dailybeast--2019-11-10--The Russians Who Went West: A Lost Generation of Emigres

The Compatriots explores the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and the Russians abroad—how the political regime in Moscow got obsessed with the threat posed by political exiles and how it has been trying to use them—from espionage to assassinations, a practice that is very much alive today.  In Russia, legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who died October 27, is mostly remembered for exposing the use of psychiatry against political opponents of the Kremlin and as someone who was famously swapped for the Chilean Communist leader Louis Corvalan.  But once in the West, Bukovsky, always a man of action, launched a political exiles umbrella organization called Resistance International. Supported and funded by the Americans, it was the most spectacular attempt to target the Soviet regime from abroad—right before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Yuri Andropov’s KGB had been throwing Soviet dissidents out of the country for so many years that by the beginning of the ’80s, there was a substantial community of third-generation Russian political exiles in the West. This group was very different from their predecessors. Unlike the first wave of White Russians, who understood close to nothing about the political circumstances in Soviet Russia, the third generation knew the Soviet regime inside out. They also differed from the second wave of postwar emigrants—who stayed in the West out of fear of repressions—in that they had emigrated largely because of their political convictions.  The new wave of Soviet emigrants included a lot of people who had protested the regime while they were in the Soviet Union. That was the reason they were thrown out of the country or escaped to the West (sometimes via very unorthodox methods, like the hijacking of planes). Now the most prominent among them set out to build organizations in the West with the goal of changing the political regime in their home country. Here, finally, was the generation George Kennan had long hoped to see.  No matter how brave they were, this generation of emigrants faced a formidable challenge: their underground experience in the highly restricted climate of the Soviet Union hindered rather than helped them when it came to building effective political organizations in the open society of the West.  In May 1984, journalist Masha Slonim got a phone call at her studio in Bush House, the time-honored London headquarters of the BBC. Lord Nicolas Bethell, an old friend of hers, had a tantalizing offer: Did she want to fly to Pakistan and bring back two Soviet soldiers who had recently defected from the Soviet army barracks in Afghanistan? Bethell, who had opposed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from the very beginning, was involved with many projects providing help to Afghan mujahedeen. As a result, he knew a lot of people on the other side of the Afghan border.  Masha couldn’t resist the temptation. The idea was, above all, interesting. And it touched a personal chord: Masha was part of a remarkable family, from the highest echelons of Soviet elite-turned-dissident. Her grandfather had been Stalin’s foreign minister Maxim Litvinov, and her cousin Pavel Litvinov was one of the eight people who had gone to Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Masha herself had left the Soviet Union for good a few years earlier. In London, she stayed in touch with Soviet dissidents in exile who tried to organize a resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—an effort of which Lord Bethell was a part.  Masha took three days off and flew to Islamabad. She didn’t say anything about her trip to her BBC bosses. When she arrived, she spent a night at the British ambassador’s residence before her meeting with the soldiers. A fragile, delicate young woman, Masha was nervous. Bethell had explained that the soldiers were junkies, and she wasn’t quite sure how she should talk to them. The ambassador gave her a bottle of vodka, saying, “These guys haven’t seen it for months; they’ll love that!” Then she was driven to the airport where the meeting was to take place. Finally, a minibus dropped off two skinny boys whose names were Oleg Khlan and Igor Rykov.  Masha had never seen withdrawal symptoms before, but on the plane back to London she could hardly fail to recognize them. The boys moaned continuously and wandered aimlessly around the plane. A steward threatened to kick them off at a layover in Damascus. Masha gave them the ambassador's bottle of vodka; they drank it immediately, but it didn't quite do the job. When the plane landed in London, the boys could hardly stand.  In London, Bethell arranged for them to stay in a safe house, but the withdrawal symptoms got worse. Oleg and Igor demanded that they be brought back to Peshawar or to the Soviet embassy—at least there must be some vodka there. They drank all the aftershave they found in the house. Frightened, Masha called a psychiatrist. He forbade her to give them any alcohol. At dawn, Masha packed the boys in a car and brought them to a private clinic. There, every night, flying severed heads haunted Oleg in his room, and he hid from them under his bed.  The two boys spent almost a month in the clinic. When they were discharged, only a bit better off, nobody knew what to do with them. Masha put them up at her house while they waited for their big moment. It came in late June.  On June 27, a press conference titled "Soviet defectors to the West tell their story" was organized in London. Lord Nicolas Bethell hosted the event, where the surprise guests were Rykov and Khlan. Thin and pale, both dressed in blue jeans and seersucker jackets, the two told the journalists of atrocities committed by Soviet troops in Afghanistan, including a mass killing of civilians in an Afghan village. Although it was no more than hearsay—neither of them had been present in the village—journalists were impressed. It was the very first time Soviet army deserters appeared in person in the West, and the press conference was reported by the world press, including the International Herald Tribune. Masha was not there. Her BBC bosses knew nothing about her role, and she wanted to keep it that way.  For Bethell, the event was deeply emotional. He was a fierce critic of the Western powers’ treatment of Soviet prisoners of war after World War II, and he wanted to help a new generation of Soviet army deserters. He was not alone in his beliefs. When hosting the press conference, Bethell identified himself as a representative of an organization called Resistance International.  The day after the press conference, an American diamond trader based in Paris picked up his copy of the Tribune. The front-page story about two Soviet defectors caught his eye. When Bert Jolis read that the conference was “arranged by Lord Bethell and Resistance International, a group that supports the Afghan insurgents,” it piqued his curiosity.  Who was behind it? He asked friends in Paris, who replied, “Oh, don’t you know? It’s Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident.” Jolis smiled. He had been waiting to hear something like this for a very long time. The diamond trader knew Bukovsky by reputation and believed he was just the kind of man of action needed.  Jolis was a successful if not very scrupulous diamond dealer active in Africa (where he was trading with the Central African dictator Bokassa). But he was also a veteran of OSS—the Office of Strategic Service, the predecessor of the CIA. Jolis had learned to hate communism when, as an American officer fighting in France during World War II, he witnessed the desperation with which Soviet soldiers tried to escape forcible repatriation. After the war, Jolis stayed in touch with his former colleagues at OSS, who were now serving in the CIA. He also kept thinking of the Russian deserters he had known.  Jolis considered himself an expert in this field and remembered how in 1951, the CIA’s legendary director Allen Dulles had asked him to write a report about how to encourage Soviet bloc defections. The topic was close to Jolis's heart, and he was happy to oblige. In his opinion, the U.S. government should take a more active stance. He envisaged the defectors' program in place at the time evolving from a small-scale covert exercise in psychological warfare into a "major weapon in our hands." Jolis had carefully saved Dulles's thank-you note.  Jolis set out to meet Bukovsky. “Right now,” Jolis was told, “he is in Palo Alto, doing scientific research.” Bukovsky was on a fellowship at Stanford University finishing his master's degree in neurophysiology; in the Soviet Union, he had never had a chance to complete his education, since he was in and out of jail constantly from the age of 20. At the first opportunity, Jolis flew to the West Coast and met Bukovsky, “a pleasant, stocky man with a broad Slavic face, in his early 40s, with an air of the street-smart intellectual about him.”  Walking across the Stanford quad, in the Californian sunshine, Bukovsky told Jolie that Resistance International had started in Paris a year earlier when he and a group of former political prisoners and exiled dissidents formed L'Internationale de la Resistance. An umbrella organization, it embraced a broad spectrum of political, religious, and social movements around the world, united by a common commitment to fighting Communist oppression. Bukovsky was president, and Armando Valladares, a Cuban poet who had spent 22 years in prison, was vice president.  Bukovsky told Jolis about some of the activities they carried out—for instance, how they printed a dummy mock-up special edition of the Soviet army newspaper, Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), in January 1984 urging Soviet troops to “Stop the War and Go Home.” At first glance, he said, it looked like the genuine issue of Krasnaya Zvezda. Afghans posted the paper on public walls in the streets of Kabul. The new organization also cooperated with Radio Free Kabul, launched by Lord Nicolas Bethell. Among other things, they broadcast 10-minute prerecorded tapes in Russian by prominent dissidents aimed at provoking opposition among the Soviet troops.  “I’d like to help,” Jolis said.  “There is only one thing we need,” Bukovsky told him. “Money!”  “I’m sorry,” Jolis answered. “I’m not rich enough for that. But maybe I can help you raise some. I’m not a professional fundraiser, but one can always try. Give me a little time to think this over. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”  Indeed, Jolis got back to Bukovsky very quickly. A month after Bethell’s press conference, the American Foundation for Resistance International was incorporated. Vladimir Bukovsky was president, and Albert Jolis served as executive director. Bukovsky was already well connected in Reagan’s Washington; he was in touch with the senior Soviet specialist at the State Department and the director of European and Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, among others. George Kennan, however, who was now in academia, was a disappointment: “He was getting more and more pro-Kremlin, promoting the improving of relations with the Soviet Union,” Bukovsky told us.  Bukovsky wanted something else from Jolis: “I needed a treasurer,” he recalled in an interview with us. “For this sort of organization, it’s essential to have a rich treasurer, from a rich family… For any of us, it would be uncomfortable to ask for money. We are émigrés; we don’t have our own money. But Jolis was already very rich.”  Jolis was, indeed, ideal: he was well connected and turned out to be very good at raising money, eventually raising several million dollars for Resistance International from politically conservative American foundations.  The war in Afghanistan was the top topic in the world. It had already done the Soviets a good deal of political damage, not the least of which was the Western boycott of Moscow’s Olympic Games. What’s more, the Soviet army was not winning. With every year that passed, the situation in Afghanistan looked more and more like the one the Americans had gotten themselves into in Vietnam. And as had been the case with Vietnam, a military disaster in Afghanistan ran the risk of huge political consequences at home.  Bukovsky had a specific goal in mind: "We argued with the Americans that if we can make defections in masses—we thought of several hundred—it would force the Kremlin to limit the Soviet army's involvement in combat missions, leaving the fighting to the Afghan army, which was already unreliable. And that would be a big help."  