The Nation, Kenya October 4, 2023 By Elizabeth Ojina & Dominic Ombok Nation Media Group Police put out a fire at a shop in Sondu market in Kisumu on October 4, 2023. credit: Nation Media Group On Wednesday night, gangs armed with bows and arrows crossed the border from Kericho and attacked residents in and around Sondu market in Kisumu County, stealing cattle and killing three people on the spot. The pain on their faces was palpable. Women and young men gathered by the roadside after fleeing their homes, pleading for help from security officers who had arrived in the war-torn area. At least seven people have now been killed in a span of 24 hours by attackers from neighboring Kericho County, barely two weeks after another succumbed to arrow wounds in Sondu town on the Kisumu-Kericho border. Wednesday's pre-dawn attack left several other locals with injuries at various hospitals, including St Joseph Nyabondo Mission Hospital, while three were referred to Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital. But the attackers were so brazen that even after the arrival of security chiefs from the two counties, they continued their raid, with arrows flying through the hilly Sondu fields, killing four more people. Upper Nyakach Assistant County Commissioner Darwin Orina told the Nation that the death toll from the clashes had now risen to seven. "We are appealing to residents to remain calm as security officers are on the ground to deal with the situation," Mr Orina told the Nation on Wednesday night. At St Joseph Nyabondo Mission Hospital, Robert Obat, a Form Three pupil at Sondu Secondary School, lay on a hospital bed. He has wounds on his back after being hit by an arrow when he went to Sondu market to buy breakfast. The 18-year-old student didn't reach his destination before an arrow hit his back. The last thing he remembers is falling unconscious. "I didn't manage to see who threw the arrows. I was rushed to hospitals by locals who were nearby," he said. Mr Obat is one of the victims of the ongoing clashes at Sondu along Kisumu-Kericho. On Wednesday night, gangs armed with bows and arrows crossed the border from Kericho and attacked residents in and around Sondu market in Kisumu County, stealing cattle and killing three people on the spot. Across from Obat's bed, another patient has similar wounds. "These people are merciless. If they can harm a mentally ill person, what about me as a student?" he wondered. Kisumu County Commissioner Hussein Alassow said the escalating tensions over the past three days were mainly due to incidents of cattle rustling. "We are actively formulating strategies to restore normalcy in the area, with a dedicated team of police officers on the ground to ensure that peace is restored," said Mr Hussein. According to Kisumu CEC for Health and Medical Services Dr Gregory Ganda, three people had died as a result of the border clashes on Wednesday, before authorities later announced four more deaths. Dr Ganda told the Nation that eight people have been hospitalized so far. Some are being treated at St Joseph Mission Hospital in Nyabondo, while three were referred to the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital this morning. "One of the patients was taken to Aga Khan Hospital at the request of family members," said Dr Ganda. He added: "The deceased include an elderly man and two middle-aged men. One had a deep cut on his throat, one had an eye injury and the other had his arm cut off". Teachers have already expressed fears of possible attacks on local schools after one of their own faced the wrath in Wednesday's attack. Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) Kisumu County executive secretary Zablon Awange accused the police of negligence. "The assailants brutally attacked an unarmed teacher Kevin Bondo of Agai Secondary with machetes, pangas and crude weapons and left him for dead. He is currently in critical condition at JOOTRH. We are demanding security and peace in Sondu," said Mr Awange. He said that just last month, a former deputy at the school, Joseph Omonge, was attacked with arrows and seriously injured. "We want justice for Kevin Bondo. We demand security from the Ministry of Home Affairs and our position is that some police officers are partisan and if the ministry does not act, we will have no option but to form our militia and defend ourselves," Mr Awange added. One of the deceased was said to be a Form Four leaver who was only waiting to be admitted to university. By last night, tensions were still high at Sondu market, the Centre of the clashes. There was a heavy police presence at the market for most of the day. Along the Kisumu-Kisii highway, men armed with panga, bows and arrows lined the road. But locals lamented the silence of local leaders over the constant clashes along the border. Most of them gathered along the road to complain about the alarming insecurity in Nyakach sub-county along the border. Lucas Ogutu, a resident of Nyabondo, complained that the tension has made residents insecure. "Because of the clashes, we have been forced to remain vigilant and protect our families and property. We are unable to carry out our normal errands with the ongoing tension," said Mr Ogutu. Larry Otieno, a resident of Sondu, has called on the national government to intervene in the incessant border clashes that have led to loss of lives and injuries. "The last time the National Administration and Internal Security CS Kithure Kindiki was in Sondu, he held a meeting with local authorities, but we didn't get any solution," said Mr Otieno. He added: "Now we are being attacked at night by our neighbours who are after our cattle and killing people. The clashes come as President William Ruto begins a visit to the region on Friday. Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong'o, who condemned the clashes, called on the national government to swiftly apprehend the perpetrators and ensure justice for the affected families. "It is very unfortunate that on the eve of the President's visit to our region, some upstarts last night instigated ethnic clashes in Sondu along the Kisumu-Kericho border," said Governor Nyong'o. But Mr Alassow, the Kisumu County Commissioner, insists that police officers will pursue the perpetrators to bring those responsible to justice and restore calm. "The situation is relatively calm at the moment and we urge the public not to take matters into their own hands. If there are any disturbing circumstances, we urge citizens to report to the nearest police station," he said. Luo Council of Elders chairman Odungi Randa urged President William Ruto to intervene and find a lasting solution to the perennial ethnic clashes along Kisumu, Kericho and Nandi counties. Mr Randa lamented that the latest attacks come at a time when the President is planning a four-day tour of Luo Nyanza region from Friday to Monday. Mr Randa said the clashes had claimed many lives and maimed dozens of others in recent years. "We are not happy with what is happening at the border, especially at a time when the head of state is about to tour the region. The President should stand firm and take measures that will resolve these perennial clashes once and for all," said Mr Randa. Copyright 2023 The Nation

November 06, 2023 10:09 PM Agence France-Presse AFP | FILE - A Chadian soldier with the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) stands in front of a convoy outside the city of Gao in Mali on Oct. 25, 2023. DAKAR, SENEGAL — Mali's ruling junta on Monday rejected as "unfounded" accusations by a rights group that its soldiers and Russian mercenaries killed 40 civilians in three operations. In Bamako, the foreign ministry said the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released last week took a "sensationalist and biased approach" and put the nation's army "on the same level as the armed Islamist groups." The ministry listed "unfounded allegations, gratuitous affirmations, testimonials taken from a distance and slanted, erroneous conclusions.” It also again denied working with Russia's Wagner paramilitary company, without naming it. HRW said Islamist armed groups and Malian soldiers killed at least 175 civilians, many of them children, between April and September, condemning the targeted killing of civilians as war crimes. The Al-Qaeda-linked Support Group for Islam and Muslims was responsible for the deaths of at least 135 civilians in two attacks, the New York-based HRW said. Malian soldiers and fighters apparently from Wagner killed 40 civilians in three operations between April and September, it said. Bamako's junta leaders struck up a partnership with Wagner after French troops pulled out of Mali in 2022. The HRW report was based on telephone interviews with 40 people conducted in August and September. Under a military junta since 2020, Mali has been locked in the grip of jihadism and a deep multidimensional crisis since 2012. "The Malian government has failed to take adequate measures to protect civilians in conflict affected areas," Human Rights Watch said. "The targeted killing of civilians by Islamist armed groups and the Malian army are war crimes that should be thoroughly and impartially investigated." Human rights organizations and the U.N. peacekeeping mission MINUSMA [Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali] have on numerous occasions accused the army of rights abuses. "The Malian Armed Forces carry out their role with strict respect for the rights of man and international humanitarian law," the ministry said. The authorities say they monitor respect for human rights and investigate where necessary, but the results are never made public. © 2023 VOA

