Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, said that the dissolution of human rights NGOs signals a deteriorating environment for civil society and human rights defence in Tajikistan. She reiterated that Tajikistan must reconsider its attitudes towards civil society and view human rights defenders as allies instead of enemies.

Earlier in November 2023, Tajikistan Minister of Justice announced that 700 NGOs in the country had been liquidated over an 18-month period.

UN Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor said, “Human rights defenders in Tajikistan working on so-called ‘sensitive’ issues have been reportedly subjected to threats and intimidation.”

“Human rights defenders working on so-called sensitive issues, including freedom from torture, the right to housing and compensation for requisitioned land, minority rights, freedom of belief and good governance, political rights, and particularly the right to free and fair elections have been reportedly subjected to threats and intimidation,” the Special Rapporteur said.

“Some of those NGOs had been in operation for over 20 years,” the UN expert continued. “This decision also affects those working on early intervention on disability issues, expanding access to education, supporting victims of domestic violence, protecting the environment and promoting public access to land.”

Some organisations were forced to close following unrest in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) in 2022. Official statistics show that after these events, the courts ordered many public organisations to shut down while several other organisations self-dissolved. It is reported that in GBAO, of 300 registered organisations in early 2022, only around 10% can continue operating.

Several NGOs decided to self-dissolve after their directors were repeatedly summoned to the Department of Justice or local executive authorities. They were then reportedly placed under pressure or coerced into shutting down their organisations ‘voluntarily.’

“Interfering with the activities of NGOs and forcing civil society organisations to cease activities will have a serious knock-on impact on a whole range of human rights in Tajikistan,” Lawlor said. “I call on the government to reverse these closures.”

Source : OHCHR

The post Mary Lawlor, UN Criticises Tajikistan Dissolution of 700 NGOs appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post, in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.

The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?

There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”

Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.

“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”

Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unsettled, because the war they theorize never takes place. A famous instance is a debate many years ago, on the pages of the journal International Security, over whether nato was adequately prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, having calculated the relative balance of forces, said that it was; the defense intellectual Eliot Cohen, who had worked in the Pentagon’s famous Office of Net Assessment, said that it was not. The debate stretched over several months, in 1988 and 1989. A short while later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours.

When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)?

Some of the figures in the argument were familiar: Eliot Cohen was back, urging the West to take a harder line with Russia (and China); so were Mearsheimer and Posen, counselling caution. (Mearsheimer sometimes went further, blaming the West for provoking the Russian bear and for violating the tenets of his books, which posit that great-power conflict is inevitable.) Both sides invoked Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz’s observation that intangible “moral factors,” like the will to fight, are the most important thing in war; Cohen’s opponents held up Clausewitz’s arguments that defense always has the advantage, and also that war is the realm of contingency and chance. (“Clausewitz is like the Bible,” the American University international-relations scholar Joshua Rovner told me. “You can pull out parts of it to suit basically any argument.”)

Among analysts who had studied the Russian military and thought it would do much better than it did, there was some soul-searching. Russian units turned out to be shorthanded, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force were as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian military had better cyber defenses than people realized, and they fought tenaciously. Importantly, they also had the full support of U.S. intelligence, which was able to tell them when and where Russian forces would try to land, and to help them prepare for it. But the biggest surprise was Vladimir Putin’s terrible war plan, which assumed that Ukrainians would not resist, and which he kept secret from his own Army until the eve of the invasion. “No one would have done a Ukraine war game that was set with the political and strategic starting conditions of the Ukraine conflict,” Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the rand Corporation who often “plays Russia” in the think tank’s war games, said. “You’d be kicked out of the room.”

So, was the Russian military as bad as it seemed, and would Russian lines collapse if subjected to a bit of pressure? Or was it a fundamentally competent military that had been given an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, between Somali militants and American special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and eighteen Americans were killed in a misbegotten snatch-and-grab mission inside the Somali capital: “You can take the best soldiers on the planet, and, if you throw them in a bad enough situation, it’s not going to go well.” Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were probably not as bad as they looked in that first month of the war, running out of gas for their tanks and asking locals for directions to Kyiv.

The very successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 presented evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, thinly defended Russian lines collapsed when confronted with mobile Ukrainian units, allowing Ukraine to take back significant amounts of territory and cut off key Russian supply lines. But along the other axis of attack, in the city of Kherson, Russian forces held out for a long time and then made a large and orderly retreat, saving much manpower and matériel. The question became which army Ukraine would face in the summer and fall of 2023: the undermanned and demoralized one they saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and capable one they saw in Kherson?

