BANGKOK: The war in Ukraine, great power rivalry Asia, inflation and food and energy shortages are on the agenda as leaders prepare for the third back-to-back gathering this week, a Pacific-Rim summit taking place in a heavily guarded venue in Thailand’s capital.
Leaders from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum will meet formally in closed-door sessions Friday and Saturday. For some, it will be at least the third such opportunity for face-to-face talks in the past two weeks. However, US Vice President Kamala Harris is attending instead of President Joe Biden, who will be hosting his granddaughter’s wedding at the White House.
APEC’s official mission is to promote regional economic integration. Most of the business conducted happens on the summit’s sidelines in meetings such as a planned meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The two Asian powers have a history of tense relations, a legacy of Japan’s World War II aggression compounded by territorial disputes and China’s growing military might. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, said the encounter would “carry great importance.”
Xi, Harris and French President Emmanuel Macron will also speak at a business conference held just ahead of the summit meetings that is mostly closed to media apart from outlets sponsoring the event.
The APEC meetings are being held in downtown Bangkok’s main convention center, which is cordoned off with some streets in the area completely closed to all traffic. Rows of riot police stood guard behind barbed wired barricades at a major intersection nearby, underscoring host Thailand’s determination to ensure the summit suffers no disruptions.
A small but noisy group of protesters scuffled briefly with police demanding to deliver a letter to leaders attending the summit. The demonstrators back various causes including demanding the removal of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and abolition of Thailand’s strict royal defamation laws.
In recent years, Bangkok has seen a wave of large-scale protests aimed both at the government and at the powerful monarchy, though they have faded under the pressures of the pandemic and targeted arrests of key figures.
Before the summit, Thai officials said they were hoping to steer APEC toward long-term solutions in various areas, including climate change, economic disruptions and faltering recoveries from the pandemic.
“The APEC meeting this year takes place amidst a dual jeopardy. We need not be reminded of the severe security conflicts that know not what victory looks like. Meanwhile, the world is staring at the hyper inflation married to recession, a broken supply chain and scarcity and climate calamities,” Don Pramudwinai, Thailand’s foreign minister said in opening a meeting of foreign ministers and commerce ministers who were working on draft statements due to be issued after the summit.
Apparently alluding to Russia and recent condemnation of its war on Ukraine, he also said there was a growing “cancel mentality” that makes “any compromise appear impossible.”
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a tweet after the morning meeting that the ministers had “reaffirmed the need to work together to promote balanced, inclusive, and sustainable growth in the Asia Pacific region.”
APEC members account for nearly four of every 10 people and almost half of world trade.
“What we are going to do is to have all economies agree on a set of targets ... climate change mitigation, sustainable trade and investment, environmental resource conservation and, of course, waste management,” said Cherdchai Chaivaivid, director-general of Thailand’s Department of International Economic Affairs.
APEC’s official mission is to promote regional economic integration, which means setting guidelines for long-term development of a free trade area. Most of its work is technical and incremental, carried out by senior officials and ministers, covering areas such as trade, tourism, forestry, health, food, security, small and medium-size enterprises and women’s empowerment.
Leaders from the 21 economies on both sides of the Pacific Ocean often take the opportunity to conduct bilateral talks and discuss side deals. The Latin American contingent comes from Chile, Mexico and Peru. Other members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been avoiding international forums where he would be showered with criticism over the invasion of Ukraine and will not attend.
That leaves Chinese leader Xi as the star attendee in Bangkok, where he also is making an official visit to Thailand just after obtaining a rare third term as top leader at a once-in-five years Communist Party congress.
Biden is giving ground to China in the competition for friends and influence in Southeast Asia by skipping the APEC meetings. But US officials say Washington has demonstrated its seriousness in relations with the region through frequent visits by Cabinet members including Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and other key senior officials.
As host, Thailand invited three special guests to the meeting: the French president Macron; Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime minister of Saudi Arabia, and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was to represent the Association of Southeast Asian Nations but will not attend after getting COVID-19.
For Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the most welcome visitor may well be the Saudi leader, whose visit may help restore friendly relations they soured due to a theft of Saudi royal jewelry in 1989 and unsolved murders of Saudi diplomats in Bangkok.
The war in Ukraine is a challenge for APEC’s consensus-oriented efforts. None of the earlier APEC meetings this year issued statements due to disagreements over whether to mention the conflict.
Like Indonesia, which hosted the Group of 20 summit in Bali this week, and Cambodia, which hosted the ASEAN meetings, Thai officials have put the best possible face on the situation, contending that agreement on other points will allow APEC to move forward regardless.
Skeptics doubt the meeting will accomplish much.
“This APEC is only a photo opportunity for leaders. Its agenda has drawn much less attention than the ASEAN summit and G-20,” Virot Ali, a political scientist at Thailand’s Thammasat University, told The Associated Press.
“I don’t think we will see any progress from APEC. The current geopolitics, trade war, COVID-19, and Russia-Ukraine war are the issues that people are paying more attention to and feeling more impact from,” he said.