Philippines military remains loyal to the president, national security adviser says Reporting by Karen Lema; Editing by Michael Perry Philippine National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano arrives to meet Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the prime minister's office in Tokyo, Japan, June 15, 2023. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo The Philippines' National Security Adviser on Saturday rejected talk of a plot to destabilise the government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, saying the military and entire security sector were loyal to the commander-in-chief. "Yes, there were healthy and passionate exchanges (and) debates among some retired or former military officers and even some criticism against certain policies of the current administration, but they are within the bounds of our democratic space," National Security Adviser Eduardo Año said. "There is no destabilisation plot (and) movement against the government," Año said in a statement. Año's remarks came after Philippine military chief Romeo Brawner was quoted in the media as telling troops on Friday that he had heard of "destabilisation efforts," with some military officers saying "the president should be replaced for many reasons" and "there should be another coup d'etat." Año said Brawner was "misquoted or misinterpreted" by the media. "The security sector shall remain vigilant and ready to take immediate action against any sinister group that will undermine our national security," Ano said. Marcos, the son and namesake of the late Philippines strongman deposed in a 1986 "people power" uprising, won office in a landslide in last year's presidential elections. However, he has suffered a "significant" drop in his approval rating, based on an opinion poll in September, as soaring consumer prices in the Philippines undermined his support. There was no immediate comment from Marcos' office. The Philippines has seen more than a dozen coup attempts since the overthrow of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. © 2023 Reuters. All rights reserved

Prominent journalist shot dead during live broadcast in the Philippines The attack by an unidentified gunman was captured on a live-stream broadcast on Facebook By Maroosha Muzaffar Juan Jumalon was shot dead during a live stream of his show (DZRH NEWS / Twitter) A prominent broadcaster in the Philippines was shot dead on Sunday during a live broadcast of his show. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines [NUJP] said in a statement that 57-year-old radio broadcaster Juan Jumalon — professionally known as DJ Johnny Walker — was gunned down in Misamis Occidental on 5 November. He worked for Gold FM 94.7 radio station in the Philippines. Local media said the attack by unidentified gunmen was caught on the radio station’s livestream on Facebook. Ferdinand Marcos Jr, president of the Philippines, condemned the killing and ordered an investigation. “Attacks on journalists will not be tolerated in our democracy, and those who threaten the freedom of the press will face the full consequences of their actions,” Mr Marcos Jr wrote on X, formerly Twitter. The NUJP called the attack on Mr Jumalon a “brazen killing”. He was shot dead inside his home in Calamba, which also served as his office. “The attack is even more condemnable since it happened at Jumalon’s own home, which also served as the radio station,” said the NUJP . “Many community journalists have reported to us receiving threats from politicians and their supporters in the aftermath of their coverage of the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections last October 30,” said senior NUJP member Kath Cortez. Cebu Daily News reported that an initial investigation by the Calamba police found that a man asked for permission to enter the radio station’s premises to announce “something important”. Rappler reported that senior police officer Paul Guigayoma, of the Calamba municipal police station, said two gunmen arrived on foot at around 5.35am on Sunday at the radio station as Mr Jumalon was airing his programme. “Apparently they knew their way around because they opened the iron gates and barged inside the radio station,” Mr Guigayoma was quoted as saying. One man reportedly took out a gun from his pocket, shortly before entering the booth where Mr Jumalon was on air. He allegedly fired a single shot toward the journalist as the other man kept watch. One of the men allegedly took the necklace Mr Jumalon was wearing before the pair fled the scene. The video footage of the shooting, widely shared on social media, shows a man pulling the necklace from the body. Mr Jumalon was rushed to a hospital by family members where doctors pronounced him dead upon arrival. The Mindanao Independent Press Council Inc [MIPC] called the killing “barbaric” and said attacks on journalists are a “grave assault on the fundamental principles of human rights, press freedom, and democracy itself”. Mr Jumalon is the 199th journalist to be killed in the Philippines since 1986, and the fourth under the Marcos administration. In the 2023 Global Impunity Index, recently published by the Committee to Protect Journalists, it ranked as the eighth-worst country in terms of prosecuting the killers of journalists. Additional reporting by agencies Originally posted by The Independent

China's maritime claims in South China Sea with Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei claims. credit: copyright 2023 SP's Naval Forces The Philippines Country Report October 2023 by Tiina Susanna Riipinen The Philippines is in a territorial conflict in the South China Sea after many encounters with Chinese vessels in the economic zone claimed by the Philippines. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has directed his focus away from suppressing Islamist rebel attacks to this conflict with China. He called on the U.S. to protect his country’s ‘’identity and integrity’’. President Biden promised to defend the Philippines against Chinese aggression. Marcos Jr.'s focus on Chinese expansionism has become a red herring in attempts to hinder further investigations by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into crimes against humanity committed during the Duterte regime’s ‘’war on drugs.’’ This state-sanctioned ‘’war on drugs’’ continues under the Marcos Jr. government as the ICC resumes its investigations. In the year since Marcos Jr took office, an additional 300+ killings of drugs users and dealers have taken place. The Marcos Jr. government continues to arbitrarily imprison and deny bail to key civil society leaders, including Leila de Lima, who is being held without charges or evidence. ‘Red-tagging’ human rights activists and labor leaders, by accusing them of being members of the communist New People's Army, became a common justification for extrajudicial executions during Duterte’s regime. Police murders are justified because the victims "fought back" while in police custody. The practice has increased under Marcos Jr. The country has refused United Nations recommendations to end the infamous practice. Those who are "red-tagged" are accused of affiliation with the ‘Left’, with communists, or with Islamist rebel groups. Under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, people accused of "red" affiliation may be detained without charges. They then have no right to trial or habeas corpus proceedings. Detention often leads to torture, death, or coercion into 'fake surrenders' to authorities and the military. Forced disappearances of journalists, activists, and farmers are widespread. Vice President Sara Duterte actively stifles pleas by the Philippines Commission on Human Rights. She has introduced ‘red-tagging’ into the schools, accusing teachers of being communist sympathizers. The military has declared some regions to be free of Abu Sayyaf, a Maoist terrorist army connected to the Islamic State. But Islamist terrorism continues in Mindanao. The Philippine Army remains at war against decades-old Muslim insurgencies. These armed conflicts endanger the peace and election process in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, where election-related violence has already begun. During the Second World War the Japanese military subjected Filipina women to sexual slavery. Filipina women still suffer from generationally transmitted trauma. The Philippine government has failed to address this trauma. It has not provided aid to these women or their descendants, focusing only on male veterans. The Marcos Jr. government continues to deny the harm the Japanese military inflicted on these women and continues to discriminate against them in rehabilitation programs. The Philippine government obstructs all pleas to Japan for compensation to Filipina women and their descendants. Genocide Watch considers The Philippines to be at Stage 5: Organization; Stage 6: Polarization; Stage 8: Persecution; and Stage 10: Denial in the Ten Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch recommends to the government of the Philippines: It should cooperate with the ICC in investigations of crimes against humanity in its "war on drugs." It should repeal the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020. It should immediately release all detained journalists and human rights activists. It should support appeals by victims of sexual slavery for reparations from Japan.

