JESUIT

Pope, quoting Buddha, urges religious dialogue to fight fundamentalism

Pope Francis and Mongolia's Catholics under one roof at papal Mass

2023/09/03


By Philip Pullella

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) -In an unprecedented event, Pope Francis and just about the entire Catholic population of a country were in the same room when he presided at a Mass in Mongolia's capital on Sunday.

The Mass in Ulaanbaatar's Steppe Arena was the religious highlight of the pope's trip to visit the Catholic community of just 1,450. Most of Mongolia's population of about 3.3 million are Buddhists.

Most of Mongolia's nine parishes are in the capital, but one in a remote area has only about 30 members and Church officials said they expected everyone who could make it to attend.

Many Mongolians still live a nomadic tradition to graze their animals and in his homily, the pope used the image to make his point.

"All of us are God's nomads, pilgrims in search of happiness, wayfarers thirsting for love," he said, adding that the Christian faith quenched that thirst.

Several Buddhist monks in their saffron robes attended the Mass, which was conducted in Mongolian, English and Italian.

Francis, who leaves for Rome on Monday after inaugurating a Church charity and health centre, began his day at an inter-religious service where he called himself one of the "humble heirs" of ancient schools of wisdom and quoted the Buddha.

There, sharing a theatre stage with a dozen other religious representatives, he urged all religions to live in harmony and shun ideological fundamentalism that foments violence.

Since he started the trip, Francis has praised religious freedom in Mongolia. The landlocked country borders China, which human rights groups say represses religious freedom.

In unscripted comments at the end of the Mass, the pope sent greetings to China, making another overture to the communist country to ease restrictions on religion.

'ANCIENT SCHOOLS OF WISDOM'

The inter-religious meeting was attended by leaders representing Mongolian Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, evangelical and Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Hindus, Shintos, Bahais and shamans.

"Brothers and sisters, today we are meeting together as the humble heirs of ancient schools of wisdom. In our encounter with one another, we want to share the great treasure we have received, for the sake of enriching a humanity so often led astray on its journey by the myopic pursuit of profit and material comfort," he said.

Francis, 86, quoted from a writings of the Buddha that says "the wise man rejoices in giving", noting it was similar to Jesus' saying "It is more blessed to give than to receive".

Conservative Catholics, such as Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, have lambasted the pope for attending such gatherings, calling them "a supermarket of religions" that diminishes the status of the Catholic Church.

But the pope repeated that he put great importance in "ecumenical, inter-religious and cultural dialogue". He said dialogue did not mean "to gloss over difference" but to seek understanding and enrichment.

He condemned "narrowness, unilateral imposition, fundamentalism and ideological constraint", saying they destroy fraternity, fuel tensions and compromise peace.

"There can be no mixing, then, of religious beliefs and violence, of holiness and oppression, of religious traditions and sectarianism," Francis said.

"This is a very important, meaningful meeting," said one of the attendees, Buddhist Monk Altankhuu Tserenjav of the Zuun Khuree Dashichoiling Monastery in Ulaanbaatar.

"He is a religious leader of the world, for us like a Dalai Lama, so I really respect and welcome him," he said.

Mongolia has seen a revival of Tibetan Buddhism since the collapse of the Soviet-backed Communist government in 1990, and the Dalai Lama is regarded as its main spiritual leader.

However, China has repeatedly put pressure on Mongolia not to allow the 88-year-old exiled Tibetan leader to visit, branding him a dangerous separatist.

(Reporting by Philip PullellaEditing by Lincoln Feast, Edwina Gibbs, William Mallard and Frances Kerry)









© Reuters

GENGIS KHAN HAD SLAVES
Pope starts Mongolia visit by praising the country’s religious freedom dating back to Genghis Khan


BY NICOLE WINFIELD AND SARUUL ENKHBOLD
September 2, 2023

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia (AP) — Pope Francis on Saturday praised Mongolia’s tradition of religious freedom dating to the times of its founder, Genghis Khan, as he opened the first-ever papal visit to the Asian nation with a word of encouragement to its tiny Catholic flock.

Francis met with President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh inside a traditional Mongolian ger, or round yurt, set up inside the state palace and wrote a message in the guest book that he was visiting “a country young and ancient, modern and rich of tradition,” as a pilgrim of peace.

Francis is in Mongolia to minister to one of the world’s newest and smallest Catholic communities — around 1,450 Mongolians are Catholic — and make a diplomatic foray into a region where the Holy See has long had troubled relations, with Russia to the north and China to the south.

While Christianity has been present in the region for hundreds of years, the Catholic Church has only had a sanctioned presence in Mongolia since 1992, after the country abandoned its Soviet-allied communist government and enshrined religious freedom in its constitution.








While Catholicism is tolerated and legal, foreign missionaries working here lament that the government restricts their numbers and treats the church as a nongovernmental organization — limitations that the Holy See is hoping will be lifted with a comprehensive bilateral agreement.

In his remarks, Francis praised Mongolia’s tradition of religious liberty, noting that such tolerance existed even during the period of the Mongol Empire’s vast expansion over much of the world. At its height, the empire stretched as far west as Hungary to become the largest contiguous land empire in world history.

Nowadays, the landlocked nation sandwiched between Russia and China is overwhelmingly Buddhist, with traditional links to Tibet’s leading lamas, including the Dalai Lama.

“The fact that the empire could embrace such distant and varied lands over the centuries bears witness to the remarkable ability of your ancestors to acknowledge the outstanding qualities of the peoples present in its immense territory and to put those qualities at the service of a common development,” Francis told the president, diplomats and cultural leaders in remarks at the state palace.

“This model should be valued and reproposed in our own day,” he said.

Referring to the 13th-century period of relative political stability within the Mongol Empire that allowed trade and travel to flourish, Francis called for such a period of fraternity and peace to take root today and spread peace throughout the region.

“May heaven grant that today, on this earth devastated by countless conflicts, there be a renewal, respectful of international laws, of the condition of what was once the pax mongolica, that is the absence of conflicts,” he said.

Khurelsukh also referred to the “pax mongolica” in his remarks, saying that same spirit still guides Mongolia’s efforts to be a peaceful, multilateral player on the world stage.

“Achievements of pax mongolica have created the solid grounds for the development of mutual respect between different nations of the world, cherishing each other’s values and identities, enabling peaceful coexistence of various civilizations,” he said.

