South Sudanese fear leaving UN protected camps despite peace

JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — Tracing his fingers over the metal fencing at a United Nations protected site in South Sudan’s capital, Nhial Nyuot Nhial hung his head as he contemplated going home after years of civil war. “At the moment it’s impossible for someone to leave,” he said.
The 33-year-old is among tens of thousands of people who are still sheltering in such camps across the country, the legacy of an unprecedented decision by a U.N. peacekeeping mission to throw open its doors to people fleeing war.

Nhial has been in the Juba camp since 2014, shortly after the country erupted in fighting. A fragile peace deal signed between President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar in September has brought little comfort. Like many in the camps, Nhial still fears for his life and refuses to leave.
What began as a temporary experiment is looking more like a permanent refuge for more than 190,000 people living in squalor in the six U.N. protected sites. Now the U.N. has pushed for the camps to close, amid warnings by the international community that rushing the process could re-ignite violence among ethnic groups.

To read more, click here.

India tests ship-borne air defense system

India successfully tests ship-borne air defense system created with Israel

In latest trial of the jointly produced Barak 8 maritime interceptor, Indian Navy fires surface-to-air missile at low altitude target The Indian Navy conducted a successful trial of the maritime Barak-8 interceptor on Thursday, in the latest test of the joint Indian-Israeli missile defense system, the Indian Defense Ministry said. The Barak-8, also known as the Long Range Surface-to-Air Missile (LRSAM), was fired from the INS Chennai at an incoming target flying at a low altitude, India said.
“The missile destroyed the target with a direct hit. All the mission objectives have been met,” the country’s defense ministry said in a statement.

                 

The Barak-8 was developed by IAI in collaboration with Israel’s Defense Ministry, India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, the navies of both countries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, IAI’s Elta Group, and local industries in India.
India, which has longstanding territorial disputes with neighbors China and Pakistan, has signed several big-ticket defense deals since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.
It has been moving away from relying on traditional ally Russia for military hardware and in recent years, India has deepened its ties to Israel, diplomatically and militarily.
Last year, IAI won a $777 million contract with India to supply a maritime version of the Barak-8 missile defense system.
The deal was signed with Indian state-owned company Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), which serves as the main contractor in the project.
Israel is a major defense supplier to India, selling an average of $1 billion of military equipment each year.
Last year, the two countries signed a military deal worth nearly $2 billion, which includes the supply over several years of medium-range surface-to-air missiles, launchers and communications technology.

China wants to eradicate Islam inside its borders

Xi's China is proving to be a state where bigotry is becoming a signature policy. View the links below to see some examples of its bigotry against Islam:
https://bitterwinter.org/tag/muslim-chinese/?gclid=Cj0KCQiA7briBRD7ARIsABhX8aB3v2tMtlmn9siMU01HP0zn54WpOnQCrk0Uo4gpx7vh1VST8hyZcOYaAqbAEALw_wcB

https://bitterwinter.org/ccp-interfering-with-muslim-funerals/
https://bitterwinter.org/sinicization-of-religion-is-a-sign-of-weakness/
https://bitterwinter.org/anti-muslim-repression-expands-outside-xinjiang/
https://bitterwinter.org/re-education-for-work-or-travel-far-from-home/
https://bitterwinter.org/authorities-sinicize-wujiawan-grand-mosque/
https://bitterwinter.org/eradication-of-muslim-traditions-extends-beyond-xinjiang/
https://bitterwinter.org/how-ccp-is-destroying-businesses-in-xinjiang/
https://bitterwinter.org/a-u-s-bills-to-sanction-china-for-misdeeds-in-xinjiang/

Malaysia Scraps $20 Billion China-Backed Train Project

Malaysia has cancelled a $20 billion rail project financed by China, a minister said Saturday, citing high interest costs for the government’s decision as he offered the clearest statement that one of Beijing’s largest One Belt, One Road infrastructure initiatives would be scrapped.

Kuala Lumpur, China’s biggest trading partner in Southeast Asia after Vietnam, has pushed back against Chinese dominance in its economy since Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad returned to power after a stunning electoral triumph in May last year, stalling billions of dollars of contracts.

