BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon announced it cannot meet its debt payments and halted a March 9 bond payment of $1.2 billion on Saturday, setting the heavily indebted state on course for a sovereign default as it grapples with a major financial crisis.
In a televised address to the nation, Prime Minister Hassan Diab said foreign currency reserves had hit a “critical and dangerous” level and were needed to meet basic needs. He called for “fair” negotiations with lenders to restructure the debt.
The default will mark a new phase in a crisis that has hammered the economy since October, slicing around 40% off the value of the local currency, denying savers free access to their deposits and fuelling unemployment and unrest.
The crisis is seen as the biggest risk to Lebanon’s stability since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.
“How can we pay creditors abroad when the Lebanese cannot get their money from their bank accounts?” Diab said. “Our debt has become greater than Lebanon can bear, and greater than the ability of the Lebanese to meet interest payments.”
The long-brewing crisis came to a head last year as capital inflows slowed and protests erupted over decades of state corruption and bad governance.
“We are paying the price for the mistakes of the past years. Must we bequeath them to our children?” Diab said.
The Lebanese had “lived a dream that was a delusion as though things were just fine, while Lebanon was drowning in more debt”, he said.
There has been no sign of a bailout from foreign states that aided Lebanon in the past. Western governments insist Beirut first enact long-delayed reforms to fight waste and corruption.
Diab was appointed in January with backing from the Iran-backed group Hezbollah and its allies. Former prime minister Saad al-Hariri, a traditional ally of the West and Gulf Arab states, stayed out of the government.
NOT PRODUCTIVE ENOUGH
Diab, a little-known academic when he became prime minister, said corruption had drained the state while also criticizing economic policies adopted since the war. Lebanon was importing 80% of its needs and was not productive enough, he said.
He took aim at a banking system that drew capital to the country with dollar interest rates five to 10 times greater than those offered abroad.
“We do not need a banking sector four times the size of our economy. We will have to come up with a plan to restructure the banking sector,” he said.
The gross public debt has reached around 170% of gross domestic product, meaning Lebanon is close to being the world’s most heavily indebted state, he added.
Citing the World Bank, Diab said more than 40% of people could soon find themselves under the poverty line. Lebanon has a population of around 6 million, including about 1 million Syrian refugees.
Lebanon has a total of some $31 billion in dollar bonds that sources told Reuters on Friday the government would seek to restructure.
A set of Lebanon’s bond holders are to step up efforts to form a creditor group in the coming days, one of the members of the group said.
“From what we understand the government wants to be reasonable and so do most creditors. They understand the country is in a difficult situation,” the member said.
Lebanon’s public debt is worth about $89.5 billion, with around 37% of that in foreign currency.
Lebanon has sought technical but not financial assistance from the IMF, though many analysts believe that the only way for the country to secure financial support would be through an IMF program.
“Watch now if bondholders can block any deal,” said Nick Eisinger, principal, fixed income emerging markets at Vanguard, which holds some Lebanese debt but has been underweight in the market for a long time.
“It’s unclear how quick they can go down the restructuring route or get a deal because they need reforms first or at the same time,” he said.
Banks began restricting cash withdrawals and transfers abroad four months ago. Diab indicated the controls could soon be standardized, saying a draft law would “regulate the relationship between the banks and their customers, for it to become more fair and just”.
Category Archives: The Denise Simon Experience
Erdogan/Turkey Floods Greece with Migrants
Primer: Erdogan broke his pledge to Europe on the Syrian migrant issue.
Ankara opened the door for migrants last week after 33 of its soldiers were killed in a Syrian government airstrike in Idlib, north-west Syria.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a military offensive in the north of the war-torn country late last year, aimed at creating a safe zone to accommodate the 3.6 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The other aim was to oust from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which it considers an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey says the PKK — which launched an armed struggle against the Turkish government in the 1980s in a bid to form an independent Kurdish state within Turkey — is a terrorist organisation.
A fire broke out at a refugee center on the Greek island of Lesbos Saturday night amid tensions with Turkey over the flow of tens of thousands of mostly Syrian migrants who’ve tried to cross into Greece by land and sea last week.
Flames engulfed the Swiss-run One Happy Family refugee center Saturday night, causing property damage but no injuries, according to Greece’s firefighting service.
