A thick haze from Canadian wildfire smoke covered cities in the northeastern U.S. this week. U.S. East Coast residents are unaccustomed to such pollution. VOA Senior Washington Correspondent Carolyn Presutti explains what’s different and shows us the strange look of the New York City skyline.
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Month: June 2023
UN Peacekeeper Killed, 8 Seriously Injured in Northern Mali Attack
Attackers killed one U.N. peacekeeper and seriously injured eight others Friday in Mali’s Timbuktu region, an area where extremists continue to operate, the United Nations said.
The peacekeepers were part of a security patrol that was targeted first by an improvised explosive device and then by direct fire in the town of Ber, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
The United Nations joined the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, El-Ghassim Wane, in strongly condemning the attack, Dujarric said.
Mali has been ruled by a military junta since a 2020 coup against an elected president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. It has faced destabilizing attacks by armed extremist groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group since 2013.
In 2021, France and its European partners who were engaged in the fight against extremists in Mali’s north withdrew from the country after the junta brought in mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group.
The United States warned Mali’s military government in April that it would be “irresponsible” for the United Nations to continue deploying its more than 15,000 peacekeepers unless the western African nation ended restrictions, including on operating reconnaissance drones, and carried out political commitments toward peace and elections in March 2024.
The warning came as the U.N. Security Council considers three options proposed by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the peacekeeping mission’s future: increase its size, reduce its footprint, or withdraw troops and police and turn it into a political mission. Its current mandate expires on June 30.
Dujarric said the peacekeeper killed on Friday was the ninth to die in Mali this year.
“This tragic loss is a stark reminder of the risks that peacekeepers in Mali and other places around the world face while tirelessly working to bring stability and peace to the people of Mali,” he said.
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Al-Shabab Attacks Beachfront Hotel in Somalia’s Capital
Somalia security forces are trying to neutralize al-Shabab militants who attacked a beachfront hotel in Mogadishu on Friday evening.
Witnesses told VOA’s Somali Service that the assault began with at least two explosions outside the Pearl Beach Hotel, followed by gunmen storming the hotel.
Gunfire was heard with an unknown number of people trapped inside the building, witnesses said, while others escaped through the back doors and windows.
“Special elite forces gained access to the entry into the upper floors of the hotel,” one witness told VOA Somali.
The Al-Shabab group, affiliated with al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the attack.
“The mujahedeen managed to enter the Pearl Beach Hotel and are still fully in control,” the group said in a statement.
Abdikadir Abdirahman, director of the Aamin ambulance service, told local media that they had received more than six people who were wounded in the attack.
The hotel at the center of the attack is near Lido Beach, a popular destination for politicians and members of the Somali diaspora visiting the capital.
This incident occurred during a period of relative calm for Mogadishu after the government in mid-April deployed newly trained military police in and around the city. However, violence by the group has wreaked havoc in other parts of the country.
In a separate incident on Friday, at least 27 people including children were killed and more than 50 were injured in a massive blast from unexploded ordnance in the village of Muraale, located between Qoryooley and Jannaale districts.
“Some individuals had retrieved unexploded explosives from a nearby field and used it for fire to cook food, but tragically, the device exploded, resulting in the deaths of 27 people, including children, mother, father and youths,” Abdirahman Yusuf Abdinur, the mayor of Jannaale, told Somalia’s state media agency.
Earlier on Friday, Somalia announced its readiness to take over security responsibilities from the African Union peacekeeping mission in the country, with 2,000 AU troops set to leave Somalia by the end of June, in line with U.N. Security Council Resolutions 2628 and 2670.
Somalia’s Ministry of Defense said in a statement that it had recruited enough forces who will assume control of the security responsibilities currently handled by the AU troops.
The AU peace mission is expected to fully exit Somalia by December 31, 2024.
This story originated in VOA’s Somali Service.
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White House Warns Private Entities: Products Could Be Used in Iran Drones
The White House has warned private entities, especially technology companies, about the risks of their products ending up in Iranian hands. Russia has been using drones in its war against Ukraine, attacking cities and destroying infrastructure, and — according to the White House — is working with Iran to produce them from inside Russia.
VOA Persian’s White House correspondent Farhad Pouladi on Friday spoke with John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, about this and other issues the administration is tackling regarding the Islamic Republic.
VOA: On Iran and Russia cooperation on drones, what advice does the administration have by issuing this new advisory?
NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL COORDINATOR FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS JOHN KIRBY: Well, we want to make sure that private entities, certainly technology companies, understand the risks of their products potentially ending up in Iranian hands to be used for the manufacture of Iranian drones in this case that can be used to kill innocent Ukrainian people. So, the purpose of the advisory was really to make sure that the business community understands our concerns and is taking a look at its own procedures and procedures.
VOA: In the past two weeks, Iran unveiled a hypersonic missile called Fattah and a 2 kilometer-range missile called Kheibar. With the arms embargo under UNSC Resolution 2231 coming to an end in October, and considering Russia’s veto power, what is the U.S. hoping to do?
KIRBY: Well, I can’t get ahead of the U.N. process here. But you’re right. This activity by Iran, particularly with ballistic missiles, is a violation of 2231. Again, I won’t get ahead of the process here and where it’s going. Clear violations, we’re going to continue to work with our allies and partners at the U.N. and outside the U.N. to make sure that we’re putting enough pressure on Iran so that they stop this destabilizing activity. Their ballistic missile program continues to improve. It presents a clear threat to the region, certainly to our friends in the region. And now some of these capabilities, not ballistic missiles necessarily but in terms of UAVs, [unmanned aerial vehicles] now, this capability, this technology is being used inside Ukraine to kill innocent Ukrainians. And now we know that Iran is working with Russia on the potential construction of a manufacturing facility, or the conversion of one, to be used inside Russia to actually produce, organically, there inside Russia, Iranian-designed UAVs, so all the more reason to continue to put pressure on the regime.
VOA: So, Europeans swap their prisoners with Iran. What is the holdup for the Americans in Iran? You mentioned it behind the podium that a blue passport is a blue passport. So what is the holdup for them?
KIRBY: I would tell you that we never lose sight of our obligations, our sacred obligation to get home wrongfully detained Americans overseas, including in Iran. I don’t have anything with specific cases to talk to you today. I can just tell you that we never stopped working on this. We’re always going to try to find a way to bring these Americans home in a way that comports with our obligation to them but also with our national security. And we’re doing that right now.
VOA: The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] Board of Governors and the U.S. “urged Iran to fully cooperate with the agency.” And if it fails, the board should be prepared to hold Iran to account at the appropriate time. Isn’t that just a slap on the wrist from the U.S.?
KIRBY: We have done an awful lot inside the United States, just unilaterally let alone multilaterally with other countries, to hold the regime accountable for their destabilizing activities, for their constant pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities, for their support to Russia inside Ukraine, for their attacks on maritime shipping. I could go on, and on, and on. And we’re not going to take any tools off the table to continue to hold them accountable going forward. So I think in Tehran, again, I won’t speak for the regime, but I’d be hard pressed to look at the pressure they’re under and for them to believe that the United States is simply slapping them on the wrist. Now, yes, we want them to comply with the requirements of the IAEA as they should, as they must, but we’re not going to take any options off the table in terms of our ability to continue to put pressure on them so that they do comply, so that … we can get to a place where they don’t have a nuclear weapons capability.
VOA: Going to the sanctions issue as part of Iran’s nuclear deal, specifically on Iranian blocked assets, that can be used only for humanitarian relief and humanitarian commodities. Any changes to that, especially when it comes to news reports that Iran’s Central Bank chief was here?
KIRBY: I mean, I don’t have — I don’t have anything on those press reports. Look, we have sanctions in place that are going to stay in place to hold the regime accountable for their activities in the region, for the way they’re treating their own people, and certainly for the manner in which they’re supporting Ukraine — I’m sorry, Russia — in their fight inside Ukraine and killing innocent Ukrainian people.
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Republicans Rally Around Trump After Indictment
Within hours of former President Donald Trump’s announcement on Thursday evening that he had been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly mishandling classified information, senior Republicans in Washington and beyond had rallied behind him, using social media to denounce the charges as a misuse of authority by the administration of President Joe Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, currently the most powerful Republican in Washington, denounced the indictment in a tweet late Thursday. McCarthy called it “unconscionable” for the Biden administration to indict the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and the person most likely to challenge Biden in his reelection bid.
Even some of the Republicans who are challenging the former president for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 spoke out against the indictment. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dismissed the charges as a “weaponization” of the government, a word echoed by many of the former president’s supporters.
Republican leaders continued to express support Friday afternoon, after the indictment was unsealed, revealing that the former president is facing 37 felony counts. Trump is facing 31 counts of willful retention of national security documents, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, four counts related to concealing documents, and one count of making false statements and representations.
The indictment, among other things, cites a recording in prosecutors’ possession in which Trump describes a document he took from the White House related to confidential military planning. In the recording, he acknowledges that it is classified, and says that while he could have declassified it while president, he never did.
Trump claims innocence
Trump and his attorneys have repeatedly proclaimed his innocence. In an interview with CNN late Thursday, Trump’s then-attorney, Jim Trusty, called the charges “ludicrous” and said that Trump intends to mount a strong defense. He repeated the former president’s insistence that the charges are politically motivated.
