Israeli foreign minister contacts Dominic Raab and says ‘Iran is not just an Israeli problem’
Israel has blamed Iran for a suspected drone attack on a tanker in the Arabian Sea that killed two crew, including a British national, and has vowed a harsh response.
The Liberian flagged Mercer Street, which is linked to an Israeli tycoon, was hit off the coast of Oman late on Thursday in what is thought to have been a swarm attack involving multiple drones.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Haiti to Pakistan
Continue reading...Benevolent dictatorship is not the answer to the region’s real problems
This week has shown that Arab regimes are tough on dissent, but much less interested in its causes. This will create problems for years to come as these states struggle to recover from the pandemic. Tunisia’s presidential power grab is a test for Joe Biden’s democracy and human rights agenda. War has impoverished ancient centres of Arab civilisation. The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia this week pointed out that poverty now affects 88% of the population in Syria and 83% in Yemen. Even nations once considered wealthy have been brought low by an unhappy meeting of leadership failures and Covid-19. Lebanon’s leaders are begging for foreign assistance after the local currency plummeted in value and the population ran short of food, fuel and medicine.
The Arab world is a varied place. The latest UN survey shows it diverging into wealthy Gulf absolute monarchies; a set of middle-income countries with more people than their oil reserves can comfortably afford; war zones in some of the largest nations such as Iraq; and very poor states. The oil-rich sheikhdoms are pulling ahead and using their financial and military clout to extend their influence, often with disastrous results. The Arab region, says the UN, hosts more than six million refugees and more than 11 million internally displaced persons. There is little coordinated action to deal with the numerous social challenges, including growing poverty, increased unemployment and persistent gender inequalities. Food insecurity has spread. One can be too downcast: the UN hopes for a silver lining in the prospect of peace in Libya.
Continue reading...The government’s words at the global education summit are completely at odds with its behaviour. Whatever the event achieves will be despite its UK hosts, not because of them
With all the fanfare Covid would allow, the global education summit opened in London this week. Ahead of the meeting, the minister for European neighbourhood and the Americas was on rousing form. “Educating girls is a gamechanger,” Wendy Morton said, going on to describe what a plan would look like to do just that.
The UK, co-hosting the summit with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, plans to raise funds for the Global Partnership for Education, from governments and donors. The UK government has promised £430m over the next five years.
Continue reading...We’d like to hear from people living in Tunisia about the political situation
A decade after the revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, has suspended parliament for 30 days and dismissed the prime minister Hichem Mechichi in what critics have described as a coup. On Monday, Saied announced a month-long nationwide curfew.
We would like to hear from people in Tunisia who are affected by the current political situation – what are your concerns? Have you taken part in the protests last week? What is the political atmosphere where you live ?
Continue reading...Photographer Maroussia Mbaye spoke to women who said crushing social stigma, poverty and lack of traditional support systems had left them with no choice but to commit infanticide
Mbeubeuss is one of the biggest rubbish tips in Africa and Senegal’s largest open cemetery for murdered children. In the past three years, the bodies of 32 infants have been recovered from the site by the waste-pickers who work there.
Looking at the high rate of infanticide in Senegal, it seems the main reasons for it are shame about pregnancy outside marriage and a loss of traditional support for young women.
Continue reading...UK scientist says gene-drive study rendering female insects infertile may lead to ‘self destruct mosquito’ field tests within 10 years
Scientists have successfully wiped out a population of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes by using a radical form of genetic engineering to render the females infertile – in the most advanced and largest ever test of use of the technology to fight the disease.
As well as bringing fresh hope in the fight against one of the world’s biggest killers, the study lays the foundations for further trials of gene-drive technology, which could mean self-destroying mosquitoes being released into the wild within 10 years.
Continue reading...Days after PM’s overthrow fears grow that Kais Saied will undo democratic gains achieved by Arab spring
Tunisia’s president has launched a purge of senior officials, including prosecutors and judges, and taken on judicial powers, days after overthrowing the prime minister and imposing emergency law.
Kais Saied’s crackdown has dragged the country deeper into uncertainty days after its elected parliament was suspended for a month in a shock move that brought a decade of faltering democracy to a sudden halt.
Continue reading...Supporters fear Yidiresi Aishan will be extradited and say arrest is politically driven
Moroccan authorities have arrested a Uyghur activist in exile because of a Chinese terrorism warrant distributed by Interpol, according to information from Moroccan police and a rights group that tracks people detained by China.
Activists fear Yidiresi Aishan will be extradited to China and say the arrest is politically driven as part of a broader Chinese campaign to hunt down perceived dissidents outside its borders.
Continue reading...Analysis: while the politics behind the government’s dismissal are local, regional players will want to influence what happens next
In the decade since the Arab spring, the crucible of the uprisings has been where its legacy has been thrashed out.
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, where it all began from mid-December 2010, have remained central to the narrative of what took place when autocracies crumbled in the face of restive streets. And for the region’s powerbrokers, all three north African states have since been the centre of an even bigger tussle for influence.
Continue reading...International Organization for Migration links rise in deaths to decrease in sea patrols
At least 57 people have died after a migrant boat capsized off the Libyan coast, taking the total death toll in the central Mediterranean in 2021 to almost 1,000 – four times as many as in the same period last year.
Flavio Di Giacomo, Italy’s spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the shipwreck raised the death toll to 987. “Last year there were 272. We must no longer hesitate, and do everything to strengthen the system of patrols at sea,” he said.
Continue reading...Over a thousand girls in rural Isiolo county, many of them young mothers, are catching up in the classroom. But entrenched cultural barriers remain a challenge for educators
For much of her girlhood, Lucy Koriang* would spend her days taking the family’s goat herd out, walking for several kilometres a day, looking for the best grazing spots.