The center is located outside the island’s capital Mitilini near the Kara Tepe refugee camp, where about 1,500 refugees live, Swissinfo reported. It served as a meeting place and offered school lessons, a hairdresser, a café and a library to hundreds of migrants daily.
Residents on the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios have been protesting government plans to build new migrant detention centers amid a renewed influx of refugees, mostly coming across the sea from Turkey. Dozens of police officers were injured when demonstrations turned violent last month with protesters attacking those guarding construction sites for new centers.
After years of living on the front line of the migrant crisis, residents on Greece’s Aegean islands oppose the government building any new migrant detention centers on their islands, and, instead, want asylum seekers relocated to the mainland while they’re processed or await deportation. Existing migrant camps on the islands are already several times over capacity.
Meanwhile on the mainland, the European Union, in an effort to curb rising tensions at its borders, announced Saturday it is allocating nearly $800 million in funding for Greece to be used for establishing and keeping up “infrastructure” at the border.
The dramatic move came amid a sharply escalating crisis after Turkey opened the country’s border to Greece as part of an apparent push to make Europe offer more support in dealing with the fallout of the Syrian war. Late last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government said it would no longer prevent migrants and refugees from crossing over to EU countries, prompting thousands to flock to the country’s land border with Greece.
The mass movement of migrants and refugees to Greece’s borders appears to be organized. Buses, cars and cabs were organized in Istanbul to ferry people to the border, while some of those who managed to cross have said they were told by Turkish authorities to go to Greece and that the border was open.
Meanwhile on the mainland, the European Union, in an effort to curb rising tensions at its borders, announced Saturday it is allocating nearly $800 million in funding for Greece to be used for establishing and keeping up “infrastructure” at the border.
The dramatic move came amid a sharply escalating crisis after Turkey opened the country’s border to Greece as part of an apparent push to make Europe offer more support in dealing with the fallout of the Syrian war. Late last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government said it would no longer prevent migrants and refugees from crossing over to EU countries, prompting thousands to flock to the country’s land border with Greece.
The mass movement of migrants and refugees to Greece’s borders appears to be organized. Buses, cars and cabs were organized in Istanbul to ferry people to the border, while some of those who managed to cross have said they were told by Turkish authorities to go to Greece and that the border was open.
Greece deployed riot police and border guards to repel people trying to enter the country. The border area has seen violent confrontations between the migrants and Greek security forces, with officers in Greece firing tear gas to block the migrants and Turkish police firing tear gas back at their Greek counterparts, according to the Associated Press.
Erdogan said his decision to open the border has pushed more than 100,000 people to cross into Greece so far. That estimate is higher than those of Greek authorities, who on Wednesday said 32,000 people have attempted to cross the border. About 230 people, mostly from Afghanistan, had been arrested.
On Saturday, youths threw rocks at Greek police and tried to break down a border fence in a desperate attempt to enter Greece. At least two migrants were injured in the skirmishes.
Erdogan will travel to Brussels on Monday to talk with top EU officials about a 2016 Turkey-EU agreement, which has now collapsed, on containing the refugee flows to Europe. The two sides have accused each other of failing to respect their commitments. More here.
Taiwan More Advanced than U.S. to Deal with Coronavirus
Taiwan, while in a contentious government power struggle with China, the country has a very conservative approach on economic stability and encourages entrepreneurial strengths.
(Reuters) – China is pressuring Taiwan with “provocative” air force maneuvers near the island and spreading fake news to sow discord during the coronavirus outbreak, security sources and government officials in Taiwan say.
This sets the table for why Taiwan’s master plan to thrive during the coronavirus outbreak.
You can be assured corporate leaders in the United States are taking notice and are hosting some top level meetings regarding research and development across the country during this anxious time in America and across the world.
Read on for some interesting actions Taiwan has taken given how interacted the country is with China.
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Taiwan is 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to have the second highest number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to its proximity to and number of flights between China.1 The country has 23 million citizens of which 850 000 reside in and 404 000 work in China.2,3 In 2019, 2.71 million visitors from the mainland traveled to Taiwan.4 As such, Taiwan has been on constant alert and ready to act on epidemics arising from China ever since the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003. Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan and assessing the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic may be instructive for other countries.
