Category: Human Rights

  • When the government tells you that you cannot pray

    When the government tells you that you cannot pray

    When Abdul Kadeer returned from Saudi Arabia in last month to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid-ul-Fitr with his family in Meerut, a city northeast of New Delhi in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, the 32-year-old found himself gripped by fear. The local administration had announced tough restrictions on Eid-ul-Fitr prayers for Muslims. 

    Eid-ul-Fitr is one of two major holidays celebrated by Muslims and commemorates the end of the holy month of Ramadan, in which Muslims fast daily from before dawn until sunset.

    Because mosques and designated grounds for prayers, known as Eidgahs, have insufficient space to accommodate the large number of worshippers during these holidays people often stop on roadsides to offer prayers. 

    But just days before the festival, Meerut police announced that offering prayers on roads and other public places could lead to passport cancellations. 

    “I came home to celebrate with my family, but now we are living in fear,” Kadeer says. “Why is it that when we pray, it becomes a problem, but during other festivals, roads are blocked and nothing happens?”

    Jamia Masjid Srinagar closed for Eid prayers in Kashmir. (Photo by Sajad Hameed)

    A minority religion

    For Kadeer, losing his passport would cost him his job.

    “I work in Saudi Arabia to support my family here,” he said. “Why are we being targeted for a prayer that lasts barely 20 minutes?”

    The state of Uttar Pradesh has a predominantly Hindu population, with Hindus comprising around 80% of the total population, while Muslims make up approximately 19%.

    Across Meerut, sentiments like Kadeer’s resonate deeply. Many Muslims in the city ask why they face restrictions when Hindu festivals frequently involve processions on public roads without similar consequences.

    “Why is it that only during Eid, roads become a law-and-order issue?” questions a shopkeeper in the city’s old quarter. “During Holi or Diwali, no one is threatened with legal action.”

    Holi and Diwali are major Hindu festivals celebrated with their own distinct rituals rooted in mythology, seasonal change and spiritual themes. Holi celebrates spring with colors, water fights and sweets, symbolizing good over evil. Diwali, the festival of lights, involves lamps, fireworks and sharing food, marking prosperity and the return of the Hindu god Rama.

    When the Indian government restricts public prayer during Muslim festivals like Eid-ul-Fitr it says it does so to maintain public order and prevent communal tensions. Authorities may cite concerns about large gatherings in public spaces causing traffic disruptions, noise pollution or potential clashes, especially in areas with a history of religious friction. 

    Tensions peaked on 31 March, for example, when violence erupted after the Eid prayer in Siwalkhas, a town northeast of New Delhi. According to police, members of two groups clashed, with reports of gunfire. Security forces quickly intervened, dispersing the crowds, but not before more than six Muslims were injured.

    A double standard?

    The restrictions on prayer have sparked national debate. Popular comedian Munawar Faruqui criticised the decision on social media, questioning why a short prayer was being singled out. But Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath defended the measure, citing the Maha Kumbh in Prayagraj as an example of religious discipline. 

    “[Six hundred and sixty million] people attended the Maha Kumbh without any incidents of violence, harassment or disorder. Roads are meant for walking,” he said, suggesting that Muslims should learn from Hindu festival gatherings. 

    Nasir Qureshi, 47, of Bijnor, said that even before Eid, they were warned not to gather in large numbers for prayers. “But when Hindus celebrate their festivals, there are no such restrictions,” he said “Why is there one rule for us and another for them?”

    The directive has drawn criticism not only from opposition parties but also from within the allies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP.

    Iqra Hasan, a member of parliament for the socialist Samajwadi Party, questioned the intent behind the restrictions while Chirag Paswan, a BJP ally, called for a focus on broader issues rather than communal divisions. And Union Minister Chaudhary Jayant Singh compared the crackdown to authoritarian measures described in George Orwell’s book “1984”.

    Opponents to restrictions argue that the Hajj in Mecca, with 2–3 million Muslims praying peacefully, shows that large Muslim gatherings can be managed safely, like the Maha Kumbh’s 400 million Hindus. With proper planning, India could allow Eid prayers fairly, avoiding bias.