Being a goat herder was not a job she enjoyed or chose, especially in the unbearably high temperatures of Isiolo county, northern Kenya, where she lives. Her father, like most parents in Ngaremara village, saw little point in taking his children to school. Moving from the shelter of one thorny acacia tree to another, the 13-year-old would get lost in her thoughts, dreaming of a different life.
Continue reading...Cebelihle Mbuyisa is a freelance journalist who was beaten for covering pro-democracy protests in the kingdom of Eswatini. Formerly known as Swaziland, the country has been rocked in recent weeks by anti-monarchy protests calling for King Mswati III, Africa's last absolute monarch, to have his powers diluted.
Protests turned violent, with reports suggesting there have been more than 50 deaths and countless casualties so far at the hands of state security forces. The Guardian spoke to Mbuyisa, who described his experience of being beaten by the police after they accused him of reporting illegally, and explained why protesters are calling for more democracy in Eswatini.
In his first comments since the unrest began, the king called the protests 'satanic' and said they had taken the country backwards.
Continue reading...Kais Saied invokes emergency article of constitution after violent protests against country’s biggest party
Often touted as the lone success story of the Arab spring revolutions a decade ago, Tunisia is facing a critical challenge to its fledgling democracy after its president suspended parliament and dismissed his prime minister in what critics described as a coup.
Kais Saied, an independent without a party behind him, announced he was invoking an emergency article of Tunisia’s constitution late on Sunday night after a day of violent protests against the country’s biggest party, the moderate Islamist Ennahda movement.
Continue reading...Fighting between Rwandan forces and insurgents linked to Islamic State breaks out in Cabo Delgado
Foreign troops sent to reinforce local security forces in Mozambique have clashed with Islamist militants for the first time, as the conflict in the east African country moves into a new and potentially dangerous phase.
Rwandan soldiers who recently arrived in Mozambique fought a series of engagements against the extremists last week. Few reliable details of the fighting, which took place near Mozambique’s border with Tanzania, have emerged, but officials claim the insurgents suffered dozens of casualties.
Continue reading...‘David Taylor’ claims hooding, sensory deprivation and waterboarding was to persuade him to cooperate with the CIA
A British citizen has claimed he was tortured in Somalia and questioned by US intelligence officers, raising concern that controversial practices of the post-9/11 “war on terror” are still being used.
The 45-year-old from London alleges he has endured hooding, sensory deprivation and waterboarding at the hands of the Somali authorities to persuade him, he believes, to cooperate with the CIA. Foreign Office officials are aware of the allegationsof torture and US involvement, but their failure to act has raised questions over UK complicity.
Continue reading...Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s new book The Sex Lives of African Women examines self-discovery, freedom and healing. She talks about everything she has learned
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has a face that smiles at rest. When she is speaking, it is with a constant grin, one that only falters when she talks about some of the difficult circumstances she and other African women have gone through in their quest for sexual liberation. She speaks to me from her home city of Accra, Ghana, where she says “no one is surprised” that she has written a book about sex. As a blogger, author and self-described “positive sex evangelist”, she has been collecting and recording the sexual experiences of African women for more than a decade. Her new book, The Sex Lives of African Women, is an anthology of confessional accounts from across the African continent and the diaspora. The stories are sorted into three sections: self-discovery, freedom and healing. Each “sex life” is told in the subject’s own words. The result is a book that takes the reader into the beds of polygamous marriages in Senegal, to furtive lesbian hookups in toilets in Cairo and polyamorous clubs in the United States, but without any sensationalism or essentialism. Her ambition, in the book as in life, is “to create more space” for African women “to have open and honest conversations about sex and sexuality”.
Sekyiamah was born in London to Ghanaian parents in a polygamous relationship, but grew up in Ghana. Her formative years in Accra were under a patriarchal, conservative, Catholic regime that instilled in her a fear of sex and all its potential dangers – pregnancy, shame, becoming a “fallen” woman. “I remember once my period didn’t come,” she recalls. “I was in Catholic school at the time, and I would go to the convent every day and pray, because I thought that meant I was pregnant.” From the moment she reached puberty she was told: “Now you have your period, you’re a woman, you can’t let guys touch you. That was always in my head.” Later, she was told: “If you leave your marriage no one else is going to want you. If you have a child as a single woman men are going to think of you just as a sexual object and not a potential partner.” Her mother would only speak to her about sex in cautionary ways. “The idea of messing with boys was so scary to me. It kept me a virgin for years and years.”
Continue reading...Durbanites expected another lockdown, not isolation enforced by violence and looting. But as the city I love turned to ruin, I saw fear change to bravery and community spirit
The past week has been one of the most difficult of my life. My home descended into chaos. Durban, a holiday city with a melting pot of cultures and a diverse range of people who live and work here, came to a standstill as rioters took to the streets to spread chaos after the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma.
Continue reading...MPs vote unanimously for abolition, making it the 23rd African state to end capital punishment
Sierra Leone has become the latest African state to abolish the death penalty after MPs voted unanimously to abandon the punishment.
On Friday the west African state became the 23rd country on the continent to end capital punishment, which is largely a legacy of colonial legal codes. In April, Malawi ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, while Chad abolished it in 2020. In 2019, the African human rights court ruled that mandatory imposition of the death penalty by Tanzania was “patently unfair”.
Continue reading...Bill could mean 10 years in prison for LGBTQ+ people and those who support their rights
Draft anti-gay legislation submitted to Ghana’s parliament could propose up to 10 years in jail for LGBTQ+ people as well as groups and individuals who advocate for their rights, express sympathy or offer social or medical support, in one of the most draconian and sweeping anti-gay laws proposed around the world.
Support for intersex people would also be criminalised and the government could direct intersex people to receive “gender realignment” surgery, said the draft legislation.
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