Belgium’s big problem with radical Islam

A copy of a Koran inside the An-Nasr Mosque on Jan. 13, 2014, in Vilvoorde, Belgium. (Virginie Nguyen Hoang for The Washington Post)

By Ishaan Tharoor-March 22

Even before bombings killed dozens in Brussels on Tuesday, Belgium was in the spotlight for the wrong reasons.

The trail from an Islamic State attack in Paris last year led to the Belgian capital. The suspected mastermind of the massacres then was a Belgian national. Numerous reporters beat Brussels's streets; many invariably pennedlong pieces about the woes of Molenbeek, the Brussels municipality that appeared to be ground zero for Islamist radicalization in the country.

[Brussels attacks pit Obama’s foreign policy instincts against political pressures]

That focus appears to be tragically warranted. Authorities have now suggestedthat Salah Abdeslam — the only surviving Paris assailant, who was seized by authorities last week — may have possibly had a hand in Tuesday's bombings. The attacks, my colleagues report, are being described as the worst on Belgian soil since World War II.

“What we had feared has happened,” Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michelsaid. “This is a black moment for our country.”

"We can say that there's a high level of threat throughout Europe," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told television station France 2. "We have been hit, today it's the Belgians, and other capitals could be" attacked, too.

A statement publicized by a website linked to the Islamic State hailed "the soldiers of the caliphate" who carried out the attacks on the main airport in Brussels — the de facto capital of the European Union — and the metro. It also warned "the crusader state" of Belgium and its like-minded allies of "dark days ahead." According to one count, the Islamic State has killed more than 1,200 people outside Iraq and Syria — where the group controls large swaths of territory — since 2014.

[Why is Brussels under attack?]

Of all the countries in the West, Belgium has produced the greatest number of foreign jihadists per capita who are fighting in Syria. The actual figure, according to researchers, is variously estimated at 470 to 553. Roughly a third of those who left to fight in Iraq and Syria have returned; many have not faced prosecution, with authorities struggling to prove that the fighters joined violent organizations such as the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

According to an analysis by the Royal Institute for International Relations, or Egmont, a Brussels-based think tank, the majority of Belgian jihadists are young (ages 20 to 24), have lower-than-average education levels and are mostly of Moroccan heritage.

The prevalence of Islamist extremism in Belgium predates the incidents of the past year, as well as the advent of the Islamic State. And this is not the first time an Islamic State proxy has struck on Belgian soil: In May 2014, a gun-wielding French national who had spent time in Syria killed four people in the Jewish Museum of Brussels.

The root causes of radicalization are largely familiar: high unemployment, marginalization, discrimination and a sense of alienation from the wider society.

BuzzFeed's Joshua Hersh spent time in Molenbeek and came away with this picture of a downtrodden, disgruntled community:

Unlike the infamous banlieues of Paris — the rundown high-rise suburbs that symbolize France’s failure to integrate its own Muslim immigrant residents — Molenbeek is practically in the middle of Brussels; it’s just two metro stops west of the central train station. Still, Molenbeek can feel deeply isolated. The immigrants of Brussels, most of them Muslim and of North African descent, are highly concentrated there — the schools they attend, shunned by white Belgian families, are disparaginglyreferred to as “concentration schools,” after the high percentage of immigrants enrolled, and the poor conditions. “I didn’t believe it was this bad when I first started,” said a teacher who works at a mostly immigrant school near Molenbeek. “The schools, all they do is accentuate the problems the students face in their daily lives.”

Moreover, as my colleague Michael Birnbaum reported, Belgium's pronounced linguistic divisions between Dutch-speaking Flanders, the largely French-speaking city of Brussels and the region of Wallonia to the south have made it difficult for some immigrant groups to assimilate. This is particularly true of those living in Flanders, where far-right Flemish nationalist parties hold real sway and inveigh against the dangers of Islam.

“The Islamic State is giving them what the Belgian government can’t give them — identity, structure,” Montasser AlDe’emeh of the University of Antwerp told Birnbaum. “They don’t feel Moroccan or Belgian. They don’t feel part of either society.”

