Iran election seen as legitimacy test for rulers as dissent grows

Iranian women wave their country’s flags as they hold posters of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, center, and the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini during an election campaign rally ahead of the March 1, parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections, in Tehran (AP)
Updated 29 February 2024
Follow

Iran election seen as legitimacy test for rulers as dissent grows

  • Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called voting a religious duty
  • Parliament has no major influence on foreign policy or Iran’s nuclear agenda

DUBAI: Iran holds a parliamentary election on Friday seen as a test of the clerical establishment’s popularity at a time of growing dissent over an array of political, social and economic crises.
The vote will be the first formal gauge of public opinion after anti-government protests in 2022-23 spiralled into some of the worst political turmoil since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Critics from inside and outside the ruling elite, including politicians and former lawmakers, say the legitimacy of Iran’s theocratic system could be at stake due to economic struggles and a lack of electoral options for a mostly young population chafing at political and social restrictions.
Iran’s top authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called voting a religious duty. He accused the country’s “enemies” — a term he normally uses for the United States and Israel — of trying to create despair among Iranian voters.
The commander of the country’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, said on Wednesday that “each vote is like a missile launched at the enemy’s heart.”
But Iranians still have painful memories of the handling of nationwide unrest sparked by the death in custody of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman in 2022, which was quelled by a violent state crackdown involving mass detentions and even executions.
Economic hardships pose another challenge. Many analysts say that millions have lost hope that Iran’s ruling clerics can resolve an economic crisis fomented by a combination of US sanctions, mismanagement and corruption.
While establishment supporters will likely vote for hard-line candidates, widespread public anger at worsening living standards and pervasive graft may keep many Iranians at home.
Prices for basic goods like bread, meat, dairy and rice have skyrocketed in past months. The official inflation rate stands at about 40 percent. Analysts and insiders put it at over 50 percent.
The US 2018 withdrawal from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers, and its reimposition of sanctions, have hit Iran’s economy hard. Efforts to revive the pact have failed.
Reformists shun ‘meaningless’ vote
Iranian activists and opposition groups are distributing the Twitter hashtags #VOTENoVote widely on social media, arguing that a high turnout will legitimize the Islamic Republic.
With heavyweight moderates and conservatives staying out of Friday’s race and reformists calling it an “unfree and unfair election,” the vote will pit hard-liners and low-key conservatives against each other, all proclaiming loyalty to Iran’s Islamic revolutionary ideals.
The interior ministry said 15,200 candidates will run for the 290-seat parliament, with a vetting body called the Guardian Council approving 75 percent of initially registered hopefuls.
The unelected Guardian Council, made up of six clerics and six legal experts generally within Khamenei’s orbit, has the authority to scrutinize laws and election candidates.
Ballots will mostly be counted manually, so the final result may not be announced for three days, although partial results may appear sooner.
On the same day, Iranians also vote for the Assembly of Experts, which appoints and can dismiss the supreme leader. The 88-member clerical body rarely intervenes directly in policy but is expected to help choose the 84-year-old Khamenei’s successor.
Parliament has no major influence on foreign policy or Iran’s nuclear agenda. These are determined by Khamenei who holds the utmost authority in the country’s unique dual system of clerical and republican rule.
Polling has projected turnover of about 41 percent, while former lawmaker Mahmoud Sadeghi said on Monday that surveys showed the participation could be as low as 27 percent, significantly lower than 42 percent in a 2020 parliamentary vote.
Discredited after years of failed attempts at widening political and social freedoms, the pro-reform opposition suffered further unpopularity in 2022 when protesters scorned its mantra of gradual change.
The Reform Front coalition has said it will not take part in the “meaningless” election but has not boycotted the vote.


New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan

Updated 5 sec ago
Follow

New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan

  • They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said
  • Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies”

CAIRO: Mohamed Idris, 27, has despaired of ever finding a job in war-torn Sudan. Instead, he’s now set his sights on a training camp on the Eritrean border, hoping to join a militia.
“I got my university degree but there aren’t any job opportunities, if I get into a training camp I can at least defend my country and my people,” he told AFP from Kassala in Sudan, the nearest city to the border.
Analysts say the growing role such militias and armed groups are playing in the war will only prolong the country’s suffering.
Sudan’s war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, sparking what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis.
More than eight million people have been uprooted internally and more than three million have fled abroad.
The northeast African country is on the brink of famine, according to aid agencies, and a UN investigation found both sides committed rights abuses with the RSF particularly implicated in sexual violence.
In Sudan’s east, Kassala and Gedaref have so far been spared the chaos of war, but host more than a million people who have fled fighting elsewhere.
In both cities, AFP correspondents have seen convoys of four-wheel drives mounted with anti-aircraft weapons speed through the streets.
Each vehicle, blasting its horn as it went, was manned by a handful of young men waving assault rifles — though the nearest battles are hundreds of kilometers (miles) away.
The men, like Idris, are part of a generation who have lost their futures to the flames of Sudan’s war.

