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Buses evacuate thousands of exhausted Aleppo residents in ceasefire deal

World News | Fri Dec 16, 2016 | 12:55am GMT
Buses evacuate thousands of exhausted Aleppo residents in ceasefire deal
By Laila Bassam, Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Tom Perry | ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT

Thousands of people were evacuated on Thursday from the last rebel bastion in Aleppo, the first to leave under a ceasefire deal that would end years of fighting for the city and mark a major victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A first convoy of ambulances and buses with nearly 1,000 people aboard drove out of the devastated rebel-held area of Aleppo, which was besieged and bombarded for months by Syrian government forces, a Reuters reporter on the scene said.

Syrian state television reported later that two further convoys of 15 buses each had also left east Aleppo. The second had reached the rebel-held area of al-Rashideen, an insurgent said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said late on Thursday that some 3,000 civilians and more than 40 wounded people, including children, had already been evacuated.

ICRC official Robert Mardini told Reuters there were no clear plans yet for how to ship out rebel fighters, who under the ceasefire will be allowed to leave for other areas outside
government control.

Women cried out in celebration as the first buses passed through a government-held area, and some waved the Syrian flag. Assad said in a video statement the taking of Aleppo - his biggest prize in more than five years of civil war - was a historic moment.

An elderly woman, who had gathered with others in a government area to watch the convoy removing the rebels, raised her hands to the sky, saying: "God save us from this crisis, and
from the (militants). They brought us only destruction."

Wissam Zarqa, an English teacher in the rebel zone, said most people were happy to be leaving safely. But he said: "Some of them are angry they are leaving their city. I saw some of them crying. This is almost my feeling in a way."

Earlier, ambulances trying to evacuate people came under fire from fighters loyal to the Syrian government, who injured three people, a rescue service spokesman said.

"Thousands of people are in need of evacuation, but the first and most urgent thing is wounded, sick and children, including orphans," said Jan Egeland, the U.N. humanitarian adviser for Syria.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, said about 50,000 people remained in rebel-held Aleppo, of whom about 10,000 would be evacuated to nearby Idlib province and the rest would move to government-held city districts.

Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed.

The once-flourishing economic centre with its renowned ancient sites has been pulverised during the war which has killed more than 300,000 people, created the world's worst refugee crisis and allowed for the rise of Islamic State.

"PLACE THEM ALL IN IDLIB"

The United States was forced to watch from the sidelines as the Syrian government and its allies, including Russia, mounted an assault to pin down the rebels in an ever-diminishing pocket of territory, culminating in this week's ceasefire.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Thursday that the Syrian government was carrying out "nothing short of a massacre" in Aleppo. U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien will brief the
Security Council on Friday on the Aleppo evacuation.

Turkey said it was considering establishing a camp in Syria for civilians being evacuated from Aleppo and the number of people brought out of the city could reach 100,000.

In Aleppo's rebel-held area, columns of black smoke could be seen as residents hoping to depart burned personal belongings they do not want to leave for government forces to loot.

"It's difficult to leave your belongings knowing that your enemy is going to use them. Thugs usually will take them ... They will take everything as a prize for kicking us out," Zarqa, the teacher, said.

A senior Russian general, Viktor Poznikhir, said the Syrian army had almost finished its operations in Aleppo.

However, the war will still be far from over, with insurgents retaining their rural stronghold of Idlib province to the southwest of Aleppo, and the jihadist Islamic State group holding swathes of the east and recapturing Palmyra this week.

Rebels and their families would be taken towards Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria which is outside government control, the Russian defence ministry said.

Idlib province, mostly controlled by hardline Islamist groups, is not a popular destination for fighters and civilians from east Aleppo, where nationalist rebel groups predominated.

A senior European diplomat said last week that the fighters had a choice between surviving for a few weeks in Idlib or dying in Aleppo. "For the Russians it's simple. Place them all in Idlib and then they have all their rotten eggs in one basket."

Idlib is already a target for Syrian and Russian air strikes but it is unclear if the government will push for a ground assault or simply seek to contain rebels there for now.

The International Rescue Committee said: "Escaping Aleppo doesn't mean escaping the war ... After witnessing the ferocity of attacks on civilians in Aleppo, we are very concerned that the sieges and barrel bombs will follow the thousands who arrive in Idlib."

SHI'ITE VILLAGES

The evacuation deal was expected to include the safe passage of wounded from the Shi'ite villages of Foua and Kefraya near Idlib that are besieged by rebels. A convoy set off to evacuate the villages on Thursday, Syrian state media said.

Efforts to evacuate eastern Aleppo began earlier in the week with a truce brokered by Russia, Assad's most powerful ally, and Turkey, which has backed the opposition. That agreement broke down following renewed fighting on Wednesday and the evacuation did not take place then as planned.
A rebel official said a new truce came into effect early on Thursday. Shortly before the new deal was announced, clashes raged in Aleppo.

Government forces made a new advance in Sukkari - one of a handful of districts still held by rebels - and brought half of the neighbourhood under their control, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.

The Russian defence ministry said - before the report of the government forces' advance in Sukkari - that the rebels controlled an enclave of only 2.5 square km (1 square mile).

The evacuation plan was the culmination of two weeks of rapid advances by the Syrian army and its allies that drove insurgents back into an ever-smaller pocket of the city under intense air strikes and artillery fire.

By taking control of Aleppo, Assad has proved the power of his military coalition, aided by Russia's air force and an array of Shi'ite militias from across the region.

Rebels have been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies, but that support has fallen far short of the direct military assistance given to Assad by Russia and Iran.

Russia's decision to deploy its air force to Syria more than a year ago turned the war in Assad's favour after rebel advances across western Syria. In addition to Aleppo, he has won back insurgent strongholds near Damascus this year.

The government and its allies have focused the bulk of their firepower on fighting rebels in western Syria rather than Islamic State, which this week managed to take back the ancient city of Palmyra, once again illustrating the challenge Assad faces reestablishing control over all Syria.

(Reporting by Laila Bassam in Aleppo and Tom Perry, John Davison and Lisa Barrington in Beirut, Michelle Martin in Berlin, John Irish in Paris, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut and Giles Elgood in London, editing by Peter Millership and Mark Trevelyan)

The Myth of India as an Upcoming Asian Economic Powerhouse

The Myth of India as an Upcoming Asian Economic Powerhouse. Rising Poverty and Social InequalityBy Junaid Ghoto
Global Research, December 13, 2016
Region: Asia
Theme: Global Economy, Poverty & Social Inequality

A common myth around the world is that, India is developing country at a very rapid pace and going to be a powerhouse in Asia soon. Some even argue we should learn from them and some argue independence should have never happened and we would have been a better off with India rather than independent. And even some pessimist especially Pakistani and Bangladeshi people regret the independence in 1947 and common chorus can be heard “look where India has reached today and where we are”.

Regret or not, but it is important to see where India stands today, the idea to write regarding this is to differentiate the illusion from fact and give reason so the sane understanding follows. A nation is called developing not because of its population, or defense budget, but how good the people fare in that country; it is about the human development and economic growth which include improving education and health by having less people as possible under the poverty line and high incomes per capita of citizen in the country, this will come when the state will have a sound economic system.
India is no doubt one of the biggest democracy in the world; because it has the highest population, Simple! (China highly populist, and officially “communist”). India is the second biggest nation in the world in terms of population and seventh largest in terms of area. According to the IMF as of 2015, the Indian economically nominally worth US$ 2.182 trillion, it, it’s the eleventh largest economy in terms of market exchange rates at US$ 8.027 trillion, third largest by PPP, with an annual GDP growth of last decade’s 5.8%.[1]

These numbers in retrospect are nonsense which feed the illusion to the general public so they can keep on living like they are in a hope that their life will get better.

