Travel risk map 2020: Libya, Somalia and South Sudan among world's most dangerous countries

World’s safest countries are mainly in Europe

The world’s most dangerous countries for 2020 have been revealed in a new interactive map.

Libya, Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, all in Africa, are the riskiest countries, according to the Travel Risk Map.

Created by global risk experts, International SOS, the map ranks countries’ safety across three different criteria: medical, security and road safety.

For the first two categories, countries are given a rating out of five, while road safety is rated out of four based on the mortality rate per 100,000 people.

Only the four countries mentioned scored the lowest safety band in each category: “very high” for travel medical risk; “extreme” for travel security risk; and more than 25 (deaths per 100,000) for road safety risk.

At the other end of the spectrum, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Andorra and Svalbard all achieved the highest safety marking for all three criteria.

The UK scored “low” for medical risk and the lowest mortality rating for road safety, but was ranked as “low” rather than “insignificant” in the travel security risk category.

Other countries graded “extreme” for security risk include Mali in northwest Africa and Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan in the Middle East.

Venezuela, Haiti, North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Eritrea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau and Burundi all scored “very high” for travel medical risk.

International SOS says it assigns its travel medical risk ratings by assessing a range of health risks, including: infectious disease burden, environmental factors, medical evacuation data, road trauma data, standard of emergency medical services, outpatient and inpatient medical care, access to quality pharmaceutical supplies, and cultural, language or administrative barriers.

The travel security risk rating evaluates the threat posed to travellers by political violence (including terrorism, insurgency, politically motivated unrest and war); social unrest; and violent and petty crime.

Other factors, such as the robustness of the transport infrastructure, the state of industrial relations, the effectiveness of the security and emergency services and the country’s susceptibility to natural disasters are also considered.

The Travel Risk Map was published alongside the Ipsos MORI Business Resilience Trend Watch survey of more than 1,300 business travel decision-makers.

Some 51 per cent of respondents believed that health and security risks had increased in the past year, while 47 per cent anticipated risks – including security threats, civil unrest and geopolitical unrest – would rise in the year ahead.

Highest security risk countries

• Libya 
• Somalia 
• South Sudan
• Central African Republic
• Mali
• Syria
• Iraq
• Yemen 
• Afghanistan

Lowest security risk countries

• Iceland 
• Norway 
• Finland 
• Denmark 
• Switzerland 
• Luxembourg 
• Slovenia 
• Andorra 
• Svalbard
• Greenland

(Source: Independent)

Battle for Tripoli: The secret network fighting to end Libya’s war

Meet the group of activists risking their lives to provide a ‘third voice’ in the conflict

A network of Libyan activists in the country’s east opposed to warlord Khalifa Haftar’s months-long offensive to seize the capital, Tripoli, has emerged; evidence that the civil society idealists who originally began the 2011 uprising against the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi persist, even if they are often cowering in fear.

Ahmed Sharksi, a 29-year-old activist and petroleum engineer now living in exile in Tunisia, is one of the coordinators of the Society for Civic Cooperation, a largely secret network of activists in eastern Libyan cities including Benghazi, Ajdabiya and Beida – the metropolises that make up the ancient Roman province of Cyrenaica.

They oppose both Haftar’s militaristic vision and the Islamist-leaning armed groups he is fighting.

“We reject the rule of militias in our capital, Tripoli,” Sharksi says. “And we are also opposing the attempt by Haftar to impose a military state. We are a third voice.”

They include lawyers, labourers, students, and engineers. They hold quiet meetings with each other and try to spread the word, occasionally appearing on one of Libya’s satellite television channels.

Anti-war movements are something of a rarity in an Arab world still enamoured with glorifications of armed forces and fighting men. Organising protests in eastern Libya’s tightly controlled streets is considered too risky.

Much of the group’s work remains underground, organising discreet meetings and launching hashtag campaigns, including one called “War is not a solution”. The group lacks even a Facebook page, worried that Haftar’s henchmen in the east would use it to track down and detain activists.

“There is without question some people who are not agreeing with this military intervention in Tripoli,” says Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan businessman and philanthropist.

“In Cyrenaica, it’s not so easy for them to say what they believe. It’s a very controlled environment. There are some people who have been imprisoned.”

