Habib Siddiqui

Tun Khin and Tomas Ojea Quintan 30.09.21 | 0 Comments [Tun Khin is President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK and Tomás Ojea Quintana is a former UN Special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar.] On 18 August, in a court in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, six women made history in the Rohingyas’ long struggle for justice. For the first time anywhere in the world, Rohingya victims of the decades-long genocide wrought by Myanmar were allowed to testify in a court of law. The women, who dialled in from their current homes in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, spoke of how they had been victims of sexual violence by soldiers in Chuk Pyin, Rakhine State, in 2017. For Rohingya – and people in Myanmar anywhere who have suffered at the hands of the military – it was a momentous occasion. Adding to the symbolism was the fact that the hearing took place just one week before 25 August, the fourth anniversary of the brutal “clearance operations” in 2017, when ...

DHAKA, Bangladesh — An international representative of ethnic Rohingya refugees was shot to death in a camp in Bangladesh by unknown gunmen late Wednesday, police said. Mohibullah, who is in his 40s, was a teacher who emerged as a key refugee leader and a spokesman representing the Muslim ethnic group in international meetings. He visited the White House in 2019 for a meeting on religious freedom with then-President Donald Trump and spoke about the suffering and persecution faced by Rohingya in Myanmar. That same year, he was bitterly criticized by Bangladeshi media after he led a massive rally of 200,000 refugees to mark the second anniversary of the crackdown by Myanmar’s military that caused about 700,000 Rohingya, including Mohibullah, to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. The unidentified attackers shot Mohibullah at the Kutupalong refugee camp at Ukhiya in Cox’s Bazar district, said Naimul Haque, an commander of the Armed Police Battalion in Cox’s Bazar. He was rushed to a hospit...

There is a narrative commonly held by observers in the west that the Afghans are a people defined by perpetual warfare. Like many stereotypes, this one comes with a cornel of truth. After all, the people of Afghanistan just got done throttling the bare hind quarters of the greatest empire Satan ever devised for the last twenty years with little more than rusty Soviet junk and raw grit. The rural highlands of southern Afghanistan have certainly fostered a distinctly martial culture that has aided its people in resisting generations of conquest, but to simply sum these people up by the wars they’ve fought completely misses the context of why they fight and what they were fighting for. You see the Afghan people, in particular the Pashtuns who have made up the bulk of the Taliban, are a people who simply refuse to be ruled by anyone or anything besides their own distinctly stateless culture. The Pashtuns of Afghanistan’s rugged borderlands are essentially anarchists and their successful c...

The quasi-official history of the Afghan War has now be written by cable news house historians. Key elements: 1. The terrorist organization al-Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11 and so HAD to be destroyed to prevent further attacks on our Homeland. It was a “war of necessity,” as President Obama said as he continued it. The allied forces succeeded in killing hundreds of terrorists and driving al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. And there has not been another 9/11. It was a success. That’s the MAIN point. 2. The Taliban, the organization governing Afghanistan, had been hosting al-Qaeda and was/is itself a terrorist organization. It had to be toppled also, to prevent future terrorist attacks on the Homeland. The allied forces accomplished this goal successfully too, with ease, within weeks. 3. After being overthrown, the Taliban were unexpectedly resilient. They soon regained control of much of the country. More U.S. troops had to be introduced, to protect all the democ...

The war on terror is still not over, and Spencer Ackerman’s new book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump is essential reading for understanding why it persists. Ackerman, one of the best national security reporters of the last twenty years, has traced the post-9/11 growth of the U.S. security state and the expansion of the war on terror that is as endless as it is toxic. He shines a light on the brutality and cruelty of American militarized counterterrorism since 2001, and he is unsparing in identifying the failures of each administration responsible for implementing and persisting in these policies. Reading Reign of Terror is an infuriating but edifying experience as Ackerman reminds us of the countless outrages of the last twenty years from the invasion of Iraq to the attack on the Capitol. Many of the stories he includes are familiar, but Ackerman’s account helps to tie everything together. While he pays close attention to the death and destr...