Thanks to Jolis's intervention, Resistance International—seven people in a three-room apartment on the third floor of a Belle Epoque building on the fashionable Champs-Elysees in Paris—was soon thriving. At its peak, it coordinated the efforts of 49 anti-communist organizations, from Poland's Solidarnost to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77.  But how effective was it?  January’s mock-up Red Star issue turned out to be a one-time adventure. It was an odd bit of propaganda. On the front page it featured such a nasty cartoon of a Soviet soldier that no soldier would associate himself with it. It also had a language problem. Using outdated slang gave the impression that the paper had been printed during World War II. Mock-up newspapers and radio broadcasts all had a whiff of the CIA's ’50s-era tool kit. The Radio Free Kabul stunt was also useless. The station was used as a communications tool by Afghans, but it was not at all popular among Soviet troops, who preferred to use the Japanese cassette recorders they bought at Afghan markets to record and play songs by popular Russian bards. It is perhaps not surprising that Resistance International failed to become an organization with significant influence in the propaganda war in Afghanistan. It also failed Russian political emigres in the West.  Bukovsky, an inspiring figure but hardly a good manager, soon busied himself with other projects, and clashes began in the three rooms of the Belle Époque apartment on the Champs-Élysées. Like many another Russian émigré organization, this one was also falling apart.  The restricted character of Soviet society affected those opposing the regime. With the government having effectively banned any kind of independent organization, and with no room for political debate outside of people’s kitchens, Soviet dissidents simply didn’t have the experience needed to build effective political organizations. This was the curse that had haunted the second wave of the Russian emigration, and now it haunted the third.  As the summer of 1984 progressed, Oleg Khlan and Igor Rykov were growing more and more desperate in London. Lord Bethell had housed them with a Ukrainian woman (both boys were born in Ukraine) and arranged for them to apply for Canadian visas so they could join the large Ukrainian diaspora there. But they couldn’t give up narcotics. One of them sent a letter home to his mother and revealed his address in London.  They started frequenting a Russian restaurant called Balalaika in Richmond, a suburb in southwest London, and there they met Boris. He said he was from a Soviet trade mission. Meanwhile, the Canadians set out conditions for issuing them visas—Oleg and Igor had to agree to surprise drug tests. The first test showed signs of LSD. Two weeks later the second test showed the same result. The Canadians refused to grant them asylum.  In November, Igor got a letter from his mother with a photo of a three-year-old girl in it, signed by his former fiancée (she had broken up with him while he was in the army). “Your daughter and I are waiting for you at home!” it read. The next day, Oleg and Igor went to the Soviet embassy.  On November 11, the two maverick Soviet soldiers, Oleg Khlan and Igor Rykov, were driven to Heathrow Airport in a Soviet embassy car. “Both soldiers could be seen smiling through the car's rear window," reported the Associated Press. Soviet officials put them on a Leningrad-bound flight. "The return of the two soldiers came a week after Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, secretly returned to Moscow from Britain after 17 years in the West," the agency added. In the Soviet Union, Alliluyeva was granted Soviet citizenship, but Oleg and Igor were at once sent to camps. They fell victim to a typical KGB ploy: they were lured back and then punished mercilessly.  Dissidents' propaganda completely failed to affect the mindset of Soviet soldiers and officers in Afghanistan. But books found their way to soldiers, and they worked.  In June 1985, Valeri Shiryaev, a military interpreter stationed on the outskirts of Kabul, headed to a local market. He wanted to buy something that was impossible to find in the Soviet Union: a Penthouse magazine. He’d heard it was even better than Playboy.  He located a shop with stacks of old magazines, picked out an issue of Penthouse, and started the long but necessary bargaining process with the tradesman. When they finally came to an agreement, the tradesman gave him something that looked like a thick pack of Marlboro cigarettes along with his dirty magazine, as a gift.  Shiryaev took it and saw it was a book, The Gulag Archipelago, printed in very small font, with no margins at all. On the first page, there was a description: "a novel." Well, so be it, thought Shiryaev, and he brought the book with him to the dormitory in the fourth district of Kabul where all the military interpreters lived. In the next few weeks, he read it under his blanket at night, thankful for his very good eyesight. He soon understood it was not a proper novel, but he read the book to the end.  The copy Shiryaev picked up by accident had traveled a long way to Afghanistan. It had originally been shipped from a warehouse in Paris, near the Opéra, from a tiny apartment filled with thousands of copies of The Gulag Archipelago and Orwell’s 1984. The warehouse was run by a couple who were both veterans of the Russian émigré organization NTS—that old enemy of the Soviet regime that the CIA had supported since the ’50s.  But the war could have lasted for another ten years if not for the arrival of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev had taken over the top position in the Communist Party in March, two months before Shiryaev picked up his copy of The Gulag Archipelago.  Gorbachev started slowly opening Soviet borders, and the number of Soviet émigrés, especially to the United States, kept growing. And the next year, in February 1986, Gorbachev made a statement at the party congress: the Soviet Union was planning to pull its troops out of Afghanistan.  Resistance International was quietly disbanded. “Our funding just stopped. Probably our American sponsors decided that there was no longer any need to undermine the Soviet Union; it undermined itself,” said Galina Ackerman, who was a member. “At the end of the day, our joint efforts helped to move 16 defectors from Afghanistan to the West,” said Bukovsky.  The country was falling apart. While Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika—a set of political and economic democratizing reforms in the Soviet Union—was gaining momentum, all kinds of disasters hit the Soviet Union, including the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl. It looked like everything the Soviet government was involved in had started to collapse. And in May 1987 it became clear that this included the performance of the army and air forces: a single-engine Cessna aircraft rented by an 18-year-old amateur German pilot flew from Helsinki to Moscow and landed right on Red Square. Nobody stopped him.  Four months later, in the United States, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs called on the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), William E. Odom, to testify on the topic of Soviet emigres. That the director of the NSA, essentially an electronic intelligence agency, would be addressing the subject of Russian emigres might sound odd, but Odom was known as an intellectual who was deeply knowledgeable about Russian culture. He had made his own contribution to the Cold War effort: While serving at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the ’70s, he smuggled out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn’s archive.  Odom started his testimony by evoking the tradition that had begun with Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin, Lenin and Trotsky. "A very large community of Russian intelligentsia... found it necessary to come to the West, if they were going to carry on the intellectual and political activities they desired," he said. Odom went on, describing the difference between the three generations of emigres to the United States and focused on the third wave, "which includes very sophisticated and well-educated people":  They are not victims of war and upheaval, but people who have tried to change the USSR from within, people who have begun to rethink the basic and age-old questions facing their former country: What is Russia's purpose? Whither the USSR? Can a totalitarian regime evolve toward a liberal and humane regime? They have come West not merely to survive Stalin and the fate of war, as did the second wave; they have come from relative privilege in many cases, from positions of status, with keen and energetic minds. They have come with basically different aims, hopes and purposes than did their predecessors. They are more akin to their 19th-century predecessors than to the first and second waves.  It looked like emigration had come full circle.  Among the people Odom mentioned as the most prominent voices of Russian dissent was Alexander Solzhenitsyn—“I listen to him for what he knows about the Soviet Union, not the U.S.,” he said. Books still worked.  The next year, Gorbachev granted amnesty to Soviet soldiers who had defected in Afghanistan. He also signed a decree that returned Soviet citizenship to 23 people who had been stripped of it by previous Soviet authorities.  Three years later, by December 1991, the Soviet Union would officially be no more: all Soviet republics proclaimed themselves independent of Moscow’s control. And the year after that, Boris Yeltsin’s government would invite Bukovsky to testify at the trial of the Communist Party. This trial was held in the Constitutional Court of Russia—a country born out of the ashes of the Soviet Union. To prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted access to the Soviet archives. He brought a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer with him to Moscow, and he managed to secretly scan many documents—including highly sensitive KGB reports to the Central Committee and transcripts of Politburo sessions. (This is how we know about the heated argument between Brezhnev and Andropov over the fate of Soviet Jews.) As Bukovsky later told us, he managed to scan these documents only because archive officials didn’t know what the scanner was. Bukovsky’s efforts resulted in his 1993 book Judgment in Moscow, which documented extensive behind-the-scenes cooperation between Western politicians and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. But this book, unlike Bukovsky’s other books, was never published in English. Bukovsky believed that he was subjected to Western censorship.  Bukovsky himself, a man of action and the most familiar name among dissidents to the Russian populace, would not return to Moscow. Many believed he could have been a strong competitor to Yeltsin in the presidential election—many, but not Bukovsky. He chose to stay in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In fact, nobody from the resistance decided to move back after the fall of the Soviet Union. The once-legendary organizations from the first generation of Russian political emigration—the NTS, the ROVS—tried to find a foothold in the rapidly changing country. They opened offices in Russia, but they failed to win popular support.  The dream George Kennan articulated in 1948 in the National Security Council's memo, "US Objectives with Respect to Russia," was that when the time came, he hoped to get "all the exiled elements to return to Russia as rapidly as possible and to see to it, in so far as this depends on us, that they are all given roughly equal opportunity to establish their bids for power." The time had come, and the dream went unfulfilled.  The U.S. government, foreign policymakers, and the intelligence community quietly forgot about the Russian emigre community. William E. Odom was the last U.S. top-level official to address the subject of the Russian Americans. The next time Congress would address the issue would be in the mid ’90s, and then the topic would be the Russian mafia. "The Russians in the U.S. fall in the category of lessened interest," Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who served in Moscow's CIA station in the ’80s and ’90s, told us.  Excerpted from The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. Copyright © 2019. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.