Now, they represent recruiting potential for new armed groups being formed, particularly along ethnic and tribal lines in the country’s army-controlled east.
“The forces I want to join are from my tribe and my family,” said Idris.
According to Sudanese analyst and former culture and information minister Faisal Mohammed Saleh, “these groups haven’t yet joined the fray in the current war.”
“But the fear is that they could be preparing for future rounds,” he told AFP.
Sudan, which has only known brief interludes of civilian rule since independence from Britain in 1956, is rife with armed groups, some with the capacity of small armies.
For decades, many were locked in wars with the central government, claiming to champion the rights of marginalized ethnic minorities or regions.
In 2020, most signed a peace agreement with the government in Khartoum, and several rebel leaders subsequently became senior officials in the government of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan.
“In the first months of the war, many of these groups were neutral, but have since declared allegiance to the army,” Sudanese policy researcher Qusay Hamrour told AFP.
They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said.
According to former information minister Saleh, “what’s new now is the eastern Sudanese groups, most of which are training inside Eritrea.”
Eyewitnesses told AFP earlier this year that they saw Sudanese fighters being trained in at least five locations in neighboring Eritrea, which has not commented on the allegations.
The witnesses said the camps were linked to Burhan’s army or to figures from the former Islamist-backed regime of ousted dictator Omar Al-Bashir.

Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies.”
Khartoum has long relied on armed groups to fight its wars in other parts of Sudan.
In response to an uprising in Darfur in 2003, Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militia, leading to war crimes charges against him and others.
The RSF, formalized by Bashir in 2013, are descended from the Janjaweed.
In 2021, army chief Burhan led a coup that derailed a fragile civilian transition that followed Bashir’s own ouster.
By April 2023, a long-running power struggle between Burhan and his deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into all-out war.
Now, what Babiker calls “the weakness of the Sudanese state” has compelled it to again to depend on militias to secure territory.
He said this strategy would “only lead to these groups growing stronger, making them impossible to bypass in the future.”
Already, there have emerged “multiple centers of decision-making within the army,” he told AFP.
According to a May report from the International Crisis Group think tank, “both main belligerents are struggling with command and control.”
Burhan, increasingly reliant on powers from the Bashir regime “as well as communal militias and other armed groups ... risks losing his hold on the various factions.”
Meanwhile the RSF is “an ever more motley assortment of tribal militias and warlords,” according to Crisis Group, which says that both wartime coalitions have become more unwieldy.

 


UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state

Updated 37 min 14 sec ago
Follow

UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state

  • The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel
  • Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity

UNITED NATIONS, United States: The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories and pushed for the creation of a Palestinian state, convening an international conference in June to try to jumpstart a two-state solution.
In a resolution passed by a 157-8 vote, with the United States and Israel among those voting no, and seven abstentions, the Assembly expressed “unwavering support, in accordance with international law, for the two-state solution of Israel and Palestine.”

Palestinian UN Representative Riyad Mansour attends the General Assembly 46th plenary meeting on the Question of Palestine on December 3, 2024, at UN headquarters in New York. (AFP)

The Assembly said the two states should be “living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, based on the pre-1967 borders.”
It has called for a high-level international meeting in New York in June 2025, to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, to breathe new life into diplomatic efforts to make the two-state solution a reality.
The assembly called for “realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination and the right to their independent state.”
The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 and maintained troops and settlements there until 2005. Though it has withdrawn, it is still considered the occupying power there.
Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity.
“The question of Palestine has been on the UN agenda since the inception of the organization and remains the most critical test to its credibility and authority and to the very existence of an international law-based order,” Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said.
It was a UN General Assembly resolution in 1947 that divided British-ruled Palestine into two states — one Arab and one Jewish.
But only the creation of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. This triggered a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

 


UN condemns deadly shelling of Sudan displacement camp

Displaced Sudanese people sit at Zamzam camp, in North Darfur, Sudan, August 1, 2024. (REUTERS)
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

