SRINAGAR: The family of a separatist icon from Indian-administered Kashmir have been booked for police investigation under a sweeping anti-terrorism law for chanting anti-New Delhi slogans and wrapping his body with Pakistan’s flag after he died, officials said.
Tensions in the Himalayan territory, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, have been heightened since Syed Ali Geelani died on Wednesday at the age of 92 in the main city of Srinagar.
Police in Kashmir said a case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) — which effectively allows people to be held without trial indefinitely — was registered on Saturday against Geelani’s family.
The family were accused of “raising anti-national slogans and resorting to other anti-national activities” at the influential resistance leader’s home soon after his death.
They have not yet been detained by police.
In India a booking may not necessarily lead to a formal charge, but is an incident that is officially recorded. Critics say bookings have been used by police to intimidate locals in the region.
The separatist leader’s son Naseem Geelani did not deny the allegations but repeated earlier claims that police took his father’s body away to be buried in the middle of the night just hours after his death, and did not allow the family to perform last rites.
Police have refuted those allegations.
“We told the visiting police officers that they had taken control of everything after my father’s death and that we were mourning. We had no way of knowing who was doing what,” the son told AFP on Sunday.
A video widely shared on social media showed the leader’s body wrapped in a Pakistani flag before police officers took it away amid a scuffle with his family members.
Chants of “we want freedom” were heard in the background during the mayhem.
Authorities on Sunday eased a lockdown imposed to maintain calm after his death across Kashmir, allowing for limited movement. An Internet and mobile phone shutdown was partially eased on Saturday.
Geelani, a popular figure in the region, spent over five decades fighting for self-determination for people in Indian-controlled Kashmir.
Islamabad observed a day of national mourning after Geelani’s death and funeral prayers for the leader were held across Pakistan and in Turkey.
In Srinagar, Indian troops are guarding Geelani’s grave and no-one is allowed to approach it.
Anger has simmered in the territory since 2019 when New Delhi controversially revoked the region’s semi-autonomy and brought it under direct rule.
Residents in the Muslim-majority region say repression has intensified in the two years since the changes.
India has used the vaguely-worded UAPA legislation against thousands of Kashmiri residents, journalists and dissidents, according to activists.
Rebel groups have been fighting Indian forces for decades, demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan that controls a part of it.
Tens of thousands have died in the fighting, most civilians.
India to investigate late Kashmir leader’s family under anti-terror law
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India to investigate late Kashmir leader’s family under anti-terror law
- Police in Kashmir said a case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) was registered on Saturday against Geelani’s family
- The family were accused of “raising anti-national slogans and resorting to other anti-national activities”
China denies pressuring other countries over Ukraine peace summit
- Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Beijing was ‘working hard today to prevent countries from coming to the peace summit’
- Beijing’s foreign ministry: ‘China’s position is open and transparent, and there is absolutely no instance of us putting pressure on other countries’
Zelensky said at a security forum in Singapore on Sunday that Beijing was “working hard today to prevent countries from coming to the peace summit” due to be hosted by Switzerland later this month.
Kyiv hopes the summit will help it win broad international backing for its vision of the terms needed to end Russia’s invasion.
China criticized the conference last week, saying it would be “difficult” for it to attend if Russia did not participate.
Beijing’s foreign ministry said Monday that “China’s position is open and transparent, and there is absolutely no instance of us putting pressure on other countries.”
“On peace talks, China’s position is fair and just. It does not target any third country, and of course is not aimed at Switzerland’s hosting of this summit for peace,” spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular press briefing.
Zelensky said Sunday that more than 100 countries and organizations had signed up to the conference so far.
China insists it is a neutral party in the conflict and is striving to bring an end to hostilities through dialogue.
But Beijing has been criticized by Western nations for cultivating strong ties with Moscow and giving Russian President Vladimir Putin diplomatic and political cover to wage a war of aggression.
UN forecasts La Nina could help lower temperatures this year
- The WMO warned that global temperatures would continue to rise in the long term due to human-induced climate change resulting in extreme weather worse and upend seasonal rainfall
The impact is likely to be felt in the next few months because the warming El Nino weather pattern — which has helped fuel a spike in global temperatures and extreme weather around the world since mid-2023 — “is showing signs of ending,” the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said in its latest update.
The WMO warned, however, that global temperatures would continue to rise in the long term due to human-induced climate change, which continues to make extreme weather worse and upend seasonal rainfall and temperature patterns.
La Nina refers to the cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in large swathes of the tropical Pacific Ocean, coupled with winds, rains and changes in atmospheric pressure.
