World

Chinese police have arrested more than 200 suspects linked to one of the country’s biggest-ever banking scandals, which triggered rare mass protests.

Four banks in central China’s Henan province suspended cash withdrawals in April as regulators cracked down on mismanagement, freezing the funds of hundreds of thousands of customers and sparking protests that at times ended in violence.

Police said Monday they had now arrested 234 people in connection with the scandal and that “significant progress” was being made in recovering stolen funds.

“A criminal gang… illegally controlled four village and town banks… and was suspected of committing a series of serious crimes,” police in the city of Xuchang said in a statement on Monday.

China’s rural banking sector has been hit hard by Beijing’s efforts to rein in a property bubble and spiralling debt in a financial crackdown that has had ripple effects across the world’s second-largest economy.

Regulators have been gradually offering repayments to depositors since mid-April. 

On Monday, the Henan banking and insurance regulator promised to repay those who had deposited between 400,000 and 500,000 yuan ($57,900 to $72,300) starting this week. 

Depositors who owed smaller amounts were repaid earlier.

The size and scale of the fraud dealt an unprecedented blow to public confidence in China’s financial system, analysts have said, with the banks involved allegedly operating illegally for more than a decade.

A July 10 mass demonstration by depositors in Henan’s provincial capital, Zhengzhou, was violently quashed, with demonstrators forced onto buses by police and beaten, according to eyewitness accounts given to AFP and verified photos on social media.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Olena and Eduard German, a Jewish couple from Kharkiv, found refuge in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Six months since the start of the war in their homeland, the Germans are rebuilding their lives in a new home decorated with Israeli flags in Maale Adumim, a settlement of over 42,000 between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, regarded as illegal under international law.

The February 24 Russian invasion triggered the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, leaving over 6.8 million Ukrainians registered as refugees across the continent, according to the latest United Nations figures.

Israel itself has welcomed more than 30,000 Ukrainians, including 12,000 Jews who made “Aliyah”, or immigrated under the Law of Return which offers automatic citizenship to people with Jewish roots.

The couple, who were university lecturers, recalled their terrifying exodus out of Kharkiv, a city near the Russian frontier in northeastern Ukraine, on a gruelling two-day drive for the relative safety of Lviv in Ukraine’s west.

“Please don’t look out the windows, you’ve got to have good memories”  of Kharkiv, Olena told her three young children, as their convoy, organised by local Jewish organisations, set off.

From Lviv, local charities helped them reach Budapest, where they met with officials from Israeli organisations that helped organise their Aliyah.

Initially given accommodation in Nof Hagalil, a city in the north of Israel, the family was determined to settle in Judea and Samaria, the biblical Jewish term for the West Bank, and set about finding a place to live in a settlement.

-‘Meaningful life’ in West Bank-

Shortly after the Russian invasion, the Yesha Council, the umbrella organisation representing the 475,000 Israelis in the West Bank, was one of the Israeli groups that sent teams to border countries and then Ukraine, where they provided counselling services and distributed aid.

Yet they had more to offer Ukrainian Jews -– a new homeland.

“Those who want to make Aliyah, we offer them an option to live here and we can put them in contact with the regional authorities and with Russian-speaking families who can accompany them in their integration process,” Yesha Council director Yigal Dilmoni told AFP.

“If you are living here, in the land of the Bible, it makes your Aliyah to Israel more meaningful,” said Dilmoni in reference to the West Bank.

According to Dilmoni, around 60 Ukrainian families, including the Germans, have moved to the West Bank since the refugee crisis began.

– From occupied to ‘occupier’ –

To many Israelis, the West Bank is the ancestral land of the Jewish people, seized from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.  

But the international community sees Israel’s control of the territory and the settlements it built there as illegal and an obstacle to a possible peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Earlier this year, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas expressed concern Ukrainian Jews would flee the war to join other expats from the former Soviet Union in settlements.

He also accused the West of “double standards” over the sanctions imposed on Russia but not on Israel for its invasion of the West Bank.

To Dianna Buttu, a Palestinian human rights lawyer, sending Ukrainians to settlements was a cynical exploitation of their plight.

“The Ukrainians are fleeing occupation and they are fleeing war, only to then turn into tools of war criminals, and to be settling in war crimes themselves,” she told AFP.

Eduard, who left under an exemption from military service for men with three children or more, rejects any suggestions that he has fled Russian occupation only to become an occupier himself.

“I can’t understand how Judea could be occupied by Jews,” he told AFP.

To him, the parallel should be drawn not between Russia and Israel, but rather Ukraine and Israel.

“Ukraine is now a young state that is fighting for its independence, which it received after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Eduard said.

“Israel also walked this path a little earlier,” he said, without reference to Palestinian aspirations for statehood in the lands in which his family have chosen to settle.

When he laid down arms at the end of Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict, Eiber Andrade did not expect to ever return to a life of crime.

Yet a mere five years later, the 24-year-old ex-guerrilla fighter makes a living from coca — from which cocaine is derived — in a region where the government’s post-conflict commitment to peace and better living has yet to bear fruit.

After the 2016 peace agreement that saw the disarmament of the FARC guerrilla group and its withdrawal from the Catatumbo region near the border with Venezuela, Andrade tried his hand at agriculture.