NEW YORK (AP) — Prime Minister Imran Khan sought to cast Pakistan as the victim of American ungratefulness and an international double standard in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday. In a prerecorded speech aired during the evening, the Pakistani prime minister touched on a range of topics that included climate change, global Islamophobia and “the plunder of the developing world by their corrupt elites” — the latter of which he likened to what the East India Company did to India. It was for India's government that Khan reserved his harshest words, once again labeling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government “fascist.” But the cricketer turned posh international celebrity turned politician was in turn indignant and plaintive as he painted the United States as an abandoner of both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. “For the current situation in Afghanistan, for some reason, Pakistan has been blamed for the turn of events, ...

At least 12 Palestinians were injured on Friday by the Israeli army during clashes in the villages of Beita and Kafr Qaddum in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC). The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli occupation soldiers fired live gunfire, rubber-coated rounds and stun grenades at Palestinian protesters in Beita, injuring at least eight of them, one of them seriously. Another 18 cases of suffocation from teargas were reported. Some of the protesters also sustained injuries after falling on the ground while being chased by soldiers. Meantime, according to WAFA, four Palestinian protesters were injured by Israeli gunfire during the weekly protest in the village of Kafr Qaddum. For near five months, Palestinians from Beita and neighboring villages have been holding almost daily protests against Israel’s construction of an illegal settlement outpost, Evaytar, on the Jabal Sabih mount, which is adjacent to the village. S...

Israeli security forces have shot dead a Palestinian man in the West Bank during a protest against settlement expansion, the Palestinian health ministry said. The victim was killed after being hit in the head by live fire on Friday, the ministry said, in the flashpoint town of Beita, a scene of regular demonstrations against Israeli settlement expansion. A family member identified the dead man as Mohammed Ali Khabisa, 27. He was taken to hospital in the northern West Bank city of Nablus where he died shortly afterward, the ministry said. Another eight Palestinians were wounded by rubber-coated bullets, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported. The Israeli military had no immediate comment when contacted by AFP. Beita residents have been demonstrating since May against the wildcat Jewish settlement outpost of Eviatar, which has been set up nearby without Israeli permission. The outpost was evacuated in early July but Israeli army troops remain stationed there while ...

the MoD says that there has been one civilian casualty during the RAF bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq against Islamic State during more than 10,000 missions since August 2014. An MoD spokesperson said the amount of compensation paid in each case was determined by a mixture of legal principles as well as local customs and practices. “Every civilian death is a tragedy and the UK always seeks to minimise the risk of civilian casualties through our rigorous targeting processes, but that risk can never be removed entirely,” they added. The MoD has previously said that it has reviewed allegations of SAS involvement in extra judicial executions, and said there was “insufficient evidence for prosecution”. The stakes could not be higher. The full cost of U.S. war-making during the past 20 years is tremendous. The Costs of War, a Brown University Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs project, recently estimated that post‑9/​11 U.S. wars have killed between 897,000 and 929,000...

British forces are linked to the deaths of 86 children and more than 200 adult civilians during the Afghanistan conflict, with compensation of just £2,380 paid on average for each life lost, new figures reveal. They are recorded in official Ministry of Defence (MoD) compensation logs, obtained by a series of freedom of information requests. According to the data, the youngest recorded civilian victim was three years old. One of the most serious incidents listed in the records is the award of £4,233.60 to a family following the death of four children who were mistakenly “shot and killed” in an incident in December 2009. Some of the payments amounted to less than a few hundred pounds. In February 2008, one family received £104.17 following a confirmed fatality and damage to a property in Helmand province, while another was compensated £586.42 for the death of their 10-year-old son in December 2009. The data was compiled by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), which examined the logs to co...

