NEW DELHI: This month marks 70 years since British India split into two nations — Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan — and millions were uprooted in one of the largest mass migrations in history.
An untold number of people — some estimates say up two million — died in the savage violence that followed, as Hindus and Muslims fleeing for their new homelands turned on one another, raping and butchering in genocidal retribution.
Five people who witnessed that bloody division told AFP of their fear, losses and attempts to rebuild their lives.
Nisar Akhtar, now a retired statistician in Karachi, was six years old when the smoke began to rise every night from the villages surrounding his family’s home in Hoshiarpur district in Punjab state — Sikhs, his father said, burning the surrounding areas.
Every day from that moment on they “faced the fear of being or not being.”
Eventually, after one failed escape attempt which saw his father separated from his family, they managed to flee to a refugee camp before beginning a 21-day walk into Pakistan, which was when the real nightmare began.
Sikhs attacked their caravan of several thousand people repeatedly. “They would toss the children in the air with their spears.
“I saw infants, children, and elders with spears pierced in their bodies. They were moaning with pain and I passed, skipping them.
“What could I have done? People were reeling in pain and shouting for water and we were too insensitive to help them. Everybody was concerned with his own life.”
He clung to his mother’s shirt so as not to lose her. She was also carrying his newborn sister. “At one stage, I am not sure whether knowingly or inadvertently, she left the baby lying on the ground. I asked her, ‘Where is my sister?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she flatly replied... I went back and I saw her (the baby) lying on the ground and picked her up. Today she is alive with the grace of Allah.”
Madhu Sondhi was five years old and living in Lahore when partition came and the Indian railway company offered her engineer father a choice of moving to India or staying in what is now Pakistan. The family ended up in a house near New Delhi’s central railway station that became a refuge for relatives streaming across the new border bringing horror stories.
“Opposite our house was a mosque where they were slaughtering Muslims. The bullets often fell in our garden so I was not allowed to play there.
“I wasn’t directly affected as I was very young. My mother’s sister, however, saw people being killed at the railway station, they were shoving pencils up their nostrils and into their eyes. She was never the same. One day she had one of her fits and picked me up, swung me around and threw me on the floor. My parents never left me alone with her again.”
“My mother’s brother stayed behind on his farm. As the rioters came looking for Hindus to kill, his Muslim servants hid him in a small shed and covered him with cow dung cakes. They loaded him onto a horse cart and set off to the refugee camp. On his way out he gave them his house keys — it’s yours, you saved my life, he told them.”
Raj Khanna was 14 years old, the third of seven children of a government accountant, living in a Hindu district of Lahore in 1947 when the killings mounted.
By summer of that year, an occasional stabbing had turned into a spree of killings and mobs attacks. “Rioters set fire to some of the houses in our lane,” he said.
“My friends and I had gone to see, and to help in any way. We were on the rooftop of the building next door, throwing water to douse the flames when someone pulled me back. That saved my life. There was a police wallah on the street firing at us. The bullet just missed me.”
“When our neighborhood went up in flames, that’s when the parents got scared and the exodus started.” The Khanna family went to Shimla, now the capital of India’s Himachal Pradesh state.
Raj Khanna eventually moved to Delhi. “I still had the refugee tag. The refugee tag stays with us. The wounds never heal.”
Saleem Hasan Siddiqui, now 76, vividly remembers the bloodied streets of old Delhi where the stench of chopped bodies wafted through the streets and frenzied mobs dumped corpses.
“The general atmosphere had become one of distrust, of fear. No one was ready to place their faith in one another,” said Siddiqui, who was first interviewed by the 1947 Partition Archive, an Indian organization that finds witnesses from that time and records their stories.
“We didn’t know who they were going to come for next.”
He recalled that as a six-year-old, he was frightened and fascinated by the violence.
“We weren’t allowed to go out much. But we would race out every opportunity we got because everyday it was ‘oh, that guy’s chopped head was found on the road’ or ‘oh, that guy was found murdered in the alley’. We were naturally excited.”
“They chopped people up and tossed them into the dry canal. Everyone was in a frenzy, killed whoever they saw... Hindu, Muslim, anyone. No one was really spared.”
Siddiqui recalled that he would run home “with chills.”
“The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve heard, they have stuck. They have forever been etched into my mind.”
Saeed Hasan Khan was 17 years old, trapped in east Punjab in September of 1947 as the killing continued. He managed to hitch a ride with a friend on a special train carrying the Pakistan army over the border.
The scenery outside the window was grotesque: “Corpses all around... We saw bodies at Jalandhar Station, Amritsar we saw the bodies, and we saw them at Ambala... There was nothing in my mind except being shocked.”
He made it over the border safely, attending college in Lahore before moving to Europe for 50 years and making several documentaries with the BBC, then ending up in Karachi.
But what stood out for him was when Pakistan played India in a Test match in 1954, just seven or so years after Partition.
Pakistan threw open the floodgates, allowing fans from Amritsar and Jalandhar to attend without visas.
In Lahore, he said, every other household had suffered some tragedy or horror during Partition. “But they all forgot all those miseries. When they saw Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs here, the sweetmeat shop owner refused to take money from them... They showed immense hospitality.
