The U.N. Human Rights Chief Fixes for a Fight with Trump

BY COLUM LYNCH-NOVEMBER 22, 2016

With President-elect Donald Trump assembling a hard-line national security team, U.N. officials in New York and Geneva are plotting their strategy to confront an American leader who has climbed to the White House on a platform that demonized Muslims and tarred Mexican and Syrian refugees and immigrants as potential criminals and terrorists.

The officials fear that four years of a Trump presidency, if not eight, could spur a global retreat from international human rights principles, marking the dawn of American leadership in a field that was pioneered by Eleanor Roosevelt, an early champion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  


The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, informed his staff in the weeks following the U.S. election that they will have to serve as the front line in an international effort to check any excesses on the human rights front. A chief concern, officials say, is that if the U.N. doesn’t call out its most powerful member for straying from universally accepted human rights norms, the rest of the world will be emboldened to ditch them.

“We are going to speak up,” one U.N. official told Foreign Policy. “It’ll be rough, but if [Trump] puts any of those ghastly campaign pledges into action we will condemn.”

The prospect of the United States emerging as one of the U.N.’s primary human rights challenges underscores the degree to which America’s standing as a champion of civil and political rights has eroded since George W. Bush’s administration launched its global war on terror after the 9/11 attacks.

President Barack Obama has eliminated some of the most controversial excesses of those years, barring the use of torture and scaling back secret rendition operations. But his administration’s human rights record has been mixed. On the one hand, Obama has promoted international efforts to stem atrocities, particularly in Africa, and increased political support for the International Criminal Court. But it has maintained a highly intrusive surveillance program, continued to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists, and lent its support to allies like Saudi Arabia, which leads a military coalition that has killed thousands of civilians in Yemen.

Still, Trump’s campaign pledged to restore waterboarding, deport millions of undocumented migrants, and ban Muslims from traveling to the United States. Those measures, if carried out, would mark a sharp break from Obama’s tenure and come at a particularly delicate moment. This month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court concluded that there is a “reasonable basis to believe” that American personnel committed war crimesin Afghanistan from May 2003 to December 2014, raising the prospect of a possible investigation into the conduct of U.S. forces.

A fresh probe into American troops could set the stage for a standoff with President-elect Trump, whose campaign advisors, including John Bolton, are among the nation’s sharpest critics of The Hague-based court. Bolton characterized his role in repudiating former President Bill Clinton’s signing of the Rome Statute, which established the court, as one of the proudest acts in his public life. It is unclear what role, if any, Bolton will play in a Trump administration. But his hostility toward the court has broad support within the Republican Party and the U.S. military.

But there were conflicting signals in recent days about how serious is about implementing some of his most controversial pledges. On Tuesday, Trump retreated from his plan to bring back waterboarding, telling reporters, editors and columnists at the New York Times that he had been persuaded by his possible pick for Defense Secretary, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, that such coercive practices are not effective. Mattis told Trump he could extract more information out of a suspected terrorist with “a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers.”

But other members of the president-elect’s national security team, including former U.S. Army general Mike Flynn, Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), have been more open to reinstituting interrogation practices that much of the world considers torture. Pompeo has defended the practice.

The U.N.’s approach to human rights is particularly tricky for the incoming U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister who headed the U.N. refugee agency for nearly 10 years. Guterres has been an outspoken champion of refugees, pressing European governments, as well as the United States, to resettle far larger numbers of refugees. Two weeks after Trump called for his ban on Muslims last December, Guterres admonished the Security Council, saying, “Those that reject Syrian refugees because they are Muslims are the best allies in the recruitment propaganda of extremist groups.”

But Guterres may be constrained as the leader of the United Nations, a job that requires a close relationship with the United States and other big powers. Previous U.N. leaders who clashed with the United States, including Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was denied a second term, have suffered. Kofi Annan, who infuriated Bush administration officials for questioning the legality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, faced calls for his resignation from Republicans, including then-Sen. Norm Coleman, who chaired a Senate subcommittee probing U.N. management of Iraq’s oil industry.

That makes it likely that Zeid will take the lead on human rights.

Throughout the U.S. presidential campaign, Zeid, a Muslim prince from the Jordanian royal family, has repeatedly excoriated Trump, telling reporters in December that his threat to ban Muslim travel to the United States is “grossly irresponsible.” In September, Zeid included Trump, along with France’s Marine Le Pen and Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders, on a list of “populists, demagogues, and political fantasists” who promoted their arguments grounded in “half truths and oversimplification.”

