Category Archives: Government Oppression

The saying that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter has gotten a lot of mileage in various conflicts in the region. It has never been convincing, mostly because terrorist tactics, by definition, target freedom-loving civilians rather than those holding the tools of oppression. When they double as terrorists, so-called freedom fighters are, at most, seeking to overthrow a government to assert control for themselves.

In the past few years in some countries, terrorist groups have managed this, to varying degrees. When ISIS captured and claimed statehood over large swathes of Syria and Iraq (after all, state is right there in the name) in 2014, and the Houthi rebel group took over Yemens capital shortly afterwards, it started becoming clear for the first time in the global war on terror that one mans terrorist could be another mans government. And they do not make very good governments (nor do they govern in a way that promotes freedom).

ISISs territory was never fully consolidated before it collapsed, and Houthi authority in Yemen remains heavily contested. But in August, when the Taliban took control of every province in Afghanistan, the full transition of a terrorist group into a real national authority was witnessed for the first time in a generation.

The Taliban might have learnt from the trials of ISIS and the Houthis that terrorist experience does not lend itself to expertise in governance. It may seem an obvious point, but it was not so obvious for the Taliban, which has filled its Cabinet with individuals distinguished only by their work on the battlefield. It declined to put together a transitional administration that drew from the experience of those who have governed before, opting instead to throw out every page of what it considered to be a wholly corrupt playbook.

Now, ironically but to tragic effect, the Taliban has to deal with other freedom fighters whom it has begun to call terrorists, and the absence of any skill in governance could make the problem intractable. IS-K, a franchise of ISIS, is chief among Afghanistans new terrorist threats. The group has murdered hundreds of civilians in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, leading the Taliban in panicked fashion to rebrand itself as a counterterrorist force. After an IS-K suicide bomber killed himself and 62 civilians in a Shiite mosque in Kunduz, Taliban authorities issued several statements condemning IS-K terrorists, and launched multiple counter-terrorist operations.

It will be difficult for the Talibans opponents not to revel in the irony, but that would be wrong. Instead, those who would wish well for Afghanistan should hope that this is an urgent lesson for the Taliban in the difference between statehood and government between what international legal experts call territorial control and effective control.

Taliban leaders have publicly condemned IS-K terrorism. AP

This is an urgent lesson for the Taliban in the difference between 'statehood' and 'government'

Terrorism can achieve one, but not the other. The Taliban, through terrorist tactics, has gained territorial control. But counterterrorism requires effective control, which can only be acquired through political skill and diplomacy at home and abroad.

Bizarrely, the US, the architect of the global war on terror, has signalled a deep ignorance of this fact in the way that it seeks to outsource its own counterterrorism to the Taliban. A few short months ago, the notion that the US would collaborate with the Taliban on counterterrorism would have been laughable. Now, Washington is not merely collaborating with them, but instead is dependent on them for it.

Ahead of bilateral talks in Doha this week, a US State Department spokesperson said that Washington would press the Taliban to ensure terrorists do not create a base for attacks in Afghanistan. It may seem that having one militant group police the actions of others is an advantage. After all, who would know terrorist tactics better than former terrorists?

But the Kunduz bombing shows how complicated counterterrorism will be for the Taliban. The attack was symptomatic of IS-Ks hatred of Shiites. But another, more public reason behind it is that it is meant to pre-empt any temptation on the part of the Taliban to acquiesce to potential Chinese requests to deport Uyghurs back to China. Indeed, the bombing was carried out by an ethnic Uyghur member of IS-K.

More from Sulaiman Hakemy

What to do about this is a decision the Taliban, which has no experienced diplomats, will struggle with. On the one hand, the Uyghur militant movement within IS-K is Islamist-tinged freedom-fighting of the kind the Taliban have long advocated. On the other, governing a country like Afghanistan, which will need Chinese political support in order to succeed economically, requires defining what the national interest is and picking the states battles. Terrorism does not prepare you for that kind of burden. Experience in government does.

The Kunduz bombing also further exposes the emptiness of Taliban promises of tolerance and security to Afghanistans majority-Shiite Hazara community, who were the main victims of the attack. I say further because there are multiple reports of Taliban security officials forcibly displacing Hazaras from their homes across the country.

Given that the Taliban Cabinet has no Hazaras or Shiites in any senior positions (and only one in a junior position), it would have been extraordinary if those promises were kept. But the fact that they are broken is yet more evidence that the Taliban does not understand how fundamental they are to public safety. Competent governments know that minority communities must be protected to maintain national cohesion, as a form of counterterrorism, lest those communities begin to generate their own freedom fighters.

When the Taliban was on the terrorist side of the fence, it often cited the corruption, oppression and incompetence of the previous Afghan government as a way of winning more supporters. Terrorists exploit those faults in government. Counterterrorism does not only require defeating terrorists on the battlefield, but addressing those faults head-on and correcting them, so as to remove the attraction of terrorist groups for people who cannot see through their false claims to be freedom fighters. Until the Taliban realises how complicated being a government is, both at home and abroad, it cannot be the counterterrorist force it claims to be.

Published: October 12th 2021, 3:00 PM

Read this article:

Is the Taliban capable of counterterrorism? - The National

BAGHDAD--Firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr may be Iraqs big election winner but he will still have to haggle with his opponents, linked to armed pro-Iranian groups, to forge a new government.

War-scarred Iraq, an oil-rich country plagued by corruption and poverty, last Sunday held its fifth parliamentary elections since the 2003 US-led invasion toppled president Saddam Hussein.

Sadr, a Shia preacher who once commanded an anti-US militia, had campaigned as a nationalist and criticised the influence of big neighbour Iran, which has grown strongly since Saddams fall.

The political maverick had initially vowed to boycott the polls but then sent his movement into the race, proclaiming in recent months that it will be he who chooses Iraqs next prime minister.

At first glance, his blocs election win would seem to reinforce that view. The Sadrists won 70 out of the assemblys 329 seats, according to preliminary results, boosting their lead from the previous parliament.

But analysts say Sadr will now have to come to terms with his adversaries, the pro-Iran Shia parties linked to the Hashed al-Shaabi network of paramilitary forces.

The Fatah (Conquest) Alliance, Hasheds political wing, lost more than half of its 48 deputies, according to preliminary results.

The results give Sadr an upper hand when it comes to politics and his negotiating position, but that is not the only thing that is important here, said Renad Mansour of the Chatham House think tank.

The Hashed has lost political power by losing seats, but they still have coercive power and that will be used in the bargaining, he said of the movement, which according to estimates has over 160,000 men under arms.

Despite the implicit threat of violence Mansour does not predict an escalation, but he warned, That doesnt mean that each side wont use threats and sometimes violence to show that they have that power.

Sour mood

Iraqi politics have been dominated by factions representing the Shia majority since the fall of Saddams Sunni-led regime.

They are, however, increasingly split, especially on their attitude toward powerful Shia neighbour Iran, which competes with the United States for strategic influence in Iraq.

The Hashed were formed in 2014 to fight the Sunni-extremist Islamic State (ISIS) group and entered the legislature for the first time in the 2018 vote, after playing a major role in defeating ISIS.

Opposition activists accuse Hasheds armed groups, which are now supposedly integrated into Iraqs state security forces, of being beholden to Iran and acting as an instrument of oppression against critics.

A youth-led anti-government protest movement that broke out two years ago ended after hundreds of activists were killed and the movement has blamed pro-Iranian armed groups for the bloodshed.

Washington, meanwhile, accuses Tehran-backed armed groups of being behind rocket and drone attacks on its military and diplomatic interests.

Among many Iraqis, the mood over Iranian interference has soured and Sadr voiced that sentiment after the election.

He attacked the resistance, the name pro-Iran armed groups give themselves in the Middle East.

