World

The United Nations’ massive annual summit returns in person Tuesday to a world divided by multiple crises starting with Ukraine.

After two years of pandemic restrictions and video addresses, the UN General Assembly is again asking leaders to come in person if they wish to speak — with a sole exception made for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

But the death of Queen Elizabeth II disrupted the summit anew. President Joe Biden of the United States, by tradition the second speaker on the first day, will instead speak on Wednesday.

The first day will feature French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the leaders of the two largest economies of the European Union, which has mobilized to impose tough sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This year, Ukraine will be very high on the agenda. It will be unavoidable,” top EU diplomat Josep Borrell told reporters in New York.

“There are many other problems, we know. But the war in Ukraine has been sending shock waves around the world.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock vowed to support countries hardest hit by the fallout from the war as she headed to the General Assembly on Tuesday.

“The brutality of Russia’s war of aggression and its threat to the peace order in Europe have not blinded us to the fact that its dramatic effects are also clearly being felt in many other regions of the world,” Baerbock said.

But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been urging leaders not to forget other priorities such as education, the topic of a special summit on Monday.

“Education is in a deep crisis. Instead of being the great enabler, education is fast becoming the great divide,” Guterres told the summit.

He warned that the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on learning, with poor students lacking technology at a particular disadvantage, and conflicts further disrupting schools.

In a report earlier this month, the UN Development Programme said Covid has set back humanity’s progress by five years.

With the Ukraine war leading to a global grain crisis, hunger could be another major issue on the agenda. On Tuesday, more than 200 NGOs called for urgent action from leaders gathered for the General Assembly to “end the spiralling global hunger crisis.”

“Around the world, 50 million people are on the brink of starvation in 45 countries,” they said, adding that as many as 19,700 people are estimated to be dying of hunger every day, which translates to one person every four seconds.

– Talks between rivals –

Other leaders to speak Tuesday include Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has staked out ground as a broker between Russia and Ukraine, including through a deal to ship out badly needed grain to the world.

Erdogan is also expected to meet in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, a dramatic rebound in relations after the Turkish leader’s strident criticism of the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians.

In the type of last-minute diplomacy common at previous UN sessions, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken convened a first meeting of the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia since a flare-up in fighting.

“Strong, sustainable diplomatic engagement is the best path for everyone,” Blinken told them.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was visiting despite a hostile reaction from the United States.

He met Monday with his French counterpart, Catherine Colonna, who urged Russia to allow a security zone outside the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, whose occupation by Moscow has raised mounting concerns.

Also high on the agenda for the UN week will be Iran, whose hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, is traveling to the General Assembly for the first time and will meet Tuesday with French President Emmanuel Macron.

In a US television interview ahead of his arrival, Raisi said that Iran wanted “guarantees” before returning to a nuclear deal that former president Donald Trump trashed in 2018.

“We cannot trust the Americans because of the behavior that we have already seen from them. That is why if there is no guarantee, there is no trust,” he told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program.

Biden supports a return to the 2015 agreement, under which Iran drastically scaled back nuclear work in return for promises of sanctions relief.

But the Biden administration says it is impossible in the US system to promise what a future president would do.

“There is no better offer for Iran,” Colonna said ahead of the meeting with Macron.

“It’s up to them to make a decision,” she said.

Raisi can expect to be dogged by protests during his visit including by exile groups that have called for his arrest over mass executions of opponents a decade after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

For years, Aracely Sanchez went to work without counting her hours, always fearful she could lose her job from one day to the next. 

“They would always ask me to do more and more and more, as if I were a machine,” she told AFP of her employers at a house in Madrid. 

Within a collective of domestic workers, this 39-year-old Mexican has been trying to assert her basic rights to have time off every week, to be paid for working overtime and to have unemployment cover. 

But given the precarious nature of this type of work in Spain, it is a challenge. 

“There are employers who are very humane and who respect us, but there are many who try to take advantage of the situation,” she explained. 

“They say: if the job doesn’t suit you, there are plenty more where you came from.”

According to the Workers Commission union (CCOO), nearly 600,000 women serve as domestic staff in Spain where taking them on for housework, cooking or childcare is widespread.

Of that number, nearly 200,000 are undeclared, working in the black economy without an employment contract. 

“Many of them come from Latin America and they don’t have papers and find themselves in a very vulnerable situation,” said Mari Cruz Vicente, the CCOO’s head of activism and employment.