Some U.N. officials say Zeid’s criticism of the U.N.’s most powerful country could strengthen his hand in disputes with other U.N. members, particularly those from the developing world who have long accused the United Nations of applying greater pressure on small powers for breaching human rights norms, while letting the United States and other big powers off the hook.

Other U.N. officials fear that Zeid may be exposing the organization to a battle with the U.N.’s most powerful players that he can’t win.

In September, Russia’s U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin formally protestedZeid’s public denunciations of Trump and other European nationalists. “Prince Zeid is overstepping his limits from time to time, and we’re unhappy about it,” Churkin told The Associated Press.

More recently, Zeid tangled with China over his attendance at a ceremony for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, which honored a Uighur economist, Ilham Tohti, who is serving a life sentence on charges of fomenting separatism and violence. A senior Chinese official appealed to Zeid not to attend the event, according to a U.N. official. But Zeid refused, insisting that he had an independent mandate to shed light on human rights violations wherever they occur, including China.

Even before Trump’s election, U.N. officials believed that human rights were under threat from authoritarian governments, including China, Egypt, Russia, and Turkey, which have been engaged in major crackdowns on civil liberties at home.

“They are backsliding on human rights, but from a position of weakness,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York City-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch. “Both [Vladimir] Putin and Xi Jinping are engaging in the worst crackdowns in their countries in two decades, each driven by the terror as to how their countries will react to a weakening economy; they’re trying to snuff out in advance opposition they anticipate.”

Roth said there is a real danger that Trump and other populist leaders will accelerate the curtailment of human rights. “The entire human rights movement is weary about Trump,” he said. “It’s not clear what his values are. That is why his initial appointees are so important.”

Dimitris Christopoulos, president of the International Federation for Human Rights, fears Trump’s controversial positions, including torture and deportation, would embolden smaller countries. When big powers, particularly the United States, tread on human rights the world tends to follow. If smaller countries, such as Burundi and Kenya, hear Trump threatening to cast out foreign refugees they may choose to act in kind, Christopoulos said. Saudi Arabia threatened this year to cut funding to U.N. relief programs and to lead a walkout by Muslim states from the United Nations if the U.N. didn’t lift its name from a list of countries that killed or maimed children in armed conflict, according to a senior U.N. official.

In its defense, Saudi officials noted that the United States had shielded its closest Middle East ally, Israel, from being included on the same list in 2015. It was only fair, therefore, that Riyadh be spared the shame of being included on the list.

The transition to the White House comes as three African states — Burundi, Gambia, and South Africa — have decided to withdraw from the International Criminal Court. Many African governments argue that the court unfairly targets Africans, while the United States and other major powers have been largely immune from prosecution.

Rights advocates say the rising tide of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States represents a potentially existential threat to the human rights movement, as governments that once championed the cause on the international stage head into retreat.

Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, has railed against “left-wing human rights lawyers” who are seeking the prosecution of British soldiers alleged to have committed war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. She has proposed that London withdraw from key provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights that potentially expose British troops to prosecution.

A generation of European nationalist leaders, including Le Pen and Wilders, who had been on the fringe of the European political spectrum, have seen their electoral prospects grow in the face of spreading anti-immigrant sentiment.

That has left German Chancellor Angela Merkel as one of the “only outspoken leaders on human rights,” Roth said. In her first statement following Trump’s election, Merkel said she would work closely with Trump, but only on the basis of “democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law, and the dignity of men regardless of origin, skin color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.”

Photo credit: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Trump’s new interview with the New York Times isn’t reassuring. It’s deeply alarming.

(Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

By Greg Sargent November 23 at 8:59 AM

This morning, the New York Times published a full transcript of the remarkable set of exchanges that occurred yesterday between Donald Trump and the paper’s editors and reporters. Some, such as Tom Friedman, see cause for hope in the fact that Trump appears to be moderating his stances on climate change and torture, as well as in the indications that Trump perhaps allows the advice of others to shape his thinking — sort of, at least.

There is a bit of cause for hope in the transcript — more on that later. But on balance, the main takeaway from it should be that, if anything, we should be more alarmed, rather than less.