The answer, unfortunately, turned out to be the latter. “The Russian military adapted,” Lee said. “They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.” A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency. “The narratives that the Russian military is an incompetent clown car, incapable of learning, that they are about to collapse, and so on, are unhelpful and have done real damage,” Massicot said. “They have not collapsed. They’re still there. They have stood in the field and absorbed billions’ worth of Western weapons and aid over two years.”

In early November, the behind-the-scenes disagreements over Russian capabilities broke out into the open, in the form of an extraordinary essay by Zaluzhny and accompanying interview published in The Economist. Zaluzhny admitted that the counter-offensive had stalled and that the war was now in what he called a stalemate. He identified several factors—technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic-warfare capabilities—that, he hoped, might move the war into a new phase. But Zaluzhny had lost faith in the idea that, by imposing devastating casualties on the invader, he would be able to take them out of the fight: “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” Zelensky, in turn, was frustrated that the commander-in-chief was making his views public—worsening an already tense relationship between the two.

Some analysts hope that the upcoming introduction of the American F-16 fighter to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the war. (Most predict that the F-16 will be helpful but not decisive.) Some believe that dropping a requirement that Western weaponry not be used to strike inside Russia could help. (Others, while agreeing, caution that deep strikes cannot be a substitute for conventional warfare; ultimately, Ukraine will have to take back territory in a ground offensive.) Many are concerned about the fact that Oleksandr Syrsky, Zelensky’s new choice for commander-in-chief, is the general who insisted on defending Bakhmut even after it became indefensible; they are even more concerned about the military-assistance package that is being held up in the U.S. Congress. But if, as Zaluzhny told The Economist, there will be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough,” what will happen instead?

The political-science literature on war duration (as opposed to war outcomes) is pretty clear: If a war is not over quickly, then it will last a long time. This is because incentives change. Blood and treasure have been expended. Society has been mobilized, the enemy vilified. People are angry. The war must go on.

There is a wrinkle to this story, however, when it comes to regime types. The standard work is “Democracies at War,” by Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, from 2002. Reiter and Stam argue, based on a slew of examples, that democracies have a better war-fighting record than autocracies. The reason is that they are better at fighting (the soldiers are more motivated) and that they start fewer dumb wars of choice. In a late chapter of the book, however, Reiter and Stam sound a cautionary note. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to grow weary of them faster: “When the promised quick victory does not materialize . . . the people may reconsider their decision to consent to the war at hand and actively withdraw their support.” According to Reiter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, democracies’ chances of victory diminish. In fact, Reiter and Stam write, “The longer a war continues, the more likely autocracies are to win.”

Putin has probably not read Chapter 7 of “Democracies at War,” but he has long been counting on the dynamics it describes. He has what he likes to think of as stability—he can decide on a policy and stick with it—whereas Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their minds. It was apparently his calculation, in the run-up to the war, that European voters would not long stand for the high energy prices that a war with Russia would entail; he believed, too, that the U.S. was preoccupied with its own difficulties and would not mount a sustained response. For nearly two years, he was wrong. Western democracies rallied to the side of Ukraine, and Russia seemed a lot less stable than Putin had supposed: a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and, in the summer of 2023, one of Putin’s longtime loyal oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column of men and started marching toward Moscow. But Prigozhin was assassinated, and, in recent months, Putin’s expectations of Western disarray have finally begun to be met. Largely owing to Hungarian recalcitrance, the European Union took months to agree on a large aid package to Ukraine; more worrisome still, a group of Republicans has been able to stall a similarly large aid package in the U.S. Congress. And inside Ukraine, too, politics have reappeared. It is widely thought that Zelensky decided to remove Zaluzhny because he worried that Zaluzhny was becoming a political rival. (Zaluzhny’s public disagreements with his boss did not help.)

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel on October 7th of last year, followed by Israel’s hugely disproportionate response, has scrambled the international map. It has also occupied the time of senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. Then there is this year’s U.S. Presidential election. The fact that, back in 2019, Donald Trump appeared to attempt to extort Zelensky—conditioning military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the Biden family—is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. Neither is Trump’s long-standing skepticism of nato, expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that did not “pay.”

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist, “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former rand analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in nato, and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

This could mean that the Russian military is constrained by some agreement that it’s been forced into, but it could also mean that Ukraine’s defenses are sufficiently bolstered, and its allies sufficiently clear in their resolve, that the cost to Russia of a renewed offensive would simply be too high. There is also the hope, not entirely illusory, that Russian vulnerabilities will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. “There’s a certain amount of instability that’s built into the Russian system that the Russians worry about,” Oliker said. “At some point, if they’re worried enough, they might be willing to negotiate.”

