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Time of India
30 minutes ago
- Time of India
Mizoram-Assam border talks await scheduling amid deadly clash anniv
1 2 3 4 Aizawl: The date for the proposed second round of official level talks between Mizoram and Assam on the vexed border dispute issue is yet to be fixed as Saturday is the fourth anniversary of firing between the two states over interstate boundary dispute which resulted in the deaths of at least five Assam policemen. Mizoram home secretary Vanlalmawia confirmed that the state is awaiting a response from Assam to schedule the next meeting, which is set to take place in Aizawl. The decision to hold the talks in Mizoram was made during the last meeting in Guwahati on April 25. Mizoram was represented by a seven-member delegation led by Vanlalmawia, while Assam's six-member team was headed by Prabhati Thaosen, secretary of the border protection & development department. Deputy commissioners from Cachar, Hailakandi, and Sribhumi districts participated via video conference. Assam is expected to respond to a state home department's letter, submitted on Nov 28, 2023, which references a claim based on an 1875 notification under the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation, 1873. This claim, involving 62 villages, was discussed in the April talks. Despite sporadic violence along the 123km border, no major incidents have occurred since the July 26, 2021, clash near Vairengte town. Following the incident, Assam's Atul Bora led a peace mission to Mizoram, and since then, three rounds of negotiations have been held in Aizawl and one in Guwahati. Former Mizoram CM Zoramthanga and Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma have also engaged in talks in Delhi with Union home minister Amit Shah. The border dispute dates back to Mizoram's transition from an Assam district to a separate Union Territory in 1972, with the North-East Areas Reorganisation Act, 1971, leaving the boundary between the two states vaguely defined.
New Indian Express
31 minutes ago
- New Indian Express
Activist aid boat approaching Gaza shores, group says
JERUSALEM: The activist group Freedom Flotilla announced Saturday that its latest aid boat dispatched to Gaza was approaching the territory and planned to land there the following morning in defiance of an Israeli blockade. The vessel, named the Handala after a popular Palestinian cartoon character, was just 105 nautical miles (194 kilometres) from its destination, organisers said -- closer to Gaza than its predecessor the Madleen was when it was intercepted in June. The Israeli navy said it would likewise block the new vessel from reaching the war-torn Palestinian territory. "The [Israeli army] enforces the legal maritime security blockade on the Gaza Strip and is prepared for a wide range of scenarios, which it will act upon in accordance with directives of the political echelon," an army spokesperson told AFP on Saturday. Carrying 19 activists and two journalists from various countries, the Handala first set sail from Sicily on July 13 in a bid to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza and deliver aid to its population. The territory is facing severe shortages of food and other essentials, with the United Nations and NGOs warning of an imminent famine. The Handala's crew said in a post on X that they would go on a hunger strike if the Israeli army intercepted the boat and detained its passengers. The last boat sent by Freedom Flotilla, the Madleen, was intercepted by the Israeli army in international waters on June 9 and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod. It carried 12 campaigners on board, including prominent Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Scroll.in
2 hours ago
- Scroll.in
Like Idi Amin, today's demagogues have convinced the majority that they are oppressed by ‘outsiders'
Fifty years ago, Ugandan President Idi Amin wrote to the governments of the British Commonwealth with a bold suggestion: Allow him to take over as head of the organization, replacing Queen Elizabeth II. After all, Amin reasoned, a collapsing economy had made the UK unable to maintain its leadership. Moreover the 'British empire does not now exist following the complete decolonisation of Britain's former overseas territories'. It wasn't Amin's only attempt to reshape the international order. Around the same time, he called for the United Nations headquarters to be moved to Uganda's capital, Kampala, touting its location at 'the heart of the world between the continents of America, Asia, Australia and the North and South Poles'. Amin's diplomacy aimed to place Kampala at the center of a postcolonial world. In my new book, A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda, I show that Amin's government made Uganda – a remote, landlocked nation – look like a frontline state in the global war against racism, apartheid and imperialism. Doing so was, for the Amin regime, a way of claiming a morally essential role: liberator of Africa's hitherto oppressed people. It helped inflate his image both at home and abroad, allowing him to maintain his rule for eight calamitous years, from 1971 to 1979. The phony liberator? Amin was the creator of a myth that was both manifestly untrue and extraordinarily compelling: that his violent, dysfunctional regime was actually engaged in freeing people from foreign oppressors. The question of Scottish independence was one of his enduring concerns. The 'people of Scotland are tired of being exploited by the English,' wrote Amin in a 1974 telegram to United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. 