World News

Myanmar Crackdown Splits Rohingya with Little Hope of Return

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh – Forged over generations in villages in Myanmar, Rohingya communities are now held together in calls over crackling phone lines.

“Mummy! Mummy!” 15-year-old Abdullah Razzaq shouted to his mother earlier this week in their once-a-week call, nearly a year after he and his brother, along with more than 700,000 other Rohingya Muslims, fled waves of attacks by Myanmar security forces and crossed the border into Bangladesh. “Why don’t you guys come here?”

“Here” is a ramshackle sprawl of refugee camps built amid low rolling hills and endless monsoon-season mud. First erected more than 20 years ago by earlier, smaller waves of Rohingya refugees, the camps exploded in size last year when Myanmar’s army launched its attacks about Aug. 25, and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya began flooding across the border.

One year later, despite months of discussions among Myanmar, Bangladesh, the United Nations and a string of aid agencies, there are few signs that the Rohingya can go home anytime soon.

“I can’t see my mother or my brother and am unable to receive a mother’s love,” said Abdullah. “I miss them a lot.”

The family was broken apart in the chaos that began with a series of Aug. 24 attacks on Myanmar police posts by a small Rohingya militant group that left a dozen security personnel dead. Soon after, Myanmar security forces and Buddhist mobs responded with brutal indiscriminate attacks on Rohingya villages, burning many down and driving villagers away in what many rights activists see as a calculated attempt to drive the Rohingya from the country.

Abdullah and his 17-year-old brother thought their mother had also fled their village in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where most Rohingya had long lived. Only later did they realize she’d been left behind, and remains in their village with their eldest brother.

The brothers call once a week to check on her. But she tells them the separation has been hard.

“I miss you guys a lot. I can’t eat or sleep properly. I am getting by somehow,” she said.

The Rohingyas’ woes can seem never-ending. They have long been treated as illegal migrants in Myanmar, denied such basic rights as the freedom of movement, even though some of their families have lived in the Buddhist-majority country for generations. Nearly all have been denied citizenship since 1982, effectively rendering them stateless.

Anti-Rohingya pogroms have been a part of life in the region for years, and violence against them began ratcheting up again in October 2016, as the Myanmar government started complaining about violence by Rohingya militants. In late August 2017, an influx of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh became an unstoppable flood.

Now, separated families depend on mobile phones to remain together.

“My son can’t call me whenever he wants. He has to call secretly” because he’s being watched by his Buddhist neighbors, said 70-year-old Dildar Begum, who waited all day Wednesday for a call from her son on Eid al-Adha, a major Muslim holiday.

The call never came. Her family was also divided by chaos.

She, her son and his family had fled to the Myanmar-Bangladesh border as the crackdown grew more brutal. She climbed onto a boat to cross the Naf River with a group of refugees, but when her son went back to shore to grab his children, he was surrounded by a Buddhist mob and hustled away.

So she came to Bangladesh alone.

One year later, she just wants to see her son.

“If Allah wants we will meet again. My son might die, or I might die. Whatever is Allah’s will we have to accept.”

Myanmar has promised to take back all the Rohingya refugees, and has built camps for them on its side of the border, while Bangladesh says it will temporarily shelter and feed them. The two countries agreed to begin repatriating them in January, but that was called off amid concerns among aid works and the Rohingya that their safety wasn’t guaranteed.

The U.N. refugee agency has said that “conditions in Myanmar are not yet conducive for returns to be safe, dignified, and sustainable.”

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of Myanmar, who has seen her image deeply tarnished by her government’s reaction to the crisis, defended its actions again earlier this week, saying Rohingya militants remained a serious threat.

“We who are living through the transition in Myanmar view it differently than those who observe it from the outside and who will remain untouched by its outcome,” she said in a speech in Singapore.

“The danger of terrorist activities, which was the initial cause of events leading to the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine, remains real and present today,” she continued. “Unless this security challenge is addressed, the risk of intercommunal violence will remain.”

Diplomats and aid workers say that while the Rohingya militants have launched some small-scale attacks, the counterstrikes by Myanmar have been overwhelmingly more destructive and deadly.

Myanmar, the international community says, now must create a situation where Rohingya feel safe to return home.

The Rohingya “need to have safety and security when they come back. They need to have freedom of movement. They need to also have a predictable and a clear pathway to a citizenship, to those who are eligible,” Knut Ostby, the U.N. resident coordinator in Myanmar, told The Associated Press in an interview. “Basically, they need to be able to exist in society, as normal people when they come back.”

