https://arab.news/mpm6g
HOUSTON: The man who inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda” and was freed by Rwanda last week from a terrorism sentence returned Wednesday to the United States and joined his family after being held for more than two years.
Paul Rusesabagina’s arrival in San Antonio was announced by his daughter Carine Kanimba, who tweeted that “our family is finally reunited today.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan tweeted that “we’re glad to have him back on US soil.”
Rusesabagina’s plane first touched down in Houston and the 68-year-old would visit a military hospital in San Antonio, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.
Rusesabagina, a US legal resident and Belgian citizen, was credited with sheltering more than 1,000 ethnic Tutsis at the hotel he managed during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide in which over 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus who tried to protect them were killed. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts.
Rusesabagina disappeared in 2020 during a visit to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and appeared days later in Rwanda in handcuffs. His family alleged he was kidnapped and taken to Rwanda against his will to stand trial.
In 2021, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted in Rwanda on eight charges including membership in a terrorist group, murder and abduction following the widely criticized trial.
Last week, Rwanda’s government commuted his sentence after diplomatic intervention on his behalf by the United States. On Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Rusesabagina was in Doha, Qatar, and would make his way back to the US.
Rusesabagina had been accused of supporting the armed wing of his opposition political platform, the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change. The armed group claimed some responsibility for attacks in 2018 and 2019 in southern Rwanda in which nine Rwandans died.
Rusesabagina testified at trial that he helped to form the armed group to assist refugees but said he never supported violence – and sought to distance himself from its deadly attacks.
Rusesabagina has asserted that his arrest was in response to his criticism of longtime President Paul Kagame over alleged human rights abuses. Kagame’s government has repeatedly denied targeting dissenting voices with arrests and extrajudicial killings.
Rusesabagina became a public critic of Kagame and left Rwanda in 1996, first living in Belgium and then the US.
His arrest was a source of friction with the US and others at a time when Rwanda’s government has also been under pressure over tensions with neighboring Congo and Britain’s plan to deport asylum-seekers to the small east African nation.
Rights activists and others had been urging Rwandan authorities to free him, saying his health was failing.
In October, the ailing Rusesabagina signed a letter to Kagame that was posted on the justice ministry’s website, saying that if he was granted pardon and released to live in the US, he would hold no personal or political ambitions and “I will leave questions regarding Rwandan politics behind me.”
Last year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Kagame in Rwanda and discussed the case.
Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesman, had said Sullivan personally engaged in the case, “really doing the final heavy lifting to get Paul released and to get him on his way home.”
LONDON: In the past two weeks the world has become used to seeing photographs of Sudan’s Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, whose forces have been locked in combat with the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since April 15, dressed in battle fatigues.
On January 26, however, the country’s de-facto ruler was wearing a dark suit, blue tie, and a broad smile, in full-on red-carpet diplomat mode as he greeted Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on the runway at Khartoum airport.
It was Abiy’s first visit to Ethiopia’s northern neighbor since the 2021 coup, led by Al-Burhan, that saw the derailing of the transition to civilian rule promised in the wake of the overthrow of the 30-year regime of dictator President Omar Al-Bashir in 2019.
The two men had much to talk about, but top of the agenda for Abiy was winning Sudan’s support for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the vast $4 billion hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile, just kilometres from Sudan’s border, that has proved controversial in the region ever since work began on it more than a decade ago.
The GERD is now 90 percent complete, and the coming rainy season will see an estimated 17 billion cubic meters of water retained in the fourth filling of the massive reservoir created by the dam.
For millions of Ethiopians, half of whom have no electricity and still rely on burning wood for heat, cooking, and light, the dam is a symbol of hope, pride, and a brighter future. At a ceremony on the imposing dam in February last year, Abiy ceremoniously activated the first of its turbines, which began generating power.
When it reaches full capacity and all 13 turbines are feeding into the national power grid, the dam will boost Ethiopia’s industrialization, revolutionize the living standards of millions of its citizens, and earn the country badly needed income as an exporter of power to the region.
Speaking at the 2022 ceremony, Abiy said: “From now on, there will be nothing that will stop Ethiopia. (The dam) will not disrupt the River Nile’s natural flow.” He noted that the start of electricity generation demonstrated “Ethiopia’s friendly attitude toward the river.”
The project was, he added, “excellent news for our continent and the downstream countries with whom we hope to collaborate.”
Ethiopia has always insisted that, as the dam was designed only to generate electricity, neither Egypt nor Sudan, although both downstream, will lose any of the precious water supplied by the Nile.