Trusty also repeated a common complaint by Trump and his supporters, who point out that President Joe Biden, too, kept classified documents after his term as vice president ended in 2017. Biden, however, immediately returned the documents when they were discovered by an attorney working in his home in January of this year. Trump, by contrast, repeatedly denied possessing classified information until the FBI executed a search warrant on his Florida home last August and found dozens of secret documents.
On Friday, Trusty and another attorney who had been representing the former president announced that they had resigned and were no longer representing Trump.
The charges against Trump were filed by special counsel Jack Smith, a politically independent former head of the Department of Justice’s public integrity unit and a former war crimes prosecutor in The Hague.
As a special counsel, Smith operates outside the direct supervision of the Department of Justice, an arrangement put in place because of the political sensitivity of an investigation involving a former president and current presidential candidate. In addition to the documents case, Smith is also overseeing an investigation of Trump’s effort to overturn his election loss to Biden in 2020, which led to the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
Retaliation promised
McCarthy on Thursday tweeted, “Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America. It is unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him. Joe Biden kept classified documents for decades.”
He added, “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
How Republicans will seek to hold someone accountable for the indictment is unclear. Democrats immediately warned McCarthy against using Congress to interfere in the federal justice system.
Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress likewise assailed the decision to charge him.
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz wrote on Twitter, “This phony Boxes Hoax indictment against President Trump reflects the most severe election interference on the part of the federal government that we have EVER seen!”
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked law enforcement agencies on Twitter for participating in the investigation of the former president. “It’s shameful. Pathetic really. Ultimately the biggest hypocrisy in modern day history. A complete and total failure to the American people. A stain on our nation that the FBI and DOJ are so corrupt and they don’t even hide it anymore.”
Campaign trail
Several of the Republicans challenging Trump for the GOP nomination in 2024 had been cautiously increasing their criticism of the former president, concerned about alienating his significant base of supporters within the party.
However, on Thursday, many of Trump’s rivals were quick to take his side against the federal government.
“The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” wrote DeSantis, currently Trump’s leading opponent. “We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?”
De Santis was referring to HIllary Clinton, the former Democratic presidential nominee who was investigated, but never charged, with mishandling classified information, and Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who is currently under federal investigation.
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the U.N., said Friday, “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country.” She added, “The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics.”
In an interview on Fox News, Senator Tim Scott, also a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, called the charges against Trump an “injustice” and said, “What we’ve seen over the last several years is the weaponization of the Department of Justice against a former president.”
Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman running for the Republican presidential nomination, recorded a video in which he denounced the prosecution of Trump and said that, if elected, he would pardon the former president.
Some break ranks
Some Republicans were more willing to consider the validity of the charges.
“Let’s see what the facts are when any possible indictment is released,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tweeted before the indictment was unsealed. “As I have said before, no one is above the law, no matter how much they wish they were. We will have more to say when the facts are revealed.” As of Friday evening, he had not released any further comments.
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson released a statement calling on the former president to withdraw from the race for the Republican nomination.
“Donald Trump’s actions — from his willful disregard for the Constitution to his disrespect for the rule of law — should not define our nation or the Republican Party,” Hutchinson said. “This is a sad day for our country. While Donald Trump is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the ongoing criminal proceedings will be a major distraction. This reaffirms the need for Donald Trump to respect the office and end his campaign.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared to try to have it both ways. In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Pence said that he was “deeply troubled” by the decision to charge the former president, but quickly followed up with, “But let me be very clear: No one is above the law.”
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Amnesty International to Zimbabwe Leader: Don’t Sign ‘Patriotic Act’ Into Law
Amnesty International on Friday called on Zimbabwe’s president not to sign into law the so-called “Patriotic Act” that lawmakers approved this week.
The government says the proposed law, which would authorize penalties against people found guilty of damaging Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and national interests, is justified and must be enacted. Critics say the law will curb freedom of expression during the August elections.
Amnesty International urged President Emmerson Mnangagwa not to sign the measure, known officially as the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Amendment Bill 2022.
The bill, if made law, would authorize jail terms of up 20 years against those found guilty of “willfully injuring the sovereignty and national interest of Zimbabwe.”
It would also allow the death penalty for a person found to have advocated for international sanctions that harm the country or its people.
Amnesty said the proposed law would effectively give authorities greater power to unduly restrict human rights and silence those perceived as being critical of the government, such as political activists, human rights defenders, journalists, civil society leaders, opposition parties and whistle-blowers.
Lucia Masuka, Amnesty’s executive director in Zimbabwe, said her organization was deeply concerned by this week’s passing of the bill by the Senate.
“The weaponization of the law is a desperate and patent move to curtail the rights to freedom of expression and to public participation in elections due in August this year,” she said. “The bill’s deliberately vague and overly broad provisions on damaging Zimbabwe’s interest and sovereignty, including by calling for economic sanctions, flies in the face of Zimbabwe’s international human rights obligations. All laws must be defined precisely, allowing people to know exactly which acts will make them criminally liable.”
But Ziyambi Ziyambi, Zimbabwe’s justice minister, said the proposed law would target only citizens who plan on harming the nation with the help of foreigners.
“The provision says this: If you go and meet a foreign government or an agent of a foreign government, and [the intention of the meeting] is to ensure that particular country imposes a trade embargo on Zimbabwe or sanctions, and you fully participate and you urge them to do that, knowing fully well that your action will injure the sovereignty of the country, you are guilty of an offense,” Ziyambi said. “Are you saying it is good?”
He added that even if the measure was enacted, Zimbabweans would still be allowed to say anything and even criticize Mnangagwa.
“The law has nothing to do with Mnangagwa,” Ziyambi said. “You can insult him as long as you do not infringe on existing laws; you won’t be arrested. We are saying we can disagree, but not to the extent of advocating for the generality of the population to suffer.”
Musa Kika, a constitutional lawyer who heads the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, said enactment of the legislation would be unfortunate.
“The government has committed itself to certain governance reforms in light of arrears and debt clearance process,” Kika said. “Under governance there are issues to do with constitutionalism and civic space, et cetera. This kind of law takes back or takes away whatever commitments it has made in that process. This is an unconstitutional law – it infringes on all sorts of civil and political rights that the constitution gives.”
He added that the bill could be struck off Zimbabwe’s statutes if challenged in court.
But Rutendo Matinyarare, chairman of the Zimbabwe Anti-Sanctions Movement, disagreed.
“Amnesty International is not a multilateral human rights institution,” Matinyarare said. “So they do not qualify to speak on human rights issues. That is the prerogative of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Secondly, Amnesty International is paid, so it is not an independent institution; it is an institution paid to advance American and Western interests over Third World interests and African interests.
“On the issue of the Patriotic Bill, they have not given any evidence how the Patriotic Bill is going to close down dissent, because there is nowhere in the Patriotic Bill that it says Zimbabweans are not allowed to criticize their government.”
Mnangagwa has not said when or whether he will sign the bill into law.
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UN Sending Home Peacekeepers Implicated in Sexual Abuse
The United Nations said Friday that it is sending home a unit of 60 Tanzanian peacekeepers from the Central African Republic, after a preliminary investigation found credible evidence that 11 of them allegedly sexually exploited and abused at least four victims.
“The unit has been relocated to another base while investigations continue, and its members have been confined to the barracks, in order to protect victims and the integrity of the investigation,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. “The unit will be repatriated once their presence is no longer required by the investigation.”
Dujarric said the victims are being provided with care and support by the mission’s humanitarian partners. He added that Tanzanian authorities have been notified and are deploying their own investigators to the Central African Republic.
“In reaffirming their commitment to zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse, the Tanzanian authorities noted the seriousness of the allegations and have committed to taking the necessary action to address these matters,” Dujarric said.
VOA has asked Tanzania’s U.N. ambassador for comment.
According to the Department of Peacekeeping’s website, Tanzania has about 1,586 uniformed personnel in the C.A.R. as part of the more than 17,000-strong mission, known by its acronym, MINUSCA.
The U.N. has the authority to repatriate international peacekeepers when there is credible evidence that members of a military or police unit have engaged in widespread or systemic sexual exploitation or abuse.
Dujarric said the Tanzanian peacekeepers were deployed at a temporary operating base in the western part of the Central African Republic.
The country has been locked in a cycle of political instability, violence and human rights abuses since the 1990s. Intense sectarian fighting in 2013 led to the U.N. authorizing the stabilization mission to the country the following year.
Since it was established, MINUSCA has had repeated problems with international peacekeepers engaging in sexual exploitation and abuse, including the abuse of children.
“The United Nations remains committed to robustly implementing the secretary-general’s zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse,” Dujarric told reporters.
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Damage Assessment of Ukraine Dam Disaster Underway
From up close, the catastrophic destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine appears worse than how it’s depicted in news reports and far off satellite imagery, according to U.N. officials who assessed conditions in the area on Friday.
“We have been visiting this morning with the authorities the communities, the small villages along the river that have been completely submerged by the flooding,” said Denise Brown, one of several U.N. officials who addressed journalists via satellite from the town of Bilozerka, on the west bank of Dnipro River.
“The status situation is dramatic,” said Brown, humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine for the U.N. office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, OCHA.
