IMPERIALIST BRAIN DRAIN
Nigeria: 9,000 Doctors Moved to UK, U.S., Canada in 2 Years - NMA


Marcelo Leal/Unsplash
(File photo).

4 APRIL 2022
Vanguard (Lagos)

By Joseph Erunke, Abuja

Over 9,000 medical doctors of Nigerian origin left the shores of the country in search of greener pastures in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Canada in two years, the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, has said.

The emigration of the medical experts which the NMA said happened between 2016 and 2018, negatively impacted the nation's health care system that only 4.7% of specialists were left to take care of Nigerians' health issues.

NMA President, Professor Innocent Ujah, speaking in Abuja, lamented the high emigration rate of doctors of Nigerian extraction to foreign nations.

Ujah who spoke at the NMA's maiden annual lecture with a theme: "Brain Drain and Medical Tourism: The Twin Evil in Nigeria's Health System", also said over $1 billion was being spent yearly by Nigerians on medical tourism.

Regretting that the development was negatively impacting the nation's health system, Prof. Ujah, who is also the Vice-Chancellor of Federal University of Medical Science, Otukpo, said Africa, including Nigeria, was encountering a health workforce crisis.

Noting that human resources for health, which according to him, represented "one of the six pillars of a strong and efficient health system", was critical to the improvement the health system, the professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said a huge amount Nigerians were injecting into medical tourism was weakening Nigeria's economy.

The impact of the development on the economy, he said was a reduction of funding and investment in the health sector, widening infrastructural deficits and the growing distrust in the Nigerian health system by the Nigerian public.

"According to the World Health Organization (WHO), sub-Saharan Africa has about 3 per cent of the world's health workers while it accounts for 24 per cent of the global burden of disease. Nigeria has a doctor-to-population ratio of about 1: 4000-5000 which falls far short of the WHO recommended doctor-to-population ratio of 1:600. Nigeria is still grappling with disturbingly poor health indices," he said.

According to him, "The Nigerian health sector today groans under the devastating impact of huge human capital flight which now manifests as brain drain."

The theme of the lecture, he noted, was apt, adding, "The twin monster of brain drain and medical tourism seems to have a bi-directional relationship, which implies that one will lead to the other and vice-versa."

"It is because of the devastating consequences of this twin evil on the health system efficiency and effectiveness and the urgent need for solutions and action that inspired the theme for this maiden NMA Annual Lecture tagged, Brain Drain and Medical Tourism: The Twin evil in Nigeria's Health System.

"The burning desire of NMA to proactively confront the many challenges of healthcare delivery in Nigeria must be sustained using evidence-based constructive engagement, high-level advocacy and understanding to achieve quality healthcare for our people so as to reduce the unacceptably high morbidity and mortality.

"This national discourse on brain drain and medical tourism is, therefore, inevitable at this time and it is only right, just and appropriate for Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) to take the lead, being the leader of the health team", he further said.

Vanguard News Nigeria

Ukraine shockwaves reverberate in war-weary Syria

Russia is the common thread in Syria and Ukraine; Syrians feel ‘abandoned by the world;' Turkey seizes an opening; UN process stymied; and US stresses ‘accountability.'

Protesters raise a giant flag of the Syrian rebels atop a building during a demonstration against Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the city of Binnish in Syria's northwestern rebel-held Idlib province. - OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images

Week in Review
@AlMonitor

April 8, 2022


The Russia-Ukraine-Syria connections

The Russian attack on Ukraine last month has diverted the international community’s already fading attention from the now 11-year civil war in Syria.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, addressing the Security Council on March 23, said that Syrians feel "abandoned by the world" after a decade of war.

Russia is the primary backer of the Syrian government. Moscow’s military intervention in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has secured Assad’s hold on power in a fragile and divided country.

Israel coordinates its Syria policy, including intermittent attacks on Iran and Iranian-backed armed groups, with Russia.

With Russia fully engaged with the war in Ukraine, Turkey, and perhaps others, may sense an opening to press their agendas in Syria.

UN: Syria destruction ‘has few equals’ in modern history

On March 11, Guterres reminded the Security Council that "the destruction that Syrians have endured is so extensive and deadly that it has few equals in modern history. … There must be no impunity."

"Hundreds of thousands have been killed, more than half of the pre-war population – somewhere in the order of 22 million - have been displaced," said Paulo Pinheiro, Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, on March 9. "More than 100,000 are missing or forcibly disappeared. Syria’s cities and infrastructure have been destroyed. Today the poverty rate in Syria is an unprecedented 90%; 14.6 million people in Syria depend on humanitarian aid.”

"Nearly 5 million children have been born in Syria since 2011," said UNICEF Syria Representative, Bo Viktor Nylund said in March. "They have known nothing but war and conflict. In many parts of Syria, they continue to live in fear of violence, landmines, and explosive remnants of war."

Syria ranks among the 10 most food-insecure countries globally, with “a staggering 12 million people considered to be food insecure,” Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator Joyce Msuya reported to the Council, while noting that the country’s economy is “spiraling further downward.”

Sultan Al-Kanj reports on the impact of higher food and fuel costs on Syrians in Idlib.

UN envoy: Parties ‘substantively far apart’ on flagging political process

The only way to break that deadlock, Guterres said, is through a credible political process that forges a sustainable peace and lets the voices of all Syrians be heard.

But the political process outlined in UN Security 2254 (2015) has been so delayed, and obstructed, that it seems out of time and place with Syria today. And that was before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one of the key players in the Syrian drama.

UN Syria Envoy Geir Pedersen told the Security Council in February that he is "very concerned that the constructive international diplomacy required to push this may prove more difficult than it already was, against the backdrop of the military operations in Ukraine."

