Police guard UN convoy which carries INGO and UN staff as they flee from Maungdaw after Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked, in Buthidaung, Myanmar August 28, 2017. Source: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun
THE ROHINGYA militant group fighting the Tatmadaw military of Burma (Myanmar) in the country’s northern Rakhine State has rejected accusations that it is linked to international jihadist organisations.
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) issued a statement via its Twitter account on Wednesday in which it “categorically” denied any ties with transnational terror groups, amid fighting with the Tatmadaw military of Burma (Myanmar) in Rakhine State.
“ARSA feels that it is necessary to make it clear that it has no links with Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Lashkar-e-Taiba or any transnational terrorist group, and we do not welcome the involvement of these groups in the Arakan conflict,” it said.
International jihadist group Al Qaeda earlier this week called for Muslims worldwide to “punish” Burma for “crimes” against the Rohingya Muslim minority by supporting the struggle with weapons and “military support.”
“We do not welcome the involvement of these groups in the Arakan conflict,” added the statement from ARSA. “ARSA calls on states in the region to intercept and prevent terrorists from entering Arakan and making a bad situation worse.” Arakan is the former name for Rakhine State.
A Rohingya refugee arrives wait at Thaingkhali makeshift refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 14, 2017. Source: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui
Renewed violence has gripped Burma’s northern Rakhine State since ARSA militants allegedly attacked the outposts of security forces on Aug 25. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) now reports at least 380,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in the past three weeks.
Presidential office spokesman Zaw Htay claimed on Thursday that Islamic State was “already active” in Asia along with a link to an article from the Atlantic Treaty Association.
The Burmese government has consistently branded the ARSA “extremist Bengali terrorists” and has accused international aid organisations of aiding terrorism. On September 10, ARSA declared a one-month ceasefire to which the government responded it did not negotiate with terrorists.
Burma’s ambassador to Washington Aung Lynn told Voice of America on Thursday that the country was the victim of “false media.”
“How can you say that [the response] is out of proportion? There may be many terrorists who were involved,” he said. “I don’t want to argue with the numbers, but if people are innocent, innocent villagers, they have no reason to flee away from their villages.”
ARSA’s statement on Wednesday said “it is prepared to work with security agencies to support counter-terrorism efforts in the region in order to prevent the infiltration of terrorist groups into Arakan.”
Mohammad Yaqoob Sheikh (C) nominated candidate of political party Milli Muslim League (MML), waves to his supporters during an election campaign for the National Assembly NA-120 constituency in Lahore, Pakistan September 9, 2017. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza
SEPTEMBER 15, 2017
LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - A new Pakistani political party controlled by an Islamist with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head is backing a candidate in a by-election on Sunday, in what a former senior army officer says is a key step in a military-proposed plan to mainstream militant groups.
The Milli Muslim League party loyal to Hafiz Saeed - who the United States and India accuse of masterminding the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people - has little chance of seeing its favored candidate win the seat vacated when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was removed from office by the Supreme Court in July.
But the foray into politics by Saeed’s Islamist charity is following a blueprint that Sharif himself rejected when the military proposed it last year, retired Lieutenant General Amjad Shuaib told Reuters.
Three close Sharif confidants with knowledge of the discussions confirmed that Sharif had opposed the “mainstreaming” plan, which senior military figures and some analysts see as a way of steering ultra-religious groups away from violent jihad.
“We have to separate those elements who are peaceful from the elements who are picking up weapons,” Shuaib said.
Pakistan’s powerful military has long been accused of fostering militant groups as proxy fighters opposing neighboring arch-enemy India, a charge the army denies.
“PATRIOTIC PEOPLE”
Saeed’s religious charity launched the Milli Muslim League party within two weeks after the court ousted Sharif over corruption allegations.
Yaqoob Sheikh, the Lahore candidate for Milli Muslim League, is standing as an independent after the Electoral Commission said the party was not yet legally registered.
But Saeed’s lieutenants, JUD workers and Milli Muslim League officials are running his campaign and portraits of Saeed adorn every poster promoting Sheikh.
Another Islamist designated a terrorist by the United States, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, has told Reuters he too plans to soon form his own party to advocate strict Islamic law.
“God willing, we will come into the mainstream - our country right now needs patriotic people,” Khalil said, vowing to turn Pakistan into a state government by strict Islamic law.
Saeed’s charity and Khalil’s Ansar ul-Umma organization are both seen by the United States as fronts for militant groups the army has been accused of sponsoring. The military denies any policy of encouraging radical groups.
Both Islamist groups deny their political ambitions were engineered by the military. The official army spokesman was not available for comment after queries were sent to the press wing.
Still, hundreds of MML supporters, waving posters of Saeed and demanding his release from house arrest, chanted “Long live Hafiz Saeed! Long live the Pakistan army!” at political rallies during the past week.