“This is a town that is five kilometers from the front line,” Brown said. “Daily shelling, including yesterday, and now because of the destruction of the bridge, which is a result of the war, and now this flooding, which came in the middle of the night. It came very fast, very quickly and people were totally taken by surprise.
“We visited a few homes this morning with people who are, as you can imagine, totally distraught by this latest catastrophe to hit them,” she said. “But I must say, as always, they are incredibly resilient and vowing to stay in their homes.”
Ukrainian authorities report at least 80 towns and villages in the Kherson region are fully or partially flooded, as well as thousands of hectares of agricultural land, with some 17,000 people in government-controlled areas affected by the flooding.
Shabia Mantoo, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, said, “Many thousands more in the areas under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, to [which] humanitarian organizations currently have no access, have also been affected.”
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that it has repeatedly asked the Russian Federation for access to the territories it occupies.
“The Russian Federation has denied us this access,” said Jeremy Laurence, spokesman for the OHCHR. “Not only OHCHR monitors, but humanitarian actors cannot get into the occupied territories.”
He added, “We reiterate the broader U.N. call to the Russian Federation to grant access to the occupied territories, to assist clinicians who have suffered from the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the destruction of the Khakhova dam.”
Humanitarian agencies report that Ukrainian authorities, the International Red Cross, as well as U.N., and non-governmental organizations reacted quickly after the dam broke on June 6 by bringing in relief supplies and aiding victims caught in the disaster.
Mantoo said the UNHCR was participating in an inter-agency convoy of five trucks that will be delivering essential relief supplies Friday and Saturday to the worst affected areas of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
“With interagency partner agencies, we are also currently carrying out damage assessments to understand the scale of the impact of the flooding,” she said.
After humanitarian agencies get on top of the short-term risks, they will have to concentrate on dealing with the more complex long-term risks threatening the local communities.
OCHA coordinator Brown cited the dangers posed by unexploded landmines in the heavily infested Kherson region as a major long-term problem. She said a U.N. mine expert was working with the U.N. system to produce a map of areas where mines were likely to be located and to communicate the threats posed by those weapons to the population, especially to children, who are most at risk of being killed and maimed.
“Mines may have moved and so when the flood waters recede, there may be mines where there were not mines before, which means there are not any markings. And this is a significant risk,” she said.
Laurence agreed noting that “the whole flood zone is a mine-contaminated area.”
However, he added that circumstances regarding the destruction of the dam remained unclear. Therefore, he said that it was “premature to examine the question whether a war crime may have been committed” by Russia in its attacks on the dam and its ongoing shelling of people trying to recover from the disaster.
“We reiterate our call for an independent, impartial, thorough, and transparent investigation,” he said.
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Trump Case Indictment
Here is the 49-page unsealed indictment in USA v Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
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Macron Visits Victims of Stabbing that Shocked France
French President Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his wife, Brigitte, traveled to the French Alps Friday to be with families of the victims stabbed Thursday in a lakeside park in the city of Annecy.
The couple’s first stop was a hospital in the French city of Grenoble, where three of the four young children are receiving treatment.
Government officials said all four children have undergone surgery and are “under constant medical surveillance,” with one child in critical condition.
The fourth child is being treated in Geneva, in Switzerland.
It is not immediately clear whether the president and his wife will go to Geneva.
A man stabbed the children and two adults at the park Thursday morning in an attack Macron said shocked the country.
All four children suffered life-threatening knife wounds, lead prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said. The youngest is 22 months old, two are 2 years old and the oldest is 3, the prosecutor said.
Police quickly detained the suspect — a 31-year-old Syrian national. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said the suspect has refugee status in Sweden.
“The nation is in shock,” Macron tweeted. He described the assault as an “attack of absolute cowardice.”
Video appearing to show the attack circulated on social media. In the video, a man in dark glasses with a blue scarf covering his head wielded a knife as people screamed for help.
One woman tried to fend off the attacker in the enclosed play park, but she could not stop him from leaning over her stroller and stabbing downward multiple times.
Two of the young victims were French. The other two were tourists, one British, the other Dutch.
Two adults also suffered knife wounds. One of the adults was also injured by a shot fired by police as they were arresting the suspect, Bonnet-Mathis said.
In Paris, lawmakers paused a debate to hold a moment of silence for the victims.
The National Assembly president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, said, “There are some very young children who are in critical condition, and I invite you to respect a minute of silence for them, for their families, and so that, we hope, the consequences of this very grave attack do not lead to the nation grieving.”
“Nothing more abominable than to attack children,” Braun-Pivet said on Twitter.
Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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Concerns Rise Over Gag Order on South African Journalism Outlet
Two very different cases in South Africa this week have both confirmed the country’s position as a bastion of the free press, and conversely also shown how the media is under threat.
In the latter case, investigative news website amaBunghane was slapped with a gag order after an influential businessman went to court alleging leaked documents — which amaBunghane had used in reporting critical of his company — had been stolen.
AmaBhungane was ordered by a judge to return the documents and cease any further reporting on the company, Moti Group – which is alleged to have been involved in wrongdoing and then orchestrating a PR blitz to try and cover it up. The company denies the charges.
When amaBhungane was informed of the judge’s order, which had been heard in secret, the media group sought an urgent reconsideration, and a second judge decided they would not be forced to hand over the leaked documents. The second judge expressed surprise and consternation at the first judge’s decision.
However, the journalists are still barred from further reporting on the Moti group until the case is heard in court.
“Were this order to stand, it would set a dangerous precedent. … Such an order undoubtedly has a chilling effect, especially on investigative journalism,” Sam Sole, a journalist with amaBhungane, told VOA.
Angela Quintal, head of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Africa Program, echoed his concerns.
“We hope that when the matter is fully ventilated in open court, investigative journalism in the public interest and the protection of confidential sources that are key to exposing massive, alleged corruption in South Africa and elsewhere will be vindicated and not eroded,” Quintal said.
“Not to do so would mean any party can stop investigative journalists from exposing corruption or any other matter of public interest by claiming that the information relied upon is stolen, endangering the lives of whistleblowers or confidential sources by forcing disclosure,” she added.
Investigations essential to democracy
From being one of the countries with the most censored press during the apartheid regime, the advent of democracy in 1994 saw South Africa – which now has one of the world’s most liberal constitutions – become one of the globe’s best places for journalists to work.
Reporters Without Borders’ 2023 Press Freedom Index ranked South Africa as the 25th most free country for press in the world, out of 180 countries. It beat the U.S., which ranked 45th, as well as the U.K.
South African journalists work to expose wrongdoing with strong investigative units at outlets like amaBhungane, Daily Maverick and elsewhere, informing the public about the numerous corruption scandals in government – especially under former President Jacob Zuma.
Without the digging by the media, the influence peddling and assault on state institutions during Zuma’s tenure that became known in South Africa as “State Capture,” might never have come to light. Zuma is currently on trial in a separate corruption case.
A lot of that reporting relied on leaks and whistleblowers, which is why the Moti Group’s gag order poses such a threat, according to independent experts.
“The original judge set a very worrying precedent – of the sort we have not seen since the apartheid days,” Anton Harber, professor of journalism at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told VOA.
“If you label leaks like this as stolen goods then you would put an end to most journalism-based leaks,” he added, pointing to the Pentagon Papers and Edward Snowden’s revelations as examples.
Sole said the Moti Group’s allegation that the documents were stolen was unproven.
“And we maintain that the constitutional protection of free expression entails, inter alia, that regardless of the manner in which information has been obtained by a source, it is not unlawful for journalists to hold any information provided by a source, provided they do so in the public interest,” he added.
The South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) is supporting amaBhungane in the case, with executive director Reggy Moalusi telling VOA, “The gag is certainly a threat to press freedom as it seeks to stop any publication of the work that amaBhungane does, despite this being in the public interest.”
A court date to try to overturn the entire initial order is set for June 27.
The pen is mightier than … the president
While experts agree the amaBhungane case is concerning, there was also a positive story this week relating to journalism in South Africa.
One of the country’s most renowned legal reporters, Karyn Maughan, was victorious when a court prohibited former President Zuma from continuing his private prosecution of her.
Quintal said the throwing out of the case was “a legal smackdown for former South African President Jacob Zuma and a massive victory for Karyn Maughan.”
Zuma had tried to prosecute Maughan, who writes for online publication News24, along with state advocate Billy Downer, after Downer allegedly leaked the ex-president’s confidential medical records to the reporter. The court found that the information was already public.
Such so-called SLAPP lawsuits (strategic litigation against public participation) are often aimed at silencing whistleblowers or preventing media from reporting.
But the court found Zuma’s private prosecution amounted to an “abuse of power,” which stemmed from his “personal animosity” toward the reporter. The judges also said Maughan’s constitutional right to freedom of expression had been violated.
“I’m very grateful that I live and operate in a constitutional democracy that recognizes the right to freedom of the press, and that that right has been explicitly referenced in this judgment,” Maughan told VOA.
“I think it’s a victory for all the people living in South Africa, because ultimately if you want an effective democracy, you need a free press that’s able to operate without fear or favor, and that’s what this judgment recognizes,” she added.
