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Ukraine Readies New High Court as Reforms Take Hold, Justice Minister Says

Ukraine could have a new Supreme Court installed by next month as part of judicial reforms aimed at rooting out corruption, Ukraine’s Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said Tuesday.

“I think from October the new Supreme Court will start working,” Petrenko told Reuters in an interview at the Concordia Annual Summit in New York. “The next challenge for us is to establish new appeal courts throughout the country, and to take in new judges in the regional courts.”

Petrenko added that reforms within appeal and regional courts could be in place within the next four years. Other government reforms began in 2014, after a popular uprising driven partly by public anger over endemic corruption.

Ukraine is still dealing with nagging allegations of graft, and Transparency International ranked it a poor 131st out of 176 countries in the World Ranking of Corruption Perception in a report this year.

The selection process for new Supreme Court judges has been questioned by figures including British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who cited concerns in July that Ukrainian government reforms were faltering.

Not ideal, but ‘very good’

Petrenko addressed criticism surrounding the selection, saying that while there are no ideal processes, “this one is very good.”

“We have a democratic society, and all the time there are people who will criticize the process,” he said.

Ukraine currently is the recipient of an aid-for-reforms program from the International Monetary Fund.

So far, the IMF has given the country $8.4 billion, helping it recover from a two-year recession following the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the outbreak of a Russian-backed insurgency in its industrial east.

Under the $17.5 billion program, the IMF wants Ukraine to set up a special court to focus on tackling corruption.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Friday said he hoped an anti-corruption chamber would be created next month, but expressed doubt that an independent court as envisaged by the IMF could be set up before 2019.

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Interfax: Russia to Pay Damages for Beslan School Siege

Russia will abide by a European Court of Human Rights ruling requiring it to pay nearly 3 million euros ($3.6 million) in damages for the 2004 Beslan school siege, the Interfax news agency reported Tuesday, citing the Russian justice ministry.

Russia used excessive force to storm a school in the small southern Russian town seized by Islamist militants in 2004, causing a high number of hostages to be killed, the court ruled in April.

The three-day drama began when Islamist militants took more than 1,000 people hostages on the first day of the school year and called for independence for the majority-Muslim region of Chechnya.

More than 330 hostages died, including at least 180 children, when the siege ended in a gunbattle. It was the bloodiest incident of its kind in modern Russian history.

The case for damages was brought by 409 Russian nationals who either were taken hostage or injured in the incident, or were family members of those taken hostage, killed or injured, the European Court of Human Rights statement said in April.

On Tuesday, the court said in a press release that its Grand Chamber Panel had rejected a Russian government request to refer the case and said its ruling was final.

“No other actions are being contemplated by the participants in this process,” the Russian justice ministry said in comments carried by Interfax.

In its April ruling, the court said the heavy-handed way Russian forces stormed the school had “contributed to the casualties among the hostages.”

It also ruled that authorities had failed to take reasonable preventive measures, despite knowing militants were planning to attack an educational institution.

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At Least 65 Skulls Found so far at a Mass Grave in Bosnia

The remains of at least 65 victims have been retrieved from a mass grave recently found in central Bosnia, forensic experts said Tuesday about the site of one of the most gruesome crimes of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

Lejla Cengic from Bosnia’s Missing Persons Institute said the remains, which included 65 skulls, were found in a grave at the Koricanske Stijene cliff near Mount Vlasic. The remains are believed to belong to some of over 220 non-Serb civilians executed in the area by Bosnian Serb forces on August 21, 1992.

The grave was discovered in August. Experts have been there since Sept. 7 and the exhumation work is continuing.

Most of those killed were taken from notorious Serb-run detention camps near the northwestern town of Prijedor and told they were going for a prisoner exchange.

The victims are believed to have been forced out of a convoy of several hundred civilians whom Serbs were deporting from Prijedor. They were ordered to line up atop the 300-meter (990-foot) cliff and executed. Once the victims fell into the abyss, Serb policemen threw bombs at them to make sure nobody would survive.

Only a dozen men survived by falling or jumping down the ravine when the shooting started.

After the killings, the Bosnian Serbs removed the bodies from the bottom of the cliff and buried them under rocks in several locations in the wider area of Koricanske Stijene. The Missing Persons Institute and the victims’ relatives have been searching the area for the remains since the end of the war.

Exhumations at previously discovered mass graves, not far from the site located in August, have uncovered the remains of 117 victims.

So far, 11 former Bosnian Serb policemen from Prijedor have been sentenced for the slayings at Koricanske Stijene.

Since the end of the war, the remains of 25,500 people have been found by forensic experts in mass graves across Bosnia. Another 7,000 people are still listed as missing and their remains are believed to be hidden at clandestine mass burial sites around the country.

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Stanislav Petrov, Who Averted Nuclear War, Dies at 77

Stanislav Petrov, a former Soviet military officer known in the West as “the man who saved the world” for his role in averting a nuclear war over a false missile warning at the height of the Cold War, has died at 77.

Petrov’s German friend, Karl Schumacher, said Tuesday that he died on May 19. Schumacher called Petrov earlier this month to wish him a happy birthday, but was told by Petrov’s son Dmitry that his father had died. The Russian state Zvezda TV station only reported the death on Tuesday.

Petrov was on night duty at the Soviet military’s early warning facility outside Moscow on Sept. 26, 1983, when an alarm went off, signaling the launch of several U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 44-year-old lieutenant colonel had to quickly determine whether the attack was real. He chose to consider it a false alarm, which it was.

The incident was particularly harrowing as it happened at one of the tensest periods of the Cold War when the Soviet Union appeared to genuinely fear a surprise U.S. nuclear attack.

A few weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a passenger plane flying to South Korea from the U.S., suspecting it of spying, killing all 269 people aboard. The United States, after a series of provocative military maneuvers, was preparing for a major NATO exercise that simulated preparations for a nuclear attack.

In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Petrov recalled the excruciating moments at the secret Serpukhov-15 control center when the fate of the world was in his hands.

“I realized that I had to make some kind of decision, and I was only 50/50,” Petrov told the AP.

The responsibility was enormous.

If he had judged it a real launch, the top Soviet military brass and the Kremlin would have had no time for extra analysis in a few minutes left before the incoming nuclear-tipped missiles hit Soviet territory. They would have likely ordered a retaliatory strike, triggering a nuclear war.

“It was this quiet situation and suddenly the roar of the siren breaks in and the command post lights up with the word ‘LAUNCH,'” Petrov told the AP. “This hit the nerves. I was really taken aback. Holy cow!”

Within minutes of the first alarm, the siren sounded again, warning of a second U.S. missile launch. Soon, the system was reporting that five missiles had been launched.

Petrov recalled standing up as the alarm siren blared and seeing that the others were all looking at him in confusion.

“My team was close to panic and it hit me that if panic sets in then it’s all over,” he said.

Petrov told his commander that the system was giving false information. He was not at all certain, but he was driven by the fact that Soviet ground radar could not confirm a launch. The radar system picked up incoming missiles only well after any launch, but he knew it to be more reliable than the satellites.

The false alarm was later determined to have been caused by a malfunction of the satellite, which mistook the reflection of the sun off high clouds for a missile launch.

Petrov was not rewarded for his actions. In fact, he received a reprimand for failing to correctly fill the duty log and retired from the military the following year.

Although his commanding officer did not support Petrov at the time, he was the one who revealed the incident after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If Col. Gen. Yury Votintsev had not spoken out, Petrov said he himself “would have forgotten about it like a bad dream.”

After his story was told, Petrov has received accolades, international awards and became known as “the man who saved the world.”

But his role won him little fame in his homeland. He continued to live in a small, unkempt apartment in the Moscow suburb of Fryazino. There have been no official reports or statements about his death from any Russian government agency.

Schumacher said it was important for him to let the world know about Petrov’s passing because “we owe this man a lot.”

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Germany Arrests 2 Islamic State Suspects in Berlin

Two Iraqi men have been arrested in the German capital on suspicion of membership in a terrorist organization and war crimes as part of the Islamic State group, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

A 31-year-old, identified only as Raad Riyadh A. A. in line with privacy laws, and 19-year-old Abbas R. were both arrested Monday in Berlin, prosecutors’ spokeswoman Frauke Koehler said. They’re both alleged to have joined IS in Mosul in June 2014 and participated in the killing of two Shiite Muslims.