To read the full article by By Ali Nufael  click here: http://www.eurasiareview.com/27012019-malaysia-scraps-20-billion-china-backed-train-project/

The fake icon - Suu Kyi

Suu Kyi was once a global icon who was admired by many, including me. We all hoped that once elected she would make a difference for good for all the people of Burma. Instead, she proved to be a sub-human, monster or a she-devil. She was a fake, a DOB.
Here is the link to an article by Reuters reporters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-suukyi-history-special-report-idUSKBN1OI1ET

The Uyghurs – Detained in their own land

By Habib Siddiqui

Imagine that you are living in a country where most of your family members are now detained in mass detention camps where they face inhuman torture including waterboarding! You ask – why? Well, according to the government, as an ethnic and religious minority your family members are perceived as potential threats to the law and order of the country. You ask – isn’t such a racist discriminatory practice against someone born into a family that is not part of the majority ethnic group? What happened to all those rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? What about the international laws prohibiting such crimes against a people? Isn’t our state a member of the United Nations? Did not our government ratify such laws and are expected to live by such binding articles?

No, you won’t get any satisfactory answer from the Chinese (PRC or the People’s Republic of China) government on a plethora of such vital questions, if you are a Turkic-speaking Uyghur (also spelled Uighur). Uyghurs of today’s Xinjiang province (formerly East Turkestan) in far northwestern part of China are victims of a brutal government policy of forced subjugation or elimination. They are targeted for mass detention simply because of their ethnicity and religion that is different from those of the majority Han Chinese. Nearly a million of them are now caged in mass detention camps in their native land, which came under full control of the Chinese only in 1949 when Mao Zedong came to power. [Before the annexation of their native land the Uyghurs had a distinct and rich history of their own. Their major cities Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and Kashgar (Kashi), an ancient center of trade on the historic Silk Road near the border between Russia and China, were famous trading cities in the medieval times.]

While, we may hesitate to use the term ‘genocide’ yet for what the Uyghurs are facing these days inside China, but the signs are all too evident to recognize early signs of an ethnic cleansing. It’s ugly and nothing to feel good about Xi Jinping’s China. The testimonies of detainees who have passed through these centers, that Amnesty International claims are being run like wartime concentration camps, are replete with reports of torture including waterboarding, electrocution and force-feeding. According to eyewitnesses, the situation is so horrific that some of the detainees have even committed suicide, which is forbidden in Islam. The Chinese government has incarcerated everyone from professors, journalists, comedians, editors and poets to nursing mothers, children, the elderly and even the terminally ill inside these detention centers.

Lately, the Xi’s government has announced a five-year plan aimed at "Sinicizing" Islam to make it "compatible with socialism". Activists, however, warned that this campaign would gradually lead to a total eradication of Islam - with which some 23 million Chinese still identify in the country.

Thanks to the Chinese government propaganda, the Uyghurs are perceived as trouble makers by most Han Chinese and as such, are told that these ‘terrorists’ must be restrained and ‘reeducated’ or ‘reprogramed’ to accept the new reality in China that has no room for dissension, dialogue and debate. Not surprisingly, the frustrated Uyghurs who increasingly find themselves cornered against the wall and are denied the rights to their culture, plus the political and economic windfalls that have hitherto benefitted the Han settlers to their mineral-rich region have sometimes reacted violently by attacking Han settlers and the trigger-happy police with knives.

As we have seen elsewhere, ethnic riots do not occur in vacuum.  If the young Uyghurs, a minority group comprising roughly half the population of Xinjiang province, had not lost trust in the state and its institutions it is difficult to accept that such riots could have occurred.

Mao’s successors have resorted to Sinicization (i.e., Hanification) of the region. They have changed the demography of the region by settling Han Chinese from other parts. They have curtailed the region’s millennium-plus-years old rich Muslim culture and are practicing widespread religious repression against the ethnic Uyghurs. Authorities have banned “abnormal beards,” religious names for children, fasting during Ramadan and restricted attending weddings and funerals. They have conducted forced abortion on Uyghur women. They have closed down Qur’anic and Uyghur language schools to cut down their Islamic and cultural ties with other Muslims. Because of the Mandarin-based educational policy of the state, the Uyghurs can’t pass and find jobs in their own land. Their intellectuals are imprisoned and anyone talking with visitors from outside, esp. foreign reporters and human rights group, are suspected of being disloyal, and often risk prison times.  Police question them on the street, demanding to know where they’re going and why. Metal detectors, facial scanners and document checks are routine. Surveillance cameras are everywhere, even in some public restrooms. “In one Uighur mosque, I counted 40 of them,” writes Peter Martin for the Bloomberg.com who recently visited Xinjiang. During his entire stay, he could not hear a single call of prayer (adhan) from any mosque.

In essence, the once dynamic region in the Silk Road that woke up for centuries with the adhan heard from the minarets has been turned into a police state where Uyghurs are afraid to speak with anyone or even call adhan for believers to gather and pray together.

The communist party-state has institutionalized unfathomed discrimination based on Uyghur’s distinct religion, habitus, physiognomy, language culture and socioeconomic status. In so doing, they have only widened the gap between the Han settlers and the indigenous Uyghurs. It developed Xinjiang as a penal colony, as a nuclear testing ground and dumping ground for radioactive wastes (that is responsible for unusually high birth defects and mortality rate amongst the inhabitants) and as a buffer against invasion, and as a supplier of raw materials and living space for an overpopulated country.

Apparently, none of the strong-arm tactics and gross disregard of the frontier territory and its native people is working and thus, now Xi and his brutal regime is experimenting with its latest criminal policy of mass detention in “political training centers,” heavily fortified buildings that were likened to the reeducation camps of the Mao Zedong era. Associated Press has reported that Uighurs were forced to disavow their Islamic beliefs, praise the communist party and endure solitary confinement. Former detainees told Human Rights Watch they were jailed without hearings, shackled and beaten mercilessly. Observers have compared the camps to Soviet Gulags, and in a May 20, 2018 editorial, the Washington Post wrote: “All who believe in the principle of ‘never again’ after the horror of the Nazi extermination camps and Stalin’s gulag must speak up against China’s grotesque use of brainwashing, prisons and torture.”

In August 2018 the United Nations called upon China to end the detention, but government officials denied the existence of the camps. How long can the criminal regime of Xi Jinping deny what is so obvious and well-known?

While one can understand Xi’s loftiest goal of transforming China as one of the world’s great powers one cannot excuse his gross violations of human rights. Although Xinjiang represents just 1.5 percent of China’s population of 1.4 billion and 1.3 percent of its economy, the Alaska-sized Muslim-majority region borders eight countries and sits at the geographic heart of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative and serves as a crossroads for a railway link to London and a route to the Arabian Sea through Pakistan, where China is financing a $62 billion port and transportation corridor called the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). It’s a trillion-dollar plan to finance new highways, ports and other modern infrastructure projects in developing countries that will connect them to China’s markets and put them in China’s debt for decades to come.

Xi’s authoritarian regime has spent vast sums of money to building up cities in Xinjiang to attract companies and fuel economic growth in the relatively poor region. Concerns about PRC’s diabolical crackdown policy of the Uyghurs and lawlessness in Xinjiang, however, don’t appear to be reassuring investors. Almost no foreign companies have located there, and the region’s economy slowed last year.

Although China sees that as a temporary setback, unless Xi changes his criminal – apparently the most intense – campaign of coercive social reengineering since the end of the Cultural Revolution and stops its ethnic cleansing crimes against the minority Uyghur Muslims, and instead focuses in nation-building through integration that benefits all (including minority Muslims and Christians) he will be forced to live with the failed Soviet and Balkan experience. Is that outcome a desirable one for the PRC and its president who has already been dubbed as the “world’s most dangerous opponent” of open societies?

It is also feared that this repugnant campaign of mass detention of Muslims is set to expand, as the regional governments within PRC with sizeable Muslim populations are dispatching officials to detention centers in Xinjiang with the explicit aim of learning to and adopting the same criminal measures.

It is important for the international community to condemn the Chinese ethnic cleansing crimes against the minority Uyghur and demand a release of all those detained immediately. If Xi’s authoritarian regime fails to comply then the international community should adopt a “Global Magnitsky Act” to sanction Chinese officials that are complicit in the human rights violations occurring in Xinjiang. The freezing of assets and exclusion from banking systems overseas are within the power of concerned governments.

It is equally important for all the developing and third world countries where China has invested heavily in recent years that they use such as a point of strategic leverage and encourage Beijing into compliance with international human-rights norms and stop its horrendous crimes against the Uyghur.

For China to be great again, it must earn the respect and trust of the world community by respecting the human rights of its minorities to live and prosper as equals. It simply cannot afford to behaving like a rogue state that arrogantly sees the Soviet Gulags and Nazi Concentration Camps as models to copy.