The political negotiations are mostly dominated by Moscow, and by extension Damascus, with no countervailing US or Western engagement to give Pedersen the leverage needed to press ahead with his "step-for-step" approach to negotiations.

"The parties' positions are substantively far apart, and narrowing their differences will inevitably be an incremental process," Pedersen told the Security Council.

Turkey: ‘A new beginning’ in Syria?

For at least one player in Syria — Turkey — the Ukraine war may present an opportunity. Russia’s distraction in Ukraine could be a chance for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to address his Syrian quagmire, which has been a drain on Turkey’s flagging economy, made worse by the Ukraine war (see the report by Mustafa Sonmez here).

Turkey currently occupies, via its military and proxy Syrian forces, approximately 3,400 square miles in northern Syria. Turkey also hosts close to 3.5 million Syrian refugees.

Erdogan has proffered a dialogue with Assad, while escalating actions in Syria to intimidate Kurdish-controlled areas and strengthening Turkish bases, as Fehim Tastekin reports.

Turkey considers the Kurdish parties aligned with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as terrorists, linked to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Meanwhile, Turkey has sought to facilitate coordination by the former al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS, and ‘Liberation of the Levant’), which controls most of the northwest province of Idlib, with Turkish-backed Syrian factions, as Khaled Al-Khateb reports from Aleppo, as HTS seeks to eliminate or absorb more radical rival groups.

Moscow may have told Damascus to hold off on any major offensive against Idlib, according to diplomatic sources, although there have been a steady stream of Syrian government attacks in the province, adds Khateb.

Also seizing the initiative in Syria is HTS leader Abu Mohamed al-Golani, who has been making the rounds seeking to expand his popular support, as Sultan Al-Kanj reports.

Meanwhile, Turkey has warmed ties with the US, establishing a new "strategic mechanism" to facilitate coordination on trade, human rights, and security, including Ukraine and Syria, as Nazlan Ertan reports.

And Erdogan’s global diplomatic credibility has been bolstered in the West by his efforts to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, writes Semih Idiz.

US: ‘Pressing for accountability’?

Under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, "It is the policy of the United States that diplomatic and coercive economic means should be utilized to compel the government of Bashar al-Assad to halt its murderous attacks on the Syrian people and to support a transition to a government in Syria that respects the rule of law, human rights, and peaceful co-existence with its neighbors."

The Biden administration’s review of Syria policy, completed in December 2021, gives priority to the US-led campaign against ISIS; supporting local ceasefires and humanitarian access throughout Syria (which requires coordination with Russia); "pressing for accountability and respect for international law while promoting human rights and nonproliferation, including through the imposition of targeted sanctions; and supporting a political process led by the Syrian people, as envisioned in" UNSCR 2254.

Dropped, or deprioritized, following the Biden review, is the Trump administration’s objective of seeking the withdrawal of Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and IRGC-backed forces in Syria.

Four US soldiers received medical attention for “minor injuries” and possible brain trauma following a rocket attack on a US-led coalition base in eastern Syria, likely attributed to Iran-backed paramilitary groups, the first such attack since January, Jared Szuba reports. The US has approximately 900 troops in Syria as part of its Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led ‘D-ISIS’ mission in Syria and Iraq.

The Biden administration continues to reject initiatives by Arab states to normalize relations with Assad, who made an official visit to the UAE in March. But these efforts are nonetheless gaining traction, if slowly, as George Mikhail reports from Cairo.

The chairs and ranking members of the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees wrote a letter to US President Joe Biden in January calling for "consequences for any nation that seeks to rehabilitate the Assad regime and to ensure all countries understand that normalization or Assad’s return to the Arab League are unacceptable."

Mostly absent from the UN diplomacy on Syria, the US has instead focused on keeping open the remaining UN humanitarian corridor at the Bab Al Hawa crossing. UNSC Res 2585 (2021) expires in July, and Russia could veto. Diplomatic sources indicate, however, that most aid through the crossing is in any case facilitated by one the ground NGOs, and that Turkey controls a number of alternative border crossings into Syria.

Elizabeth Hagedorn, on this week’s On the Middle East podcast, suggests that the focus on alleged Russian atrocities in the Ukraine war could spark similar calls for accountability for war crimes in Syria.

Tunisia's future darkens with dissolution of parliament

Tunisia's president has taken a darker turn after unilaterally dissolving parliament and threatening to put elected deputies on trial.

A picture shows the Tunisian parliament in Tunis on March 31, 2022. Tunisia's President Kais Saied yesterday dissolved the country's parliament and said MPs would be prosecuted, extending an eight-month power grab and intensifying the country's political crisis. - FETHI BELAID/AFP via Getty Images

Stephen Quillen
@stephen_quillen

April 5, 2022

TUNIS, Tunisia — Tunisian President Kais Saied’s orders to dissolve parliament and investigate its members for “conspiracy” have pushed the country into deeper political turmoil and raised fears of a budding autocracy.

What lies ahead for the country’s political system — and whether it will restore its democratic institutions or continue on a path toward one-man rule — will likely hinge on the ability of civil society and other political players to mediate a resolution, as well as Saied’s ability to maintain public support amid a stumbling economy, analysts say.

The Tunisian president issued a decree to formally dissolve the legislative body, which has been suspended since July after its members voted to revoke “exceptional powers” the president gave himself eight months ago. Saied also threatened judicial action against the deputies, accusing them of “conspiracy against the state” by holding an “illegal” meeting.

The Tunisian Constitution gives Saied no mandate to issue such a decree and explicitly states that parliament cannot be dissolved if the president holds “exceptional powers.”

