Sunday, March 20, 2016

A run-away government and the president’s ‘Pirivena’ mandate

Sunday, March 20, 2016

There is more than a trace of Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the lofty disdain with which the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition leadership lectures to Sri Lankans on its inherited economic woes. One tale succeeds another, all equally stupendous and some patently deserving of ridicule.

Achieving monumental confusion

First we were told that recovering the Rajapaksa hidden loot would save the country from economic ruin. Instead months of procrastination followed with lapses in basic legal processes. One notable example last year was unsuccessfully attempting to move a foreign court to freeze the off-shore bank account of a Rajapaksa scion without first initiating a domestic legal inquiry into charges of money laundering.

Then the Budget was amended multiple times by a Government anxious to placate its various supportive lobbies, resulting in further economic strains. Next we were told of an investor who would proverbially appear like the savior-Prince and rescue the country from impending financial doom. Compounding this nonsense, the Government announced more than a year after the change of regime that the Rajapaksa debts were far higher than what was previously believed. True to form, the knee-jerk reaction was to declare a typically lazy quick-fix of higher taxation with minimum clarifications, leading to even more economic uncertainty and investor trepidation.

Is the ‘yahapalanaya’ (good governance) regime achieving all this monumental confusion solely by itself? If so, this is no mean feat in the most oxymoronic sense. Sri Lanka’s economic woes originated due to the monstrous financial profligacy of the Rajapaksas. That much is clear. But has not poor fiscal management since last year worsened this situation? The Central Bank bond scandal implicating this Government’s choice of Central Bank Governor still remains unresolved moreover.

Devilishly ill-timed move

Overall the lack of foresight and wisdom in government decision-making is truly startling, whether it concerns economic policy, agriculture policy or reconciliation and constitutional reforms. For instance, inflicting higher taxation on the people was announced just prior to the Parliament lavishly approving increased allowances for its (un)worthy members. At the very least, this was a devilishly ill-timed move.

The increases were occasioned by potential additional sittings on new fangled oversight committees and as part of a proposed Constitutional Assembly. ‘Yahapalanaya’ ideologues masquerading under trade union (and sundry other) hats are quick to justify this. But as the civic-minded ‘DecentLanka 2015′ observed in response, these are public duties which should not incur additional financial remuneration.

Meanwhile the Sirisena Presidency appears to have replaced its ‘people’s mandate’ to keep a watchful check on government with a ‘pirivena mandate.’ The President engages in almost daily perorations on good living even as he extravagantly declares a potential ban on a growing list of items, from cigarettes to alcohol. Certainly excessive drinking and smoking are irrepressibly bad habits. Yet this puritanical compulsion to act as the moral arbiter of the ‘common good’ is deplorable. We saw this earlier in Presidential outbursts threatening corporal punishment on organizers of the Enrique Iglesias concert.

There are other incongruities. The Ministry of Agriculture justifies an obscenely high rental for its premises and cuts fertilizer subsidies while engaging in a frantically publicized drive towards a toxin-free agriculture policy. The overall objective of this policy may be salutary. But the manner in which it is sought to be done lacks commonsense, to put it mildly.

Inability to deal with its own saboteurs

Above all, the high point of government idiocy was demonstrated over the electricity breakdown as some ruling politicians shouted sabotage. Reasons for the two transformer blasts in Biyagama and Kotugoda which led to the worse power outage in decades may be a tad more pedestrian, given that engineers had been hopelessly warning of shortcomings in Sri Lanka’s electricity system a while ago. Regardless, the President called out the army to protect sub-stations of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB). So were saboteurs expected to come with weapons to attack? The second explosion of the Kotugoda transformer took place despite army protections. So what does that tell us exactly?

The very meaning of sabotage is stealth. But this political leadership appears to be extraordinarily incapable of dealing with saboteurs artfully disguised as ‘yahapalanaya’ advocates in its own ranks. Or was this all a choreographed padding over of the ineptitude of its Ministers? Whatever it may be, the Prime Minister’s way of dealing with challenges is apparently to threaten. Initially the media and the doctors were alleged to be siding with the Rajapaksas. Now the engineers will probably be accused of trying to torpedo the Government. This is classic McCarthyism exemplifying the leveling of allegations of subversion without actual proof. Where will this all end?

