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Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations
5 months of protests, fighting for real freedom has Hong Kong facing recession. Asian Airlines has cut flights due in part to cancellations by passengers for several airline carriers of up to 13%.
(UPI) — A government report last week projected a recession for the Hong Kong economy in 2019, which would be its first in a decade.
The forecast said the Hong Kong economy will have contracted by 1.3 percent by the end of the year, in no small part due to ongoing political protests that began to reject a proposed extradition law but have grown to include numerous issues.
Meanwhile, at the Polytechnic University where students and protestors were trapped, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to keep the protestors from fleeing.
Police say 4,491 people, aged from 11 to 83, have been arrested since protests began in June.
Demonstrators are angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in Hong Kong’s promised freedoms when the then British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. They say they are responding to excessive use of force by police.
China says it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula granting Hong Kong autonomy. The city’s police deny accusations of brutality and say they show restraint. More here.
The European Union and the United States have condemned the escalating violence in Hong Kong amid fears of a bloody crackdown as authorities laid siege to a university campus occupied by pro-democracy demonstrators.
Hundreds of anti-government protesters armed with petrol bombs and other homemade weapons had retreated to the Polytechnic University after a weekend of mayhem, which saw roads blocked, a bridge set alight and a police officer shot with a bow and arrow.
Protesters who tried to make a run for freedom were met with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets.
‘Unacceptable’
A spokeswoman for foreign affairs at the European Commission expressed “deep concern” on Monday over reports that Hong Kong first responders and medical staff were being detained by law enforcement forces, preventing them from providing assistance to injured people.
“Any violence is of course unacceptable and any action by the law enforcement authorities must remain strictly proportionate and fundamental freedoms, including in particular the right of peaceful assembly and expression, must be upheld,” Maja Kocijancic told reporters.
Britain also described itself as “seriously concerned” over the violence on Monday with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying London continues to urge “restraint on all sides and support the right to peaceful protest.”
The Foreign Office added that “it is vital that those who are injured are able to receive appropriate medical treatment, and that safe passage is made available for all those who wish to leave the area.”
The United States had earlier condemned the “unjustified use of force” in Hong Kong and called on Beijing to protect Hong Kong’s freedom, a senior official in President Donald Trump’s administration said.
‘We need help’
According to Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority, 38 people were wounded during the night of Sunday to Monday.
Dan, a 19-year-old protester on the Polytechnic University campus, said protesters may need international help.”
“We’ve been trapped here for too long. We need all Hong Kongers to know we need help,” he added, bursting into tears. “I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this.”
Police, who have faced an array of weapons including petrol bombs, bow and arrows and catapults, urged protesters to leave.
“Police appeal to everyone inside the Polytechnic University to drop their weapons and dangerous items, remove their gas masks and leave via the top level of Cheong Wan Road South Bridge in an orderly manner,” they said in a statement.
One country, two systems
Recent days have seen a dramatic escalation of the unrest that has plunged the Asian financial hub into chaos for almost six months.
Demonstrators angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in Hong Kong’s promised freedoms when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. They say they are responding to excessive use of force by police.
China says it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula granting Hong Kong autonomy, with the city’s police accusations they use undue violence.
Chinese soldiers in a base close to the university were seen on Sunday monitoring developments at the university with binoculars, some dressed in riot gear.
Separately, Hong Kong’s High Court ruled on Monday that a British colonial-era emergency law revived by the government to ban protesters wearing face masks was unconstitutional.
It said the law was “incompatible with the Basic Law”, the mini-constitution under which Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
2011: Hillary Clinton declared that Bashir al Assad was a reformer.
Primer:
Rami Makhlouf: Wealthy, powerful cousin of Syria’s president
Makhlouf, 45, is Syria’s richest man and a member of what was described during U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearings as a powerful “mafia” that also includes Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, Makhklouf’s cousin. Before his country plunged into civil war, Makhlouf was allegedly worth $5 billion thanks to his control of monopolies and semi-monopolies in the air travel, telecommunications, real estate, oil and construction sectors. Makhlouf is on U.S. sanctions lists and is a known beneficiary of corruption.
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Several Makhlouf family members, close cousins and accomplices of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, have purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of properties in Moscow’s prestigious skyscraper district.
Headed by al-Assad’s uncle, Mohammed Makhlouf, the Makhloufs are considered to be Syria’s richest and second most important family. Before 2011, they controlled 60 percent of the Syrian economy, ostensibly acquired through years of corruption and intimidation.
