World Press on Bangladesh Birth, Nazi-Fighting Women, Afghanistan and Myanmar Crisis: New Age Islam's Selection, 20 March 2021
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
20 March 2021
• 50th Anniversary of Bangladesh's Birth
By Mahfuz Anam
• The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance
By Judy Batalion
• Why Is It So Tough To Leave Afghanistan?
By Mark Hannah
• China Has Detained My Young Children. I Don't Know
If I'll Ever See Them Again
By Mihriban Kader
• Foggy Road Ahead In Myanmar Crisis
The Daily Star, Bangladesh
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50th Anniversary of Bangladesh's Birth
By Mahfuz Anam
March 19, 2021
A woman walks past a
large cutout of Bangladesh's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the nation marks
his 101th birthday in Dhaka, March 17, 2021.
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My generation and others close to it formed the bulk of the
Mukti Bahini in 1971. The majority of Dhaka University students of the time
were an integral part of it, as it was my distinct privilege. Most joined in
the field but many others played key roles while living where they could carry
out courageous acts of collecting money, medicine and supplies for those taking
up arms. Some from this group carried out dangerous sabotage operations that
form part of the heroic tales that we are so proud to recount today. Every turn
and twist of the war reverberated in our hearts at that time because someone
amongst us—a Mukti Bahini member—were involved in it, either making that "supreme
sacrifice" or suffering grievous injury or teaching the enemy a rare
lesson in courage and determination.
One such case was of my close friend and neighbour
Nizamuddin Azad, son of Kamruddin Ahmed, a politician, diplomat and author of
the seminal book "Emergence of Bengali Middleclass". Azad was warm,
generous and had a most disarming and hearty laugh, and was the epitome of
sincerity and earnestness. We formed our local cricket club, played together
and spent all our spare time together, as neighbourhood friends usually do.
I got him involved with the activities of East Pakistan
Students Union (EPSU), popularly called Chhatra Union, the preeminent
left-leaning student organisation at that time. We would attend all the EPSU
activities, especially street processions. But soon, he became far more
involved than me. His sterling qualities of feeling for the poor and the
downtrodden surfaced brilliantly when, during the terrible cyclone of 1970, he
fully immersed himself in the relief work. With time, he involved himself more
and more with the underground work of EPSU.
When the genocide started after March 26, 1971, we lost
touch with each other, and our joining the war took place at different times
and through different routes. He joined the armed unit of Chhatra Union and was
killed during an operation. He never received the recognition that he so richly
deserved for his sacrifice.
There must be thousands of other similar cases of
patriotism, determination, selflessness and supreme sacrifice remaining unsung.
Maybe this could be a worthwhile project to be taken up by our Liberation War
Ministry on the occasion of the golden jubilee of our independence. I recall
Azad on this occasion for all his love for the country and his courage to take
up arms and sacrifice his life so that we could all live with freedom and
dignity.
Thus, the 50th anniversary of Bangladesh's birth resonates
with a far deeper meaning for our generation. We can personally relate to many
events and have authentic accounts of many others. We were there at the time of
the preparation, the unfolding, the cruelties inflicted by the enemy, and at
the conclusion of our freedom struggle. It is also our privilege to have lived
through the first half-century of independent Bangladesh—some of it tragic and
heartrending, and others most exhilarating.
In these fifty years, we had very hopeful beginnings, like
our constitution and first election. Then tragedy befell us through the most
brutal and tragic assassination of the Father of the Nation along with his
whole family save two daughters, the present PM and her sister Rehana. This was
followed by two successive military-sponsored regimes accounting for a total of
16 years. These two regimes gave birth to two political parties—the BNP and
JP—that have had their own impact on our political evolution.
The military interlude was followed by 30 years of
democracy, triggered by the fall of the autocratic regime of Gen. Ershad.
Though freer at first, our democracy became generally restricted to holding
elections every five years with the latest ones becoming more and more
questionable. This period can be divided into two parts: the first—from 1991 to
2009—during which the governments oscillated every five years between the two
rival parties, BNP and AL, and politics was highly combative and mainly
consisted of mutual vilification, destructive hartals and boycott of the
parliament, making that central institution of democracy all but dysfunctional.
This brand of politics had a terrible impact on our economy
with frequent interruptions to all sorts of production and transportation
disrupting export, import, retail business and the service industry. It is to
the credit of our workers, entrepreneurs and industry owners that they devised
ways—like keeping factories open and transporting products at night during
day-long hartals—to navigate through the political minefield and somehow keep
the economy moving.