A senior Biden Administration official who has helped develop sanctions against Russia expounded on this theory. He said that, for some time, the Administration’s view has been that Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the running down of its hard-currency reserves, and the increasingly complex supply lines that Russia needs to evade Western sanctions. “It’s like a top that’s slowing down,” the official said. “They’re going to have to start making harder and harder choices, faster and faster, as we get into 2025. That’s a far cry from whatever Putin’s aim was in this war—which was, you know, reinstating Catherine the Great’s empire or something.”

The Administration official was painting an optimistic picture—one that depends on continued Western support. When I asked whether there was a contingency plan if the aid did not come through, he said there wasn’t one: “The contingency plan, frankly, is that the Ukrainians will keep fighting with less and less.” Ukraine is already running short of artillery shells, and it could eventually run out of air-defense interceptors. “So it’s a very stark choice in terms of the security assistance,” the official said. He estimated that, with the help of Western air-defense systems, Ukrainian forces could shoot down as many as ninety per cent of Russian air-attack assets. “Without it, that number will be zero soon.”

There is a third option for how the war might develop, beyond a “mutually hurting stalemate,” as it’s known in the literature, and a measured Ukrainian victory. As Michael Kofman, a longtime analyst of the Russian military who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed to me, Ukraine could start to lose. That could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, though they have so far been unable to achieve one, or just enough wearing down of Ukrainian and Western will that Ukraine is forced to negotiate concessions from a position of weakness. The question then becomes what, aside from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences in Ukraine, a Russian victory would mean for the world. If Putin wins, or feels like he has won, what will he do next?

Some argue that he would do nothing—that Ukraine is a special case, more central to Russia’s conception of itself as an imperial power than any other country. The counter-argument is that we don’t know. “In Moscow, they have all sorts of assessments of nato power,” Massicot said. “I don’t think they can confront it directly. For one thing, the Russian Army is partially destroyed. The Russian Air Force has not exactly covered themselves in glory in this war. But they will downgrade their assessment of nato as a cohesive alliance on the basis of our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with nato. And they’re going to be angry, they’re going to want revenge, and now they think we’re weaker than we are. That’s a dangerous situation.” Right now, the U.S. has about a hundred thousand troops in Europe; in 1989, there were three times that many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive action, could mean a movement toward old troop levels. And Mearsheimer, Posen, and Cohen would have to dust off their essays on nato preparedness.

It feels, in fact, like all the old Cold War arguments are back. Clearly, the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But just how far are they willing to go, and what exactly will they think of next? “The problem that I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on a militarized footing,” Kofman said. “So the Russian government is probably going to be focussed on regenerating military power for some time, both because it’s a matter of strategy but also because the militarized economy is going to be producing military goods and they will not have an easy way to transition it back.” This, Kofman concluded, means “that they could be in a position sooner than people think to actually contest the security and stability of Europe.”

Kofman, Lee, and Massicot recently published an article on the national-security Web site War on the Rocks in which they outlined a strategy for Ukrainian victory. “Hold, Build, and Strike,” they called it. In the essay, they urged Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike, in 2025, when they could see an advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past several months. “You shouldn’t fight a war till your first failed offensive,” Kofman said. “That’s not how most conventional wars go. If that’s how they went, they’d all be over really fast.” He went on to give an example from the Second World War. “You know Stalin’s famous ten blows?” These were ten major offensives, several of them on Ukrainian territory, that the Soviets undertook against Germany in 1944. But there were, in fact, far more than ten offensives, Kofman said: “They just don’t include all the offensives that failed.” Last summer was a good opportunity for Ukraine to take back territory from the Russian Army, but it will not, Kofman believes, be the last such opportunity.

Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.”

Source: The New Yorker

The post Can Ukraine Still Win? appeared first on The Victoria Post.

In May 2022, tens of ethnic Pamiri protesters were killed by security forces as demonstrations were violently suppressed and an “anti-terrorist operation” was launched in the east of the country. Activists, local leaders, journalists and bloggers were arrested and sentenced in unfair trials. Many reported being tortured. Access to information, including through the media and internet, remained heavily restricted. Domestic violence remained widespread with victims rarely securing justice or support. Afghan refugees continued to be detained and deported.