And it seems as if Sri Lanka cannot now do anything without ‘foreign assistance,’ from constitutional reforms to reconciliation, with even further expenditure of public funds. Proceeding apiece from comedy to farce, we were informed on Saturday by the easily flustered Deputy Minister of Power and Energy that investigating the two ‘suspicious’ transformer blasts will be done with ‘foreign assistance.’ Why do we not hand over the leadership of this country, lock, stock and smoking barrel to ‘foreign’ expertise? Incoherence is made worse by pompous ignorance on the part of these worthies.

Avoiding being backed into a corner

Indeed, this seems to be a run-away Government driven by a small coterie of power brokers jostling in Colombo whose collective arrogance is only exceeded by a profound inability to reach out to the people. The alarmingly surging crowds at the Mahinda Rajapaksa led Hyde Park meeting this week listening enthralled to the same old chauvinistic and racist rhetoric was a direct result of the criminal irresponsibility of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition in frittering away its good governance mandate. It is simply not enough to boast, as the President did this week, that such opposition meetings are only possible due to ‘yahapalanaya’ liberality.

The Prime Minister has said that before long, his detractors will also join them. But absent general course correction in political leadership, that is a wish only for the wittingly credulous. Increased rumblings of public anger hold out ominous warnings. If this Government finds itself backed into a corner sooner or later, this will be emphatically due to its own fault, apart from Rajapaksa saboteurs.

Time will prove this. But by then, it may be too late for this country and its people.

Neither whys nor wherefores, let alone solutions, as government lurches from crisis to crisis

by Rajan Philips-March 21, 2016, 12:05 am

To paraphrase the poet (Coleridge), it is crisis, crisis everywhere, but no robust government response anywhere. The economy is in deep trouble and no one is trying to exaggerate the challenges or the consequences of failure. The power system has failed and the consequences have been felt everywhere and more than once or twice. Whether the causes of these crises are current or inherited is immaterial. The people are reasonable enough not to expect instant solutions, but they can see through bluff, bluster and incompetence on the part of any government, old or new, corrupt or conning. The current economic troubles are mostly inherited from the previous government. And the electrical troubles go back even farther. But the political and administrative troubles are mostly manufactured by the present government. The deficit between good governance promises and actual practices is worse than the budget deficit. The confusion in government ranks is confusing everyone else. There is an Executive President and an Executive Prime Minister. Together they made a cabinet that broke the rule for size that they stipulated in the much vaunted 18th Amendment. The size of the cabinet doesn’t matter when all it has are Jokers and no Aces. The Prime Minister has virtually become the Man for all Ministries in the cabinet and the government. Every file goes to him for decision and statement as the government lurches from one crisis file to another.

Sri Lanka joins the blackout club

There have been three island-wide blackouts in six months, each lasting several hours. The restoration of power supply has been intermittent and not uninterrupted. The total collapse has brought industries to a halt and threatened the treatment of drinking water in Colombo. Even the standby generator in the President’s office wouldn’t start and Mr. Sirisena had to leave work early. Apparently, the President was not amused. We do not know what Secretary General U Thant was thinking when he walked down, with a candle in hand, from the top floor of the UN building during the Manhattan power failure in 1971. On the bright side, the urban darkness facilitated a baby boom in a few of New York’s boroughs. Sri Lanka is not the first place to suffer a major blackout, but it is now at the bottom of a list of thirteen significant national or regional power failures in the last fifty years. The twelve failures before Sri Lanka’s, affected larger populations ranging from 30 million (US/Canada Northeast blackout in 1965) to 620 million (in India in 2012). Ten of these blackouts have been in this century, and Sri Lanka is now the fourth South Asian country to suffer a major power failure, joining India (2012 and 2001), Bangladesh (2014) and Pakistan (2015).

German specialists to assist probe into

transformer explosions

March 20, 2016
German specialists are expected to arrive in the country tomorrow (21) to look into the recent explosions in several transformers belonging to the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB).