However, Saied justified the decision under a separate constitutional article, which says the president is responsible for guaranteeing the state’s “independence and continuity” and ensuring “respect for the constitution."

“We must protect the state from division. … We will not allow the abusers to continue their aggression against the state,” Saied said in an address to the Tunisian people.

Tunisia’s crisis escalated April 1 when the anti-terror brigade summoned at least seven parliament members, including parliament speaker Rached Ghannouchi, for investigation, a move the International Court of Justice called a “travesty.”

More than 20 additional parliament members have received subpoenas, according to Ghannouchi, and the justice minister has called for even more to be investigated.

“If it was not clear already, Kais Saied’s moves to put half of the parliament on trial for treason and conspiracy should reveal to all his authoritarian ambitions,” Sharan Grewal, a professor at the College of William & Mary who focuses on the Middle East and North Africa politics, told Al-Monitor. “He has never been committed to the constitution.”

Tunisia analysts and watchdogs said the developments are putting the country’s young democracy in further peril, eight months after the president stunned the political class by ousting the government, suspending parliament and giving himself overarching powers.

“Tunisia has clearly taken an authoritarian turn, and Saied’s recent moves only deepen these concerns,” Lamine Benghazi, programs coordinator of Lawyers Without Borders, told Al-Monitor.

Saied “has consistently exhibited a tendency toward executive aggrandizement, increasing his powers in violation of the constitution,” added Grewal.

Rights groups previously warned of a rise in repression of journalists and activists, a hallmark of the regime of longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

"A police and security mentality is running the state. … Tunisia has become a country that suppresses freedoms,” Yassine Jelassi, head of the Tunisian National Journalists' Union, said at a press conference in January.

Saied, a political outsider who won in a landslide election victory in 2019 on promises of curbing corruption, has enjoyed strong public backing even while consolidating his power. In July, many Tunisians applauded his decision to freeze the widely unpopular parliament, which was often mired in embarrassing scandals and brawls and was too gridlocked to pass legislation. Since then, parliament has remained on the sidelines, while Saied has used his expansive powers to reshape the government and chart a new political vision by attempting to overhaul the 2014 Tunisian Constitution.

After months of “keeping a low profile,” Tunisia’s parliament finally attempted to reclaim its place on the political scene, Saida Ounissi, a deputy with the moderate Islamist Ennahda party who attended Wednesday’s online plenary session, told Al-Monitor.

“We tried to find other ways to reach out to the president … but after his refusal to engage in dialogue with anyone, it was important for parliament to regain its role in helping to manage the crisis,” said Ounissi.

The chamber’s plenary session, held via video conference, had been planned behind the scenes for more than a month and drew deputies from across the political spectrum in a rare show of unity from the disparate forces. One-hundred and sixteen out of 120 participating parliament members voted to repeal Saied’s “exceptional measures” in a strong public rebuke of the president’s eight-month rule by fiat.

“We finally found enough common ground in our opposition to Saied to rally together. The success of the plenary is the result of Saied’s failure to be a leader of any sort,” said Ounissi.

There were signs that government forces were threatened by the vote and had mobilized to try to stop it, parliament members said.

Just before the session was due to begin Wednesday afternoon, online video platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom went down in Tunisia, forcing deputies to delay the session and switch to another site. Parliament’s official webpage was also reportedly inaccessible during the afternoon, drawing the suspicion of government interference.

Technology Minister Nizar Ben Neji denied the government had disabled any communications applications.

While parliament’s vote was largely symbolic, it shows that more political parties — including those that once supported Saied — are changing their tune and growing more confrontational.

Saied’s order to dissolve parliament puts even more question marks on the country’s political future.

Ghannouchi rejected the move and said the chamber should still be considered “operational” because Saied does not have the authority to dissolve it. Other parliament members and civil society groups said the president must hold snap parliamentary elections to replace the body within three months, as required by the constitution.

Saied has balked at both views, saying he will carry on with a plan to reform Tunisia’s Constitution and wait until December for a parliamentary poll.

So far, the president has kept details of his reform plan under wraps, but he previously advocated for changes that would strengthen the presidency. These include installing local councils to decentralize the power of parliament and clipping the wings of “corrupt” political parties. In the coming months, a committee of Saied’s favored experts will write the proposed reforms to be put to a national vote on July 25.

Grewal expects whatever new system the president creates to be “one in which the presidency wields significant power.”

“Regardless of what happens to the parliament and political parties in the new system, the most likely outcome is a shift to a presidential system — a worrying trend for all who opposed the strong presidentialism of Ben Ali,” he said.

While Saied remains popular, there appears to be little interest in his project. Less than 10% of eligible Tunisians participated in an online survey he initiated to gather public input in a blow to the process’s credibility. And with the economy sinking and prices on the rise, many are beginning to tire of his focus on rewriting the constitution.

“We are suffering more and more as prices grow higher and higher,” Alaa Kadri, a teacher in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, told Al-Monitor. "Many of us lack basic needs and food staples such as flour, sugar, grain and even oil to cook.”

Grewal said that “civil society organizations, despite their frustrations with Saied, are trying to set themselves up as the ‘neutral’ arbiters between the president and the opposition.”

Saied met with UGTT head Noureddine Tabboubi on April 1, and the two agreed on the need for a “partnership” to chart a way out of the crisis, Tabboubi said. But to what extent Saied is willing to make concessions — even amid mounting criticism at home and abroad — remains to be seen.

“Even if political parties, civil society and international donors all unify around a demand of restoring democratic institutions, and public opinion turns on Kais Saied (both of which are tall tasks), that still may not be enough,” said Grewal.