UN condemns deadly shelling of Sudan displacement camp

  • According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition

UNITED NATIONS, United States: The United Nations on Tuesday denounced the shelling of a displacement camp in North Darfur by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which killed at least six people.
The famine-stricken Zamzam camp, just south of state capital El-Fasher, came under intense rocket and artillery bombardment by the RSF on Sunday.
“The United Nations and humanitarian partners in Sudan strongly condemn these acts of violence against innocent civilians,” the UN resident coordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said in a statement.
She added: “I am deeply concerned by reports of the indiscriminate shelling of Zamzam camp, health clinics and shelters of displaced people. Their protection is paramount.”
Since April last year, a war between the regular army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 11 million and created what the UN has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
El-Fasher has been besieged by paramilitaries for months, paralyzing aid operations and plunging the Zamzam camp, which is home to at least half a million people, into famine.
According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition.
“It is now 232 days since the siege of El-Fasher began, which has resulted in unacceptable levels of human suffering,” Nkweta-Salami said.
Both sides of the conflict face accusations of war crimes, including targeting civilians, shelling residential areas and blocking or looting aid.
In recent weeks, the RSF has tightened its grip on El-Fasher, launching attacks on multiple fronts against Sudan’s military and allied armed groups.

 


Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem

Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem

  • Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas

JERUSALEM: Medics and rights groups on Tuesday called for the immediate opening of a humanitarian corridor from Gaza to allow the urgent evacuation of patients to hospitals in east Jerusalem.
Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Rare medical evacuations have been organized by international organizations or foreign countries in coordination with Israeli authorities.
But amid mounting casualties from the war, the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) called for the immediate reopening of the Gaza to east Jerusalem medical corridor, estimating that about 25,000 patients in Gaza were in need of urgent care.
Fadi Atrash, the director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in east Jerusalem, said the reopening of the evacuation corridor “is essential to allow us to continue to provide vital treatments in hospitals in east Jerusalem, where we have both the space and the medical expertise.”
Prior to the war, patients in Gaza who were in need of medical care unavailable in the Palestinian territory could be evacuated to hospitals in the Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem or the occupied West Bank, and in some cases in Israel.
But since the Gaza war broke out last year, that mechanism has been defunct.
During an exceptional evacuation of about 200 patients from Gaza in early November, the World Health Organization said about 14,000 people were awaiting medical evacuations.
Days later, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said “Israeli authorities blocked, without explanation, the medical evacuation of eight children and their caretakers from Gaza who are in need of medical care, including a two-year-old with leg amputations, to the MSF hospital in Jordan.”
“We strongly denounce this decision,” it said.
On Tuesday, “31 patients and caregivers left Gaza” through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel, COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry agency managing civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said.
It added that the patients were to be transferred to Jordan and the United States for treatment.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X that the 31 comprised 11 children with cancer awaiting treatment and 20 companions.
“Thousands of patients across Gaza still need medical evacuations for life-saving medical care. We urge that all corridors be utilized for the safe transfer of patients outside the Gaza Strip,” he said.
More than 105,000 people have been wounded in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7, 2023, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations deems reliable.
Gaza’s health care system has largely been decimated by the war, with only a handful of medical facilities now able to provide care.


Palestinian factions Hamas, Fatah close to deal on postwar Gaza governance

Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

Palestinian factions Hamas, Fatah close to deal on postwar Gaza governance

CAIRO: Palestinian officials say Fatah and Hamas are closing in on an agreement to appoint a committee of politically independent technocrats to administer the Gaza Strip after the war. It would effectively end Hamas’ rule and could help advance ceasefire talks with Israel.
The two factions have made several failed attempts to reconcile since Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007. Israel has meanwhile ruled out any postwar role in Gaza for either Hamas or the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by Fatah.
A Palestinian Authority official on Tuesday confirmed that a preliminary agreement had been reached following weeks of negotiations in Cairo. The official said the committee would have 12-15 members, most of them from Gaza.
It would report to the Palestinian Authority, which is headquartered in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and work with local and international parties to facilitate humanitarian assistance and reconstruction.
A Hamas official said that Hamas and Fatah had agreed on the general terms but were still negotiating over some details and the individuals who would serve on the committee.
The official said an agreement would be announced after a meeting of all Palestinian factions in Cairo, without providing a timeline.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media on the talks. There was no immediate comment from Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is dismantled and scores of Israeli hostages are returned. He says Israel will maintain open-ended security control over Gaza, with civilian affairs administered by local Palestinians unaffiliated with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
No Palestinians have publicly volunteered for such a role, and Hamas has threatened anyone who cooperates with the Israeli military.
The United States has called for a revitalized Palestinian Authority to govern both the West Bank and Gaza ahead of eventual statehood.