“Anyone who is India’s friend is a traitor, a traitor,” went another campaign slogan, a reference to Sharif’s attempts to improve relations with long-time foe India that was a source of tension with the military.
‘DERADICALISATION’ PLAN
Both Saeed and Khalil are proponents of a strict interpretation of Islam and have a history of supporting violence - each man was reportedly a signatory to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring war on the United States.
Mohammad Yaqoob Sheikh (R) nominated candidate of political party, Milli Muslim League (MML), distributes handbills to residents during an election campaign for the National Assembly NA-120 constituency in Lahore, Pakistan September 10, 2017. Picture taken September 10, 2017. REUTERS/Mohsin Raza
They have since established religious groups that they say are unconnected to violence, though the United States maintains those groups are fronts for funnelling money and fighters to militants targeting India.
Analyst Khaled Ahmed, who has researched Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity and its connections to the military, says the new political party is clearly an attempt by the generals to pursue an alternative to dismantling its militant proxies.
“One thing is the army wants these guys to survive,” Ahmed said. “The other thing is that they want to also balance the politicians who are more and more inclined to normalize relations with India.”
The military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency first began pushing the political mainstreaming plan in April 2016, according to retired general Shuaib, a former director of the army’s military intelligence wing that is separate from the ISI.
He said the proposal was shared with him in writing by the then-ISI chief, adding that he himself had spoken with Khalil as well as Saeed in an unofficial capacity about the plan.
“Fazlur Rehman Khalil was very positive. Hafiz Saeed was very positive,” Shuaib said. “My conversation with them was just to confirm those things which I had been told by the ISI and other people.”
Saeed has been under house arrest since January at his house in the eastern city of Lahore. The United States has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his conviction over the Mumbai attacks.
Then-Prime Minister Sharif, however, was strongly against the military’s mainstreaming plan, according to Shuaib and three members of Sharif’s inner circle, including one who was in some of the tense meetings over the issue.
Sharif wanted to completely dismantle groups like JuD. Disagreement on what to do about anti-India proxy fighters was a major source of rancour with the military, according to one of the close Sharif confidants.
In recent weeks several senior figures from the ruling PML-N party have publicly implied that elements of the military - which has run Pakistan for almost half its modern history and previously ousted Sharif in a 1999 coup - had a hand in the court ouster of Sharif, a charge both the army and the court reject.
A representative of the PML-N, which last month replaced him as prime minister with close ally Shahid Khaqi Abbasi, said the party was “not aware” of any mainstreaming plan being brought to the table.
RELIGION AND POLITICS
Some analysts worry that mainstreaming such controversial groups would be a risky strategy for Pakistan.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened sanctions against members of Pakistan’s military and even raised the specter of declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.
“It will send a wrong message,” said analyst Zahid Hussain, who nevertheless thought that Saeed’s new party would have a “negligible” effect on Pakistani elections because religious parties have never won more than a few seats in parliament.
Others are not so sure.
Sheikh, the MML candidate in Sunday’s by-election who says he was handpicked by Hafiz Saeed, vowed to establish strict Islamic rule and “break” liberalism and secularism.
Analyst Ahmed warned that few existing religious parties have a charismatic leader like Saeed, and Pakistan may find itself unable to control a rising tide of Islamist sentiment.
“If Hafiz Saeed comes into the mainstream, it’s not that he is going to be politicized,” he added. “It’s that he is going to make politics more religious.”
The Maldivian Ambassador-designate in Sri Lanka, Mohamed Hussain Shareef, has strongly refuted contentions by the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) and the US Acting Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Alice G. Wells, that the Indian Ocean archipelago is a hotbed of Islamic radicalisation with grave security implications for South Asia, the US, and the international maritime trade route.
While admitting that there has been a change in the Islamic culture in the Maldives in terms of the dress code and religious practices, as indeed the world over, envoy Shareef said that Maldivian Islam is still very moderate and cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be described as “extremist”.
And the Maldives is by no means a hotbed of Islamic terrorism, he stressed. Admittedly, there are hard line Islamic groups, but these are small, fragmented and ineffective. They are audible because there is democracy since 2008, and people have begun expressing themselves in the public domain thanks to the tremendous expansion of the social media.
But even given the advantages of democracy and technological development, the impact of extremist propaganda has been negligible, Shareef said.
Dire need to
protect tourism
Prevention of terrorism is particularly important in the Maldives because any terrorist incident in the country would be catastrophic for its largest industry, tourism, the envoy said.
“Maldives welcomes 1.5 million tourists every year and the safety and security of visitors is among the highest priorities of the government,” he underlined.
Statistics provided by the Maldivian Tourism Ministry say that there has been a 6% increase in arrivals, comparing the figures for January-June 2016 with January-June 2017. Significantly, there has also been an increase in arrivals even from the Western world which is very sensitive to political disturbances and travel advisories.