Later in the day, Francis met with bishops and the missionaries who have cultivated the Catholic faith here for the past three decades, presiding over a prayer in the ger-shaped St. Peter and Paul cathedral in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. On the altar sat a delicate wooden statue of the Madonna, which was found by a Mongolese woman in a landfill and now is a symbol of the church in the country.

As Francis entered and blessed the crowd with holy water, he was met with shouts of “Viva il Papa!” inside and out of the cathedral, where an estimated 2,000 people gathered.

Francis sought to encourage the missionaries, telling them not to be concerned by their “small numbers, limited successes or apparent irrelevance.” Rather, he urged them to be close to their Mongolian flocks, learn their language and love their culture.

“May you find refreshment, knowing that being little is not a problem but a resource,” he said. “God loves littleness, and through it he loves to accomplish great things.”

In the pews was one of the two Mongolese priests who have been ordained, the Rev. Peter Sanjaajav, who got a rousing applause from the crowd when he addressed Francis in Mongolian.

“Many thanks for coming to Mongolia, and for visiting our Church. Your visit makes us particularly happy,” he said.

Another Mongolian woman who converted, Rufina Chamingerel, told Francis she had spent 14 years learning her Catholic faith, to which she converted as a student. Addressing Francis in Italian, she acknowledged the Mongolian church is young and small.

“Our Church is in that phase typical of children who constantly ask their parents questions,” she said.

In his remarks to government authorities, Francis also praised Mongolia’s efforts to care for the environment. The vast, landlocked country, historically afflicted by weather extremes, is considered to be one of the countries most affected by climate change. The country has already experienced a 2.1-degree Celsius (3.8-degree Fahrenheit) increase in average temperatures over the past 70 years, and an estimated 77% of its land is degraded because of overgrazing and climate change, according to the U.N. Development Program.

Mongolia is set to host the 2026 U.N. conference on desertification and has launched a campaign to plant 1 billion trees across its vast steppes and mountains of grasslands

The pope, however, noted the need to combat “the insidious threat of corruption,” an apparent reference to a scandal over Mongolia’s trade with China over the alleged theft of 385,000 tons of coal. In December, hundreds of people braved freezing cold temperatures in the capital to protest the scandal.

“Corruption is the fruit of a utilitarian and unscrupulous mentality that has impoverished whole countries,” he said.

The Mongolian government has declared 2023 to be an “anti-corruption year” and says it is carrying out a five-part plan based on Transparency International, the global anti-graft watchdog that ranked Mongolia 116th last year in its corruption perceptions index.

Mongolians Catholic and not welcomed Francis’ visit, saying it was a sign of Mongolia’s prominence on the world stage.

“The visit of Roman pope is the proof that Mongolians are peace loving, mindful and spiritual nation,” said Chinbat Gantulga, a Mongolian engineer.“It also shows that Mongolia has a religious freedom, and respect of spiritual beliefs of anyone.”
___

Zhang Weiqun contributed to this report.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

 

  

  

 

 

Swiss glacier watcher warns recent heat wave threatens severe melt again this year after record 2022
 

 

BY JAMEY KEATEN
 September 1, 2023

GENEVA (AP) — A top glacier watcher has warned that a warm early summer combined with a heat wave last week may have caused severe glacier melt in Switzerland, threatening to make 2023 its second-worst year for ice loss after a record thaw last year.

Matthias Huss of the GLAMOS glacier monitoring center said full data won’t be in until late September and a precipitous drop in temperatures and high-altitude snowfall in recent days could help stem any more damage.

But early signs based on readings from five sites and modeling results across Switzerland suggest considerable damage may already be done

“We can definitely say that we had very high melting in Switzerland and in Europe in general because the temperatures, they were extremely high for a long time — a more than one week heat wave,” Huss said in an interview this week.

Swiss meteorologists reported last week that the zero-degree Celsius level had risen to its highest altitude since recordings on it in Switzerland began nearly 70 years ago — meaning that all of the Alpine country’s mountains faced temperatures above freezing.

The late-summer heat wave was particularly harmful to glaciers this year because high temperatures earlier in the summer had already melted nearly all of the protective snow cover, which meant that “almost all glacier ice was kind of naked,” Huss said.

A blanket of white snow cover has a crucial effect in protecting glaciers by reflecting energy from sunlight back upward, a process known as the albedo effect.

Last year marked a historically punishing year for Switzerland’s estimated 1,400 glaciers — the largest count of any country in Europe, and a bellwether for the impacts of climate change

“We’re definitely not going to beat the records of last year ... but right now, it seems that we’re on track to be maybe the second-most negative year,” Huss said.

A combination of factors made for a near-perfect storm in 2022 including low wintertime snow cover, warm temperatures in early summer, greater heat later that season, and weather patterns that carried orange-colored dust from the Sahara Desert up to Switzerland — coloring the snow and ice.

A staggering 6% of glacier volume in Switzerland was lost in that single year.

“For comparison, we lost, on average, about 2% in the last decade, and already 2% is very high,” said Huss. “If you extrapolate that, that would tell you that in 50 years we have nothing left. If we lose 6% in one year, it’s even much more extreme.”

Strong melting and glacier disappearance in recent years has already caused Huss’ team to halt three of its 20 monitoring programs where detailed measurements are taken. This year, one was ended at the Saint Annafirn glacier, south of the central village of Andermatt, because measurements there were no longer meaningful, he said.

“The glacier is so small by now, and dangerous, because it has receded so much that there is a lot of rock fall,” he said.

With areas like the town of Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn, hitting 31 degrees Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) last week, the impacts will continue to be felt.

“We can say it’s climate change that makes these years with very strong melting much more likely,” said Huss. “In the last decades, I would say that almost every year is kind of an extreme year.”

A building marked by fire and death shows the decay of South Africa’s ‘city of gold’

Johannesburg is seen from the sky. Johannesburg has established itself as one of the best cities in the world, South Africa’s economic hub where careers are made and dreams come true. But over the last few years, that image and reputation has been changing.

 (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)

Medics stand by the covered bodies of victimes of a deadly blaze in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, Aug. 31, 2023. The fire has reignited complaints about the continuously decaying state of the “City of Gold”, as the city is affectionately known. Unhealthy finances, inward migration and crime are among some of the cited reasons for the decay. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — One of the few things that survived the fire and smoke that caused at least 76 horrific deaths in a rundown apartment block in Johannesburg is a circular plaque hanging on the brown brick exterior. It has a five-sentence inscription outlining the building’s history.

No. 80 Albert Street - the scene of one of South Africa’s worst inner-city tragedies - was a central pass office during the apartheid era of racial segregation, a checkpoint for enforcing a despised law that controlled the movement of Black people nearly everywhere in the country.

