Al Jazeera reports: Iran’s president has said his country is ready to hold talks with the United States and Saudi Arabia on ways to resolve the Syrian civil war.
Shia powerhouse Iran is a leading patron of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and accuses Sunni rival Saudi Arabia and the US of siding with anti-Assad rebels and fighters.
President Hassan Rouhani’s remarks came during a press conference on Tuesday in Tehran with visiting Austrian counterpart Heinz Fischer. [Continue reading…]
The Daily Beast reports: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is betting that increased pressure on Kurdish rebels in southeast Anatolia will be a vote-getter in snap elections less than two months away.
But a flare-up of Kurdish rebel attacks that have inflicted the heaviest losses on Turkish soldiers in years has Turks wondering whether Erdogan is dragging the country to war to suit his own political needs.
So devastating was the shock of the latest attack by rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) near the Turkish border with Iraq on Sunday that the government and the military waited more than 24 hours before revealing that 16 soldiers had died. It was the highest death toll for the Turkish army in a single combat event since 2011.
Fighters from the PKK, a rebel group designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and Europe, attacked a military convoy in the town of Daglica and blew up a number of military vehicles with roadside bombs. The well-connected security analyst Metin Gurcan said on Twitter that 500 to 600 rebels attacked the soldiers, while bad weather prevented Turkish attack helicopters from helping the encircled troops. The PKK said at least 31 soldiers were killed. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: While the desperate flight of Syrians from their country’s war was dominating news bulletins this summer, yet another diplomatic push to end the four-year-old conflict was quietly running into the sand.
That largely unnoticed failure has reinforced the view amongst Syria experts that there is no solution in sight, with one of the biggest obstacles a seemingly unbridgeable international divide over President Bashar al-Assad’s future.
As a consequence, Syria looks set for ever greater fragmentation into a patchwork of territories, one of them the diminishing Damascus-based state where Assad appears confident of survival with backing from his Russian and Iranian allies.
While some Western officials say even Assad’s allies now recognize he cannot win back and stabilize Syria, Moscow is setting out its case for supporting him in ever more forthright terms. [Continue reading…]
Kenneth Roth writes: European leaders may differ about how to respond to the asylum-seekers and migrants surging their way, but they seem to agree they face a crisis of enormous proportions. Germany’s Angela Merkel has called it “the biggest challenge I have seen in European affairs in my time as chancellor.” Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has warned that the migrant crisis could pose a major threat to the “soul” of Europe. But before we get carried away by such apocalyptic rhetoric, we should recognize that if there is a crisis, it is one of politics, not capacity.
There is no shortage of drama in thousands of desperate people risking life and limb to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats or enduring the hazards of land journeys through the Balkans. The available numbers suggest that most of these people are refugees from deadly conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Eritreans — another large group — fled a brutally repressive government. The largest group — the Syrians — fled the dreadful combination of their government’s indiscriminate attacks, including by barrel bombs and suffocating sieges, and atrocities by ISIS and other extremist groups. Only a minority of migrants arriving in Europe, these numbers suggest, were motivated solely by economic betterment.
This “wave of people” is more like a trickle when considered against the pool that must absorb it. The European Union’s population is roughly 500 million. The latest estimate of the numbers of people using irregular means to enter Europe this year via the Mediterranean or the Balkans is approximately 340,000. In other words, the influx this year is only 0.068 percent of the EU’s population. Considering the EU’s wealth and advanced economy, it is hard to argue that Europe lacks the means to absorb these newcomers. [Continue reading…]
Michael Ignatieff writes: Those of us outside Europe are watching the unbelievable images of the Keleti train station in Budapest, the corpse of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the desperate Syrian families chancing their lives on the night trip to the Greek islands — and we keep being told this is a European problem.
The Syrian civil war has created more than four million refugees. The United States has taken in about 1,500 of them. The United States and its allies are at war with the Islamic State in Syria — fine, everyone agrees they are a threat — but don’t we have some responsibility toward the refugees fleeing the combat? If we’ve been arming Syrian rebels, shouldn’t we also be helping the people trying to get out of their way? If we’ve failed to broker peace in Syria, can’t we help the people who can’t wait for peace any longer?
It’s not just the United States that keeps pretending the refugee catastrophe is a European problem. Look at countries that pride themselves on being havens for the homeless. Canada, where I come from? As few as 1,074 Syrians, as of August. Australia? No more than 2,200. Brazil? Fewer than 2,000, as of May.