According to the Egmont report, the current crop of Belgian extremists are significantly younger than earlier generations, which went off to join the ranks of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups. That radicalization is driven less by religious fervor than by more local factors, and it is shaped also by ties to gangs and other criminal activity:

Their acquaintance with religious thought is undoubtedly more shallow and superficial than their predecessors’, as is their acquaintance with international politics. Geopolitics is less important to them than it once was to their predecessors, who felt motivated by the struggle against the superpowers. Injustice was often a starting point with their predecessors’ journey towards extremism and terrorism. This has now largely been overshadowed by personal estrangement and motives as the primary engines of their journey

The report goes on to cite a top Belgian police official, who said the country in the past had been "mostly dealing with ‘radical Islamists’ — individuals radicalized toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam — but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as ‘Islamized radicals.’"

At a security conference this weekend, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders had emphasized the "many links between the so-called terrorist and the criminals," suggesting militants, such as Abdeslam, exploited the same infrastructure used by local gangs and syndicates.

The nihilistic allure of the Islamic State, combined with its sophisticated recruitment networks as well as communities of support elsewhere, led to a period when upwards of a dozen Belgian nationals a month were leaving the country to journey to Syria. That rate of recruitment has dwindled after government crackdowns, but top officials, including the prime minister, have acknowledged that the situation has slipped out of control.

No one is entirely sure of the number of potential jihadists who have returned from the front lines in Syria and Iraq. "Recruitment continues — at a much lower level than we were used to, for example, two years ago — but, yes, it continues," Belgian Interior Minister Jan Jambon told CNN, gesturing to the ease with which militants can operate online. "It is difficult to find the people that are [responsible] — you can do it in a small room in every house."

The difficulty of the challenge mirrors the complexity of its causes. The Islamic State's plots in Europe have largely hit soft targets, a sign of the group's willingness to sow terror wherever it can. Yet heavy-handed policing methods risk antagonizing and stigmatizing a whole community, and deepening radicalization.

The Egmont report urges local authorities to clamp down on departures to Syria, invest in better community policing and separate "the discussion on Islam in Europe from deradicalization initiatives."

Europe "has created the conditions for the resentment that drives the terrorists, but the vast majority of people in those conditions do not resort to terrorism," said Cas Mudde, an associate professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. "But it also doesn’t mean that simply destroying foreign terrorist threats like ISIS would get rid of the ‘Jihadi threat’ in Europe."
Read more:
Brussels on high terror alert after explosions at airport and metro station

Why is tiny Belgium Europe’s jihad-recruiting hub?

A decade ago, she warned of radical Islam in Belgium’s Molenbeek

 

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Belgian police hunt Brussels bomb suspect

Federal police issue a photograph of a man wanted over today's bomb attacks in the Belgian capital, which killed dozens of people.

Airport blasts

22 MARCH 2016
More than 30 people are believed to have died and more than 100 were wounded when bombs went off in the city's airport, followed by a blast at a metro station.

Hundreds of passengers were trying to check in at Zaventem airport at around 8am when two explosions went off in the departure hall.

Another explosion struck the Maelbeek station in the city, close to EU buildings. Pictures appeared to show the aftermath of a bomb detonating on a train carriage at the station.

Belgian federal police released a CCTV still of a man suspected of involvement.

The suspect was dressed in a white shirt and jacket and wearing a dark hat, and was pictured along with two other men as they pushed luggage trolleys through the airport.

Prosecutor Eric van der Sypt said two bombers had died at Brussels airport and a third is being "actively" sought.

Belgian broadcasters RTL and RTBF reported that anti-terrorist police were carrying out searches in the Brussels districts of Schaerbeek and Jette.

Read more: Timeline: how terror came to Brussels

'Islamic state' claims responsibility

The attacks came just days after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, a Belgian man wanted over the deadly Paris attacks in November

The so-called Islamic State (IS) issued a statement claiming it had organised the attacks in revenge for Belgium joining the coalition that has been targeting its forces with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.

The statement said: "A small group of Caliphate soldiers targeted the crusader country of Belgium which has been fighting Islam and its own people.

It went on: "A couple of caliphate soldiers equipped with suicide belts and carrying bombs and machine guns targeted very well chosen positions in Brussels, the capital of Belgium.

"They carried out their attacks inside Brussels airport and metro station, killing a number of the crusaders, before they martyred themselves by blowing up their suicide belts."

Read More

U.S. commander apologises for hospital bombing in Afghanistan

A member of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) looks inside a damaged building at the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan October 16, 2015.REUTERS/STRINGER

BY FEROZ SULTANI-Tue Mar 22, 2016

The new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan apologised on Tuesday for the American bombing of a hospital last year that killed 42 people and wounded 37 more.