COVID-19 occurred just before the Lunar New Year during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays. Taiwan quickly mobilized and instituted specific approaches for case identification, containment, and resource allocation to protect the public health. Taiwan leveraged its national health insurance database and integrated it with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics; it generated real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms to aid case identification. It also used new technology, including QR code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the past 14 days. Persons with low risk (no travel to level 3 alert areas) were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS (short message service) messaging to their phones for faster immigration clearance; those with higher risk (recent travel to level 3 alert areas) were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phone to ensure that they remained at home during the incubation period.
Moreover, Taiwan enhanced COVID-19 case finding by proactively seeking out patients with severe respiratory symptoms (based on information from the National Health Insurance [NHI] database) who had tested negative for influenza and retested them for COVID-19; 1 was found of 113 cases. The toll-free number 1922 served as a hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms or cases in themselves or others; as the disease progressed, this hotline has reached full capacity, so each major city was asked to create its own hotline as an alternative. It is not known how often this hotline has been used. The government addressed the issue of disease stigma and compassion for those affected by providing food, frequent health checks, and encouragement for those under quarantine. This rapid response included hundreds of action items (eTable in the Supplement).
Recognizing the CrisisIn 2004, the year after the SARS outbreak, the Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC). The NHCC is part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak response and acts as the operational command point for direct communications among central, regional, and local authorities. The NHCC unified a central command system that includes the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), the Biological Pathogen Disaster Command Center, the Counter-Bioterrorism Command Center, and the Central Medical Emergency Operations Center.5
On December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was notified of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane. As early as January 5, 2020, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry; suspected cases were screened for 26 viruses including SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Passengers displaying symptoms of fever and coughing were quarantined at home and assessed whether medical attention at a hospital was necessary. On January 20, while sporadic cases were reported from China, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (CDC) officially activated the CECC for severe special infectious pneumonia under NHCC, with the minister of health and welfare as the designated commander. The CECC coordinated efforts by various ministries, including the ministries of transportation, economics, labor, and education and the Environmental Protection Administration, among others, in a comprehensive effort to counteract the emerging public health crisis.
Managing the CrisisFor the past 5 weeks (January 20-February 24), the CECC has rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items (eTable in the Supplement) including border control from the air and sea, case identification (using new data and technology), quarantine of suspicious cases, proactive case finding, resource allocation (assessing and managing capacity), reassurance and education of the public while fighting misinformation, negotiation with other countries and regions, formulation of policies toward schools and childcare, and relief to businesses.
Border Control, Case Identification, and ContainmentOn January 27, the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) and the National Immigration Agency integrated patients’ past 14-day travel history with their NHI identification card data from the NHIA; this was accomplished in 1 day. Taiwan citizens’ household registration system and the foreigners’ entry card allowed the government to track individuals at high risk because of recent travel history in affected areas. Those identified as high risk (under home quarantine) were monitored electronically through their mobile phones. On January 30, the NHIA database was expanded to cover the past 14-day travel history for patients from China, Hong Kong, and Macau. On February 14, the Entry Quarantine System was launched, so travelers can complete the health declaration form by scanning a QR code that leads to an online form, either prior to departure from or upon arrival at a Taiwan airport. A mobile health declaration pass was then sent via SMS to phones using a local telecom operator, which allowed for faster immigration clearance for those with minimal risk. This system was created within a 72-hour period. On February 18, the government announced that all hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies in Taiwan would have access to patients’ travel histories.
Resource Allocation: Logistics and OperationsThe CECC took an active role in resource allocation, including setting the price of masks and using government funds and military personnel to increase mask production. On January 20, the Taiwan CDC announced that the government had under its control a stockpile of 44 million surgical masks, 1.9 million N95 masks, and 1100 negative-pressure isolation rooms.
Communications and PoliticsReassure and Educate the Public, While Fighting MisinformationIn addition to daily press briefings by the minister of health and welfare the CECC, the vice president of Taiwan, a prominent epidemiologist, gave regular public service announcements broadcast from the office of the president and made available via the internet. These announcements included when and where to wear a mask, the importance of handwashing, and the danger of hoarding masks to prevent them from becoming unavailable to frontline health workers. The CECC also made plans to assist schools, businesses, and furloughed workers (eTable in the Supplement).