Last night, I came across the book, Unsettled as I Roam: My Endless Search for a Home. It is written by Azmat Ashraf whom I had the pleasure of knowing as a fellow cadet at Ayub (later renamed Rajshahi) Cadet College for four years (1966-1970) before he graduated in 1970, a year before the birth of Bangladesh in an ocean of blood, mostly of the innocents on all the sides of the divide. He was a year senior to me. His two younger brothers Hasnat and Hannan were also students there whom I had known. But we came from two different divides of the 1971 tragedy. He came from the minority Bihari background, and I was a Bangladeshi (whose parents did not have to be a refugee from India). Soon after the liberation of Bangladesh, when the classes resumed in early 1972, and I reported back to the cadet college campus to complete my last year of the pre-college/university academic (HSC) program, I learnt of the tragedy suffered by many of our cadets, including those of our (so-called) Bihari (Ur...

WRITTEN BY Michael Martin Myanmar, also known as Burma, is locked in a political impasse in which neither Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s State Administrative Council (SAC) nor the self-declared National Unity Government (NUG) can effectively govern the nation. Meanwhile, the country’s decades-old civil war continues to spread and intensify. On September 7, the NUG’s acting president, Duwa Lashi La, called for a “revolt against the rule of military terrorists led by Min Aung Hlaing in every corner of the country.” SAC spokesperson General Zaw Min Tun dismissed the announcement, referring to the NUG as “extremists.” Some of the nation’s ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), people’s defense forces (PDFs), and civil society organizations that have sustained the anti-SAC protests have reportedly expressed support for the NUG’s call for revolution. Myanmar is shifting from being a failed state to a warring state. It is too early to tell how much Myanmar’s civil war will intensify in the ...

Only a few weeks ago, a Reichsbürger in Germany shot a police officer with a crossbow during a house’s search in a remote town called Linden, in the north of Hessen. The Reichsbürger is accused of attempted manslaughter and he was sent to prison until his court hearing. Violent attacks by the right-wing extremist Reichsbürger are nothing out of the ordinary in Germany. Germany’s antisemitic and semi-fascistic Reichsbürger, also known as sovereign citizens – were at the forefront when a mob of right-wing extremists attacked Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag in August 2020. Like many other right-wing extremists, Reichsbürger too, use anti-lockdown rallies as cover to conjure up supports for its reactionary ideology. At Germany’s parliament, three policemen were fighting the crowd of Reichsbürger, Neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy fantasies believers until reinforcements arrived preventing a German version of what has happened in Washington in January 2021. ...

Dozens of prisoners in Egypt have reportedly been offered amnesty in exchange for participating in a scripted conference with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi planned in Tora prison next month, a local independent publication reported on Sunday. According to Mada Masr, three lawyers representing detainees in the Tora, Minya and Wadi al-Natrun prisons had been informed by their clients that officials from Egypt’s National Security Agency had reached out to hundreds of prisoners, offering early release should they agree to speak about incarceration conditions in a favourable light during the conference. Dozens of prisoners have reportedly been transferred from Minya and Wadi al-Natrun to Tora ahead of the conference planned for early October. Those allegedly scheduled to receive amnesty reportedly include Islamists and other political prisoners - amid longstanding accusations of a crackdown on political opposition under Sisi. A government source also told Mada Masr that a number of amn...

New Delhi, India – It is a humid and sweaty morning. The nearby drain, overflowing with overnight monsoon rains, stinks. A few metres away, pigs rummage through the rubbish. But the weather or stink does not dissuade Bapu Nishtar Singh, who has been protesting for nearly 10 months against a set of agricultural laws passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in September last year. KEEP READING ‘Modi gov’t anti-farmer’: Thousands rally against India farm laws ‘Pind California’: US doctor camps with India’s agitating farmers ‘Black Day’: Indian farmers mark six months of farm law protests The 85-year-old from Punjab state’s Ludhiana district is among thousands of farmers from across India camping at Singhu outside capital New Delhi, the epicentre of nationwide protests that have posed the biggest challenge for Modi since he came to power seven years ago. Last September, Modi’s right-wing government passed three laws aimed at “modernising” the country’s agricultural system. ...