But when the plan was first unveiled, it was condemned by both Cairo and Khartoum as an existential threat — both nations are utterly dependent upon the life-giving waters of the Nile, which have flowed down from the Ethiopian Highlands since time immemorial.
More than once over the past decade Egyptian concern over the scheme has threatened to escalate into violence.
In June 2013, several Egyptian politicians were overheard live on television discussing military options to halt the dam, with proposals ranging from backing Ethiopian rebels to sending in special forces to destroy it.
In March 2021, during a visit to Khartoum four days after signing a military cooperation agreement with Sudan, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said: “We reject the policy of imposing a fait accompli and extending control over the Blue Nile through unilateral measures without taking the interests of Sudan and Egypt into account.”
A few days later he upped the stakes, declaring that “the waters of Egypt are untouchable, and touching them is a red line.”
No one, he added, “can take a single drop of water from Egypt, and whoever wants to try it, let him try.”
As recently as March this year, Egypt’s foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, warned that on the issue of the dam “all options are open, all alternatives remain available.”
Since then, however, Sudan’s attitude toward the dam has appeared to ease, leaving Egypt increasingly isolated in its outspoken opposition to the project.
In Sudan in January, in addition to meeting Al-Burhan, Abiy also sat down for talks with Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, with whom the head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council is now locked in a bloody power struggle.
A statement issued by the council after the meeting welcomed the fact that Abiy had “confirmed that the Renaissance Dam will not cause any harm to Sudan but will have benefits for it in terms of electricity.” The two countries, it added, were “aligned and in agreement on all issues regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.”
But even as he worked to allay Sudanese fears over the dam, Abiy was walking a diplomatic tightrope between Al-Burhan and Dagalo.
In December, a framework agreement outlining a two-year transition to democracy was signed between the two generals and some Sudanese pro-democracy groups. On his visit to Khartoum in January, Abiy had supported the agreement, tweeting that he was “pleased to come back again and be amidst the wise and vibrant people of Sudan,” and adding that “Ethiopia continues to stand in solidarity with Sudan in their current self-led political process.”
But a prescient commentary in February by the head of a Khartoum think tank highlighted the tensions between the two generals.
Kholood Khair, the founder and director of Confluence Advisory, told Africa Report: “When Abiy Ahmed visited Khartoum, he lent his support to the framework agreement, which favors Hemedti.
“By doing so, he is trying to get both generals on board … they have diverging foreign policies, they have diverging income streams, they have diverging political constituencies domestically that they play to.
“Because you have that inherent divergence between the two generals, you get different and unpredictable sorts of power plays.”
Those power plays have now exploded into a conflict which Jordan-based Jemima Oakey, associate in Middle East and North Africa water and food security at London-based consultancy Azure Strategy, said has serious implications for the future management of the dam.
“Informal discussions were looking pretty positive,” she told Arab News. “From recent reports, Sudan certainly seemed to be coming to an arrangement with Ethiopia, while Egypt had begun to accept its new water reality and had begun developing adaptation measures through increasing the number of desalination plants and rehabilitating its irrigation networks.”
Now, she said, all-important regional cooperation on the management of the dam, for the benefit of Sudan and Egypt, as well as Ethiopia, may hinge on who emerges victorious from the current struggle.
In addition to generating electricity that could be supplied not only to the 60 percent of Ethiopians who currently have no access to mains power, but also to Sudan and Egypt, the dam promises to maximize agricultural yields, in Sudan especially, by ending the destructive cycle of floods and droughts caused by the seasonal variations in the flow of the Nile.
But the only way this is going to work, Oakey noted, was “through a data-sharing agreement where water availability and water releases from the dam are clearly laid out and fairly divided between the Nile’s riparians, both through droughts and periods of high rainfall.
“(Right now) we have no idea of what the position of Hemedti on territorial disputes in the Al-Fashaga region in northern Ethiopia might be, if he might try to claim that region for Sudan, or whether he would lend support to rebel militias in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
“Any of that could derail any agreements or understandings over access to the dam’s water flows, and really damage Sudan’s access to both water and electricity,” she added.
And she pointed out that such a development could also have serious consequences for Egypt.
“Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Egypt has been trying to expand its agriculture sector in order to become more self-sufficient in wheat production and make up for lost Ukrainian wheat imports, so they really need that water, and they need a reliable supply of it,” Oakey said.
“That’s why an agreement for water access and monitoring availability is so crucial.
“But if there’s a prolonged conflict in Sudan, that could really throw both Sudan’s and Egypt’s water and food security into massive uncertainty.”
One scenario, according to Oakey, was as unlikely as it was unthinkable, whatever happens in Sudan’s internal conflict: military action being taken by either side against the dam.
