Landlocked Afghanistan has used a regional summit to call on Pakistan to reopen formal border crossings between the two countries, saying barriers on trade, transit and the movement of people defy stated objectives of promoting economic cooperation among participating nations.

Islamabad, which hosted Wednesday’s summit of the 10-nation Economic Cooperation Organization, or ECO, sealed all of the border two weeks ago, alleging militants planned and executed recent terrorist attacks across the country from Afghan soil.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Shaif chaired the meeting where the presidents of Iran and Turkey, as well as several Central Asian states, were also in attendance.

Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, Hazrat Omer Zakhilwal, who represented his government at the conference, underscored the need for separating economics from politics to promote the ECO mission of regional connectivity for economic prosperity.

Consequences

“They [border crossings with Pakistan] have now been closed for about two weeks, causing enormous hardship to ordinary people and damage to traders on both sides. We cannot be for regional connectivity if at the same time we continue to implement barriers to trade, transit and movement of people between us,” he said.

Zakhil attended the conference as a special envoy of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

“Honorable Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, in the spirit of today’s summit…, it will be the right message if your excellency instruct the opening of our formal trade and transit routes between our two brotherly countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said Zakhilwal

Kabul rejects charges that anti-Pakistan militants are using Afghan soil for staging attacks in the neighboring country.

Mutual accusations

The Afghan government in turn has reiterated its long running allegations that Islamabad harbors sanctuaries and leaders of the Taliban waging a deadly insurgency in Afghanistan, charges Islamabad denies as baseless.

Mutual terrorism allegations have lately prevented the two uneasy neighbors from engaging in official talks to ease tensions.

Pakistan army spokesman, Major-General Asif Ghafoor, on Tuesday called on Afghan authorities to enhance security on their side of the border to prevent terrorist infiltrate into his country, insisting the border closure is not an “indefinite” measure.

“There are some things Afghanistan should be doing before the border reopens that can be decided through shared discussions, so that when the border reopens, no one from our side should be able to go there and no one from their side should be able to come here for terrorism.”

Pakistani officials were hoping for the Afghan president to attend Wednesday’s ECO summit and billboards displayed at the meeting included Ghani’s picture along with other leaders.

But the rise in tensions prompted Ghani to skip the event and so did the Afghan foreign minister, who Pakistani officials say had confirmed his participation days before the summit.

 
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Malaysia charged two women with murder Wednesday in connection with the death of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Siti Aisyah, a 25-year-old Indonesian, and 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam were under heavy security as they appeared at a Kuala Lumpur court.

The women were not asked to enter pleas in the case, but have said they are innocent, and believed they were taking part in a prank for a television show. They each face the death penalty if convicted.

They are accused of being the two women shown on security camera footage smearing something on Kim Jong Nam’s face at an airport in Kuala Lumpur last month. He died 20 minutes later from what authorities say was the effects of the powerful VX nerve agent.

Prosecutors want to try the two women together, and the pair is due back in court in mid-April. They wore bulletproof vests as they were escorted from the court back to prison.

The court on Wednesday also issued a gag order meant to prevent police and potential witnesses from making public statements about the case.

North Korea has not confirmed that the dead man is Kim Jong Nam, and is demanding that Malaysia release the body, as well as a North Korean suspect who is in custody.

Malaysian authorities have not said what connection the North Korean man may have to the killing, or whether he will be charged.

Kim Jong Nam was the older estranged brother of Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Nam was once considered the heir apparent to lead North Korea, but he fell out of favor with their father, the late dictator Kim Jong Il, after a failed 2001 attempt to enter Japan on a forged passport to visit Disneyland.

Since then, Kim Jong Nam had lived in virtual exile, primarily in the Chinese territory of Macau.
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A pair of suicide bombings, both claimed by the Taliban, struck the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Wednesday, an Afghan official said. 

Najib Danish, deputy spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said that one bomber targeted the gates of a police station in western Kabul as part of a coordinated attack and that a gun battle between police and an unknown number of armed attackers was ongoing.

Mohibullah Zeer, a Public Health Ministry official, said that one person was killed and at least 37 wounded.

“We were in the dining room, eating lunch when a loud explosion happened. I couldn’t see anything for a while,” said Manizha, a policewoman, who only identified herself by her first name. She said she managed to escape the compound but wasn’t sure how many gunmen were attacking. 

