: UN Academic Impact, United Nations

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Excerpt:

Afghan women. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Jun 17 2022 (IPS)

Gynophobia is defined as an intense and irrational fear of women or hatred of women, it may be characterized as a form of specific phobias, which involves a fear that is centered on a specific trigger or situation, which in the case of gynophobia is women.

After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, in August 2021, the Taliban completed their shockingly rapid and forced advance across Afghanistan by capturing Kabul on 15th August. What followed this takeover has since then been a series of human rights violations, humanitarian catastrophe, roll back on women’s rights and media freedom – the foremost achievements of the post-2001 reconstruction effort. The country has also been enduring a deadly humanitarian crisis, with malnutrition spiking across the country with 95 percent of households experiencing insufficient food consumption and food insecurity, according to this report. The number of malnourished children in Afghanistan has more than doubled since August with some dying before they can reach hospitals.

According to this report, 9 million people are close to being afflicted by famine in Afghanistan, millions have gone months without a steady income. Afghanistan’s economic crisis has loomed for years; the result of poverty, conflict and drought. This, combined with a sudden drop-off in international aid, has made it more tough for Afghans to survive, adding to this list is illicit opium trade and the worrying drug addiction, an ongoing challenge for the country.

However the priority for the Taliban was not saving the economy and the country from these disasters, instead under the cloak of religion, it didn’t take too long for the fundamentalist group to focus and display its misogynistic gynophobia towards the women and girls in the country, as it was expected. What Taliban fears, yet again, Afghan girls attending school beyond 6th grade, a decision directly affecting 1.1 million secondary school girls, depriving them of a future.

Taliban officials have also announced women and girls would be expected to stay home and if they were to venture out, they would have to cover in all-encompassing loose clothing that only reveals their eyes, making it one of the harshest controls on women’s lives in Afghanistan since it seized power in August last year. They fear women journalists so much, they ordered all female newscasters to cover their faces while on air.

International rights groups, Human Rights Watch says the list of Taliban violations of the rights of women and girls is long and growing. Amongst many that have been listed, include appointment of an all-male cabinet, abolition of the ministry of Women’s Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry of Vice and Virtue. Banning secondary education for girls, banning women from all jobs, blocking women from traveling long distances or leaving the country alone. “They issued new rules for how women must dress and behave. They enforce these rules through violence,” it stated in this report.

Women in Afghanistan since last August have been fighting back, through protests demanding the right to work and to go to school.

Sara Wahedi

“We know what is happening is terrifying, it’s unjust, it’s inhumane, what is the international community going to do to facilitate accountability measures now,” says Wahedi.

In 2021, Wahedi was named one of the Next Generation leaders by TIME Magazine, her mobile app, Ehtesab, crowd-sources verified reports of bombings, shootings, roadblocks and city-service issues, helping residents of Kabul to stay safe. As a young tech entrepreneur, Wahedi says she is amongst the few who got her education and the freedom to do what she wanted, as the times were different

“I feel incredibly guilty, I think most Afghan women who are out of Afghanistan, who were able to pursue education to the highest level feel a crippling sense of anxiety and guilt. Education is ingrained in our psyche right from the time we are born from our parents, but for our country it was also different because we have seen war, we have seen instability, it is even more pertinent to get out of this life, all Afghan girls, they know this and to have it taken away from them so violently, it’s obviously affected their mental health, and I feel an inexplicable level of guilt to be in this position,” Wahedi says.

Women and girls have continued to bear the brunt of restrictions under the Taliban and their imposed doctrine, as seen in the past. The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (UNHCR) in this report said, “What we are witnessing today in Afghanistan is the institutionalized, systematic oppression of women.”

In this interview given to CNN, Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting Interior Minister and Taliban’s co-deputy leader since 2016 said, “We keep naughty women at home.” After being pressed to clarify his comments, he said: “By saying naughty women, it was a joke referring to those naughty women who are controlled by some other side to bring the current government into question.”

With the Taliban coming into power, there is no doubt that the women in Afghanistan will continue to face an uncertain future and in order to avert the irreversible damage being done to the female population, international communities and organizations must not just condemn the Taliban, but also hold them accountable and speak up on behalf of Afghan women, before they are all forced into invisibility. Whatever little progress was made by women in Afghanistan, the Taliban have through their rules and policies reversed them, pushing women towards invisibility and exacerbated inequalities against women. What they fear – women being educated, being seen, having an identity, agency, work, job, rights, freedom and their ability to hold them accountable. The realities of life under the Taliban control, whatever the timeline may be, remains the same.

Sania Farooqui is a New Delhi based journalist, filmmaker and host of The Sania Farooqui Show where she regularly speaks to women who have made significant contributions to bring about socio economic changes globally. She writes and reports regularly for IPS news wire.

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Authorities in North Waziristan district in Pakistan, vaccinate children against polio. With one case reported, intensified efforts to eradicate the disease are underway. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 12 2022 (IPS)

Pakistan’s North Waziristan district authorities have launched an aggressive vaccination drive after a polio case surfaced after 15 polio-free months in the country.

The disease was detected in a 15-month-old toddler about 15 kilometers away from the Afghanistan border. This area was considered a Taliban militant’s hub until 2014.

The Taliban were against polio vaccinations, but immunization drives restarted after the militants were evicted in 2014.

The boy’s family says he had been vaccinated.

“The boy has been vaccinated in every door-to-door polio vaccination campaign, but even then, he developed the crippling disease. We aren’t opposed to polio drops,” says Naheedullah, the toddler’s uncle. “We are religious people but never defied vaccination.”

However, the authorities dispute the family’s version and say the newly infected child hadn’t received oral polio vaccines (OPV) because his family was among those they call “silent refusals”.

“Silent refusals are those whose families argue that their children below five years have been inoculated, but they remain unvaccinated,” Dr Shamsur Rehman, a health official in the region, told IPS. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 18,349 children remain unvaccinated due to refusal by their families during the March 2022 campaign. This is down from 19,874 recorded in December 2021.

Vaccinators also face threats from the defiant parents – and as a result, often record the children as vaccinated to stay safe from reprisals. More than 50 people have been killed, allegedly by militants, since 2012 in various anti-polio drives, mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which remained a hotspot of the virus for many years, Pakistan’s oldest newspaper Dawn reported.

Religious scholar Muhammad Sami says polio vaccines aren’t allowed in Islam, and therefore, there is polio vaccine hesitancy. He said his group had “information” that the vaccination was a plot to “render the recipients incapable of producing children and cut down the population of the Muslims.”

However, others in the same area have a different opinion.

“We have been persuading parents to administer OPV to their kids as it is their religious responsibility to protect their offspring from diseases,” says Maulana Sagheer, adding that it was false information that the vaccines caused sterility and infertility.

Zulfiqar Babakhel, spokesperson for Pakistan Polio Programme, told IPS that the detection of this latest case of wild poliovirus wasn’t unexpected.  The Pakistan programme had anticipated this risk and put in place contingency plans to enable a rapid response, he said.

It continues to intensify its efforts to eradicate all remaining residual transmission of any strain of poliovirus.

“The ‘last mile’ has always proven to be the toughest phase of national eradication efforts in all countries. Although challenges remain, the programme is capitalizing on the momentum of recent success and continues to strive for zero-polio. This is the most critical time for the programme,” Babakhel said.

It is important to emphasize that the number of polio cases has been significantly reduced this year due to health workers’ unwavering commitment and communities’ and various stakeholders’ support, he said.

It is the third case of wild polio to be reported globally in 2022. Others were reported from Afghanistan and Malawi.

Pakistan had reported one case last year with onset on January 27, 2021, in Killa Abdullah district, Balochistan province.

Health Secretary Dr Aamir Ashraf told IPS that this was a tragedy for the child and his family. It is also regrettable both for Pakistan and polio eradication efforts worldwide.

“We are disappointed but stay undeterred. The case appeared in Southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the poliovirus was detected late last year and where an emergency action plan is already being implemented,” he says.

“The National and Provincial Polio Emergency Operations Centres have deployed teams to conduct a full investigation of the recent case, while emergency immunization campaigns are underway to prevent further spread of the wild poliovirus in Pakistan,” he says.

Repeated immunizations have protected millions of children from polio, allowing almost all countries to become polio-free, besides the two endemic countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The next sub-national Polio vaccination campaign, expected from 23 – 27 May 2022, will target over 24 million under-five children.

The polio programme had identified Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as the area most at risk after wild poliovirus was detected in environmental samples in the last quarter of 2021.

“This validates the programme’s concerns about virus circulation in Southern KP and strengthens our resolve to reach every child with the polio vaccine,” said the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) coordinator for polio, Dr Shahzad Baig.

To address the challenges in Southern KP, the Government and global polio partners had already initiated an emergency action plan to address the challenges in this part of the province, he explained.

In 2020, the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa reported 22 cases, while no wild poliovirus cases were recorded in the area last year.

Substantial progress has been made recently, with most areas accessible to implement immunization campaigns, but deep-rooted problems and security concerns remain in a few places. Despite the challenges, the programme’s frontline workers continue to reach children with the life-saving vaccine.

The programme is capitalizing on the momentum gained last year and continues to strive for zero-polio. Parents must continue to vaccinate their children during every immunization round until they reach the age of five.

Pakistan remains one of only two countries globally with circulating wild poliovirus, together with Afghanistan. Polio is a highly infectious virus. Until this last epidemiological block wipes out polio, children worldwide remain at risk of life-long paralysis or fatality by the poliovirus.

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By Inés M. Pousadela
May 11 2022 (IPS-Partners)

In an election season, India’s ruling party has again resorted to the right-wing populist playbook, stirring up divisions for political gain. This time it is the turn of Muslim women, caught in the crossfire of a backlash against both the rights of religious minorities and women’s rights. The controversy over the wearing of the hijab in schools is just the latest chapter in the saga starring Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party in their quest to consolidate power. Their attempts will continue, as will civil society resistance and struggles for rights.

One day in late December 2021, Muslim students at an all-female college in the small town of Kundapur, in India’s southern state of Karnataka, were offered an impossible choice: either ditch their hijab, a headscarf they wear as a symbol of their faith, or renounce their right to education. But they refused to comply, and instead protested.

As protests spread and brought counterprotests by Hindu students, a piece of cloth soon became the centre of a storm, where struggles for the rights of women and religious minorities intersect. With both under attack by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing populist government, Muslim women must have seemed the perfect target.

The hijab row

Out of the blue, the authorities of a state-run school in Karnataka ruled that the hijab was in contravention of uniform rules and denied those wearing it entry into classrooms. Other government-run schools followed suit. The state government, in the hands of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), backed the ban and extended it to the whole state through a directive stating that ‘clothes which disturb equality, integrity, and public law and order should not be worn’.

Karnataka is often described as the ‘hotbed’ of the Hindutva ideology supported by many right-wing Hindu groups. Thirteen per cent of its population is Muslim, and although nominally secular, the state has increasingly turned religious mandates into law – the very definition of religious fundamentalism. Among other things, the sale and slaughter of cows have been banned in the state because cows are sacred for Hindus, and an anti-conversion bill has made it more difficult for people to convert to Islam or Christianity and for interfaith couples to marry.

On 31 December, six Muslim girls who were denied entry to their classrooms because they wore the hijab protested outside their school, marking the start of wider protests. The students also filed a writ in the Karnataka High Court and brought their complaint to the National Human Rights Commission.

While the ban was imposed only in Karnataka, rights groups feared it would pave the way for tighter nationwide restrictions. To resist this, protests spread throughout India, and by early February they had reached the capital, New Delhi, and were even echoing abroad, as Turkish rights groups held a demonstration outside the Indian consulate in Istanbul.

As protests spread, counterprotests followed: many right-wing Hindu students, mostly male, marched in saffron shawls, a colour considered a Hindu symbol. A civil society report has described in detail the tactics of Hindutva supremacists to push ‘saffronisation’ into schools and fuel communal violence.

In Karnataka the script was followed to the letter: as Hindutva activists turned up to disrupt protests against the hijab ban, heated arguments and physical harassment ensued. Some cities witnessed incidents of stone-throwing and arson. On 10 February, on the grounds of treating ‘both sides’ equally, the Karnataka high court issued an interim order banning anyone from wearing any covering or religious symbol within classrooms. Muslim students challenged the order in the Supreme Court.

On 15 February the Karnataka government ordered a three-day closure of all high schools and colleges. The next day, city authorities in the state’s capital, Bengaluru, banned protests outside schools for two weeks. On 21 February, the murder of a member of the right-wing Hindu group Bajrang Dal added fuel to the fire: the 23-year-old man, identified as Harsha, was killed while campaigning against the hijab. Schools were closed again.

On 15 March, the Karnataka high court upheld the ban on the basis of the argument that wearing the hijab was not an essential Islamic principle. With one stroke of the pen it swept away any pretence of secularism, under which no court should be able to decide what is essential to any religion.