He added, “It ultimately depends on Kais Saied: Will he agree to negotiate, or will he escalate into even greater repression? We just don’t know. His personality and behavior will ultimately make or break Tunisian democracy.



Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/04/tunisias-future-darkens-dissolution-parliament#ixzz7PwwiR2JR

People live here

Why are Ngorongoro's Maasai at risk of being evicted again? Tanzania's conservation-tourism industrial complex wants them out.

Image credit Abir Anwar via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

BY Jevgeniy Bluwstein

Since last year, as thousands of Maasai are at risk of being evicted from their homes, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area has been in the news. For decades now, the residence of Maasai in Ngorongoro has been a concern for conservation authorities and NGOs, tourism companies, and the Tanzanian state—all of whom worry that they may be spoiling the natural beauty of Ngorongoro. Although the threat of dispossession has loomed large over Ngorongoro residents in the past, this time the Tanzanian government seems to be particularly serious about resettling thousands of Maasai pastoralists in the name of conservation.

To better understand why the Maasai are perceived as a threat to Ngorongoro, we need to take a look at the colonial beginnings and the postcolonial history of the conservation industry in Tanzania. By resettling the Maasai from the Serengeti to Ngorongoro in the 1950s (where other Maasai had already lived prior to the establishment of Serengeti National Park), the British colonial administration and international conservation interest groups had sought to protect the Serengeti from the pastoralists. In doing so, they promised the Maasai that they would never be evicted from the Ngorongoro highlands. At the time, the irony of protecting the Serengeti from the people whose land use and environmental conservation practices had led to the very creation of the famous Serengeti plains was apparently lost on the colonial administration and Western conservationists such as Bernhard Grzimek.

To European colonizers, resettling the Maasai was not only good for nature conservation, but for evicted populations themselves. To this day, people living around protected areas in Tanzania continue to experience a deeply paternalistic treatment by the state, which perceives them as backward and in need of modernization and development. The state has mobilized the colonial discourse of a civilizing mission whenever Maasai or other pastoralists are resettled in the name of “conservation” and “development” in Tanzania. While this colonial legacy persists today, what has changed since the end of colonial rule is the paramount role of the tourism industry in present-day Tanzania.

When Tanzania’s world-famous protected areas were initially created, tourism was hardly developed as an economic sector and poorly integrated into the global tourism industry. What is more, in socialist Tanzania under Nyerere, the role of tourism was hotly debated and deeply contested, as Issa Shivji’s 1973 edited volume Tourism and Socialist Development demonstrates (it is unfortunately out of print today). Should Africans endure the “extremely humiliating subservient ‘memsahib’ and ‘sir’ attitudes” in order to “create a hospitable climate for tourists” in return for foreign exchange? Can, in other words, the economic promise of tourism outweigh the price of “cultural imperialism”? These were central questions 50 years ago—questions that seem almost entirely out of place today.

Since the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy beginning in the 1980s, the state has worked closely with western conservation NGOs, donors, and private tourism companies to grow the tourism industry in the country. Today, tourism funds conservation projects across the country and is a source of wealth and power for Tanzania’s political and economic elites. In 2017, Ngorongoro alone was visited by almost 650,000 tourists and generated around 56 million USD in entry fees. Before the pandemic, the direct and indirect contribution of tourism to Tanzania’s GDP was almost 11 percent, and the tourism industry was Tanzania’s largest source of foreign exchange.

Nature conservation has thus become economically unsustainable without a vibrant international tourism industry. At the same time, tourism depends almost entirely on the conservation of Tanzania’s flagship species—most prominently its elephants and lions—in some of the world’s most famous protected areas, such as the Serengeti and Ngorongoro. It is this conservation-tourism industrial complex that offers Tanzania’s political and economic elites the justification to continue threatening rural people with eviction and resettlement. The more successful Tanzania’s tourism sector is, the more the state desperately tries to protect its cash cow from any potential risks. Tourism has thus become a trap. The state cannot live without it, while some of its people suffer from it.

Due to this questionable role of tourism, the state treats rural people living around protected areas as conservation subjects whose contribution as citizens is primarily judged in relation to their value for the conservation-tourism industrial complex. Through tourism ads and brochures, the Maasai are visually represented and celebrated as exotic conservationists when they attract more tourism. When it undermines tourism potential, however, they are vilified through media campaigns. Ultimately, state and conservation authorities see any group whose land use practices are perceived to threaten the generation of revenues from international tourism as economic saboteurs. In Ngorongoro, once people were perceived as a threat, a slow process of marginalization and “stealthy dispossession” was set in motion to render their land grabbable and local people relocatable.

We should not overlook—or worse, dismiss—this patronizing relationship between the rent-extracting state-conservation-tourism nexus and its rural subjects when we discuss environmental conservation issues, when we are concerned about the state of wildlife, or when we consider the next trip to protected areas in Tanzania. We should not overlook, in other words, how “tourism perpetuates a colonialist political economy in a postcolonial world.” Tourists who visit Tanzania indirectly contribute to strengthening this status quo and thus bear some responsibility. Whether they agree with it or not, international tourists visiting Tanzania’s world-famous protected areas are complicit in this politics of conservation.

What, then, can be done? Grassroots efforts from Tanzanian civil society to stop the evictions should be supported. Environmentally minded people could reconsider their donation practices and stop funding conservation organizations that—directly or indirectly—support the fortress conservation model in Tanzania and beyond. People considering visiting Tanzania as tourists can also do their part by demanding that tourism operators present Tanzania as a country populated by people and wildlife, not as an unfenced zoo whose violent history of evictions remains invisible in curated and sterile safari experiences. Tourists can also consider boycotting protected areas whose operation and conservation is bound up with the dispossession of people living in or around these areas.

https://africasacountry.com/

PATRIARCHICAL CHATTEL OWNERSHIP* NOT POLYAMORY

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Polygamy is illegal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, it is still practised by two percent of the population, like in the church of self-styled pastor Zagabe Chiruza, in the eastern city of Bukavu.