 

Four months later, prosecutors said, they were involved in the execution of a captured Iraqi military officer.

 

While in Iraq, Raad Riyadh A.A. is also accused of extorting money from businesses to support IS and procuring weapons from the Iraqi army and police forces for the group.

 

After arriving in Germany in July 2015, Raad Riyadh A.A. tried to recruit two other Iraqis and convince a third to carry out a suicide attack, Koehler said.

 

In a separate case, a 24-year-old Syrian was arrested in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein on allegations he was a member of multiple foreign terrorist organizations, including IS. Majed A. was arrested Sept. 13 and is also accused of weapons violations.

 

In 2013, he joined a militia affiliated with the Nusra Front group in Syria to fight against the Assad regime, Koehler said. He ended up with IS in 2014 and fought against Kurdish forces in northern Syria before entering in Germany in August 2015.

 

 

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Turkey Starts Trial of 30 Newspaper Staff for Links to Coup Attempt

Thirty journalists and newspaper executives from a Turkish newspaper which was shut down last year went on trial Monday, facing life sentences over charges that they had links to a failed coup attempt.

The former employees of the Zaman newspaper are charged with “membership of an armed terror organization” and “attempting to overthrow” the government, parliament and the constitutional order through their links to cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Zaman was affiliated with Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric and former ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Gulen is blamed by Ankara for instigating the failed July 2016 coup, but denies any involvement.

Zaman was first seized by the Turkish government in March 2016, months before the coup attempt, and then closed down by a government decree.

Twenty-two of the suspects have been in pre-trial detention for months, including 73-year-old columnist Sahin Alpay.

“If it had ever crossed my mind that the Gulenist movement would take a role in a coup attempt, I would never have written a column in the Zaman newspaper,” Dogan news agency quoted Alpay as saying.

The indictment calls for three consecutive life sentences for the Zaman staff on charges of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order, the Turkish parliament and the Turkish government, and says the newspaper had exceeded the limits of press freedom and freedom of expression.

“I accept that this is an armed terrorist organization, but I was never a member of it,” columnist Ali Bulac told the court in Silivri, the site of a large prison about 60 km (40 miles) west of the city. He had not paid close attention to the Gulenist movement’s activities, he said.

“I missed the hole in the ground when I was watching the stars. But who did see it?” Bulac said, adding the group’s operations were perceived to be legal during the time he worked for Zaman.

Turkey’s Justice Ministry announced in July that more than 50,000 people had been arrested and 169,013 have been the subject of legal proceedings since the coup attempt.

The scale of the crackdown has drawn criticism from Turkey’s Western allies and led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to call for Ankara’s European Union accession talks to be called off.

Turkey says the sweeping response to the coup reflects the deep security challenges the country has faced.

Rights groups say more than 160 journalists are detained in Turkey, making it the world’s biggest jailer of journalists. The hearing will continue this week.

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Opposition Sees Brexit ‘Chaos’ in UK Government Shifts, Feuds

The British government’s attempt to appear strong and united over Brexit wobbled Monday as a top official was shifted from his post days before a new round of divorce negotiations with the European Union. Opposition lawmakers said the move reflected the Conservatives’ “chaotic” approach to handling the biggest challenge facing the country.

Prime Minister Theresa May, meanwhile, faced calls to discipline fellow Conservative Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for undermining her leadership by publishing his own manifesto for Brexit.

A week before negotiations between Britain and the bloc are due to resume in Brussels, the U.K. government announced Monday that the top civil servant on its negotiating team had left the Department for Exiting the European Union. The department said Oliver Robbins was moving to become May’s EU adviser.

Reports of friction

The move follows reports of friction between Robbins and Brexit Secretary David Davis, the U.K.’s top negotiator.

Opposition Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said the shuffle “adds a whole new dimension to government’s chaotic approach to Brexit.”

In March, Britain triggered a two-year countdown to departure from the 28-nation EU. Since then, negotiations have made little progress on key issues including the status of the Ireland-Northern Ireland border and the amount Britain must pay to settle its financial commitments to the bloc.

EU officials say talks can’t move on to future relations with Britain until key divorce terms have been agreed upon. May is making a major speech Friday in Florence, Italy, that is intended to help break the logjam.

But before she could speak, Johnson laid out his own vision of Britain’s future outside the EU in a 4,000-word article for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. It called for the U.K. to adopt a low-tax, low-regulation economy outside the EU’s single market and customs union.

Sparks speculation

The article drew rebukes from May’s Cabinet allies — and sparked immediate speculation that Johnson wants replace May as leader of the Conservative Party.

 

Unlike May, who campaigned to stay in the EU before last year’s referendum, Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of the “leave” side. He has the support of some Brexit-backing Conservative lawmakers, who worry that May will settle for a compromise “soft Brexit” that somehow keeps Britain inside the EU’s single market.

Some lawmakers called on May to fire Johnson — whose bumbling, jokey persona masks intense political ambition — but she is likely in too weak a position to do so. Her authority was severely undermined when she called an early June 8 election in a bid to increase her majority — only to see the Conservatives reduced to a minority administration.

‘Boris is Boris’

May said Monday that “Boris is Boris,” but insisted she was firmly in charge.

 

“The U.K. government is driven from the front, and we all have the same destination in our sights, and that is getting a good deal for Brexit with the European Union,” she said during a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.

Johnson’s article also was criticized by Britain’s statistics regulator, which accused him of misleadingly claiming that leaving the EU will give Britain control of an extra 350 million pounds ($475 million) a week.

‘Misuse of official statistics’

U.K. Statistics Authority chief David Norgrove called the figure “a gross misuse of official statistics.” He said the 350 million pounds was a gross rather than net figure. It doesn’t take into account a substantial rebate that Britain receives before the money is sent, or money the EU sends to Britain, which reduces the figure to about half the amount cited.

Also Monday, the British government called for a wide-ranging security treaty with the EU to ensure that intelligence-sharing and law-enforcement cooperation continue after Brexit. Such a deal would allow Britain to remain a member of the EU police body Europol and keep use of the European Arrest Warrant, which allows for the quick extradition of suspects.

 

But it is unclear what legal framework would underpin such a treaty, because Britain says it will leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

 

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US Students in Acid Attack in France Forgive Assailant

The four American college students attacked with acid at a Marseille train station have forgiven their assailant, who reportedly suffers from a mental illness, a university spokesman said Monday.

 

The four women, on a study-abroad year, have all said they intend to remain in Europe to continue their studies, the spokesman for Boston College, the private Jesuit school they attend, told The Associated Press.

 

The women “have stated their intention to remain in Europe for their studies and have offered forgiveness to the woman who attacked them, an individual who police say suffers from mental illness,” said Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn.

 

The four were attacked Sunday morning at the Saint Charles train station in the southern French city. A 41-year-old woman has been taken into custody by police in the case.

 

Two of the students had asked for prayers for their assailant in Facebook posts late Sunday.

 

One of the women, Michelle Krug, said she was one of two who got hit in the eye with “a weak solution of hydrochloric acid.” She asked friends to “please consider thinking about/praying for our attacker” so she can receive help.

 

“Mental illness is not a choice and should not be villainized,” Krug wrote, adding she planned to continue her “incredible opportunity” to study in France.

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Chinese Fleet Heads for Russian Coast for Naval Drill, as Moscow Continues Zapad Exercises

A four-ship fleet from China has performed formation drills in the Sea of Japan, near North Korea, before heading to the Russian port of Vladivostok for joint land and sea military exercises with Russia. Moscow is already conducting the largest military exercise since the Cold War in areas close to its northwestern borders. That operation, code-named Zapad 2017, includes joint drills with Belarus. NATO is closely watching the exercises and says they include as many as 100,000 servicemen, not 12,700 as Moscow claims, and involve firing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.

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Violent Storm in Romania Kills 8, Injures Dozens

At least eight people were killed and dozens more injured when a violent storm hit western Romania on Sunday.  

The storm, bearing winds of 100 kilometers an hour, also caused property destruction in neighboring Serbia, and in Croatia.

Road and rail traffic in parts of Romania was halted by fallen trees and dozens of towns and villages were left without power.

“We can’t fight the weather,” Romanian Prime Minister Mihai Tudose told Antena3 TV. “The entire medical sector is focused on the injured.”