The worst are the petro states. As of last count by Amnesty International, how many Syrian refugees have the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia taken in? Zero. Many of them have been funneling arms into Syria for years, and what have they done to give new homes to the four million people trying to flee? Nothing.
The brunt of the crisis has fallen on the Turks, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese. Funding appeals by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have failed to meet their targets. The squalor in the refugee camps has become unendurable. Now the refugees have decided, en masse, that if the international community won’t help them, if neither Russia nor the United States is going to force the war to an end, they won’t wait any longer. They are coming our way. And we are surprised?
Blaming the Europeans is an alibi and the rest of our excuses — like the refugees don’t have the right papers — are sickening. [Continue reading…]
The Los Angeles Times reports: German officials say they are prepared to accept as many as 800,000 asylum seekers this year, a number equal to 1% of the population. The government announced Monday that it would set aside $6.7 billion next year to deal with the influx.
France and Britain also said Monday that they would increase the number of refugees they would accept.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said that his country would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees within the next five years, and French President Francois Hollande pledged to admit 24,000 asylum seekers in the next two years. [Continue reading…]
Karl Mathiesen writes: The desperate and the displaced of Syria’s war should not be cast as climate refugees, observers have told the Guardian, as this overstates the role of global warming in setting off the conflict.
Many agree that the collapse began in March 2011, when a group of Syrian teenagers sprayed the words “Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam” on a wall in the southwest Syrian town of Dara’a.
The words, which translate to ‘the people want to topple the regime’, were a rallying call of the Arab Spring in Tunis and Cairo. The boys were caught, beaten and tortured by president Bashar al-Assad’s secret police. Their powerful parents were enraged. Protests and repression spread and spiralled into the disaster that has sent hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing toward Europe’s uncertain reception.
The narrative has since been fleshed out by journalists and observers to incorporate the impact climate change was having on the lives of those youths. [Continue reading…]
Der Spiegel reports: Every day, people are dying because of the policy that refugees must first get to Europe before they can apply for asylum. And because of the fact that they are required to remain in the country where they fill out their application and are not allowed to travel further. It is a situation that human smugglers have found to be extremely profitable and one that enables them to charge €300 ($335) to €400 per head for the trip from Budapest to Vienna in a jam-packed truck even though a train ticket doesn’t even cost €50.
Refugees are dying because Europe is failing. But the drama continues. One week after the catastrophe [in which 71 people died] on the A4 in Austria, a new batch of horrific images has emerged, this time of a Syrian boy lying dead on a beach. He drowned while attempting to cross the water from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. His family, too, had put their fates in the hands of human smugglers.
These tragedies serve to illustrate just how great is the desperation gripping the refugees — and how irrepressible is the greed of those in whom they entrust their fates. There are several indications that the deaths of the 71 people inside the truck were not the result of a planned crime but that it was probably the result of an oversight, of stupidity. But it could happen again at any time; that is the incident’s uncomfortable lesson. At least if nothing changes.
Thousands of people continue to cross into Europe every day. In just the first eight months of this year, almost a quarter of a million people crossed the sea to Greece, including young men, families, pregnant women and children from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan and elsewhere. Many are fleeing from bombs and terrorism — and they are prepared to use the last of their money and to entrust their lives to people they don’t know.
In the end, during recent days at least, they get stuck at Keleti Station in Budapest where Hungarian authorities have prevented them from boarding trains to continue their journeys westward. Some refugees have made signs reading: “We love to go to Germany.” At some point, someone starts chanting the German chancellor’s name, quietly at first before getting louder and louder. “An-ge-la! An-ge-la!” Those who pay particularly close attention to the calls for help are waiting outside, next to taxis and minibuses. They are the true profiteers of Europe’s refugee drama.
The trip from Syria to Germany currently costs at least €2,500 per person, with the human smuggling market likely worth several hundred million euros per year. The organization The Migrant’s Files, a consortium of journalists from over 15 European countries, estimates that migrants have paid smugglers around €16 billion since the year 2000. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: A French secret service diver who took part in the operation to sink Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior 30 years ago has spoken publicly for the first time to apologise for his actions.
Jean-Luc Kister, who attached a mine to the ship’s hull, says the guilt of the bombing, which killed a photographer, still weighs heavily on his mind.