“It is regrettable that fear mongering on the issue is often led by the irresponsible opposition parties in the country. Funded overseas media depicts the Muslim veil and beard as signs of growing extremism,” Shareef pointed out.
The Maldives has seen political turmoil with one of its former Presidents Mohamed Nasheed in exile in the UK. And there have been serious charges of undemocratic actions against the incumbent President Abdulla Yameen. But there has been no terrorist act after the 2007 Sultan Park IED blast in Male in which 12 foreigners were injured.
Wells’ statement in Congressional Committee
Ambassador Shareef’s comments were sought in the context of a statement made by the Acting US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Alice G. Wells, at a Congressional hearing in Washington recently.
Wells said: “The United States has real concerns about the status of rule of law and democracy in the Maldives. Lack of higher educational opportunities, high youth unemployment, rise of social media, and weak institutions all contribute to an environment in which Islamist violent extremism is on the rise.”
“Our work with the Government to combat violent extremism remains critically important, in a country with a grim distinction: per capita, it has produced more terrorists who have fought in Iraq and Syria than any other country in the world.”
“The State Department’s request for $ 440,000 in foreign assistance for the Maldives is to continue “limited support for maritime security cooperation,” she added, noting “threats posed by narcotics trafficking, piracy in the Indian Ocean, and seaborne trade in illicit materials of potential use for terrorist activity.”
The Maldives abuts sea lanes through which pass two-thirds of the world’s oil and half of its container shipments, Wells underlined.
Contentions rebutted
Answering these charges, Ambassador Shareef said: “With the enactment in 2015 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), important measures have been implemented to root out terrorism and violent and violent extremism including the establishment of the multi-agency coordinating body, the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).”
“Through screening and licensing it is ensured that all religious clerics, preachers and lecturers are educated in moderate (true) Islam. It is seen that religious education does not incite the youth to violence. The national curriculum places a high emphasis on moderate Islamic values and tolerance.”
On the PTA, Shareef contended that it “largely mirrors legal steps in the UK in the fight against extremism, including advanced monitoring and extended detention of suspects”.
The threat of religious extremist attacks are on home soil is continuously monitored, and has been found to be relatively low. But the issue of Maldivian participation in foreign armed conflicts has been identified as a major concern, Shareef admitted.
“But the numbers of Maldivians going abroad to fight for Islamic groups have been few in comparison with other countries,” he contended.
In fact, the Maldives does not figure in the tables prepared by the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) for the year 2015. Out of the 20,730 foreign nationals fighting for the IS in various parts of the world, 1,200 were from France, 1,200 from Russia, 600 from the UK and another from Germany.
By 2017, the number of fighters from UK had swelled to 850. Maldives was not worthy of mention.
“Often encouraged by irresponsible opposition politicians the figure at any given time is largely inflated,” Shareef charged.
“And given the Maldives is a wholly Muslim society of approximately 400,000, the practice in the Western press to simplify the issue by stating the number of such foreign fighters on a per capita basis has not been helpful.”
Mentioning a per capita figure vis-à-vis a small population gives the listener an inflated picture, a very wrong impression.
However the Maldives has not lowered its guard in regard to its citizens going abroad to fight for the ISIS or al Qaeda.
“In actual fact, the NCTC is working very closely with law enforcement and anti-terror agencies across the world including the US, India, UK, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Turkey and Sri Lanka. It has successfully pinpointed suspects and intercepted many of them at transit points,” the envoy said.
The new 2015 PTA is designed to contain the threat of returning fighters by monitoring ,education rehabilitation and integration into society, he added.
Referring to the 2007 Sultan Park incident in Male in which 12 foreigners were injured, the Ambassador said that the incident jolted the Government into action on the issue of violent extremism.
“The suspects were found and handed lengthy jail sentences. Since the current Government assumed office in November 2013, there has been zero tolerance of violent extremism. It has been encouraging youth aspiring for a religious education to seek seats in reputed, moderate, Islamic universities rather than madrasas and other institutions where they may be brainwashed into taking up arms,” Shareef said.
Since the Maldives has one of the highest penetrations of social media anywhere in the world, vigilance against their misuse by religious extremists has been stepped up, the Ambassador added.
“What did these vain and presumptuous men intend? How did they expect to raise their lofty mass against God, when they had built it above all the mountains and clouds of the earth’s atmosphere?” This is St. Augustine writing about Babylon in his “City of God”. In more modern times Jonathan Raban has written in “Soft City”, “The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: A dream pursued, and found vain, wanting and destructive.”
St. Augustine wrote the “City of God” in a state of sorrowful contemplation. The city of man, he believed, ought to be a harmonious reflection of the City of God. In actuality it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the satanic. St Augustine would surely write the same way if reincarnated in Atlanta, Johannesburg, Mumbai or Riyadh.