These numbers do not represent the true picture of the country, not only India`s but any country. Like GDP can be a good indicator, but the real measure is GDP per capita. Which measures how a single person achieves the share of income among its citizens. When it comes to India the GDP is $2.182 trillion, but per capita income is only $1581 which is not much higher than Bangladesh`s $1086 and Pakistan’s $1316 per capita, but less among many African countries, like Nigeria $3203, South Africa $6,482, Zambia $1721, Sudan $1875, Namibia $5408, Ghana $1441, Djibouti $1813, Botswana $7123 and many more to mention here.[2] In fact, India is like “ticking time bomb” by 2026 the world population will be 1.5 billion largest in the world and the economy is not growing enough to meet the demands to create 20 million jobs per year.[3]

Yes, I know India is part of BRICS and they have announced in creating their own kind of bank but then what? India still owes money to the IMF; their public debt to GDP is nearly 70%,[4] Likewise, India is worst in terms of BRIC countries when it comes to GDP per capita, human development, education, poverty and so forth. India is lagging behind in BRIC countries. And Yes, then there is IT, the huge investments in India by the foreign companies just because those corporation can have cheap labor rather than paying their people in home countries with high wages. The beauty of globalization which no body mentions and no one talks all they care to show people the random numbers and apathy of people to consent without barely eliciting a yawn.

One of the main hurdles in the progress of India is poverty, poverty which should have been brought under control, but in India it is more or less same ratios of poverty post-independence.[5]

The figure shows the total population every decade with poverty in percentage and how much the poverty has declined in India, the percentage may have decreased, but the total number of people living under the poverty line has been more or less same.

To combat poverty the country introduced anti-poverty policies, to help people living under the poverty line but according to World Bank report in some states more than 50% were misclassified as poor in other words they were not poor but reaped full benefits from these polices, but still by no means can these policies achieve their true objective, even without corruption free. How anti-poverty policy can and will work which make the poor`s dependents on government`s mercy rather than concentrating on human development by educating poor people, training and developing them so they can take care of themselves, the government chose spoon feeding. Human development is not alien Jerry Sternin owner of an NGO based in the United States helped Vietnam reduce malnourishment in 1990s without bringing a single dollar in the country, his work was finished in 6 months or so. Seeing good things in anti-poverty policy is like a finding a needle in a needle box with a needle.

The figure shows two very important things how India fare among BRIC countries and Second the working poor in India out of Total Employed working in India. Many poor people are not those who don’t have job, in fact some poor are with jobs but their wages are low compared to International standards and it becomes difficult for them to increase their living standards.

The mistake which people generally make is when they start comparing India with Pakistan or Bangladesh, this is incorrect for many reasons, India is an enormous big country, its market share, volume is big, its population is big it should be compared more with China. China went in more difficult level in combating poverty than India, but being a communist, it has reduced poverty effectively. It’s also true that in China the gap between Rich and Poor is widening but better to have that gap rather than letting your people live in poverty.

Since 1980 China has significantly brought people out of poverty where India has failed to achieve substantial reduction

In retrospect, not in even the next two decades, India can reduce poverty, for many reasons; first, the policies they have introduced which I have discussed earlier are still in practice. Second, the focus of these policies as I have mentioned earlier is not sincere and not focused on human development; the nuisance still and will continue. Third, even they all of a sudden change the policy, let’s say tomorrow and bring fair policy with no corruption; even then it will take decades to achieve and reduce levels of impoverishment. This melancholy reality gives the notion of hubris and musing thinking that prevails in the country which is heedless in their direction unfortunately.
======================
Further Reading
Nelson, D. (2013, April 18). India has one third of world’s poorest, says World Bank. The Telegraph
World Bank report (2011). Social protection for changing India vol 1
Statistics of GDP on different countries by World Bank (2015) retrieved from:
 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
World Economic Outlook Database, October 2015 – Report for selected counties and subjects. International Monetary Fund (IMF).Retrieved from:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/02/weodata/weorept.aspx?pr.x=49&pr.y=8&sy=2013&ey=2020&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=534&s=NGDPD%2CNGDPDPC%2CPPPGDP%2CPPPPC&grp=0&a=
Report for Selected Countries and Subjects: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, International Monetary Fund, April 2011. Retrieve from:
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/weodata/weorept.aspx?pr.x=25&pr.y=15&sy=1991&ey=2012&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=512%2C558%2C513%2C564%2C566%2C524%2C534%2C578%2C536%2C548&s=NGDPDPC&grp=0&a=
United Nations (2014, 2015) Human Development Report.
Statistics on India (2016) India Government debt to GDP, trending economics retrieved from:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/government-debt-to-gdp
 Notes
[1] World Economic Outlook Database, October 2015 – Report for selected counties and subjects. International Monetary Fund (IMF).
[2] Statistics of GDP on different countries by World Bank (2015)
[3] Nelson, D. (2013, April 18). India has one third of world’s poorest, says World Bank. The Telegraph

[4] Statistics on India (2016) India Government debt to GDP, trending economics.
[5] Source: UN Department of Economic and Social affair’s 2012, Poverty MGNREGA Statistics, (2012)
Juan Ghoto is a recent graduate in public administration. writing on comparative development and human rights issues.
 
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Junaid Ghoto, Global Research, 2016

Aleppo hit by air strikes and shelling as evacuation stalls

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* There was no immediate indication when the Aleppo evacuation might take place but a pro-opposition TV station said it could be delayed until Thursday.

 * Turkey was in contact with Iran, Russia and the United States to try and ensure the evacuation of civilians and rebel fighters from Aleppo.

* People in eastern Aleppo packed their bags and burned personal belongings, fearing looting by the Syrian army and its Iranian-backed militia allies.

 * By taking full control of Aleppo, Assad has proved the power of his military coalition, aided by Russia's air force and an array of Shi'ite militias from across the region.

*United Nations voiced deep concern about reports it had received of Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters summarily shooting dead 82 people in recaptured east Aleppo districts. It accused them of "slaughter".

* The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and Russia said on Tuesday rebels had "kept over 100,000 people in east Aleppo as human shields".

* "People are saying the troops have lists of families of fighters and are asking them if they had sons with the terrorists. (They are) then either left or shot and left to die," said Abu Malek al-Shamali

* "There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al-Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said.

*A crisis the United Nations said was a "complete meltdown of humanity". There were food and water shortages in rebel areas, with all hospitals closed.

Aleppo hit by air strikes and shelling as evacuation stalls
Reuters
Aleppo hit by air strikes, shelling as evacuation stalls (00:46)

By Laila Bassam, Tom Perry and Lisa Barrington | ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT

Plans to evacuate besieged rebel districts of Aleppo were under threat on Wednesday as renewed air strikes and shelling rocked the city.

Iran, one of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main backers in the battle that has all but ended four years of rebel resistance in the city, imposed new conditions, saying it wanted the simultaneous evacuation of wounded from two villages besieged by rebel fighters, according to rebel and U.N. sources.

There was no sign of that happening. Insurgents fired shells at the two majority Shi'ite villages, Foua and Kefraya, in Idlib province west of Aleppo, causing some casualties, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

There was no immediate indication when the Aleppo evacuation might take place but a pro-opposition TV station said it could be delayed until Thursday.