General John W. Nicholson met family members of victims and the staff of the now-closed Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, which was captured by Taliban insurgents for several days last year, to express his condolences.

"As commander, I wanted to come to Kunduz personally and stand before the families, and people of Kunduz, to deeply apologise for the events" that led to the bombing, Nicholson said.

"I grieve with you for your loss and suffering; and humbly and respectfully ask for your forgiveness," added Nicholson.

A U.S. investigation found that the Oct. 3 air strike was a "tragic and avoidable" incident, primarily caused by human error. The U.S. military has disciplined more than a dozen personnel, including officers following the strike.

MSF, known as Doctors Without Borders in English, has in the past publicly cast doubt on the idea that the strike could have been a mistake.

The brief capture of the Kunduz provincial capital was arguably the biggest victory for the Taliban militants in the 15-year war since they were toppled by U.S.-led forces in late 2001.

Afghan security forces, who suffered a record number of losses last year, have been struggling to contain Taliban militants who are fighting to topple the government of President Ashraf Ghani.

Violence is at its worst since the departure of most foreign combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014 as the country is bracing for the start of the spring fighting season.

(Writing by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Alison Williams)

The G-Word Paradox

BY REBECCA HAMILTON
MARCH 22, 2016

On March 17, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the Islamic State was responsible for genocide against groups including Yazidis, Christians, and Shiites. The statement came following pressure from Congress and after the House of Representatives issued a unanimousresolution earlier in the week drawing the same conclusion. “[The Islamic State] kills Christians because they are Christians, Yazidis because they are Yazidis, Shia because they are Shia,” Kerry said solemnly.

There is nothing particularly controversial about his conclusion. Moreover, everyone including the European Parliament and Ted Cruz has already said it. Yet there is an assumption among many in America that if the U.S. executive branch utters the word “genocide,” it will serve as a tripwire action to help victims and options that were previously not possible will become so. In anticipation of Kerry’s remarks, Greg Stanton, the president of the advocacy group Genocide Watch, told the Washington Post that although a genocide determination may not hold any sway on the Islamic State, it “could galvanize the world.”

But the idea that the “g-word” is a true game-changer is the stuff of urban legend. The enormous expectations for what the word “genocide” can accomplish go back to its very inception. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew whocoined the term in 1944, wanted to create a word that would have high moral salience.

In that sense, he succeeded far beyond what he could have imagined; for most people today, the word genocide conveys and communicates the worst crime humanity can inflict. Yet the weight the word carries in the public mind is quite distinct from the impact the U.S. government’s use of the word has on effecting action to stop the crime. In reality, the impact of the U.S. executive branch making an official genocide determination has yet to match up to the hope that many, inside and outside the policymaking process, seem to invest in it. So how did we reach this point? Why is a U.S. executive branch designation of an atrocity as genocide seen as so significant?

In untangling the answer, it helps to go back to June 10, 1994. On that day at a press conference in Istanbul, then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher responded to reporters who were pushing him to say whether the slaughter that had begun months earlier in Rwanda was genocide. Genocide is defined under international law as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” By the time the press starts asking whether a situation is genocide, there is generally little doubt that the specific acts that can constitute genocide, such as killings, or the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm, have taken place. This was certainly true by June 1994 with respect to Rwanda where hundreds of thousands had already been killed.

The more challenging question is usually whether the perpetrators of these acts did so with the specific intent to destroy the group in question, since most genocidaires do not go around making their intentions known. (The Islamic State, a group that has been disarmingly explicit about its intent to destroy certain groups, serves as the exception that proves the rule.) Consequently, the question of intent may not be resolved until years later when a court sifts through the totality of the evidence. And this is one reason government lawyers may be reluctant to let their advisees make a determination of genocide while the genocide is ongoing. Still, by June 1994, even the question of intent was clear in Rwanda. Christopher replied to reporters, “If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that.”

As is now well known, there was no such “magic” forthcoming; the U.S. government continued to turn a blind eye to the massacres that took the lives of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. One might expect the lesson from Rwanda, then, was that having a U.S. government official call the killing of 800,000 men, women, and children a genocide actually had no impact on events on the ground. Yet that was not the lesson absorbed. Why, even after Christopher called Rwanda a “genocide,” and the United States still failed to mount an effective response, does the belief persist that a U.S. government official invoking the word will suddenly spark effective action?

