Crimea college attack: student carries out mass shooting in Kerch

At least 19 dead and scores wounded in ‘armed rampage’ that may have involved bombs
Multiple casualties after explosion at college in Crimea – video

Andrew Roth in Moscow-Wed 17 Oct 2018 

At least 19 people have been killed and almost 40 wounded in a shooting carried out by a student at a vocational college in Crimea.

Several witnesses described a gunman stalking the halls and firing at classmates and teachers until he ran out of ammunition. A bomb may also have been detonated during the attack, although Russian government agencies provided conflicting reports. Sappers said they later disarmed several more explosive devices at the college.

The attacker was identified as Vladislav Roslyakov, 18, a student of the Kerch polytechnic college, Sergei Aksyonov, Crimea’s regional head announced on television. Roslyakov, who carried a shotgun or rifle, killed himself at the site of the attack. The motive behind the attack was not immediately made public, although reports in Russian media said he had told acquaintances he was angry at his teachers and wanted to “get revenge”.

Stills from a video camera showed that he wore black pants and a white T-shirt, clothing that resembled the outfit worn by the Columbine high school attacker Eric Harris. The 1999 high school massacre has led to dozens of copycat attacks and plots in the US and abroad, including a foiled plot by two 14-year-old boys at a North Yorkshire school last year.

Such school shootings are rare in Russia, in part because rifles and handguns are hard to acquire.
The National Anti-Terrorism Committee (NAC), a government body, said an “unidentified explosive device” had detonated at the polytechnic college, and that it bore metal strips that acted as shrapnel. But the bodies of those killed mostly had gunshot wounds, the country’s Investigative Committee said. The NAC also said there could have been more than one attacker.


Law enforcement officers at the site of a bomb blast at the college. Photograph: Yekaterina Keizo/TASS

The assault took place in the city of Kerch, from where a new 12-mile (19km) bridge links Crimea to Russia. The location of the attack will heighten scrutiny from Russian authorities, who are already concerned about terrorist attacks. Crimea was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, and providing security to the peninsula has been a priority for Moscow.

Some politicians initially suggested that the Ukrainian government was behind the attack, although as more information emerged about the attacker, the dominant version became a disaffected student angry at his school.

Vladimir Putin, who is in the southern Russian city of Sochi with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, issued condolences to the families of those killed and ordered a full investigation. Ukraine said it had stepped up security on the border with Crimea.

Roslyakov had recently acquired a hunting licence, a regional official said, and may have legally owned his weapon. A local media outlet said that he had recently bought a 12-gauge shotgun and 150 shells, although that could not be confirmed.

On local television, the head of the college described an armed rampage with attackers gunning down pupils and teachers, leaving bodies strewn throughout the building.

“It was a real terrorist attack, like in Beslan,” the school’s director, Olga Grebennikova, said, referring to the 2004 attack by Islamist militants at a school that left more than 330 dead.

The Investigative Committee initially declared the Kerch assault a terrorist attack, but later reclassified it as a “mass killing”. Russian media at first reported the blast as the result of a gas explosion.


Emergency workers at the scene. Photograph: Yekaterina Keizo/Tass

“There are a lot of bodies, a lot of bodies of children,” Grebennikova said in a video posted to the news site KerchNet. The attacker “ran with automatic rifles, I don’t know what they were, on the second floor, opening offices and killing everyone they could find”.

“I would also be a corpse,” she said. “Because all of my people were shot to death. Kids and employees were killed.”

The most recent mass casualty attack in Russia took place in April 2017, when a naturalised Russian citizen from Kyrgyzstan detonated a bomb in the St Petersburg metro, killing 16 people including himself.

Crimea will hold a three-day mourning period for those killed in the attack. Russian authorities dispatched 12 doctors to the peninsula and announced plans to bring some of the wounded to elite Moscow hospitals for treatment. The government has also promised free medical care to the wounded and financial support to families of the dead.

Khashoggi Was the Victim of an Ottoman-Saudi Islamist War

The journalist’s suspected murder, and its aftermath, was the latest battle of a 300-year war over Sunni Islam.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman during the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Summit at the Istanbul Congress Center on April 14, 2016. (Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images)

BY MUSTAFA AKYOL-

OCTOBER 17, 2018, 6:26 AM

The apparent abduction, and probable murder, of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 unmasked the ugly despotism behind the reformist image of the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Less noticed, however, is the way this scandal revealed a long-running rivalry between the two countries that directly butted heads at the outset: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

The foundation of the rift lies in the countries’ distinct versions of Sunni Islam—versions that have evolved within very different historical trajectories and that have produced contrasting visions about the contemporary Middle East. If the present crisis forces the non-Muslim world to choose sides between these religious models, the decision should be easy.

This is a story that goes back to the 18th century. Then, much of what we call “the Middle East” today, including the more habitable part of the Arabian Peninsula, was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul, then called Constantinople, by a cosmopolitan elite of mainly Turks and Balkan Muslims, including Bosnians and Albanians. The Hejaz, the western region of the Arabian Peninsula that included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was revered for religious reasons, but it was a backwater with no political or cultural significance.

In the 1740s, in the most isolated central area of the Arabian Peninsula, called Najd, a scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab emerged with a fiery call for the restoration of “true Islam.” He had revived Hanbalism, the most dogmatic of the four main Sunni schools, with a passion to renounce and attack “apostate” Muslims, which included Shiites but also fellow Sunnis such as Ottomans. The latter was guilty of various “innovations” in religion—a term that amounts to “heresy” in Christianity—such as Sufi mysticism and venerations of shrines.