    Police and worshippers

    In Meerut, protests took shape in subtle ways. Some worshippers displayed posters stating, “It’s not just Muslims who pray on roads.” The banners listed instances of Hindus and others conducting religious activities on public streets.

    Authorities forcibly removed the posters, leading to further tensions. Among the congregation, expressions of solidarity with Palestine were visible, with worshippers seen holding “Free Palestine” placards and some donning traditional Palestinian attire.

    Mohammed Saeed, 29, a resident of Meerut, said that the police didn’t let them complete their prayers. “They stormed in, shouting at us to leave, and when people protested, they started hitting us,” Saeed said. “Even elderly men were pushed around.”

    Police have registered cases against those raising Palestine-related issues in previous instances, making this a sensitive act of defiance. Beyond Meerut, other decisions have added to the sense of alienation. In Haryana, the state government removed Eid from its list of gazetted holidays, relegating it to a restricted holiday status. This means government offices will remain open on Eid and employees —Hindus or Muslims — must request leave if they wish to observe it.

    Asaduddin Owaisi, an member of parliament from Hyderabad and chief of the right-wing political party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, said that these kind of decisions are a direct attack on Muslim minorities in the country. 

    He also said that earlier last year the central government ordered a survey of the Jamia Masjid in Uttar Pradesh, a 500-year-old mosque that is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. It turned into violence with five people killed and 30 injured. 

    “Hundreds were detained only to deny the survey,” Owaisis said. “These decisions will increase the hate in the communities nothing else.”

    Religious clashes elsewhere

    While India sees frequent communal flashpoints between Hindus and Muslims, other South Asian nations have also witnessed religious tensions manifesting in different ways.

    In Pakistan, religious minorities, particularly Hindus and Christians, have often faced restrictions on their religious practices, though state-imposed bans on mass religious gatherings have been rare.

    In Bangladesh, political conflicts sometimes intertwine with religious identity, leading to incidents of violence during Hindu Durga Puja celebrations. Sri Lanka has seen its own set of religious tensions, with growing restrictions on Muslim practices such as a ban on the niqab — a face veil worn by women — following the 2019 Easter bombings when 269 people were killed in six suicide bombings in churches and hotels. 

    In Kashmir, meanwhile, the state’s approach to religious gatherings has taken a different but equally restrictive form. On 31 March, as Muslims worldwide prepared for Eid-ul-Fitr, authorities in Srinagar locked down the historic Jamia Masjid, preventing worshippers from offering prayers there.

    The region’s chief cleric, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, was placed under house arrest, a move he strongly condemned.

    “When huge claims of ‘normalcy’ are made every day by the authorities, why are Muslims in Kashmir being kept away from their religious places and practices?” Mirwaiz said in a statement. “What is the agenda? Is the collective identity of Kashmiri Muslims a threat to the rulers?”

    The Jamia Masjid closure follows a pattern seen in recent years, where authorities have restricted access to religious sites on key Islamic occasions, citing security concerns.

    Earlier in March, the mosque was locked for Shab-e-Qadr and Jummat-ul-Vida prayers, triggering strong reactions from opposition parties in Kashmir.

    Darakhshan Andrabi, who is a senior BJP leader and chairs the Jammu and Kashmir Wakf Board, a body that controls the use of religious and charitable properties, justified the decision, stating that Eid prayers could not be held at Eidgah grounds due to ongoing construction work. However, many local residents and religious leaders see such restrictions as politically motivated and part of broader efforts to control religious expression in the region.

     

    Questions to consider: 

    1. What is Eid-ul-Fitr?

    2. What is a rationale the Indian government has to restrict public prayer during Muslim festivals?

    3. Do you think that the government should be able to regulate religion? Why?

     

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  • Decoder: The Silence of America

    Decoder: The Silence of America

    Iconic photos from the Cold War cover the corridors of the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, news networks created by the U.S. government to counter censorship and disinformation from the Soviet Union and their East European satellite nations during the Cold War.