– ‘Exposing violations’ –

Following a ruling by the EU’s Court of Justice (CJEU) and pressure from the unions, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez adopted a reform this month aiming at ending the “discrimination” suffered by these workers. 

Under the changes, dubbed by the government as “settling a historic debt”, domestic workers are now entitled to claim unemployment benefits and cannot be dismissed without justification. 

They will also be covered by healthcare “protection” and be able to access training to improve their “professional opportunities” and job conditions. 

“This is a very important step forward,” said Vicente, while stressing the need to step up efforts to register those who are working without a contract and don’t benefit from the reform. 

“This reform was very necessary,” said Constanza Cisneros of the Jeanneth Beltran observatory which specialises in domestic workers’ rights. 

“Spain was very behind. Every day we have people coming to us whose rights have been violated. We have to end such practices now,” she said. 

“Such situations have to be exposed.”

-‘Not seen as people’ –

Mexican home help Sanchez has often experienced such abuses in more than two decades of employment.

In 2001, she arrived in Madrid to take up full-time employment caring for an elderly person for 350 euros a month. 

She then spent the next 15 years working in short-term jobs, almost always without a contract, despite the fact she had a valid residency permit. 

“When I said I wanted a contract, they never called me back. They didn’t want to pay contributions,” she said, describing her work as “undervalued” with domestic staff seen as “labourers” and not “as people”. 

Amalia Caballero, a domestic worker from Ecuador, has had a very similar experience. 

“We often finish very late, or they change our hours at the last minute assuming we’ll just fall in line. But we also have a life that we need to sort out,” said Caballero, 60. 

She also talks about the “humiliations” often endured by those who live with their employers. 

“One time, one of my bosses asked me why I showered every day. It was clear he thought (the hot water) was costing him too much money,” she told AFP.

But will such attitudes change with the reform? 

“There’s still a long way to go,” she sighed, saying many domestic staff “have completed their studies” back home and even hold a degree. 

“People need to recognise that,” she said. 

Cisneros agreed. 

“Our work needs to command greater respect, not least because it’s so necessary. Without staff to pick up the children, run the household and look after elderly people, what would families do?” 

Anti-coup fighters in Myanmar patrol the smouldering ruins of a burned village after what they say was a reprisal attack by junta troops struggling to crush resistance to last year’s military coup.

Corrugated roofs, support beams and cooking utensils are all that remain amid the ash in the village in northwestern Sagaing — an area which has seen some of the fiercest fighting against the military’s power grab.

Rare footage obtained by AFP shows a region wracked by violence, and criss-crossed by junta troops, pro-military militias and anti-coup fighters, where internet access is regularly cut by authorities.

Win Soe said junta troops brought destruction to his village of Tharyarkone, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Myanmar’s second city Mandalay, late last month.

“Soldiers came to our village on their way back to their camp,” he said. 

“There had been no fighting here and they just came to destroy things — they torched 60 houses in our village,” Win Soe said. 

A group of about a dozen young men — some in combat fatigues, football socks and sneakers, others in shorts and sandals — arrived to survey the burned remnants of the village as they patrolled the district, trailing military forces.

The unit is part of a local “People’s Defence Force” (PDF), dozens of which have sprung up in Sagaing and across the country to fight the military in an attempt to overturn the coup that last year ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected civilian government.

Often armed with little more than homemade weapons and knowledge of the terrain, some of these groups have surprised the military with their effectiveness, according to some analysts.

The junta has responded with an offensive that rights groups say includes razing villages, mass extra-judicial killings and airstrikes on civilians.

In May, the UN humanitarian agency UNOCHA said more than 12,000 civilian properties were thought to have been burned or destroyed since the coup.

The military accuses PDF fighters -– which it has declared “terrorists” –- of setting the fires and says their assassination campaigns have killed hundreds including Buddhist monks, teachers and medical workers.

On Friday last week, junta forces in helicopters attacked Depeyin township in Sagaing. 

The military says they were targeting fighters from a PDF and an ethnic rebel group in the area, accusing them of using civilians as human shields.

The UN children’s agency says at least 11 schoolchildren were killed in the incident, with 15 more still missing.

– A million displaced –

Post-coup violence has pushed the number of displaced people in Myanmar to over one million, according to the UN, adding to those previously forced from their homes by long-running conflicts in ethnic border areas.

