Tag: InternationalNews

{Mir Quasem Ali was hanged after being convicted for offences committed during 1971 war with Pakistan.}

Bangladesh has executed a wealthy tycoon and top financial backer of its largest opposition party after his family paid him a final visit.

Mir Quasem Ali, a key leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hanged on Saturday after being convicted by a controversial war crimes tribunal for offences committed during the 1971 independence conflict with Pakistan.

“The execution took place at 10:35 pm (1635GMT),” said Anisul Huq, the country’s law and justice minister.

Ali had been imprisoned at the Kashimpur high security jail in Gazipur, some 40 km north of the capital Dhaka.

After the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal against the penalty on Tuesday, Ali declined to seek a presidential pardon, which would require an admission of guilt.

Ali was a key commander of the pro-Pakistan militia in the southern port city of Chittagong during the 1971 war, and later became a shipping and real estate tycoon.

Past convictions and executions of high-profile Jamaat leaders have triggered violence in Bangladesh, which is polarised along political lines.

Russel Sheikh, a senior Gazipur police official, told the AFP news agency that officials took “highest security measures” ahead of the execution for fear of violence by his supporters.

“More than 1,000 police have been deployed in the district,” Sheikh said.

Talha Anmad, a commentator and lawyer on Bangladeshi affairs, told Al Jazeera that Ali was different than other Jamaat leaders.

“He was a celebrated philanthropist, a very successful businessman and somebody who has done tremendous amount of work to create free media and to work with vulnerable people, especially refugees,” Anmad said.

“He was one of the rare breed of Jamaat politicians who was able to reach out to the wider society. It seems government goes after anybody who is capable of mounting an intellectual and practical challenge to the them. The government has become so authoritarian recently that they don’t let any opposition activism at all whether it is Jamaat or any other party.”

Major blow

The Supreme Court’s decision to reject Ali’s appeal was a major blow for the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which the 63-year-old tycoon had helped to revive in recent decades.

Five opposition leaders have been executed for war crimes since 2013. Ali was the last prominent leader of Jamaat to face execution.

The war crimes tribunal set up by the government has divided the country, with supporters of Jamaat and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) branding it a sham aimed at eliminating their leaders.

Ali was convicted in November 2014 of a series of crimes during Bangladesh’s war of separation from Pakistan, including the abduction and murder of a young independence fighter.

His son Mir Ahmed Bin Quasem, who was part of his legal defence team, was allegedly abducted by security forces earlier in August, which critics say was an attempt to sow fear and prevent protests against the execution.

{Turkish military says it “neutralised” at least 100 PKK fighters, without specifying how many were killed or wounded.}

Turkey’s security forces killed or wounded more than 100 Kurdish fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on Saturday, according to the Turkish military.

The figure is one of the highest casualty tolls in a single day of the conflict in recent years. Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast has been rocked by waves of violence since the 2015 collapse of ceasefire between the state and the PKK.

The military said in a statement that more than 100 PKK fighters had been “neutralised”, without detailing how many were killed and how many were wounded. It said that most had been taken back to northern Iraq where the PKK has mountain camps.

Turkey’s southeast has seen heavy fighting in recent days in Hakkari province, near the border with Iraq, and in Van province, near the border with Iran.

Five Turkish security force members were killed and six more were wounded in Hakkari on Saturday in heavy clashes with PKK fighters, Reuters reported.

Eight more security force members were reportedly killed overnight in Van.

More than 40,000 people have been killed since the PKK first took up arms in 1984 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, although it now focuses more on rights and demands for greater autonomy.

Turkey, the European Union and the United States have labelled the PKK a “terrorist” group.

{Republican presidential nominee says he wants to help rebuild Detroit as he pursues black voters ahead of election.}

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promised African Americans prosperity and jobs on Saturday in a visit to a black church in Detroit, as he called for a “civil rights agenda of our time”.

“I am here to listen to you,” Trump told the congregation at the Great Faith Ministries International. “I am here to learn.”

