World Press on Rape, Human Rights, Biden, Macron and Saudi-Israeli Normalization: New Age Islam's Selection, 19 October 2020
By New Age Islam Edit
Bureau
19 October
2020
• Rage against Rape
By Ramisa Rob
• Biden’s Proposed Middle East Policy Would End
Any Prospect for Saudi-Israeli Normalization
By Dr. Raphael Benlev
• No Vaccine for Cruelty: The Pandemic Has
Eroded Democracy and Respect For Human Rights
The Economist
• Macron Has Enjoyed Wielding His Authority
during Covid – And The French Don't Like It
By Cole Stangler
• In America’s Bizarre Electoral System, Some
Votes Are More Equal Than Others
By Farhad Manjoo
-----
Rage Against Rape
By Ramisa Rob
October 19,
2020
Death
penalty is not a solution to gender-based sexual violence—which is a much
larger systemic problem deeply rooted in the fabric of our society. Photo
Courtesy: Sudeshna Biswas (Beyondparameters)
-----
Many have
welcomed the government's introduction of the death penalty, misconceiving
Bangladesh's rape problem as a quick-fix punishment problem. Reckless rape
reporting concentrating on graphic details, sensationalising disturbing rape
cases, and the new fashion of sharing trauma porn to raise awareness on social
media have all contributed to misdirecting collective outrage against sexual
violence.
But let's
get one thing straight: death penalty is not a solution to gender-based sexual
violence—which is a much larger systemic problem deeply rooted in the fabric of
our society.
The Indian
government had also responded to the 2012 Nirbhaya rape case by introducing the
death penalty and what has that done for India? This March, after seven years,
four perpetrators of the case were executed, while according to
recently-released figures from the National Crime Records Bureau, the police
registered 33,977 cases of rape in 2018. The numbers have been consistently
rising over the years.
As for
Bangladesh, what positive change in favour of rape victims will the Women and
Children Repression Act Ordinance 2020—replacing life imprisonment as the
maximum sentence for rape with the death penalty—accomplish? Most of us
overlook the fact that the death penalty already exists in Bangladesh for
certain cases of rape, under Section 9 of the 2000 Act which include gang-rape
and rape leading to death. In other words, the ordinance isn't bringing any new
form of "justice" for the victim in the Noakhali gang-rape case,
which has galvanised the series of protests last week.
The reintroduction
of the death penalty essentially means rapists in all rape cases will receive
death sentence as maximum punishment. But the rape law—section 375 of the penal
code 1860—still hasn't changed its narrow definition of rape, so it's rather
hard to imagine the authorities holding speedy trials, prosecuting and
executing all rapists in the 975 cases from January to September, 208 of which
were gang-rape, per Ain o Salish Kendra. And even if that were to happen, does
it realistically counter rape culture and the culture of impunity? Can we
really imagine a future where husbands won't rape their wives because they're
afraid that the wife reporting on them would lead to their death? It seems
far-fetched to even imagine all these scenarios of "justice."
We must not
be satisfied with this death penalty announcement that we know all too well
will accomplish no such justice for rape victims. We must not fall for this
punishment debate trap either, which essentially trivialises sexual violence as
an exceptional problem that can be solved by addressing those few exceptions.
Addressing
the recent introduction of the death penalty, a panel discussion organised by
Feminist Across Generations—an alliance established by a group of young and
experienced feminists who have been fighting gender-based violence for decades
through legal and social advocacy—asserted that "legal reforms is one part
of the puzzle, an extremely crucial part, but it needs to go hand in hand with
bold ambitious plans to bring societal change."
Moderating
the conversation, Umama Zillur, founder of KOTHA, added that, "even if we
were able to pass every single law and reform that has been put forward over
the last couple of years and decades, and if we were able to have the most
airtight strong legal framework," we would not feel safe because at the
end of the day we would be coming back to our "homes and our families and
our schools and our friends who would continue to inflict violence on us."
More often
than not, we tend to other rapists as psychopaths and monsters and not men who
live amongst us, in our communities. It's high time to put a stop to all these
counterproductive and harmful practices we have normalised in society. We must
use our anger and pain productively and strategically to dismantle the system
that upholds a culture of impunity and holds so much space for men to rape
women.