Later in March, in another district of Karnataka, teachers were suspended for allowing Muslim students to attend exams wearing the hijab. A few days later, the state government excluded teachers wearing the hijab from exam duty, effectively expanding the ban to teachers.

Schools have been turned into yet another political arena. The backdrop and apparent driving force was a series of state-level elections, including in India’s biggest state, Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP was looking for a strong showing ahead of upcoming national-level elections. Religious divides are being intensified and instrumentalised for political gain.

Voices from the frontline: Aiman Khan and Agni Das

Aiman Khan and Agni Das are members of the Quill Foundation, an Indian civil society organisation (CSO) engaged in research and advocacy, focused on the human rights issues faced by underprivileged people.

There have been protests on two fronts. The girls who have been directly affected by this restriction are protesting outside their college gates and holding demonstrations in other public spaces. But they are facing intimidation and threats by Hindutva vigilante groups while also being warned that they will be criminally charged for protesting.

In bigger cities, protests are also being organised by human rights CSOs and Muslim groups, and particularly by Muslim women.

Following the Karnataka high court ruling, CSOs have played an important role in raising awareness about the implications of the verdict. Several CSOs rejected the court order while also producing analysis to help the public understand its intricate legal language.

Civil society has been able to respond in a tangible and timely manner, offering unconditional solidarity and support to the schoolgirls affected by the order and experiencing trauma resulting from violence, discrimination and harassment in the aftermath of the high court order. Some CSOs have offered mental health counselling and other services.

Other CSOs have offered litigation support, in two forms: first, by representing individual cases of religious discrimination and providing legal support to those who missed out on exams due to the ban; and second, by petitioning on larger issues before courts of law. There have been several petitions before the Supreme Court of India to challenge the Karnataka high court order.

In short, the civil society response has been key because of its capacity to play a full range of roles to drive change, from the micro to the macro level. An effective civil society is essential for advancing human rights in India, and the international community can play a vital role in reinforcing the work of local CSOs to amplify marginalised voices.

This is an edited extract of our conversation with Aiman Khan and Agni Das. Read the full interview here.

The surge of Hindu nationalism

The controversy around the hijab was nothing but an excuse – but an effective one. Straight out of the right-wing populist playbook, this crackdown on the Muslim minority formed part of a wider BJP strategy to consolidate its power. And it was only the most recent link in a long chain of affronts.

Modi’s resounding re-election victory in 2019 gave him the green light to take a decisively autocratic turn and seek to homogenise India as a Hindu state, undermining India’s foundational secular principles and violating the guarantees of religious freedoms enshrined in its constitution.

Although most of the world’s major religions are represented in huge numbers in India, the BJP and its allied paramilitary Hindu nationalist force, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, have popularised a vision of Indian nationhood that excludes Muslims, who make up over 14 per cent of the population: a 172 million minority bigger than the population of most countries in the world.

Minority communities are subjected to vilification because they are framed as ‘the other’. The Muslim minority is a specific target of persecution.

AIMAN KHAN AND AGNI DAS

Soon after his re-election, Modi made a definitive move of aggression against Indian Muslims. On 5 August 2019 he unilaterally revoked the constitutional special status of Jammu and Kashmir state, which is around 70 per cent Muslim. The following day, the BJP-dominated parliament passed a law to divide the state into two union territories to be ruled by central government instead of their own state governments. Widespread protests were violently suppressed and a long communications clampdown was imposed.

The next step came in December 2019, when parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which modified the constitutional clause that prevented undocumented migrants from becoming citizens, granting this right to people coming from specific countries who were highly likely to be members of non-Muslim religious minorities.

This law was used in conjunction with the extension of the National Register of Citizens, which excluded from citizenship millions of people who lacked evidence of having been legally in India since at least 1971, but allowed them to apply for asylum under the CAA – unless they were Muslims.

At both national and state levels, BJP governments adopted countless discriminatory laws and policies targeting religious minorities, and specifically Muslims. This stoked hatred and division with increasingly bloody consequences, as seen in early 2020, when violence erupted between Hindu and Muslim communities in New Delhi, leaving dozens dead. The police mostly stood by as mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were targeted and journalists covering the unrest were attacked.

Voices from the frontline: Syeda Hameed

Syeda Hameed is co-founder and board member of the Muslim Women’s Forum, a civil society organisation working for the empowerment, inclusion and education of Muslim women in India.

The decision to ban Muslim students from wearing the hijab in colleges’ premises came as a surprise. Such a ban is strange to our society. Unlike in France, where it has long been under the spotlight, the hijab had until very recently never been prohibited in India.

Karnataka state is known for its diverse society and pluralistic culture, with the two major religious groups, Hindus and Muslims, historically coexisting, along with a wide spectrum of other religious groups.

However, the roots of the Karnataka hijab controversy are quite deep, and are linked to growing Islamophobia. Those in power have ignited a sectarian fuse all over India in every possible way. Right now, Karnataka state also has a right-wing government, which has created fertile ground for strain in Hindu-Muslim relationships.

To them, the hijab ban is just another tool to remain in power. It is tied to current political events, notably the upcoming election. Right-wing politicians fabricate issues that target Muslims, who are depicted as the ‘disruptive other’, to divert people’s attention from dire economic conditions. The hijab ban did the job well, as it captured media attention. Sensational media coverage only added fuel to the fire.

The hijab ban is a complete violation of women’s rights to express their own identities. It should be my choice alone whether to wear the hijab or not.

The hijab ban is very much part of Muslim marginalisation. Muslims are being driven to a corner and targeted by a right-wing government that demonises them to boost their support and remain in power.

This is an edited extract of our conversation with Syeda. Read the full interview here.

Why women?

This time, the target was not just Muslims, but specifically Muslim women. Indian Muslim women are members not only of a minority religious group that has increasingly come under attack but also of a gender that has perennially been subjugated by men both within and outside their religious group, forced to follow male dictates on what to wear and what not to wear – among many other things.

A source of controversy in some western countries, the hijab had never before been a big deal in India – until politicians saw in it an opportunity to stoke division for political gain. But many Indian Muslim women view the hijab as an integral part of their faith. For others, it is a token of negotiation with conservative families, and the very reason they are allowed to go to school in the first place. Either way, they have made a choice that is no longer being respected.

‘Whether it is a bikini, a ghoonghat, a pair of jeans or a hijab, it is a woman’s right to decide what she wants to wear,’ tweeted Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, general secretary of the Indian National Congress, one of India’s opposition political parties.

The hijab ban is a complete violation of women’s rights to express their own identities. It should be my choice alone whether to wear the hijab or not.
SYEDA HAMEED

This story was originally published by CIVICUS Lens

Excerpt:

These days there is nary a dull moment in Pakistani politics. It is a cauldron where the mix from the globe, the region and the country boil in a deadly blend. Any unwanted spillage could do much harm at both home and abroad. For one thing it is a very large country with a population of over 220 million, the world’s fifth largest. For another it is one that hosts over a hundred nuclear war heads with potentials for horrendous destruction. Also, apart from these, importantly, it is a Muslim -majority polity and a practising democracy where stability or the lack of it would have ramifications for many societies of comparable milieu in the region, and beyond.

Dr. Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury

The opposition comprised three major parties the largely Sindh- based Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led by former President Asif Zardari and his son Bilawal Bhutto, the largely Punjab-based Pakistan Muslim League (N) led by Shahbaz Sharif, younger brother of ex-Premier Nawaz Sharif, the party supremo residing in London and technically a fugitive from law, and the largely Khyber Pakhtunkhwa based Jamiat-e Ulema led by Mowlana Fazlur Rahman, a worldly cleric. Ideologically and personally, they were strange bedfellows, evidently brought together only for the purpose of toppling Khan! Immediately afterwards for a while it seemed they would fragment again, bickering over the pickings of gains, mainly distribution of ministerial positions. But wiser counsels prevailed, and they succeeded in papering over their differences, at least for now!

Khan initially demurred on resignation, and instead proposed dissolution of Parliament by the President and elections in three months’ time. But his decisions were reversed by the Supreme Court and he was narrowly voted out of office in Parliament, nudged it now seems, by what in Pakistan is called the ‘establishment , another name for the military. The army is currently led by General Qamar Bajwa, who sought to distance itself from Khan’s anti-American rhetoric obviously due to the Army’s strategic dependence on America. Khan, culturally more westernized than most Pakistanis, was trenchantly critical of the perceived ‘interference’ pf the US in Pakistan’s domestic affairs. He attributed his removal to a “foreign” “conspiracy supposedly hatched abroad and revealed in a cypher despatch from Pakistani Ambassador to Washington.

Obviously not one to mince his words Khan called the new cabinet a “bunch of thieves”, claiming vindication in the fact that nearly two-thirds were out on bail from charges of corruption, a malady wrecking the society like malignant cancer! He accused them of “Chhanga Manga politics” (in 1990 Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim league forcibly confined their legislators in a forest rest house at a place called “Chhanga Manga” near Lahore, in other words “roped in their horses and stabled them” till they could be let out for a parliamentary voting. Khan addressed massive rallies, or ‘Jalsas’ as they are called in Pakistan, in Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in Karachi in Sindh and in Lahore in Punjab. In each of these rallies, hundreds of thousands gathered to chant his name, wave his banners, and cheer him on! In each he projected his PTI Party as an all-Pakistan organization without the provincial bias that mark the others. In each he asked if the new government was acceptable and in each the crowd roared back a resounding negative response! He frequently cited the historic example of Mir Jafar the army general who betrayed the last Muslim Nawab of Bengal Sirajuddoula to the English ion 1776 as the supreme act of treachery, which some could have related to his perception of the “establishment’s” perfidy! In all his rallies, he lustily asked of the crowds: “‘Imported hakumat’ manzoor hai”? (Is the imported government acceptable? Deafeningly, the crowds roared back: “Naa manzoor! Naa manzoor!” (Not acceptable! Not acceptable!)

The army was now caught between a rock and a hard place. While at a stated level the army claims to be apolitical, it has always been the most significant political component of the community. A very well -regarded strategic scholar and former Chief of army Staff General Jehangir Karamat has argued, with that the army in Pakistan is a mirror image of the society. There is logic in that claim in that, unlike the leadership of political parties, the army sociologically comprises non-feudal professionals. It includes some of the best engineers and doctors, disciplined, dedicated and representative of the urges of rural Pakistan. The strong military tradition, particularly in Punjab and the old North- West Frontiers, date back to the British Raj, and is more pronounced than anywhere in the South Asian subcontinent. Unsurprisingly, realpolitik analysts acknowledge its role in the nation’s body politic.

However, as a political entity, the army has evolved. It no longer, both by choice and capacity, seeks to control the government machinery directly, as it did under such military leaders like Generals Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia ul Huq and Pervez Musharraf. Instead, they work to exert influence covertly from behind the scenes under the cognomen of the ‘establishment’, or sometimes also overtly through such players as the Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (DGFI), an office created by the British generals immediately after Partition, liaising directly with the Prime Minister, certainly more active and powerful now than then. The army’s challenge is that it needs to function as a political influencer without its participation in such political processes as elections. Because its power is sourced in public support and it cannot afford to be unpopular, it needs to pick and choose its allies in civilian politics with utmost circumspection. If for nothing else, it is for the fact that tacit public acquiescence is politically necessary to secure its large budgetary requirements.

Indeed, it was the Army which was said to help ease in Khan in 2018. But Khan, given his personality and a mind of his own, chose to strike-out on his own, which miffed the generals who may have eventually, with a nudge and a wink at least, helped to bring about his fall. But truth be told, the army quickly deduced unnatural partners in their new political masters, given, among other things, the latter’s perceived laxity about financial ethics. A change of heart was therefore not much beyond the rim of the saucer. But it did not depend on the army alone. For instance, the army would prefer Khan to rein- in his anti-western rhetoric. That may be contrary to Khan’s personal predilections, more so now because that anti-western stance in Pakistan has an electoral dividend, though at a political and economic cost. Even the mercurial Khan would probably judge that balancing would be key.

When after his triumphant ‘jalsas’, Khan, like Achilles in the Iliad, still smarting from his losses, retired to his tent, or rather his home at Bani Gala near Pindi for a brief hiatus before his next move, Bajwa had a huddle with his senior but retired peers in Lahore. Perhaps as an upshot the general declared that he would neither seek nor accept an extension of service when his retirement is due come November. Thereafter the army, albeit in a small way, sought to influence some key new appointments which were against the grain of its perceived interests or at any event, tastes. Also, with the contents of the dreaded “Exit Control List”, a key political tool in Pakistan; but, in both cases, not necessarily with absolute success vis-a-vis the current government, which would have exacerbated their peeve. Still, it’s too early to say if Khan and the army can hug and make up before the next general election.