The second part—from 2008 to present—saw the gradual demise
of our highly acrimonious two-party system. A massive electoral loss by BNP in
the 2008 election and its boycotting of the one held in 2014 literally gave the
ruling Awami League a walkover, resulting in the latter having an iron grip
over all types of political activities. In the following years, nearly all opposition
activities became severely controlled and expression of dissent throttled, as
aptly epitomised in the enactment of the Digital Security Act.
Contrary to its impact on politics and dissent, the economy
told a remarkable story of success with all important indicators foretelling
the emergence of Bangladesh as an inspiring case of struggling out of poverty.
The graduation to the status of a developing country, though not unique among
LDCs, is remarkable considering our large population, limited land and
vulnerability to the vagaries of the nature. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina must
be credited for having inspired a "can-do" mindset—akin to Barack
Obama's "Yes, we can" slogan—galvanising our people, especially women
and youth, into an engine of advancement not before seen in post-independence
Bangladesh.
However, now is the time to forge ahead and our golden
jubilee provides the perfect occasion to think anew how best to move forward.
So far, we have made a remarkable journey. The challenge now is to make the
coming one more meaningful and more equitable. The future must be dedicated to
greater freedom and democracy and also to building a more inclusive society
with a far greater awareness of the environment. We cannot continue to destroy
the environment for economic gains, which can be ephemeral as harming the
nature always proves disastrous.
There is an interesting book titled "What Got You Here
Won't Get You There", written by Marshall Goldsmith. It essentially makes
the case that future successes cannot be achieved by replicating the thoughts,
behaviour and mindset that brought the present ones. Though the book's focus is
on individuals, I think it equally applies to nations and countries. For
Bangladesh to forge ahead, we must first start by changing our mindset and
being fully aware that the global situation under which we developed in the
last three decades has completely changed, and will further change in the
coming decades in ways that will far outpace anything we can imagine now.
According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, we have no
idea what the job market will look like by 2040, a mere 19 years in the future.
Consequently, we have no way of knowing what sort of education we will need to
provide to our children so they can fit into that job market.
"The World in 2050", a publication by The
Economist Newspaper, looks at the mega-changes that we should prepare for by
the middle of this century. It also gives a good idea of which direction we
should proceed in.
For us, the population, environment, economy and education
should be the major areas to focus on. Population concerns us directly and
immediately as we are among the most densely populated countries in the world.
We may have managed our population so far but any lowering of guard on its future
growth may prove extremely short-sighted. Hence population control, human
resources development with a particular focus on women and youth, and health
must form a far more urgent priority than it has been so far. The Covid-19
pandemic has made that message poignant and immediate.
We are among the few countries in the world at the frontline
of climate change. Most scientific predictions say that 10-15 percent of our
land areas will be directly affected by climate change with all its social,
economic and human consequences, much of which is mostly unknown. We do not see
the mobilisation of people and resources that is necessary to meet such
challenges.
On the economy, the prediction is about the future being the
"Asian Century", with China, India and Japan playing pivotal roles in
it. Bangladesh is strategically placed between the two Asian giants—China and
India—and with excellent relations with Japan, we are well-poised to gain from
the shift in global economic power to the East.
On education, we have miles to go. Recently, we have fallen
into the trap of promoting quantity at the cost of quality. This misconceived
emphasis on numbers will prove extremely damaging for us as with the internet,
information and communication technology making the world a global village, the
standard of education too will become global (it already is in many senses).
And the employability of our educated youth will more and more be determined on
common and universal educational standards. We are not likely to fare well in
that scenario.
While we celebrate our golden jubilee—and there is a lot to
celebrate for—we must be fully aware of the arduous tasks that lie ahead. We
must face those challenges, not with slogans or rhetoric, but with data-based
analysis and well-calculated and sustainable options.
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Mahfuz Anam is Editor and Publisher, The Daily Star.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/the-third-view/news/what-got-us-here-will-not-take-us-there-2062953
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The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance
By Judy Batalion
March 18, 2021
Noor Inayat Khan, in
the uniform of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, is pictured in 1943.
Credit: Imperial War
Museum
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In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment
on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old
Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now
dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied
around her braided blond hair.
She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and
shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied.
She found a physician’s coat, entered the hospital where the injured man was
being treated, and killed both the Nazi and the police officer who had been
guarding him.
“Little Wanda With the Braids,” as she was nicknamed on
every Gestapo most-wanted list, was one of many young Jewish women who, with
supreme cunning and daring, fought the Nazis in Poland. And yet, as I
discovered over several years of research on these resistors, their stories
have largely been overlooked in the broader history of Jewish resistance in
World War II.