Johannesburg? Who can forget Alan Paton’s dark description of that city in his beautiful but painful novel, “Cry the Beloved Country”. The old, liveable, city got overtaken in the 1950s. “We shall live from day to day. And put more locks on our doors, and get a fine, fierce dog when the fine, fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously, and the beauty of the trees by night and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things shall we forgo. We shall forgo the coming home drunken through the midnight streets and the evening walk over the starlit veldt. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives and that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution.”
We shall live from day to day. And put more locks on our doors, and get a fine, fierce dog when the fine, fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously, and the beauty of the trees by night and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things shall we forgo
Johannesburg, it is true has its own peculiar burden, but which of us city dwellers would be brave enough to say this does not touch some primeval instinct we have that tells us this is the way our own city might go, if indeed it has not already gone, as many have the last 20 years.
However, there is another instinct, close to us too, that orders us to construct a better city. Plato did this in his Republic. Napoleon 111 asked Baron Haussmann to build a beautiful Paris. Le Corbusier tried with his radiant city. But be warned by the latter. Dreamers can be dangerous. Recall Le Corbusier’s 12 cardinal principles:
The plan: totalitarian
The death of the street
Classification of simple speeds and complex speeds.
Arrangement made to an agreement on imminent laws of machine civilization.
The mobilization of the soil.
Housing considered as an extension of the public services.
The civilization of the road replacing the civilization of the railway.
The radiant city.
The radiant countryside.
The twilight of morning.
The essential joys, satisfaction of psycho-physiological need, collective participation and individual liberty.
The renaissance of the human body.
High thought? Raban calls it repellent. Much of it is. Le Corbusier’s vertical city with its skyscraper tower blocks of pre-stressed concrete must be man’s worst attempt at the soulless “lofty mass” since Babylon.
Why do politicians and planners build cities like Dubai and Qatar, all busy roads, no pavements for walking and no bicycle lanes? Didn’t they learn about Los Angeles’s mistakes of half a century ago? In Britain the country is still reeling from a fire that engulfed a high-rise in January, built for workers in London. At the other end of the scale was the fire in Abu Dhabi at the luxury flats last month in one of the world’s tallest buildings. Years ago I made a BBC documentary, “It’s Ours Whatever They Say”, that chronicled the fortunes of young boys who used to play on the roof of a tall block of working class flats. One boy fell off and died. (The film won the Silver Medal at the Venice Film Festival.)
Increasingly in Europe and North America, city governments are realizing their folly; that renovation of old houses at street level or building ordinary houses are a better bet than wholesale slum clearance and acres of new blocks. Not only is it often cheaper it is quicker. When joined with imaginative schemes to plant trees, to reduce traffic flow and build bike lanes it provides an earthbound style of living that makes many of the high-risers jealous. Most working class people think they have been vertically ghettoised. Most middle class people would never live in them.
I lived in India for a while. I’ve seen Mumbai mushroom upwards while, in-between the towers, shanty towns thrive. In Calcutta there are no tower blocks and few homeless. The big shanty towns have been destroyed, and the city’s stylish, graceful, houses and mansions, inherited from the British, are being renovated. Parks with boys playing cricket and parents walking their children abound. Crime is the lowest of all the world’s large cities.
A little less architectural vanity, a little less presumption and urban man will be a lot happier.
(For 17 years, the writer has been a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune/New York Times.)
What nobody in their anticipation realised that the new £10 Note had both shrunk in size. It had come nearer in dimension to the Old One Pound “O’Brien Note of the 1980’s.
by Victor Cherubim -
( September 16, 2017, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Cash has always been king in people’s pockets for centuries. Today the world is awash with paper currency. Major Central Banks are pumping hundreds of millions, if not trillions in currency notes. The Yen10, 000 Japan Note (approx £73) accounts for roughly 90% of all currency transactions. The European Central Bank (ECB) announced it would phase out the Euro 500 Note nicknamed the “Bin Laden” because of its association with money laundering and terror financing. Illegal money flows now exceed $2 trillion (£1.4 trillion) a year.
Banks everywhere encourage the growth of debit and credit cards, with apps for electronic transfers and mobile payments, as more and more people are using plastic to pay for everything. Physical cash transactions are becoming rarer. Many have given up carrying money around completely.
But there are also advantages using cash. What you see is what you pay for. But when you go on holiday they all buy and carry foreign currency. Many say it is just more fun than plastic when you are out and about in a foreign land.
Bucking the trend Britain issued the first polymer £10 Note
More than 1 million of new plastic (polymer) £10 Notes were put into circulation on Thursday 14 September 2017 by the Bank of England, celebrating author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, on the back of the note, some 200 years after her death.
Londoners queued outside the Bank of England on release of the new note. They were
along with many foreigners who wanted to lay their hands on the new note, perhaps, as “Collector’s item,” as the first polymer “Tenner” in circulation.
Others wanted the new £10 note in honour of Jane Austen and her enduring contribution to English Literature.