    Images from 1989, the year communist rule melted away in more than a dozen countries, were reminders of earlier days when Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had broadcast news in Polish, Czech, Slovakian and the Baltic languages; those countries are now robust democracies as well as members of the European Union and NATO.

    Those historic photos jostle with more recent images from countries where human rights and democracy are not observed, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and other nations across Central and South Asia. In total, the two networks broadcasted in 27 languages to 23 countries providing news coverage and cultural programming where free media doesn’t exist or is threatened.

    The journalists who broadcast there often do so at great risk. 

    Many are exiles unable to return to their own countries. Three of their journalists are currently jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea, Russia and Azerbaijan. The charges against them are viewed as politically motivated.

    Countering power with news

    On 14 March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order which cut the funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It also cut the funding of Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, the Voice of America — the “official” voice of the United States — as well as Radio & Television Marti which broadcasts to Cuba.

    The funding cuts would effectively silence these networks. In response, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. 18 March that argued that Congress has exclusive authority over federal spending and that cannot be altered by a presidential executive order. Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz filed suit 26 March. 

    On March 27, the Trump administration announced it had restored the funding for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. 

    Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came into being after the end of the second World War when Europe became a divided continent. While the wartime allies, including Britain and the United States, focused on rebuilding their economies after years of war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent his army to occupy most of Eastern Europe. 

    Despite promises made at a meeting in the Crimea, known as the Yalta Conference, during the final months of the war in 1945, Stalin refused to allow free elections in East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 

    Neither were free elections held in the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — which the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. The crushing of democratic rule in so many nations was characterised by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as “an iron curtain” that had “descended across the continent.” 

    After years of fighting Nazi Germany, half of Europe was now ruled under a Soviet dictatorship.

    Containing communism

    The United States responded with a policy of ‘containment’ that aimed to halt the spread of communism without using soldiers and tanks. Radio Free Europe started broadcasting in 1950 followed by Radio Liberty in 1953. 

    With a system of transmitters pointing east, news programmes that countered the state propaganda were beamed to the countries in the Soviet bloc, eventually in 17 languages. These were tactics that came to be known as ‘soft power’.

    Based in Munich, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL as they became known, attracted dissidents who opposed the Soviet-imposed governments. Their audiences grew during the Cold War, despite threats of prosecution. 

    In addition to news, broadcasts covered music, sports and science. Banned literature written by dissidents who challenged the communist systems could be heard on RFE/RL. Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was one of those voices.

    The Berlin Wall tumbled down in November 1989. It was followed by the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Czech government and installed as its president, the former political prisoner Haval. He invited RFE/RL to move their base from Munich to Prague. 

    “My confinement in prison might have lasted longer had it not been for the publicity I had through these two stations,” Haval said at the time. 

    An outcry in Europe and elsewhere

    The news that the Trump administration would shut down the radio networks spread quickly. Listeners, viewers and supporters who had lived through the Cold War years when only pro-government broadcasts were legal, shared their stories on social media:

    “In Romania, they [RFE] lightened communism with the hope of freedom.”

    “As a small girl, living under a communist regime in Poland, I remember my grandfather listening every night to Radio Free Europe, to get uncensored news from around the world, to get different opinions on the world’s affairs, and probably hoping that one day, he would live in a free world. It was illegal to listen to this Radio, and the quality was very poor, and yet, he would do it every night … ” 

    Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski recalled how his father had listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. “This is a great shame,” he wrote. “My grandfather was listening to RFE in Soviet-occupied Poland in 80s. It’s how we learned basic facts about our own countries because communist propaganda was so tightly controlled.”

    On 17 March the Czech Republic asked the foreign ministers of the European Union to support RFE/RL so the journalism could continue. 

    One diplomat who was in the meeting said that stopping RFE/RL’s broadcasts would “be a gift to Europe’s adversaries.” Already Russia’s state broadcaster, Russia Today, had tweeted that cutting the funding for RFE/RL was an “awesome decision by Trump.”