In 2007, when I was living in London and grappling with my
Jewish identity, I decided to write about strong Jewish women. Hannah Senesh
jumped immediately to mind. As I’d learned in fifth grade, Hannah was a young
World War II resistance paratrooper. She had left her native Hungary for
Palestine in 1939, but later returned to Europe to fight the Allied cause; she
was caught and was said to have looked her killers directly in their eyes as
they shot her.
That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the
granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family,
flight meant life. I had grown up to be a runner in relationships, careers and
countries. But Hannah had returned to fight. I wanted to grasp what had
motivated her boldness.
I went to the British Library, looked her up in the catalog
and ordered the few books listed under her name. One, I noticed, was unusual,
bound in worn blue fabric with gold lettering and yellowing edges — “Freuen in
di Ghettos,” Yiddish for “Women in the Ghettos.” I opened it and found 180
sheets of tiny script, all in Yiddish, a language I was fluent in. To my
surprise, only a few pages mentioned Hannah Senesh; the rest relayed tales of
dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance
to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.
All this was a revelation to me. Where I had expected
mourning and gloom, I found guns, grenades and espionage. This was a Yiddish
thriller, telling the stories of Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” who paid off
Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then
killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails,
bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and bore the truth about what was
happening to the Jews.
I was stunned. I was raised in a community of Holocaust
survivors and had earned a doctorate in women’s history. Why had I never heard
these stories?
“Freuen” was compiled for Yiddish-speaking American Jews in
1946 in an attempt to share this stunning history as widely as possible. But in
the years that followed, these resistance narratives, like many historical
contributions made by women, were sidelined or ignored for a variety of
political and personal reasons.
Many women who told their stories in their own communities
after the war were met with disbelief; others were accused by relatives of
abandoning their families to fight; still others were charged with sleeping
their way to safety. Sometimes, family members feared that opening old wounds
would tear them apart. And many fighters suffered from survivors’ guilt —
they’d “had it easy,” they felt, compared with others — and so in later years
remained mostly silent about their experiences.
Several other factors in postwar decades may have
contributed to the relative obscurity of this history. In the 1950s, some say,
many Jews had trauma fatigue; in the 1960s, the emerging horrors of Auschwitz
and other camps became the predominant subject; in the “hippyish” 1970s,
stories of violent rebellion were out of fashion; and in the 1980s, a flood of
Holocaust books in the United States overshadowed many earlier tales.
My quest to learn more about these women turned into a dozen
years of research across Poland, Israel and North America; in archives and
living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos. I learned
of the scope of Jewish rebellion: More than 90 European ghettos had armed
Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the
partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw
alone. All this alongside daily acts of resilience — smuggling food, writing
diaries, telling jokes to relieve fear, hugging a barrack mate to keep her
warm. Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts. I
learned their names: Tosia Altman, Gusta Davidson, Frumka Plotnicka. Hundreds
of others
At the center of “Freuen” was a striking testimonial by a
woman identified only as Renia K.; it was composed at the end of the war, when
she was just 20 years old. Her writing was descriptive, even witty. “For them,”
she wrote of the Nazi officers, “killing a person was easier than smoking a
cigarette.” I found her file at the Israel State Archives and used the book she
published in 1945 and additional testimonies to fill out her story.
Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in
Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature,
and some 180 Jewish newspapers. After Hitler invaded Renia’s town, Jedrzejow,
and locked her family in a ghetto, Renia escaped and fled through fields. She
leapt off a moving train when she was recognized, bargained with the police and
pretended to be Catholic. She got a job as a housemaid, nervously genuflecting
at weekly church services. “I hadn’t even known that I was such a good actor,”
Renia reflected in her memoir, “able to impersonate and imitate.”
Helped by a paid Polish smuggler, she joined her older
sister in the town of Bedzin. Before the war, Bedzin had been a largely middle-class
Jewish community and a hub for Jewish political parties, which had proliferated
in response to the question of modern Jewish identity. A vast network of Jewish
youth groups was affiliated with these parties. These groups had trained young
Jewish men — and women — to feel pride, live collectively, be physically active
and question, critique and plan. They trained them in the skills necessary for
“staying.”
After Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the youth groups formed
militias. When Renia arrived, Bedzin hosted a burgeoning cell of rebellion
organized by secular, socialist-leaning Jewish teenagers and young adults.