And it is indeed on the next election that Khan is laser focused. He wants it now. He has directed all senior PTI leaders to spread out throughout the country to muster political support. As his next move, he has declared that unless a date for the election is announced in four weeks’ time, he will organize a ‘Tsunami’ march to the capital Islamabad with such a massive crowd drawn from all over the country as never seen before. He has urged all Pakistanis, irrespective of political affiliations, to join. He further threatened that the gathering will offer a ‘dharna’ (‘sit-in’) to continue till such time the election schedule is announced, with a change in the Election Commission leadership. The current government is obviously taking it seriously as authorities have been seen collecting for possible use shipping ‘containers’, a favoured item in Pakistan for its alternative use in creating roadblocks, this time for in-coming demonstrators.

One evidence of a change of wind in national politics, since Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif assumed office, could be the recent ruling of the Courts, a fair bellwether in this regard, to widen the catchment area for investigation into the ‘foreign funds case’ to include other parties besides the PTI. Also, the Lahore High Court has just turned down a prayer from Maryam Sharif, one of the most powerful leaders of the ruling Coalition parties, for the return of her passport legally impounded to enable her to accompany the Prime Minister on a trip to Saudi Arabia. So, what implications will any change in the position of the ‘wider establishment ‘ (the military plus the Courts) have for the future of Pakistan’s turbulent politics?

The answer, as with many critical queries that come to our minds may also just be, as the Bob Dylan song famously states, “‘blowin’ in the wind!”

This story was originally published by Dhaka Courier.

The Karnataka court’s verdict to uphold the hijab ban has intensified the protest in the state. The row has been typically perceived by many as manufactured by the politicians pointing to the culture of politics in the state. While the jury is still out there on this, evidence on how state’s local culture constructs and deconstructs religious identity allows drawing conclusions with some definitiveness. The culture of state’s politics is one side of the coin. Considering its flip side – politics of culture, particularly of the religious cultural identity, is just as relevant.

Vani S. Kulkarni

Interestingly, Muslims used the same description of munda and hinda except from a different perspective: “we muslims are munda to make use of government provided resources”, a Muslim household member remarked, “but we are forced to be ahead because Hindus have pushed us hinda (behind) in accessing the higher quality resources.”

While such dissonance with sharing of valued-resources with a group that was religiously distinct was telling, it was around the dress code – wearing of the hijab, burqa and niqab wearing that the binary distinction – hinda and munda, sharpened.

The remark of a Hindu woman summed up such an ethos: “how can we access health insurance when large number of Muslim women in their long hijabs and long burqas are always in the queue ahead of us? The burqas certainly help them to hide their faces but the dress also makes them hypervisible to the hospital staff and that is how they end up being ahead of us using up all the time and space at the hospital. The burqas may hide their faces but they also make us invisible to the doctors and nurses because we get hidden behind their large burqas, and thus get left behind.”

Burqa ban isn’t unique to Karnataka. Many countries in the west have banned these articles of clothing and the justification for the ban globally ranges from concern about national security, integration into the mainstream society and feminist arguments such as, promoting women’s liberation. However, the cultural contexts in which bans operate are certainly unique and need to be explored. In Karnataka, the ban has surfaced in the colleges and in the education sphere at large but, as the evidence on reaction to the availing of health services indicates, the dissonance is much more deep-seated and widespread. While officially the ban is justified on grounds of need for uniformity and wearing of hijab is not seen as necessary to religious practice, such top-down rationale needs to be understood within the context of everyday local, cultural perception that Muslims are a threat to fair share of valued resources, including education and health of the country. Burqa and hijab are identity markers serving as reminders of presence of minorities, and even as the presence of the “other” who are being out of their place if they are spotted accessing valued resources. There exists a cognitive dissonance with the idea, practice and sight of burqa population in spaces where valued resources are available. It is politics of cultural identity of Muslims – the scepticism and sometimes intolerance for them as beneficiaries. The need for uniformity, social integration and women’s liberation as the top-down narrative (culture of politics) while serving as some explanation for the hijab ban, is at best a partial one. It is an intricate interaction on the ground between development and cultural perception of inclusion (or exclusion) of certain populations in the developkment process (politics of culture) that provides important clues to Karnataka’s hijab row. The latter narrative is made significant by its absence. I fear an unintended consequence of the hijab ban maybe deepening the schism between Hindus and Muslims.

Vani S. Kulkarni, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

IPS UN Bureau

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Refugees entering Poland from Ukraine at the Medyka border crossing point. March 2022. Credit: UNHCR/Chris Melzer

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Apr 19 2022 (IPS)

“The war in Ukraine is a European …and a Christian… matter… It does not require the involvement of a colourful array of religions or people”. These words were uttered and affirmed by some European Protestant men, working in interfaith circles in Europe. The ‘colourful’ encompassed other than European, mostly Christian – and likely mostly male.

Add this perspective to another one from a seasoned Catholic lay male leader, diplomat and academic, echoing representatives working in various Vatican offices, who maintain that if there is to be any religious engagement [e.g. a meeting with the Russian or Ukrainian senior Orthodox Church representatives] around Ukraine or Russia, “it is the Pope who should be doing this [not any other faith leaders or institutions] …and this is the preference of European governments”.

To these people, the fact that the war in Ukraine (and economic sanctions against Russia), have raised the price of oil, gas, and wheat (and therefore basic staples such as bread) for all other inhabitants of our world, is simply irrelevant.

The important fact appears to that Europe is suffering – and losing face in doing so, one might add. The fact that there are religious minorities in Ukraine also suffering, is not meriting as much attention. The supremacy of the Catholic Pope, who is a leader of but 16 percent of the world’s religious populations, is also apparent in the discourse of many esteemed European male leaders.

Were European governments to see value-added to religious involvement in affairs of state, then it would clearly be the Pope who would merit the role, out of the thousands – if not more – of other faith leaders in (the rest of) the world.

Yet so significant is the war in Ukraine, along with the role of Russia (and perhaps after that China) in geopolitics, and the changing political, financial and economic consequences around a world already damaged by the vagaries of Covid lockdowns and declines in tourism (which was the source of basic income for hundreds of millions of people), that it is a staple of many conversations – outside of Europe.

One such perspective of some seasoned diplomats in the USA, is that “religion and religious institutions have nothing to do with this war nor play much of a role in it. This is one politician’s madness”. Someone must have forgotten to send the memo with the words of a Patriarch of the largest Church in Russia, with over 120 million adherents worldwide, justifying the war – and using a homophobic discourse to do so.

Or maybe we erased the other memo where millions of Russians voted for this one “mad” politician (as millions of others voted for other mad politicians elsewhere in the world).

And yet, as we ponder the rampant ignorance about the intersections of politics and religion worldwide, and the arrogance of some European religious and political actors, and as some of us listen to religious leaders from other corners of the world, it would be wise to ponder a couple of questions: are we sure that all religions would have found the Patriarch of Russia’s language, and its subject, quite so distasteful? And, are we sure that it is one man causing all this carnage and hate (and profit to weapons manufacturers, mercenaries, and all who make money from war)?

There are many forms of this kind of arrogance of ignorance, which have coalesced to bring our world to this point where it would seem that almost every corner of it, is blighted. For some it is the blight of many forms of extremism: from launching war against a sovereign nation and killing its people, to horrific gang violence, to desecrating sacred sites and attacking pilgrims and devotees during their prayers, even during times which are holy to both attacked and attackers.

For others, it is the blight of democracy abused and myriad human rights systematically and deeply violated. For yet others the blight is having to live with various forms of hate speech and hate filled actions, including those with distinct anti-Semitic and Islamophobic blows. Holocaust deniers are reemerging out of many layers of rotten woodwork in all corners of the world.

The semantics of Islamophobia are being argued about in some western government circles, even as veiled women are being openly abused in some streets and denied access to jobs in countries claiming respect for religious freedom, and where even turbaned Sikh men continue to face abuse because they are mistaken as Muslims, and/or because their form of dress is deemed injurious to secular sensibilities.

For others the blight is to have to contend with shootings by lone gunmen of innocents in schools or subways or nightclubs or concerts. All this in the middle of a public health epidemic that has claimed the lives of millions – and we are still counting (where it is possible to have reliable data) – and while climate change is contributing to the largest numbers of refugees and forcibly displaced peoples ever in recorded collective human history.

Yet climate change is still being denied. And as for misogyny, it is the new normal in private and public spaces, everywhere in the world – in Europe too.

But it is not all gloom. The same European country which decried the one million Syrian refugees it allowed in (and subsequently quietly offloaded thousands of them to other countries), has announced no limit to the number of Ukrainians needing to enter it, and sometimes ensuring that some of the newer Ukrainian refugees receive access to homes before other refugees (who had waited longer but now must continue their wait). Another European country which let some refugees die of cold on its borders rather than allow them in, is now providing all manner of support to the Ukrainian ones.

The United States, which a few months ago lost significant credibility as a result of a messy exit after a 20 year struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan (leaving the country largely back in control of the Taliban), is today resonating with righteous indignation, and crowing that “the West is back”. The European Union too, has seen the error of its ways of being overly dependent on cheap Russian gas, and oil, and is now hastening to rid itself of such a dependency.

The war in Ukraine (albeit apparently not the ongoing horrors in Myanmar, Yemen, Mali, Niger, Cameroon, and Ethiopia – to name but a few) is indeed impacting our world. Like Covid-19, the war will doubtless continue to influence political, financial, and socio-cultural frames for decades. But here is another question: are we sure that the rampant and now fully on display discriminatory arrogance of ethnocentrism, and its appendages, will change?

This April 2022, witnesses another form of coalescing. Bahá’ís celebrate Riḍván, a festival of joy and unity which commemorates the beginning of their Faith. For Hindus and many others also, this month marks the celebration of the Spring festival of the harvest, and the Hindu new year. For Sikhs as well, this April celebrates the birth of the religion as a collective faith.

Jews celebrate Pesach, or Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Jewish people escaping the slavery of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Christians (Western and Eastern) – celebrate the resurrection of Christ this Easter. All while Muslims observe the thirty days of fast known as Ramadan. There are more faith traditions celebrating and/or commemorating. Definitely the best time, then, to pray for – or for those of tender anti-religious sensibilities let us say ‘to reflect’ on: the twin birth of humility and mercy.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

By Mushahid Hussain
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Apr 7 2022 (IPS)

The retrenchment of American power in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, coupled with the war in Ukraine, has provided a geopolitical breather for China. Beijing is effectively deploying this to make strategic inroads into the region, given this vacuum and focus on Europe.

The recent invitation to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to address the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference in Islamabad is a ‘historic first,’ and a significant breakthrough for Chinese diplomacy. For the first time, the foreign minister of the Peoples Republic of China was invited to address the most representative platform of the 57-member body representing the 1.5 billion Muslims.

During his speech at the OIC conference in Islamabad on the 22nd March 2022, Foreign Minister Wang Yi talked about the “long standing relationship between China and the Muslim world” and reaffirmed that China would continue supporting Muslim countries in their quest for political independence and economic development.

Historically, China has always been etched in the Muslim consciousness as a country with a great civilisation based on knowledge, learning and development. For example, there is a famous saying of the Holy Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him), 1,400 years ago, which urged Muslims to “seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China,” implying that although China was physically far away from Arabia, it was a land of learning.

Soon after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a professor of the prestigious American university Harvard, Prof. Samuel Huntington, talked of a ‘clash of civilisations’ in which he implied that Western civilization would be at odds with both the Islamic and the Confucian civilisations. Interestingly, he also talked of a united front of the Islamic and Confucian civilisations.

During his speech at the conference on Dialogue among Civilisations, held in Beijing in May 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping mentioned the contribution of the Islamic civilisation to “enrich the Chinese civilisation” and also referred to the Holy Mosque in Makkah (Mecca) as well as the travels to China of the Muslim explorer, Ibn Batuta, who wrote favourably on China and the Chinese people.

China has a longstanding relationship with the Muslim world. After the Chinese revolution in 1949, Pakistan was the first country in the Muslim world to recognise the People’s Republic of China in May 1950. The first institutional interaction between China and the Muslim countries took place at the 1955 Afro-Asian Summit in Bandung, Indonesia.

It was hosted by the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia and Pakistan and China were among the countries attending this historic summit. China shares a border with 14 countries, five of which are members of the OIC and none of these have border disputes with China.

In January 1965, when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was formed, China was among the first countries who recognised it. And in the 1960s and early 70s, China also provided material support and aid to various Muslim countries that were facing economic and political pressures, including Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, South Yemen and Egypt.

As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China also has been in the forefront of countries that have a proactive approach to the Muslim world. China, for example, presented a Middle East peace plan and it was unveiled during visits to China in May 2013 by the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mehmood Abbas, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

During his meeting with the two leaders, President Xi Jinping presented the 4-point peace plan that called for an independent Palestine State alongside Israel, based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. While recognising Israel’s right to exist in security, the Chinese peace plan also called for an end to building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine, cessation of violence against civilians and termination of the Israel blockade of Gaza.