The Rage
Against Rape movement overhauled by Feminist Across Generations has declared
gender-based violence a national emergency and put forth 10 demands to the
society and to the state which must complement each other to holistically fight
rape culture. Their demands include: an end to all gender-based violence by
private and state actors; zero tolerance for victim-blaming at all levels of
society (structural, institutional, societal and individual); that families
hold their boys and men accountable for any and all violence they perpetuate;
that rapists are no longer sheltered in our homes, schools and workplaces; that
women have the right to occupy public spaces without fear of violence, at any
time or for any purpose; rejection of the idea that women's bodies hold their
and their family's honour; that comprehensive sex education, including consent,
is made mandatory in school curricula; that swift action is taken against all
those weaponising cyber tools to commit violence against women; that existing
rape laws are reformed to recognise and criminalise marital rape regardless of
the age of the victim; urgent and immediate adoption of 10-point demand issues
by the Rape Law Reform Coalition, including: i) redefining rape to ensure that
it covers all forms of non-consensual penetration, irrespective of gender; ii)
reviewing Evidence Act of 1872 to remove scope for institutional
victim-blaming; iii) ensuring protection and access to justice without
discrimination for all rape victim/survivors (irrespective of gender, religion,
race, ethnicity, disability, gender identity, sexuality); conducting
sensitisation trainings for police, lawyers, judges and social workers so rape
survivors are treated with respect and due responsiveness during reporting,
investigation and prosecution.
Fighting
systemic sexual violence requires us as a society to start questioning all the
harmful sexist myths we have accepted as normal in our everyday lives. Cholo
Kotha Boli has envisioned a pyramid to explain how the culture of sexual
violence functions like a toxic system in Bangladesh. At the bottom of the
pyramid, you have attitudes and beliefs that normalise sexual violence. This
leads to degradation which leads to assault. According to Kotha, "the
tolerance of the behaviours at the bottom supports or excuses those higher
up."
So for
example, everytime we say "orna koi"—no matter how
"well-intentioned" the phrase may seem—we perpetuate victim-blaming
and recycle the harmful myth that victims can prevent rape. Every single time
we invoke a woman's modesty to slut-shame her—even if we do it as harmless
gossip—we ensure that women in this nation feel unsafe, we sustain the toxic
system that allows men to rape women every day. Every time we excuse
wolf-whistling, groping and inappropriate advances on Facebook, citing
"boys will be boys," we as a society take one step backwards from
fighting towards a society where every single woman wouldn't feel unsafe in one
way or another.
Every
single time, we entertain or allow microaggressions that don't outright seem
harmful, we recharge the system that allowed the vile Noakhali gang-rape case
to happen in the first place. It's difficult to lessen the distance between our
"normal" lives and face that our mindsets have contributed to the
crime that continues to plague this nation year after year. But this fight
isn't supposed to be comfortable. It's time to start these uncomfortable
conversations with family members and friends and face each and every one of
our complicities. It's time to challenge ourselves to change the attitudes and
beliefs starting from our own homes.
----
Ramisa Rob is a masters candidate at Columbia
University.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/rage-against-rape-1980261
------
Biden’s Proposed Middle East Policy Would End
Any Prospect for Saudi-Israeli Normalization
By Dr. Raphael BenLev
October 19,
2020
Joe
Biden, January 18, 2020, image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr CC
-----
The Abraham
Accords were the product of a slowly developing structural shift in Middle East
geopolitics that led to an alignment of interests between the Gulf States and
Israel. The most central of these interests was opposing the threat posed by
Iran and its proxies throughout the region. The current US administration
successfully identified this structural shift and played a positive role as a
catalyst that moved the actors toward formal recognition.
A similar
dynamic lay at the basis of both previous successful peace agreements signed
between Israel and Arab states, with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994. In each
case, there was first a fundamental alignment of interests and, as a
consequence of that alignment, each state recognized the benefits that could be
had by a formal peace agreement. Only then did the US have a positive role to
play in helping incentivize the sides to take the next step. The US cannot make
peace between regional actors that are not ready, but it is vital to the
incentivizing and encouragement of progress once fundamental mutual interests
have been acknowledged.
The Trump
administration played this role with exceptional skill in 2020. So well, in
fact, that there has been speculation about the potential for normalization
between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, it
is Washington’s strong support for Riyadh’s security needs, clear stance
against Iran’s pursuit of regional hegemony, support for Saudi actions in
Yemen, and willingness to set aside criticism of Riyadh’s domestic policies
that have allowed for even the possibility of a formal shift in the kingdom’s
stance on Israel.
But
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s intended policies for the Middle
East would completely undermine any existing potential for progress toward
normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. It would be stopped dead in its
tracks. This is because Biden and his advisors have stated unambiguously that
they intend to reverse all the above aspects of current US Middle East
policy—in other words, all the policies that allowed the Abraham Accords to
come to fruition.
Biden
foreign policy advisor Jake Sullivan has argued that the US “should absolutely
be removing all forms of support for the continuing hostilities in Yemen” as
well as adopting a greater willingness to pressure Riyadh on its domestic human
rights shortcomings. Biden himself recently penned an op-ed outlining his plan
for a renewed détente with Tehran. Top Biden foreign policy advisor Tony Blinken
has made the same contention on a number of occasions: that Washington must
abandon its current policy of maximum pressure on Iran and pursue direct
negotiations along the lines of the 2015 JCPOA.