In many locations, especially in the tropics, La Nina produces the opposite climate impacts to El Nino, which heats up the surface of the oceans, leading to drought in some parts of the world and triggering heavy downpours elsewhere.
The WMO said there was a “60 percent” chance of La Nina conditions in the period from July to September and a “70 percent” likelihood during August-November.
The chances of El Nino redeveloping are negligible, it added.
Every month since June 2023, when El Nino returned, has set a new high temperature record, and 2023 was by far the warmest year on record globally.
The WMO said the planet would continue to heat up overall from the use of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
“The end of El Nino does not mean a pause in long-term climate change, as our planet will continue to warm due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases,” WMO deputy secretary general Ko Barrett stressed.
“Exceptionally high sea surface temperatures will continue to play an important role during next months.”
Much of the planet’s excess heat from climate change is stored in the oceans.
In the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has already factored the expected La Nina into its forecasts for this year’s Atlantic hurricane season.
The NOAA said it expected four to seven major hurricanes in the Atlantic between June and November.
“The upcoming Atlantic hurricane season is expected to have above-normal activity due to a confluence of factors, including near-record warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, development of La Nina conditions in the Pacific, reduced Atlantic trade winds and less wind shear,” the NOAA said on May 23.
The WMO noted that the past nine years had been the warmest on record, even with the cooling influence of a La Nina event that lasted from 2020 to early 2023.
The latest El Nino, which peaked in December, was one of the five strongest on record.
“Our weather will continue to be more extreme because of the extra heat and moisture in our atmosphere,” Barrett said.
The WMO has made it a priority to ensure that all regions of the world are covered by early warning systems by 2027, particularly the least well-equipped, such as Africa.
“Seasonal forecasts for El Nino and La Nina, and the anticipated impacts on the climate patterns globally, are an important tool to inform early warnings and early action,” Barrett said.
Muslim schools caught up in France’s fight against Islamism
PARIS: Last year, Sihame Denguir enrolled her teenage son and daughter in France’s largest Muslim private school, in the northern city of Lille some 200 kilometers (125 miles) from their middle-class suburban Parisian home.
The move meant financial sacrifices. Denguir, 41, now pays fees at the partially state-subsidised Averroes school and rents a flat in Lille for her children and their grandmother, who moved to care for them.
But Averroes’ academic record, among the best in France, was a powerful draw.
So she was dumbstruck in December when the school lost government funding worth around two million euros a year on grounds it failed to comply with secular principles enshrined in France’s national education guidelines.
“The high school has done so well,” Denguir told Reuters in a park near her home in Cergy, calling Averroes open-minded. “It should be valued. It should be held up as an example.”
President Emmanuel Macron has undertaken a crackdown on what he calls Islamist separatism and radical Islam in France following deadly jihadist attacks in recent years by foreign and homegrown militants. Macron is under pressure from the far right Rassemblement National (RN), which holds a wide lead over his party ahead of European elections this week.
The crackdown seeks to limit foreign influence over Muslim institutions in France and tackle what Macron has said is a long-term Islamist plan to take control of the French Republic.
Macron denies stigmatizing Muslims and says Islam has a place in French society. However, rights and Muslim groups say that by targeting schools like Averroes, the government is impinging on religious freedom, making it harder for Muslims to express their identity.
Four parents and three academics Reuters spoke to for this story said the campaign risks being counterproductive, alienating Muslims who want their children to succeed within the French system, including at high-performing mainstream schools such as Averroes.
Thomas Misita, 42, father of three daughters attending Averroes, said he was taught at school that France’s principles included equality, fraternity and freedom of religion.
“I feel betrayed. I feel singled out, smeared, slandered,” Misita said. “I feel 100 percent French, but it creates a divide. A small divide with your own country.”
The school’s long-term survival is now in question.
Despite raising about 1 million euros in donations from individuals, enrolment for next year has dropped to about 500 students, from 800, headmaster Eric Dufour told Reuters in May.
Macron’s office referred a request for comment to the interior ministry, which did not respond. The education ministry said it did not differentiate between schools of different faiths in applying the law. The ministry said despite academic success, Averroes had failings, citing “administrative and budgetary management” and a lack of transparency.
The school is in a legal battle to overturn the decision.
Headmaster Eric Dufour told Reuters the school had given the state “all the guarantees” to show that it respected funding terms and French values.
“We are the most inspected school in France,” he said.
SCHOOLS CLOSED
Local offices of the national government have closed at least five Muslim schools since Macron came to power in 2017, according to a Reuters tally. Reuters was only able to find one Muslim school closed under his predecessors.