Our exposé of the Makhloufs’ properties is rare supporting evidence that lends substance to rumours of regime money being funnelled out of Syria throughout the war. Information about the regime’s assets and finances is notoriously scarce due to the terror fostered by al-Assad’s apparatus at home and abroad.
Our investigation further shows that the loans secured against some of the properties could be for the purposes of laundering money from Syria into Moscow. This opens the possibility that the money could then be moved into other jurisdictions, such as the EU, where members of the family are sanctioned.
Of the newly-revealed Moscow property purchases, the largest amount was bought by Hafez Makhlouf, one of Bashar al-Assad’s first cousins.
Hafez is accused of overseeing the killings and torture of detainees and protestors. Most of Hafez’s purchases were arranged using an opaque Lebanese loan structure that bears several hallmarks of money laundering, possibly with the purpose of moving the money beyond Russia.
Russia has been a key ally of the al-Assad family over their almost 50-year rule. It intervened on their side of the war in Syria in 2015, turning it in their favour through airstrikes and land offensives on opposition-controlled territory.
Reports of Russian banks aiding the Syrian regime surfaced in 2012 and 2013, after Western sanctions hit and the more powerful family members were stripped of European visas and their EU and Swiss bank accounts were frozen. Now it seems that the Syrian regime has been using Moscow as an alternative safe haven, and possibly a potential gateway for its ill-gotten gains to enter the wider financial system.
Hafez Makhlouf, who purchased US$22.3 million worth of property in Moscow’s ‘City of Capitals’ towers, was head of the Damascus ‘Section 40’ of Syria’s infamous General Intelligence Directorate until late 2014. This is the Syrian agency charged with quelling internal dissent, formerly and popularly known as the State Security service. As Damascus is the capital, this was already an important role, but Hafez appears to have had a great deal more authority than this official title reflects.
Testimony collected by Syrian human rights groups about Hafez’s Section 40 and its command branch, the Al-Khatib Branch, as well as wider testimony collected by journalists about the systemic use of torture by Syria’s intelligence services, points to how Hafez would have potentially overseen the detention of thousands of Syrians and their subsequent abuse, and, in some cases, even murder.
Moreover, multiple regime defectors have since testified, in a 2019 book by journalist Sam Dagher, that Hafez was a hard-line member of Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle and one of his most influential advisers. According to the testimony, Hafez was one of two main advocates for crushing the demonstrations in 2011. Dagher’s book includes testimony from witnesses who saw Hafez shooting civilians in Douma and giving shoot-to-kill orders on hundreds of peaceful protestors in Daraa and Homs.
When buying the Moscow office space in 2016, Hafez Makhlouf’s Russian-registered property companies took out loans using 11 of the properties as collateral. The complex structure of these loans disguises Hafez’s connection to the funds. This is characteristic of money laundering and could have been designed to establish money flows between Russia and Syria which would appear unconnected to Hafez, raising the possibility that the ultimate aim is to move the money out of Russia.
The loans were provided to Hafez’s Russian companies by a Lebanese company called Nylam SAL Offshore. The company is classified as ‘offshore’ in Lebanon; while Lebanese ‘offshore’ companies do not hide their owners like offshore companies in so-called secrecy jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, these companies do benefit from enhanced banking secrecy. The exact amount loaned by Nylam is unknown.
In 2018, two years after the property purchases, Hafez, the sole shareholder of his three Russian companies, passed his shares to Briana SAL Offshore, a Lebanese company with identical shareholders, directors and address as Nylam. Russian corporate records for the Russian property companies contain details about Briana because it is a shareholder. These records show that Briana states its country of business as Syria.
Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank, provided banking services for at least one of the Russian property companies formerly owned by Hafez and now owned by Briana, a Russian corporate database shows.
As the loans from Nylam to Hafez’s Russian companies were international (coming into Russia from Lebanon), it is feasible that they were transacted in US dollars, which is the commonly used international currency. If that were the case, the money could have transited through Sberbank’s SWIFT payment system, which, according to anti-money laundering expert Graham Barrow, could risk breaching the terms of the US sanctions against Hafez Makhlouf.
The convoluted nature of the loans taken against the properties should have raised red flags with Sberbank, but it is unclear what due diligence was carried out on the loans.
Sberbank’s dealings with the Makhloufs are part of a broader pattern of major Russian banks helping the Syrian regime. In 2012 and 2013, both Reuters and Wall Street Journal reported that the al-Assad regime held accounts at Gazprombank and VTB, two of Russia’s largest banks, which, like Sberbank, have extensive international correspondent banking relationships. More here.
It is called debt-trapping by China. China has been trapping small desperate nations for several years and few are paying attention. Imperialism? Yes on a global scale.