Though it’s true that Trump did shift on climate, the exchange on this topic is, on balance, more worrying than not, and it perhaps deserves the most attention, because as I’ve argued, the question of whether Trump will really pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord is one of the most consequential we face. Here’s the exchange on that topic:

QUESTION: Are you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?

TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely….I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. . . .

It’s a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know. I know we have, they say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists. . . .

QUESTION: When you say an open mind, you mean you’re just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn’t connected?

TRUMP: I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.

It’s good that Trump acknowledged that human activity might be connected to climate change. But the mere fact that this is seen as a major breakthrough is alone a reminder of how worrying it is that the incoming president is someone who previously said climate change is nothing but a “hoax.” What probably happened here is that Trump knew he could not tell this particular audience that climate change has no human cause without feeling or looking foolish. This may have been a driving motivator in making this concession, which, when you really examine it, is a pretty tiny one. Indeed, Trump also flatly says here that we may not ever know who is right in the dispute over whether climate change poses the dire long-term threat that the scientific consensus tells us it does.

[Journalists shouldn’t try to win a popularity contest with Trump]

What’s more, Trump does not appear at all preoccupied with another crucial aspect of this line of questioning: the notion that pulling out of the Paris accord would mean the U.S. is abdicating its global leadership role in combating global warming. Nor does he seem preoccupied with the potential consequences of this, i.e., that it heralds a badly weakened global consensus behind the need to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius before it is too late, which in turn could make future widespread human suffering and dislocation far more likely. The main consequences here Trump appears even aware of are the supposed “cost to our companies” of acting to curb carbon emissions.

 France tells U.S. President-elect Donald Trump that the Paris accord on climate change is "irreversible" and that the U.S. will be affected by rising oceans and natural disasters.(Reuters)

It’s also less than reassuring that Trump cites the “horrible emails that were sent between the scientists.” That appears to be a reference to a seven-year-old “scandal” in which a large number of hacked emails between climate scientists supposedly revealed that the science is largely fabricated. Those emails actually showed nothing of the sort. But regardless, the idea that this, of all things, is still weighing (if that’s the right way to put it) on Trump’s mind — when the scientific consensus has been reaffirmed again and again countless times over the many years since then — is disconcerting, to say the least.

All that said, Friedman makes a good point when he argues that the interview shows that Trump “clearly learns by talking to people, not reading,” and that “the struggle for Donald Trump’s soul has just begun.” 

Elsewhere in the Times interview, Trump gushed about his recent private meeting with President Obama, and seemed to signal that he genuinely learned new and enlightening things about the complexities and challenges he’s about to face. I suspect that in private conversations, Trump is susceptible to persuasion by those who really appear to know what they’re talking about, since his own convictions don’t appear to be all that deeply rooted.

[Trump may have just flatly and openly admitted to a conflict of interest]

On climate, for instance, one can imagine a scenario in which the relatively non-crazy Mitt Romney becomes secretary of state and advises Trump that pulling out of the Paris deal might create all sorts of international diplomatic complications that should give him pause about acting too rashly. John Kerry is already suggesting something like this might happen. To avoid doing too much damage, Trump would also have to refrain from reversing Obama’s climate rules putting us on track to lower carbon emissions. Trump could conceivably be influenced by the fact that hundreds of companies are now warning that a weakened commitment to a lower-carbon future could pose a grave threat to our long term prosperity. We don’t yet know whose counsel Trump will truly value, but we can hope.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says action on climate change has become "unstoppable" and predicts that President-elect Donald Trump will drop plans to quit the global climate change deal. (Reuters)

OBAMA OVERTIME RULE CHANGE BLOCKED: A federal court has blocked Obama’s executive action raising overtime pay for four million workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which had been challenged by some states and business groups. Note this from the AP write-up:

Overtime changes set to take effect Dec. 1 are now unlikely to be in play before vast power shifts to a Donald Trump administration, which has spoken out against Obama-backed government regulation and generally aligns with the business groups that stridently opposed the overtime rule.

Trump, who ran on a supposedly pro-worker agenda, will probably support the ruling. Elections have consequences!

* BATTLE ERUPTS FOR DNC CHAIR: Dem Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, is running for DNC chair, but the New York Times reports that the White House and other Dems are pushing Labor Secretary Tom Perez:

Some Democrats, in Mr. Obama’s orbit and beyond, say that elevating Mr. Ellison would amount to handing the party to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. . . . Mr. Ellison was a high-profile backer of Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign, and Mr. Sanders has been rallying support for Mr. Ellison’s D.N.C. bid.

