Tajikistan steps up use of traditional over Islamic clothing

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A picture taken on March 19, 2017 shows Tajik women wearing the Atlas and other traditional dresses celebrating the spring Nowruz festival in Dushanbe. (AFP / Nozim Kalandarov)
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A picture taken on March 19, 2017 shows young Tajik girls wearing traditional dresses celebrating the spring Nowruz festival in Dushanbe. (AFP / Nozim Kalandarov)
Updated 04 April 2017
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Tajikistan steps up use of traditional over Islamic clothing

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan : Clothing factories in Tajikistan are churning out brightly colored national dresses amid a surge in sales, and it’s not just because of the arrival of spring.
An increasing number of female officials, teachers and students have been wearing the Atlas and other traditional dresses following a recommendation by the Central Asian country’s government.
“The Atlas will never go out of fashion,” said Nasiba Anvarova, who owns a dress boutique in the capital Dushanbe, referring to a popular, dye-streaked style of dress.
“Any Tajik bride should have several of these dresses in her wardrobe,” Anvarova told AFP.
The campaign reached its peak last month during the spring Nowruz festival in Tursunzoda, a town west of Dushanbe, where the country celebrated its Persian heritage in a vibrant display of indigenous fashion.
State television showed President Emomali Rakhmon, a practicing Muslim, and other officials dancing at a concert along with thousands of women in traditional garb, bearing baskets of bread.
But Rakhmon and the male officials wore Western-style suits, and the festivities belied the government’s growing fears of Islamist extremism.
The authorities have campaigned against Arab-style head and face coverings like the hijab as part of a crackdown that has also included forced beard shavings.
The government claims that over a thousand Tajiks have joined the Daesh group in Iraq and Syria, and points to “foreign” Islamic clothing as “being a sign of radicalization,” said Edward Lemon, a researcher at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University in New York.
Rakhmon, a secular autocrat who took charge of the country in the early 1990s as it plunged into a bloody civil war after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nonetheless makes public demonstrations of piety.
Last year he completed the latest of several pilgrimages to Makkah, where his wife and daughter were photographed wearing the hijabs that Tajik women are increasingly discouraged from wearing.
At home, however, the crackdown has gathered strength since 2015, when the government banned a moderate Islamic opposition party and handed heavy prison sentences to its leaders following a wave of political unrest.
Several incidents of forced beard shavings have been reported, and a hospital recently turned away a group of women wearing hijabs, Lemon said.
The trend could be explained by a Soviet-style “fear of religion as a competing system of morality and legitimacy to the state,” he said, which dates back to early communist times when the authorities actively promoted veil-burning.
But many critics see the dress recommendations as a sign of an accelerating slide toward authoritarianism under Rakhmon, who has never hid his preferences regarding women’s fashion.

Inculcating national style

The dress code recommendations for women and girls, issued by the education ministry ahead of the March holidays, were aimed at “inculcating national style and patriotism,” a ministry spokesman told AFP.
“No one has forced teachers, students or schoolchildren to wear the clothes,” he said.
But in 2015, ahead of Mother’s Day — which the country celebrates on March 8, when other countries mark International Women’s Day — Rakhmon complained that in the past, Tajik women had never worn black, “even at funerals.”
This year, ahead of the same holiday, an official from the country’s state committee on women and family affairs called on women to dress and behave like Rakhmon’s late mother.
Tajikistan is not alone in the region taking aim at Islamic dress.
In neighboring Kyrgyzstan, President Almazbek Atambayev endorsed a series of controversial banners last year that depicted women in traditional Kyrgyz dress opposite women wearing dark niqab veils.
“Poor nation, where are we headed to?” the banners asked.
But critics note that the government-backed campaigns almost never impose dress codes on men.
The Tajik education ministry’s recommendation is a “typical phenomenon in which women’s bodies become the battlefield where political struggles take place,” said Mohira Suyarkulova of the Central Asian Studies Institute at the American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan.
Suyarkulova also said that Tajikistan’s 2009 decision to change International Women’s Day to “Mother’s Day” suggested a “narrowing of the possible field for women’s participation in politics and society.”
Others have railed against the sheer impracticalities of wearing the dresses, made from thin silk cloth or cotton, on a daily basis while cool weather persists in the mountainous republic.
“Probably the authors of this crazy recommendation don’t have daughters!” one woman wrote on Facebook, expressing her “outrage” at seeing girls walk to school in the dresses.
“Then we get surprised when young girls fall ill with serious flu. What does the health ministry think about this? Or is this a means of lowering the birth rate in the country?“
 


Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

Updated 52 min 29 sec ago
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Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

  • A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010

JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.


Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

Updated 26 November 2024
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Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.


The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.


Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.


Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

Updated 26 November 2024
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Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.


China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

Updated 26 November 2024
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China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

  • The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait

BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)


Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

Updated 26 November 2024
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Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.