Tajikistan’s economic and political life continued to be tightly controlled by the president, in the 30th year of his rule, and his family. Over 100 people, including dozens of civilians, were killed and homes, schools and markets destroyed during cross border clashes between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in September. In May, following months of targeted repression by the central government, longstanding tensions in the eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) between these authorities and the Pamiris, a small, unrecognized ethnic minority belonging to the Shia Islam Ismaili community, flared into new protests. These were brutally suppressed by the authorities, who launched an “anti-terrorist operation” on 18 May during which tens of Pamiris were killed over several weeks. Over 200 people were arrested.

Pamiri protesters were killed by security forces in May and June 2022, as demonstrations were violently suppressed and an “anti-terrorist operation” was launched in the east of the country. Activists, local leaders, journalists and bloggers were arrested and sentenced in unfair trials. Many reported being tortured.

The official government figure in May for those killed in the “anti-terrorist operation” in the GBAO was originally 21, although unofficial sources reported more than double that number. The circumstances of many deaths, in the absence of independent reporting from Tajikistan, prompted allegations of extrajudicial executions. Prominent activists, informal local leaders, poets, religious leaders and journalists were arbitrarily targeted for arrest. Several prominent members of the Pamiri diaspora in Russia were abducted before resurfacing in custody in Tajikistan. By the end of the year, most of those arrested had been sentenced to long prison terms in unfair trials, typically for purported membership of a criminal organization and seeking to overthrow the constitutional order. The fate and whereabouts of some of those arrested remained unknown, prompting fears that they had been forcibly disappeared.

The crackdown on prominent Pamiri influencers, local leaders and activists was accompanied by a broader assault on the cultural heritage of Pamiris. Following the May-June unrest, the authorities shut down and confiscated the property of multiple local organizations linked to the Aga Khan Development Network working in the fields of education, economic development and religious instruction.

Freedom of expression remained severely curtailed. The few remaining independent media outlets, human rights defenders and bloggers were heavily targeted in the crackdown that followed the GBAO protests. On 17 May, Mullorajab Yusufi and Anushervon Aripov, journalists working for Radio Free Europe’s Tajik service and regional news outlet Current Time, were severely beaten by unknown assailants in the capital, Dushanbe, shortly after interviewing the well-known Pamiri journalist and human rights activist Ulfatkhonim Mamadshoeva about events in the GBAO. The next day Ulfatkhonim Mamadshoeva was herself arrested and accused of “publicly calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order”. In December, she was sentenced to 21 years’ imprisonment following a closed, unfair trial. Following her arrest, the authorities ordered Asia-Plus, the privately owned news agency for which she reported, to cease covering events in the GBAO. Other outlets reported similar coercion. On 19 May, Pamiri blogger and journalist Khushruz Jumayev (known online as Khush Gulyam) was arrested. He was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in December on opaque charges relating to the May events in the GBAO. Other activists who faced unfair trials during the year included around a dozen members of Commission 44, an independent group of lawyers and human rights defenders established to investigate the November 2021 killing of an activist that sparked protests in the GBAO.

Shaftolu Bekdavlatov and Khujamri Pirmamadov were sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment each on charges of organizing a criminal group and receiving financial assistance from abroad. The head of the Pamiri Lawyers’ Association, Manuchehr Kholiknazarov, was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on 9 December. Journalists and bloggers also faced prosecutions for critical reporting unrelated to the GBAO. On 15 June, two journalists and collaborators who reported widely on economic and social rights violations, Daler Imomali and Avazmad Gurbatov (also known as Abdullo Gurbati), were arrested shortly after reporting on the demolition of homes in Dushanbe. Avazmad Gurbatov was sentenced on 4 October to seven-and-a-half years’ imprisonment in a closed trial on trumped-up charges of assaulting a police officer and membership of the arbitrarily banned political organization Group 24. In a separate trial two weeks later, Daler Imomali was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, on equally far-fetched charges of tax evasion, disseminating false information and purported membership of Group 24. The internet was completely shut down for the first few months of the year in the GBAO and only intermittently and partially restored during the rest of the year. Tight restrictions remained in place throughout the country.

Torture and other ill-treatment remained widespread both as a means of intimidation and extracting confessions. Prisoners continued to report abuse and neglect, including beatings, lack of access to food and water and cold and wet conditions within the cells. While in pretrial detention following his arrest in July, Abdusattor Pirmuhammadzoda, a blogger who had been fired from a state radio broadcaster for criticizing the government in 2020, managed to smuggle out a letter in which he described being subjected to severe beatings, electric shocks and psychological torture, including threats against his family, in order to secure a confession. He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in November. In June, while trying to attend a concert in a public park in Dushanbe, Elobat Oghalykova was arrested for wearing a black dress in mourning for the death of one of her sons – a traditional practice that was banned in 2017. She was beaten at Spitamen District Police station and required hospitalization. When she filed a complaint, she was threatened with 15 days’ detention for disobeying a police officer.