The deeper dispute is over whether Dems lost because they strayed from populism and nominated a creature of the establishment. Perez has deep ties to unions, but he’s less of an outsider than Sanders is.

* TRUMP’S COMMENTS ON CLINTON STIR CONCERNS: Trump now says his administration won’t prosecute Hillary Clinton. But The Post reports that experts worry Trump doesn’t get that this isn’t his decision and that the Justice Department is independent. One says:

“Trump’s implicit assumption that he can direct the Department of Justice to prosecute Clinton — or not — demonstrates a dangerous assumption the president can dictate the department’s prosecutorial decisions. But the Department of Justice depends on its independence as the source of its authority and power.”

In other words, the underlying assumption seems to be that Trump also thinks he can dictate affirmative decisions to prosecute. How reassuring . . .

* CONSERVATIVES WORRY ABOUT TRUMP GOING WOBBLY:Politico talks to conservatives who are increasingly worried by Trump’s modifications of his positions. They want reassurances that he’ll fully repeal Obamacare (rather than just change it, as he’s hinted he might) and honor his promises on immigration.

My question is: What would that look like? Does Trump have to build a border wall, remove protections from deportation from the dreamers, and deport as many longtime U.S. residents as possible to make them happy?

* HALEY TAPPED AS U.N. AMBASSADOR: Trump has tapped South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as U.N. Ambassador:

Her views on various U.S. military and national security matters usually fall within the GOP’s hawkish mainstream. . . . Haley also represents the addition of a rival. She was critical of some of Trump’s proposals, such as his temporary ban on Muslims’ entry to the U.S., during the Republican primary contest. 

The addition of someone who (apparently) doesn’t think we’re embroiled in a global war with Islam is relatively good news.

* CLINTON’S POPULAR VOTE WIN PASSES TWO MILLION: That’s per the latest calculations by Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who now puts her margin at 1.5 percentage points.

* TRUMP SAYS HE CAN’T HAVE A CONFLICT OF INTEREST: Trump also said in the Times interview that “the law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Glenn Kessler and Michelle Lee investigate the claim and get to the key nuance:

The president-elect did rightly point to an exemption for the president and vice president in conflicts of interest laws. And while such an exemption exists, the theory was that the presidency has so much power that any policy decision could pose a potential conflict. The law assumed that the president could be trusted to do the right thing and take actions to avoid appearance or presence of impropriety — not that the law is “totally” on the president’s “side” or that it would allow the president to use the exemption to his favor.

Trump obviously can’t be trusted to take actions to avoid the appearance of impropriety, but surely he can be trusted to do the right thing.

Nigeria: Biafran Independence Agitation Worldwide

NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT IS SUPPRESSING AND PERSECUTING BIAFRANS  

by Osita Ebiem

( November 22, 2016, New York City, Sri Lanka Guardian) At the end of the Biafran War many experts came to the conclusion that genocide had been committed against the Igbo by the Nigerian government. In an effort to suppress the scandal, the Nigerian government with some help from Great Britain worked frantically to cover up the news about the atrocities. For almost fifty years that effort paid off. The crime of Biafran Genocide was carefully hidden away from the public.

However, today 2016 the agitation for the restoration of the defunct Biafran state is in the news again. This is coming nearly half a century after the country’s demise in 1970. After suffering a pogrom in which more than 100,000 of their people were killed by Nigerian civilians and various security forces of the Nigerian government, Igbo people with other southeasterners who also were affected in the killings declared an independent Biafran state in mid-1967. Immediately following the secession the Nigerian state levied a genocidal war of aggression that lasted two and half years against Biafra. With the help of Great Britain, USSR (Russia) and Islamic Arab states; all those countries supplied arms to Nigeria and the war resulted in the genocide of Igbo people.

The war was prosecuted with the declared intention of wiping out the Igbo from the face of the Earth. By the time the war was over a quarter of Igbo population, that is 3 million of them were further exterminated. About 2 million of the casualties died from starvation resulting from the Nigerian government official policy of “hunger as a legitimate weapon of war.” Almost fifty years after that horrific genocide which tends to have been largely forgotten by much of the world community, a new generation of Igbo people who are majorly Animists and Christians are reviving the call to free themselves and territory from the largely Islamic state of Nigeria.

