Pakistan, China and Afghanistan signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) vis-a-vis anti-terrorism cooperation during a second trilateral ministerial dialogue in Kabul on Saturday.

The MoU was signed by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Chinese as well as Afghan counterparts Wang Yi and Salahuddin Rabbani, respectively. The signing of the document was witnessed by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Speaking at the trilateral dialogue, Rabbani said that collective efforts were required to address the common challenge of terrorism. “We desire to strengthen our relations with Pakistan,” he said and also appreciated the Chinese One Belt One Road initiative.

Qureshi, during a joint press conference, called for a joint strategy to eradicate terrorism from the region. He said he was visiting Kabul to bridge the trust deficit between the two countries, the Express Tribune reported.

“We all want peace and stability in Afghanistan,” the minister said, adding that Pakistan will continue to play facilitative role in Afghan reconciliation process. 

“We will do everything to support the growing momentum towards reconciliation provided others play their due role and share responsibility and create an enabling environment towards that end.”

Calling Afghanistan and Pakistan as “friends of China”, Wang said that Beijing will extend “every possible cooperation to build trust and confidence between the two countries”.

China will also assist in establishing connectivity projects including a rail line between Peshawar, Kabul and Kandahar, he said, adding that Beijing “desires to make Afghanistan a part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor”.

“We support an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace process,” Wang said.

This was the second meeting of the three foreign ministers after their kick-off meeting in Beijing last year. 

IANS

A petition for the statue’s removal cited Gandhi’s writings calling Indians ‘infinitely superior’ to black Africans.

A statue of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi has been removed from Ghana’s most prestigious university following complaints that he was racist against the black Africans.

The statue, installed at the University of Ghana in capital Accra, was removed in the middle of the night earlier this week after protests from students and faculty.

India’s former president Pranab Mukherjee had unveiled the statue two years ago as a symbol of ties between the two nations.READ MORE

Ghana: Call to remove Gandhi statue over ‘racist views’

But professors at the university soon began a petition calling for its removal. They cited passages written by Gandhi depicting Indians as “infinitely superior” to black Africans and using the racist pejorative “kaffirs” to describe them.

One of Gandhi’s writings cited in the petition read: “Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.”

The online protest was one of a number on university campuses in Africa and beyond about the enduring symbols of the continent’s colonial past.

‘Victory for black dignity’

The Gandhi statue on the university’s Legon campus in Accra appeared to have been removed overnight on Tuesday, students and lecturers told AFP news agency.

The head of language, literature and drama at the Institute of African Studies, Obadele Kambon, said the removal was an issue of “self-respect”.

“If we show that we have no respect for ourselves and look down on our own heroes and praise others who had no respect for us, then there is an issue,” he said.READ MORE

Gandhi: 125 years since whites-only train incident

“If we indeed don’t show any self-respect for our heroes, how can the world respect us? This is a victory for black dignity and self-respect. The campaign has paid off.”

Adelaide Twum, a student, said the move was “long overdue”.

“I’m so excited. This has nothing to do with diplomatic ties,” she added.

Another student, Benjamin Mensah, said, “It’s a massive win for all Ghanaians because it was constantly reminding us of how inferior we are.”

The university authorities refused to comment. An official at Ghana’s foreign affairs ministry said it was “an internal decision by the university”.

Ghana’s former government had said the statue would be relocated “to avoid the controversy … becoming a distraction from our strong ties of friendship” with India.

Campaigners in Malawi are currently trying to stop a statue of Gandhi going up in the capital, Blantyre, arguing that he used racial slurs against black people.

Though Gandhi is more commonly remembered for his non-violent resistance to British colonial rule in his native India, his legacy in Africa is mixed.

Born in 1869, Gandhi lived and worked as a lawyer in South Africa from 1893 to 1915 before he left for India to continue his anti-colonialism struggle.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will be on a four-day India visit from December 21 to attend the first people-to-people exchange agreed between Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi at their icebreaking meet in Wuhan earlier this year.

After witnessing chill in their ties over the military stand-off in Doklam last year, the two countries came closer later and pledged that bilateral ties would not be affected by a border dispute between them.

“At the invitation of India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, Chinese State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit India from December 21 to December 24 and co-chair the first China-India people to people mechanism,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said.

The forum is the outcome of Modi-Xi meet at Chinese city Wuhan in April this year. The two countries stepped up their engagements after the Wuhan summit.

