Somalia breakaway opens Taiwan office
TAIPEI, Taiwan — The breakaway territory of Somaliland opened a representative office in Taipei on Wednesday in a move that has already drawn China’s ire.
The territory’s representative to Taipei, Mohamed Hagi, said trade, security and development corporation were key aspects of “this very special relationship.”
The two are “members of the same community of democracies founded by our shared political and economic freedoms, as well as international values,” Hagi said.
Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu said both faced external pressures but are “proud of our sovereignty and ready to defend it.”
Taiwan has just 15 formal diplomatic allies and is considered by China a part of its territory, while Somaliland is recognized internationally as part of Somalia, from which it broke away in 1991 as the country split and descended into clan-based civil war.
Somaliland has seen little of the violence and extremist attacks that plague the rest of Somalia.
While neither Taiwan or Somaliland are recognized by the United Nations, they both maintain their own independent governments, currencies and security systems.
Turkish journalists face years in prison
ANKARA, Turkey — A Turkish court on Wednesday convicted five journalists over their reports on the funeral of an intelligence officer who was killed in Libya and sentenced them to more than three years in prison, state-run media outlets reported. But all have been released from custody pending the appeals process.
The five journalists from Odatv news website, the pro-Kurdish newspaper Yeni Yasam and the nationalist daily Yenicag, were among eight defendants accused of violating Turkey’s national-intelligence laws and disclosing secret information for their coverage of the funeral of the agent who was quietly buried in February.
Prosecutors claimed that their reports revealed the officer’s identity and exposed other secret agents who attended the funeral.
Odatv editor-in-chief Baris Pehlivan and reporter Hultay Kilinc were sentenced to three years and nine months in prison while Yeni Yasam newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Ferhat Celik, editor Aydin Keser and Murat Agirel, a columnist for Yenicag, received four years and six months, the Anadolu Agency reported.
Pehlivan, Kilinc and Agirel, the only defendants who were kept in pretrial detention, were ordered released on Wednesday, but have been barred from leaving the country. Other defendants were released in June.
All of the defendants had denied the charges and demanded their acquittal arguing that the slain intelligence officer was previously identified during discussions in Turkey’s parliament.
U.K. letter raps China ‘ethnic cleansing’
LONDON — More than 100 British lawmakers signed a letter to the Chinese ambassador on Wednesday condemning what they described as “a systematic and calculated programme of ethnic cleansing against the Uighur people” in China’s far western Xinjiang region.
“When the world is presented with such overwhelming evidence of gross human rights abuses, nobody can turn a blind eye,” said the cross-party letter, which was signed by 130 lawmakers. “We as Parliamentarians in the United Kingdom write to express our absolute condemnation of this oppression and call for it to end immediately.”
The letter referred to reports of forced population control and mass detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, as well as video apparently showing a large number of blindfolded and shaven men waiting to be loaded onto trains. The lawmakers said the video bore “chilling” similarities to footage of Nazi concentration camps.
Chinese officials have repeatedly derided allegations of genocide, forced sterilization and the mass detention of nearly 1 million Uighurs in Xinjiang as lies fabricated by anti-China forces. They maintain that the Uighurs are treated equally and that the Chinese government always protects the legitimate rights of ethnic minorities.
South Africa’s Tutu, wife escape fire
JOHANNESBURG — South African anti-apartheid veteran and Nobel laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and his wife Leah have escaped unharmed from a fire in their cottage at a retirement complex outside Cape Town.
“The couple did not sustain any injuries and were in good spirits considering events that unfolded around daybreak today,” a statement from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation said Wednesday.
A faulty gas heater is suspected of starting the fire, according to the statement.
Tutu, 88, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s previous racist regime of white minority rule known as apartheid. In 1986 he became the first Black person to be archbishop of Cape Town in the Anglican church.
When apartheid was abolished and Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president in 1994, Tutu popularized the term “rainbow nation” to describe South Africa’s multiracial democracy.