Those who were forced to labor in Nazi uniform factories slipped notes into the
boots urging soldiers at the front to drop their weapons. They constructed
workshops where they experimented with homemade explosives and designed
elaborate underground bunkers. “Haganah!” was their rallying cry: Defense!
Women who were selected for undercover missions were
required to look “good,” or passably “Aryan” or Catholic, with light hair, blue
or green eyes, good posture and an assured gait. Renia was one of those chosen.
Fueled by rage and a deep sense of justice, 18-year-old Renia became an
underground operative, “a courier girl.”
I learned that “courier girls” connected the locked ghettos
where Jews were imprisoned. Being caught on the Aryan side meant certain death;
despite that, these young women dyed their hair blond, took off their
Jewish-identifying armbands, put on fake smiles and secretly slipped in and out
of ghettos, bringing Jews information and hope, bulletins and false
identification papers, and linking youth resistance groups across the country.
They smuggled pistols, bullets and grenades, hiding them in marmalade jars,
sacks of potatoes and designer handbags.
As women, they were well positioned to do this work: Their
brothers were circumcised and risked being found out in a “pants drop” test.
Before the war, Jewish girls were more likely than Jewish boys to have studied
at Polish public schools (many boys attended Jewish schools and Yeshivas). They
were over all more assimilated than Jewish boys and spoke Polish without the
Yiddish accent, making them excellent spies.
They also took enormous risks. Bela Hazan got a job working
as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo; she stole their documents and
delivered them to Jewish forgers. Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw
ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement
that lined the ghetto border. She later supported Jews in hiding, secretly
bringing them money, medical help and trusted photographers to take their
pictures for fake IDs.
Hela Schupper, a beauty who’d studied commerce, dressed up
as an affluent Polish woman attending an afternoon of theater, wearing clothes
she’d borrowed from a non-Jewish friend’s mother. In 1942 she met a “Mr. X”
from the Polish underground on a Warsaw street corner, followed him onto a
train and into a safe house, stuffed her fashionable jute handbag, and brought
five guns and clips of cartridges to Krakow’s “Fighting Pioneers,” who then
bombed a Christmas week gathering at an upscale cafe frequented by Nazi
officers, killing at least seven Germans and wounding more.
These women were so unlike me — they were the fight to my
flight — and I was becoming increasingly obsessed with them.
Renia ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw. She moved
grenades, false passports and cash strapped to her body and hidden in her
undergarments and shoes. She transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots. She
wore a red flower in her hair to identify her to underground contacts, met up
with a black-market arms dealer in a cemetery, and slept in a cellar, wandering
the city by day to gather information. She smiled coyly during searches on the train,
and befriended one border guard to whom she “confessed” about smuggling food to
distract him from the real contraband that was fastened to her torso with
belts. “You had to be strong in your comportment, firm,” she wrote in her
memoir. “You had to have an iron will.”
In Vilna, Ruzka Korczak found a Finnish pamphlet in a
library on how to make bombs — it became the underground’s recipe book. Her
comrade Vitka Kempner put a rudimentary explosive under her coat, slipped out
of the ghetto, and blew up a German supply train in 1942. The Vilna resistance
fled the ghetto to fight in the forests, where both women commanded units.
Their comrade Zelda Treger completed 17 trips transporting hundreds of Jews out
of ghettos and slave labor camps to the woods. In a different forest, a
19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated
in combat missions and performed surgery — she was once forced to amputate a
soldier’s wounded finger with her teeth. “When it was time to hug a boyfriend,
I was hugging a rifle,” Faye said of her wartime adolescence in a documentary
film.
Renia, through cunning and luck, managed to fend off prying
Nazis and Poles who attempted to turn her in for a reward — until one border
guard noticed her fabricated passport stamp. Imprisoned in Gestapo lockups that
prided themselves on their medieval torture strategies, Renia was brutally
beaten alongside Polish political prisoners. She masterminded an escape, helped
by other courier girls who plied the guards with cigarettes and whiskey. Renia
was able to slip away, change her clothes and run. Using an underground
railroad set up by Jews, she crossed the Tatra Mountains by foot, then reached
Hungary hidden in the locomotive of a freight train. The engineer expelled an
extra puff of smoke to hide her departure from the engine.
Renia finally arrived in Palestine, where she was invited to
lecture about her experience, and she published her memoir in Hebrew in 1945 —
one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust. But in her life after
the war, she remained mostly silent about it. For many female survivors,
silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new
generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to
create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves. Renia’s family
home after the war was not filled with stories of the resistance, but with
music, art and tango nights; she was known for her fashionable tastes, and for
her sharp sense of humor. Like so many refugees, the resistors wanted to start
afresh, to blend into their new worlds.