'Scotland was once an independent country, happy, well governed and administered with peace and prosperity,' but under the British government, 'England has thrived on the energies and brains of the Scottish people.' Even his cruelest policies were framed as if they were liberatory. In August 1972, Amin announced the summary expulsion of Uganda's Asian community. Some 50,000 people, many of whom had lived in Uganda for generations, were given a bare three months to tie up their affairs and leave the country. Amin named this the ' Economic War '. In the speech that announced the expulsions, Amin argued that 'the Ugandan Africans have been enslaved economically since the time of the colonialists.' The Economic War was meant to 'emancipate the Uganda Africans of this republic.' 'This is the day of salvation for the Ugandan Africans,' he said. By the end of 1972, some 5,655 farms, ranches and estates had been vacated by the departed Asian community, and Black African proprietors were queuing up to take over Asian-run businesses. A year later, when Amin attended the Organization of African Unity summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, his 'achievements' were reported in a booklet published by the Uganda government. During his speech, Amin was 'interrupted by thunderous applauses of acclamation and cheers, almost word for word, by Heads of State and Government and by everybody else who had a chance to hear it,' according to the the report. It was, wrote the government propagandist, 'very clear that Uganda had emerged as the forefront of a True African State. It was clear that African nationalism had been born again. It was clear that the speech had brought new life to the freedom struggle in Africa.' Life at the front Amin's policies were disastrous for all Ugandans, African and Asian alike. Yet his war of economic liberation was, for a time, a source of inspiration for activists around the world. Among the many people gripped by enthusiasm for Amin's regime was Roy Innis, the Black American leader of the civil rights organization Congress of Racial Equality. In March 1973, Innis visited Uganda at Amin's invitation. Innis and his colleagues had been pressing African governments to grant dual citizenship to Black Americans, just as Jewish Americans could earn citizenship from the state of Israel. Over the course of their 18 days in Uganda, the visiting Americans were shuttled around the country in Amin's helicopter. Everywhere, Innis spoke with enthusiasm about Amin's accomplishments. In a poem published in the pro-government Voice of Uganda around the time of his visit, Innis wrote: 'Before, the life of your people was a complete bore, And they were poor, oppressed, exploited and economically sore. And you then came and opened new, dynamic economic pages. And showered progress on your people in realistic stages. In such expert moves that baffled even the great sages, your electric personality pronounced the imperialists' doom. Your pragmatism has given Ugandans their economic boom.' In May 1973, Innis was back in Uganda, promising to recruit a contingent of 500 African American professors and technicians to serve in Uganda. Amin offered them free passage to Uganda, free housing and free hospital care for themselves and their families. The American weekly magazine Jet predicted that Uganda was soon to become an 'African Israel,' a model nation upheld by the energies and knowledge of Black Americans. As some have observed, Innis was surely naive. But his enthusiasm was shared by a great many people, not least a great many Ugandans. Inspired by Amin's promises, their energy and commitment kept institutions functioning in a time of great disruption. They built roads and stadiums, constructed national monuments and underwrote the running costs of government ministries. Patriotism and demagoguery Their ambitions were soon foreclosed by a rising tide of political dysfunction. Amin's regime came to a violent end in 1979, when he was ousted by the invading army of Tanzania and fled Uganda. But his brand of demagoguery lives on. Today a new generation of demagogues claim to be fighting to liberate aggrieved majorities from outsiders' control. In the 1970s, Amin enlisted Black Ugandans to battle against racial minorities who were said to dominate the economy and public life. Today an ascendant right wing encourages aggrieved white Americans to regard themselves as a majority dispossessed of their inheritance by greedy immigrants. Amin encouraged Ugandans to regard themselves as frontline soldiers, engaged in a globally consequential war against foreigners. In today's America, some people similarly feel themselves deputised to take matters of state into their own hands. In January 2021, for instance, a right-wing group called 'Stop the Steal' organised a rally in Washington. Vowing to 'take our country back,' they stormed the Capitol building. The racialised demagoguery that Idi Amin promoted inspired the imagination of a great many people. It also fed violent campaigns to repossess a stolen inheritance, to reclaim properties that ought, in the view of the aggrieved majority, to belong to native sons and daughters. His regime is for us today a warning about the compelling power of demagoguery to shape people's sense of purpose.