A ceasefire brokered on Tuesday by Russia, Assad's most powerful ally, and Turkey was intended to end years of fighting in the city, giving the Syrian leader his biggest victory in more than five years of war.

But air strikes, shelling and gunfire erupted on Wednesday and Turkey accused government forces of breaking the truce. Syrian state television said rebel shelling had killed six people.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov predicted however that rebel resistance would last no more than two or three days. The defence ministry in Moscow said the rebels now controlled an enclave of only 2.5 square km (1 square mile).

Turkey was in contact with Iran, Russia and the United States to try and ensure the evacuation of civilians and rebel fighters from Aleppo.

Officials in the military alliance backing Assad could not be reached immediately for comment on why the evacuation, expected to start in the early hours of Wednesday, had stalled.

Nobody had left by dawn under the plan, according to a Reuters witness waiting at the departure point, where 20 buses stood with engines running but showed no sign of moving into rebel districts.
People in eastern Aleppo packed their bags and burned personal belongings, fearing looting by the Syrian army and its Iranian-backed militia allies.

U.N. war crimes investigators said the Syrian government bore the main responsibility for preventing any attacks and reprisals in eastern Aleppo and that it must hold to account any troops or allied forces committing violations.

In what appeared to be a separate development from the planned evacuation, the Russian defence ministry said 6,000 civilians and 366 fighters had left rebel-held districts over the past 24 hours.

A total of 15,000 people, including 4,000 rebel fighters, wanted to leave Aleppo, according to a media unit run by the Syrian government's ally Hezbollah.

RAPID ADVANCES

The evacuation plan was the culmination of two weeks of rapid advances by the Syrian army and its allies that drove insurgents back into an ever-smaller pocket of the city under intense air strikes and artillery fire.

By taking full control of Aleppo, Assad has proved the power of his military coalition, aided by Russia's air force and an array of Shi'ite militias from across the region.

Rebels have been supported by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies, but the support they have enjoyed has fallen far short of the direct military backing given to Assad by Russia and Iran.
Russia's decision to deploy its air force to Syria 18 months ago turned the war in Assad's favor after rebel advances across western Syria. In addition to Aleppo, he has won back insurgent strongholds near Damascus this year.

The government and its allies have focused the bulk of their firepower on fighting rebels in western Syria rather than Islamic State, which this week managed to take back the ancient city of Palmyra, once again illustrating the challenge Assad faces reestablishing control over all Syria.

As the battle for Aleppo unfolded, global concern has risen over the plight of the 250,000 civilians who were thought to remain in its rebel-held eastern sector before the sudden army advance began at the end of November.

The rout of rebels in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of terrified civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a "complete meltdown of humanity". There were food and water shortages in rebel areas, with all hospitals closed.

"SHOT IN THEIR HOMES"

On Tuesday, the United Nations voiced deep concern about reports it had received of Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters summarily shooting dead 82 people in recaptured east Aleppo districts. It accused them of "slaughter".

The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and Russia said on Tuesday rebels had "kept over 100,000 people in east Aleppo as human shields".

Fear stalked the city's streets. Some survivors trudged in the rain past dead bodies to the government-held west or the few districts still in rebel hands. Others stayed in their homes and awaited the Syrian army's arrival.

"People are saying the troops have lists of families of fighters and are asking them if they had sons with the terrorists. (They are) then either left or shot and left to die," said Abu Malek al-Shamali in Seif al-Dawla, one of the last rebel-held districts.

Terrible conditions were described by city residents.

Abu Malek al-Shamali, a resident in the rebel area, said dead bodies lay in the streets. "There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al-Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said.

(Reporting by Laila Bassam in Aleppo and Tom Perry, John Davison and Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Aleppo battle is over Russian UN envoy

Aleppo battle is over and deal reached to evacuate civilians and rebels says Russian UN envoy
Vitaly Churkin told the UN the Syrian government is now in control of the east of the city.

Tom Porter
By Tom Porter December 13, 2016 18:10 GMT

BREAKING Rebel groups to leave Aleppo 'within hours' says Russian UN envoy
Syrian government forces re-enter a part of Aleppo retaken from rebel groups.

Russia's ambassador to the United Nations has said military action has ceased in eastern Aleppo which if confirmed, would bring to an end four years of fighting.

Vitaly Churkin said the Syrian government was now in control of the areas of the city that had been held by rebels.

"According to the latest information that we received in the last hour, military actions in eastern Aleppo are over," Churkin told an emergency session of the UN Security Council.

Boris Johnson urges Russia to abandon 'puppet Assad' as regime forces take Aleppo
Earlier, he said that a deal has been agreed for rebel groups to evacuate the areas of east Aleppo they still occupy.

"My latest information is that they indeed have an arrangement achieved on the ground that the fighters are going to leave the city," Churkin said, adding that rebel groups are
scheduled to start leaving the city "within hours".

Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped in rebel-held areas of the city besieged by Syrian government forces backed by Russian air strikes.

A rebel official from the political office of the Nurredin al-Zinki group said the deal included allowing civilians to leave.

"An agreement has been reached," Yasser al-Youssef told AFP. "The first stage will be the evacuation of civilians and wounded, within hours, and afterwards fighters will leave with
their light weapons."

Those leaving will be allowed to travel to other rebel-held territory in the west of Aleppo province or neighbouring Idlib province, he said.

Churkin said the deal, agreed between the Russian military and Turkish intelligence, meant the Syrian government would be regaining control of the city, so there was no need to for
residents to leave their homes.

It comes hours after UN agencies reported that pro-government forces had been summarily killing civilians in Aleppo, including women and children.

Unicef added that as many as 100 children may be trapped inside a building under heavy attack in the city.

Parts of Aleppo were seized by rebel groups after the 2011 uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

In recent months, pro-government forces launched a major offensive to regain control of the city, with Russia's military saying 98% of territory was back in government hands.

Battle of Aleppo ends after years of bloodshed with rebel withdrawal

 

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World News | Tue Dec 13, 2016 | 6:39pm EST

Battle of Aleppo ends after years of bloodshed with rebel withdrawal

 

By Laila Bassam, Angus McDowall and Stephanie Nebehay | ALEPPO, Syria/BEIRUT/GENEVA

Rebel resistance in the Syrian city of Aleppo ended on Tuesday after years of fighting and months of bitter siege and bombardment that culminated in a bloody retreat, as insurgents agreed to withdraw in a ceasefire.

The battle of Aleppo, one of the worst of a civil war that has drawn in global and regional powers, has ended with victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his military coalition of Russia, Iran and regional Shi'ite militias.

For rebels, their expected departure with light weapons starting on Wednesday morning for opposition-held regions west of the city is a crushing blow to their hopes of ousting Assad after revolting against him during the 2011 Arab uprisings.

However, the war will still be far from over, with insurgents retaining major strongholds elsewhere in Syria, and the jihadist Islamic State group holding swathes of the east and recapturing the ancient city of Palmyra this week.

"Over the last hour we have received information that the military activities in east Aleppo have stopped, it has stopped," Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told a heated U.N. Security Council meeting. "The Syrian government has established control over east Aleppo."

Rebel officials said fighting would end on Tuesday night and a source in the pro-Assad military alliance said the evacuation of fighters would begin at around dawn on Wednesday. A Reuters reporter in Aleppo said late on Tuesday that the booms of the bombardment could no longer be heard.
Fighters and their families, along with civilians who have thrown in their lot with the rebels, will have until Wednesday evening to quit the city, a Turkish government source said. The ceasefire was negotiated by Turkey and Russia, without U.S. involvement.