The above
proposals would constitute drastic changes to the current policy. Taken as a
whole, Biden’s program is essentially that the US administration should say to
Muhammad bin Salman: “Look, we’re not going to sell you any more missiles for
your operations against Iran’s proxies in Yemen. We’re abandoning the maximum
pressure policy against Iran and instead are going to pursue a more
conciliatory relationship with your greatest rival and most serious
geopolitical threat. We’re also not happy with aspects of your political
culture and human rights record and expect to see changes if you want to
maintain our support. But hey, would you mind taking the dramatic and historic
step of normalizing relations with Israel?”
The Biden
team’s policy proposals that would undermine any prospect of normalization
don’t end there. The structural shift that pushed Israel and the Gulf States
together allowed for the diplomatic opening, but wasn’t enough on its own for
the UAE take the final step of formal recognition. In fact, as long ago as
2002, Saudi Arabia, and later the Arab League, expressed a willingness (in
theory) to recognize Israel with the announcement of the Arab Peace Initiative.
The problem was that the demands the initiative made of Israel were complete
nonstarters, such as an Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 lines and the
implementation of the Palestinian “right of return,” the standard Arab
euphemism for Israel’s demographic subversion. No Israeli government is going
to accept such terms, so whatever potential existed for normalization has been
dead upon arrival for almost two decades.
It was only
the recent change in US policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue that
altered the dynamic. Instead of making unreasonable and ill-founded demands on
Israel for territorial concessions, the Trump administration demonstrated its
willingness to go along with Israeli plans to assert sovereignty over parts of
the Jordan Valley. This put an entirely new card on the table. It was the
credible threat of annexation that opened the door for normalization. The Gulf
States were interested in normalization for their own interests but needed
another incentive to take the next step. Once annexation was on the table,
there was a concession that Israel could reasonably make, as putting off the
assertion of sovereignty for an undefined period is something even the Israeli
right can live with. The UAE could then show it had achieved something concrete
by taking the final step.
But Biden
and his advisors intend to reverse that as well. As he and his team have made
abundantly clear for months, Biden adamantly rejects any prospect of extending
Israeli sovereignty to additional territory.
It is a
basic principle in negotiations that a stalemate can be broken by adding more
dimensions to the mix that can then be traded. But by preemptively rejecting
even the notion that Israel could move forward with extending its sovereignty
over vital territories in the future, Biden would be doing the exact opposite:
he would remove dimensions for negotiation and deepen the state of deadlock.
In
November, Americans will decide whom to elect as their next president, and
Israel will work and cooperate with whomever the American people place in the
White House. One would hope that whoever is making decisions in Washington will
be open to learning the lessons of the Abraham Accords regarding what works in
today’s Middle East and what does not, and to adapt their actions accordingly.
If Biden wishes to further the historic process that began with Trump, he might
want to consider retaining a little more continuity with current US policies in
the region. This would be for the good of the US, Israel, and their Arab
partners.
---
Dr. Raphael BenLevi is a postdoctoral fellow at
the School of Political Sciences at the University of Haifa.
https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/biden-policy-saudi-arabia-israel/
----
No Vaccine For Cruelty: The Pandemic Has Eroded
Democracy And Respect For Human Rights
The Economist
Oct 17th
2020
People were
hungry during lockdown. So Francis Zaake, a Ugandan member of parliament,
bought some rice and sugar and had it delivered to his neediest constituents.
For this charitable act, he was arrested. Mr Zaake is a member of the
opposition, and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has ordered that only the
government may hand out food aid. Anyone else who does so can be charged with
murder, Mr Museveni has threatened, since they might do it in a disorderly way,
attract crowds and thereby spread the coronavirus.
Mr Zaake
had been careful not to put his constituents at risk. Rather than having crowds
converge on one place to pick up the food parcels, he had them delivered to
people’s doors by motorbike-taxi. Nonetheless, the next day police and soldiers
jumped over his fence while he was showering and broke into his house. They
dragged him into a van and threw him in a cell. He says they beat, kicked and
cut him, crushed his testicles, sprayed a blinding chemical into his eyes,
called him a dog and told him to quit politics. He claims that one sneered: “We
can do whatever we want to you or even kill you...No one will demonstrate for
you because they are under lockdown.” The police say he inflicted the injuries
on himself and is fishing for sympathy with foreign donors.
The charges
against him were eventually dropped, but the message was clear. “The president
doesn’t want the opposition to give out food,” says Mr Zaake, who walks with
crutches and wears sunglasses to protect his eyes. “He knows that people will
like us [if we do].”