Part of the reason can be found on the other side of the Atlantic, on that very same June day two decades ago. Hours before Christopher’s response, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelley had been peppered with similar questions while hosting a press conference in Washington, D.C. But unlike Christopher’s fatalistic acknowledgment, Shelley made a disastrous effort to avoid using the word, sending herself through a set of linguistic hoops that would subsequently be derided as the “genocide jig.”

In the recounting of any story, we seize on certain incidents while letting others fade to the footnotes. In light of Shelley’s made-for-satire performance, it is perhaps not surprising that in future retellings of the American failure to try to stop the genocide in Rwanda it was her remarks, and not Christopher’s, which captured the public imagination. And in time, the narrative solidified to connect the refusal of the executive branch to utter the word “genocide” with the loss of Rwandan lives.

Of course, Shelley’s reticence was the result of simply following official guidance. According to a subsequently declassified memo, State Department lawyers had warned the government that labeling the atrocities in Rwanda “a genocide” would commit the U.S. government “to actually ‘do something.’” They were referring to Article 1 of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, originally drafted in 1948, which the United States ratified in 1988; it requires that those who join “undertake to prevent and to punish” genocide.

Since the “do something” memo was written, legal opinion within the State Department has shifted. A 2004 memo that I got declassified a few years later concluded that a U.S. executive branch acknowledgment of genocide would have no legal consequences. Nonetheless, genocide remains a determination that government lawyers are generally cautious to endorse. Indeed, prior to Kerry’s announcement on March 17, the first and only formal declaration of genocide made by a U.S. secretary of state was issued in September 2004 by Colin Powell about Darfur. In remarks given to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said: “The evidence leads us to the conclusion that genocide has occurred and may still be occurring in Darfur.”

In 2009, I interviewed Powell and learned that it was not only advocates who had connected a U.S. acknowledgement of genocide with the hope of effective action. In explaining the reasons for his declaration, he told me he hoped that his use of the word genocide would mobilize the governments of the world to stop the killings in Darfur. As is now clear, it did no such thing. Today, Darfur remains in crisis, killings continue, and there are an estimated2.5 million people still displaced.

So where does all this leave us? If we let go of the idea that a declaration of genocide has some outsized power to it and instead absorb a new and more modest set of expectations, then does Kerry’s statement last Thursday even matter? The answer is a resounding yes — just for different reasons.

Although labeling something “genocide” doesn’t stop the destruction any more than labeling a situation “famine” feeds the hungry, it can, in Lemkin’s words, “help to crystallize our thinking.” Effective policy requires a clear-headed assessment of the problem at hand. When used correctly, the word genocide provides a more accurate and specific description to guide the formulation of a policy response than general references to “atrocities,” “horrors,” or “crimes” ever can.

But beyond the instrumental value that the word can offer the policy process, there is something bigger at stake. As scores of survivors from Rwanda, Serbia, and Sudan have told me over the years, there is inherent value in calling something by its rightful name. We should not expect Kerry’s statement to magically transform the situation for those in Islamic State-held territory. But by calling the crimes committed against Yazidis, Christians, and Shiites “genocide,” Kerry adds the voice of his office to that of others who have publicly acknowledged the experience of those groups for what it is.

EMRAH YORULMAZ/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

How Jacob Zuma got away with it – this time

Justice Malala

South African president let off the hook by a party that has forgotten the millions of poor people who voted it into power

Jacob Zuma faces a series of allegations of corruption and cronyism. Photograph: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe. Photograph: Mujahid Safodien/AFP/Getty Images

Tuesday 22 March 2016

One wonders what the smart young suits of the credit ratings agency Moody’s must have thought of it all when they arrived in Johannesburg last week to evaluate South Africa’s economy.

The front pages of newspapers were full of the sort of lurid drama one expects to see in B-grade Hollywood movies. A specialised police department, ominously called the Crimes Against The State Unit, had threatened to arrest the country’s highly respected finance minister just days after he returned from a trip to try todrum up international investment.

His deputy, Mcebisi Jonas, announced that he had been offered his former boss’ job by a wealthy family with close ties to the president, Jacob Zuma, shortly before Zuma fired the finance minister in question.

Jonas was allegedly told by two of the influential Gupta family patriarchs that “the old man wants to make you finance minister” and that if he agreed to “work with us”‚ then “we’ll fix you up”. The Guptas and Zuma have denied the claims.

