PARIS: A video of police beating a black music producer in Paris triggered outrage and condemnation on Thursday, leading to the suspension of several officers and a public backlash that drew in French World Cup football stars.
The incident comes after a string of high-profile probes into police violence and as concern grows over new legislation proposed by the government that would restrict the right of citizens to film and publish images of police on duty.
Online news site Loopsider published security camera images on Thursday showing three officers punching, kicking and using their truncheons on the producer, identified as Michel, as he entered his studio in the French capital late on Saturday.
The beating lasted around five minutes, during which Michel said he was repeatedly subjected to racist abuse, before he was dragged out of the building in the northwestern 17th district of the capital.
He was initially arrested for violence and failure to obey the police. But prosecutors threw out the probe and instead opened an investigation against the police officers themselves for committing violence while in a position of authority.
Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told French television that the officers “had soiled the uniform of the republic” and that he would press for their dismissal.
Police sources said four officers had been suspended in total.
As the hashtag #Michel trended on French social media, politicians and footballers who played on France’s 2018 World Cup winning team denounced the latest evidence which comes amid a wider debate in France about police methods.
The death in US police custody of George Floyd in May has also reverberated in France where allegations of brutality against police officers are commonplace, particularly in poor and ethnically diverse areas in the country’s major cities.
“People who should have been protecting me attacked me. I did nothing to deserve this. I just want these three people to be punished because we have a good justice system in France,” Michel told journalists on Thursday.
“I was lucky to have videos which protect me, unlike a lot of others, otherwise I would not be here with you today,” he added.
Michel’s lawyer, Hafida El Ali, told AFP that his client had been detained for 48 hours after the beating on the basis of “lies by the police who had outrageously attacked him.”
Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz told AFP that he had asked France’s National Police General Inspectorate (IGPN) to shed light on what happened “as quickly as possible.”
Loopsider, which has exposed several episodes of police violence in recent months, said that the images “had to be seen to understand the full extent of the problem.”
Michel told the site he was in the street not wearing a face mask on Saturday, but went inside his studio when police arrived.
The beating took place in the hallway of the building, with the violence captured on CCTV.
Paris’ Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo said she was “profoundly shocked” “by an intolerable act... that is exceptionally serious.”
Football stars on the 2018 squad such as Antoine Griezmann, Samuel Umtiti and Kylian Mbappe all denounced the images.
“Unbearable video, unacceptable violence,” Mbappe wrote on Twitter next to a picture of the injured producer. “Say no to racism.”
There has already been virulent criticism of the police this week after they used tear gas late Monday to remove migrants from a camp set up in central Paris.
Prosecutors have opened probes into that operation after videos showed a journalist being assaulted and an officer tripping a migrant as he runs away from the scene.
The beating of the producer has piled new pressure on Paris police chief Didier Lallement who has faced criticism over the dispersal of the migrant camp, as well as on hard-line Interior Minister Darmanin.
The outcry comes after the lower house of parliament on Tuesday evening gave initial approval to a security bill which would restrict the publication of photos or videos of police officers’ faces.
Media unions say it could give police a green light to prevent journalists from doing their work and potentially documenting abuses, as well as stopping social media users from posting incriminating footage.
A protest against the law has been called for Saturday in Paris.
In a sign that the government was possibly preparing to backtrack, Prime Minister Jean Castex announced late Thursday that he would appoint a commission to redraft Article 24 of the law that would restrict images of the police.
In a reminder of a previous police operation that caused outrage, three officers accused of severely injuring a man named Theodore Luhaka outside Paris in February 2017 are to face trial on charges of involuntary violence, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Luhaka was severely wounded in the area of his rectum by a blow from a truncheon. The judge has followed advice of prosecutors and the officers will not be tried for rape.
President Emmanuel Macron swept to power in 2017 as a centrist who rallied support from across the political spectrum. But with the new security law, critics and even some supporters accuse him of tilting to the right as he seeks re-election in 2022.
Outcry grows in France after police filmed beating music producer
https://arab.news/w8per
Outcry grows in France after police filmed beating music producer
- Online news site Loopsider published security camera images showing three officers punching, kicking and using their truncheons on the producer, identified as Michel
- The beating lasted around five minutes, during which Michel said he was repeatedly subjected to racist abuse, before he was dragged out of a building in Paris’ 17th district
Cambodia welcomes Japanese navy ships to naval base that US suspects is for China’s special use
China and Cambodia have close political, military, and economic ties
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia: Two Japanese naval ships docked Saturday at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, whose recently completed Chinese-funded upgrade has heightened US concerns that it will be used as a strategic outpost for China’s navy in the Gulf of Thailand.
The visit by the two minesweepers, the 141-meter (463-foot) -long Bungo and the 67-meter (219-foot) -long Etajima, part of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, marks the first foreign navy visit since the base’s expansion project was completed earlier this month.
