Canada signs CAN$1.3B land settlement deal with Siksika First Nation

Compensation 'rights past wrongs' for breaking Crowfoot Treaty

Barry Ellsworth |03.06.2022


Canada signed a CAN$1.3 billion ($1.03 billion) land settlement deal with the Siksika First Nation on Thursday, one of the largest in the country's history.

"This settlement aims to right past wrongs dating back over a century when the Government of Canada broke its Blackfoot Treaty (Treaty 7) promise and wrongfully took almost half of the Siksika Nation’s reserve land, including some of the most productive agricultural and mineral-rich lands, to sell to settlers," said a statement from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office.

Trudeau and Chief Ouray Crowfoot of the Siksika Nation signed the deal during a ceremony at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park in Alberta province.

Crowfoot said it was important to understand that this settlement is not a gift from the Canadian government.

"Settling this case, which dates back to 1910, is long overdue for the People of Siksika Nation," he said in the statement. "I want to make that clear: Canada is not giving CAN$1.3 billion to Siksika.”

"Canada is righting a wrong committed over a century ago when Canada illegally took 115,000 acres of lands provided to Siksika along with other illegal acts."

Across the country, the government of Canada is attempting to correct colonial acts in which land was taken from Indigenous tribes.

“In order to move forward as a country, we will work together to address the harms of the past," Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Marc Miller said in the statement.

Trudeau said the funds will allow the Siksika First Nation to improve conditions for its people.

“This settlement will enable you to invest in your priorities like infrastructure, education and supports for elders and youth,” he told those gathered at the ceremony, as reported by the Canadian Press.

“It will create new economic, social and cultural opportunities,” he added.

Australia hails Queen Elizabeth as republican question returns

Australian PM Anthony Albanese lights the beacon for Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee in Australia on June 2, 2022. PHOTO: EPA-EFE


SYDNEY (REUTERS) - Australia's new prime minister joined more than 50 Commonwealth leaders in paying tribute to Queen Elizabeth amid celebrations of her 70 years on the throne but added that the relationship had matured, fuelling debate about becoming a republic.

Mr Anthony Albanese, whose centre-left Labor party ended nearly a decade of conservative government in a May 21 election, praised the Queen as "an enduring, inspiring, growing presence of calm, decency and strength" in the capital, Canberra, where he lit a beacon to mark the Platinum Jubilee.

But he noted that although Australians felt affection for the Queen, "the bond between our nations is no longer what it was at the dawn of her reign".


The relationship was "no longer parent and young upstart", Mr Albanese said at the low-key event late on Thursday (June 2). "We stand as equals; more importantly, we stand as friends".

The remarks build on a debate that has simmered for decades in Australia, which was colonised by the British in 1788 and remains a key Commonwealth member. The discussion was reignited on Tuesday when Mr Albanese named the country's first "assistant minister for the republic" in his ministry.

The minister, Mr Matt Thistlethwaite, later told media he would wait until Labor's second term to advocate for a republic but that as Queen Elizabeth approached "the end of her reign, Australians are naturally beginning to ask themselves, well, what comes next"?

The Australian Monarchist League accused the new government of misleading the country by promising no change to the system of government before the election.

"It's unheard of to have a minister of the Crown whose sole purpose is to remove the Crown," the Australian Financial Review quoted monarchist league chairman Philip Benwell as saying.

Mr Albanese has supported republicanism. In his first speech to Parliament in 1996, he lamented that Labor lost an election that year because his party had an "exciting vision of a diverse and just Australian republic for the 21st century".

In 1999, a referendum held by conservative then Prime Minister John Howard, a monarchist, went in favour of maintaining the status quo, 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

Salvadoran authorities are committing 'massive' human rights violations, with nearly 2% of the country detained, Amnesty alleges


By Merlin Delcid, Karol Suarez and Kara Fox, CNN
Updated, Thu June 2, 2022


Salvadoran soldiers guard the outskirts of San Salvador's La Esperanza prison in May.

(CNN)Salvadoran authorities have committed "massive" human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, torture, and ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

The report, released Thursday, found that since late March, nearly 2% of the country has been detained, with at least 18 people having died in state custody.