He said the government would help support the communities hit by the storm.

Romania’s national weather agency issued warnings of strong winds and rainstorms for western areas of the country.

Emergency responders urged people to take shelter indoors, unplug household appliances and park in areas not close to trees or power lines.

The storm followed several days of high temperatures.  Temperatures were above 30 degrees Celsius on Sunday.

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In First, Serbia’s Openly Gay PM Joins Belgrade Pride Parade

Ana Brnabic, Serbia’s first openly gay prime minister, joined several hundred activists at a gay-pride march in Belgrade on Sunday.

Brnabic, who is also the first woman in top-level job, said she is working “one step at a time” toward building a more tolerant society.

Serbian riot police cordoned off the city center with metal fences early Sunday to prevent possible clashes with extremist groups opposed to the gathering. Similar events have been marred by violent clashes in the conservative country.

 “The government is here for all citizens and will secure the respect of rights for all citizens,” Brnabic told reporters. “We want to send a signal that diversity makes our society stronger, that together we can do more.”

Members of Serbia’s embattled LGBT community face widespread harassment and violence from extremists. Violence marred the country’s first gay pride march in 2001, and more than 100 people were injured during a similar event in 2010 when police clashed with right-wing groups and soccer hooligans. Several pride events were banned before marches resumed in 2014.

Brnabic, who was elected in June, has tried to shift the focus away from her sexual orientation, asking “Why does it matter?”

Serbia is on track to join the European Union, but the EU has asked the country to improve minority rights, including for the LGBT community.

The marchers Sunday said they hoped Brnabic will bring about legislative changes for same-sex couples.

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Russia Rejects Allegation it Bombed US-Backed Fighters in Syria

The Russian Defense Ministry on Sunday denied it had bombed U.S.-backed militias in Syria, saying its planes only targeted Islamic State militants and that it had warned the United States well in advance of its operational plans.

U.S.-backed militias said they came under attack on Saturday from Russian jets and Syrian government forces in Deir al-Zor province, a flashpoint in an increasingly complex battlefield.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias fighting with the U.S.-led coalition, said six of its fighters had been wounded in the strike.

But Major-General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, dismissed the allegations in a statement on Sunday.

Konashenkov said Russian planes had only carried out carefully targeted strikes in the area based upon information that had been confirmed from multiple sources.

The strikes had only hit targets in areas under the control of Islamic State, he said.

 

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Russian Influence on US Elections Renews Attention to Russian Adoption Ban

The investigation into Russian influence on the US elections has renewed attention to the Russian ban on US adoptions, a response to American sanctions about five years ago. Donald Trump Jr. said that was the topic when he met with a Russian lawyer during his father’s election campaign. As Svetlana Prudovskaya of VOA’s Russian service reports, the adoption ban has affected families and children in both countries.

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NATO Concerned About Russia’s Transparency on Military Games

A senior NATO official says there’s reason to be concerned about the large-scale Zapad 2017 military maneuvers being conducted now by Russia and Belarus, since they could be seen as “a serious preparation for big war.”

General Petr Pavel, head of NATO’s Military Committee, told the Associated Press in an interview Saturday that NATO is increasing efforts to re-establish the military-to-military communications with Russia to avoid any “unintended consequences of potential incidents during the exercise.”

The defense chiefs of NATO member countries were holding their annual conference this year in the Albanian capital of Tirana to discuss fighting terrorism, the situation in the Western Balkans and the new U.S. strategy on Afghanistan.

The Zapad war games, being conducted this year mostly in Belarus, run until September 20 and reportedly involve 5,500 Russian and 7,200 Belarusian troops.

‘Not aimed at NATO’

Despite assurances from Moscow that “NATO is not considered as an enemy” and that “the exercise is not aimed at NATO,” Pavel said Russians have not been transparent about the facts of the exercises. He says the number of troops in the exercises — which the Russians say is about 12,700 — could actually be between 70,000 to 100,000.

“All together, what we see is a serious preparation for big war,” he told The Associated Press. “When we only look at the exercise that is presented by Russia, there should be no worry. But when we look at the big picture, we have to be worried, because Russia was not transparent.”

Two weeks ago, Pavel met with the head of the Russian military’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov.

 

The Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, had a phone call with Gerasimov at the beginning of Zapad 17. Pavel said it was “mainly focused on transparency and risk reduction and avoidance of unintended consequences of potential incidents.”

“We have a high concentration of troops in the Baltics. We have a high concentration of troops in the Black Sea, and potential for an incident may be quite high because of a human mistake, because of a technology failure,” said Pavel. “We have to be sure that such an unintended incident will not escalate into conflict.”

The Military Committee offers consensus-based advice on how the alliance can best meet global security challenges.

Western Balkans

Stability and security in the Western Balkan countries was also discussed during the conference. Pavel said trouble in the region could come from radicalism, organized crime, migration, economic problems or the “malign influence from Russia.”

“We do not compete with Russia for the Western Balkans. We are primarily focused on the Balkans being stable and secure,” he said.

He also added there was no plan for reducing troops in Kosovo or setting a time length for their presence.

About 4,500 troops from 31 countries have been deployed in Kosovo since June 1999, after NATO’s 78-day air campaign to stop a deadly Serbian crackdown against ethnic Albanian separatists. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia has not recognized it.

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World Hunger Swells as Conflict, Climate Change Grow

The United Nations reports world hunger is rising because conflicts and problems related to climate change are multiplying. The report finds about 815 million people globally did not have enough to eat in 2016 — 38 million more than the previous year.

The statistics in this report are particularly grim. They show that global hunger is on the rise again after more than a decade of steady decline. The report, a joint product by five leading U.N. agencies warns that malnutrition is threatening the health of and compromising the future of millions of people world-wide.

The report says 155 million children under age five suffer from stunting of their bodies and often their brains, thereby dimming prospects for the rest of their lives. It notes 52 million, or eight percent, of the world’s children suffer from wasting or low weight for their height.

Executive Director of the UN Children’s Fund, Anthony Lake, says the lives and futures of countless children are blighted because of food insecurity. And those trapped by conflict are most at risk.

“Millions of children across northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere; innocent victims of a deadly combination of protracted, irresponsible conflicts; of drought, poverty and climate change… If unreached, a generation of children, more likely someday as adults, will replicate the hatred and conflicts of today,” Lake said.

The report also explores the problems of anemia among women and growing obesity among adults and children as well. This study does not present a favorable outlook for the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030.

Authors of the report say governments must set goals and invest in measures to bring down malnutrition and to promote healthy eating for healthy living.

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Millions of World’s Children Lack any Record of Their Births

Would a 15-year-old girl be married off by her parents in violation of the law? Would another girl, who looks even younger, get justice after an alleged statutory rape at the hands of an older man?

In their impoverished communities in Uganda, the answers hinged on the fact that one girl had a birth certificate and the other didn’t. Police foiled the planned marriage after locating paperwork that proved the first girl was not 18 as her parents claimed. The other girl could not prove she was under the age of consent; her aunt, who’s also her guardian, has struggled to press charges against the builder who seduced and impregnated her.

“The police were asking me many questions about proof of the girl’s birth date. How old she is? Where she goes to school,” said the aunt, Percy Namirembe, sitting in her tin-roofed shantytown home in Masaka near the shores of Lake Victoria in south-central Uganda. “I don’t have evidence showing the victim is not yet 18.”

As Namirembe spoke, in a room decorated with a collage of Christ and the Madonna, her niece sat beside her, her belly swollen and a vacant stare on her face.

In the developed world, birth certificates are often a bureaucratic certainty. However, across vast swaths of Africa and South Asia, tens of millions of children never get them, with potentially dire consequences in regard to education, health care, job prospects and legal rights. Young people without IDs are vulnerable to being coerced into early marriage, military service or the labor market before the legal age. In adulthood, they may struggle to assert their right to vote, inherit property or obtain a passport.

“They could end up invisible,” said Joanne Dunn, a child protection specialist with UNICEF.

With the encouragement of UNICEF and various non-governmental organizations, many of the worst-affected countries have been striving to improve their birth registration rates. In Uganda, volunteers go house to house in targeted villages, looking for unregistered children. Many babies are born at home, with grandmothers acting as midwives, so they miss out on the registration procedures that are being modernized at hospitals and health centers.