Most people waited for hours outside the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street in the City for one sole purpose, to make a fast buck. They were hoping to be able to grab and be the first lucky few to obtain the new note in circulation containing the serial numbers prefixed with JA 01, as they are Jane Austen’s initials. Others hoped they would get the low serial number AA 01 to trade on eBay. One specialist paper currency dealer had circulated information in advance that the lucky person/s with the “luck of the Irish” to obtain any notes with Serial Numbers starting with AA01 000010 onwards could command a guide price of £2000 to £3000. In fact sellers were taking bids on eBay for what they promised were low serial numbers. The lower the number, the more valuable the banknote. It was no longer currency, it was gambling. Strangely, there were no “Bobbies” outside the Bank.
The Tenner has shrunk in size and value
What nobody in their anticipation realised that the new £10 Note had both shrunk in size. It had come nearer in dimension to the Old One Pound “O’Brien Note of the 1980’s.
It has also lost its purchasing power and is nearer the 1980’s Pound in value.
There is always more to it that meet the eye. Making currency notes from polymer film means that the new £10 Note is more durable. It is expected to last as much as 5 years instead of the 2 years when paper notes last during circulation. Besides, it is so hard to forge as it contains at least 10 advanced security features, according to the Bank of England leaflet.
For those who want to see and feel the difference between the Old £10 and the New Note, the BoE leaflet summarises as follows:
There is a see-through window on the note. A clearly defined portrait of the Queen printed on the window with the words ‘£10 bank of England’ printed twice, around the edge.
There is the image of Winchester Cathedral positioned over the see through window. The foil is gold on the front and silver on the back of the note. When the note is tilted, a multi-coloured rainbow effect can be seen, The foil “£” symbol in the window is silver on the front and copper on the back of the note.
The side of the window is a coloured quill, to signify Jane Austen renown as an author. It changes colour from purple to orange depending on the angle the note is held.
On the front of the note, below the see through window, is a silver foil patch hologram. When the note is tilted, the word “Ten” changes to “Pounds” and a multicoloured rainbow effect can be seen.
There in front of the note is a silver foil patch containing an image of the Coronation Crown
Which appears in 3D.When the note is tilted, a multi-coloured rainbow effect can be noticed.
On the back of the note, there is a book-shaped copper foil patch, which contains the letters “JA”. It is immediately behind the silver crown in the front.
As you check the polymer note and the raised print and by running your finger across the front of the note, the words “Bank of England” and in the bottom corner, the number “!0” are printed in raised ink, known as intaglio, to assist the blind and the partially sighted.
The print quality on the note is sharp, clear and free from smudges or blurred edges.
Using a magnifying glass when you look at the lettering beneath the Queen’s portrait in the front, in small lettering is seen the value of the note and number “10”.
When you check the ultra-violet feature at the front of the note, the number “10” appears in bright red and green, on a dull background in contrast.
Surely the BoE and its Canadian Governor, Mark Carney should take credit for the above jargon, which no Englishman in his right mind will have the time to read, let alone assess the quality, print, texture of the New Note.
With all the above security features on a “Tenner” which is worth roughly a “Pound” in today’s value, is it highly unlikely a money launderer will tamper with this note.
Disadvantages of the New £10 Note
Whilst appreciating the time, the effort, the costs of the above security measures on the New Tenner, it is anybody’s guess whether this polymer note will soon have to be replaced with a Ten Pound Coin instead.
Further, if at any stage the New Note is folded, unlike the Charles Darwinian £10 paper notes, the crease remains and is difficult in counting large volumes of currency notes. But who now worries about counting cash. The Chinese Counting Machines installed in most banks do all the machine counting these days.
There is another issue with polymer notes, which only can be noticed in England. More than 130,000 people have signed a petition online last year calling on the Bank of England to stop using animal fat in the production of polymer notes. We are informed that this poses a problem, it would compromise anti-counterfeit measures.
Most critics say although we got rid of plastic bags, we now are bringing in plastic money, which is a sensitive issue.
How long is the Old Charles Darwinian £10 Note legal tender?
BoE states for a limited period until spring 2018, both the New and the Old Ten Pound Notes will be in circulation. No exact date as yet has been set when it would be withdrawn.
Unlike in many countries “withdrawn notes” will retain their nominal value “for all time.”It can always be exchanged for a limited period at any Bank or later at the Bank of England.
British bank Notes
Most British currency notes have featured portraits of personalities like Adam Smith, Boulton, Watt and recently on the new polymer £5 Note, Winston Churchill.
Jane Austen will be one of two women on the English Bank note. Elizabeth Fry was the only other woman and of course H.M. Queen Elizabeth.
British bank notes are in circulation around the world and they maintain their recognition.
