CounterVortex

Southeast Asia

Land conflicts escalate in Indonesia

Agribusiness and resource companies embroiled in land disputes with rural communities in Indonesia appear to be using the lull in oversight during the COVID-19 outbreak to strengthen their claims to contested areas. Since the first confirmed cases of the disease were reported in the country last month, two local land defenders have been killed and four arrested in connection with disputes in Sumatra, Java and Borneo. (Photo: Mongabay)

Southeast Asia

Police raid Java ‘anarcho-syndicalists’

Police in Jakarta arrested five suspected members of an “anarcho-syndicalist” group they claim was hoping to trigger unrest across the island of Java amid public anxiety over the COVID-19 pandemic. The group allegedly painted graffiti inciting people to riot with messages such as “time to burn,” “kill the rich,” and “die ridiculously or fight” on the walls of a shopping complex in Tangerang, an outlying city of the Greater Jakarta metropolitan area. Their plan to spark mass looting was announced on social media, police said. The five have been charged with “misinformation” and “public provocation,” and face up to 10 years imprisonment. (Photo: Anarchist Communist Group)

Mexico

Mining opponent assassinated in Veracruz, Mexico

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has condemned the assassination of Mexican environmental activist Adán Vez Lira, who was shot while riding his motorcyle in the municipality of Actopan, Veracruz. Vez Lira worked with the Veracruz Assembly for Environmental Defense Initiatives (LAVIDA) to oppose mining operations that threaten local water sources. Gold and silver exploitation by the Canadian-based Almaden Minerals and Candelaria Mining are encoraching on the borders of La Mancha Ecological Reserve and contaminating springs and wells in nearby villages. (Photo via: El Imparcial)

East Asia

Wuhan death toll massively under-counted?

Speaking at COVIDCon, an online Oslo Freedom Forum event presented by the Human Rights Foundation, exiled Chinese dissident Yang Jianli charged that the death toll for Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 outbreak began, was massively under-counted by authorities. Yang said that as Xi Jinping visited Wuhan on March 10, “endless Wuhan residents pleaded for help online, saying hospitals were overflowing and their family members were turned away and left to die at home. Nobody knows how many people died before managing to get to hospitals.” (Photo of shopping queue in Wuhan: Wikimedia Commons)

Watching the Shadows

Global COVID-19 police state consolidates

It’s an irony that with police-state measures mounting worldwide to enforce lockdowns and contain COVID-19, Trump is now claiming sweeping executive power to lift lockdowns in the US in spite of the pandemic. Asserting his prerogative to override state governors and order economies open again, Trump stated: “When someone is president of the United States, the authority is total.” The media response has been to call this out as blatantly unconstitutional. While it is necessary to point out the illegitimacy of Trump’s pretended power-grab, it is also side-stepping the real threat here: of the pandemic being exploited to declare an actual “state of exception” in which constitutional restraints are suspended altogether—perhaps permanently. (Photo of protest outside “morgue truck” in New York City: Donna Aceto/Rise and Resist)

Europe

COVID-19 port closures leave migrants stranded at sea

Migrants trying to reach Europe from North Africa have been left stranded on the Mediterranean Sea after Italy and Malta closed their ports due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Alarm Phone, which acts as a hotline for refugees and migrants in distress on the Mediterranean, says that it has lost contact with boats that requested assistance in Malta’s search-and-rescue zone. Maltese authorities have failed to respond. The Aita Mari, a rescue ship run by a Spanish NGO, has been dispatched in an attempt to reach them, but it is only authorized to provide life vests, food and water. Meanwhile, the Alan Kurdi, a rescue ship run by a German charity, has been in Italian waters for a week, but has been prevented from docking. The ship has 150 people aboard. (Photo: callmonikm/Flickr via TNH)