By UNICEF’s latest count, in 2013, the births of about 230 million children under age 5 – 35 percent of the world’s total – had never been recorded. Later this year, UNICEF plans to release a new report showing that the figure has dropped to below 30 percent due to progress in countries ranging from Vietnam and Nepal to Uganda, Mali and Ivory Coast.

India is the biggest success story. It accounted for 71 million of the unregistered children in UNICEF’s 2013 report – more than half of all the Indian children in that age range. Thanks to concerted nationwide efforts, UNICEF says the number of unregistered children has dropped to 23 million – about 20 percent of all children under age 5.

Uganda is a potential success story as well, though very much a work in progress. UNICEF child protection officer Augustine Wassago estimates that the country’s registration rate for children under 5 is now about 60 percent, up from 30 percent in 2011.

While obtaining a birth certificate is routine for most parents in the West, it may not be a priority for African parents who worry about keeping a newborn alive and fed. Many parents wait several years, often until their children are ready for school exams, to tackle the paperwork.

Maria Nanyonga, who raises pigs and goats in Masaka, says lack of birth registration caused her to miss out on tuition subsidies for some of the seven nieces and nephews she is raising.

“I tried my best to get the children’s certificates, but I didn’t even know where to start,” she said. “I didn’t know when they were born, and the officials needed that.”

Even now, two years after losing out on the financial aid, Nanyonga is uncertain about the children’s ages.

“I can only guess,” she said. “I think the oldest is 10 and the youngest is 5.”

Henry Segawa, a census worker in the Rakai administrative district, is among those who’ve been trained to do the registration outreach. Their efforts have been buttressed by public awareness campaigns; radio talk show hosts and priests have been encouraged to spread the word.

“When you go to a home, you explain the benefits of birth registration, and people have been responding well,” Segawa said.

On one of his forays, Segawa was on hand in a remote village as a midwife delivered a baby at a decaying health center with a leaky roof, no running water and outhouse walls smeared with excrement.

Upon hearing the newborn’s piercing bawls, Segawa strode toward the birth register to record the newborn’s details.

The baby, Ben Ssekalunga, was the ninth child in his family, said his grandmother, Mauda Byarugaba.

“I want this baby to be her last one,” she said of her daughter. “Nine children are too many.”

Birth registration plays a pivotal role in Uganda’s efforts to enforce laws setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage.

Child marriage remains widespread, due largely to parents hoping to get a dowry from their daughters’ suitors. In the rare cases where the police are alerted, investigators face an uphill task pressing charges if they cannot prove, with a birth certificate or other official document, that the girl is a minor.

But in the recent case in Rakai, police detective Deborah Atwebembeire was able to prevail in a surprise raid on a wedding party because the bride-to-be’s birth certificate proved she was 15.

“When we reached there, I heard one man say, ‘Ah, but the police have come. Let me hope the girl is not young,'” Atwebembeire recalled.

The girls’ parents claimed she was born in March 1999, which would have made her old enough to consent. Yet only months before, the girl’s parents had told birth registration officials she was born in October 2001.

The wedding was called off, and the parents spent a night in jail.

“We achieved our objective, which was to stop the wedding,” Atwebembeire said.

The girl, Asimart Nakabanda, had dropped out of school before the planned marriage. “The man is out of my mind now. I don’t want him anymore,” she said. “I want to go back to school and study.”

The birth registration campaign in Uganda dates back only about five years and there’s still uncertainty as to whether the government will invest sufficient funds to expand and sustain it.

In India, by contrast, the major progress in birth registration results from a decades-long initiative. Public health workers, midwives, teachers and village councilors in remote areas have all been empowered to report births. In areas with internet connectivity, online registration has helped boost overall coverage.

Chhitaranjan Khaitan, an official with the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, said 15 of the country’s 29 states had reported a 100 percent birth registration rate, and seven more states surpassed 90 percent. Many states have successfully linked registration to a nationwide effort to provide every Indian citizen with an identification number.

An added motivation is India’s effort to stem its skewed gender ratio, due largely to families’ preference for sons. By requiring health workers and village officials to register all births, authorities hope fewer newborn girls will be killed by their families.

Pradeep Verma, a 28-year-old car mechanic in the village of Gram Mohdi in the central state of Chhattisgarh, was thrilled to obtain his daughter’s birth certificate earlier this year.

“It was the first thing I did after my daughter was born,” Verma said. “My parents did not register my birth. It was not considered important or necessary in those days.”

Verma has had repeated problems with proving his identity, particularly in getting a government ration card that entitled him to cheap rice and sugar.

“I know how difficult it has been to get an official identity document or enroll in government welfare programs, since I have no proof of birth,” said Verma, who dropped out of school in 10th grade. “My daughter will not have to face such hassles.”

Verma’s state of Chhattisgarh was recording just 55 percent of births in 2011. Amitabha Panda, the state’s top statistician, said reasons included lack of registration centers, outdated data collection methods and wariness of extending outreach to areas where Maoist rebels held sway.

In 2013, with help from UNICEF, the state government launched a campaign using street theater, graffiti and notices distributed at markets to get the word out. Today, the state says it registers virtually every birth.

The West African nation of Mali is another success story. It’s now reporting a birth registration rate of 87 percent – one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – despite a long-running conflict involving Islamic extremists.

Michelle Trombley, a UNICEF child protection officer in Mali, admires the parents and local officials who persisted with registration efforts even when their communities in the north were occupied by rebels.

“They were so dedicated to having children registered, they would smuggle in the official registration books,” she said. “People were literally putting their lives at risk.”

For all of the progress, huge challenges remain for UNICEF and its partners to attain their goal of near-universal registration by 2030.

In Somalia, wracked by famine and civil war, the most recent registration rate documented by UNICEF, based on data from 2006, was 3 percent – the lowest of any nation.

In Myanmar, the overall registration rate has surpassed 70 percent, but is much lower in the western state of Rakhine, base of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority. Human rights agencies say many thousands of Rohingya children there have no birth certificates because of discriminatory policies.

More broadly, there’s the massive problem of children without birth certificates or other identification who make up a significant portion of the millions of displaced people around the world, fleeing war, famine, persecution and poverty.

In Lebanon, tens of thousands of Syrian children have been born to refugee parents in recent years without being registered by any government. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, has pushed Lebanese authorities to ease barriers to registration, such as requirements to present certain identity documents.

Major efforts to register refugee children also are under way in Thailand and Ethiopia.

Monika Sandvik-Nylund, a senior child protection adviser with UNHCR, said birth registration can be crucial to enabling refugee children to return to their home countries or to reunite after being separated from their parents.

There are no comprehensive statistics on the extent of such separations, but Claudia Cappa, author of the upcoming UNICEF report, says they can be heartbreaking for a parent.

“How can you claim your child if you don’t have proof he or she really existed?” she said. “Imagine how devastating this might be to a mother.”

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Russia’s Digital Weapons Refined on Virtual Battlefield’ of Ukraine

It was a Friday in June, a short workday before a public holiday weekend in Ukraine, and cybersecurity expert Victor Zhora had left the capital, Kyiv, and was in the western city of Lviv when he got the first in a torrent of phone calls from frantic clients.

His clients’ networks were being crippled by ransomware known as Petya, a malicious software that locks up infected computers and data. But this ransomware was a variant of an older one and wasn’t designed to extort money — the goal of the virus’ designers was massive disruption to Ukraine’s economy.

“I decided not to switch on my computer and just used my phone and iPad as a precaution,” he said. “I didn’t want my laptop to be contaminated by the virus and to lose my data,” he said.

​Virus spread like wildfire

The Petya virus, targeting Microsoft Windows-based systems, spread like wildfire across Europe and, to a lesser extent, America, affecting hundreds of large and small firms in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Britain.

While many Europeans saw the June cyberattack as just another wild disruption caused by anonymous hackers, it was identified quickly by experts, like the 37-year-old Zhora, as another targeted assault on Ukraine. Most likely launched by Russia, it was timed to infect the country’s networks on the eve of Ukraine’s Constitution Day.

The cyberattack started through a software update for an accounting program that businesses use when working with Ukrainian government agencies, according to the head of Ukraine’s cyberpolice, Sergey Demedyuk. In an interview with VOA in his office in the western suburbs of Kyiv, Demedyuk said, “every year cyberattacks are growing in number.”