Tokyo has developed increasingly close ties with Cambodia in recent years, seeking to offset China’s influence in the region, and Cambodia invited it to make the renovated port’s first port call, widely seen as an attempt to allay Washington’s concerns.
Both Japanese ships, making a four-day port call with a total of 170 sailors, docked at the base’s new pier, where Cambodian officials, including Rear Adm. Mean Savoeun, deputy commander of the base, held a welcome ceremony.
Concerns about China’s activities at the Ream base emerged in 2019 following a Wall Street Journal report alleging a draft agreement that would grant China 30-year use of the base for military personnel, weapon storage, and warship berthing. The US government has publicly and repeatedly aired its concerns.
China and Cambodia have close political, military, and economic ties. They commenced the port project in 2022, which included the demolition of previous naval structures built by the US at the base.
Cambodia has stated that warships from all friendly countries are welcome to dock at the new pier, provided they meet certain conditions. When Japanese Defense Minister Gen. Nakatani announced the planned visit on Tuesday, he said Japan’s port call symbolizes friendship with Cambodia and is key to regional stability and peace.
He stated that the visit would help ensure Cambodia has an open and transparent naval port, while noting the concerns over China’s growing efforts to secure overseas outposts for military expansion.
The port call came just one day after Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded a two-day state visit to Cambodia aimed at further strengthening China’s strong ties with its closest ally in Southeast Asia.
A statement on Saturday from Japan’s embassy in Cambodia stated that the two vessels are on a mission that began in January to visit 11 countries across Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia. The port call in Cambodia is considered a “historically significant event for Japan-Cambodia relations,” it said.
The embassy emphasized that the journey of the Japanese vessels “underlines the importance of freedom of navigation, free and open international order based on international law, and its development.”
In December last year, a US Navy warship called at the nearby civilian port of Sihanoukville on a five-day visit. The visit by the USS Savannah, carrying a crew of 103, was the first in eight years by a US military vessel to Cambodia.
A US citizen was held for pickup by ICE even after proving he was born in the country
- It is unclear if Lopez Gomez showed documents proving he is a citizen to the arresting officers
- Court records show Judge Lashawn Riggans found no basis for the charge
MIAMI, USA: A US citizen was arrested in Florida for allegedly being in the country illegally and held for pickup by immigration authorities even after his mother showed a judge her son’s birth certificate and the judge dismissed charges.
Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez, 20, was in a car that was stopped just past the Georgia state line by the Florida Highway Patrol on Wednesday, said Thomas Kennedy, a spokesperson at the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
Gomez and others in the car were arrested under a new Florida law, which is on hold, making it a crime for people who are in the country illegally to enter the state.
It is unclear if Lopez Gomez showed documents proving he is a citizen to the arresting officers. He was held at Leon County Jail and released after his case received widespread media coverage.
The charge of illegal entry into Florida was dropped Thursday after his mother showed the judge his state identification card, birth certificate and Social Security card, said Kennedy, who attended the hearing.
Court records show Judge Lashawn Riggans found no basis for the charge.
Lopez Gomez briefly remained in custody after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested he remain there for 48 hours, a common practice when the agency wants to take custody of someone. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
The case drew widespread attention because ICE is not supposed to take custody of US-born citizens. While the immigration agency can occasionally get involved in cases of naturalized citizens who committed offenses such as lying on immigration forms, it has no authority over people born in the US
Adding to the confusion is a federal judge’s ruling to put a hold on enforcement of the Florida law against people who are in the country illegally entering the state, which meant it should not have been enforced.
“No one should be arrested under that law, let alone a US citizen,” said Alana Greer, an immigration attorney from the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “They saw this person, he didn’t speak English particularly well, and so they arrested him and charged him with this law that no one (should) be charged with.”
Money, power, violence in high-stakes Philippine elections
- The country’s elections commission, Comelec, recorded 46 acts of political violence
- Comelec said “fewer than 20” candidates have been killed so far this campaign season, which it notes is a drop
MANILA: Philippines election hopefuls like mayoral candidate Kerwin Espinosa have to ask themselves whether the job is worth taking a bullet.
The country’s elections commission, Comelec, recorded 46 acts of political violence between January 12 and April 11, including the shooting of Espinosa.
At a rally this month, someone from the crowd fired a bullet that went through his chest and exited his arm, leaving him bleeding but alive.
Others have been less lucky.
A city council hopeful, a polling officer and a village chief were among those killed in similar attacks in the run-up to mid-term elections on May 12.
Comelec said “fewer than 20” candidates have been killed so far this campaign season, which it notes is a drop.
“This is much lower, very low compared to the past,” commission spokesperson John Rex Laudiangco told AFP, citing a tally of about 100 deaths in the last general election.
Analysts warned that such violence will likely remain a fixture of the Philippines’ political landscape.