The
pandemic has been terrible not only for the human body but also for the body
politic. Freedom House, a think-tank in Washington, counts 80 countries where
the quality of democracy and respect for human rights have deteriorated since
the pandemic began. The list includes both dictatorships that have grown
nastier and democracies where standards have slipped. Only one country, Malawi,
has improved (see map). Covid-19 “has fuelled a crisis for democracy around the
world,” argue Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz of Freedom House. Global freedom
has been declining since just before the financial crisis of 2007-08, by their
reckoning. Covid-19 has accelerated this pre-existing trend in several ways.
The disease
poses a grave and fast-moving threat to every nation. Governments have, quite
reasonably, assumed emergency powers to counter it. But such powers can be
abused. Governments have selectively banned protests on the grounds that they
might spread the virus, silenced critics and scapegoated minorities. They have
used emergency measures to harass dissidents. And they have taken advantage of
a general atmosphere of alarm. With everyone’s attention on covid-19, autocrats
and would-be autocrats in many countries can do all sorts of bad things, safe
in the knowledge that the rest of the world will barely notice, let alone to
object.
Measuring
the pandemic’s effect on democracy and human rights is hard. Without covid-19,
would China’s rulers still have inflicted such horrors on Muslim Uyghurs this
year? Would Thailand’s king have grabbed nearly absolute powers? Would Egypt
have executed 15 political prisoners in a single weekend this month? Perhaps.
But these outrages would surely have faced stronger opposition, both at home
and abroad. Granted, the current American administration makes less fuss about
human rights than previous ones have and covid-19 has not changed that. But the
voice from the White House is not the only one that counts.
Last year
was a year of mass protests, which swept six continents, brought down five
governments (Algeria, Bolivia, Iraq, Lebanon and Sudan) and forced others to
rethink unpopular policies, as in Chile, France and Hong Kong. This year, by
contrast, governments have banned mass gatherings to enforce social distancing.
For many, this is wonderfully convenient.
For
example, in India, the world’s largest democracy, the biggest campaign of civil
resistance for decades erupted shortly before the pandemic. For 100 days
protesters raged against proposed changes to citizenship laws that would
discriminate against Muslims and potentially render millions of them stateless.
These protests petered out after a curfew was imposed in response to covid-19,
since it was no longer possible to occupy the streets.
Later, when
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government began imposing
strict local lockdowns, it singled out neighbourhoods which had held protests,
many of which were Muslim. Heavy police barricades locked in residents for
weeks.
In early
September the government declared that in the upcoming parliamentary session
there would be no Question Hour for the opposition and no private members’
bills—long-standing institutions that allow opposition mps to query the
government directly. The excuse: the health risks of covid-19, along with
assertions that in a crisis, legislative time was too precious to waste on
noisy debate. The opposition walked out, allowing Mr Modi to ram through 25
bills in three days. He then suspended the session eight days early, having
apparently forgotten the earlier excuse that time was short.
At the
outset of the crisis Mr Modi, who has a knack for the theatrics of power,
called on citizens to bang on pots, and later to light sacred lamps, in a show
of solidarity to fight the pandemic. These displays, taken up by his supporters
with glee, were not spontaneous expressions of support for doctors and nurses,
like similar displays in Italy, Spain or Britain. Rather, they were a
demonstration of Mr Modi’s power.
H.L.
Mencken, an American journalist, once wrote that “the whole aim of practical
politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to
safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” He could
have added that when people have real cause for alarm, they are even keener to
be led to safety. Some put their trust in the sober calculations of
evidence-driven experts. Others put their faith in strongmen.
Mr Modi has
racked up colossal approval ratings this year, even as he presides over a
double catastrophe of mass death and economic slump. So has Rodrigo Duterte in
the Philippines, despite the largest reported caseload in South-East Asia. Mr
Duterte’s poll numbers may be coloured by fear; he has had thousands of people,
supposedly criminal suspects, killed without trial, a campaign that appears to
have intensified during the pandemic. But many Filipinos admire his grim
style—extending a “state of calamity” for another year last month, temporarily
banning many nurses from going to work overseas and vowing to try the first
covid-19 vaccine himself to show it is safe.
Popular,
you’re gonna be popular
Admiration
for Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s militaristic president, is as high as ever,
despite over 5m covid-19 cases and more than 150,000 deaths. This is partly
because he has handed out emergency aid to 67m hard-up Brazilians, but his
macho posturing also appeals to many voters. He caught covid-19 and recovered,
crediting his background as an athlete. He declared: “We have to face [the
virus] like a man, damn it, not like a little boy.” He blames state governors
for being so scared of the disease that they wreck people’s livelihoods
unnecessarily.
That
strikes a chord with some. When São Paulo’s lockdown was at its tightest, a
clothing shop was illegally letting customers in through a tiny metal shutter
door. “The governors shut things down to hurt the economy and make Bolsonaro
look bad,” grumbled the owner, who shared his president’s dismissive attitude
towards covid-19. “The death numbers are a lie,” he said: “I’m only wearing
this mask out of respect for our clients. I don’t need it.”