“Sometimes when targeting a particular government agency or official, they mount complex attacks, first using some disguising action, like a denial-of-service attack, and only then launch their main attack aiming, for example, at capturing data,” he said.

Ukraine’s 360-member cyberpolice department was formed in 2015. The department is stretched, having not only to investigate cybercrime by nonstate actors but also, along with a counterpart unit in the state security agency, defend the country from cyberattacks by state actors. Demedyuk admits it is a cat-and-mouse game searching for viruses and Trojan horses that might have been planted months ago.

​Cybersecurity summit

On Wednesday, the director of U.S. National Intelligence, Dan Coats, told a cybersecurity summit in Washington that digital threats are mounting against the West, and he singled out Russia as a major culprit, saying Moscow “has clearly assumed an ever more aggressive cyber posture.”

“We have not experienced — yet — a catastrophic attack. But I think everyone in this room is aware of the ever-growing threat to our national security,” Coats added.

And many of the digital weapons the West may face are being refined and developed by Russian-directed hackers in the cyberwar being waged against Ukraine, said Zhora and other cybersecurity experts.

“They are using Ukraine as a testing laboratory,” said Zhora, a director of InfoSafe, a cybersecurity company that advises private sector clients and Ukrainian government agencies.

​Eye of the digital storm

Since the 2014 ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine has been in the eye of a sustained and systematic digital storm of big and small cyberattacks with practically every sector of the country impacted, including media, finance, transportation, military, politics and energy. Sometimes, the intrusions are highly tailored; other times, more indiscriminate attacks like Petya are launched at Ukraine.

Russian officials deny they are waging cyber warfare against Ukraine. Zhora, like many cybersecurity experts, acknowledges it is difficult, if not impossible most times, to trace cyberattacks back to their source.

“Attribution is the most difficult thing. When you are dealing with professional hackers it is hard to track and to find real evidence of where it has come from,” he said. “But we know only one country is the likely culprit. We only really have one enemy that wants to destroy Ukrainian democracy and independence,” he added.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, has been less restrained in pointing the finger of blame. Last December, he said there had been 6,500 cyberattacks on 36 Ukrainian targets in the previous two months alone. Investigations, he said, point to the “direct or indirect involvement of [the] secret services of Russia, which have unleashed a cyberwar against our country.”

Ukraine’s cyberpolice head agrees. Demedyuk says his officers have been able to track attacks, especially denial-of-service intrusions, back to “Russian special services, tracking them to their own facilities and their own IP addresses.” But the original source of more complex intrusions, he said, are much harder to identify, with the hackers disguising themselves by using servers around the world, including in Asia and China.

​Digital weapons refined

Digital intrusions have seen data deleted and networks crippled with real life consequences. And digital weapons are being refined often with the knowledge gained from each intrusion.

Zhora cites as an example of this evolution the difference between two large cyberattacks on the country’s electricity grid, the first in December 2015 and the second at the end of last year, which cut off energy to hundreds of thousands of people for several hours.

With the first attack the hackers used malware to gain access to the networks and then shut the system down manually. 

“They sent an email and when someone opened it, the payload was downloaded and later it spread across the network and they used the path created for the hackers to get to the administrator’s work station and then in a live session switched off the subsystems overseeing electricity distribution,” he said.

But with the 2016 attack no live session was necessary.

“They used a malware which opened the doors automatically by decoding specific protocols and there was no human interaction. I think they got a lot of information in the first attack about the utility companies’ networks and they used the knowledge to write the malware for the second intrusion,” he said.

Digital threats to US

In his speech midweek in Washington, Coats specifically cited possible digital threats to America’s critical infrastructure, including electrical grids and other utilities, saying it is of rising concern. 

“It doesn’t take much effort to imagine the consequences of an attack that knocks out power in Boston in February or power in Phoenix in July,” he said.

After the second cyberattack on Ukraine’s electrical grid, a group of American government and private sector energy officials was dispatched to Kyiv, where they spent a month exploring what happened, according to Ukrainian officials.

One lesson the visitors drew was that it would be much harder in the U.S. to switch the grid back on after an intrusion. The Ukrainians were able to get the electricity moving again by visiting each substation and turning the system on again manually, an option apparently more challenging in the U.S., where grid systems are even more automated.

“Virtual attacks are every bit as dangerous as military ones — we are living on a battlefield,” Zhora said.

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Ankara Threatens Sanctions Against Iraqi Kurds Over Independence Vote

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim warned Friday that the Iraqi Kurdish plan to hold an independence referendum was a “grave mistake.”  Iraqi Kurdistan regional President Masoud Barzani has called for the referendum on Sept. 25 in the semi-autonomous area.

Turkey, which borders the Iraqi Kurdish region, has strong ties with Barzani, but Ankara has been stepping up its pressure to call off the vote. “There are 10 days left (to the referendum). Therefore, I want to repeat our friendly call to Masoud Barzani:  Correct this mistake while there is still time,” Yildirim said Friday to supporters.

The warning was followed by Ankara’s first direct threat. “We don’t want to impose sanctions, but, if we arrive at that point, there are steps that have been already planned that Turkey can take,” Yildirim added.

The warning comes days after the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told the Kurds that they would “pay a price for the vote.”

Ankara, with its own restive Kurdish minority, that mainly borders Iraqi Kurdistan, fears an independent Kurdish state could fuel similar secessionist demands. Those fears are heightened by the suspicion that Syrian Kurds on the Turkish border harbor the same independence ambitions.

Turkish fears over the referendum have created rare common ground across the country’s deep political divide. “Balkanization of the Middle East would bring instability,” warned Ceyda Karan, a columnist with the Turkish opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper. “Borders are not drawn fairly in many parts of the world. The question of where to find fairness in redrawing them is unknown.”

The United States has voiced strong opposition to the independence vote. On Friday the White House released a statement saying the United States “does not support” the Kurdish plan to hold a referendum, saying the plan “is distracting from efforts to defeat ISIS and stabilize the liberated areas.” Further, it says, “Holding the referendum in disputed areas is particularly provocative and destabilizing.”

The Trump administration is calling on the Kurds to cancel the referendum and instead engage in “serious and sustained dialogue with Baghdad,” which the U.S. has offered to facilitate.

Iran has also registered its opposition to the referendum, but Turkey arguably has the most leverage on the Iraqi Kurds. The Habur border gate on Turkey’s frontier with Iraq is the main trade route to the outside world for Iraqi Kurdistan, while an oil pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan provides a financial lifeline.

Sanctions could prove to be a double edged sword.

“Habur does not only mean gate to Iraqi Kurdistan,” points out former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen, who set up Turkey’s consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital of Irbil.  “Habur means gate to Iraq and in today’s terms means gate to the Middle East as all border gates are closed with Syria. There is the oil pipeline; Iraqi Kurdistan oil, including Kirkuk oil, is being marketed to global markets through (the port city of) Ceyhan. That is a win, win for Ankara,” Selcen added.

Financial considerations are not the only factors that Ankara has to consider.

“Ankara is against it (the referendum) but on the other hand, Barzani is the best ally in the region. I think they are not that vocal when it comes to the referendum,” says political scientist Cengiz Aktar. Barzani in the past decade has developed a close relationship with Ankara, one built not only on lucrative trade, but on security cooperation.

Barzani has provided assistance to Ankara in Turkey’s war against the Kurdish rebel group the PKK, which is waging a decades-long insurgency for greater minority rights in Turkey and has bases in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Turkish election politics could further restrict Ankara’s room to maneuver.

The Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum threatens to complicate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election bid in 2019. “I understand Mr. Erdogan is trying to balance the traditional Kurdish vote that goes with (Erdogan’s) AK Party and (Turkish) nationalists,” points out former diplomat Selcen, who is now a regional analyst.

The Kurdish vote in Turkey traditionally accounts for about 10 percent of Erdogan’s support, votes that could be crucial in what is predicted to be a closely fought presidential election.

Analyst Selcen suggests the solution to the political conundrum posed by the Iraqi Kurdish independence vote to Erdogan’s own ambitions could be to simply do nothing. “I think in today’s system in Turkey, one should only follow closely what Mr. Erdogan says, and, knowing his usual style and usual rhetoric, I find Mr. Erdogan’s position much milder and more moderate. I will speculate that following Sept. 25, the day of the referendum, it will be business as usual between Ankara and Irbil.”