Wahhab soon allied with a chieftain called Ibn Saud—the founder of the Saudi dynasty. The First Saudi State they established together grew in size and ambition, leading to a big massacre of Shiites in Karbala in 1801 and the occupation of Mecca in 1803. The Ottomans crushed the Wahhabi revolt in 1812 via their protectorate in Egypt, and Wahhabism retreated to the desert.

Another tumult in Hejaz occurred in 1856 when the Ottomans, thanks to the influence of their British allies, introduced another heretical “innovation”: the banning of slave trade, which was then a lucrative business between the Africa coast and the Arabian city of Jeddah. At the behest of angry slave traders, Grand Sharif Abd al-Muttalib of Mecca declared that Turks had become infidels and their blood was licit. As we learn from the chronicles of Ottoman statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Turks’ sins included “allowing women to uncover their bodies, to stay separate from their fathers or husbands, and to have the right to divorce.”

These were the changes introduced during the Tanzimat, the great Ottoman reform movement in the mid-19th century by which the empire imported many Western institutions and norms. The Tanzimat allowed the Ottoman Empire to ultimately become a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—something still unimaginable in the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia
. It also allowed the rise of the modern Turkish Republic, where secular law became the norm, women gained equal rights, and democracy began to grow.

Today, admittedly, we are at a very grim point in Turkish democracy, as a religious reaction to the excesses of French-style secularism has been captured by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to bolster a fiercely authoritarian populism. The “Turkish model” that Erdogan’s party seemed to represent at the outset of this century was an inspiration to many Muslims, including myself, as a synthesis of Islam with liberal democracy. In the past five years, however, this model has collapsed dramatically, as Turkey became the home of jailed journalists, crushed opponents, hate, paranoia, and a new cult of personality that I have called “Erdoganism.”

Yet Erdogan and his fellow Islamists are still Turkey’s Islamists—that is, compared with Saudi Arabia’s elites, they are still operating within a more modern framework that reflects a milder interpretation of Sunni Islam. And this sheds light on the two major political disputes that have emerged between Ankara and Riyadh.

The first of these concerns Iran. The Saudis are the champions of a united Sunni front against Iran, which is not free from the hatred of the rawafid, a derogatory term for Shiites, that is deeply embedded in Wahhabism.

 And while this militancy may sound like music to hawks in Washington and Israel, who are eager to ostracize Iran for their own reasons, it only escalates the poisonous sectarianism in the region, whose main example is the disastrous civil war in Yemen.

In contrast, despite being at odds with Iran for years over the Syrian civil war, Turkey has not condemned Iran as an enemy, let alone fueled any anti-Shiite view. “My religion is not that of Sunnis, of Shiites,” Erdogan has repeatedly said. “My religion is Islam.” This is the right approach in a region that needs not more but less sectarianism. Erdogan believes that the best way to tame Iran’s destabilizing influence is through diplomacy, of the sort former U.S. President Barack Obama tried, rather than threats and aggression.

The second dispute between Ankara and Riyadh is over the Muslim Brotherhood, the main Islamist political party in Egypt with franchises all over the region. Riyadh condemns the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and supported the brutal military coup in Egypt against it in 2013. Ankara, on the other hand, condemned the coup and threw its lot in with the Brotherhood, making Istanbul the new capital of Arab dissidents, especially those who are allied with the Brotherhood.

It’s important to properly understand the contours of the dispute. The Muslim Brotherhood, a political party whose ultimate aim is to introduce sharia, or Islamic law, can be a legitimate concern for secular Arabs. Saudi Arabia, however, already implements the most rigid form of sharia and also promotes the Salafi movements around the region, which are more regressive than the Muslim Brotherhood on issues like women’s rights.

The real concern of Saudi Arabia with Muslim Brotherhood is political—that a popular Islamist movement that doesn’t recognize the absolute authority of the ruler is subversive. So, they should be crushed by force—an argument that again makes sense to hawks in the West, for their own reasons. History shows, however, that the very thing that created terrorist offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood has been its violent repression by Arab tyrants. As experts such as Shadi Hamid argue, “normalizing Islamist parties” is in fact the only way to build Arab democracies.

The Turkish Islamists who now rally behind Erdogan, who have long been accustomed to electoral democracy, are correct in making the same argument. Yet they also need to see that democracy hardly means anything if it means the tyranny of the majority, which seems to be their current approach in Turkey. To make progress in Turkey, they should emulate the much brighter model of Tunisia, where Islamists and secularists have been able to forge a liberal constitution together.

The appropriate reform model for Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, would come from the reasonable constitutional monarchies of the region, such as Jordan and Morocco, which are freer than most other Arab states. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who apparently has tried to charm the West with his popular reforms such as allowing women to drive cars, must understand that modernity is not just about cosmetic social changes, but also about some measure of political freedom. That means not unabashedly killing your critics.

Record number of families crossing U.S. border as Trump threatens new crackdown

The Washington Post joined agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection on a patrol along the border near McAllen, TX. (Video: Jon Gerberg/Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

By Nick Miroff andNick Miroff-October 17 at 6:07 PM

The number of migrant parents entering the United States with children has surged to record levels in the three months since President Trump ended family separations at the border, dealing the administration a deepening crisis three weeks before the midterm elections.

Border Patrol agents arrested 16,658 family members in September, the highest one-month total on record and an 80 percent increase from July, according to unpublished Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by The Washington Post.

Large groups of 100 or more Central American parents and children have been crossing the Rio Grande and the deserts of Arizona to turn themselves in, and after citing a fear of return, the families are typically assigned a court date and released from custody.

“We’re getting hammered daily,” said one Border Patrol agent in South Texas who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

Having campaigned on a promise to stop illegal immigration and build a border wall, Trump now faces a spiraling enforcement challenge with no ready solutions. The soaring arrest numbers — and a new caravan of Central American migrants heading north — have left him in a furious state, White House aides say.