A close look at most of the people who are championing the new struggle to separate Biafra from Nigeria reveals that they either did not witness the Biafran War or they were mere children during the war. For this reason some people have asked the question; why are people in this age bracket bent on defiantly reviving such a horrific episode and experience in their history half a century on. Some people have argued that it has something to do with the fact that the Nigerian government barned the teaching of history in Nigerian schools soon after the Biafran War. People were prohibited from mentioning the name, “Biafra” for many decades afterwards. The government wanted to hide the genocide permanently from public consciousness. As a result, subsequent generations which did not witness the war are unable to appreciate fully the devastating impacts of the war on their parents’ generation. But since the years following the war even the generations of Igbo people who did not witness it are being punished and marginalized by the Nigerian state. And this is part of what is fueling the independence protests.

Remembering how horrible the war was, people like the current Muslim President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari who incidentally fought on the Nigerian side to defeat Biafra have asked the new agitators for a revived independent state of Biafra to forget it. Of course he did not find it necessary to express any remorse about the Igbo Genocide which he helped to orchestrate. He instead believes that the people will just forget just because he asked them to forget the heinous crime that was committed against them. Insensitively, the president went on to argue that the agitators are doing this because they did not experience or witness the war. This has made many observers to interpret Buhari’s highhanded response by killing the peaceful nonviolent agitators as his way of trying to teach the “inexperienced” agitators a lesson. In the past one and half years Buhari has rolled out, on many occasions, the full strength of his country’s military force to violently suppress the peaceful nonviolent Biafran independence movement.

The human rights organization; Amnesty International reports that since the advent of Buhari administration in 2015 till now – the tail end of 2016, Nigerian government has killed more than 300 Biafrans and wounded many more while they held peaceful protests for Biafra’s independence. Amnesty International says that many of those pro-Biafra protesters were shot and killed in their sleep and others while they gathered in churches to pray. Many of the protesters were shot and killed from behind while they tried to escape.

The fact is that the peaceful protests for the separation of Igbo territory (Biafra) from Nigeria has been going on since the year 2000. The group known as Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) had spearheaded these protests. Various Nigerian administrations before the advent of the present one in 2015 had used mostly the incarceration of the leaders of the movement in trying to deal with and suppress it. MASSOB’s former leader Ralph Uwazurike suffered many jail times in Nigerian prisons. Sometimes the MASSOB leader was detained for many years at a time. Apart from many of the agitators who are being killed extra-judicially by government forces there are some notable individuals who are being held in various Nigerian prisons just because they are agitating for Biafra’s independence. Some were snatched off the streets into prisons for merely wearing vests with Biafran insignia or just being in possession of Biafran flags. There are such people like Benjamin Onwuka the leader of Biafra Zionist Movement (BZM,) Chidiebere Onwudiwe whose home was invaded by Nigerian security agents in the middle of the night. He was taken away from his house at 2 AM and has not been heard from again since the last one year. Then there is Nnamudi Kanu who runs an online radio called Radio Biafra London (RBL.) These individuals except for Onwudiwe whose fate is yet to be known, can be described as almost lucky because Buhari’s government has not yet executed them and their cases have been celebrated because of the relatively wide media publicity they have attracted.

But there are many unsung pro-Biafra agitator-victims who are not as lucky. They are currently suffering various kinds of persecutions in many detention centers around the world. Some of these less known victims are being prosecuted in different courts of law in many places around the world simply because they demonstrated publicly for the independence of Biafra. These people are being deprived of their freedom or are being subjected to other forms of hardships and inhumane treatments because of their involvement in Biafran freedom activism.

Over the years many critics have complained that the Nigerian government has used some unorthodox diplomatic manipulations to influence how some foreign government agencies carry out their duties in its effort to suppress Biafra’s independence and hide the Biafran Genocide. Since the time of Biafra War till now, Nigeria has deployed its diplomatic tentacles across the world to make sure that those who agitate for Biafra anywhere are suppressed. We will cite two little known examples of those who are going through persecutions in so-called civilized societies like European countries of Norway and England.

Lotachukwu Okorie used to serve as MASSOB’s District Officer in southeast Nigeria before he emigrated to Norway, fleeing from persecution by Nigerian government authorities. On getting to Norway, a civilized society, he believed that his problems were over and his human rights would be protected. Unfortunately, he discovered that they had only just begun. In what looked like a remotely influenced operation the Norwegian government detained Okorie and charged him with illegal immigration crime. He was then detained for one year and six months without any conclusive decision on his case. According to Norwegian laws he overstayed in jail the period he was legally supposed to. Just before he was arrested, Okorie was so frustrated by the various dehumanizing treatments he was receiving from Norwegian security agents that he was driven to attempt suicide with a kitchen knife.