The immense influence of the posts is seen as something worth killing for.
Holding municipal office means control over jobs, police departments and disbursements of national tax funds, said Danilo Reyes, an associate professor at the University of the Philippines’ political science department.
“Local chief executives have discretion when it comes to how to allocate the funding, which projects, priorities,” he said.
Rule of law that becomes weaker the farther one gets from Manila also means that regional powerbrokers can act with effective impunity, said Cleve Arguelles, CEO of Manila-based WR Numero Research.
“Local political elites have their own kingdoms, armed groups and... patronage networks,” he said, noting violence is typically highest in the archipelago nation’s far north and south.
“The stakes are usually high in a local area where only one family is dominant or where there is involvement of private armed groups,” Arguelles said.
“If you lose control of... city hall, you don’t just lose popular support. You actually lose both economic and political power.”
In the absence of strong institutions to mediate disagreements, Reyes said, “confrontational violence” becomes the go-to.
Espinosa was waiting for his turn to speak at a campaign stop in central Leyte province on April 10 when a shooter emerged from the crowd and fired from about 50 meters (164 feet) away, according to police.
Police Brig. Gen. Jean Fajardo told reporters this week that seven police officers were “being investigated” as suspects.
Convictions, however, are hard to come by.
While Comelec’s Laudiangco insisted recent election-related shootings were all making their way through regional court systems, he could provide no numbers.
Data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project show that in 79 percent of violent acts targeting local government members between 2018 and 2022 the perpetrators were never identified.
National-level politicians, meanwhile, reliant on local political bases to deliver votes, have little incentive to press for serious investigations, said Reyes.
“The only way you can ensure national leaders win positions is for local allies to deliver votes,” he said.
“There are convictions but very rarely, and it depends on the potential political fallout on the national leaders as well as the local leaders.”
It’s part of the “grand bargain” in Philippine politics, Arguelles said.
Local elites are “tolerated by the national government so long as during election day they can also deliver votes when they’re needed.”
Three days after Espinosa’s shooting, a district board candidate and his driver were rushed to hospital after someone opened fire on them in the autonomous area of Mindanao.
Election-season violence has long plagued the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, known as the BARMM.
Comelec assumed “direct control” over the municipalities of Buluan and Datu Odin Sinsuat after municipal election officer Bai Maceda Lidasan Abo and her husband were shot dead last month.
Since last year, Comelec has held the power to directly control and supervise not only local election officials but also law enforcement.
Top police officials in the two municipalities were removed for “gross negligence and incompetence” after allegedly ignoring requests to provide security details for the slain Comelec official.
Their suspensions, however, will last only from “campaigning up to... the swearing-in of the winners,” Comelec’s Laudiangco said.
The commission’s actions were part of a “tried and tested security plan” that is showing real results, he said.
But he conceded that the interwoven nature of family, power and politics in the provinces would continue to create a combustible brew.
“You have a lot of closely related people in one given jurisdiction... That ensures polarization. It becomes personal between neighbors.
“We all know Filipinos are clannish, that’s our culture. But we’re improving slowly.”
Afghan FM tells Pakistan’s top diplomat deportations are ‘disappointment’
- Pakistan has launched a strict campaign to evict by the end of the month more than 800,000 Afghans
- “Muttaqi expressed his deep concern and disappointment over the situation and forced deportation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan,” Ahmad said
KABUL: Afghanistan’s foreign minister expressed “deep concern and disappointment” to his Pakistani counterpart on Saturday over the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Afghans since the start of April.
Pakistan has launched a strict campaign to evict by the end of the month more than 800,000 Afghans who have had their residence permits canceled, including some who were born in Pakistan or lived there for decades.
Pakistan’s top diplomat Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul for a day-long visit on Saturday where he held discussions with Afghan Taliban officials, including Prime Minister Hasan Akhund and Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
“Muttaqi expressed his deep concern and disappointment over the situation and forced deportation of Afghan refugees in Pakistan,” the Afghan foreign ministry’s deputy spokesperson Zia Ahmad said on X.
“He strongly urged Pakistani authorities to prevent the suppression of the rights of Afghans living there and those coming here.”
Ahmad added that Dar reassured officials that Afghans “will not be mistreated.”
Afghans in Pakistan have reported weeks of arbitrary arrests, extortion and harassment by authorities as they ramp up their campaign to expel migrants.
Islamabad has said nearly 85,000 have already crossed into Afghanistan, with convoys of Afghan families heading to border crossings each day fearing raids, arrests or separation from family members.
On Friday, Pakistan’s deputy interior minister Tallal Chaudhry told a news conference that “there will not be any sort of leniency and extension in the deadline.”
“When you arrive without any documents, it only deepens the uncertainty of whether you’re involved in narcotics trafficking, supporting terrorism, or committing other crimes,” he added.