On March 27, the country was placed under a state of emergency to tackle an uptick in homicides, driven by gangs Barrio 18 and MS-13. The country's Legislative Assembly passed the measure at the request of President Nayib Bukele after an upsurge in violence left 62 dead in a single day. It has been extended twice.

More than 36,000 people have been detained since, according to a Tuesday statement from the Salvadoran government.

Salvadoran authorities are "committing widespread and flagrant violations of human rights and criminalizing people living in poverty," on the "pretext of punishing gangs," Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International said.

El Salvador proclaims state of emergency as homicides soar

"Instead of offering an effective response to the dramatic violence caused by gangs and the historic public security challenges facing the country, they are subjecting the Salvadoran people to a tragedy," she added.

In what appeared to be a pre-emptive response to the report, which had been distributed to the media on embargo on Wednesday night, Bukele said "these organizations should also worry about the victims of gangs."

"Hopefully, just as they care because we have captured criminals, they would care about our children, about our elderly, about our working people, about the innocent Salvadorans who have suffered at the hands of those same criminals," he said during a speech before the Legislative Assembly.

According to Amnesty, at least 1,190 children have been detained and held in youth facilities, with many of them charged with being a member of an illegal group of terrorist organizations.

In one case, two cousins, aged 14 and 15, were detained in April while playing outside their house, just outside of San Salvador. Their families told Amnesty that police accused them of "looking like criminals," and told their mothers that they would spend 30 years behind bars, according to the report. Since, the mothers have been unable to communicate with their children and are unclear about the trial that they will face -- with a public defender assigned to the case "barely" arguing on behalf of their clients, Amnesty reported.

A protestor demonstrates against the policies of El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele in San Salvador on June 1.

The state of emergency suspends constitutional guarantees, including freedom of association, and an alleged offender's right to state-sponsored legal defense in court. It also extends provisional detention from 72 hours to 15 days and allows authorities to intervene in telecommunications without needing a judge's authorization.

Those in detention face tough circumstances, according to Amnesty, which has documented cases of torture and ill-treatment inside detention centers.

Amnesty detailed cases of such alleged abuse in their report.

In one instance, a 16-year-old, who was arrested in April and held for 13 days for being an alleged member of an illegal group, was chained to a wall of the detention center, where he said he was beaten by police. Later, he was transferred to youth detention center, where he was beaten by gang members, who he said also threw a bag of urine at his head, it said.

Many of the detainees are being held without due process "purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele's government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state," according to Amnesty.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaks in front of the Salvadoran Armed Forces in San Salvador last July.

El Salvador has a long history of organized crime groups fighting against security forces and among themselves to control territory and drug routes across Central America. The small Central American country -- roughly the size of Massachusetts -- led the world for the number of homicides related to the size of its population for several years in a row in the 2010s.

Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," took office in June 2019 with broad support, after promising to stand tough against gang violence, which has racked El Salvador for decades.

In February 2020, Bukele sent armed troops into Congress as he demanded that lawmakers approve his plan to secure a $109 million loan to tackle gang violence. In June, he pulled El Salvador out of an anti-corruption accord backed by the United States.
And last September, El Salvador's highest court ruled the president can serve two consecutive terms in office, paving the way for Bukele to run for re-election in 2024.
Bukele's hard line remains popular among voters however, who have lauded an overall decrease in violence to his presidency.

CNN's Stefano Pozzebon contributed to this report.

Ecuadoran frogs Rocket and Harlequin taking on mining industry


By AFP
Published June 2, 2022

Biologist Andrea Teran holds a new species of rocket frog in her hands by the Velo de Novia waterfall in Junín, Ecuador, April 2022 - Copyright AFP Tolga Akmen

Paola LOPEZ

On the banks of a crystalline waterfall, biologist Andrea Teran lets out a yelp.

She holds in the palm of her hand one of two frog species at the center of a legal battle against Ecuador’s mining industry.