Sulakshana Jayawardana, Director (Development) at the Ministry of Power and Renewable Energy, stated that two specialists from the company that manufactured the transformers will arrive in Sri Lanka.

An explosion had occurred in one of the transformers at the Biayagama substation last Sunday while a similar explosion occurred at the CEB grid substation in Kotugoda on Friday.

He stated that the German specialists would visit the two locations and examine the transformers in question.

Electricity breakdown is not sabotage

Mar 20, 2016

Trade union leaders said the electricity breakdown encountered last Sunday was not due to a sabotage act but a result of technical failure.

Electricity Board Technical Specialist Union chairman Lalith Janakan told BBC the reason which took so many hours to provide electricity is due to a conflict between the old administration in the electricity board and the electricity board workers.

When BBC inquired wasn’t there any pre-preparation when such a situation arises, he said surely there are security measures prevailing.

He said “there is a question whether those security measures were duly implemented? Were the people in charge allowed to continue the situation?”

Supplying electricity is a team work of many sections. The old administration increased the wages of the engineers giving a special consideration which resulted the other staffs to mentally fall, said the chairman.

“Different workers have specific responsibilities and precise duties and all of them are specialists in their field”

However it is doubtful whether the non engineer technical staff who were mentally deprived over the previous administration was fully committed to reinstate the electricity breakdown, said the chairman of the Technical Specialist Union.

The trade union leader said if all the workers would have acted with a collective coordination the breakdown would have been reconnected.

“The supply chain of the electricity board is similar to a chain connected. The error was found in a transformer carrying 234,000 KW line from Kothmale” he said

When the error impacted the Norochcholai power station and when a large supply of electricity was removed at once, all power stations around the country came to a standstill.

Chairman Lalith Janakanth said following the electricity breakdown the electricity supply still have not restored properly.

Govt. to revive diesel power plants

2016-03-20

The government is planning to revive diesel power plants which were shut down last year after the Norochcholai Coal Power Plant started generating power to the national grid.

According to the Power and Renewable Energy Ministry sources, around 300 diesel power plants in several areas, including Embilipitiya, Puttalam, Matara and Horana were shut down last year.

The ministry Secretary Suren Batagoda said the decision was taken following the lack of hydro power generation due to continuous dry weather.

“We shut down all the expensive diesel power plants after the Norochcholai Coal Power Plant started adding 900 MW to the national power grid. We were contemplating on what we could do in case of a lack of power production. The private companies-owned diesel power plants are the solution we chose,” he said.

The Ministry had informed the private companies to gear up diesel power generating capacity. (Piyumi Fonseka)

I'm not afraid of drunkards who shout slogans beating their chests – Maithri responds to Mahinda

SUNDAY, 20 MARCH 2016

The conspirators would not be allowed to topple the government for the next five years and he would not be afraid of drunkards who shout slogans beating their chests at junctions says President Maithripala Sirisena.

He said this at the Convention of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress held at Kalmunai yesterday (19th). President Sirisena was responding to a statement made by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa at the rally of the joint opposition held at Hyde Park recently where Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa said if Mr. Sirisena couldn't rule the country he could show Mr. Sirisena how to do it.

"I saw some had told in Colombo that the government should be handed over to him to build a new government. He tells this while bating his chest. We have seen how these people who bet their chests ruled the country. IRC's and drunkards also come to junctions to beat their chests and utter various things. We do not care for those who beat their chests and shout slogans," said President Maithripala Sirisena.

‘If I’m not given premiership, I will end Maithri’s presidency too’ – Mahinda

Mar 20, 2016

Following the joint opposition’s rally at Hyde Park in Colombo on the 17th, president Maithripala Sirisena sent a team of his loyalists to meet with Elle Gunawansa Thera, say reliable sources. Speaking to the Thera via a mobile phone of one of them, the president had a lengthy review of the prevailing political situation and said in the end, “had Mahinda Rajapaksa given me the premiership, he would still have been the president.”

Immediately, Gunawansa Thera telephoned Mahinda and related to him everything he was told by the president. Through speaker phone, the Thera allowed all to hear what Mahinda said in response.