 

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Trump: US, Allies ‘Will Not Be Intimidated’ by North Korea

President Donald Trump has responded to North Korea’s most recent missile launch with a vow that the United States and its allies will not be intimidated.

Trump made the remark Friday during a speech to military personnel and their families at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, just outside Washington.

He said North Korea’s launch hours earlier showed Pyongyang’s “utter contempt for its neighbors and for the entire world community.”

Earlier in the day, NATO called for a global response to North Korea’s latest launch of a missile, which flew over northern Japan just days after the United Nations imposed new sanctions on Pyongyang for conducting its sixth nuclear test.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Twitter, “North Korea’s missile launch is another reckless breach of U.N. resolutions — a major threat to international peace and security which demands a global response.”  

 At the United Nations, the Security Council met behind closed doors for more than an hour. Afterward, in a statement, the council condemned the “highly provocative launch” and called on North Korea to reduce tensions on the peninsula. It also urged states to implement U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang, the latest round of which the council adopted Monday.

“We are discussing for a while that we are really in a vicious circle: We have a provocation, a resolution and then another provocation,” Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters.

‘Stop it’

Nebenzia urged North Korea to “stop it” and said the only political proposal to resolve the standoff was the joint Russian-Chinese “freeze for freeze.” That plan seeks to set the stage for a resumption of talks after Pyongyang suspends its nuclear and ballistic missile activity and the U.S. and South Korea suspend their joint military exercises.

 

The statement appeared unlikely to change North Korea’s behavior. After the new sanctions were imposed Monday, North Korea called for the Security Council to be broken up, accusing it of being a “tool of evil” working for the United States.

The latest missile was launched from the Sunan district in Pyongyang and flew over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

 

Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, said, “We absolutely cannot accept these repeated provocations by North Korea and we strongly protest to North Korea and convey to them the nation’s strong anger in the strongest words possible.”

Warnings about the missile blared around 7 a.m. local time in the northern Japanese town of Kamaishi, according to footage from national broadcaster NHK.

South Korea’s military reported the missile reached an altitude of about 770 kilometers (475 miles) and flew 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles), far enough to reach the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.

U.S. threat assessment

The U.S. Pacific Command said in a statement, “Initial assessment indicates the launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile” that did not pose a threat to Guam.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command also determined that the missile had posed no threat to North America.

The South Korean military responded to the provocation from the North by launching a Hyunmoo-II missile into the sea that traveled the distance it would take to reach the Sunan airfield in Pyongyang, according to a military spokesman.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in also convened a National Security Council meeting to monitor the situation and prepare for any emerging threats from North Korea.

 

“President Moon ordered [the military] to closely analyze and increase the readiness posture against new types of threats from North Korea, such as EMP [electromagnetic pulse] and biochemical threats,” presidential spokesman Park Su-hyun said.

North Korea said earlier this month it was developing a hydrogen bomb that could carry out an EMP attack. Experts disagree about whether the North had the capability to mount such an attack, which would involve setting off a bomb in the atmosphere that could heavily damage power grids and other infrastructure.

In August, North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan from a region near Pyongyang. That missile flew more than 2,700 kilometers at a maximum altitude of about 550 kilometers.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for new sanctions “to be firmly imposed” in response to the latest North Korean missile test that violated Japanese airspace.

‘New measures’ urged

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also called for “new measures” against North Korea and said, “These continued provocations only deepen North Korea’s diplomatic and economic isolation.”  

 

“We call on all nations to take new measures against the Kim [Jong Un] regime,” the top U.S. diplomat said.

Tillerson noted that China, which supplies North Korea with most of its oil, and Russia, as the largest employer of North Korean forced labor, have a unique responsibility in the diplomatic situation. “China and Russia must indicate their intolerance for these reckless missile launches by taking direct actions of their own,” Tillerson said.

 

The North Korean state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun on Friday said in an editorial, “If the U.S. continues to walk on the current course, we will take stronger actions for our self-defense.”

 

A North Korean state agency threatened Thursday to use nuclear weapons to “sink” Japan and reduce the United States to “ashes and darkness” for supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution and sanctions over the latest nuclear test.

In the past two years, North Korea has conducted 27 ballistic missile launches and three nuclear tests.

At the beginning of this year, North Korea’s Kim announced plans to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.

The Trump administration has called the development of a North Korean ICBM an unacceptable existential threat. Washington has tried to work with Beijing to restrain the latter’s ally in Pyongyang through economic sanctions.

 

While U.S. officials say they prefer a diplomatic solution to this nuclear standoff, military force is also an option.

VOA’s U.N. correspondent Margaret Besheer and national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.

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Police Manhunt Following Terror Attack on London Underground

Police in London are urgently trying to establish who was behind a terror attack on the city’s metro network Friday morning. Twenty-two people suffered burns and other injuries, but none are considered life-threatening. As the manhunt continues, U.S. President Donald Trump responded by saying the world needs to get tougher on terrorism. Henry Ridgwell reports from the British capital.

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On UK Visit Tillerson Urges China to Cut North Korean Oil Exports

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged China to cut oil exports to North Korea to force Pyongyang to rein in its nuclear weapons program during his visit to London on Thursday.

Tillerson’s trip to Britain comes days after the United Nations Security Council imposed new sanctions on North Korea. He said he had hoped for stronger measures from the U.N., and urged Beijing to use its leverage.

“I am hopeful that China, as a great country, as a world power, will decide on their own and will take it upon themselves to use that very powerful tool of oil supply to persuade North Korea to reconsider its current path toward weapons development, reconsider its approach to dialogue and negotiations in the future,” he told reporters following meetings with his British and French counterparts.

Tillerson also had strong words for Iran, which he said was “clearly in default” of its expectations over the nuclear agreement. Britain supports the deal, but the United States accuses Tehran of breaching the terms.

“We must take into account the totality of Iranian threats — not just Iran’s nuclear capabilities, that is one piece of our posture toward Iran,” Tillerson told reporters.

Alongside his British hosts, Tillerson attended a summit on Libya with the country’s U.N. special representative, and delegations from France, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and Egypt.

He said the United Nations has Washington’s full backing in seeking a political settlement.

“What we don’t want to see happen is Libya becoming a place to birth additional terrorist organizations, or provide opportunities for ISIS to re-emerge in a different part of the world. We are all committed to helping the Libyans find a Libyan solution that will lead to their future,” Tillerson said. ISIS is an acronym for Islamic State.

WATCH: In London, U.S. Secretary of State Chides Iran, Urges China to Block North Korean Oil

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson expressed hope that elections could be held in Libya within a year.

“It’s very important, however, that you don’t do it too fast, and that you get the political groundwork done first. There has to be a constitution, there has to be an accepted basis for those elections to take place,” Johnson said.

Islamic State

There are growing fears, though, that the Islamic State terror group is making a comeback after being ousted in December from its stronghold city of Sirte, Libya.

Militias are exploiting the standoff between the internationally recognized Tripoli-based government and its rival administration in the east, said Riccardo Fabiani of the Eurasia Group.

“Those militiamen and jihadis that were part of the group were going to reform at some point somewhere, and to mount new attacks. So this is not something that is going to disappear overnight and will continue to be there as long as there is insecurity and instability in Libya,” Fabiani said.

Rohingya Muslims

Tillerson also was questioned on U.S. support for the Myanmar government in the wake of the attacks on ethnic Rohingya Muslims. He said the military should take the blame.

“This violence must stop. This persecution must stop. It’s been characterized by many as ethnic cleansing — that must stop,” Tillerson said. “And we need to support [Myanmar State Counselor] Aung San Suu Kyi and her leadership. But also be very clear and unequivocal to the military power-sharing government that this is unacceptable.”

In closing remarks, Tillerson said Britain faced challenges over Brexit, but reiterated that the United States would be a steadfast ally.

Analysts said Britain is keen to underline its ambitions of remaining a global player after its exit from the European Union. London sees its relationship with the United States as key to that goal.

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Catalan Independence Campaign Kicks Off as Barcelona Gives Backing

The Catalonian government on Thursday launched its official campaign for an independence referendum, which Madrid has declared illegal, buoyed by the support of the capital Barcelona.