Teran, 37, is a specialist in the fragile existence of a creature called the Resistance Rocket Frog, which does not yet have a scientific name, and the Longnose Harlequin (Atelopus longirostris), which was believed extinct for 30 years.

The discovery several years ago of these two tiny frogs measuring no more than four centimeters has become the central argument in opposition to a proposed nearly 5,000 hectare mining project in a native forest in Junin, Imbabura province, around three and a half hours north of Quito.

The Longnose Harlequin reappeared in 2016.

“It was a frog that came back from the dead,” said an emotional Teran, whom AFP accompanied on an expedition in this forest area following a two-hour walk.

“If the water is polluted (by mining) the last populations of this frog will be lost,” said the biologist from the Jambatu Center dedicated to the study and conservation of amphibians.

The Longnose Harlequin is extinct according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list.

But scientists rediscovered traces of life in this forest where the mineral exploitation license was granted to Ecuador’s Enami and Chile’s Codelco. They are due to begin in 2024 to extract 210,000 tons of copper a year.

In Ecuador, which launched a massive mining exploitation operation in 2019, there are at least 12 projects at advanced stages to mine reserves of 43.7 million ounces of gold, 46 billion pounds of copper and 183 million ounces of silver, according to the Spurrier Group consultancy.

But the 2019 discovery of a new species of rock frog has only intensified the desire to protect its forest habitat.



– Last hope –



In 2020, Teran launched a legal battle to prevent the mining project from going ahead.

Although she succeeded in the first instance, she then lost on appeal.

But the mining concession has also been challenged by a collective of Junin residents pointing to errors in the environmental impact studies, such as the lack of a protection plan for the two frog species.

“There are so many mistakes. They are violating the rights of nature, and on top of that the documents were never correctly communicated to the community and there was no environmental consultation,” the file’s lawyer Mario Moncayo told AFP.

But a judge rejected the claim of oversights.

Defenders of these two frogs can still appeal, which is perhaps their last hope of halting the mining project.

Contacted by AFP, both the government and the mining companies refused to comment.



– No solutions –



When the Jambatu Center scientists came across the new rocket frog species they initially mistook it for one called the Confusing Rocket Frog (Ectopoglossus confusus).

However, an anatomical difference in its tongue was found, and genetic studies allowed experts to identify it as a completely new Ectopoglossus species that they named “resistance.”

“It lives in unique conditions, with the sound of the waterfall we don’t know how it communicates, we don’t know anything about its reproductive biology,” said Teran.

Their skin contains great medicinal potential, and renders them extremely sensitive to environmental changes.

They are thus considered bioindicators, meaning that if the ecosystem is affected, they could disappear.

Protection of nature is enshrined in the constitution of Ecuador, which has 650 known species of frogs, 60 percent of which are in danger of extinction.

But the South American country derives six percent of its GDP from its oil and mining industries, according to the Central Bank.

“We are in a mega-diverse region and the decisions taken have to be mega-responsible,” said Teran.

It’s an issue that divides opinion in Junin.

“If authorities value the species that live here then they need to halt” the mining project, said farmer Hugo Ramirez, 40.

But for carpenter Pedro Vallejos, 63, environmentalists are offering no solutions to end poverty.

“There’s no employment in the countryside, there are no alternatives,” he said.

Read more: https://www.digitaljournal.com/world/ecuadoran-frogs-rocket-and-harlequin-taking-on-mining-industry/article#ixzz7V72bKpDj

Immersed in political crisis, Peru neglects Amazon's destruction, report says

FABIANO MAISONNAVE
Thu, June 2, 2022

This 2016 photo shows the deforestation of what was once pristine rainforest in Peru's Madre de Dios region. (Rodrigo Abd / Associated Press)

Peru has descended into one of the worst political crises in its history and protection of its Amazon rainforest is failing, according to a report published Thursday. Peru is home to the second-largest portion of the Amazon rainforest after Brazil. The country had pledged to stop deforestation by 2021.

The South American country has been immersed in political turbulence since 2016. Corruption scandals and disputes between the executive and legislative branches of government have led to intense turnover — four presidents in five years. Peru’s current president, leftist outsider Pedro Castillo, has already survived two impeachment attempts since he took office last July.