“I do not want any deal with Maithri after he sent my boy inside on false cases and tormented me. My last deal is premiership. If I am given than, I can form an entirely SLFP government. I will support it. If I am not given the premiership, I will end his presidency too.”

The team of loyalists of the president has told the Thera that the president would never agree to give premiership to Mahinda. As an alternative, either Chamal or Gotabhaya could be given a top position in the government or the SLFP, they said. The team of loyalists of the president left with the intention of having yet another discussion with the Thera later.

Alice Was There But Where The Heck Was Daham?

March 20, 2016

Everyone at the grounds and especially those around the stage at the Royal/Thomian Mustangs Trophy awards ceremony at the R.Premadasa Stadium last night was wondering why Daham Sirisena was not on stage this time around.

“Where the fuck is Daham today?” asked a disgruntled group of old boys who were waiting to jump on stage if Daham was to breach protocol and security like he did at last week’s big match awards ceremony.

Many distinguished old boys had requested that an inquiry be held as to why the Royal / Thomian big match joint organizing committee failed to prevent Daham from getting on to the stage and also permitting him to remain there during the entire awards distribution Colombo Telegraph reliably learns.

At the conclusion of last week’s big match,the awards ceremony and theRoyal College victory celebrations was marred when President Mathripala Sirisena’s son Daham breached security and all norms of protocol when he jumped on stage initially to shake the hand of the chief guest Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

He then forcibly stood next to the premier on his left hand side until Zulki Hamid a Royal College joint committee member took him to the far right hand side of the stage and asked him to get off.

Since the brat Daham refused to get off saying he was the son of President, Hamid permitted him to stay at the far right corner of the stage away from the Prime Minister and trophy distribution. This is clearly visible in the video when another joint committee member blocks Daham’s view shunning him away from the limelight.

“We did not know who he was. There was this fellow who jumped on stage and approached our chief guest the Prime Minister. We were also wondering who he was as he was scruffily dressed in a Royal College coloured t-shirt. His shoes was also dirty and he looked as if he needed a hair cut badly. I was more concerned about the Prime Minister’s safety more than anything else” a joint committee member said when contacted by Colombo Telegraph.

by Kumar David-March 19, 2016, 3:00 pm

Robert Bolt’s Man for All Seasons is a gloomy play focussed on intrigue and the three Thomases (Cromwell, More and the fading Wolsey) entanglements leading to the imprisonment and execution of scholar-statesman Thomas More. Bolt depicts England’s parting of ways with the Roman Church in the conventional way, a consequence of Henry VIII’s excessive concupiscence, but in truth more fundamental was the rise of the mercantile classes, financial dependence of the monarchy and pressure for economic restructuring and seizure and sale of monastic lands. The Act of Supremacy symbolised England’s independence; it did not certify the warmth of Anne Boleyn’s bosom.

The eponymous film with Paul Schofield in the lead was tilted towards depiction of More as scholar, public figure (he was Chancellor after Wolsey was fired) and man of many talents, a ‘man for all seasons’. Prof Carlo Fonseka’s immersion in rationalism, involvement in science and philosophy of science, dabbling in politics, hostility to tobacco - jaundiced eye on single-malt notwithstanding - earns his collection of pleasantly panoptic essays, mutatis mutandis, a similar cachet.

Essays of a Lifetime published in hardback by S. Godage & Brothers (Pvt) Ltd in 2016, is all of 368 pages. The 34 essays are arranged in ten sections ranging over Medicine, Science, Philosophy, Religion, Economics, Politics, Education, Arts, Biography and Travel; throw in technology, sports, a few others and one could have called it encyclopaedic! Some substantial discourses, some anecdotal, none are not a good read. I will focus on a selection that I found striking or interesting.

A measure of the man

The opening essay (‘To Err was Fatal’) recounts five cases where Prof Carlo says he erred but should not have, that ended in patient fatality. Few have the strength for such brutal honesty; failure to take a symptom seriously, allowing an insistent patient to take a course of action that he (Carlo) should have more forcefully prohibited, a too perfunctory examination, failure to see how seriously depressed a patient was, and persuading another to undergo a surgical procedure that he, the patient, was much opposed to. A friend who read and commented on the chapter was generous: "You can’t never make a mistake; think of the thousands of lives this doctor must have served or saved".