VIDEO https://www.africanews.com/embed/1889604

In 2012, he married three women at the same time in his church. Pastor Zagabe Chiruza, leader of the "Primitive Church of the Lord" is convinced that Polygamy is a divine institution.

"This is the message of the end time. The others who hunt us down, that's their business, but we must go to the end and show the people of God the truth, which is the teaching of polygamy. Meaning a man can marry more than one woman although society is against it, others don't care" he said.

Three live with him under the same roof in Bukavu, the fourth in Bujumbura, Burundi, where some of his children are studying. Yaëlle, one of the wives says she lives in harmony with her co-wives but the situation is different with her neighbours.

"When I was still alone at home, I had a good relationship with all the neighbours. But when my husband got married to other women, all the neighbours cut contact with me, they all ran away. Nowadays, we only greet each other on the way, but they don't visit us anymore, that's how it is."

In an interview with Catholic priest Raymond Kongolo, he explained "Polygamy is a human institution that goes back a long way in our African and traditional Congolese culture". Adding however: "it is not a divine institution".

According to the American research centre Pew Research Center, about 2% of the world's population lives in polygamous households and it is in Africa that the practice is most widespread (11%).

*LIKE SOME MORMONS AND MUSLIMS

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/10/polygamy-is-not-polyamoury.html

SCURRILOUS SLANDER

Medvedev escalates anti-Ukrainian rhetoric

Maria Domańska

On 5 April, Dmitri Medvedev, Vice-Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, posted a post on his Telegram channel entitled “On Fakes and True History”. The text included the following phrases:

- reports of Russian war crimes are “fake cynical Ukrainian propaganda” prepared for “huge money” by “troll factories” under the supervision of Western governments and NGOs at their service;

- to dehumanise and denigrate Russia, “the crazed beasts of the nationalist and territorial defense battalions are ready to kill Ukrainian civilians”; all because “the very essence of Ukrainianness, fed by anti-Russian venom and lies about its identity, is one big sham”. Ukrainian identity does not exist and never has;

- the comparison of Ukrainianness to Prussian militarism, which was “bred in schools” and later developed into National Socialism; the latter unleashed World War II and was defeated only by the Red Army; today’s Ukrainian radicals were also formed in schools in the spirit of hatred towards everything Russian;  "a pseudo-history of Ukrainian statehood was hastily written" after 1991; the historical ties of Kievan Rusʹ with today’s Russian territories were broken; the idea of one nation was destroyed; “Ukrainian historical figures of the 20th century are exclusively Nazis and collaborators”;

MAKHNOVITZ ANARCHIST ARMY UKRAINE REVOLUTION 1917-1921

- some Ukrainians have been “literally worshipping the Third Reich” for the last 30 years; photographs of "Nazi symbols found in every military unit captured by the Russian army” are supposed to bear witness to this;

- “Ukraine has mentally become a second Third Reich and will suffer the same fate”; “this also applies to the monsters who usurp the right to represent Ukraine”;  the current “special operation” should teach them a lesson, as should one episode of the “glorious past”. In this context, Medvedev mentions the NKVD officer, Pavel Sudoplatov, who killed the head of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, Yevhen Konovalets, with a bomb planted in a box of chocolates [Sudoplatov also organised the assassination of Lev Trotsky];  “There will be many more such gifts for Nazi criminals”;

- President Putin has clearly defined the “special operation’s” aim: the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine; these tasks will be carried out not only on the battlefield. The most important objective is to change the  consciousness of some Ukrainians, which is “bloody and full of false myths”; it will serve to “ensure peace for future generations of Ukrainians and build an open Eurasia – from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

Commentary

• Since the beginning of the war, Medvedev has been heavily involved in the propaganda field, which contrasts with his previous low level of activity in public life (following his resignation as prime minister in January 2020). This engagement may indicate an ambition to strengthen his position within the ruling elite. He may also be fulfilling a task assigned to him by the Kremlin to set a highly aggressive tone for the official narrative and thus set specific ‘standards’ for the entire state administration.
• In addition to the repudiation of Ukrainian national identity and statehood, which became common in Russian propaganda, the text contains openly totalitarian slogans. Medvedev in fact calls for the forced re-education of Ukrainians and dehumanises the Ukrainian people, thus justifying mass war crimes. Furthermore, he makes thinly-veiled allusions to the need to assassinate top representatives of the Ukrainian government.
• The phrase referring to “building an open Eurasia” through “denazification” suggests that Russia has more far-reaching plans, encompassing the  “denazification” and “demilitarisation” of all of Europe. The aim would be to neutralise it in the global conflict over the future world order between Washington and the Beijing-Moscow tandem.
• The language of the text – saturated with invectives, hate speech and extreme aggression – is probably an expression of the Kremlin’s growing frustration, both at the failure of its initial plan to conquer Ukraine and the West’s resilience to Russian war propaganda. One of the purposes of stirring anti-Ukrainian hysteria is to fan Russian society’s ‘rally-around-the-flag’ sentiment. Medvedev’s text is in keeping with the tone of an article published on 3 April on the main page of the RIA Novosti state news agency. It called for the extermination of Ukraine’s elite, the “de-Ukrainisation” of society, and a long occupation of Ukrainian territory.

UKRAINE, RUSSIA AND HUNGARY ELECTIONS

Can Europe get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within?

