GENEVA: Myanmar’s security forces may be guilty of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority, the United Nations’ top human rights official said on Tuesday, adding that more were fleeing despite an agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh to send them home.
Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that none of the 626,000 Rohingya who have fled violence since August should be repatriated to Myanmar unless there was robust monitoring on the ground.
Myanmar’s Ambassador Htin Lynn said that his government was working with Bangladesh to ensure returns of the displaced in about two months and “there will be no camps.”
Zeid, who has described the campaign in the past as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing,” was addressing a special session of the UN Human Rights Council called by Bangladesh, which is struggling to accommodate Rohingya who have fled.
He described “concordant reports of acts of appalling barbarity committed against the Rohingya, including deliberately burning people to death inside their homes, murders of children and adults; indiscriminate shooting of fleeing civilians; widespread rapes of women and girls, and the burning and destruction of houses, schools, markets and mosques.”
“Can anyone — can anyone — rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” he told the 47-member state forum.
The United Nations defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. A UN convention requires all countries to act to halt genocide and to punish those responsible.
Shahriar Alam, Bangladesh’s junior foreign affairs minister, told the session in Geneva that his country was hosting nearly one million “Myanmar nationals” following summary executions and rapes “as a weapon of persecution.”
Mainly Buddhist Myanmar denies the Muslim Rohingya are its citizens and considers them foreigners.
These crimes had been “perpetrated by Myanmar security forces and extremist Buddhist vigilantes,” Alam said, calling for an end to what he called “xenophobic rhetoric..including from higher echelons of the government and the military.”
Zeid urged the Council to recommend that the UN General Assembly establish a new mechanism “to assist individual criminal investigations of those responsible.”
Prosecutions for the violence and rapes against Rohingya by security forces or by civilians “appear extremely rare,” Zeid said.
Marzuki Darusman, head of an independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said by video from Malaysia: “We will go where the evidence leads us...Our focus is on facts and circumstances of allegations in Myanmar as a whole since 2011.”
His team has interviewed Rohingya refugees, including children in the Bangladeshi port city of Cox’s Bazar, who recounted “acts of extreme brutality” and “displayed signs of severe trauma.”
Myanmar has not granted the investigators access to Rakhine, the northern state from which the Rohingya have fled, he said. “We maintain hope that it will be granted early in 2018.”
Pramila Patten, special representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, who interviewed survivors in Bangladesh in November, said: “I heard the most heart-breaking and horrific accounts of sexual atrocities reportedly committed in cold blood out of a lethal hatred of these people solely on the basis of their ethnicity and religion.”
Crimes included “rape, gang rape by multiple soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery in military captivity,” Patten said.
Myanmar denies committing atrocities against the Rohingya. Its envoy Htin, referring to the accounts, said: “People will say what they wanted to believe and sometimes they will say what they were told to say.”
Kelley Currie, US ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council, said the Rohingya’s lack of Myanmar citizenship was “the fundamental root cause of this crisis,” adding: “Stop denying the seriousness of the current situation.”
UN: Myanmar forces may be guilty of genocide against Rohingya
UN: Myanmar forces may be guilty of genocide against Rohingya
US lawmakers urge Biden to extend TikTok Jan. 19 ban deadline
- Biden could extend the deadline by 90 days if he certifies ByteDance is making substantial progress toward a divestiture but it is unlikely ByteDance could meet that standard
WASHINGTON: Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday urged Congress and President Joe Biden to extend a Jan. 19 deadline for China-based ByteDance to sell the US assets of TikTok or face a US ban.
The Supreme Court held arguments Friday on Tiktok and ByteDance’s challenge to the law. A lawyer for the companies, Noel Francisco, said it would be impossible to complete a sale by next week’s deadline.
He said if banned, the short video app used by 170 million Americans would quickly go dark and “essentially the platform shuts down.”
Biden could extend the deadline by 90 days if he certifies ByteDance is making substantial progress toward a divestiture but it is unlikely ByteDance could meet that standard.
Senator Edward Markey said he planned to introduce legislation to delay the deadline by which ByteDance must sell TikTok or face a ban by an additional 270 days.
“A ban would dismantle a one-of-a-kind informational and cultural ecosystem, silencing millions in the process,” Markey said Monday.
“A TikTok ban would impose serious consequences on millions of Americans who depend on the app for social connections and their economic livelihood. We cannot allow that to happen.”
President-elect Donald Trump has asked the court to delay implementation of the law, arguing he should have time after taking office on Jan. 20 to pursue a “political resolution” to the issue.
Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat, on Monday urged Biden and Trump “to put a pause on this ban so 170 million Americans don’t lose their free speech. Millions of Americans’ livelihood will be ended if this ban takes place.”
If the court does not block the law by Sunday, new downloads of TikTok on Apple or Google app stores would be banned but existing users could continue to access the app for some period. Services would degrade and eventually stop working as companies will be barred from providing support.
The White House did not immediately comment.