Another case which is fast becoming a source of embarrassment to the British government is that of Yahgozie Immanu-el victim of political persecution by British authorities that apparently are trying hard to please Nigerian government which it is believed are tele-guiding and influencing the current ordeals of Yahgozie. It appears that the British government is willing to compromise their country’s very reputable centuries-old national respect for the fundamental human and civil rights of all people simply to please the Nigerian government. Yahgozie is an independent journalist as well as a pro-Biafra activist who is based in London. He got arrested by the British police while he covered the recent official visit to Britain by the Nigerian President Buhari. He was subsequently taken to court on frivolous and trumped up charges that he was trying to attack President Buhari’s motorcade. Some eyewitnesses of the incident are still unable to understand how the actions of someone who only had a microphone and was trying to cover the unfolding events could have been interpreted as an intention to attack President Buhari. Yahgozie’s case comes up again in the City of London Magistrates Court later in this month of November. Many people think that the case is actually turning into an embarrassment to the human rights image of the British government.

Venezuela opposition says Vatican-brokered talks 'frozen'

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro (R) greets supporters during a rally on University Student Day in Caracas, Venezuela November 21, 2016. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

By Corina Pons and Alexandra Ulmer | CARACAS-Thu Nov 24, 2016

Venezuela's opposition said on Wednesday talks with the government were "frozen" after officials failed to attend meetings, throwing cold water on Vatican-brokered attempts to bridge the country's deep political crisis.

Though the formal talks, which began last month, appeared to have led to the release of a handful of detained activists, hopes for real rapprochement were always slim.

The two sides are fundamentally at loggerheads, with the opposition seeking the ouster of Socialist President Nicolas Maduro, while authorities vow he will not leave office before his term ends in 2019.

"The government, in an irresponsible manner, froze the dialogue process by not showing up to two technical meetings last night," opposition coalition leader Jesus Torrealba told Reuters.

Opposition activists said authorities backed away after the National Assembly on Tuesday held a heated session in which they slammed Maduro over a drug scandal.

Two nephews of Maduro's wife were found guilty this month on U.S. charges that they tried to carry out a multimillion-dollar drug deal to help their family stay in power.

"The government is using the debate as an excuse," said two-time presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, accusing authorities of not being committed to talks.

"The government has not complied with any of its promises. They promised to free political prisoners; there are more than 100 imprisoned. They promised (to open) a humanitarian channel; not a single medicine has come in."

Maduro acknowledged "difficulties" in the talks but said they were still on track.

"The dialogue is advancing ... and by January, February or March, it will be strengthened," he told reporters.

It was not clear if the opposition would resume a more militant agenda, which before the talks included protests and putting Maduro on trial before the National Assembly.

International figures trying to facilitate dialogue, including Spain's ex-Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and U.S. diplomat Thomas Shannon, were shuttling between both sides.

Dialogue had divided the diverse opposition coalition, with some activists feeling the government was duping the opposition to buy time.

The situation in oil-rich Venezuela has worsened in the last months, with a recession leaving millions unable to find or afford food amid shortages and spiralling inflation.

The opposition blames Maduro, who is unpopular, and has been vying to remove him via a recall referendum. The former bus driver and union leader, however, has said the opposition is seeking a coup against him and has vowed to end his term.

(Additional reporting by Eyanir Chinea, Andrew Cawthorne and Girish Gupta; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Alistair Bell)

Toronto reporter becomes Canada’s first hijab-wearing news anchor

Ginella Massa says greater diversity in Canadian media is needed to better reflect the country’s multicultural society

Ginella Massa is the first Canadian news anchor to wear a hijab on air (Courtesy of Ginella Massa)

TJillian D'Amours-Wednesday 23 November 2016

ORONTO, Canada – Ginella Massa wasn’t always sure she wanted to be in front of a camera.

“I had never seen anyone who looked like me on TV, so that sometimes makes you feel like it’s not possible. I had said some time ago, ‘Maybe I’ll go into radio because then it doesn’t matter what I look like,’” the 29-year-old said with a laugh.

