GENEVA: United Nations investigators on Wednesday urged world leaders to do everything they could to avoid Ukraine becoming another Syria, a country “destroyed” by 11 years of conflict.
Russian forces have been involved in the Syrian civil war since 2015 and the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said it hoped the disregard for civilian casualties would not be repeated in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Rather than winding down, the investigators said the war in Syria was heating up again and warned that its participants may take advantage of world attention turning away toward Ukraine.
Commission chair Paulo Pinheiro spoke of the millions of people displaced, the more than 100,000 people missing or forcibly disappeared, the poverty rate at an unprecedented 90 percent, human rights violations and crimes against humanity.
“We can only hope that world leaders are doing everything now that they can avoid a similar fate for Ukraine,” he told reporters.
Syrian and Russian forces “operating side by side have continued to indiscriminately bomb densely populated areas in the northwest,” he said.
“Civilians have also been attacked with sophisticated precision-guided weapons and airstrikes — including in strikes where Russian fixed-wing aircraft were identified flying over targeted areas.”
Pinheiro also said Russia and Syria were insisting on humanitarian aid being delivered from Damascus rather than across the border, but “their attacks in the northwest occur along the very road where such humanitarian aid would travel.”
He added: “We are seeing since 2015 similar practices by the Russian Federation in the conflict that we are seeing in another country today.”
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria was mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and record all violations of international law since March 2011 in the country.
Hanny Megally, one of the three commissioners, said Russian forces were in Syria to help the government, while they were in Ukraine “to remove it.”
Another difference, he said, was that the Russians were using more air power in Syria, rather than the large number of ground forces seen in Ukraine.
Citing indiscriminate attacks on civilians and targeted attacks on medical facilities, he said: “The disregard for civilian casualties is one of our biggest concerns in Syria and I would hope that’s not being repeated in Ukraine.”
The Commission of Inquiry’s latest report covers the second half of 2021.
Megally said regular fighting had increased over the last six to nine months, with increased shelling and aerial attacks by President Bashar Assad’s regime and his Russian allies.
“Our worry is that it’s not a war that’s coming to an end; it’s actually on the uptick again,” said Megally.
“It’s a country that’s been destroyed and can’t take much more of this, and we’re seeing it now plunging more into crisis wherever you look.
“If eyes are gazing elsewhere, then we may see actors on the ground take advantage of that.”
The commission will present its report to the Human Rights Council on March 18.
Don’t let Ukraine become another Syria: UN investigators
https://arab.news/6whnu
Don’t let Ukraine become another Syria: UN investigators
- Russian forces have been involved in the Syrian civil war since 2015
- The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria said it hoped the disregard for civilian casualties would not be repeated in Moscow's invasion of Ukraine
Trump names loyalist Kash Patel to serve as FBI director
- The child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, Patel spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before catching the Trump administration’s attention as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump has picked Kash Patel to serve as FBI director, turning to a fierce loyalist to upend America’s premier law enforcement agency and rid the government of perceived “conspirators.” It’s the latest bombshell Trump has thrown at the Washington establishment and a test for how far Senate Republicans will go in confirming his nominees.
“I am proud to announce that Kashyap “Kash” Patel will serve as the next Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Trump posted Saturday night on Truth Social. “Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American People.”
The selection is in keeping with Trump’s view that the government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies require a radical transformation and his stated desire for retribution against supposed adversaries. It shows how Trump, still fuming over years of federal investigations that shadowed his first administration and later led to his indictment, is moving to place atop the FBI and Justice Department close allies he believes will protect rather than scrutinize him.
Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability, and the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday night.
It remains unclear whether Patel could be confirmed, even by a Republican-led Senate, though Trump has also raised the prospect of using recess appointments to push his selections through.
Patel would replace Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump in 2017 but quickly fell out of favor with the president and his allies. Though the position carries a 10-year term, Wray’s removal was not unexpected given Trump’s long-running public criticism of him and the FBI, including after a search of his Florida’s property for classified documents and two investigations that resulted in his indictment.