pamelagellerreport--2019-12-23--French Jewish principals urge their students to leave France

France has gone down a dark road and Democrats are working to take us down that same evil path. “One cannot – even if there are decades between them – kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place,” Creative genius and late Chanel director Karl Lagerfeld.  France has made its terrible choice and Jews must do the same.  ‘France is not our place anymore. My project is to make sure that all my students emigrate to Israel.’  Principals of Jewish schools in France are urging their students to move to Israel due to the increasing amount of anti-Semitic attacks in the country, Ynet reported on Sunday.  “I think all Jews should move to Israel,” Paul Fittousi, the director of Yavne School in Marseille said. “France is not our place anymore. The younger generation must do this. Two of my daughters have already moved and are learning in Be’er Sheva, and I’m encouraging my third to do the same.”  It’s not just the principals who feel that France isn’t safe for Jews anymore – the students feel it too.  Yoav Zanuv, a student at Akiva School in Strasbourg, an area that has been particularly plagued with multiple anti-Semitic attacks lately, said that he doesn’t always feel safe in France. “Because of the Muslims, there are neighborhoods you can’t enter with a kippah [skullcap],” he said.  Lena Salem, a 17-year-old from Marseille, says she “hides her star of David necklace and other Jewish markers. I don’t want to be the religious Jewish girl who gets attacked on the Metro or in one of bad neighborhoods. I always carry a can of pepper spray with me.”  “When I saw the desecration of the Jewish cemetery, I thought I have no place to call my own other than Israel,” Salem added.  Fitoussi said that he doesn’t allow his students to “eat or have gym lessons outside of the school. More than once someone has thrown stones at students or called them ‘dirty Jews’. Nowadays, France’s Jewish community lives in a ghetto. If you’re in the Jewish area of town, you’re all good. But if you walk out a little bit – you might get it.”  “Although it might sound strange, to us the fact that we are encouraging people to move to Israel is completely natural,” said Yoni Elimelech, deputy headmaster of Otzar Ha’Torah school in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. “I think any 18-year-old boy or girl living in France should move to Israel.”  Moshe Twito, another principal of a Jewish school, said that a few of his students were attacked outside during a gym class.  “Several young people walked up to them, one them holding a knife and stabbed a student who has since migrated to Israel. There are many students who transferred to us from other public schools because of anti-Semitism. My project is to make sure that all my students emigrate to Israel.”  Fitoussi, Twito and Elimelech are currently on a trip to Israel as part of the “Bac Bleu Blanc” program in which hundreds of Jewish high school seniors from France visit Israel. In the course of their visit, they are exposed to the academic settings available in Israel to encourage them to move. Past trips have resulted in 40% of the students moving to Israel.  The students are visiting universities such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and will meet with French immigrants who work in high-tech in Israel.


thedailycaller--2019-05-03--Nearly 40 Percent Of Guatemalans Want To Leave The Country Poll Finds

Nearly 40 Percent Of Guatemalans Want To Leave The Country, Poll Finds

A poll by one of Guatemala’s largest newspapers found a startling number of its citizens expressed a desire to leave the country, with the U.S. being the destination of choice for most of them.  A survey by Prensa Libre published on Thursday found that 39 percent of Guatemalans intend to leave the country. Of those who said they wanted to leave, 85 percent picked the U.S. as the country they hoped to land in. Results also showed how emigration to the U.S. has become such an integral part of their lives, with 57 percent of respondents saying they have friends or relatives already living in America.  Prensa Libre, which is one of the most circulated newspapers in the country, polled 1,596 people between Jan. 22 and March 20 using electronic devices. The survey was done in conjunction with the Association for Research and Social Studies and Barometro de las Americas.  Poll results found other eyebrow-raising answers from everyday Guatemalans. Despite the dire situation in the country, 75 percent of respondents expressed “little interest” in politics. Nearly 90 percent did not align themselves with any political party, and one-in-five Guatemalans said they would not be participating in the upcoming election on June 16.  The survey follows months of record-breaking apprehensions at the U.S. southern border, with many of the illegal migrants originating from the Northern Triangle region of Central America. A total of 103, 492 migrants were either turned back or apprehended in March — the highest month in over a decade. More than 418,000 apprehensions have taken place this fiscal year so far.  “We don’t have room to hold [detainees], we don’t have the authority to remove them, and they are not likely to be able to be allowed to remain in the country at the end of their immigration proceedings,” acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said during an April press conference at the U.S.-Mexico border. (RELATED: Report: Border Agents Will Soon Have Authority To Decide Asylum Claims On The Spot)  “Without action from Congress, criminals will continue to profit from human misery along our border,” he continued. “It’s clear that all of our resources are being stretched thin. The system is full and we are beyond capacity.”  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.


theindependent--2019-12-13--How to leave the United Kingdom

How to leave the United Kingdom

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have achieved their best election result since Margaret Thatcher’s government.  It was reported in the run-up to the general election that some people of colour were considering leaving the UK if the Tories retained power as a result of the PM’s history of racist comments.  There were also reports of Jewish people planning to do the same if Jeremy Corbyn won the keys to Number 10, due to antisemitism within the Labour Party.  And after the 10pm exit poll forecast the Tories could win a commanding majority of 86 seats, fresh statements of intent to leave the country began to flood social media.  But other than packing possessions, kissing loved ones goodbye and boarding international transport, how do you actually leave the country?  UK residents are obliged to tell the relevant government offices dealing with your benefits, pension and taxes before moving abroad, according to the government’s website.  In order to move country, you need to inform HMRC, to make sure you either pay the right amount of tax and avoid paying in both countries at the same time, while those with a student loan should also advise the Student Loans Company.  If you receive a pension, you must contact the International Pension Centre. You can still claim a state pension while based abroad “if you’ve paid enough UK national insurance contributions to qualify”, the government’s website states.  For those claiming benefits, you must inform your local Jobcentre Plus, and you may be able to continue claiming UK-based benefits if you’re moving to one with a special arrangement with the UK, or in the European Economic Area.  However you could be committing benefit fraud by failing to report a change in circumstances, such as working, buying a property, or claiming benefits in another country.  While the UK remains part of the European Union – which could be only until 31 January – there will be no change to the rights and standards of UK nationals living in EU countries, according to the government’s website.  Those looking to emigrate to a non-EU country will need to apply for a visa, for which you will need to qualify and in many countries can take months to process.  But as the statements of intent to leave Britain emerged on social media after the exit poll, voices emerged in response, urging people to put the interests of those without the means to move country before their own.  Others suggested getting involved with local politics and joining a party, volunteering and donating to charity as ways to affect tangible change.


cnsnews--2019-02-08--US Envoy Maduro Should Leave Venezuela He Has Friends in Places Like Cuba and Russia

US Envoy: Maduro Should Leave Venezuela; He Has ‘Friends in Places Like Cuba and Russia’

(CNSNews.com) – The United States would like to see Venezuela’s leftist dictator leave the country to help facilitate the transition to democracy there, U.S. special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams said Thursday, noting that Nicolás Maduro has “friends in places like Cuba and Russia.”  Briefing reporters at the State Department, Abrams also disclosed that several other countries have informed the U.S. quietly that they would be willing to take regime members, although he declined to name them.  National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted recently, “I wish Nicolas Maduro and his top advisors a long, quiet retirement, living on a nice beach somewhere far from Venezuela.”  “They should take advantage of President Guaido’s amnesty and move on. The sooner the better,” he added, referring to National Assembly leader Juan Guaido who the U.S. and dozens of other countries have now recognized as interim president, in line with Venezuela’s constitution.  Asked Thursday what the U.S. has in mind for Maduro, Abrams replied, “The endgame for him should be to leave power, and the sooner the better. Because his own situation is only going to decline the longer he clings to power and the more misery there is in Venezuela.”  As to whether or not he should remain in the country, Abrams said, “I think it is better for the transition to democracy in Venezuela that he be outside the country. And there are a number of countries that I think would be willing to accept him.”  Asked to identify them, he noted, “he’s got friends in places like Cuba and Russia, and there are some other countries actually that have come to us privately and said they’d be willing to take members of the current illegitimate regime if it would help the transition.”  Abrams took issue with accusations by Maduro allies like China that the U.S. is interfering in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.  “If you look around at the now nearly 50 democracies that are supporting interim-president Guaido and the National Assembly, it’s hard really to say that all of those countries are engaged in some kind of joint effort to interfere,” he argued.  Abrams said there has been outside interference in Venezuela’s internal politics for a long time, but that it had come primarily from Cuba, “which has a very large presence in Venezuela.”  The communist regime in Havana has been a longstanding close ally of the administration ruling Venezuela since the late President Hugo Chavez took the helm in 1999 and introduced his “21st century socialism” project.  Chavez held power for 14 years until he died of cancer in 2013, after handpicking as his successor Maduro, a former bus driver and Cuban-trained activist who served as Chavez’ foreign minister from 2006-2013.  Under Chavez and Maduro, Caracas drew closer not just to Cuba and fellow leftist regimes in the region like Nicaragua, Ecuador and Bolivia, but also to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, Iran, Turkey and Russia.  On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo drew attention to some of Maduro’s alliances.  “The Cubans have been controlling the security apparatus, protecting Maduro, and destroying the way of life for the Venezuelan people for an awfully long time,” he said in an interview with Fox Business’ Trish Regan.  He noted that both the Cubans and Russians were in Venezuela today, and voiced the hope that, post-transition, “the Venezuelan people will want to be sovereign and independent, not rely on Cubans and Russians for their security or their wellbeing.”  In response to a question, Pompeo alluded to longstanding concerns about the involvement of Iran and its Lebanese terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Latin America.  “People don’t recognize that Hezbollah has active cells,” he said. “The Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout South America.”