Analysts, however, say it is a politically motivated strategy to put pressure on Afghanistan’s Taliban government over escalating security concerns.
The relationship between the two neighbors has soured as attacks in Pakistan’s border regions have soared, following the return of the Taliban government in Kabul in 2021.
Last year was the deadliest in Pakistan for a decade, with Islamabad accusing Kabul of allowing militants to take refuge in Afghanistan, from where they plan attacks.
The Taliban government denies the charge.
Chaudhry said on Friday that nearly 85,000 Afghans have crossed into Afghanistan since the start of April, the majority of them undocumented.
More than half of them were children, according to the United Nations refugee agency, entering a country where girls and women are banned from education after secondary school and barred from many sectors of work.
Afghanistan’s refugees ministry spokesman told AFP on Saturday the Taliban authorities had recorded some 71,000 Afghan returnees through the two main border points with Pakistan between April 1 and 18.
In the first phase of returns in 2023, hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans were forced across the border in the space of a few weeks.
In the second phase announced in March, the Pakistan government canceled the residence permits of more than 800,000 Afghans and warned thousands more awaiting relocation to other countries to leave by the end of April.
Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades to flee successive wars, but tensions with the Afghan community have risen as Pakistan’s economic and security concerns have deepened.
The move to expel Afghans is widely supported by Pakistanis.
“They are totally disrespectful toward our country. They have abused us, they have used us. One can’t live in a country if they don’t respect it,” said Ahmad Waleed, standing in his shop on Friday in Rawalpindi, near the capital.
Despite small diaspora share, Gulf-based Indians send home 40% of remittances
- India’s diaspora is one of the largest, accounting for 35.4 million people
- Most Indians in Gulf countries do not plan to settle there and focus on earning
New Delhi: Despite making up only about one-quarter of India’s overseas population, Indian nationals in Gulf states send almost 40 percent of the country’s bank remittances, the latest data shows.
India’s diaspora is one of the largest, accounting for 35.4 million people, based on last month’s estimates submitted to parliament by Minister of State for External Affairs Pabitra Margherita.
Members of the diaspora are a key source of India’s foreign currency inflows and, in the fiscal year 2023–24, sent home $118.7 billion, according to a remittances survey released in March by the Reserve Bank of India.
Indians living and working in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries accounted for almost 40 percent of this amount, led by those in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — 19.2 percent, 6.7 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively.
The 40-percent remittance share from Gulf-based Indians is disproportionately high compared to their share of the overall diaspora. Of the 35.4 million Indians living abroad, only 9.7 million — just slightly more than one-quarter — reside in GCC countries, according to data from India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
Dr. S. Irudaya Rajan, chair of the International Institute for Migration and Development in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, attributes the imbalance to the nature of Indian migration in the Middle East.
“People who go to work in the Gulf don’t plan to settle there, but work and bring money home and support the family ... they are coming to make money and secure their future in India,” Rajan told Arab News.
“They went to earn money with double work, midnight work, evening work, overtime work to send it back home.”
The reason why many of them are able to save and send more is that most travel to Gulf countries alone, focusing on work as there are no prospects of obtaining citizenship — unlike in other major migration destinations like the US and UK.
Out of the 4.3 million Indians living in the UAE, 2.65 million in Saudi Arabia, 1 million in Kuwait, 830,000 in Qatar, 665,000 in Oman and 350,000 in Bahrain, the majority were either unmarried or had their family waiting for them back home.
“Eighty percent of them are living alone ... they are not taking their wives, they are not taking their children,” Rajan said.
“Either they are unmarried and are sending money to their parents, or they are married and sending it to their wives and their parents, or they are sending it to their children studying in some other country.”
The actual amount of remittance coming from overseas Indians was likely much higher than what the central bank indicated. While the RBI’s survey covered 30 banks, two money transfer operators and two fintech companies in the cross-border remittance business, inward remittances from the Gulf also reach India through informal means.
Given the region’s proximity and frequent and cheap flights, money can be easily brought from places like Dubai without relying on bank transfers — unlike remittances from Europe, Singapore, or the US.
“From the informal channel, it can be as much as the formal channel,” Rajan said.
“All estimates on remittances are underestimated. The government of India, the World Bank, the RBI — all will underestimate the remittance because they can calculate it only from the formal channel.”
While the central bank’s data has shown an increase in the remittance share from the West and a drop from the Middle East compared with the previous survey in 2016-17, Rajan forecast that the Gulf will still continue to play a major role.
“These remittances coming from Canada, Australia (and the US), are more because they are vacating the place and coming home. People who are coming from America will bring all their savings, all that they had in America, so this is a short-term trend,” he said.
“I think the Gulf will bounce back ... the future will be very uncertain for migration, but Gulf migration will continue for at least the next 15 to 20 years.”