Taiwan’s Outcomes so Far (as of February 24)Interim OutcomesThe CECC has communicated to the public in a clear and compassionate manner. Based on a poll of 1079 randomly selected people conducted by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation on February 17 and 18, the minister of health and welfare received approval ratings of more than 80% for his handling of the crisis, and the president and the premier received an overall approval rating of close to 70%. As of February 24, Taiwan has 30 cases of COVID-19. These cases represent the 10th-highest case number among countries affected thus far, but far fewer than the initial models predicting that Taiwan would have the second-highest importation risk.
ChallengesFirst, real-time public communications were mostly in Mandarin Chinese and sign language. Other than the Taiwan CDC website, there was not enough communication in different languages to non-Taiwanese citizens traveling or residing in Taiwan. Second, while its attention was focused on air travel, Taiwan permitted the docking of the Diamond Princess cruise ship and allowed passengers to disembark in Keelung, near New Taipei City, on January 31, before the ship left for Japan. The ship was subsequently found to have numerous confirmed infections onboard. This created a temporary public panic with concern about community spread. The government published the 50 locations where the cruise ship travelers may have visited and asked citizens who may have been in contact with the tour group to conduct symptom monitoring and self-quarantine if necessary. None were confirmed to have COVID-19 after 14 days had passed. Third, whether the intensive nature of these policies can be maintained until the end of the epidemic and continue to be well received by the public is unclear.
ConclusionsTaiwan’s government learned from its 2003 SARS experience and established a public health response mechanism for enabling rapid actions for the next crisis. Well-trained and experienced teams of officials were quick to recognize the crisis and activated emergency management structures to address the emerging outbreak.
In a crisis, governments often make difficult decisions under uncertainty and time constraints. These decisions must be both culturally appropriate and sensitive to the population. Through early recognition of the crisis, daily briefings to the public, and simple health messaging, the government was able to reassure the public by delivering timely, accurate, and transparent information regarding the evolving epidemic. Taiwan is an example of how a society can respond quickly to a crisis and protect the interests of its citizens.
Article InformationPublished Online: March 3, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3151
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
Details of Bernie Sanders and Yaroslavl, the Sister City
One has to travel to Russia and visit the archives in Yaroslavl to see the full details of the trip then Mayor of Burlington, Vermont Bernie Sanders took for his honeymoon.
WaPo
IN part from the NYT’s: Many of the details of Mr. Sanders’s Cold War diplomacy before and after that visit — and the Soviet effort to exploit Mr. Sanders’s antiwar agenda for their own propaganda purposes — have largely remained out of sight.
The New York Times examined 89 pages of letters, telegrams and internal Soviet government documents revealing in far greater detail the extent of Mr. Sanders’s personal effort to establish ties between his city and a country many Americans then still considered an enemy despite the reforms being initiated at the time under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary.
They also show how the Kremlin viewed these sister city relationships as vehicles to sway American public opinion about the Soviet Union.The Sanders campaign didn’t dispute the documents’ authenticity; the English-language documents were shared with the campaign and the relevant Russian documents were described. At the time of Mr. Sanders’s announcement in 1987 that Burlington would seek a Soviet sister city, several dozen other American cities already had such a relationship or had applied for one.
The documents, available at the Yaroslavskaya Region State Archive in Yaroslavl, are included in a file titled “documents about the development of friendly relations of the city of Yaroslavl with the city of Burlington in 1988.”
Mr. Sanders’s involvement in the Cold War debate grew in the 1980s as he forcefully opposed the Reagan administration’s plans to have Burlington and other American cities make evacuation plans for a potential nuclear war.
Instead, Mr. Sanders reached out to the Soviet Union via an organization based in Virginia, requesting a sister-city partnership with the Cold War adversary in an effort to end the threat of nuclear annihilation. In December 1987, the records show, Mr. Sanders spoke by phone with Yuri Menshikov, the secretary of the Soviet sister-city organization in Moscow. In a follow-up letter later that month, Mr. Sanders said he had received word that Yaroslavl would be an ideal partner. He proposed leading a Burlington delegation to Yaroslavl to lay the foundation for a sister-city relationship.