    When Vaclav Havel welcomed Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to Prague after democracy had been restored to Czechoslovakia, he said that having RFE/RL in the Czech capital was equivalent to having three NATO divisions. 

    The supporters of the networks are hoping that the soft power of free media is indeed able to pack a powerful punch for free media.

    Update to this story: As of 30 March, Radio Free Liberty has informed News Decoder that, while two weeks worth of funds have been received, the rest of U.S. government funding had not yet been restored. We will continue to update this story as we learn of further developments. 

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why, during the Cold War, were radio broadcasts across closed borders one of the few ways people could receive news that was not controlled by the government?
    2. In what ways are people limited in accessing news, culture and music?
    3. In what ways might a free media be important in a democracy?

     

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  • Can France accept its past as an oppressor?

    Can France accept its past as an oppressor?

    The captives were taken to a centre where masked Algerian informers picked out suspected rebels. “Those were detained, interrogated, with a lot of violence. The rest were released.”

    Worse followed. Kihn was on guard duty when he first saw a suspect being tortured with electricity from a hand-cranked generator. “It was unbearable. The man was yelling, jerking around. I had tears in my eyes,” he said, his eyes filling again as he re-lived the moment.

    When he was discharged, no one in his village wanted to hear his war stories, so for decades he clammed up. But memories, nightmares and panic attacks kept tormenting him. When he was 70, a film-maker cajoled him into an interview. He later wrote a book and found a measure of relief.

    Kihn, disgusted by his experiences, would not touch his military pension. Instead, he and some other former soldiers send the money to local NGOs in Algeria.

    “What we need is recognition of the truth,” he said. “Yes, we were criminals in Algeria.”

    France has tried to turn the page, but the past will not die.

    It took France until 1999 to recognise formally that its struggle in Algeria had been a “war,” even though it had mobilised up to two million conscripts for “operations to restore order” against the independence-seeking fighters of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).

    The French campaign led to widespread torture, the forced displacement of two million civilians to cut the FLN from its rural base and countless summary executions and “disappearances.”

    The FLN was ruthless, too, terrorising French and Algerian civilians and eliminating its political rivals and eventually factions within its own ranks.

    The conflict, which brought violence to both sides of the Mediterranean, exposed deep divisions within France, toppled the country’s Fourth Republic and raised the spectre of civil war.

    After President Charles de Gaulle set Algeria on course for independence with a 1961 referendum, some French die-hards formed the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), an armed group that mounted bomb attacks and assassinations, including at least one attempt to kill the French leader.

    OAS members eventually benefited from sweeping post-war amnesties. France sought to draw a veil and forget, but the past refused to die.

    Keeping the past alive

    Suzy Simon-Nicaise, 67, who heads one of the main associations of pieds-noirs, is determined to preserve a particular vision of the lost world of French Algeria, its culture, history and lifestyle.

    In her memory, it was a cosmopolitan place where Europeans mixed freely with Muslims based on mutual respect, where the French colonists had promoted development from the ground up.

    France, she concedes, may have committed some “not very glorious” deeds early on in its conquest of Algeria. “But Algeria did some things that were just as unbearable, if not more so,” she said.

    At a memorial event in Perpignan, Simon-Nicaise, wearing a dress as bright as her red hair, recounted a massacre of pieds-noirs in the mainly European city of Oran on July 5, 1962, the day Algeria became independent.

    She said 700 to 1,200 people were killed that day while French troops, in their barracks since the ceasefire in March, stood by with orders not to intervene. An exact toll has never been established. Macron, in his address to the pieds-noirs this year, said “hundreds” had died.

    Simon-Nicaise’s family had planned to stay on after independence, but an Algerian friend working with her father warned them to leave urgently, advice driven home by a French official who told her father that his name was on an FLN death-list. The family raced to the port with four suitcases.

    Around 800,000 pieds-noirs, the vast majority of the Europeans living in Algeria, also voted with their feet, believing their only choice was “la valise ou le cercueil (the suitcase or the coffin).”