“We are not assassins and we have a conscience,” the former agent told investigative website Mediapart. “I have the weight of an innocent man’s death on my conscience … It’s time, I believe, for me to express my profound regret and my apologies,” Kister said.
He said he wanted to apologise to the family of the dead man, Fernando Pereira, “especially his daughter Marelle … for what I call an accidental death but what they consider an assassination”, to the Greenpeace crew aboard the ship and the people of New Zealand where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk. [Continue reading…]
Galen Strawson writes: ‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ And, for good measure, another American philosopher, Daniel Dennett: ‘we are all virtuoso novelists, who find ourselves engaged in all sorts of behaviour… and we always put the best “faces” on it we can. We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character at the centre of that autobiography is one’s self.’
So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.
I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves. [Continue reading…]
Peter Mellgard writes: The hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving in Europe or dying on the way to its shores could be a harbinger of things to come, researchers and policymakers warn, because a potentially greater driver of displacement looms on the horizon: climate change.
As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned at a recent State Department-led conference on climate change in the Arctic, the scenes of chaos and heartbreak in Europe will be repeated globally unless the world acts to mitigate climate change.
“Wait until you see what happens when there’s an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival,” Kerry said.
World leaders have long warned that natural disasters and degraded environments linked to climate change could — indeed, have already started to — drive people from their homes. UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres declared in 2009 that climate change will create millions of refugees and internally displaced populations. “Not only states, but cultures and identities will be drowned,” Guterres said.
Displacement is already happening in some parts of the world. Almost 28 million people on average were displaced by environmental disasters every year between 2008 and 2013, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center — roughly three times as many as were forced from their homes by conflict and violence. [Continue reading…]
Al Jazeera reports: France’s President Francois Hollande has announced his country will take in 24,000 refugees over the next two years, while it is understood Germany will take 31,000 additional people under a European plan which is strongly opposed by Hungary.
The figure revealed by the French leader on Monday represents France’s share of a European proposal to relocate 120,000 refugees.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker is due to unveil new proposals on Wednesday.
EU officials have said Juncker will propose adding 120,000 people to be relocated on top of a group of 40,000 the commission previously proposed relocating.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told a gathering of foreign ambassadors on Monday, however, that the plan could not be discussed while the EU’s outer borders were not secured. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Israel plans to demolish up to 17,000 structures, most of them on privately owned Palestinian land in the part of the illegally occupied West Bank under full Israeli military and civil rule, a UN report has found.
Between 1988 and 2014, Israel’s Civil Administration, the governing body that operates in the West Bank, issued 14,000 demolition orders, of which more than 11,000 are still outstanding and could result in the demolition of up to 17,000 structures owned by Palestinians in Area C, including houses, sheds and animal shelters, according to the report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In Area C, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, Israel retains control of security and land management and “views the area as there to serve its own needs”.
Nearly 4,500 of the demolition orders affected Palestinian Bedouins, who human rights groups argue are at the centre of Israeli plans to force them off their land to allow for expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law. [Continue reading…]
The Los Angeles Times reports: For many Israeli Jews, even the smallest number of additional non-Jews is a potential threat, and the Syrian refugee crisis and the debate about Israel’s role has reawakened the country’s most deep-seated fear — that of losing the Jewish majority and subsequently the character of the Jewish state.
Even those in support of opening the gates to refugees say they mean 10,000 at the most, with some calling for a token action such as that taken by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1977 took in about 70 refugees from Vietnam.
However, Immigrant Absorption Minister Zeev Elkin accused Herzog of gambling on Israel’s strategic interests for the sake of “one minute of favor” in international media. He also expressed the fear that the refugee crisis could give Palestinians an opening to bring the so-called right of return, which would allow Palestinians to return to land they occupied before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, in “through the back door.” [Continue reading…]
By Gabriel Moreno Esparza, Northumbria University, Newcastle
The harrowing picture of a man carrying the corpse of a drowned boy on Bodrum beach published by numerous news organisations could be the defining image of a globally significant event.
As a piece of photojournalism it has already made an impact in a way Daniel Etter’s moving picture of a crying father holding his children after landing on Kos beach did not. Etter’s piece was said to have “brought the world to tears” and has been used for fundraising . It was certainly example of how photojournalism is “at its best when it embodies our ability to benefit the issues and people with whom we connect“.