Gaza woes force educated to leave

Palestinians await permission to enter Egypt at the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza on 13 February.

Abed Rahim KhatibAPA images

Mousa Tawfiq-18 March 2016

When Egypt opened the Rafah crossing in February for three days, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza applied to leave.

Among them were 29-year-old Rani Humeid.

“I’m leaving Gaza to find the future that I dream of,” said Humeid as he was waiting in a makeshift departure hall at the crossing.

Humeid earned a master’s degree in media and public relations in Malaysia in 2012, and he continued studying when he returned.

“I received a research grant from the Media Development Center of Birzeit University in Gaza,” said Humeid.

But the young scholar also needed to earn money. He worked, he said, as a part-time lecturer at both Al-Aqsaand Palestine universities in Gaza and took on a job as a program coordinator at the Palestinian Association for Education and Environmental Protection.

“I’ve done a lot during the last three years in Gaza but I’m sure I would have accomplished more if I had been abroad,” he said. “Life here is difficult. I lost a lot of opportunities because of the closed crossings.”

Brain drain

After nearly 10 years of suffocating siege, the Gaza Strip’s economy lies in tatters.

The 43 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the world, according to the World Bank, and youth unemployment has soared above 60 percent.

In such a climate, it is not surprising that Gaza’s brighter and better educated, like Humeid, seek their futures elsewhere.

Humeid is now going the US where he hopes to finish his PhD.

“I am going to find opportunities and improve my academic capacity,” he said.

He is not alone.

Travel from Gaza is entirely contingent on the political situation. There are only two exits. Travel north, through the Erez checkpoint and into Israel or on to the West Bank, is only allowed for some aid workers with international organizations, patients in need of critical care, those with special permits granted by the Israeli military, almost impossible to obtain, or a few merchants with business in Israel.

South, to Egypt, the way is mostly barred. Before Cairo opened the Rafah crossing from 13 to 15 February, and since October 2014, the crossing had been open a mere 39 days.

Full Story>>>

Ethiopian Israelis protest after immigration plan axed

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the issue will be part of budget discussions (AFP)

AFP-Sunday 20 March 2016

Hundreds of Ethiopian Israelis marched in Jerusalem on Sunday after the government canceled plans to allow their relatives to emigrate from the African nation, calling the move discrimination.

The Israeli government had in November voted to allow the immigration of some 9,100 Ethiopians known as Falash Mura, descendants of Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity, many under duress, in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But on 7 March, a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office informed members of parliament the decision would not be implemented because of budgetary constraints.

Israel brought the bulk of Ethiopia's Jewish community to the country between 1984 and 1991 under the Law of Return, guaranteeing citizenship to all Jews, but the law does not apply to

the Falash Mura. Israel's Ethiopian community includes about 135,000 people.

Police and organisers estimated the crowd at up to 2,000 people for Sunday's march, which ended outside Netanyahu's office.

"Stop the suffering, stop the discrimination, stop the racism," demonstrators chanted, holding signs bearing similar slogans as well as pictures of relatives left behind in Ethiopia.

"Our children, our parents are in Ethiopia," they chanted, marching alongside elderly residents wearing more traditional garb, some leaning on canes.

Antaihe Cheol, a 30-year-old resident of northern Israel, said his father and brother have been waiting to immigrate for 20 years.

"This is simply discrimination," he said.

His friend Ashebo noted that the government actively encourages immigration of Jews from France, the United States and Russia.

"When it comes to Jews from Ethiopia -- everyone refuses," he said. "It's embarrassing."

Netanyahu's office said it was working on bringing to Israel "elderly, solitary and dependent Falash Mura to ease their condition".

But "the latest amendment to the budget law does not enable the government to take upon itself significant budgetary commitments to upcoming years, without regulating fiscal sources", the statement read.

The issue will be discussed in the coming months as part of the budget discussions, the premier's office said.

Netanyahu's office considers reuniting Falash Mura families an issue "of humane and social importance".