Asia-Pacific leaders tackle trade, sustainability in Bangkok
https://arab.news/mze5b
Asia-Pacific leaders tackle trade, sustainability in Bangkok
- APEC’s official mission is to promote regional economic integration
- A small but noisy group of protesters scuffled briefly with police demanding to deliver a letter to leaders attending the summit
Russian warships make routine visit to Cuba
The patrol ship Neustrahimiy, training vessel Smolniy and support vessels, all from the Baltic Fleet, are scheduled to depart on Tuesday
HAVANA: Havana residents watched from shore on Saturday as Russian warships arrived for the second time in as many months, in a visit that Cuba called routine.
Cuban authorities sent shots into the air to signal their welcome, while curious fishermen watched from Havana’s waterside promenade as the ships advanced up the bay. Russian residents were also among the few up early to see the fleet’s arrival.
The patrol ship Neustrahimiy, training vessel Smolniy and support vessels, all from the Baltic Fleet, are scheduled to depart on Tuesday.
A brief statement by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces described their arrival as routine.
The US State Department and Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Russian nuclear submarine, frigate and support ships in June also flexed Moscow’s muscles in the port of Havana, less than 100 miles (160 km) from Florida.
Tensions between the United States and Russia have increased since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and Russian naval activity — though routine in the Atlantic — has ratcheted up because of US support for Ukraine, US officials say.
Simultaneously, relations between Cold War allies Russia and Cuba have markedly improved as the Communist-run country battles an economic crisis it charges is due mainly to US sanctions.
High-level contacts between the two countries have increased to a level not seen since the fall of former benefactor the Soviet Union with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel visiting Moscow four times.
Russia has sent oil, flour and increasing numbers of tourists to the cash and goods short Caribbean nation as citizens suffer through daily power outages and other travails resulting in scattered protests and record migration.
Ana Garces, a 78-year-old retiree, told Reuters she remembered the then-Soviet Union was the only country to help Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, the peak of tensions with Washington when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.
“We are very grateful,” she said. “Why should we not receive it with open arms? This is friendship. All kinds of ships have entered here.”
“It shows how other countries do support us and takes away a little of the world’s mentality about our country,” added her husband, 71-year-old retiree Rolando Perez.
Bangladeshi police arrest student protest leaders from hospital
- Police say they arrested three student leaders ‘to keep them safe’
- Two of them were still undergoing treatment, hospital worker says
DHAKA: Bangladeshi police have discharged from hospital and arrested the leaders of a student protest that led to nationwide unrest last week, when security forces clashed with demonstrators.
Students have been demonstrating since the beginning of July against a rule that reserves a bulk of government jobs for the descendants of those who fought in the country’s 1971 liberation war.
At least 209 people have been killed and thousands injured, according to a count based on reports in the local media after the protests turned violent last week.
Most of the casualties were reported in Dhaka, which saw intense clashes between protesters, government supporters, police and paramilitary troops, when the country went into a communications blackout for six days.
Among the injured were student leaders Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, coordinators of Students Against Discrimination, the main protest organizing group. They were patients at Gonoshasthya Hospital in Dhaka, from where they were arrested by the Detective Branch of Dhaka Metropolitan Police on Friday evening. Another student leader visiting Islam and Mahmud, Abu Baker Majumder, was detained as well.
Detective Branch chief Harun Or-Rashid told reporters in Dhaka on Saturday that the trio had been detained “for security reasons” as their families were worried about their safety.
“We took them in our custody to keep them safe,” he said.
The student leaders were arrested by a group of more than a dozen plainclothes officers despite objections from medical staff, a hospital worker told Arab News.
“At first, we tried to make them understand that without proper protocols, admitted patients couldn’t be released from the hospital. Later on, they talked with our authorities, and the students were taken from the hospital. There was no way we could hold them further,” the hospital worker said on condition of anonymity.
“The students’ health was not so good ... Asif was dealing with low blood pressure, and Nahid was suffering from blood clots and bruises on different parts of his body. Both of them needed further treatment.”
The arrests come in a crackdown launched by police in Dhaka, where a curfew imposed last week was still in place.
Liton Kumar Saha, joint commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police, said that 2,284 people have been arrested in Dhaka over the protest-related clashes, in which numerous administration offices were set on fire.
“We are analyzing the footage of different places and identifying the miscreants. When we get confirmed about someone’s involvement in the anarchy, we conduct the operations to arrest them. It has been conducted with transparency, and we are checking the people who were involved with sabotage,” he told Arab News.
“In the last 24 hours, 245 persons were arrested in Dhaka. Our drive will continue until the situation gets normal.”
International rights groups have repeatedly raised concerns over Bangladesh’s handling of the protests, with Amnesty International saying that witness testimonies and video and photographic evidence “confirm the use of unlawful force by the police against student protesters.”
The protests broke out after the High Court upheld a controversial quota system, in which 56 percent of public service jobs were reserved for specific groups, including women, marginalized communities and children and grandchildren of freedom fighters — for whom the government earmarks 30 percent of the posts.