activistpost--2019-12-28--Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World’s Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world’s biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country.  You will find more infographics at Statista  This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.  While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.  You will find more infographics at Statista  Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.  This article was sourced from Zerohedge.com  Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Become an Activist Post Patron for as little as $1 per month at Patreon. Follow us on SoMee, Flote, Minds, Twitter, and Steemit.  Provide, Protect and Profit from what’s coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.


democracynow--2019-12-13--Climate Refugees: Climate-Fueled Drought, Sea Level Rise, Storms & Fires Displace Millions Worldwide

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. We’re broadcasting from inside the U.N. climate summit here in Madrid, Spain, in the last few days of this climate summit that people are calling a cop-out, that we inside the climate summit have seen mass protests here, and yet still it limps along, and outside, the number of people who are so affected by the climate catastrophe.  NERMEEN SHAIKH: A new study finds that the climate crisis is already leading to a massive increase in the number of refugees being displaced around the world. In Berkeley, California, we are joined by Hossein Ayazi, policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s the co-author of the new report, “Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied.” And still with us here in Madrid is Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He’s advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries here in the climate negotiations.  So, Hossein Ayazi, could you lay out what you found in this report on climate refugees? How many are there? What countries are the worst affected?  HOSSEIN AYAZI: Yes. So, we’re finding in the report that permanent and short-term displacement due to the climate crisis is only increasing. In 2018, for example, of the 28 million new displaced persons, over 17 million were displaced due to weather-related natural disasters. And these displacements are, by and large, across the Global South. One need only look to the drought in Pakistan, the floods in India, in Nigeria, the crop failures and droughts in the Central American Dry Corridor that was behind the Central American migration caravan, the migrant caravan, that dominated news cycles last year.  And the second finding in the report is that although we generally refer to climate-induced displaced persons as “climate refugees,” this is actually not a legally recognized term, as in this is not a term within international refugee protections. And in fact, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees does not officially endorse the term “climate refugees.” And this is really emblematic of the issue at large, in that across international refugee law, international human rights law, international humanitarian law and other bodies of law, protections for climate refugees are limited, piecemeal and, by and large, not legally binding.  AMY GOODMAN: So, you were here. Is that right, Hossein Ayazi?  HOSSEIN AYAZI: No, I was not at COP.  AMY GOODMAN: Ah, but some of your colleagues were. This issue of climate refugees right now, how does what’s happening inside the U.N. climate summit affect what’s happening outside, this discussion we’re having with you about climate refugees? And if you can talk more about, for example, what you mean by “petro-persecution”?  HOSSEIN AYAZI: Sure. So, I’ll start with your second question, in that petro-persecution is the main notion that we’re advancing within the report. And it’s a term — basically, we’ve identified a major barrier in negotiations toward refugee protections for climate refugees. In order to obtain refugee status, one need cross international borders due to a real risk of persecution on the basis of one’s race, ethnicity, religion, other circumstances. But this notion of persecution within refugee law assumes that the source of persecution, the actor, the persecutor, is either one’s country of origin, the government, or internal to one’s country of origin. And this is not how forced migration under the climate crisis works. In fact, when we think of forced migration under the climate crisis, it’s fundamentally impossible to tie a specific climate-related natural disaster to a specific actor of persecution, whether it’s corporation — fossil fuel corporations or fossil fuel-dependent industrial processes. Additionally, many of the countries that are at greatest risk of the effects of the climate crisis are in fact working hard to protect their own populations, to keep them in place, to ensure that they have the livelihoods to remain in place.  And so, what we’re trying to do with this notion of petro-persecution is, one, delink the notion of persecution from territory. By that, I mean the climate crisis is a global phenomenon, and so we need to recognize it as such within international refugee law. And the second thing that we want to advance within this notion of petro-persecution is that the actor of persecution is actually our global dependence upon fossil fuels and the global investment patterns behind this dependence.  NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Hossein, your report doesn’t just look at climate refugees in the sense of people who are forced to flee across borders, but also at people who have been forced to flee their homes within countries, internally displaced people. Could you talk about that? What did you find? How many people are affected, and where?  HOSSEIN AYAZI: Yes. So, by and large, most migration due to the climate crisis and most migration — most forced migration, in general, is internal. And this is something that we state clearly in the report. And that is actually — people displaced internally do have the legally recognized ability to gain — ability to resettle within their country of origin and stay put. And the issue that we found in the report is that while internally displaced peoples do have the means for recourse and redress in some way or another, that this is not at all the case for peoples forced to cross international borders. So, when we discuss refugees, whether climate refugees or not, we’re really talking about movement across international borders and how — as a certain island nations, for example, are at risk of complete inundation, or desertification makes entire countries potentially uninhabitable, that people are forced to flee their country and that there’s no place for them to resettle at home. And this is the major gap in international refugee law that we are shining the light on.  HOSSEIN AYAZI: Yeah. So, this notion of food refugees is one that we are using to define people or communities displaced due to growing food insecurity. And this can be due to a number of dynamics. This could be due to land grabs or natural resource grabs, seed monopolies, international free trade agreements — basically, what people might describe as the corporate food regime or corporate food system. And this structural vulnerability that communities face as a result of this larger system actually intersects with the climate crisis, in the sense that natural disasters exacerbated by the climate crisis force people to already — force already vulnerable peoples to search elsewhere for sustainable livelihoods. And so, while we recognize that the term “climate refugee” is different from “food refugee,” the two are really interrelated and need be recognized as both distinct categories yet fundamentally inseparable.  AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, before we end, Saleemul Huq, this year we’re in Madrid, Spain; next year, Glasgow. What do you expect to happen in this time? Or does it even matter what happens here? Is it the action in the streets the only thing that makes a difference, like the young climate activists, by the millions, going on school climate strike, demanding that their leaders pay attention and take action?  SALEEMUL HUQ: I think it still matters. I think it does matter, because this is where the leaders are. This is where the leaders are negotiating. They have to listen to their own kids who are out on the streets shouting at them and telling them that they’re ruining their own kids’ future. So we are still hopeful that they will listen between now and Glasgow. We hope we’ll get a result in Madrid that will, on the particular issue that I’m concerned about, get a funding mechanism for loss and damage opened up for discussion, which we can come back to in Glasgow and see whether or not we can actually make it happen. We not asking for it to happen here. We’re asking for it to be allowed to happen next year in Glasgow. We’re hopeful that we might get that.  AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both so much for being with us, Saleemul Huq, climate scientist, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, and Hossein Ayazi, policy analyst and co-author of the new report, “Climate Refugees: The Climate Crisis and Rights Denied.” We’ll link to that report at democracynow.org.  That does it for our coverage right here on site at the 25th United Nations climate change summit. We want to say special thanks to our crew right here in Madrid, but we’ll let them speak their own names in their own words.  AMY GOODMAN: And thank you also to the crew who helped us with our live crew last Friday from El Cumbre Social on Climate: Ana Galatea, Marina Peñuelas and Daniel Vasquez. And to the Democracy Now! crew here on the ground in Madrid: Libby Rainey, Carla Wills, Nermeen Shaikh, John Hamilton, Hany Massoud, Charina Nadura, Laura Gottesdiener, María Taracena, Julia Thomas, Adriano Contreras, Denis Moynihan and María Carrión. Special thanks to Julie Crosby — welcome back — and to Miriam Barnard. And a very welcome to the world to Malachy. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.


france24--2019-09-30--Rioting breaks out at Greek refugee camp after two migrants die in fire