The prime minister has not visited Manipur even five months into the conflict, and, until the no-confidence motion against his government in Parliament, did not make any public appeal for peace in Manipur. By Harsh Mander Representative image of security forces in Manipur. Photo: X/@manipur_police Manipur, literally the ‘jewelled land’, today is the theatre of a full-blown civil war of the kind that free India has not seen. Civilian populations on both sides flaunt sophisticated modern weapons including assault rifles, light machine guns and mortars. Even five months after the conflagration began, the combat shows no sign of an end. It is rare for even a day to pass without the rattle of gunfire and bombs and news of fresh deaths and injuries. The state of Manipur is effectively partitioned, the valley emptied out of the last of its Kuki residents, as the Kuki dominated southern hills are of their Meitei inhabitants. The border between the valley and the Kuki dominated part of the hills – guarded and patrolled by military and paramilitary personnel of diverse stripes and uniforms – is mutually impenetrable for people of the two respective warring communities. Women’s groups successfully blockade for weeks the passage of army trucks carrying food supplies for soldiers in the hills. No rations have been supplied by the state government for patients and students in the medical college in the hills. Teachers, doctors, nurses and even police persons have been reallocated (or have fled) on ethnic lines to the two sides of this border: it is unsafe for Kuki public servants to work in the valley, as it is for Meitei public servants to work in the Kuki dominated part of the hills. Representative image of Army Commander Lt Gen. R.P. Kalita interacting with Manipur CM N Biren Singh in August. Photo: X/@easterncomd The ten Kuki members of the legislative assembly were unable to participate in the record eleven-minute-long legislative assembly session because the government could not ensure their safety.These ten Kuki MLAs, including eight from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), expressed their despair in a public statement: “Our people can no longer exist under Manipur as the hatred against our tribal community reached such a height that MLAs, ministers, pastors, police and civil officers, laymen, women and even children were not spared, not to mention the destruction of places of worships, homes and properties.” To live amid the Meiteis after the violence, they declared, would be “as good as death”. The anguish of a retired Lieutenant General of the Indian Army living in Manipur is even more palpable. “The state is now ‘stateless’,” laments Lt Gen Nishikanta Singh. “Life and property can be destroyed anytime by anyone just like in Libya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Syria, etc.”. This spurred a former chief of the Indian Army General Ved Malik to respond, “Law & order situation in Manipur needs urgent attention at [the] highest level”. Manipur – an ethnic mosaic The current battle between the Meitei and Kuki people centres on competing claims of indigeneity, belonging and non-belonging: about which people are indigenous to Manipur, and who are outsiders. There is no dispute that the Meitei people are native to the Manipur valley, and the Nagas to the hills. But the Kukis insist that they too have long been inhabitants of the Manipur hills, and are not “foreigners” from Myanmar as is now claimed. The three main ethnic groups in Manipur have historically clustered in different parts of the state’s geography – the Meiteis in the valley, the Kukis in the southern hills and the Nagas in the northern hills. But there has not been, before the 2023 combat, an absolute, hostile segregation of the communities. In places dominated by one ethnic group, there have grown minority settlements of the other community. And barring interludes of internecine violence, the three communities have lived together with peace and goodwill. It is this long history of inter-ethnic peace that the 2023 warlike clashes threaten to destroy. The Meitei are the dominant group in Manipur, in population share (53%) as well as politically and economically. They reside mainly in the Imphal valley, which comprises just 10% of the state’s geography. The Meitei trace their ancestry in the Imphal valley at least to 2000 years back. The kingdom was ruled by one of the longest unbroken dynasties of the world, the Ningthouja, from 33 AD. The name Manipur came later. The kingdom was Kangleipak, renamed in 1724 by the king now converted to Hinduism, who chose the Sanskrit name Manipur. The boundaries of the kingdom sometimes included the surrounding hills, and went so far as the Irrawady river in Myanmar. But for the greater part of its history of two millennia before the arrival of the British, it was confined to the valley. The rulers and people of the Imphal valley followed the indigenous animistic faith of Sanahism until the 18th century. The king in 1704 converted to the Hindu faith, and large sections of the people also adopted the Vaishnavite faith. The Naga and Kuki-Zomi are not two homogenous tribes but are clusters of many tribes, listed as 34 Scheduled Tribes (ST) in the Indian Constitution. The Nagas, 17% of the population of present-day Manipur, inhabited the northern hill ranges for almost as long as the Meitei people in the valley. The Kukis, around 26%, are admittedly of more recent origin, but how recent is a matter of current dispute. The first archival mention of the Kuki in Manipur is in British colonial records in 1777. It is alleged that the British encouraged the settlements of the Kuki people in the hills of Manipur to provide a counter to the more aggressive Naga tribes, but it is also true that the Kukis were enemies of the colonial British and therefore colonial writings cannot be taken at face value. Apart from these three large ethnic clusters, the valley also is home to Muslim Meitei (called Pangal) who are believed to have migrated in the 17th century from Sylhet, and now are 8% of the state’s population, and also the Gurkhas and immigrants from mainland India. After Manipur was invaded by Burma in 1819, the king reached out to the British for protection and Manipur became, between 1826 to 1891, a protectorate of the British, and from 1891 a princely state of the British Empire. It signed an annexation treaty with India in 1947, and merged with the Indian union in 1949. It is interesting that before its annexation, the briefly independent state of Manipur had passed the State Constitution Act in May 1947, the first of its kind in Asia. The king two years earlier had converted Manipur into a democratic constitutional monarchy. The constitution was progressive in its representation of various communities: it created three categories that it termed General, Hill and Mohamaden (Muslim), and provided for elections to the legislature for these three groups in the ratio of 30, 18 and 3 respectively. Another interesting fact of this history is that when the legislature of Manipur passed a resolution opposing the merger of Manipur with the union of India, the Speaker was a Kuki, TC Tainkhan. Manipur – a site of entrenched violence It is not as though violence is new to Manipur. The state witnessed some of the earliest insurgent movements in North-East India, of both Naga and Meitei militant groups, not long after the merger of the princely state of Manipur into the union of India in 1949. Kuki militant groups rose only from the 1990s. The militant groups are organised around ethnic lines of the three main ethnic clusters of the state – Meitei, Kuki and Naga. Their demands have ranged from independence from the Indian state to various grades of self-rule within the Indian union, and they have targeted both the Indian state and other ethnic communities within Manipur. While the Nagas and Kukis fought a bloody series of ethnic battles in the 1990s resulting in more than 400 deaths, 2023 sees the first major clash between the Meitei and Kuki people. (Kuki leaders recall that Kuki chiefs sent 300 volunteers to support the Meitei king in his opposition to the merger as proof that the Kuki people were historically not enemies but supporters of the Meiteis). File photo of violence in Manipur. Photo: Twitter@MangteC The Naga militant groups have engaged in extended peace negotiations with the Indian government in recent years. The government of India entered into a Suspension of Operations agreement with the Kuki militant groups in 2008. The Meitei groups have not been part of any peace agreement. The present chief minister Biren Singh has not hidden his closeness – and some suggest active patronage – to the Meitei militias Arongal Tenngol and Meitei Leepun, who have reportedly played a major role in the present conflict. One indicator of how deeply entrenched the violence in post-merger Manipur is that although Manipur is home to just 0.2% of India’s population, as many as 38% of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) cases in the country registered between 2014 and 2020 were in Manipur. Data from the National Crimes Research Bureau reveal that in this period while the highest number of cases registered under the UAPA were in Manipur (2,595), this was followed quite distantly by Jammu and Kashmir (1,202) and Assam (1,071). Today there are an estimated 30 militant groups in Manipur, but for many years most of these have been dormant – the Naga groups in long drawn-out peace talks with the Indian government, and the Kuki groups in a tripartite Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreement. Some operate from across the porous border in Myanmar. What lit the fires in Manipur in 2023? Given this long history of internecine and anti-state conflict in Manipur ever since its merger with the Indian union, what had contributed to the unprecedented ferocity of the present combat? Most accounts begin with the Manipur high court ruling for suggesting ST status for the Meitei, the state-wide protests by Kuki organisations against this, and violent counter-protests by the Meitei. But these actually were only the matchsticks that lit a fire for which the fuel had already been dangerously (and wantonly) spilt. The paramount responsibility for pushing Manipur, and with it the country, to the brink must rest most on the shoulders of the chief minister, N. Biren Singh, for his open unapologetic partisanship, his frequent resort to deliberately provocative public statements and actions, and for his wanton refusal to disarm, charge and arrest those openly spreading hate and lethal violence. And with him, the union government is responsible for not reining him in, or better, replacing him, and for not ensuring that sufficient forces are deployed to disarm the civilian populations and ensure the safety of all people of every identity. PM Modi and CM Biren Singh. In the background is