Patel’s past proposals, if carried out, would lead to convulsive change for an agency tasked not only with investigating violations of federal law but also protecting the country from terrorist attacks, foreign espionage and other threats.
He’s called for dramatically reducing the FBI’s footprint, a perspective that dramatically sets him apart from earlier directors who have sought additional resources for the bureau, and has suggested closing down the bureau’s headquarters in Washington and “reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state” — Trump’s pejorative catch-all for the federal bureaucracy.
And though the Justice Department in 2021 halted the practice of secretly seizing reporters’ phone records during leak investigation, Patel has said he intends to aggressively hunt down government officials who leak information to reporters and change the law to make it easier to sue journalists.
During an interview with Steve Bannon last December, Patel said he and others “will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.”
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said, referring to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden, the Democratic challenger, defeated Trump. “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
The child of Indian immigrants and a former public defender, Patel spent several years as a Justice Department prosecutor before catching the Trump administration’s attention as a staffer for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Trump also announced Saturday that he will nominate Sheriff Chad Chronister, the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, to serve as the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“As DEA Administrator, Chad will work with our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to secure the Border, stop the flow of Fentanyl, and other Illegal Drugs, across the Southern Border, and SAVE LIVES,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social announcing the pick.
British PM Starmer to set out detailed policy targets in week ahead
- Starmer said he would set out a “plan for change” as the next phase of delivering goals including the fastest sustained growth in the Group of Seven advanced economies, a halving of serious violent crime, lower energy bills and less ill health
LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will set more detailed targets in the coming week to achieve the government’s five main goals on areas including growth, health care, crime and green energy, as his party approaches five months in power.
Labour won a sweeping majority in Britain’s lower house of parliament in July, taking power for the first time in 14 years, but has fallen just behind the opposition Conservative Party in some recent opinion polls.
Starmer said he would set out a “plan for change” as the next phase of delivering goals including the fastest sustained growth in the Group of Seven advanced economies, a halving of serious violent crime, lower energy bills and less ill health.
“Mission-led government does not mean picking milestones because they are easy or will happen anyway. It means relentlessly driving real improvements in the lives of working people,” Starmer said in a statement released by his office.
Government ministers and officials would be told to focus on these goals rather than individual ministries’ traditional priorities, Starmer’s office added.
Labour has not had an easy start in office. Ministers say the previous government concealed the extent of problems in areas such as prisons and the immigration system, contributing to what finance minister Rachel Reeves said was a 22 billion pound ($28 billion) black hole in public finances.
Conservatives dispute this and say much of the cost overrun reflected Labour decisions to increase pay for public-sector workers and standard in-year spending variations.
Reeves announced 40 billion pounds of tax rises in her first budget last month — up from around 8 billion pounds in Labour’s pre-election plan — on top of higher borrowing to halt a fall in public investment planned by the previous government.
Businesses have complained that they will bear the brunt of the tax rises and will probably cut investment or jobs and need to raise prices as a result.
Trump wants pardoned real estate developer Charles Kushner to become US ambassador to France
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida: President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to nominate real estate developer Charles Kushner, father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, calling Charles Kushner “a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker.”
Kushner is the founder of Kushner Companies, a real estate firm. Jared Kushner is a former White House senior adviser to Trump who is married to Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka.
The elder Kushner was pardoned by Trump in December 2020 after pleading guilty years earlier to tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations.
Prosecutors alleged that after Charles Kushner discovered his brother-in-law was cooperating with federal authorities in an investigation, he hatched a scheme for revenge and intimidation.
Kushner hired a prostitute to lure his brother-in-law, then arranged to have the encounter in a New Jersey motel room recorded with a hidden camera and the recording sent to his own sister, the man’s wife, prosecutors said.