Hungarian authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s victory in 3 April general election reveals something rotten in the heart of the European Union. It may also make it more difficult to help Ukraine.

Published on 5 April 2022 
Timothy Garton Ash - The Guardian (London)
 

Bas van der Schot | De Volkskrant


As I stood in a cold, disconsolate crowd in central Budapest late on Sunday night, listening to Hungarian opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay concede defeat in the country's general election, the Twitter feed on my phone filled with images of murdered Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha. Some of them had their hands tied behind their backs. Beside one murdered woman lay a keychain with a pendant showing the yellow stars on blue background of the European flag. The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected.

It is a bitter irony that, just as we learn of some of the worst atrocities in Russian president Vladimir Putin's war of terror against Ukraine, Putin's closest ally among EU leaders, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is re-elected partly because he turned that very war to his own political benefit. As well as exploiting all the advantages he has already built in to a heavily rigged political system, such as gerrymandered constituencies and overwhelming media dominance, Orbán won by telling Hungarians that he would keep them out of this war – and that their heating bills would stay low due to his sweet gas deals with Putin.

 

More : Timothy Garton Ash: ‘Hungary shows us that we haven’t yet succeeded in linking the Europe of values to the Europe of money’

In his victory speech, the Hungarian leader listed the 'opponents' he had defeated. They included the international media, Brussels bureaucrats and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has criticised him fiercely for his opposition to the weapon supplies and further sanctions that Ukraine desperately needs. So he tells us exactly who his enemies are - and friend Putin has hastened to congratulate him on his famous victory.

If the Hungarian six-party opposition coalition led by Péter Márki-Zay had won, Hungary would have become a staunch Western ally in the face of Russian aggression, as other central European countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic are proving to be. 'Russians go home!' some youngsters chanted at the very end of that disconsolate opposition wake in Budapest, recalling a slogan from the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Walking back at midnight across a deserted Heroes Square, I recalled how in that very place in June 1989 I heard a young, seemingly idealistic Orbán himself call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Yet now the ageing cynic is flatly refusing to let Western arms supplies pass through Hungary in order to help the Ukrainian army send the Russians home. I wonder what he sees when he looks in the mirror.

An opposition government would also have joined the European Public Prosecutor's Office, enabling the pursuit of well-documented corruption in the use of EU funds. They would have kicked out the International Investment Bank, which the opposition says is closely linked to the Putin regime. And they would have set about the difficult process of turning Hungary back into a proper liberal democracy.

Instead, Orbán's Fidesz party has once again secured a two-thirds supermajority, enabling it to change the constitution at will. Whatever honeyed assurances it gives in Brussels or Washington, it will continue to consolidate what political scientists describe as an electoral authoritarian regime. Hungary's political system is now closer to that of non-EU Serbia, where this weekend saw a simultaneous victory for another nationalist electoral authoritarian, president Aleksandar Vučić, than it is to that of a democracy like France or Portugal. Orbán and Vučić are close allies.

 

More : Viktor Orbán’s ten-year war on the media in Hungary

There were significant failings by the opposition. The six parties were not as united as they should have been and the lead candidate obviously failed to convince the electorate outside Budapest. Overall, the opposition actually lost votes, although it gained some single-member constituencies in the capital. But there is no way in which this was a fair election.

Wherever I went over the last five days, I saw streets and metro carriages plastered with government-funded posters showing an avuncular image of Viktor Orbán beside the slogan 'Let's Protect Hungary's Peace and Security'. Another ubiquitous poster showed a young mother and child with the slogan 'Protect the Children'. This advertised a government referendum conducted at the same time as the election, with questions such as 'do you support the promotion of sex reassignment therapy for underage children?'. (The referendum did not reach the required 50% of valid votes.) State media relentlessly promoted a pro-Orbán narrative, as they have done for more than a decade, and even spent some time effectively blaming the war in Ukraine on the Ukrainians. Márki-Zay got just five minutes on state television to explain the opposition programme. Facebook was plastered with regime-supporting paid advertising, thus continuing the platform's ignoble record of helping the enemies of liberal democracy in return for filthy lucre.
State media relentlessly promoted a pro-Orbán narrative, as they have done for more than a decade, and even spent some time effectively blaming the war in Ukraine on the Ukrainians

Yet having spent lavishly on tax and welfare handouts to win the election, the Orbán government needs EU funds to fill a big hole in its finances. Unless the EU is prepared simply to accept that it now has an authoritarian member state, it should at long last impose rigorous conditionality on the flows of European money which have long been one of the main founts of Orbán's power. This means continuing to withhold post-Covid recovery grants and loans, since transparency cannot be guaranteed by a regime that is actually built on the corrupt use of EU money. It also means finally triggering the rule of law conditionality mechanism which could hold back significant chunks of funding from the EU's regular budget. (And don't be fooled into giving Hungary lots of money for Ukrainian refugees who have in fact already moved on to other countries.)

More : How George Soros was transformed from herald of democracy into Hungary’s “enemy of the people”

But here's the problem. Faced with the latest evidence of the barbaric behaviour of Russian troops in Ukraine, Europe needs to step up its sanctions on Putin. When Orbán returned from back-to-back summits of NATO and the EU in Brussels last month, his government sent an email to all Hungarians who had signed up for a Covid vaccine saying that 'proposals were put on the agenda against which Hungary's interests had to be protected'. His government would never allow weapons supplies to go through Hungary to Ukraine, nor sanctions to be imposed on the 85% of Hungary's gas and 64% of its oil that comes from Russia. In response to the Bucha atrocities, EU leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron are now calling for more sanctions, including on Russian oil. Self-styled 'realists' may argue that Brussels has to stay soft on Hungary in order to keep Orbán on board for a common front over Ukraine.