Trump has been receiving regular updates on the border numbers, telling senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and Chief of Staff John F. Kelly that something has to change, according to senior administration officials.

Aides including Miller and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have continually told the president that many of the children coming across the border are being smuggled illegally and that the United States is being taken advantage of. The president’s welling anger has left him pushing once more for a reinstatement of a family-separation policy in some form, which he believes is the only thing that has worked, despite the controversy it triggered.

[Trump administration weighs new family-separation effort at the border]

One senior official, also not authorized to speak to the media, conceded that the separations were halted to stanch political fury but ended up sending a “clear signal” that people could cross, adding, “Now we’re actually getting crushed.”

GOP strategists working on the midterms said that the separations coincided with the worst polling times of the presidency and that reinstituting separations would sag numbers for the Republicans, who are already struggling in many close races.

Trump continues to criticize Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and has asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to work with Mexico to make it tougher for Central American immigrants to cross its southern border, inserting the issue into ongoing trade negotiations.

A senior DHS official said Wednesday that Nielsen continues to take the lead role engaging with leaders from Central America on migration issues and has been in regular contact with the Mexican government and the transition team of President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will take office Dec. 1.

Trump has been lashing out this week at the new caravan of 2,000 migrants, mostly from Honduras, who crossed into Guatemala on Monday, pushing past police roadblocks. On Tuesday, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador if their governments “allow their citizens, or others, to journey through their borders and up to the United States.”

In a tweet Wednesday morning, Trump urged GOP candidates to campaign on the issue. “Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country,” he wrote. “Great Midterm issue for Republicans!”

The latest DHS figures show 107,212 members of “family units” were taken into custody during fiscal 2018, obliterating the previous high of 77,857 set in 2016.

The number of “unaccompanied alien children” and single adults apprehended remained essentially unchanged last month, another indication that more migrants who might have traveled alone in the past are now bringing children with them.

Katie Waldman, a DHS spokeswoman, said the agency did not have official numbers ready to publish, but “current trends indicate enforcement efforts against single adults entering illegally have been hugely successful.” However, she said, “the removal of actual family units, or those posing as family units, has been made virtually impossible by Congressional inaction — which will most likely result in record numbers of families arriving illegally in the United States this year.”

There have been several senior-level meetings at the White House about the numbers, administration officials say, at which Miller has channeled the president’s frustration.

Miller is pushing for a more aggressive stance, including changes at U.S. ports of entry that would make it tougher for asylum-seeking Central Americans to gain admission.

Another option under consideration, known as “binary choice,” would detain migrant families together and give parents a choice — stay in immigration jail with their child for months or years as their asylum case proceeds, or allow their child to be assigned to a government shelter while a relative or guardian can apply to gain custody.

Some DHS officials remain wary of the proposal and the potential blowback it could bring, and there is a lack of detention space to accommodate the record wave of parents and children coming across.Immigration and Customs Enforcement has about 3,300 detention beds at three “family residential centers,” but five times as many parents and children are crossing each month. The volume has overwhelmed Border Patrol stations and prompted mass releases.

Though the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas remains the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, Border Patrol agents in recent weeks have seen a new increase in southern Arizona. Bus-loads of migrant parents and children have been dropped off at churches and charities there by ICE, which has little detention space for families and pregnant women.

[Faced with migration ‘crisis,’ U.S. border chief finds no easy fix in Central America]

The latest DHS figures show U.S. agents made 396,579 arrests along the Mexico border during the government’s 2018 fiscal year, a 30 percent increase over the same period in 2017, when illegal migration dropped to a 56-year low.

Trump viewed the 2017 figures as a validation of his tough rhetoric on illegal immigration and had plans to campaign on the achievement this year. When border arrests jumped earlier this spring, he berated Nielsen and demanded swift action, furious to be losing ground on one of his core issues.

That led to the “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative this spring and the separation of at least 2,500 children from their parents, hundreds of whom were deported without their sons and daughters. The president issued an executive order June 20 ending the practice amid public outcry.

DHS officials have seen a particularly large increase this year in families arriving from Guatemala, where smuggling guides have been encouraging migrants to bring children with them to avoid deportation.

[Hunger, not violence, fuels Guatemala migration surge, U.S. says]

Courts have limited the amount of time minors can be held in immigration jails to 20 days, so many parents who arrive with children are fitted with ankle monitoring bracelets and given a court appointment that may be several months away.

Administration officials blame this “catch and release” model for the growing number of families arriving at the border, proposing to end it by expanding family detention space and changing rules that limit their ability to hold children in long-term custody.

Agents along the border say the family migration surge has continued this month.

“If October is any indication of what’s to come, Fiscal Year 2019 is going to be a very busy year,” Manuel Padilla Jr., chief of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector in South Texas, said on Twitter. Agents in the sector, the busiest for illegal crossings, arrested more than 1,900 people last weekend alone, according to Padilla.

Bangladesh’s newly formed political coalition

Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is after all equal to zero

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by Anwar A Khan-Oct 16, 2018

( October 16, 2018, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) Signed zero is zero with an associated sign. In ordinary arithmetic, the number 0 does not have a sign, so that −0, +0 and 0 are identical. However, in computing, some number representations allow for the existence of two zeros, often denoted by −0 (negative zero) and +0 (positive zero), regarded as equal by the numerical comparison operations but with possible different behaviuors in particular operations. This occurs in the sign and magnitude and ones’ complement signed number representations for integers, and in most floating-point number representations. The number 0 + O are usually encoded as 0. Zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is after all equal to zero and so, it is not a fine line, at all.