Without a pass from the apartheid government to work there, people were “denied a place” in Johannesburg, the inscription reads.

What it doesn’t say is that the building still saw people excluded up until last Thursday, nearly 30 years after apartheid ended, when a fire swept through it and killed dozens of South Africans and poor foreign migrants clinging on at the fringes of society in a city claiming to be Africa’s richest.

Death toll from Johannesburg fire rises to 76 as city turns to tough job of identifying victims

At least 74 are dead, many of them homeless, as fire rips through a rundown building in South Africa

The approximately 200 families living there were desperate for some form of accommodation and found a five-story block that had been left derelict and abandoned by authorities. They were paying rent to unofficial “landlords,” who had illegally taken over the building.

It’s what is known in Johannesburg as a “hijacked building.” There are hundreds of them in the crumbling city center.

They’ve come to embody the decay of South Africa’s most important city and, beyond that, what so many view as the larger failure of a post-apartheid government to provide a dignified life for many of the poor Black majority.

What appeared to anger South Africans in the aftermath of the nightime fire that killed entire families was the admission by city officials that it was a city-owned building. Yet they hadn’t taken responsibility for it or for its inhabitants, who lived in shacks crammed into every corner, even the parking garage.

“This has been a long time coming and it will keep happening until the city wakes up. It’s devastating,” said Angela Rivers, general manager of the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association. Rivers said that numerous government departments were aware of the appalling conditions of hijacked buildings across the city center, but “they don’t take it seriously.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the scene of the fire, put himself among the poor of downtown Johannesburg, and tried to reassure them.

“We are a caring government,” Ramaphosa said. “It may fall short, but the determination to care for the people of South Africa is a priority.”

The promises are wearing thin from the government of the ruling African National Congress party, which led South Africa out of apartheid and has been in power since the first democratic elections in 1994.

Johannesburg is a focal point for the perceived failures. The infrastructure of the city is in deep trouble almost everywhere, from burst water pipes, cracked roads, a malfunctioning electricity supply, and trash piling up on street corners.

Founded on a huge gold reef little more than 100 years ago, Johannesburg was always a destination for Black South Africans, initially men who left their wives and children to board steam trains to the city to work in the gold mines, a journey jazz great Hugh Masekela sang about in “Stimela.” It is one of the most vivid songs of South Africa.

The city saw rapid and recent urbanization after apartheid and its pass laws were dismantled, going from a population of 1.8 million in 1990 to an estimated 6 million now. People keep coming to the “city of gold.”

What they find now is the surrounding Gauteng province’s unemployment rate of 36% — even higher than South Africa’s national figure of 33%, itself the worst in the world. Around 1.2 million people in the province don’t have housing, officials said, with much of the crisis playing out in Johannesburg.

“The general sense is that things have gotten worse with time,” said Lebogang Lechuba of the South African Cities Network, which analyses urban development. “(But) there are more people coming to the city. That does not change.”

The warning signs for Johannesburg began in the late 1990s as the big companies left downtown for the new financial district of Sandton, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) to the north. Johannesburg still has more millionaires than any other city on the continent, according to this year’s World’s Wealthiest Cities Report. But the chasm between the silver high-rises of Sandton and the old heart of Johannesburg underlines why South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world.

As the money seeped away, the degradation of central Johannesburg initially was slow, said Volker von Widdern, a risk analyst for businesses, until it reached a tipping point.

“One domino falls, maybe. We don’t fully appreciate what the full effect of 20 dominoes falling may be,” von Widdern told the Moneyweb financial news website. “It has a cumulative impact and then, unfortunately, it has a catastrophic impact.”

Johannesburg voters have turned away from the ruling ANC recently, but that has done nothing to enhance the city’s prospects and has only led to a series of political coalitions that have failed. The city has had six mayors in less than two years.

The failure of basic infrastructure also brings a much greater threat to the social foundation of a country, said professor Yunus Ballim of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand. Ballim, a civil engineering expert, went on national television last month following an underground gas explosion in Johannesburg about a mile from Albert Street that was blamed on poorly maintained pipes.

But what he started to speak about was that every failure to provide a house, running water, and electricity for South Africans eroded their faith in their post-apartheid democracy, which has guaranteed freedom for every citizen and no more pass laws, but hasn’t yet delivered housing or jobs for millions.

Ballim posed a question on why frustrated, poor protesters sometimes burn clinics or schools.

“Perhaps ... they’ve lost their confidence in the ability of the clinic to do what it was meant to do,” he said.

Rivers, whose association works with derelict buildings in Johannesburg, said one of the most desperate situations she came across was a pregnant woman going into labor alone in the wet, cold basement of a hijacked property that had no electricity or running water.

The woman, Rivers said, refused to go to a hospital because she was so scared she’d lose her place to live in the building and had no faith there’d be another home for her and her child.

“This baby was born in the dark,” Rivers said.
___

Imray reported from Cape Town, South Africa.

Greece: Firefighters rescue 25 migrants trapped in forest as massive wildfire approached



1 of 17 |

Flames burn a forest during a wildfire in Giannouli village, in the northeastern Evros region, Greece, Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. Greek authorities have further reinforced firefighting forces in the country’s northeast, where a massive blaze in its thirteenth day has flared up once more, triggering authorities to issue alerts to residents in the area to be on standby for possible evacuation.

A wildfire burns a forest in Giannouli village, in the northeastern Evros region, Greece, Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. Greek authorities have further reinforced firefighting forces in the country’s northeast, where a massive blaze in its thirteenth day has flared up once more, triggering authorities to issue alerts to residents in the area to be on standby for possible evacuation.


Burnt trees stand as a wildfire burns in Giannouli village, in the northeastern Evros region, Greece, Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. Greek authorities have further reinforced firefighting forces in the country’s northeast, where a massive blaze in its thirteenth day has flared up once more, triggering authorities to issue alerts to residents in the area to be on standby for possible evacuation. 

A helicopter flies over a wildfire in Giannouli village, in the northeastern Evros region, Greece, Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023. Greek authorities have further reinforced firefighting forces in the country’s northeast, where a massive blaze in its thirteenth day has flared up once more, triggering authorities to issue alerts to residents in the area to be on standby for possible evacuation.

 (e-evros.gr via AP)

BY ELENA BECATOROS AND COSTAS KANTOURIS
September 1, 2023


ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek firefighters rescued a group of 25 migrants trapped in a forest in northeastern Greece Friday as flames from a massive wildfire burning for two weeks approached, authorities said.