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Fuel Prices Soar in Cameroon After Nigeria Scraps Fuel Subsidy
In parts of Cameroon, the price of gasoline has doubled since Nigeria’s new President Bola Tinubu scrapped a government fuel subsidy in the oil rich nation. Nigeria is one of Africa’s leading oil producers and subsidized petroleum products are routinely smuggled into Cameroon and sold by the roadside. Now, with the subsidy in place, business people in Cameroon say they are struggling to cope as fuel prices rise.
Traders in towns and villages on Cameroon’s border with Nigeria say business has suffered since Nigerian President Bola Tinubu announced the end of fuel subsidies on May 29.
Thousands of Cameroonians and Nigerians trade cattle, cotton, foods and other products across their countries’ 2,000-kilometer long border.
Thirty-three-year old Alphonsine Ngaba buys body lotions, perfumes and cosmetic products in Nigeria for sale in Limani, a town in northern Cameroon.
She says the end of the fuel subsidy has led to a fuel shortage, hampering business on both sides of the border.
Ngaba says at least a hundred merchants returning from Nigeria have been stranded for three days in Limani, where several dozen transport trucks, vehicles and motorcycles are grounded by fuel scarcity. She says within the past two weeks a fuel shortage has hit towns and villages on Cameroon’s border that solely depend on Nigeria for petrol.
Ngaba said a few drivers entering Cameroon complain that fuel is expensive in Nigeria and have more than doubled the fares they charge to transport goods.
Cameroon’s National Institute of Statistics reports that in 2022, more than 30 percent of Cameroonians bought petrol from Nigeria. A liter of Nigerian petrol sold for about 50 cents, while petrol supplied by Cameroon’s state oil firm SONARA sold at more than one dollar.
Nigerian President Tinubu cited heavy smuggling of petrol into Cameroon, Chad, Benin and other countries as a reason for halting the subsidy.
Donatus Manga imports petrol from Nigeria and sells in Buea, a town near Cameroon’s southwestern border with Nigeria.
He says the price of petrol from Nigeria has more than doubled in the past 10 days, cutting deeply into his business.
“Business is quite slow and difficult,” said Manga. “At first, I could sell up to 2,000 liters a day, but as of now, I hardly sell up to 200 liters a day due to the rise in the price of petrol from Cross River state, Nigeria.”
Manga said his supplier has been unable to import petrol from Nigeria’s Cross River state for two weeks.
Civilians in Cameroon’s border towns and villages say the fuel situation has also caused a 15 percent increase in prices of basic commodities and motor spare parts imported from Nigeria.
To ease the fuel shortage, the government of Cameroon says it will supply petrol to towns and villages in need.
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Reflection: Historic Trump Indictment Opens New Chapter in US Politics
Donald Trump made history on Thursday. The 78-year-old former president and front-runner in next year’s Republican presidential primaries announced he has been indicted on federal criminal charges. None of his predecessors, since the United States declared independence in 1776, has ever faced such legal peril.
While politics is a zero-sum game in many countries, including some democracies where rival leaders will use the levers of powers to neutralize their predecessors, that has not traditionally been the case in America.
When he was president, Trump’s critics accused him of lurching towards authoritarianism and trying to use his political office to stay in power after he lost his bid for reelection.
Of course Trump, in his trademark approach to politics, is now alleging just such an abuse of office, accusing the Democratic administration of Joe Biden of weaponizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its parent agency, the Department of Justice, in “warfare for the law.”
Trump, who like all defendants is presumed innocent pending the outcome of a trial, has been claiming the system is rigged against him since the first votes were cast in the Iowa caucuses in 2016. Back then he blamed rival candidate Ted Cruz and demanded, without success, that “a new election should take place or Cruz results (be) nullified.”
Even when he won the general election later that year, he claimed fraud. Trump won the Electoral College vote (based on a majority of votes in each individual state) but lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump stated without any evidence.
During his four years in office, in which he was impeached twice by the House but not convicted in the Senate, Trump repeatedly stated he was the target of witch hunts and that he never did anything wrong. There was the “perfect phone call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he repeatedly pressed for the foreign leader to investigate Biden in a suggested quid pro quo. That led to the first impeachment.
Then there was the ignominious day at the U.S. Capitol when Trump supporters stormed the symbol of American democracy after their president incited them to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Trump returned to the White House while the crowd headed into the Capitol. He then tweeted that his vice president, Mike Pence (now a Republican primary opponent) “didn’t have the courage” to thwart the ceremonial counting of ballots to declare Biden the victor of the 2020 election.
That led to Trump’s second impeachment in the waning days of his presidency.
A signature line of his political rallies was: “We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never, ever back down.”
During his presidency, Trump sometimes did back away from his more outlandish proposals, appointments and rhetoric, usually under intense pressure from Cabinet secretaries, key aides and family members. Trump always seemed to regret it, however, telling his lawyers and his advisers that he trusted his instincts more than their expert advice. That usually put him into greater jeopardy.
Eventually he had a falling out with nearly everyone in his inner circle. Some of those whom he cast out would occasionally return to the fold. Top White House officials observed Trump seemed to have no true friends; all relationships were transactional and loyalty to the boss (who had never worked for anyone except his own father) was the ultimate desirable trait.
Legal observers have little doubt Trump will fight these federal charges every step of the way and is unlikely to plea bargain, as that would be tantamount to admitting guilt to something, not a Trump trait.
Within hours of announcing the indictment, Trump sent out fundraising letters imploring supporters: “Please make a contribution to peacefully stand with me today and prove that YOU will NEVER surrender our country to the radical Left.” The note concluded with suggested contributions between $24 and $250.
Political observers do not expect the indictment to hurt Trump much with his core supporters, about a third of Republican Party voters. But overall, before news of the fresh charges, six in 10 Americans told pollsters Trump should not be president again.
The current expectation is that with perhaps a dozen other Republicans vying for the nomination by the time the first 2024 votes are cast at the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, the former president will remain the front-runner and be the most likely to capture his party’s nomination for a third consecutive time – although this time while battling serious criminal charges of violating the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiring to obstruct justice.
Only once has an American president, out of office, returned to the White House. That was Grover Cleveland after defeating the incumbent president, Benjamin Harrison, in 1892.
Only once, in 1920, has a relevant political party nominated a convicted felon. That was Eugene V. Debs, who had run unsuccessfully for president four times previously and was a household name of the era.
Debs had been convicted of violating the Espionage and Sedition acts but was chosen by the Socialist Party again in 1920. He was allowed by authorities to issue one written statement weekly from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He captured more than three percent of the vote in the general election. He remained a popular figure after President Warren Harding pardoned him the following year.
If Trump loses the 2024 election for a second time, would Biden (the presumptive Democratic Party nominee again), even consider pardoning his vanquished rival if the Republican is convicted of one or more felonies?
Many in America never forgave Gerald Ford for pardoning his fellow Republican Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than face certain impeachment for the Watergate scandal. And Ford paid the price in an election loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Biden talks often of healing and bridging the deepest political divide since the Civil War. A devout Catholic of Irish ancestry, he takes solace in the words of popes who call for forgiveness and in the lines of his favorite poet.
Perhaps in Seamus Heaney’s line there lies a hint:
History says, Don’t hope
On the side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.
Editor’s note: VOA’s chief national correspondent Steve Herman, was VOA’s White House bureau chief during the Trump administration and extensively interacted with the 45th president.
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Russia Receiving Hundreds of Iranian Drones, Plans to Produce Them: White House
Moscow has not only received hundreds of Iranian drones but is working with Iran to produce them from inside Russia, according to the White House — a sign of the deepening military partnership between the two countries.
“We have information that Russia is receiving materials from Iran needed to build a UAV manufacturing plant inside Russia,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby in a statement sent to VOA Thursday. “This plant could be fully operational early next year.”
The White House released satellite imagery of the planned location of the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) manufacturing plant in Russia’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone.
Kirby said that currently, drones are built in Iran, shipped across the Caspian Sea from Amirabad, Iran to Makhachkala, Russia, and then used operationally by Russian forces against Ukraine.
On Friday, the Biden Administration is releasing a new advisory to help businesses and other governments “better understand the risks posed by Iran’s UAV program and the illicit practices Iran uses to procure components for it.”
“This will help governments and businesses put in place measures to ensure they are not inadvertently contributing to Iran’s UAV program,” Kirby added.
Russia has increasingly deployed drones to bombard Ukrainian cities and targets in recent weeks. They are “a difficult target because Ukraine has limited air defense resources,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat told VOA Friday.
“Iranian drones are hard to detect; they are slow,” he said. “The Shaheds fly very low, use the river delta and forest, and drop from the radars.”
Ihnat noted that Moscow sends the drones to all parts of Ukrainian territory from different directions. “Ukraine Air defense today is focused on the protection of big towns, infrastructure objects, and critical infrastructure,” he said.
JCPOA sunset
This latest revelation is part of the administration’s periodic release of intelligence findings about Russia’s war in Ukraine, with the goal of further isolating Moscow and its supporters.
The timing coincides with sunset clauses in the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which imposed international restrictions on Iranian weapons.
Many of the JCPOA’s sunset clauses were already made obsolete after President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions, which led Iran to breach its obligations and enrich uranium to higher levels beginning in July 2019.
Still, since the JCPOA was never officially nullified by its other signatories — Iran, the European Union, Russia and China — from a legal standpoint the sunset clauses matter.