He suggested arriving on May 9 — the day that the Soviet Union celebrated its victory over Nazi Germany — and said he was especially interested in discussing economic development, the police, winter street cleaning, libraries, and plumbing and sewer systems. “People there seemed reasonably happy and content,” Mr. Sanders told reporters in Burlington about Yaroslavl, a city of about 600,000. “I didn’t notice much deprivation.”
Two days after returning to Vermont, Mr. Sanders wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, asking for help in setting up the sister-city program.
“It is my strong belief that if our planet is going to survive, and if we are going to be able to convert the hundreds of billions of dollars that both the United States and the Soviet Union are now wasting on weapons of destruction into areas of productive human development, there is going to have to be a significant increase in citizen-to-citizen contact,” Mr. Sanders wrote. The sister city program was something of a capstone to nearly a decade’s worth of foreign policy activism in Burlington City Hall. As mayor, Mr. Sanders championed a range of international causes that often aligned him with left-wing movements and leaders in other countries, and against the Reagan administration, which he described as pursuing a strategy of military escalation that risked setting off a nuclear war.
Mr. Sanders pressed the city government to take positions against American intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and against the invasion of Grenada. In 1985, he visited Managua for the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution and met with its leader, Daniel Ortega. To read the full article from the NYT’s, click here.
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Just a lil more from Politico:
Bruce Seifer, a top economic development aide to Sanders when he was mayor, said that 100 residents from Yaroslavl immigrated to Burlington after the trip and others visited.
“Over time, it had a positive impact on to the economy,” he said. “Businesses started doing exchanges between Burlington and Yaroslavl.”
Davitian, who lived in Burlington at the time, said progressives were thrilled by Sanders’ trip to the Soviet Union, while everyday residents didn’t mind. “As long as the streets were getting paved, there wasn’t opposition to him as an activist mayor,” she said.
When Sanders’ delegation returned to Burlington, CCTV captured the group on film in a hopeful mood, applauding the Soviet Union’s after-school programs, low rent costs and hospitality.
At the same time, they admit the poor choices of available food. Sanders says he was impressed by the beauty of the city and Soviet officials’ willingness “to acknowledge many of the problems that they had.”
“They’re proud of the fact that their health care system is free,” he says, but concede that the medical technology is far behind that of the United States.
Later that year, the relationship was officially established. Since then, “exchanges between the two cities have involved mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians, and the Yaroslavl Torpedoes ice hockey team,” according to Burlington’s city government. A delegation traveled there as recently as 2016.
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One last thing from National Review to consider:
Sanders made further globe-trotting expeditions to socialist countries. He visited Cuba, scoring a meeting with Havana’s mayor. In 1985 he attended the celebrations marking the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. “In a letter addressed to the people of Nicaragua, penned in conjunction with that trip, Sanders denounced the activities of the Reagan administration, which he said was under the influence of large corporations,” the Guardian notes. “In the long run, I am certain that you will win,” Sanders wrote, “and that your heroic revolution against the Somoza dictatorship will be maintained and strengthened.” (The Sandinistas were ousted by Nicaragua’s voters in 1990).
Sanders isn’t the only radical U.S. politician to have a weakness for Communist dictatorships. In 2013, Bill de Blasio was caught off guard during his campaign for New York mayor when a Cuban-American radio host challenged him about Castro’s regime.
Ino Gómez, who fled Cuba in 1970, asked de Blasio in an interview about what he was thinking when he chose to violate U.S. law and spend his honeymoon in Cuba in 1991.
“What did you see in Cuba? What is your impression going on a honeymoon in a country that hasn’t had free elections in the last 50 years? What did you get from that trip?” Gómez asked.
A defensive de Blasio sputtered: “I didn’t go on a trip to study the country. I don’t pretend to have full perspective of the country.” He then acknowledged Cuba is undemocratic but praised “some good things that happened — for example, in health care.”
Gomez was having none of it. “I just had to send my aunt in Cuba some, you know, the thread to have stitches, because they don’t have in Cuba the thread,” he told the future mayor of Gotham.
De Blasio chose not to reply and the host moved on to other topics, giving him a pass on his 1988 trip to Nicaragua in support of the Sandinistas.
In closing, remember that New York Mayor de Blasio is campaigning for Sanders…gotta wonder if all this is well known to the gigantic grass-roots operation Sanders has built for his presidential campaign.