a video screengrab of cars burning in Manipur. Even when he was in the Congress, he became infamous (or popular, depending on who was making the evaluation) for his anti-Kuki rhetoric. These became more strident in the run-up to the midsummer bloodbath of 2023, and in the months after it broke out. Outlook India spoke to many people, including BJP Kuki MLAs, who described the chief minister as “prejudiced” and “anti-Kuki”. Even Meitei commentators like Pradip Phajouban said that the chief minister’s provocative discourse over the last two or three years made the Kukis “very sensitive, pushed to the wall”. The first strand of his rhetoric is to stigmatise the Kuki people as “illegal immigrants” and “foreigners”. This is an obvious canard, as pointed out by the Editors’ Guild in their report after visiting the state, because the decennial censuses from 1901 to 2011 have not shown any unusual rise in the non-Naga tribal population. The military coup in neighbouring Myanmar led Chin minorities to flee into neighbouring states like Mizoram and an estimated 4,000 to Manipur. But it is unfair to use this to tar all Kuki residents as illegal foreigners. A second part of the “othering” discourse led and fuelled by the chief minister is of Kukis being “poppy cultivators” (or worse, narco-terrorists) engaged in transnational drug trade centred in Myanmar, responsible for the spread of drug addiction like a silent epidemic across the valley. There is no doubt that vast tracks of fields in the hills grow poppies, and that the majority of poppy farmers are Kuki. But successive state governments, including the present one, have done little to halt this cultivation. People estimate the volume of the illegal drug trade in the state at around Rs 50,000 crore (incidentally much higher than the entire budget of the state); and there is no credible claim that the processing and trafficking of the drugs are enterprises operated and owned by Kuki people. The responsibility for the massive illegal drug industry lies elsewhere, including with powerful men and women in Imphal and Delhi. While all of this unfolded, the temperature of hate propaganda in the popular discourse against the Kuki people was also raised dangerously. There was, for instance, a systematic attack on the history of Kukis in the Sangai Express, the largest circulated newspaper in Manipur. A new joint organisation of the Meitei and Tangkhul people called the ‘Federation of Haomee’ demonised the Kukis. To all of this, the chief minister and his government never reacted. These too were preparatory to the current violence. But even more than this hate discourse, what triggered further existential insecurities and fear among the Kuki people were a series of imperious public actions clearly targeted at them. Important among these was what could only be described as the weaponising of provisions and powers of the state government under the Hills Area Committee Act of 1972. The Kuki people continue to resort to their customary modes of shifting cultivation in the forested hills as they have for centuries, moving from one forest habitat to another. The Editors Guild reports that without following proper procedure as laid down in this Act, “the N. Biren Singh government declared parts of Hills as ‘reserved’ and ‘protected’ forests and ‘wetland reserves’. All land owner-ship documents within these areas were cancelled and a drive started to evict them in December 2022”. What fuelled Kuki anger more “is that the forest surveys, inquiries, evictions and demolitions were carried out only in the non-Naga inhabited tribal areas, once again leading the Kuki community to believe that it was being singled out”. Manipur chief minister N. Biren Singh. Photo: Facebook/N. Biren Singh This led inevitably to violent confrontations in the early months of 2023 between the state authorities and the Kuki-Zo community which had been living in these villages. A committee of the state government headed by the chief secretary on April 3, 2023, cancelled all land/property deeds and recognition of villages within the designated reserved and protected forest areas, without any rehabilitation plan for the evicted tribal population. There was then the chief minister’s highly publicised “war on drugs”. Experts tell us that in this highly lucrative trans-national drug trade, the “drugs of choice are: heroin, brown sugar, prescription painkillers, cough syrups and Yaba or WIY (“World is yours”) pills”. The government’s exclusive focus was only on poppy growing which targeted the poorest poppy cultivators, many of whom are Kuki, to the wilful neglect of “the other components of the drug trade, the smuggling of synthetics to Myanmar and the smuggling in of drugs and their distribution through Manipur”. In yet another series of openly provocative official moves, in March 2023, the state government peremptorily withdrew from the tripartite Suspension of Operations (SoO) agreement with the Kuki militants. This was effectively a ceasefire, which was suddenly, summarily and unilaterally terminated, without explanation or discussion with the Manipuri people. The government then went on to remove the application of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) selectively only from the Imphal Valley and not the hill districts. As the Editors Guild notes, this was obviously partisan because “the Kuki insurgent groups were in peace talks with the Union while the Meitei insurgents active in the Imphal Valley were outside any process of negotiation for peace”. To make matters worse, the chief minister made no secret of his closeness with Meitei militias like the Arambai Tenngol, even on occasion posing for photographs with the militants. “In retrospect, this was seen by the Kuki-Zo tribals as a partisan move in preparation for violence against the Kukis, which came a few weeks later”. It was against this background that the provocation and rage of the Kuki people can be understood against the decision of a single-judge bench of the high court. Tellingly, the state government did not appeal against the court’s directive. (Incidentally, the Supreme Court struck down the order after it spurred violent clashes, describing it as “factually wrong”). This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Tribal student organisations resolved to organise protest marches in all district headquarters on May 3 under the conciliatory theme ‘Come Let Us Reason Together‘. Rallies were held in 10 of the 16 districts of the state. But in some of these rallies, clashes broke out between people of the two communities, and the state exploded in flames. The same night, homes and churches of Kuki residents of the Imphal valley were vandalised and burnt by radical gangs of Meitei young men, killing many including women and children. In the next few days, massive counter-rallies were organised by the Meiteis, including women who often blocked attempts by security forces to rescue people and protect shrines and property. Killings and horrific acts of sexual violence followed. The clashes quickly spread to the hills where armed mobs destroyed villages and homes of the Meitei people. Burning down of almost all the Meitei settlements in Churachandpur and Moreh by the Kuki militants further triggered the cycle of violence. Five months later, as I write this, the killings continue with numbing constancy. At least 200 people have been killed, an uncounted number are injured and by the chief minister’s own admission, there are “hundreds” of complaints of sexual violence. Almost 60,000 people have been rendered homeless as Kuki homes and habitations in Meitei majority areas, and Meitei homes and villages in Kuki majority hill tracts have been destroyed and razed to the ground. While both communities have both perpetrated and suffered horrific losses of life and property, it would be fair to underline that the losses are much greater among the Kuki people, probably because of tacit or open state support. At least 300 churches have been vandalised and burnt down. Through all of this, the state has remained culpably absent from the discharge of its constitutional duties. The governments of India and Manipur are unable (or unwilling) to disarm civilian populations and militant militias, and to charge, arrest and prosecute people responsible for horrific murders and rapes, the looting of armouries, and the burning and looting of homes and villages, in which no one was spared: the home of even a union minister of Narendra Modi’s cabinet was burned down in Imphal. The state is also absent from its duty to extend relief to the 60,000 internally displaced people whose houses and villages have been razed, resulting in a colossal humanitarian crisis in what has become a war zone. The might of the Indian state seems singularly unequal to the challenge of restoring peace and security in this tiny but enormously sensitive frontier state that shares a long border with Myanmar. After the violence began, the state government ticked the mandatory boxes, by ordering a curfew and directing District Magistrates to issue shoot-at-sight orders in extreme cases. But in practice, none of this was enforced. The state government has done nothing to prevent men brandishing modern and presumably unlicensed weapons from patrolling the streets, nothing to disarm them, and nothing to investigate, charge and detain those named in police complaints for murder, rape and arson. Bunkers lined with sandbags manned by heavily armed men have come up on both sides of the “border” of a state that has been effectively partitioned. Close to the checkpoints along this border are clusters of women groups, the Meira Paibi (revered for their iconic protests against killings and rape by army personnel) on the Meitei side, and Kuki women groups on the other. The state police and paramilitary forces in the state have also been perilously divided on ethnic grounds. The local police is largely Meitei and does not hide their partisanship. The Assam Rifles, a paramilitary formation controlled by the Indian army is being stigmatised for performing its duty of protecting the Kukis. There is a long history of this: the Meitei version is that the Assam Rifles and Kuki militants partnered in counter insurgency operations against Naga and Meitei insurgent groups; and that Kuki militants under the Suspension of Operations agreement draw a monthly salary from the Government of India. The Assam Rifles, in turn, sent a legal notice to a Meitei leader for his allegations that the Assam Rifles was partisan. The Manipur police filed FIRs against Assam Rifles soldiers for allegedly blocking their way with armoured vehicles, helping Kuki militants to escape, feeding into the popular Meitei narrative that the Assam Rifles soldiers are shielding Kuki “narco-terrorists”. The Assam Rifles argue that they are being pilloried only because they escorted endangered Kuki people to safety, and