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{Al Jazeera is to take legal action against Egypt’s military-backed government over what the media network says is a “sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation” against its journalists in the country.}

The Qatar-based network says that since deposed President Mohammed Morsi was overthrown in July, a large number of its journalists have been arrested and detained, either without charge or on what it calls politically-motivated charges.

Al Jazeera’s offices have been raided and closed, equipment confiscated, correspondents deported and its transmission jammed by signals coming from military installations.

In a statement on Thursday, Al Jazeera said it had instructed London-based lawyers, Carter-Ruck, to take action in international courts and before the United Nations to protect its journalists and their right to report from Egypt.

“Al Jazeera cannot permit this situation to continue. The right of journalists to report freely in situations of this kind is protected by international law and is reaffirmed by UN Security Council Resolution 1738 (2006),” a spokesman said.

“However, the new regime in Egypt has disregarded this fundamental right and seems determined to silence all independent journalism and reporting in the country, leaving only the voices of its own state-controlled media to be heard.”

Source: Al Jazeera

{{The Netherlands sought to “close a difficult chapter” with its former colony Indonesia on Thursday by publicly apologising for summary executions carried out by the Dutch army in the 1940s.}}

As children of some of the men who were massacred without trial looked on, Dutch ambassador to Indonesia Tjeerd De Zwaan offered a state apology during a ceremony at the Dutch embassy in Jakarta.

“On behalf of the Dutch government, I apologise for these excesses,” said the ambassador.

“The Dutch government hopes that this apology will help close a difficult chapter for those whose lives were impacted so directly by the violent excesses that took place between 1945 and 1949.”

He was referring to the years of the Indonesian war of independence, when the sprawling archipelago nation sought to shake off Dutch colonial rule.

The Hague had previously said sorry to the relatives of those in particular cases but it has before never offered a general apology for all summary executions.

Last month the Dutch government also announced that it would pay 20,000 euros ($26,600) to the widows of those killed.

Special attention was given at Thursday’s ceremony to the widows of men killed during a brutal campaign on Sulawesi island in central Indonesia.

The Dutch government in August compensated 10 women whose husbands were executed by its army in the “South Sulawesi Campaign” of 1946 and 1947, and their children were those present at the Jakarta ceremony.

The ambassador said he planned to fly next week to Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, to meet the widows, who are aged between 90 and 100.

One of the worst atrocities committed by the Netherlands in Indonesia, the campaign saw Dutch troops carry out summary executions in a series of villages over three months in a bid to wipe out resistance to colonisation.

Some in Indonesia have claimed the death toll was as high as 40,000 but historical studies have put it at several thousand.

In 2011 the Dutch government also offered a public apology and compensation for victims of summary executions which took place at Rawagede, on the main island of Java.

Thousands of Indonesians were killed in the war of independence, which ended in 1949.

AFP

{{The last remaining Iranian dissidents in a camp in eastern Iraq have been transferred to a base in Baghdad pending resettlement abroad, the United Nations said on Thursday, less than two weeks after a bout of violence that killed 52 people there.}}

The dissidents belong to the Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MEK), which wants Iran’s clerical leaders overthrown, and are no longer welcome in Iraq under the Tehran-aligned, Shi’ite Muslim-led government that replaced late Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

The MEK fought on Saddam’s side during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and was given a camp by the strongman who was toppled by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

Earlier this month, 52 dissidents were killed in violence at Camp Ashraf, which the MEK blamed on Iraqi army and special forces acting at Tehran’s behest. Baghdad said the accusation was baseless and that it would investigate what had happened.

“The tragic events of 1st September … were a somber reminder of the necessity to conclude the final phase of the relocation process without further delay,” acting U.N. envoy to Iraq Gyorgy Busztin said in a statement.

“Resettlement outside Iraq is now the priority, and it is urgent that countries ready to host the residents come forward to accept them, providing them a safe future outside Iraq.”

Seven camp residents went missing during the violence and remain unaccounted for, the United Nations said. MEK says they were taken hostage by Iraqi forces and have been flown to Amara province from where they will be extradited to Iran.

Before the violence there were about 100 MEK Iranian exiles at Camp Ashraf. Most of its inhabitants were relocated last year to a former U.S. military base in northeastern Baghdad known as Camp Liberty, which has come under attack twice this year.

The U.S. State Department removed MEK from its list of terrorist organizations last year and the group is now seeking to recast itself as a mainstream opposition force.

The September 1 bloodshed occurred hours after a mortar bomb attack on the camp which MEK blamed on the Iraqi army. Two Iraqi security sources said that army and special forces fired on residents who had stormed a post at the camp entrance.

MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran, led a guerrilla campaign against the U.S.-backed Iranian Shah during the 1970s that included attacks on American targets.

{{Diplomatic efforts to place Syria’s chemical weapons under international control intensified on Wednesday as Russia warned that a U.S. strike could unleash extremist attacks and carry the country’s bitter civil war beyond Syria’s borders.}}

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke by phone, the State Department said, one day before they meet in Geneva to try to agree on a strategy to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The five permanent veto-wielding powers of the U.N. Security Council met in New York to discuss plans to put Syria’s chemical weapons under international control – averting a threatened U.S. military strike – as Britain, France and the United States talked about drafting a resolution.

The U.N. ambassadors of China and Russia as well as Britain, France and the United States met for about half an hour at the Russian U.N. mission. They declined comment as they left.

In a reminder of the mounting atrocities in Syria, a report by a U.N. commission of inquiry documented eight mass killings, attributing all but one to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. It said Assad’s forces almost certainly committed two massacres in May that killed up to 450 civilians.

An initial French draft Security Council resolution called for delivering an ultimatum to Assad’s government to give up its chemical weapons arsenal or face punitive measures.

But underscoring the diplomatic gulf over military action, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned against a U.S. strike on Syria, saying such action risked escalating the conflict beyond that country and unleashing terrorist attacks.

Putin, writing in the New York Times, said there were “few champions of democracy” in the 2-1/2-year-old civil war in Syria, “but there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all types battling the government.

{agencies}