Crowds filled a bull ring in the northeastern city of Tarragona, applauding and shouting “We will vote!” as regional president Carles Puigdemont arrived to rally support for the October 1 vote.

In a boost for the credibility of the referendum, the mayor of Barcelona said earlier on Thursday that the vote would go ahead in the city, having previously expressed concern that civil servants involved may lose their jobs.

A town hall spokesman was unable to comment further or explain how civil servants could be protected.

Puigdemont himself is facing criminal charges of misuse of public money, disobedience and abuse of office for organizing the referendum, and prosecutors have summoned hundreds of the region’s mayors for questioning.

Police raided a newspaper office and a printing press last week, looking for signs of preparation, and the regional court has ordered Civil Guard agents to shut down web pages providing information about the referendum.

Regional home affairs councillor Joaquim Forn said there was a bigger than usual presence of national police in Catalonia.

“They are moving throughout the region. They must be looking for ballot boxes,” he told RAC1 radio.

A majority of Catalonia’s 5.5 million voters want to have their say on the northeastern region’s relationship with Spain, but the independence cause has lost support in recent years and surveys indicate less than 50 percent of the population would choose full self-rule.

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A Dead Dictator, His Rusting Boat and a Fight for History

In a Croatian port sits a boat built to carry bananas from Africa to Italy, that laid mines for Nazi Germany and was sunk by Allied planes before it was salvaged as the personal yacht of a globe-trotting communist leader.

Josip Broz Tito and the state he led – Yugoslavia – have long passed into history, and the boat, the Galeb (Seagull), was left to rust in a corner of Rijeka’s once mighty docks.

Now, with Rijeka readying to become European Capital of Culture in 2020, city authorities have secured European Union money to restore the 117-meter (384-feet) boat as a museum, just as debate in Croatia rages over the life and deeds of the man who graced the pink mattress in the front port-side cabin.

If the Galeb was a symbol of Tito’s prestige on the world stage – a communist leader welcome in ports West as well as East – its restoration is part of Croatia’s own tortured process of reconciliation with its 20th century history.

Villain to some, hero to others

To conservatives in Croatia, Tito – who was born in what is today Croatia to a Croat father and Slovene mother – was a totalitarian dictator: to look fondly on him means to be nostalgic for a shared federal state that denied Croats their own until they forged one in a 1991-95 war.

Liberals, however, recall his guerrilla fight against the Nazis and the relative freedom and prosperity of Yugoslavs compared to those who lived in the Soviet Union or in its shadow.

They see in the disdain of conservatives a thinly veiled fondness for the World War II Croatian state that collaborated with the Nazis but was snuffed out with Tito’s Partisan victory – sentiment that has gained a foothold in mainstream Croatian

politics in recent years.

It is a tug-of-war over history and identity that was encapsulated this month in the renaming by Zagreb’s city council of the capital’s Marshal Tito Square to Republic of Croatia square.

Days later, the government ordered the removal of a plaque near the site of a World War II concentration camp that bore a notorious slogan associated with the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia.

“We live in a time when history is being reinvented retroactively,” said Ivan Sarar, who as head of culture at Rijeka’s city council is in charge of its 2020 makeover.

“It’s interesting that just by undertaking this [restoration] we have already been declared revisionists,” he told Reuters.

‘Quasi-cultural exhibitionism’

After years of false-starts, work on restoring the Galeb is imminent – “a mammoth, multi-million-euro task to recreate the 1950s chic of Tito’s floating palace, host to over 100 heads of state and some of Hollywood’s finest.

Some of the furniture remains – in Tito’s cabin, his turquoise-tiled bathroom and the adjacent salon with doors that open to the deck. But the ship itself is little more than a rotting hull.

The Galeb was the stage for Tito’s major contribution to history, said Sarar, a showcase for the non-aligned movement he helped found in answer to the East-West polarization of the Cold War.

But Sarar stressed: “We won’t be soft on anyone.”

He noted Tito’s cosy ties with dictators around the world, the exodus of Italian residents of Rijeka when he took the city as part of Yugoslavia, and his denial of democracy during 35 years of one-man rule until his death in 1980. Yugoslavia fell apart in war a decade later and some 135,000 people were killed.

It was Tito’s seizure of Rijeka and the Istrian peninsula that cemented his status in this part of Croatia as a liberator.

Dozens of streets in Istria still bear his name, as do others in the Balkans – most notably in Serbia, once the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Conservatives, however, struck a blow with the renaming of Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square, part of a deal struck by the mayor to secure his majority in the city assembly.

The man behind the initiative, leading right-wing politician Zlatko Hasanbegovic, told Reuters that while Tito was “undeniably a significant historical figure,” so were Napoleon, Stalin and Lenin.

“In all countries, streets and squares bear the names of those who embody the values with which the entire nation identifies itself,” he said, describing the restoration of the Galeb as part of an attempt to revive the cult of Tito.

“Those insisting on it should ask themselves how the tens of thousands of victims of Yugoslav communism look on that kind of quasi-cultural exhibitionism.”

In Rijeka, Sarar denied planning any kind of homage to Tito.

“We want to create a place for dialogue, away from the current situation of extreme black, white and red truths that lead nowhere,” he said. “It’s bound to be difficult.”

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US-Turkey Tensions Escalate Over Russian Missile Deal

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed U.S. concerns about his government’s recent decision to buy an S-400 missile defense system from Russia. In a speech Wednesday to mayors from his ruling AK Party, Erdogan said of the U.S., “They went crazy because we made the S-400 agreement. What were we supposed to do? Wait for you? We are taking and will take all our measures on the security front,” he added.

The multibillion-dollar missile purchase has dealt another blow to deeply strained relations with the United States, which spent months lobbying against the deal. 

“We have relayed our concerns to Turkish officials regarding the potential purchase of the S-400. A NATO interoperable missile defense system remains the best option to defend Turkey from the full range of threats in its region,” Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael said in a statement. 

Compatibility issue

Turkey has also pushed back over concerns about whether the Russian weapons are compatible with those within NATO. Turkey’s NATO allies have warned Ankara that all members are obligated to use weapons that can be integrated with each other’s systems, and that Russian arms do not meet the criteria. Turkey countered by pointing to fellow NATO member Greece’s purchase several years ago of an S-300 Russian defense system. Erdogan, however, indicated that his country’s controversial deal was in part influenced by current strains with Western allies.

The German government recently decided to curtail some weapons sales to Turkey, citing growing concerns about human rights in light of a failed coup against Erdogan last year. Germany has been critical of mass arrests in Turkey, refused to extradite people whom Turkey accuses of involvement in the attempted coup and demanded the release of German or Turkish-German citizens arrested in recent months.

Ankara maintains that the deal has given Turkey the best value for its money as well as a unique offer of technology transfer. Turkey is rapidly expanding its defense industry and is one of the top 10 weapons producers in the world.

​Turkey, Russia getting cozy

Analysts warn that the missile deal between Russia and Turkey is another step by Moscow to weaken the NATO alliance. Russian presidential adviser Vladimir Kozhin appeared to stoke such concerns when he said, “I can only guarantee that all decisions taken on this contract strictly comply with our strategic interests.” 

Turkish-Russian relations have been warming since rapprochement efforts were launched last year. Bilateral ties became strained after a Turkish jet downed a Russian bomber operating from a Syrian airbase in November 2015. Following the announcement of the missile deal, Moscow announced the easing of a Turkish tomato import ban, a sanction that had hit thousands of farmers hard.

The Turkey-Russia rapprochement coincides with escalating tensions with Washington. The U.S.’s increasing support for Syrian Kurdish group the YPG, in its fight against Islamic State, has infuriated Turkey because it considers the YPG a terrorist group. Ankara accuses the YPG of being an offshoot of the Kurdish rebel group PKK, which has been waging a decades-long insurgency in Turkey. The United States and Turkey have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization. Washington, however, has not done so in the case of the YPG.

Additionally, U.S.-Turkey relations are reeling after a U.S. court last week indicted a former head of a Turkish state bank and a former minister with close ties to Erdogan in an Iran sanctions violations case.

“There is a general crisis of confidence,” warns political columnist Semih Idiz of the al-Monitor website, “and now the indictments for Iranian sanction busting will feed into this definitely.”