Dissent is easier in western Libya because of the competition between rival groups. “There are too many powers running it, so it feels looser,” he says.

Sharksi was forced to flee Tunisia after he posted a video criticising Haftar’s Tripoli offensive that went viral and struck a chord with Libyans.

“Why do you destroy our dreams and aspirations for a stable country?” he said in the five-minute clip, which he posted to Facebook on 19 April, 15 days after Haftar launched his battle to take Tripoli.

“Haven’t we had enough bloodshed, enough killing? We don’t want another war.”

He chastised eastern Libyans for supporting Haftar’s grab for the capital, now nearing four months with over 1,100 dead and tens of thousands displaced. He also criticised western Libyans for believing the worst about their eastern compatriots.

We can’t tell the fighters to put down their weapons unless we have a logical solution. We are trying to assemble an alternative
Ahmed Sharksi
“Everyone in the western region heard that there were calls for massive demonstrations [in Benghazi] to support the war in Tripoli,” he said. “In these demonstrations, not even five or 10 people turned up. The silent majority did not participate and rejects this war.”

The threats came quickly and became increasingly violent. He was blasted as a liar and a traitor.

“I swear that you are a liar,” said one commentator. “May god damn you!”

“We will kill you,” another warned.

Some were from random trolls. But others came from Facebook accounts with postings and religious sentiments suggesting they were tied to the Saudi-influenced armed extremist militias partnered with Haftar.

Less than a week after he made the video, he wound up in neighbouring Tunisia, where many Libyans have fled to escape their country’s continuous armed conflicts.

He was right to be intimidated.

On 17 July, Haftar’s henchmen allegedly abducted Libyan activist and former lawmaker Seham Sergiwa, shooting her husband and 14-year-old son during an attack on her home a day after she criticised the war in a television appearance.

Haftar, backed by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russia and France, launched his operation to seize control of the capital from the United Nations-brokered government on 4 April, promising his benefactors a quick victory.

But militias in the west united against him, garnering the support of Turkey. The conflict has now become bogged down in a stalemate on the capital’s outskirts.

Ordinary Libyans are increasingly uneasy about the situation of their country, but unable to speak out, with both camps tightly controlling media. In recent days came allegations that Haftar’s forces bombed a clinic facility, killing five medical personnel, although the claim has been disputed by his side.

Like many Libyans, Sharksi said he supported Haftar when he first launched his 2014 effort to rid the country of the militias that had sprung following the collapse of Gaddafi’s rule. Some, such as Ansar al-Sharia, had ties to al-Qaeda.

But Sharksi and others turned against Haftar as it became apparent he sought to usher in a new dynasty.

Haven’t we had enough bloodshed, enough killing? We don’t want another war
Ahmed Sharski
“Haftar tried to push his family as ruler of Libya,” he says. “We are against that. We won’t allow it. We won’t support any new dictatorship in Libya.”

In his video, Sharski sought to appeal to Libyans’ better instincts. “We must try our best to reject hateful speech, and reject violence,” he said. “Frankly, war has never been a solution. We are honestly scared that this country will be divided, and we don’t want that.”

Other than rhetoric, there is not a lot that ordinary Libyans can do to change the course of their country. UN-backed plans for elections to install a new government overseeing all of Libya have been repeatedly delayed, and it remains unclear whether any of the country’s well-armed factions would respect any results that diminished their power.

Armed men rule Libya’s streets in both the country’s east, west and south. Haftar appears to answer to no one, surprising not only the UN but even his own benefactors with his assault on the capital.

Armed groups in the west, though reined in somewhat in the last year or so, have re-emerged vigorously on the streets of the capital, their tan Toyota pick-up trucks spray-painted and plastered with the names of their brigades and cities.

Activists like Sharksi try to build networks online, reaching out to like-minded Libyans in the rest of the country as well as in the diaspora.

In Tunis, he seeks audiences with diplomats and the UN, demanding a halt to the blatant interference in Libya’s affairs by countries such as France and Turkey. But ultimately he acknowledges that it is Libyans themselves that must work out a solution.

“Today we are just organising ourselves,” he says. “We can’t tell the fighters to put down their weapons unless we have a logical solution. We are trying to assemble an alternative.”

Protests in neighbouring Algeria and Sudan brought down governments this year. But Tatanaki says Libyans might be too exhausted and hopeless to make such a move. “I don’t think there’s enough courage or organisation or will,” he says.