Set the Uyghurs free now, Mr. Xi. Otherwise, history will treat you the same way it has treated despots like Hitler and Mussolini, and many others that followed their inglorious trail.

Brace for Impact: Global Financial Crisis May be Just Around the Corner

                     Author: Jean Perier        

The cyclical nature of the world economy, when every single decade ends in a major meltdown of the world financial results in a number of experts predicting a global crisis to take place in 2019.

Everyone remembers the crisis of 2008, from which the West hasn’t fully recovered as production levels across the Western states still remain below the level shown in 2007. For the point of view of an impartial bystander, it’s rather hard not to point out that most countries would be borrowing cheap money at breathtaking rates in a bid to stimulate consumer spending. The problem of a wealthy lifestyle some still enjoy these days on borrowed funds is that it doesn’t solve any issues, it just delays the inevitable. In the end, all the printed money will flow back down to the stock market and the bubble starts to deflate. And where do we go from here? The only thing the West is still producing these days are shale hydrocarbons and even those are hardly profitable.

Of course, some businesses will go bankrupt, which will in turn trigger an aftershock of even more bankruptcies. Then the behind-the-scenes firefighters will start covering the whole mess with even more cheap money. Sadly, this time around Europe won’t be able to trim the fat, as there’s none left. AS for the US, it’s been desperate to get one last breath before getting submerged underwater with zero interest rates. And again, over the last couple of years Trump would start trade wars left and right, as if there was no tomorrow. It seems that this time we are about to learn just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The word “crisis” itself is Greek and can be loosely translated as “the turning point” or “judgment day.” The crisis is the price all of us are about to pay for investing the money we don’t own in depreciating asset that we don’t really need or want. It would be naive to think that the rich will become poorer during the crisis, as the crisis itself is nothing but a tool for the redistribution of capital.

As a matter of fact, the World Bank is convinced that should expect a new global financial crisis to come upon us in the nearest future. This was stated in the report titled Global Economic Prospects, Darkening Skies, which states that the year 2019 may easily become a turning point to the world economy against the backdrop of the slowdown of the world economy.

Today, there are too many factors that can make the matters even worse than they are now. Of course, the leading among those is the over unpredictability of the Trump administration as it’s seems a bit too willing to turn its back on the previous international commitments of the United State, be it the unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, hints that the US will abandon the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty or threats to impose new economic punishment on those players who prefer to agree to disagree with the crumbling hegemon.

According to Stratfor, the great power rivalry with China and Russia pushes the United States to downgrade its military commitments in Africa and the Middle East.

It’s been pointed out that a decade ago Beijing was in no position to claim the role of world leader, thus challenging the US. But these days things are different, as China is full of determination and economic power, and it will be satisfied with the place of the second world economy. There’s no telling who till take the upper hand, but this rivalry creates preconditions for a perfect storm.

Yet another factor is the the Fed’s raising key rate for the first time since 2014. This means that money becomes more expensive. Thus, the Fed is preparing to become a beneficiary of the crisis, along with those powerful and wealthy people who will be buying bonds at about half the price at the height of the crisis.

It’s hardly a secret that during the global crisis salaries are slashed in half, while price tags in stores are rising, employees are being laid off, housing prices are falling, loans are getting more expensive. But this time around we may as well add public widespread public disobedience, riots, mass looting, revolutions and military conflicts plunging a number of continents into chaos.

It’s been pointed out that the era of largely uncontested US primacy fades. Тhe so-called international order based on the so-called rules has been thrown into turmoil. Instruments of collective action, such as the United Nations Security Council are undermined, while those of collective accountability, including the International Criminal Court have all but lost all credibility.

For the year ahead of us, various political experts predict a rapid exacerbation of differences between the United States, China and Europe and Russia. The already dire situation in such countries as Yemen, Afghanistan and Ukraine can rapidly go from bad to worse. We can expect the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel launching military aggression against Iran, due to the continuing deterioration of the situation in the Middle East. Things don’t look any better for Africa and Latin America too.

It didn’t take long for trade wars, cyberattacks, shifting defense strategies and arms races to convince the world that this is the new and uncomfortable global reality. However, the main danger of today’s age of uncertainty is that the race to the bottom may turn out to be a long one.

Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook“.