The Supreme Court last week scaled back the quota system, ordering 93 percent of government jobs to be allocated on merit.
Russia slams Olympic opening as ‘massive failure’
- “I wasn’t planning to watch the opening. But after seeing the photos, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a deep fake or photoshop,” Zakharova wrote on Telegram
- “Ridiculous open-air opening ceremony forced guests to sit for hours under pouring rain“
MOSCOW: Russia on Saturday slammed the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games as a “massive failure.”
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova gave a long list of shortcomings at Friday’s ceremony, which was not broadcast live on Russian television.
“I wasn’t planning to watch the opening. But after seeing the photos, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a deep fake or photoshop,” the spokeswoman wrote on Telegram
Only a few Russian athletes have been approved to participate in the Games as “neutrals.” Competiors under the Russian flag have been banned over Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine.
Zakharova wrote that the “ridiculous open-air opening ceremony forced guests to sit for hours under pouring rain.”
“The organizers did not think of either seeding the clouds or awnings,” she said, referring to Russia’s practice of sending up planes ahead of major outdoor events to attempt to break up clouds.
France detained a Russian man just ahead of the Games’ opening, accusing him of a “destablization” plot for the event. “I wonder how many more ‘spies’ had to be embedded for the opening of the Olympics in Paris to end up such a massive failure?” said Zakharova.
Zakharova also mocked the “transport collapse” on the day, after three arson attacks on the rail system, and France’s blaming this on sabotage.
She said the center of Paris was “transformed into a ghetto for homeless people,” while “rats flooded the streets.”
Other targets were the US rapper Snoop Dogg carrying the Olympic torch and gaffes such as introducing the South Korean team as North Korea and raising the Olympic flag upside-down.
Zakharova picked on a part of the opening ceremony featuring drag queens, interpreted by some as parodying The Last Supper. She called it a “mockery of a sacred story for Christians,” saying that “the Apostles were shown as transvestites.”
“Evidently in Paris they decided that if the Olympic rings are multi-colored, you can turn it all into one giant gay parade,” she added.
A spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, Vakhtang Kipshidze, also condemned this section, writing on his personal Telegram channel that it was “cultural and historical suicide.”
Indian PM Modi likely to visit Ukraine in August, local media reports
- Ukraine’s embassy in New Delhi said it had no information to share immediately
- There was no immediate response from India’s foreign ministry
NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to visit Ukraine next month, a local media report said, his first visit to the country since its war with Russia began and just weeks after he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Ukraine’s embassy in New Delhi said it had no information to share immediately. There was no immediate response from India’s foreign ministry.
Western countries have imposed sanctions on Moscow following its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but “friendly” nations such as India and China have continued to trade.
India has refrained from directly blaming Russia, while urging the two nations to resolve their conflict through dialogue and diplomacy.
Modi met Putin just as a Russian missile struck a hospital in Kyiv killing at least 41 people. The Indian leader told Putin that the death of innocent children was “painful and terrifying.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed unhappiness over Modi’s visit, calling it a “huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts” to see him hug “the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day.”
Russia denied striking the hospital.
The US State Department has raised concerns over India’s relationship with Russia especially at a time when it has been seeking to strengthen ties with India as a potential counterweight to an ascendant China.
New Delhi is seeking to deepen its relationship with the West while keeping ties intact with Russia.
The final date of Modi’s visit is not yet confirmed, The Print reported on Saturday.
French minister says foreign involvement not ruled out in rail sabotage
- “Who is responsible? Either it’s from within, or it’s been ordered from abroad, it’s too early to say,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said
- Two security sources said on Friday the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists
PARIS: France’s interior minister said on Saturday he could not rule out foreign involvement in an attack that sabotaged signal stations and cables on the country’s high-speed rail network, causing travel chaos on the opening day of the Olympic Games.
Friday’s pre-dawn attacks damaged infrastructure along the lines connecting Paris with cities such as Lille in the north, Bordeaux in the west and Strasbourg in the east. Another attack on the Paris-Marseille line was foiled, SNCF has said.
There has been no immediate claim of responsibility.
“Who is responsible? Either it’s from within, or it’s been ordered from abroad, it’s too early to say,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told France 2 television.
He added: “We have uncovered a certain number of elements which lead us to believe that we will know fairly quickly who is responsible.”
Two security sources said on Friday the modus operandi meant initial suspicions fell on leftist militants or environmental activists, but that there was not yet any evidence.
Traffic on France’s high-speed rail network should be back to normal by Monday, Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete and rail operator SNCF’s chief Jean-Pierre Farandou told reporters on Saturday.
SNCF reiterated that transport plans for teams competing in the Paris 2024 Olympics would be guaranteed.
On Friday, 100,000 people could not take their trains, and another 150,000 faced delays but eventually got to their destinations, Vergriete said.
“There will still be disruptions tomorrow,” Vergriete said. “From Monday, there is no need to worry.”