Erdogan criticized the court’s decision, with a thinly veiled claim it was politically motivated. The Turkish president declared he would take up the issue during his planned trip to New York this week to attend the U.N. General Assembly.

Analysts warn that Erdogan needs to tread carefully given the high stakes involved.

“If Turkey decides to criticize the U.S. on the basis of this indictment being a political decision, that would make the diplomatic relationship more difficult because there is no backtracking from this position,” said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels. “Turkey has to face a set of very difficult security challenges in its own neighborhood — the possible [Iraqi] Kurdish independence referendum, the fact that the Syrian crisis is ongoing, the fight against Islamic State is ongoing — therefore Turkey’s ability to address those challenges can only be enhanced if it’s in a position to have better and more solid alliances with its Western partners.”

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Report: Migrant Children Vulnerable to Discrimination, Abuse

Migrant children, especially those who became separated from their parents, are at risk of abuse, exploitation and trafficking, according to a United Nations report. While discrimination against migrants who travel through the Mediterranean is widespread, children and young people are the most vulnerable. Findings by UNICEF and the International Organization for Migration show that children from sub-Saharan Africa are targeted for abuse more than any other group. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.

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Dutch Pitch In to Help Hurricane Victims, Applaud US Aid 

Hollywood celebrities may have been the first to host a telethon to raise money for Hurricane Irma victims, but the idea is not theirs alone.

Dutch TV and radio stations also are banding together for an evening-long broadcast aimed at showing solidarity and gathering donations for victims on the island of St. Martin, Netherlands Ambassador to the U.S. Henne Schuwer told VOA in an interview.

“We don’t have as many [radio and TV] stations as you have here in the United States,” so it’ll be easier to arrange, Schuwer said with a smile.

​A cherished exotic part of the whole

Asked how the Dutch people on the mainland feel about the disaster happening half a world away, Schuwer insists that his nation is firmly united with all its citizens.

“It’s part of our kingdom that has been hit, the smallest part, but it’s the Netherlands, the kingdom, that has been hit; they’re part of us.” The ambassador describes the island as “an exotic part of us” but one that the Dutch are happy to have.

The Caribbean island, divided between Dutch St. Martin and French St. Martin, is less than 64 square kilometers located roughly 241 kilometers southeast of Puerto Rico. The island got its name when Christopher Columbus spotted it in 1493 on the feast day of the eponymous Catholic saint.

An island that prides itself as a destination where one’s limits “are the sky in one direction and the bottom of the sea in the other” now finds itself struggling to survive.

​Daily crisis meeting

The Dutch government conducts a crisis meeting every day in The Hague, chaired by the prime minister, and the initial focus is on the basic necessities.

“Get the sewage system back working again, hopefully that can be done quite quickly; the drinking water system, that needs to be back on line again very, very quickly; luckily, that’s not as heavily damaged as could have been, as far as we can see,” Schuwer said.

Addressing health care issues, preventing outbreaks of infectious diseases and getting St. Martin’s hospital up and running again, are also high on the agenda.

Schuwer says reported looting on St. Martin is now under control.

“All looting is bad,” he said, but there’s a difference between taking a bottle of water from the store because one needs it, versus walking off with a television set for which he says “there’s no excuse, under any circumstances.”

An enhanced military presence, with a target number of around 550 total, is being deployed to St. Martin.

​Friend in need

Schuwer said his country is grateful for the help the United States immediately offered and almost just as immediately provided, after the hurricane hit the island.

“It was wonderful to see that in a moment like this, you’re here as an ambassador, and one of the first phone calls you get is from your colleague in the State Department, with a very simple message: If you need something, just ask.”

Schuwer credits close bilateral ties, including strong military cooperation, as having laid the foundation for the show of support in time of crisis. 

“The U.S. military also asked immediately: Can we help?” he said.

Schuwer said the U.S. has assets in the Caribbean which “we either don’t have or only have in smaller numbers,” such as military transport planes. He credits the Americans with helping clear the runway for the main airport on the island.

“We asked them for help on Saturday, on Sunday we got our reply and they were there, that was fantastic; they’re there now helping us with air traffic control,” he said, which is crucial as planes arrive to evacuate individuals with medical conditions, followed by tourists, and then local permanent residents.

Now the difficult part starts

Dutch authorities hope the majority of St. Martin’s permanent residents will decide to stay and begin rebuilding the island quickly, Schuwer said, but added: “If they want to get out, we cannot stop them, but we’ll talk to them, and say that this is your island, now the difficult part starts.’”

The ambassador said the Dutch government understands that tourism, the island’s main source of income, will probably be paralyzed for months, so it is considering incentives to encourage residents to stay on and rebuild.

King Willem-Alexander has visited the Dutch half of St. Martin and chose to stay there overnight to demonstrate his commitment and support for the rebuilding effort. Above all, the ambassador said, there is solidarity linking all Dutch people in other parts of the kingdom with the “Sint Maarteners.”

Schuwer said the message is: “You’re part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. We are with you. You have suffered very badly; we will get you through the first few days and, more importantly, we will remain with you after the television cameras are gone.”

The Latin phrase semper progrediens, always progressing, is St. Martin’s official motto. The island’s residents may have cause to recall that sentiment in the weeks and months ahead, as they weather the aftereffects from Hurricane Irma.

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EU Commission President Rules Out Turkish Membership for Foreseeable Future

In his annual State of the Union address European Union Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker ruled out Turkish membership of the bloc for the “foreseeable future” over human rights concerns. He also pledged to improve conditions for African migrants held in horrific conditions at detention centers in Libya.

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EU Commission President Rules Out Turkish Membership in Foreseeable Future

The head of the European Union Commission has ruled out Turkish membership of the bloc for the “foreseeable future” because of human rights concerns.  In his annual State of the Union address Wednesday, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker cited human rights concerns as the reason.

Addressing other topics, Juncker struck an upbeat tone compared to his annual address last year, which came in the wake of Britain’s vote to quit the bloc.

“Europe’s economy is finally bouncing back and with it our confidence… this leads me to believe the wind is back in Europe’s sails,”  he told EU lawmakers gathered in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France..  “We have now a window of opportunity but it will not stay open forever.  Let us make the most of the momentum, catch the wind in our sails,”

 

Juncker said the European Union is aiming to complete trade deals with Mexico and South American countries, and to open trade talks with Australia and New Zealand.

 

But he reserved strong criticism for Ankara, highlighting the ongoing trial of dozens of Turkish journalists and opposition activists on terrorism charges.

“The rule of law, justice and fundamental values have a top priority in the negotiations and that rules out EU membership for Turkey in the foreseeable future.  For some considerable time Turkey has been moving away from the European Union in leaps and bounds.  Journalists belong in editorial offices, amidst the heated debate, and not in prisons.”

 

Amnesty International, whose Turkey chairperson is among those detained, welcomed the focus of Juncker’s speech.

 

“Over 150,000 people actually are facing some kind of prosecution, or loss of their position in the civil service.  This situation is intolerable and in terms of human rights in Turkey, dissent is becoming an endangered species,” Amnesty’s Turkey campaigner Milena Buyum told VOA.

 

Istanbul residents offered mixed feelings on Europe’s rebuff Wednesday. 22-year-old Teoman Yilmaz said he understood Brussels’ position.  “We cannot expect Europeans to be happy with us, especially when our own people are not happy about being here.”

 

Fifty five year old resident Cetin Dincer backs the crackdown led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan following last year’s failed coup.  “We have no need for Europe. We’re a self-sufficient country, but Europe doesn’t want this.”

Ending Turkey’s accession negotiations will be discussed next month at a Brussels summit.

Europe’s migration crisis will also top the agenda. Juncker praised Italy for “saving the honor of Europe” by continuing to take in thousands of migrants.  He pledged to address concerns of horrific conditions at migrant detention centers in Libya.

 

“Europe has got a collective responsibility and the Commission will work hand in hand with the United Nations to bring to an end this scandalous situation,” he told lawmakers.

 

As for Brexit, Juncker said Britain would come to regret leaving the bloc, adding the European Union would look at admitting new members after Britain withdraws in 2020.  EU officials say Serbia, Albania and Macedonia are the most likely candidates, but no date has been set for their accession.

 

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