But bolstered by her mother’s support, Massa went for it, becoming the first Muslim woman who wears a headscarf to report on camera for a television news programme in Kitchener, Ontario, in 2015.

Last week, she added another important first to her resume: the first woman in a hijab to anchor a Canadian television newscast.

“As much as I knew that it was a milestone, I almost wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming response,” Massa told Middle East Eye in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

She filled in as the anchor of the 11 p.m. newscast on City News, a local television news channel serving Toronto, Canada’s largest city, and the Greater Toronto Area, on 17 November.

After posting a photo of herself on Twitter with the caption, “That's a wrap! Tonight wasn’t just important for me. I don’t think a woman in hijab has ever anchored a newscast in Canada,” the reaction was almost immediate.

View image on Twitter

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Ginella Massa @Ginella_M

That's a wrap! Tonight wasn't just important for me. I don't think a woman in hijab has ever anchored a newscast in Canada. Thx @CityNews 

12:11 AM - 18 Nov 2016

 
•  782782 Retweets
 
•  2,5782,578 likes

And it was overwhelmingly positive, Massa said, “from Muslims who feel like this tells them that they belong in this society when they see someone that looks like me reading their nightly news [and] from non-Muslims who say, it’s about time that our newscasts look like our community”.

Media diversity lacking in Canada

Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world. About 1.3 million people, or 49 percent of the city’s total population, identified as a visible minority in 2011, according to the last nationwide census.

Canada, meanwhile, prides itself on being a multicultural country. Approximately 6.3 million people in Canada (about 19.1 percent of the total population) identified as being members of a visible minority in 2011.

But that diversity is not reflected in Canada’s news media, or television and film industries – and it hasn’t been for a long time.

In 1994, John Miller, professor emeritus at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, conducted a survey of racial diversity at 41 newspapers, and found that only 2.6 percent of newsroom staff (67 of 2,620 staff members) identified as minorities.

A decade later, Miller surveyed 34 daily newspapers across Canada, and found that “that racial minorities are more than five times under-represented in daily newsrooms,” while “the commitment of editors to change their hiring patterns” actually declined between 1994 and 2004.

For Massa, the importance of media reflecting the communities they are reporting from – from racial and gender diversity, to age, sexual orientation and physical ability – cannot be overstate (Courtesy of Ginella Massa)

“A majority of managing editors agreed with the statement that ‘minorities just don’t apply here.’ Yet only one mentioned taking any steps to ensure that it was attracting minority candidates, such as recruiting at journalism schools or ethnic publications,” the 2004 report found.

In a blog post from last June, Miller explained that while media organisations in the US have kept track of diversity for over 30 years, Canada does not. Reports on making Canadian broadcasting more diverse, meanwhile, have been conducted, but go largely unimplemented.

“If newsrooms cannot stay in touch with the issues, the concerns, hopes and dreams of an increasingly diverse audience, those news organisations will lose their relevance and be replaced,” Miller wrote.

“That's not all. By denying media access to ethnic minorities, the public gets a wrong perception of reality and the place ethnic minorities have in society. And that's a recipe for social conflict - the kind of blind fear of ‘the other’ that Donald Trump is stoking in the US presidential election campaign.”

Efforts fall short

In the last year, several Canadian media organisations have sought to tackle diversity, from Colour Code, a podcast on race produced by journalists at The Globe and Mail, to columnists and reporters writing about racial and gender representation more frequently.

But despite having these conversations, Canadian media outlets largely remain under-representative of the larger communities they cover.

Last year, Davide Mastracci described “the unbearable whiteness of Canadian columnists” in the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Of 11 columnists at the Ottawa Citizen, all but one were white, a reality that Mastracci said reflects a wider trend in Canadian newspapers.

“Canadian columnists are predominately white, and this undermines the relevance of the conversation they help shape on a daily basis,” Mastracci wrote.

Most Canadian columnists are also disproportionately male and middle-aged, according to a 2014 survey of Canada’s English-language columnists conducted by J-Source, the Canadian journalism project. It found that of 73 national columnists surveyed, only 27 percent were female and 66 percent had a median age of 58.5 years.

Canadaland, a weekly podcast on media criticism and reporting, recently attempted to get 18 of Canada’s largest daily newspaper to answer a survey on diversity in their newsrooms. Only three newspapers responded.

Meanwhile, the nation’s public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), employs a staff that is about 90 percent white, despite a mandate to reflect the multicultural diversity of Canada’s population.