Thick smoke lingered above the police compound, and several rounds of small arms fire as well as other explosions were heard, according the Mohammad Naser, a shopkeeper near the station. Dozens of windows were shattered in nearby houses and shops, he added.

“Right now, police forces have started a clearing up operation inside the police compound,” Danish said.

Meanwhile a second suicide bomber on foot carried out another attack in eastern Kabul, targeting an office belonging to the national intelligence service.

Danish said two people were wounded in that attack.

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, claimed responsibility for both attacks.
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Vietnam is coming under pressure from lawmakers in Europe to improve its human rights record before ratification of an EU free trade deal that the Communist government prizes after the loss of a major U.S.-led agreement.

European Parliament members voiced concerns in late February about Vietnam as its Subcommittee on Human Rights traveled to the Southeast Asian country. The committee recommended more debate in Vietnam on political rights and freedom of expression and religion.

Europe’s human rights concerns

Without meeting Europe’s strict conditions on human rights, ratification of the trade agreement will be difficult, the subcommittee’s chair was quoted saying in Hanoi. The Vietnamese government has not directly responded to the comments. 

The deal, signed in December 2015 and due to take effect next year, must pass the European Parliament as well as the legislatures of the member countries. When lawmakers in Belgium deliberated the agreement in January, a number raised questions about Vietnam’s socio-economic situation.

“They have this very daunting prospect of having to go through 27 national assemblies to get anything ratified,” said Frederick Burke, partner with the multinational law firm Baker & McKenzie in Ho Chi Minh City. “That’s a challenge to get through all those ratifications.”

The European Union had pursued the trade deal with Vietnam so its companies could better access an increasingly wealthy consumer market of about 93 million people. The agreement also builds toward an eventual EU free trade agreement with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to which Vietnam belongs.

Vietnam wants the agreement as a burgeoning export-driven nation keen to diversify markets and avoid dependence on China, a long-time political rival. 

TPP died with Trump Administration

Vietnam was a member of the Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP, which would have dropped import tariffs in Japan and the United States. The deal effectively died after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States in January.

EU-Vietnam trade comes to about $40.1 billion per year. Vietnam counts the European Union, with a market of about 500 million people, as its No. 3 trading partner after China and the United States.

“If it’s ratified soon, it’s much better. The sooner the better for Vietnam,” said Hoang Viet Phuong, head of institutional research and investment advisor at SSI Securities Services in Hanoi.

Free trade deal helps garment and textile exports

“It should not be a problem because already (it has) been signed,” she said. “I think people expected the TPP the most but as the TPP was not realized, this FTA will also help. For sectors such as garments and textiles, we export to Europe a lot.”

The deal would drop almost all import tariffs within seven years and open Vietnam to European services such as healthcare, packaging and holding exhibitions.

Almost a year before the parliament committee’s visit to Vietnam, the French advocacy group Worldwide Movement for Human Rights had accused the European Union of failing to do a human rights impact study.

Human rights demands less rigorous than TPP

The FTA includes “strong commitments to protect people’s basic rights at work, their human rights more broadly, and the environment,” chief European negotiator Mauro Petriccione said in a statement last year.

But the European agreement’s language is less rigorous than corresponding text in the TPP, Burke said. 

The TPP would have required pro-union changes in Vietnamese labor law to stop worker exploitation and forced heavy industries to pay penalties if poor pollution controls caused an impact on trade, with violators facing extra tariffs.

“The EU FTA was not drafted as clearly as the TPP,” he said. “The language is not as self-enforcing. It relies more on goodwill and people willing to do things.”

Human rights abuses continue

Vietnamese authorities harass and imprison bloggers and political activists as well, American advocacy group Human Rights Watch says. Workers cannot form their own unions, it says, while farmers are losing land to development projects.

Some of the estimated 8 million Christians in the officially atheist state are sometimes arrested for airing their beliefs because the government sees their religion as “being tied to foreign powers,” the American advocacy group Open Doors says.

To satisfy European legislators, the country will probably pass laws or release a few prisoners of conscience without making fundamental changes, said Carl Thayer, Vietnam scholar and emeritus professor of politics at The University of New South Wales in Australia.

Hanoi changed what it was required before being allowed into the TPP, he noted. Human rights activists could still criticize Vietnam, he said, but American officials were satisfied.