Wang is also likely to meet other leaders of the country given the current world situation, especially China’s trade war with the US. This will be the last high profile visit by the Chinese leader this year.

India and China have the world’s 9th longest border which is largely disputed. The two went to war in 1962 and have had military skirmishes since then.

Their latest and one of the most serious showdowns was last year at Doklam, a contested region between China and Bhutan close to India’s arterial highway where the Chinese were building a road.

Both sides are in talks to set up a military hotline to avert a Doklam-like crisis in the future.

IANS

A top court in Pakistan on Thursday gave a one-month deadline to the federal government to complete formalities to deport Indian prisoner Hamid Nihal Ansari, whose three-year jail term will end on December 15.

Hamid Nihal Ansari, a 33-year-old Mumbai resident, is currently in Peshawar Central Jail after being sentenced by a military court to three years’ imprisonment for allegedly possessing a fake Pakistani identity card on December 15, 2015.

He was arrested reportedly from Pakistan in 2012 and accused of illegally entering the country from Afghanistan, to meet a girl he had befriended online.

A two-judge Peshawar High Court bench, comprising Justice Roohul Amin and Justice Qalandar Ali Khan, on Thursday heard an appeal filed by Hamid Ansari through a senior lawyer. The petition said that the federal government hasn’t taken any steps for his release.

Hamid Ansari’s lawyer, Qazi Muhammad Anwar, said that his client’s prison term will end on December 15 and he should be released on the morning of December 16.

Mr Anwar informed the bench that the sentence of the 33-year-old would complete after two days and both the Ministry of Interior (Pakistan) and authorities of the prison, where he was lodged, were completely silent about his release and deportation to India.

After hearing this, Justice Khan asked the Additional Attorney General to explain how would they keep the prisoner in jail after completion of his term.

“I wonder that after two days the jail term of the prisoner would be completed and the government did not complete requirements for releasing and deportation of the prisoner,” the judge observed after additional attorney general informed the court that documents for release and deportation of the prisoner were not ready.

An officer, representing Pakistan’s interior ministry, informed the court that a prisoner could be kept for one month while the legal documents were being prepared.

After knowing the legal position, the court directed the ministry to make all the arrangements within a month for releasing and deportation of Hamid Ansari.

Pakistan’s deputy attorney general recorded his statement on behalf of the interior ministry and said that Hamid Ansari would be handed over to Indian authorities at Wagah border after completion of his term.

Hamid Nihal Ansari had gone missing after he was arrested by Pakistani intelligence agencies in 2012.

PTI

As Russia observes 25th anniversary of its constitution, many activists say there is not much to celebrate.by Rory Challandsan hour ago

Russia is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its post-Soviet era constitution.

However, critics say there is not much to celebrate as the constitution has been used to allow President Vladimir Putin to tighten his grip on power.

Ban on formal schooling, poor resources leave children of mostly Muslim minority without basic education, report warns.by Kate Mayberry7 hours ago

The Rohingya are facing a “lost generation” as children both in Myanmar and in the refugee camps of Bangladesh struggle to get an education, a new report has warned.

The Rohingya youth who remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state have faced serious restrictions on access to schooling since the outbreak of violence there in 2012, with children often kept in separate facilities and unable to attend mainstream schools, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) said on Thursday.

Older students are unable to attend university.

In Bangladesh, where more than 700,000 Rohingya now live in sprawling refugee camps after fleeing a brutal Myanmar army crackdown last year, authorities have banned formal education, and even the construction of any structure that might seem like a permanent school building.

As a result, most young people only have the option of attending informal learning centres run by civil society groups.

“Now more than ever, we need educated Rohingya who can act as leaders for the community, but as long as education remains severely restricted this will be impossible,” Tun Khin, president of BROUK, said in a statement.

“We are facing the prospect of a lost generation.”

‘Learning centres’

The mostly Muslim Rohingya are one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, attacked and driven out of Rakhine in what United Nations investigators have said remains an”ongoing genocide”.

An international law firm hired by the US State Department said earlier this month it had found evidence of genocide in the August 2017 military crackdown that drove the Rohingya into Bangladesh, and urged a criminal investigation into the atrocities.

“Right now, Rohingya are not getting any kind of formalised education in the camps,” John Quinley, a human rights specialist with Fortify Rights in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where the refugee camps are located, told Al Jazeera. “This is a big concern for future generations of Rohingya. We are talking about lots of children who are unable to access education.”