The Peruvian Amazon is massive — larger than Ukraine, some 168 million acres. It holds the headwaters of the Amazon river as well as Manú National Park, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world. It's a transition zone between the Andes mountains and the rainforest lowlands, rich in microclimates and ecology.

But the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), an initiative of the nonprofit Amazon Conservation Assn., reports that deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon has hit six historical highs in the last 10 years. The analysis is based on data from the University of Maryland, which has kept records since 2002.

The worst year ever was 2020, when Peru lost around 420,000 acres of Amazon rainforest. Last year, that number declined but still ranked as the sixth highest on record. Peruvian official data, which only goes through 2020, agree.

Corrupt actors who benefit from environmental crime, together with the political crisis, have resulted in a lack of government ability to fight environmental crime, the report said. "What’s more, the Peruvian government continues to prioritize economic development over the protection of the Amazon rainforest.”

The Igarapé Institute commissioned the report from InSight Crime, a nonprofit organization focused on investigating crime in Latin America.

As in Brazil’s Amazon, cattle ranching and agriculture are the main drivers of deforestation. Agribusiness companies and poor migrants from other parts of Peru seize land illegally. Other illegal activities that harm the forest are gold mining, logging and coca plantations.

“Agriculture is now firmly established" as the leading driver of deforestation, concentrated in the central and southern Peruvian Amazon, said MAAP Director Matt Finer. “This includes both widespread small-scale agriculture as well recent large-scale activities from new Mennonite colonies.”

The report, titled "The Roots of Environmental Crime in the Peruvian Amazon," identifies three actors behind deforestation: big businesses, such as palm oil companies; entrepreneurial criminal networks, which profit from the trade in timber, land or drugs; and cheap labor — poorly paid workers who cut down trees and plant coca crops.

The products of these illegal activities end up in other parts of the world. Most of the gold exports go to Switzerland, the United States, India and Canada. Peru's domestic market absorbs most of the timber; what is exported goes mainly to China. Around 28% of Peru’s gold production is illegal, according to the InsightCrime investigation, which also estimates that most timber extraction is done without permits.

“The political crisis has distracted us a lot from environmental problems," said former Minister of Environment Manuel Pulgar-Vidal in an interview with the Associated Press in Rio de Janeiro, on the sidelines of a meeting on climate change hosted by the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine have magnified these problems, he said.

The current government also promotes activities like illegal mining and logging, he said. The former minister tied this to the unprosecuted deaths of numerous environmental advocates.

Contacted Monday by phone and email, Peru's Ministry of Environment didn’t respond to requests for comment about the current situation in the Amazon.

The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and an enormous carbon sink. There is widespread concern that its destruction will not only release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, further complicating hopes of slowing down climate change, but also push it past a tipping point, after which much of the forest will begin an irreversible process of degradation into tropical savannah.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

The great Mona Lisa cake mystery

The famous painting was attacked with cake. But why?

The portrait of Lisa Gherardini | Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images

BY PAUL DALLISON
June 3, 2022 4:03 am

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.

Last summer, your author went to Paris (la-di-da, look at the Liberal Elite and their fancy ways). One morning, I woke up and went to Stohrer — the oldest patisserie in the city — for pastries and an éclair (OK, two éclairs and a tarte aux pommes. Back off, calorie police!) and then it was a brisk 10-minute walk to the Louvre (because I was on holiday and that’s what people on holiday in Paris do).

At no point did I consider taking one of my delicious food items and smearing it all over a painting, let alone probably the most famous painting in the world.

Yet this week, a man disguised himself as an old woman in a wheelchair and threw a piece of cake at the Mona Lisa.

I have questions.

The Louvre, and indeed all other museums — including the museum of David Hasselhoff paraphernalia in the basement of a Berlin hostel, which features a giant mural of the man himself that used to feature fake (hopefully) chest hair that visitors could stroke but which was removed because, in the words of a hostel worker, the fuzz “got really oily and gross very quickly. People just couldn’t resist touching it!” — let people of all ages and genders in, so why dress as an old woman? Maybe old women get a special ticket at major tourist attractions that allows them to bring in cake.

