NAIROBI: South Sudan is witnessing a “new wave of repression,” global rights group Amnesty International warned Friday, with many activists now in hiding after a string of arrests in the conflict-wracked country.
The world’s newest nation has suffered from chronic instability since independence in 2011, with a coalition of civil society groups urging the government to step down, saying they have “had enough.”
The authorities have taken a tough line against such demands in recent weeks, arresting eight activists as well as detaining three journalists and two employees of a pro-democracy non-profit, according to rights groups.
“We are witnessing a new wave of repression emerging in South Sudan targeting the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa.
The clampdown followed a declaration last month by the People’s Coalition for Civil Action (PCCA) calling for a peaceful public uprising.
The PCCA had urged the public to join its protest on Monday in the capital Juba but the city fell silent as the authorities branded the demonstration “illegal” and deployed heavily-armed security forces to monitor the streets for any sign of opposition.
“Peaceful protests must be facilitated rather than cracked down upon or prevented with arrests, harassment, heavy security deployment or any other punitive measures,” Muchena said in a statement.
The rights group noted that many activists had faced harassment since the aborted demonstration, “with some suspecting they were being surveilled by security forces.”
The authorities have also shut down a radio station and a think tank in connection with the protests.
Media rights group Reporters Without Borders, known by its French acronym RSF, on Friday condemned the closure of the radio station and called for “an immediate end to the harassment of South Sudanese reporters.”
“The undisguised hostility of the authorities toward the media highlights how difficult it is for journalists to cover politics in South Sudan, where at least ten have been killed since 2014,” said Arnaud Froger, the head of RSF’s Africa desk.
South Sudan is ranked 139th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
In a statement released on Friday, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Norway urged the South Sudan government to protect “the rights of citizens... to express their views in a peaceful manner, without fear of arrest.”
Since achieving independence from Sudan in 2011, the young nation has been in the throes of a chronic economic and political crisis, and is struggling to recover from the aftermath of a five-year civil war that left nearly 400,000 people dead.
Although a 2018 cease-fire and power-sharing deal between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar still largely holds, it is being sorely tested, with little progress made in fulfilling the terms of the peace process.
The PCCA — a broad-based coalition of activists, academics, lawyers and former government officials — has described the current regime as “a bankrupt political system that has become so dangerous and has subjected our people to immense suffering.”
South Sudan facing ‘new wave of repression’, Amnesty warns
https://arab.news/527nj
South Sudan facing ‘new wave of repression’, Amnesty warns
- The world's newest nation has suffered from chronic instability since independence in 2011
- The clampdown followed a declaration last month by the People's Coalition for Civil Action calling for a peaceful public uprising
China’s DeepSeek trained AI model on Nvidia’s best chip despite US ban, official says
- DeepSeek could remove technical indicators showing use of US chips, official says
- US export controls bar Blackwell shipments to China
WASHINGTON: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior Trump administration official said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of US export controls.
The US believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China.
The person declined to say how the US government received the information or how DeepSeek obtained the chips, but emphasized that US policy is :“we’re not shipping Blackwells to China.”
Nvidia declined to comment, while the Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not respond to requests for comment.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing opposes “drawing ideological lines, overstretching the concept of national security, expansive use of export controls and politicizing economic, trade, and technological issues.”
The news, not previously reported, could further divide Washington policymakers as they struggle to determine where to draw the line on Chinese access to the crown jewels of American AI semiconductor chips.
China hawks fear chips could easily be diverted from commercial uses to help supercharge China’s military and threaten US dominance in AI.
But White House AI Czar David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argue that shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors like Huawei from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia’s and AMD’s technology.
US export controls, overseen by the Commerce Department, currently bar Blackwell shipments to China.
In August, US President Donald Trump opened the door to Nvidia selling a scaled-down version of the Blackwell in China. But he later reversed course, suggesting the firm’s most advanced chips should be reserved for US companies and kept out of China.
Trump’s decision in December to allow Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s second most advanced chips, known as the H200, drew sharp criticism from China hawks, but shipments of the chips remain stalled over guardrails built into the approvals.
“Chinese AI companies’ reliance on smuggled Blackwells underscores their massive shortfall of domestically produced AI chips and why approvals of H200 chips would represent a lifeline,” said Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security at the White House’s National Security Council under former President Joe Biden.
The official declined to comment on how the latest news would impact the Trump administration’s decision on whether to allow DeepSeek to buy H200s.
The model they helped train likely relied on the “distillation” of models made by leading-edge US AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, echoing allegations made by OpenAI and Anthropic, the official added.
The technique known as distillation involves having an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluate the quality of the answers coming out of a newer model, effectively transferring the older model’s learnings.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivaled some of the best offerings from the US, fueling concerns in Washington that China could catch up in the AI race despite restrictions.