But the images of the little boy, taken by Nilüfer Demir, a photographer for the Turkish news agency Doğan, seem to have touched a deeper nerve.
We’ve since been told that the boy’s name was Aylan Kurdi and that his mother and brother also died trying to get to Europe, while his father survived.
The Huffington Post reports that this image in particular has prompted several British opposition politicians to call for action. “Bodrum” quickly became a top trending topic on Facebook, while the hashtags #refugeeswelcome and #SyriaCrisis were the centre of attention on Twitter.
Ben Taub writes: Michael Delefortrie grew up in a secular Christian household in Antwerp, Belgium, but secretly converted to Islam in 2006, when he was seventeen. One day, he came home from the mosque to discover that his father had dug up his Koran and prayer rug, and placed them on the table as props for the heated dispute to come. “I was a little bit angry that he touched the book,” Delefortrie told me, “because I know it’s a sacred book,” and now it was sullied by his father’s touch. His father was angry too. Delefortrie told me he issued a cruel ultimatum: “If you want to be a Muslim, go.” The teen-ager, who had A.D.H.D. and was trying to stop using alcohol and drugs, moved into an apartment above the mosque. He lived there for the next two years.
Elsewhere in Antwerp, a petty criminal named Fouad Belkacem began to gain notoriety for delivering fiery homophobic rants in public squares, and for demanding that Belgium become an Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. He quickly established a following of young men, named the group Sharia4Belgium, and plugged into an international network of jihadis striving to dismantle liberal European values and institutions. (I wrote about one Sharia4Belgium member, Jejoen Bontinck, for the magazine.) Delefortrie became one of Belkacem’s enthusiastic devotees. In December, 2011, he was arrested for trying to sell a Kalashnikov online. After being temporarily shunned by the group for having drawn too much negative attention, he created a splinter organization called Sharia4Flanders, but never managed to secure the interest of a second member. The following summer, the first Sharia4Belgium member left for Syria. Several dozen others had followed before Delefortrie left home.
In December, 2013, Delefortrie boarded a bus from Antwerp to Cologne, Germany, then took a taxi to Dusseldorf. From there, he flew to Istanbul, Turkey, then south to Adana, near the Syrian border. He paid a smuggler, hopped an unguarded patch of wire fence, and, now in Syria, met up with a Belgian friend, who drove him to an ISIS base in Aleppo. After being questioned about his reasons for coming to Syria, Delefortrie was transported to a large, walled villa housing foreign ISIS recruits. He lived there, among Tunisian, French, Belgian, and Dutch fighters, for five weeks, occasionally updating his Facebook account with pictures of himself dressed in camouflage and gripping a Kalashnikov, until moderate Syrian rebels attacked the villa. He and the other ISIS fighters fled. While the Syrian rebels pilfered their money and belongings, his group took refuge for a couple of days in an abandoned Carrefour shopping mall. Then, “We attacked them,” he told me in a dimly lit bar in Antwerp, this winter, before quickly revising his story: “They” — his comrades — “attacked them,” he emphasized this time.
Shortly after the battle, Delefortrie came back to Belgium, where, a few weeks later, he found himself in an interrogation room, seated opposite federal police. He told them repeatedly that he had never participated in the armed struggle, insisting that he only left for Syria to seek a “better life” and to provide “ideological support.” He dismissed the online pictures of himself carrying guns as “pictures to brag,” and denied any knowledge of a video posted to his Facebook account, titled “ISIS mujahid gives some advice,” claiming, “I don’t know what this movie is about.” Six other Sharia4Belgium members also returned from Syria, some of them offering even flimsier excuses. One claimed to work for the U.N.H.C.R., the U.N. refugee agency, but, when asked to give the full name of the organization, he told police that the first letter “probably stands for United, but I don’t remember the rest.” Another said he had been an ambulance driver, but could not name a single aid organization operating in northern Syria. A third, who confessed to joining a jihadi group that kidnapped, ransomed, and murdered local civilians, swore he only carried out menial tasks, telling police, “I just assumed if a bomb fell on the house while I was doing the dishes, I was also a martyr.” Mark Eeckhaut, a Belgian crime reporter, joked over beers in Antwerp, this winter, “If you believe the guys who are in this trial, nobody is fighting in Syria. Everybody’s cooking.” [Continue reading…]