A year after the flood of refugees, the camps have become functional towns, with shops, roadside restaurants and pharmacies. There are playgrounds for children and makeshift schools run by development agencies. More medical clinics are being built and many shanties have solar panels. Most people have at least some protection against monsoon landslides.

But people are still terrified and angry, facing a profoundly uncertain future. Many doubt they will ever go home.

Mohammad Arif ran a small grocery store in Myanmar and was comparatively well-off. Now, the only way he can see his old house is through video calls he makes to relatives and friends still living on the other side.

On Thursday, as he spoke to a cousin in Myanmar on a video call, he was told there was still a strong military presence in their village.

“I think there are anywhere between 100 to 700 (soldiers) here right now,” his cousin told him.

“Ever since I came here, I have been suffering and have lots of tensions,” he said. “But people who are still there are suffering even more than we are, because they are constantly thinking if they are going to survive or be killed.”

The Associated Press

World News

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Wins the First Round in France 2024 Election

Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) party scored historic gains in France

Exit polls in France showed that Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (RN) party made huge gains to win the first round of election on Sunday. However, the final outcome will depend on how people trade votes in the days before next week’s run-off.

Exit polls from Ipsos, Ifop, OpinionWay, and Elabe showed that the RN got about 34% of the vote. This was a big loss for President Emmanuel Macron, who called the early election after his party lost badly in the European Parliament elections earlier this month.

The National Rally (RN) easily won more votes than its opponents on the left and center, including Macron’s Together group, whose bloc was predicted to get 20.5% to 23% of the vote. Exit polls showed that the New Popular Front (NFP), a hastily put together left-wing alliance, would get about 29% of the vote.

The results of the exit polls matched what people said in polls before the election, which made Le Pen’s fans very happy. But they didn’t say for sure if the anti-immigrant, anti-EU National Rally (RN) will be able to “cohabit” with the pro-EU Macron in a government after the runoff election next Sunday.

Voters in France Angry at Macron

Many French people have looked down on the National Rally (RN) for a long time, but now it is closer to power than it has ever been. A party known for racism and antisemitism has tried to clean up its image, and it has worked. Voters are angry at Macron, the high cost of living, and rising concerns about immigration.

Fans of Marine Le Pen waved French flags and sang the Marseillaise in the northern French district of Henin-Beaumont. The crowd cheered as Le Pen said, “The French have shown they are ready to turn the page on a power that is disrespectful and destructive.”

The National Rally’s chances of taking power next week will rest on what political deals its opponents make in the next few days. Right-wing and left-wing parties used to work together to keep the National Rally (RN) out of power, but the “republican front,” which refers to this group, is less stable than ever.

If no candidate gets 50% of the vote in the first round, the top two candidates and anyone else with 12.5% of the registered voters immediately move on to the second round. The district goes to the person who gets the most votes in the runoff.

France is likely to have a record number of three-way runoffs because so many people voted on Sunday. Experts say that these are much better for the National Rally (RN) than two-way games. Almost right away on Sunday night, the horse trade began.

Macron asked people to support candidates who are “clearly republican and democratic.” Based on what he has said recently, this would rule out candidates from the National Rally (RN) and the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party. Leaders on the far left and the center left both asked their third-placed candidates to drop out.

Minority government

Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of France Unbowed, said, “Our rule is simple and clear: not a single more vote for the National Rally.” But the center-right Republicans party, which split before the vote when some of its members joined the RN, didn’t say anything.

The president of the RN party, Jordan Bardella, who is 28 years old, said he was ready to be prime minister if his party gets a majority of seats. He has said he won’t try to make a minority government, and neither Macron nor the communist NFP will work with him.

“I will be a “cohabitation” Prime Minister, respectful of the constitution and of the office of President of the Republic, but uncompromising about the policies we will implement,” he said.

A few thousand anti-RN protesters met in Paris’s Republique square on Sunday night for a rally of the leftist alliance. The mood was gloomy.

Niya Khaldi, a 33-year-old teacher, said that the RN’s good results made her feel “disgust, sadness, and fear.”

“This is not how I normally act,” she said. “I think I came to reassure myself, to not feel alone.”

Election Runoff

The result on Sunday didn’t have much of an effect on the market. In early Asia-Pacific trade, the euro gained about 0.23%. Fiona Cincotta, a senior markets expert at City Index in London, said she was glad the outcome “didn’t come as a surprise.”

