Countries that make weapons of war foment
migration but refuse refugees, Pope Francis says
Pope
Francis said the world is becoming increasingly "elitist and cruel towards
the excluded", adding that it is the duty of Christians to look after all
those left behind in a "throwaway culture" taking root in society.PHOTO: AFP
SEP 29, 2019, 9:30 PM SGT
VATICAN CITY (REUTERS) - Pope Francis on Sunday
(SEPT 29) scolded countries that produce weapons for wars fought elsewhere and
then refuse to take in refugees fleeing the very same conflicts.
The 82-year-old Argentine pope, whose parents
were of Italian immigrant stock, has made the defence of migrants and refugees
a plank of his pontificate and he has often clashed over immigration policy
with US President Donald Trump and populist anti-immigrant politicians in
Europe.
Francis has also criticised the arms trade
repeatedly and his sermon for 40,000 people in St. Peter's Square on Sunday
linked the issues of war and migration as the Roman Catholic Church marked
its World Day of
Migrants and Refugees.
"Wars only affect some regions of the
world, yet weapons of war are produced and sold in other regions which are then
unwilling to take in the refugees generated by these conflicts," Francis
said.
Sunday's Mass was attended by many immigrants
and groups helping them. It was also marked by a mix of African, Spanish and Portuguese
music as well as traditional Church music.
Francis said the world is becoming increasingly
"elitist and cruel towards the excluded", adding that it is the duty
of Christians to look after all those left behind in a "throwaway
culture" taking root in society.
"This means being a neighbour to all those
who are mistreated and abandoned on the streets of our world, soothing their
wounds and bringing them to the nearest shelter, where their needs can be
met," he said.
People could not remain indifferent to "the
bleak isolation, contempt and discrimination experienced by those who do not
belong to 'our' group", the pope said.
Francis then inaugurated a large statue in St.
Peter's Square, showing dozens of migrants and refugees from different faiths
and different periods of history.
SPH
Digital News / Copyright © 2019 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. Co. Regn. No.
198402868E. All rights reserved
The Saudi Crown
Prince Plans to Make Us Forget About the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi Before the
US Election
Posted By Patrick
Cockburn On September 18, 2019
Photograph Source: Mohammed bin Salman – Public Domain
The hideous cruelty of the murder and dismemberment of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi death squad almost a year ago still jumps
from the pages of the latest apparent transcript of the conversation between
his killers as they wait for him to arrive at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
“Is it possible to put the body in a bag?” enquires
Lieutenant-Colonel Maher Mutreb, a leader of the operation and a senior member
of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s team of bodyguards. He later asks if “the
animal to be sacrificed” has arrived at the consulate.
Mutreb speaks to Salah al-Tubaigy, the forensic
pathologist in charge of cutting up the body, who calmly lists the professional
challenges he will face. “No,” he replies to the query about putting body in a
bag. “Too heavy, very tall too. Actually, I’ve always worked on cadavers. I
know how to cut very well. I have never worked on a warm body, but I’ll also
manage that easily.”
Tubaigy explains to Mutreb what should be done to
Khashoggi’s corpse: “After I dismember it, you will wrap the parts into plastic
bags, put them in suitcases and take them out [of the building].”
This disgusting exchange comes from a bugging device
said to have been placed in the consulate by Turkey’s National
Intelligence Organisation which has been systematically leaking their
recordings to the Turkish press ever since the murder of Khashoggi on
2 October 2018. Some of the conversations were revealed earlier in the year to
the UN investigator Agnes Callamard who confirmed in her report that
Saudi Arabia was responsible for the “deliberate premeditated execution”
of Khashoggi. She found “sufficient credible evidence” for the crown prince
and his assets to be subjected to “targeted sanctions” until “evidence is
provided and corroborated that he carries no responsibility for this
execution”. US officials have said that the operation could not have been
carried out without the crown prince’s knowledge. The Saudi government has said
that neither he nor King Salman knew about the killing in advance.
They have blamed a “rogue” operation.