The peace plan also called for resolving the issue of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and sought more humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians, while underlining that these are “necessary for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestinian Authority.”

China also has been principled on the issue of Syria urging an end to both interference in Syrian affairs and an end to the Syrian civil war. In January 2022, China invited Syria to be part of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI).

China today is the largest importer of crude oil in the world and almost 50% of that oil comes from the Muslim countries of the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE. Saudi Arabia has also invited President Xi Jinping to visit the Kingdom and there have been media reports that China and Saudi Arabia are engaged in discussions to have their oil trade done partially in Yuan or the RMB, the Chinese currency.

Defence cooperation between China and the Muslim world is also expanding and the Chinese advanced jetfighter J10C is now in use in countries like Pakistan and the UAE. In January 2022, China and Iran signed a comprehensive Strategic Accord which will run for 25 years, worth well over $400 billion dollars.

The centre piece of China’s relationship with the Muslim world today is the BRI. Interestingly, the BRI was launched in two phases by President Xi Jinping, with two important speeches in two different Muslim countries. In September 2013, during the speech in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Silk Road Economic Belt.

During another speech in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, in November 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Maritime Silk Road, both pillars of the BRI. And during his speech at the OIC conference on the 22nd March, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that “China is investing over 400 billion dollars in nearly 600 projects across the Muslim world under the BRI.”

He underlined that “China is ready to work with Islamic countries to promote a multi-polar world, democracy in international relations and diversity of human civilisation, and make unremitting efforts to build a community with a shared future for mankind”. On the issue of Palestine and Kashmir, Wang Yi said that “China shares the same aspirations as the OIC, seeking a comprehensive and just settlement of these disputes.”

Another example of close ties between China and the Muslim world was the February 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, where a majority of Muslim countries like Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar had a high level of representation, despite the boycott called by certain Western countries. Also, only last week, on the 30th March, China hosted an important conference, the Meeting of Foreign Ministers of Afghanistan’s Neighboring Countries, which was well attended.

China has also received support from Muslim countries on the issue of Xinjiang at the UN Human Rights Council. In fact, in July 2019, when a group of 22 nations led by the West sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council criticising China on Xinjiang, not a single Muslim country was a signatory of that letter, while another group of 37 countries submitted a letter on the same issue defending Chinese policies.

These countries included all the six Gulf countries plus Pakistan, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, and Sudan — all Muslim countries.

Given the changing geopolitical scenario, where there is a shift in the global balance of economic and political power, away from West and toward the East, followed by calls for a New Cold War, China’s thrust for cooperation and connectivity, given the common threat of the Coronavirus pandemic and the need for connectivity through BRI, has a broad resonance in the Muslim world.

The Muslim countries see their relations with China as a strategic bond to promote stability, security and economic development in the Muslim world and the BRI has become the principal vehicle in the promotion of such an approach.

In the coming years, China’s partnership with the Muslim world is likely to be strengthened, given the mutuality of interests and the convergence of worldviews in upholding a world order based on International Law, the UN Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

Ironically, thirty years after enunciating the Huntington thesis on the ‘clash of civilisations,’ which talked of the Islamic and Confucian Civilisations co-existence with each other but possible confrontation with Western Civilisation, recent developments may be pointers to a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Source: Wall Street International MagazineTop of Form/OTHER NEWS
https://wsimag.com/economy-and-politics/69117-chinas-entry-into-the-muslim-world

Chairman of the Senate Defence Committee Pakistani, Senator Mushahid Hussain was Bureau Chief in Islamabad of Inter Press Service (IPS) during 1987-1997 & later in 2014. He launched the first Public Hearings on Environment & Climate Change in the Pakistan Parliament. As Senator, he chairs the Senate Sub Committee on ‘Green and Clean Islamabad’ which has launched a campaign to ban plastic use in the Pakistani capital.

IPS UN Bureau

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Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait, is welcomed by teachers and students at a girls’ primary school in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sherif led the first all-women UN mission to Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover to meet with the new de facto education authorities in October 2021. She has called on the de facto authorities to resume adolescent girls’ access to secondary education. Credit: Omid Fazel/ECW

By Naureen Hossain
New York, Mar 28 2022 (IPS)

The late-night reversal of a decision by Taliban authorities in Afghanistan to allow girls from grades 7 to 12 to return to school has been met with distress from within the country and internationally – and fear that it could herald further restrictions.

A Taliban spokesperson from the Ministry of Education on March 23 made the announcement reversing an earlier decision that all students would be expected to return to school, including girls.

Local media in Afghanistan reported protests, including one held outside the Ministry of Education building. At least 87 percent of the population favor girls’ education across all levels, even among those who may say they would not expect the girls in their family to attend school but would not oppose government schooling otherwise.

The abrupt decision has also taken humanitarian organizations by surprise. Sam Mort, Chief of Communications for UNICEF Afghanistan, spoke at a press briefing at the United Nations headquarters, revealing that this announcement came late.

“Among our staff, there was collective disbelief… and anxiety,” Mort said, speaking of the reaction of field officers and national staff to the news. “We are just as confused as everyone else.”

The Taliban’s decision has been met with swift condemnation from the international community. UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in a statement said the Taliban’s decision was “a major setback for girls and their future” and urging them to “honor their commitment to girls’ education without any further delays”.

Yasmine Sherif, Executive Director of Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations’ global fund for children’s education, said: “With this announcement, an entire generation of Afghan children and adolescents could be left behind.”

Sherif said that “ensuring that both girls and boys can return to school – including the resumption of adolescent girls’ access to secondary education – is key for the development of the country.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the Taliban’s decision was “a profound disappointment and deeply damaging for Afghanistan”.

UN agencies, their partners, and other humanitarian organizations have been involved in discussions with the Taliban since their rise to power last August. Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis leaves 24.4 million people – or more than half the population – in dire need of aid and protection.

Both sides have been expected to negotiate the involvement of humanitarian organizations and donors in their capacity to provide the necessary services and protections.

The Taliban have expressed their readiness to comply with international organizations in their bid for formal legitimacy. But they have also asserted their code for governance, which they claim would be according to Islamic law and Afghan culture, something humanitarian organizations with education programs are working to adapt. This same reasoning that senior members of the Taliban have used to justify the ban on secondary education for girls. Where was this concern for a standardized curriculum aligning with Islamic law and Afghan culture when boys returned to secondary school in September?

The right to education has been an oft-discussed, critical human rights issue for Afghanistan, especially when it comes to how, or even if, this right is extended to girls. This concern had already been compounded by the forced closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted all school-going children and adolescents. While alternative learning pathways, including Community-Based Education centers based in rural and remote provinces for children to attend, have been available, girls’ education in government schools remained a lingering question.

The Taliban’s rise to power raised the fear that the right to education would be denied to girls indefinitely, if not permanently. It would only signal increasing measures to control women’s rights and mobility beyond the domestic sphere.

The last-minute decision may likely indicate infighting between factions that are divided on the issue of girls’ education.

As Heather Barr, Associate Director of the Women’s Rights Division in Human Rights Watch, notes, there are factions that recognize the steps the Taliban must take to receive the funding and legitimacy they want from the international community, and there are hardliner members who believe that girls beyond puberty should not be allowed out for their studies. Given their handling of the issue, it is only indicative of how unprepared the Taliban are to govern and provide the necessary services to a population where over half the population relies on international humanitarian aid.

Barr also notes that their decision speaks to the ingrained beliefs that view women through a misogynistic and reductive lens. She expresses concern that the Taliban’s decision does not bode well for the state of human rights in the country and may “herald a further crackdown, of girls and women, and human rights generally”. The decision to revoke girls’ access to secondary school education is only among several examples of the recent actions taken by the Taliban to police women’s movements across the country, with stricter, more frequent enforcements occurring in provinces outside the capital.

“We’ve been seeing more and more different restrictions put in place, including new rules on women’s freedom of movement and them being blocked from traveling without a mahram overseas, being blocked from traveling… over certain distances,” says Barr. “Taxi drivers being told that women need to wear a hijab before they are allowed to drive them.”

When it comes to girls’ education, if the ban on girls’ secondary education continues, this could escalate to the restriction of access to tertiary education for girls and women in the country.

What is harrowing is that even as public pressure and condemnation come from both sides, the Taliban continues to act upon the principles which even they cannot agree on. International leaders and experts have reiterated that education for all can only guarantee that developing or impoverished countries can walk down a path of peace and prosperity. For the girls and women of Afghanistan, they may not get to walk down that path without a chaperone.

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Tahira Hasan poses under the Fearless Collective public wall artwork, she and others in India and internationally are calling for tolerance and an end to hate speech in India. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/IPS

By Mehru Jaffer
Lucknow, Feb 24 2022 (IPS)

More and more women from different walks of life and corners of the world are raising their voices against the treatment of minorities in India today.

“Unity and the safety of citizens is the first and foremost condition of a country’s security,” Roop Rekha Varma, former vice-chancellor of Lucknow University (LU), told IPS.

With Ramesh Dixit, a former professor LU, Varma walked into a local police station to file a police report against hate speech against those who have threatened to kill Muslims in India.

In a recent case, provocative speeches allegedly calling for a genocide of Muslims were made at a December 2021 conclave held in the Himalayan town of Haridwar.

“If 100 of us become soldiers and are prepared to kill two million (Muslims), then we will win … protect India, and make it a Hindu nation,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, a senior member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha political party in a video recording of the event.

Pandey, Wasim Rizvi alias Jitendra Narayan Tyagi, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, and Sagar Sindhu Maharaj are facing hate speech charges for their utterances.

The Fearless Collective public wall artwork. Credit: Mehru Jaffer/IPS

Varma is shocked at rising incidents of unprovoked targeting of Muslims, including Muslim women, in recent times.

Sunita Viswanath, founder and executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, a US-based civil society organization, is equally anxious.

“Muslim women in India are being barred from entering college for wearing the hijab. This is a country where the Prime Minister rode to power promising equal rights for women. Clearly, not everyone is equal. If this is not apartheid, please tell what is,” Viswanath says. She referred to the controversy that erupted in January when a government-run college in the Udupi district of Karnataka state barred girls from attending lectures for wearing headscarves. The matter is now under judicial review.

Along with 16 other civil society organizations in the US, Viswanath organized two Congressional briefings on India’s treatment of Muslims.

“We are US citizens of Indian origin, and we have the power to influence and to move US lawmakers and the Biden Administrations to speak out,” says Viswanath on social media. She feels that the world needs to understand that something is wrong in India, that India is on a perilous path.

“India’s tryst with hate is on overdrive. The only way we can fight systematic hate is to stand by India’s tried and tested secular fabric,” Saumya Bajaj told IPS on the phone. Bajaj is associated with Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch (GNEM), a Delhi-based group for unity among citizens.

“Terrorizing Muslims and Christians on a daily basis seems to be the new norm. We, as citizens, can no longer afford to remain silent spectators to this macabre celebration of hate engulfing us?” reads a circular, inviting citizens to say no to hate mongers.

GNEM demands that the police investigate all violence cases against fellow citizens, including online abuse.

Nayantara Sahgal, 94, an award-winning Indian, says she does not recognize the new India.

“Today, that India is disappearing. My country is unrecognizable. It seems like a foreign country full of hatred and exclusion. There is a deep slide in democracy. It is utterly despairing. Yet we cannot be silent. A writer has to speak loud and clear,” the former vice president of PEN International said in a recent interview.

Booker Prize-winning author and essayist Arundhati Roy fears that Hindu nationalism could break India into little pieces like Yugoslavia and Russia. The hope is that ultimately the Indian people will resist what she calls the fascism of the ruling party.

Sahgal is pinning her hopes on the elections in five Indian states, including Uttar Pradesh (UP), until March 7.

In UP, interfaith marriages have been restricted in recent times. Muslim men married to Hindu women have been harassed by vigilante mobs and often arrested by the police. Many online attempts to humiliate and terrorize Muslim women continue.

Sahgal is the daughter of Vijay Laxmi Pandit, sister of Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of independent India. She is also the widow of the late bureaucrat Edward Nirmal Mangat Rai, an Indian Christian. Today she is concerned about the safety of her Christian relatives and Muslim friends as incidents of majoritarian hate against minorities peak.

Sabika Naqvi, community and advocacy head at The Fearless Collective, says that vocal and assertive Muslim women have woken up in India to find their names on Auctioning apps – from Sulli Deals over the last two years to Bulli Bai. The call to rape and kill Muslim women is routine, and efforts to dehumanize Muslim women is on the rise, she says.

“They fear our ability to write, to speak, to journal, to dream, articulate, assert, organize, and fiercely fight the oppressors. They either sexualize us, try to act as our messiahs or plot to kill. But we are here to conquer the world. We are lawyers, poets, journalists, actors, activists, entrepreneurs, scholars and much more,” says Naqvi, adding that this is not just a ‘prank’ or mere ‘bullying’ but harassment that Muslim women face every day.