Strongmen
find it easier to impress the masses when they control the news. In April
Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog, counted 38 countries using the
coronavirus as an excuse to harass critical media. That number has now more
than doubled, to 91, says Freedom House.
Many
governments have criminalised “fake news” about the pandemic. Often, this means
commentary that displeases the ruling party. Nicaragua’s regime plans to ban
news that “causes alarm, fear or anxiety”. El Salvador has relaunched a state
television outlet, having purged 70 journalists since President Nayib Bukele
came to power last year. “I am watching a very balanced newscast,” grinned Mr
Bukele. “I don’t know what the opposition will see.”
Anyone in
Zimbabwe who publishes or disseminates “false” information about an official,
or that impedes the response to the pandemic, faces up to 20 years in prison.
Two journalists were arrested when they tried to visit in hospital three
opposition activists, including an mp, who had been abducted, tortured and
forced to drink urine by ruling-party thugs.
All around
the world, ordinary people are being gagged, too. Some 116 citizen journalists
are currently imprisoned, says Reporters Without Borders. In Uzbekistan people
entering quarantine facilities have had to hand over their phones, supposedly
to prevent the devices from spreading the virus but actually so they cannot
take photos of the woeful conditions inside.
Medics, who
see covid-19 fiascos close up, face extra pressure to shut up. China’s rulers
silenced the doctors in Wuhan who first sounded the alarm about the new virus.
Censorship can be lethal. Had China listened to doctors and acted faster to
curb the disease, it would not have spread so fast around the world.
Still,
other regimes have copied China’s example. In September the Turkish Medical
Association accused Turkey’s government of downplaying the outbreak. A
ruling-party ally called for the group to be shut down and its leaders
investigated for stoking “panic”. Yet the doctors were right. The health
ministry later admitted that its daily figures did not include asymptomatic
patients. An opposition lawmaker shared a document suggesting that the true
number of cases in a single day in September was 19 times the official tally.
Egypt’s
government says it is coping admirably with the pandemic. A dozen doctors have
been arrested for suggesting otherwise, as have several journalists. One,
Mohamed Monir, died of covid-19 contracted during detention.
Of the 24
countries that had national elections scheduled between January and August,
nine were disrupted by the pandemic. Some delays were justified. But as South
Korea showed, a ballot can be held safely if suitable precautions are taken.
Some other governments were in no hurry. Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya
Rajapaksa dissolved the opposition-controlled parliament in March and did not
allow fresh elections until August. In the meantime, he ran the country without
lawmakers to check him.
In Hong
Kong pro-democracy candidates were expected to do well in elections in
September. Citing the risk of covid-19, the territory’s pro-communist leaders
delayed them for a year.
Burundi’s
election in May was probably never going to be clean, but the virus supplied
the perfect excuse to exclude pesky foreign observers. Twelve days before the
election they were told that they would have to quarantine on arrival in the
country for 14 days, thus missing the vote.
In Russia
Vladimir Putin has turned the virus to his advantage. He shifted responsibility
for a strict lockdown to regional governors, but then took credit for easing
it. In the summer he held a constitutional pseudo-referendum to allow himself
to stay in office until 2036. Citing public health, he extended the vote to a
week and allowed people to vote at home, in courtyards, in playgrounds and on
tree stumps. The vote was impossible to observe or verify. Mr Putin declared a
resounding victory. Parliament voted to change the voting procedure
permanently.
In
countries with too few checks and balances, rules to curb the virus can be used
for other ends. On a dark road in Senegal, a policeman recently stopped a taxi
and detained the driver for wearing his anti-covid mask on his chin. After 45
minutes, shaking with fury, the driver returned to his vehicle. The cop had
threatened him with dire punishments unless he handed over some cash, he
explained to his passenger, a reporter for The Economist. He drove off as fast
as he could, cursing.
While petty
officials abuse the rules to pad their wages, strongmen typically abuse them to
crush dissent. Police assaulted civilians in 59 countries and detained them in
66 for reasons linked to the pandemic. Violence was most common in countries
Freedom House classifies as “partly free”, where people are not yet too scared
to protest, but their rulers would like them to be.
In
Zimbabwe, for example, many of the 34 new regulations passed during a national
lockdown are still in place, and have been used as a pretext for myriad abuses.
In September the Zimbabwe Human Rights ngo Forum, an umbrella group, released a
report listing 920 cases of torture, extrajudicial killings, unlawful arrests
and assaults on citizens by the security services in the first 180 days of
lockdown. One man was forced to roll around in raw sewage. Many had dogs set on
them. Dozens of opposition activists have been arrested or beaten, including a
former finance minister. There were too many everyday cases of intimidation and
harassment to count.
Many
strongmen are also chipping away at pre-pandemic checks on their power.