“Over the past few years there has been alarmist speculation in the media that GERD could be attacked in order to prevent its completion, but I seriously doubt that either side in the Sudan conflict would ever consider using this to secure a military advantage,” she said.
“There are now almost 73 billion cubic meters of water behind the dam. To destroy it and unleash that volume of water would inundate most of southern Sudan with catastrophic flooding, so no, no one is going to try that.”
But some experts hope that nature gets the same memo.
The possibility of a catastrophic failure of the dam has been raised in several academic papers over the past few years. These have highlighted “the high risk of soil instability” around the GERD site which, as one recent study by Egyptian civil and water engineers pointed out, was “located on one of the major tectonic plates and faults in the world.”
Around that fault, they added, about 16 earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.5 or higher had occurred in Ethiopia during the 20th century.
The first and largest of the sequence of devastating quakes that struck Turkiye and Syria in February, killing tens of thousands of people and causing widespread damage, had a magnitude of 7.8.
Hesham El-Askary, professor of remote sensing and Earth systems science at Chapman University in California, told Arab News that seismic risks, rather than the current conflict in Sudan, were the real threat to the dam that the world should be focused on.
“What really bothers me now is the possibility of tectonic moves in Ethiopia, which is the most tectonically active nation in Africa,” he said.
There was, he added, also evidence that dams could “exacerbate tectonic activities and slippage.
“We saw what happened in Turkiye, when dams were opened to ease water pressure on the crust.
“With the changing climate, what Ethiopia is doing is really serious and, with the situation in Sudan, no one can guess how this will all end up.”
LONDON: Britain’s home secretary has been accused of double standards after she said the situation in Sudan was “very different” to Ukraine and that the government had “no plans” to open up safe and legal routes for Sudanese refugees.
Suella Braverman said: “The situation is very different to Ukraine, so I wouldn’t want to draw those comparisons. We’re at a very early stage of the situation emerging in Sudan.”
When asked whether the UK would provide safe routes for Sudanese asylum-seekers similar to those provided to Ukrainians, she said: “We have no plans to do that.”
Braverman added: “Our priority first and foremost is to support British nationals, British passport holders and their dependents. That is our priority. That’s why we’ve commenced an evacuation mission.”
Chris Doyle, the director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding, said that the “position of the British government on refugees, not just from Sudan but other countries, has been appalling.”
He added: “It has failed to provide proper safe passage to many of those fleeing persecution and war, including Sudan, to the UK, and instead they have been driven to the arms of criminal smuggling networks and then faced with being sent back or sent to Rwanda if they ever come to the UK.
“It jeopardizes Britain’s long-standing reputation for upholding refugee rights, and across the world people do see those double standards where Britain was all too willing to take in refugees from Ukraine — quite rightly — but closing their doors to those in similar situations from other conflicts.
‘We have no plans to do that’@SuellaBraverman says the govt is not intending to open up safe and legal routes for refugees wanting to flee Sudan https://t.co/1JqVgH1NX5 pic.twitter.com/flLyBqYZ37
“The prime minister also evaded the question in Parliament today and refused to answer a question about child refugees from Sudan coming to the UK.”
Members of the public have also criticized Braverman over the UK’s policy.
Twitter user @greenbenali posted: “Opening the door for Ukraine and closing the door to Sudan is racism. Pure and simple.”
Opening the door for Ukraine and closing the door to Sudan is racism. Pure and simple https://t.co/6ujiaQ1rWH
A tweet from @jacqdodman said: “Wonder why Braverman thinks the situation in Ukraine is very different to the situation in Sudan? Wonder why she isn’t setting up safe routes for people fleeing war-torn Sudan in the same way she set up routes from Ukraine? What’s the difference? Why are they treated differently?”
User @kercle “wondered” why Braverman was reluctant to draw comparisons between people needing help in the two countries.
Suella Braverman doesn’t want to draw comparisons between people needing help in Sudan and those needing help in Ukraine. I wonder why
“I wonder, what’s the difference between the much welcomed mainly white #Ukrainian war #Refugees & not welcomed mainly black #Sudanese war refugees then? Maybe we’ll never know. #ToryFascistDictatorship #toryracists #BrexitReality #Brexitisland” @Kevcrq1975 tweeted.
Twitter user @ijb19662 tweeted: “Braverman stating that the Government seems to have a systemic racist approach to refugees from war! #Ukraine #Sudan”.
Braverman stating that the Government seems to have a systemic racist approach to refugees from war!#Ukraine #Sudan
And user @EU_for_me said that Braverman’s answers were another example of her disregard for humanity.