Some 70 years after the war, I went to speak with Vitka
Kempner’s son, Michael Kovner, on the outdoor terrace of a Jerusalem cafe. “She
was someone who went toward danger,” he told me. “She didn’t care about the
rules. She had true chutzpah.”
Researching these women, I’ve learnt that my family’s
narrative is not the sole option for confronting large and small dangers in the
world. Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times, I can stop and
fight, or, at least, pause and discuss. Renia and her comrades were brave and
powerful and paved the way for the generations that followed — not just the
Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, but also women like me and my daughters. My children
should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and
even running toward danger.
When I left the cafe, I found myself on a quiet side road. I
looked up and saw the street sign with a name I would have never recognized a
few years before: Haviva Reik Street. With Hannah Senesh, Haviva had joined the
British Army as a paratrooper, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing
Allied servicemen. Strong female legacies were all around us; if only we
noticed, if only we knew their stories.
-----
Judy Batalion is the author of the forthcoming “The Light
of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos,”
from which this essay is adapted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/opinion/Jewish-women-Nazi-fighters.html?
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Why Is It So Tough to Leave Afghanistan?
By Mark Hannah
March 19, 2021
As his two predecessors did, President Biden has pledged to
end the war in Afghanistan. But also as his two predecessors did, he could end
up tragically perpetuating it. Outnumbered by a national security establishment
fixated on continuing this misadventure, the Biden team will need courage and
clarity if it is to finally disentangle America from what has become a futile
struggle.
It is fortunate to have an opportunity to do so. Last year,
after a decade of negotiation, the United States and the Taliban reached an
agreement calling for a complete withdrawal of American troops by May 1. The
administration is now attempting to broker peace talks between the Afghan
government and the Taliban. That effort should not come at the expense of this
commitment. But the administration is reportedly considering a six-month
extension of the deployment of American troops. If the United States gets the
Taliban to agree to such an extension, those troops become mere leverage in a
complicated diplomatic drama. If it doesn’t and delays withdrawal anyway, the
agreement that has prevented any U.S. combat casualties for the past year
dissolves. Regardless, it will be “tough” to get American troops home by the
deadline, as Mr. Biden told ABC News this week.
As vice president, Mr. Biden opposed the surge of troops in
Afghanistan in 2010. Last year, he wisely recognized “it is past time to end
the forever wars.” His secretary of state, Antony Blinken, asserted two years
ago that it was “time to cut the cord” in Afghanistan. This month, Mr. Blinken
insisted military action would be taken “only when the objectives and mission
are clear and achievable” and “with the informed consent of the American
people.” According to polling my colleagues and I have conducted, the American
people support the details of the U.S.-Taliban agreement by six to one.
Why, then, is leaving Afghanistan so “tough”?
True, the country presents dilemmas: Despite decades of
American intervention and investment, it remains weak and poorly governed. Like
other weak and poorly governed states, it could attract violent extremists.
This is a real concern but not an impossible one to overcome: Mr. Biden will
need to maintain diplomatic ties and intelligence capabilities to thwart groups
like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
There are also real concerns that removing U.S. troops will
force the Afghan government and the Taliban to face the prospect of an
escalating civil war. But Afghanistan has been stuck in a civil war for
decades, well before the arrival of U.S. troops 20 years ago; it’s more than a
little egocentric for American policymakers to think they alone can hold the
country together.
The bigger barrier confronting the Biden administration may
be closer to home. Despite promises to make foreign policy serve the interests
of everyday Americans, many of Washington’s decisions are circumscribed by a
professional culture among policymakers that normalizes war and idealizes
military might. It’s not as if Mr. Biden is being pressured to stay in
Afghanistan with a cogent argument; most analysts freely admit that the United
States has no plausible path to victory, that the military isn’t trained to
midwife democracy and that the Afghan government is grievously corrupt.
Rather, the national security community cannot bear to
display its failure. That’s why many who advocate continuing the war are left
grasping for illogical or far-fetched justifications. In a meeting of National
Security Council principals, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen.
Mark Milley, reportedly made an emotional plea to stay in Afghanistan, after
“all the blood and treasure spent” there.
A recent report from the congressionally commissioned
Afghanistan Study Group, which advised against withdrawing U.S. troops, shows
just how ossified the foreign policy establishment has become. The group’s
members argue that the military’s mission should include lofty goals like
creating stability, promoting democracy and “shaping conditions that enhance
the prospects of a successful peace process.” Their recommendations reflect the
unimaginative assumptions and stale rationales that have kept the United States
stuck in Afghanistan for so long. And their otherwise impressive bona fides
appear to be compromised by an array of financial connections to major defense
contractors.