Led by Gono Forum President Dr. Kamal Hossain, BNP, JSD, Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and NagorikOikya (Citizen’s Unity) announced a new opposition political alliance named the JatiyaOikya Front, ‘National Unity Front’ on 13th October 2018 excluding Jukto Front (United Front) Convener AQM Badruddozza Chowdhury ahead of the upcoming National Polls in Bangladesh.  At the very outset, National Unity Front has faced a rift on the question of tying-up with JeI people, the dreaded killing squad who masterminded the mass murdering of millions of our people, molestation of 300 thousand of our mothers and sisters and many more unspeakable misdeeds during our glorified War of Independence in 1971.

The new coalition envisages realising 7-point demand, including the resignation of the government, dissolution of parliament, formation of an election-time neutral government and the release of BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia, and meeting other 12 goals.

The direful killing squad Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) has been recognised as a member of this newly formed coalescence. Dr. Kamal Hossain’s political party has no anchor on the soil of Bangladesh. He is a solitaryshowcase.  ASM Abdur Rob, the supreme leader of a bantam faction of a political party – JSD, one time a great revolutionary and contributed gigantically to the process of establishing Bangladesh in a bloody war in 1971 with the flagitious Pakistani military junta. He has now become a midget figure in the country’s political arena. Mahmudur Rahman Manna is a lone wolf in Bangladesh’s politics though once upon a time he was a famed student leader. Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury is a veteran Freedom Fighter, physician, owner of GonoShashtya Hospital and a noetic of BNP politics. He is also a loner having no foot in politics.

Those of us, who are now sexagenarian, can hark back those of days of our glorified Liberation War of 1971 to attain Bangladesh and many extolled movements during the pre-independence days which eventually culminated our war with the savage Pakistani rulers to acquire an independent and sovereign state for us; for our people.

During my Dhaka University days of 1972-76, once upon a time, I found AFM Mahbubul Hoque and Mahmudur Rahman Manna as President and General Secretary of JSD Chhatra League. Hoque was a most brilliant student and an outstanding orator. His speech used to cast spell-bound on the audience of students, but when Manna began to speak, be it at DU’s Bot-tola or elsewhere, all students started to leave the locus spots as he was then a hapless speechifier. But with the passage of a long time, he, being an aged Dhaka University (DU) student, became a wondrous public speaker. I heard many of his addresses under the famed spot of DU’s banyan tree and at other places taking some breaks from my work-places. He left JSD politics and then joined BSD, a small splinter political party of JSD. After a little pause, he joined Awami League (AL), the largest political party in Bangladesh which had glorious past history and which led our Bengali nation to establish our own homeland. He left AL, and is now the Convener of Nagorik Oikya (Citizen’s Unity), a one-man show political platform and has no strongbasal in the country’s politics.

If one tries to read or try to know who is Mubaidur Rahman and it would then be adjuvant for anyone to agniseMahmudur Rahman Manna! An old famed adage says, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” and I must say without any arrièrepensée that “he is not what he is.” In point of fact, he has gone back to the outfall at a far-off grime billet from where he has primitively sprung up.

Dr. Kamal Hossain was in abroad at the time of Bangabandhu’s brutal murder, but he was then touring abroad being Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Government’s Foreign Minister. He was then well-known throughout the world because of his outstanding educational background (his teacher Henry Kissinger also praised him aloud uttering the words “Dr. Kamal Hossain could speak better English than him” when he visited Bangladesh after we achieved independence and The Daily Ittefaq carried this news on its front page), and was also an accepted persona to the Western World leaders. He could have convened a press conference or more than that in the overseas countries to condemn the savage putting to death of the country’s Founding Father Mujib in the harshest language and marshalled immense backing of the famed world leaders. The history of Bangladesh would then have been different. But he did nothing.

After his return to Bangladesh (maybe sometime in 1979), I heard a speech of Dr. Hossain Hossain at a seminar at the DU’s TSC Auditorium where many prominent figures of political and social classes were present. I found him that he could not speak Bengali well. He spoke Bangla mostly in Urdu tone. Now he can speak very good Bangla. But that is not my point. The point is: Bangabandhu loved him so much because of his mettlesome educational status and intellectual calibre. He made him as the Law Minister and then the Foreign Minister at his Cabinet at such a young age of him. But where are his humanistic lineaments? I have heard that he is the legal counsel of so many multinational organisations and looks after their interests only, not for ours. He earns huge money through his legal profession. Have you ever heard that he has spent a single coin for the down-trodden people of our society? Have you ever heard that he has served his legal profession for poor people in the country at free-of-cost or at a minimal fee? What about his reciprocation for Bangabandhu and Bangladesh?

During pettifogger Ershad’s regime, he was once off-loaded from the plane when he tried to go abroad, but he chose to remain unsounded against this rough-cut shenanigan character. He is a man fond of ease and comfort in life. Politics is a very large science; here there is no short-cut pathway; politics means the mythos of political orientation and bring about greater welfare of people which are not the dominant allele in the character of Dr. Kamal Hossain. Being a politician, what is the contribution of Dr. Kamal Hossain to the country? If you ask this question to him directly, we think he will immediately enshroud his face.

Dr. B. Chowdhury, President of BikalpaDhara Bangladesh, a petite political party with no fundament or cornerstone in the soil of Bangladesh. He was instrumental among others who belonged to the anti-Bangladesh liberation force and strongly backed up self-declared President Gen Zia in introducing ‘Bangladeshi Nationalism’, ‘Bangladesh Zindabad’ like inglorious ism in the light of Pakistani spirit in opposing the glorious spirits up of Bangladesh in the country and sheer betraying the supreme sacrifices of our millions of valorous and patriotic people to ground Bangladesh in 1971.