Leading the demonstration was MP Avraham Neguise, himself an immigrant from Ethiopia and a member of Netanyahu's Likud party.

Along with MP David Amsalem, Neguise has boycotted all parliamentary votes since being told the government was walking back its November decision, and reiterated on Sunday he would continue doing so until the decree was reversed.

Netanyahu's coalition holds only a one-seat majority in parliament.

Revital Swid, a lawmaker from the opposition Zionist Union, also accused the government of racial discrimination.

"Would the government tell even one Jew from Russia, or Europe, or America who had family in Israel, we don't have the money to bring you here?" she asked ahead of the march.

Previous demonstrations by the Ethiopian community against alleged discrimination have led to violence, but Sunday's march was calm.

At least 13 university students die in Spanish coach crash

Coach carrying students of 19 nationalities collides with car in motorway accident near Tarragona

Stephen Burgen in Barcelona and Nicola Slawson in London-Sunday 20 March 2016

At least 13 university exchange students, all of them women, have died in a motorway coach crash near Tarragona in north-east Spain.

Jordi Jané, the Catalan interior minister, said the victims of the crash early on Sunday morning were aged between 22 and 29 and that the majority were Erasmus students of various nationalities, adding authorities were trying to draw up a list of the victims.

Jané confirmed that 13 of 63 people involved in the accident were dead, and that 30 had been injured. Three were said to be in critical condition.

British students were on the coach, but it is not known if they are among the dead or injured.

Emergency services confirmed that the students on the coach represented 19 nationalities: France, the Netherlands, Finland, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, the UK, Italy, Peru, Bulgaria, Poland, Ireland, Palestine, Japan and Ukraine. They could not confirm the nationalities of the dead.

Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s president, said identification was difficult because the coach was one in a group of five returning to Barcelona after celebrating the Fallas festivities in Valencia, and there were no passenger lists of who was on which coach. He has declared two days of mourning.

At around 6am on Sunday, the driver lost control near Amposta, Tarragona. The vehicle crossed the central reservation and collided with an oncoming car.

The coach driver was among the survivors and tested negative for drugs and alcohol. He has driven for the company that chartered the bus for 17 years and had never had an accident.

The son of the owner of the company that chartered the bus told Spain’s national radio station RNE that his father was driving another bus in front of the one that crashed.

“All of a sudden, he stopped seeing it in his rear-view mirror,” said the son, named only as Raul. “He stopped at the next service area, called the driver but he didn’t pick up.”

He said his father asked passengers in his bus to call those in the other vehicle and that is when he got news of the accident. “The driver is in a state of shock, but he’s OK physically,” he added.

The occupants of the other coaches in the party were unaware of the accident until they arrived in Barcelona.

Dídac Ramírez, the rector of the University of Barcelona, travelled to the scene to help identify the victims, some of whom were not carrying identity documents. He said it was likely that most of the students were at his university, one of four involved in organising the trip.

The stretch of motorway where the incident occurred is notorious. Núria Ventura, the mayor of nearby Ulldecona, said: “This is an accident black spot. There have been numerous accidents here,” while Jané added: “Everything points to human error being the cause of the accident, though it’s too early to say. There’s no reason to think there was a problem with the road itself.”

The Erasmus programme provides foreign exchange courses for students from countries within the 28-nation European Union. Around 3 million students have taken part in the study abroad scheme since its inception, and Spain is one of the most popular destinations.

The University of Barcelona offered its condolences to the victims’ families in a statement released via Twitter: “The #UniBarcelona sends its condolences to the families and relatives of the victims of today’s bus accident. We remain at your disposal for any further needs.”

Flags at the university were reportedly being flown at half-mast as a sign of respect towards the dead.

Erasmus Student Network Barcelona, an organisation representing Erasmus students throughout the city, confirmed the trip had been organised by them and that volunteers from their organisation were also on the coach.

The trip, which cost €20, had set off for Valencia on Saturday morning and participants were told to expect “the best show of fireworks, smoke and noise you’ve ever seen” throughout the day and evening. A slogan on the website reads: “Study hard, party harder.”