Europe should now get tough on both the Russian enemy without and the Hungarian enemy within. But can it and will it do both at once? Here is another dilemma this dark depressing weekend has presented to a deeply shaken Europe.

Foreign ship sinks in Mariupol after missile attacks, says flag registry

Tue, April 5, 2022
By Jonathan Saul

LONDON (Reuters) -A Dominica-flagged cargo ship sank on Tuesday in the besieged southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol after being targeted by Russian missile strikes, the vessel's flag registry said.

The Azburg was believed to have been without cargo and at berth in Mariupol when it was initially hit by two missiles on April 3, the Dominica Maritime Administration said.

"On April 4, around 2240 LT (local time) the vessel was heavily fired upon by Russian armed forces after intentionally shelling the vessel twice a day earlier," the registry said in a statement.

"Specific characteristics of firing on the vessel remain unknown, crew reported shelling, bombing and repeated hits by missiles, causing a fire in the engine room."

One of the 12 crew members required medical treatment while the remaining crew were evacuated onto nearby vessels, the Dominica registry said.

Russian officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow has said that it is not targeting civilians in what it calls a "special operation" to demilitarize Ukraine.

Ukraine said this week that it was bracing for about 60,000 Russian reservists to be called in to reinforce Moscow's offensive in the east, where Russia's main targets have included Mariupol and Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city.

Eric Dawicki, deputy administrator of maritime affairs with the registry, said the vessel sank early on Tuesday.

He said the registry assumed the sinking would "create some environmental impediments".

"It certainly will create navigational impediments at the dock and we are certainly concerned," he told Reuters.

"The indiscriminate shelling of a merchant vessel with a civilian crew with no place to seek refuge is the lowest of lows," Dawicki added.

Dawicki said the information was received by the vessel's operator which was in email contact with the crew.

A senior official with Ukraine's Maritime Administration said earlier on Tuesday that the ship had been hit by a Russian navy missile, according to initial information.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the details of the sinking.

The vessel arrived in Mariupol on Feb. 23 and was unable to leave Ukrainian waters because of the closure of the port, according to British security company Ambrey Intelligence and the registry.

Russia's military took control of waterways around Ukraine when it invaded on Feb. 24.

Two seafarers have been killed and five other merchant vessels hit by projectiles - which sank one of them - off Ukraine's coast since the start of the conflict, shipping officials say.

UN shipping agency the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said there were 86 merchant ships still stuck in Ukrainian ports and waters as of March 30, with around 1,000 seafarers unable to sail.

Maritime officials have said supplies are running low onboard the ships, which also face multiple perils including missiles and floating mines.

"As well as the dangers arising from bombardment, many of the ships concerned now lack food, fuel, fresh water, and other vital supplies," the IMO said.

"The situation of the seafarers from many countries is becoming increasingly untenable as a result, presenting grave risks to their health and wellbeing."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday Ukraine's efforts to push back Russian troops from Mariupol were facing difficulties and the military situation was "very difficult".

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul; Editing by Nick Macfie and Rosalba O'Brien)

Mines kill, injure more than 500 children in Iraq: UN

More than 500 children have been killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance in Iraq in the past five years, UN agencies have warned     

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
05 April, 2022

The material is particularly present near borders where Iraq has been involved in armed conflicts over the past four decades [Getty- archive]

At least 519 children have been killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance in Iraq in the past five years, UN agencies have warned.

"More than 80 percent of children affected are boys," the rights groups UNICEF, the world body's children's agency, and the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) said in a joint statement on Monday night.

They added that boys were "disproportionately impacted due to incidents of child labour, such as grazing animals or collecting scrap metal to sell".

The statement said although Iraq has not "suffered from open conflicts" over past years, "the effects of explosive weapons will reverberate for years to come".

A report by the charity Humanity & Inclusion said: "Iraq is considered one of the countries most contaminated by explosive devices in the world," with more than 3,225 square kilometres (1,245 square miles) of land contaminated with unexploded ordnance.

The material is particularly present near the borders with Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, all areas where Iraq has been involved in armed conflicts over the past four decades.

Baghdad fought a war with Iran between 1980-1988, as well as the first Gulf War triggered by the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The Iraqi military between 2014 and 2017 backed by an international coalition fought a war against the Islamic State militant group.

In the joint statement, UNICEF and UNMAS urged "all parties to accelerate every effort to clear existing mines and unexploded ordnance" and called on "all parties to accelerate their efforts to remove mines and explosive remnants, to strengthen victim assistance and to support children's right to a safe, secure and protected environment".

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Ukraine war: African students face Russian missiles and racism

African students who have fled the war in Ukraine say the racism they face is making a bad situation worse. DW's Tobore Ovuorie has kept in touch with several of them as they go about seeking refuge in Europe.


A group of African students on the station platform in Lviv, Ukraine

At dawn on February 24, Olufunmilola Bamidele found 40 missed calls and numerous voice messages on her phone.

The 33-year-old Nigerian post-graduate student at the Dnipro Medical Institute in Ukraine had wrapped up her studies and gone to bed just hours earlier.

The calls were from relatives in Nigeria, worried about her safety because Russia had invaded Ukraine.

"If I didn't wake up to use the restroom, I wouldn't have seen these because I would have probably woken up around 7 a.m. or 7:30 a.m.," Bamidele told DW.

News sites were reporting explosions in Ukraine's capital Kyiv and in Kharkiv. Explosions had also been heard in Dnipro, which lies between the two cities.

Dnipro is a six-hour drive from Ukraine's capital Kyiv whose outskirts came under heavy attack

Discrimination on trains

Bamidele initially wanted to stay put in her home of the past six years.