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The new coalition envisages realising 7-point demand, including the resignation of the government, dissolution of parliament, formation of an election-time neutral government and the release of BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia, and meeting other 12 goals.

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Dr. B. Chowdhury’s father late Kafiluddin Chowdhury was a very senior politician (senior to BangabandhuMujib), belonged to AL and a MNA of the 1970 Pakistan-based national polls. B. Chowdhury personally drove his vehicle on-board of his father, crossed over the Indian border and joined our glorious Liberation War of 1971 to establish Bangladesh. But throwing away all his morals bare-facedly, he vauntingly pigged, ravened, downed and shored at the bivouac of anti-Bangladesh liberation camp and bootlicked the self-declared president Gen. Zia and his anti-liberation compadres. He was thrown out from the palace of Bangababhan by Khaleda Zia and her confederates. Once I saw him fleeing away to salvage his life riding at the backside of a motorbike like a stooge or a laughingstock at Mohakhali Railway crossing point being chased by some gawks of Begum Zia and her brigands.

Begum Zia is anerrant politician and supremo of the second largest political party in the country, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), has been convicted on graft charges lawfully and is now in jailhouse. Her son Tarique Zia, the de-facto chief of BNP, a fleer and hiding in UK, has been awarded lifecaptivity by the court for his notorious involution of 21st August 2004 grenade attack on the life of AL Chief and the current officeholder of Premier of Bangladesh.

BNP, the ill-famed political party, an illegitimate child born in the military bivouac after BangabandhuMujib’s brutal assassination in 1975, dared to kick to the very foundation of Bangladesh that we achieved in 1971 at supreme sacrifices of three million of our people and losing chastity of three hundred thousand of our mothers and sisters. It has come forth as a terrorist outfit and emerged in the new name of Jamaat-e-BNP. It has also taken refuge in the den of another criminal outfit-Jamaat-e-Islami and of perdition. There is a wise saying, “The devils would not listen to the Scriptures.” Canada’s Federal Court made a judicial decision on 25th January, 2017 to clearly call BNP as a terrorist organisation vide clause Nos. 37, 39, 41 and 50 (2nd paragraph) of its verdict.

Self-declared military President Zia was a flagitious baddie in Bangladesh’s politics! An ill star as he was in politics, his political life highlights a notorious, guileful egotistic politico; his character; and his actions were a full load of lies and buncombe. As a public persona, he was as ticklish as an imaginary creature, he diddled with politicians, people and even mulcted his party stalwarts and the army clique. He used to love to play with everybody only to gain control of the throne of Bangladesh by hook or by crook. The word “principle” was never found in his lexicon.

A politician with brightness and extremely intelligent must be a principled one, humble, and unpretentious, but Zia and her Begum have possessed demoniac pitilessness in the country’s politics. They are swaggering characters only to harm people and their legitimate rights. Hence, no memory is for such a highway man or woman of distinctly inferior lineaments; and their right place should be the outfall at a grime place. Being power-hungry, they have ghosted the Bangladesh’s throne was their only and to ascent to it, they didn’t bother for any rationales; rather, they danged to invoke evils only in connivance with the anti-Bangladesh liberation force to demean and belittle our glorified Liberation War of 1971 and the glorious gains that we attained.

Jamaat-e-BNP people are not befitting human beings. Maudud, Fakhrul, Rizvi (a gothic man) …have now uncloaked their own debilitating cheap and shoddy grapheme. Like all other malefactors, they also havecrossfiled their names as snotty-nosed.

This bevy group of people has resorted to misleading falsehood anew like their brutish forerunners. When you pull back or look back, you may remember that this Begum boastfully described Jamaat-e-Islamisupremo and a gangster of 1971 Human Tragedy-Golam Azam and his lieutenants as political prisoners. Look at that woman’s inward heart. We can at once safely say “deceit thy name is Jamaat-e-BNP.” Before the upcoming national election, Dr. Kamal Hossain and his present mobsters along with BNP in connivance with the country’s hydra- Jamaat-e-Islami sub-humans may create harum-scarum and slaphappy, but their dare-devilish acts shall have to be smacked-down in a flash for betterment of the country.

We must also not forget that the anti-Bangladesh liberation force may be kept dumped for a short while by their foreign Beelzebub and their feudatory states. This evil spirit may conjure up to deadening dissembles to the country and our people without premeditation with the cover-up services by those archfiends. We must be vigilante to thwart their any malefic elbow grease tout-de-suite.

We should also not blank out grimed-faced manacles outshout purposive of disembodied vociferation and a disembodied spirit’s fiction. This grapheme may be described as excogitating, ugly duckling, despicable, malefic figure…having many hats! I have put across the verity in order in this whole write-out.

Bangladesh was liberated from the roughshod seizes of Pakistani military regime in 1971 because of supreme sacrifices of millions of our people and losing chastity belts by three hundred thousand of our honourable sisters and mothers.

So many of us went to the war field in 1971, fought valiantly and gave a crushing defeat to the Pakistani side, but I must say many freedom fighters and strong supporters of our glorious Liberation War to attain our own homeland in 1971 have later on turned or sided them into or with the anti-liberation forces. Self-declared President Gen Zia, once a veteran FF, emerged as a member of anti-Bangladesh liberation force, sided with them unashamedly and vauntingly reinstalled politically those sub-humans belonged to Jamaat-e-Islami like killing outfit and some other minor or smaller political parties who had adjunction with our biting enemy – Pakistani regime and who were on the run both at home and abroad because of their grave criminal offences. Those vile, treacherous and loathsome characters first bull-dozed down the four core pillars of our glorious constitution of 1972 only for their self-interests.