A commander with the Jabha Shamiya rebel group said that Aleppo was a moral victory for the insurgents. "We were steadfast ... but unfortunately nobody stood with us at all", the commander, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

"UNCOMPROMISING VICTORY"

The plight of civilians has caused global outrage in the wake of a sudden series of advances by the Syrian army and its allies across the rebel enclave over the past two weeks.

"We appear to be witnessing nothing less than ... a total uncompromising military victory," U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.

The rout of rebels from their ever-shrinking territory in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of terrified civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a "complete meltdown of humanity". There were food and water shortages in rebel areas with all hospitals closed.

The United Nations earlier on Tuesday voiced deep concern about reports it had received of Syrian soldiers and allied Iraqi fighters summarily shooting dead 82 people in recaptured east Aleppo districts. It accused them of "slaughter".

"The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes," said Rupert Colville, a U.N. spokesman. "There could be many more."

"They have gone from siege to slaughter," British U.N. ambassador Matthew Rycroft said. "Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later - Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica and now Aleppo," said U.S. ambassador Samantha Power.

The Syrian army has denied carrying out killings or torture among those captured, and its main ally Russia said on Tuesday rebels had "kept over 100,000 people in east Aleppo as human shields".
An official with an Aleppo rebel group said the bulk of about 50,000 people was expected to be evacuated.

Fear stalked the city's streets. Some survivors trudged in the rain past dead bodies to the government-held west or the few districts still in rebel hands. Others stayed in their homes and awaited the Syrian army's arrival.

For all of them, fear of arrest, conscription or summary execution added to the daily terror of bombardment. "People are saying the troops have lists of families of fighters and are asking them if they had sons with the terrorists. (They are) then either left or shot and left to die," said Abu Malek al-Shamali in Seif al-Dawla, one of the last rebel-held districts.

WASTELAND OF RUBBLE

A Syrian military source said the evacuation of fighters would start at 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) on Wednesday. The source said fighters' families would also leave, but did not mention other civilian evacuations.

"We're going to watch this closely," U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said. "Obviously if it is true and there has been a ceasefire arrangement reached that not only stops the bombing and the violence but allows people to safely leave Aleppo, we would welcome it."

Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed.

The once-flourishing economic center with its renowned ancient sites has been pulverized during the war which has killed hundreds of thousands of people, created the world's worst refugee crisis and allowed for the rise of Islamic State.

The U.N.'s Colville said the rebel-held area had become "a hellish corner" of less than a square kilometer. Its capture was imminent, he added.

The Syrian army and its allies could declare victory at any moment, a Syrian military source had said earlier, predicting the final fall of the rebel enclave on Tuesday or Wednesday, after insurgent defenses collapsed on Monday.

Terrible conditions were described by city residents.

Abu Malek al-Shamali, a resident in the rebel area, said dead bodies lay in the streets. "There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al-Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said.

"Last night people slept in the streets and in buildings where every flat has several families crowded in," he added.

TIDE OF REFUGEES

State television broadcast footage of a tide of hundreds of refugees walking along a ravaged street, wearing thick clothes against the rain and cold, many with hoods or hats pulled tight around their faces, and hauling sacks or bags of belongings.

One man pushed a bicycle loaded with bags, another family pulled a cart on which sat an elderly woman. Another man carried on his back a small girl wearing a pink hat.

At the same time, a correspondent from a pro-Damascus television station spoke to camera from a part of Aleppo held by the government, standing in a tidy street with flowing traffic.

In some recaptured areas, people were returning to their shattered homes. A woman in her sixties, who identified herself as Umm Ali, or "Ali's mother", said that she, her husband and her disabled daughter had no water.

They were looking after the orphaned children of another daughter killed in the bombing, she said, and were reduced to putting pots and pans in the street to collect rainwater.

In another building near al-Shaar district, which was taken by the army last week, a man was fixing the balcony of his house with his children. "No matter the circumstances, our home is better than displacement," he said.

"The crushing of Aleppo, the immeasurably terrifying toll on its people, the bloodshed, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children, the destruction – and we are nowhere near the end of this cruel conflict," U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said in a statement.



வெற்றியைக் கொண்டாடும் ரசிய ஈரான் ஆதரவு சிரியப் படை

(Reporting By Laila Bassam in Aleppo, Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Lisa Barrington, John Davison and Tom Perry in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut; Editing by Peter Millership)

Thousands flee Aleppo onslaught as battle reaches climax

World News | Tue Dec 13, 2016 | 9:05am EST
Thousands flee Aleppo onslaught as battle reaches climax
 By Laila Bassam and Stephanie Nebehay | ALEPPO, Syria/GENEVA

Thousands of people fled the front lines of fighting in Aleppo on Tuesday as the Syrian military hammered the final pocket of rebel resistance and Russia rejected an immediate
ceasefire.

The rout of rebels from their ever-shrinking territory in Aleppo sparked a mass flight of civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis the United Nations said was a "complete meltdown of humanity" with civilians being shot dead.

The U.N. human rights office said it had reports of abuses, including that the army and allied Iraqi militiamen summarily killed at least 82 civilians in captured districts of the city, once a flourishing economic center with renowned ancient sites.

"The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. office. "There could be many more."

Behind those fleeing was a wasteland of flattened buildings, concrete rubble and bullet-pocked walls, where tens of thousands had lived until recent days under intense bombardment even after medical and rescue services had collapsed.

Colville said the rebel-held area was "a hellish corner" of less than a square kilometer, adding its capture was imminent.

The Syrian army and its allies are in the "last moments before declaring victory" in Aleppo, a Syrian military source said, after rebel defences collapsed, leaving insurgents in a tiny, heavily bombarded pocket of ground.

Turkish and Russian officials will meet on Wednesday to examine a possible ceasefire and opening a corridor, a senior Turkish official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.

But Moscow, the Syrian government's most powerful ally, rejected any immediate call for a ceasefire. "The Russian side wants to do that only when the corridors are established,"

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.

The spokesman for the civil defence force in the former rebel area of Aleppo said rebels now controlled an area of less than three sq km. "The situation is very, very bad. The civil
defence has stopped operating in the city," he told Reuters.

A surrender or withdrawal of the rebels from Aleppo would mean the end of the rebellion in the city, Syria's largest until the outbreak of war after mass protests in 2011, but it is unclear if such a deal can be struck by world powers.

By finally dousing the last embers of resistance burning in Aleppo, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's military coalition of the army, Russian air power and Iran-backed militias will
have delivered him his biggest battlefield victory of the war.

However, while the rebels, including groups backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies, as well as jihadist groups that the West does not support, will suffer a crushing
defeat in Aleppo, the war will be far from over.

"FLEEING IN PANIC"

Aleppo's loss will leave the rebels without a significant presence in any of Syria's main cities, but they still hold much of the countryside west of Aleppo and the province of Idlib, also in northwest Syria.

Islamic State also has a big presence in Syria and has advanced in recent days, taking the desert city of Palmyra.

The army and its allies had taken full control over all the Aleppo districts abandoned by rebels during their retreat in the city, a Syrian military source said on Tuesday.

After days of intense bombardment of rebel-held areas, the rate of shelling and air strikes dropped considerably late on Monday and through the night as the weather deteriorated, a Reuters reporter in the city said.