“The real answer is that Vietnam will resist, but instead of stonewalling, like they did with the U.S., they worked out a kind of modus vivendi,” he said. 
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Two years after Avijit Roy was hacked to death by suspected Islamist militants in Dhaka, relatives and friends of the Bangladeshi-American atheist blogger and writer say they are not satisfied with the pace of the police investigation.

As Bangladesh probes of Roy’s murder– and those of about a dozen other secular bloggers, writers and a publisher, killed between 2013 and 2015—are making no public progress, fears of threats from the Islamists has halted the publication of books critical of religions and religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

“[In the case of Roy’s murder] although two years have been passed by, the [government] agencies have not filed the charge-sheet to the court as yet. They postponed the date[s] of submission of the charge-sheet at least sixteen times. Eight people were arrested, but no charge-sheet was filed against any of them. Now they are saying that they have identified five men as the actual killers, but they are yet to be arrested,” said Imran H. Sarker, who leads the Blogger and Online Activist Network in Bangladesh.

“We have noticed that the government is shielding the killers and is not keen to arrest them,” he added.  

Bangladesh police have said a local hardline Islamist militant group, the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), was behind all the killings. However, none of the murders, including that of Roy, has been solved as yet.

Baseless allegations

But Bangladesh’s Inspector General of the national police (IGP), AKM Shahidul Hoque, said the charge that police are doing a poor job investigating the cases of the blogger killings, is baseless. The police will file a charge-sheet in the case of Roy “very soon,” he said.

Hasanul Haq Inu, information minister of Bangladesh said all investigations into the blogger killings are going on well.

“The performance of our police is commendable in all investigations in the killings of the bloggers. We are close to resolve all cases. In the case of Avijit we have already located the killers,” Inu told VOA.

“The so-called Islamist groups are not in a position to launch any violent attack at all. We have neutralized all of them.”

Publishing chill

Months after Roy was murdered in February 2015, Faisal Arefin Dipan, one of his publishers, was hacked to death in Dhaka.

“[The] killings of the author and his publisher triggered an atmosphere of sheer fear in the society. And, that fear has taken its toll on the publishing industry in the country,” said Robin Ahsan, head Shrabon Prokashoni, a Dhaka-based publishing house, which is taking part in the ongoing national book fair in Dhaka.

A little over a decade ago, some Bangladeshi writers, who presented their arguments against Islamic and other religious beliefs online, became known as “atheist bloggers.”

Blogger Mohiuddin Sharif, who faced death threats and fled Bangladesh in 2015, said new critical writings on religion, society and the state have disappeared in the past couple of years largely because the government has taken a “soft stance” against the Islamists.

“When the Islamists began targeting the bloggers, the government did not provide them the security. Instead of protecting the bloggers, it blamed them that they were indulging in ‘provocative’ writing. Many were even advised to leave the country,” said Sharif, who has taken refuge in a South Asian country with his family.

In the past, many books written by the secular writers used to be published during the annual Dhaka book fair, the blogger noted.

“But this year, not a single book on freethinking has been published in the fair. No stall in the fair is displaying even any old book authored by Avijit Roy this year,” he said.

Communication law

Along with the threats from the Islamists, Section 57 of Bangladesh’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Act is a contributing factor to the disappearance of writing critical of religion, government and society, say the bloggers, writers and publishers. 

Under this controversial piece of legislation, one can face seven to 14 years in jail for “hurting religious sentiment” and “publishing fake, obscene or defaming information in electronic form” or information that “prejudices the image of the State or person.”

Mahbub Leelen, co-founder of Shuddhashar Publishing House, which published many books authored by Avijit Roy, said that using the “draconian” act the government has clamped down heavily on writers and publishers.

“The ICT Act and the related statements from the government directly support the views the fundamentalists demand in the issue. As individuals, the writers or publishers have no ability to fight this united force of the fundamentalists and the government,” said Leelen, who fled to the U.S. in 2015, weeks after Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury Tutul, his co-publisher of Shuddhashar, was violently attacked by suspected Islamists in Dhaka, told VOA.

Shuddhashar closed down in Dhaka soon after the attack and Leelen and Tutul, who lives in Norway now, are working on a project to revive the publishing house abroad, with the publication of some e-books.
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