Arms should be in the hands of the state and their use outside of that framework prohibited, even for those who claim to be from the resistance, he said in a clear reference to Hashed.

Rejecting election results

The Hashed and their allies denounced the election outcome as a scam.

These elections are the worst Iraq has known since 2003, charged the head of Houqouq, a party close to the Hezbollah Brigades which are under the Hashed umbrella.

The factions military spokesman accused Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi of being the sponsor of electoral fraud.

Amid the heated rhetoric, the political blocs are seen to be starting the process of post-election haggling aimed at forming parliamentary blocs ahead of finding a prime minister.

One pro-Iran figure and Hashed partner made surprising gains, former Prime Minister Nuri Maliki, who served from 2006 to 2014 and whose State of Law Alliance can count on more than 30 seats.

Fatah is looking at Malikis party and smaller groups to create the largest parliamentary bloc and nominate him as prime minister, said Hamdi Malik, of the Washington Institute for Near East Study.

This is very hard to achieve, but it can form their starting point to enter into negotiations with Sadr to secure a lot of positions in the next government, Malik said.

The most likely outcome, the analyst added, is a compromise PM with a lot of Sadrist control over him.

Political scientist Ali al-Baidar said that, whatever happens, Hashed wont be content sitting in opposition.

There is no culture of opposition in Iraqi politics, he said. Everyone wants some of the power.

Excerpt from:

Despite Iraq election win, Sadr still has to work with pro-Iran groups | | AW - The Arab Weekly

Because there is no way to deny that Israel refuses to grant basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians in the territories it has occupied since 1967, the Israeli government and its supporters in the West reflexively smear anyone who refuses to ignore or excuse this injustice using a familiar set of lies.

Thats why the attacks on Sally Rooney this week, for refusing an Israeli publishing firms request to produce a Hebrew translation of her new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to honor the Palestinian-led cultural boycott of Israel, were so predictable.

Rooney explained in a written statement that she was convinced that Israels unequal treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories was akin to the former apartheid regime in South Africa, justifying an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions like the successful one against that state.

Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a reportentitled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israels most prominent human rights organization BTselem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israels system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law, Rooney wrote.

Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses, she continued, preempting one of the most common objections tothe boycott campaign raised by supporters of Israel. This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers unions.

But before Rooney released the statement explaining her reasons for joining the boycott, she was accused of being either an antisemite, for singling out the worlds only Jewish state for criticism, or a hypocrite, for not taking similar actions to prevent translation of her work into the languages used in authoritarian nations.

Sally Rooneys novels are available in Chinese and Russian, the literary critic Ruth Franklin tweeted. Doesnt she care about the Uighurs? Or Putin-defying journalists? To judge Israel by a different standard than the rest of the world is antisemitism.

A London correspondent for i24 News, an outlet based in Tel Aviv, Israel, chimed in, asking, Will she refuse Russian, Arabic and Chinese publishers, too?

The next day, an app used by Israels government to coordinate the outrage of its supporters on social networks directed them to like a Facebook comment saying that her decision reflects her antisemitic behaviour!

Ignorance about the Irish was a factor of much of the criticism of Rooneys decision on social networks. The thought that something other than antisemitism like the sympathy of one formerly colonized nation for another might explain widespread Irish support for the Palestinians seemed to be utterly lost on most of those dismissing Rooneys stance.

More knowledge of Irish history might have made Rooneys decision less shocking to her critics. None of them, for instance, seem aware that the battle of an indigenous population to regain control of its land from settlers who seized it as part of a violent process of colonization is far from abstract to the Irish. Just last month, Irelands president, Michael D. Higgins, turned down an invitation to join the British queen at an event to commemorate the creation of Northern Ireland through the partition of Ireland along ethnic lines 100 years ago.

Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement, observed in an email interview that the first significant instance of cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa was a 1964 declaration signed by twenty-eight Irish playwrights who committed not to permit their work to be performed before segregated audiences in South Africa.

Barghouti also observed that the demand for Rooney to make her work available in Hebrew, or be branded an antisemite, attempts to center the oppressor community and its privileged entitlement to read world literary works in its language intentionally de-center the oppressed, the Indigenous Palestinians, and our fundamental entitlement to freedom, justice and basic human rights. (He might have added that the outrage at Rooneys decision to not license a Hebrew translation is particularly odd given that just 8 percent of Jewish Israelis do not speak English.)

Then theres the fact that Rooney is from Mayo, the Irish county where the term boycott was invented in 1880, during a popular struggle to regain control of the land from the descendants of English settlers.

It is also absurd to claim that Rooney somehow arrived at her decision on a whim. In 2019, she added her name to an open letter deploring a decision by the city of Dortmund to rescind a literature prize from the writer Kamila Shamsie because of her stated commitment to the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Earlier this year, she signed a Letter Against Apartheidthat called on artists to exercise their agency within their institutions and localities to support the Palestinian struggle for decolonization to the best of their ability. Israeli apartheid is sustained by international complicity, it is our collective responsibility to redress this harm.

As the writer and activist Omar Robert Hamilton observed, Rooney was simply following through on those principles when she announced that she would stop working with the Israeli publishing house Modan, which published Hebrew translations of her two previous novels but also prints books for Israels Ministry of Defense, including an ethics guide for soldiers by the moral philosopher Asa Kasher, who helped craft the Israeli army doctrine that killing civilians in Gaza is acceptable to protect Israeli soldiers.

There was also support for Rooney. The novelist Michael Chabon told The Associated Press that as a proudly Jewish writer who wants Israel to survive and thrive, and (and therefore) supports the Palestinian people in their struggle for equality, justice and human rights, I say yasher koach (Hebrew for Good job or More power to you) to Rooney. Chabon added that he might consider joining the boycott of Israeli publishers in the future.

On Twitter, Chabon responded to a defender of Israel who called Rooneys boycott silly and ineffectiveby writing: I commend her experimental spirit; intractable evils demand no less. Who knows what effect it will or wont have? Not us.

Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, mockeda claim from a spokesperson for Israels foreign ministry, who said that Rooneys stance impedes peace, dialogue, or any meaningful change.

Because Rooney achieved fame in her 20s and has been marketed in ways that draw attention to her youth, such as Salinger for the Snapchat generation, supporters of Israel have also attacked her as a self-obsessed millennial, a young woman too naive to understand the conflict.

Jake Wallis Simons, deputy editor of Londons Jewish Chronicle, accused Rooney of making a statement against Jews in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph headlinedSally Rooneys Israeli boycott is nothing but a futile millennial gesture. On Twitter, he added: if Sally Rooney really cared about human rights and the values of democracy, free speech, and the rights of women and minorities, she would *support* Israel and prevent her books from being translated into Arabic or Chinese.

But Simons has been making exactly the same argument since at least 2014, when he was celebrated by pro-Israel activists for describing calls to boycott Israel but not China or Saudi Arabia as ridiculously naive and even hypocritical.

Because these same arguments have been made since the BDS movement was created by Palestinian activists in 2005, the late historian Tony Judt had time to debunk them thoroughly before his death. In 2010, Judt told the London Review of Books:

If Zionism is to succeed as a representation of the original ideas of the Zionist founders, Israel has to become a normal state. That was the idea. Israel should not be special because it is Jewish. Jews are to have a state just like everyone else has a state. It should have no more rights than Slovenia and no fewer. Therefore, it also has to behave like a state. It has to declare its frontiers, recognise international law, sign international treaties and agreements. Furthermore, other countries have to behave towards it the way they would towards any other state that broke those laws. Otherwise it is treated as special and Zionism as a project has failed. People will say: Why are we picking on Israel? What about Libya? Yemen? Burma? China? All of which are much worse. Fine. But we are missing two things: first, Israel describes itself as a democracy and so it should be compared with democracies not with dictatorships; second, if Burma came to the EU and said, It would be a huge advantage for us if we could have privileged trading rights with you, Europe would say: First you have to release political prisoners, hold elections, open up your borders. We have to say the same things to Israel. Otherwise we are acknowledging that a Jewish state is an unusual thing a weird, different thing that is not to be treated like every other state.