The fire department said the group became trapped in the forest between two villages in the Evros region, near the border with Turkey. No injuries were reported. There was no immediate information on their nationalities.

The blaze, burning for the 14th day Friday, has already been blamed for the deaths of 20 people whose bodies were found last week. All are believed to have been migrants who had recently crossed the border. Greece’s Disaster Victim Identification Team has been tasked with identifying the remains.

A multinational force of more than 580 firefighters backed by six planes and two helicopters is battling the wildfire that began on Aug. 19 and within days had joined with other blazes to form the largest single wildfire in a European Union country since records began in 2000.

The fire has burned homes and vast tracts of forest, scorching more than 81,000 hectares (200,000 acres).

Overnight, residents of the border town of Soufli were put on alert for possible evacuation as a huge wall of flames approached. To date, thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes in villages and towns in northeastern Greece due to the fire, although the vast majority have since been allowed back.

Greece has been stricken by hundreds of wildfires across the country this summer, with dozens of new blazes breaking out each day. The vast majority are extinguished quickly before they spread, but the Evros blaze has proved particularly tough to control.

Another persistent blaze has been burning for more than a week in a national park on the slopes of Mount Parnitha, on the fringes of Athens, with more than 160 firefighters trying to extinguish occasional flare-ups.




With its own firefighting forces stretched to the limit, Greece called on other European countries for help, and has received hundreds of firefighters and a dozen aircraft from France, Germany, Spain, Cyprus, Romania, Albania, Serbia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.

Arson is suspected in some of the smaller fires that were quickly brought under control, and authorities have made several arrests across the country. But the causes of the major blazes are still under investigation.

Speaking in Parliament Thursday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis implied — without providing any evidence — that migrants may have been responsible for the Evros fire, even though he noted an investigation into the causes is still ongoing.

“It is almost certain that the causes were manmade. And it is also almost certain that this fire started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country,” Mitsotakis said. “We don’t know if it was negligence or deliberate.”

Last week, three people — two Greeks and one Albanian national — were arrested in northeastern Greece and charged with a series of crimes for allegedly rounding up 13 people from Syria and Pakistan and forcing them into a car trailer, accusing them, without any evidence, of setting fires.

Mitsotakis said incidents of vigilantism would not be tolerated.

On Friday, a court in the northeastern city of Alexandroupolis ordered the three to be jailed pending trial, said Nikos Karavellakis, a lawyer representing the eight Syrians who had been sequestered in the trailer. The three suspects had been under house arrest since their arrest.

Greece is one of the preferred entry routes into the European Union for people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia fleeing conflict and poverty. Those crossing the country’s land border with Turkey often use mountain and forest trails to evade authorities and head west to the main northern city of Thessaloniki.

Several people, all Greeks, have been arrested in the past two weeks on suspicion of arson for allegedly deliberately attempting to start wildfires.
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Kantouris reported from Thessaloniki, Greece

A STRIKE NOT A RIOT
Minnesota prison reaches resolution with inmates who refused to return to their cells in heat wave

A fleet of emergency vehicles sit parked outside of Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater prison in Bayport, Minn., on Sunday, Sept. 3, 2023. The prison was placed on emergency lockdown after about 100 inmates in a housing unit facing dangerously high heat would not return to their cells. 

(David Boehnke via AP)

AP

 September 3, 2023

STILLWATER, Minn. (AP) — A Minnesota prison has “resolved without incident” a situation involving about 100 inmates in one housing unit who would not return to their cells Sunday in what one former inmate there called an act of “self-preservation” amid dangerously high temperatures in the region.

The situation was “calm, peaceful and stable throughout the day,” a Department of Corrections spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “incarcerated individuals in the unit indicated dissatisfaction” because the understaffed facility had to limit inmates’ time out of their cells.

But advocates positioned outside of the Stillwater prison, some of whom have family members inside, said inmates are fed up with the excessive heat, lack of air conditioning and limited access to showers and ice during on and off lockdowns over the past two months.

The prison is in Bayport about 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Minneapolis, which was under an afternoon heat advisory for temperatures approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius).

“My organization got calls from inmates who are actually inside” starting at 6:30 a.m., said Marvina Haynes of Minnesota Wrongfully Convicted Judicial Reform, whose brother is an inmate at Stillwater.

“This morning, they decided that they weren’t going to lock into their cells,” said David Boehnke of Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee.

The department confirmed that inmates have been in lockdown status because of the holiday weekend, meaning they are kept in their cells, with “limited access facility-wide to out-of-cell time for showers, phone use and recreation.” The facility remains on lockdown now, and all inmates have returned to the cells.

The executive director of the union representing Stillwater’s correctional officers, Bart Andersen, said in a statement that the incident is “endemic and highlights the truth behind the operations of the MN Department of Corrections with chronic understaffing.”

Andersen said such conditions upset inmates because of restrictions on program and recreation time “when there are not enough security staff to protect the facility.”

Haynes, Boehnke and Cathy Stroud Caldwell said the inmate action was an impromptu response to unsafe conditions, including access to clean drinking water, which they say is reportedly brown in color. The department said those claims “about a lack of clean water in the facility are patently false.”

“They didn’t have time to organize and plan,” Haynes said. “It was just ... we’re not going back to that hot cell with no drinking water and not being able to shower.”

Haynes said they hope to meet with officials “to talk about the conditions that inmates are living in” and “solutions for the future.”

Intense heat waves across the country have led to amplified concern for prison populations, especially those in poorly ventilated or air-conditioned facilities

Two correctional officers stayed in a secure control area and in contact with facility staff since the emergency lockdown status was initiated at 8 a.m. There were no injuries, according to the Department of Corrections.

Members of a crisis negotiation team and the Special Operations Response Team were deployed “out of an abundance of caution.”

In total, about 1,200 inmates are at the facility just southeast of Stillwater in Bayport, according to department records. It was built in 1914.

Kevin Reese, founder of a criminal justice organization, Until We Are All Free, described Stillwater as a “pizza oven” in the summers. He was incarcerated there during the summers from 2006 through 2009.

“It is a 100-year-old building with no air conditioning, no central air,” Reese said. “The walls actually sweat.”

SOP

New Delhi got a makeover for the G20 summit. The city’s poor say they were simply erased

XI AND PUTIN NOT AVAILABLE

NO PURPOSE IN YOU GOING JOE

BY RISHI LEKHI AND PIYUSH NAGPAL
September 3, 2023

NEW DELHI (AP) — New Delhi’s crowded streets have been resurfaced. Streetlights are illuminating once dark sidewalks. City buildings and walls are painted with bright murals and graffiti. Planted flowers are everywhere.