Sharksi says it is still way too dangerous to try to take on the country’s armed factions in the streets with flowers and peaceful slogans.

“We’re trying to decrease the risks for activists,” he says. “We’re trying to limit information about our group so the names don’t get public.

“We move slowly,” he says.

(Source: Independent)

Thousands of ISIS children suffer in camps as countries grapple with their fate

Many of them were barely school age when their parents took them to the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of others were born there.

The children are the most vulnerable of the Islamic State’s captured followers — the remainders of the more than 40,000 foreign fighters and their families who came from 80 countries to help build the caliphate. Many are now detained in camps and prisons across eastern Syria, Iraq and Libya.

“What have these kids done?” said Fabrizio Carboni, a Red Cross official, after witnessing the misery surrounding him on a recent visit to Al Hol camp in Syria. “Nothing.”

Children detained at Al Hol camp in eastern Syria. “What have these kids done?” said a Red Cross official during a recent visit. “Nothing.”CreditCreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Yet even when it comes to the children, the foreign governments whose citizens are marooned in the camps and prisons have struggled with what to do with them.

The Islamic State, researchers say, employed children as scouts, spies, cooks and bomb-planters, and sometimes as fighters and suicide bombers. Propaganda videos showed young children beheading and shooting prisoners.

Some have had years of ISIS indoctrination and, in the case of older boys, military training.

“They’re victims of the situation because they went against their will,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, “but that doesn’t mean that they’re not, in some cases at least, a risk.”

If figuring out what to do with the children is that complicated, deciding what to do with the women and men is even more difficult.

There are at least 13,000 foreign ISIS followers being held in Syria, including 12,000 women and children. That number does not include the estimated 31,000 Iraqi women and children detained there. Another 1,400 are detained in Iraq.

Women and children who fled the Islamic State’s last territory in Syria waiting to be screened by Kurdish forces in February. Most ended up in camps in eastern Syria.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

But only a handful of countries — including Russia, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and France — have intervened to bring back some of their citizens.

The debate is more pressing than ever.

In overflowing camps in eastern Syria, the wives and children of ISIS fighters who fled the last shreds of ISIS territory are dying of exposure, malnutrition and sickness. Children are too spent to speak. Women who have renounced the group live in dread of attacks from those who have not.

The local militias running the camps say they cannot detain other countries’ citizens forever.

Across the border in Iraq, government authorities are administering hasty justice to people accused of being Islamic State members, sentencing hundreds to death in trials that often last no longer than five minutes.

But most foreign governments are reluctant to take them back, leaving them international pariahs wanted by no one — not their home countries, not their jailers.

“Who wants to be the politician who decides to repatriate Individual A who, two years down the road, blows himself up?” said Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the George Washington University Program on Extremism.

The fact is, Mr. Vidino said, few extremists return to stage attacks in their home countries. But the exceptional cases — including the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 people and two of Tunisia’s deadliest terrorist attacks — have made the idea of repatriation politically toxic in many countries. At least one of the bombers who carried out the attack in Sri Lanka on Easter was a Sri Lankan who had trained with the Islamic State in Syria.

Some countries, like Britain and Australia, have revoked the citizenships of their nationals suspected of joining the Islamic State abroad, effectively abandoning them and their children to indefinite detention without charge and potential statelessness. Britain alone has canceled the passports of more than 150 people, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, has said.

While bringing them home could pose an obvious danger, so could leaving them in the camps, desperate and disenfranchised.

Historically, fighters who gained experience with one extremist group have been the ones who seed new ones, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the George Washington program.

A bus packed with women and children fleeing the last ISIS-controlled area in Syria headed to a detention camp in February. Their countries are grappling with what to do with them.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

“Do we ignore the problem because it’s easier in the short term?” he said. “If so, it’s going to become a problem in the long term.”

But bringing them home requires foreign governments to answer virtually impossible questions, like how to separate those who committed crimes from those who did not, and those who still pose a threat from those who do not.

The puzzle has been hardest to solve when it comes to the tens of thousands of women and children affiliated with the Islamic State.

The once common view that ISIS women were passive prey, “jihadi brides” seduced into joining the caliphate and marrying its fighters, crumbled as evidence emerged that women had served as enforcers for the caliphate’s morality brigade or, in some cases, taken up arms in battle.