Angelos Tzortzinis, AFP | A migrant carries a woman during clashes with police outside the refugee camp of Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos, on September 29, 2019.  At least two migrants died on Sunday in a fire at a Greek island refugee camp, with the blaze triggering rioting by angry residents.  Athens News Agency, quoting police sources, reported that a woman and a child had died in the blaze at the overcrowded Moria camp on the island of Lesbos.  The body of the woman was taken to the island's general hospital while the body of the child was handed over to authorities by migrants.  The fire inside the camp was extinguished by plane. But police later fired tear gas to control an angry crowd who said authorities took too long to respond to the incident, according to an AFP correspondent.  The death toll, however, was unclear with an Afghan migrant eyewitness saying three people died as a result of the fire that spread to six or seven containers used to house residents.  "We found two children completely charred and a woman dead. We gave the children covered in blankets to the fire brigade," Fedouz, 15, told AFP.  The AFP correspondent saw two bodies, one surrounded by weeping family members.  In a statement, police said the riots occurred after two separate fires broke out, firstly outside and then inside Moria camp with a time gap of twenty minutes.  Additional officers were sent from Athens in C-130 army planes in a bid to contain the situation, although local police sources said calm had returned to the camp by 2300 GMT.  The Deputy Minister of Citizen Protection Lefteris Economou, along with the Chief of Police and the Secretary General for Migration Policy, are due to visit.  Moria camp hosts around 13,000 people but has facilities for just 3,000.  It has become like a small town with UN refugee agency tents for around 8,000 people sprawling into the olive fields of nearby Moria village. Others are housed in containers.  Greece is hosting some 70,000 mostly Syrian refugees and migrants who have fled their countries since 2015, and crossed over from neighbouring Turkey.  Under an agreement reached with the European Union in 2016, Turkey has made greater efforts to limit departures towards the five Greek islands closest to its shores.  But the number of arrivals has been steadily climbing in recent months causing a dangerous burden in the camps of the islands that are in the forefront of the migrant influx.  The Greek government said on Sunday it planned to discuss a new asylum draft law to deal with the fresh migrant crisis.  "In the cabinet meeting on Monday, we are going to discuss a draft law proposed by the Citizen's Protection Ministry which will update, in accordance with European standards, the asylum procedure", Minister of State, George Gerapetritis said in an interview with Skai Tv on Sunday.  He stressed that migrants should be sent to camps with humane conditions, admitting that existing ones were not able to deal with the increase in migrants.  On Friday, Citizen's Protection Minister, Michalis Chrysochoidis, asked for the cooperation of regional governors, during an emergency meeting, in order to share the migrant burden of the overcrowded islands.  He asked regional authorities of mainland Greece to expand existing camps or to revive some closed ones.


frontpagemagazine--2019-08-15--Turks Want Syrian Refugees Out of Their Country

Not all that long ago the media insisted on telling Americans that they were shirking their responsibility by not taking in Syrian migrants.  "Look at how many millions of Syrian refugees the Turks and Jordanians have taken in," the media would insist.  These were crazy lies.  Jordan and Turkey were stuck with large numbers of Syrians, but neither was willing to take them in. Turkey wouldn't even classify them as refugees. They certainly weren't doing what the media wanted us to do, which was resettle them permanently in their countries.  Fast forward to today and the populace wants them gone, as [Tom Gross c](http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001865.html)ites.  >  In a poll conducted earlier this year, 68% of Turkish respondents expressed discontent with the Syrian presence, compared to 58% in 2016.  >  > Turks are sharply divided on many issues, with one bloc tending to oppose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies and an equal-size bloc ardently supporting him. Yet dissatisfaction with the decision to welcome Syrian refugees since 2011 is a rare exception to that rule, garnering majority criticism across party lines. Around 60% of those who back Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) express discontent with the Syrian presence, together with 64% from the AKP-allied Nationalist Action Party (MHP); on the opposition side, the figures are 62% from the IYI Party, 71% from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and 83% from the Republican People’s Party (CHP).  The more secular Turkish political movements accuse Erdogan of wanting to resettle Syrian Sunni Islamists in Turkey. Even Erdogan doesn't seem that crazy, but illegal migration may be the issue that finally topples his Islamist regime.  > Many citizens believe that Syrians are to blame for rising unemployment and low wages across all sectors. Unemployment was at 14% as of March, up from 9% in 2011. Put another way, the number of jobless Turks has nearly doubled to 4.5 million since the government first began admitting Syrian refugees.  >  > The Syrian presence is also being blamed for many of Turkey’s social troubles. Emerging opinion leaders with large online followings have been especially important in normalizing anti-Syrian attitudes. Dismissed MHP parliamentarian Sinan Ogan, who boasts over a million Twitter followers, attracted thousands of interactions with a July post claiming that Syrian and Afghan refugees rape women and boys, and that “chopping heads” is a part of Syrian culture. Similarly, a recent article by popular opposition journalist Yilmaz Ozdil alleged that Syrians are “invading” Istanbul “street by street,” causing disturbances and forcing Turks to move out of their neighborhoods. He also accused them of setting up illegal businesses, forming gangs, and stockpiling prescription drugs, claiming that “Syrians are free to commit crimes.”  Funny how attitudes toward migrants are the same around the world, regardless of race, creed or culture.


jerusalempost--2019-11-07--Erdogan: Turkey will let refugees into Europe if EU does not support it

ANKARA - Turkey will have to open the doors to Europe for Syrian refugees unless the European Union provides Ankara with enough support, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday, adding that Turkey could not carry that burden alone.  Turkey aims to establish a "safe zone" in northeast Syria, where it says up to 2 million Syrian refugees can settle once the region is cleared of the Kurdish YPG militia. Ankara has repeatedly urged the EU to help Turkey in hosting more than 3.5 million refugees. "Whether we receive support or not, we will continue to aid the guests we are hosting. But, if this doesn't work out, then we will have to open the doors," Erdogan told a news conference alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest.  var cont = `Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>    `; document.getElementById("linkPremium").innerHTML = cont; (function (v, i){ });


jerusalempost--2019-12-17--Pakistan's Khan says millions of Muslim refugees could flee India

Khan, addressing the Global Forum on Refugees in Geneva, said: "We are worried there not only could be a refugee crisis, we are worried it could lead to a conflict between two nuclear-armed countries."


jerusalempost--2019-12-24--Missing from India's citizenship law: 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees

India's Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) aims to fast-track citizenship for persecuted Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Christians who arrived in India before Dec. 31, 2014, from Muslim-majority Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.  The law excludes nearly 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamils, an ethnic minority, who live in India, including about 60,000 in camps in southern Tamil Nadu state, according to the home department.  Most of these refugees are Hindu or Christian, whose forefathers were born in India, said S. Velayutham, an advocacy officer at the non-profit Organisation for Eelam Refugees Rehabilitation in the southern city of Chennai.  "Many were sent by the British as indentured labourers on Sri Lankan tea plantations, and hoped for a better life in India when they came here during the war," he said.  "Some 25,000 children were also born in the camps. They do not know any country but India, but now they may have no choice but to go to Sri Lanka," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.  A Tamil Nadu government official who oversees Sri Lankan refugees in the state did not return calls seeking comment.  Earlier, state government officials said Home Minister Amit Shah had promised Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami he would consider the issue of Tamil refugees excluded from CAA.  Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a rally on Sunday, said the government has introduced reforms without any religious bias.  Thousands of people were killed in Sri Lanka's civil war, which ended in May 2009 after nearly three decades.  Tens of thousands fled, or were forced from their homes in the country's north and east, and many sought refuge in neighbouring India, particularly in Tamil Nadu.  While many of them would like to return to Sri Lanka, repatriation has been slow because there is scant assurance on homes and jobs, human rights groups said. Many had their properties seized during the war.  In Tamil Nadu, the refugees get free education, healthcare, rations and a modest allowance but they have limited access to jobs and cannot get official documents.  The decision to exclude some marginalised groups from the CAA is "extremely disturbing", said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at advocacy group Human Rights Watch, calling on the government to revoke the CAA.


nationalreview--2019-10-10--Erdogan Threatens To ‘Open the Doors’ to Europe for Refugees if Criticisms Continue

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a warning to the European Union during a speech to his party on Thursday, threatening to flood the continent with millions of refugees in response to international criticism of Turkey’s recent military offensive in northern Syria.  “Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you,” Erdogan said in the speech. The public opinion over Erdogan’s actions has largely been negative.  On Thursday, France’s foreign ministry requested the Turkish ambassador, Ismail Hakki Musa, speak in Paris about the recent attacks, according to sources. Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio also called for an immediate end to the fighting.  “As a government we think that the Turkish offensive initiative is unacceptable. We condemn it … because military action in the past has always led to more terrorism,” he said. “We call for an immediate end to this offensive which is absolutely not acceptable given that the use of force continues to endanger the life of the Syrian people, who have already experienced tragedy in recent years.”  Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a statement Thursday joining his European counterparts in calling for Turkey to end its attacks against the Kurds. “Israel strongly condemns the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies. Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people,” he said.  Iran, a close ally of the Syrian government, called for the Turks to halt their advance, while Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia would push for the necessity of dialogue between Turkey and Syria.”  During the Thursday rally, an inflammatory Erdogan defended his government’s decision-making and accused other countries of being dishonest in their criticisms.  “They are not honest, they just make up words,” he said. “We, however, create action and that is our difference.”


naturalnews--2019-03-21--Muslim refugees bringing wave of tuberculosis to Minnesota CDC silent media refuses to accuratel

Muslim refugees bringing wave of tuberculosis to Minnesota... CDC silent, media refuses to accurately cover