According to multiple indicators published during the year, including the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, Tajikistan’s gender gap was the highest of all Central Asian countries and one of the highest globally. According to a survey published by the EU-UN Spotlight Initiative in June, 77.3% of respondents considered violence against women to be prevalent in Tajikistan and 34% of respondents (across both genders) believed it was justifiable to beat a partner who refused to obey. The accompanying report highlighted many longstanding problems: the weak legal framework; the limited range and inadequate funding of protection services; and stereotypical attitudes among public service providers, including law enforcement agencies. A draft criminal code criminalizing domestic violence, put before parliament in 2021, had not been passed by the end of the year.

In August, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, raised grave concerns about the continued detention and deportation of Afghan refugees. The agency documented dozens of cases in August and September alone. Members of the nearly 14,000-strong Afghan refugee community reported that the forced expulsions were taking place without any procedure or obvious justification.

Source: Amnesty International

The post The Story of Tajikistan appeared first on The Victoria Post.

The Rabbit is about to be devoured by a snorting, writhing, fire-breathing Dragon, come 10 February 2024 (Lunar Calendar, for lunatics). While the dreadful 2023, known by the philosophical Chinese as the “Year of the Rabbit”, is characterized as “thoughtful, tender, considerate, kind-hearted, and talented in language” for folks born in 1939 / 1951 / 1963 / 1975, Dragons born in 1940 / 1952 /  1964 / 1976 are reputedly “…confident, intelligent and enthusiastic – not afraid of challenges, willing to take risks”. That sounds more like this year of living dangerously, don’t you think? “…aggressive, angry Dragon, not open to criticism, nor aware of just how  irritating and arrogant they are…”

No matter where you may be, no matter what your religious conviction or cultural milieu, the end of a calendar year is a suitable moment for reflection, memories, stock-taking and the envisioning of an oncoming year. Assuming, that is, that we have a future, and do not all go up in a merry thermonuclear flash, the coda of an ancient Cold War quarrel.

Up at the cold cold North Pole, Santa’s reindeer are giggling, as they hark to sleigh bells jingling in the snow. Alas, not all the human race will share the happy bounty: a Holiday Season means little if you are broke and cold and sick, and your children look at you like you betrayed them – the story in much of our sad world today – like the displaced Christians of Armenia. Better to avoid Christmas promises that cannot be fulfilled…

In temperate zones an end of the year entails the blessings of snow, in our tropics but a myth. I write to you from six degrees below the equator, with the prediction of a snowy, stormy, and early winter in Europe this year – one might even extend to northern Asia.

Records are being set! Extreme cold and snow permeates Russia and Siberia, where temperatures have plummeted to as -57 degrees Celsius, exceptionally cold for this early in the winter. Where is the Global Warming in all of this! Did it run off to the tropics to keep warm?

The glorious Alps are buried in an above-average snow cap, with some locations approaching record highs for this time of year. Hey girls! Wax those skis and head for the lodge.

This month Germany has recorded their largest snowstorms since March 2006 – among the greatest of any on record. How are the Germans going to stay warm without the nice cheap Russian gas? Will the politicians provide enough hot air to a shivering electorate to avoid frostbite?

We are told that the extreme cold is connected to a negative Arctic Oscillation (AO) which sweeps winter from the North Pole southward, down across the British Isles to Southern and Central Europe. Very often this frigid jetstream cavorts over Eastern Europe and Asia, with a neutral phase and even a thaw in Europe. Maybe, maybe not.

Ideally the cold weather will cool the mood of the head-choppers and missile launchers, determined fanatics whose antics promise to ruin the mood, although “Christmas” won’t mean much to Muslims eternally fighting Jews and Jews retaliating against Muslims. What a broken record: if the world was not sick enough of the meaningless slaughter in Ukraine, now they must deal with the eternal quarrels of the Arab crescent.

Across the Atlantic, Americans can treat all the sad action like a Hollywood thriller, as an entitled folk with a habit of thinking that two oceans insulate them from all the bad acts descending on Europe, Africa and East Asia. Continental isolation will not, however, keep the Yanks warm, as heavy snow is forecast, with a winter weather advisory covering 13 states, amid whiteout conditions and risk of hypothermia. What’s more, vicious tornadoes are ripping through Tennessee, as severe storms head south – hey you righteous Christians aren’t praying hard enough! Get down on those knees and pray harder!

