KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh: Abdul Hasan can spend hours watching old videos he shot on his cellphone.
“My heart aches for my village, my home,” the 16-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar said in a camp in neighboring Bangladesh. “That’s why we have brought these memories, this video, from Myanmar.”
Since late August, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape attacks by Myanmar security forces. But before fleeing from advancing soldiers, few Rohingya had time to grab many of their belongings. Instead, they poured across the border into Bangladesh bringing with them little more than horror stories of marauding forces and memories of terrifying treks through the forests.
Their old lives — homes, cattle, villages, everything — are gone. All they have left is their memories.
But if they’re lucky, some of those memories are stored on the cellphones many refugees managed to bring with them.
It’s the closest Hasan gets to experiencing his old life and country. One video shows him having what he calls a “coconut party.” A song hailing the bravery of a Rohingya rebel leader plays in the background as Hasan and his friends eat coconuts, and laugh as they throw them at each other.
“When I watch this video, I think of my country, Myanmar. It really breaks my heart so much,” he said.
The government of Buddhist-majority Myanmar has refused to accept Rohingya as a minority group, even though some have lived in the country for generations. Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship in 1982, denying them almost all rights and rendering them stateless.
In late August, attacks by Rohingya militants triggered a brutal and indiscriminate response by Myanmar’s military, sending more than 630,000 Rohingya fleeing to nearby Bangladesh.
Mohammad Fahid, 15, said he often finds himself looking through old photos and videos on his phone. He misses his friends. He misses school.
“I shared a lot of good times and laughter with my friends. I can’t do that here anymore,” he said. “We could go to school, now we can’t. So that is why I have kept these pictures. To remember.”
There is little work for the adults in the camps, and almost no schools for the children, who make up nearly 60 percent of the refugees. There is plenty of time to scroll through cellphones.
But not all the phone memories are happy.
Mujib Ullah is sitting with his sisters in their new home, a dark one-room shelter made from bamboo and plastic sheets. Ullah, 22, is showing a video of people in the Myanmar village of Borgiyabil frantically trying to extinguish the flames after soldiers lit their homes on fire with Molotov cocktails. The villagers used buckets of sand and water to try to put out the fires, but the homes kept burning, Ullah said.
A few hours after shooting his video, Ullah returned to his own village nearby and found his neighbors coming out of their homes. Everyone thought the soldiers had left. Suddenly gunfire rang out. Soldiers they hadn’t spotted were firing into the crowd.
“Some people were able to save themselves, others could not,” Ullah said. “My brother could not save himself. He was riddled with bullets.”
Heartbroken Rohingya refugees return home to Myanmar, even if only in videos
Heartbroken Rohingya refugees return home to Myanmar, even if only in videos
Biden praises COP29 deal, vows US action despite Trump
- Biden hailed the goal as “ambitious,” though poorer nations quickly decried it as inadequate
- As agreed, developed nations will pay at least $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developing countries green their economies and prepare for worse disasters
WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden praised the COP29 deal Saturday as a “significant step” to fighting global warming, and pledged continued action by America despite his incoming successor Donald Trump’s climate skepticism.
“While there is still substantial work ahead of us to achieve our climate goals, today’s outcome puts us one significant step closer,” Biden said in a statement.
After two exhausting weeks of negotiations in Azerbaijan, the pact hammered out commits developed nations to pay at least $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developing countries green their economies and prepare for worse disasters.
Biden hailed the goal as “ambitious,” though poorer nations quickly decried it as inadequate.
The Baku meeting kicked off shortly after Trump won a new term in the White House, potentially setting the stage for him to undo actions by Biden’s administration.
Biden, who leaves office on January 20, said he was “confident” the United States “will continue this work: through our states and cities, our businesses, and our citizens, supported by durable legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act.”
“While some may seek to deny or delay the clean energy revolution that’s underway in America and around the world, nobody can reverse it — nobody.”
A $300B a year deal for climate cash at UN summit sparks outrage for some and hope for others
BAKU, Azerbaijan: United Nations climate talks adopted a deal to inject at least $300 billion annually in humanity’s fight against climate change, aimed at helping developing nations cope with the ravages of global warming in tense negotiations.
