Day: December 30, 2019

Chinese pastor Wang Yi, founder of Early Rain Covenant Church, has been sentenced to nine years in prison on the charges of inciting state subversion and illegal business operation, a court in Sichuan in southwest China said on Monday.

One year after his incommunicado detention and a recent secret trial, Wang has also been deprived of his political rights for three years with 50,000 yuan ($7,157) of his personal property being confiscated, the announcement on the court’s website added.

The court, however, gave no details of its so-called “open” trial, which Wang allegedly faced last week.

Religious rights activists called Wang’s verdict the harshest in a decade, which paints a bleak picture of China’s government-led persecution of religious groups under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Wang was among dozens of the church’s followers and leaders including his wife detained by police in December 2018 although most were subsequently released.

The 46-year-old pastor is also a productive writer, social activist and formerly a legal scholar at Chengdu University before he took up the pastorate.

According to Bob Fu, founder of China Aid, a Texas, U.S.-based Christian human rights group which promotes religious freedom and rule of law in China, Wang’s sentence is the longest against an ethnic Chinese house church leader in a decade, prior to which, Uyghur house church leader Alimujiang Yimiti from Xinjiang was given a 15-year sentence in 2008.

“This demonstrates President Xi’s regime is determined to be the enemy of the universal values and the religious freedom,” Fu said.

“It shows the regime is very afraid of pastor Wang Yi’s national and international impact based on his reformed evangelic movement,” he added.

Under Xi, China has intensified its crackdown on unsupervised religious followers be it Christians, Muslims or even Buddhists.

In the past few years, authorities there have not only jailed pastors, but also closed churches and taken down thousands of crosses and, in some places, there is a push to ensure that anyone under the age of 18 cannot attend church or be under the influence of religion – what Fu called the worst religious persecution since the Cultural Revolution.

China is officially atheist, but says it allows religious freedom.

And Wang’s church is one of China’s best-known unregistered Protestant “house” churches, deemed illegal under Chinese laws, which require all places of worship to register and submit to government oversight.

In other words, criminal charges against Wang can apply to all other unregistered church leaders and goers, which observers say is sending another chilling effect on Chinese religious believers

“He [Wang] is a martyr who suffers the persecution… The chilling effect was there because many people will be deterred, not to speak up. But those who really are fighting hard for their own faith, for their own religion, will not bend,” said Sang Pu, a commentator in Hong Kong.

Sang said that many church goers are finding new places or new ways to worship in spite of the Chinese government’s crackdown.

Analysts have long argued that China’s Communist Party will have a hard time suppressing Christians in China as Yang Feggang of Purdue University once estimated that the country’s population of Christians has unstoppably grown ten-fold from six millions in 1980 to more than 67 million in 2010.

Yang estimated that China will turn out to have the world’s largest population of more than 247 million Christians in 2030.

Rights activists, in addition, denounced Wang’s trial, saying that the pastor has been deprived of due legal proceedings and representation.

They said that Wang likely stood trial secretly on December 26th when no one from his family was notified or present at the court.

His former lawyer Zhang Peihong, originally hired by Wang’s parents to represent him, had been replaced by two government-appointed lawyers in November.

“Those who do evil will be in trouble. You’re not keeping a criminal behind bars. Instead, you’re crowning a righteous man!” Zhang posted Monday on Facebook, which is banned in China, apparently writing about Wang’s case.

Since June, Wang’s wife Jiang Rong has been out on “bail” after being detained alongside her husband during the initial raid on the church.

But both she, their son and Wang’s parents are still under close surveillance by state security police, according to Fu.

“Jiang Rong is staying in a public security-arranged apartment and their 13-year-old son is not allowed even to have freedom to meet with his own mom and grandparents,” Fu said, adding that “every day, he has to take a police car to go to school and being picked up by the police. No freedom at all.”

…

A court in Sudan on Monday sentenced 27 members of the country’s security forces to death for torturing and killing a detained protester during the uprising against Sudan’s longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir earlier this year.

The death of protester Ahmed al-Khair, a school teacher, while in detention in February was a key point — and a symbol — in the uprising that eventually led to the military’s ouster of al-Bashir. Monday’s convictions and sentences, which can be appealed, were the first connected to the killings of protesters in the revolt.

Last December, the first rally was held in Sudan to protest the soaring cost of bread, marking the beginning of a pro-democracy movement that convulsed the large African country. That led, in April, to the toppling by the military of al-Bashir, and ultimately to the creation of a joint military-civilian Sovereign Council that has committed to rebuilding the country and promises elections in three years.

The anniversary of that protest this month drew teeming crowds to the streets in several cities and towns across the country, with people singing, dancing and carrying flags. A train packed with exuberant demonstrators, clapping and chanting, arrived in the northern city of Atbara, the birthplace of the uprising, from the capital, Khartoum.

Monday’s verdict in the trial of the security forces took place in a court in Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city, where dozens of protesters had gathered outside the courtroom, demanding justice for al-Khair.