Plus, the painting is protected by a glass screen, so it was less of a protest against artists not focusing enough on saving the planet and more of a protest against the glass-making industry?

Perhaps the cake-thrower was a British Conservtive MP trying to cause a distraction from Boris Johnson’s woes in the wake of the Partygate scandal. Remember, earlier this year Conor Burns, a long-standing ally of the prime minister, said Johnson was “ambushed with a cake” at one of the many lockdown-breaking parties he attended.

Or maybe it was another enemy of German leftist MP Sahra Wagenknecht, who had a chocolate cake smashed into her face in 2016 because of her support for a limit on the number of migrants being let in.

The group behind the German cake attack was the “Anti-Fascist Initiative ‘Cake for Misanthropists'” — maybe they’ve made a rather messy return.

AUSTRALIA

Food delivery cyclist injuries going under-reported, Sydney study finds


Delivery riders 13 times more likely than recreational cyclists to present to emergency department between 8pm and midnight

Over a quarter of the food delivery riders in Australia working as independent

 contractors for multinational giants are not eligible for Medicare. 

Photograph: Daniel Pockett/AAP


Australian Associated Press

Fri 3 Jun 2022 

Delivery riders with companies such as Uber Eats or Doordash are more likely to be injured on the job and end up at the emergency department than previously reported, a new study has found.

A pilot study in one Sydney hospital emergency department between May 2019 and April 2020 identified at least 43 cycling-related injuries among commercial riders.

SafeWork NSW had reported 37 pedal cycling injuries associated with commercial delivery across the state during the same period.

The study, published in the biomedical journal Pilot and Feasibility Studies, was conducted by researchers at Macquarie University and St Vincent’s hospital.


Australia's delivery deaths: the riders who never made it and the families left behind

“SafeWork NSW uses police and workers’ compensation records to identify injuries to food delivery riders, but our research shows that this data is substantially lower than the real number of cycling-related injuries,” says Macquarie University’s Dr Mitchell Sarkies.

Medical records were analysed for all 386 adults treated for cycling-related injuries at St Vincent’s emergency department over about a year.

Some 43 (12%) were commercial delivery cyclists and 153 (42%) were non-commercial cyclists, while the rest were unidentified.

Sarkies said food delivery riders were 13 times more likely than recreational riders to present to the emergency department between 8pm and midnight than the early hours of the morning.

He said the data suggests these injuries occurred during the busiest evening meal delivery times.

Delivery cyclists were more likely to be male, younger and 11 times more likely to have a primary language other than English.

Over a quarter of the riders (26%) working as independent contractors for multinational giants were not eligible for Medicare, confirming previous claims that “most commercial delivery cyclists are temporary migrants in Australia”.

In a scathing parliamentary report into the gig economy released in April, chair Daniel Mookhey said the precarious job “puts workers in very real danger of injury, abuse and harassment”.

Under Australian labour laws, being an independent contractor means not being entitled to minimum wage, sick leave and annual leave.

At least five food delivery riders in NSW, all from migrant backgrounds, were killed in the space of two months in late 2020 in road accidents while on the job.

Their deaths prompted the establishment of a state government taskforce last year.

'Nein danke': Elon Musk's office ultimatum faces pushback in Germany

JUNE 02, 2022

Model Y cars are pictured during the opening ceremony of the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, on March 22, 2022.

BERLIN - Elon Musk’s demand that Tesla staff stop "phoning it in" and get back to the office got short shrift from Germany’s largest trade union on Thursday (June 2).

The Tesla chief executive waded into the future of work debate by telling staff at the electric carmaker that they must return to the office for at least 40 hours a week or leave the company, according to an email seen by Reuters.More from AsiaOneRead the condensed version of this story, and other top stories with NewsLite.

The IG Metall union in Berlin-Brandenburg-Sachsen, where Tesla's plant is located, said it would support any employee who opposed Musk’s ultimatum. Tesla employs around 4,000 people in Germany and plans to expand the workforce to 12,000.