“The rhetoric from the media and politicians is they’re brainwashed, they’re deceived, they’re lovestruck, they don’t know what they’re doing,” said Meredith Loken, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has studied women who join violent extremist groups. “But even if they didn’t pick up guns,” she said, many were “actively contributing to this group.”

Some were reluctant accessories while others were violent zealots. Some were both victims and perpetrators, experts say.

Women like Shamima Begum, a British teenager, and Hoda Muthana, a young American-born woman, have drawn headlines in recent weeks partly because it is so difficult to size up their roles and the risk they pose.

Ms. Begum was unrepentant when a journalist found her in a Syrian camp in February, asking to return to Britain for her unborn child’s sake while insisting that the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 were killed, was justified. Ms. Muthana later said she regretted joining the Islamic State, insisting that she had been “brainwashed.”

Experts contend that bringing ISIS members home to be prosecuted or monitored is smarter, safer and, in most countries, more humane than leaving them stranded in the desert or outsourcing their prosecution to the Iraqi justice system.

“I don’t have words for how much regret I have,” says Kimberly Gwen Polman, 46, a dual United States-Canadian citizen who joined ISIS in 2015. Now she is one of thousands detained at Al Hol camp in Syria.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

The Trump administration has called for foreign governments to repatriate their citizens, though officials have suggested that some detainees who cannot be repatriated could be sent to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

“They are your citizens, and, for better or for worse, you’re responsible for the mess they’re creating,” said Tanya Mehra, a researcher at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague.

Some countries say that Iraq should be able to prosecute foreign ISIS members for crimes against Iraqis committed on Iraqi soil. The American-backed forces in Syria have handed over at least 150 Iraqis and foreigners to be tried in Iraq.

Yet Iraqi due process standards fall glaringly short of Western ones. Many defendants have been convicted on the basis of confessions extracted through torture, including, according to Human Rights Watch, teenagers who said that they were beaten until they confessed.

Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has said that at least 185 foreign children had been convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to prison by the end of 2018. Iraq is also negotiating with the Kurdish-led militias who oversee the camps in Syria for the return of the 31,000 Iraqi women and children but Iraq’s government has been unable to decide what to do with them.

Abandoning ISIS followers to the camps or to Iraqi justice, experts argue, may only postpone a reckoning later on.

“If you leave them there and you lose track of them, sooner or later they’ll try to come back and you have no clue what’s happened with them,” Ms. Mehra said. “At least it’s a controlled risk if you bring them back.”

Several countries have proposed an international tribunal to try ISIS suspects. While the idea has gained some traction among countries eager to avoid handling the problem themselves, other international tribunals — which have generally tried only top officials — have proved unwieldy, expensive and of limited effectiveness. Experts view the prospect as unrealistic.

Prosecution at home is also complicated.

Many countries were so unprepared to deal with returnees that they did not have laws to prosecute them until a few years ago; even now, those laws generally carry sentences of only a few years.

Foreign women and children at Al Hol camp in eastern Syria. Most countries have been reluctant to take back their citizens who joined ISIS, but leaving them in the camp poses other dangers.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Successful prosecution often requires resources that are hard to scrape up and evidence that has long since disappeared on the battlefield.

Countries have also struggled with imprisoning former ISIS fighters in a way that prevents them from radicalizing other prisoners, and then reintegrating them into society once they are released.

While no nation has yet developed a large-scale, tried-and-true model for detention — to say nothing of deradicalization, which remains an elusive goal — Mr. Neumann, the radicalization expert, said that those that have developed a more sophisticated approach have found that it often requires labor-intensive, case-by-case tailoring.

Some governments have appeared more willing to repatriate children than their parents, though few seem ready to send people to Syria and Iraq to collect them. Several countries require children born in the caliphate to undergo DNA testing to prove their parentage, and therefore their citizenship, before repatriation.

Kosovo, Russia and Kazakhstan are among the few countries that have retrieved children on a large scale, with the Chechen ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, organizing the return of dozens of Russian-speaking children and, in some cases, their mothers. In the largest one-time repatriation to Europe so far, Kosovo flew 110 of its citizens back from Syria last month, including 32 women and 74 children.