Nicaragua has borrowed an idea from Mr Putin: a law will require ngos that
receive foreign funding to register as “foreign agents”. India used similar
rules to shut down the local arm of Amnesty International, which closed in
September after its bank accounts were frozen.
In
Kazakhstan trials are taking place on Zoom, leading some defendants in
politically charged cases to complain that this makes it easy for judges to
have selective hearing. Alnur Ilyashev, a pro-democracy campaigner who was
sentenced to three years of restricted movement for “disseminating false information”,
said he could not always hear his own trial.
Nothing
spreads like fear
Panic about
a contagious disease makes people irrational and xenophobic. A study in 2015 by
Huggy Rao of Stanford University and Sunasir Dutta of the University of Minnesota
found that people were less likely to favour legalising irregular immigrants if
told about a new strain of flu. Many autocrats, even if they have not read the
academic literature, grasp that blaming out-groups is a good way to win
support.
Mr Modi’s
government tars Muslims as superspreaders. Bulgaria imposed harsher lockdowns
on Romany neighbourhoods than on others. Turkey’s religious authorities blame
gay people. Malaysian officials blame migrant workers, some of whom have been
caned and deported.
Minorities
have had an especially grim time in Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de
facto president, threatened severe penalties for residents who re-enter the
country illegally. People understood this to refer to the Rohingyas, a
persecuted Muslim group, roughly 1m of whom have fled into neighbouring
countries. The rumour that Rohingyas were infecting the nation spread rapidly.
A cartoon circulating online showed a Rohingya man, labelled as an “illegal
interloper”, crossing the border, carrying covid-19.
Meanwhile,
a un rapporteur warns that the pandemic has “emboldened” Myanmar’s army, which
has stepped up its war on secessionists. The Arakan Army, a rebel group,
offered ceasefires in April, June and September; all were rebuffed. In May and
June the army bombed civilians, razed villages and tortured non-combatants,
says Amnesty International. Some 200,000 have fled to camps for displaced
people, according to a local ngo, the Rakhine Ethnics Congress. Since covid-19
struck, donations have declined and supplies of food to the camps have
dwindled.
Abusers and
autocrats have not had it all their own way this year. The pandemic has drained
their treasuries. Their finances will still be wobbly even when a vaccine is
found and the public-health excuse for curbs on freedom is no longer plausible.
And people
are pushing back. Although 158 countries have imposed restrictions on
demonstrations, big protests have erupted in at least 90 since the pandemic
began. Furious crowds in Kyrgyzstan this month forced the government to order a
re-run of a tainted election. Protests in Nigeria prompted the government to
disband a notoriously torture-and-murder-prone police unit on October 11th.
Mass rallies in Belarus have so far failed to reverse a rigged election there,
but have made it clear that the dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has lost the
consent of his people.
Institutions
are pushing back, too. A court in Lesotho barred the prime minister from using
the virus as an excuse to close parliament. Russia’s opposition parties refuse
to be cowed even by the poisoning of their main leader, Alexei Navalny.
With luck,
when covid-19 eventually recedes, the global atmosphere of fear will recede
with it. People may find the capacity to care a bit more about abuses that
occur far away, or to people unlike themselves. They may even elect leaders who
speak up for universal values. But for the time being, the outlook is grim.■
https://www.economist.com/international/2020/10/17/the-pandemic-has-eroded-democracy-and-respect-for-human-rights?
-----
Macron Has Enjoyed Wielding His Authority
during Covid – And The French Don't Like It
By Cole Stangler
16 Oct 2020
It’s not
quite a lockdown, but the new measures announced by President Emmanuel Macron
on Wednesday come pretty close. Starting this Saturday, Paris and eight other
metropolitan areas, home to some 20 million people, will see curfews imposed on
all non-essential activity between 9pm and 6am for at least four weeks.
With France
now well into its second wave of Covid-19 – the last week has seen 120,000 new
cases alongside a steady uptick in hospitalisations – fresh restrictions had
come to be seen as inevitable. Still, as the shower of criticism from across
the political spectrum has made clear, that hasn’t made the new measures any
less grating.
Much of the
groaning stems from a broader sense of frustration shared by the public: while
French authorities may have fared better than their counterparts in the US or
UK – less dithering in the early stages and less amateurism overall – there is
nevertheless a sense that the government hasn’t fully met the challenge. One
need only look to neighbouring Germany, which counts both far fewer deaths and
a fraction of the caseload today.
To be fair,
French authorities have tackled some of the most glaring deficiencies from the
spring in addition to extending some vital economic aid. There is no longer a
shortage of masks, and in the cities where wearing one is required, people
largely follow the rules. While still insufficient, testing is also on the
rise. Meanwhile, the pillar of the government’s support system for workers – a
broad expansion of partial unemployment benefits – has been extended until at
least the end of the year. (In France, employees put on this scheme are paid
84% of their net salary, more generous than the latest job support scheme in
the UK.)