The Fearless Collective is a movement that helps citizens move from fear to love through the creation of participatory art in public space.

Naqvi feels that the time has come to speak up and ensure that solidarity voices are louder than those who support hatred.

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Credit: Religions for Peace

By Azza Karam
NEW YORK, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

A “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, issued on February 4, 2022 on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development”, contains laudable and strong language about commitment to democracy and human rights:

“The sides [the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China] call on all States to pursue well-being for all and, with these ends, to build dialogue and mutual trust, strengthen mutual understanding, champion such universal human values as peace, development, equality, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries and the sovereignty and the security and development interests of States, to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world… The sides share the understanding that democracy is a universal human value, rather than a privilege of a limited number of States, and that its promotion and protection is a common responsibility of the entire world community.”

The fact that these are the words from one country that is amassing thousands of troops on the borders of a sovereign nation (threatening to enter it and ‘protect’ its people at any moment as of the writing of this), together with another country which is denying the existence of camps housing over a million people of one particular religion and ethnicity, within its borders, is interesting – eerily so.

And yet it was not so long ago, that ‘noblesse oblige’, ‘la mission civilisatrice’ and ‘white man’s burden’ were being articulated as pretexts for territorial takeover and the oppression and subordination of people, land, and dignity.

The colonial missions (mandates, protectorates, etc.) created a fundamental imbalance in the power of man over (others’) resources, and the power of some (men) over others, and a continuing legacy of interference in others’ affairs ostensibly to help (hence presumably the reference to sovereignty in the above statement), and usually – and here is part of the vexing reality – at the behest of nationals who ask for the ‘assistance’.

And it is still the case, that the very ideologies of supremacy of one people over another, including of one race and/or one sex or one religion over another, the refusal to be held accountable to centuries of discrimination now part of the DNA of almost all institutions; the insistence on subjugation of nature to man; and the perpetuation of misogyny – all continue to define our present broken world.

But today we have an awareness among esteemed politicians, academics, and several governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions, that religion matters. Indeed, that in various forms of ‘engagement’ with (usually specific and selective) religious institutions, religious NGOs, and/or religious leaders, good things come about.

Salvation may be imminent. “Faith for [insert the wording here]” or “religion and [insert appropriate term here] is the new formula for overcoming most difficulties, from vaccine hesitancy to gender discrimination, from electoral gerrymandering to racism, and everything in between.

And why not? After all, religious institutions (churches, mosques, temples, etc.) actually are the original development and humanitarian actors, and are still critical service providers in countries where governments are increasingly struggling to serve basic needs of many of their populations.

The very first schools and hospitals known to societies all around the world originated in and through religious bodies. Today, Catholic Churches alone manage significant public health infrastructures from North America to Sub-Saharan Africa. Caritas Internationalis for instance, is one of the largest (Catholic) humanitarian and development NGOs in the world.

If we begin to look at other religiously inspired NGOs, we will find a significant number of them delivering much needed refuge and support to the largest refugee and displaced populations ever recorded in human history, as well as health, education, sanitation, nutrition and humanitarian relief services, to hundreds of millions, in all corners of the world.

Furthermore, ‘Islamic finance’ is a source of funding for major United Nations entities’ development and relief efforts (e.g. UNHCR, UNDP, UNICEF) around the world – and more of that is being sought after, with various Muslim entities rushing to provide fatwas (religious edicts) and justifications for why this is good Islamic practice.

Increasing ‘faith investments’ in and for sustainable development are being strongly advocated for by some, with new initiatives emerging in that advocacy space to ‘help and encourage… ethical religious investments’. Private sector interest is focusing on how ‘faith-based actors’ are facilitators of emerging markets – and possibly multipliers of profits, for some pharmaceuticals, among other companies.

Just as in the 1990s, we started to learn how investing in women’s rights makes economic sense. Today, we are hearing how investing in faith actors makes that kind of sense too. In fact, some humanitarian and development religious NGOs (mostly with a Christian background, many Evangelical) are being actively mobilised to run initiatives to champion freedom of religion and belief, and/or to facilitate strategic ‘advocacy’ for major faith-based NGOs – ostensibly as part of their learning and wisdom acquired defending other human rights (albeit sometimes with an underdeveloped track record).

Yet, while they touched on almost every single aspect in their strong statement, neither the Russian Federation nor China reference ‘faith’, or ‘religion’ in their Joint Statement. Indeed, not once is ‘civil society’ mentioned. For these powerful states, as with others like them, religions, and any aspect of civic engagement, are either non-existent, or totally subservient to their own will, as to be unworthy of singling out.

Instead, an appropriation of the language of human rights, of democracy, of “cultural diversity”, “balance, harmony and inclusiveness” and even “moral principles” is de rigeur. But you see, this is the other side of using religion. You can overemphasize its value, or you can eclipse it.

Religious institutions, faith leaders and faith-based NGOs, have a responsibility to protect civil society. Instead of seeking to earn a celebrity status with some governments or political parties, or trying to leverage their own influence as Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox/Evangelical/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/etc., all faith actors need to learn to come together as a collective power that is part of their secular civil brethren.

In doing so, their combined moral, economic, financial, political, cultural, and social weight, will dwarf the most authoritarian of structures. At the very least, in coming together to serve all, religious communities can hold all decision makers accountable to a collective justice – of gender, of environment, of voice, of representation, and ultimately, of dignity.

Civil societies are the barometers of collective planetary wellbeing. As we dismember and silence civil societies, by using/focusing on (some) religions at a time, and serving piecemeal selective interests, we ensure that the arc of history remains mired in the abuse of indivisible and interdependent human rights, which are central to vibrant and healthy democracies.

To the tyranny of states and religious institutions alike, I would say: stop using your power to gain political and financial expediency. Instead, work with all religions on a level playing field, with the rest of civil society, to hold one another accountable, and thereby, to ensure peace and security for all times.

Prof. Azza Karam, PhD, is Secretary General, Religions for Peace International.

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In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly designated 6 February as the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, with the aim of amplifying and directing the efforts on the elimination of this practice. Credit: UNFPA

By Catherine Russell and Natalia Kanem
NEW YORK, Feb 4 2022 (IPS)

“Multiple overlapping crises are putting millions of girls at increased risk of female genital mutilation. “Countries already grappling with rising poverty, inequality and conflict are seeing the COVID-19 pandemic further threaten years of progress to end the practice, creating a crisis within a crisis for the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized girls.

“Even before COVID-19, 68 million girls were estimated to be at risk of female genital mutilation between 2015 and 2030. As the pandemic continues to shutter schools and disrupt programmes that help protect girls from this harmful practice, an additional 2 million additional cases of female genital mutilation may occur over the next decade.

“Rapid population growth in some countries is expected to further increase the number of girls at risk, adding urgency to the global effort to eliminate the practice by 2030 as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Female genital mutilation harms girls’ bodies, lives and futures. It is also a violation of their human rights. Only united, concerted and well-funded action can end the practice everywhere.

“As the global community adopts programmes to reach girls and women impacted by the pandemic, there is an urgent need to accelerate investment to end female genital mutilation. Some $2.4 billion are needed to eliminate this practice in 31 high-priority countries. Specifically:

• • Investment in the empowerment of girls and women, and in adequate services and response for those affected and at risk of female genital mutilation

• • Investment in building partnerships and mobilizing allies – including men and boys, women’s groups, community leaders and even former practitioners of female genital mutilation – to help eliminate the practice.

• Investment in developing and enforcing national-level laws and strengthening institutions.

“So far, progress has been clear and measurable. Today, girls are one third less likely to be subjected to female genital mutilation than 30 years ago, and in the last two decades, the proportion of girls and women in high-prevalence countries who oppose the practice has doubled.

“Those gains now face an unprecedented challenge. Global efforts must keep the momentum moving forward and build on years of progress to end this harmful practice completely.”

Dr. Natalia Kanem is UNFPA Executive Director and Catherine Russell is UNICEF Executive Director.

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Sri Lankan Buddhist monks at the UN General Assembly session commemorating Vesak. Credit: Sri Lanka’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations

By Neville de Silva
LONDON, Feb 3 2022 (IPS)

Driven by unprecedented hardship to pass round the begging bowl, Sri Lanka has become the centre of a tussle between Asia’s two superpowers.

There was a time in Asia’s predominantly Buddhist countries when saffron-robed monks walked from house to house in the mornings, standing outside in silence as lay people served up freshly cooked food into their ‘alms bowls’. The food was then taken to the temples, where it was shared among the monks.

That religious tradition has now largely given to other ways of serving alms to monks.

Today, governments and their aggrandising acolytes have converted this respected and virtuous tradition into one of begging richer nations to rescue them from economic deprivation, brought on largely by failed promises and disjointed and ill-conceived foreign and national policies.

This ‘begging bowl’ mentality in search of ‘alms’ is more likely to succeed if a nation is strategically-located in an area of big power contestation. Sri Lanka is just that, situated in the Indian Ocean and only a few nautical miles from the vital international sea lanes carrying goods from West to East and vice versa.

The country’s economy has been caught in a real bind. Buffeted by the Covid pandemic on the one hand and, on the other, ego-inflating economic and fiscal policies introduced by the new president Gotabaya Rajapaksa shortly before the country was pounded by the pandemic, Sri Lanka now has to beg or borrow to keep its head above water.

By December, Sri Lanka’s parlous foreign reserves situation had dropped to a perilous $1.2 billion – enough for three weeks of imports. The foreign debt obligation of $500 million that needed to be met last month was only the beginning. Another $1 billion is due in July. The total pay-off in 2022 will amount to some $7 billion.

Meanwhile the pandemic has virtually killed tourism, one of the country’s main foreign exchange earners, driving the hospitality industry into free-fall. If this was not bad enough, the Central Bank’s attempts to put a tight squeeze on incoming foreign currency led the country’s migrant labour remittances to drop drastically as overseas workers turned to the black market to earn real value for their money sent to families at home.

But nothing has had such widespread political repercussions as the government’s ill-advised policy of banning overnight chemical fertilisers last May, ahead of the country’s main agricultural season between October and April.

Its over-ambitious agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was laudable enough, but was botched when the sudden ban on chemical fertilisers and other agrochemicals – used by farmers for the last 50 years or so – left rice farming and other cultivations in disarray and farmers inevitably confused.

The government’s agenda of trying to turn Sri Lanka into the world’s first totally ‘green agriculture’ was botched.

While agricultural scientists and other experts warned of an impending food scarcity due to failed harvests and sparsely cultivated fields, the government ignored the warnings, sacking heads of the Agriculture Ministry and removing its qualified agricultural experts for spreading doom and gloom.

Against this backdrop of confused governance, probable food shortages due to poor harvests and slashing of imports and even essential medicines for lack of foreign currency, growing public unrest has seen even farmers take to the streets.

Consequently, a once-buoyant government confident of public popularity, especially among the Sinhala-Buddhist voters and the rural community, began to look beyond its faithful ally and ‘all weather’ friend China for ‘alms’ to pull it out of the morass.

China has already planted a large footprint in Sri Lanka, with massive infrastructure projects such as sea and airports in strategic areas, which allowed a monitoring of international sea lanes to make neighbouring India worry.

A major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

From the early 1950s Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and China had established close ties. Despite threats of sanctions by the US, Colombo sold natural rubber to China – then involved in the Korean War –in exchange for rice, marking the beginning of the long standing ‘Rubber-Rice Pact’.

As long as China’s immediate concern was the Pacific theatre, where the US and its allies remained dominant, and China faced territorial disputes in the South China sea and elsewhere, India was not overly concerned with China-Sri Lanka bilateral ties.

But as soon as China began to expand into the Indian Ocean, challenging what India considered its sphere of influence, New Delhi’s concerns multiplied considerably, as did its disquiet over China’s growing influence over Colombo.

The 70th anniversary of that Sino-Ceylon agreement, which cemented bilateral relations at a time when the People’s Republic of China was not even a member of the UN, was commemorated last month when China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Colombo in early January during an influence-building visit to Africa, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.

This is the third high level visit by a Chinese official in little over a year, beginning with former foreign minister and Politburo member Yang Jiechi in October 2020, and followed last April by Chinese Defence Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe, a visible signal to India and US-led ‘Quad’ countries the importance that China attaches to its relations with Sri Lanka.

But Sri Lanka’s struggle against dwindling reserves, the need for foreign investment and expansion of trade relations at a time of economic hardship has shown the Rajapaksa regime that reliance on China alone will not suffice.

A more balanced foreign policy and an equidistant relationship between Asia’s two superpowers cannot remain at the level of diplomatic rhetoric. It is an imperative, given Sri Lanka’s geographical location in close proximity to India and the historical, cultural and ethnic ties with it huge neighbour.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Beijing, Dr Palitha Kohona, said recently that Colombo should not depend on China forever – a valid piece of advice Colombo should seriously consider.