“And when they (Pakistanis) went to Jalandhar and Amritsar, the people there reciprocated.
“It means that a common man is ready to forget and forgive, despite that all the things were quite recent and alive in the memories of the people.”
India-Pakistan: Voices of the Partition
India-Pakistan: Voices of the Partition
Philippine VP made ‘active threat’ on Marcos’ life: palace
- The statement followed an expletive-laced press conference in which Duterte alleged she was the subject of an assassination plot
The statement followed an expletive-laced press conference in which Duterte alleged she was the subject of an assassination plot and said she ordered a member of her security team to kill the president should it succeed.
The Duterte and Marcos families have seen their alliance unravel in spectacular fashion in recent months, trading accusations of drug addiction and increasingly extreme rhetoric ahead of next year’s mid-term elections and presidential polls in 2028.
“I already talked to a person in my security. I told him if I get killed, kill BBM (Ferdinand Marcos), (first lady) Liza Araneta and (the president’s cousin) Martin Romualdez. No joke,” Duterte said at a press conference that began after midnight.
“I said, if I die, don’t stop until you have killed them.”
Hours later, the palace communications office said it had referred “this active threat to the Presidential Security Command for immediate proper action.”
“Any threat to the life of the President must always be taken seriously, more so that this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and certain terms,” it said in a statement.
Duterte is facing the threat of impeachment in the House of Representatives, led by Marcos’s cousin Romualdez, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028.
She has also had a messy falling out with the president’s wife Liza Araneta-Marcos, who has accused her of laughing at a January event where her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, accused Marcos of being a “drug addict.”
Duterte called her late-night press conference after House officials said they would transfer her chief of staff — detained after being cited for contempt — from the lower chamber’s detention center to a correctional facility.
Zuleika Lopez was detained on Wednesday after being accused of “undue interference” in House proceedings focused on Duterte’s spending of public funds.
Duterte stepped down from the cabinet post of education secretary in June as relations between the two families reached a breaking point.
Months earlier, her father had accused Marcos of being a “drug addict,” with the president the next day claiming his predecessor’s health was failing due to long-term use of the powerful opioid fentanyl.
Neither provided evidence of their allegations.
In October, Duterte said she felt “used” after teaming with Marcos for the May 2022 election, which they won by a landslide.
Duterte remains the constitutional successor to the 67-year-old president.
US restricts food, metal imports on Uyghur forced labor concerns
- Goods wholly or partially made by the sanctioned firms will be restricted from entering the US, says the Department of Homeland Security
- China is accused of incarcerating over 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, although officials strongly deny this
WASHINGTON: The United States said Friday that it is barring imports from dozens more China-based companies — ranging from businesses in the metals to food industries — citing worries over forced labor.
Officials are adding around 30 entities to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act entity list, meaning that goods wholly or partially made by these firms will be restricted from entering the United States.
The new additions bring the total number on the list to 107, said the Department of Homeland Security.
The reason is that the companies were found to either source materials from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region or work with its local government “to recruit, transfer, and receive workers, including Uyghurs, out of Xinjiang,” said the US Trade Representative’s office.
Beijing has been accused of incarcerating over one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention facilities in Xinjiang, although officials strongly deny this.
The newly-targeted companies make goods ranging from agricultural to aluminum products, along with polysilicon materials.
They also mine and process metals like copper, gold and nickel, the USTR statement added.
Among them are companies tied to Chinese electric vehicle battery manufacturer CATL and China-linked Gotion too, a bipartisan US congressional committee noted on Friday.
Earlier this year, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and others flagged CATL and Gotion’s ties to two businesses, Xinjiang Nonferrous and Xinjiang Joinworld.
Both were included in the latest update.
The committee’s chairman John Moolenaar and other lawmakers released a statement saying: “While we are pleased with this initial step, we remain concerned that CATL and Gotion’s supply chains are deeply tied to the Xinjiang region.”
The rule comes into effect on November 25.
“Companies should not secure unfair advantages by exploiting workers,” said US Trade Representative Katherine Tai.
“We will enforce our laws to address forced labor and prevent companies that violate workers’ rights from benefiting from the US market,” she added in a statement.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was signed into law in 2021.
Trump plans to assemble investigative teams to look into 2020 election, Washington Post reports
WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump plans to assemble investigative teams at the Department of Justice to search for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing a source.
Trump, who won the 2024 election but lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, has falsely claimed that he lost the 2020 election due to extensive voter fraud, a view shared by millions of his supporters.
Trump was indicted last year on federal charges for his attempts to overturn the election. The charges stemmed from an investigation by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
The Washington Post, citing two people close to Trump’s transition team, reported that Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with Smith.
Dutch court weighs a lawsuit against arms sales to Israel
- Opening the case at the court in The Hague, Judge Sonja Hoekstra noted: “It is important to underline that the Dutch State does not contest the gravity of the situation in Gaza, nor is the status of the West Bank”
THE HAGUE: Pro-Palestinian groups took the Dutch state to court on Friday, urging a halt to arms exports to Israel and accusing the government of failing to prevent what they termed a genocide in Gaza.