However, rocket fire pounded rebel-held areas, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, reported. Rebels and government forces still fought at points around the reduced enclave, the Observatory said.

The U.N. children's agency UNICEF cited an unnamed doctor in Aleppo as saying that many unaccompanied children were trapped in a building that was under attack, but the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights said it had no knowledge of the incident.


"Artillery shelling is continuing but because of the weather the aerial bombing has stopped. Many of the families and children have not left for areas under the control of the regime because their fathers are from the rebels," said Abu Ibrahim, a resident of Aleppo in a text message.

Colville said he feared retribution. "In all, as of yesterday evening we have received reports of pro-government forces killing at least 82 civilians, including 11 women and 13 children,"
Colville told a news briefing, naming the Iraqi armed group Harakat al-Nujaba as reportedly involved in the killings.

The military official said the rebels were fleeing "in a state of panic", but a Turkish-based official with the Jabha Shamiya insurgent group in Aleppo said on Monday night that they
had established a new frontline along the river.

"The bombardment is not on the frontlines, the greater burden of the bombardment is on the civilians, and this is what is causing a burden on us," the official said. Terrible conditions were described by city residents.

Abu Malek al-Shamali, a resident in the rebel area, said dead bodies lay in the streets. "There are many corpses in Fardous and Bustan al Qasr with no one to bury them,” he said.

"Last night people slept in the streets and in buildings where every flat has several families crowded in," he added.

TIDE OF REFUGEES

A daily bulletin issued by the Russian Defence Ministry's "reconciliation center" from the Hmeimin airbase used by its warplanes, reported that more than 8,000 civilians, more than half of them children, had left east Aleppo in 24 hours.

State television broadcast footage of a tide of hundreds of refugees walking along a ravaged street, wearing thick clothes against the rain and cold, many with hoods or hats pulled tight around their faces, and hauling sacks or bags of belongings.

One man pushed a bicycle loaded with bags, another family pulled a cart on which sat an elderly woman. Another man carried on his back a small girl wearing a pink hat.

At the same time, a correspondent from a pro-Damascus television station spoke to camera from a part of Aleppo held by the government, standing in a tidy street with flowing traffic.

In some recaptured areas, people were returning to their shattered homes. A woman in her sixties, who identified herself as Umm Ali, or "Ali's mother", said that she, her husband and
her disabled daughter had no water.

They were looking after the orphaned children of another daughter killed in the bombing, she said, and were reduced to putting pots and pans in the street to collect rainwater.

In another building near al-Shaar district, which was taken by the army last week, a man was fixing the balcony of his house with his children. "No matter the circumstances, our home is better than displacement," he said.

All around the buildings in that area were earthen fortifications and rebel slogans daubed on walls. But in a playground, all the equipment was burned.

(Reporting By Laila Bassam in Aleppo, Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Lisa Barrington and Tom Perry in Beirut, Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman and Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Angus McDowall in Beirut; Editing by Pravin Char and Peter Millership)

India’s crackdown in Kashmir: is this the world’s first mass blinding?

The long read
India’s crackdown in Kashmir: is this the world’s first mass blinding?


A bloody summer of protest in Kashmir has been met with a ruthless response from Indian security forces, who fired hundreds of thousands of metal pellets into crowds of civilians,
leaving hundreds blinded.

by Mirza Waheed
Tuesday 8 November
2016 06.00 GMT 

For the past month, while the attention of the world has been fixed on every dramatic twist in the US presidential election, the renewal of armed conflict between India and Pakistan has barely touched the headlines. In the past few weeks, the two nuclear states have, between them, killed two dozen civilians and injured scores of others in exchanges of artillery fire across the disputed border – known as the “line of control” – that divides Kashmir into parts controlled by India and Pakistan.

The latest flare-up in the long-running war of attrition between the two countries comes on the heels of a bloody summer of protest and repression in Kashmir that has now been erased from memory by the banging of war drums in Delhi and Islamabad. Since July, when the killing of a young militant leader sparked a furious civilian uprising across the Kashmir valley, the Indian state has responded with singular ruthlessness, killing more than 90 people. Most shocking of all has been the breaking up of demonstrations with “non-lethal” pellet ammunition, which has blinded hundreds of Kashmiri civilians.

In four months, 17,000 adults and children have been injured, nearly five thousand have been arrested, and an entire population spent the summer under the longest curfew in the history of curfews in Kashmir.

All this has been quickly forgotten in the past two months. On 18 September, a small group of jihadi fighters, widely believed to have come from Pakistan, staged a commando raid on an Indian army camp near the northern Kashmir town of Uri, killing 19 Indian soldiers – the deadliest attack on Indian security forces in Kashmir in two decades. Indian politicians quickly blamed Pakistan, which the country’s home minister described as a “terrorist state”, while Pakistani leaders made the implausible claim that India had staged the attack itself to distract from the protests in Kashmir.

The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who came into office promising to take a harder line with Pakistan, announced that “those behind this despicable attack will not go unpunished”. At the end of September, India retaliated with what it called a “surgical strike” against alleged militant camps in Pakistan-controlled territory, which, according to an army statement, “caused significant damage to terrorists”. Pakistan denied the attack ever took place – claiming that there had been nothing more than the usual exchange of fire across the border. Meanwhile, an ugly war of words continued to escalate in TV news studios, some of which were refurbished as pop-up war rooms.

Since then, the relationship between the two countries, which is at the best of times characterised by varying degrees of hate – depending upon the political temperature in Kashmir – has soured to the point where both are now suddenly finding spies in each others’ diplomatic missions. A tit-for-tat nearly every day, on TV, on social media, in ambassadorial corps – even in the realm of culture, where India has effectively banned Pakistani actors from working in Bollywood, and Pakistan has banned the screening of Indian films in cinemas.

According to recent reports, civilians caught in the crossfire have been evacuated, hundreds of schools shut, and local residents pressed into service to ferry supplies to troops stationed high in the Himalayas. As always, the victims of the artillery duels have been the civilians living on either side of a border that did not exist until the middle of the 20th century.

In the war of words that has followed the bloodshed in Uri, the brutal oppression of protest in Kashmir has been largely ignored. Indeed, the Indian state, aided by a near-militaristic TV news media, has used the Uri attack and its aftermath to cover up a surge of killings, maimings and blindings in one of the longest-running conflicts in the world. This is the story of the bloody summer that Kashmiris have endured – and of why they will not forget it.

On 8 July, a militant rebel leader, Burhan Wani, was shot dead by Indian armed forces and police in a remote Kashmir village. The killing sparked a series of spontaneous demonstrations and protests, which, in a matter of days, turned into a reinvigorated popular revolt against India’s dominion over this disputed state.
 
Wani’s path to militancy began in another one of Kashmir’s bloody summers – back in 2010, when Indian security forces killed 120 protesters. Wani, who was then 15 years old, is said to have joined a small group of homegrown militants after he and his brother were humiliated and abused by Indian soldiers. Over the next few years, he became Kashmir’s most famous militant commander, and acquired something of a cult following among young Kashmiris, who saw him as a symbol of resistance against Indian occupation. Wani was a new breed of militant: unlike the first generation of Kashmir separatist fighters in the early 1990s, he did not cross over into Pakistan; he didn’t use a nom de guerre, and he amassed a huge following on social media, where he issued brazen challenges to the Indian state. It was therefore no surprise that thousands attended Wani’s funeral in his hometown of Tral – or that those who could not get there organised their own funeral services across the Kashmir valley.