We graved two-nation theory through achieving Bangladesh in 1971. In fact, Bangladesh was created for all people irrespective of religions to live together in peace. The names of so many more living and dead Punic personas including Gen Zia, GenErshad, Khaleda Zia…can be adduced who did consecrate legal injuries barefacedly to the true spirits and values that we achieved through establishing Bangladesh in 1971. All these traitors must not escape the tight-rope of justice.

In 1971, I saw in my own eyes that the majority members of a family went to the battle fields to fight valorously with the brutal Pakistani forces and their local mango-twigs and established Bangladesh, but one or two members of the same family sided (in a rare case) with the Pakistani government. I also witnessed a fearless and patriotic member of our FF group was compelled to kill his father who carried out brutal atrocities to our freedom-loving people.  So, to bring in Dr. Kamal Hossain, Dr. B. Chowdhury, ASM Abdur Rob, Mahmudur Rahman Manna, Dr. Zafarullah Chowdhury and their congeners or their otherwise roles, are extraneous, not perfect; but defective or inadequate. We must reckon whether a FF or its supporters uphold the noble cause of our Liberation War unto their death with no deflection.

Al-Jajeera TV, Toby Cadman, LA Carlile, Dr. Ghumdi, David Bergman… are widely known as malevolently paid agentive of Jamaat-e-Islami like sub-humans; killing squad; a rancid like ram-rod which is excoriated gratingly in many parts of the world for its felonious deeds; many of Al-Jajeera TV’s so-called journos were punished worldwide for their life-threatening misdoings; and beaucoup of them are still in jailhouses for their denigrated and slanderous engagement in many parts of the world. Al-Jajeera TV operations should be completely shut down in Bangladesh sooner for its begriming gages!

The actors of the newly constitutedbond are a big zero and grandiloquent cretins.  These actors that join politics are flops everywhere. The media should not pay any attention to such scalawag politicians. Wrong again. Stacking rocks on rocks for an hour might produce nothing of value. In the medieval framework, all candy bars would have their values set by fiat. Bypassing that would be cheating. Something a hag would do. Obviously you cannot increase the fiat value by trading them around, so there’s no need to even consider that. It can be negative-sum game for damaging to the country to a great extent. For example, if you wage a war there is certainly some destruction involved plus expenses that are only used for the war. At the end, there might be a winner and a loser, but the total sum of the goods will be decreased.

It can be zero-sum game for Dr. Kamal Hossain, ASM Abdur Rob, Mahmudur Rahman, Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury and the likes of them. The stock exchange is sometimes described as a zero-sum game, because it doesn’t create nor lose value, only redistribute it. Of course, this is true only for some idealised exchange that we use as example. They have fallen into the ground-emplaced mine because it is luculent that under the cover of trammeling or trapping of them, the anti-Bangladesh liberation bivouac would get the larger benefits but not for benefits of Bangladesh’s people, liberation war, its spirits, our glorious national fag, our national anthem…

The quadruple characters of National Unity Front under the stewardship of Dr. Kamal Hossain would be used as cat’s-paw under the veiled cover-up to batter the country ineffably by the anti-Bangladesh liberation force.The quadruplet or more so “zeroes”, adding when they come together, nothing comes out of it. Besides that, their political parties are veryLilliputian in their scale of power and influence upon people.

That’s all the verities about those vagrants in Bangladesh’s politico. Dr. Kamal Hossain’s daydream to be the Premier or President of Bangladesh is a very remote possibility; rather, his life is at full risk because he is now surrounded by his own new-fangled of people of coup-de-grace.

The Election Commission must conduct a free and fair election. The polls-time government must ensure that a free and fair election is held.

The government shall have to be changed through ballots, but those unsavoury people do not have any constituencies to run for memberships for Bangladesh’s parliament to emerge as victorious to form the government and the common voters do not even know them.  Every one of them will lose in the election as they do not have any base in the general voters. We ingeminate that zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is after all equal to zero and so, it is not a fine line, at all.

-The End-

The writer writes about politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs

‘This is a 21st century version of fascism’ – Michael Moore on Trump and his new documentary

Krishnan Guru-Murthy-15 Oct 2018Presenter

The documentary maker Michael Moore has a new film out on Friday about Donald Trump. Fahrenheit 11/9 is an account of why America ended up with Trump as President. In fact Moore thinks Trump will be re-elected, unless America’s silent majority – the ones who don’t vote – can be mobilised to stop what he believes is a march to a new kind of fascism. We went to meet Michael Moore.

Latest U.S. sanctions show disregard for human rights of all Iranians - foreign minister

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif (L) speaks during a news conference in Baghdad, September 8, 2013. REUTERS/Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Pool/File Photo

OCTOBER 17, 2018

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States’ latest economic sanctions against Iran display a disregard for the human rights of all Iranians, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Wednesday.

The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday sanctioned two Iranian banks and a handful of companies it says are linked to Iran’s Basij militia.

“Latest US sanctions violate 2 ICJ orders: to not impede humanitarian trade & to not aggravate the dispute. Utter disregard for rule of law & human rights of an entire people. US outlaw regime’s hostility toward Iranians heightened by addiction to sanctions,” Zarif said in a Twitter post.

By ICJ, Zarif was referring to the International Court of Justice.

Tensions between Iran and the United States rose after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from a multilateral agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme in May and reimposed sanctions in August.

U.S. officials have said a new set of sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry, will be imposed on Nov. 4.
“U.S. addiction to sanctions is out of control,” Zarif also wrote on Twitter.

He said in the tweet that one of the banks was vital for food and medicine imports and seemed to suggest it was not close to the militia - a volunteer force mainly involved in Iran’s internal security operations - without naming it directly.