MELBOURNE: Former Jewish girls school principal and now convicted sex offender Malka Leifer was ordered on Wednesday to appear in an Australian court in June for a two-day sentencing hearing.
A Victoria state County Court jury convicted the 56-year-old Israeli citizen and mother of eight early this month on 18 charges relating to the sexual abuse of sisters Dassi Erlich and Elly Sapper when they were students and student teachers at Adass Israel School in Melbourne from 2003 until 2007.
Leifer faced a procedural hearing via a video link from prison on Wednesday during which Judge Mark Gamble set a timetable for her sentencing hearing on June 28-29.
Gamble said there were significant matters he wanted addressed by prosecutor Justin Lewis and Leifer’s lawyer Ian Hill in the hearing, including details of the time Leifer spent in police or correctional custody in Israel.
That includes time in “quasi-custody” such as home detention, Gamble said.
The convictions include rape, indecent assault and sexual penetration of a child aged 16 or 17.
She was acquitted of nine charges, including all five involving the siblings’ older sister Nicole Meyer. Abuse allegations were first raised with the Adass Israel School board in 2008 and Leifer was stood down.
Within days, she fled to Israel. She was charged in 2014 and spent years fighting extradition to Australia, which was granted in 2020. She left Israel in early 2021.
“The sentence will protect her from hurting others, but she has been found guilty — the whole world will know that now,” Meyer told reporters.
CAIRO: A rubber boat carrying dozens of Europe-bound migrants sank off the coast of Libya and at least 55 people drowned, including women and children, the UN migration agency said Wednesday. It was the latest tragedy in this part of the Mediterranean Sea, a key route for migrants.
The International Organization for Migration said the disaster took place on Tuesday. The boat was carrying at least 60 migrants and had set off from the coastal town of Garabouli, east of Libya’s capital, Tripoli.
The agency said five migrants survived the shipwreck and were brought back to shore by the Libyan coast guard. It was not immediately clear what happened to the vessel.
Safa Msehli, an IOM spokesperson, said the boat capsized a short while after leaving Garabouli. She said the Libyan coast guard has so far retrieved the bodies of nine men and a child.
The five survivors include four men — three Pakistanis and one Egyptian — and a Syrian child, Msehli told The Associated Press.
The was the latest tragedy in the central Mediterranean Sea, a key route for migrants. The IOM said at least 537 people have drowned or gone missing in migrant disasters in the Mediterranean off Libya so far this year, while over 4,300 have been intercepted and returned to shore.
Earlier this month, the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project said that the first quarter of this year was the deadliest in the Central Mediterranean since 2017, with at least 441 documented deaths.
That number, however, is likely “an undercount of the true number of lives lost,” the agency said, adding that it was still investigating several other unreported shipwrecks where the fate of more than 300 people onboard remain unclear.
In 2022, at least 529 migrants were reported dead and 848 people were missing off Libya, while over 24,680 were intercepted and returned to the chaos-hit North African country, according to the IOM.
Libya has in recent years emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants from Africa and the Middle East trying to make it to Europe. The oil-rich country plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
Human traffickers in recent years have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants across the country’s lengthy borders with six nations. The migrants are crowded into ill-equipped vessels, including rubber boats, and set off on risky sea voyages.
Those who are intercepted and returned to Libya are held in government-run detention centers rife with abuses, including forced labor, beatings, rapes and torture — practices that amount to crimes against humanity, according to UN-commissioned investigators.
The abuse often accompanies efforts to extort money from families of those held, before the migrants are allowed to leave Libya on traffickers’ boats.
TOKYO: Japan’s foreign ministry has raised the danger rating in Sudan to level three and advised against all travel to the country amid worsening violence between rival military groups.
The ministry’s decision follows armed clashes between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces across large areas of Sudan, including the capital Khartoum.
Japan’s foreign ministry has listed the following areas to be a risk level three: Khartoum Province, North Kordofan Province, Red Sea Province (excluding the border area with Eritrea), Kassala Province (excluding the border area with Eritrea), Gadarev Province (excluding the border area with Ethiopia), Northern Province (Ribi), River Nile State, Gesira State, Sennar State (excluding the border area with South Sudan and Ethiopia), White Nile State (excluding the border area with South Sudan).
Japan follows a four-level travel risk assessment, with immediate evacuation at level four and currently advised for Syria, Libya and Yemen. In other Arab countries, some areas have been rated between levels one and three.
The foreign ministry has warned Japanese citizens to get the latest security information through overseas safety websites to minimize the risk of terrorism or kidnapping.