Education in the 27 camps around Cox’s Bazar is provided by international and local NGOs as well as community-based organisations, and quality depends on who is running the centre.

The report, titled The Right to Education Denied for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh, noted that what classrooms existed were often overcrowded and poorly resourced. Many of the learning centres were located in refugees’ own shelters, it said.

Years of discrimination in Rakhine itself, “an apartheid state” according to Fortify Rights’ Quinley, had made the recruitment of teachers a serious challenge.

BROUK said of the teachers who arrived initially in August last year, only 21 percent had education beyond the secondary level while the segregation in Rakhine meant that Rohingya teachers were not allowed to travel and were therefore unable to access government-run teacher training programmes.

‘Inescapable’ challenges

UNICEF, which has been heavily involved in the provision of education in the camps, admitted in an August report that there were “inescapable” challenges in addressing the issue.

“Without an agreed and approved curriculum, children were taught with a variety of materials,” the UN agency for children said. “So enthusiastic were the children to learn that classrooms were often over-crowded.”

BROUK said that while aid groups had made “heroic efforts” to respond to the crisis there had been little long-term planning in relation to education, while prioritising primary over secondary education had created a shortage of opportunities for teenagers.

By July 2018, approximately 1,200 learning centres were operating while almost 140,000 Rohingya children had been enrolled in non-formal education of some kind, according to UNICEF.

BROUK noted that more than 150,000 children remained excluded from any kind of education, particularly those between the ages of 15 and 18.

UNICEF said it was developing a Learning Competency Framework and Approach (LCFA) to address some of the problems faced by school-age Rohingya.

The LCFA aims to double the amount of contact time for each child from the current two hours of teaching a day, expand classes for older children and teach in the languages used by the Rohingya including English, Burmese and local dialects.

Community involvement

According to BROUK, any solution required the involvement of the community who had been “largely absent” from any decision-making on education.

“It is essential to both the access and acceptability of education that communities have the freedom to establish their own schools – with the curriculum and language of their choosing,” the group’s report said. “While politically unpopular – such permissions should acknowledge the reality and potentially protracted nature of the situation.”

BROUK urged authorities in Bangladesh to remove all barriers on Rohingya refugees access to education and reiterated its call for the Myanmar government to address the hurdles facing the minority in their homeland.

“The only long-term and viable solution to the crisis lies inside Myanmar,” the report said. “The Myanmar authorities must immediately remove all restrictions on the human rights of Rohingya (including on access to education and freedom of movement), and grant Rohingya citizenship under national law.”

A November plan to start the repatriation of Rohingya to Myanmar fell apart after the refugees refused to leave.

The repatriation, agreed at the government level without the input of the Rohingya themselves, has been postponed indefinitely.

Aljazeera

Jack Dorsey encouraged his 4 million followers to visit Myanmar even though military is accused of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Dorsey visited Myanmar for a 10-day meditation retreat and tourism

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been criticised for encouraging his 4.12 million followers to visit Myanmar, without mentioning the widespread allegations of ethnic cleansing of the country’s majority-Muslim Rohingya ethnic group.

In a lengthy thread on Twitter, Dorsey, 42, described in detail his experience on a silent meditation retreat in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town in northern Myanmar, before encouraging his followers to visit the South Asian country.

“Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing,” he said in the post on Saturday evening.

There was no mention of the plight of the Rohingya in the more than 700-word thread.

More than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017, according to the United Nations, following a sweeping army crackdown in response to Rohingya attacks on security forces.

Rohingya refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh say Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist civilians killed families, burned many villages and carried out gang rape. UN-mandated investigators have accused Myanmar’s army of “genocidal intent”.

Myanmar has denied the allegations, saying its forces engaged in a counterinsurgency operation against “terrorists”.

Dorsey’s comments provoked a backlash with Twitter users accusing the Silicon Valley boss of being tone-deaf to the plight of the Rohingya and spawning the hashtag #JackIgnoresGenocide.

“I’m no expert on meditation, but is it supposed to make you so self-obsessed that you forget to mention you’re in a country where the military has committed mass killings and mass rape, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in one of today’s biggest humanitarian disasters?” Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director of Human Rights Watch, responded on Twitter.