To help reintegrate them into society, some countries have favored separating children from radicalized parents and placing them with relatives or in foster or adoptive homes. While this approach may be the fastest way to rescue innocent children, it also means tearing them away from their mothers, many of whom refuse to part with them.

Tunisia, which had one of the largest contingents of foreigners to join ISIS, has balked at repatriating its citizens, leaving at least 200 Tunisian children and 100 women marooned in Syria and Libya, according to Human Rights Watch.

It has taken months of urging by activists and families for Tunisia to repatriate three children, including a 4-year-old who was orphaned when his parents were killed in airstrikes and two children whose mother remains detained in a camp, the rights group said.

“Every day they spend in the camp is one more day outside of school and their fundamental rights,” said Khawla Ben Aicha, a member of Tunisia’s Parliament who has pushed the government to retrieve the rest of the children. “They didn’t choose where they were born, or to have a jihadist parent.”

But the fragile Tunisian government has stalled, despite calls from Ms. Ben Aicha and others for it to take responsibility.

“We’re in an election year,” Ms. Ben Aicha said. “It’s not something people want to deal with.”

(Source: NYT)

As rival states jostle for power in Libya, the fate of one Gaddafi son hangs delicately in the balance

Hannibal Gaddafi has been held in Lebanon since 2015 in connection with the disappearance of three men in 1978 – when he was just two

As the ninth anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi approaches, Libya remains in a state of turmoil. Bloody clashes took place last week in the suburbs of Tripoli between rival militias while General Khalifa Haftar, the strongman saviour-in-waiting to his supporters, has launched a new offensive in the southwest. The largest oilfield of the oil-rich land remains shut, after an armed group took it over.

France and the UK instigated the Nato bombing campaign that led to the fall of the Gaddafi regime during the uprising. Foreign powers are back in what is now a dismembered state. The Italians, the French, the Americans, the Russians, the Egyptians and the Emiratis are all at present backing rival blocs competing for power. The UN-backed interim government has little reach outside the capital.

The Italians and the French are the main European power brokers. David Cameron may have led the chorus of “Gaddafi must go”, but Brexit Britain, wrapped in its own internal political turbulence, has little presence or influence in Libya except for some special forces.

Slowly emerging into this changing milieu – albeit still in the background – are the Gaddafis. Seven years and 10 months ago I saw the bodies of Muammar Gaddafi and his son Mutassim laid out on the floors of a meat warehouse in the city of Misrata for the public, queues of people, some families with children, who had waited for hours to see the grim display. The rebels and their international sponsors declared that the dynasty which had ruled the country for more than four decades was gone forever.

Syria and Russia have called for the release of Colonel Gaddafi’s fifth son ( AFP/Getty )

Colonel Gaddafi had been lynched after being captured and tortured as he tried to escape from his home town of Sirte, his last hiding place, as the tide of civil war turned against him. Mutassim was shot dead after being caught with his father. Another son, Khamis, who led a brigade named after himself in the conflict, was killed by a Nato airstrike at the end of August 2011, while another, Saif al-Arab, was reportedly killed after returning to Libya from Germany in April 2011.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the leader’s heir apparent, was also captured as he tried to flee Libya. He was sentenced to death by a court in Tripoli and the International Criminal Court announced that it would try him in The Hague. But the militia in the city of Zintan which had kept him in custody – after cutting off the two fingers with which he used to signal victory on TV – refused to hand him over.

As post-liberation Libya fell apart into feuding fiefdoms, I found on successive visits that many were comparing the state of insecurity with the Gaddafi years, wondering whether authoritarian rule was a price worth paying for stability. This may have been rose-tinted nostalgia: many of the same people had celebrated the downfall of the man they called a cruel despot. But the time may come in the not too distant future when Libyans can show if they really want a future linked to the past.

Saif al-Islam was quietly freed 18 months ago and his supporters announced that he intended to run in last year’s presidential election. They were postponed but are due to be held, supposedly, in the next few months, although no date has been set yet. There is nothing constitutional to stop Saif al-Isla from standing. A law passed in 2013 banning officials in Colonel Gaddafi’s administration from standing for public office was revoked two years later.