Armed Guard of Concentration Camp from Tennessee Ordered Deported
WASHINGTON – A U.S. Immigration Judge in Memphis, Tennessee has issued a removal order against a German citizen and Tennessee resident, based on his service in Nazi Germany in 1945 as an armed guard of concentration camp prisoners in the Neuengamme Concentration Camp system (Neuengamme).
After a two-day trial, U.S. Immigration Judge Rebecca L. Holt issued her opinion finding Friedrich Karl Berger removable under the Immigration and Nationality Act because his “willing service as an armed guard of prisoners at a concentration camp where persecution took place” constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution. The court found that Berger served at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, and that the prisoners there included “Jews, Poles, Russians, Danes, Dutch, Latvians, French, Italians, and political opponents” of the Nazis.
Judge Holt found that Meppen prisoners were held during the winter of 1945 in “atrocious” conditions and were exploited for outdoor forced labor, working “to the point of exhaustion and death.” The court further found, and Berger admitted, that he guarded prisoners to prevent them from escaping during their dawn-to-dusk workday, and on their way to and from the worksites. At the end of March 1945, with the advance of British and Canadian forces, the Nazis abandoned Meppen. The court found that Berger helped guard the prisoners during their forcible evacuation to the Neuengamme main camp – a nearly two-week trip under inhumane conditions which claimed the lives of some 70 prisoners.
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Built in December 1938 by one hundred inmates transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Neuengamme concentration camp was established around an empty brickworks in Hamburg-Neuengamme. The bricks produced there were to be used for the “Fuehrer buildings”, part of the National Socialists’ redevelopment plans for the river Elbe in Hamburg.
Until June 4th, 1940, Neuengamme was a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen. At this date Neuengamme became an independent concentration camp, under the direct control of the overseer of concentration camps. The prisoners worked on the construction of the camp and the brickworks, regulating the flow of the Dove-Elbe river and the building of a branch canal, as well as on the mining of clay. The number of inmates increased dramatically in only a few months: in 1940, the population of the camp was 2,000 prisoners (with a proportion of 80% German inmates among them), Between 1940 and 1945, more than 95,000 prisoners were incarcerated in Neuengamme. On April 10th, 1945, the number of prisoners in the camp itself was 13,500. More than 2,000 men and 10,300 women were working in the different sub-camps depending on Neuengamme SS administration.
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“Berger was part of the SS machinery of oppression that kept concentration camp prisoners in atrocious conditions of confinement,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. “This ruling shows the Department’s continued commitment to obtaining a measure of justice, however late, for the victims of wartime Nazi persecution.”
The investigation was initiated by DOJ’s Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section (HRSP) and was conducted in partnership with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center and HSI’s Nashville Special Agent in Charge office.
“The investigation of human rights violations and those who engage in these heinous acts, continues to be a focus for Homeland Security Investigations and this successful outcome is an example of those efforts” stated Jerry C. Templet Jr, Special Agent in Charge, HSI Nashville.
The removal case was jointly tried by attorneys in ICE New Orleans Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (Memphis), and attorneys from DOJ’s HRSP, with the assistance of the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center.
Established in 2009, ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center furthers ICE’s efforts to identify, locate and prosecute human rights abusers in the United States, including those who are known or suspected to have participated in persecution, war crimes, genocide, torture, extrajudicial killings, female genital mutilation and the use or recruitment of child soldiers. The HRVWCC leverages the expertise of a select group of agents, lawyers, intelligence and research specialists, historians and analysts who direct the agency’s broader enforcement efforts against these offenders.
Since 2003, ICE has arrested more than 450 individuals for human rights-related violations of the law under various criminal and/or immigration statutes. During that same period, ICE obtained deportation orders against and physically removed 1034 known or suspected human rights violators from the United States. Additionally, ICE has facilitated the departure of an additional 160 such individuals from the United States.
Currently, HSI has more than 180 active investigations into suspected human rights violators and is pursuing more than 1,640 leads and removal cases involving suspected human rights violators from 95 different countries. Since 2003, The HRVWCC has issued more than 76,000 lookouts for individuals from more than 110 countries and stopped over 315 human rights violators and war crimes suspects from entering the U.S.
