DELHI: Just a few hours before her murder in Bangalore on Tuesday, allegedly by Hindu right-wingers, Gauri Lankesh, a secular journalist and civil rights activist, spoke up for the rights of Rohingya Muslims in India.
“Are Rohingiya ‘terrorists’ killing Hindus and burning their homes and temples?” she tweeted, citing an article in Quint news magazine about fake news being used to incite anger against the minority in India.
“She took a strong line against the deportation of Rohingya from India and their genocide in Myanmar,” said Kavita Krishnan, a prominent civil rights activist and secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association. Lankesh’s killing “is an attempt to strike terror in the heart of dissent,” Krishnan added.
Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood on her doorstep in the city of Bangalore. She was returning home from work when she was gunned down by three men who came on a motorcycle in the early evening in front of her home in Bangalore.
She was an editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a popular weekly magazine in the local Kannada language.
Her killing has sparked outrage across India, with civil rights activists, journalists and others taking to the streets in protest. But the government has remained largely silent.
MP Smriti Irani tweeted a condolence message, but “such tweets are meaningless,” said Krishnan.
“There are Twitter handles followed by (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi that are busy celebrating Lankesh’s death.”
When contacted by Arab News, many members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) refused to comment.
When asked about Lankesh’s opposition to deporting Rohingya, Rakesh Sinha, director of the India Policy Foundation — a think tank promoted by the BJP — simply said: “It’s not good to go into specifics.”
The BJP’s ambivalence about the killing of a prominent voice of dissent has not gone down well with opposition leaders.
Krishnan said “a strong section of media in India” is also “responsible for creating an atmosphere where any political dissent is termed anti-national.”
Modi landed in Myanmar for talks with its leader Aung San Suu Kyi on the same day Lankesh was killed.
Indian journalist opposed to deporting Rohingya killed
Indian journalist opposed to deporting Rohingya killed
Australia bans a citizen with alleged links to militant Daesh group from returning from Syria
- The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians and fly on Monday from Damascus to Australia, Burke said
- “These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents”
MELBOURNE: Australia’s government banned an Australian citizen with alleged ties to the militant Daesh group from returning home from a detention camp in Syria, the latest development in the case of fraught repatriation of families of Daesh fighters.
The woman was planning to join another 33 Australians — 10 women and 23 children — and fly on Monday from Damascus, Syria, to Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Wednesday.
But the group was turned back by Syrian authorities to the Roj detention camp, due to unspecified procedural problems.
The Australian government had acted on news that the group planned to leave Syria, Burke said. He said the woman, whom he did not identify, had been issued with a temporary exclusion order on Monday and her lawyers had been provided with the paperwork on Wednesday.
She was an immigrant who left Australia for Syria sometime between 2013 and 2015, Burke said, declining to elaborate on whether she had children — though he generally blamed the parents for the predicaments of their offspring stranded in Syria.
“These are horrific situations that have been brought on those children by actions of their parents. They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made,” Burke told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Burke has the power to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent high-risk citizens from returning to Australia for up to two years.
The laws were were introduced to in 2019 to prevent defeated Daesh fighters from returning to Australia. There are no public reports of an order being issued before.
Burke said security agencies had not advised that any of the other Australians in the group warranted an exclusion order. Such orders can’t be made against children younger than 14.
Confusing messages at a cramped camp
At the Roj camp, tucked in Syria’s northeastern corner near the border with Iraq, the Australian women who had expected to travel home refused to speak to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
One of the women, Zeinab Ahmad, said they had been advised by an attorney not to talk to journalists.
A security official at the camp, Chavrê Rojava, said that family members of the detainees — who she said were Australians of Lebanese origin — had traveled to Syria to arrange their return. They brought temporary passports that had been issued for the would-be returnees, Rojava said.
“We have no contact with the Australian government regarding this matter, as we are not part of the process,” she said. “We have left it to the families to resolve.”
Rojava said that after the group had departed the camp to travel to Damascus, they were contacted by a Syrian government official and warned to turn back. The families were “very disappointed” upon returning to the camp, she said.
“We recently requested that all countries and families come and take back their citizens,” Rojava said.
She added that Syrian authorities do not want to see a “repeat of what happened in Al-Hol camp” — a much larger camp, also in northeastern Syria that once housed tens of thousands of people, mostly women and children, with alleged ties to Daesh.
Last month, during fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which had controlled Al-Hol, guards abandoned their posts and many of the camp’s residents fled.
That raised concerns that Daesh members would regroup and stage new attacks in Syria.
The Syrian government then established control of Al-Hol and has begun moving its remaining residents to another camp in Aleppo province. The Kurdish-led force remains in control of Roj camp and a ceasefire is now in place.
The thorny issue of repatriating Daesh-linked foreign citizens
Former Daesh fighters from multiple countries, their wives and children have been detained in camps since the militant group lost control of its territory in Syria in 2019. Though defeated, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both Syria and Iraq.
Australian governments have repatriated Australian women and children from Syrian detention camps on two occasions. Other Australians have also returned without government assistance.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday reiterated his position announced a day earlier that his government would not help repatriate the latest group.
“These are people who chose to go overseas to align themselves with an ideology which is the caliphate, which is a brutal, reactionary ideology and that seeks to undermine and destroy our way of life,” Albanese told reporters.
He was referring to the militants’ capture of wide swaths of land more than a decade ago that stretched across Syria and Iraq, territory where Daesh established its so-called caliphate. Militant from foreign countries traveled to Syria at the time to join the Daesh. Over the years, they had families and raised children there.
“We are doing nothing to repatriate or to assist these people. I think it’s unfortunate that children are caught up in this, that’s not their decision, but it’s the decision of their parents or their mother,” Albanese added.