(Natural News) While parents of schoolchildren in California are being bullied into getting their kids vaccinated and shamed by the mainstream media, refugees are entering our country with highly contagious diseases and the media and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are barely batting an eye.  In the span of five years, 296 cases of active tuberculosis were diagnosed among Somalian refuses in Minnesota alone. In fact, the 81 percent of TB cases that were diagnosed among foreign-born residents in Minnesota is much greater than the 66 percent of tuberculosis cases nationwide attributed to foreign-born residents.  It’s also worth noting that the number of tuberculosis cases reported in the U.S. climbed for the first time in 23 years in 2015, and much of that rise is being pinned on the jump in foreign-born population compared to the total population during the same period.  Many of these Somali-born migrants came to the country through the federal refugee resettlement program. More Somalis are living Minnesota than in any other state. Around 20 percent of Somalis aged five and older speak little or no English, most are Sunni Muslims, and eight out of ten of them live in poverty.  Tax payers in Minnesota spent an estimated $5 million treating active TB cases among refugees, spending roughly $3 million on the Somalian refugees diagnosed with the disease and $2 million on refugees from other countries with the illness.  If this is the first time you’re hearing about this tuberculosis wave, you’re not alone; although sites like Natural News and Breitbart reported on this back in 2016, it’s hardly getting the coverage it deserves. The mainstream media, despite being all too eager to devote countless hours of coverage to measles outbreaks, has been completely ignoring it, with coverage these days coming mostly from more obscure outlets like The Israel Wire.  100% organic essential oil sets now available for your home and personal care, including Rosemary, Oregano, Eucalyptus, Tea Tree, Clary Sage and more, all 100% organic and laboratory tested for safety. A multitude of uses, from stress reduction to topical first aid. See the complete listing here, and help support this news site.  Although Minnesota’s TB problem isn’t being widely reported on, at least the statistics are being made available. States like Michigan, on the other hand, are doing their best to ensure that word doesn’t spread about the problem, with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services being accused of adopting a “culture of concealment” when it comes to hiding latent tuberculosis infection rates in refugees from the public.  In fact, Michigan has not been collecting and keeping data on latent TB infection rates. County health departments and private refugee health screening services carrying out initial medical screenings are not sharing their screening data, even though the provision of such data is required by federal health statutes pertaining to refugee health screening.  Identifying latent tuberculosis infections as refugees enter the country is essential as treatment must commence right away to prevent the disease from being spread. When latent TB activates into infectious TB, it becomes a public health risk. With 22 percent of the refugees who arrived in Minnesota testing positive for latent TB at their initial screening, it’s not a stretch to imagine a similarly high percentage being found in Michigan.  It’s interesting that kids in California are being banned from school until they get measles vaccines despite no cases of the illness actually being reported at their school, yet no one talks about the fact that migrants are bringing highly contagious diseases into the country – in fact, the World Health Organization’s fact sheet says that latent TB is the top infectious disease killer on the planet. These people are also bringing in diseases like diphtheria, whooping cough, and yes, measles.  For all the overblown drama about vaccinated kids going to school with kids who haven’t been vaccinated against measles, where is the concern among the CDC and the media about people who are demonstrably importing contagious diseases into our country? Is their fear of being labeled racist for calling attention to the problem really worth putting the population at risk?


newsweek--2019-01-24--The Venezuela Crisis Could Produce More Refugees than Syria Here is How the US Can Prepare Opin

The Venezuela Crisis Could Produce More Refugees than Syria. Here is How the U.S. Can Prepare | Opinion

Venezuela used to be one of the richest economies not only in the region, but in the entire world. By now, however, more than 3 million have been reduced to leaving the country, as unparalleled economic crisis brings healthcare, education, and all other basic services to their knees. Living standards are so dramatically depressed those of the US Great Depression pale in comparison. All this has already happened—even with no armed conflict taking place. It’s difficult to imagine how much worse this socioeconomic disaster of unprecedented magnitude will get if the currently ongoing escalation erupts into civil strife.  Here is where Venezuela stands as the calamitous political situation enters the most dramatic political spiral since the death of Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. As many as 40,000 Venezuelans the Simon Bolivar bridge to Colombia every day, to access basic services and goods. Some 5,000 of them do not return - and already this number has jumped up with the renewed protests and increased political turmoil. Venezuelans who have already endured years of immiseration are beyond the breaking point. The forecasts for 2019 paint an even more worrying picture: as inflation in Venezuela is expected to reach an inconceivable 10 million percent, the UN has estimated that over 5 million refugees will be displaced, with 2 million expected in Colombia alone - eclipsing even the Syrian refugee crisis. It's time we take this seriously.  While in Cucuta, Colombia, with the International Rescue Committee, I had a chance to hear these human stories first-hand. I expected to be moved by them, but to feel powerless to help. This trip changed that. After all, Venezuelans looking for a better life do not look the part of the desperate refugee fleeing a war-torn country. They look just like you and me.  I was struck by how much of myself I saw in the stories of people like Desiree. Up to months ago, Desiree—a wife and mother of two children, like me—was working as a schoolteacher, providing for herself and her family. Today, after months and years of immiseration, she is unable to afford even one meal a day for her family in Venezuela. Her anguish was palpable at not being able to keep her family above water. Through her tears, she told me that she does not want charity but the possibility to provide for her family and give back to the society that received her. Her wish for 2019 is for her children, and those she used to teach, to have a future. I know I share the same wish for mine.  Beyond the essential assistance the IRC is providing to children and their families for the short-term in neighboring countries like Colombia, it’s apparent that a long-term solution is needed now that allows these refugees a chance to access healthcare, send their children to school, be documented and to contribute.  Unlike many rich countries, which have been closing their doors to migrants and refugees, Venezuela’s neighbors have shown welcome - but conditions are fragile. The Government of Colombia and other regional states must take concrete steps to ensure Venezuelans have access to documentation and basic services such as health and shelter of which they are in dire need.  Countries like my native Brazil are threatening to leave the new UN Global Compact for Migration—a new and much-needed international approach for the 68 million people currently displaced around the world- just as more Venezuelan refugees seek safety there. Governments across South America as well as international donors must step up their support to prevent this crisis turning into a bigger catastrophe.  The introduction of a bipartisan bill by US Senators Menendez and Rubio to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelans already in the United States (which already exists for Syrians, Yemenis and other populations at risk) is a promising recognition of our moral and humanitarian obligations.  I witnessed an extraordinary welcome from Colombians, whether it be by opening their arms, their homes or their businesses to Venezuelans in need. One Colombian IRC staff member told me, "I am Colombian, but my heart is also Venezuelan."  Standing with refugees is a test of our humanity, not just our policies. The refugees I met opened their hearts and souls to me. A Venezuelan mom told me, “Los suenos nunca se van a perder”—dreams are never lost.  With some small steps, a little at a time—we can all help solve this crisis and ensure that all Venezuelans’ dreams are never lost indeed.  Morena Baccarin is a Brazilian-American actress who has starred in Deadpool, Homeland, and currently stars in Gotham. She is an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own.


npr--2019-03-12--Refugee Soccer Player Hakeem al-Araibi Granted Australian Citizenship

On Tuesday, a Bahraini refugee soccer player who was jailed and facing deportation arguably got his biggest goal — citizenship in a foreign country.  Hakeem al-Araibi, 25, was one of about 200 people who became Australia citizens at a ceremony in Melbourne.  Prime Minister Scott Morrison fastened his own Australia flag pin to Araibi's jacket. "I'll take the new one," he said. "But this is for you, which you can wear very proudly, as our newest Australian but as someone whose Australian values have always been deep in his heart."  The developments in Araibi's life triggered outcry among human rights activists, sports enthusiasts and lawmakers across the globe.  Araibi used to play on the national soccer team in the small Persian Gulf state of Bahrain. In 2012, authorities arrested him. In 2014, a court convicted him in absentia of torching a police station, handing him a prison sentence of 10 years. The professional soccer player fled Bahrain that year.  He had been living in Australia as a refugee until last November, when he landed in Thailand during his honeymoon. Thai officials arrested him on an Interpol red notice. He spent two months in jail, facing extradition to Bahrain.  "I could still remember the tone in Hakeem's voice," Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, the director of advocacy for the London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, tells NPR. "He was telling me about his sleepless nights, like it was a film running back in his head. Remembering everything in detail about how he was abused in Bahrain detention."  Araibi was beaten, especially on his legs and feet just to remind him that he would not play soccer again, Alwadaei says.  He says video footage showed that Araibi was playing in a televised soccer match when the alleged vandalism occurred.  Inside Bangkok Remand Prison, Araibi told The Guardian that "Bahrain wants me back to punish me" for speaking publicly about human rights abuses and discrimination against Shia Muslims by Sunni leaders.  Under international pressure, Thai prosecutors dropped the case in February and Araibi was released from a Bangkok prison cell. Bahrain withdrew its extradition request but on the same day, the minister of foreign affairs gave the ambassador of Australia to Bahrain a memorandum with the international arrest warrant issued against Araibi.  On Tuesday, the soccer player announced that he finally felt safe. "No one can follow me now," he tweeted.  In attendance at the ceremony was Craig Foster, an Australian sports analyst and retired soccer player who worked tirelessly to raise awareness of Araibi's case. "May we learn from the experience as a nation, treat every asylum seeker as supportively, with corresponding compassion as Hakeem. All deserve equal dignity, opportunity," he said.  Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne told a crowd from the podium about the widespread concern for Araibi's welfare. Public support "played an enormous part in ensuring he was returned to Australia," she said.  His soccer club, Pascoe Vale, described Tuesday's event as "a moment we all have been waiting for." It added that his example showed how soccer can break down barriers and unite people.  Araibi is currently training and trying to regain the strength he lost while away from soccer, according to The Guardian.  Alwadaei says Tuesday's joy only goes so far.  "Although someone managed to escape the torture doesn't mean that their family members will be immune from consequences from the government," he says. Araibi's brother, who was imprisoned on the same charges, remains behind bars, Alwadaei says.  He adds that many more political prisoners are languishing in Bahrain.  "Although Hakeem got unprecedented support from the international community simply for his affiliation with [soccer]," he says, "there are thousands of other individuals who simply have no one to advocate on their behalf simply because they don't happen to be a famous athlete or to have the community behind them."


npr--2019-04-15--Bangladesh Struggles To Cope With Pressures Of Hosting 1 Million Rohingya Refugees