China mulls potential sale of TikTok US to Musk, Bloomberg News reports
Chinese officials are mulling a potential option that involves the sale of TikTok’s US operations to billionaire Elon Musk if the company fails to fend off a potential ban, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Chinese officials prefer that TikTok remain under the control of parent Bytedance, the report said, adding that the company is contesting the ban with an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Under one scenario, Musk’s social media platform X would take control of TikTok US and run the business together, the report said, adding that the Chinese officials have yet to reach any firm consensus about how to proceed and their deliberations are still preliminary.
TikTok declined to comment, while Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment. X could not immediately be reached for a comment.
The Cyberspace Administration of China and China’s Ministry of Commerce, government agencies that could be involved in decisions about TikTok’s future, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Last week, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold a law that would force a sale or ban of the popular short-video app TikTok in the United States by Jan. 19, with the justices focusing on the national security concerns about China that prompted the crackdown.
Trump says he will meet ‘very quickly’ with Putin
US President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday he is going to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin “very quickly” after he takes office next week.
He did not provide a timeline for the meeting, which would be the first between the leaders of the two countries since Russia’s war with Ukraine started in February 2022.
When asked about his strategy to end the war, Trump told Newsmax: “Well, there’s only one strategy and it’s up to Putin and I can’t imagine he’s too thrilled about the way it’s gone because it hasn’t gone exactly well for him either.
“And I know he wants to meet and I’m going to meet very quickly. I would’ve done it sooner but...you have to get into the office. For some of the things, you do have to be there.”
US Congressman Mike Waltz, the incoming national security adviser, said on Sunday he expected a call between Trump and Putin in “the coming days and weeks.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has left tens of thousands of people dead, displaced millions and triggered the biggest rupture in relations between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Biden says he’s leaving Trump with a ‘strong hand to play’ in world conflicts
- “My administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play,” Biden said
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden said Monday that his stewardship of American foreign policy has left the US safer and economically more secure, arguing that President-elect Donald Trump will inherit a nation viewed as stronger and more reliable than it was four years ago.
Biden trumpeted his administration’s work on expanding NATO, rallying allies to provide Ukraine with military aid to fight Russia and bolstering American chip manufacturing to better compete with China during a wide-ranging speech to reflect on his foreign policy legacy a week before ceding the White House to Trump.
Biden’s case for his achievements will be shadowed and shaped, at least in the near term, by the messy counterfactual that American voters once again turned to Trump and his protectionist worldview. And he will leave office at a turbulent moment for the globe, with a series of conflicts raging.
“Thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition compared to four years ago,” Biden said in his address at the State Department. “America is stronger. Our alliances are stronger. Our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We have not gone to war to make these things happen.”
The one-term Democrat took office in the throes of the worst global pandemic in a century, and his plans to repair alliances strained by four years of Trump’s “America First” worldview were quickly stress-tested by international crises: the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Hamas’ brutal 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war in the Middle East.
Biden argued that he provided a steady hand when the world needed it most. He was tested by war, calamity and miscalculation.
“My administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play,” Biden said. “America is once again leading.”
Chaotic US exit from Afghanistan was an early setback for Biden
With the US completing its 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden fulfilled a campaign promise to wind down America’s longest war.
But the 20-year conflict ended in disquieting fashion: The US-backed Afghan government collapsed, a grisly bombing killed 13 US troops and 170 others, and thousands of desperate Afghans descended on Kabul’s airport in search of a way out before the final US aircraft departed over the Hindu Kush.
The Afghanistan debacle was a major setback just eight months into Biden’s presidency that he struggled to recover from.
“Ending the war was the right thing to do, and I believe history will reflect that,” Biden said. “Critics said if we ended the war, it would damage our alliances and create threats to our homeland from foreign-directed terrorism out of a safe haven in Afghanistan — neither has occurred.”
Biden’s Republican detractors, including Trump, cast it as a signal moment in a failed presidency.
“I’ll tell you what happened, he was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment, most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump said in his lone 2024 presidential debate with Biden, just weeks before the Democrat announced he was ending his reelection campaign.
Biden’s legacy in Ukraine may hinge on Trump’s approach going forward
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden rallied allies in Europe and beyond to provide Ukraine with billions in military and economic assistance — including more than $100 billion from the US alone. That allowed Kyiv to stay in the fight with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vastly bigger and better-equipped military.
Biden’s team also coordinated with allies to hit Russia with a steady stream of sanctions aimed at isolating the Kremlin and making Moscow pay an economic price for prosecuting its war.
Biden on Monday marveled that at the start of the war Putin thought Russian forces would easily defeat Ukraine in a matter of days. It was an assessment US and European intelligence officials shared.
Instead, Biden said his administration and its allies have “laid the foundation” for the Trump administration to help Ukraine eventually arrive at a moment where it can negotiate a just end to the nearly three-year old conflict.
“Today, Ukraine is still a free and independent country with the potential for a bright future,” Biden said.
Trump has criticized the cost of the war to US taxpayers and has vowed to bring the conflict to a quick end.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan made the case that Trump, a billionaire real estate developer, should consider the backing of Ukraine through the prism of a dealmaker.
“Donald Trump has built his identity around making deals, and the way you make a good deal is with leverage,” Sullivan said in an interview. “Our case publicly and privately to the incoming team is build the leverage, show the staying power, back Ukraine, and it is down that path that lies a good deal.”