As Kashmiris took to the streets, police and paramilitaries were deployed in large numbers across the region. Thousands of young protesters charged at the armed forces with stones and slogans demanding freedom. Indian forces responded with lethal effect, firing bullets, CS gas, and metal pellets into the crowds. In less than four days, nearly 50 people were killed and thousands injured. More people took to the streets to protest against these killings, and the Indian forces and Kashmiri police killed and injured more of them. A cycle of protests connected to the funerals of those protesters were, in turn, fired upon, resulting in yet more killings and blindings. By the end of July, India was faced with a full-scale popular revolt in Kashmir.


The most recent figures put the number of dead at 94, including a young Kashmiri academic who was battered to death by Indian soldiers, and an 11-year-old boy, whose body, riddled with hundreds of pellets, was found on the outskirts of Srinagar, the joint capital of Kashmir, in mid-September. Shockingly, more than 500 people, most of them young, were shot in the face with the pump-action “pellet guns” that the Indian forces routinely use to suppress protests. These weapons discharge hundreds of small metal pellets, or birdshot, capable of piercing the eye.

As the uprising continued, the armed forces, by their own admission, fired nearly 4,000 cartridges at stone-throwing demonstrators, crowds protesting against police brutality, and even onlookers. This means that they sent, by one recent estimate, 1.3m metal balls hurtling towards public gatherings predominantly made up of young unarmed people.

Children as young as four and five now have multiple pellets in their retinas, blinding them partially, or fully, for life. At the start of September, doctors at Kashmir’s main hospital reported that on average, one person had their eyes ruptured by pellets every other hour since 9 July. “It means 12 eye surgeries per day,” one doctor told a local newspaper. “It is shocking.”

On 12 July, the fourth day of the protests, the state government, which is run by a controversial coalition between Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a local ally, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), finally issued its first official statement on the use of the so-called “non-lethal” pellet guns. A spokesperson for the government, representing  the PDP, described its position to the media: “We disapprove of it … But we will have to persist with this necessary evil till we find a non-lethal alternative.”

There is no recorded instance of a modern democracy systematically and willfully shooting at people to blind them

At first, the statement appeared as a typical soundbite, the sort of thing that officials must compose and recite with studied ambiguity for the press – the “government version”, as its known. But I was struck by its cavalier defence of state violence and brutalisation. It was obvious that this was not the spokesman’s personal view; it was a clear articulation of the intent of the Indian state in Kashmir: we have no choice but to shoot people in the eyes.

This was an unprecedented expression of state violence. There is no other recorded instance of a modern democracy systematically and wilfully shooting at people to blind them. At the end of August, according to data obtained by one of India’s national newspapers, nearly 6,000 civilians had been injured, and at least 972 of them had suffered injuries to their eyes.

According to official records at SMHS, the main hospital in Srinagar, 570 people sought treatment after their eyeballs were ruptured by metal pellets. Ophthalmologists at the hospital performed more surgeries in three days – from 10 to 12 July – than they had in the past three years. Many of the wounded were protesters, but not all. Not one of them deserved to be robbed of their sight.

By 14 August, as India prepared to celebrate its Independence Day, Kashmir was under a near total blackout. I briefly lost touch with my parents, as the state cut off all telephones and the internet. I was reminded, once again, of the lines of the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, which still echo 20 years after he wrote them: “The city from where no news can come / is now so visible in its curfewed night / that the worst is precise.” Just before the shutdown, I had talked to my youngest sister over WhatsApp – she was a little girl in the 90s, when Kashmir witnessed the first rebellion against Indian rule. “I’d never imagined my [three-year-old] child would see everything that I saw as a child,” she told me.

Rebellion against India’s rule over Kashmir is neither new nor surprising – and the brutality of the state’s response is equally familiar. In the 1990s, India came down hard on a widespread uprising in the Kashmir valley – killing, torturing, disappearing, and imprisoning thousands. Some estimates put the number of people killed since 1989 at 70,000. Some 8,000 non-combatants are thought to have been disappeared, and 6,000 are believed to have been buried in mass graves. Human rights reports have identified thousands of cases of torture, including shocking techniques such as “simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses”. According to a 2012 report in the Guardian, government documents revealed that one group of security agents had “lopped off the limbs of suspects and fed prisoners with their own flesh”.

In southern Kashmir, four girls, aged between 13 and 18, were shot in their faces as recently as last weekYears later, very little has changed in the Indian state’s response to the demand for self-determination from the people of Kashmir. In a matter of four to five weeks this summer,
Indian troops, with a clear mandate to be unsparing, wounded over 10,000 people. One of the youngest – five-year old Zohra – was admitted to a hospital in Srinagar with lacerations
to her abdomen and legs. Fourteen-year-old Insha was in the family kitchen when a swarm of pellets pierced her face. She has lost vision in both eyes. In southern Kashmir, four girls, aged between 13 and 18, were shot in their faces last week. The prognosis for the youngest of these, 13-year-old Ifra Jan, “is not good”, a doctor said. It is doubtful that these little girls posed a threat to the military force – estimated at 700,000 soldiers and police – stationed in Kashmir.

As the showers of metal pellets were unleashed upon protesters, bystanders and homebound schoolchildren, hospitals in Kashmir began to resemble scenes from the great wars of the
20th century. Rows of beds with blindfolded boys and girls on them, parents waiting anxiously, doctors and paramedics in attendance around the clock. On occasion, police and spies
also infiltrated the wards to compile profiles of the injured, in order to place them under surveillance after their release. The wounded were brought in by the dozen, like birds in the hunting season.

All of this was incomprehensible, even to longtime observers of violence in Kashmir. One of the largest military forces on the planet could not be waging a war against seeing. Perhaps
a few aberrations, a crowd-control tactic gone woefully wrong – one hoped so, but the numbers kept piling up, eye after mutilated eye popping up on the screens of phones and computers, as journalists began to publish their reports.

As none of the powerful men who run Kashmir from Delhi expressed qualms about the blinding of children, it became clear that in its hubris the Indian state had decided that snatching vision from a few hundred young people was a fair price to pay for keeping Kashmir in check. Perhaps itself blinded by a strain of arrogance peculiar to occupying powers, it continued to pummel a subject population into submission.

The phrase Raqs-e-Bismil, used in mystic Persian poetry to denote the passion of the devoted, translates as the “dance of the wounded”. In the slaughterhouse of the Kashmir valley,
even the grievously injured – with pellet-scarred eyes or broken limbs – have remained defiant. “We have even got some patients whose guts are perforated and they are asking when they can go back and join the protests,” one doctor reported.

Two-and-a-half decades of rebellion in Kashmir have hardened the indifference of India’s political and intellectual classes to the human cost of the country’s repressive tactics in the valley. Amid rising nationalist fervour, any sense of the basic rights of a suffering population has been eroded or vanished entirely. The hostility now appears to be total, unbridgeable, and for those on the receiving end, unbearable. Powerful TV studios urge the state to be more aggressively macho, while actively suppressing or distorting news from Kashmir.

One prominent newspaper ran an online poll about the continued use of the pellets that had wounded and blinded so many Kashmiris – a clear majority voted in support. Eminent columnists speak calmly of the need for “harsh love” toward civilian protesters to rationalise the state’s ruthless response. And the Twitter account for a government initiative, Digital India, posted a poem calling for the army to murder Kashmiris until they surrender.