Governments and printing currency
Cash remains important not only for the public but for governments to facilitate small everyday transactions and for protecting privacy. In his book, “The Curse of Cash,” Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, offers a plan that involves a gradual phasing out of larger notes, while leaving small notes ($10 and below) in circulation for an indefinite period.
Scaling back paper money is the name of the game of the Banks around the world. But societies seem to need tangible money, as money is reckoned as a foundation of security.
People seem to have a need to feel currency with their hands. Who can complain?
Burma is essentially run by one of the world’s most lauded humanitarians — a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a democracy icon. Aung San Suu Kyi, who leads the party in charge of the government, suffered more than two decades of repression, including a long house arrest, rather than leave the country or abandon her quest for elections.
Yet since her party took power last year, Suu Kyi — the country’s de facto leader, though not its official president — has stood by and watched the slaughter and flight of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya, a Muslim minority more than a million strong. In 2016, Burma’s military was engaged in a campaign of brutal suppression in Rakhine state, in the west of the country. Then, scattered attacks by Rohingya militant groups on police posts prompted an even harsher counterattack from the generals, reportedly joined by vigilante groups and other state security forces. That cycle intensified further this summer.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other monitors have cited expulsions of Rohingya from towns, campaigns to burn whole villages and killings by the armed forces in Burma (which is also called Myanmar) . In recent weeks alone, some 370,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh, according to United Nations estimates. The U.N. rights chief calls the campaign in Rakhine a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” NPR noted that “reports of unbridled murder and arson, rape and persecution have followed [Rohingya] out of Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, sketching a stark portrait of government violence.”
Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party was also repressed and brutalized by the armed forces during the long era of military rule, refuses to look squarely at the crisis. She has yet to visit the center of the violence, and in her public comments, she has refrained from criticizing the armed forces. This month, she claimed that there was an “iceberg of misinformation” circulating about the situation in Rakhine . Her office has mocked supposed “fake news” about the plight of the Rohingya. And her spokesman told local news outlet Frontier Myanmar that Rohingya “are holding weapons — swords, daggers, catapults and home-made rifles” — and then seemed to give non-Rohingya carte blanche to shoot Rohingya if they perceived danger from them.
Why did somebody who achieved so much good become complicit in so much ugliness? There are several possible, interlocking reasons.
Why has Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel laureate and Burma's de facto civilian leader, been so unwilling to condemn the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in her country? (The Washington Post)
First, Suu Kyi’s current silence is consistent with her approach to the Rohingya for years: She has never demonstrated much sympathy. On the campaign trail before the November 2015 election, she strove to avoid discussing violence in Rakhine , even though an earlier wave had destroyed Rohingya communities and no militant group had yet emerged there. When she did speak about the Rohingya, she called reporters into a news conference shortly before the vote and told them not to “exaggerate” the difficulties that the Rohingya faced.
It’s possible that this disinterest reflects Suu Kyi’s personal views, but it’s impossible to know for sure. One of her best-known biographers, Peter Popham, has written that Suu Kyi is not, at her core, a bigot: She has had senior advisers who are Muslims (although not Rohingya). And “one of the key figures in persuading her to dive into the democracy movement” was a best-selling dissident Muslim author, Maung Thaw Ka, Popham notes.
But Suu Kyi does represent her party. And there was little concern among the NLD rank and file in 2015, or even now in 2017, about violence against the Rohingya. Many NLD members, like a significant share of the Buddhist majority, simply think that the Rohingya are outsiders — called “Bengalis” by many Burmese — who do not deserve to live in the country, even though some have been there for generations. Last year, Suu Kyi reportedly asked the U.S. ambassador in Burma not to refer to the group as Rohingya, a sign that she sees them this way, too.
That means there is no political benefit to challenging majority views toward the Rohingya. The NLD did not put up any Muslim candidates during the 2015 national elections. Other former pro-democracy leaders, who also were harshly repressed by the military during the decades of junta rule, have expressed far stronger anti-Rohingya sentiments than Suu Kyi ever has.
These sentiments coincide with a growing Buddhist nationalist movement. As a recent International Crisis Group investigation revealed, this political and social movement is building extensive services at the community level. Buddhist nationalist groups offer what the ICG calls “a sense of belonging” for many young Buddhists. Such groups are the type of grass-roots organizations that no politician likes to alienate. Suu Kyi does not depend on the movement’s support — many hard-line Buddhist nationalists view her as soft on the Rohingya — but she also probably does not want a major rift with it.
Since taking control of the government — at least, the ministries not controlled by the military — Suu Kyi has made clear that she has two major priorities: trying to improve Burma’s economy and, most important to the government, making peace with the ethnic armies that have waged long insurgencies in northern and northeastern parts of the country.
Suu Kyi has launched an ambitious peace process with a number of insurgent groups, clearly seeing it as essential to her legacy and to making the country whole. Her father, the independence leader Aung San, tried to lay the groundwork for a federal Burma and prevent this civil conflict, but he was assassinated not long after he came to an initial agreement with ethnic minority groups. So all other issues are second to the economy and the peace process, as a government spokesman told the New York Times, playing down the relative importance of “democracy and human rights, including press freedom.”