Another ANC MP told of being offered a cabinet job by the same family. The former chief government spin doctor said the president had called him and told him to place state advertisements in the Guptas new pro-government newspaper. This followed revelations in January that a mining minister had flown to Zurich to clinch a mining deal for the Guptas.

All this in a week in which Moody’s, the only ratings agency to have kept South Africa on investment grade since 1994, was visiting to assess our ability to steer a prudent fiscal path. It’s a delicate year, with Standard & Poor’s and Fitch – the two other ratings agencies – having placed the country one grade above junk status.

The revelations reinforced repeated claims of corruption levelled at Zuma. Revelations that the Gupta family, with interests stretching from mining to media, had been the hidden hand behind the hiring and firing of cabinet ministers and senior government apparatchiks, led to widespread calls for Zuma’s removal.

“This is the last warning shot to the ANC to say that if they don’t fire him or remove him this weekend, society must stand up and remove him,” said former ANC Youth Leader deputy president, Ronald Lamola.

Ahead of a crucial meeting of the party’s highest decision-making group at the weekend, three heavyweight organisations formed by anti-apartheid stalwarts – Nelson Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada and Oliver Tambo – called on the ANC national executive committee to take urgent “corrective” actions in the interests of all South Africans.

Instead, after three days of deliberations in which the 86-member body apparently gave Zuma a standing ovation, the national executive committee issued a statement backing its compromised leader.

“The appointment of ministers and deputy ministers is the sole prerogative of the president of the republic, in line with the constitution. To this end, the ANC continues to confirm its full confidence in our president,” party secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, who had earlier said the revelations could turn the country into a “Mafia state”, told reporters.

Mantashe went on to say that the ANC executive had “mandated the officials and the national working committee to gather all pertinent information about the allegations to enable the ANC to take appropriate action on this matter”.

This is akin to asking the wolf to stand guard over the chicken coop. Zuma, around whom all these allegations of state capture have swirled, is the president of the ANC.

The party is now asking him to listen to those who have turned down his own proxies and give them succour. It will not happen.

What happens now? Zuma retains control of the ANC’s top echelons and will essentially continue to manipulate state resources to benefit his benefactors, family and himself.

With the truth of his actions so luridly in the public eye, ratings agencies will have no option but to act.

As renowned economist Razia Khan of Standard Chartered Bank tweeted: “State capture makes sub-investment grade almost inevitable. Price to be paid by millions of South Africans who will remain mired in poverty.”

That’s the rub, really. The ANC took the decision to applaud a compromised leader and reinforce his power, demonstrating it has forgotten what it means to stand for the poor who supported it for more than a century and have voted it into power overwhelmingly since 1994. As Zuma and his cronies benefit, it is these poor masses who continue to suffer under an economy that will grow by less than one percent this year while unemployment stands at 25,5%.

Justice Malala is the author of We Have Now Begun Our Descent: How To Stop South Africa Losing Its Way

Cambodia’s beach tourism clean-up comes at a high price for locals

Many of the local vendors, who make living on Otres beach, are women. Their incomes support their children and families. Pic: Alexandra Demetrianova.

Otres beach – local and foreign tourism can be two very different things. Pic: Alexandra Demetrianova.

By Alexandra Demetrianova-22nd March 2016

TOURISM is an ever growing sector in Kingdom of Cambodia, which welcomes more and more foreign arrivals each season, reaching more than 4.5 million last year. The top number one tourist attraction is the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap. But in recent years more tourists have been flowing to Cambodia’s coast. The Kingdom’s beaches are a new and attractive alternative to the more developed and much busier tourism hotspots on the coast of neighboring Thailand.

In the provincial Cambodian coastal town of Sihanoukville, hundreds of thousands of holidaygoers visit every year to enjoy nearby beaches. In recent years the private sector has taken advantage of that. Locals and foreign entrepreneurs alike have been fast developing businesses on Sihanoukville’s beaches – resorts with bungalows, restaurants, and bars with sunbeds.

This beach development has also brought more tourists to the coast. Otres beach, just 5 kilometres outside of Sihanoukville, is a great example of that. In the last 5 years the number of tourist businesses on Otres I and II has more than tripled, if not quadrupled, generating not only more revenue, but also income and jobs for the locals.

However, this growth could soon be history. A recent government decree has ordered all beaches to be vacated this month. Legally, beaches are public in Cambodia and no development or buildings are allowed on the beachside. Bungalows, restaurants with kitchens and even sunbeds are to be vacated or bulldozed as ordered by local authorities. Hundreds of tourist businesses will therefore have to move away from the beach or close. How is this possible? Many are asking in shock in Sihanoukville, where the atmosphere is tense ever since the mid-February decree.