Sagaing — home to mostly ethnic Bamar and a traditional recruiting ground for the military — has seen more than half a million people displaced since the coup, the UN said.

Even in villages that escape being torched, locals said they lived in fear of violence from the military.

“When soldiers came to our village, we hid behind some shrubs, but my son was in bad health and could only hide nearby,” said San Nwae, from Mintaingpin village, close to Tharyarkone. 

“When the soldiers found him, they beat him to death. From my hiding place, I heard the sound of someone being killed,” she said.

“After soldiers left the village… I came out from hiding and I realised the one who had been killed was my son.” 

Diplomatic efforts led by the UN and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to resolve Myanmar’s bloody impasse have made little headway, with the generals refusing to engage with opponents.

“We have been fighting the military for one year, but we don’t have enough weapons and we are just fighting with our homemade guns,” said one anti-junta PDF member. 

He admitted that his group of about 20 fighters was often unable to hold off the military for long.

“When the soldiers come to our village, we warn villagers to run away and we try to evacuate them,” he said.

“If soldiers arrest villagers, most of them are killed.”

A rare operation by the Palestinian Authority security forces to arrest a Hamas member sparked clashes in the West Bank city of Nablus on Tuesday, multiple sources said. 

There were reports that a bystander, 53-year-old Firas Yaish, was killed in the crossfire but the Palestinian health ministry had not yet confirmed the death. A tweet, purportedly from Yaish’s cousin Kawther, said it was “mourning” Firas’s death.

Unrest persisted through the morning, with hundreds of youths hurling rocks at PA armoured vehicles and the sound of gunfire ringing out across the city centre, AFP correspondents reported.   

Hamas, historic rivals of the secular Fatah movement that controls the PA, condemned the arrest of 30-year-old Musaab Shtayyeh, calling it a “kidnapping… a national crime” and a “stain” on the PA’s image. 

It demanded the immediate release of Shtayyeh and Ameed Tbaileh, who was arrested with him, and blasted the PA for keeping up security coordination with Israel. 

“The authority has positioned itself as an exclusive agent of the occupation (Israel) in the face of our Palestinian people,” the statement said.

While Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s forces maintain security ties with Israel, which has occupied the West Bank since 1967, PA raids targeting Hamas members are not common. 

Fatah and Hamas have made various reconciliation attempts in recent years but relations remain tense. Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007, when it ousted PA forces from the coastal enclave in deadly street battles. 

The northern West Bank has suffered near daily violence in recent months. 

Israel has conducted dozens of night-time raids in the area, particularly in Jenin, pursuing wanted individuals. 

Dozens of Palestinians, including fighters, have been killed in the raids that began after a series of deadly attacks against Israeli targets in March.  

Israel has put mounting pressure on the PA to crack down on alleged militants in the West Bank. 

Last week, after two Palestinians and an Israeli soldier were killed in clashes near Jenin, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said he would “not hesitate to act in any place that the Palestinian Authority does not maintain order”.

Earlier this month, Israeli armed forces chief Lieutenant General Aviv Kohavi said the “helplessness of the Palestinian Authority security forces” was providing fertile ground for the armed groups.

Cambodia’s UN-backed court set up to try Khmer Rouge leaders finishes its work this week, ending a 16-year process that has helped national reconciliation but brought only limited solace to survivors of the genocidal regime.

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) will on Thursday give its judgment in the appeal by 91-year-old former head of state Khieu Samphan against his 2018 conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity. 

It will be the last verdict given by the tribunal, which has cost more than $330 million and been dogged by complaints about the slowness of its work as well as allegations of interference by Cambodia’s ruling party.

For Chum Mey, one of only a handful of survivors of the notorious S-21 torture prison, nothing will erase the trauma of the Khmer Rouge butchering his wife and four children.

“Only when I die, then I can forget everything,” Chum Mey told AFP inside S-21, once a school and now a museum chronicling the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

Under leader Pol Pot, two million Cambodians died from starvation, torture, forced labour and mass execution — nearly a quarter of the kingdom’s population wiped out by the ultra-communist regime as it sought to create an agrarian utopia.

Khieu Samphan is one of only three top leaders convicted by the special court, along with “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea — considered the regime’s chief ideologue — and S-21 prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch.