Biden’s Mideast diplomacy shadowed by devastation of Gaza
In the Middle East, Biden has stood by Israel as it has worked to root out Hamas from Gaza. That war spawned another in Lebanon, where Israel has mauled Iran’s most powerful ally, Hezbollah, even as Israel has launched successful airstrikes openly inside of Iran for the first time.
The degradation of Hezbollah in turn played a role when Islamist-led rebels last month ousted longtime Syrian leader Bashar Assad, a brutal fixture of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.”
“Iran is weaker than it’s been in decades,” Biden said.
Biden’s relationship with Israel’s conservative leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been strained by the enormous Palestinian death toll in the fighting — now standing at more than 46,000 dead — and Israel’s blockade of the territory, which has left much of Gaza a hellscape where access to food and basic health care is severely limited.
Pro-Palestinian activists have demanded an arms embargo against Israel, but US policy has largely remained unchanged. The State Department in recent days informed Congress of a planned $8 billion weapons sale to Israel.
Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Middle East negotiator, said the approach has put Iran on its heels, but Biden will pay a reputational cost for the devastation of Gaza.
“The administration was either unable or unwilling to create any sort of restraint that normal humans would regard as significant pressure,” Miller said. “It was beyond Joe Biden’s emotional and political bandwidth to impose the kinds of sustained or significant pressures that might have led to a change in Israeli tactics.”
More than 15 months after the Hamas-led attack that prompted the war, around 98 hostages remain in Gaza. More than a third of those are presumed dead by Israeli authorities.
Biden’s Middle East adviser Brett McGurk is in the Middle East, looking to complete an elusive hostage and ceasefire deal as time runs out in the presidency.
“We are on the brink of a proposal that I laid out in detail months ago finally coming to fruition,” Biden said.
Trump, for his part, is warning that “all hell” will be unleashed on Hamas if the hostages aren’t freed by Inauguration Day.
Sullivan declined to comment on Trump’s threats to Hamas, but offered that the two sides are in agreement about the most important thing: getting a deal done.
“Having alignment of the outgoing and incoming administration that a hostage deal at the earliest possible opportunity is in the American national interest,” he said. “Having unity of message on that is a good thing, and we have closely coordinated with the incoming team to this effect.”
Europe must combat antisemitism as thousands of Jews abandon the continent, top Jewish leader says
- Margolin said 2025 will be a “critical year” for European Jews because the course of action that governments will take to combat antisemitism will determine the future of Jewish communities on the continent
LARNACA, Cyprus: Governments across Europe need to immediately take action against a precipitous rise in antisemitism that’s driving thousands of Jews to abandon the continent, the leader of a prominent European Jewish organization said Monday.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association (EJA), said some 40,000 Jews have already left Europe in recent years with no intention of returning as a result of a rise in antisemitic sentiment.
Instead of a wave of solidarity with Israel following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack that triggered a war now in its 15th month, Margolin said antisemitism has skyrocketed by 2,000 percent, according to statistics he says have been collated by organizations that monitor antisemitism.
Margolin said 2025 will be a “critical year” for European Jews because the course of action that governments will take to combat antisemitism will determine the future of Jewish communities on the continent.
“There’s still a chance that Jewish people will be living in Europe,” Margolin told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of a gala dinner honoring former Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades for his efforts to foster closer Cyprus-Israel relations during his tenure.
“But if the governments of Europe will not take serious measures that we are demanding from them in this year this is the beginning of the end of Jewish presence in Europe,” he said.
His said the EJA, the largest Jewish organization in Europe representing several hundred Jewish communities, brought together Jewish leaders from across the continent for a summit on tackling rising antisemitism.
He said European governments need to move beyond mere verbal condemnations of antisemitic behavior and take effective action to ensure the safety and security of Jewish institutions and Jews practicing their customs in Europe.
Authorities also need to establish a “code of conduct” by which demonstrations against Israel don’t devolve into antisemitic protests, Margolin said.
These immediate steps should be accompanied by “strong and swift” punishment of individuals found guilty of antisemitic actions.
Over the long term, Europe needs prosecutors who have a clear understanding of the many forms antisemitism can take, as well as programs introduced in schools to educate people against antisemitic attitudes.
“But more important is the willingness of the government to combat antisemitism,” said Margolin.
The EJA chairman said antisemitism is “coming from all sides of the political spectrum” as Russia’s war in Ukraine fuels concern and uncertainty within Europe that’s compounded by “demographic change.”
Margolin attributed political shortsightedness to European elected officials who “pretend to think that everything is just alright” and “do not understand the emergency of combating antisemitism.”
He said his organization chose to hold the summit in Cyprus because Jewish people on the eastern Mediterranean island nation feel “very, very welcome” and secure while the government has close relations with the state of Israel.
According to Margolin, opposition to the Jewish state is the prime reason for antisemitism in Europe.
“The moment the government is friendly toward Israel and understands and defends Israel’s right to defend itself, it reduces a lot of tension against Jewish people,” Margolin said.