Al-Khair was detained on Jan. 31 in the eastern province of Kassala and was reported dead two days later. His body was taken to a local hospital where his family said it was covered in bruises. At the time, police denied any police wrongdoing and blamed his death on an “illness,” without providing any details.

The court, however, said on Monday that the teacher was beaten and tortured while in detention. The 27 sentenced were policemen who were working in the jail where al-Khair was held or intelligence agents in the region.

Also this month, a court in Khartoum convicted al-Bashir of money laundering and corruption, sentencing him to two years in a minimum security lockup. The image of the former dictator in a defendant’s cage sent a strong message, on live TV for all of Sudan.

The deposed ruler is under indictment by the International Criminal Court on far more serious charges of war crimes and genocide linked to his brutal suppression of the insurgency in the western province of Darfur in the early 2000s. The military has refused to extradite him to stand trial in The Hague.

Amnesty International and other rights groups have called on the new government to hold security forces accountable for killing scores of people in their efforts to stifle protests against military rule, especially those behind a deadly crackdown on a huge sit-in outside the military headquarters in Khartoum last June.

Since last December, nearly 200 protesters have been killed in Sudan. The government recently appointed independent judges to oversee investigations into the killings, a major achievement for the protest movement.

Sudan is under heavy international and regional pressure to reform. With the economy on the brink, the new government has made it a mission to get Sudan removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism so that it can attract badly needed foreign aid.

…

Police in Turkey detained at least 124 people suspected of links to the Islamic State group, the state-run news agency reported Monday, in an apparent sweep against the militant group ahead of New Year celebrations.

At least 33 foreign nationals were detained in the capital Ankara in a joint operation by anti-terrorism police and the national intelligence agency, according to the Anadolu Agency.  In Istanbul, police raided 31 houses, detaining 24 suspects, including four foreign nationals.

Police conducted simultaneous, pre-dawn raids in the city of Batman, in southeast Turkey, where 22 suspects were detained, it said in a separate report. Raids were also conducted in the cities of Adana, Kayseri, Samsun and Bursa where 45 people, including six foreign nationals were detained.

Anadolu said the IS suspects apprehended in Ankara were from Iraq, Syria and Morocco. Police were searching for some 17 other suspects, the report said.

The country was hit by a wave of attacks in 2015 and 2016 blamed on IS and Kurdish militants that killed over 300 people.

The IS group also claimed responsibility for an attack at an Istanbul nightclub during New Year celebrations in the early hours of 2017. The attack killed 39 people, most of them foreigners.

Meanwhile, Turkey deported a total of 778 IS or other jihadists back to their home countries in 2019, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said Sunday.

Turkey has stepped up its efforts to expel foreign fighters back to their countries of origin in recent months, accusing many European countries of not taking responsibility for their nationals and saying Turkey was “not a hotel” for foreign fighters.

…

U.S. President Donald Trump regularly says his relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un remains positive. But Trump may soon have little choice but to change his approach toward Kim, who within days may unveil a new, hardline policy toward the United States. 

Kim, who has given the U.S. an end-of-year deadline for nuclear talks, is set to deliver a New Year’s Day speech that may give major clues about North Korea’s direction in 2020. Kim is also presiding over a symbolically important meeting of the country’s ruling party this week.

While no one is sure what Kim will announce – there is always a possibility of a last-minute breakthrough in talks – North Korea has strongly hinted it will raise pressure on Trump in the new year, and Kim has vowed to take his country a “new way” if talks with the United States don’t advance.

Over the past several months, North Korea has threatened to resume intercontinental ballistic missile tests or other major provocations, even warning of an unspecified “Christmas gift” to the U.S. that so far remains undelivered. 

Trump has shown an unusual tolerance for North Korean provocations, at least by the standards of other recent U.S. presidents. But as evidence mounts that Trump’s personal outreach to Kim is not leading to progress in nuclear talks, many Trump critics and allies are calling for him to change course.
 
“From no angle – policy or political – does it make sense for Trump to keep things as they are,” said Rebecca Heinrichs, who focuses on nuclear deterrence and missile defense at the conservative Hudson Institute. 

Change how?

The question is whether Trump should become more or less conciliatory.

Heinrichs, who has defended aspects of Trump’s unorthodox outreach to Kim, says the United States should expand sanctions on North Korea and reinstate U.S.-South Korea military exercises, which were scaled back to preserve the talks.

“In the course of giving Kim diplomatic space, sanctions enforcement and readiness with regional allies have slipped while Kim’s nuclear program and image have improved,” she says.

“The whole approach is on the thinnest ice.”

Another ideological camp prefers a less aggressive approach. They say there’s no evidence sanctions will convince Kim to give up his nuclear program, but will only further raise tensions.