"Whoever does not agree with such one-sided demands and wants to stand against them has the power of unions behind them in Germany, as per law," Birgit Dietze, the district leader for IG Metall in Berlin-Brandenburg-Sachsen, said.

Employees at Tesla's plant in Gruenheide, Germany, elected 19 people to its first workers' council in Feb, setting the plant apart from others run by the carmaker in the United States and elsewhere without union representation, which Musk has fiercely resisted.

Some of the workers are part of IG Metall which represents workers across automotive companies and other industrial sectors

In Germany there are currently no laws enshrining a right to work from home but the labour ministry is working on policies that would increase flexibility for workers. Many large employers, including automakers, have already embraced hybrid working models in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic which forced companies to send staff home to work.

Elon Musk attends the opening ceremony of the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, on March 22, 2022.
PHOTO: Reuters

"We have a fundamentally different view on creating an attractive working environment, and stand for empowerment and personal responsibility in our teams to balance the ratio of mobile and in-person work," said Gunnar Kilian, Volkswagen board member responsible for human resources.


Read AlsoTesla Model Y in Canada suffers power failure before going up in flames


Luxury carmakers BMW and Mercedes-Benz echoed that view when asked about Musk's ultimatum.

"Hybrid working is the working model of the future... different forms are possible, from complete presence to predominantly remote working," a Mercedes-Benz spokesperson said.

Musk, who has helped shift the traditional car sector to an all-electric future making himself the world’s richest man in the process, had blunt words for companies that didn’t require staff to be back in the office full-time.

"There are of course companies that don't require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It's been a while," Musk wrote in the email.

(This story corrects IG Metall district name in paras three and four from 'German state of Brandenburg Sachsen' to 'Berlin-Brandenburg-Sachsen')

Source: Reuters

Myanmar Violence: UN Estimates Displacement Of More Than 1 Million People

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says in a report that an already critical situation is being exacerbated by ongoing fighting between the military government and its opponents and the increasing prices of essential commodities.

Violence erupts on roads of Myanmar AP

 Latest Iss

UPDATED: 03 JUN 2022 7:32 AM


The United Nations' humanitarian relief agency says the number of people displaced within strife-torn Myanmar has for the first time exceeded 1 million, with well over half the total losing their homes after a military takeover last year.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says in a report that an already critical situation is being exacerbated by ongoing fighting between the military government and its opponents, the increasing prices of essential commodities, and the coming of monsoon season, while funding for its relief efforts is severely inadequate. Its report covers the situation up to May 26.

The military has hindered or denied independent access to areas not under its control, hampering aid efforts.

US Terms Repression Of Muslim Rohingya Population In Myanmar A 'Genocide'


US Mulls Declaring Rohingya Repression In Myanmar A 'Genocide'


Myanmar's army in February last year seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, triggering widespread peaceful protests. When those were put down with lethal force by the army and police, nonviolent opposition turned into armed resistance, and the country slipped into what some UN experts characterize as a civil war.

OCHA says that fighting has recently escalated.

“The impact on civilians is worsening daily with frequent indiscriminate attacks and incidents involving explosive hazards, including landmines and explosive remnants of war," the report says.

It says that more than 694,300 people have become displaced from their homes since the army takeover, with thousands being uprooted a second or third time, and an estimated 346,000 people were displaced by fighting before last year's takeover — mostly in frontier regions populated by ethnic minority groups who have been struggling for greater autonomy for decades.

The report also says about 40,200 people have fled to neighboring countries since the takeover and more than 12,700 “civilian properties,” including houses, churches, monasteries and schools are estimated to have been destroyed.

As of the end of the first quarter of this year, humanitarian assistance reached 2.6 million people in Myanmar, or 41% of the 6.2 million people targeted, OCHA says. The country's total population is over 55 million.

But it warns this year's Myanmar Humanitarian Response Plan is only 10% funded so far, falling short by $740 million.

An official of the military government's Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement said Wednesday at a news conference in Myanmar's capital Naypyitaw that the government distributed humanitarian aid to more than 130,000 displaced people from May 2021 through May 27 this year.