‘A voice of the people’

For Massa, the importance of media reflecting the communities they are reporting from – from racial and gender diversity, to age, sexual orientation and physical ability – cannot be overstated.

“If we want to truly be a voice for the people in our society, if we want to tap into the stories of the people who live among us, then we need to see diversity in our newsrooms,” she said.

“If we want to truly be a voice for the people in our society, if we want to tap into the stories of the people who live among us, then we need to see diversity in our newsrooms" - Ginelle Massa

She said the first step in making newsrooms more diverse is simply creating opportunities for people who might not otherwise have easy access to the industry.

Her work may also help open the door for others in the future, she said. “For young Muslims, it’s really important for them to see themselves not just in television, but also in positions of power, because it tells them that those are the things they can do and achieve.”

“I’m trying to be the best journalist I can be,” Massa added, “and I just happen to wear a scarf while I’m doing it.”

India's rape problem is exaggerated, says minister for women

Maneka Gandhi says media stories are driving away tourists and claims country is among lowest four in the world for rape cases

 Maneka Gandhi said she had been told no one wanted to travel to India because of the media overemphasis on rape. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP

Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai-Wednesday 23 November 2016 

India’s minister for women has been criticised for claiming that the country’s rape and sexual violence problem is exaggerated by the media, driving away tourists.

Maneka Gandhi, the minister for women and child development, told a workshop for female journalists that India ranks “among the lowest four countries in the world” for rape cases, according to a number of people in attendance.

Replying to a question about government inaction on rape, the minister said: “I went to Sweden two years ago when, because of the Nirbhaya incident, cases were being reported every day,” the Times of India reported her as saying, referring to the Delhi gang rape which focused international attention on India’s rape crisis.

“Someone said to me that no one wanted to travel to India. I had data with me and I took a look at it and then showed it to him. As per that data in the world, we ranked among the lowest four countries in terms of rape cases. Sweden was number one.”

Gandhi claimed that the Indian media’s supposed overemphasis on rape was driving away foreign tourists, who are told that India is unsafe for women. She said: “In those [foreign] countries [rape] does not become big news, as their newspapers don’t report these cases like we do. We have zero tolerance towards rape and our newspapers will write about it everyday.

According to a survey of global experts in 2012, India was voted the worst place in the world to be a woman, lower even than countries such as Saudi Arabia. Rape often goes unreported in the country. 

Women who come forward are frequently blamed for enticing attackers by wearing revealing clothing, drinking alcohol or being outdoors after dark. Victims may also face huge social stigma: many are labelled unfit to marry or “dirty” after they have been attacked. Many women who report rape cases to police are turned away and pressured not to speak about it. Marital rape is not considered a crime.

A student displays a ‘No Rape’ message on her hands during a protest to demand the death sentence for four men convicted in the Delhi rape case. Photograph: Mahesh Kumar/AP

Sweden, on the other hand, has one of the widest definitions of rape and records every rape incident as a separate crime, so if a man rapes a woman 10 times, he faces 10 separate charges. In India separate incidents are lumped together as one charge.

Loveleen Tharmani, a bureau chief at Himachal Dastak who attended the workshop, said the minister’s statements were inaccurate. “In my state [Himachal Pradesh], there are countless rape cases. The minister seemed to be saying that rape is not such a big problem, but I don’t really agree. It is an everyday matter. Perhaps it’s true that the government isn’t really doing anything about it, there are so many reported cases still lying in files, and nothing has really been done.”

Senior ministers in the prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata party have made similar comments in the past. In 2014, the finance minister Arun Jaitley said the Delhi gang rape was “a small incident” that cost the country billions in tourist dollars. Others, such as the tourism minister Mahesh Sharma, have implied that foreign women share accountability in rape if they wear short skirts or reveal too much skin.

Aarefa Johari, a journalist with the news website Scroll, said it was time the Indian government started to take its rape problem seriously. “As the minister for women and child development, [Gandhi] should know how these reports are put together. She was trying to make it sound like India’s not that bad, that we shouldn’t think of it as a rape capital, but the basis on which she was making that claim was uninformed and silly. What does it matter where India stands on an international list? We have a toxic rape culture and there is proof of it all over India.

“It is exhausting to see India’s leaders, especially the minister for women, not wanting to talk about the root of the problem.”

The ministry of women and child development did not reply to the Guardian’s requests for comment.