The former real estate mogul and Reality TV star has stepped up his appeals to minority voters in recent weeks, but the visit was the first time Trump has addressed a largely black audience since winning the Republican nomination.

While protesters were a vocal presence outside, Trump made a pitch inside for support from an electorate strongly aligned with Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“I want to help you build and rebuild Detroit,” he said. “I fully understand that the African-American community has suffered from discrimination and there are many wrongs that should be made right.”

He also said the nation needs “a civil rights agenda of our time,” with better education and good jobs.

The visit is a high-profile stop in Trump’s recent bid to offset the overwhelming advantage his rival Hillary Clinton has among African American voters, who make up 12 percent of the electorate.

{{‘Devil’s in the pulpit’}}

Before the speech, protesters chanting “Dump Trump” and “We’re going to church” tried to push through police barriers to gain entrance.

“The devil’s in the pulpit,” shouted Wyoman Mitchell, one of about 200 protesters who were pushed back by police on foot and on horseback in the tense encounter.

“[Trump] didn’t come to hear us, he came to talk to one of us to tell us what he thinks we ought to do,” Pastor Lawrence Glass, one of the organisers of the protest, told Al Jazeera.

“We are protesting against someone who has proven to have a legacy of bigotry and bullying… people of color and people of faith are not standing for Trump and his antics of racial bias.”

Church pastor Bishop Wayne Jackson had invited the New York billionaire to attend the fellowship service, and make some remarks.

“We’re told he’ll be there for at least an hour and a half and then he’s going to record an interview with the pastor, which will then be edited and broadcast on a black television channel in a couple of days,” said Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from outside the church.

{{Charm offensive }}

The church appearance contrasted sharply with Trump’s previous crude appeals for black support.

“What do you have to lose?” he said, addressing African Americans in a speech in Ohio less than two weeks ago to an overwhelmingly white audience.

“They don’t care about you. They just like you once every four years – get your vote and then they say: ‘Bye, bye!’” he said.

To bolster his case, Trump points at the Democratic stance on immigration, claiming his rival would rather give jobs to new refugees than unemployed black youth.

The African-American electorate traditionally leans heavily Democratic.

In 2012, about 93 percent of black voters backed Obama – an overwhelming enthusiasm that Clinton appears to have kept alive, taking 90 percent of the black vote in her primary contest against Bernie Sanders.

Detroit has the highest percentage of black residents – more than 80 percent – of any large American city.

Many neighborhoods have been hollowed out by decades of “white flight,” in which Caucasian families left downtown and midtown for more affluent suburbs.

“Our political system has failed the people and works only to enrich itself. I want to reform that system so that it works for you, everybody in this room.” Trump told the audience inside the church.

Democrats regularly remind voters that Trump’s backers include former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke – although the candidate has publicly rejected the extreme-right endorsement.

They also point out that Trump spearheaded the dubious “birther” movement, which sought – with backing from the Republican Party’s right wing – to cast doubt on the nationality of Obama, America’s first black president.

{Preparations for large funeral under way in hometown of president, who died at the age of 78 after suffering a stroke.}

President Islam Karimov’s funeral cortege made its way through the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, as thousands of people lined the city’s main road on Saturday morning.

Karimov, who died on Friday at the age of 78 after suffering a stroke, will be buried later on Saturday in his hometown, Samarkand, about 300km southwest of the capital.

Since the announcement of his death, a three-day mourning period was declared, and the preparations accelerated in Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s second city, Al Jazeera’s Andrew Simmons said, reporting from Bishkek in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan.

“With most countries being represented at prime minister-level, the funeral will be huge,” he said.

The veteran leader had run the ex-Soviet Central Asian nation since 1989, and nearly half of its 32 million citizens were born after he came to power.

Many mourners held flowers, mostly red roses, which they laid on the road as the funeral convoy, which set out at 6am (01:00 GMT) drove by on its way to the airport.

“What are we going to do without you?” a weeping mourner shouted.