It was suggested in the publicity for the trip that the journey home could be spent sleeping, as the meet-up time for the return journey was 3:30am. The estimated arrival time in Barcelona had been 8am.

A statement said: “ESN Barcelona would like to convey our condolences and join the pain of the families, friends and relatives of the victims. We feel the deep loss. In the same way, we would like to express our sincere willingness to be as helpful as possible with the family, friends or institutions.”

The accident is one of the deadliest in Spain in recent years. In November 2014, a bus carrying pilgrims fell into a ravine in the south-east, leaving 14 dead and another 41 injured.

Puigdemont was due to travel to Paris on Sunday but cancelled the trip to go to the site of the accident. He will lead five-minutes’ silence on Monday in memory of the students at the University of Barcelona, accompanied by the city’s mayor, Ada Colau.

Joining in mourning for the tragedy, players for Barcelona and Villarreal – which is only around 100 kilometres from the crash site – observed a moment of silence before kick-off, as will those from the Real Madrid and Sevilla later on Sunday.

The emergency hotline for those seeking information is +34 900400012 from abroad or 900400012 from within Spain.

Rights Groups: U.S. Is Whitewashing the Kunduz Massacre

American troops were responsible for one of the worst tragedies of the Afghan war. The Pentagon has chosen to give them only a slap on the wrist.

BY DAN DE LUCE, PAUL MCLEARY-MARCH 17, 2016

Human rights advocates denounced the U.S. military’s decision not to file criminal charges against troops responsible for a disastrous airstrike on a Doctor Without Borders hospital last year, calling it an outrage that could inflict lasting damage to America’s credibility and raise questions about Washington’s commitment to humanitarian law.

U.S. Defense Department officials said Thursday that more than 12 service members involved in the airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, which left 42 people dead and dozens more wounded, will face various disciplinary measures for their roles in the raid, including administrative penalties that will effectively end some of their military careers. The officer who led a U.S. commando unit on the ground is among those being reprimanded, officials told Foreign Policy.

But none of the troops are due to face a court martial for their actions, even though Doctors Without Borders and other rights groups said their negligence led to the wrong target being bombed from the air by an American gunship — a mistake, they say, that constitutes a potential war crime.

“It’s incredibly disappointing and discouraging,” Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch told FP. “We have come up with our own analysis of the case, and we think there should be a criminal investigation.”
The outcome of the Pentagon’s inquiry into the air raid showed that when it comes to grave and complicated incidents in battle that are not easily pinned on one rogue soldier, the American military “has a vested interest in protecting its own,” Prasow said.

In the Oct. 3 strike, an AC-130 gunship was scrambled from the sprawling Bagram Air Base at the request of a team of U.S. special operations forces in the northern city of Kunduz, which had been overrun by Taliban militants. The aircraft, equipped with heavy machine guns on the left side of its fuselage, pounded the hospital intermittently for an hour, killing 42 people, including 14 medical staff. Doctors Without Borders, the Geneva-based medical charity that also goes by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, had provided its coordinates to the U.S. military and, once the attack started, placed desperate phone calls to the Pentagon and U.S. officers in Afghanistan to halt the raid.

The president of Doctors Without Borders, Joanne Liu, has demanded an international inquiry of the strike. In a speech days after the incident, Liu said the strike “was not just an attack on our hospital — it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions.”

Sandra Murillo, a spokeswoman for the group, said Thursday that Doctors Without Borders would not comment on the disciplinary actions until the Pentagon officially conveyed its decision to the organization or made a public announcement.

The Defense Department, for its part, has insisted that the U.S. military goes to great lengths to avoid causing civilian casualties and rejected allegations from Doctors Without Borders that the strike represents a possible war crime.

“No nation does more than the United States to avoid civilian casualties, but in this case we failed to live up to that standard,” U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. Patrick Ryder said Thursday. “We have learned from this terrible incident and will take the steps necessary to prevent a recurrence in the future.”

But legal experts and rights activists say that recklessness can be prosecuted under the law of armed conflict through a well-established principle dating back decades. That means U.S. personnel would, in theory, be culpable even though no critic is arguing that they were trying intentionally to attack the hospital.