Many of the city’s poor say they were simply erased, much like the stray dogs and monkeys that have been removed from some neighborhoods, as India’s capital got its makeover ahead of this week’s summit of the Group of 20 nations.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government hopes the elaborate effort to make New Delhi sparkle — a “beautification project” with a price tag of $120 million — will help showcase the world’s most populous nation’s cultural prowess and strengthen its position on the global stage.

But for many street vendors and those crammed into New Delhi’s shantytowns, the makeover has meant displacement and loss of livelihood, raising questions about the government’s policies on dealing with poverty. In a city of more than 20 million people, the 2011 census had the homeless at 47,000 but activists say that was a vast underestimate and that the real number is at least 150,000.

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Since January, hundreds of houses and roadside stalls have been demolished, displacing thousands of people. Dozens of shantytowns were raised to the ground, with many residents getting eviction notices only a short while before the demolitions got underway.

Authorities say the demolitions were carried out against “illegal encroachers,” but right activists and those evicted question the policy and allege that it has pushed thousands more into homelessness.

Similar demolitions have also been carried out in other Indian cities like Mumbai and Kolkata that have hosted various G20 events leading up to this weekend’s summit.

Activists say it was more than just a case of out of sight, out of mind.

Abdul Shakeel, with the activist group Basti Suraksha Manch, or Save Colony Forum, says that “in the name of beautification, the urban poor’s lives are destroyed.”

“The money used for G20 is taxpayers’ money. Everyone pays the tax. Same money is being used to evict and displace them,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

The two-day global summit will take place at the newly constructed Bharat Mandapam building, a sprawling exhibition center in the heart of New Delhi near the landmark India Gate monument — and scores of world leaders are expected to attend. The G20 includes the world’s 19 wealthiest countries plus the European Union. India currently holds its presidency, which rotates annually among the members.

In July, a report by the Concerned Citizens Collective, a rights activist group, found that the preparations for the G20 summit resulted in the displacement of nearly 300,000 people, particularly from the neighborhoods that foreign leaders and diplomats will visit during various meetings.

 (AP video/Rishi Lekhi and Piyush Nagpal)    1 minute, 32 seconds

India’s government hopes an elaborate makeover of New Delhi will showcase the nation’s cultural prowess and boost its position on the world stage. However, hundreds of houses and roadside stalls have been demolished in the capital ahead of the G-20 summit.

At least 25 shantytowns and multiple night shelters for the homeless were razed to the ground and turned into parks, the report said, adding that the government failed to provide alternative shelters or places for the newly homeless.

Last month, Indian police intervened to stop a meeting of prominent activists, academics and politicians critical of Modi and his government’s role in hosting the G20 summit and questioning whose interests the summit would benefit.

“I can see the homeless on the streets ... and now the homeless are not allowed to live on the streets either,” said Rekha Devi, a New Delhi resident who attended the Aug. 20 gathering.

Devi, whose home was demolished in one of the drives, said authorities refused to consider documents she showed as proof that her family had lived in the same house for nearly 100 years.

“Everyone is behaving as if they are blind,” Devi said. “In the name of the G20 event, the farmers, workers and the poor are suffering.”

Home to 1.4 billion people, India’s struggle to end poverty remains daunting, even though a recent government report said that nearly 135 million — almost 10% of the country’s population — moved out of so-called multidimensional poverty between 2016 and 2021. The concept takes into consideration not just monetary poverty but also how lack of education, infrastructure and services affect a person’s quality of life.

Indian authorities have been criticized in the past for clearing away homeless encampments and shantytowns ahead of major events.

In 2020, the government hastily erected a half-kilometer (1,640-foot) brick wall in the state of Gujarat ahead of a visit by then-President Donald Trump, with critics saying it was built to block the view of a slum area inhabited by more than 2,000 people. Similar demolitions were also carried out during the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.

Some street vendors say they are helpless, stuck between sacrificing their livelihoods for India’s pride and wanting to earn a living.

Shankar Lal, who sells chickpea curry with fried flatbread, said authorities told him three months ago to move away. These days, the only time he gets to open his stall along a busy New Delhi road near the G20 summit venue is on Sundays, when police pay less attention to the street vendors.

It’s not enough to eke out a living.

“These are government rules, and we’ll do what we are told,” Lal said. “The government doesn’t know whether we are dying of hunger or not.”

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Security in Ecuador has come undone as drug cartels exploit the banana industry to ship cocaine

SNAKES FAVOUR BANANAS

BY REGINA GARCIA CANO
, September 3, 2023


GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AP) — Men walk through a lush plantation between Ecuador ’s balmy Pacific coast and its majestic Andes, lopping hundreds of bunches of green bananas from groaning plants twice their height.

Workers haul the bunches to an assembly line, where the bananas are washed, weighed and plastered with stickers for European buyers. Owner Franklin Torres is monitoring all activity on a recent morning to make sure the fruit meets international beauty standards — and ever more important, is packed for shipment free of cocaine.

Torres is hypervigilant because Ecuador is increasingly at the confluence of two global trades: bananas and cocaine

The South American country is the world’s largest exporter of bananas, shipping about 6.5 million metric tons (7.2 tons) a year by sea. It is also wedged between the world’s largest cocaine producers, Peru and Colombia, and drug traffickers find containers filled with bananas the perfect vehicle to smuggle their product.

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Drug traffickers’ infiltration of the industry that is responsible for about 30% of the world’s bananas has contributed to unprecedented violence across this once-peaceful nation. Shootings, homicides, kidnappings and extortions have become part of daily life, particularly in the Pacific port city and banana-shipping hub of Guayaquil.

“This is everyone’s responsibility: the person who transports it, the person who buys it, the person who consumes it,” vendor Dalia Chang, 59, a lifelong resident of Guayaquil, said of the cocaine trade. “They all share responsibility. They have ruined our country.”

The country, which is not a major cocaine producer, was especially rattled when a presidential candidate known for his tough stance on organized crime and corruption — Fernado Villavicencio — was fatally shot at the end of an Aug. 9 campaign rally. He had accused the Ecuadorian Los Choneros gang and its imprisoned leader, whom he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before the assassination.

In addition to its proximity to cocaine production, cartels from Mexico, Colombia and the Balkans have settled in Ecuador because it uses the U.S. dollar and has weak laws and institutions, along with a network of long-established gangs like Los Choneros that are eager for work.