In the same interview, Judt explained that economic and cultural ties to European nations were very important to Israelis. The joke is that Jews spent a hundred years desperately trying to have a state in the Middle East, Judt said. Now they spend all their time trying to get out of the Middle East. They dont want to be there economically, culturally or politically they dont feel part of it and dont want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe.

In 2006, Judt, who had been an idealistic supporter of Zionism in his youth, had warned in the pages of Haaretz that decades of occupation and military rule over millions of Palestinians had been a moral and political catastrophe for Israel.

Israels actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the countrys shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world, Judt wrote. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, targeted assassinations, the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish which means that Israels behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts, Judt added, while warning that such accusations, when made baselessly, would only erode Israels moral credibility.

Judt, who taught at New York University, also sensed that Israels brutal occupation was alienating younger generations. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, Judt observed. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint.

Fifteen years later, Rooney, who was born in 1991, argued this week that the most relevant historical frame for understanding the Israeli occupation is apartheid-era South Africa.

Barghouti points out that Jews in Israel and abroad who support the BDS movement play a significant role in exposing Israels regime of oppression and advocating for isolating it.

Younger Jewish activists there and elsewhere are increasingly abandoning Zionism and supporting Palestinian liberation, Barghouti added. They understand that there is nothing Jewish about Israels siege, ethnic cleansing, massacres, land theft and apartheid, and therefore there is nothing anti-Jewish per se in supporting BDS to end these crimes.

One of the most prominent Jewish writers to endorse the BDS movement is Intercept contributor Naomi Klein. Klein explained in 2009 that in order to respect the boycott, her book The Shock Doctrine was published in Hebrew by a now-defunct publisher called Andalus which she found with the help of BDS activists. Andalus, as Klein explained, was an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. In that way she was boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Barghouti also notes that the boycott of apartheid South Africa was a key reference for Palestinians who first called for cultural boycotts against in 2004. This reference is neither coincidental nor rhetorical, Barghouti says. It stems from the many similarities between the two cases of colonial oppression, and it aims to highlight the effectiveness and moral unassailability of using the boycott in the cultural sphere to resist a persistent oppressive order that enjoys impunity and ample complicity from the powers that be around the world and to increase the isolation of oppressive regimes, like apartheid Israel.

Rooneys use of the word apartheid to describe Israels treatment of the captive Palestinian populations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which was repeated on news sites worldwide this week, comes five years after the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee defined that term on the closing night of the 2016 Palestinian Festival of Literature in Ramallah.

Coetzee, who had just completed an intense weeklong fact-finding mission across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, began by saying that he had always been reluctant to use the word apartheid to describe what was happening in Palestine. Like using the word genocide to describe what happened in Turkey in the 1920s, using the word apartheid diverts one into an enflamed semantic wrangle which cuts short opportunities of analysis, Coetzee explained.

More here:

Lies Are Being Told About Sally Rooney Because She Refuses to Ignore Israeli Apartheid - The Intercept

Museveni challenger in the last elections spoke to Jonathan Kamoga why EAC integration is failing

What are your thoughts about EAC integration?

The integration of East Africa and ultimately Africa is a noble cause that started from the time of the Lumumbas and Nkurumas. Only that at that time, it was not simply a talking shop. In the past, we had a functional East African Community with East African Railways and Harbours, for example. Our parents and grandparents worked from as far as Tanzania and Kenya, and Tanzanians worked here. But the EAC has been reduced to a club of rulers. How come leadership succession in Kenya and Tanzania is peacefully but Uganda has the same ruler for 35 years and counting? It implies we still have many other problems as partner states.

The frosty Rwanda-Uganda relations are impacting people many of whom have lost businesses on both sides of the border. How do we resolve this?

President Museveni wants to portray himself as father of the region, but maybe Rwanda leaders just wont take that.

Kenya, one of Ugandas biggest trade partners, has an election next year. What are your thoughts on that poll?

Kenya is an important neighbour as Ugandans and Kenyans are siblings. They are going into an election and of course that is a matter for the people of Kenya to decide but they should avoid any influence from Museveni.

Uganda has had one of the strictest Covid-19 restrictions in the region and several sectors remain shut. How would you rate the governments handling of the pandemic?

They have gone wrong everywhere. Corruption has reduced this pandemic into a bonanza where money has been borrowed to fix healthcare is used to buy other things. We might be the only country in the world that fights diseases with guns and bombs. Instead of empowering health centres, we are empowering security centres.

The National Unity Platform is the biggest opposition party. How do you intend to use these numbers to push for the reforms you are fighting for?

We are using every platform at our disposal, both formal and informal. We are nothing without the peoples mandate.

What have you been up to?

My team and I have been put on the defensive against state violence and persecution. Weve been reduced to demanding freedom for political prisoners.

Do you know where they are?

A number have been freed, but others are detained in ungazetted places.

There has been a wave of murders in Masaka District, which overwhelmingly voted for you. Two MPs from your party have been arrested and charged with the killings. Does this scare you?

I know this is targeting me as happened in 2014 and 2018. The government imposed a curfew in the region so nobody could move.

You have been quiet lately and we are seeing figures like Kizza Besigye giving alternatives to government decisions, for example, the reopening of schools, economic recovery after the pandemic, etc

Recently, you saw the leader of opposition, who speaks and largely represents me, presenting the alternative legislative agenda. It is a reflection of our manifesto on what we would do if we were in power. We have had intelligent people speak out since I was in primary school, but nothing matters according to those holding onto power with guns.

Lately youve met Ugandans in the diaspora. Why are you not making the same outreach in Uganda?

We moved all over the country and everybody got our message. Uganda has been locked down. There have been arrests of people for simply wearing a red beret or T-shirt like me. So, with the danger the people face intimidation, so we reach out to the diaspora because we know that they also play a big role.

Our diaspora chapters are now approaching foreign leaders and powerful international partners to seek support in ensuring there is rule of law in Uganda.

You have bashed the international community for supporting and funding President Museveni, why then are you running to them?

Our oppression is being sponsored by the so-called world democracies. The United States gives almost a billion dollars to the military here. The US, UN and EU all issued statements after the election, saying it was far from free and fair, but then they continue dealing with the government. They should stop because it is wrong to think that the standards of human rights in Africa should be lower than in their countries.

These donors fund key sectors like health sector and education. Dont you think if this aid is cut its the common man, whom you are fighting for, that stands to suffer?

Even that money is being stolen. Some ministers have been implicated in several corruption scandals. The recent Auditor Generals report pointed out gross mismanagement of Covid money. Any right-thinking Ugandan would advocate a reduction or stoppage to pouring funds into a hole. The healthcare system you talk about, where the funds have been going, is terrible. Do we need to continue borrowing this money as it gets misused?

Visit link:

Bobi Wine dismisses EAC bloc as a club of the ruling elite - The Citizen

MILFORD In a government dominated by Democrats, Peter Berube said he hopes to bring balance and transparency to the citys highest office.

Berube, who has never served in public office, said he brings management experience from his time in the military, work in the restaurant business and service on the Boys and Girls Club executive board in his battle against longtime incumbent Democrat Mayor Ben Blake this November.

I just dont think it should be a one-party rule, Berube said about city government. It doesn't matter Democrat or Republican ... it should be a down the middle, at least balanced with the Board of Ed, aldermen and planning and zoning.