Like General Milley, the report fell for the “sunk costs”
fallacy, insisting American troops must stay in the country, in part, to “honor
the sacrifices that have been made.” (Listening to the majority of veterans who
favor withdrawing troops might actually achieve that goal.) The report couldn’t
conjure a vital national interest in remaining and instead came up with only
vague claims like: “A stable Afghanistan would create the potential for
regional economic cooperation that could benefit all countries in the region,
linking energy-rich Central Asia with energy-deprived South Asia.”
Mr. Biden came to office envisioning a “foreign policy for
the middle class.” When he tapped Jake Sullivan to be his national security
adviser, he insisted Mr. Sullivan judge all of his decisions on “a basic
question: Will this make life better, easier, safer for families across this
country?”
Staying the course in Afghanistan accomplishes none of this
— and Mr. Sullivan seems to know it. He admits as much in a report he
co-authored last year, plainly stating the war has “proven costly to
middle-class economic interests.” But it’s not easy to construct a foreign
policy that prioritizes the interests of ordinary Americans once you’re back
among the Beltway herd. If the Biden administration wants to match its policies
to its precepts, it will have to buck Washington’s culture of inertia.
This isn’t just about Afghanistan. The people who make
foreign policy tend to be walled off from public opinion and all too eager to
conform to a bipartisan consensus that favors intervention over restraint.
Washington isn’t solely to blame. American voters don’t often prioritize
foreign policy during election season and so don’t exert the political
influence they might. Fortunately, in recent years, there have been more
efforts to constrain American military power, and a new generation wary of war
has begun to make its voice heard. All this hasn’t been enough to bring about
the end of America’s war in Afghanistan — yet.
Achieving peace and stability in Afghanistan has always been
a Sisyphean task, and America’s foreign policy leadership has little motivation
to confront the political cost of withdrawal. Even though most Americans favor
ending the war, after 20 years, they have become inured to it. Mr. Biden most
likely knows a May 1 withdrawal from Afghanistan is not premature but long
overdue. Seeking to avoid the political distraction of a troop withdrawal’s
potentially messy aftermath, he risks keeping the United States bogged down in
a war it cannot win.
President Biden, who wants America to reclaim a humble and
sober outlook, is uniquely qualified to get Washington to quit its compulsive
continuation of this conflict beyond this spring. Let’s hope he musters the
wisdom and the will to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/opinion/biden-afghanistan.html?
-----
China Has Detained My Young Children. I Don't Know If
I'll Ever See Them Again
By Mihriban Kader
19 Mar 2021
When I left my children five years ago, I did it in a rush.
I didn’t have time to grab any mementoes, any toys. All I took was a single
family photo.
At the time, my husband and I felt we had no choice. As
Uighurs in Xinjiang, the Chinese authorities had been harassing us constantly
and demanding that we give up our passports. There would be “consequences” if
we didn’t. There was also a strict birth control policy. They wanted to do a
“body check” on me to see if I was pregnant, and I was.
We had managed to get visas to go to Italy, but we feared
there would be questions at the border if we left with all our children at
once. So we decided to take my then youngest son, who was still breastfeeding,
and leave the four others with their grandparents until they could join us
later on. They were between seven and 11 years old at the time.
If we hadn’t left China at that moment, I don’t know if we
ever could have. But still we did not imagine how much worse things would get
in Xinjiang. After we made it to Italy, the authorities started to target our
family. My mother was taken to an internment camp, and my father was
interrogated for several days before being taken to hospital. He was 80 years
old.
Meanwhile, the children had no one. According to the Chinese
government, they were the children of “betrayers”. Our other relatives could
not take care of them because they were afraid that they would be sent to camps
too.
The school soon noticed that no parents or guardians were
present at meetings, so they asked the government to handle these “orphaned”
children. They were sent to a prison-like school with 24-hour surveillance.
They call these places “orphan camps”.
My children are called “orphans”, but I am still alive.
In November 2019, my father passed away. But that was also
the month we received some good news, when the Italian government issued a permit
to bring my children to Italy. Informing our children was a risk, because of
surveillance of their communications, but we managed to do it in March last
year in a video call.
To obtain their visas they would need to travel to the
Italian consulate in Shanghai, 5,000km away. They were too young to take such a
journey alone, and we couldn’t find anyone to accompany them due to the risks.