Authorities say Ecuador also gained prominence in the global cocaine trade after political changes in Colombia last decade. Coca bush fields in Colombia have been moving closer to the border with Ecuador due to the breakup of criminal groups after the 2016 demobilization of the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better-known by their Spanish acronym FARC.

A record 2,304 metric tons of cocaine was manufactured in 2021 around the world, mostly in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. That year, nearly a third of the cocaine seized by customs authorities in Western and Central Europe came from Ecuador, double the amount reported in 2018, according to a United Nations report citing data from the World Customs Organization. Large drug busts have become more frequent and within the past month, European authorities have made record-setting busts after inspecting containers carrying bananas from Ecuador.

Authorities on Aug. 25 announced Spain’s biggest cocaine haul yet: 9.5 metric tons hidden among cardboard boxes of bananas from Ecuador in a refrigerated container. Dutch officials also made their country’s largest-ever cocaine seizure last month — nearly 8 metric tons — in a container of Ecuadorian bananas. Authorities in Greece and Italy also announced seizures of cocaine hidden in Ecuadorian bananas this year.

Bananas headed to Europe are boxed at plantations, loaded into trucks that take them to massive warehouses in and around Guayaquil and transferred to maritime containers driven to an area port.

Then the ships head northeast to the Panama Canal, cross to the Caribbean Sea, and go east across the Atlantic.

Knowingly or not, banana growers, exporters, shipping corporations, port operators, private security companies, customs agents, agriculture officials, police, and buyers offer opportunities that drug traffickers have exploited.

The port city of Guayaquil sees thousands of shipments of fruit pass through daily. The country’s geography makes it the perfect place to grow bananas - situated along the Equator, it is temperate all year round. But drug cartels are exploiting this trade - packing cocaine in with legitimate shipments of bananas which pass undetected through ports which are poorly supervised. (August 4) 

(AP Video/Cesar Olmos)Video 02.31

Some traffickers have created front companies to mimic legitimate banana exporters, while others have acquired legitimate businesses, including plantations. They have found companies willing to be complicit in trafficking. They also have paid off, threatened or kidnapped truck drivers and other workers to help get cocaine into shipments.

Other traffickers have corrupted or intimidated police, customs agents, security guards and port workers to assist with — or ignore — tampering with containers at the ports.

Drug trafficking has contributed to the number of violent deaths in Ecuador, which doubled from 2021 to 2022, when 4,600 died, the most ever recorded in a year. The country is on track to break the annual record again, with 3,568 violent deaths tallied in the first half of 2023.

In Guayaquil, where maritime shipping containers are part of the landscape, people live in fear these days. Pedestrians don’t dare take their phones out of their pockets. Convenience stores have floor-to-ceiling metal bars that prevent customers from entering from the sidewalk. Restaurants that survived the pandemic close early.

Along with the rise in homicides, the amount of cocaine seized at the country’s ports has increased, too, reaching 77.4 metric tons last year. That is more than three times the amount seized in 2020.

National Police Gen. Pablo Ramírez, Ecuador’s national director of anti-drug investigations, attributed the change to increased smuggling, not better enforcement.

Police data also show that of last year’s total, a record 47.5 metric tons of cocaine were found in shipments of bananas, even though the fruit’s exports dropped 6.4% compared to 2021.

No more than 30% of containers is currently inspected at Ecuadorian ports, a process done manually or with drug-sniffing dogs. President Guillermo Lasso’s government says it wants to use scanners on entire containers. Twelve of those machines were supposed to be operating already but Ramírez said that has not happened yet.

Ramírez said he expects all ports to have operational scanners by mid-2024. He said two ports have tested the scanners to smooth out internal procedures and train the people who will be working with the machines



The operator of the largest port in Guayaquil, Contecon Guayaquil S.A., turned down Associated Press requests for an interview and access to the port to see existing security procedures. In response to written questions about the measures, spokeswoman Alexandra Pacheco said in a statement that the operator entered into an agreement with the National Police in 2022 to among other things “reinforce operations in the port.” She added that the operator plans to spend about $15 million on the scanners.

Jose Hidalgo, executive director of the Association of Banana Exporters of Ecuador, said the industry faces greater exposure to trafficking than other commodity exports because of the volume of containers that it uses.

“It is because of bananas that there are so many ports,” Hidalgo said. “It opens routes to other export products.”

He explained that exporters spend about $100 million annually on security measures, which include surveillance cameras at plantations, GPS monitoring of trucks and the identification of land routes that require police patrols to keep criminals away.

Nonetheless, some exporters have been accused of being complicit or directly involved in trafficking cocaine.

Torres, the plantation owner, would like to see that type of exporter kicked out of the industry. But there is no regulation that can be used to revoke a company’s banana-exporting permission when the business is tied repeatedly to drug trafficking.

“It bothers me so much,” Torres said. “My people work with bananas, they don’t work with drugs. It’s a flagship product, the best in the world, and to see it tainted like that is unfortunate.”

TRENCH WARFARE REDUX

Upward of 20,000 Ukrainian amputees face trauma on a scale unseen since WWI


Roman Yarmolenko, a Ukrainian soldier from the 93rd brigade, learns to walk on a prosthetic leg. He crosses rough, muddy terrain outside the Unbroken rehabilitation center in Lviv, Ukraine, Wednesday, July 26, 2023. Ukraine is facing the prospect of a future with upwards of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)Read More

Ukrainian army veterans rest with their families and comrades outside St. Panteleimon hospital in Lviv, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 25, 2023. Ukraine is facing the prospect of a future with upwards of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Burns cover 30% of Dmytro Yarmolchuk’s body. The 50-year-old Ukrainian soldier, who is being treated at St. Panteleimon hospital, was hit by an anti-tank missile in the battle for P’yatykhatky. He shows his wounds at the hospital n Lviv, Ukraine, Wednesday, July 26, 2023. Ukraine is facing the prospect of a future with upwards of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Dmytro Kononchuk, left, a prosthetist, tests Ruslan’s prosthesis at the Superhumans rehabilitation center in Vynnyky, Ukraine, Thursday, July 20, 2023. Ukraine is facing the prospect of a future with upwards of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

PHOTOS 4/26

BY EVGENIY MALOLETKA
September 4, 2023

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The small band of soldiers gather outside to share cigarettes and war stories, sometimes casually and sometimes with a degree of testiness over recollections made unreliable by their last day fighting, the day the war took away their limbs.