Uganda is about to default to China. 39% of the debt in Uganda is owed to China. It could be that beyond Uganda, Tanzania, Ethopia and Kenya could be the next victims to debt-trapping. China financed a $4 billion oil pipeline as part of the Belt and Road initiative. When this default suraces, China will own the strategic sites that connects Beijing to the Persian Gulf. Railways are an essential part of the required transportation channels.
Others think the Chinese government is in some ways gangsters, taking over mines all over Africa, sending thousands of Chinese workers, destroy the environment, bring the minerals such as copper, sink, gold, silver, diamonds etc home, and make deals with corrupt politicians to plunder the countries.
“The case is one of the examples of China’s ambitious use of loans and aid to gain influence around the world and of its willingness to play hardball to collect,” says the New York Times on December 12, 2017.
But Uganda’s auditor-general warned in a report released this month that public debt from June 2017 to 2018 had increased from $9.1 billion to $11.1 billion.
The report — without naming China — warned that conditions placed on major loans were a threat to Uganda’s sovereign assets.
It said that in some loans, Uganda had agreed to waive sovereignty over properties if it defaults on the debt — a possibility that Kasaija rejected.
“China taking over assets? … in Uganda, I have told you, as long as some of us are still in charge, unless there is really a catastrophe, and which I don’t see at all, that will make this economy going behind. So, … I’m not worried about China taking assets. They can do it elsewhere, I don’t know. But here, I don’t think it will come,” he said.
China’s Exim Bank has funded about 85 percent of two major Ugandan power projects — Karuma and Isimba dams. It also financed and built Kampala’s $476 million Entebbe Express Highway to the airport, which cut driving time by more than half. China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation, France’s Total, and Britain’s Tullow Oil co-own Uganda’s western oil fields, set to be tapped by 2021.
Whatever vision that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration had to Libya is now best described as a Russian operation where death and destruction manifests.
As Fox News Anchor, Bret Baier says each night, ‘beyond our borders’ there is a very ugly nasty world that is hardly if at all reported.
TRIPOLI, Libya — The casualties at the Aziziya field hospital south of Tripoli used to arrive with gaping wounds and shattered limbs, victims of the haphazard artillery fire that has defined battles among Libyan militias. But now medics say they are seeing something new: narrow holes in a head or a torso left by bullets that kill instantly and never exit the body.
It is the work, Libyan fighters say, of Russian mercenaries, including skilled snipers. The lack of an exit wound is a signature of the ammunition used by the same Russian mercenaries elsewhere.
The snipers are among about 200 Russian fighters who have arrived in Libya in the last six weeks, part of a broad campaign by the Kremlin to reassert its influence across the Middle East and Africa.
After four years of behind-the-scenes financial and tactical support for a would-be Libyan strongman, Russia is now pushing far more directly to shape the outcome of Libya’s messy civil war. It has introduced advanced Sukhoi jets, coordinated missile strikes, and precision-guided artillery, as well as the snipers — the same playbook that made Moscow a kingmaker in the Syrian civil war.
The Russians have intervened on behalf of the militia leader Khalifa Hifter, who is based in eastern Libya and is also backed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, at times, France. His backers have embraced him as their best hope to check the influence of political Islam, crack down on militants and restore an authoritarian order.
Mr. Hifter has been at war for more than five years with a coalition of militias from western Libya who back the authorities in Tripoli. The Tripoli government was set up by the United Nations in 2015 and is officially supported by the United States and other Western powers. But in practical terms, Turkey is its only patron.
The new intervention of private Russian mercenaries, who are closely tied to the Kremlin, is just one of the parallels with the Syrian civil war.
The Russian snipers belong to the Wagner Group, the Kremlin-linked private company that also led Russia’s intervention in Syria, according to three senior Libyan officials and five Western diplomats closely tracking the war.
In both conflicts, rival regional powers are arming local clients. And, as in Syria, the local partners who had teamed up with the United States to fight the Islamic State are now complaining of abandonment and betrayal.
The United Nations, which has tried and failed to broker peace in both countries, has watched as its eight-year arms embargo on Libya is becoming “a cynical joke,” as the United Nations special envoy recently put it.
Yet in some ways, the stakes in Libya are higher.
More than three times the size of Texas, Libya controls vast oil reserves, pumping out 1.3 million barrels a day despite the present conflict. Its long Mediterranean coastline, just 300 miles from Italy, has been a jumping-off point for tens of thousands of Europe-bound migrants.
And the open borders around Libya’s deserts have provided havens for extremists from North Africa and beyond. Read on.