Berube, a member of the Milford Republican Town Committee, said the search for mayoral candidates to challenge Blake proved difficult with some simply not wanting to run, others interested but unable to fully commit to the rigors of the position.

I told the committee that I would like to throw my hat in the ring to run for mayor, he said. They said it was a great idea.

Berube said while he has not handled city affairs, his experience in restaurant management has offered the background on budgets and employee management both key assets in his run against Blake, known for his run of annual tax decreases for city residents.

Its easy to run a restaurant that is doing the volume in sales, but you still have to create a budget and every year youre creating a budget to do better, Berube said. You still have to do better than the competition and the environment like more people moving in and more housing moving in.

Its the same format as far as your profit, loss, budget systems, what categories you can use and how we can save money. Its a larger scale in the city, but I have that experience, Berube added.

Berube said, if elected, he will bring transparency to city government something that he said is lacking under Blakes leadership. Berube says his goal is to let voters know where their tax dollars are being spent and if business growth is truly as robust as Blake contends.

The Republican candidate also said he plans to open the city books and find savings by making sure all city positions are filled, eliminating overtime pay which can be a drain on budgets.

Blake did a hiring freeze on a lot of departments, the last five-plus years, and in public works, they are down 32 plus positions for the city, he said. We budget for that, it gets approved for those positions, and we dont hire for those positions.

Meanwhile, when I go knocking on doors and talk to different people on public works, Berube added, I ask how public works is treating them, they tell me they are tired because they just worked 60 hours. Whats the total of overtime compared to a normal salary or an hourly rate would have been for those employees. So I think we could save money there if we just fill the positions needed.

Berube said he will focus on providing the city police and fire departments with needed support.

I talked to different police officers around and asking them how is the city of Milford, he said. What they are telling me is in schools they are teaching firefighters are good and policemen are bad. Just because of everything that has happened in the United States and George Floyd and everything else that is going on. These are first responders firemen, police, the ambulance people are the first ones to hit a scene they are going into danger.

For Berube, it is also important to help provide parents a voice in their childrens education.

Its just interesting when everything is going on, and the board of education is bringing stuff in and putting stuff in education that parents dont agree with, Berube said. A lot of it we are talking about the social-emotional learning, which some parts people would say it has parts of critical race theory. All Im talking about is parents need to have a voice.

The Milford superintendent has denied claims of critical race theory being taught in schools. CRT is a controversial academic framework through which to view systems of racism and oppression in America. Even though it is generally considered a college-level theory, not taught as part of K-12 curriculum, the term is used by some conservatives to refer to certain school programs that encourage inclusion, diversity and equity.

While Blake touts the increase in business and development in Milford, which has led to the jump in the tax base and lower taxes, Berube says overdevelopment can also be a problem.

This overdevelopment going on in Milford and all these apartment buildings popping up on these small areas, he said. If I was mayor, I would work with the economic developer, to see if there was a way we can get a tax incentive for the landlords to rent out to local businesses to gain another tax base and get them in these empty buildings and stores.

Berube said if elected, he will work together with both sides of the aisle.

You have to be able to work together. When I talk about being bipartisan, you have to be bipartisan, you have to have it split, he said. You have to be able to have those conversations, you have to have Democrats keep you in check when youre working and not just have people go with whatever you say.

See the original post here:

Berube looks to unseat incumbent Blake in Milford - Milford Mirror

The creation of nation states in America went hand in hand with the creation of normal schools whose educational objective was to homogenise the population on the basis of a single culture, European culture. From there, the prevailing narrative was that of a Christopher Columbus who brought about the Discovery of America and who brought civilisation over the barbarism that supposedly inhabited these lands.

After almost 200 years, historical revisionism managed to present Christopher Columbus as who he really was, a genocide and his arrival as the Conquest of America, which produced the greatest genocide that human history has ever known and left approximately 120 million indigenous people dead. So great was the depletion of the indigenous population that black slaves had to be brought from Africa to compensate for the decline. But it was not only the Spaniards with bible in hand who perpetrated the genocide, but also many of those who today are remembered as Latin American patriots, for example Julio Roca or the great master Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina.

An official version of history was written by the hand of the European conquerors and/or their descendants, which excluded the indigenous voice, their culture, their leaders, their struggle, their political ideology, their science, their economy, etc. This version was transmitted from both the right and the left from a Eurocentric point of view. Most of the intellectuals of the traditional and colonial left or of progressivism who write about the indigenous question are of European descent. They run the academies, they reproduce the Eurocentric thinking and colonialism they claim to question. They do not assume their coloniality, for they conceive of colonialism as something external to the ultra-right that openly proclaims white supremacy.

Eurocentric colonial thinking, firstly, precedes us and runs through us from the moment we are born because it was imposed by blood and fire in Abya Yala, which was colonised in the past. Secondly, it is part of the colonial mental structure that is constructed mainly through the transit through an educational system built from Eurocentrism, especially the university, where even the postgraduate courses on Cultural Diversity or the very fashionable Living Well are dictated by white middle-class men or women.

They try to explain the ideology and culture of the indigenous when they cannot break with their own colonialism, which does not respect the indigenous voice they are trying to supplant and prevents them from doing something basic, doing their research based on indigenous voices, they do it based on white voices, even those who are precisely those who are confronted and accused of blocking the way to new indigenous leadership. There are numerous indigenous leaders inside and outside MAS in Bolivia of the stature of Felipe Quispe Huanca El Malku, the deceased mining leader Orlando Gutirrez, the indigenous leader Segundina Flores of the Confederation of Indigenous Women Bartolina Sisa, etc., who accuse the elite of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) itself, made up of white middle class men called intellectuals who make up the colonial left in Bolivia, of using the indigenous as a ladder to gain access to political posts.

How can one investigate and get to know indigenous thought through white men or women? How can one ignore the voice of an indigenous people who denounce, time and again, being used and not feeling represented by a white elite within the MAS, as the indigenous leader Segundina Flores denounced on behalf of the entire unity pact and the Bolivian workers centre (C. O.B.) during the blockades of August 2020? Why do we hear the white bell and not the indigenous bell to relate events in the indigenous world as in the Bolivian case? This action is only understandable because of the prevailing colonial thinking where the indigenous voice is devalued, the indigenous is profitable only for the progre photo for political gain, now when they want to present their political ideology and express themselves without being told by another white, it is no longer profitable and even counterproductive, because it implies two issues: 1) it does not need a white intermediary who makes his professional career, obtains economic benefits and / or political gain at the expense of silencing the indigenous voice 2) it is more comfortable to maintain the colonial system of privileges to the detriment of the indigenous person that benefits the white man and woman who claims to support the indigenous cause.

If what has been denounced by various indigenous leaders is really happening in Bolivia, where an indigenous president such as Evo Morales has governed for 14 years, it is because this racism towards indigenous people is also happening and is naturalised in other countries in the region. In Argentina, it is not a minor fact that the only political prisoner who has been imprisoned for 6 years is Milagro Sala, an indigenous leader of the Tpak Amaru who was a comrade while she served, but when she began to criticise, she ceased to be one.

The same is true in Bolivia, where those who make constructive criticisms or have the audacity to demand post-coup self-criticism of the white MAS elite are subjected to smear campaigns accusing them of making pacts with the right, as in the case of the indigenous leader Segundina Flores, or are directly expelled from MAS, as in the case of the young Aymara woman Eva Copa. The anniversary of the death of the mining leader Orlando Gutirrez was recently celebrated, and he passed without shame or glory, while the causes of his death are still unknown, even though he was one of the protagonists of the recovery of democracy in Bolivia; this is the treatment that indigenous people receive in Bolivia.

On the other hand, indigenous communicators who try to open a critical line of thought within the MAS itself are not hired, do not receive advertising from the state or are accused of being functional to the right. Perhaps for this reason, the indigenous community radio stations that ez took away in order to silence the indigenous voice have still not been returned to the social organisations. Those who do receive advertising from the state without problems are the right-wing media. What prevails in the state media is the white face in a country with an indigenous majority, as they are not going to question anything because racism is not an issue that affects them. The procedure of closing the way to critical thinking and self-criticism is a double-edged sword because it is what ends up imploding a party.

The popular power of the womens movement in Argentina lies in the fact that they have managed to ensure that their leaders are women, that those who speak about their problems and struggles are women. Because it is women who experience gender violence in all its forms in their bodies, and therefore they are the only ones who are capable of fighting and giving their lives for their own cause. This is a vital achievement for the liberation of the collective. Even feminist epistemology is being produced and a social history is being reconstructed from a gender perspective, recovering women leaders excluded from official history. Because historically, science and history were produced by white Western men who, from their masculine and Eurocentric parameters, excluded women and native peoples.

The indigenous movement has not been able to conquer this exemplary approach of the womens movement in Argentina at the regional level, not even in Bolivia, and they face the challenge of breaking with their coloniality and making it a reality. Today, they are the political subjects who are the protagonists of social transformations throughout the region. They are the ones who put their bodies on the front lines of the battlefield in the face of neoliberalism, where there are no white revolutionary intellectuals on their desks who try to direct them in a paternalistic and colonial way in order to impose their own interests.

The native peoples have the right, if currently no party can win an election without their vote, as in the case of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, etc., to demand high-ranking political positions of decision-making power within the government, including the presidency.

In Bolivia, it has become naturalised that white middle-class men who use the unnecessary strategy of putting on a poncho, folklorising the indigenous, present themselves as leaders of the indigenous movement, ignoring the problems of the indigenous with demagogic speeches in an indigenous key. But the hegemonic white male model does not experience colonial oppression in the body, nor is racism something that affects it, and so in moments of crisis it disappears from the map, as did the white elite of the MAS who did not participate in the resistance and the recovery of democracy in Bolivia.

In order to dismantle imposed narratives such as the Discovery of America and construct our own history and common sense, more indigenous people are needed in high-ranking political decision-making positions because it is from political power that decolonising policies are constructed in terms of communication, education, etc. From the bottom of the pyramid of power, indigenous people only have a decorative function. Furthermore, there is a need for more indigenous communicators and media that communicate from a decolonial perspective, in order to avoid white intermediaries who, tell the story and the struggle of the indigenous from Eurocentric perspectives. The womens movement worldwide has understood this key point in order to confront the cultural battle and promote patriarchal deconstruction, which is why they have their communicators with a gender perspective, which today has become a specialty within the field of communication, and they also have their own feminist media.

It is also important to give a voice to indigenous intellectuals such as El Mallku who have emerged in the heat of the indigenous struggle. The mistake of the former vice-presidency of the former MAS government that promoted white Eurocentric intellectuals, including foreigners, to advise a Bolivian government cannot be repeated, because this is not only a counterproductive and colonial practice, but also humiliating for Bolivians. Neither before the coup could they anticipate the coup with their wisdom and their doctorates in anti-imperialism, nor during the coup did they come out to defend the former MAS government, since they were precisely part of the errors pointed out within the indigenous hard core of the MAS.

Today there are basically two opposing narratives facing each other in Bolivia about what happened during the coup dtat in 2019, an official history told by the MAS elite who proclaim themselves in their own books as heroes who recovered democracy, when they were not on the battlefield, some of them were not even inside the country at the time. Moreover, they were at odds with the Resistance Unity Pact and the Bolivian Central Workers Union (C.O.B.) during the coup dtat.

What role do indigenous people play in these comics, such as the leader Felipe Quispe Huanca El Mallku, who was defamed by this sector? There is another version of the history of the coup, there is always another version of everything in a country, or rather in a misnamed America, where the indigenous voice is devalued, it is the voice of the nobodies, where the microphone of the progressive international press does not reach, nor the Eurocentric intellectuals who write about the indigenous question. There are the stories of the indigenous people who have a lot to tell because they put their bodies on the ground during the blockades that forced Jeanine ez to set an election date, which paved the way for Luis Arces triumph as president of the plurinational state of Bolivia.

Original post:

The conquest of America: the situation of the indigenous today - PRESSENZA International News Agency

American political analyst and activist Bill Dores saysChina is no threat to the people in the United States; Wall Street, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Pentagon are.

Dores, a writer for Struggle/La Lucha and longtime antiwar activist, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Saturday after the CIA launched a new mission center to address what it calls the most important geopolitical threat posed by China.

CIA Director William Burns said in a statement last week that the new unit, called the China Mission Center, will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.

Burns said that his agency will still focus on other threats as well, including those emanating from Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The CIAs renewed attention to China is the latest evidence of the Biden administrations focus on Beijing as its main foreign policy target.

Since taking charge of the White House earlier this year, the Biden administration has been directing resources toward countering China.

Why is CIA targeting China?

The CIA is grabbing more tax money to start a mission center aimed at China, which it calls the most important geopolitical threat we face. This is ominous news, considering the agencys history of fabricating evidence to start wars, e.g. Iraqs nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Dores commented to Press TV.

US troops have left Afghanistan. But not a dime has been slashed from the bloated US military budget. Indeed, its being increased to $778 billion from $753 billion to face the alleged Chinese threat. Thats more than the combined military budgets of China, India, Russia, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy and Australia, he added.

Its also been revealed that US Special Forces have been operating secretly on Taiwan for two years. Meanwhile, the US Congress will not pass the Build Back Better Act to modestly extend our social safety net, he added.

The Peoples Republic of China has five times the population of the United States. But it spends only $258 billion on its military. Chinas forces are deployed in or around the borders and coasts of China. By no stretch of the imagination is China threatening the US militarily. Why would it? For what gain? he asked.

So, what the Sam Hill is a geopolitical threat. Its a twisted concept based on the twisted premise that the United States, with 4 percent of the worlds population, should dominate the world politically and economically. And that really means the billionaires and millionaires that Occupy Wall Street protesters called the One Percent, he stated.

Chinas economic threat to US

Chinas real threat, in the minds of the US corporate ruling class, is economic. China produces more than the United States, and its economy is growing much faster, the analyst said.

It has achieved this not by destroying the economies of other countries with war and sanctions, but by growth and trade. Chinas Belt and Road Initiative has greatly weakened the stranglehold Wall Street banks once held on the world economy. An article in the US magazine Foreign Policy whined that China is whittling away at the murderous sanctions regime the US and West Europe use to punish countries that defy their dictates, he explained.

US corporations do of course invest in China. They make a lot of money there. But they cant dictate to the Chinese government the way US oil companies dictated to the Shah of Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Or the way they dictate to their paid servants in the White House and the Capitol today, he observed.

Politicians and news media tell working-class people in the United States that Chinas growth is somehow a threat to our well-being. They conceal the fact that Chinas dynamic growth is the biggest single factor staving off a global economic collapse, he said.

Yet it is their own Wall Street masters who have shut down plants all over this country and foreclosed on millions of homes. It is they who used the technological revolution as a weapon to drive down wages and destroy millions of jobs, Dores said.

Washingtons hate China campaign

Washington raises several phony issues in its hate China campaign. One is the alleged persecution of the Uighur people in Xinjiang Province. Theres nothing but hypocrisy here, the analyst said.

If this claim were true-and Ive seen no reliable evidence that it is Washington would be the last to care. The United States leads the world in mass incarceration and murder by police, he noted.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, Millions of Americans are incarcerated in overcrowded, violent, and inhumane jails and prisons that do not provide treatment, education, or rehabilitation. The majority are from the oppressed Black, Latin and Native nations targeted by police, he said.

Among the incarcerated are dozens of political prisoners, such as Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Jamil Abdullah Al Amin, who have spent decades behind bars on frame-up charges, he stated.

Last years Black Lives Matter uprising highlighted the extent of racist police murder in the United States. Between 1980 and 2018, US police killed more than 30,000 people. Half of those killings were misclassified, according to a study published in the Lancet medical journal, he said.

US supports ethnic cleansing and murder of Palestinian people

We also cannot forget that Washington not only supports but subsidizes the ethnic cleansing and murder of Palestinian people by the racist state of Israel, including the mass imprisonment of 2 million people in the giant concentration camp called the Gaza Strip. The US also has no problem with the oppression of the majority Muslim people of Kashmir by the Indian state, Dores noted.

The US accuses China of stealing intellectual property, a twisted concept indeed. Perhaps the West should pay China for inventing paper, iron smelting, the seed drill, the compass, rockets, gunpowder and other innovations that made its economic development possible, he said.

There is the accusation of currency manipulation. But Washington has flooded the world with devalued dollars ever since the Nixon administration took the dollar off the gold standard in the 1970s. The US has long used the dollar as an instrument of financial warfare, he said.

Why is the US Navy in the South China Sea?

And there is the issue of free navigation in the South China Sea. Which raises the question, what is the US Seventh Fleet doing in the South China Sea anyway? For that matter, why is the US Fifth Fleet off the coast of Iran and the US Fourth Fleet off the coast of Venezuela, Dores said.

Every year, ships carry $3.4 trillion worth of goods through the South China Sea. Most of that is bound to and from China, he said.

The PRC has no interest in stopping that commerce. It does have an interest in keeping US warships away from its coast and ports, he said.

For the past seven years, the US Navy has helped Saudi Arabia impose a naval blockade that is starving the children of Yemen. US sanctions, backed by the US Navy, are the main obstacle to commerce between nations in the world today, he said.

Instead of new CIA mission centers, military bases and fleets of warships and warplanes all over the world, the US should do what China does: Invest in schools, health care, housing, railroads and renewable energy. Bring all the ships, planes, troops and spies home. The world would be a much better and safer place, he concluded.

See the rest here:

China is no threat to people in the US; Wall Street, CIA & the Pentagon are: Analyst - Press TV

By JONATHAN KAMOGA

Museveni challenger in the last elections spoke to Jonathan Kamoga why EAC integration is failing

What are your thoughts about EAC integration?

The integration of East Africa and ultimately Africa is a noble cause that started from the time of the Lumumbas and Nkurumas. Only that at that time, it was not simply a talking shop. In the past, we had a functional East African Community with East African Railways and Harbours, for example. Our parents and grandparents worked from as far as Tanzania and Kenya, and Tanzanians worked here. But the EAC has been reduced to a club of rulers. How come leadership succession in Kenya and Tanzania is peacefully but Uganda has the same ruler for 35 years and counting? It implies we still have many other problems as partner states.

The frosty Rwanda-Uganda relations are impacting people many of whom have lost businesses on both sides of the border. How do we resolve this?

President Museveni wants to portray himself as father of the region, but maybe Rwanda leaders just wont take that.

Kenya, one of Ugandas biggest trade partners, has an election next year. What are your thoughts on that poll?

Kenya is an important neighbour as Ugandans and Kenyans are siblings. They are going into an election and of course that is a matter for the people of Kenya to decide but they should avoid any influence from Museveni.

Uganda has had one of the strictest Covid-19 restrictions in the region and several sectors remain shut. How would you rate the governments handling of the pandemic?

They have gone wrong everywhere. Corruption has reduced this pandemic into a bonanza where money has been borrowed to fix healthcare is used to buy other things. We might be the only country in the world that fights diseases with guns and bombs. Instead of empowering health centres, we are empowering security centres.

The National Unity Platform is the biggest opposition party. How do you intend to use these numbers to push for the reforms you are fighting for?

We are using every platform at our disposal, both formal and informal. We are nothing without the peoples mandate.

What have you been up to?

My team and I have been put on the defensive against state violence and persecution. Weve been reduced to demanding freedom for political prisoners.

Do you know where they are?

A number have been freed, but others are detained in ungazetted places.

There has been a wave of murders in Masaka District, which overwhelmingly voted for you. Two MPs from your party have been arrested and charged with the killings. Does this scare you?

I know this is targeting me as happened in 2014 and 2018. The government imposed a curfew in the region so nobody could move.

You have been quiet lately and we are seeing figures like Kizza Besigye giving alternatives to government decisions, for example, the reopening of schools, economic recovery after the pandemic, etc

Recently, you saw the leader of opposition, who speaks and largely represents me, presenting the alternative legislative agenda. It is a reflection of our manifesto on what we would do if we were in power. We have had intelligent people speak out since I was in primary school, but nothing matters according to those holding onto power with guns.

Lately youve met Ugandans in the diaspora. Why are you not making the same outreach in Uganda?

We moved all over the country and everybody got our message. Uganda has been locked down. There have been arrests of people for simply wearing a red beret or T-shirt like me. So, with the danger the people face intimidation, so we reach out to the diaspora because we know that they also play a big role.

Our diaspora chapters are now approaching foreign leaders and powerful international partners to seek support in ensuring there is rule of law in Uganda.

You have bashed the international community for supporting and funding President Museveni, why then are you running to them?

Our oppression is being sponsored by the so-called world democracies. The United States gives almost a billion dollars to the military here. The US, UN and EU all issued statements after the election, saying it was far from free and fair, but then they continue dealing with the government. They should stop because it is wrong to think that the standards of human rights in Africa should be lower than in their countries.

These donors fund key sectors like health sector and education. Dont you think if this aid is cut its the common man, whom you are fighting for, that stands to suffer?

Even that money is being stolen. Some ministers have been implicated in several corruption scandals. The recent Auditor Generals report pointed out gross mismanagement of Covid money. Any right-thinking Ugandan would advocate a reduction or stoppage to pouring funds into a hole. The healthcare system you talk about, where the funds have been going, is terrible. Do we need to continue borrowing this money as it gets misused?

Go here to read the rest:

Bobi Wine dismisses bloc as a club of the ruling elite - The East African

Chief Abia Onyike, a former Commissioner for Information and Social Orientation in Ebonyi State, has been a staunch critic of governor David Umahi of Ebonyi state. The former Deputy National President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) is also the chairman and convener of the Ebonyi Advocacy for Human Rights Initiative, an organisation that works to defend the rights of Ebonyi citizens against alleged political impunity, tyranny and oppression. In this interview with JOSEPH ONYEKWERE, Onyike bares his mind on the governance of Ebonyi state, insecurity in the South East and other burning issues.

You have been in the news of late criticising Gov. David Umahi of Ebonyi state. What actually is the problem?Well, the problem is Gov. Umahis mediocre leadership style, which is a combination of autocracy and anarchism. He is far from being a democrat. He came into governance with a totalitarian mindset. He has uprooted and destroyed all the legacy institutions he inherited from his predecessor in 2015. He has retarded the progress of the state. The first quarter report released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that Ebonyi State has been on the table as one of the 10 poorest states in Nigeria. The state also came third in food inflation in Nigeria. Ebonyi state is the only state in Southern Nigeria falling into such dangerous poverty levels in recent times because of his vicious anti-peoples policies. His definition of development is extremely dubious.

He sees governance as an opportunity for self-enrichment. He worked for four years (2015-2019) without Permanent Secretaries to deliberately destroy all forms of checks and balances in the governance of the state. It was only in his second tenure, which started in 2019 that he reluctantly appointed Permanent Secretaries. Ebonyians have witnessed a lawless and oppressive government; one in which only the governors companies are awarded all the major contracts in the state. For the first time in the history of the state, the civil service and local government service have been submerged and destroyed.

Communal disturbances have reached abnormal levels with attendant destruction of life and property, because of his divide and rule tactics. The Ebonyi State University, which was being rated as one of the best state universities has been ruined and relegated because the Governor has no respect for University autonomy. He constantly invites the university authorities and lecturers to his office to intimidate them. In 2020, he recklessly went to the university and collected N3.5 billion allocated to the institution by the TETFUND for staff training and infrastructural development. He took the money to his village, Uburu in Ohaozara local government area and started building some houses. He then announced that what he was building was the Ebonyi State University College of Medicine, thereby unceremoniously transferring the College of Medicine to his village. The Ministry of Education, which is the supervising Ministry had to gather information about these developments from the radio. There were no documentations. Then months ago, he announced that the College of Medicine he was building in Uburu has been converted to a new University to be known as David Umahi University of Medical Sciences. He claimed that it will be the best medical university in Africa and would end medical tourism in Nigeria. Even without a formal take-off, he also announced that the school fees would be N5million per student. Look at that level of recklesness.

Right now as we speak, the governor has handed over the controversial University to the Catholic Church. Personally, I knew all he was interested in was how to divert a chunk of the money from TETFUND, which he succeeded in doing. So, he is a man bereft of ideas. He is ready to do any thing to break the rules so as to undermine the orderly governance of the state. Secondly, he sees development as costume. He engages in useless paintings and decorations. Yet he has never provided pipe borne water to Abakaliki metropolis since he came into office. No rural electrification is available under his watch. Workers are paid half salary in the state and he has banned new employments into the civil service. He also banned the payment of retirement benefits to retired civil servants since 2015. People are dying installmentally in the state because of his evil policies. The state is getting poorer, while the governor and his trading/construction companies are getting richer.

You reportedly gave Gov. Umahi a two-week ultimatum to withdraw his executive order or you sue him. What was the problem?On September 2, 2021, he announced that he had issued an Executive Order withdrawing all Certificates of Occupancy in the state. That meant that he was embarking upon the total revocation of all C of Os in Abakaliki and Afikpo. That was the height of executive recklessness unbecoming of an elected public officer. We gave him the ultimatum, calling on him to withdraw the punitive order or we shall deploy all legal and legitimate instruments to compel him to step down his threat. We appreciate that a responsible government may have a genuine reason based on overriding public interest to revoke one or two C of Os but never to revoke all the C of Os in the state. That is anarchism! He is an uncontrollable land grabber and we suspect that he was embarking on the exercise as a selfish and self-serving land grabbing strategy to confiscate landed properties belonging to his critics, political opponents and non-indigenous elements who own property in Abakaliki. He had done the same thing when he closed the old meat market and opened the new Abakaliki International Market. Most of the traders who owned shops in the old market were subjected to fulfilling impossible conditions before they could get stalls in the new market. Many of them developed hypertension and died. We cannot allow him to continue to experiment with the lives of Ebonyi citizens.

But many people hold the view that the governor has transformed Ebonyi state? The governor is a propagandist! He is not a humanist. Anything he does, he blows out of proportion. Moreover, like I said before, he came into government not to render service. He was a contractor even though he was struggling to make ends meet. He became governor and felt that the opportunity to make it has arrived. Umahi came into office and decided to embark on some white elephant projects, such as the new Government House at Ochudo city, the Ecumenical Centre, the Shopping Mall, the 10 over-head bridges. Unfortunately, the bridges are being built in places without any atom of traffic congestion. The state has no need for any new Government House, but he embarked on it as a process of fund diversion. So, he is merely experimenting with the lives of the people. How can someone spend billions of naira building flyovers when he has cancelled scholarships and re-introduced extortionate levies in primary and secondary schools? How can you be so fixated to certain useless projects such as the Ecumenical Centre, which gulped about N7billion when you have no single functional hospital in the state? The only available health facilities in the state are the Teaching Hospital operated by the Federal University and the mission hospitals at Mile 4 Abakaliki and Afikpo respectively. Human capital development in Ebonyi State is at its lowest ebb.

Ebonyi youths have been forced to go back into petty trading mostly at roadblocks in some Nigerias major cities. Umahis government has reversed all the positive achievements recorded by the former Governor, Dr. Sam Egwu, who pioneered genuine youth empowerment programmes through overseas scholarship schemes, which he cancelled immediately he took office in 2015. After spending over N6 billion to build a Shopping Mall, he is confused and does not know what to do with it. At the beginning, some companies came up and wanted to build the mall but he rebuffed them and went ahead to commit the scarce resources of the state. That boils down to what I was saying, that the man does not believe in developing the state based on certain priorities. His own priority is to develop conduit pipes for diverting funds. Even the roads he is reputed to have constructed with cement technology, has started falling apart because of cheap materials and low quality compacting. The road from Afikpo to Amasiri is already collapsing and the current rainfall has weakened the structures of his cement roads.

What can you say about the alleged N6 billion paid by the Federal Government to Ebonyi State Government for RUGA, which the governor denied receiving?I dont want to bother myself with whether he received N6 billion for cattle ranching or not. What I know is that he is not principled. He is part of the problem we have today in the South East as far as fashioning out a clear-cut policy on the rampaging activities of Fulani Herdsmen in the region is concerned. His unsteady posture arises from certain imaginations of his, which are based on the role he plays as a self-appointed Caliphate operative in Igboland. He believes that by acting that way, he would have warmed himself to the Fulani kingmakers as a possible presidential candidate of APC come 2023. But he must be very funny to contemplate such. He is too small and Ebonyi State is too isolated to become a central part of the Caliphates political permutation. He will soon be left in the lurch. The governor has not hidden his role as a double agent in the ongoing crises. He wants to be seen as the one who could help these people have a foothold in Alaigbo. But he is too provincial. He lacks the boldness of Hope Uzodimma. So, he still prevaricates between here and there.

How do you assess his performance as the chairman of South East Governors Forum?It is my considered opinion that he is unfit for that office. We know the sort of things that former Anambra State Governor, Peter Obi did when he occupied the office. This one is a disservice to Ndigbo. A man who cannot offer satisfactory service in a small state like Ebonyi dabbles into the South East. He is always looking at what to gain from any position he holds instead of considering the challenges of the office. He is not a stable character and he lacks the exposure required for leadership at that level. Look at his counterpart in the Southwest, Gov. Rotimi Akeredolu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and former National President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). What was the governor before coming into government? He was unknown. May be, someday, Ebonyians may demand that former Governor, Chief Martin Elechi explain how he came about Umahi. Elechi brought him from nowhere and foisted him as State PDP chairman and four years later as the deputy governor. Umahi sees himself as a smart guy.

In 2020, Ohanaeze Imeobi passed a resolution mandating governors to create a regional security outfit for the Southeast. Umahi worked hard to undermine that decision for a whole year. He was lucky to get away with his treacherous role because of the internal weaknesses of Igbo political leadership at the moment. When the chips were down, killings by Fulani Herdsmen erupted everywhere around March and April this year, especially in Ebonyi. Then pressure was mounted on him before he came up with the setting up of Ebube Agu, which has now become an exercise in futility. Ebube Agu is only operational in Ebonyi State. Umahi has only succeeded in bequeathing a pseudo security structure to Ndigbo. And his colleagues could as well be threading carefully with him before he blackmails them in Aso Rock.