Some clearly remember the moment they were hit by anti-tank mines, aerial bombs, a missile, a shell. For others, the gaps in their memories loom large.

Vitaliy Bilyak’s skinny body is a web of scars that end with an amputation above the knee. During six weeks in a coma, Bilyak underwent over 10 surgeries, including his jaw, hand, and heel, to recover from injuries he received April 22 driving over a pair of anti-tank mines.

“When I woke up, I felt like I was born again and returned from the afterlife,” said Bilyak, who is just beginning his path to rehabilitation. He does not yet know when he’ll receive a prosthesis, which must be fitted individually to each patient.

Ukraine is facing a future with upward of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front. Europe has experienced nothing like it since World War I, and the United States not since the Civil War.

Mykhailo Yurchuk, a paratrooper, was wounded in the first weeks of the war near the city of Izium. His comrades loaded him onto a ladder and walked for an hour to safety. All he could think about at the time, he said, was ending it all with a grenade. A medic refused to leave his side and held his hand the entire time as he fell unconscious.

When he awoke in an intensive care unit the medic was still there.

“Thank you for holding my hand,” Yurchuk told him.

“Well, I was afraid you’d pull the pin,” the medic replied. Yurchuk’s left arm was gone below the elbow and his right leg above the knee.

In the 18 months since, Yurchuk has regained his equilibrium, both mentally and physically. He met the woman who would become his wife at the rehabilitation hospital, where she was a volunteer. And he now cradles their infant daughter and takes her for walks without the slightest hesitation. His new hand and leg are in stark black.

Yurchuk has himself become the chief motivator for new arrivals from the front, pushing them as they heal from their wounds and teaching them as they learn to live and move with their new disabilities. That kind of connection will need to be replicated across Ukraine, formally and informally, for thousands of amputees.

“Their whole locomotive system has to be reoriented. They have a whole redistribution of weight. That’s a really complicated adjustment to make and it needs to be made with another human being,” said Dr. Emily Mayhew, a medical historian at Imperial College who specializes in blast injuries.

There are not nearly enough prosthetic specialists in Ukraine to handle the growing need, said Olha Rudneva, the head of the Superhumans center for rehabilitating Ukrainian military amputees. Before the war, she said, only five people in all of Ukraine had formal rehabilitation training for people with arm or hand amputations, which in normal circumstances are less common than legs and feet as those sometimes are amputated due to complications with diabetes or other illnesses.

Rudneva estimated that 20,000 Ukrainians have endured at least one amputation since the war began. The government does not say how many of those are soldiers, but blast injuries are among the most common in a war with a long front line.

Rehabilitation centers Unbroken and Superhumans provide prostheses for Ukrainian soldiers with funds provided by donor countries, charity organizations and private Ukrainian companies.

“Some donors are not willing to provide military aid to Ukraine but are willing to fund humanitarian projects,” said Rudneva.

Some of the men undergoing rehabilitation regret they’re now out of the war, including Yurchuk and Valentyn Lytvynchuk.

Lytvynchuk, a former battalion commander, draws strength from his family, especially his 4-year-old daughter who etched a unicorn on his prosthetic leg.


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He headed recently to a military training ground to see what he could still do.

“I realized it’s unrealistic. I can jump into a trench, but I need four-wheel drive to get out of it. And when I move ‘fast’ a child could catch me,” he said. Then, after a moment, he added: “Plus, the prosthesis falls off.”

The hardest part for many amputees is learning to live with the pain — pain from the prosthesis, pain from the injury itself, pain from the lingering effects of the blast shockwave, said Mayhew, who has spoken with several hundred military amputees over the course of her career. Many are dealing with disfigurement and the ensuing cosmetic surgeries.

“That comorbidity of PTSD and blast injury and pain — those are very difficult to unpick,” she said. “When people have a physical injury and they have a psychological injury that goes with it, those things can never be separated. ”

For the severely injured, rehabilitation could take longer than the war ultimately lasts.

The cosmetic surgeries are crucial to allowing the soldiers to feel comfortable in society. Many are so disfigured that it’s all they believe anyone sees in them.

“We don’t have a year, two,” said Dr. Natalia Komashko, a facial surgeon. “We need to do this as if it was due yesterday.”.

Bilyak, the soldier who drove over anti-tank mines, still sometimes finds himself dreaming of battle.

“I’m lying alone in the ward on the bed, and people I don’t know come to me. I realize they’re Russians and they start shooting me point-blank in the head with pistols, rifles,” he recounted. “They start getting nervous because they’re running out of bullets, and I’m alive, I show them the middle finger and laugh at them.”
___

Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine; Volodymyr Yurchuk in Lviv, Ukraine; and Lori Hinnant in Paris contributed to this report.
___

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for AMPUTEE 

Zimbabwe opposition party calls for fresh elections supervised by neighboring countries


Zimbabwe’s main opposition party deputy spokesperson Gift Siziba addresses a press conference in Harare, Tuesday, Aug, 29, 2023. Siziba told reporters at a news conference that the party was demanding fresh elections supervised by neighbouring countries, digging in on its rejection of of last weeks polls that gave President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his party a majority.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)Read More

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party deputy spokesperson Gift Siziba addresses the media in Harare, Tuesday, Aug, 29, 2023. Siziba told reporters at a news conference that the party was demanding fresh elections supervised by neighbouring countries, digging in on its rejection of of last weeks polls that gave President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his party a majority.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa casts his vote at a polling station in Harare, Zimbabwe, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023. Polls have opened in Zimbabwe as President President Emmerson Mnangagwa seeks a second and final term in a country with a history of violent and disputed votes. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

Zimbabwe’s main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa addresses the press after casting his vote at a polling station in Harare, Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023. Delays have marked voting in Zimbabwe as President Emmerson Mnangagwa seeks a second and final term in a country with a history of violent and disputed elections. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)

BY FARAI MUTSAKA
August 29, 2023

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabwe’s main opposition party on Tuesday demanded fresh elections supervised by neighboring countries, digging in on its rejection of last week’s polls that saw President Emmerson Mnangagwa win re-election and his long-ruling ZANU-PF party retain its majority in a vote criticized by international observers.

Gift Siziba, the deputy spokesman for the Citizens Coalition for Change party, told reporters at a news conference in the capital, Harare, that the party will “not settle for less.”

“There is no alternative to a fresh and proper election … as an exit out of the vicious cycle of disputed elections,” Siziba said. “We are calling upon our African brothers to help facilitate, mediate and guarantee a process that will lead to our return to legitimacy.”