In October 2023, the JCPOA bans on Iran’s import and export of missile-related technology will formally end, including on missiles and drones with a range of 300 kilometers (186 miles) or more.
In other words, in a few months it will be officially legal to trade Iranian missiles and drones.
The U.S. and partners want to alert businesses around the world about the Iran-Russia cooperation on drones and the drones’ devastating impact in the war in Ukraine, said Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. The goal is to interrupt the production of the drones, which depend on components available on world markets.
“The U.S. clearly wants to put businesses on notice in a preemptive move and to highlight the reputational risks,” he told VOA.
While the administration may try to disrupt the drones’ production chain, Vatanka is skeptical that Western political pressure will compel Iranian leaders to rethink their military cooperation with Moscow.
“Tehran has basically decided to put its money on Russia,” he said. “The calculation is as simple as it is cynical: By supporting Russia today in Ukraine, Iran can hope that Moscow will back Iran in its conflict with the U.S.”
Two-way support
As it purchases Iranian drones, mainly the Shahed-136, Russia has provided Iran with “unprecedented defense cooperation, including on missiles, electronics, and air defense,” Kirby said, adding that Tehran is seeking to purchase billions of dollars of additional Russian military equipment, including attack helicopters, radars, and YAK-130 combat trainer aircraft.
Earlier this year, Iran announced that it had finalized a deal to buy Russian Su-35 fighter jets.
“This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Iran’s neighbors, and to the international community,” Kirby said, adding that the administration is working with allies and partners to hold Moscow and Tehran accountable, including through existing and additional sanctions and export restrictions.
Collaboration between Tehran and Moscow is likely to continue, said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution.
He said the U.S. should be mindful of Moscow garnering support from other partners, namely Beijing.
“We should be careful not to so demonize China,” he told VOA. “In regard to the Ukraine conflict in particular as well as current geopolitics more generally, that we also drive Beijing and Moscow closer together under the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The Shahed drones, often called suicide or kamikaze drones, have an operational range of around 2,000 kilometers. Packed with explosives, they can be directed at targets and detonate upon impact like a missile.
They can also be launched in a swarm where several of them are launched at the same time in formation.
On Friday, the Russian military mistakenly identified one of its own drones as Ukrainian and took it down.
Myroslava Gongadze contributed to this report.
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Smoke Gives US East Coast, Canada New View of Fire Threat
Images of smoke obscuring the New York skyline and the Washington Monument this week have given the world a new picture of the perils of wildfire, far from where blazes regularly turn skies into hazardous haze.
A third day of unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires may have been an unnerving novelty for millions of people on the U.S. East Coast, but it was a reminder of conditions routinely troubling the country’s West — and a wake-up call about the future, scientists say.
“This is kind of an astounding event” but likely to become more common amid global warming, said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College geography professor and climate scientist. “This is something that we, as the eastern side of the country, need to take quite seriously.”
Millions of residents could see that for themselves Thursday. The conditions sent asthma sufferers to hospitals, delayed flights, postponed ballgames and even pushed back a White House Pride Month celebration. The fires sent plumes of fine particulate matter as far away as North Carolina and northern Europe and parked clumps of air rated unhealthy or worse over the heavily populated Eastern Seaboard.
At points this week, air quality in places including New York, the nation’s most populous city, nearly hit the top of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s air-pollution scale. Local officials urged people to stay indoors as much as possible and wear face masks when they venture out.
Such conditions are nothing new — indeed, increasingly frequent — on the U.S. West Coast, where residents were buying masks and air filters even before the coronavirus pandemic and have become accustomed to checking air quality daily in summertime. Since 2017, California has seen eight of its 10 largest wildfires and six of the most destructive.
The hazardous air has sometimes forced children, older adults and people with asthma and other respiratory conditions to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Officials have opened smoke shelters for people who are homeless or who might not have access to clean indoor air.
So what’s the big deal about the smoke out East?
“The West has always burned, as has Canada, but what’s important now is that we’re getting these massive amounts of smoke in a very populated region, so many, many people are getting affected,” said Loretta Mickley, the co-leader of Harvard University’s Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.
Fueled by an unusually dry and warm period in spring, the Canadian fire season that is just getting started could well become the worst on record. More than 400 blazes burned Thursday. Over a third are in Quebec, where Public Safety Minister François Bonnardel said no rain is expected until next week and temperatures are predicted to rise.
He said there have been no reports of injuries, deaths or home damage so far from the fires, but it remained unclear Thursday when more than 12,000 evacuees from various communities would be able to return. Manon Cyr, mayor of the evacuated town of Chibougamau, said she advised residents to be “Zen and patient. That’s the most important.”
But, she noted, the real solution will be a good dose of rain.
In neighboring Ontario, a haze hung over Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, where many school recess breaks, day care center activities and outdoor recreation programs were canceled or moved inside.
U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that hundreds of American firefighters and support personnel have been in Canada since May, and that he’d offered Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “any additional help Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the effort to put out these fires.” The two spoke Wednesday.
Wildfires aren’t the only air-quality problems that beset major population centers around the globe.
In Beijing, for example, decades of sandstorms blowing in from the Mongolian plains have mixed with human-made pollution, sometimes making neighboring buildings invisible to one another. Commuters have even been spotted walking down streets wearing plastic bags over their heads to insulate against particulates.
Many African countries in and near the Sahara Desert, too, regularly grapple with bad air mainly because of sandstorms. Senegal, in particular, has endured years of unsafe levels of air pollution, which is causing asthma and other respiratory diseases, climate experts say.
Chemically, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than typical urban pollution, but with an asterisk: With smog, “the problem is you’re in it all the time,” says Jonathan Deason, an environmental and energy management professor at George Washington University.
In New York City, Health Department spokesperson Pedro Frisneda said emergency rooms were seeing a “higher than usual” number of asthma-related visits from the blanket of smoke, estimating patients were in the “low hundreds.”
The city public school system — the nation’s largest — said Friday’s classes would be conducted remotely, a decision that mostly affected high schoolers because most other pupils already had a scheduled day off. Motorists even got a break Thursday and Friday from having to move their cars for street cleaning.
In Washington, a big Pride Month celebration on the White House’s South Lawn was moved from Thursday to Saturday, and a Washington Nationals-Arizona Diamondbacks game was postponed. Local officials closed public parks and suspended some road work.
Philadelphia ended trash collection ended early, for the sake of sanitation employees. Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city, opened spaces usually used as hot-weather cooling centers so that residents could escape the unhealthy air.
A Chris Stapleton concert at a Syracuse amphitheater was pushed back, fireworks were canceled at Niagara Falls and racing was canceled at New York’s Belmont Park two days before the famed Belmont Stakes. It wasn’t yet clear whether the Triple Crown race itself might be affected; Gov. Kathy Hochul said that would depend on the air quality at the track Saturday.
And in central Pennsylvania, Country Meadows Retirement Communities temporarily closed walking areas and outdoor courtyards designated for residents in secured memory support units — “they may or may not recognize when they experience respiratory distress,” explained company spokesperson Kelly Kuntz. All 2,300 residents of its 10 facilities were asked to cancel outdoor trips and strenuous outdoor activities.
“Bocce is huge,” Kuntz said. “No bocce ball until this is done.”
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US Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Black Alabama Voters
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case from Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting a Republican-led effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh aligned with the court’s liberals in affirming a lower court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The state now will have to draw a new map for next year’s elections.
The decision was keenly anticipated for its potential effect on control of the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives. Because of the ruling, new maps are likely in Alabama and Louisiana that could allow Democratic-leaning Black voters to elect their preferred candidates in two more congressional districts.
The outcome was unexpected in that the court had allowed the challenged Alabama map to be used for the 2022 elections, and in arguments last October the justices appeared willing to make it harder to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining “to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests.”
Roberts also was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.
The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces “Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.”
The Biden administration sided with the Black voters in Alabama.
Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the ruling: “Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race.”
Evan Milligan, a Black voter and the lead plaintiff in the case, said the ruling was a victory for democracy and people of color.
“We are grateful that the Supreme Court upheld what we knew to be true: that everyone deserves to have their vote matter and their voice heard. Today is a win for democracy and freedom not just in Alabama but across the United States,” Milligan said.
Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl said in a statement that state lawmakers would comply with the ruling. “Regardless of our disagreement with the Court’s decision, we are confident the Alabama Legislature will redraw district lines that ensure the people of Alabama are represented by members who share their beliefs, while following the requirements of applicable law,” Wahl said.
But Steve Marshall, the state’s Republican attorney general, said he expects to continue defending the challenged map in federal court, including at a full trial. “Although the majority’s decision is disappointing, this case is not over,” Marshall said in a statement.
Deuel Ross, a civil rights lawyer who argued the case at the Supreme Court, said the justices have validated the lower court’s view in this case. A full trial “doesn’t seem a good use of Alabama’s time, resources or the money of the people to continue to litigate their case.”
The case stems from challenges to Alabama’s seven-district congressional map, which included one district in which Black voters form a large enough majority that they have the power to elect their preferred candidate. The challengers said that one district is not enough, pointing out that overall, Alabama’s population is more than 25% Black.