India also cannot ignore that, security-wise, Sri Lanka lies in India’s underbelly, whose vulnerability was exposed during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. So a major Chinese presence in Sri Lanka could endanger India’s own security at a time when China continues to militarily pressurise India in the Himalayas.

Last December Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s hurried visit to New Delhi, even as his maiden budget was still being debated in parliament, was indicative of Sri Lanka’s anxiety to seek India’s economic and financial assistance, without depending solely on Beijing.

That visit led to the two countries agreeing on ‘four pillars’ of cooperation in the short term, including emergency support of a $1 billion line of credit for importing food and medicines and a currency swap to bolster Colombo’s dwindling foreign reserves.

Other assistance included investment in an oil tank farm for oil storage in northeastern Trincomalee, close to the vital natural harbour that served the British well during the Second World War.

An Indian company, the Adani Group, has already won a stake in the Colombo port, where it will engage in developing the western terminal while the Chinese build the eastern wing.

Meanwhile, Colombo is having talks with China for a new loan besides the $500 million loan and a $1.5 billion currency swap.

While the two major Indian Ocean powers tussle for supremacy in this vital maritime region, Sri Lanka is beginning to understand that it sometimes pays to dip one’s oars in troubled waters.

Source: Asian Affairs, a current affairs magazine.

Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for foreign media including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently he was Sri Lanka’s deputy high commissioner in London

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Muslims at a mosque in Sri Lanka. Credit: Financial Times, Sri Lanka

By Alan Keenan
BRUSSELS, Jan 25 2022 (IPS)

On 28 October, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed the militant Buddhist monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara to head a presidential task force on legal reforms, shocking many in Sri Lanka and beyond. Gnanasara is the public face of the country’s leading anti-Muslim campaign group, Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power, or BBS). He is widely accused of inciting inter-communal violence, including two deadly anti-Muslim pogroms in June 2014 and March 2018.

Convicted of contempt of court for a separate incident, Gnanasara was sentenced to six years in prison but received a presidential pardon from Rajapaksa’s predecessor, Maithripala Sirisena, in his final months in office. The act of clemency came after intensive lobbying by nationalist monks and an upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of the 2019 Easter bombings, a series of attacks on churches and tourist hotels carried out by a small group claiming allegiance to the Islamic State, or ISIS.

Observers across the Sri Lankan political spectrum, including some Buddhist nationalists, expressed dismay – at times, outrage – that the president could name someone whose disrespect for the law and hostility to non-Sinhala Buddhist minorities are a matter of public record to head a commission ostensibly designed to prevent “discrimination” and ensure “humanitarian values”. Critics have called the appointment “irrational” and even “incomprehensible”.

In fact, it is anything but. The Rajapaksa government is deeply unpopular, including among large sections of its core Sinhala Buddhist constituency, and desperate to divert public attention from its economic mismanagement.

There is thus a clear if deeply unfortunate logic for it to bring back to the fore the best-known proponent of a theme that was key to getting the president elected: fear of Muslims as a source of “religious extremism”.

While it was in one sense surprising to see the open affirmation of Rajapaksa’s active support for the controversial monk after many years of distancing himself from Gnanasara, tight links between Sri Lankan government officials and the Buddhist clergy are nothing new. The 1978 constitution gives Buddhism the “foremost place” in the country’s religious landscape and the state the duty to “protect” it.

There is nothing comforting in this history, however. The Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian nature of the Sri Lankan state – ie, the extent to which the state represents and enforces majority interests at the expense of the rights of other communities – has had disastrous effects on the country’s ethnic and religious minorities.

The state’s transition from being structurally discriminatory to openly hostile toward Tamils (who are Hindu or Christian) – a process fed by Sinhala politicians’ warnings about the threat the community allegedly posed – ultimately led to three decades of devastating civil war.

During that period, from 1983 to 2009, terrorist attacks by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam provided some objective grounds for Sinhalese fears, reinforcing the narrative that the majority community was under threat. Now, there is growing reason to fear that this pattern may be repeating itself in the Sri Lankan state’s interactions with its Muslim citizens.

Credit: Sunday Times, Sri Lanka

In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s successful campaign for Sri Lanka’s presidency made much of the slogan “one country, one law”, which had gained popularity after the 2019 Easter bombings. Its ambiguity was useful: at one level, it could be interpreted as merely asking for uniform treatment of all citizens and resonated with voters angry at the impunity with which politicians and their powerful supporters are able to violate the law.

But its discriminatory implication was also obvious from the start, hinting at a need to “protect” the Buddhist nature of state and society by eliminating the separate rules and treatment that many Sinhalese believe Muslims use to gain economic and political advantages.

Many Sinhalese have for years held the view that Sri Lankan Muslims are more concerned with advancing their own interests than working for the larger national interest. Even during the civil war, when Muslims remained overwhelmingly loyal to the state and played a critical role in fighting the Tamil insurgency, one regularly heard complaints in Sinhalese (as well as Tamil) circles that they were exploiting the conflict for personal and collective economic benefit.

Because Muslim lawmakers held the balance of power in parliament between the two major Sinhala-dominated parties, they were commonly accused of using their “kingmaker” role to gain undue advantages for their co-religionists.

By the early 2000s, many Sinhalese had also begun to express discomfort at the increasing numbers of Muslims, especially women, wearing religious attire and the growing focus among Muslims on practices meant to demonstrate religious piety. Many interpreted this trend as Muslims deliberately distancing themselves from the majority.

With the arrival of BBS ultra-nationalists on the political scene in late 2012 – whose message was amplified by the smaller militant Sinhalese groups Sinhala Ravaya and Ravana Balakaya – the public portrayal of Sri Lankan Muslims rapidly took on more overtly hostile forms. (The decade earlier had seen organised Buddhist activism, at times violent, directed against the growing number of evangelical churches; pressure on Christian evangelicals continues today, though not on the scale of anti-Muslim campaigns.)

At the height of its influence, in 2013 and 2014, BBS dominated news coverage and helped set the political agenda through rallies, speeches and vigilante actions aimed at containing the threat Muslims’ alleged “extremism” posed to Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist character. The range of allegations promoted by BBS and like-minded organisations, often through online hate speech, was broad and shifting.

They claimed that population growth meant that Muslims would eventually overtake the Sinhalese majority; that Muslim-owned businesses were secretly distributing products to sterilise Sinhalese in order to keep their numbers down; and that the system of halal food labelling was encroaching on the religious rights of others and covertly funding Islamist militants.

More generally, conservative religious practices adopted by increasing numbers of Muslims in a quest for greater piety were read by ultra-nationalists as evidence of growing “extremism” that threatened other communities. These charges were based on either outright falsehoods or malicious misinterpretations of complex social and religious developments among Sri Lankan Muslims.

The anti-Muslim rhetoric helped set off inter-communal violence late in the presidency of Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015). These years saw a series of attacks on Muslim-owned businesses (with many alleging that Sinhala business rivals were backing the attackers) and disruption of political meetings held by anyone daring to challenge the Buddhist militants, against the backdrop of mass rallies denouncing the alleged threat posed by Muslims’ “extremism”.

In a June 2014 speech in the town of Aluthgama, Gnanasara declared to a large crowd: “This country still has a Sinhala police. A Sinhala army. If a single Sinhalese is touched, that will be the end of them all [Muslims]”. Minutes later, hundreds of his supporters marched through a nearby Muslim neighbourhood, sparking two days of devastation that left three Muslims and one Tamil security guard dead. Sinhala rioters, many of them brought in from outside the area, targeted mosques and Muslim-owned shops and homes for arson and destruction. The police were widely accused of standing by or even assisting the rioters.

Despite government denials, many independent observers told Crisis Group at the time that the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration was actively supporting the BBS and other anti-Muslim campaigns. They suspected the government of executing an electoral strategy designed to consolidate the Sinhala vote behind the government, which projected itself as the defender of Sinhalese Buddhist identity. The appearance of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then defence secretary, at a BBS event in March 2013, and his known connections with senior monks associated with the group, fuelled the speculation.

More tangible evidence of state backing lay in the fact that police gave BBS and like-minded groups permission to hold rallies at a time when government critics were not allowed to do so. Police took no apparent action, moreover, to prevent or investigate repeated vigilante raids on Muslim-owned shops or violent efforts to silence critics of militant Buddhist organisations.

Nor was anyone prosecuted for any of these crimes. Multiple sources told Crisis Group that Senior Deputy Inspector General of Police Anura Senanayake, who worked closely with Gotabaya at the time, led efforts to persuade victims not to press charges. Following Mahinda’s defeat in the January 2015 election, officials announced they had evidence of close ties between Buddhist militants and military intelligence units, confirming what Muslim community leaders had previously told Crisis Group.

With the 2015 election of President Maithripala Sirisena, representing a united opposition determined to end the Rajapaksas’ rule, the strategy of demonising Muslims for electoral ends seemed to have failed. Sirisena’s yahapaalanaya (good governance) coalition won in part through strong Muslim and Tamil backing based on its promises to end the BBS-led reign of terror.

But while the new administration stopped tacitly encouraging anti-Muslim violence and hate speech, it lacked the political courage – and possibly the necessary support within the police and intelligence agencies – to crack down on Buddhist militant groups.

After a brief lull in anti-Muslim activism, 2016 and 2017 saw a series of small attacks on Muslim businesses by unknown assailants, encouraged by sustained hate speech campaigns in traditional and social media, backed by effective local networks.

In February 2018, Buddhist militants in Ampara damaged a mosque and Muslim-owned shops as the police looked on, following social media rumours that a Muslim-owned restaurant had injected sterilising chemicals into Sinhala customers’ food. The following month, four days of anti-Muslim rioting shook the central hill district of Kandy, sparked by the death of a Sinhala man assaulted weeks earlier by four Muslim men.

Gnanasara visited the victim’s family and later joined other militant leaders to address a crowd of protesters just hours before the riots began. Videos later appeared to show local politicians from the Rajapaksa family’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, taking part in the mayhem. Two people were killed, many injured, hundreds of Muslim-owned houses and shops destroyed, and at least a dozen mosques damaged. The violence was severe enough for President Sirisena to declare a state of emergency, during which the army eventually brought things under control.

President Sirisena, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and senior ministers all condemned the violence and promised tough action in response. But despite hundreds of arrests, including of several prominent Buddhist activists, no one was held accountable for these incidents, which included well-documented attacks on Muslims by security forces, with eyewitnesses telling Crisis Group of numerous cases of complicity between the police and Buddhist rioters.

In August 2018, courts eventually convicted Gnanasara of contempt of court and criminal intimidation of a prominent Sinhala human rights activist. Many hailed his six-year sentence as a landmark, though Gnanasara has faced no jail time for attacks on or other actions against Muslims, and most of the slow-moving criminal cases against him in lower courts have now been dropped.

The partial victory over impunity was, however, short-lived. In 2019, in the aftermath of the horrific Easter Sunday suicide attacks, the Sri Lankan state for the first time adopted policies that directly discriminated against the Muslim minority. With tensions running high, President Sirisena’s government used the post-bombing state of emergency to prohibit the niqab, or full face covering, invoking national security concerns (the ban was rescinded in August 2019 when the emergency was lifted).

It also enacted new rules for government employees that, in effect, barred the full-length abaya, worn by many Muslim women teachers, especially in the Eastern Province (these were later withdrawn after being challenged by Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission). Anxious to salvage his sinking political fortunes as the November 2019 presidential election drew near, Sirisena then pardoned Gnanasara.

The nationalist monk immediately leapt into the political fray, joining his peers in protests demanding the resignation of Muslim ministers Rishad Bathiudeen and Azath Salley, accusing them – to date without convincing evidence – of involvement in the Easter attacks.

For many Sinhalese, especially Christians, as well as some Tamils, the Easter attacks seemed to confirm earlier warnings of a growing threat from “Islamic extremism”. Authorities responded to these fears in the attacks’ aftermath with what appeared to be the criminalisation of Muslims’ everyday practices.

Police arrested more than two thousand Muslims under emergency and terrorism laws, in all but a few cases with no evidence of links to the bombings or any threatening behaviour; they picked up many merely for having a Quran or other religious materials in Arabic script at home.

After the Easter bombings, the previously failed electoral strategy of shoring up Sinhala support through vilification of Muslims gained new traction. Gotabaya announced his candidacy just days after the attacks, promising to eradicate new forms of religiously motivated terrorism just as he had previously destroyed the Tamil Tigers when he was defence secretary.

At the polls, Gotabaya received overwhelming support from Sinhala voters, including many Catholics who had not previously backed him. The new president himself seemed to acknowledge the strategy’s success, declaring in his inaugural speech given in front of a Buddhist shrine: “I knew that I could win with only the votes of the Sinhala majority”.