Suu Kyi may also believe that her ability to stop the brutal military campaign in Rakhine state is limited. Although she is the de facto head of government, the top general, Min Aung Hlaing, maintains a great degree of power. Burma’s constitution gives the armed forces control over the military budget and over ministries related to security issues; they are also allotted 25 percent of seats in parliament. Perhaps the army will have less power at some point in the future, after a period of civilian rule and a change in the constitution to reduce its role in politics. But until then, Suu Kyi may judge it impractical to waste political capital challenging the military on an issue many people in her party do not care about.
Another problem is that foreign pressure on her to stop the Rohingya crisis seems to have made her even more intransigent. Suu Kyi has always been known as stubborn. (How else does one survive decades under house arrest and other repression?) She also is known to keep her own counsel. She does not have many voices in her inner circle pushing back or offering critiques of her actions — voices that could argue for a change in her Rakhine policy. She has a small staff and reportedly gets little input from NLD members of parliament. Fergal Keane, a longtime chronicler of Suu Kyi for the BBC, noted that “last December, when Vijay Nambiar, the UN Special Representative to Myanmar, urged Aung San Suu Kyi to visit Rakhine state, he was rebuffed.” Why? Because, as one Suu Kyi adviser told Keane, she simply did not want to be seen as following outside orders. This stubbornness could be multiplied by a feeling of betrayal: The very countries, rights organizations and international leaders who for decades supported Suu Kyi are now inveighing against her.
Suu Kyi has not been totally inactive on the Rakhine crisis. She created a commission of experts, chaired by former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan, to investigate the violence. This was an important step, and her government has rhetorically committed to implementing the panel’s recommendations.
Meanwhile, Suu Kyi may see that, despite criticism of how she has handled the Rakhine crisis, most powerful foreign governments are not going to punish Burma. The White House put out a statement this past week noting that it was “deeply troubled” by the violence in Rakhine but has done little else. Elsewhere, Delhi has stood alongside Suu Kyi in condemning Rohingya terrorist groups and has threatened to deport Rohingya seeking shelter in India. Beijing blames the Rohingya militants for the violence. This month, Suu Kyi’s security adviser noted that “friendly countries” such as China would block any resolution at the U.N. Security Council criticizing Burma.
Given her moral stature, her history and her power in Burma, Suu Kyi’s inaction has surely worsened affairs. She has shown the military that it can act with impunity, and her public statements have done nothing to challenge people within her party who don’t see the issue as important. Her indifference has hurt aid organizations’ ability to get people on the ground and to potentially raise money to help the Rohingya.
Suu Kyi can still make a difference, though. By speaking out more about the plight of the Rohingya, she could boost international aid efforts to keep Rohingya in camps in Bangladesh — and temporary places of shelter inside Burma — from dying. And in the end, she is the popularly elected leader in Burma; while Buddhist nationalist groups and generals might dislike a visit by her to Rakhine , they would be unlikely to stop her.
She knows these things. But she has watched the humanitarian crisis unfold anyway.
The United Nations released its first ever report on global hunger and malnutrition on Friday, and the prospects for a world without hunger by 2030 are looking grim.
After a decade of decline, the report indicates that global hunger has increased, with 815 million undernourished people in 2016, up from 777 million in 2015. While this is still far below 900 million in 2000, the rise in conflicts, caused, in part, by climate-related disasters, has triggered an uptick.
The UN has issued reports that measure the prevalence of hunger in the past, however, this is the first time they calculating metrics relating to malnutrition, such as stunting and obesity in collaboration with the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Rather than solely measuring global hunger, this report seeks to understand its wider effects on populations.
“We are broadening our collaboration, expanding the discussion, and understanding the linkages between hunger and malnutrition,” said Marco Sánchez Cantillo, deputy director and officer in charge of the Agricultural Development Economics Division of the United Nations.
Using official data gathered from each of the countries covered, the report records the prevalence of children who are below average height by the age of five, called stunting, and tallies overweight and obesity in children and adults. It also documents the occurrence of anaemia in women of reproductive age, which is a leading cause of maternal mortality, and rates of breastfeeding.
The findings are of global concern, affecting not only developing countries, but developed ones as well.
While there was a 6.6 percent decrease in stunting between 2005 and 2016, the current trends show that there will still be 130 million stunted children by 2025. The number of overweight children has also increased 1 percent between 2005 and 2016; and for adults, obesity more than doubled everywhere in the world between 1980 and 2014 and continues to accelerate. Obesity “is most severe in Northern America, Europe, and Oceania, where 28 percent of adults are classified as obese,” the report states.
“This is no longer a developing country problem,” Sánchez Cantillo said. “We have these problems in developed countries, too.”
Sánchez Cantillo points to three main drivers of world hunger and malnutrition: conflict and violence, weather related events, and economic slowdowns. “The drivers behind this will differ from country to country and even sometimes within countries,” he said. “We believe conflict and violence is one of the leading drivers in several parts of the world.”
The data shows that those who live in countries with conflict suffer more from hunger and malnutrition. About 60 percent live of the 850 million people suffering from hunger live in areas affected by conflict.
World hunger and malnutrition is particularly harmful in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South-Eastern and Western Asia, which are more susceptible to floods or droughts. Regions hit by climate-related disasters are then more susceptible to conflict and need more assistance in order to recover.
Global hunger is caught in a downward spiral: disasters cause conflict, conflict causes food insecurity, and food insecurity causes further conflict.
However, even for those who live in countries with little to no violence, economic slowdown can provoke difficulties with food imports, increasing domestic prices and resulting in a decrease in food availability.
While people in countries with long-term conflict suffer more than those with intermittent conflict or peace, food insecurity can happen anywhere — even in Texas or Florida. Rather than solely focusing on immediate humanitarian aid, the report emphasizes long term solutions and rebuilding towards resilience.
“The rising hunger that we are observing should set off alarm bells that we cannot afford to ignore,” said Sánchez Cantillo. “And that importantly, we will not end hunger by 2030 unless we address all the factors that undermine food security.”
This report marks the beginning of ongoing monitoring of global hunger and malnutrition.
Barbara Ellen-Sunday 17 September 2017 World Childless Week was created by a British woman, Stephanie Phillips, as a way of highlighting the experiences of people who are unable to have children. Not to be confused with those who are childless by choice – the “child-free”, as some say.
Seemingly worlds apart, they share a vexed similarity. Of course, most people each group encounters are probably just interested and kind. Less helpfully, the childless can sometimes find themselves tormented by invasive, agonising questions, while the child-free can end up being ruthlessly interrogated about the “strange” decision they’ve made.
It’s one thing to listen sympathetically when people are in pain and need to tell their story; quite another to demand a detailed explanation for something that’s effectively none of your damn business. Worse, too often, all this is a mere preamble to what the interrogators really want to do, which is to tell you what they did and how much better it is than what you did – in effect, launching a full-out defence of their own life choices.
This is what the childless/child-free need to understand – that the tactless, prying uber-prescriptive babble they endure doesn’t begin and end with the issue of childlessness. The world of parenting is infested with the roar of self-aggrandisement about what certain parents did, why they did it, and why everyone else should do it too.
Not all parents are like this, just a certain breed, who never seem to tire of defining themselves by their (often tedious) choices. Natural/assisted birth; breast/bottle; working/staying at home; washable/disposable nappies and so on. Whatever they happen to be talking about, parenting topics that should only ever be friendly, laid-back debates take on a Napisan-soaked pugilism.
It’s as though these people aren’t just idling away the time, swapping observations, they’re defending to the hilt their lives and their tribes. All too often, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly helpful or interesting going on, no new credo or illuminating spin. It’s just a cacophony of different needy voices, all convinced that their way is best. Otherwise, what are they doing with their lives?
Perhaps this partly explains all the poking and prodding, the ongoing social examination that the childless and child-free both endure. In their very different ways, their very existence negates the “normal” world of parenting. They’re living, breathing human testaments to the fact that, whether someone dearly, heartbreakingly wanted a family or opted to give procreation a swerve, without children, life goes on.
The only sane response to either of these narratives would be a modicum of polite interest and instinctive human solidarity – a respect for their experience or their choice. Frequently, however, it doesn’t quite go like that. On too many occasions, the childless end up having to field pitying questions about their lack of fecundity, sometimes very bluntly, among people they barely know and in a manner that I humbly suggest helps in no way whatsoever.
For their part, the child-free are often pressured to explain and justify their stance. There are rude questions, dire warnings about a barren future, an underlying hiss of disbelief. But there’s anxiety in there, too. It’s almost as though the thought simply can’t be accepted that, in actual fact, the parenting life path isn’t remotely special – it is, by definition, ordinary, a trajectory shared by countless others, most of whom don’t feel the slightest compunction to drone on about it.
This is where a certain strain of modern parenting seems to end up – not an interesting, complex debate, but a wailing torrent of self-justification. It’s not someone’s childlessness they pity – it’s the fact that they can’t ever be like them. And it’s not people being child-free that gets to them – it’s the fact that they quite clearly and rather hilariously don’t want to be.
“What did these vain and presumptuous men intend? How did they expect to raise their lofty mass against God, when they had built it above all the mountains and clouds of the earth’s atmosphere?” This is St. Augustine writing about Babylon in his “City of God”. In more modern times Jonathan Raban has written in “Soft City”, “The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: A dream pursued, and found vain, wanting and destructive.” 