In the first year of Macron’s presidency, one other school lost public funding, pledged in May 2017 by the government of former president Francois Hollande.
Since 2017, only one Muslim school has been awarded state funding, compared to nine in total under Macron’s two predecessors, Education Ministry data shows. The National Federation for Muslim Education (FNEM) told Reuters it made about 70 applications on behalf of Muslim schools in that period.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen current and former headmasters and teachers in ten Muslim schools, who said the establishments were being targeted, including being censured on flimsy grounds, and that perceived discrimination was preventing them integrating more closely with the state system.
“It’s really a double standard of who has to conform to secular Republican values in a certain way, and who doesn’t,” said American anthropologist Carol Ferrera, who studies French faith schools and says Catholic and Jewish schools are treated more leniently.
Prominent Parisian Catholic school Stanislas has kept its funding despite inspectors last year finding issues including sexist or homophobic ideas and mandatory religious classes, French media has reported.
The education ministry said the government had increased supervision of private schools under Macron, leading to more closures, including of some non-denominational schools. It cited budget restraints as a reason for the low number of schools offered public funding.
While some of the five closed Muslim schools taught conservative versions of Islam, according to the education ministry statements and closure orders, the headmasters and teachers Reuters spoke to emphasized their schools’ efforts to create a mainstream and tolerant teaching environment.
“There was never a desire for separatism,” said Mahmoud Awad, board member at Education & Savoir, the school that lost state funding soon after Macron took office.
“At some point they have to accept that a Muslim school is like a Catholic school or a Jewish school,” he said.
Idir Arap, headmaster of the Avicenne middle school in Nice, told Reuters he has unsuccessfully sought public funding since 2020, as he wants the school brought into the state fold. The latest request was rejected in February, according to a document reviewed by Reuters.
“We’re the opposite of radicalism,” Arap said.
In February, Education Minister Nicole Belloubet said she wanted to close Avicenne, citing ‘opaque funding’ found by a local representative of the government. In April, an administrative court provisionally ruled any irregularities were minor, suspending the closure order. The next hearing is set for June 25.
In a reply to Reuters, the ministry reiterated that financial opacity was widespread at Avicenne, saying it awaited the court’s final ruling. It said the school could appeal the funding refusal.
FAITH SCHOOL TRADITION
France has a tradition of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish schools that allow religious expression within the constraints of lay principles broadly excluding religion from public life.
A prohibition on hijab headscarves in public schools in 2004 created demand for schools where Muslim students, and in particular girls, could express religious identity.
State funding was extended to Averroes in 2008, in return for oversight, in a push by former president Nicolas Sarkozy to better integrate Muslim institutions.
An estimated 6.8 million Muslims live in France, data from France’s statistics agency shows, around 10 percent of the population. Islam is the country’s second-largest religion after Catholicism.
There are 127 Muslim schools, according to FNEM. Only ten benefit from state funding, a report from the public audit office said last year.
In contrast, 7,045 Catholic schools are funded, the report said. France’s Catholic Church says there are 7,220 such schools.
Macron’s government introduced laws granting powers to local authorities to strip institutions, including private schools, of funding for failing to respect “liberty, equality, fraternity,” among other things.
In a 2020 speech, Macron described a need to reverse what he saw as radicalization in Muslim communities, including practices such as the separation of sexes.
“The problem is an ideology which claims its own laws should be superior to those of the Republic,” he said.
In 2020, Elysee advisers told reporters monitoring of Muslim schools and associations involved with children was key to fight separatism. Officials said they feared religious indoctrination was taking place in some of them.
Rights group Amnesty International has warned the government’s approach is potentially discriminatory and risks reinforcing stereotypes that conflate all Muslims with terrorism or radical views.
CULTURAL BRIDGE
The first Muslim high school in mainland France, Averroes was named after a 12th century Muslim scholar from Spain who helped reintroduce Aristotle’s thought to Europe and is seen as a symbol of cooperation between Islam and the West.
It was voted France’s best high school in 2013.
Reuters spoke to seven parents and pupils who spoke of a nurturing space that took constitutional commitments seriously.
On a visit in March, Reuters reporters observed girls and boys studying together. Teachers included non-Muslims. Some girls wore the hijab while others chose not to.
Religious studies are optional, as is prayer.
In 2019, French journalists and local politicians drew attention to Averroes over a 850,000 euro grant from aid organization Qatar Charity, which works with the United Nations. They also questioned links between members of the school’s board and proponents of political Islam in France.
An education ministry inspection of the school in 2020 found the grant to be legal. But officials and politicians in the Lille region continued a campaign to restrain the school’s state income.