But French
people also tend to hold the state to a high standard. If they’re making
personal sacrifices, they rightfully expect something in return. And polls show
they’ve been disappointed with what they’ve been offered.
The French
were already among the most critical in Europe of their government’s response.
According to one opinion study in May, strong majorities of Germans and Britons
(and even 50% of Italians) believed their government was handling the crisis
well, while two-thirds of French people felt just the opposite. That lack of
confidence persists. A poll last month found that 62% in France still didn’t
have faith in Macron and his government to successfully fight the pandemic.
Much of the
mistrust took root in the early days of the crisis. Just as their counterparts
did elsewhere in Europe, government officials repeatedly told the public that
wearing masks was unnecessary. We now know there was a shortage of masks at the
time and that the government was desperately scrambling to replenish its stock
behind closed doors.
And yet, to
this day, high-ranking officials haven’t offered credible explanations for why
those initial recommendations turned out to be so patently and fatally false.
In one blistering column lambasting the state for keeping citizens in the dark,
journalist Edwy Plenel quotes from the pages of historian Marc Bloch’s Strange
Defeat, the classic 1940 analysis of France’s defeat at the hands of Nazi
Germany: “Our people deserve to be trusted, to be taken into the confidence of
their leaders”.
More recent
criticism has focused on the state’s management of la rentrée, the collective
return to school and work after summer vacation. According to the government’s
latest weekly data, universities and schools now make up a staggering 35% of
Covid clusters under investigation, more than any other source. The second
largest source are workplaces, generating about a fifth of current outbreaks.
Bafflingly,
the government continues to urge people to go to work. While the state
officially encourages “telecommuting”, it has left the final say on the matter
to individual employers who, in large numbers, have apparently decided it’s not
worth the hassle. That insistence on a physical on-the-job presence is proving
especially inflammatory under the new restrictions: according to the
government’s logic, meeting friends on a cafe terrace at night is too risky,
and yet packing into an enclosed warehouse or office is safe, so long as one
follows the right precautions. As an MP from the left wing La France Insoumise
party wryly put it: “Macron is locking down the hours of freedom that French
people have. Does the virus disappear in the morning?” Another conservative MP
and second-in-command of the right wing Les Républicains party also slammed the
“absurdity” of policies that call for “curfew at night, but metro in the day”.
In the
meantime, contact tracing systems have proven largely inadequate, with the
president himself acknowledging the failure of the government’s “StopCovid”
application and vowing to unveil a new-and-improved version next week. (The
current iteration has been downloaded just 2.6m times, far less than its
counterparts in the UK or Germany, which, last month, counted 12m and 18m
downloads respectively.) Earlier this week, the French prime minister, Jean
Castex, revealed he didn’t even have the app on his phone himself, all the
while repeatedly and incorrectly referring to it as “TéléCovid”. One bemused
commenter online quipped that Castex must have been looking for it on his
Minitel, the infamous French-designed precursor to the internet that never
quite took hold abroad.
Amplifying
each of these missteps, trip-ups and inadequacies is the government’s highly
verticalised process for approving and communicating policies. Of course,
top-down decision-making is a feature of the French state and, in particular,
the turbocharged Fifth Republic presidency designed by Charles de Gaulle. But
Macron has done little to break with those traditions – to the contrary, he has
basked in the aura of his authority, unveiling each of the key changes in Covid
policy in a string of highly choreographed, nationally televised primetime
speeches.
The French
can be unforgiving of their politicians, and unsurprisingly, Macron has been
personally taking the heat for his management of the crisis. This is one of the
risks of his approach to the job: shining a spotlight on executive action can
magnify success, but it can also make for an easy target when things go wrong.
----
Cole Stangler is a Paris-based journalist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/16/emmanuel-macron-covid-french-france-restrictions-president
----
In America’s Bizarre Electoral System, Some
Votes Are More Equal Than Others
By
Farhad Manjoo
Oct. 14,
2020
I spent
about an hour over the weekend filling out my ballot for the 2020 general
election. As an immigrant from a country where elections were not free until
1994, I understand the privilege of the franchise. Every two years, when it’s
time to vote in national elections, I rip open my voting packet with a sense of
sacred, nerdy seriousness. I’ll even study the positions of the candidates for
school board. But that feeling never lasts; by the time I finish filling in all
the bubbles, I am bitter and angry, weighed down by the pointlessness of the
whole exercise.
Like more
than 100 million other Americans, I live in one of the dozens of states that do
not really matter in determining the makeup of our national government. Because
I’m in California, the country’s most populous state and its biggest economy,
my vote in The Most Important Presidential Election of Our Lifetime is hardly
worth the paper it’s printed on.