The $300 billion will go to developing countries who need the cash to wean themselves off the coal, oil and gas that causes the globe to overheat, adapt to future warming and pay for the damage caused by climate change’s extreme weather. It’s not near the full amount of $1.3 trillion that developing countries were asking for, but it’s three times a deal of $100 billion a year from 2009 that is expiring. Some delegations said this deal is headed in the right direction, with hopes that more money flows in the future.
But it was not quite the agreement by consensus that these meetings usually operate with and some developing nations were livid about being ignored.
COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev gaveled the deal into acceptance before any nation had a chance to speak. When they did they blasted him for being unfair to them, the deal for not being enough and the world’s rich nations for being too stingy.
“It’s a paltry sum,” India negotiator Chandni Raina said, repeatedly saying how India objected to rousing cheers. “I’m sorry to say we cannot accept it.”
She told The Associated Press that she has lost faith in the United Nations system.
After a deal, nations express their discontent
A long line of nations agreed with India and piled on, with Nigeria’s Nkiruka Maduekwe, CEO of the National Council on Climate Change, calling the deal an insult and a joke.
“I’m disappointed. It’s definitely below the benchmark that we have been fighting for for so long,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey, of the Panama delegation. He noted that a few changes, including the inclusion of the words “at least” before the number $300 billion and an opportunity for revision by 2030, helped push them to the finish line.
“Our heart goes out to all those nations that feel like they were walked over,” he said.
The final package pushed through “does not speak or reflect or inspire confidence,” India’s Raina said.
“We absolutely object to the unfair means followed for adoption,” Raina said. “We are extremely hurt by this action by the president and the secretariat.”
Speaking for nearly 50 of the poorest nations of the world, Evans Davie Njewa of Malawi was more mild, expressing what he called reservations with the deal. And the Alliance of Small Island States’ Cedric Schuster said he had more hope “that the process would protect the interests of the most vulnerable” but nevertheless expressed tempered support for the deal.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a post on X that he hoped for a “more ambitious outcome.” But he said the agreement “provides a base on which to build.”
Some see deal as relief following tough talks
There were somewhat satisfied parties, with European Union’s Wopke Hoekstra calling it a new era of climate funding, working hard to help the most vulnerable. But activists in the plenary hall could be heard coughing over Hoekstra’s speech in an attempt to disrupt it.
Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s environment minister, called the agreement “a huge relief.”
“It was not certain. This was tough,” he said. “Because it’s a time of division, of war, of (a) multilateral system having real difficulties, the fact that we could get it through in these difficult circumstances is really important.”
UN Climate Change’s Executive Secretary Simon Stiell called the deal an “insurance policy for humanity,” adding that like insurance, “it only works if the premiums are paid in full, and on time.”
The deal is seen as a step toward helping countries on the receiving end create more ambitious targets to limit or cut emissions of heat-trapping gases that are due early next year. It’s part of the plan to keep cutting pollution with new targets every five years, which the world agreed to at the UN talks in Paris in 2015.
The Paris agreement set the system of regular ratcheting up climate fighting ambition as away to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. The world is already at 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) and carbon emissions keep rising.
Hopes that more climate cash will follow
Countries also anticipate that this deal will send signals that help drive funding from other sources, like multilateral development banks and private sources. That was always part of the discussion at these talks — rich countries didn’t think it was realistic to only rely on public funding sources — but poor countries worried that if the money came in loans instead of grants, it would send them sliding further backward into debt that they already struggle with.
“The $300 billion goal is not enough, but is an important down payment toward a safer, more equitable future,” said World Resources Institute President Ani Dasgupta. “This deal gets us off the starting block. Now the race is on to raise much more climate finance from a range of public and private sources, putting the whole financial system to work behind developing countries’ transitions.”
And even though it’s far from the needed $1.3 trillion, it’s more than the $250 billion that was on the table in an earlier draft of the text, which outraged many countries and led to a period of frustration and stalling over the final hours of the summit.
Other deals agreed at COP29
The several different texts adopted early Sunday morning included a vague but not specific reference to last year’s Global Stocktake approved in Dubai. Last year there was a battle about first-of-its-kind language on getting rid of the oil, coal and natural gas, but instead it called for a transition away from fossil fuels. The latest talks only referred to the Dubai deal, but did not explicitly repeat the call for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Countries also agreed on the adoption of Article 6, creating markets to trade carbon pollution rights, an idea that was set up as part of the Paris Agreement to help nations work together to reduce climate-causing pollution. Part of that was a system of carbon credits, allowing nations to put planet-warming gasses in the air if they offset emissions elsewhere. Backers said a UN-backed market could generate up to an additional $250 billion a year in climate financial aid.
Despite its approval, carbon markets remain a contentious plan because many experts say the new rules adopted don’t prevent misuse, don’t work and give big polluters an excuse to continue spewing emissions.
“What they’ve done essentially is undermine the mandate to try to reach 1.5,” said Tamara Gilbertson, climate justice program coordinator with the Indigenous Environmental Network. Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts, called it a “climate scam” with many loopholes.
With this deal wrapped up as crews dismantle the temporary venue, many have eyes on next year’s climate talks in Belem, Brazil.
Daesh group claims attack on Sufi shrine in Afghanistan
- A local resident, who said he knew victims of the attack, said worshippers had gathered at the Sayed Pasha Agha shrine on Thursday evening
KABUL: Daesh (IS-K), the terrorist group’s branch in Afghanistan, on Saturday claimed responsibility for a gun attack that left 10 people dead at a Sufi shrine in northern Baghlan province.
Taliban authorities in Kabul have repeatedly said they have defeated IS-K, but the group regularly claims responsibility for attacks, notably against Sufi or Shiite minorities, targets they consider heretical.
On Friday, interior ministry spokesman Abdul Matin Qani told AFP that a gunman opened fire on Sufis “taking part in a weekly ritual” at a shrine in a remote area of Nahrin district, killing 10 people.
A local resident, who said he knew victims of the attack, said worshippers had gathered at the Sayed Pasha Agha shrine on Thursday evening.
They had begun a Sufi chant when “a man shot at the dozen worshippers,” he said on condition of anonymity.
“When people arrived for morning prayers, they discovered the bodies,” he added.
The UN special rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, wrote on X: “Religious minorities remain under grave threat. More prevention, protection & justice needed.”
The Daesh group accuses Sufis of worshipping more than one god because of their devotion to saints.
In mid-September, the group claimed responsibility for an attack in central Afghanistan that killed 14 people who had gathered to welcome pilgrims returning from Karbala in Iraq, one of the holiest sites for Shiites.
India opposes COP29 finance deal after it is adopted
BAKU: India strongly objected to a climate finance deal agreed at the United Nations COP29 summit on Sunday, but their objection was raised after the deal was formally adopted by consensus.
“I regret to say that this document is nothing more than an optical illusion. This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face. Therefore, we oppose the adoption of this document,” Indian delegation representative Chandni Raina told the closing plenary session of the summit.
UN secretary general says more work needed on COP29 finance deal
- Final deal commits developed nations to pay at least $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developed countries green their economies and prepare for worse disasters
- Climate chief Simon Stiell says it was “no time for victory laps”
UNITED NATIONS/BAKU, Azerbaijan: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern that the climate finance deal agreed early Sunday in Azerbaijan did not go far enough, as he urged nations to view it as a “foundation” on which to build.
“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome — on both finance and mitigation — to meet the great challenge we face,” Guterres said in a statement, adding that he is appealing “to governments to see this agreement as a foundation — and build on it.”
After two exhaustive weeks of negotiations, the final deal commits developed nations to pay at least $300 billion a year by 2035 to help developed countries green their economies and prepare for worse disasters.
That is up from $100 billion now provided by wealthy countries under a commitment set to expire — and from the $250 billion proposed in an earlier draft Friday.
The deal “must be honored in full and on time,” Guterres said.
“Commitments must quickly become cash. All countries must come together to ensure the top-end of this new goal is met.”
He called on countries to deliver new economy-wide climate action plans “well ahead of COP30 — as promised.”
“The end of the fossil fuel age is an economic inevitability. New national plans must accelerate the shift, and help to ensure it comes with justice,” he said, closing with a message to activists pushing for more to “keep it up.”
“The United Nations is with you. Our fight continues. And we will never give up,” Guterres said.
‘No time for victory laps’
UN climate chief Simon Stiell on Sunday said it was “no time for victory laps” after nations at COP29 in Azerbaijan agreed a bitterly negotiated finance deal.
“No country got everything they wanted, and we leave Baku with a mountain of work still to do. So this is no time for victory laps,” Stiell said in a statement.