As images from Kashmir began to circulate on the internet – despite frequent attempts to block communications, including at least one midnight raid on the offices of a local newspaper, and a blanket ban on one English daily, the Kashmir Reader – pictures of the wounded emerged by the dozen, many of them looking as though they had ruptured fruits where their eyes should have been. On the second day of the protests, more than 50 people were admitted to the main hospital in Srinagar. Medics and parents were desperate to save vision in at least one eye for those who had been shot, attempting to extract the jagged and irregular pellets. “This only happens in a war-like situation,” a surgeon sent from Delhi later said.

The protocol for the use of these crowd control weapons is to aim at the legs to disperse demonstrators. But it seems that the paramilitaries and the police have been deliberately firing
into faces. Some may only have minor wounds, some will suffer limited loss of vision, some will lose one eye, some both, and some will be impaired for life, but the pitiless assault on protesting adolescents forces us to ask one question: is the Indian state happy to blind a generation?
It is inconceivable that policy mandarins in Delhi or their advisers in Kashmir could be unaware of the destructive power of “non-lethal weapons”.

Earlier this year, the International Network of Civil Liberties Organisations and Physicians for Human Rights published a report titled “Lethal in Disguise”. “Pellet rounds”, it stated, “cause an indiscriminate spray of ammunition that spreads widely and cannot be aimed ...” They, therefore, “are not only likely to be lethal at close range, but are likely to be inaccurate and indiscriminate at longer ranges, even those recommended by manufacturers for safety”.

Many countries have banned police from using ammunition meant for hunting animals. The multidirectional spray of pellets was designed to catch prey in flight. But many countries
have continued to use them as a means of force to control civilian demonstrators.

In Israel, security forces often deploy lethal and “non-lethal” ammunition against Palestinian protesters, and crowd-control weapons have blinded at least five young Palestinians in the
last two years. The use of rubber bullets by police was banned in the Spanish region of Catalonia in 2014, after at least seven people were blinded by them on the streets of Barcelona.

In 2011, months after the uprising in Tahrir Square that toppled an Egyptian dictator, a young police lieutenant, Mohamed el-Shenawy, became infamous for firing pellets into the eyes of protesters against Egypt’s military government. His exemplary skill at blinding civilians earned him the nickname the “Eye Sniper”, and his notoriety as a symbol of ongoing state brutality eventually led to a three-year jail sentence.

Will India prosecute its own eye snipers?
Or outlaw the use of these weapons?

In the country’s present hypernationalist mood, every kind of other is a suspicious figure, a ready-made scapegoat for any failure that befalls the politicians determined to make India great again: the secessionist Kashmiri, the impure Dalit, the traitorous beef-eating Muslim, the woman who speaks her mind, the anti-national journalist, the dissenting writer.

Any voices who might call for a ban on these “non-lethal” guns are certain to be ignored. To the contrary, ministers and police, and their demagogues and cheerleaders, have continued to
advocate the use of both pellets and bullets against protesting crowds in Kashmir: unruly cattle must be reined in at any cost.

Because Kashmiris have become accustomed to the violence inflicted on them – as they are to the indifference of the world – when pellets were first sprayed at protesters in the heated summer of 2010, most people processed this as nothing more than a new misfortune; just another element of the war in Kashmir. If one were to draw a diagram of the assaults inflicted on Kashmiri bodies over the decades, hardly a single part would remain unmarked: in the 1990s, when the violence was at its worst, the eyes were spared; now they seem to have become a favourite target.

The victims of such tactics, consciously and not, cultivate reserves of tolerance for pain, but also a capacity to remember.

I remember, too. I grew up amid the darkness of the late 80s and early 90s. I remember that most of us teenagers innately understood that being abused, slapped, or beaten with batons and rifle butts by an Indian trooper was a bit of a joke when compared to the horrors that others endured in the dungeons of Kashmir. (One of the most notorious torture centres, Papa II – a colonial-era building on the banks of Dal Lake in Srinagar – was refurbished and redecorated, and served as the stately residence of the late pro-India politician Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. His daughter, as the current chief minister, now presides over the brutalisation of another generation of Kashmiri youth.)

I remember that the war in those years taught us to treat corpses and shrouds as reminders of passing time, which was measured for the young in massacres and assassinations. I recall, too, the tragic rupture in the Kashmiri body politic when an atmosphere of fear and loathing forced out the Kashmiri Pandits – a Hindu minority that had cohabited with Muslim Kashmiris for centuries – in an almost overnight exodus, many of them targeted and killed by separatist militants. Sanjay Tickoo, who runs an organisation for the welfare of Kashmiri Hindus, says: “Over the past 20 years, we estimate that 650 Pandits were killed in the valley.” I don’t know what happened to Sunil and Rajesh, my childhood mates from the primary school we all attended near an idyllic river bend in Verinag in south Kashmir.

Growing up, I experienced a brutal, bleak time, as India’s response to the uprising included the grotesque policy of “catch and kill”, under which combatants and non-combatants alike were dispatched in summary executions or tortured to death. And yet, I don’t remember such a vengeful assault on ordinary people as we are seeing now. Buoyed by a belligerent nationalist at the helm in Delhi, the security forces on the ground perhaps feel emboldened to unleash a more widespread cruelty.

In 2013, an affecting photo essay by journalist Zahid Rafiq in the New York Times documented a few of the stories of those who had been blinded by pellets. It remains a grim testament to the darkness in Kashmir – even though the blindings at that time, amid hundreds dead, did not attract too much notice. At the time, hardly any Indian civil society group or human rights organisation thought fit to speak up about such a wicked crime. The wanton demonisation of the Kashmiri Muslim, a project that some media organisations in India take particular pleasure in, was perhaps fully realised even then. It certainly is now, when thousands, fed on a daily diet of nationalist fury, take to social media to celebrate the killing, maiming, and blinding of young Kashmiris.

That the government in Kashmir – a collection of local elites comprising career politicians, technocrats, and chancers loyal to India – considers pellet guns a “necessary evil”, might
make us feel grateful. At least they acknowledge the “evil” part – perhaps to address their own guilty consciences.

A few days into this summer’s uprising, the Kashmir Observer, a local English-language daily, reported that the local government had deployed a fleet of brand new ambulances to
securely ferry visiting VIPs to picnic spots in the valley. This was while protesters were being killed, maimed and blinded – and while the ambulances carrying them to hospitals were coming under fire from security forces.

An ophthalmologist at the main hospital in Kashmir told the Indian Express in July: “For the first time the foreign bodies are irregular edged, which causes more damage once it strikes the eye.” Irregular, sharp edges? I had assumed that the pellets fired at protesters – like rubber or plastic bullets, were round discoid things. It turns out that there exist different kinds of pellets, and in 2016, some Indian forces are using the jagged variety – which inflict greater damage to flesh and eyes alike, and which doctors say is far more difficult to remove.

How did India get here? How is it all right for a constitutionally democratic and secular, modern nation to blind scores of civilians in a region it controls? Not an authoritarian state, not a crackpot dictatorship, not a rogue nation or warlord outside of legal and ethical commitments to international statutes, but a democratic country, a member of the comity of nations. How are India’s leaders, thinkers and its thundering televised custodians of public and private morality, all untroubled by the sight of a child whose heart has been penetrated by metal pellets? This is the kind of cruelty we expect from Assad’s Syria, not the world’s largest democracy.