As the first anniversary of the Khashoggi murder
approaches in a few weeks’ time, Saudi Arabia is desperate for the impact of
the crime to fade and for the kingdom to escape the pariah status it has earned
in the eyes of many across the world.
The crown prince is, above all else, eager to make
sure that the murder of Khashoggi is not an issue when the US presidential
campaign gets under way. President Trump’s close relationship with the Saudi
leader will make Trump highly vulnerable to attacks by the Democratic candidate
during the election. Again and again, Trump has gone out of his way to protect
his Saudi ally over bi-partisan criticism from Congress over Khashoggi, US arms
supplies and the war in Yemen.
The crown prince
has adopted a strategy aimed at removing the killing from the political agenda
before the US presidential campaign gets seriously underway, according to a confidential
report which draws its information from high level sources in the United Arab
Emirates that has been published by Middle East Eye online
magazine. Written for circulation among UAE leaders, it says that “it was a
wise step by Riyadh to move quickly to close the case and indict those
responsible before the start of the American presidential election. Otherwise
the killing could have been turned into one of the presidential debate topics.”
It appears that the crown prince’s plan is to escape
the legacy of the murder by first fast-tracking the trial of members of the
Saudi team accused of the killing, so court proceedings are finished before the
US presidential campaign heats up. The report goes on to explain that the
second part of the strategy is to close down the case in a different way by
persuading members of Khashoggi’s family to accept “blood money” and forego the
right of revenge under sharia law. According to US press reports, Khashoggi
family members in Saudi Arabia have already been given $10,000 a month and
million-dollar houses by way of compensation.
The report is written by the Emirates Policy Centre
which has close links to the UAE government and intelligence services. As the
closest ally of Saudi Arabia until a recent rift over Yemen and Iran policy,
the UAE is well positioned to know about the intentions of the Saudi leader.
The crown prince’s plan to move on from the Khashoggi
killing might just succeed, but it faces a number of obstacles. Any trial
conducted in Saudi Arabia will have little credibility because of its courts’
well-attested record of relying solely on evidence based on false confessions
extracted by torture and threats of execution. If anything, the repression of
dissent in Saudi Arabia – of which the elimination of Khashoggi was only one
element – has been stepped up since his death.
At least 134 executions are known to have been carried
out in the first half of this year, including 37 political activists killed en
masse on 23 April according to a report by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC on the
death penalty and illegal executions in Saudi Arabia. She says that the
executions of the activists followed “lengthy periods of detention in solitary
confinement, subjection to torture, and grossly unfair trials”.
A further difficulty Saudi Arabia will face
in trying to reboot its image is that the Khashoggi affair has energised a
wave of criticism from former friends. It was the Republican senator Marco
Rubio who said that the crown prince had gone “full gangster”, an assertion
echoed by another Republican senator. The Saudi bombing of Yemen has become a
live political issue in a way that had never happened previously, though Saudi
airstrikes have been going on since 2015. A group of Republican and Democratic
senators this week sent a letter to the crown prince demanding that he fulfil
Saudi Arabia’s pledge to give $750m to the UN in Yemen to provide food, fuel
and medicine.
All politicians are acutely conscious of the ebbs and
flows of the power of their friends and allies and are swift to abandon a
listing ship. Of no politician is this more true than President Trump, who has
contemptuously dismissed his national security adviser John Bolton, whose
aggressive policy towards Iran was much closer to that of the Saudis than it
was to that of Trump himself who these days broadcasts his wish to avoid armed
conflict with Iran and do a deal.
Whatever Trump
expected from Saudi Arabia when he made his triumphal visit to the country in
2017, the results are well below expectations. In the wake of the Khashoggi
murder he has paid a political price for his close relationship with the Saudi
leaders – and that price could get a lot costlier if the Khashoggi affair
becomes an issue in the presidential election. Democratic Party candidates are
notorious for their ability to miss an open goal, but even they may come to see
that Trump is vulnerable over his links to the crown prince and Saudi Arabia,
tainted as they are by the killing of Khashoggi.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001
[at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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