What are his chances as a presidential aspirant in APC? Even President Buhari and his kitchen cabinet cannot claim not to have his dossier. Of all those who contributed to making him governor, is there anyone still with him? Starting from former President Goodluck Jonathan, former Senate President, Anyim Pius Anyim, to business men like Chief Cletus Ibeto. Nobody can stand with him today because of his vicious and ruthless attitude to power. So, Umahis chances amount to nothing. He should be advised to moderate his inordinate political ambition and concentrate on the governance of Ebonyi State. He is not a material for presidential office. Let him stop carrying trailer loads of rice and yams to Northern leaders, in the name of contesting for presidency. Even if the APC decides to hand over power to someone from the South East, it can never be Umahi. Other stalwarts of APC such as Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, Dr. Oji Uzor Kalu, Dr. Chris Ngige, Chief Ken Nnamani etc., are more qualified than him. In the PDP, there are the likes of Chief Anyim Pius Anyim, Mr. Peter Obi, etc., who are more credible, visible and accomplished.

What are the political permutations in Ebonyi State in the build-up to the 2023 elections?Ebonyi is a PDP state any day. The governors decision to cross over to APC in October 2020 was informed by his selfish calculations, especially his desire to try and shield himself away from the inquisition of EFCC. All the major stakeholders in the state refused to follow him to APC. He has incurred the wrath of Ebonyi masses because of his excesses. He will face a level of mass resentment, which he never witnessed in his political career. We hope to use the platform of the opposition to mobilise against whomsoever he would want to support as his successor in 2023. We hope to reclaim the state from him and APC come 2023.

See original here:

Umahi's government has reversed all positive achievements by former governor, says Onyike - Guardian

KABUL, Afghanistan By the time Ghulam Maroof Rashids 50th birthday passed, he had spent more than one-third of his life fighting for the Taliban on one battlefield or another in Afghanistan. He believed they would eventually win the war but had no idea that this year would finally be its end.

We once thought that maybe the day would come when we would not hear the sound of an airplane, he said this month while sitting on the dusty red carpet of a governors compound in Wardak Province. Weve been very tired for the last 20 years.

In the last year of the war, the Talibans lightning military offensive, the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government and the withdrawal of the last American troops, have brought about an upheaval as profound as the U.S. invasion in 2001 two decades ago this month.

Now, former fighters like Mr. Rashid are grappling with governance. A generation of women are struggling to keep a sliver of space in public life. And Afghans across the country are wondering what comes next.

Mr. Rashids story is only one in the kaleidoscope of experiences Afghans have shared over the years of the American war that officially began on Oct. 7, 2001, when the dark silhouette of U.S. bombers clouded the Afghan skies.

Since then, a generation of Afghans in urban areas grew up spirited by an influx of international aid. But for more than 70 percent of the population living in rural areas, the way of life remained largely unchanged except for those caught under the violent umbrella of the Western war effort that displaced, wounded and killed thousands.

The New York Times spoke to five Afghans about the sudden end of the American war in Afghanistan, and the uncertainty that lies ahead.

A young intelligence officer with the Taliban in the 1990s, Mr. Rashid remembers the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: I started farming at first but then became a teacher in the village school, he said about his life after the Talibans collapse. Then, we started our jihad.

Soon, they were planting Russian-made mines and homemade explosive devices on the roads, one of the deadliest tactics of the war. Mr. Rashid said he mainly fought in Chak, his home district. That district fell to the Taliban about four months ago.

I remember because we paid the army soldiers some money so they could travel to their homes, he said. I didnt expect that two months later all Americans would have left and we would be visiting our friends in Kabul.

Mr. Rashid has found himself once more in the Taliban government. He goes to work at the Wardak governors office every day, sleeps with his family every night and no longer shudders at the metallic whir of aircraft overhead.

When the Taliban began its brutal advance across the country this year, Khatera, 34, thought about her daughter, just 14 years old the same age Khatera was when she learned of her impromptu engagement during the first Taliban regime to stave off the possibility of being forced to wed a Talib.

I knew what life would look like, she recalled as the insurgents returned in what seemed like an unstoppable force. Female season was over.

She reflected on the career she built from a broadcaster at a radio station to the project manager for an international aid organization over the past two decades. I had the pleasure of independence and economic freedom, she said. When I was getting into those doors, I saw what life could be.

In the first few weeks since the Taliban took over, much of that freedom is gone. Khatera is afraid to send her children to school. She is afraid to go to her office and knows that even if she is able to, she could not return to her old job. The international aid organization she works for put a man in her position to communicate with the Taliban.

This is the worst feeling as a woman, I feel helpless, she said.

On a recent day in September, Shir Agha Safi, 29, stood in front of two Marine military police officers outside the tent city on the base in Quantico, Va., that was now his temporary home. He had been evacuated from Afghanistan this summer, along with thousands of others.

I never believed that would happen, that all of Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban, Mr. Safi said, even though he had spent the last year on one of the most volatile front lines in Afghanistan.

Until Aug. 15, he had been an intelligence officer in the Afghan Army, after joining the U.S.-backed military force more than a decade earlier.

Both of the Marines, when asked, had never heard of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistans southern Helmand Province, where Mr. Safi had spent months locked in a bloody urban battle with the Taliban. A cascade of suicide bombings and airstrikes, both Afghan and American, destroyed much of the city, leaving hundreds of combatants and civilians dead and wounded.

Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Heres more on their origin story and their record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These arethe top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be. One spokesman told The Timesthat the group wanted to forget its past, but that there would be some restrictions.

At that time we still had hope, Mr. Safi said of the battle for Lashkar Gah, which dragged through the summer as surrounding districts collapsed. We never thought to surrender.

Where Mr. Safi will end up after he leaves Quantico is anything but clear, though he understands he might be placed in a home elsewhere in the United States.

Do you know about Iowa? he asked.

Abdul Basir Fisrat, 48, has driven trucks along the Herat-Kandahar-Kabul route for 35 years, but during the twilight months of the American war, that path traced the collapse of much of the country as the Taliban swept toward the capital.

The first district that he saw fall was Nawrak, in Ghazni Province, about five months ago. He was relieved to see it go: A security checkpoint staffed by soldiers from the previous government used to fire on his truck, demanding money to pass. After it was seized, he said, we thanked God that we were saved from the oppression of the government soldiers.

Mr. Fisrat lives in Kandahar with his family, but he makes the 1,000-mile trip whenever there is work. He has made due without an education and driven under five different Afghan governments since the 1980s, two of them ruled by the Taliban.

Now Mr. Fisrat, who owns three trucks, has the potential to pocket what he was paying in thousands of dollars in bribes to the Afghan government. Under the Taliban, he pays none. It would be a significant windfall, if it was not for the worsening economy that has made trips fewer and far between. But the lack of fighting means he can go where he wants when he wants: If I want to, I will leave in the middle of the night, he said.

The life of Samira Khairkhwa, 25, encapsulates the gains made for Afghan women during the war years, and the ambition those advances spurred in many of them.

After finishing college in the north, she found her way to Kabul, the capital, through a program for youth leadership funded by U.S.A.I.D., and by 2018, she landed a job working on the re-election campaign for Afghanistans president, Ashraf Ghani. From there, she became the spokeswoman for the state-run electric company in Kabul. She had dreams of eventually running for president herself.

But as the Taliban pressed their relentless advance over the summer, Ms. Khairkhwa began to have nightmares. I dreamed that the Taliban came to our office and our house, she said. She kept those visions to herself, worried that telling anyone might make them a reality.

On Aug. 15, Ms. Khairkhwa was headed to the office when she got caught in the snarl of panicked traffic in Kabul. She stopped in a restaurant, uploaded a clip of the chaos that ended up on the news, and made her way home.

We didnt believe that America would leave Afghanistan in this situation, she said. That the Taliban would return or that Ghani would surrender. But once it happened we were shocked.

Safiullah Padshah and Yaqoob Akbary contributed reporting.

See the original post:

I Never Believed That Would Happen: After 20 Years of War, an Abrupt End - The New York Times