Meanwhile, Australians are enjoying a resilient summer – “So pop me another shrimp on the barbie, Sheila, and get me a fresh beer while you’re up!” Burp.

En fin,  kindly tell me, Santa Claus – or Krampus, more likely, considering the angry state of the planet at the moment – where is the global warming and why isn’t it keeping us as warm as the Russian gas used to do?            

A Merry Merry Christmas to all our Christian readers in every country, Peace on Earth, Good Will toward one another… and relax: we are but visitors to this world.

The post Bye-bye Rabbit … Did the Dragon Chase You Off? appeared first on The Victoria Post.

On Google, searches for “no degree jobs” reached an all-time high this year in the U.S., according to Google Trends data shared with CNBC Make It. 

Close to 75% of jobs in the U.S. that pay more than $35,000 a year require a college degree, but just 38% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree, says Lisa Gevelber, Google’s chief marketing officer for the Americas.

That earnings gap is a “big problem” for understaffed companies and workers feeling the pinch of inflation, Gevelber adds.

Google’s research shows that people are most excited about jobs that offer ample travel opportunities, flexible work schedules and a clear path to becoming your own boss. 

Here are the top 3 most Googled jobs of 2023 in the U.S. as of November:

1. Real estate agent 
2. Notary 
3. Travel agent 

Google determined the ranking based on the top “how to become…” queries people searched for in the U.S. 

While all three of these roles require — or recommend — at least a high school diploma or GED, there are no formal education requirements beyond that. 

Instead, to work as a notary or real estate agent, you’ll need to obtain a certification or official license with the state you’re working in. Depending on where you live, that process could take anywhere from 1-9 months, according to the National Notary Association and Indeed.

Most travel agents require at least a high school diploma and on-the-job training. Agents can also choose to acquire certifications with different transit associations, such as the Cruise Lines International Association or the International Air Transport Association, which enables them to book travel for clients on airlines and cruise lines. 

Compensation is a major consideration for job seekers looking for no-degree jobs. Within Google searches for jobs without a degree, “high paying jobs without a degree” was a top search in 2023. 

The average salaries for these roles vary: According to ZipRecruiter, the average pay for travel agents in the U.S. is $39,955, while real estate agents are pulling in an average $86,356 per year and notaries earn $129,717. 

The top 10% of real estate agents and notaries, however, are earning well over $100,000 and $200,000, respectively.

Source: CNBC

The post The 3 Most-Googled Jobs in the U.S. Don’t Require a Degree—Some Can Pay Over $200k appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Two attacks on Sunday occurring within a couple of hours of each other in Texas and Washington state were the year’s 37th and 38th mass shootings. Authorities believe a murder-suicide was responsible for the death of five family members in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, just across the border in Washington, while in Dallas a 21-year-old with a previous aggravated assault charge shot five people in a house, including a toddler.

It is the highest number of mass shootings in any year since at least 2006, breaking the previous record of 36, reached last year.

Another attack occurred on Sunday in New York City, when a 38-year-old man stabbed four of his relatives – including two children – as well as another woman and two police officers before they shot him. That was the country’s 41st mass killing of 2023, according to an Associated Press database.

At least 203 people have died this year in mass killings, defined as incidents in which four or more people have died, not including the killer. The FBI uses a similar definition.

Despite the media attention they attract, most mass shootings do not happen in public spaces, with at least 26 of this year’s 38 happening in private homes or shelters, according to the Washington Post.

Different groups count mass shootings and killings in different ways. Some, such as the Gun Violence Archive, include events in which multiple people are shot regardless of number of deaths, and so report much higher figures. Its tally for the year is 630 mass shootings.

Mass shooting deaths dropped in 2020 during the Covid pandemic to 21, but have since rebounded to a new record.

The Fourth of July long weekend was overshadowed by 16 shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.

But the deadliest attack of 2023 happened in Lewiston, Maine, on 25 October when an army reservist murdered 18 people in a bowling alley and a bar. Previously the year’s worst attack had been in January when a man shot 11 people in Monterey Park, California, with a semi-automatic rifle during a Lunar New Year celebration.

Source: The Guardian

The post US Breaks Record for Most Mass Shootings in Single Year After Weekend Murders appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Berlin (23/11 – 67)

November 2 is the “International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists”.  The date was chosen in commemoration of the assassination in Mali of Claude Verlon and Ghislaine Dupont, two French journalists, on November 2, 2013. The 2023 observance seeks to raise awareness of the main challenges faced by journalists and communicators in the exercise of their profession, and to warn of the escalation of violence and repression against them.