Instead, Trump should work toward an interim deal, in which the United States offers limited sanctions relief, a formal suspension of military exercises, or both, possibly in exchange for a permanent moratorium on North Korean ICBM and nuclear tests, said Joshua Pollack, a North Korea researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

“We’ve repeatedly suspended combined military exercises in South Korea, so why not finally put them on the table?” asks Pollack. “Then the two sides could take their time in talks.”

It’s not clear North Korea would accept an interim agreement. The country’s ambassador to the United Nations earlier this month declared that denuclearization is off the negotiating table and that talks with the United States are no longer needed. 

Trump downplays threats

There’s also not much evidence Trump is committed to drastic change in either direction.

Trump has rarely discussed North Korea in recent months, and when he has, it’s mainly been to stress his good relationship with Kim.

Asked about North Korea’s threat to deliver a “Christmas gift” to the U.S., Trump responded: “Maybe it’s a present where he sends me a beautiful vase as opposed to a missile test.”

Trump refused to criticize North Korea as it conducted 13 rounds of short-range missile tests in 2019, though the launches violated U.N. Security Council resolutions and threatened U.S. troops and allies in the region.

For Trump, North Korean provocations are potentially embarrassing, in part because he has already claimed to have solved the problem.

After their first meeting in Singapore, Trump said he knew “for a fact” that Kim would return home and start a process that would “make a lot of people very happy and very safe.”

“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” Trump tweeted while returning from the summit.

U.S. officials, including Trump, have also repeatedly insisted that Kim agreed in Singapore to give up his nuclear weapons, though in reality the joint statement referenced the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” – a much vaguer description that indicates unspecified concessions from each side.

By one estimate, North Korea has produced material for about 10 more nuclear bombs since Singapore, meaning it now has enough for around 40 total bombs.

Would Trump admit defeat?

But Heinrichs insists it’s not too late for Trump to modify his North Korea policy, and that doing so doesn’t have to be a great political embarrassment.

“I don’t think he needs to or will say the approach failed,” Heinrichs says. “It’s more likely he’ll blame Kim and the previous (U.S.) administrations for passing along the compounding problem.”

Whereas Trump’s comments about Kim have been widely mocked in Washington for being contradictory or inaccurate, Heinrichs sees it differently. Such comments, she says, are an attempt to flatter Kim – essentially to soften him up for a big agreement. And Trump’s approach, she says, could easily be reversed. 

“Any other president would have a hard time going from ‘fire and fury’ to nice letters to a return to max pressure…I don’t think it would be as much of a challenge for Trump,” Heinrichs said. 

“He seems to be immune to the pressure of convention. Sometimes that creates rare openings for good things and sometimes it results in enormous headaches,” she added. 

A bullet-point win? 

Others say Trump, a former reality television star and self-styled master negotiator, appears to be looking for a legacy-defining win on North Korea and won’t easily change course. 

“Absolutely he can’t admit failure,” said Pollack. “But he can spin it away.” 

According to Gwenda Blair, a Trump family biographer who has followed Trump’s real estate and other deals for decades, Trump has often prematurely declared victory or attempted deals even when victory is impossible.

“He wants to be able to do something that’s like a moonshot,” said Blair.

For Blair, Trump’s desire to reach a nuclear deal with North Korea – which has eluded U.S. diplomats for decades – is much like Trump’s recently declared wish to buy Greenland.

“This would be adding the biggest thing since Alaska,” she says. “But no one was interested in selling.”

So what will Trump do if Kim never agrees to denuclearize? Trump himself foreshadowed such a scenario in his post-summit press conference in Singapore.

“Honestly, I think he’s going to do these things. I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong,'” Trump said, before adding: “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of excuse.”

…

This year was the hottest ever registered in Russia, the country’s weather chief said on Monday, as climate change pushes global temperatures to record highs.

“This year in Russia was the hottest for the entire period of instrumental observations,” the head of the Gidromedtsentr weather service, Roman Vilfand, told Russian news agencies.

He said Moscow’s average temperature for 2019 had hit 7.6-7.7 degrees Celsius (45.7-45.9 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the previous record by 0.3 degrees.

Weather records have been kept since 1879 in Moscow and since 1891 in Russia as a whole.

Global warming has sent temperatures rising around the world, with the United Nations saying earlier this month that 2019 was on course to be one of the three hottest years on record.

Known for its notoriously harsh winters, Moscow has seen its warmest December in a century this year.

While some flurries fell on Monday, the Russian capital — normally covered with a blanket of snow by mid-December — saw a largely snowless and cloudy last month of the year.

The city’s ski resorts were closed and spring buds were beginning to show on trees — three or more months too early.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has always been reluctant to acknowledge the link between human activity and global warming.

At his traditional year-end annual news conference earlier this month, Putin insisted that “nobody knows” the causes of climate change.

But he acknowledged the consequences of global warming could be catastrophic for a country that is one of the world’s biggest producers of carbon fuel and with a fifth of its land within the Arctic circle.

Putin said that the rate of warming for Russia was 2.5 percent higher than elsewhere on the planet.

And “for our country, this process is very serious,” he said.

…