Iran remains the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. The regime has spent nearly one billion dollars per year to support terrorist groups that serve as its proxies and expand its malign influence across the globe. Tehran has funded international terrorist groups such as Hizballah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It also has engaged in its own terrorist plotting around the world, particularly in Europe. In January, German authorities investigated 10 suspected Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force operatives. In the summer, authorities in Belgium, France, and Germany thwarted an Iranian plot to bomb a political rally near Paris, France. In October, an Iranian operative was arrested for planning an assassination in Denmark, and in December, Albania expelled two Iranian officials for plotting terrorist attacks. Furthermore, Tehran continued to allow an AQ facilitation network to operate in Iran, which sends fighters and money to conflict zones in Afghanistan and Syria, and it has extended sanctuary to AQ members residing in the country.
Forty years ago, on November 4, 1979, the United States embassy in Tehran was taken over by a group of people calling themselves “Student followers of the line of the Imam.”
Fifty-two U.S. embassy employees and diplomats were taken hostage for 444 days. Years later, the hostage-takers went on to become the most senior officials of Iran’s regime, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former President of the regime. Many of the hostage-takers still hold key positions in the regime. Some were wrongly dubbed as “moderates” by the West despite their loyalty to the regime’s agenda.
Masoumeh Ebtekar, spokeswoman of the “Student followers of the line of the Imam”:
Masoumeh Ebtekar, also known as “Sister Mary,” was the spokeswoman for the hostage-takers. She vehemently defended the Americans’ detention and demanded to be tried. She is now Iran’s Vice President for women and family affairs. In the first term of Hassan Rouhani’s Presidency, she was also Vice President and head of the environmental preservation organization. In Mohammad Khatami’s administration, she was Vice President and Head of the environmental preservation organization for several years.
Hamid Abutalebi:
He is now Political Advisor to the President. For years, he held top positions in the Foreign Ministry, including the post of Deputy Foreign Minister for political affairs, the regime’s Ambassador to a number of Western countries including Italy, Belgium, Australia, and the European Union (for 15 years). He was previously General Manager of Political Affairs in the Foreign Ministry (for 5 years), Advisor to the Foreign Minister (for 5 years), and member of Foreign Ministry’s Strategic Council. In 2014, he was Rouhani’s candidate to become the regime’s representative to the United Nations in New York, but the U.S. government refused to grant him a visa due to his role in the hostage-taking and in the 1993 assassination of Mohammad-Hossein Naqdi, representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Italy.
Hossein Sheikholislam, council member of “Student followers of the line of the Imam” and member of the team reviewing U.S. embassy documents:
He is now Advisor to the Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Previously, for several years, he was Deputy for International Affairs to Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani. For 16 years, Sheikholislam was Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs. Subsequently, for three years, he became Iran’s Ambassador to Syria, and after two terms as a Member of Parliament, he became Deputy Foreign Minister for Middle Eastern affairs.
Mohammad-Ali (Aziz) Jafari, one of the plotters of the U.S. embassy takeover:
Until April 21, 2019, for over 10 years, Major General Mohammad-Ali Jafari was Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). He is currently in charge of the “Baqiollah Cultural and Social Headquarters.”
Hossein Dehqan:
IRGC Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan was Iran’s Defense Minister in Rouhan’s first term (2013-2017), and he is now Advisor to the Supreme Leader on Defense Industries and Army Support. From 2004 to 2009, he was Vice President and chairman of the Shahid Foundation (Bonyad-e Shahid), one of the largest economic institutions in the regime.
During Khatami’s Presidency, he was Deputy Defense Minister. Prior to that, he was Deputy Chief of the IRGC Air Force.
After the U.S. hostages were released, Hossein Dehqan joined the IRGC and went to Lebanon. In the years 1982 to 1984, he was in Beirut at the peak of terror attacks in Lebanon, especially massive explosions like the ones at the U.S. embassy and U.S. Marines barracks. He had acknowledged his key role in the formation of Lebanese Hizballah. Based on reports by U.S. media, he had a direct role in the 1983 bombing in Beirut, in which 241 U.S. marines were killed.
Reza Seifollahi, a main plotter of the embassy takeover and member of the central council of the “Student followers of the line of the Imam”:
From 2013 to 2018, Reza Seifollahi was the Political Deputy of the Secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). From 2008 to 2013, He was deputy coordinator of the regime’s Expediency Council. He was a senior IRGC commander, including the commander of IRGC Intelligence. When the Police, Gendarmeries, and Committees (Comite) were all combined into once force, Seifollahi was appointed as the first commander of the State Security Forces (SSF). During Khatami’s Presidency, he was Deputy Interior Minister for Security Affairs.
Habibollah Bitaraf, a main plotter of the embassy takeover and member of the central council of the “Student followers of the line of the Imam”:
From 1997 to 2005, he was Iran’s Energy Minister. From 1986 to 1989, he was the Governor of Yazd Province. Also, for nearly five years, he was Deputy Minister of Energy for Educational Affairs.
Ezzatollah Zarghami
An IRGC Brigadier General, he became head of the state Radio and Television Corporation on the orders of the Supreme Leader, and from 2004 to 2014 he played a key role in the regime’s propaganda machine. For years, Zarghami was the keynote speaker at ceremonies in front of the US embassy in Tehran to mark the anniversary of the embassy takeover.
Alireza Afshar:
After the hostages were released, Afshar joined the IRGC, and he has held important posts in the IRGC ever since, including as Chief of the IRGC General Staff, Commander of the Basij Force and Deputy Commander of the Armed Forces for Cultural Affairs.
In Ahmadinejad’s administration, Afshar was Deputy Minister of Interior for Political and Social Affairs.
He is now head of the Supreme Delegation for the IRGC School of thought.
Mohsen Aminzadeh:
During Khatami’s presidency, Mohsen Aminzadeh was Deputy Foreign Minister for Asian Affairs. He was a shadow minister when Kamal Kharrazi was Foreign Minister.
Hossein Sharifzadegan:
During Khatami’s second term as President, Sharifzadegan was a member of “the Islamic partnership front” and General Manager of the Social Security Organization and Minister of Social Security.
Mohammad Mehdi Rahmati:
During Ahmadinejad’s Presidency, Rahmati was in charge of President’s Office of Planning and Strategic Oversight
Mohammdreza Behzadian-Nejad:
In the first term of Ahmadinejad’s Presidency, Behzadian-Nejad was Deputy Interior Minister for Economic Affairs. Later, he became head of the Commerce Office of Tehran.
The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran marked the beginning of the regime’s policy of hostage-taking and international blackmail, a policy that has become official and institutionalized as part of the foreign policy of this regime.
For 40 years, the foreign policy of the mullahs’ regime has been rooted in terrorism and blackmail. Today, it is recognized as the world’s main state sponsor of terrorism. In the past 40 years, there has never been a time that this regime has not held onto hostages. Still, under different pretexts, Americans and other countries’ citizens are kept in the Iranian regime’s prisons as hostages.
In the past 40 years, thousands of innocent people have fallen victim to the regime and its proxy groups’ terrorism in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and even Latin America.
Terrorism and hostage-taking are a part of the DNA of Iran’s regime.
The 1979 U.S. embassy takeover, which later was dubbed by regime officials as a ‘revolution greater than the 1979 revolution,’ had the goal of eliminating Iran’s democratic forces, and more specifically the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), or Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) from the political scene. Khomeini, the regime’s Supreme Leader at the time, supported the act of the students, and Khamenei the current Supreme Leader, who at the time was Friday prayers’ leader and Khomeini’s representative, was one of the main supporters of the takeover; he went to the embassy and encouraged the students.
It is no surprise then that just last week Khamenei, through his representative in the state-run Keyhan newspaper, called on regime-backed Iraqi militias known as the “Hashd al Shaabi,” who are under the command of the IRGC Qods Force, to take over the U.S. embassy in Baghdad by the same model that took place in Tehran 40 years ago.
Hossein Shariatmadari, editor and representative of the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader in Kayhan, in the paper’s October 30, 2019 editorial called for the takeover of the U.S. Embassy by the Iraqi militias.
Shariatmadari, whose words reflect Khamenei’s opinions, wrote: “In a previous note, by mentioning the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran, which the Imam called the “second revolution,” the issue was raised in the context of a question that why the Iraqi revolutionary youths … are not ending the presence of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which is the epicenter of conspiracy and espionage against the innocent people of Iraq!? And why are you not eliminating and throwing out this infected wound from your holy land? The takeover of the U.S. espionage center in Islamic Iran and eliminating that epicenter of conspiracy had many benefits for us. So why then are the revolutionary youths of Iraq depriving their holy land from these benefits?”
When buying the Moscow office space in 2016, Hafez Makhlouf’s Russian-registered property companies took out loans using 11 of the properties as collateral. The complex structure of these loans disguises Hafez’s connection to the funds. This is characteristic of money laundering and could have been designed to establish money flows between Russia and Syria which would appear unconnected to Hafez, raising the possibility that the ultimate aim is to move the money out of Russia.