    The French government had not anticipated such an exodus, and the flood of new arrivals met a chaotic and chilly reception.

    “We were treated worse than foreigners,” Simon-Nicaise said, recalling how she, then five, and her family were put up in a holiday village. “My family was crying, and everyone else was dancing the twist.”

    Later, her family had to share a cramped, squalid apartment with another family in Le Havre. Simon-Nicaise went to school there, where she heard a classmate declare: “Don’t talk to her. She’s a dirty pied-noir.”

    France’s rejected allies in Algeria

    If the pieds-noirs were mostly unwelcome in France, the harkis — Algerians who had served with the French military — were doubly so. De Gaulle had rejected any idea of taking them in, effectively abandoning tens of thousands of men and their families to FLN vengeance.

    Nevertheless, up to 90,000 harkis made it to France, many helped by their French commanders. They were consigned to grim army camps behind barbed wire, most of them for many years.

    “There were no toilets, one washbasin for 10 families,” said Abdelkrim Sid, who was six on arrival and spent the next 15 years with his sprawling family in isolated camps.

    His father, like many other harkis, was later put to work in forestry settlements on the minimum wage but never fully integrated into the wider economy.

    “My father was a spahi (cavalryman). He really believed in France,” said Sid at the bleak Rivesaltes camp near Perpignan.

    In Rivesaltes, a museum now commemorates successive waves of inmates dumped there from 1939 onwards, among them refugees from the Spanish civil war, Gypsies and Jews interned by the wartime Vichy régime, German prisoners of war and then harkis.

    Sid, a burly retired truck-driver, says he can’t forget how shamefully the harkis were treated in the camps, which he likened to pens for animals.  “It was as if we had the plague.”

    Troubled identity

    The war deeply marked the Algerian diaspora, swelled by migration that also drew in Moroccans and Tunisians whose labour was in demand as the French economy revived after World War Two.

    North Africans today make up the bulk of France’s estimated 5-6 million Muslim citizens, roughly 8% of its total population, the biggest ratio in any European country.

    France, which prides itself on its principle of laïcité, which makes the secular state neutral towards religion, has found it difficult to come to terms with its Muslim minority. The complex relationship is made no easier by mutual mistrust that has lingered since the colonial venture in Algeria.

    Magyd Cherfi has tried hard to integrate in his native France, with outward success as a musician and songwriter, a devotee of French literature and an author in his own right.

    Yet as he explained at a café in a mostly Arab quarter of Toulouse, the city where he grew up, he has never felt fully accepted as French. Ironically, he knows that many in the deprived milieu of his childhood resent him as a traitor to his origins.

    “It’s as if being French is a mountaintop. You climb and climb, and it’s never far enough,” he said.

    “In the street, they ask, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ That means you are not French, because if you are, no one asks that question.”

    Cherfi’s father, a building worker, fled to France after four of his brothers were killed fighting in the maquis, or underground, during the Algeria war. “He only told us fragments of what happened then, about bad things the French did to his family, girls raped, cousins killed, imprisoned, tortured.”

    So Cherfi grew up with an uneasy sense of difference from his French chums because France had been the enemy in Algeria. Yet when his parents decided to stay in France, when he was about 15, they told him, “You must respect the French. They give us work. They feed us.”

    He admires much of what France offers, notably freedom and secularism, but says it fails to honour its own principles when it comes to its non-white citizens.

    “That’s the big rip-off of the republic. France is unable to build a narrative that is anything other than exclusively white. We barely exist in French history,” he said.

    “So France is still sausages, accordions, traditions, villages, and now, with millions of Muslims here, you feel they cling to this even more. So it’s quick, get out the accordions!”

     

    Questions to consider:

    • What was Algeria’s relationship to France before it gained independence in 1962?

    • How were the post-war experiences of the pieds-noirs and harkis similar and different?

    • Why do you think it took until 1999 for France to recognize the conflict over Algeria as a war?