"I was like: I am going to remain here since this city is still calm and there is nothing going on. So, definitely, maybe, we would just be safe till the end of it," she said.

But her parents in Nigeria ordered her to leave Ukraine.

On February 28, Bamidele set off for the train station. She told DW that she wanted to see if it was true that foreigners were not being allowed on outbound trains. Media reports about stranded African, Indian and Arab students were going viral.

"I just wanted to see what was going on because I was hearing on the news that they were not allowing foreigners to enter the trains," she said.

"When I got there, there were a lot of people. I met some people who said they had been there for 12 hours and they were not allowed to enter the train."

She said that she saw a person of color smash a train window and a fight break out.

The scramble for any bus

The next day, Bamidele returned to the train station and found some of the foreigners she had seen the previous day still waiting. There were only two trains per day bound for Lviv, not far from the Polish border.

Russian missiles had damaged the train station and Ukrainian soldiers had been ordered to prevent entry and exit to Dnipro as of March 3

Bamidele realized that she had to leave immediately. A day before the city was shut down, she scoured the bus stations for a way out and met a woman who could get her on to a private bus.

Hours later, Bamidele, five other Dnipro Medical Institute students from Nigeria and 44 others boarded a 50-seater bus bound for the border.
Hypothermia and exhaustion

The six Nigerian students did not want to travel to the Romanian border but that was where the bus was heading.

"So, when we got to a city that was close to Romania after 24 hours, it was a very hectic journey for us because we needed to stop at every checkpoint and there were a lot of checkpoints," said Bamidele.

The soldiers, she said, checked everyone to ensure there was no "intruder" on the bus.

The students decided to stay in the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi until they could figure out which country they would try to reach.

Soldiers in Ukraine on the lookout for "intruders" at checkpoints

They had to figure out a plan while suffering from hypothermia, said Bamidele. They had also heard about the discrimination and ill treatment being meted out to Africans at Poland's border.

Hotels and apartments in Chernivtsi were fully booked but the group of students eventually found two very small rooms they could rent.

"That city was cold and the apartment was cold as well. There was nothing we could do. So we were there the first day to see what was going to happen. Maybe there would be another border that would be opening, and we would be going there," said Bamidele.
A smoother journey to Hungary

By the third day, the cold rooms in Chernivtsi had become unbearable. At the bus station, they bought tickets to Uzhhorod, near Ukraine's border with Hungary.

The 12-hour trip to Uzhhorod was smoother than the ride to Chernivtsi and there were fewer military checkpoints.

They arrived in Uzhhorod at about 4 a.m. on March 6 and caught a taxi to the city of Chop, where they waited to transfer to a train bound for the Hungarian border. Too tired to wait five more hours for a free train, the students bought tickets for a train departing immediately for Budapest, Hungary's capital.

Young Africans flee to Hungary because people of colour are better welcomed there.

On the platforms at the main train station in Budapest, many volunteers were on hand to help those fleeing Ukraine. Bamidele said they distributed toiletries and other basic supplies. Some even opened their homes to those who had nowhere to go.

In Dnipro, Bamidele used to volunteer for Diaspora Relief. In Budapest, a volunteer from the non-profit organization welcomed the six students and took them to a hostel.

Bamidele's uncle in Nigeria was not pleased that she was staying in a hostel where men and women were sharing bedrooms and bathrooms. On March 8, she moved to a private one-bedroom apartment he had booked online.

Bamidele volunteered to cook for the students and to help others still trying to reach Hungary.

"I started cooking because I knew that a lot of people hadn't eaten good food. We had been eating junk. And I knew that while they are in the hostel, they cannot even cook. So, finding myself in a comfortable place, I was like: Let me just cook for other people that don't have this opportunity,” she said.

Soon Bamidele was cooking for over 300 students. The meals are sponsored by Diaspora Relief.

Rejection upon rejection

Bamidele is doing more for African students than cooking because they are going through a rough time in Hungary. Accommodation is hard to find. Apartments need to be booked for four to five nights and check-in is always 4 p.m., while checkout is 10 a.m. The students need somewhere to stay warm in the times in between.

The governments of countries such as Nigeria, Zambia and South Africa helped students to leave Ukraine

Bamidele is helping people to search for apartments where new arrivals can stay temporarily.

"After booking on Airbnb, we have to go and check to see if they want us as people coming from Ukraine because it is very hard to get hosts that are going to take people coming from Ukraine,” she said.

DW asked several of the African students who had made their way to Hungary about their experience. Many said that the owners of Airbnb apartments in Hungary were now refusing to rent to them.

"They are not specific but I think it is Africans," Bamidele suggested.

African students in Hungary also told DW that Ukrainians who had fled to Hungary were more likely to find private accommodation or stay in refugee camps.

Racism in a refugee camp

A Ghanaian management student who declined to be named said he had left the refugee camp he was placed in after fleeing Sumy in northeastern Ukraine because of discrimination. He told DW that a Ukrainian man had complained to camp officials that sleeping beside a black man was traumatizing. The student was then moved to another space within the camp.

"So, hearing that, a lot of people don't want to stay in a refugee camp. So we just look for Airbnb and some of the NGOs like Diaspora Relief have been paying for food and accommodation," he said.

Though many African students in Hungary are without stable accommodation, some are still trying to attend the online lectures offered by their universities in Ukraine, while others are taking up the language classes offered by the government of Hungary.

Olufunmilola Bamidele told DW she would stay in Budapest for now. But she is planning to travel to Ireland, which she has heard is open to Africans who left Ukraine.

Edited by: Benita van Eyssen

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