Kushner eventually pleaded guilty to 18 counts including tax evasion and witness tampering. He was sentenced in 2005 to two years in prison — the most he could receive under a plea deal, but less than what Chris Christie, the US attorney for New Jersey at the time and later governor and Republican presidential candidate, had sought.
Christie has blamed Jared Kushner for his firing from Trump’s transition team in 2016, and has called Charles Kushner’s offenses “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was US attorney.”
Trump and the elder Kushner knew each other from real estate circles and their children were married in 2009.
France returns ancient artifacts to Ethiopia
- The artifacts currently stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday
ADDIS ABABA: France on Saturday began the return of some 3,500 archeolo-gical artifacts to Ethiopia, which Paris held since the 1980s for study.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot handed over two prehistoric stone axes, bifaces, and a stone cutter to Ethiopia’s Tourism Minister Selamawit Kassa during a visit to the National Museum in Addis Ababa.
The tools are “samples of nearly 3,500 artifacts from the excavations carried out on the Melka Kunture site,” a cluster of prehistoric sites south of the capital excavated under the direction of a late French researcher, Barrot said.
France and Ethiopia hold a longstanding bilateral agreement to cooperate in archeology and paleontology.
The artifacts stored at the French Embassy in Addis Ababa will be delivered to the Ethiopian Heritage Directorate on Tuesday.
“This is a handover, not a restitution, in that these objects have never been part of French public collections,” said Laurent Serrano, culture adviser at the French Embassy.
“These artifacts, which date back between 1 and 2 million years, were found during excavations carried out over several decades at a site near the Ethiopian capital,” he added.
Concern grows over rise in fatal migrant shipwrecks in Greece
- UNHCR representative: ‘Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm’
ATHENS: The UN refugee agency has voiced concern at a rise in deaths of migrants trying to reach Greece by sea in small boats from Turkiye, following two fatal shipwrecks this week.
The UNHCR said in a statement Friday that 17 people have died in such accidents this month, while the total so far this year is at least 45 deaths.
Some 56,000 people have illegally entered Greece since Jan. 1, mostly by sea. That’s a five-year high, and the number has already exceeded government estimates of some 50,000 arrivals by the year’s end in October.
The UNHCR representative in Greece, Maria Clara Martin, said the migrant deaths “highlight the urgent need for long-term responses and safer and credible alternatives” for people fleeing conflict, persecution, violence, or human rights violations.
“Counting lives lost at sea cannot become a norm — we should not get used to it,” she said.
The UN agency said that this week’s two fatal accidents off the eastern Aegean Sea island of Samos, which is close to the Turkish coast, saw a mother lose three of her children, while another survivor lost his wife and daughter.
Greek authorities have attributed this year’s rise in migrant arrivals to conflicts in the Middle East.
While there’s been a surge in people attempting the long and dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossing from Libya to the southern Greek island of Crete, most migrants pay smuggling gangs to ferry them from Turkiye to the eastern Aegean islands.
On Friday, the Greek coast guard said it arrested a 17-year-old Turkish youth on suspicion of having landed 16 migrants — including three children — on the eastern island of Chios.
Tunisia and Libya have become vital departure points for migrants, often from other African countries, who risk perilous Mediterranean Sea journeys in the hopes of reaching better lives in Europe.
Each year, tens of thousands of people attempt to make the crossing. Italy, whose Lampedusa island is only 150 km from Tunisia, is often their first port of call.
In the latest incident reported on Friday, two unidentified bodies were recovered off Tunisia’s eastern coast after a migrant boat capsized, with one person still missing and 28 rescued.
The boat had set sail from Teboulba, a coastal town some 180 km south of Tunis.
In late October, the bodies of 15 people believed to be migrants were recovered by authorities in Monastir, eastern Tunisia.
And in late September, 36 would-be migrants — mainly Tunisians — were rescued off Bizerte in northern Tunisia.
Since Jan. 1, at least 103 makeshift boats have capsized, and 341 bodies have been recovered off Tunisia’s coast, according to the Interior Ministry.