It is, however, another of the late Libyan leader’s sons whose fate is in the news. Hannibal Gaddafi has been held in a Lebanese prison for four years after being kidnapped in Syria where he had ended up from Libya. He is in bad health, say his friends, and there is inadequate medical care for his deteriorating condition.

Hannibal was abducted by a Lebanese Shia militia who released him after a day. He was then immediately arrested by Lebanese security forces in connection, it was announced, with the disappearance of the Shia Imam Musa al-Sadr and two of his companions, Sheikh Muhammad Yaacoub and Abbas Badreddine, in Libya in 1978. There are grounds for suspecting collusion in what took place: the militia that carried out the kidnap has links with the imam and his missing companions. Imam Musa is one of the founders of Libya’s powerful Amal movement, with its leader Nabih Berri, the parliamentary speaker.

Imam Musa, it is claimed, went to Tripoli at the invitation of Colonel Gaddafi. Various theories have since surfaced over what happened to him and his companions: they were killed on the orders of the Libyan leader after a doctrinal dispute, or at the behest of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, or they were incarcerated in a Libyan prison or, according to the Libyan authorities, left for Italy. No evidence has emerged, however, to prove any of the allegations.

The imam’s family are opposed to Hannibal being freed. They said in a recent statement: “To say that Hannibal Gaddafi was just a child in 1978 is just a smokescreen: nobody is accusing him of a role in the kidnapping at the time, but the crime continued and Hannibal Gaddafi became a security official in his father’s regime. The fact that he was a political refugee in a fellow Arab country does not give any immunity or have any judicial effect.” Some followers of the imam believe that he is still alive now in a Libyan jail, but that seems highly unlikely with the detention centres long in the hands of anti-Gaddafi rebels.

Hannibal’s lawyers want to stress that the Lebanese government has not offered any evidence showing his culpability in the Musa al-Sadr case. Fresh information may yet surface, of course, but there does not appear to be any sign of that occurring. Those of us journalists who found voluminous amounts of confidential documents in government buildings in Tripoli in the aftermath of the Gaddafi’s regime’s fall – including the involvement of the British government in rendition – did not come across anything relating to Imam al-Sadr.

Hannibal has also been given an 18-month sentence for “insulting” the Lebanese judiciary over the Musa case. It is reported that last July he was also banned by a Lebanese judge from leaving the country for a year after a complaint by a Lebanese national that a militia associated with Gaddafi had once kidnapped him in Libya. The legal scope of the order remains unclear.

Family and friends of the prisoner say they are deeply worried about him. Reem El Debri, who has known Hannibal since childhood and recently visited him in prison, said: “He is suffering from back and knee problems and he can’t walk well. There are also the after-effects of his nose fracturing and the head injuries when he was beaten up after his kidnapping. There have been years spent in prison, without sunlight, and this has also caused a skin problem. What Hannibal Gaddafi would like is for a doctor from a humanitarian agency to visit him in hospital.”

Childhood friend: Reem El Debri has visited Hannibal in prison

She continued: “All this is happening because he was kidnapped by an armed group and tortured. And then the state put him in prison. He wants to point out that he is being accused of something [the disappearance of Imam Sadr] which took place when he was just two years old. How can he be held responsible? He was in the naval forces of Libya, not in its security services. We would really like international organisations to investigate what is going on.”

One of the latest messages from Hannibal Gaddafi’s Twitter account struck a note of despondency: “Hannibal Gaddafi completed four years in detention. The arrest of the son of the Libyan leader did not bring any new information about the fate of Musa al-Sadr and his two companions and there seems to be no hope in the horizon.”

But there may well be. Syria has increased pressure for his return and now Vladimir Putin, whose backing had ensured Bashar al-Assad’s survival in his country’s conflict, is reported to be prepared to give him refuge. Moscow is now a major player in the Middle East with far more influence in both Sunni and Shia states than it has had for decades. “Hannibal is aware of the kind offer from Russia,” said Reem El Debri, “and we are very grateful.” Tehran, another Syrian ally, has not publicly expressed its views on his guilt or otherwise.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is also said to be working to secure his brother’s release through intermediaries. With the future of Libya uncertain, and new alliances being formed, the house of Gaddafi may yet play a part in shaping the country’s future.