One night in May, the Chinese police interrogated my
children for two hours. They asked why they kept in contact with their parents.
They said this was dangerous, and threatened to take them to an internment camp
at the end of the school term. The children were scared. My son was calling us
every day, pleading to be rescued. He said he was on a list of people going to
an internment camp. With the Italian visa set to expire in August, we had to
let the children go to Shanghai by themselves.
We gave them instructions and, with the help of strangers
and contacts, they made it to Shanghai. But when they got there, they were refused
entry to the Italian consulate. Two days later the police caught them, and they
were sent back to the orphan camp.
Until then, I had never given up hope that we would see our
children again. But now our situation is desperate. China has detained my children,
and if it wants to harm them, it can.
It is a risk for Uighurs to speak out about the human rights
violations we are suffering, but we are telling our story in the hope that
someone will help us. In the five years since I left my children, I have not
stopped thinking about them, even for a minute. Nobody can truly understand
what I feel unless they experience this.
I do not know what my children are doing now. I have seen
footage of orphan camps posted online, so I know they watch Chinese propaganda
films and sing “red” songs in the school. Whenever I watch these videos, I
think of my children and the way they’re being educated. How they’re restricted
in a small classroom, learning things they don’t want to, separated from their
parents, and how they must miss us.
My baby was born in Italy, and we have another that was born
here. Sometimes we hold them in our arms and tell them about their brothers and
sisters in Xinjiang, and we cry. They ask when they will meet their siblings,
and I do not know the answer. At night I wake from nightmares, and I pray to
Allah to bring the children back to us. In those times, the only thing that
comforts me is the photo of them I grabbed as I rushed out of the door five
years ago.
----
Mihriban Kader is a Uighur Muslim who fled from Xinjiang
to Italy in 2016. Her four eldest children were taken into Chinese state
custody. She is featured in Amnesty International’s latest report, Hearts and
Lives Broken: The nightmare of Uyghur families separated by repression
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/19/china-detained-my-young-children-uighur
----
Foggy Road Ahead In Myanmar Crisis
The Daily Star, Bangladesh
March 20, 2021
Four events on Sunday (March 14) are proving pivotal to the
outcome of the escalating crisis in Myanmar.
First, the acting leader of Myanmar's ousted lawmakers under
an entity called the Committee for Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH),
backed by the US, issued a call to arms for the protesters to defend themselves
in a "revolution".
Second, unidentified assailants set fire to scores of
garment factories in an industrial zone—some of which were Chinese-owned. Both
the protesters and the junta are blaming the other for the arson attacks. The
incidents followed weeks of "hate" messages in social media over
China's opposition alongside Russia when the UN Security Council sought to
condemn and impose sanctions on the Myanmar military junta over the February 1
coup.
Third, deaths of anti-junta protesters on Sunday hit a high
of at least 39, bringing the total death toll to well over 100.
Fourth, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has
imposed martial law in two townships, one of which is in Yangon. More were
underway afterwards.
The upsurge in violence comes as a blow to Asean, which was
hopeful of further engaging the Tatmadaw to convince it to open a dialogue with
all stakeholders, including the National League for Democracy; and also to
allow a humanitarian channel to aid the people as Myanmar already faces an
uphill task controlling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Separate initiatives by Indonesia and Thailand, which
managed to establish preliminary "trust" with the junta as evidenced
by the visit of Myanmar Foreign Ministry representative Wunna Maung Lwin to
Bangkok on February 24 to meet Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai and
Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, now appear to be in tatters
following Sunday's call to arms and the consequent violence.
Greater involvement by superpowers and their taking sides in
the conflict could further complicate matters.
The US had earlier initiated a series of sanctions on
Myanmar military personnel and stopped the military junta from withdrawing
Myanmar's USD 1 billion deposit in New York, as well as a World Bank loan
freeze. The US has backed the CRPH, which is now seeking recognition as a
government in exile. It is also trying to bring on board the ethnic minorities,
including those who have been fighting for independence under a federal
principle.
These signals are heightening the challenges for the
Tatmadaw to hold the country together and avoid a potential civil war, a
scenario which Asean, especially Thailand as well as China, is most wary of.
Unlike the 1940s when the Tatmadaw began as the only institution in Myanmar
able to build a nation state, now the NLD and its allies have a blanket
presence in all parts of the country, although with few arms.
Meanwhile China, with its controversial economic relations
with Myanmar plus complex activities along the borders, is poised for greater intervention
following Sunday's arson attacks on the properties of Chinese investors.
