A new report from Human Rights Watch says the M23 rebel group in eastern Congo continues to receive significant support from neighboring Rwanda despite ongoing abuses including killings, rape and forced recruitment of children. …read more
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Myanmar President Thein Sein denied on Friday accusations of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims, saying the claims were part of a “smear campaign” against his government.
On a visit to Paris, Sein told France 24 television that his government was not guilty of the charges.
“Outside elements are just exaggerating, fabricating news, there is no ethnic cleansing whatsoever,” he said.
“This is a smear campaign against the government. What happened in Rakhine was not ethnic cleansing.”
In April, Human Rights Watch accused Myanmar of “a campaign of ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya.
It cited evidence of mass graves and forced displacement affecting tens of thousands.
The New York-based HRW said Myanmar officials, community leaders and Buddhist monks organised and encouraged mobs, backed by state security forces, to conduct coordinated attacks on Muslim villages in October in the western state of Rakhine.
Communal unrest last year in Rakhine left about 200 people dead and up to 140,000 displaced, mainly Rohingyas, who are denied citizenship by Myanmar.
Dozens more people died in Buddhist-Muslim clashes in central Myanmar in March.
Thein Sein, on a European tour that took him to Britain and France, said the unrest had been contained and insisted authorities were looking to prevent further violence.
“The government has been able to contain this communal violence and things have returned to normal,” he said.
“My government has set up an independent commission to investigate the root causes of this communal violence. We have also been implementing the recommendations issued by the commission.”
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Six Chinese local government employees involved in a dispute that saw a roadside watermelon seller die have been detained, state media reported Friday as outrage over power abuses mounted.
Deng Zhengjia, 56, was beaten to death Wednesday by local regulation enforcers known as ‘chengguan’ for selling watermelons at a street stall without a licence, Chinese media reported previously.
The officials in Linwu county, in the central province of Hunan, kicked and punched Deng and one used a metal measuring weight to smash his head, the reports said, citing his wife.
He had recently moved his stall in accordance with instructions from chengguan and paid 100 yuan ($16) in fines, she said.
The county government held a press conference Thursday, said the Beijing News, after the news sparked an outpouring of online anger.
Six chengguan “involved in the matter” had been taken into police custody, county officials said, according to the report.
They said preliminary investigations showed the enforcers did not smash Deng’s head with the weight and a postmortem was being conducted.
A news portal linked to the county government said he suddenly fell to the ground and died during a row.
Authorities denied reports police forcibly removed the body from the scene, saying it was taken away following a request by his relatives and out of “respect for the death”.
Chengguan, who are tasked with enforcing non-criminal regulations in towns and cities, have long been accused of abusing their powers, with street vendors a common target of violence.
They “have earned a reputation for brutality and impunity… They are now synonymous for many Chinese citizens with physical violence, illegal detention, and theft,” a spokeswoman for advocacy group Human Rights Watch said last year.
Chinese Internet users poured scorn on the officials’ accounts, with one describing them as “shameless liars”, and the county government’s website was hacked on Friday.
“To the county chief who (ordered) the snatch of the body: the wages of sin are death,” read a message on the site, according to a screen grab by the semi-official China News Service.
The website was inaccessible Friday afternoon.
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A rights group says a prominent gay rights activist in Cameroon has been tortured and killed just weeks after issuing a public warning about the threat posed by “anti-gay thugs.”
Human Rights Watch said Tuesday that friends discovered the body of Eric Ohena Lembembe at his home in the capital, Yaounde, on Monday evening after he was unreachable for two days.
One friend said Lembembe’s neck and feet looked broken and that he had been burned with an iron.
Lembembe was executive director of CAMFAIDS, a human rights organization. In a July 1 statement, he condemned recent break-ins by “anti-gay thugs” at the offices of groups advocating for gay rights.
The precise motive for Lembembe’s killing was unclear Tuesday. HRW urged officials to launch a thorough investigation.