(Source: The Independent)

Books can take you places Donald Trump doesn’t want you to go

"The most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded then that I am really no different from anyone else," writes Hisham Matar, the author of “The Return”, a memoir investigating his father’s disappearance in Libya, on NYT:

Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, “Read so as to know the world.” And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.

I have had access to private rooms, overheard exquisite conversations and been able to observe subtle changes in another person’s inner life. Books have shown me horror and beauty. All this is true.

But the most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself, when I read a sentence that perfectly describes something I have known or felt all along. I am reminded then that I am really no different from anyone else.

Perhaps that is the secret motive behind every library: to stumble upon ourselves in the lives and lands and tongues of others. And the more foreign the setting, the more poignant the event seems. For a strange thing occurs then: A distance widens and then it is crossed.

How many times, and in ways that did not seem to require my consent, have I suddenly and in my own bed found myself to be Russian or French or Japanese? How many times have I been a peasant or an aristocrat? How many times have I been a woman? I have been free and without liberty, gay, disabled, old, loved and loathed.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self. These occurrences aren’t merely amusing or disorientating or interesting experiments in “virtual reality.” They are moments of genuine expansion. They are at the heart of our humanity. Our future depends on them. We couldn’t have gotten here without them.

Just as a river leads to the sea — and from Jane Austen’s vernacular social order to William Faulkner’s American South, from Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo to Tayeb Salih’s village in Sudan — the particular in great literature has always flowed to the universal.

That is perhaps what the author of the iconic novel “The House of Hunger,” the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera, meant when he said, “If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race,” then he had no use for you. What he was resisting was narrow provincialism, the sort of identitarianism that has invaded our academies and public discourse, and which sees individual life as, first and foremost, representative of a racial, religious or cultural category.

Mr. Marechera was instead promoting a courageous universalism that is at the heart of how literature works and, I believe, central to our resistance to the narrow visions of right-wing populists such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Nigel Farage.

Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don’t, in one form or another, already possess. “Every reader,” as Marcel Proust writes in “Time Regained,” “is actually the reader of himself.” Books can’t install unknown feelings or passions into us. What they can do is develop our emotional, psychological and intellectual life, and, by doing so, show us how and to what extent we are connected.

This is why literature is the greatest argument for the universalist instinct, and this is why literature is intransigent about its liberty. It refuses to be enrolled, regardless of how noble or urgent the project. It cannot be governed or dictated to. It is by instinct interested in conflicting empathies, in men and women who are running into their own hearts, in doubt and contradictions. Which is why, without even intending to, and like a moon to the night, it disrupts the totalitarian narrative. What it reveals about our human nature is central to the conversation today.

Doubt and contradictions are not tolerated in Mr. Trump’s life; but, of course, they are there — as they are in every life — no matter how deeply concealed. You can see it in the tragic air that never leaves him, in the rhythm of his steps, the lines sculpted into his face, the rigidity of his neck as he signs those wretched executive orders. Yes, doubt must be there because he is not only intolerant of complexity; he fears it.

What false vigor then must demonizing and excluding millions of innocent people based on their race and religion inspire. And just like the censor who underestimates the common reader, Mr. Trump too has a limited interpretation of himself and therefore of humanity. And just like the censor, his actions will damage the fiber of his society because, in the long run, the more lasting damage falls on the one doing the excluding more than those being excluded.

Bel Air Police detain woman walking, question her immigration status

Police agencies in Harford County say they don't stop people just to check their immigration status, but the recent experience of a Bel Air woman raises questions about how clearly that's understood by officers on his streets, the town's police chief admits.

Bel Air Police Department Chief Charles Moore, who's led the agency since September 2015, said he's not sure if his department has a policy specifically dealing with questioning a person's immigration status, but added: "If there isn't one, there will be."

In the wake of President Trump's statements on Wednesday that federal grants may be withheld from so-called "sanctuary cities" that don't take enforcement actions against people who are in the United States illegally, Moore and other law enforcement leaders in the county could find they have to walk an even finer line between civil liberties and checking for undocumented aliens.

Trump also is expected to suspend issuing visas for people from several predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — for at least 30 days, according to a draft executive order obtained by The Associated Press, as reported Wednesday by Tribune News Service.

On the morning of Dec. 21, Aravinda Pillalamarri was walking in her Bel Air neighborhood, where she walks all the time, when she said she was stopped by a Bel Air Police Department officer.