“Le Pen had a slightly smaller margin than some of the polls had pointed to, which may have helped the euro a little bit higher on the open,” she noted. “Now everyone is waiting for July 7 to see if the second round supports a clear majority or not. So it does feel like we’re on the edge of something.”

Some pollsters thought the RN would win the most seats in the National Assembly, but Elabe was the only one who thought the party would win all 289 seats in the run-off. Seat projections made after the first round of voting are often very wrong, and this race is no exception.

On Sunday night, Reuters reported there were no final results for the whole country yet, but they were due in the next few hours. In France, exit polls have usually been very accurate.

Voter turnout was high compared to previous parliamentary elections. This shows how passionate people are about politics after Macron made the shocking and politically risky decision to call a vote in parliament.

Mathieu Gallard, research head at Ipsos France, said that at 1500 GMT, nearly 60% of voters had turned out, up from 39.42% two years earlier. This was the highest comparable turnout since the 1986 legislative vote. It wasn’t clear when the official number of people who voted would be changed.

World News

Pakistan Seeks US Support for Counter-Terrorism Operation Azm-e-Istehkam

(CTN News) – Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Masood Khan, has urged Washington to provide Pakistan with sophisticated small arms and communication equipment to ensure the success of Operation Azm-e-Istehkam, a newly approved counter-terrorism initiative in the country.

The federal government recently approved the reinvigorated national counter-terrorism drive, which comprises three components: doctrinal, societal, and operational.

Ambassador Khan noted that work on the first two phases has already begun, with the third phase set to be implemented soon.

Addressing US policymakers, scholars, and corporate leaders at the Wilson Center in Washington, Khan emphasized the importance of strong security links, enhanced intelligence cooperation, and the resumption of sales of advanced military platforms between Pakistan and the US.

He argued that this is crucial for regional security and countering the rising tide of terrorism, which also threatens the interests of the US and its allies.

“Pakistan has launched Azm-i-Istehkam […] to oppose and dismantle terrorist networks. For that, we need sophisticated small arms and communication equipment,” said Ambassador Khan.

Pakistan–United States relations

The ambassador observed that the prospects of Pakistan-United States relations were bright, stating that the two countries “share values, our security and economic interests are interwoven, and it is the aspiration of our two peoples that strengthens our ties.”

He invited US investors and businesses to explore Pakistan’s potential in terms of demographic dividend, technological advancements, and market opportunities.

Khan also suggested that the US should consider Pakistan as a partner in its diplomatic efforts in Kabul and collaborate on counterterrorism and the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan.

He stressed that the bilateral relationship should be based on ground realities and not be hindered by a few issues.

“We should not base our engagement on the incongruity of expectations.

Our ties should be anchored in ground realities, even as we aim for stronger security and economic partnerships. Secondly, one or two issues should not hold the entire relationship hostage,” said the ambassador.

World News

China Urges Taiwanese to Visit Mainland ‘Without Worry’ Despite Execution Threat

China Urges Taiwanese to Visit Mainland Without Worry Despite Threats

China has reassured Taiwanese citizens that they can visit the mainland “without the slightest worry”, despite Taiwan raising its travel alert to the second-highest level in response to Beijing’s new judicial guidelines targeting supporters of Taiwanese independence.

Last week, China published guidelines that could impose the death penalty for “particularly serious” cases involving “diehard” advocates of Taiwanese independence.

In response, Taiwan’s government urged the public to avoid “unnecessary travel” to mainland China and Hong Kong, and raised its travel warning to the “orange” level.

However, Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for a Chinese body overseeing Taiwan affairs, stated that the new directives are “aimed solely at the very small number of supporters of ‘Taiwan independence’, who are engaged in malicious acts and utterances”.

She emphasized that “the vast majority of Taiwan compatriots involved in cross-strait exchanges and cooperation do not need to have the slightest worry when they come to or leave mainland China”.

“They can arrive in high spirits and leave fully satisfied with their stay,” Zhu added.

What’s Behind The China-Taiwan Tensions?

The tensions stem from the longstanding dispute over Taiwan’s status. Mainland China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has refused to rule out using force to bring the democratic island under its control, while Taiwan sees itself as a sovereign state.

Beijing has not conducted top-level communications with Taipei since 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen became Taiwan’s leader. China has since branded her successor, President Lai Ching-te, a “dangerous separatist”.

“The DPP authorities have fabricated excuses to deceive the people on the island and incite confrontation and opposition,” Zhu said in her statement.
Despite the political tensions, many Taiwanese continue to travel to mainland China for work, study, or business.