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The transitional leader of Central African Republic says the security situation is improving in his coup-plagued country, despite reports to the contrary from aid groups.
During a visit to Burkina Faso on Monday, Michel Djotodia said the biggest security threat came from the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious rebel group led by Joseph Kony that has operated in the country for years.
Djotodia became interim leader in March after his Seleka rebel coalition deposed former President Francois Bozize.
Human Rights Watch has accused Seleka of destroying dozens of villages since February, and aid groups have accused the international community of ignoring the humanitarian crisis in the nation of 4.6 million.
Djotodia made no mention of Seleka abuses but said peace had been restored to the capital, Bangui.
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More than a quarter of Chinese children with disabilities don’t get to go to school, while many of those who do are blocked from mainstream institutions or taught by untrained teachers, a human rights group said Tuesday.
The report by New York-based Human Rights Watch said young Chinese students with disabilities are denied access to regular schools unless they can prove they can adapt to the schools’ physical and learning environment, and that accommodations for such students are “little to none.”
In one example, the group said a mother went to school several times a day to carry her child up and down stairs because the restroom was on a different floor from the classroom.
The report sheds light on how China’s burgeoning problem of social inequality — even in education — applies to people with disabilities. In China, there is only a nascent public awareness of the issues that people with disabilities face.
Prejudice and social stigma run high in this deeply competitive society, driving many parents to abandon children with disabilities to China’s chronically underfunded state orphanage system.
Just days before the Human Rights Watch report was released, China’s Education Ministry issued its own report on the same topic.
The ministry’s report said that 28 percent of Chinese children with disabilities are not enrolled in China’s compulsory nine-year education. But it said the 72 percent enrollment rate represented a jump of nearly 10 percentage points from 2008, and that an increasing number of disabled students were in regular schools with proper accommodations.
Maya Wang, a researcher for the rights group, said the ministry’s report failed to show how it was making mainstream schools more accessible to disabled students, as the government is obligated to do under an international treaty on the rights of disabled people that Beijing ratified in 2008.
Yang Zhanqing, an independent advocate for people with disabilities, said the HRW report is “quite objective” but that the picture would be worse if interviewees from remote, mountainous regions were included in the research.
Another activist had harsher words on the overall situation.
“No Chinese student with disabilities has his or her rights fully protected,” said Cheng Yuan of the non-governmental agency Ganzhilu, which helps …read more
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Civil rights activists and human rights lawyers Monday demanded that Nigeria arrest Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir and deliver him to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes in Darfur.
President Goodluck Jonathan was urged “to support the demand by the international community for justice for the victims of genocide and war crimes,” by the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project.
Human rights lawyers are going to court to argue for an order to force the arrest, said Chino Obiagwu of Nigeria’s Legal Defense and Assistance Project.
Human Rights Watch was contacting diplomats to add to the pressure. They are urging Nigeria’s international partners “to signal that Nigeria should show leadership and not host ICC fugitive Bashir,” said Elise Keppler of the New York-based organization’s International Justice Program.
Nigeria is a member of the International Criminal Court and “has international legal obligations to ensure that this country does not become a safe haven for alleged perpetrators of crimes under international law like al-Bashir,” said Adetokunbo Mumuni, executive director of the rights and accountability project.
A failure to arrest al-Bashir could have “huge legal ramifications” and lead to sanctions by the U.N. Security Council, he warned, though Chad and Djibouti have welcomed al-Bashir in the past year without suffering any consequences.
Human Rights Watch said Nigeria’s stand is “a stark contrast” to that taken by most African countries.
South Africa, Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Central Africa Republic “have specifically made clear Bashir will be arrested on their territory, seen to it that other Sudanese officials visit instead of Bashir, relocated conferences or otherwise avoided his visits,” said Obiagwu, who also heads the Nigerian Coalition on the International Criminal Court.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted the Sudanese leader in 2009 and 2010 for crimes including extermination, forcible transfer of population, torture and rape. He was the first sitting African head of state to be indicted by the court.
Al-Bashir arrived in Nigeria on Sunday to a red carpet welcome with full military honors. He is here to attend a health summit of the African Union, which has told its 53 members not to cooperate with the ICC. Some Africans argue that the European-based court is racist in its targeting of Africans.
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Row after row of tin shacks and shelters made of plastic and branches stretch almost as far as the eye can see in the world’s largest refugee camp, home to over 427,000 Somalis who fled war.
Dadaab, in northeast Kenya, is a grim place few would choose to call home, but many here are nervous about the growing pressure to leave this camp and return to their unstable homeland some last saw two decades ago.
Kenya, which hosts more than 600,000 Somali refugees, has made clear its ambition to send them back, and is in talks with the government in Mogadishu to start the move.
“I don’t know of a stable place in Somalia” to return to, said Abdi Arte, leader of the Kambios section in the sprawling camp, set in arid bushland some 100 kilometres (60 miles) inside Kenya.
“But the government is insisting to have refugees relocated back home.”
Last month, Kenya and Somalia signed a deal for “voluntary repatriation”, with plans under way to work out how people can start moving back.
Kenya’s new government has steered clear of strong-arm statements made last year when Nairobi ordered more than 30,000 refugees living in urban areas to return to remote and overcrowded camps.
But based on past experiences, refugees are worried.
Rights groups have accused Kenyan police of a brutal campaign against Somali refugees, following a string of grenade attacks or shootings inside Kenya blamed on supporters or members of Somalia’s Al-Qaeda linked Shebab insurgents.
Human Rights Watch, in a report released in May, documented multiple cases of police rape of Somali refugees.
“The police held the detainees — sometimes for many days in inhuman and degrading conditions — while threatening to charge them, without any evidence, with terrorism or public order offences,” the report said.
Somali refugees say they are eyed with suspicion by police, even though many of those actually charged for attacks have not been ethnic Somalis.
Impoverished Somalia spiralled into repeated rounds of bloody civil war beginning in 1991, allowing piracy, militia armies and extremist rebels to flourish.
Last year an internationally-backed government took power in Mogadishu, defended by a 17,700-strong African Union force — including Kenyan troops — but its control beyond the capital remains fragile at best.
There is no doubt that many refugees long to be able to return to a safe home in Somalia. The problem is whether that is available.
“I want to go back home,” said Amina Yussuf, who lives in Dadaab’s Ifo 2, a crowded camp, insecure and beset by violence and abductions.
“I fear being raped here in the camp,” she added.
More than a million Somalis are refugees in regional nations, the most from a single country after Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the United Nations.
But another million people are displaced inside the country, a sign that Somalia is still very far from the stability needed for large scale return.
“It is not a good time to go back,” said Ibrahim Roble, a youth leader in Dadaab’s Dagahaley camp, who fled southern Somalia as a child.
“So many of us here in Dadaab are …read more
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Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir travelled on Sunday to a health summit in Nigeria, official media said, after Human Rights Watch urged authorities in Abuja to arrest him for war crimes charges.
Bashir “left today for the Nigerian capital Abuja to participate in the African Union summit about HIV, TB and malaria to be held over two days,” the state SUNA news agency said.
Nigeria is a member of The Hague-based International Criminal Court, which in 2009 and 2010 issued two warrants against Bashir for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Sudan’s Darfur region.
His visit marks “a real test of Nigeria’s commitment to the ICC”, Elise Keppler, associate director of the International Justice Programme at Human Rights Watch, told AFP ahead of Bashir’s trip.
Some ICC members including Chad, Djibouti and Kenya have allowed visits by Bashir, but others like Botswana, South Africa and Uganda have ensured that he stays away.
A number of states “have found a way out of this problem and Nigeria should do the same,” Keppler said, urging Nigeria to arrest him if he sets foot in the country.
Nations that have signed on to the world’s only permanent court for war crimes and crimes against humanity have a legal obligation to arrest any indicted suspect found within their territory.
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Clashes erupted in Bangladesh Sunday between police and supporters of the country’s biggest Islamic party ahead of a court verdict against a top Islamist for allegedly masterminding atrocities during the 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.
Some 400 Jamaat-e-Islami activists burnt a police van and hurled crude bombs in the capital Dhaka, police said, to protest what they say are false charges against Ghulam Azam, 90, who could face the death penalty if convicted by the war crimes court on Monday.
Previous sentences by the controversial court sparked the country’s worst political violence since independence.
A police officer was seriously injured in the latest clashes after being hit by a rock, assistant police commissioner Saifur Rahman told AFP.
Azam was the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party during the war in which the government says millions were killed, many by the militias he allegedly helped create to support the Pakistani army.
The International Crimes Tribunal — set up by the secular government in 2010 — will deliver its verdict against Azam on Monday, prosecutor Sultan Mahmud told AFP.
Prosecutors have sought the death penalty for Azam, comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. They describe him as a “lighthouse” who guided all other war criminals and the “architect” of the militias which committed many of the 1971 atrocities.
Jamaat, the country’s largest Islamic party and a key member of the opposition, has called a nationwide strike on Monday to protest the verdict, a statement posted at the party’s website said.
Azam is no longer politically active but is seen as Jamaat’s spiritual leader. He faces five broad charges of planning, conspiracy, incitement, complicity and murder and torture in regard to the atrocities, alleging a total of 61 crimes, Mahmud said.
Azam’s lawyer Tajul Islam said the charges were based on newspaper reports of speeches Azam gave during the war, which led to the creation of Bangladesh.
“The prosecution has completely failed to prove any of the charges,” he told AFP.
The verdict against Azam will be the fifth to be delivered by the tribunal. Three Islamists have been sentenced to death and one given life imprisonment.
The verdicts triggered nationwide protests by Jamaat, leading to mass violence in which 150 people were killed in clashes with police.
Eight more opposition politicians — six from Jamaat and two from the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party — are also on trial.
The court last month also ordered an influential British Muslim and an American citizen to stand trial in absentia.
The opposition has criticised the cases as politically motivated and aimed at settling old scores rather than meting out justice.
Unlike other war crimes courts, the Bangladesh tribunal is not endorsed by the United Nations. The New York-based Human Rights Watch group has said its procedures fall short of international standards.
The government maintains the trials are needed to heal the wounds of the 1971 war in which it says three million died. Independent estimates put the death toll at between 300,000 and 500,000.
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Edward Snowden possesses data that could prove far more “damaging” to the US government but the fugitive leaker has chosen not to release them, said a journalist who first broke the story.
Glenn Greenwald told Argentina’s La Nacion paper that Snowden, who is currently stranded in Moscow, had only sought to alert people that information they thought was private was being exploited by US intelligence agencies.
“Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States,” he told the paper in an interview published on Saturday.
“But that’s not his goal,” said Greenwald, who published a series of stories in Britain’s Guardian newspaper based on top-secret documents about sweeping US surveillance programmes that were leaked by Snowden.
His comments came as Russia waited Sunday for a promised request for asylum from Snowden.
The United States wants the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor returned to them to face trial over the leaks. Moscow has so far rejected that demand.
Snowden, 30, has been stranded in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, after the US withdrew his passport on his arrival from Hong Kong three weeks ago.
Snowden on Friday dramatically summoned Russian activists to his temporary base, to say he wanted to claim asylum in Russia until he could safely travel to Latin America for a permanent sanctuary.
He withdrew an initial request earlier this month after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would have to stop releasing information embarrassing to Washington if he wanted to stay.
After Snowden made his statement Amnesty International reiterated its support for him and denounced what it described as US government persecution of him.