The NGOs argued that Israel is breaking international law in Gaza and the West Bank, invoking, among others, the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
“Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid” and “is using Dutch weapons to wage war,” said Wout Albers, a lawyer representing the NGOs.
“Dutch weapons are killing children every day in Palestine, including my family,” said Ahmed Abofoul, a legal adviser to Al-Haq, one of the groups involved in the suit. Israel furiously denies accusations of genocide as it presses on with the offensive in Gaza.
Opening the case at the court in The Hague, Judge Sonja Hoekstra noted: “It is important to underline that the Dutch State does not contest the gravity of the situation in Gaza, nor is the status of the West Bank.”
“Today is about finding out what is legally in play and what can be expected of the state if the state can be expected to do more or act differently than it is currently acting,” she added.
She acknowledged this was a “sensitive case,” saying: “It’s a whole legal debate.”
The lawyer for the Dutch State, Reimer Veldhuis, said the Netherlands has been applying European laws in force for arms exports.
Veldhuis argued the case should be tossed out.
“It is unlikely that the minister responsible will grant an arms export license to Israel that would contribute to the Israeli army’s activities in Gaza or the West Bank,” said Veldhuis.
The case comes one day after another court based in The Hague, the International Criminal Court, issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister.
How COP29 outcome may impact countries most affected by climate change
- UN Climate Change Conference in Baku brought together policymakers, researchers and environmentalists from 200 countries
- Discussions covered energy transition, climate finance, loss and damage funding and environmental cost of geopolitical tensions
BAKU, Azerbaijan: The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference concluded in the capital of Azerbaijan on Friday with climate activists, world leaders and investors reflecting on climate change’s global impacts and the urgent need for actionable solutions.
This year’s event emphasized financing mechanisms, particularly to alleviate the suffering of vulnerable nations, and especially the developing countries most affected by climate change.
COP29 — the 29th Conference of the Parties under the United Nations climate organization UNFCCC — ran from Nov. 11 to 22 and brought together policymakers, researchers, and environmentalists from 200 countries.
A dominant theme was energy transition, as fossil fuel emissions remain the biggest driver of global warming.
The UN reports that burning coal, oil, and gas accounts for more than 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and roughly 90 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.
Policymakers argued that reducing reliance on traditional fuels and adopting modern energy solutions could significantly shrink the global carbon footprint and bring the world closer to net-zero targets.
The University of Exeter’s Global Carbon Budget recently projected total CO2 emissions to rise from 40.6 billion metric tons in 2023 to 41.6 billion in 2024.
Sharing his perspective on the COP29 negotiations and the change he hopes to see, climate activist Philip McMaster, known on social media as SustainaClaus, told Arab News he is campaigning for a a healthier environment for children.
“The message of SustainaClaus is ‘Make childhood great again.’ Why? Because we all had a childhood before,” he said on the sidelines of the conference. “It was either great or not, but it was a very important period of time, and that is what these negotiations should be about: how we make the world a better place for the next generations.”
He added: “I hope to see global change.”
DID YOUKNOW?
• In the first week of COP29, as a step to foster sustainable energy, Saudi Arabia signed an executive program with Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to strengthen collaboration on renewable energy development.
• The COP29 agenda included energy transition, finance, urbanization and Article 6.
• Climate finance was the main topic discussed in Baku, along with the need to raise funds for vulnerable nations.
Military activity also emerged as a significant environmental threat. Olga Lermak, communications lead at Greencubator, a Ukraine-based cleantech accelerator, noted the ecological devastation caused by war.
“War creates a climate crisis not just where it happens; it pollutes air, water, and land,” she said.
Ukraine accounts for 35 percent of Europe’s biodiversity, including 70,000 plant and animal species, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature. Among its endangered animals are the sandy blind mole-rat, the Russian desman, and the saker falcon.
The country’s ongoing conflict with Russia has caused significant damage to that biodiversity, according to Lermak.
“I hope that the negotiations held here bring great solutions, something that will help us to move forward,” she said. “I hope it is not just conversations, not just talking, but real action after this.”
Opinion
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Another key issue debated at COP29 was loss and damage funding — addressing “unavoided” damage caused by climate change in the most vulnerable countries as well as “unavoidable” damage such as that caused by rising sea levels. Investment in emissions reduction was one of the key solutions put forward for dealing with unavoided damage.
Researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change estimate that the loss and damage needs of vulnerable countries will amount to between $130 billion and $940 billion in 2025 alone.
Gloria Bulus, team lead at Nigeria’s Bridge that Gap Initiative, emphasized that beyond highlighting loss and damage, there must also be a focus on delivering investment and implementing concrete solutions.
“We are expecting a lot to be (invested) in terms of the loss and damage, so that it goes beyond the speeches,” she said.
Highlighting some of the pressing environmental challenges her country is facing, Bulus expressed her hope for “fair” negotiations.
“Negotiations have been very slow for us,” she said. “What we want is action. What we want is an outcome that favors people, where we have renewable energy transition.”
Among other steps, COP29 promised to secure “the highest ambition outcome possible,” proposing that wealthier countries contribute $250 billion annually to developing nations to support their efforts in tackling climate change.