    • What would you do to improve the integration of France’s Arab/African-origin citizens?

     

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  • Trump’s idea of peace in Gaza? Hotels and yacht clubs.

    Trump’s idea of peace in Gaza? Hotels and yacht clubs.

    U.S. President Donald Trump views Israel’s war on Gaza through the eyes of the real estate developer he was before he entered politics. 

    “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” he said at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 4 February. “And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East.”

    He was talking about the possibility of forcing 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza to make place for “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

    Elaborating the idea in social media posts and interviews, the U.S. president left no doubt that he saw one of the world’s most complex problems — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — as a real estate deal.

    Trump explained that the United States could take over Gaza, a place where tens of thousands of people have been killed by Israeli air strikes and ground troops over the past 16 months. 

    Taking ownership of the conflict

    Israel has pummelled Gaza ever since 7 October 2024 when gunmen from the militant Hamas group stormed across the border, killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 people hostage. 

     “I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East and maybe the entire Middle East,” Trump said. “We’re going to take over that piece and we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs. And it will be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

    To make that possible, the people now living in the future Riviera must leave, possibly to neighbouring Jordan or Egypt, he said. 

    Leaders of both countries have rejected that idea, as has the Arab League, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres and a host of human rights groups.

    Conspicuously absent from statements by Trump and officials of his administration was the matter of international law.

    The thorny issue of international law

    The forced deportation of civilians is prohibited by an array of provisions of the Geneva Conventions which the United States has ratified. 

    Forced deportation has been considered a war crime ever since the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi officials.

    The International Criminal Court lists the kind of forcible population transfer visualized by Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East plan as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. (The United States is not a member of the court because it never ratified the Rome Statute on the court’s establishment).

    The legal and geo-political arguments triggered by Trump’s controversial proposal often leave out the collective trauma that shapes the Palestinians’ national identity and political aspirations.

    That trauma dates back to the violence preceding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, more than 50 years after an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl, published a book (Der Judenstaat) that inspired the Zionist movement.

    A history of forced expulsion

    An estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from what is now Israel during the war between Zionist paramilitary fighters of the Haganah, the forerunners of today’s Israeli Defence Force, and regular soldiers of six Arab countries. 

    Palestinians call that forced exodus the Naqba (the catastrophe). At the time, many expected to return to their homes once the fighting was over.

    A resolution by the U.N. General Assembly seven months after the formal establishment of Israel provided for a right of return for those who fled. A General Assembly resolution in 1974 declared the right to return an “inalienable right.” 

    Like all General Assembly resolutions, the 1948 vote was not binding, but it was explicit: “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest possible date and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…”

    Neither happened but the concept that those who left had a right to return has lived on for four generations, with hopes fading gradually but not entirely. There are still families who keep as heirlooms keys to the houses they fled in the turmoil of the Naqba.

    How history plays out today

    This history helps explain why today’s Palestinians in Gaza take seriously Trump’s proposal to resettle them all and their fear that any resettlement would result in permanent exile. 

    Trump’s “Riviera” proposal came as a surprise, apparently even to Netanyahu who stood next to him at the press conference. But it appears to have been a subject of discussion inside the Trump family for some time.

    At an event at Harvard university in February 2024, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, mused about the untapped value of the Gaza strip and its beautiful beaches. “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said. 

    He did not specify which people would do the building but his father-in-law appears to be determined that it would not be the people now living there. 

    Who, then? It’s one of many questions yet to be answered in the era of Trump 2.0.

    Questions to consider:

    • What is one problem Trump will have if he wants the United States to take over Gaza?

    • Why do many Palestinians take Trump’s threat of relocation seriously?

    • What makes the idea that people have the right to return to homes their ancestors were force out of complicated?

     

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  • Can regional leaders help bring peace to DR Congo?

    Can regional leaders help bring peace to DR Congo?

    Critics abroad and in Congo accuse DRC president Tshisekedi and his government of being distant, corrupt and ineffective and continually failing to meet promises or even talk to the rebels. 