International lawyer Suchitra Vijayan also weighed in comparing the “silence” Dorsey sought from his meditation to his tight-lipped approach to the plight of the Rohingya.

Matthew Smith, CEO of Southeast Asia-based human rights NGO Fortify Rights, told Al Jazeera that Dorsey had “at best” miscalculated the reaction his post would provoke.

“It’s important that powerful people know and understand the landscape of abuse in Myanmar and speak openly and publicly about it. Genocide is everyone’s problem, and while we don’t expect everyone to speak about it publicly at every turn, atrocity crimes are the elephant in the room with regard to social media here,” Smith said.

“Mr Dorsey’s failure to mention the Rohingya or the Kachin, the Shan, and other [ethnic groups in Myanmar] was a political miscalculation at best. The pope made the same mistake. It’s not a good look”.

Social media in Myanmar

It was the second time Dorsey kicked up a social media storm within a month. In November, a picture of him with a placard saying “smash Brahminical patriarchy”, referring to the “highest” Hindu caste, went viral.

Twitter later apologised for the photo, which was taken during a trip to India and posted by a journalist Dorsey met during his visit.

Twitter CEO trolled for ‘smash Brahminical patriarchy’ placard

Dorsey has not responded publicly to the criticism over his visit to Myanmar, but an individual with knowledge of the trip stressed to Al Jazeera it was a holiday and Dorsey did not hold business meetings while in the country.

Social media companies have drawn criticism for allegedly allowing hate speech to spread at the peak of the military crackdown in Myanmar.

In August 2017, hundreds of new Twitter accounts sprang up in Myanmar, many of which appeared to be attempts to counter sympathetic portrayals of the Rohingya by the Western news media and human rights activists.

They portrayed the ethnic minority as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, or “Bengalis”. Rohingya regard themselves as native to Rakhine but the government has denied most of them citizenship.

In November, Facebook admitted it had not done enough to prevent the social network from being used to incite violence, following a report it commissioned on its presence in Myanmar.

Aljazeera

Beijing Apple has appealed against a Chinese court ruling that banned the sale and import of most iPhone models after granting Qualcomm an injunction against Apple, a stunning decision that comes amid the trade war between the US and China, CNBC reported.

Apple accused Qualcomm of playing dirty tricks, including asserting a patent that had already been invalidated by international courts, and other patents that it had never before used.

“Qualcomm’s effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world,” Apple said in a statement on Monday.

The ban does not cover the new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Plus or iPhone XR, which were not yet available when Qualcomm, an American microchip maker, filed its lawsuit, CNN reported.

The ruling was announced publicly on Monday but put into effect last week, but Apple said in a statement that all iPhone models remain available in China.

The phones covered by the ban make up about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of current iPhone sales in China, according to Daniel Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities.

The court granted a pair of preliminary injunctions requested by Qualcomm.

Qualcomm claims that Apple violates two of its patents in the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X.

The patents allow people to edit and resize photos on a phone and to manage apps by using a touchscreen, according to Qualcomm.

The practical effect of the injunction is not yet clear.

“If Apple is violating the orders, Qualcomm will seek enforcement of the orders through enforcement tribunals that are part of the Chinese court system,” CNN quoted Don Rosenberg, general counsel for Qualcomm, as saying on Monday.

Qualcomm applauded the ruling, saying Apple owes it money for using its technology.

Apple and Qualcomm are suing one another in courts across the world. Billions of dollars are at stake, and each side has claimed some victories.

(IANS)

Pakistan would continue to lend full diplomatic, political and moral support to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Monday.

Khan’s remarks came in a message on the Human Rights Day which is observed every year on December 10.

This year, the Human Rights Day marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

He said this year is also significant for Pakistan as it has joined the UN Human Rights Council.

“Pakistan’s membership of the Council, for the fourth time, is a testimony to the confidence of the international community in Pakistan, as a consensus builder within the international human rights policy framework,” he said.

PTI

 Morocco’s navy coast guards have rescued 72 illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean, the Moroccan Army said.

The rescued included 53 sub-Saharan Africans and 19 Asians, Xinhua quoted the Moroccan Army as saying on Saturday.

The migrants, among them women and children, were brought safely to the port of Nador, the army said.

Morocco has witnessed a significant hike in illegal immigration attempts in 2018.

According to the Moroccan Interior Ministry, the authorities have foiled over 76,000 illegal immigration attempts between January and November 2018.

IANS