The bodies of two people missing and presumed dead since a New Zealand volcano erupted last week  may never be found, authorities said Wednesday.

Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Clement said he was “deeply sorry” that the bodies of local tour guide Hayden Marshall-Inman, 40, and Australian tourist Winona Langford, 17, have not been recovered.

He said the bodies were probably swept out to sea. “The reality is we have to wait for Mother Nature to produce those bodies. It may and it may not,” Clement said.

The White Island Volcano, also known as “Whakaari” in the Maori language, erupted on Dec. 9 while dozens of tourists were visiting the island, located about 48 kilometers off the coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

At least 16 other people were killed and more than 20 survivors suffered severe burns.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said this week that official inquiries by coroners and work safety regulators into the eruption could take up to a year, and will carry potential criminal penalties of up to five years in jail.

There has been much criticism of why tourists were allowed on to the country’s most active volcano.
 

…

Yemenis are facing a new battle: Dengue Fever, a potentially fatal illness that spreads in the unsanitary conditions and decimated infrastructure of their conflict-torn country. The World Health Organization says nearly 59,500 suspected cases, including 219 deaths, were recorded in the first 11 months of 2019. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on this new challenge for a country that has endured five years of war that have killed thousands and pushed millions to the brink of famine.

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The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump late Wednesday, making him the third president in the country’s history to face an impeachment trial and the potential punishment of being removed from office.

The House, according to rules adopted Tuesday, will spend six hours debating the impeachment articles that accuse Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency by soliciting Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 U.S. election and of obstructing Congress by defying subpoenas seeking testimony and documents as lawmakers investigated the matter.

A vote is expected in the evening, around the same time Trump is scheduled to be speaking at a campaign rally in the state of Michigan.

With Democrats controlling the House, the impeachment articles are expected to pass over the objection of minority Republicans. A Senate trial would follow in January, but with Republicans in control of that chamber and a two-thirds majority required to convict the president, Trump is likely to remain in office.

Ahead of the House vote, Trump used a series of tweets to criticize the investigations against him and reiterate his defense that he has done “nothing wrong.”

“I’m not worried!” he wrote.

He also sent a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying it is Democrats, and not Trump, who have committed the acts alleged in the impeachment articles.

“You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting America’s Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain,” Trump wrote.

Pelosi sent her own letter to House Democrats saying that in voting to approve the impeachment articles, they will be exercising “one of the most solemn powers granted to us by the Constitution.”

“Very sadly, the facts have made clear that the President abused his power for his own personal, political benefit and that he obstructed Congress as he demanded that he is above accountability, above the Constitution and above the American people,” Pelosi wrote. “In America, no one is above the law.”

One of the articles of impeachment accuses Trump of trying to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to launch investigations of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company, and a debunked theory that Ukraine tried to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The second impeachment article accuses Trump of obstructing Congress by refusing to turn over thousands of pages of Ukraine-related documents to House impeachment investigators and blocking key aides from testifying at the weeks-long impeachment inquiry.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out Tuesday at Western nations for their lack of support for his so-called Operation Peace Spring, which he launched in October in Kurdish-controlled areas of northeastern Syria. 

Speaking at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, Erdogan described the difficulties encountered by the millions of refugees forced to flee war and persecution, and the need for universal solidarity to support them.  

The Turkish president, who said his country has welcomed more than 5 million displaced individuals — 3.7 million of them Syrian refugees, criticized the European Union for its lack of financial support and the member nations’ unwillingness to share the burden of welcoming refugees inside their own borders.

Erdogan also criticized Western leaders, whom he said have failed to support his military offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria. He has accused the Kurds of being allied with PKK terrorists in Turkey, and said his reason for launching Operation Peace Spring was to clear a 120-kilometer area in Syria of what he called a terrorist presence.

“Let us declare these areas as safe zones,” Erdogan said through an interpreter. “Let us implement resettlement and housing projects altogether. Let us have hospitals. Let us have schools there and let the refugees go back to their motherland peacefully and in a dignified fashion. But nobody seems to be inclined to help us. Why? Because oil is a much more needed commodity.”  

President Donald Trump announced in November his decision to post U.S. soldiers in Syria to guard oil fields. The Trump administration previously had been criticized by allies for allowing Turkey’s military assault to go forward by withdrawing U.S. troops allied with the Kurds in the region. The Kurds have called the move a betrayal.

Erdogan said he will go ahead with his plans to resettle about 1 million Syrian refugees in this so-called peace zone in northern Syria, despite international criticism. 

“The YPG and PKK terrorist organizations are attacking civilians, but despite that fact, these areas are now the safest and most stable zones of Syria, which are inhabitable,” Erdogan said. “The Syrian refugees should go back on a voluntary basis, but we know what powers around the world would be disturbed by their resettlement peacefully and in a dignified fashion.”  

Western powers and humanitarian organizations have expressed alarm at Turkey’s insistence on relocating the refugees across the border into the area once controlled by the Syrian Kurds. They warn this will lead to enduring ethnic tensions between the two groups, leading to permanent instability in the region.
 

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U.S. lawmakers granted formal recognition to the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians on Tuesday and directed federal officials to acquire land on the tribe’s behalf, following a decades-long struggle by its members scattered across the Northern Plains of the U.S. and Canada.

A provision to recognize the tribe and make it eligible for millions of dollars annually in federal assistance was included in a defense bill approved in the Senate on a vote of 86 to 8. The measure now goes to President Donald Trump to be signed into law.

Most of the tribe’s more than 5,000 members are in Montana, descendants of Native Americans and early European settlers.

They have a headquarters in Great Falls, Montana but have been without a recognized homeland since the late 1800s, when the tribe’s leader, Chief Little Shell, and his followers in North Dakota broke off treaty negotiations with the U.S. government.

Tribe members later settled in Montana and southern Canada, but they struggled to stay united because they had no land to call their own.

Formal government recognition gives cultural validation to a tribe whose members have long lived on the fringes of society and were sometimes shunned by whites. More practically, it makes its members, many of them poor, eligible for government benefits ranging from education and health care to housing.

“It’s truly amazing. I’m almost speechless that this has finally come to fruition for us,” Little Shell Chairman Gerald Gray said. “Besides the dignity part and us fighting for this for over 150 years, it’s going to provide access to services our people have never had access to but have always deserved”

Providing services to the tribal members through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Service would cost roughly $40 million over five years, or about $8 million a year, the Congressional Budget Office said in a March report. That figure was based on an enrollment of roughly 2,600 members, a number that Gray said was outdated and too low.

Tribal leaders first petitioned for recognition through the Interior Department in 1978. Members trace their other attempts back to the 1860s, when the Pembina Band of Chippewa signed a treaty with the U.S. government.

Recognition was granted by the state of Montana in 2000, but denied by the U..S. Interior Department in 2009.

Montana U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat, said he worked with Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines to convince Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to get language recognizing the tribe into the defense bill.

“There were no deals cut here,” Tester said moments after Tuesday’s vote. “This happened because Leader McConnell made it a priority.”

Daines said the Senate vote marked a “historic day for the state of Montana” and had been one of his main priorities.

Legislation recognizing the tribe was approved by the House last year but later blocked in the Senate.

 Tester said a similar measure was the first piece of legislation he introduced after being first elected in 2006. Daines and Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte, Montana’s sole member of the House, also took up the Little Shell’s cause after taking office.

The House passed the defense bill with the Little Shell provision included in a vote last week. It calls on the U.S. Department of the Interior to acquire 200 acres (80 hectares) for the Little Shell’s members that could be used for a tribal government center, health clinic, housing or other purposes.

Gray said the tribe will work in coming months to identify the location of that land. The legislation says is must be within a four-county area of north-central Montana that includes Great Falls.

“It’s going to take some time,” Gray said. “We want to build a nation and you’ve got to get it right.”

…

One of the biggest refugee crises is about to take place because of recent actions by the Indian government, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan warned delegates Tuesday at the Global Refugee Forum.

Khan said India’s revocaton of Kashmir’s special status on Aug. 5 aims to change the demographics of the region from a Muslim-majority to a Muslim-minority state, which is likely to provoke a refugee crisis that will dwarf previous ones.

“I would like the world community to take notice of what is happening,” Khan said. “We in Pakistan are not just worried that there will be a refugee crisis. We are worried that this could lead to a conflict, a conflict between two nuclear-armed countries.”

Khan pointed to India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Assam state as another flash point. Under this act, he said, Muslims must prove they are citizens of India or will be stripped of their nationality.

“Please understand the implications,” Khan said. “There are 200 million Muslims in India. … If two or three percent of them cannot prove their citizenship, where will they go?”

Khan warned that the riots in opposition to the new legislation are likely to worsen, but said that Pakistan, which already hosts around three million Afghan refugees, cannot accommodate more.

Khan urged nations to pressure the Indian government to reverse its discriminatory policies against Muslims.
 

…

The sixth and final Democratic presidential debate of the year will be held Dec. 19, 2019, on the campus of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Only seven of 15 candidates seeking the nomination to challenge President Donald Trump will be on stage this time, as the first primary contests early next year draw closer. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has more on the significance of this debate and the issues young student voters want to hear from the candidates.

…

Spanish police retrieved a body from a boat off the southern coast on Tuesday, the eighth migrant killed at sea in a 24-hour period while trying to reach the country.

The boat was spotted in the western Mediterranean off the coast of the southern region of Andalusia before dawn and 47 survivors — 30 men and 17 men — were taken to the port of Motril, a spokesman for Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said.

A Moroccan coastguard vessel had earlier retrieved seven bodies and rescued 70 migrants after they got into difficulty in the Alboran Sea in the western Mediterranean, a Moroccan military source said.

The survivors, including 10 women and a baby, were found in a “very poor state” and were taken for medical treatment in Nador in northern Morocco, the source added.

The boat capsized carrying around 100 migrants headed towards Spain, according to Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which added that 24 people were still missing. 

Over 98,000 people have reached Europe by sea this year, including around 25,000 who arrived in Spain, according to the International Organization for Migration.

More than 1,200 migrants have died or are missing at sea after attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year, UN figures show.

…

Pope Francis has abolished the “pontifical secret” used in clergy sexual abuse cases, after mounting criticism that the high degree of confidentiality has been used to protect pedophiles, silence victims and keep law enforcement from investigating crimes.

In a new document, Francis decreed that information in abuse cases must be protected by church leaders to ensure its “security, integrity and confidentiality.” But he said “pontifical secret” no longer applies to abuse-related accusations, trials and decisions under the Catholic Church’s canon law.

The Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, called the reform an “epochal decision” that will facilitate coordination with civil law enforcement and open up lines of communication with victims.

While documentation from the church’s in-house legal proceedings will still not become public, Scicluna said, the reform now removes any excuse to not cooperate with legitimate legal requests from civil law enforcement authorities.

Prominent Irish survivor Marie Collins said the reform was “excellent news” that abuse survivors and their advocates had been pressing for. “At last a real and positive change,” she tweeted.

Francis also raised from 14 to 18 the cutoff age below which the Vatican considers pornographic images to be child pornography.

The new laws were issued Tuesday, Francis’ 83rd birthday, as he struggles to respond to the global explosion of the abuse scandal, his own missteps and demands for greater transparency and accountability from victims, law enforcement and ordinary Catholics alike.

The new norms are the latest amendment to the Catholic Church’s in-house canon law — a parallel legal code that metes out ecclesial justice for crimes against the faith — in this case relating to the sexual abuse of minors or vulnerable people by priests, bishops or cardinals. In this legal system, the worst punishment a priest can incur is being defrocked, or dismissed from the clerical state.

Pope Benedict XVI had decreed in 2001 that these cases must be dealt with under “pontifical secret,” the highest form of secrecy in the church. The Vatican had long insisted that such confidentiality was necessary to protect the privacy of the victim, the reputation of the accused and the integrity of the canonical process.

However, such secrecy also served to keep the scandal hidden, prevent law enforcement from accessing documents and silence victims, many of whom often believed that “pontifical secret” prevented them from going to the police to report their priestly abusers.

While the Vatican has long tried to insist this was not the case, it also never mandated that bishops and religious superiors report sex crimes to police, and in the past has encouraged bishops not to do so.

According to the new instruction, which was signed by the Vatican secretary of state but authorized by the pope, the Vatican still doesn’t mandate reporting the crimes to police, saying religious superiors are obliged to do so where civil reporting laws require it.

But it goes further than the Vatican has gone before, saying: “Office confidentiality shall not prevent the fulfillment of the obligations laid down in all places by civil laws, including any reporting obligations, and the execution of enforceable requests of civil judicial authorities.”

The Vatican has been under increasing pressure to cooperate more with law enforcement, and its failure to do so has resulted in unprecedented raids in recent years on diocesan chanceries by police from Belgium to Texas and Chile.

But even under the penalty of subpoenas and raids, bishops have sometimes felt compelled to withhold canonical proceedings given the “pontifical secret,” unless given permission to hand documents over by the Vatican. The new law makes that explicit permission no longer required.

“The freedom of information to statutory authorities and to victims is something that is being facilitated by this new law,” Scicluna told Vatican media.

The Vatican in May issued another law explicitly saying victims cannot be silenced and have a right to learn the outcome of canonical trials. The new document repeats that, and expands the point by saying not only the victim, but any witnesses or the person who lodged the accusation cannot be compelled to silence.

Individual scandals, national inquiries, grand jury investigations, U.N. denunciations and increasingly costly civil litigation have devastated the Catholic hierarchy’s credibility across the globe, and Francis’ own failures and missteps have emboldened his critics.

In February, he summoned the presidents of bishops conferences from around the globe to a four-day summit on preventing abuse, where several speakers called for a reform of the pontifical secret. Francis himself said he intended to raise the age for which pornography was considered child porn.

The Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, said the new law is a “historical” follow-up to the February summit and a sign of openness and transparency.

“The breadth of Pope Francis’ decision is evident: the well-being of children and young people must always come before any protection of a secret, even the `’pontifical secret,'” he said in a statement.

Also Tuesday, Francis accepted the resignation of the Vatican’s ambassador to France, Archbishop Luigi Ventura, who is accused of making unwanted sexual advances to young men.

Ventura turned 75 last week, the mandatory retirement age for bishops, but the fact that his resignation was announced on the same day as Francis’ abuse reforms didn’t seem to be a coincidence.

…

Almost 200 Rohingya Muslims sailed more than 1,500 kilometres to escape Bangladesh refugee camps only to be arrested by Myanmar’s navy, the country’s military said Tuesday.

The boat seizure came just days after Myanmar’s leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi addressed the U.N.’s top court to deny allegations of a genocidal campaign against the ethnic minority.

With the monsoon over and seas relatively calm, increasing numbers of Rohingya Muslims are once again risking their lives attempting to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.

Bangladeshi authorities say they are stopping one or two boats a week leaving the country’s shores, and many more are thought to evade patrols.

Few make it as far south as Kawthaung, Myanmar’s southern-most tip, where on Sunday the country’s navy picked up the 173-strong Rohingya group, including 69 women and 22 children, a military spokesman told AFP.

“We will hand them over to immigration authorities and police to take action,” said Zaw Min Tun, adding they had come from camps in Bangladesh and were heading to Malaysia.

Seven boatmen were also arrested in the vessel’s seizure some 135 miles (217km) off Myanmar’s coast, he said.

Life is becoming increasingly difficult in the sprawling camps that are home to nearly one million Rohingya, around 750,000 of whom fled a crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017.

Officially they are forbidden to leave the settlements, but the camps’ vast size means they are difficult to police.

Bangladesh has stoked fear among the Rohingya by erecting barbed-wire fences around the sites and installing checkpoints on nearby roads.

Rights groups condemn the move, saying it transforms the camps into a “big prison”.

An internet blackout, the confiscation of SIM cards and phones, and a clampdown on illegal documentation papers are also making refugees’ lives even less bearable.

Frustration is also growing in Bangladesh about hosting the refugees, especially after failed attempts to repatriate them.

The Rohingya refuse to return to Myanmar until their security and rights are guaranteed.

Last week Suu Kyi rejected allegations of genocide against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), despite admitting the army may have used excessive force against the Rohingya.

…

A Russian woman jailed in the United States for working as a foreign agent and deported to Moscow has been hired by Russia’s state-funded RT television as a host for an online show that mocks the opposition, the station said on Tuesday.

Maria Butina, 31, pleaded guilty in a U.S. court last December to one count of conspiring to act as an agent for Russia by infiltrating a gun rights group and influencing conservative activists and Republicans.

She was deported in October after serving most of an 18-month sentence and met with fanfare in Moscow where officials had called the charges against her ridiculous and said she had been forced to confess.

“Well, I’m home now,” Butina says with a grin and wearing a “foreign agent” T-shirt in a promotional clip for the show aired on Tuesday.

The show is called “Wonderful Russia Bu Bu Bu,” a play on words mocking a similar slogan by prominent Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny who talks of the “Wonderful Russia of the future” when President Vladimir Putin is no longer in power.

“Bu bu bu” roughly translates as “blah blah blah.”  But “bu” is also the beginning of the word for “future.”

RT said Butina had taken part in the show last week and defended the jailing of several Russian opposition activists at anti-Kremlin protests earlier this year.

Russia’s human rights commissioner last month gave Butina a job helping campaign for and defend Russians who have been imprisoned abroad.

Putin has in the past warmly welcomed home alleged Russian agents arrested abroad and said in 2010 he had sung patriotic songs with Anna Chapman, a Russian spy arrested in the United States and then freed as part of a major swap.

Chapman herself later received a job as a television presenter on Russia’s privately owned Ren TV channel.

Officials in Moscow say RT, which broadcasts news in English, Arabic and Spanish, gives Russia a way to compete with the dominance of global media companies based in the United States and Britain, which they say offer a biased world view.

But critics say the channel functions like a propaganda arm of the Russian state, an assertion the station rejects.

…

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called on Tuesday for the resettlement of 1 million Syrian refugees in their homeland in “a very short period of time” and accused world powers of moving more quickly to protect Syria’s oil fields than its children.

Erdogan, whose country hosts 3.7 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population worldwide, said more than 600,000 should voluntarily join around 371,000 already in a “peace zone” in northern Syria from which Turkey drove Kurdish militia.

“We need to find a formula that will allow the refugees to remain in their homelands and the ones who have already traveled to Turkey to be peacefully returned and resettled in their homelands,” he said.

Addressing the Global Forum on Refugees in Geneva, he said Turkey had spent $40 billion hosting the refugees over nine years and criticized the European Union, which had earmarked nearly 6 billion euros ($6.61 billion), for failing to deliver it all.

“We are still waiting at the threshold of receiving the other 3 billion euros that was pledged,” he said.

Housing and schools could be set up in the northern zone, where some 371,000 Syrian refugees have already returned since Turkish military operations to clear the area of “terrorist organizations”, he said, naming Islamic State as well as the Syrian Kurdish YPG and PKK, Kurdish separatists within Turkey.

“If we can implement the projects that I have talked about at the General Assembly of the United Nations I think the resettlement can easily reach 1 million in a very short period of time,” he added.

Erdogan, taking a thinly veiled swipe at the United States, which moved quickly to protect oil fields in Syria after the retreat of Islamic State, said: “Unfortunately the efforts that were spared to protect the oil fields were not mobilized for the safety and security of the children in Syria.”

…

Burundi’s main opposition alliance in exile, the National Council for Compliance with the Arusha Agreement (CNARED), says it plans to participate in the 2020 national elections.

A recent announcement, at a news conference with CNARED press officer Mames Bansubiyeko, took many politicians by surprise. On Wednesday, the alliance’s executive secretary, Anicet Niyonkuru, arrived in the capital, Bujumbura, from Brussels, Belgium, along with 15 other opposition politicians who have lived in exile the past four years.

Niyonkuru said elections were the only way to improve conditions in Burundi, which has been stuck in political turmoil since President Pierre Nkurunziza ran for and won a controversial third term in 2015.

Niyonkuru also said that his party, CDP, and his alliance CNARED would not repeat the same mistakes made in 2010 and in 2015 when they boycotted the elections, paving the way for an easy win by the ruling CNDD-FDD party.

“We will participate in elections slated for 2020 whether the political situation improves or not,” he said.

The decision has triggered both criticism and praise from other political organizations. Some politicians argue that the decision is a capitulation from the alliance’s initial tough stance on the president’s third term, which critics still consider unconstitutional.

Professor Liberat Ntibashirakandi of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium contends that politicians who fled the country after the 2015 crisis should not return until thousands of Burundian refugees now living in camps can also come home, safely.
 
“I personally believe that CNARED members have the right to go back to Burundi, but the only thing I fear are the consequences of such a decision and the impact it may have on Burundian refugees who will feel betrayed by the decision to go back to a country they fled and still fear to go back to,” he told VOA’s Central Africa service. He said opposition politicians in exile have heeded the call by President Nkurunziza for all Burundians to come home and build their nation.

“The return of Burundian refugees in exile — specifically that of Anicet Nionkuru and a dozen other opposition politicians — is in line with the response many politicians and Burundians are giving to the call urging of them to go back,” he said.

Ildephonse Rugema, a political analyst based in London, said that it is too early to judge the choice made by leaders of the CNARED alliance. Rugema said he would be observing to see if the government upholds democratic principles and freedom for all politicians.

“The announced return of politicians could be a good thing for the future of Burundi only if the Burundi government is going to provide freedom and political space to all Burundians wishing to participate in the coming elections, including refugees,” he said.

Ever-changing stance

Since 2015, CNARED has changed its political stance several times. At the beginning of the crisis, CNARED announced it would not hold talks with Nkurunziza’s government until he resigns and accepts a transitional government.

Later, CNARED agreed to participate in the inter-Burundian dialogue under the auspices of regional mediator Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda, and international facilitator and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa.

The inter-Burundian dialogue ended in failure three years later when Mkapa announced that he was resigning from his role as a facilitator on February 9, 2019.

During the two past months, CNARED leaders have been between Belgium and Uganda for peace consultations aimed at exploring possibilities of returning to Burundi.

To some extent, the alliance is bending to the hard facts of the political situation. The East African Court of Justice recently issued a ruling that President Nkurunziza did not violate Burundi’s constitution or the East African community’s laws.

The decision is in line with that taken by the Burundi Constitutional Court, right after Nkurunziza’s “third term” was challenged by the opposition.

…

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham met with leaders in Pakistan Monday to discuss “a broader” bilateral relationship, with particular focus on economic cooperation and peace-building efforts in Afghanistan, official said.

In his meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan, Graham, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, hailed Pakistan’s consistent support in the Afghan peace process, Khan’s office said. Officials quoted the U.S. senator as commending Pakistan’s unilateral installation of a fence to secure its long and traditionally porous border with Afghanistan.  

While underscoring the importance of a peaceful and stable Afghanistan for his country, Khan reiterated that Pakistan would continue to play its facilitating role in the Afghan peace and reconciliation process.

Graham also visited Pakistan in January, paving the way for a meeting between Khan and Trump at the White House in July.

Senator Graham later traveled to the neighboring city of Rawalpindi and met with Pakistan’s military chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, at the army headquarters there. The discussions focused on regional security and the Afghan peace process, said an army spokesman.

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been marred by mistrust and suspicion. They stem from allegations that leaders and fighters of the Afghan Taliban use sanctuaries on Pakistani soil to orchestrate and sustain insurgent activities in Afghanistan with the covert support of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, or ISI. Islamabad denies the accusations.  

Islamabad maintains close contacts with the Afghan Taliban and takes credit for bringing the insurgents to the negotiating table with the U.S. to help find a political settlement to the Afghan war, which has become America’s longest overseas military engagement.

Taliban leaders’ families reside among nearly three million Afghan refugees Pakistan is still hosting on its soil.

Senator Graham flew to Afghanistan after concluding his meetings in Islamabad. While speaking to reporters in Kabul, he stressed that Pakistan could still do more to accelerate the chance for Afghan peace.

“We all know that if Pakistan applied more pressure on the Taliban it would be enormously helpful to resolving the conflict here” the U.S. senator told reporters in the Afghan capital.

Trump had suspended the U.S.-Taliban dialogue in September and resumed the process a week ago. But the dialogue was again paused by Washington last Thursday after an insurgent attack on the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan that killed two Afghan civilians and wounded scores of others.  

The U.S. has been trying to seal a deal with the Taliban that would bind the insurgents to prevent Afghan soil from being used for terrorist attacks against other countries. The proposed deal would also require the Taliban to reduce violence and engage in intra-Afghan negotiations to end decades of hostilities in the country.  

In return the U.S. and NATO allies would commit to a phased withdrawal of their troops from Afghanistan. The insurgent group wants to conclude a troop drawdown agreement with Washington in the presence of international guarantors before entering into Afghan-Taliban peace talks.  

…

Senegal is failing to prevent the abuse of thousands of students at the West African country’s Quranic schools, says Human Rights Watch, despite government promises to stop the exploitation.  The rights group analyzed the Senegalese government’s efforts to address abuses over the last two years and found them to be insufficient and ineffective.   

Modou – not his real name – was just six years old when he says the abuse started.  

After his parents died, the now 12-year-old boy says his uncle sent him to study and live at a Quranic school, where teachers forced him and other students to beg in the streets.

If they didn’t return with adequate money and food, they were restrained for months at a time, he says.

Pointing to the scars on his legs, Modou says if he misbehaved or didn’t recite the Koran properly, the teachers beat him and locked him in chains.  

He says when he was beaten, he’d think of his mother and how, if she were still here, this would have never happened.  But eventually, says Modou, he accepted it and told himself it would pass.

Modou is one of 100,000 Quranic students, known as talibés, who are being exploited and abused in Senegal, says Human Rights Watch in a report released Monday.

And the government, according to the rights group, is doing little to stop it.

The report titled “Senegal: Failure to End Abuses in Quranic Schools,” says students at some schools who refuse to beg are subject to harsh, physical punishments and often suffer from malnutrition and untreated illness.  

Human Rights Watch found that some children have even died from neglect.

The number of teachers arrested for abuse has increased in recent years, but according to Human Rights Watch’s Lauren Seibert, charges are often dropped due to the social influence of Koranic teachers.

“There were a dozen or so cases like this in the past couple years where you can clearly see that the final charge and or the corresponding sentence were reduced,” Seibert said.

Quranic schools are unregulated in Senegal so anyone looking to make money can open a religious school and profit from exploiting their students, says Human Rights Watch.  

Modou was able to escape and find help at Empire des Enfants, a shelter in Dakar that cares for talibé runaways. 

Program coordinator Alassane Diagne says the children often arrive filthy, tired and sick.

He asks why does this problem persist?  It’s because there are people who profit from this disorder, says Diagne.  They don’t need authorization to open their Quranic school, he says, no one is going to verify their credentials, and the government lacks the will to fix it. If you ask, they’ll say it’s because they don’t have the resources, says Diagne, adding that he disagrees. They know where to find the means to fund the things that serve their interests, he says, so, it’s a matter of will.

But not all Quranic school students are mistreated.

Quranic teacher Mouhamed Niass says his nearly 200 students are well cared for at his school in a Dakar suburb and that it is up to the state to stop abuse. The state should also provide funding to religious schools, says Niass, so children aren’t forced to beg.

He says the children need mats, they need mattresses, they need shelter.  They need to be supported like the children at the public schools.  It’s unfortunate that the state doesn’t do it. It causes problems.  The schools need support in order to support the children, because they’re the children of Senegal.

Thierno Diop, an inspector with Senegal’s ministry of education, says the ministry doesn’t inspect religious schools, known as daaras, because it’s not authorized to do so.  

He says this problem goes above the education inspectors.  The inspections are meant to investigate the regulated schools, says Diop, but the daaras, which are constantly moving from one location to the next, can’t be controlled.  It’s because of the bad will of the state that the talibé are still in the streets, he says.  If the state wanted to stop it, adds Diop, they could do it.

A few towns in Senegal have seen some success, says Human Rights Watch’s Seibert, with mayors not only enforcing bans on begging but also shutting down religious schools that were deemed unsafe.  

But enforcement at the local level is rare, she says.

A 2013 bill would have created a regulatory system for Quranic schools by establishing so-called “modern daaras” that teach secular subjects in addition to religious ones.  

But the bill has yet to be passed into law.

And until the national government steps up, the majority of talibés, including Modou, will have to rely on a few, private shelters to protect them from those willing to do them harm.

…

Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 16 signed amendments to the Administrative Violations Code that allow hefty fines for violating the controversial law on “foreign agents,” which critics say is used to muzzle dissent and discourage the free exchange of ideas and a free press.

According to the changes, individuals who violate the law more than twice in a 12-month period will have to pay a fine of up to 10,000 rubles ($159) for the first violation, and up to 100,000 rubles ($1,590) or 15 days in jail for repeat violations.

Organizations will be obliged to pay a penalty of up to 1 million rubles ($15,900) for the first violation, and up to 5 million rubles ($79,500) for subsequent violations of the law.

The amendments were approved by lawmakers earlier this month.

Two weeks earlier, Putin signed into law a bill that gives authorities the power to label reporters who work for organizations officially listed as foreign agents as foreign agents themselves.

The tag will be applied to individuals who collaborate with foreign media outlets and receive financial or other material support from them.

Russia passed the original foreign agent law — which requires all NGOs receiving foreign funding to register — in 2012 following a major wave of anti-government protests. Putin blamed Western influence and money for those protests.

Critics of the law say it stigmatizes organizations with the designation and would do the same to journalists if they are labeled as foreign agents.

RFE/RL President Jamie Fly said on December 4 that the law ratchets up pressure on hundreds of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) correspondents in Russia who provide one of the few remaining alternatives to Kremlin-controlled news.

Last month, Russia’s Justice Ministry listed RFE/RL’s Sever.Realii website as a “foreign agent,” saying the decision was based on conclusions made by the parliamentary committee on an investigation into meddling in the country’s internal affairs.

In December 2017, the Justice Ministry listed Current Time TV, several RFE/RL services and projects, such as its Russian Service, Tatar-Bashkir Service, Sibir.Realii, Idel.Realii, Factograph, Kavkaz Realii, and Krym.Realii, as well as the Voice of America, as “foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent.”

Russian officials have said the law is a “symmetrical response” after Russia’s state-funded channel RT — which U.S. authorities accuse of spreading propaganda — was required to register its U.S. operating unit under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

U.S. officials have said the action is not symmetrical, arguing that the U.S. and Russian laws differ and that Russia uses its “foreign agent” legislation to silence dissent and discourage the free exchange of ideas.

Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based rights group, in 2017 called the law “devastating” for local NGOs, saying more than a dozen had been forced to close their doors.

With reporting by TASS and Meduza.

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Sharing the cockpit of a helicopter on sizzling tarmac, French and British air force chiefs vowed to pursue the joint fight against jihadists in the heart of the Sahel even as the shadow of Brexit looms over their countries.

“We’ve got a long, fabulous history of working alongside each other, and I don’t expect anything to change anytime soon,” Royal Air Force (RAF) Chief of Air Staff Mike Wigston told AFP on a visit to the city of Gao with French counterpart Philippe Lavigne.

“If anything, we are going to work stronger together,” he said.

Backed by 100 British personnel, France has a 4,500-strong Sahel force supporting national armies struggling with a seven-year-old jihadist revolt.

Thousands of civilians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.

The two generals this weekend visited Mali, Niger and Chad, which with Burkina Faso and Mauritania form the so-called G5 Sahel, an anti-terror force.

Wigston said Mali and its neighbors were “the front line of instability.”

The priority of the Sahel deployment “is to stamp out the violent extremism which is making people’s lives a misery,” he said.

“But there is a wider security issue here which affects Europe and the potential for this instability and the conflict in this region to spill into Europe… so we are also here to protect Europe.”

What next?

Britain is set to leave the European Union by January 31 following a general election that gave the pro-Brexit Conservative party a large majority.

France sent troops into Mali in 2013 to help drive back Islamist insurgents who had seized the north of the country.

But attacks have continued since then, and the conflict has since spread to the country’s center as well as to neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger.

France’s Operation Barkhane remains in place to train and support poorly equipped local forces, but at a hefty cost that France’s EU allies have only partially eased.

Britain and France signed a defense cooperation pact in London in 2010 — and both sides have repeatedly said it will not be affected by Brexit.

Since July 2018, London has contributed three heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to France’s Sahel fight. They have clocked up some 1,600 hours of flying time to date, transporting about 11,000 personnel and 800 tonnes of freight.

The twin-rotor helicopters can haul nearly four tonnes of supplies and more than 30 troops at a time — a vital contribution in a region where road access to frontline troops is long and dangerous, with a high risk of mines and militia attacks.

The helicopter support “allows us to devote ourselves to air combat missions while our British comrades provide logistics, refuelling and troop transport,” said Loic, who heads France’s Barkhane air combat group in Mali.

In line with French military security protocol, the colonel can be identified only by his first name.

Without the British help, he said, “we would be forced to assign other helicopters or resort to slower, riskier, road convoys.”

‘With or without Brexit’

Fighters on the ground say the Chinooks have been invaluable.

They were deployed to help out last month when two French army helicopters crashed in Mali, killing all 13 on board and bringing to 41 the number of French troops killed in the Sahel region since 2013.

“For us, it would be a real plus if this [Chinook] capacity remained beyond the summer of 2020,” the current deadline for the British deployment, Colonel Loic said.

For his part, Wigston said: “I absolutely understand how vital this asset is to Barkhane, I will transmit (the message) to the political authorities in London.”

Aside from Barkhane, London has announced the deployment of 250 troops to the Sahel for three years from 2020 as part of the United Nations’ MINUSMA peacekeeping force in Mali.

Lavigne insisted that broader military cooperation would continue “with or without Brexit”.

“Our air forces are quite similar, they have the same operating capacities and expertise, and tomorrow we will continue to work together to bring security,” he said.

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The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, is holding a first-ever forum in an effort to drum up international support for tens of millions of people displaced by war, poverty, repression and other woes. The Global Refugee Forum, taking place December 16-18 in Geneva, will seek to gather leaders from governments, business and civil society to work together to find solutions for the unprecedented number of people — more than 70 million, according to the U.N. — displaced in their home countries or abroad. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.

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The full House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on two articles of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee. It is likely that Donald Trump will become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, with a Senate trial expected next year. Democrats have accused him of abusing the power of the presidency by soliciting Ukraine to investigate one of his chief 2020 Democratic challengers and of blocking Congress to investigate. Trump and his supporters insist he did nothing wrong. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi has more.

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Leaders of the G5 Sahel nations held summit talks in Niamey Sunday, after the death last week of 71 Niger soldiers in a jihadist attack, calling for closer cooperation and international support in the battle against the Islamist threat.

Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the regional G5 group, called for a minute’s silence for the victims of Tuesday’s attack at a military camp in Inates, near the Mali border.

“These endless attacks carried out by terrorist groups in our region remind us not only of the gravity of the situation, but also the urgency for us to work more closely together,” said Kabore.

“The terrorist threat against the Sahel countries is getting worse,” said Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou, the host of the summit.

The attacks were aimed not just at military targets but increasingly “civilian populations, notably traditional local leaders”.

Earlier four of the five Sahel leaders paid homage at the graves of 71 Niger military personnel killed. Kabore and Issoufou attended along with Mali’s Ibrahim Boubakar Keita, Chad’s Idriss Deby Itno for the short ceremony at an air base in Niamey.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the assault, in which hundreds of jihadists attacked a camp near the border with Mali with shells and mortars.

The attack in Inates in the western Tillaberi region was the deadliest on Niger’s military since Islamist militant violence began to spill over from neighboring Mali in 2015, and dealt a blow to efforts to roll back jihadism in the Sahel.

At Sunday’s ceremony, a large panel painted in the red, white and green of the Niger flag bore the inscription; “rest in peace, worthy and valiant sons of the nation. The Fatherland will be eternally grateful”.

The G5 leaders announced on Saturday they would hold the extraordinary summit in Niger to show solidarity and to “consult” after the large-scale attack. The meeting had originally been due to take place in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou.

Niger has been observing three days of national mourning from Friday to Sunday.

Militant violence has spread across the vast Sahel region, especially in Burkina Faso and Niger, having started when armed Islamists revolted in northern Mali in 2012.

In the last four months, the insurgency has claimed the lives of more than 230 soldiers in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Last month, 13 French troops were killed in a helicopter collision while hunting jihadists in northern Mali.

Thousands of civilians have also died and more than a million have been forced to flee their homes since the jihadist revolt began.

Analysts note an escalation in the jihadists’ operational tactics, which seem to have become bolder and more complex in recent months.

From hit-and-run raids by a small group of Kalashnikov-armed guerrillas, the jihadists are now carrying out operations that involve hundreds of fighters, armed with mortars and using vehicles for suicide attacks.

Ranged against them are the impoverished armies of Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, plus a 4,500-man French force in the Sahel and the 13,000-man UN force in Mali, MINUSMA.

Tuesday’s attack prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to postpone a meeting scheduled for next week in the southwestern French town of Pau, where he and five presidents from the Sahel were due to discuss security in the region.

The talks will now take place early next year.

The Sahel region of Africa lies to the south of the Sahara Desert and stretches across the breadth of the African continent.

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Human remains discovered last month at a farm outside the city of Guadalajara have been confirmed as belonging to at least 50 people, authorities in Mexico’s west-central state of Jalisco reported.

Jalisco state prosecutors said recovery work at the farm in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, which began Nov. 22 after the initial discovery, concluded Friday as experts determined there was no more evidence to be gathered from the scene.

The office said in a Saturday statement that there was a “preliminary” indication that the remains corresponded to 50 individuals.

Prosecutors said they had identified 13 people so far — 12 male and one female, all of whom were previously listed as missing.

The state forensic sciences institute will seek to determine the sex of the rest and cause of death.

The investigation continues, with the goal of identifying more victims as well as “those responsible for this crime which gravely harms society,” the statement said.

The state is home to Jalisco New Generation, one of Mexico’s bloodiest and most ruthless drug cartels.

In July, Jalisco prosecutors announced 21 bodies had been found in excavations in the yard of a house near Guadalajara. In May, authorities discovered the remains of at least 34 people at two separate properties in the state.

Such clandestine burial sites are frequently used by criminals to dispose of bodies.

At least 40,000 people have disappeared since Mexico’s drug war began in 2006.

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Libya’s U.N.-supported government is held hostage by “armed and terrorist militias” in the capital, Tripoli, Egypt’s leader said Sunday.

President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said in televised comments that the Government of National Accord “is not able to have a free and real will because they have been taken hostage by armed and terrorist militias there.”

The GNA is backed by Egypt’s regional rivals Turkey and Qatar and Egypt’s relations with the two countries have been strained since 2013. That’s when Sissi, as defense minister, led the military overthrow of elected but divisive Islamist President Muhammad Morsi amid mass protests against his brief rule. Morsi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Tripoli-based government is supported by a Libyan affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood group, which Cairo designated as a terrorist organization in 2013. Turkey and Qatar are also staunch backers of the Brotherhood.

Sissi said the Libyan conflict has posed a threat to Egypt’s national security because militants and weapons spill over the border into Egypt. He said it had been a priority for Egypt to directly interfere in Libya “but did not take this step to maintain the relationship and brotherhood with the Libyan people.”

There was no immediate comment from the Tripoli authorities.

Last week, the Egyptian president said a comprehensive political solution for the Libyan conflict would be achieved in the coming months that would put an end to a “terrorist hotbed that pushes militants and weapons to (Libya’s) neighboring countries including Egypt.”

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Fighting Stalls After ‘Final Assault’ on Tripoli Fails to End War

Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar has announced plans to overrun the western capital several times, but a stalemate continues in the suburbs

Libya descended into chaos after the 2011 civil war that ousted and killed long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The turmoil that followed Gadhafi’s death enabled the rise of Islamic militants. The country was divided into two parts, a weak U.N.-supported administration in Tripoli and a rival government in the east aligned with the self-styled Libyan National Army, led by Gen. Khalifa Haftar.

Haftar, who has modeled himself after Sissi, has for months been fighting an array of militias allied with the Tripoli authorities to wrest control of the capital. He is backed by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, as well as France and Russia, while the Tripoli-based government receives aid from Turkey, Qatar and Italy.

On Saturday, Egypt’s parliament Speaker Ali Abdel-Al said Egypt recognizes the Libyan legislature as “the sole legitimate body representing the Libyan people,” according to the MENA news agency. He said the Egyptian parliament backs Haftar’s forces in their “fighting against terrorism.”

Libya’s parliament is affiliated with the government based in the country’s east and has opposed the U.N.-supported government in Tripoli.

Abdel-Al did not say whether the government of Sissi decided to rescind its recognition of the Tripoli-based government. Multiple calls to the country’s presidency and Foreign Ministry went unanswered.

The Libyan commander Thursday declared a “final” and decisive battle for Tripoli, unleashing heavy clashes on the southern reaches of the city in the past two days against the Tripoli-based militias.

Sissi’s comments came amid heightened tensions with Turkey after a controversial maritime border agreement it signed last month with Libya’s U.N.-based government.

Greece, Egypt and Cyprus, which lie between the two geographically, have denounced the deal as being contrary to international law, and Greece expelled the Libyan ambassador last week over the issue.

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