A 39-year-old Tashkent resident, who declined to be identified, told Reuters news agency: “This was the longest and hardest week in my life … Still can’t believe it happened. I don’t know what happens now. I am lost.”

Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been designated mourner-in-chief at Karimov’s funeral, which is seen as a strong hint he might become the next president.

“I think in the corridors of power, they have already started fighting,” Kamoliddin Rabbimov, an independent Uzbek political analyst based in France, told the AFP news agency, while predicting the elite will be eager to ensure the transition is “more or less stable”.

If they fail to agree on a compromise, however, open confrontation could destabilise the mainly Muslim state that shares a border with Afghanistan.

Unrest would have repercussions for Russia, the regional power and home to hundreds of thousands of Uzbek migrant workers, and for the US-allied government in Afghanistan.

The Kremlin’s top political adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said on Saturday that Moscow expected the political situation in Uzbekistan to remain stable.

The Uzbek government has repeatedly been criticised for human rights abuses, most notoriously in 2005 in the city of Andijan, where government forces are accused of killing hundreds of demonstrators.

The United Nations describes the use of torture in Uzbekistan as systematic, and Reporters Without Borders said Karimov frequently broke his own records for repression and paranoia.

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, accused Karimov’s security forces of executing two dissidents by boiling them to death.

Karimov grew up in an orphanage in Samarkand and went on to study mechanical engineering and economics, before joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1989, he was appointed as the party’s First Secretary in Uzbekistan.

{China, the world’s worst polluter, ratifies agreement in move the United States is expected to soon follow.}

China has ratified the landmark Paris agreement on climate change just hours before the start of the G20 summit, where representatives of the world’s leading economies will gather.

The standing committee of China’s National People’s Congress voted to adopt “the proposal to review and ratify the Paris Agreement” at the closing meeting of a week-long session, state news agency Xinhua said.

The ratification by China, the world’s biggest polluter with about 25 percent of global carbon emissions, took place ahead of the G20 meeting in Hangzhou where the United States, the world’s second biggest polluter, is also expected to announce it will ratify the accord.

G20 countries emit about 80 percent of global greenhouse gases, with China and the US responsible for about half of that.

“The timing of this announcement is important because it comes a few hours before the start of the G20 Summit,” Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Hangzhou, said.

“We understand that President Barack Obama will announce the United States will also ratify the deal.”

The Paris agreement was signed in December 2015 by nearly 200 countries. But before today’s announcement, only 23 signatories, responsible for about one percent of global emissions, had ratified it.

“For the accord to go into legal effect, however, at least 55 countries need to ratify the agreement. What China and presumably the US will do is set an example for other countries to follow,” Brown said.

The main goal of the deal is to slash greenhouse gas emissions and keep global temperature increases to “well below” two degrees Celsius.

Experts have said that target is already in danger of being breached, with the UN weather agency saying that 2016 is on course to be the warmest year since records began.

Environmental groups have reacted to the Chinese announcement with cautious optimism, stressing other countries must also ratify the Paris deal.

Greenpeace East Asia’s senior climate policy adviser, Li Shuo, said both China and the US should put pressure on other G20 countries to ratify the agreement: “Xi and Obama should seize the opportunity to lead the world’s 20 wealthiest nations by joining and building on the Paris Agreement.”

{More than 300 people evacuated amid fears of forced demographic changes around the capital.}

Buses carrying more than 300 Syrians left the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiyeh on Friday, in the first stage of a deal that will enable the government to retake control of the rebel-held area.

In the first stage of the deal, 303 people, including 62 gunmen who agreed to lay down their arms and accept a presidential amnesty deal, were bussed out of the area and taken to the nearby government-controlled town of Horjelah, according Syrian state news agency SANA.

The Moadamiyeh agreement comes just a week after a deal was struck in neighbouring Daraya that brought about the full evacuation of the suburb, a move heavily criticised by the international community as forced displacement.

Those who left Moadamiyeh on Friday were originally from Daraya, having fled heavy bombardments earlier in the year.