Human Rights Watch accused Washington of trying to block Snowden’s attempts to claim asylum and said that was in violation of his rights under international law.
Representatives from both organisations attended Snowden’s presentation.
But on Saturday, officials in Moscow said they were still waiting for Snowden’s request.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Snowden would have to submit his application to the Federal Migration Service (FMS), Russian news agencies reported.
The head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) Konstantin Romodanovsky said Saturday they had received nothing. If they did, he added, it would examined according to the usual procedures.
Washington has reacted sharply to the possibility that Moscow might offer Snowden a safe harbour.
“We would urge the Russian government to afford human rights organisations the ability to do their work in Russia throughout Russia, not just at the Moscow transit lounge,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
“Providing a propaganda platform for Mr Snowden runs counter to the Russian government’s previous declarations of Russia’s neutrality,” he added.
US President Barack Obama spoke to Putin by telephone Friday on issues including the Snowden affair, the Kremlin and White House both said, but no further details were forthcoming.
The United States has already rebuked China for allowing Snowden to leave for Russia from Hong Kong.
At his meeting with activists, Snowden vowed he did not want to harm the United States.
It was …read more
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US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden said he wanted to claim asylum in Russia until he can travel on to Latin America, as Washington kept up the pressure with a warning to Moscow.
In his first encounter with the outside world since becoming stranded at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport three weeks ago, Snowden met Russian rights activists and lawyers.
He is still looking for a safe haven from US attempts to extradite him to face espionage charges for disclosing extensive American surveillance activities.
Washington warned Moscow against allowing Snowden to stay in the country and continue his embarrassing revelations.
President Barack Obama spoke by phone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Friday, as previously scheduled. No details were released but the White House had said Snowden would be discussed.
“Providing a propaganda platform for Mr Snowden runs counter to the Russian government’s previous declarations of Russia’s neutrality,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
“It’s also incompatible with Russian assurances that they do not want Mr Snowden to further damage US interests.”
Carney renewed a US call on Russia to expel Snowden so that he could be returned to American soil to face trial for leaking US national security secrets.
Amateur footage aired on television showed Snowden dressed in a grey shirt and looking relaxed as he read out a statement.
“I announce today my formal acceptance of all offers of support or asylum I have been extended and all others that may be offered in the future,” he told his audience, which included representatives from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
“That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets,” said the 30-year-old former National Security Agency contractor.
Snowden, who has no official travel documents, said he hoped Russia would accept his renewed asylum request so he could then work out a way to travel legally to Latin America.
Although most countries to which he has applied for asylum have rejected his request, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have all indicated they would be open to offering Snowden a safe haven.
Human Rights Watch senior researcher Tanya Lokshina, who attended Friday’s meeting, said the US embassy in Moscow had asked her to pass a message to Snowden.
The message was that they did not consider him a whistleblower and he had broken the law, she said.
But Snowden, in his statement, said the US intelligence service’s covert surveillance activities violated not just the US constitution but the UN declaration of human rights.
In denouncing what he saw as illegal activities, “I did what I believed right…”, he added.
His statement was posted online by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Latin American leaders defended their right to offer asylum to Snowden at a summit of the regional bloc Mercosur held in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo.
That included the right of safe passage for those granted asylum to the country offering them refuge, said a Mercosur statement.
Mercosur also condemned an incident earlier this month when several European countries denied airspace to Bolivian President …read more
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By Matt Cantor Burma and its Buddhist monks have “organized and encouraged” ethnic cleansing in the country, asserts Human Rights Watch in a new report . Some 125,000 of the country’s minority Rohingya Muslims have been displaced, in what amounts to “crimes against humanity,” per the report. It’s the culmination of more than…
From: http://www.newser.com/story/166628/burma-monks-encouraging-ethnic-cleansing-report.html
A leading international rights group is accusing authorities in Myanmar, including senior Buddhist monks, of organizing a “campaign of ethnic cleansing” against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
Human Rights Watch on Monday described a series of bloody attacks last year that killed hundreds of people and forced 125,000 from their homes as crimes against humanity that the government of President Thein Sein has yet to punish.