“Not all war crimes are odious or inhuman acts,” wrote Gary Solis, a retired Marine who teaches at Georgetown University’s law school, in his 2010textbook, The Law of Armed Conflict. “Recklessness, as well as intent, is a sufficient prosecutorial basis.”

In a January letter to President Barack Obama, Physicians for Human Rights called on the U.S. government to release promptly the military’s internal probe and launch a formal inquiry into possible criminal liability of the troops and commanders involved in the air raid in Kunduz.

“On the face of it, there is every indication that these attacks were the result of gross negligence and possibly criminal negligence,” Susannah Sirkin, a senior advisor for the New York-based group, told FP. “So it would be of concern if there is only an administrative response to this and not an inquiry that would lead to court martial.”

The disciplinary moves against the U.S. troops were telegraphed last November when the military command in Kabul announced that a number of service members had been suspended from their duties. On Nov. 25, Gen. John Campbell, then-commander of American-led forces in Afghanistan, released a portion of the 3,000-page report into the incident that was submitted to U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command, saying that the strike was “a tragic, but avoidable, accident caused primarily by human error.”

For some troops implicated in the bungled airstrike, Campbell has recommended that Special Operations Command decide on the proper disciplinary action to be taken, officials said.

Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly demanded that the U.S. military appoint an international, independent panel to investigate the Oct. 3 incident. But, instead, the Pentagon named Maj. Gen. William Hickman, the deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Central based in Kuwait, to conduct the probe. The military’s rationale was that Hickman could conduct an unbiased review because he was not involved in operations in Afghanistan.

U.S. officers have said members of the crew of the AC-130 gunship failed to follow the military’s own rules of engagement in launching the attack. The personnel aboard the warplane were among those suspended from their duties. Members of the U.S. special operations team on the ground in Kunduz were also a focus of the investigation. After several days of combat with Taliban fighters in the city, the team had taken up positions several hundred meters away from the hospital, according to the military’s probe.

At the time of the strike, the commandos did not have the building within their line of sight. That lack of visibility led the gunship to strike the wrong building, and the commandos on the ground didn’t know enough to call them off.

Military investigators found that the mistakes began even before the AC-130 left the ground. The gunship crew rushed to get in the air after they were given a report of U.S. troops in a clash with the Taliban and launched without being briefed on the “no-strike list,” which would have given them the coordinates of the hospital. Adding to that were technical failures, so the plane’s crew relied almost entirely on a physical description of the building, as opposed to grid coordinates, which led them to attack the wrong building.

Personnel at Bagram Air Base also failed that night, not realizing that the grid location the aircrew transmitted back before opening fire showed they were about to fire on the hospital, which was marked on the no-strike list. The soldiers continued to fire on the hospital even when the aircraft’s grid location system came back on and indicated that they were firing on the wrong building. The aircrew relied instead on the verbal description relayed by the American forces on the ground.

Humanitarian and rights groups say that medical clinics and health professionals face a growing danger given a pattern of attacks — both intentional and indiscriminate — in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Given that backdrop, the United States has a particular duty to be seen as living up to humanitarian law and holding its troops accountable for the Kunduz strike, rights advocates said.

In Syria’s civil war, regime forces have invaded and attacked hospitals, blocked medical transport, and detained and tortured doctors for treating wounded civilians. In 2015 alone, there were 122 attacks on medical facilities, with the vast majority carried out by Syrian government troops or their allies, according to a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights.

In the wake of Kunduz and other airstrikes on Doctor Without Borders hospitals across Syria and in Yemen, some aid workers have started to rethink the policy of providing their locations to military forces. But it might not always make a difference. In February, one Doctor Without Borders-supported hospital in Syria refused to share its coordinates with government authorities but was hit by four missiles fired from a Syrian or Russian jet anyway. At least 25 people — including nine staff members and one child — were killed. The strike underscored the violence being visited on medical workers in conflict zones around the world, with attacks against hospitals and clinics from Afghanistan to South Sudan becoming increasingly common, killing hundreds and shutting down numerous medical facilities in places that need them the most.

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