“The heroic acts of the Syrian army in Daraya led to the achievement in Moadamiyeh,” Alaa Ibrahim, the governor of rural Damascus, told Syrian state TV.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkey-Syria border, said the concept of “forcing deals on local populations” has been criticised by the United Nations and the international community as something “that would give the government precedent to continue starving its own population into surrender”.

The UN’s Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura voiced concern that the Daraya agreement was part of a larger strategy by the government to empty rebel enclaves and that it may soon be extended to other areas.

There are “indications that after Daraya we may have other Darayas,” he told reporters in Geneva on Thursday.

“There is clearly a strategy at the moment to move from Daraya” to other besieged areas “in a similar pattern”.

Jan Egeland, the UN humanitarian chief, said the UN humanitarian task force for Syria had “failed the people of Daraya”.

The UN has underlined that it was not consulted on the Daraya deal, and described the evacuation of the suburb as a forced displacement.

Fears of ‘demographic change’

In the second stage of the Moadamiyeh deal, rebels who refuse to hand over their weapons will be forced to leave the suburb, probably to rebel-controlled Idlib province.

It was not clear when the second stage would be implemented or when government security forces would take over control of the suburb.

The deal was reportedly reached on Tuesday in a meeting between Moadamiyeh’s local council, government officials and Russian military officers at the army’s 4th Armoured Division headquarters in the mountains on the southern outskirts of Damascus.

“It wasn’t a negotiation or a conversation, it was a threat,” Moadamiyeh-based media activist Dani Qappani told Al Jazeera. “They basicallly told us: ‘Either surrender or we burn Moadamiyeh.’”

“They know the situation here. There’s little to no food or medical supplies,” said Qappani, adding that residents of the besieged suburb could not hold out much longer.

“Once they finish evacuating people of Daraya who are living here, they’ll try to begin the process of surrendering arms and dismantling the revolutionary establishments inside the city.”

Moadamiyeh was hit with toxic sarin gas in 2013, according to the UN, and has suffered a three-year government siege, leaving its 28,000 residents with little food or medical supplies.

Rebel fighters in Moadamiyeh have negotiated several local truces with the government since 2012, and the suburb has been spared much of the destruction and bombing that occured in Daraya, just a mile away.

“At the core of the matter is the clearing of the area,” said Qappani.

“A large portion of people don’t want to leave their homes because they don’t want the regime to forcefully change the demography of the area.”

Abo Kanan al-Dimashqi, a member of the Moadamiyeh local council, told Al Jazeera he believes the government “clearly wants to do what it did in Daraya”.

“They want to clear the area and put a different sect here. That’s their plan – a demographic change.”

After last week’s deal in neighbouring Daraya, government troops took control of a completely empty suburb – once home to a quarter of a million people.

“The government is now gaining some momentum on the outskirts of the capital with this new tactic, forcing the population into leaving their areas through years of siege,” said Al Jazeera’s Ahelbarra.

“Now after Daraya, today is Moadamiyeh. There are concerns that the government is going to further replicate the resettling of the Sunni community in different parts of the capital. There are fears that Douma, a major opposition stronghold near the capital, could be the next.”

{The health of President Islam Karimov, 78, has sharply deteriorated over the last 24 hours, cabinet says.}

Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov is in critical condition after a stroke, the government has said, which could mean that Central Asia’s most populous nation is preparing for its first transfer of power since independence.

The health of Karimov, 78, sharply deteriorated over the past 24 hours, the cabinet said in a brief statement on Friday.

“The doctors assess [his health] as critical,” the statement said, adding Karimov has been in hospital since Saturday.

Several other media outlets, including Russian news agency RIA and Uzbek news website Gazeta.uz, also ran reports quoting the same statement.

Uzbekistan celebrated its Independence Day on September 1 with Karimov notably absent from the celebrations, causing speculation over his health.

Several reports, which were later officially denied, claimed he had died on August 29.

Born on January 30, 1938, Karimov was raised in an orphanage in the ancient city of Samarkand, before studying mechanical engineering and economics and rising up the Communist Party ranks to become head of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989.