China had earlier signalled its intention to enter the fray.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi was unequivocal in stating: "China and Myanmar
are a community with a shared future through thick and thin. China will not
waver in its commitment to advancing China-Myanmar relations, and will not
change the course of promoting friendship and cooperation, no matter how the
situation evolves."
One Thai diplomat, who did not want to be named, expressed
his apprehensions. "We are naturally worried because as the conflict
intensifies, the reactions from major nations, especially western ones, will
increase, with the consequent danger of everything getting irretrievably out of
control. As we are seeing, moral support, financing etc to keep the protests
going may lead to supply of arms and weapons. The entire environment can lead
to this as well as external interference reaching various groups of people,
including ethnic minorities to fight the military government, triggering chaos.
So, what does this lead to—a problem for Asean, particularly Thailand [sharing
long borders with Myanmar]."
"If we talk about patience, we don't want to say if
they [the US] have or don't have—but we would like them to have the same
objectives and good aspirations for Myanmar. That's what we would like to
see," he added.
Thai observers believe that co-existence of the Tatmadaw and
the NLD is the best of the alternatives before Myanmar.
And there is nothing better than a return to normalcy.
"It's best for them to walk forward together, as it had proven throughout
recent years that by sticking together, trying to depend on one another, or
even with sporadic conflicts at times, it is the optimum option for their country,"
Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai had said in an earlier interview with
Asia News Network.
Don stressed the importance of dialogue and trust to achieve
a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Myanmar.
Thais believe that if the two sides had tried to stay
together and accommodated each other and not sought to annihilate the other,
the crisis would not have taken place. And if they can nurture the relations as
they did in the past several years, it would have created a "special"
characteristic in themselves, and the role of the military would have then
steadily evolved in tandem with domestic politics, benefiting the people in the
process.
The failure at mutual accommodation had precipitated the
present crisis, which is escalating by the day.
Amid threats of a civil war and martial law imposed on two
townships and more, the chance of the Tatmadaw imposing a nationwide martial
law, blocking access to the internet and all communication with the outside
world cannot be ruled out.
The Tatmadaw has woven tightly the fabric of the Myanmar
nation for long and has become used to being in control of virtually every
facet. The soldiers are industrious, serious, brutal, ruthless, and aloof, with
distrust of everyone. It is as if the world changed little in the post-colonial
time, and everybody is a virtual enemy.
But the world has changed from the time when the military
held the country in a tight leash. The people of Myanmar strongly believe that
life would be better for them with a democratically elected civilian government,
and communication technology.
There is a fear in Asean that the crisis could spiral out of
control and become complicated like in some other countries, such as foreign
fighters intruding, or the use of drone bombs from outside. Even the Tatmadaw
would not be in a position to tackle such a scenario.
A Thai diplomat added that Thailand had not talked to China,
but if Beijing offered a solution that could work, it would be welcomed. And
Bangkok is open to combining its approach with the Chinese and work together
for mutual benefit.
But Thailand maintains that if trust and dialogue can be
established without outside interference, it is best for Myanmar because it
doesn't have to share the "cake" with anyone.
While several Asean members have supported Indonesia's
initiative, they are sceptical of Thailand's approach. "Yes, trust is key,
but Thailand is mistaken in thinking that its special relationship with Myanmar
could protect the region," one Asean diplomat commented.
Meanwhile, on the ground the military still has the upper
hand. A Myanmar source said the Tatmadaw is determined to carry out its
objectives, despite the strong and inspired protests. There has been no
significant switching of sides by soldiers and police to annul the coup, which
is seen as a key determination of the outcome as international pressure has not
been effective at the moment.
Some Myanmar analysts believe the best hope right now is to
have a free and fair election after a year or two. The key challenge will be
how best to hold the military accountable for its promises including
maintaining basic human rights, freedom of the press and freedom of information
flow. And also to make sure that Myanmar does not become a pariah state so that
its citizens can recover from the Covid pandemic. Policy engagements are needed
from the international community rather than isolation.
But they conceded that the fate of the NLD is not good
unless something can be salvaged. In addition to voter fraud charges, the
military is now piling on corruption charges. It is widely surmised that Aung
San Suu Kyi's political career is likely over. Some blamed her stubbornness and
political naivete for a series of actions leading to the coup.
The events of Sunday have stirred more uncertainty about the
end-game, as the competing interests and geopolitics of China and the US
further muddy the waters.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/foggy-road-ahead-myanmar-crisis-2063477
-----
URL: https://newageislam.com/world-press/world-press-bangladesh-birth,-nazi/d/124585
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