A three-judge court, with two appointees of former President Donald Trump, had little trouble concluding that the plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black Alabamians. That “likely” violation was the standard under which the preliminary injunction was issued by the three-judge panel, which ordered a new map drawn.
But the state quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, where five conservative justices prevented the lower court ruling from going forward. At the same time, the court decided to hear the Alabama case.
Louisiana’s congressional map had separately been identified as probably discriminatory by a lower court. That map, too, remained in effect last year and now will have to be redrawn.
The National Redistricting Foundation said in a statement that its pending lawsuits over congressional districts in Georgia and Texas also could be affected.
Separately, the Supreme Court in the fall will hear South Carolina’s appeal of a lower court ruling that found Republican lawmakers stripped Black voters from a district to make it safer for a Republican candidate. That case also could lead to a redrawn map in South Carolina, where six U.S. House members are Republicans and one is a Democrat.
Partisan politics also underlies the Alabama case. Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority, or close to one, that could send another Democrat to Congress.
The judges found that Alabama concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it much more difficult to elect more than one candidate of their choice.
Alabama’s Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district, the judges found.
Denying discrimination, Alabama argued that the lower court ruling would have forced it to sort voters by race and insisted it was taking a “race neutral” approach to redistricting.
At arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race could not be part of the equation. Jackson, the court’s first Black woman, said that constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing, make Black Americans “equal to white citizens.”
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Reporting on Serbian Leader’s Links to Criminal Groups Raises Questions for US
In early May, The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth story about Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic with details about his alleged connections with a criminal group that is being prosecuted for a range of crimes including drug trafficking and murder.
The story drew broad attention internationally, not just in the Balkans where local investigative outlets have reported many of the same allegations, which Vucic denies.
The State Department declined to comment on the merit of the allegations in the story, however at least one high-ranking State Department official shared the story on social media. And the allegations were raised last month during a congressional hearing about the Western Balkans.
Outside analysts though have been vocal.
“It’s a shocking and horrific story that the highest levels of government are so intertwined with criminal enterprises. I think we have seen this in enough other nations that it is a growing concern, the conflation between authoritarian governments and criminal networks,” Gary Kalman, executive director of Transparency International USA, told VOA’s Serbian Service.
“It’s terrible. It’s too bad,” said Susan Rose-Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale University, who co-authored the book “Corruption and Government.” She told VOA that connections between people in political power and organized crime create an extreme version of political corruption.
The Times story reported that the connections between police and the criminal group, led by a soccer hooligan Veljko Belivuk, nicknamed Trouble, were well documented. The story also claimed “there is little doubt that Belivuk and his gang are in prison because Europol cracked the code” of the phone-messaging app through which they communicated.
Author Robert Worth reported that Belivuk testified in court that “his gang had been organized ‘for the need and by the order of Aleksandar Vucic.'” He added that the group, among others, used to intimidate political rivals and prevent fans at soccer games from chanting against Vucic.
Worth also wrote that he is skeptical that Vucic was unaware of all the groups did since Vucic “now exercises near-total control over almost every aspect of public life” in Serbia.
International context
Vucic has been in politics since the 1990s. He served as information minister to Slobodan Milosevic, where he led a crackdown on the press, and he publicly voiced support for Serbian war criminals.
His Serbian Progressive Party has now been in power for more than 10 years, during which he was also a prime minister.
Vucic’s spokespeople declined Worth’s requests for comments, but in an interview for pro-government Happy TV in Serbia, Vucic said that the “preposterous New York Times story was ordered” and that he understands it as a message during the dialogue about normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, which Serbia has never recognized.
“I know how they do it,” said Vucic for Happy TV. “You know, CIA sets you up, CIA watches you, if you don’t behave well and don’t listen, this is only the beginning.”
It has become common practice in past years that Serbian authorities denote any criticism as treason, conspiracy against the country or a plot to overthrow the government.
Both Worth and The New York Times denied such allegations.
VOA interviewees noted that the most significant aspect of the story was the fact that it was published in English, in a reputable outlet with a great number of readers.
“It is an exposé of Aleksandar Vucic and his government. And it put it in an international context, given that it’s The New York Times,” Tanya Domi, professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, told VOA. “Everybody is reading this.”
Is Serbia a reliable partner for the United States?
“Is this reporting credible?” Senator Bob Menendez asked the State Department’s counselor Derek Chollet during a May hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy toward the Western Balkans, referencing the Times story.
“We believe it is. I can’t speak to the specifics of the article, but there is absolutely a lot of corruption,” replied Chollet, with Gabriel Escobar, State Department deputy assistant secretary, sitting next to him.
“So what are the real prospects for a reliable partner in Serbia with that background?” Menendez asked.
“We’re doing this with eyes open, but we are holding Vucic to account and his colleagues to account for their corruption, for their behavior and activity,” said Chollet, noting that corruption is a major issue in the whole region.
But in an interview for VOA’s Bosnian Service, Kurt Bassuener, senior associate at the Democratization Policy Council, pointed out that the U.S. has not sanctioned any Vucic administration official for corruption as it has done in some neighboring countries.
“They essentially dodged it,” Bassuener said of State Department officials. “They didn’t deal with any of the substance. And I think that’s emblematic of the overarching policy, which is pacification toward the region.”
Domi believes the United States and the West are pursuing the idea that Serbia is “a stabilizing force in the region.” But if the goal of such foreign policy toward the Western Balkans is to draw Serbia closer to the West and further from Russia, Domi says there is no proof such a strategy works.
Serbia is one of the rare European countries that has not introduced sanctions against Russia, and there is a strong pro-Russian sentiment in the country.
Transparency International’s Kalman said Washington’s strategy with Serbia could shift in the future.
“I think there is a possibility that the U.S., given sort of Serbia’s role and where it sits in the world, that they might put some pressure on to try and improve things in Serbia,” he said.
“How far they push and whether or not they are concerned that the Serbian government will start an alliance with countries and interests that the U.S. counter to their national security, and so then they back up. I don’t know the answer to that question,” Kalman said.
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Biden, Sunak Announce Economic Partnership, Support for Ukraine
President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday announced an economic partnership focusing on energy transition and key technologies, and also vowed continued support for Ukraine in its defense against Russia. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.
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US East Coast Continues to Grapple with Wildfire Smoke Billowing from Canada
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials encouraged people to spend time outdoors and wear masks inside if they had to be with other people.
This week, officials are again urging people to mask up — but this time, to protect themselves outdoors against smoke.
The tables have turned on the East Coast of the United States this week as wildfire smoke billows down from eastern Canada, prompting officials to urge people to stay indoors as much as possible — and to wear a mask if they go outside.
Wildfires in Quebec and Nova Scotia have sent hazardous smoke as far as North Carolina and northern Europe, disturbing the lives of millions, turning the skies a dystopian orange and underscoring the ever-rising threat of climate change.
“It’s critical that Americans experiencing dangerous air pollution, especially those with health conditions, listen to local authorities to protect themselves and their families,” U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday on Twitter.
In Canada, 20,000 people have been displaced as a result of more than 400 blazes that have burned 3.8 million hectares. Dry conditions and higher-than-normal temperatures have helped trigger fires across the country since May.
Many of the blazes now burning in Quebec were caused by lightning earlier this month.
Starting Wednesday, millions of Americans were urged to stay indoors as the U.S. National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for much of the East Coast. Spending time outdoors could cause respiratory problems as a result of the high levels of fine particulates in the atmosphere, health officials have warned.
The Midwest has not gone unscathed either, with smoke descending on Chicago earlier this week.
According to the private forecasting service AccuWeather, this week marks the worst outbreak of wildfire smoke to shroud the northeastern United States in over two decades. Poor air quality will likely continue into the weekend, the service said.
Up and down the East Coast, school officials canceled recess, sports games and field trips. The New York Yankees, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Nationals are among the professional sports teams that have postponed games as a result of the smoke.
Reduced visibility has also caused flights to be delayed, with the Federal Aviation Administration saying Thursday morning on Twitter it “will likely need to take steps to manage the flow of traffic safely into New York City, DC, Philadelphia and Charlotte.”
Even the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., was closed Thursday due to poor air quality. The air quality in the nation’s capital and surrounding area reached its most dangerous levels in decades on Thursday.
“We’ve deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters, support personnel, and equipment to support Canada as they respond to record wildfires — events that are intensifying because of the climate crisis,” Biden said on Twitter.
Biden and lawmakers including New York Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said the Canadian wildfires and subsequent smoke blanketing the East Coast are tied to climate change.
In light of the extreme smoke in New York City, which effectively hid the iconic skyline, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It bears repeating how unprepared we are for the climate crisis.”
In some regions, the air quality index, which evaluates major pollutants like particulate matter produced by fires, was above 400, according to AirNow, which marks 100 as “unhealthy” and 300 as “hazardous.”
The nightmarish landscapes that have gripped social media over the past couple of days may become the new normal as climate change worsens globally.
Last year, the United Nations said the number of extreme wildfires will rise 14% by 2030 and 30% by 2050. The world will be forced to “learn to live with fire,” the U.N. Environment Program report said.
For some parts of the United States, wildfires have already entered the realm of normal. The country’s West has for years been learning to live with wildfires, with California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico among the states facing some of the worst of the conflagrations.
Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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Stalemate in US-China Ties Appears Likely to Continue Despite Talks
After a series of renewed talks between the U.S. and China leading up to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s expected visit to Beijing in coming weeks, experts said the two rivals need to come up with a plan to avoid conflict.
The talks had been stalled since February over a suspected Chinese spy balloon flying across the U.S.
The two countries agreed to “open lines of communications,” said a statement released after Dan Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, held talks with his Chinese counterparts on Monday.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters on Tuesday that the two countries held talks “on improving bilateral relations and managing differences.”
The talks followed CIA Director William Burns’ apparent secret trip to Beijing in May, first reported by the Financial Times on June 2, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Vienna on May 10-11.
“The United States and China are moving slowly and cautiously to restore normal dialogue channels between them with the goal being able to establish so-called ‘guardrails’ to prevent bilateral relations from careening off track and leading to confrontation,” said Evans Revere, who served as acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs during the George W. Bush administration.
“It’s extremely important for Washington and Beijing to find a way to manage bilateral relations in a way that prevents misunderstanding, misperception and strategic competition from leading to conflict,” he told VOA via email.
The two nations are at odds over a range of issues, each seeing the other’s demands as attempts to undermine its national interests.
Washington has been vocal about China’s disregard for the rule of law, human rights and fair-trade practices. The U.S. has especially been keen on defending the right of passage in the Taiwan Strait against growing Chinese aggression.
Beijing says it has been respecting international law and accuses the U.S. of using the rule of law to undermine its sovereignty and advocating for human rights as a way to interfere in its domestic affairs. China claims Taiwan, a self-governing island, as its own and takes Washington’s military presence in the region as a provocation.
Standing their ground
Hal Brands, professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said neither of them wants their differences to drive them toward conflict, but both are unwilling to relent.
“Both sides have reasons to keep the competition within bounds,” said Brands. “Neither side really wants a war, for instance. But neither side is willing to retreat on issues it cares most about.”
He added, “There is virtually no [chance] of a substantive improvement in U.S.-China relations in the coming year or so because differences on the key issues driving the competition – technology, Taiwan, trade, the balance of power in the Western Pacific and beyond – are nowhere near a resolution.”
Despite renewed talks between diplomatic and intelligence officials, military talks have not resumed, even as the two nations’ defense chiefs believe conflict would be catastrophic.
Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said at the Shangri-La security forum in Singapore on Sunday that “a severe conflict or confrontation between China and the U.S. will be an unbearable disaster” and proposed “seeking common ground.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, while also stressing that “conflict in the Taiwan Strait would be devastating,” told the forum a day earlier that he was “deeply concerned” that China has been “unwilling to engage” in talks “for crisis management between our two militaries.”
While the top military chiefs were at the Shangri-La forum on Saturday, a Chinese navy ship made an “unsafe” move on a U.S. destroyer navigating the Taiwan Strait with a Canadian frigate to demonstrate their right to navigate, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said on Monday.
Differences over fundamental values such as democracy and the rule of law have prevented the two countries from seeing eye to eye, according to experts.
“The ideological and value gap between Beijing and Washington is large and growing,” said Revere via email. “Under [President] Xi Jinping, China has taken an historic turn toward authoritarianism, illiberalism and strict centralization under Communist Party control.”
He added, “At the same time, China’s unprecedented military buildup and desire to become the dominant actor in the Western Pacific is clashing with the United States’ long-term role as the major power in the region.”
Zack Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former deputy national security adviser at the White House National Security Council, said via email, “The two sides have fundamentally different views that aren’t easily bridged.”
“Both the United States and China are pessimistic about the likelihood of making progress bilaterally but feel that it is necessary to show third parties that they are trying.”
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Biden, Sunak Announce Partnership on Clean Energy, New Technologies
U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced Thursday the Atlantic Declaration, a narrow economic partnership focusing on energy transition and emerging technologies considered critical to national security.
The deal will help the U.S. and U.K. “remain at the cutting edge of a rapidly changing world,” Biden said.
However, the two sidestepped questions about progress toward a broader U.S.-U.K. free-trade agreement that the British Conservative Party promised in 2019 to negotiate within three years of governing.
Thursday’s announcement, covering technologies such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, followed talks at the White House addressing economic ties and support for Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion.
Pillars of the Atlantic Declaration include ensuring U.S.-U.K. leadership in critical and emerging technologies, economic security, digital transformation and clean energy transition.
According to the White House, the agreement will deepen trade and investment ties, diversify supply chains and reduce strategic dependencies on adversarial powers.
China and Russia are “willing to manipulate and exploit our openness, steal our intellectual property, use technology for authoritarian ends or withdraw crucial resources like energy,” Sunak said during a joint press conference following his talks with Biden.
Free-trade pact
A comprehensive free-trade agreement was once promised in the U.K. as a post-Brexit goal. However, with little appetite for new free-trade agreements in the U.S. Congress, there’s “real pragmatism” from the British side, said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and the Americas program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
She told VOA that Britain is going for selected wins that don’t have to go through Capitol Hill to get traction and can move forward on leading-edge technology issues, especially AI.
AI, which Biden said presents a staggering potential for technological changes, is a key area of concern as both capitals work toward formulating regulations that address key risks without constricting innovation.
“They’re looking at each other’s models to see how they can do that better,” said Joshua Meltzer, a senior fellow on global economy and development at the Brookings Institution.
Biden and Sunak are aware that rival China, also a top AI player, has an advantage in that it can ignore privacy issues such as using AI for surveillance and facial recognition, and it “really wants to put its foot on the innovation accelerator,” Meltzer told VOA.
Regulations that balance values and innovation will ensure that the U.S. and the UK. remain leaders in AI, he said, and determine “where China is going to end up as well.”
As part of the deal, the two countries will begin talks on U.K.-produced critical minerals used in electric vehicles and batteries that would be eligible for U.S. tax credits. Similar negotiations are ongoing with the European Union, modeled after a deal signed with Japan allowing certain critical raw materials for electric vehicles to be treated as if they were sourced in the U.S.
Ukraine and NATO
Biden underscored transatlantic unity, saying: “There’s no issue of global importance, none, that our nations are not leading together.”
He downplayed growing Republican skepticism about increasing defense spending for Kyiv.
“I believe we’ll have the funding to support Ukraine as long as it takes,” the president said.
He declined to say whether Kyiv has initiated its long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces in southeast Ukraine, as some media outlets have reported.
Thursday’s meeting brought together the leaders of the top two military donors to Ukraine, sending a signal ahead of a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month that the allies are committed and unified behind Kyiv.
U.S -U.K. alignment on Ukraine has become even more synergized under the new prime minister, said Andrew Hyde, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.
“The U.K. feels under Sunak it could go further, in terms of supplying weapons and support for Ukraine in ways that the U.S. as the leader of the alliance really can’t,” he told VOA, noting Britain’s push to supply Kyiv with tanks, long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets.
“They’ve cleared the ground a little bit for Western assistance, giving the U.S. a degree of distance, plausible deniability,” he said, “eventually opening up the field for more allies to supply at that level of quality of weapons.”
Stoltenberg successor
Biden declined to respond to a question on whether he would support Ben Wallace, the British defense minister, whom Sunak is pushing to be the next NATO secretary-general.
“That remains to be seen,” he said. “We’re going to have to get a consensus within NATO.”
Biden is meeting with outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday.
Biden and Sunak’s meeting happened on the heels of an attack on the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine. Neither Washington nor London has officially accused Russia of blowing up the hydroelectric dam. But Sunak said, “If it does prove to be intentional, it will represent a new low … an appalling barbarism on Russia’s part.”
Before meeting with Biden, Sunak held talks with congressional leaders and took part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. He appeared Wednesday evening at the Washington Nationals baseball game, where the team was honoring U.S.-U.K. Friendship Day.
It’s the British prime minister’s first visit to the United States since taking office in October, but he and Biden have already met three times this year. During the two-day trip, Sunak stayed at Blair House, the president’s official guesthouse, near the White House.
Anita Powell and Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.
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Kremlin Says Ammonia Pipeline Blast Is Negative for Black Sea Grain Deal
The Kremlin on Thursday said a blast that damaged a pipeline once used to export Russian ammonia via Ukraine could have a “negative impact” on the fate of a Black Sea grain deal.
The Togliatti-Odesa pipeline, which once pumped up to 2.5 million tons of ammonia annually for global export to Ukraine’s Pivdennyi port on the Black Sea from Togliatti in western Russia, has been idle since the start of the war in February last year.
Russia has accused Ukrainian forces of blowing up a part of the pipeline, the world’s longest to carry ammonia, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on Monday. The regional Ukrainian governor said Russia had shelled the pipeline on Tuesday. Neither side provided evidence to back its allegations.
Asked by reporters about how the damage to the pipeline could affect the fate of the Black Sea grain deal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “It can only have a negative impact.”
He described it as “yet another complication in terms of extending the deal,” adding that Russia did not know “what kind of destruction” there had been to the ammonia pipeline.
Russia has threatened to walk away from the Black Sea grain deal on July 17 if demands to improve its own food and fertilizer exports are not met. The deal, struck in July last year, facilitates the “safe navigation” of grain, foodstuffs and fertilizers — including ammonia — for export to global markets.