In February, a Lille administrative court upheld the decision of the local representative of the government to halt funding, largely on the grounds that a 1980s Syrian book on the curriculum of an optional Muslim ethics class contained ideas about the separation of genders and the death sentence for apostasy, according to the ruling, reviewed by Reuters.
The Lille office of the government declined a request for comment.
Headmaster Dufour told Reuters the book should not have been on the curriculum and was removed earlier in 2023. He said it was not present in the school and had never been taught. The Muslim ethics class helped pupils practice faith in compliance with French law, he said.
Nine pupils, former pupils, parents and teachers said the class advocated for democratic, tolerant values.
On a March afternoon, Denguir’s son Abderahim, 14, attended the class during Ramadan alongside other boys and girls from the middle school.
Abderahim said he wanted to become an architect and make his parents proud.
“They want me to excel at school,” he said, “to have a good job, a good salary, to take care of our family later.”
New Caledonia separatists urge Paris to drop voting reform
- Kanaks fear their ambitions for independence will be crushed by leaving them in a permanent minority in the territory of 270,000 people
NOUMEA: Separatists in French Pacific territory New Caledonia pressed Paris Monday to drop a planned voting reform that triggered weeks of deadly unrest.
The Socialist Kanak National Liberation Front (FLNKS) — named for the indigenous people who fear being marginalized by the changes — said President Emmanuel Macron should “be clear in his words by stating clearly he will... abandon the constitutional reform,” which has yet to be approved by both houses of parliament.
“Such an announcement would permit... the calming of the current tensions so as to resume discussions on the future of New Caledonia,” the FLNKS’ political committee told Macron in a letter seen by AFP.
The government plans to open up the archipelago’s electoral roll — frozen since 1998 — to more recent arrivals who have lived there for at least 10 years.
Kanaks fear the change will crush their ambitions for independence by leaving them in a permanent minority in the territory of 270,000 people.
Anger over the plans spilled into two weeks of riots and erection of barricades that cut off many neighborhoods and blocked major roads.
Clashes cost the lives of seven people and left hundreds more injured, as well as causing around one billion euros ($1.1 billion) in damage.
Macron said during a brief visit to New Caledonia on May 23 that he did not want to “pass the reform by force” — while vowing he would not “turn back.”
“On the ground, these remarks regrettably continue not to be understood,” the FLNKS said.
“This incomprehension poses a real difficulty and prevents our activists from hearing the call for calm and easing tensions,” it added.
French authorities insist capital Noumea is back under their control, although barricades endure and pro-independence demonstrators are determined to stay in the streets.
Noumea’s international airport remains closed, while an overnight curfew is in force across New Caledonia until at least June 10.
South Korea to suspend military pact with North over trash balloons
- Suspending the agreement will pave the way for the South to conduct training near the military border
- The pact had been all but scrapped when Pyongyang declared last year it was no longer bound by it
SEOUL: South Korea plans to suspend a military agreement signed with North Korea in 2018 aimed at easing tensions, the presidential office said on Monday, after Seoul warned of a strong response to balloons launched by Pyongyang carrying trash to the South.
North Korea has launched hundreds balloons carried by wind across the border that dropped trash throughout South Korea, which called it a provocation and rejected Pyongyang’s claim it was done to inconvenience its neighbor.
The National Security Council said it would raise the plan to suspend the entirety of the military agreement for approval by the cabinet at a meeting on Tuesday.
Suspending the agreement will pave the way for the South to conduct training near the military border and take “sufficient and immediate measures” in response to North Korea’s provocation, the Council said in a statement.
It did not elaborate what those measures may be.
The pact, which was the most substantive deal to come out months of historic summit meetings between the two Koreas in 2018, had been all but scrapped when Pyongyang declared last year it was no longer bound by it.
Since then, the North deployed troops and weapons at guard posts near the military border.
By continuing to comply with the pact, “there have been considerable problems in our military’s readiness posture,” the Council said.
South Korea has previously said it would take “unendurable” measures against North Korea for sending the trash balloons over the border, which could include blaring propaganda from loudspeakers positioned at the border directed at the North.
North Korea has said the balloons were in retaliation for a propaganda campaign by North Korean defectors and activists in the South, who regularly send inflatables containing anti-Pyongyang leaflets with food, medicine, money and USB sticks loaded with K-pop music videos and dramas across the border.
North Korea has reacted angrily to the campaign because it is worried about the potential impact of the materials on the psychology of the people who read or listen to them and on the state’s control of the public, experts said.