Bangladesh Struggles To Cope With Pressures Of Hosting 1 Million Rohingya Refugees  It's high tide in Cox's Bazar and there's a traffic jam right on the beach at Bangladesh's most prominent seaside resort. The lone road that leads south to the sprawling new camps sheltering hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees is closed for repairs. All the traffic has been diverted onto the gray sand beach, where people are taking selfies and strolling in the shallow surf.  Little green rickshaws jostle with passenger vans and pickup trucks to get over a sand dune and back onto the paved roadway to head in the direction of the camps. At high tide, some of the vehicles get stuck in the wet sand, blocking those behind them.  The sudden influx of 700,000 refugees in 2017 has had a huge negative impact on the local community, says Mohammad Abul Kalam, the head of Bangladesh's Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission in Cox's Bazar.  "We're being outnumbered by the sheer number of the refugee population," he says.  Beyond this, "The infrastructure has been under unbelievable pressure," Kalam says — not just from the refugees themselves, but also from the tremendous aid effort underway to keep so many people sheltered, fed and healthy.  Kalam is the Bangladesh government's top local official regarding the Rohingya. He says the area's roads and bridges are being beaten up by convoys of aid vehicles shuttling from Cox's Bazar to the camps.  "They were not meant for this much population," he says.  Kalam points out that Ukhiya, the administrative district that includes the camps, has a population of 230,000 people. "Yet we now have more than 700,000 in the refugee population," he says. "So the entire demographic balance has been reversed."  Late in 2017, Rohingya fled from Myanmar into Bangladesh to escape attacks by soldiers and pro-government militias. The U.N. and human rights groups condemned the attacks as a campaign of ethnic cleansing and an organized effort to drive the Rohingya out of Myanmar.  Thousands of people were killed. The refugees who arrived in Bangladesh in 2017 joined other Rohingya who'd fled earlier waves of violence and pushed the total number of Rohingya refugees in the area up to nearly 1 million.  Kalam notes that the refugees' activities have been detrimental to the environment. They've cut down all of the forests surrounding the camps for firewood in what is a nature preserve. They've diverted streams as they've terraced hillsides to build new shelters.  He claims they are driving up some food prices — while, at the same time, food aid diverted to local markets is driving down demand for Bangladesh-grown rice. And, he says, the refugees are pushing down wages by accepting jobs at lower pay than Bangladeshis are willing to accept. Aid convoys beat up the local roads and further congest what was already heavy traffic.  The refugees are not supposed to leave the camps. Nor are they allowed to work in Bangladesh. Kalam says they do both. He doesn't blame them.  "You cannot really stop people from being engaged in work of one kind or another," he says. "It always happens."  But he says the Rohingya are taking away jobs from Bangladeshis, particularly low-skilled jobs on farms and other manual labor.  The presence of nearly a million refugees is in this part of Bangladesh, he says, is unsustainable.  "It's very, very difficult for us," he says. "We are already an overpopulated country with more than 160 million population in very limited space. It would be really very difficult for Bangladesh to allow them to integrate within our own society."  Given the trauma that the Rohingya experienced in 2017, it appears unlikely that many will want to return to Myanmar anytime soon. Late last year, there was an effort to repatriate any Rohingya who wanted to go back. The Bangladeshi government offered free transportation and moving benefits. No one signed up.  So Bangladesh last year proposed another solution: move from the overcrowded camps outside Cox's Bazar to a camp with brand-new dormitories that can accommodate 100,000 refugees.  The only problem: It's on an island in the Bay of Bengal, more than 15 miles from the mainland.  The Bhasan Char island emerged 20 years ago, formed in the bay's shifting currents. It is uninhabited and was designated by the government as a forest reserve in 2013. Kamal says Bangladesh has spent $300 million building housing, concrete seawalls and cyclone shelters on the giant sandbar.  "Very good quality shelters and other infrastructure are put in place there, including long barriers meant to secure the inhabitants from any cyclonic hit from the Bay of Bengal," he says. "The government is suspecting that the Rohingyas will have a better life there."  But Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch, says it's a terrible idea. She warns the island will serve more as a detention facility than upgraded refugee housing.  "The truth is these are people who are going to be locked on this island," she says. "Because they're not really allowed to leave."  Most international aid groups have been skeptical of the plan to relocate refugees to Bhasan Char. Supplies, aid workers, even teachers would have to be ferried in by boat. The island is controlled by the Bangladesh navy and it's unclear if the Rohingya would have the same access to international aid that they currently do in the camps.  Kalam insists refugees won't be forced to move to the island and any relocations will be voluntary. The government had planned to start sending them to the island April 15, but now it's unclear when it may begin. The government may find few takers. There's little enthusiasm among refugees in the sprawling Balukali camp.  In his bamboo and tarp shelter, Hamid Hassin, 30, says he has no desire to move to the island. He doesn't want to be separated from other Rohingya in the camps and is worried the low-lying island could flood in a major storm.  "We fled Myanmar to save our lives," he says. "I don't want to end up dying on that island."


pinknewsuk--2019-06-20--Kenya sends LGBT refugees back to homophobic camp

Kenya sends LGBT refugees back to ‘homophobic’ camp

Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  Kenya has ordered a group of LGBT+ refugees to return to a camp where they faced homophobic violence.  Kenya’s armed police reportedly escorted the group of 76 people back to the camp in Kakuma on Wednesday night (June 19).  The refugees—including at least 20 children, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation—were moved to safe houses in Nairobi by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) after a series of violent attacks.  The first among them fled in December 2018, after a protest outside the UNHCR building saw several LGBT+ people attacked by fellow refugees and locals. At the time it was described as a “permanent relocation.”  However on Thursday (June), the UNHCR told the BBC that the Kenyan government decided the refugees “should be living in camps and, if they reside outside of camps, it should be with appropriate documentation.”  The announcement coincided with World Refugee Day, which seeks to highlight the plight of the 70 million people who have been displaced from their homes around the world.  One refugee, originally from Burundi, told BBC Great Lakes he had been left with a facial scars after being violently attacked in the Kakuma camp.  Frank (not his real name) said that the camp’s administration told the LGBT+ group at the end of 2018 that they were no longer able to protect them from violence.  Some of the group fled immediately. In April, Frank joined them in Nairobi, where he said that they faced further attacks by neighbours.  “Wherever we have lived we face homophobia because of our orientation, we don’t know where to flee to,” he said  The UNHCR has said that it will protect the LGBT+ refugees while they are living in the camp.  Gay sex remains illegal in Kenya after its High Court ruled against decriminalisation on May 24.  Under the colonial-era sodomy law, sexual acts “against the order of nature” are punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment.  The Thomson Reuters Foundation reports that most of the refugees come from the Congo, where according to UN figures, over 800,000 people have been forced to seek refuge in other African countries following widespread unrest.  Others hail from Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Sudan.


prisonplanet--2019-06-20--UK Govt to Resettle Thousands More Refugees Starting Next Year for Years to Come

UK Govt to ‘Resettle Thousands More Refugees Starting Next Year, for Years to Come’

The British government has announced it will “resettle thousands more refugees starting from next year, and for years to come.”  In an official video message uploaded to social media by the Home Office, Secretary of State Sajid Javid, a contender for Tory leader — and therefore Prime Minister — and former Remainer, boasted that, “Since 2016, Britain has resettled more refugees than any other EU state, something that we’re very proud of.”  “Now, with the start of Refugee Week, we’ve made a renewed commitment to resettle thousands more refugees, starting from next year, and for years to come,” continued the Home Secretary, himself a son of Pakistani migrants.  “It’s something that we’ll continue to do in conflict zones and danger zones and from dangerous countries around the world, especially the Middle East and Africa,” he concluded — although why the Middle East and Africa should receive priority over refugees from anywhere else was left unexplained.  This article was posted: Thursday, June 20, 2019 at 5:31 am


renegadetribune--2019-10-03--62 Million Non-White Refugees Seeking Asylum in Europe Since 2011

6.2 Million Non-White “Refugees” Seeking “Asylum” in Europe Since 2011

According to official statistics from the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), at least 6.2 million non-Whites have claimed to be “refugees” and demanded “asylum” in Europe since 2011.  From January to July of this year, 400,100 non-Whites have already sought “asylum” in the White countries of Europe, as the flood of invaders continues unabated.  Here are the total number of “asylum” applications in Europe per year:  When totaled together, there have been around 6.2 million “refugees” seeking the good life in Europe, where Whitey is forced to pay for their food, clothing, schooling, housing, and healthcare. “Asylum seekers” are able to have booming birthrates thanks to the White people of Europe, whose birthrates have been declining drastically. We are told that this is all part of our “inevitable brown future” and that we must embrace this change, or else we are bigoted racists who should be locked up.  The New Observer reports on the fraudulent nature of the “asylum” claims:  Just how blatantly fake these claims of “asylum” are is obvious from the countries of origin of the nonwhite invaders. According to the EASO’s figures, for example, the top “countries of origin” include Syrian, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Turkey, Colombia, Iran, China, Nigeria, Somalia, the Congo, Peru, India, Sudan, Eritrea, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Salvador—among at least 100 others. None of these nationals qualify in any sense for “asylum” status, as even in places such as Syria and Afghanistan, large swathes of those states were always under government control and millions of people lived quite safely there—completely negating anybody else’s “need” to flee across several safe countries to get to Europe. Other state’s nationals—such as those from Nigeria—are clearly not in any danger at all, and are merely swooping on Europe because they want to live in a society set up by white people, as it offers them a higher standard of living, free welfare and shelter—and, in many cases, more profitable criminal opportunities than their own self-created chaos-ridden home nations.  The 6.2 million figure is only the number of non-Whites who have sought asylum since 2011. There are many more non-Whites who were living in Europe previously and there are also a good number of non-Whites who illegally Europe and never sought “refugee” status. We are facing a similar crisis in the US, along with almost every other White (or formerly White) country in the world. This has all been orchestrated, not by the invading army of “refugees,” but by an international clique of jews who are dedicated to the destruction of the White race. Unless their agenda is stopped in its tracks, there will be no more Europe or even European people with a few generations.