Attacks on journalists have become a frequent occurrence in Tajikistan in recent years, but in almost all cases the perpetrators have remain unpunished. One of the most famous cases is an attack on known Tajik journalist, Rajab Mirzo in Dushanbe in 2004.  He was beaten by several men in Dushanbe as he returned home on July 29, 2004.  

Attacks on journalists have increased in Tajikistan in recent years, but in almost all cases the perpetrators have remain unpunished. Of the 92 recorded attacks, 73 were committed by government officials.

On August 31, 2011, the head of the Investigative Journalism Center also editor-in-chief of Farazh Weekly, Khurshed Atovullo was badly beaten in Dushanbe. The journalist turned for help to the authorities.  But in this case there was no investigation as well and assailants remained unpunished. In September 2016, a trainee journalist at Farazh Weekly, Doro Suhrobi was beaten.  The assailants remained unpunished.  

Abdullo Ghurbati, a 23-year-old correspondent for Asia-Plus news agency, was beaten by two unknown men on the evening of May 11, 2020.  According to Abdullo, the incident occurred when he was on his way home from a grocery store. Ghurbati, who is currently servings his jail term in a penal colony in Dushanbe, believed that the assault was related to his professional activities, as before that he had received several threatening phone calls.

On May 29, 2020, Abdullo Ghurbati was beaten by unidentified persons in Khuroson district, Khatlon province, where he went on assignment from the editorial office. However, instead of searching for criminals, the Interior Ministry accused the journalist himself of wanting to excite a feeling of dissatisfaction with the state and government among the residents.

However, the attackers were found this time round. The Khuroson district court found three local residents guilty of petty hooliganism and fined each of them 580 somonis.

On March 4, 2021, two reporters of Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service, Shahlo Abdullo and Mullorajab Yusufi were attacked while preparing a report on gasoline price hikes.  The reporters were attacked as they interviewed a driver at a gas station. The assailants remained unpunished.    

On May 17, 2022, unknown assailants attacked journalists from Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service and Current Time (the Russian-language channel run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA) in Dushanbe and took the journalists’ equipment and personal phones.  A vehicle of journalists from RFE/RL was blocked by another car and several men in civilian clothes came out of the car, forced journalists, Mullorajab Yusufi and Barot Yusufi out of their vehicle, and attacked them. The men punched Mullorajab Yusufi several times in the body and head and took the journalists’ equipment and personal phones. Moments later, two journalists from Current Time, Anoushervon Orifov and Nasim Isamov, were reportedly attacked the same way, apparently by the same assailants.  The attacks took place after the journalists conducted separate interviews with well-known civil rights activist, Ulfatkhonum Mamadshoyeva. 

In most cases, those attacking journalists remain unpunished. Concern grew in the Tajik journalistic community and forced dozens of journalists to leave the country. Those who remain in the country would have to censor themselves and their work, including remain quiet.  

A report by Justice for Journalists released on October 10, 2023 stated that 92 cases of attacks/threats against professional and civilian media workers, and against editorial offices of traditional and online publications in Tajikistan were identified and analyzed in the course of the research. “Attacks on Media Workers in Tajikistan in 2022” notes that the number of attacks on media workers in 2022 has been unprecedented over the past decade. 

There were 92 cases of attacks on media workers and bloggers, 61 of which were committed by the authorities via legal means.  Eight of these cases resulted in long prison sentences for journalists, ranging from seven to 21 years in prison.  Since 2017, the number of incidents has reportedly increased by more than five times.  Slander against journalists and bloggers on both state media outlets and anonymous social media channels continued in 2022.

Of the 92 recorded attacks, 73 were committed by government officials, 14 by unknown persons, and six by individuals who were not representatives of the authorities. There were a record-breaking eight instances of physical attacks.

Source : Asia Plus

The post Tajikistan: Attacks on Journalists Remain Unpunished appeared first on The Victoria Post.

“There’s a lot of conversations going on now about the need for humanitarian pauses, and I think that’s something that Canada supports,” Trudeau told reporters on his way to the House of Commons in Ottawa.

Foreign Minister Melanie Joly echoed those sentiments and added the pause would also allow Canadians to get out of Gaza to safety.

“We need more humanitarian aid entering Gaza, and for Canadians to be able to exit,” Joly wrote on X, Tuesday. “For this reason, we are calling for humanitarian pauses on hostilities to be considered.”

She said whether Israeli or Palestinian, “a civilian is a civilian” and deserves to receive humanitarian aid. 