The official, whose testimony was broadcast but who was not identified by name, said 1,255 houses and five religious buildings were burned or destroyed in fighting between the army and local resistance militias, and consequently received government aid for rebuilding.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said last month that the number of people worldwide forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution has crossed the milestone of 100 million for the first time on record. That's more than 1% of the global population and comprises refugees and asylum-seekers as well as people displaced inside their own countries by conflict.

Violence and conflicts in countries including Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo had driven the total to almost 90 million by the end of last year. The war in Ukraine pushed the number past the 100 million mark.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an independent Geneva-based non-governmental organization, said 53.2 million people were displaced within their countries as a result of conflict and violence as of Dec. 31.

Mystery Surrounds How Munitions Imported for Indonesia's Civilian Spies Were Used in Attacks on Villages

By Reuters
June 2, 2022, 


FILE PHOTO: A local resident holds an unexploded mortar following the October aerial attacks in Kiwirok, Pegunungan Bintang regency, Papua, Indonesia, October 18, 2021. Courtesy of West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB)

/Handout via REUTERSREUTERS

Tom Allard and Stanley Widianto
Publishing date:Jun 02, 2022 •

JAKARTA — Almost 2,500 mortar shells from Serbia bought for Indonesia’s spy agency last year were converted to be air-dropped, and some were used in attacks on eight villages in Papua, according to a report from an arms monitoring group and photos provided to Reuters.

The alleged procurement for the state intelligence agency, known as BIN, was not disclosed to the parliamentary oversight committee that approves its budget, three members told Reuters.

The London-based monitoring group, Conflict Armament Research (CAR), said the mortar rounds were manufactured by Serbia’s state-owned arms-maker Krusik and later modified to be dropped from the air rather than fired from a mortar tube. It said the arms sent to BIN also included 3,000 electronic initiators and three timing devices typically used to detonate explosives.

The 81mm mortar rounds were used in attacks in October on villages in Papua, an Indonesian province where a decades-long campaign by armed separatists has accelerated in recent years, according to CAR, an eyewitness, and human rights investigators working on behalf of several church groups.

Reuters was not able to independently confirm certain aspects of the CAR report, including whether BIN had received the shipment. Reuters also could not establish who authorized the purchase of the munitions or who used them in Papua.

BIN and the Ministry of Defence did not respond to requests for comment about the purchase or use of the mortar shells.

The parliamentary oversight committee is holding a closed hearing next week with BIN, and the weapons purchase will be discussed, one committee member said.

Tubagus Hasanuddin, a former general who also sits on the parliamentary committee that oversees BIN, said that the intelligence agency can acquire small arms for its agents’ self defense but that any military-grade weapons “must be for education or training purposes and not for combat.”

“We need to conduct a hearing first with BIN and check the reason. Afterwards we will check the legality,” he said.

No one was killed, although homes and several churches burned down, according to one witness and investigators working for eight human rights and church groups to document the attacks.

“It’s clear cut that these mortars are offensive weapons that were used in civilian areas,” said Jim Elmslie, convenor of the West Papua Project at the University of Wollongong, who submitted CAR’s report to the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in April. “This is a breach of humanitarian law.”

BIN is a civilian agency under the direct authority of Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi. The president’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the purchase or use of the weapons.

A spokesman for Indonesia’s military, Col. Wieng Pranoto, told Reuters its forces did not drop the munitions on the villages. He declined to say whether BIN deployed the munitions.

Indonesian law requires the military, police and other government agencies to seek permission from the Ministry of Defence to buy arms, and requires them to use materiel produced by the domestic defense industry if it is available. The country’s state-owned arms-maker PT Pindad produces mortar rounds, and they are part of the armed forces’ arsenal.

A defense ministry source familiar with the procurement system said the ministry never approved the purchase or any regulation that would allow BIN to acquire the munitions.

“It raises questions of why BIN would want them,” this person said.

Another member of the parliamentary committee that oversees BIN said he was personally investigating the findings in CAR’s report to determine whether there was any wrongdoing. He said he had approached BIN and PT Pindad for an explanation but “found a lot of giant walls.”