Historically, such an inhuman response to an uprising – to mass dissent – has been the province of empires and tyrants. A modern democratic nation rarely unleashes such violence, except upon victims whom it does not regard as its own people. It is quite clear that for India and its rulers, Kashmiris have been subjects and not citizens for as long as Kashmiris have refused Indian rule. You do not shower projectiles that target eyes and viscera on a people you consider your own. In snatching away the vision of Kashmiri children, the Indian state has decisively announced that it has only one message: you must be servile and submissive, and if you refuse, we will unleash our fury.

With a hubris derived from its might and military dominion over Kashmir, the state convinces itself that it has the power to inflict blindness. In no time, then, it blinds itself too – to the character of democracy that is its central founding principle. The harsh repression of Kashmiri protests, the Nobel prize-winning Indian economist Amartya Sen declared in July, is “the biggest blot on India’s democracy”.

It is hard not to see this mood of brutality connected, at the very least in its tenor, to the larger register of extreme violence, by both state and non-state actors, that has come to be normalised over the last couple of decades.

There has been some dissent in India. Journalists, activists, even some politicians, have written elegiac columns and essays on the savage response to the rebellion in Kashmir. They have implored their government to cease the brutality, to be kind, and to talk to Kashmiris. But it appears that the Indian government, clouded by a newfound chauvinism and a hunger for votes, is in no mood to listen to the nation’s voices of sanity. In August, only a few days after Indian forces in Srinagar murdered a 21-year-old cash-machine watchman by firing 300 pellets into his body from close range, the Indian prime minister used a speech on Kashmir to taunt Pakistan over its own atrocities against separatists in the province of Balochistan, where the Pakistani army has inflicted forced disappearances and summary executions on the Baloch people. “Pakistan forgets that it bombs its own citizens using fighter planes,” he said. But Modi chose to forget that his own forces had, by then, killed scores of young Kashmiris.

We need to interrogate the circumstances that have led to the deliberate blinding of hundreds of young people at the hands of armed forces in Kashmir, before this too is forgotten. As some of the wounded have begun to heal, some accounts have suggested that the damage may have been less severe than initially feared – that perhaps many of those who underwent eye surgery will regain “some vision” in at least one eye. This might make one feel better – relieved that its not worse – but there is something wrong with that kind of moral reckoning, akin to the Indian security officials who continue to maintain that pellet guns must be used because the alternative would be worse. One security official told an Indian news website that pellet guns had actually “saved lives”: “It is unfortunate that there have been eye injuries but the pellets are less lethal than getting hit by bullets.”

So we might ask: what if the armed forces stationed in Kashmir had fired live bullets instead? Imagine the death toll! But this doesn’t compute: in 2016, the security forces have
already killed nearly 100 civilians. Is that an acceptable number?

In a year or two, as India, and Pakistan, continue to harp on their territorialist positions, there will arrive a season of surface calm – a “return to normalcy” – in Kashmir. People will
shop, marry off their children, and celebrate an uncurfewed Eid. They will also welcome tourists in their blighted land.

But when this new generation of freedom-seekers grows up into blinded, maimed, adulthood, they will carry our guilt-ridden consciences for us. They will remember more than they have seen. They will certainly remember the country that did this to them.

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அமெரிக்காவின் ``அலெப்போ நீதி``!

Aleppo rebel zone facing 'death or surrender' - rebel official

World News | Sun Dec 11, 2016 | 11:00am GMT
Aleppo rebel zone facing 'death or surrender' - rebel official

Smoke and flames rise after air strikes on rebel-controlled besieged area of Aleppo, as seen from a government-held side, in Syria December 11, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

Syrian rebels control only a small area of Aleppo that is full of civilians and under very fierce bombardment after pro-government forces took the al-Maadi district, a Turkey-based official with the Jabha Shamiya rebel group said on Sunday.

Rebel groups in Aleppo had received no word about U.S.-Russia talks to resolve the crisis in Aleppo, the official said, warning that it would end "in a tragic way" without outside intervention and that they faced "death or surrender".

(Reporting by Tom Perry; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Russia says no agreement with U.S. on safe exit for Aleppo rebels: RIA
 

Smoke and flames rise after air strikes on rebel-controlled besieged area of Aleppo, as seen from a government-held side, in Syria December 11, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Sunday that Moscow had not reached an agreement with the United States for rebel fighters in Syria's Aleppo to have safe passage out of the city, RIA news agency reported.

Rebel officials told Reuters earlier on Sunday that a proposal had been tabled by the two countries for fighters to leave the city with their families and other civilians.

"What western agencies are reporting does not necessarily correspond with reality," Ryabkov said, adding that Russia was working to create the necessary conditions for the safe extraction of people from Aleppo.

"The issue of withdrawing militants is the subject of separate agreements. This agreement has not yet been reached, largely because the United States insists on unacceptable terms," RIA quoted him as saying.

Ryabkov said there was no discussion about a joint agreement with the United States on Syria which would then be considered by the opposition. The rebel groups in Aleppo said they had yet to respond to the proposal.

Talks between Russian and U.S. experts will continue in Geneva, he said, adding: "There is some progress, but no agreement."

(Reporting by Jack Stubbs; editing by David Clarke)
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World News | Sun Dec 11, 2016 | 2:11pm EST

Exclusive: U.S. and Russia propose safe exit for Aleppo rebels - opposition officials

People walk near rubble of damaged buildings, in the rebel-held besieged area of Aleppo, Syria November 19, 2016. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail 

The United States and Russia on Sunday tabled a proposal to rebels in Aleppo that would offer safe passage from the city for fighters, their families and other civilians, three opposition officials with Aleppo rebel groups told Reuters.

However, Russia denied that any deal had been reached, saying that reports of the proposal do not "necessarily correspond with reality".

The rebel groups in Aleppo have yet to respond to the proposal, the opposition officials said. The proposal promised rebel fighters a "secure" and "honorable" withdrawal from the city, they said.

If rebels accept the proposal, it would restore Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's full control over rebel-held areas of eastern Aleppo, his biggest victory yet in the civil war that has shattered his country.

The Russian-backed Syrian military and its allies have captured swathes of rebel-held eastern Aleppo in a ferocious military campaign, squeezing rebel fighters and tens of thousands of civilians into an ever shrinking enclave.

Russia and the U.S. have been meeting in Geneva to seek a solution to the fighting and the humanitarian crisis it has caused.

Moscow's RIA news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying that Russia was working to create the necessary conditions for the safe extraction of people from Aleppo and that the Geneva talks would continue.

"The issue of withdrawing militants is the subject of separate agreements. This agreement has not yet been reached, largely because the United States insists on unacceptable terms," RIA quoted him as saying.

Under the proposal, the Syrian government and its allies would guarantee safe passage for fighters, their family members, and other civilians from the city.

The rebel groups in the city have previously said they would not leave eastern Aleppo, while demanding safe passage for civilians who wish to leave to areas to the north of Aleppo near the border with Turkey.

A draft of the proposal sent to Reuters from two of the rebel officials said the Syrian government and its allies would give a public guarantee that fighters and civilians leaving the city would not be detained or harmed, and guarantee the safety of civilians who wish to remain in the city.
It would require fighters from the jihadist group formerly known as Nusra Front to head to the northwestern province of Idlib. But it would allow fighters from other groups to go to other destinations including areas near the Turkish border to the northeast of Aleppo, which are held by groups fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army.

Implementation would be carried out over a 48-hour period, and U.N. oversight would be sought. Fighters would be allowed to take their light weapons with them, but must leave heavy weapons behind, the proposal said.

The office of the U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura said it had no comment for now on the report.

(Reporting by Tom Perry and Suleiman al-Khalidi; editing by David Clarke and Ros Russell)