patrol the border blocking Meitei militants from executing killing missions into the hills. Meitei groups led by the Meitei Paibi have been demanding the withdrawal of the Assam Rifles from all of Manipur, and in the course of their protests locked the gates of central government offices. Whatever may have been their role in the present conflict, it must be acknowledged that the Manipuri people have long hated the Assam Rifles. It was, for instance, the rape and brutal murder of a Meitei woman Thongam Monorama that led to the iconic protest by women of the Meitei Paibi in 2004 when they stripped naked before the headquarters of the Assam Rifles. Meitei groups also met defence minister Rajnath Singh to press this demand. The chief minister assured representatives of the Meitei Paibi that the Assam Rifles would indeed be withdrawn from the state in September. Meanwhile, the state cabinet ordered the replacement of the Assam Rifles with the local police in manning a crucial border checkpoint. In this background, the initiative by Union home minister Amit Shah, after his sole visit to Manipur after the violence broke out, to establish a unified command of police and paramilitary forces under the chief minister was still-born. The prime minister has not visited Manipur even five months into the conflict, and, until the no-confidence motion against his government in Parliament, did not make any public appeal for peace in Manipur, barring a 30-second statement condemning the sexual violence. He brushed aside all demands to dismiss the state government or at least to replace the chief minister. Video screengrab showing PM Modi with his back to the cameras after he addressed the Manipur video. There are also questions about the role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in stoking majoritarian sentiments among the Meitei people. In recent years the valley has witnessed the rise of “‘Meiteism’ – a concerted effort to revive Meitei identity, religion and culture often aligned with Hinduism”, and a Meitei sub-nationalism often converging with Hindutva nationalism. Within this revival is a strong assertion of indigeneity and primary belonging – the idea that Manipur is the land of the Meitei, and they are threatened by the alleged growing numbers of Kuki tribes of Christian faith. There is also fueling a narrative of alleged proselytising by the Christian church. Analysts sometimes compare the Manipur violence of 2023 to the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. The comparison is apt only up to a point. In both, the state government was aggressively majoritarian and the leadership bellicose in its communal or ethnic partisanship; in both, the state government did nothing to protect the targeted minorities, and to extend relief or to secure to them legal justice; and in both, the state leadership was stubbornly protected by the Union government. But the resemblance ends here. Imagine Gujarat in 2002 if the Muslim victims also fought back and both sides were armed to their teeth with weapons of modern warfare. And this brings me to what is arguably the state government’s most culpable contribution to converting what could have been a bloody ethnic battle of the kind that the state has seen too often in the past, into a civil war – the looting of armouries. On the day of the march, and repeatedly after it, Meitei mobs stormed police armouries and absconded with an estimated 4,000 modern weapons including assault rifles, long-range guns, 51 mm mortars and half a million bullets. There is no evidence that the Manipur police, most of them of Meitei identity, used any significant force to prevent this pillage, which has continued to recur. It is alleged that Kuki police persons in the valley permitted a similar looting of arms, but on a much smaller scale. To date, only a small fraction of these arms have been recovered. It is this plunder with impunity of state armouries that has armed large civilian populations with lethal modern weapons on an scale unprecedented in independent India. The poisonous harvest of a majoritarian state In summary, the story that emerges out of Manipur is an extremely grim one. The agony of the Manipuri people is the poisonous harvest of a state that openly treats a segment of its own citizens as enemies. It begins, as we saw, with relentless runaway hate speech by the chief minister himself, which stigmatises the Kuki citizens as illegal foreigners and narco-terrorists. With toxic falsehoods he builds a dark sceptre that haunts the popular Meitei imagination, of a shining Manipur home to the Meitei people for more than two centuries in grave danger of being overrun by alien immigrants pouring in from Myanmar. These unwanted aliens, according to his “alternative truth”, encroach and destroy Manipuri forests, grow poppies and ravage Meitei youth with their trade in opium and brown sugar. He then follows this up with a battery of public actions, directly targeting the Kuki minority in the state he has been elected to lead. He declares the forest abodes and shifting cultivation farms, inhabited for many generations by the Kuki people, as illegal and drives a campaign to free the forests from their “encroachments”. He launches a “war on drugs” that targets only the lowest rung of poppy cultivators, mostly impoverished Kuki farmers, leaving unscathed, those engaged in the highly lucrative transnational drug trade. He suddenly terminates without explanation the virtual ceasefire with Kuki militants, while not disguising his sympathies – and possible patronage – of Meitei militia. He does not appeal against a high court decision to recommend ST status to the Meitei, knowing how much this would stoke fears among the Kuki people and that this would open the doors for Meitei people to lawfully buy lands in the hills, pushing the minority further into the margins. And then his government stands by as militants loot police and paramilitary armouries, arming civilians to fight a civil war against another section of the people of the state. A land of settled grief The critically wounded Manipur is a land of profound and settled grief. In relief camps of both communities, people spoke of their agony that their neighbours of generations had turned overnight into enemies. But an even greater sense of loss arose from their conviction that they would never be able to return to the only place they called home. A partition had been accomplished, a border had been drawn on their lands, as impenetrable and uncompromising as the one the country endured in 1947. And even more dangerously, in the hearts of ordinary people. A silent march in Manipur on June 24, 2023. Photo: Special arrangement In the relief camps that we visited in a four-day journey of the Karwan e Mohabbat to the state from July 25 to 28, we found the state virtually absent. Communities pool donations every day to ensure that people are fed. We saw camps in the hills where children were eating just rice water with salt. The Karwan e Mohabbat prepared a detailed report on the immense humanitarian crisis and what the state urgently needs to do. But little changes, as residents of the camps are offered little hope and reassurance that they will be able to pick up the broken pieces of their lives in the foreseeable future. Barely a day passes without people with serious bullet injuries being wheeled into the single medical college in Churachandpur. Prior to the conflict, a one-hour road journey on an ambulance would transport them to the much better-equipped Imphal hospital. But today, this journey is impossible because of the “border” that implacably divides them. They sometimes struggle with a 12-hour mountain road journey to Aizawl, but no life-support ambulance to keep their patients alive through this difficult journey is at hand. Since the conflict, the state government has halted supplies of food and medicine for patients and medical students. The battered community raises donations not just for the camps, but also to keep the public hospital functioning. A Wall of Remembrance has been erected in Churachandpur. On it are pasted pictures of every Kuki person who has been killed. You see on the wall faces of small children, women, old people and young men. The wall is surrounded by empty coffins. Every alternate day thousands of women dress in black and gather around the wall to collectively mourn. For five months, at the time of writing, 96 bodies lie in the mortuaries in Imphal and Churachandpur. The state government has not made safe arrangements for the families to travel to Imphal to identify the remains of their loved ones. And for those in Churachandpur, they long refused to bury them as a mark of their grief and protest. A gentle pastor in Churachandpur Reverend Jangkholam Haokip barely finds time to sleep ever since the conflict broke, tirelessly organising food and medicines for the relief camps and hospital, and tending to the injured men brought in each day. I call him from time to time. One day, he almost broke down. “What do I tell our young people? What solace or hope can I offer? Do I tell them that we must just endure and wait to die? Each day, I search really hard to find some reason to hope. But I just cannot find even a single ray of hope for our future in Manipur.” Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer. © The Wire 2023

By Nyasha Chingono Takudzwa Ngadziore © 2023 African Insider HARARE, Nov 1 (Reuters) - A Zimbabwean opposition lawmaker was abducted by unknown armed men on Wednesday, assaulted and then dumped about 50 km north of the capital Harare, members of his party said. Takudzwa Ngadziore, 25, one of the youngest legislators for the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) posted a live video on Facebook showing a man running toward him with a rifle before it cut off after seven seconds. He was later found near mine shafts in the village of Mazowe naked, badly assaulted and injected with an unknown substance, said CCC chief whip in parliament Amos Chibaya. "Ngadziore was this morning on his way to parliament abducted and tortured at gunpoint," Chibaya told Reuters, calling it an example of "surging politically motivated violence". CCC spokesperson Promise Mkwananzi confirmed the abduction and said a police report would be filed. Contacted for comment, police spokesperson Paul Nyathi said: "I am yet to get that report." Zimbabwe's government spokesman did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The incident came barely two months after the abduction of a CCC councilor, Womberaishe Nhende, who has since fled the country. Zimbabwe's opposition parties have been calling for a fresh election since President Emmerson Mnangagwa secured a second term in office. Despite flagging irregularities in the electoral process, a Southern African Development Community (SADC) extraordinary summit on Tuesday formally endorsed the results. © 2023 Reuters.