When she responded to his question about what she was doing – that she was walking – Pillalamarri says the questions continued.

When she asked why the officer was asking her so many questions, he replied because someone had called police.

"Walking while brown?" Pillalamarri said she then asked the officer.

A police supervisor arrived and began to question Pillalamarri, more aggressively, she said, and told her she wasn't free to leave because she "was under criminal investigation."

He asked why she didn't have identification with her.

"Why don't you have ID?" she said the supervisor asked her. "Are you here illegally?"

Once the officers had run her name through their computer system, Pillalamarri said, she was allowed to leave and walked to her home, just a few doors away.

Pillalamarri, 47, has lived in Bel Air for more than 30 years and is a U.S. citizen. Her parents came to America from India when she was a baby. She went to Bel Air High School.

She walks in her neighborhood nearly every day, she said.

Aravinda Pillalamarri of Bel Air shares her story of being stopped by a Bel Air police officer the morning December 21 while walking in her neighboorhood and being questioned about her legal status as a citizen.

She related her story to members of the Bel Air Board of Town commissioners at their town meeting Jan. 17, not to get anyone in trouble, she explained, but to bring to their attention the need to uphold everyone's civil rights.

Color was not on her mind when she was first stopped, Pillalamarri told the commissioners.

"Only when the supervisor asked 'are you here illegally' did my sense of color, and of being unequal, come forth and my interest in my civil rights take a back seat to get out of the situation safely," she said.

"Public safety does not need to come at the cost of civil rights," she continued. "I am sharing this incident here not to ask anyone here to find fault or take sides. We are all on the same side and can use this as an opportunity to learn and improve. The responsibility to uphold civil rights is one that all of us share, and we need to do our part and also expect the police to do their part."

Moore, who was present at the meeting, said his officers do not ask someone's immigration status, particularly during a routine call.

"That's not a concern of ours," Moore said Wednesday. "That's just not the proper protocol that I would take. And my officers, from what I've seen from their performance, I don't see that from them either."

Immigration status could come into play when someone is arrested, Moore said, but he added that would more likely be when they're taken to the Harford County Detention Center.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office, which runs the detention center and is the chief law enforcement agency for most of the county, does not ask for proof of citizenship when stopping or detaining someone. Deputies only ask for identification, according to Cristie Kahler, spokesperson for the agency.

"We do not have a policy that specifically requires deputies to ask for proof of citizenship," Kahler explained via email. "We do ask to see identification as a regular course of action during a motor vehicle or personal stop. Once they provide ID, we query the info through multiple databases. Should one of those databases provide an alert regarding the status of the individual, and indicate they have been flagged by immigration or federal authorities, we then contact that agency. That agency then provides direction on how to further handle the individual and whether or not to detain for further investigation."

"It doesn't matter to me where you're from, who you are, anything else. If you live in the town of Bel Air or you're in my jurisdiction, my position is to protect and serve everyone," the Bel Air PD's Moore said. "I'm not going to question who you are or where you came from. My job is to maintain and build trust among everyone."

In Pillalamarri's case, there had been a call about suspicious activity and the officers responded, he said.

"There could have been more sensitivity on the part of the officer," Moore told the town commissioners.

Pillalamarri said she was uncertain of what her rights were when the officers stopped her.

"Police are training in dealing with people when they stop them on the street, but ordinary people are not necessarily training in interacting with the police," she said to the commissioners. "I did not know when I was stopped whether I had the right to remain silent, whether I was being legally detained or what information I was required to give."

Pillalamarri has since met with Moore, as well as Town Administrator Jesse Bane, who was formerly county sheriff and a career police officer, about the incident.

Moore said at the town meeting the police department could hold an open forum with the community.

"The community needs to be aware of what police are doing. They have to investigate fully," he said. "And on the officer's part, there has to be sensitivity, so it doesn't escalate to the point of being wrong, of things being said they way they're said."

The community needs to be able to trust the police, and work with them, he said.

"That's not going to be the norm to ask someone if they're illegal, or if they're legal. That's not what we want. When you start doing that to people of color, of different origin, different cultures, you start to develop a level of mistrust among those people," Moore said. "That's not what we want in the Town of Bel Air. We want to build trust and a level of cooperation among all our citizens.

(Source: The Baltimore Sun)