Growing Tensions

Within months of taking office, Gotabaya deepened the state’s hostility toward Muslims on several fronts. His administration used COVID-19 lockdowns and ad hoc village-level quarantines to harass the community, which pro-government media outlets accused of spreading the virus. More damaging was the government’s decision on 1 April 2020 to ban burial of anyone even suspected of having died of the disease.

Announced the day after the first Muslim victim died, the decision was justified by a claim – quickly rejected by the World Health Organisation and Sri Lankan experts – that the virus could spread from interred remains through the groundwater. The policy, which stayed in place for nearly a year, had a profoundly cruel effect on Muslim families, who were forced to cremate their loved ones’ bodies against their religious convictions.

It was rescinded on 26 February, after a global advocacy campaign that sought to mobilise the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and member states of the UN Human Rights Council, which was due to assess Sri Lanka’s human rights record weeks later. Even after the ban was lifted, however, Sri Lanka has allowed burials in only one remote location, heavily guarded by the military – a limitation that continues to impose hardships on Muslims, as well as the smaller number of Christians and Hindus who choose to bury their dead.

On 12 March, the government also announced new regulations for “deradicalisation” of those “holding violent extremist religious ideology”. Issued under the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act, the rules allowed the defence ministry to detain anyone accused of causing “acts of violence or religious, racial or communal disharmony or feelings of ill will or hostility between different communities or racial or religious groups” for up to eighteen months, without any judicial process or oversight.

Human rights lawyers and Muslim leaders quickly filed suit in the Supreme Court, which in August put the measures on hold until it decides the case. Even if the court quashes the regulations, however, the government’s clear intention to establish a “deradicalisation” program leads some to believe it may enshrine similar powers in revisions to the counter-terrorism law it is presently preparing.

The regulations were issued without evidence that any significant number of Muslims in Sri Lanka posed a threat to security or would benefit from a program along the contemplated lines. They did, however, offer the government a face-saving way to release some of the hundreds of Muslims arrested after the Easter attacks who are still detained, in some cases without charge, by putting them into a “deradicalisation program”.

Holding large numbers of Muslims in special camps for another year or more, as the proposed deradicalisation program would do, however, would risk contributing to a collective sense of humiliation and anger that could itself push some toward “violent extremist religious ideology”. As Muslim activists regularly warn, the risk is particularly high as long as the government’s approach leaves no room for the possibility that Buddhists could promote their own forms of violent extremism.

Overlapping enquiries into the Easter bombings have, meanwhile, been politicised in ways that appear aimed at keeping alive fears of Muslims as a source of insecurity. As part of its broader attack on the independence of police and courts, Gotabaya’s government replaced the entire team looking into the bombings soon after coming to power, arrested the chief investigator, Shani Abeysekera, on what appear to be trumped-up charges, and demoted other officers. Another key investigator fled the country fearing arrest.

The administration has also refused to act on the key recommendations of a separate commission of enquiry – appointed by President Sirisena – into the bombings. These included, among others, prosecuting Sirisena, who is now a key government ally, and banning BBS, whose anti-Muslim incitement the commission found had contributed to the bombers’ turn to violence in a process of “reciprocal radicalisation”.

In what seems to be an attempt at maligning Muslim leaders, the Gotabaya administration also detained or charged a number of prominent Muslim personalities, seemingly without credible grounds. Ex-minister Bathiudeen faces terrorism and extremism charges – despite having been cleared of links to the Easter bombings by the presidential commission of enquiry.

On 2 December, a court released another Muslim lawmaker, Salley, after he had spent eight months in jail, citing lack of evidence. The prosecution of human rights lawyer and political activist Hejaaz Hizbullah for his supposed links to the Easter terrorist attacks also appears to be groundless, relying in part on coerced testimonies.

The government’s approach has angered Sri Lanka’s Catholic leadership, which has accused it, and the president himself, of covering up the “masterminds” behind the Easter bombings. Church leaders suggest that the government has been protecting Sirisena and refusing to follow up on evidence uncovered by the presidential commission that implies military intelligence officers had contact with some of the bombers before and on the day of the attack.

Backed by Pope Francis, Colombo’s archbishop Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has called for an international investigation. Following an October online meeting that aired church criticisms, the police summoned one of the cardinal’s top advisers for three days of questioning.

A Dangerous Slogan

Stung by growing criticism of its handling of the Easter bombings investigation, and facing a grave economic crisis that has badly damaged its popular support, including among Sinhala Buddhists, the Rajapaksa government signalled with Gnanasara’s appointment that it is returning to the “one country, one law” agenda that helped get it elected.

Given the concept’s vagueness, however, and the deep contradiction between it and the explicit privileges that Buddhism enjoys under the constitution, no one is sure what Gnanasara’s task force will actually do. While it can, in principle, look into the practices of all religious and ethnic groups, few observers doubt that it will focus its attention on the Muslim minority.

It is expected to consider reforms to the madrasa education system – Muslim leaders have submitted proposals to the government – as well as government plans to regulate activities in mosques, monitor the import and translation of the Quran and other Arabic texts, ban the niqab and burqa, and outlaw cattle slaughter (an industry dominated by Muslims and often criticised by Buddhist activists).

Gnanasara’s task force also seems certain to weigh in on long-discussed changes to the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, a new version of which the cabinet approved in August. Over the past years, Muslims and others have bitterly debated possible reforms to the Act, with complicated overlap between human rights and feminist critiques of the legislation as patriarchal and oppressive and Buddhist nationalist criticisms of Muslims having their own marriage and family law.

Sri Lankan law enshrines distinct traditions of family law for Sinhalese in Kandy and Tamils in Jaffna, as well as for Muslims, but this Act has come in for particular criticism on account of allowing polygamy, setting no minimum age for marriage, requiring no explicit consent from the bride and establishing all-male courts to hear divorce cases.

But Gnanasara’s involvement in government efforts to alter it will likely weaken the leverage of Muslim feminist reformers pushing to strengthen women’s marriage and divorce rights and strengthen resistance to change from the all-male communal leadership, which has argued that feminist criticisms of the law, in effect, endorse Buddhist militant portrayals of Islam as a backward religion.

It remains to be seen, however, how far the government will allow or encourage Gnanasara to go. On the one hand, Buddhist nationalists appear to see “one country, one law” as a call for “a single law” that gives pre-eminence to Buddhist institutions while denying those of other religions official recognition.

Some top officials clearly see things the same way: it was particularly revealing that Gnanasara’s appointment was followed three weeks later by a series of large-scale Buddhist religious ceremonies in the sacred city of Anuradhapura, featuring the president, cabinet and top military brass alongside the Mahanayakes, Sri Lanka’s most powerful Buddhist clerics.

The two days of ceremonies were grand displays of the government’s project of more fully integrating state, military and Buddhist clergy on the basis of an overtly Sinhala nationalist political vision. On the other hand, in a December meeting, Foreign Minister G.L. Peiris assured ambassadors from Muslim countries that Sri Lanka would “continue to retain” “personal laws specific to Muslim, Kandyan and Tamil communities”.

Moreover, to date, Colombo has carefully calibrated its anti-Muslim policies so as to keep the backing of its hardline Buddhist nationalist supporters and win a degree of international support for helping “counter violent extremism”, while maintaining good relations with economic and political allies in the Muslim world.

The government may as yet have no precise agenda for the task force, but given Gnanasara’s charisma and theatrical skills, he is a potentially powerful, and dangerous, asset for reframing political debate, deepening divisions between Tamils and Muslims and possibly even provoking a new round of anti-Muslim unrest. He has been central in propagating Buddhist nationalist ideology over the last decade.

There is little that those outside of Sri Lanka, concerned about the rule of law, religious harmony and political stability, can do directly to address these dynamics. Foreign partners of the Sri Lankan state, can, however, be more careful about not inadvertently strengthening them.

Following the Easter bombings, a range of new programming by foreign donors has focused on counter-terrorism, preventing “violent extremism” and building “social cohesion”. In the words of one activist, though, “There is a lot of foreign funding to the government for ‘countering violent extremism’ but it only targets one faith. … No one dares tell the government to ‘rehabilitate’ Gnanasara or other extremist monks”.

Until such programming finds – or creates – the space to name and challenge the violent history, rhetoric and exclusionary political projects of all communities, it is more likely to perpetuate, rather than resist, the anti-Muslim ideology that today poses the greatest risk of destabilising violence in a country that has yet to recover from decades of brutal civil war.

The link to the original article: “One Country, One Law”: The Sri Lankan State’s Hostility toward Muslims Grows Deeper.

Alan Keenan is Senior Consultant, Sri Lanka, at the International Crisis Group in Brussels.

Source: International Crisis Group

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South Asian countries are grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent, a report by Human Rights Watch says. Credit: 2017 Paula Bronstein for Human Rights Watch

By Sania Farooqui
New Delhi, Jan 21 2022 (IPS)

As countries across South Asia continue to battle the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, causing serious public health and economic crisis, this region, which is home to almost 2 billion people, is also grappling with the erosion of democratic norms, growing authoritarianism, the crackdown on freedom of press, speech and dissent.

Despite the committed efforts of human rights defenders across South Asia, achieving human rights objectives remains a challenging task. Almost all countries in the region – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – face a common trend of human rights violations and a culture of impunity.

Afghanistan 

In Afghanistan, the Taliban rule has had a devastating impact on the lives of Afghan women, girls, journalists and human rights defenders. “The crisis for women and girls in Afghanistan is escalating with no end in sight. Taliban policies have rapidly turned many women and girls into virtual prisoners in their homes, depriving the country of one of its most precious resources, the skills and talents of the female half of the populations,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch in this report.

This report states, “the Taliban’s return to power has made members of some ethnic and religious minorities feel more vulnerable to threats even from those not affiliated with the Taliban. Taliban authorities have also used intimidation to extract money, food, and services. Fighting has mostly ended in the country, but people expressed fear of violence and arbitrary arrests by the Taliban and lack of the rule of law and reported increased crime in some areas.”

A group of three dozen Human Rights Council appointed experts in this report said, “waves of measures such as barring women from returning to their jobs, requiring a male relative to accompany them in public spaces, prohibiting women from using public transport on their own, as well as imposing a strict dress code on women and girls. Taken together, these policies constitute a collective punishment of women and girls, grounded in gender-based bias and harmful practices.”

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, has urged the UN security council to hold all perpetrators of human rights violations accountable, “I ask the security council to ensure that the perpetrators of these violations are accountable, I ask all states to use their influence with the Taliban to encourage respect for fundamental human rights. Denial of the fundamental rights of women and girls is massively damaging to the economy and the country as a whole,” Bachelet said.

The Taliban victory propelled Afghanistan “from humanitarian crisis to catastrophe”, with millions of Afghans facing severe food insecurity due to lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Afghan refugees constitute one of the world’s largest refugees population, with more than 2.2 million refugees. “Afghanistan’s displacement crisis is one of the largest and most protracted in UNHCR’s seven-decade history,” says UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.

Bangladesh

While Bangladesh, despite making economic progress and getting upgraded by the United Nations from the category of least developed country to developing country last November, the country continues to be in the news for enforced disappearances, abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings by its security forces with impunity.

In this letter written by 12 organizations to Under-Secretary-General Jean-Pierre Lacroix, urging the United Nations Department of Peace Operations to ban Bangladesh’s notoriously abusive paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) from UN deployment.

As many as 600 people, including opposition leaders, activists, journalists, business people, and others, have been subjected to enforced disappearance since 2009. In this report, Dhaka–based rights organization Odhikar said that “some of the disappeared persons resurfaced in government’s custody after being arrested under the draconian Digital Security Act 2018.”

“Human rights defenders, journalists, and others critical of the government continue to be targeted with surveillance, politically motivated charges and arbitrary detention,” says this report. Earlier in November 2021, the United States slapped sanctions on elite Bangladeshi paramilitary force, Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), stating it threatens US national security interests by undermining the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the economic prosperity of the people of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is the only South Asian country other than Afghanistan to receive US sanctions since 1998.

India

In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in India was downgraded from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy” by global political rights and liberties US-based nonprofit Freedom House. Following this, a Sweden based V-Dem institute said, India had become an “electoral autocracy”. The country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today on The Economist’s list.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended India be designated as a “country of particular concern, or CPC, for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations, as defined by the International Religious Freedom Act in its report.

In its World Report 2022, Human Rights Watch said, “Indian authorities intensified their crackdown on activists, journalists, and other critics of the government using politically motivated prosecutions in 2021. “Attacks against religious minorities were carried out with impunity under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Hindu nationalist government.”

Indian authorities have continued to press charges against students, activities, journalists, including counter-terrorism and sedition laws. To undermine rights to privacy and freedom of expression, reports of Pegasus spyware, developed and sold by Israeli company NSO group, were used to target Indian human rights defenders, journalists, and opposition politicians.