The New York-based group says ethnic Rakhine nationalists from a powerful political party in western Rakhine state, along with senior Buddhist monks, encouraged coordinated attacks on Muslim neighborhoods.
The rights group says that while state security forces sometimes intervened to protect fleeing Muslims, more often they either stood idly by or participated directly in atrocities.
A Rakhine state government spokesman denied the allegations.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/yk9QDntXnos/
An international rights group is urging Libyan authorities to give an ex-spy chief indicted for alleged crimes against humanity access to a lawyer.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Wednesday that its team visited Abdullah al-Senoussi in prison earlier this month and that he did not complain of any physical mistreatment in prison, but said he didn’t have a lawyer.
Al-Senoussi was indicted by The International Criminal Court in June 2011 for crimes against humanity during brutal attempts to put down the Libyan rebellion that ousted dictator Moammar Gadhafi after four decades in power.
Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch says al-Senoussi needs to be granted the rights the Gadhafi regime long denied to the Libyan people.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/UnhTI9umtxc/
Iraq has executed 21 prisoners convicted on terrorism charges and links to Al Qaeda, the Justice Ministry said Wednesday, setting off fresh criticism from an international human rights expert over Baghdad‘s insistence on carrying out capital punishment.
The executions were carried out by hanging in the Iraqi capital on Tuesday, according to a statement posted on the ministry’s website. All the convicts were Iraqi Al Qaeda operatives who were involved in bombings, car bomb attacks and assassinations, the statement said.
The hangings brought the number of prisoners executed in Iraq so far this year to 50, according to Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim. The latest group was the biggest this year, Ibrahim added. Executions in Iraq are usually carried out by hanging.
According to the London-based Amnesty International, Iraq was ranked fourth among the top five executioners in the world in 2011, after China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Last year, Iraq executed 129 people, triggering concerns among rights groups on whether defendants had received a fair trial.
After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, coalition authority officials suspended Iraq‘s death penalty, but it was reinstated in 2004 by Iraq‘s transitional government. Since 2005, Iraq‘s government has executed 422 people, including women and foreigners convicted on terrorism charges.
Erin Evers, a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the number of those executed and the timing of the latest announcement was cause for concern. On Saturday, Iraqis vote in local elections, the country’s first vote since the U.S. withdrawal in December 2011.
The country has seen intensifying violence in recent weeks, some of it directly related to the elections, in an apparent attempt by insurgent to derail the voting. On Monday, at least 55 people were killed in a wave of bombings and other killings across the country.
“The fact that this they announced this huge number (of executions) just after the attacks and just before elections is raising questions about what their motives are,” Evers told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
Nine people were killed and 32 were wounded in four separate attacks in Iraq on Wednesday.
In one attack, gunmen in two SUVs opened fire early in the morning on a military checkpoint in Baghdad‘s western suburb of Abu Ghraib, killing two soldiers and wounding five, a police officer said. Another police officer said a parked car bomb went off shortly afterward in another part of Abu Ghraib, killing two civilians and wounding six people.
Around noon, a parked car bomb exploded in a commercial area in Baghdad‘s western neighborhood of Jihad, killing three civilians and wounding 12. In a Baghdad southeastern suburb, a Sunni lawmaker escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb hit his convoy. Three of his guards were wounded.
In the western Anbar province, police said a sticky bomb attached to a car exploded in a parking lot near the main Sunni protest area on a highway near the provincial capital, Ramadi, killing two people and wounding six others.
Members of Iraq‘s Sunni minority have been staging weekly rallies to protest perceived second
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/K1aXf-BzaCk/
A top Congolese official says 12 senior army officers have been arrested on charges of responsibility for mass rapes committed by several army units in eastern Congo in November 2012.