The original deadline for all beaches in Sihanoukville to be cleared was March 13. However, the Governer had been on a trip to China, so authorities will start clearing O’Chheuteal and Ariston beaches this week. 

As for the recuperation of lost investment and damages from the government decree, only a few local Cambodian families on O’Chheuteal beach, who have been on their land for more than 15 years, were paid. Most accepted the US$3,500 dollars compensation. The rest of the businesses on all other beaches will receive no money from the government.

Full Story>>>

Netherlands mosque attacks and rising Islamophobia

The Essalam mosque in Rotterdam, the biggest in the country, opened on December 18, 2010 [Valerie Kuypers/EPA]

Imam Azzedine Karrat received this letter at his mosque [Courtesy of Azzedine Karrat]

Religious and ethnic minorities feel the consequences of growing intolerance as mosques and asylum centres are targeted.

Brenda Stoter-16 Mar 2016

Rotterdam, the Netherlands - Charif Slimani, the imam of the Moroccan mosque in Roosendaal in the Netherlands, arrived early on the morning of November 14, 2015, to prepare his sermon for the Friday prayer.

He had not slept that night because of the attacks in Paris and had been contemplating what he should say during his sermon to address them. When he arrived at the mosque, however, he was surprised to discover that the prayer room was unusually empty.

"There was smoke coming from the room and a heavy, penetrating smell of gas. We initially thought that a gas line had been broken," said Slimani, 42. "So we decided to pray elsewhere."

The police arrived a few hours later and revealed that gallons of gasoline had been distributed throughout the prayer room. The perpetrator had tried but failed to start a fire.

The damage to the mosque was minor, but, the imam explained, the community was traumatised.

"The fear, the worries, the feeling that you are not safe anymore: that damage is a lot worse. That hurts more than the material damage," he said. "Although we have cameras, we ensure that there is always someone present to guard the mosque, also during the night."

Neo-Nazi symbols

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UN agency slams new Greek refugee 'detention facilities'

UNHCR suspends some activities on Greek islands, saying EU-Turkey deal has turned reception centres into mandatory detention facilities
Refugees queue outside the Moria camp on Lesbos, March 2016 (AFP)

Tuesday 22 March 2016

The UN refugee agency on Tuesday harshly criticised an EU-Turkey deal on curbing the influx of migrants to Greece, saying reception centres had become "detention facilities", and suspended some activities in the country.

"Under the new provisions, these sites have now become detention facilities", the UNHCR said. "Accordingly, and in line with our policy on opposing mandatory detention, we have suspended some of our activities at all closed centres on the islands," it added.

The EU and Ankara struck a deal on Friday aiming to cut off the sea crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands that enabled 850,000 people to pour into Europe last year, many of them fleeing the brutal war in Syria.

The agreement, under which all migrants landing on the Greek islands face being sent back to Turkey, went into effect early on Sunday.

"UNHCR is not a party to the EU-Turkey deal, nor will we be involved in returns or detention," the agency said Tuesday, adding though that it would "continue to assist the Greek authorities to develop an adequate reception capacity."

It pointed out that Greece currently "does not have sufficient capacity on the islands for assessing asylum claims, nor the proper conditions to accommodate people decently and safely pending an examination of their cases."

The UN agency said 934 refugees and migrants had landed on Lesbos alone since the accord took effect.

"They are being held at a closed registration and temporary accommodation site in Moria on the east of the island," it said, adding that the 880 others who arrived before Sunday were being hosted separately at the Kara Tepe centre, which is run by the local municipality and "remains an open facility".

Middle East Eye reported on Sunday that Moria camp on Lesbos had been cleared of many refugees. Volunteers said they feared it was cleared to allow its conversion into a detention "hotspot" for new arrivals.

On Saturday, Greek authorities had begun accelerating the transfer to the mainland of some 8,000 refugees and migrants who had arrived on the islands before 20 March, to separate them from those subject to return to Turkey.

UNHCR said it had until now been supporting the so-called "hotspots" where refugees and migrants were received, assisted and registered on the Greek islands.

But it said it would not participate in closed centres. "This includes provision of transport to and from these sites," the agency said.