Two previous appeals have been unsuccessful — in fact, the court increased Duch’s sentence on appeal.

– Difficult start –

The court had a difficult birth. In 1997 the Cambodian government asked for UN help in judging Khmer Rouge leaders.

But it rejected the idea of another International Criminal Tribunal along the lines of those created for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, insisting on a sovereign court run by Cambodian and international judges.

Eventually an agreement was reached in 2003, but the first hearing — in the case against Duch — was not held until 2009.

In total, five senior Khmer Rouge cadres, all elderly, faced trial at the court, but two died during proceedings and two others — Duch and Nuon Chea — died after conviction.

Regime leader Pol Pot died in 1998 before the court was established, while three other figures charged with genocide and crimes against humanity will not face trial due to disagreements between Cambodian and international judges.

S-21 survivor Chum Mey, who gave evidence in 2009, said the court had given only “about 70 percent of justice” but its work was still valuable.

“The most important point is that the court prosecuting the Khmer Rouge leaders makes people know nationwide… about the killings by Pol Pot, so they won’t let this happen again,” the 91-year-old said.

Another source of controversy was the court’s limited remit, which allowed it to prosecute only senior Khmer Rouge leaders.

Exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy says this decision effectively shielded Prime Minister Hun Sen — a former Khmer Rouge commander who has ruled the country since 1985. 

The strongman premier has repeatedly warned against broadening the scope of the trials, saying it could threaten national stability.

– ‘Mixed legacy’ – 

“The court has a decidedly mixed legacy, a mix of solid accomplishments and disappointing failures,” said Craig Etcheson, author of several books on Cambodia including one on the special court.

However, the tribunal helped “super-charge the process of national reconciliation,” Etcheson said.

“Parents feel more free to talk to their children about what happened to them… schools have incorporated new materials about the Pol Pot time into their curricula, neighbours began to talk to neighbours about their experiences,” he said.

Nearly a quarter of a million people attended the hearings, which took evidence from more than 300 witnesses, civil parties and experts.

Etcheson argues the court was “a relative bargain” compared with other international tribunals, and donors were “far too stingy”, causing delays in the proceedings.

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which conducts research on the Khmer Rouge regime, believes it is a mistake to focus on the court’s financial issues.

“It confirms that we can live after genocide — that we can move on, that we can rebuild, we can put back what has been lost,” he said.

Back at S-21, the sombre black-and-white photos of over 18,000 murdered detainees are displayed in the exhibition halls.

Survivor Bou Meng, 85, still bearing the physical and mental scars from his time here, calls for handcuffs and chains to encircle the graves of dead Khmer Rouge leaders.

“I will remember everything for my whole life,” he said. “They beat me up, they tortured me, I can never forget these things, it’s still fresh and vivid.”

At least 11 schoolchildren died in an air strike and firing on a Myanmar village, the UN children’s agency said, an attack the country’s junta said targeted rebels hiding in the area.

Myanmar has been in chaos since the military seized power in a coup in February last year, with nearly 2,300 civilians killed in a crackdown on dissent according to a local monitoring group.

The Sagaing region in the country’s northwest has seen some of the fiercest fighting, and amid clashes between anti-coup fighters and the military, entire villages have been burned down.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF condemned Friday’s incident in Depeyin township in Sagaing.

“On 16 September, at least 11 children died in an air strike and indiscriminate fire in civilian areas,” UNICEF said in a statement issued Monday.

It said schools must be safe and never targeted.

“At least 15 children from the same school are still missing,” UNICEF said, calling for their immediate safe release.

Video footage obtained from a local community group shows a classroom with blood on the floor, damage to the roof and a mother crying over her son’s dead body.

The junta confirmed they had sent troops in helicopters to the village after receiving a tip-off that fighters from the Kachin Independence Army — an ethnic rebel group — and from a local anti-coup militia were moving weapons in the area.

The military accused the rebel fighters of using civilians as human shields, and said it had seized mines and explosives from the village.

Save the Children Asia Regional Director Hassan Noor expressed condolences to the families and said schools should be off limits and the safety of students protected.

“How many more incidents like this need to take place before action is taken?” Noor said, urging the UN Security Council and Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to take swift action.

ASEAN has led so far fruitless diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in Myanmar and its leaders will meet in Phnom Penh in November to discuss limited progress on a peace plan.