Justice Minister Wivine Mumba confirmed the arrests to The Associated Press Saturday. The arrests come more than two weeks after the United Nations pressed the Congolese government to take action in the case.
In November, the Congolese army was defeated by the M23 rebels who seized the provincial capital of Goma, in eastern Congo. The national army retreated in disorder and regrouped some 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Goma, in Minova. For days, the Congolese army troops raped, killed and looted in anger after the defeat. An estimated 126 women were raped by soldiers, according to Human Rights Watch.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/v7Ggmft0nUM/
In preparation for a drawdown of French troops from Mali, a European Union team started training Malian soldiers for battle against jihadists who overran much of this West African country before they were pushed back by a French military intervention.
On a recent day, small groups of Malians stood in the burning heat and orange sands in the town of Koulikoro, 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of the capital Bamako, learning to hold weapons. They began the training last week, and this week they learned how to shoot from standing, sitting and prone positions.
About 550 people form the team meant to ready Mali‘s army for combat. But there is worry that the project to train thousands of soldiers may not be sufficient to keep the armed Islamic militants at bay.
French forces entered Mali swiftly and strongly in January after Islamic militants began a formidable push south toward the country’s capital. The militants, who are inspired by a radical interpretation of Islam, ruled the northern half of Mali for nearly 10 months before the French-led military operation forced them into the desert surrounding the main cities. The extremists have responded with a series of attacks, including suicide bombings.
French military spokesman Col. Thierry Burkhard said this week that about 100 French troops have been pulled out of Mali and were as of this week in Cyprus on their way back to France. Last month, French President Francois Hollande said that by July, about 2,000 French soldiers will still be in the former French colony, down from 4,000 at the peak deployment, and at the end of the year “1,000 French soldiers will remain.” He said the French troops would likely be part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation that France is pushing for.
The French-led operation with backing from regional bloc ECOWAS and under authorization of the U.N. Security Council has largely been hailed a success so far, though there are some concerns the militants will simply regroup once the French start drawing down.
Mali‘s military chain of command was broken after a coup last year. Soldiers lack respect for their commanders and superiors. There are reports that soldiers, humiliated by their defeat last year at the hands of the Islamic extremists, have carried out reprisals against the Arab and Tuareg civilians left behind.
Human Rights Watch released a report Thursday that said two Tuareg men who had been arrested in February and tortured by Malian soldiers in the
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/nmDhU81h-EQ/
An international rights group has condemned Gaza’s Hamas rulers for failing to investigate the public slayings of seven Palestinian men accused of collaborating with Israel.
Human Rights Watch says Gaza’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh had promised an investigation into the deaths.
The New York-based group says that four months after masked Hamas gunmen killed the suspects and dragged their bodies through the streets, Gaza’s authorities have done nothing to address the murders.
The men had been imprisoned in Gaza but were apparently handed over to the Hamas gunmen during a November bout of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants. The men were paraded into a public square, accused of aiding Israel and shot.
Islam Shahwan, spokesman for Hamas’ Interior Ministry in the Gaza Strip, had no comment on HRW‘s charges.
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/world/~3/4fC__5YUCOQ/
An international rights group says the Syrian regime has been carrying out indiscriminate and sometimes deliberate airstrikes against civilians that have killed at least 4,300 people since last summer.
Human Rights Watch says Syrian fighter jets have targeted bakeries, breadlines and hospitals in the country’s north. Parts of the region have fallen under the control of rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.
In a report Thursday, the New York-based group says its activists inspected 52 sites in northern Syria, documenting 59 attacks by the Syrian Air Force that killed at least 152 people.
HRW says that across Syria, more than 4,300 civilians have been killed in attacks by Assad’s jets since last July.
The United Nations says that more than 70,000 people have been killed in Syria‘s 2-year-old conflict.
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