It stressed though that it would "maintain a presence to carry out protection monitoring to ensure that refugee and human rights standards are upheld, and to provide information on the rights and procedures to seek asylum."

"UNHCR staff will also continue to be present at the shoreline and sea port to provide life-saving assistance," it said.

Why there might be many more universes besides our own

The idea of parallel universes may seem bizarre, but physics has found all sorts of reasons why they should exist

• By Philip Ball-21 March 2016

Is our Universe one of many?

The idea of parallel universes, once consigned to science fiction, is now becoming respectable among scientists – at least, among physicists, who have a tendency to push ideas to the limits of what is conceivable.

In fact there are almost too many other potential universes. Physicists have proposed several candidate forms of "multiverse", each made possible by a different aspect of the laws of physics.

The trouble is, virtually by definition we probably cannot ever visit these other universes to confirm that they exist. So the question is, can we devise other ways to test for the existence of entire universes that we cannot see or touch?

Earth is one of many planets (Credit: Mopic/Alamy Stock Photo)

A black hole (Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech)

Worlds within worlds

In at least some of these alternative universes, it has been suggested, we have doppelgängers living lives much like – perhaps almost identical to – our own.

Giordano Bruno speculated that the Universe might be infinite

That idea tickles our ego and awakens our fantasies, which is doubtless why the multiverse theories, however far-out they seem, enjoy so much popularity. We have embraced alternative universes in works of fiction ranging from Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle to movies like Sliding Doors.

Indeed, there is nothing new about the idea of a multiverse, as philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein explains in her 2014 book Worlds Without End.

In the mid-16th century, Copernicus argued that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe. Several decades later, Galileo's telescope showed him stars beyond measure: a glimpse of the vastness of the cosmos.

So at the end of the 16th century, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno speculated that the Universe might be infinite, populated by an infinite number of inhabited worlds.

An illustration from Fontenelle's "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds" (1686) (Credit: King's College London/Science Photo Library)

The idea of a Universe containing many solar systems became commonplace in the 18th Century.

By the early 20th Century, the Irish physicist Edmund Fournier d'Albe was even suggesting that there might be an infinite regression of "nested" universes at different scales, ever larger and ever smaller. In this view, an individual atom might be like a real, inhabited solar system.

Scientists today reject that notion of a "Russian doll" multiverse, but they have postulated several other ways in which multiverses might exist. Here are five of them, along with a rough guide to how likely they are.

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Why are our kids so miserable?

WRITTEN BY-Jenny Anderson-March 21, 2016

“Something in modern life is undermining mental health,” Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, wrote in a recent paper.

Specifically, something is undermining young people’s mental health, especially girls.

In her paper, Twenge looks at four studies covering 7 million people, ranging from teens to adults in the US. Among her findings: high school students in the 2010s were twice as likely to see a professional for mental health issues than those in the 1980s; more teens struggled to remember things in 2010-2012 compared to the earlier period; and 73% more reported trouble sleeping compared to their peers in the 1980s. These so-called “somatic” or “of-the-body” symptoms strongly predict depression.

“It indicates a lot of suffering,” Twenge told Quartz.

It’s not just high school students. College students also feel more overwhelmed; student health centers are in higher demand for bad breakups or mediocre grades, issues that previously did not drive college kids to seek professional help. While the number of kids who reported feeling depressed spiked in the 1980s and 1990s, it started to fall after 2008. It has started rising again:

Kids are being diagnosed with higher levels of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and everyone aged 6-18 is seeking more mental health services, and more medication.

The trend is not a uniquely American phenomena: In the UK, the number of teenagers (15-16) with depression nearly doubled between the 1980s and the 2000s and a recent survey found British 15-year-olds were among the least happy teenagers in the world (those in Poland and Macedonia were the only ones who were more unhappy).

“We would like to think of history as progress, but if progress is measured in the mental health and happiness of young people, then we have been going backward at least since the early 1950s,” Peter Gray, a psychologist and professor at Boston College, wrote in Psychology Today.
What’s going on?

Researchers have a raft of explanations for why kids are so stressed out, from a breakdown in family and community relationships, to the rise of technology and increased academic stakes and competition. Inequality is rising and poverty is debilitating.

Twenge has observed a notable shift away from internal, or intrinsic goals, which one can control, toward extrinsic ones, which are set by the world, and which are increasingly unforgiving.

Gray has another theory: kids aren’t learning critical life-coping skills because they never get to play anymore.

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