Another Canadian Cabinet minister, Deputy-Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, weighed in on the conflict and said Canada would not be providing military aid to Israel. Rather, she said Canada is zeroed in on humanitarian aid, “that is consistent with … the long-standing role that Canada has played” in world affairs. 

International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen added to the chorus Tuesday and said Canada would support “whatever it takes” to get more aid to civilians in the Gaza Strip. 

A third convoy of aid trucks arrived in Gaza Monday, crossing from Egypt, as reported by Anadolu, and delivered water, food and medicine. 

But the UN said fuel was not included and supplies were dangerously low.

Israel has continued a relentless bombardment campaign on the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by Hamas on Israeli border towns on Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis.

Nearly 5,800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the bombardment began, including more than 2,000 children, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry.

Source: AA

The post Canada Backs ‘Humanitarian Pauses’ in Conflict to Get Aid Into Gaza Strip appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Berlin (3/11 – 40)

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe will visit China in the upcoming week as the crisis-hit country makes progress on debt restructuring talks with its biggest lender.

Wickremesinghe took office in July last year, after a popular uprising, brought on by an economic meltdown, had forced his predecessor out of power. His Oct. 15-19 visit to Beijing will be his first to China since then.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is also finance minister, has been leading Sri Lanka’s push to manage its heavy debt and keep funds flowing from a $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme. He will visit China to continue debt talks.

Wickremesinghe, who is also finance minister, has been leading Sri Lanka’s push to manage its heavy debt and keep funds flowing from a $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.

He will attend a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing that would mark the 10th anniversary of the initiative championed by China’s President Xi Jinping to develop global infrastructure and energy networks.

Wickremesinghe is expected to meet Xi on the sidelines of the forum, said the source who declined to be named as he was not authorised to speak with the media. The Sri Lankan leader intends to meet China’s finance and foreign ministers too.

Sri Lanka owes Chinese lenders – bilateral and commercial – around $7 billion. It reached an agreement with the Export-Import Bank of China on Thursday covering about $4.2 billion of outstanding debt but is still working with other key bilateral creditors including Japan and India on reaching a debt restructuring plan.

Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt in May last year after its dollar reserves fell to a point where the island nation of 22 million people could no longer pay for essential imports like fuel and medicine.

Sri Lanka needs to reach agreements with creditors to push forward its first review of the IMF programme, which will release a second tranche of about $334 million. The first tranche was released in March.

The country has been a key receiver of loans under China’s Belt and Road infrastructure drive, helping it to build highways, a port, an airport and a coal power plant.

Source

The post Sri Lanka President to Visit China as Debt Talks Progress appeared first on The Victoria Post.

A US-based security company has sued Air Canada over gold bars and cash worth millions that were stolen from Toronto’s airport in April.

Brink’s International alleges the airline was “reckless” and had failed to prevent the theft.

The goods, worth more than C$20m ($15m, £12m), had recently arrived on an Air Canada flight from Zurich to Toronto before they were stolen.

The heist is one of the largest in Canada’s history.

Among the items stolen were gold bars that weighed 400.19kg and $2m in cash.

The 14 April theft garnered international headlines at the time, and it remains unsolved by the police.

In the lawsuit, filed in the Federal Court of Canada on 6 October, Brink’s said it was hired by a bank and a precious metal company to coordinate the shipment of the goods.

The goods were stolen 42 minutes after they were unloaded from a plane that had just arrived in Toronto Pearson International Airport from Switzerland, the company said.

After they were unloaded, the lawsuit alleged that an unidentified person gained access to the warehouse where the valuables were kept at around 18:30 local time.

“No security protocols or features were in place to monitor, restrict or otherwise regulate the unidentified individual’s access to the facilities,” Brink’s said.

The person was allegedly able to enter by showing an airway bill for an unrelated shipment to an Air Canada employee.

The airline then released the shipment to the individual, who “absconded with the cargo,” the lawsuit stated.

Brink’s alleged that Air Canada staff made no attempt to verify the waybill’s authenticity “in any way,” and that the theft could have been prevented if Air Canada properly followed its security guidelines.

The company argued that Air Canada is liable for the damages. Brink’s has asked that the price of the goods stolen be paid back by the airline in full.

Air Canada has not released a public statement on the allegations. The BBC has reached out to the airline for comment.

The theft is one of the biggest heists in Canadian history. Other heists include the 2011 and 2012 Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist when 3,000 tonnes of syrup valued at $18.7m were stolen from a storage facility in Quebec.

Source : BBC

The post Air Canada Sued Over $20m Gold and Cash Heist appeared first on The Victoria Post.