The roots
of my despair are well known. There is the Senate, which gives all states equal
representation regardless of population, so voters in Wyoming, the least
populous state, effectively enjoy almost 70 times more voting power than us
chopped-liver Californians. And there is the winner-takes-all Electoral
College, in which a tiny margin of victory pays off, with the whole pot of
electoral votes going to the winner. This means that millions of presidential
votes, from both Republicans and Democrats, are effectively wasted — all the
votes cast for the loser in each state and all the excess ones cast for the
winner.
In 2016,
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in California by more than four million
votes. But in our bizarre system, Clinton’s four million Californians were
ignored, superseded by the 80,000 voters who gave Trump the narrow margin he
needed to win in three other states, and he became president.
I am not
here to argue over the merits of these rules. (For that, read my colleague
Jesse Wegman’s recent book, which makes the definitive case against the
Electoral College.) Fights over the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian provisions
tend toward tedium; one side painstakingly explains how the rules are unfair,
the other side insists that the unfairness is actually very wise and by design,
and then they go back and forth until oblivion.
But I would
like to speak up for all of us scorned voters, especially my 40 million fellow
Californians, who are watching the 2020 election sail by like a derelict oil
tanker passing under the Golden Gate. All we can do is hope it doesn’t blow up
in our faces; otherwise, we have little say over the matter.
I have
voted in every federal election since 2000, and not once do I remember a
presidential candidate ever making an effort to get my vote. This year, I feel
worse than ever. Though I am as stressed out as anyone about the outcome, the
election often seems to be happening in some other country, where the voters
live different lives from me, the candidates don’t care about the issues that
matter to me and the only time a candidate reaches out is for my credit card
number.
We have had
a tough time lately in the Golden State. You might have heard. Beyond the
pandemic — nearly a million Californians have been infected by the coronavirus,
and more than 16,000 have died — millions of Californians have had to endure
months of raging wildfires and extremely unhealthy air quality.
Climate
change-related disasters have compounded our other entrenched problems of
livability: housing costs that eat up paychecks, an epidemic of homelessness
that seems to defy all attempts to fix it, one of the highest poverty rates in
the country, and the growing sense that only the very wealthy can afford to
live in many of our largest cities.
These issues
are not California’s alone: There are similar problems in other states’ big
cities, among them Seattle, Portland, New York and Chicago. You might even say
that these urban issues constitute a kind of national problem. But neither Joe
Biden nor Trump dwell much on them, because they aren’t the problems of
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Florida.
Every two
years, I think about how thoroughly I am being ignored, and each time I’m more
infuriated than the last. Twice in my lifetime, the loser of the national
popular vote has won the presidency. The same injustice might happen again this
year. But even if it doesn’t, don’t conclude that all is well and good with the
way we pick the president.
Consider
last week’s debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. By my count, the
candidates mentioned fracking — an issue of environmental and economic
importance in southwestern Pennsylvania, one of the most prized battlegrounds —
10 times. First, Pence accused Biden of wanting to ban fracking, then Harris
said Biden would never ban fracking, then Pence said he would, then Harris said
he wouldn’t, the whole argument very much like the one my kids have over who
gets to take a shower second.
By
comparison, the wildfires that set ablaze the western United States last month
received only glancing mention — and it was Susan Page, the moderator, rather
than Harris, California’s junior senator, who brought them up. Page mightn’t
have bothered. When Pence was asked about the fires and other climate
disasters, he ended his answer by insisting that Biden would ban fracking.
It wasn’t
just fracking over fires. In both the vice-presidential and the presidential
debates, nobody mentioned housing or homelessness, a top policy issue for
people in my state. There was barely a mention of building new roads, bridges
or expanding public transportation — Harris raised the issue mainly to take a
shot at how Trump has turned his plan for “infrastructure week” into a joke.
Then, of
course, there is the Supreme Court nomination that Republicans are ramming
through the Senate. Because Republicans derive much of their political strength
from many small states, the Senate amplifies their power; as CNN’s Ronald
Brownstein pointed out last month, the 47 Democratic senators represent nearly
169 million people, more than they represent the 158 million people represented
by the Senate’s 53 Republicans.
If Amy
Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is confirmed
along partisan lines, the Supreme Court will cross “an undemocratic milestone,”
as Adam Cole pointed out in Vox. For the first time, “a controlling majority of
the court will have been put there by senators whom most voters didn’t choose.”
It boils my
blood, all of it. Is it any wonder that the United States has one of the lowest
rates of voter turnout among developed nations? The system is corrosive. We are
told by everyone, everywhere, that voting is the path toward a better country,
but in every election, we are shown that some votes matter much more than
others, and that we should all just live with it, because smart people a long
time ago decided it should be so.
I still
vote. I do it out of a sense of civic duty and as a role model to my children,
and to make sure I can get the NIMBYs off the City Council. But when it comes
to the national government, I long ago gave up any hope of ever mattering.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opinion/california-voting.html?
------
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism