The Istanbul governor’s office said it had received advanced information that “illegal terror organizations and their extensions” would resort to violence to stoke unrest.
Fly any banner, service to others forms the bedrock of civil societies, and journalists, perhaps war journalists especially, serve others every hour afield. Across the jagged puzzle pieces of the Islamic Small Wars, journalists have been doing more than “taking it on the chin” — they have been taking bullets and leaving behind children and spouses, colleagues and readers.
The end of last week saw the brutally cold blooded, cold hearted, and senseless murder of AP photojournalist Anja Neidringhaus and the attempted murder of AP veteran Kathy Gannon by a so-called “defender” of civil order, of the innocent, and of Islam, Afghan police platoon commander Naqibullah, a man one report cites as enraged by NATO air strikes on his village elsewhere in the country.
If that’s the way he felt, what was he doing heading up a state police unit in the first place?
Two women sitting in a car and along comes this nut with an AK-47 . . . .
While reading over the latest from the attack on Kathy Gannon and Anja Neidringhaus, I found news of still recent other murders of journalists in Afghanistan: Nils Horner, a Swedish broadcast journalist assassinated on the street; Sardar Ahmad, whose entire family was gunned down by teenage numbnuts shooting up the dinner hour at Kabul’s Serena Hotel restaurant — call the method “gangdum style”: after three hours of fighting, security managed to kill the baby killers (“Three Afghan children between 2 and 5 years old were shot point-blank in the head, the Reuters news agency reported”) after three hours of fighting, but not before nine people had died.
In the BackChannels way (until I get out of this place, if ever), excerpts follow.
______
She covered every major conflict, every massive world-changing event of the past 25 years. She was unflinchingly brave. Not in a cavalier way, but more like “This is very dangerous. But it’s important. It has to be done. It has to be covered. Who else is going to do it? I’m going.”
Two unidentified men approached Nils Horner, 51, in Kabul’s diplomatic district this morning, according to a New York Times report citing Col. Najibullah Samsour, a senior police official. One of the assailants shot Horner in the head at close range, and then both men fled the scene, the report said.
A gregarious 40-year-old star of Afghanistan’s booming media scene, Ahmad had an eye for both a story and a joke that helped him juggle two jobs as senior correspondent for Agence France-Press and head of media firm Pressistan, which he founded to support visiting foreign correspondents.
An enraged Afghan police commander on a “secure base”; Taliban assassins; four teenagers with guns — and gone: a courageous and talented AP photographer; an award-winning Swedish radio reporter; a brave Afghan journalists, husband, and father.
Whatever the motives of the killers, however they felt, whatever they were paid, they have been offing the best of the best, the most just, most merciful, and most free among mankind.
To Russian and Syrian officials and their supporters, the Syrian war and the standoff over the Crimean Peninsula are essentially part of a single, larger battle, against post-Cold War American unilateralism.
When Putin’s Russia pledged $10 million to Syrian relief while spending $52 billion to host the winter games in Sochi, it told the world unmistakably what it was going to be about: the greatness of the Great Leader.
Why shouldn’t Bashar al-Assad continue what he’s doing while “encouraging” votes to reelect him as their Great Leader?
Why should Vladimir Putin halt the expansion of either mafia enterprise or Russian hegemony in Crimea?
* * *
Six documents stamped with the seal of the Venezuelan army show that as far back as December 2001, agents of then president Hugo Chavez — Maduro’s mentor — sought to build a paramilitary. What is more, the recruitment efforts targeted military bases in order to incorporate army personnel into this non-uniformed militia. In other words, the Chavez government was looking for trained professionals who could handle weapons.
I read the above in hard copy at the coffee shop an hour ago, so it has been out today, Monday, March 24.
Venezuela’s axis may be counterpoised to Russia, as I recall the note of a South American friend: “You can see the oil rigs of the Chinese from Miami.” [1]
The business would seem to come along with the way of doing business – or perhaps dictatorships simply understand one another in the way of crooked and sociopath elites:
The challenges facing most of the Caribbean nations are neither unique nor entirely isolated. They include high unemployment and migration levels, unsustainable levels of government debt and increasingly high costs of energy. In fact, the high costs of energy have led some small Caribbean island nations to join Hugo Chavez’s radical ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) in exchange for cheap Venezuelan petroleum. When a powerful nation such as China comes on the scene and offers loans, credits and investment, local actors take substantial notice, especially when the traditional hegemon, the United States, seems preoccupied elsewhere.
To spell in schematic, “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” and “Putin-Yanukovych” (so sorry it didn’t last) seems to me perfectly sensible, and then to suggest a similar but Chinese-oriented path for Chavez seems not unreasonable.
The line may be missing a dot or two, but the dots are there and whether intentionally among the Bond-villain set — in the post-00s of the 21st Century, these already have their nukes — or unconsciously by way of the anomic lust for money that produces the policy that pipes out Sudanese oil while ignoring the Darfur Genocide, for example — hardly matters: free Europeans say “hello” to the new old bosses, the old familiars, the kind that talk kindly while select suspect associates are thrown off the roofs above their heads and the children of their constituents are barrel bombed into dead certain compliance with their will.
Berkin Elvan, then 14, got caught up in street battles in Istanbul between police and protesters on June 16 while going to buy bread for his family. He slipped into a coma and became a rallying point for government opponents, who held regular vigils at the hospital where he lay in intensive care.
. . . Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the main target of last year’s demonstrations, has so far declined to apologise for any of the protesters’ deaths. He has riled opponents, however, by praising the police response to what he and his allies depict as a foreign-backed coup attempt as “heroic”.
Between the Islamic Small Wars and its pack of malignant narcissists and renewed Russian imperialism driven by the vertical of the hour Putin and his coterie, I think we’re going to see a lot of breathtakingly callous violence perpetrated by the same and lied about in similar ways.
The recent revolution in Ukraine cannot be Yanukovych’s fault, except perhaps for being weak in the face of western-backed nationalist fascist aggression, or so he might say; ditto for whatever Russians may be thinking about Putin tonight while he most certainly intends to annex Crimea, regardless of the true fealty, or lack thereof, on the part of Crimean Ukrainians: and so it goes for Assad and Khamenei and too many others around the world.
Put it in common punk talk: “They wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
On that horrific and too familiar a kind of story, one of my friends in Islamabad, Asad Khan, who states on his Facebook page, “every human has the right to communicate with the creator, in the manner s/he thinks best . . . “, provided me permission to relay his thoughts here.
As an editor in this process, I’ve added paragraph breaks to help ease the reading, question marks to the interrogative statements, and applied rote grammatical corrections (“has” to “have” for example) where needed.
“MPAs” refers to members of the Provincial Assembly; “MNAs” to members of the National Assembly. There are a few other acronyms sprinkled about (“FC” refers to “Frontier Corps”), but the reader is online too and look-up works fast.
Guest Post by Asad Khan
The Police Service is the most vilified, most underfunded, most politically manipulated, probably most demoralized, and most undertrained of all government services.
With this background of our own home grown “keystone cops”, should we be surprised that the terrorists came calling to the courts and turned it into a shooting gallery, shooting innocent people as if they were sitting ducks.
I think what has happened in Islamabad should not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to the current political leadership. I have always expounded the view that we should have job descriptions and selection criteria for ministers and other leaders and policy makers. For example what are the qualifications of the interior minister, other than the fact that a whole bunch of nincompoops have voted him to the national assembly on false promises?
The same holds true for the rest of that galaxy of greats and near greats that adorn the corridors of power in Islamabad.
First of all I would like to ask the interior minister to define the roles of the police departments/service, the FC and various other “law enforcement” agencies that he lords over?
Probably he will not know the answers to this/these question(s).
Next what is the internal security policy for the nation as whole, not just Raiwind, Lahore, and Punjab in that order, and not just security for the star spangled generals, judges, ministers and MPAS or MNAS?
Does the interior minister know the shelf life of a cartridge in the bandolier of a Police Constable, or when it was purchased, and to how many rain falls and sun shines that cartridge has been exposed to?
Probably it is beneath the dignity of that snotty, arrogant minister to know such trivia.
Why must the Police Constable die in the line of duty protecting a judge who does not value his (police constable’s) life?
What has the government done for Malakand, post 2009 conflict other than some nicely written fraudulent reports?
FATA has been in the eye of the storm for the past 10 years and other than drones, bombs and shells, what pacification measures have the government taken, other than to be scared witless of the terror merchants and their cronies?
We are adopting the line of appeasement not because of our love for the Taliban, but because we are scared blue of them.
Has the Interior Minister, or the PM or the CM ever been to the funeral of a police constable or an FC jawan killed in the line of duty in KPK?
I don’t think so.
Has a survey ever been conducted to know the views of the police or the FC?
I don’t think so.
If I were a Police constable or an FC jawan I would not throw my life away for the protection of some judge or politician.
Have the powers that be ever stood in the shoes of a police constable and thought of these things?
The post-event inquiries ordered by the Head Judge, the PM, CM and what not make me laugh.
It is a joke on the nation.
Pakistan can only get out of the morass it is in if we have honest, decent men and women at the helm of affairs, but unfortunately this will never be. The West is rooting for parliamentary democracy because they know that this sham “democracy” is our nemesis and will be the cause of our eventual downfall. Robber barons will keep on replacing one another and this game of musical chairs will keep on going, and we will keep on sinking deeper and deeper until the sands of time will cover us and there will be no trace left, and the freebooters will take their loot and head West, to out their miserable lives there.
For the present, this country is being run by mafias and unless their hold is broken, and they are made accountable for their actions, we can bid sayonara to any hope for the better.
Knife-wielding attackers, dressed in black clothes, stormed the railway station of provincial capital Kunming shortly after 9 p.m. on March 1, slaughtering those who could not flee fast enough.
Related: Chinese Communist System Rules! – Video – TIME.com — Narrator in regard to China’s political system: ” . . . notoriously opaque and mired, so far as we can tell, by corruption and a whole vast untold story of political intrigues . . . .”
As an editor and writer, one might say of my own node on the web that it is itself a vast territory devoted to information control.
That would be true.
However, I don’t gate what others may have to say and, in fact, invite a fairly broad (but must be civil by my own mysterious standards) conversation.
*
The “Islamists” are ruining Islam as may be Muslim apologists and others who bend and twist to make it come out okey dokey no matter what murders and persecution may take place in its name, but we have also intimations of “false flag” operations and thoroughly evil impression-making pacts, such as appears to exist between Assad and ISIS in Syria, that also are destroying those who have bought into them: they think they are getting away with something — they are not: all comes out in the sun when finally the sun again comes out.
China is dark.
Beijing glitters some today, and magnificent-dangerous projects like the Three Rivers Dam astonish those with more modest ambitions (I’ve no ambition myself to make the earth wobble on its axis), but at the top sit another national elite — another cloaked dictatorship defended by The Party and beyond the influence and reach of the common worker and starving child entrusted to the care of the monster that runs North Korea.
China will be dark — and so will Islam — if it cannot turn up all of its cards, leaving to the truly aberrant within its districts a much reduced channel for criminal pursuits, for in the information dark, one cannot separate sophisticated thieves from perhaps even the most compassionate and earnest of politicians.
One more thing in loose regard to some tribal societies and precepts: 90 percent charitable and 10 percent murderous and piratical does not work where the surrounding world desires, promotes, and demands from itself a good ethics and morality.
Note 5/8/2014: after so many months with this post live, I’ve elected to remove the image of two children hanging from rafters allegedly victims of the persecution of of the Muslim Rohingya in Burma. As agitprop or testament, the picture had a visceral impact in real time and space — i.e., it was not bounded in the long ago of historical artifact — and in part because they are someone’s children, nephew and niece, cousins, playmates, and so on, I thought it time to leave the picture at its central vector.
There are some other pictures published on BackChannels that I would regard as “war porn” — the artifacts of conflict-linked violence, from bombing to stoning to firing squad to beheading: how much do you need to see? How much do I need to inadvertently promote in relation to commentary?
For visual impact, there’s plenty for finding online, but here I hope to generate insight beside observation in politics and political psychology.
______
I fear to tread.
As noted (ftac) to the Pakistani friend who shared the image in a forum:
I’ll share this image. Although it seems natural for Muslims to view what is happening in Burma as a Buddhist-on-Muslim genocide, the state itself remains a military junta (with cosmetic reforms, if that much) hostile to Buddhist political power — its suppression of its own “Orange Revolution” was brutal — and otherwise cultivating through neglect the fears and resentments attending primitive tribalism. The Burmese leadership is holed up in its own paradise, basically, and the country as a country and culture have been left to go to hell, which is where they are today.
Parlayed in the way of other special interest religious press that plead their own victimization in the world, the above obscenity has at least as much to do with the global reserve of primitivism and tribalism as it does with Buddhist aggression, not that Buddhists and much of the rest of the world have not been pissed off by the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas (and only Buddhists would have the discipline to take that kind of aggression in stride). However, this is not to suggest that whatever is working within some portion of the Burmese Rakhine People does not conflate with their religious identity.
Dark Space
The photograph as downloaded from Live Leak seems to have no EXIF or IPTC data. Somebody made the recording somewhere, and it can neither be authenticated nor denied as recent or valid.
Dark space — censorious, cordoned, private — abets autocrats, dictators, malignant narcissists. Whether geographically convenient — distant from airports, communication centers, and roads — or enforced in back rooms in the mafia way, informationally “dark space” hides evil.
President Obama may come away from Burma with the pasted on rictus telling nothing about what he’s thinking, apart from choosing his battles carefully and disengaging from most, but, lately, it seems that was has been happening in Burma isn’t staying in Burma.
Local people and senior police officers, speaking off the record, told us the southern section of this beautiful island is gangster territory – the hood of human traffickers, who run a number of secret prisons from the jungle floor.
However, one may call the true region Thailand’s dark space and, perhaps, corrupt edges.
It’s hard to tell.
While “The Majors” in the news business dip their toes in the bloody waters, for the most part, there seems to be some up-to-the-minute coverage in the blogosphere (I’ve been working with this post for a couple of hours and am surprised that it took the search string “Burmese military Royhinga genocide” to find it: Rohingya Blogger
* * *
Since the second Rohingya massacre in October, the Burmese people have watched the world ignore or misrepresent what many experts are calling a genocide. President Thien Sein has been on a world tour, where he has been met with open arms, receiving a 21-gun salute in Australia and getting $5.9 billion of international debt canceled. Canada has opened its first-ever Burmese embassy, and multinational resource corporations are queuing for contracts. No one is in the mood to bring up genocide, even when a third massacre was openly planned for this month.
The initial enthusiasm surrounding recent political reform in Burma has recently given way to reminders of the dark legacy of the nation’s past. Among the most notable of these expositions was a July 2013 cover story published by Time Magazine in which journalist Hannah Beech showed that the specter of past crimes against humanity, including genocide, have resurfaced in Burma and that extremist forces in the country have focused their attention upon the Muslim minority within the Buddhist-majority state.
Today happens to be the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have been following via Facebook, but while it’s rightly a day for the Jews, my people, to honor the memory of the dead, to reflect on unimaginable suffering, to rejoice in life and statehood in the possession of the Land of Israel, it is also perhaps not the day to leave the next day to rest on the laurels of the last one.
This day, while reflecting on the murder of six million Jews and the miraculous survival and recovery of Jewry worldwide and the jewels that are Israel and Jerusalem that have stood symbolically and in real space and time against despotism for thousands of years,perhaps we should look again and with dogged persistence into the inhumanity displayed in the despicable photo that tops this post and the mentality in Burma, its government, and then in southeast Asia that has so brutalized and demeaned the Rohingya.
It is estimated that there are currently 800,000 to 1 million Rohingya living in Burma. Since the 1970’s the regime in Burma has been trying to drive out or restrict the Rohingya.[5] This sentiment was put into law in 1982 when it created a Citizenship Law, which mandates that a person must prove their Burmese ancestry dating back to 1823 in order to have freedom of movement and access to other basic rights such as education in the country.[6] (Recall: Armenian Genocide and Nazi Germany). This law is one of the prime reasons why the Rohingya have become “stateless.”
BackChannels 