“Iranian private bank key to food/medicine import is designated because of alleged EIGHT degrees of separation w/ another arbitrary target. In comparison, all humans on planet are connected by SIX degrees of separation. You do the math,” Zarif said on Twitter.

Earlier, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi railed against the “spitefulness” of the U.S. government in imposing the sanctions, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Renewed sanctions could shrink Iran’s exports of oil and other goods, leaving the rial currency more volatile and banks facing financial difficulties.

Protests linked to the economic situation in Iran erupted last December, spreading to more than 80 cities.

Sporadic protests, led by truck drivers, farmers and merchants, have continued since then and have occasionally resulted in violent confrontations with security forces.

Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Alison Williams

Rwanda: An inspiration for Africa

 Monday, 15 October 2018

Rwanda, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, the Singapore of Africa as it’s referred to, is rebranding itself as an economic miracle. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has praised Rwanda as a nation to admire for its economic progress even though it has few natural resources as is the case with Singapore. This economic progress is becoming ever more evident when one looks at Kigali (capital of Rwanda).

Kigali is a modern city with new buildings of glass and steel with remarkable cleanliness. Shopping malls and hotels are booming in Kigali with demand outstripping supply when it comes to housing. A new airport and rising rent prices show progress. Extreme poverty has gone down. People are living longer and earning more. Rwanda is having an expanding services industry and moving towards a cashless society. How was so much success achieved? Many Rwandans point to one man, Paul Kigame.

Rwanda in 1994

When talking about Rwanda, the genocide of 1994 is not easy to overlook. It was termed as one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Extremist Hutus murdered more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus mostly by hacking the victims to death using machetes. Government institutions, schools and banks were closed. Businesses were looted and the government itself did not function for several months. Buildings, roads and airports were destroyed. The 1994 genocide left Rwanda a totally destroyed country.

Paul Kagame-led Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the Hutu government army and took power in the country. Kagame formed a government with the Tutsis. A fear of retribution led to an exodus of Hutus leaving the country. This was the state of the country when Kagame inherited it. Rwanda was in chaos. But it had to have economic growth to outshadow the devastation of the genocide. Economic growth was harder with the fact that Rwanda had few natural resources and no seaport.

Paul Kigame – Lee Kuan Yew of Africa

Kagame is a Tutsi (victims of the Rwandan genocide). He was a rebel leader at the time of the genocide and resumed the war in 1994 and won it. After being the Vice President and Defence Minister of Rwanda for six years, Kagame became the President in 2000. Even in the six years before becoming the President, Kagame was the de facto leader of Rwanda. Kagame prioritised national development putting great efforts to transform Rwanda into a middle income country by 2020. The government has focused heavily on healthcare, education, services and tourism.

Rwanda is dependent on a stable government and peace as the lack of these two can bring in the ethnic divide which led to the genocide in 1994. So Kagame is a strong leader and is referred to as a pillar of strength. Certain human rights groups have accused him of being undemocratic and suppressing the media. But many in Rwanda have agreed that a strong leadership is needed to keep Rwanda stable. He is very popular in Rwanda and has been called a miracle man.

Kagame has introduced a new amendment after a referendum allowing him to run for president for a third term. The amendment does have a two-term limit but it does not take effect until 2024. So theoretically he can be president till 2034. Many would welcome this because of the stability brought by Kagame as his government has focused on economic growth over communal disharmony. Rwanda is still a poor country with most people living in rural areas but this is changing rapidly and the government has to continue.

Rwanda of today

The Rwanda of today is totally different to the one in 1994. Over 80% of the refugees have returned to Rwanda as Kagame has brought stability and confidence to the country. Many Rwandans who fled the country and became successful abroad are reinvesting in the country. Rwanda has a higher percentage of female representatives which is well above the world average and women are allowed to own and inherit land unlike in certain other African countries.

Rwanda has rich soil and even though 75% of the population lives in rural areas, it requires food to be imported. The Kagame government has bet on services and tourism to grow the economy. Poverty has decreased and around a million people were taken out of poverty in the last five years alone. Infant mortality rate has dropped a lot and so has dependency on foreign aid.

Forgive and forget

None of this could have been possible if not for the peace between the Tutsis and the Hutus. Rwandans as a whole made a wise decision to forgive and forget. Two decades ago, the Tutsis and Hutus were fighting each other to death. Today, they are doing joint ventures in businesses. Business partnerships between the Tutsis and Hutus are common. They prefer to partner with someone from the other ethnicity if it is good for business as now Rwandans put business before communal disharmony. Tutsis and Hutus are seen playing sports in the same team. The government has worked hard to bring communal harmony and remove division based on ethnicity. This has worked miracles for Rwanda.

Rwanda moves forward

Rwanda beats its neighbours in every kind of development. The World Bank in 2013 itself ranked Rwanda as the second best place to do business in Africa in its Doing Business Report. Kagame wants to turn Rwanda into a high tech hub for Central Africa. Carnegie Mellon University moved into Rwanda and offered masters in IT and electrical engineering.

Another industry was the Arabica coffee industry which was destroyed after the genocide. Rwanda could not compete with countries like Brazil on quantity so the Rwandan coffee industry changed its strategy to focus on quality and today Rwandan coffee is found in cafes in the West. Like Singapore, Rwanda is doing its research and finding a way out of difficult situations which is remarkable.

In 2016, Marriot opened its first hotel in Rwanda seeing it as a transportation, logistics and services centre for Central Africa. The 254-room Marriot in Kigali enhances Kigali’s reputation as a regional hub for conventions and conferences.

Rwanda is a fast growing economy with a vision to become a cashless, service based economy with an efficient bureaucracy, business-friendly environment, good infrastructure, good education, healthcare and is a rising tourist destination. It has the potential to attract investments as it is undervalued. If it continues to have the same stability, peace and vision of the government, it can be an inspirational story for the world. A story of a devastated country with few resources and no seaport which made it to the top.