The forces were ambushed twice Tuesday while moving to Moreh, and eventually a convoy of 60 commandos reached. By Sukrita Baruah , Jimmy Leivon Family mourns Manipur cop Ch Anand Kumar, who was killed Tuesday in an attack, in Imphal on Wednesday. PTI Full curfew was reimposed in both districts of Imphal Wednesday which saw a mob attempt to storm the First Manipur Rifles Campus even as 44 people, most of whom police said were Myanmar nationals, were detained in the Indo-Myanmar border town of Moreh. Tensions were high on Wednesday in both Moreh and Imphal, 100 km apart, as locals reported hearing firing in Imphal city in the evening. A security official said that a mob had attempted to storm the First Manipur Rifles Campus which led to an exchange of fire with the security forces, who successfully stalled any attempt of weapon looting, according to an official. This incident comes after a Meitei officer with the Manipur Police, Chingtham Anand Kumar, was shot dead Tuesday in Moreh, which is dominated by the Kuki-Zomi community. The 3,000-odd Meitei residents of the town have fled since violence erupted. The state cabinet had decided to launch a joint operation in Moreh and adjoining areas to nab Kumar’s killers. Additional forces of Manipur police commandos were also deployed in Moreh. The forces were ambushed twice Tuesday while moving to Moreh, and eventually a convoy of 60 commandos reached. Manipur police stated Wednesday that 44 people have been detained following search operations by security forces in Moreh and 32 of these people were “found to be Myanmar-ese/Burmese”. “10 Myanmarese citizens from Moreh were taken to Foreigner Detention Centre, Sajiwa,” read a statement by the Manipur police. Tensions have now escalated in the Kuki-Zomi dominated hill areas which had already been pushing back against the presence of Manipur police in Moreh, alleging bias against their community in the ongoing conflict. Reacting to the increase in deployment of Manipur police in Moreh, multiple Kuki-Zomi community organisations have supported a call for a 48-hour shutdown starting Thursday midnight in areas dominated by the community. A “shutdown notice” issued by Kuki Student’s Organization stated, “while the demand for withdrawal of state forces in the aforesaid town (Moreh) has been gaining momentum following their excesses and total disregard to civil rights and liberties, the moves of the state government in forcefully deploying a convoy of 19 vehicles carrying Manipur police commandos and the Arambai Tenggol added more fuel to the fire in already volatile situation.” Meanwhile, Chief Minister N Biren Singh led his council of ministers, MLAs and other top officials in paying tributes to Kumar Wednesday afternoon. © The Indian Express Pvt Ltd

By Edward Mcallister, David Lewis and Michelle Nichols November 3, 20236:09 AM EDT An armored vehicle escorting a MINUSMA logistic convoy from Gao to Kidal, is parked as trucks pass by, Mali February 16, 2017. Each month MINUSMA organizes logistic convoys involving hundreds of civilians and military vehicles to supply remote UN bases in northern Mali. Picture taken February 16, 2017. MINUSMA/Sylvain Liechti handout via REUTERS/File Photo Summary U.N. accelerates withdrawal from Mali as fighting increases Kidal base left to rebels as peacekeepers move out Restrictions by Mali junta jeopardising U.N. troops and kit DAKAR, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Before United Nations peacekeepers hurriedly abandoned their base in Kidal in northern Mali on Tuesday, they made a costly call: with insurgents stationed nearby, they destroyed sensitive equipment to avoid it falling into the wrong hands, the U.N. said. Shortly after the last U.N. convoy rolled out, the ethnic Tuareg rebels announced they had taken over the base. Photos posted on social media on Wednesday appeared to show locals loading trucks with looted goods, including tyres, cables and chairs. Mali's ruling military junta in June ordered the decade-old UN mission, known as MINUSMA, to leave as its relations soured with former international allies. MINUSMA has accelerated its departure in recent weeks as northern Mali has been engulfed in fighting between the rebels and government forces vying for control over areas it vacates. Chaos has ensued. Bloody confrontations have surrounded at least two U.N. bases, and two have also been looted, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the withdrawal. At least a dozen peacekeepers have been injured by explosive devices hit by U.N. convoys heading south, according to U.N. statements. The U.N. has acknowledged difficulties with its departure. MINUSMA said in statements that it has been forced to destroy equipment including vehicles, ammunition and generators that its forces couldn't evacuate after the government imposed restrictions on moving them. Mission spokesperson Fatoumata Sinkoun Kaba told Reuters that millions of dollars of kit has been lost. Authorities have denied approval for air support for convoys travelling over some of the most volatile terrain in West Africa. They ordered a halt to some imports of fuel and spare parts, and in some cases jeopardised the safety of departing peacekeepers, according to the two sources with direct knowledge of the withdrawal. Mali's government did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Security analysts have warned that the Malian state could collapse altogether, further destabilising a region where insurgents with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State are gaining ground. MINUSMA had originally planned to leave Kidal in mid-November, the sources said. The equipment that was destroyed there and at two other northern bases could have been removed by U.N. trucks earlier, but Mali's junta blocked access, the U.N. said. Four aircraft have been grounded for lack of parts, the U.N. told Reuters, without specifying what kind of aircraft. Dozens of U.N. import requests have gone unanswered, the U.N. Department of Peace Operations and the Department of Operational Support said in an internal letter to the Security Council on Oct. 14, seen by Reuters. With routes to the south under threat from Islamist militants, the mission has explored the possibility of exiting through Algeria to the north or Mauritania to the west, the letter said, both of which were proving "difficult to operationalise". The two sources, who asked to remain anonymous to speak on a sensitive topic, said they believe Mali's junta has sought to delay the retreat to give it time to reach the bases before the U.N. leaves. Reuters was unable to confirm this but the junta has expressed concern in public pronouncements about the U.N. leaving bases before it arrives, including after the Kidal departure. Last month, it called the acceleration of MINUSMA's withdrawal a "betrayal". "NASTY WAR" The situation marks a bitter end to the U.N.'s mission in Mali, where it deployed after the north was overrun by Islamist militants and Tuareg rebels in a 2012 uprising. MINUSMA initially helped restore some calm, but violence has persisted. Thousands of civilians have died, and more than 170 peacekeepers have been killed in combat, making MINUSMA the U.N.'s deadliest mission. Worsening insecurity prompted military coups in 2020 and 2021. The junta then kicked out French troops who were helping fight the Islamists, teamed up with Russian private military contractor the Wagner Group, and ordered MINUSMA to leave. The mission has until Dec. 31 to pack up. So far, more than 6,000 of nearly 14,000 personnel have left, the U.N. spokeswoman said. The Tuareg rebels signed a 2015 peace agreement brokered by MINUSMA but maintained control of much of the north from Kidal. That accord has fallen apart since the mission began moving out. The first sign of trouble came in early August, when fighting broke out between Mali's army and Tuareg rebels around the U.N.'s camp in Ber in the north. The mission left the camp on Aug. 13, two days early. Its convoy was attacked twice that day, injuring four peacekeepers, it said. In October, gunfire around its base in Tessalit, near the Algerian border, forced peacekeepers to shelter in bunkers, the U.N. said. On Oct. 19, shots hit a MINUSMA plane landing at the airstrip. When the last troops left Tessalit on Oct. 21, they were denied air support for the nine-day journey across the unpoliced desert. "They are effectively endangering the lives of our troops," one of the sources said. As in Kidal, peacekeepers destroyed equipment before leaving that could have been transported in trucks earlier, if the government had allowed. Air support was also denied convoys departing Kidal on a 350-kilometre (217-mile) journey south to the city of Gao, the MINUSMA spokesperson said. Three security analysts told Reuters that Kidal, a Tuareg stronghold from which rebels have long fought for autonomy of the desert region they call Azawad, was a potential flash point now that the U.N. has left. It is not clear how well positioned the Malian army is to take back the base. It has been trying to reach the city in recent weeks, but progress is slow, the analysts said. "If the base in Kidal falls into the rebels' hands, this will cause an outcry in Bamako," said Yvan Guichaoua, senior lecturer at the University of Kent's Brussels School of International Studies. "A nasty war may eventually erupt." Reporting by Edward McAllister in Dakar, David Lewis in Nairobi and Michelle Nichols in New York. Additional reporting by Mahamat Ramadane in N'Djamena; Editing by Alexandra Zavis and Daniel Flynn © 2023 Reuters. All rights reserved

The notifications suggested that many opposition figures could be under “state-sponsored” surveillance, but even Apple said the warning could have been a false alarm. By Alex Travelli and Suhasini Raj Throngs of people fill an Apple store in Mumbai. Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters More than a dozen iPhones across India buzzed with the same message earlier this week. Each notification sounded its own little alarm, but was amplified many times over when the targets identified themselves publicly. Most were prominent political opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. The warning on their phones, sent by Apple on Monday, seemed stark: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone,” it said in part. But these so-called threat notifications could, by Apple’s own admission, be a false alarm, and Mr. Modi’s government dismissed allegations that it was spying on the opposition, journalists and critics, as some speculated. Now in power for nearly a decade, Mr. Modi and his government have consolidated power by cracking down on free speech, undermining the independent press and silencing dissenting voices, including those in the opposition. This week’s episode seemed to fit into that pattern for his critics and many who got the warning from Apple. And, they said, the surveillance suggested by the alert would help the governing party in getting an upper hand on rivals ahead of next year’s election. Rahul Gandhi, the foremost opposition leader, said many of his confidants in the Congress Party received the notification. Mr. Gandhi added that he takes illegal surveillance by the government for granted. At a news conference, he said, “We are not scared. You can do as much phone-tapping as you want, I don’t care.” This tussle is a distraction, he said, from the government’s most serious failings, like corruption. Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of communications, electronics and I.T., dismissed the allegations of spying as complaints from “compulsive critics,” making it plain that he meant Mr. Gandhi in particular. He, too, called it a distraction, adding that the government would investigate the matter even as he urged the public to ignore the “vague” notifications. But Sriram Karri, a newspaper editor in the southern city of Hyderabad, said this was the fourth such alert he had received in two years. This time, he said, he “freaked out” and feared “very political” motives. “One feels breached, that not just your calls, but someone has access to all of the data on your phone including photos and videos,” Mr. Karri said. Apple started sending the threat notifications in 2019, after the widespread use of Pegasus, a spyware program developed by NSO, an Israeli cyber-intelligence company, became public. NSO’s clients included governments around the world who used Pegasus to sneak into the phones of dissidents and opponents. One of those customers, The Times reported last year, was India. Pegasus was a centerpiece of a $2 billion defense package that it bought from Israel in 2017. Some independent researchers in India have reported evidence of Pegasus infections on their phones. A committee formed by India’s Supreme Court to investigate those reports disbanded last year, noting that “the government of India has not cooperated.” The human rights group Amnesty International played a crucial role in uncovering the global scale of Pegasus spyware. In a statement, Likhita Banerji, a technology and human rights researcher at the group, said that the cause of the Apple notifications “appears to be yet another surveillance scandal.” She added: “In India, reports of prominent journalists and opposition leaders receiving the Apple notifications are particularly concerning in the months leading up to state and national general elections.” On Tuesday, Apple confirmed that it was the source of the alerts in India. But its public statements, like the Indian government’s, had the effect of minimizing the warnings’ impact. The notifications were based on “intelligence signals that are often imperfect and incomplete,” the company said, adding, “It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms.” And they must remain vague in order to avoid helping “state-sponsored attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future.” The company also said that it has sent out these notifications in nearly 150 countries since it started alerting potential victims. For Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer who started an organization in India defending the rights of internet users and software developers, the episode stood out because only opposition figures appeared to have received it. “This was not a run-of-the-mill security breach,” she said. In recent years, Apple has set up a high-stakes position in India as the country’s economy has grown to the fifth-largest in the world. It has moved more forcefully into India’s consumer market, opening Apple Stores and challenging the dominance of the Android platform. At the same time, Apple has become more important to India’s government. It is by far the most prominent company to have joined a government campaign to increase manufacturing in the country. India’s Tata Sons and Taiwan’s Foxconn have bought and built factories that are churning out more and more high-end iPhones at the same time that Apple is eager to reduce its dependence on China as a manufacturing hub. Alex Travelli is a correspondent for The Times based in New Delhi, covering business and economic matters in India and the rest of South Asia. He previously worked as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. Suhasini Raj has worked for over a decade as an investigative journalist with Indian and international news outlets. Based in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in 2014. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Exclusive: Chinese jet fired flares close to submarine-hunting helicopter in South China Sea, Canadian Navy says By Brad Lendon Royal Canadian Navy/Canadian Armed Forces | The HMCS Ottawa has been making its way through the South China Sea Aboard HMCS Ottawa (CNN) — A Chinese warplane fired flares in front of a Canadian military helicopter over international waters of the South China Sea last Sunday, an operation that Canadian military officers said was reckless and could have resulted in the downing of the aircraft. “The risk to a helicopter in that instance is the flares moving into the rotor blades or the engines so this was categorized as both unsafe and non-standard, unprofessional,” said Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ottawa, the warship from which the Sikorsky Cyclone helicopter was flying. The incident was the second of two encounters the Ottawa’s helicopter had with Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy J-11 fighter jets over international waters on October 29, which saw the fighters get as close as 100 feet from the helicopter, Millen told CNN in an interview aboard the warship. He said that Canada and other nations have seen Chinese aircraft get close to fixed-wing aircraft on numerous occasions, but it was rare to see such action taken against a helicopter. The first incident was over international waters outside of 34 miles from the Paracel Island chain in the northern part of the South China Sea. The second was also over international waters outside of 23 miles from the Paracels. The warship was operating in international waters 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of the Paracels at the time. The Canadian helicopter was searching for a previously detected submarine when the incidents occurred, officers aboard the Ottawa said. Millen said he was piloting the Canadian helicopter earlier in the day, when Chinese J-11s intercepted it at close range while it flew straight and level at 3,000 feet above the water back toward the Ottawa, a signal to that it had no hostile intent. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press/AP/File | A Canadian military Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone conducts test flights with HMCS Montreal in Halifax harbour on Thursday, April 1, 2010. In that earlier encounter, Millen said the Chinese fighters flew in circles around his helicopter. “When the intercepting aircraft was closer and closer, at a certain point it became unsafe,” he said. His helicopter experienced turbulence coming off the Chinese jets, also posing a danger to the copter, Millen said. “I certainly am not as comfortable as you can be based on the fragility of the rotor system,” he said. Millen said he ended that encounter by descending to 200 feet, an area where the helicopter can operate but is “very uncomfortable for fast air fighter jets.” The Canadian air force major said his military’s air crews train on how to respond to such intercepts as occurred on Sunday and will continue to fly over the international waters of the South China Sea. CNN is reaching out to Chinese authorities for comment on the latest incidents. China claims historic jurisdiction over almost the entirety of the vast South China Sea, and since 2014 has built up tiny reefs and sandbars into artificial islands heavily fortified with missiles, runways and weapons systems – sparking outcry from the other claimants. The Paracels, called the Xisha Islands by China, are in the northern part of the South China Sea, east of Da Nang, Vietnam, and south of China’s Hainan Island. The 1.3-million-square-mile waterway is vital to international trade, with an estimated third of global shipping worth trillions of dollars passing through each year. It’s also home to vast fertile fishing grounds upon which many lives and livelihoods depend. In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague concluded that China has no legal basis to claim historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea. China has ignored the ruling. Freedom of navigation Major western powers frequently conduct passage across the sea in order to assert that the region is international waters, sparking Beijing’s ire. The Ottawa had been patrolling the waterway since last Monday, at times operating with United States, Australian, Japanese and New Zealand naval vessels and aircraft in a multinational exercise dubbed Noble Caribou. However, it was operating alone when the encounters with the Chinese jets. The Ottawa and the US Navy destroyer USS Rafael Peralta overnight Wednesday into Thursday local time continued their deployment into the Taiwan Strait, another international waterway and vital shipping channel that has seen tense encounters between PLA and allied vessels. See how close Chinese fighter jet came to US bomber | 01:01 - Source: CNN Last June, the US Navy reported a close encounter between the destroyer USS Chung-Hoon and a Chinese warship during a Taiwan Strait transit, in which the US warship slowed down to avoid colliding with the Chinese navy vessel that cut in front of it. The Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal was accompanying the US ship at the time, and a news crew aboard it recorded the incident. Then Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu blamed the US for ratcheting up tensions in the region when questioned by reporters at a defense conference in Singapore. “They are not here for innocent passage, they are here for provocation,” Li said of US warships. Li said if the US and other foreign powers did not want confrontation, they should not send their military assets near China. “Mind your own business,” Li said, adding, “Why did all these incidents happen in areas near China, not in areas near other countries?” This week’s passage of the allied warships through the strait was uneventful, however, with no contact reported. U.S. INDO-PACIFIC COMMAND/Reuters/File | A Chinese Navy J-11 fighter jet is recorded flying close to a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft in international airspace over the South China Sea, according to the U.S. military, in a still image from video taken December 21, 2022. Sunday’s incidents come after other reports of unsafe intercepts of allied aircraft in the recent days. On Tuesday, a PLA fighter jet came within 10 feet of a US Air Force B-52 bomber flying over the South China Sea, the US military said. And earlier in October, a Chinese fighter jet came within five meters (16 feet) of a Canadian CP-140 reconnaissance and surveillance plane over the East China Sea. That incident was recorded by news crews aboard the Canadian aircraft and witnessed by Maj. Gen. Iain Huddleston, the commander of Canada’s 1st Air Division, who was also on the plane. Huddleston called the intercept “unprofessional” and “very aggressive” in a report from Radio Canada, which was on the plane. “The Canadian aircraft was subject to multiple close-proximity manoeuvres by a PLAAF aircraft that put the safety of all personnel at risk,” Canada’s Defense Ministry said in a statement. China’s Foreign Ministry said the Canadian plane illegally entered Chinese airspace and accused the Canadian military of sending “warplanes halfway around the world to stir up trouble and make provocations at China’s doorsteps.” In February, in an incident witnessed by a CNN crew, a Chinese fighter jet came within 500 feet of a US Navy reconnaissance plane flying at 21,500 feet about 30 miles from the Paracels. Earlier this month, the Pentagon’s top official in charge of security in the Indo-Pacific, Ely Ratner, said that the US has seen more instances of “coercive and risky” behavior from Chinese pilots against US aircraft in the last two years over the East and South China Seas than in the entire decade before that. “Since the fall of 2021, we have seen more than 180 such incidents,” Ratner said. “It’s a centralized and concerted campaign to perform these risky behaviors in order to coerce a change in lawful US operational activity.” © 2023 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved. CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.

Ex-Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte Sued Over ‘Grave Threats’ The case, filed by Representative France Castro over threats made Rodrigo Duterte on his TV program, will be a crucial test of the country’s judicial system. By Mong Palatino Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks at the Duterte Golf Cup 2023 in Dasmariñas, Cavite, Philippines, on Septemper 29, 2023. Credit: Facebook/Bong Go An opposition lawmaker has filed a criminal complaint against former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte for making “grave threats” against some members of Congress on his TV show. A day after the House of Representatives confirmed the removal of the confidential funds of Vice President Sara Duterte, the former president, her father, lambasted lawmakers and singled out House Deputy Minority Leader and Act Teachers Party-list Representative France Castro as among those who exposed the questionable items in the government’s budget bill. Duterte said confidential funds are needed to identify and “kill” communists in Congress. He said that he used the same type of funds to kill drug suspects in Davao, where he served as city mayor for more than two decades before being elected president in 2016. Two weeks after the airing of Duterte’s TV show, Castro filed her affidavit against the former president, who could face a prison term of between six months and six years if found guilty. “Duterte’s statements echo his admitted record of extrajudicial killings of and attacks against mere suspects. Certainly, he still has, to date, considerable influence either directly or indirectly over the military and police institutions,” states an excerpt of Castro’s petition. This was the first criminal complaint filed against Duterte, who verbally attacked his critics when he was president from 2016 to 2022, during which time he enjoyed legal immunity. Since Duterte uttered his remarks against Castro on a live TV show as a private citizen, will the complaint lead to his indictment and prosecution? Attorney Rico Domingo of the Movement Against Disinformation, who is also Castro’s legal counsel, said the case “is a challenge to our judicial and prosecutorial system, as to how effective or ineffective it is.” But Duterte’s former spokesperson dismissed the complaint as having “no legal basis” and was only filed “for propaganda purposes.” Duterte’s former police chief said the threat to kill was merely a figure of speech. Duterte’s son, Rep. Paolo Duterte, said that “public servants should not be onion-skinned and should not make use of this right as a tool to silence critics.” Castro was quick to refute the arguments of Duterte’s supporters. “Death threats and red-tagging aired on television must be stopped because it endangers the lives of people. It is far different from criticisms and should not be tolerated because it fosters the state of impunity. We have to draw the line,” Castro said in a public statement. House leaders backed Castro by releasing a joint statement urging the former president to stop making threats against incumbent legislators. “We call upon the former President and all parties involved to avoid making threats or insinuating harm against any member of the House or the institution itself,” House leaders said. “Dialogue and understanding should always be at the forefront, superseding divisive rhetoric.” The Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) passed a resolution during its 212th session expressing concern about the threat made by Duterte and its impact on the work of legislators. “It may deter its members from speaking out on important matters and put their lives at significant risk,” the IPU declared. A former senator also revealed that a video clip of Duterte’s TV show was sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as additional evidence about the former president’s involvement in the brutal “war on drugs,” which killed thousands of alleged drug suspects. Duterte and some of his subordinates are being investigated by the ICC for committing crimes against humanity in the enforcement of the anti-drug campaign. Castro’s complaint is significant because it could embolden other opposition figures to file separate complaints or revive previous cases against the former president to demand accountability. More importantly, it serves as a timely reminder to other public officials and their supporters to refrain from incitement and the spreading of online hate speech against critics of government policies and abuse of power. © 2023 DIPLOMAT MEDIA INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.