sottnet--2019-02-28--Contradiction Syrian refugees were fleeing US proxy war not Assad

Contradiction: Syrian refugees were fleeing US proxy war, not 'Assad'

A recent BBC segment titled, " The Syrians returning home after years of fleeing war ," contradicted 8 years of the British state media's narratives regarding the war in Syria.A synopsis of the short BBC video segment would read:The flood of returning refugees to government-held areas indicatesViewers and readers who invested trust in the BBC's narratives over the past 8 years will be shocked to hear thousands of Syrians crowding the Jordanian-Syrian border daily to return to the war-ravaged nation.The BBC has insisted for 8 years, millions of refugees had fled Syria to escape the nation's "brutal dictator" Syrian President Bashar Al Assad - accused of "gassing his own people," raining down "barrel bombs" that were both crude and "indiscriminate" but also paradoxically capable of pinpointing elementary schools and children's hospitals, and whose "Shabiha" death squads lurked around every corner.In 2016, a BBC article titled, " Syria conflict: Aleppo bombing shuts largest hospital ,"The BBC would eagerly report:The BBC - along with the rest of the Western media - have depicted bombs used by the Syrian military as "barrel bombs," claiming that because of their crude construction, they could not be aimed and therefore were "indiscriminate" in nature.A 2013 BBC article titled, " Syria conflict: Barrel bombs show brutality of war ," would claim:The article would also claim such "barrel bombs" were, "in no sense accurate," except of course - when they needed to be accurate for the sake of war propaganda - such as allegedly pinpointing US-funded "hospitals" in terrorist-held Aleppo.A 2017 BBC article titled, " Syria chemical 'attack': What we know ," would claim:The report - of course - was based entirely on "witness" accounts, with OPCW inspectors unable to investigate the site due to the fact Khan Sheikhoun was - and still is - under Al Qaeda occupation.In other words - the samples could have come from anywhere, including labs where they were likely fabricated.The BBC has faithfully repeated every claim made by militants regarding chemical weapons throughout the war. The BBC has gone as far as claiming - though failed categorically to explain how.Why would people - enjoying refugee status in neighboring countries and even in Europe, risk returning to Syria where "brutal dictator" Bashar Al Assad not only still remains in power - but has decisively defeated his opponents through the use of "barrel bombs," "chemical weapons," and other forms of indescribable brutality?The answer is simple -The vast majority of Syria's displaced remained inside Syria - and simply moved into areas under government protection. Now with many other areas of the country having security restored by government forces with Russian and Iranian backing -specifically because the specifics of the crisis clearly revealed who Syrians were really fleeing and why. Analysis of Syria's internally displaced refugees was intentionally and systematically omitted by the BBC and other Western media organizations in their reports over the years toand voluntarily returning once militants were pushed out of various regions across Syria.London-based security expert Charles Shoebridge in a short but insightful social media post would note:And of course - the BBC knows that any viewer or reader still investing trust in its daily and extensive propaganda efforts - will unlikely notice the sudden, dramatic shift in narrative regarding Syria.as a "madman" "gassing his own people" and raining "barrel bombs" on their headsA similar defense has been mounted since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction after media organizations like the BBC assured the public of the necessity of that war.The very refugees it now reports are returning to Syria suffered the fate they have specifically because of theThe cost of the Syrian war helps remind the public why during the Nuremberg trials following World War 2, war propagandists were sent to the gallows alongside the trigger-pullers their lies helped enable.While the BBC still enjoys vast amounts of impunity with no likelihood in the foreseeable future of ever being held accountable for its actions -This fact should be kept in mind whether its correspondents are covering the Middle East, South America, or Southeast Asia.


sottnet--2019-04-06--Russian military Nearly 1000 refugees left Syrias Rukban Camp on 4 April

Russian military: Nearly 1,000 refugees left Syria's Rukban Camp on 4 April

"On 4 April, 985 civilians left the Rukban refugee camp through the Jeleb checkpoint. They were transported to temporary residence sites in the city of Homs", Kupchishin said at a daily briefing.The general stressed that the refugees were provided with all necessary assistance, including the provision of food and temporary accommodation.The Rukban refugee camp is part of the US-controlled zone around its base in Al-Tanf. The camp, which houses some 40,000 displaced people, is located in the south of Syria, not far from Jordan. The Russia-Syria coordination centre on refugee repatriation has repeatedly blamed the United States for blocking access to the camp.The Russian military also set up a humanitarian corridor and the Jleb mobile checkpoint in order to prevent a humanitarian disaster in the Rukban refugee camp.


sottnet--2019-04-15--Russian military Over 1300 refugees safely departed Syria Rukban camp in past 24 hours

Russian military: Over 1,300 refugees safely departed Syria Rukban camp in past 24 hours

More than 1,300 refugees have left the Rukban camp in Syria through the humanitarian corridor in the past 24 hours, according to Major General Viktor Kupchishin, the head of the Russian Centre for Syrian Reconciliation.Kupchishin said late on Sunday at a daily news briefing.Last week, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said at a meeting of the UN Security Council that Moscow intends to continue negotiations with the United Nations, the United States and Jordan on the issue.and the vast majority of them wishes to leave the settlement and return to their places of origins.Nebenzia also noted that Russia had already opened up two humanitarian corridors to allow the passage of refugees from Rukban to chosen places of residence, including Latakia, Homs, Palmyra, suburban Damascus and Aleppo, among others.Russia and Syria have repeatedly tried to draw the attention of the international community to the deplorable conditions at the camp, which houses more than 40,000 internally displaced people, mostly women and children. Both Moscow and Damascus have criticized the United States over its reluctance to allow people to leave the camp.Since 2017, Russia has been one of the three guarantors of the ceasefire in Syria, which has been engulfed in a civil war for years. The Russian armed forces have been providing military assistance to Damascus throughout the conflict, while also carrying out regular humanitarian operations across the country.Russia is now assisting Syria in the post-war reconstruction and the return of refugees.


sputnik--2019-01-17--Outrage as Swedish TV Cuts Word Islam From Saudi Refugee Girl Story

Outrage as Swedish TV Cuts Word 'Islam' From Saudi Refugee Girl Story

In their piece on Rahaf Mohammad, the Saudi refugee girl who claimed to have suffered "abuse" back home due to her non-conformist behaviour, SVT omitted the reference to Islam, triggering many Swedes' ire.  In the interview aired by SVT Aktuellt, Rahaf Mohammed said that she was kept locked up for six months after getting a short haircut and suffered abuse from her brother and her mother. The reason for it, she claimed, is that short haircuts for women are forbidden in Islam, because it makes women look like men.  However, SVT's translation left out the Islam reference completely, with words "Islam" and "haram" ("forbidden" in Arabic) conspicuously absent from the subtitles, despite clearly being uttered by the teen.  READ MORE: Swedish TV in a Pickle Over Celebrating 'Christmas Classics' With Muslim Cook  This mismatch was first observed by Sweden Democrat politician Kent Ekeroth, who compared the Swedish translation with the original English subtitles and summed up his findings in a piece in the news outlet Samhällsnytt, raising suspicions about state-sponsored censorship.  Ekeroth's revelations made his compatriots spew bile at SVT's coverage and vent their outrage over the obligatory "TV tax" all Swedes have had to pay since New Year, regardless of whether they own a TV or not.  Blogger Hanna Lindholm, who identifies as "right-wing feminist", suggested that SVT has "gone nuclear" since their funding was guaranteed by the tax.  Some compared SVT's "angled" coverage with that of the Communist era. To expand on this reference, one user posted an "updated" SVT logo with a hammer and sickle and corrupted Cyrillic letters, whereas another user mockingly spelled out SVT (originally "Sveriges Television") as "Stasi Vision TV".  Others ventured that SVT's handling of the news content in accordance with its so-called "value base" was tantamount to "fake news". Yet another recurrent theme in the comments was that Sweden had allegedly "caved in" for Islam.  Rahaf Mohammed was offered asylum in Canada after a week's limbo in Bangkok, which she spent barricaded in a hotel room. As a token of an irrevocable breakaway from her family, she renounced her surname, al-Qulun, and quit Islam. Since then, she reports that she's received threats on the Internet.  SVT is the Swedish national public television broadcaster; it is funded by a public service tax on personal income and largely modelled after the BBC.


sputnik--2019-02-04--Angelina Jolie Arrives in Bangladesh to Meet Rohingya Refugees

"Angelina Jolie is on a three-day mission in Cox's Bazar to assess the humanitarian needs of the Rohingya refugees and some of the more critical challenges facing Bangladesh as a host country," a statement released from UNHCR today read.  She first visited the Rohingya refugees at the Chakmarkul camp and later went to the Nayapara camp and the Leda camp in Taknaf.  READ MORE: Bangladesh Lodges Protest With Myanmar Over Racist Remark About Rohingyas  The actress-envoy will meet Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Foreign Minister A. K. Abdul Momen to discuss how UNHCR can support the Bangladeshi government to work towards safe and sustainable solutions to the Rohingya refugee crisis.  Rohingya Muslims are originally from Myanmar, which they fled amid an ethno-religious conflict in 2017. Currently, over 1.1 million Rohingya reside in Cox's Bazar's refugee camps. The pre-crisis 2011 population of the region was slightly less than 2.3 million.