    “I am exhausted with Tshisekedi’s governance,” said one Congolese citizen.

    There have been strong and repeated accusations by the United Nations and others that the M23, which is now part of the broader Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), receives both funding and tangible support from Rwanda and its army, that it has been responsible for excessive violence — including reports of rape in a Goma prison last week — and that it has benefited from the increasing control of lucrative mineral mines in the region.  

    A multinational push for peace

    The actual truth is much more complex, nuanced and difficult to distinguish, especially given the direct involvement of national army soldiers on the ground, not just from the DRC and Rwanda but from other countries, such as Burundi, South Africa and Tanzania. 

    There are also about 14,000 UN peacekeeping forces in the region, as well as more than 100 other militia groups and even mercenaries from Eastern Europe. Rwanda recently ensured the safe repatriation of 300 of them back to Romania.

    And then there are powerful political and business leaders in the United States, Europe, Russia and China who somewhat cynically want to ensure the continued supply of precious minerals — such as cobalt, coltan and tantalum — for their cars, cellphones and computers. 

    On a more personal level, I live with my Rwandan wife and young son in a newly-built house just south of Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, which lies only 150 kilometres away from the current conflict zone and which has been repeatedly threatened by DRC president Tshisekedi and leading government officials.

    Just last week, Rwanda’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, James Ngango, accused the DRC of amassing a stockpile of weapons — including rockets, kamikaze drones and heavy artillery guns — that are pointed straight at Rwanda.

    Fears that violence will cross borders

    My wife Merveille — whose father and three brothers may well have been murdered by some of the current FDLR militia fighters in eastern DRC — still has nightmares about them possibly attacking or even taking back Rwanda.

    A Rwanda security expert texted me that the threat to “attack Rwanda immediately” was real before the M23 rebels took over Goma and there are still concerns about large weapon stockpiles in South Kivu province. He added that if the M23 can now secure the regional capital of Bukavu and the nearby Kavumu airport “all security risks against Rwanda will be reduced/mitigated.”

    This will allay our personal concerns but we are still worried about the security of some close friends in Goma, who fell silent for five whole days after the M23 rebels took control of their city in late January but thankfully got back in contact right after power and WiFi service were restored.

    Daily life in Goma has returned to something like normal over the last week or so but the nighttime is different.

    One of our friends texted me on Tuesday: “Safety in Goma is degrading day in, day out. Getting armed looters at night. From this night alone we register more than seven deaths. A friend was visited as well. He let them in and his life was spared and his family. He said this morning that it was hard to determine their identity because they had no military uniforms but we all suspect they are they are the Wazalendo or prisoners who escaped from Munzenze prison. They come in to steal, rape and kill who ever shows resistance.”

    The Wazalendo — meaning “patriots” or “nationalists” — are a group of irregular fighters in North Kivu province, who are allied with the Congolese army and opposed to the M23.

    Our friend in Goma said that he still has enough security in his house but when asked about the potentially revitalised multilateral peace process, he said: “I am actually speechless right now, I don’t know what to think about all this. So much has happened.” 

    The weekend summit’s joint communiqué did call for an immediate end to the violence and for defense ministers to come up with concrete plans for sustainable peace measures, such as the resumption of “direct negotiations and dialogue with all state and non-state parties,” including the M23 that DRC president Tshisekedi has long tried to resist.

    Observers see this as a positive sign and there are renewed hopes — along with lingering doubts after so many earlier failed initiatives — that this unusual and timely degree of coordinated Africa-based action and support at the highest levels could mean that the fighting, killing and disruption may wane soon and a long-lasting, peaceful solution can be reached.

    In the words of the sadly-departed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the UK: “The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities, discovering a genesis of hope.”

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. Why is the situation in Eastern DRC so difficult to sort out?
    2. Think of a time when you, someone you knew or someone you respected used “direct negotiations and dialogue” to achieve a positive outcome to a challenging problem.
    3. What would you say or do if you were one of the regional African leaders trying to achieve a sustainable, non-violent solution to the Eastern DRC crisis?

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