Greater Middle East

Ceasefire confusion as COVID-19 arrives in Yemen

Yemeni government officials reported the country’s first case of COVID-19, shortly after the Saudi Arabia-led coalition announced that it would be observing a two-week unilateral ceasefire, in part to help confront the pandemic. The move was welcomed by the UN, and the office of Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths said he was working with the warring parties on a “comprehensive initiative” to end the five-year war. But a Houthi rebel spokesperson said coalition air-strikes have continued after the truce’s onset, and dismissed the initiative as a “political and media manoeuvre.” The past weeks have seen an increase in violence, including Saudi air-strikes on the Houthi-controlled capital city of Sana’a, and the shelling of a prison in the province of Taiz that killed at least five women and one child. (Map: Perry-Castañeda Library)

Oceania

Pacific megastorm complicates COVID-19 response

A powerful storm that ripped across four Pacific Island nations raises an uncomfortable question for humanitarians on lockdown: how do you respond to a disaster during a pandemic? Cyclone Harold was the first Category-5 storm to make landfall in the Pacific since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic in March. Vanuatu, Tonga and the Solomon Islands saw extensive damage, while some 6,000 people were evacuated in Fiji. COVID-19 has forced the global aid sector to rethink how it responds to disasters when faced with flight cancellations and closed borders. (Photo: NASA via The New Humanitarian)

South Asia

Bangladesh arrests fugitive in assassination of founder

Bangladeshi counter-terrorism authorities announced the arrest in Dhaka of Abdul Majed, who faces the death penalty for involvement in the 1975 assassination of the country’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Independence leader Rahman served as the country’s first prime minister from 1971 until the 1975 coup in which he was killed along with his family. Majed has publicly admitted his involvement in the massacre, but, like the others involved, faced no legal consequences during the 15-year period of military rule following the coup. In 1998, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. (Photo: Bangabandhu Commission)

Planet Watch

Growing police-state measures in face of COVID-19

As nations across the globe remain under lockdown, more sweeping powers are being assumed by governments in the name of containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Facing demands for relief from poor barrios running out of resources under his lockdown orders, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to shoot protesters in the streets. Police have opened fire on lockdown violators in Nigeria, Ghana and Peru. In Tunisia, remote-controlled wheeled robots have been deployed to accost lockdown violators. States of emergency, including broad powers to restrict movements and control the media, have been declared from the Philippines to Serbia. Amnesty International warns that the restrictive measures could become a “new normal.” (Photo: Pulse, Ghana)

Southeast Asia

Netherlands to pay over Indonesia atrocities

The Hague District Court ordered the Netherlands to pay compensation to the relatives of 11 men executed by Dutch soldiers in South Sulawesi in 1946 and 1947, during the 1945-49 Indonesian War of Independence. Ten of the cases under consideration were found to be summary executions; there was one case in which a man was randomly shot. The largest compensation, in the form of intangible damages of €10,000, was awarded to a man who witnessed his father’s summary execution when he was a child. The relatives of other men were awarded material compensation for lost livelihood, varying from €123.48 to €3,634. The court explained that the amounts are low because many of the executed men were farmers who only earned about €100 a year. This judgment follows a series of “Indonesia cases,” which the Dutch courts have been hearing since 2011. (Photo: KITLV)

Syria

UN panel: ‘highly likely’ Assad bombs hospitals

A report by a special UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry ordered by the Secretary-General finds that it is “highly probable” that the Bashar Assad regime and allied forces have bombed hospitals and other civilian targets in Syria. The report cited air-strikes last year on a hospital, a clinic, and a childcare facility in opposition-held areas of Idlib and Hama provinces. All three were on a “deconfliction list” of protected sites that the UN had provided to Damascus. The Board of Inquiry also found it “plausible” the regime targetted another healthcare center. Yet the report failed to specifically mention Russia, which has also been engaged in the air-strikes, referring only to “the Government of Syria and/or its allies.” The Assad regime has claimed that the targeted sites were being used by “terrorists.” (Photo via EA Worldview)