The region is home to the world’s largest concentration of coca crops — a total of 40,084 hectares under cultivation in 2020 according to the UN.

It is also fertile ground for coffee, cacao and bananas, but none of these are as profitable.

Short on skills and capital, Andrade’s brief foray into food farming failed — making him one of many among the 13,000-odd disarmed FARC combatants unable to find a way to make a legitimate living.

Andrade, who became a guerrilla fighter at the tender age of 10, said he felt let down by the government.

The money he and other disarmed fighters were to have received as part of the peace deal never materialized. 

And in the end, Andrade told AFP, he had no choice but to rejoin the criminal underworld and become a coca harvester.

He has a three-year-old daughter to take care of.

“The presidents we have had have not given us any help,” Andrade said.

– ‘May Petro help us’ –

Other demobilized FARC fighters unable to find a niche in civilian life turned to violence.

Hundreds rejoined rebels battling other groups in a violent rivalry for control of drug and illegal mining resources and smuggling routes in the border region.

Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro, has vowed to stop the violence and negotiate peace with the last recognized guerrilla group still fighting, the ELN.

He has denounced the failure of the war on drugs that presidents before him had waged with US backing at a cost of tens of thousands of lives among police, soldiers, judges, journalists, subsistence farmers and others over four decades.

Petro has said he wants no more coca growers in jail in Colombia, the world’s biggest producer of cocaine, consumed mainly in the United States and Europe.

The country’s first left-wing president has also urged cocaine-importing countries to shift the focus from dismantling production to diminishing consumption.

The 2016 peace agreement had envisaged a program of rural development to replace Colombia’s lucrative drug trade with legitimate farming activities.

But with lagging funding for bridging projects, there has been no significant decline of coca production. 

In 2020, the country had 142,783 hectares under cultivation, according to the latest UN report, compared to 146,139 hectares in 2016.

“May Petro help us,” said Andrade. “If he does not, we will have to continue with these things.”

Three other ex-guerrillas work with Andrade as coca pickers on a six-hectare estate in Catatumbo.

They earn about $3 per 10 kilograms of coca leaf harvested. 

– ‘Out of necessity’ –

Last Friday, Petro visited the Catatumbo region for talks with coca growers on how best to ease their transition to legitimate and viable farming.

The president, who as a youngster belonged to an urban guerrilla group that later downed arms, wants to boost domestic food production at the same time.

But former FARC child soldier Carlos Abril, now 25, said he had heard similar promises before.

“We entered the (peace) process with joy, with the expectation that we are going to see a new Colombia, in peace,” Abril told AFP.

Instead, he too had to become a coca harvester “out of necessity.”

Elizabeth Pabon, leader of the Catatumbo small-scale farmers’ association of mainly coca growers, welcomed Petro’s stated aversion to the large-scale chemical or manual eradication of coca crops.

“It is a relief,” she told the government delegation.

And Wilder Mora, leader of the COCCAM coca growers’ grouping, said “we are willing to substitute” coca with other crops.

But he stressed could only happen with public investment, which coca-growers have been clamoring for since the 1990s.

The last of his people, a Brazilian indigenous man known only as “the man of the hole” has been found dead, decades after the rest of his uncontacted tribe were killed off by ranchers and illegal miners, officials said.

Having lived in complete isolation for 26 years, the man — whose real name was never known to the outside world — was found in a hammock in a hut in the Tanaru indigenous territory in Rondonia state on the border with Bolivia on August 23, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) said in a statement.

Since losing everyone he knew, the man had refused all contact with the outside world and supported himself by hunting and raising crops. His nickname derived from his habit of digging deep holes inside the huts he built, possibly to trap animals in but also to hide inside.

He lived in an indigenous territory surrounded by vast cattle ranches and under constant threat from illegal miners and loggers in one of the most dangerous parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, according to Survival International.

Authorities did not comment on the cause of the man’s death, nor his age, which wasn’t known, but said “there were no signs of violence or struggle.”

They also found no evidence of the presence of anyone else in his home or around it.

“Everything indicates that the death was from natural causes,” said FUNAI, a government agency under the justice ministry that is tasked with handling indigenous affairs.

Local media reported that the man’s body had been covered in macaw feathers, prompting one expert to speculate that he had known he was about to die.

The man was believed to have been alone since the remaining members of his small tribe were killed in the mid-1990s by illegal loggers and miners seeking to exploit the tribal area.

Rights groups said that the majority of the tribe had been killed in the 1970s when ranchers moved into the area, cutting down the forest and attacking the inhabitants.

“With his death, the genocide of this indigenous people is complete,” said Fiona Watson, Survival’s director of investigation, who visited the Tanaru territory in 2004.

“It really was genocide: the deliberate elimination of an entire people by ranchers hungry for land and wealth,” she added.

According to the most recent government data, there are some 800,000 indigenous people belonging to more than 300 distinct groups living in Brazil, a country of 212 million.

More than half live in the Amazon and many of those are under threat from illegal exploitation of natural resources that they rely on for their survival.

According to FUNAI, there are 114 records of isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, although that number varies.

Under Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Amazon deforestation reached a record level in the first half of 2022.

The president, who is trailing in polls ahead of this year’s elections, has encouraged mining and farming activity in protected areas, sparking anger among environmentalists.