Indonesians underestimate how bad nepotism is for the economy

Nepotism is a drag on the local economy. Source: Shutterstock

By Asmiati Malik | 17th October 2018

INDONESIA is one of the world’s most corrupt countries and is making little progress in ending the practice.

Corruption is rampant in Indonesia but so is nepotism, or favouritism granted to family, friends and individuals. Many believe corruption is worse than nepotism.

There has yet to be a lot of studies of nepotism. But, recently, studies have looked at the impact of nepotism on the performances of family-owned business and cooperation.

The studies show that nepotism have resulted in bias in decision-making, unfair treatment and losses to company’s performances in the long term. Recent studies also prove that nepotism makes people feel demotivated, lacking in confidence and alienated. It also hinders competition and innovation.

SEE ALSO: 1MDB: Why Malaysia fell victim to the biggest heist in history

These consequences can weaken an organisation and eventually will impact economic development as a whole.

Nepotism affects the performance of organisations. However, the lack of research on this topic could potentially mean the impact is far greater than we thought.

Nepotism is indeed bad for the economy but my recent research suggests most people in Indonesia underestimate it.

Nepotism in Indonesia

File image shows demonstrators holding placards with the initials KKN (corruption, collusion and nepotism) during a 2000 protest. Source: AFP Photo/Kemal Jufri

Corruption is the abuse of power for private gain. Nepotism means the abuse of power is extended to support a specific group’s interest, usually based on personal greed.

In Indonesia, the term nepotism became popular in the late 1990s. Student protesters demanding the end of Suharto’s corrupt and authoritarian rule coined a popular abbreviation KKN. It stands for korupsi, kolusi and nepotisme, or corruption, collusion and nepotism.

Even after Suharto was no longer in power, the practice of favouritism based on kinship remained very strong. Many political parties were formed based on family ties, such as the Democrat Party and Berkarya Party

Nepotism also exists in local governments. In Banten and South Sulawesi, for example, the governors ran their administrations based on family favouritism. Even though these leaders are no longer in power, their political influence remains strong.

These cases show that nepotism appears in every level of bureaucracy in Indonesia.

Individual perception on nepotism

Similarly to corruption, nepotism is everywhere in Indonesia’s political and social system.

But how does an Indonesian perceive nepotism? To answer that question, I conducted a survey involving 237 participants from May to June 2018. I also interviewed ten participants between July and August 2018. Some 90 percent of the respondents were university students.

The research finds most participants agree that corruption is bad. These respondents also rank corruption, including bribery, embezzlement, abuse of authority and money laundering, as worse than political dynasties, collusion and politic cronyism, and nepotism.

Even though 73 percent of respondents state that it is wrong for the elite officers to give opportunities to their own families, nepotism is considered less damaging than the others.

Respondents’ responses based on which act is worse than others. Source: Author provided/The Conversation

Respondents’ responses to the elites giving job opportunities to their relatives. Source: Author provided/The Conversation

Despite the numbers, the interviews show that nepotism has worse consequences than corruption.

Seven interviewees considered nepotism to be acceptable, arguing it was human nature for people to choose their own family or friend as their trusted officer/staff because they know them better than anyone. In addition, they would not have to worry that the person might betray them.

These respondents also argued it is their responsibility to ensure that their relatives have a stable job with a good salary. Even when they do not have sufficient skills, the respondents believed they should still be supervised in their work.

SEE ALSO: ‘Democracy isn’t always pretty’: Human rights in post-Suharto Indonesia

Meanwhile, three other respondents who were against nepotism argued that it closed opportunities for others to work and compete fairly. They said the presence of nepotism made them believe there was no point in studying and working harder if merit counts for so little.

The unfair career treatment as a result of nepotism triggers these people to become lazy. It means nepotism removes competition and stymies people’s motivation, making innovation impossible to achieve.

Nepotism a natural tendency

Nepotism can be found not only in workplaces and government, but also in social animals like wasps, bees, ants, termites and monkeys.

In natural science, Neo-Darwinian scholars agree that nepotism significantly affects the behaviour of social organisms.

A queen bee, for example, selects individual workers to stay inside or outside the queen’s cell based on her preferential genotype.

For humans, nepotism also operates in any social classes and influences how people determine other socioeconomic rankings based on their preference on skin colours, looks and style.

Nepotism starts early. It begins with parents’ favouritism towards their children. This kind of favouritism is embedded in the children’s unconscious mind and will influence their future behaviour.

Some Indonesians think nepotism is acceptable and part of human nature. Source: Shutterstock

A study from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and research firm Penn Schoen Berland showed the high prevalence of favouritism in workplaces. In interviews with 303 senior executives, researchers found that 84 percent confirmed that favouritism existed in their organisation.

Similar cases also happen in government bureaucracy where many people are selected based on personal validation instead of quality and qualification. As long as the selected individual fulfils the qualification, they consider nepotism an acceptable act.

SEE ALSO: #20TahunReformasi: Celebrating 20 years of Indonesian democracy

Justifications for nepotism can influence how a country perceives it. In a developing country such as Ghana, nepotism is considered to be simply part of human nature.

In a developed country such as Italy, nepotism does not appear until a person goes to higher education. During university enrolment, students from a powerful family in politics will get bigger chances to be supervised by an influential professor.

There is no easy way to end nepotism in Indonesia because it persists in every level of society.

The public needs to understand the consequences of nepotism. At the same time, the government should enact anti-nepotism law to prevent the practice in the bureaucracy.

By Asmiati Malik, Doctoral researcher, University of Birmingham. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.