“There must be something that is very, very sensitive about it,” he told Reuters.

PT Pindad’s spokesperson and chief executive’s office did not answer detailed questions from Reuters about how the mortar rounds were procured or who used them.

One of the company’s commissioners, Alexandra Wuhan, declined to discuss specifics of the purchase, but said: “Pindad is obliged and subjected to Indonesia’s laws, rules and regulations regarding military and civilian arms procurements, likewise BIN as the end user. Pindad cannot be held responsible for the when and where the arms are used by Indonesian authorities. We do not have such control.”

ARMS PURCHASE

CAR is a Europe-based arms monitor whose clients have included the European Union, the United Nations, and the U.S. and British governments.

The organization analyzed photos of ordnance used in the attacks in Papua and formally requested information on the shells from the Serbian government via the country’s mission at the United Nations in New York on Nov. 26.

Serbia’s UN ambassador, Nemanja Stevanovic, provided a response on Dec. 31 in a “note verbale,” a formal diplomatic communique. James Bevan, CAR’s executive director, said the information in that communique formed the basis of the weapons tracking group’s report.

CAR declined to share Serbia’s response, citing protocols. Stevanovic, and Serbia’s UN Mission, did not respond to a Reuters request to share the note verbale.

THE TRANSFER

The report said Serbia confirmed Krusic made the M-72 high-explosive mortar rounds, which were sold to Serbian arms supplier Zenitprom DOO in February 2021 along with the 3,000 electronic initiators and timing devices. The munitions were then exported by Zenitprom DOO to PT Pindad for BIN, the group says.

On Oct. 6, 2020, at the beginning of the procurement process, BIN provided Serbian authorities with end-user certificate No. R-540/X/2020, confirming that they would be the exclusive users of the items in the consignment and that the munitions would not be transferred or sold to other parties without the permission of the Serbian authorities, the report said. No request to transfer the weapons was made before the Papua attack, the Serbian government told CAR, according to the report.

In its report, CAR said Serbia confirmed the lot numbers on the shells used in Papua matched those of the ones purchased by BIN.

Some details of the report that Reuters was not able to independently confirm include the mortar shells’ matching lot numbers, the transfer of the munitions consignment to BIN or whether BIN complied with the end-user certificate. Reuters was unable to determine who had modified the mortar rounds or why BIN had purchased the timers and igniters.

CAR said BIN had provided the Serbian government with a “delivery verification certification,” although Reuters could not independently confirm the weapons had arrived in BIN’s hands.

An official at the arms-control section of Serbia’s Ministry of Trade in Belgrade and the country’s embassy in Jakarta did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. Krusik and Zenitprom DOO did not respond to requests for comment.

VILLAGE ATTACKS

An independence rebellion has simmered in resource-rich Papua since 1969, when a United Nations-supervised vote involving only about 1,025 people led to the former Dutch colony becoming part of Indonesia.

The security situation in Papua has “dramatically deteriorated” since April 2021, when separatists killed the head of BIN’s Papua office in an ambush, according to a statement by three U.N. special rapporteurs in March. Between April and November last year, they said there were “shocking abuses” by the government. The Indonesian government rejected their statement.

Starting on Oct. 10, 2021, helicopters and drones fired into and dropped munitions on eight villages in the Kiwirok district for several days, according to the eyewitness interviewed by Reuters, human rights investigators and several local church leaders.

“They dropped bombs with drones,” Pastor Yahya Uopmabin told Reuters, saying he watched the assault from nearby mountains, where many residents had fled. “Places of worship, houses of residents were burning.”

Eneko Bahabol, a Papuan investigator working for a consortium of eight human rights and church groups, said 32 mortar rounds were dropped, including five that didn’t detonate. Reuters has seen photos of the unexploded rounds.

The photos from CAR show the mortar shells carry the markings of the Serbian state-owned arms-maker. Samuel Paunila, head of the ammunition management advisory team at the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, confirmed the mortar rounds had Krusic markings.

 (Reporting by Tom Allard and Stanley Widianto. Additional reporting by Michelle Nicholls in New York and Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade. Editing by Gerry Doyle)