U.N. officials are continuing discussions with all the parties to the deal, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Thursday.
“We’re continuing our efforts through as many avenues as we can, given the importance of all of this to the fight against global hunger and ensuring that the prices of food do not spike on the global market,” Dujarric told reporters.
The United Nations and Turkey brokered the Ukraine grain Black Sea export deal to help alleviate a global food crisis worsened by conflict disrupting exports from two of the world’s leading grain suppliers.
To help persuade Russia to allow Ukraine to resume its Black Sea grain exports last year, a separate three-year agreement was also struck in July in which the United Nations agreed to help Russia with its food and fertilizer exports.
Dujarric said top U.N. trade official Rebeca Grynspan was due to meet with Russian officials in Geneva on Friday “as part of our routine contacts on our efforts to facilitate the trade in Russian fertilizer and Russian grain.”
Russian Industry and Trade minister Denis Manturov said earlier Thursday that Moscow had no access to the damaged part of the pipeline and did not expect to be granted it, the Interfax news agency reported.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that it would take one to three months to repair the damaged section of the pipeline.
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US Sees Islamic State Affiliates Pooling Resources, Growing Capabilities
U.S. officials tasked with tracking Islamic State are seeing worrisome signs that the terror group’s core leadership is strengthening control over its global network of affiliates despite a series of key losses.
Specifically, the United States is raising concerns about the group’s General Directorate of Provinces, a series of nine regional offices set up over the past several years to sustain the group’s reputation and global capabilities.
The U.S. State Department on Thursday highlighted the threat posed by these regional offices, designating the leaders of the offices in Iraq and in Africa’s Sahel region as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.
‘Not yet done’
“We remain focused on cutting off ISIS’s ability to raise and move funds across multiple jurisdictions,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, speaking to a meeting in Riyadh of the global coalition that has been working to defeat Islamic State, also known as ISIS, IS or Daesh.
“For all our progress, the fight is not yet done,” Blinken added.
A separate State Department statement Thursday noted the terror group maintains connections to the global financial system and that IS’s core leadership has “relied on its regional General Directorate of Provinces offices to provide operational guidance and funding around the world.”
The new designations specifically name Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rufay’I, the former emir of IS’s Iraq province, as the leader of the Iraq-based Bilad al-Rafidayn Office, and Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Mainuki as the leader of the al-Furqan office, which oversees operations in the Sahel.
Concern about the regional offices has been growing for more than a year, with a U.N. report warning in July 2022 that the offices were key to the terror group’s plans for “reviving its external operational capability.”
The U.N. report cited the al-Furqan office, located in the Lake Chad Basin and charged with overseeing the terror group’s efforts in and around Nigeria and the western Sahel, as one of “the most vigorous and best-established [ISIS] regional networks.”
The report further warned that the Al-Siddiq office in Afghanistan and the Al-Karrar office in Somalia were likewise playing critical roles in Islamic State’s expansion.
Intelligence shared by U.N. member states at the time, however, suggested some of the other regional offices, including those in Turkey, Libya, Yemen and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, were struggling, and in some cases nonfunctional.
And despite a series of high-profile leadership losses, including the deaths or captures of at least 13 senior officials since early 2022, time seems to have worked in the terror group’s favor.
The regional office model, answering to the group’s core leadership, “has really enabled a lot of these groups to rapidly gain capability,” said Anand Arun, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency senior officer and analyst.
“They’re pooling resources. They’re sharing TTP [tactics, techniques and procedures]. They’re sharing guidance,” Arun told a forum hosted by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism on Wednesday. “We’re seeing ISIS’s local and regional attack capabilities in Africa increase.”
Enhanced internet ties
Others are also seeing IS affiliates, like IS West Africa Province, maximize these connections by using enhanced internet connections for what one expert described as “real-time communication.”
“We also saw conference calls, sometimes conference calls between ISIS central and African groups but also amongst African groups,” said Bulama Bukarti, a researcher and vice president at the Bridgeway Foundation, a charity that aims to prevent mass atrocities.
“They also share intelligence information, best practices,” he said, speaking at the same forum as Arun. “So, for example, if one affiliate looted a particular weapon they don’t know how to operate, they just would take a photo of it, put it in the group [chat], and then someone would send them instructions, would send them a YouTube link with instructions on how to operate it.”
Bukarti also warned that IS’s adoption of advanced technologies has extended to other areas, with IS West Africa Province conducting trials on how to arm commercial drones to be used in attacks.
U.S. officials share the concern.
“I’m very much concerned about that and kind of the trajectory,” said the DIA’s Arun, calling the possibilities “exponential.”
“I think there’s a lot of ways that they can harness what’s coming with AI [artificial intelligence] and drones and other things,” he said.
Already, the United States has been leading efforts to crack down on these networks.
Last November, the Treasury Department sanctioned a smuggling network in Somalia that may have been linked to IS’s Al-Karrar regional office.
And in January, U.S. special operations forces killed Bilal al-Sudani, a key IS financial facilitator, during a raid on a mountainous cave complex in a remote part of northern Somalia.
But some of the information turned up during that operation has given U.S. officials cause to worry about IS’s growing technological prowess.
“If Bilal al-Sudani can access the internet from a cave in the Puntland of Somalia, I think they can figure it out,” Arun said.
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Azerbaijan Asks for Postponement of US-Hosted Talks with Armenia
The timing of new U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which had been expected to start Monday, is now uncertain despite the U.S. administration’s conviction that direct dialogue between the two nations is key to any stable peace agreement.
“At the request of the Azerbaijani side, the next round of discussions planned to take place next week in Washington D.C. is postponed,” Armenia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan said in a statement Thursday on social media. “The public will be duly informed on the new timeframes of the meeting.”
Badalyan had previously stated that foreign ministerial talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan scheduled for June 12 would be aimed at stabilizing relations between the neighboring rivals and reaching a peace treaty.
The countries have had a decades-long conflict involving the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is inside Azerbaijan but populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians.
When asked Thursday whether the talks have been postponed, a State Department spokesman told VOA, “Regarding the date of the next round of talks, we don’t have any specific dates to announce at this time.”
Experts predict difficult talks whenever they begin, saying there are many obstacles to a durable peace deal between the two countries.
“Even though the [Nagorno-Karabakh] region is recognized as a part of Azerbaijan, the Armenia government will likely not sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan unless the Azerbaijan government provides assurances about the security and safety of the Karabakh Armenians,” said Heather Ashby, acting director for U.S. Institute of Peace’s Center for Russia and Europe program.
“Azerbaijan’s plan for incorporating Karabakh Armenians into Azerbaijan will play an important role in the peace talks,” Ashby told VOA on Thursday.
Armenia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on June 6 tweeted that Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan and the State Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian affairs, Dereck Hogan, had “discussed key issues of normalization process” of Armenia-Azerbaijan relations ahead of the talks.
They discussed “border delimitation and security” as well as the “rights and security” of people living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the ministry tweeted.
Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov had acknowledged the coming meetings and the need to prepare an agreement to normalize relations with Armenia, while expressing uncertainty about the duration of the peace process, according to VOA’s Azerbaijani service.
At the State Department, deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters during a briefing this week that the United States looks “forward to hosting another round of talks in Washington as the parties continue to pursue a peaceful future in the South Caucasus region.”
“We continue to believe that direct dialogue is key towards reaching a durable and dignified peace,” said Patel, while declining to confirm the date that Secretary of State Antony Blinken would host the peace talks.
If the meetings take place next week, they will follow peace talks hosted by the State Department in early May, when Blinken said “tangible progress” had been made toward an agreement.
The top U.S. diplomat said he believed a peace deal was “within sight, within reach” at that time.
Meanwhile, tensions remain high between the two former Soviet republics over Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor, which is the only land route giving Armenia direct access to Nagorno-Karabakh.
“As a starting point for improving security, we call on Azerbaijan to take steps to ensure constant gas and electricity supplies to Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as to ensure the free flow and movement of goods and people, including through the Lachin Corridor,” said Ambassador Michael Carpenter, the U.S. envoy to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, on June 6.
He urged all sides to “refrain from provocative, threatening, or hostile actions or rhetoric,” while pledging Washington’s support for “a durable and sustainable peace agreement.”
The Lachin Corridor allows supplies from Armenia to reach the 120,000 ethnic Armenians in the mountainous enclave. The corridor has been policed by Russian peacekeepers since December 2020.
The blockade has left those ethnic Armenian residents in Nagorno-Karabakh without access to essential goods and services, including life-saving medication and health care, according to Amnesty International.
The rights group said Azerbaijan’s government has failed its human rights obligations by taking no action to lift the blockade.
Azerbaijan maintains the land route is open for humanitarian deliveries, emergency services and peacekeepers.
In November 2022, Blinken hosted foreign ministers from Armenia and Azerbaijan for peace negotiations at Blair House in Washington.
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held face-to-face meetings hosted by Blinken on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in February.
“For any sustainable peace, the populations of Armenia and Azerbaijan also need to see the value of peace,” USIP’s Heather Ashby told VOA.
“For 30 years, they have lived through violence and conflict between the two countries. A peace agreement will have a significant impact on the populations of both countries and it is important not to lose sight on how they may respond and accept a treaty.”
VOA Armenian and Azerbaijan services contributed to this report.
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