He said his party rejected the election “in its entirety.”


Zimbabwe’s opposition alleges ‘gigantic fraud’ in vote that extends the ZANU-PF party’s 43-year rule

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa wins re-election after troubled vote, officials say

Zimbabweans anxiously wait for election results as African observer missions note voter intimidation

Siziba declined to say whether the CCC has told the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union, the regional bodies which sent observers to Zimbabwe, of its demand.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of neighboring South Africa has already congratulated Mnangagwa’s government on the elections, as has Namibian leader Hage Geingob. Ramaphosa had “taken note” of the reports by the election observers, his office said.

Although SADC’s observer mission criticized the elections, the body doesn’t have a history of interfering to force a rerun.

CCC leader Nelson Chamisa described the presidential election result as a “blatant and gigantic fraud” on Sunday, a day after the electoral commission announced Mnangagwa — a former guerrilla fighter nicknamed “the crocodile” — had won a second five-year term with 52.6% of the vote. Chamisa won 44%, according to the commission.

Opposition spokesman Siziba also didn’t rule out approaching the courts, saying the party “will employ all necessary measures” to ensure there is a fair election.

Going to court would mark a repeat of 2018, when Chamisa launched a legal challenge after narrowly losing to Mnangagwa in the first election since the ouster of longtime leader Robert Mugabe in a coup a year earlier. The Constitutional Court rejected Chamisa’s challenge.

The results from the latest disputed vote in the southern African nation with a history of troubled elections were announced Saturday night, two days earlier than expected.

People in the country of 15 million were bound to view the results with suspicion, but Mnangagwa, 80, dismissed the opposition’s allegations of vote fraud.

International rights groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said there had been a crackdown on opposition in the buildup to the election. They accused Mnangagwa’s administration and the ruling party of weaponizing the police and courts to arrest opposition figures, ban and break up opposition party rallies, and intimidate its supporters. More than 40 local election monitors were arrested during the election on what government critics said were trumped up charges.

Chamisa alleged in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the vote that his supporters had often been threatened with violence.

The actual election last Wednesday was also problematic and voting was extended into Thursday because of a shortage of ballot papers, especially in the capital and other urban areas that are opposition strongholds. People slept at polling stations to make sure they were able to vote.

Mnangagwa’s officials have angrily reacted to reports by African and Western observer missions that said the polls failed to meet international standards for democracy. The European Union and Carter Center also described an atmosphere of intimidation and raised concerns about the possible disenfranchisement of some voters.

In response, Mnangagwa said some of the observers had gone “beyond their limit” by questioning laws passed by Zimbabwe’s parliament in the buildup to the election.

There are no signs of unrest in the country, with people going about their business Tuesday in central Harare, which is again teeming with vendors after two days of quiet as people steered clear of the streets, fearful of the violence that has marked previous Zimbabwean elections.
___

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

CONSPIRACY THEORY
Gabon opposition leader alleges the ousted president’s family arranged the coup to retain power

Mutinous soldiers in Gabon have proclaimed their republican guard chief Gen. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema as the country’s leader after ousting just-reelected President Ali Bongo Ondimba. 

BY SAM MEDNICK

 September 1, 2023


DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Gabon’s opposition leader accused the family of the recently ousted president of engineering his removal from power in order to retain their control in the oil-rich Central African nation, and said Friday that he should have won last week’s presidential election.

Albert Ondo Ossa told The Associated Press on Friday that the junta who ousted Gabon’s president on Wednesday, just after he had been declared the winner in the election, did not engage in a coup but rather a “palace revolution” in order to continue his family’s reign.

Soldiers toppled President Ali Bongo Ondimba and put him under house arrest, accusing him of irresponsible governance that risked leading the country into chaos. They then put Bongo’s cousin, Gen. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, head of the elite republican guard, in char

Oligui is expected to be sworn into office on Monday before the constitutional court.

Gabon election results were a ‘smokescreen’ for soldiers to oust unpopular president, analysts say

Gabon’s wealthy, dynastic leader thought he could resist Africa’s trend of coups. He might be wrong

 This video grab shows coup supporters cheering police officers in Libreville, Gabon, on Aug. 30, 2023. Gabon’s opposition leader accused the family of the recently ousted president of engineering his removal from power in order to retain their control in the oil-rich Central African nation. 

(AP Photo/Betiness Mackosso, File)

Ossa lost the Aug. 26 presidential election to Bongo by more than 30 percentage points. The vote was widely criticized by locals and the international community for irregularities and a lack of transparency.

“This is a family issue ... They think that Bongo is sick and fragile, so, another Bongo has to take over,” Ossa told the AP by phone. Ossa condemned the coup and called for the return of constitutional order and said the results from last month’s election must be recounted and that he should “be declared winner.”

Gabon’s coup is the eighth military takeover in Central and West Africa in three years and comes roughly a month after Niger’s democratically elected president was ousted. Unlike Niger and neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali, which have each had two coups apiece since 2020 and are being overrun by extremist violence, Gabon was seen as relatively stable.

However, Bongo’s family has been accused of endemic corruption and not letting the country’s oil wealth trickle down to the population of some 2 million people.

Bongo, 64, has served two terms since coming to power in 2009 after the death of his father, who ruled the country for 41 years, and there has been widespread discontent with his reign. Another group of mutinous soldiers attempted a coup in 2019 but was quickly overpowered.

The Bongo dynasty and those associated with it through family ties have permeated state institutions and key economic activities, and it will be extremely difficult to undercut their influence, said Maja Bovcon, senior Africa analyst at risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft.

“It is a question of whether the coup indeed ended the Bongo family rule or if we are simply witnessing another power struggle between different factions within the family,” she said.

Bongo hasn’t been heard from since a video message circulated hours after he was ousted Wednesday. In the video, he said he was being held in his residence in the capital, Libreville. He appealed to the international community and Gabonese citizens to “make noise.

Mark Pursey, the chief executive officer of BTP Advisers, a communications firm that helped the president with polling before the elections, said after the video came out that people’s phones in the residence where Bongo was being held were confiscated and that he hasn’t been able to communicate since then.

Pursey called allegations that the Bongos were behind the coup “nonsense.”

“It’s a ridiculous thing to say. Does anyone really believe that President Bongo would organize a coup against himself? I think Ossa in a few short sentences has demonstrated why he was not fit to hold the office of president himself,” he said.

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-bongo-familys-56-year-rule-over.html