The ongoing harassment of journalists, including particularly those reporting from and in Kashmir, including the recent crackdown on Kashmir’s independent press club being shut down, arbitrary detention of journalists, alleged custodial killings, and a broader pattern of systematic infringement of fundamental rights used against the local population,” the report said.

According to this report, calls for genocide have become more common than ever, “where Hindu extremists organized 12 events over 24 months in four states, calling for genocide of Muslims, attacks on Christian minority and insurrection against the government. In this interview, the founding president of Genocide Watch, has warned: “Genocide could very well happen in India.”  

Nepal

In Nepal, lack of effective government leadership, inadequate and unequal access to health care, and a ‘pervasive culture of impunity’ continue to undermine the country’s fundamental human rights. “A lack of effective government leadership in Nepal means that little is done to uphold citizens’ rights, leaving millions to fend for themselves without adequate services such as for health or education, said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director, Human Rights Watch.

“Systemic impunity for human rights abuses extends to ongoing violations, undermining the principles of accountability and the rule of law in post-conflict Nepal. The report states that the authorities routinely fail to investigate or prosecute killings or torture allegedly carried by security forces,” the report states.

In October 2020, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) published 20 years of data, naming 286 people, mostly police officials, military personnel, and former Maoist insurgents, “as suspects in serious crimes, including torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killings”.

Along with this, the situation of women’s and girls’ human rights continues to be alarming in the country. According to this report, Nepal has the highest rate of child marriages in Asia, with 33 percent of girls marrying before 18 years and 8 percent by 15. Reports also indicate there has been an increase in cases of rape in 2021, with widespread impunity for sexual violence.

Patriarchal Citizenship Law in Nepal which does not treat men and women equally, has been criticized for undermining Nepali women’s identities and agency, subordinating them to the position of second-class citizens – also impacting children.

Pakistan

The Pakistan government, on the other hand, “harassed and at times persecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” said this report by Human Rights Watch. Significant human rights issues include freedom of expression, attacks on civil society groups, freedom of religion and belief, forced disappearances by governments and their agents, unlawful or arbitrary killings, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary detentions, terrorism, counter-terrorism and law enforcement abuses.

“Pakistan failed to enact a law criminalizing torture despite Pakistan’s obligation to do so under the Convention against Torture,” the report said.  The country’s regressive blasphemy law provides a pretext for violence against religious minorities, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary arrests and prosecution.

According to this report by Human Rights Without Frontiers, 1,865 people have been charged with blasphemy laws, with a significant spike in 2020, when 200 cases were registered.

This piece highlights the plight of thousands of Pakistan’s Baloch who security forces have abducted. International human rights law strictly prohibits enforced disappearances, in Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan vowed that a draft law to criminalize enforced disappearances would be “fast-tracked”. A bill about enforced disappearances, which the National Assembly passed, mysteriously went missing after it was sent to the Senate.

The continued attack on journalists and activists for violations of the Electronic Crimes Act, the use of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), an anti-corruption agency to target critics, attacks and well-coordinated campaigns and attacks on women journalists on social media, and reported intimidation of nongovernmental organizations, including harassment and surveillance are all crackdowns which are only getting worse.

Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the government continued to ‘suppress minority communities and harassed activists, and undermined democratic institutions.’ According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2022, “President Gotabaya Rajapaksha seems determined to reverse past rights improvements and protect those implicated in serious abuses. While promising reforms and justice to deflate international criticism, his administration has stepped up suppression of minority communities,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.

The report highlights the harassment of security forces towards human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and the families of victims of past abuses and suppression of peaceful protests. As covid-19 cases surged in the country, military-controlled response to the pandemic “led to serious right violations”.

A major concern from the minority Muslim and Christian communities in Sri Lanka was the government’s order not to allow the bodies of Covid victims to be buried. According to this report, “several bodies were forcibly cremated, despite experts saying that bodies could be buried with proper safety measures.” This order, which rights activists said was intended to target minorities and did not respect religions, after much criticism was reversed.

A leading British religious freedom advocacy group, CSW, in its report titled, “A Nation Divided: The state of freedom of religious or belief in Sri Lanka,” said the Muslim community experiences “severe” religious freedom violations. A key factor in the violations is the perception by Sinhalese-Buddhist nationalists that Muslims are a threat to both Buddhism and the Sinhalese. The report also noted attempts to “reduce the visibility of Islam through the destruction of mosques and restrictive stances on religious clothing.

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A woman hides her face with the poster protesting forced conversions during the Aurat March (Women's March) in 2021. Experts say ‘forced conversions’, usually of underage girls, involve abduction, rape, human trafficking and other serious offences. Activists and experts have called improved legislation. Credit: Aurat March Karachi

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jan 19 2022 (IPS)

Two years after Michelle, 15, was kidnapped, sold, forced to convert to Islam and married to a stranger, relatives still ostracise her.

“My aunts and uncles have left us, and my two older brothers, till a few months ago, were not even talking to me,” said Michelle, talking to IPS over the phone from Faisalabad, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. They believe she has brought dishonour to them.

Her captors and even the cleric who officiated the marriage are free despite committing multiple offences, including abduction, trafficking and rape.

“There are several laws that can be invoked for tackling offences, such as kidnapping and abductions,” lamented Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), a research and advocacy organisation. “But the prosecution has failed to do so.”

Most of the young, female victims belong to the Christian (in Punjab) and Hindu (in Sindh) minorities and followed the same pattern.

Experts and activists demand legislation to prevent ‘forced conversions’ that are often associated with human trafficking, abduction and rape. The white poster on the left says: ‘Forced conversion unacceptable’. The blue poster says: ‘Underage marriage is a crime’. Credit: NCJP.

“This year, at least 62 such cases have been reported,” he told IPS over the phone from the eastern city of Lahore, in the Punjab province.

In the predominantly Muslim nation of 220 million people, the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan are estimated to be 1.27% and 2.14%, respectively, according to the 2017 census.

Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a member of the national assembly from the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, also the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council, told IPS “hundreds of cases” remain unreported.

Rukhsana Khokhar, senior project manager at the Karachi-based non-profit, Legal Aid Society, agreed with Vankwani.

“The victim’s family is hesitant to approach the police because of their harsh attitude,” she said.

“The affected family is diffident to report the crime because of the repercussions from the powerful and influential another side.”

Moreover, Khokhar said, the road to justice was tedious and complicated, but it was also expensive and often beyond their means.

In a majority of the cases, the adolescent girls from Hindu communities are uneducated, belong to poor families and are “surrounded by misogyny and patriarchy,” she said.

However, the reason for the conversion of educated Hindu girls belonging to well-off families was different. They want to seek escape from being forced into marrying uneducated Hindu men from their community. The only way out is for them is to convert to Islam.

Khokhar, who has been studying this issue for over a decade, believed that sensitisation was one way of overcoming the issue since societal prejudices remained the most significant barrier. This should include the clerics who officiate the nikah (the ceremony where the couple is legally wed under Islamic law), the investigating officers working on such cases and the district administration.

According to Vankwani, many parliamentarians concede the issue persists, but it is not as rampant as to be of concern.

“I say, even if it’s just one person who is forcibly converted, it becomes our responsibility to stop this practise through legislation,” he says.

Over the years, there have been several attempts to regulate conversions through legislative means without success.

In 2019, the Sindh assembly, for the second time, rejected a bill criminalising forced religious conversions. The first attempt was in 2016.

Safina Javed, Vice President Pakistan Minority Rights Commission, Sindh chapter, holding a poster. Credit: Safina Javed

In 2020, the Standing Committee on Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony had rejected the Protection of Rights of Minorities Bill, 2020, which recommended an age limit of 18 years for conversion.

The parliamentary committee shot down a draft of yet another anti-forced conversion bill opposed earlier in the year by the ministry of religious affairs even before it could be tabled in the national assembly.

The excuse made by the minister for religious affairs, Noorul Haq Qadri, was the “unfavourable” environment.

According to political and integrity risk analyst Huma Yusuf, the current “social, religious and political environment” was too oppressive in a Talibanized Pakistan for the law to find favour from any quarter.

“A key problem is that the term ‘forced conversion’ glosses over what’s really at stake. Reportedly, some 1,000 girls from religious minorities, primarily Hindus, are forced to convert each year,” Yusuf says.

“These conversions can involve abduction, rape, violence, human trafficking and extortion. They also enrich clerics who receive payments for solemnising such marriages, corrupt police officials who take bribes instead of investigating, and magistrates who look the other way. By rejecting the bill, our lawmakers are condoning these other activities. How does this serve Islam?”

The reasons for rejecting the most recent bill by the ministry and the parliamentary committee were the minimum age (set to be 18 years) kept for converting to another religion, a 90-day contemplation period before conversion and testifying before a judge.

The bill stated that the “age will be ascertained based on the child’s birth certificate, school enrolment certificate, or the official database. In the absence of all, the person’s age may be determined through a medical examination”.

“There are about 20 laws that place some or the other restrictions on a person below 18 years of age,” pointed out Jacob, including getting a driver’s license, voting or seeking employment.

“These are reasonable restrictions and enhance the scope of freedoms and protect the rights in those specific areas.”

He also found the 90-day contemplation period logical for a “matter that is individually and socially important and should not be dealt with casually or hastily”.

Further, says Jacob, testifying before a judge eliminates the possibility of covering the crime of kidnapping by marriage and will ensure that conversion is not under any duress, deceit, threat or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Terming the bill a “dam” that was drafted to “restrain the spread of Islam,” Pir Abdul Khaliq, 66, who heads the century-old madressa Ahya Darul Uloom, in Dharki, in Sindh province’s Ghotki district, was happy it was “rejected”.

This madressa (a “hotbed” for alleged conversions), next to the shrine of Khanqah-i-Aalia Qadria Bharchundi Sharif, has a chain of nearly 200 seminaries spread across Sindh (140), Punjab (30) and almost two dozen in Balochistan.

Since he took over the reins of the seminary from his father 50 years ago, he says, he has converted scores of men and women of their “free will”. Talking to IPS over the phone from Dharki, he conceded he was among those who had threatened the ministry that his followers would “come on the streets and hold protests” if the bill was passed.

Having converted entire families, “from 80-year-olds to some as young as eight”, he says no one ever objected to that, so why the need for a law.

“If an underage child converts alongside the parents or guardians, there is no objection,” responded Khokhar. The objection raised was of the conversion of single adolescents like Michelle.

“Why are they never elderly women, why do they have to flee to another city to convert and why are the parents not allowed to meet them?” she asked.

“There is no age to conversion,” responded Khaliq, but insisted he “respected the age of marriage”, which is 18 in Sindh.

However, many underage Hindu girls from Sindh are taken to Punjab, where the legal age of marriage is 16, says Khokhar. She believes it would help halt forced conversion if the age restriction of 18 years for conversion and marriage was “enforced uniformly” throughout the country.

In 2019, two Hindu sisters, Raveena and Reena, made headlines by going to the court seeking protection from their family, saying they had wilfully accepted Islam. The family insisted they were abducted.

The sisters were converted before their marriage in Sindh (where the age for marriage is 18) but married in Punjab (where the age for marriage is 16).

However, the court allowed the sisters to go to their husbands but sent a five-member fact-finding team to ascertain this was not a forced conversion.

The report recommended religious conversion be carried out through a “proper process and be formalised or registered in a court of law”.

At times, says Khaliq, girls eloped and converted to Islam because they had fallen in love with Muslim men and “not for the love of religion”.

In that case, says the cleric, the woman is given “a day or two to think over her decision”. But if she still insists on conversion, he performs the ceremony. “Marriage between a Muslim and Hindu is not permissible in Islam,” he says, and so she converts.

He also pointed out that there are times the woman realises she has made a wrong judgement, but after having fled her parent’s home, the chances of her being accepted by her family are very slim on her return.

“She has little recourse but to follow the original plan of converting to Islam”.

However, he reiterated, his seminary would not perform the nikah if the girl was underage.

“We will convert her only, and then she can go back to her parents till she attains the age of marriage. If her family won’t accept her new religion, and which happens in most cases, we provide her shelter, till she attains the legal age of marriage,” says Khaliq.

Responding to Khokhar’s query of moving to another city to convert, Khaliq explains: “Once the girl elopes with the man and the parents go to the police, many forces come into play, including the feudal lord of the area and the police. Fearful of their life, their first thought is to find a safe place.”

If it were passed, the bill would have effectively addressed this issue by restricting the person applying for a conversion certificate to get it issued from the judge of the area where the non-Muslim resided, says Jacob.

He, however, refuses to let the rejection dampen his spirit. “We have no other option but to fight taking the legal route to ensure a fixed process for conversion is followed,” says Jacob.

Along with Dr Vankwani, he is working with the Council of Islamic Ideology (tasked with giving legal advice on Islamic issues to the government and the parliament) to develop a draft bill that would be acceptable to all faiths.

This article is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7, which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.
The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such as exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking”.

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