Category World News

Warning: This story contains references to suicide

In a damp, crowded basement at the southern entrance of the Dariala Gorge, the mountainous no-man’s-land between Georgia and Russia, more than 90 Ukrainian deportees from Russia are being held.

The deportees at the Georgian border checkpoint can only step outside when they need the toilet, and they must go in pairs under the watchful eyes of Georgian border guards.

They are here because they can’t cross the border directly from Russia to Ukraine due to the war, and Georgia refuses to let them in because many have criminal backgrounds, so they are stranded. Some have now been living in the basement for nearly two months.

Most of these men – along with a handful of women – are former prisoners in Russia who have been deported after serving their sentences, but some have been expelled for other reasons, such as problems with their immigration documents.

On Sunday night, July 20, they mounted a protest.

“We’re not allowed outside!” one of the men shouted as they were surrounded by security personnel on the premises.

“We’re being tortured here,” called another.

“It’s damp, there’s [disabled people] here without medical attention, there’s nothing here at all,” he added.

A video sent by the deportees to Al Jazeera shows one man very seriously harming himself during the Sunday night protest.

“He’s been here more than a month,” 45-year-old Nikolai Lopata, one of the other detainees, told Al Jazeera by phone.

“He was promised twice [that] he would be taken away. He bought [travel] tickets twice, and both times no one returned the money,” Lopata said, noting that the man, who suffers from anxiety, has repeatedly been denied permission to travel through Georgia to Ukraine.

An ambulance arrived after more than an hour, and paramedics bandaged his wounds, then left without him. The man, who appeared in the video to be in his late 30s or early 40s, was not hospitalised and remains at the checkpoint, volunteers at the scene who are in contact with Al Jazeera said.

‘They won’t let us in or out’

The detainees, who have arrived from Russia or territories occupied by Russia and have been released from prison in recent months, are now stuck in limbo in this buffer zone, Lopata explained. In total, approximately 800 deportees are thought to be stuck in Russia or at Russian-Georgian border points, experts say.

“They [Georgian border officials] took our documents. They won’t let us in or out of Georgia. They keep telling us ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’. Some people have been here for more than a month and a half in terrible, unbearable conditions,” Lopata said.

Originally from Dnipro in central Ukraine, Lopata said he had been living in Russia, where he has a Russian wife, two children and a sister, since 2005. But in 2010, he was convicted of murder. When he completed his sentence in 2024, he was sent to a deportation centre for another year. By then, the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine was raging, so getting a one-way flight to Kyiv was impossible.

“Last summer, they [the Russian authorities] promised to send me to Georgia. Then, in winter, they promised to send me to Ukraine through Belarus. Then, we were taken to the border of Georgia, which supposedly accepts us, but Georgia is not accepting,” Lopata said.

Instead, when he reached the border on July 4, Lopata said, he was photographed, fingerprinted and had his documents confiscated by Georgian border officials before being taken to a cellar.

“We don’t do anything. We sit in the basement,” Lopata continued, explaining that the men sleep in shifts because there are only 40 beds.

The men are provided with very little and lack reliable medical assistance, instead having to rely on emergency care.

“An ambulance comes almost every day, sometimes twice a day, because there are disabled people, there are sick people,” Lopata said, adding that there is someone with epilepsy, a person with HIV, and another with tuberculosis. “But they don’t offer anything besides immediate help. Yesterday, for example, they made an injection of painkiller, then said, ‘That’s it, we can’t help with anything else.’”

Activists and volunteers try to bring essentials to the detainees each week.

Food, household items and personal hygiene products are delivered by Volunteers Tbilisi, an organisation helping Ukrainian refugees in Georgia.

“There is no access to fresh air, there is a lot of heat and the cellars are closed,” organiser Maria Belkina told Al Jazeera.

“These are not conditions you can live in at all.”

Route through Moldova cancelled

Anna Skripka, a lawyer for the NGO, Protection of Prisoners of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera that this problem has been mounting for the past two years of the war in Ukraine: “This humanitarian disaster started in 2023.”

Skripka said some people have become so desperate they have tried to kill themselves. “They didn’t understand what was going on,” she said.

“The conditions there are terrible.”

According to Skripka, there are 84 men and seven women currently being detained, and while the women are held in a separate room, their conditions are also poor.

“The women complain to me that they’re not being taken to the toilet,” Skripka said.

“They asked us to buy them a bucket with a lid to go to the toilet.”

Previously, deportees at this border crossing were transferred by bus to Tbilisi Airport to fly to Moldova and then on to Ukraine. That’s how Ukrainian activist Andriy Kolomiyets, considered a political prisoner by the Russian human rights group Memorial, returned home earlier this month after serving 10 years on drug and attempted murder charges.

Skripka explained that 43 detainees managed to leave between early June and July, landing in Moldova and then getting a bus to Ukraine. But four of them got off the bus and stayed in Moldova, prompting the landlocked Eastern European country to halt cooperation.

“They’re already back in Ukraine,” Skripka said about the missing four, which Al Jazeera could not confirm, “but Moldova said, ‘Stop, we do not want to risk it.’”

As a result, since mid-July, Moldova has refused passage for Ukrainian deportees from Russia.

While Georgia was cooperative at first, it has also begun refusing to allow deportees through on the basis that many are ex-convicts who have served prison time in Russia, seriously limiting the options for Ukrainians trying to return.

“Most of these individuals have a serious criminal past and have been convicted numerous times for grave or particularly grave crimes,” the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.

But Skripka said that it is unfair to smear them all as hardened criminals. Some were expelled from Russia for lacking proper paperwork. Others have had their Russian citizenship revoked.

Their treatment, Skripka argues, goes beyond bureaucratic injustice; it raises serious legal and moral questions.

“They were beaten, pushed from another country by the barrel of a machinegun … they are victims of war crimes,” Skripka said.

Further complicating things, many of the deportees lack the proper documentation.

Ukraine has been issuing “white passports” – emergency documents to allow citizens to travel home – but these only last for 30 days.

Some Ukrainian politicians have spoken out.

Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused Russia of “weaponizing the deportation of Ukrainian citizens through Georgia”.

Russia is weaponizing the deportation of Ukrainian citizens through Georgia. We propose that Russia transport them directly to the Ukrainian border instead.

Since June, Russia has significantly increased the number of deported Ukrainian nationals, mostly former convicts, to the…

“We are actively working with the Georgian and Moldovan sides to get the rest of our people transited to Ukraine,” he wrote.

“To avoid further complications, we publicly offer Russia to send these categories of Ukrainian citizens directly to the Ukrainian border. We will be prepared to take them on from there. There are relevant parts of the border where this can be done.”

A matter of national security

Once detainees have returned to Ukraine, they must undergo a thorough security check.

“They were in Russia for a long time. Everything is possible. They could have been recruited [by Russian intelligence]. This is a matter of national security for Ukraine,” Skripka explained.

There are also fears that the number of deportees will soar in the coming months as there are hundreds of Ukrainians who are still waiting in Russian deportation camps.

“According to our calculations, there are about 800 people. And if they are all brought to Georgia, it will be a disaster,” Skripka warned.

Meanwhile, in March, an edict issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin demands that Ukrainians living in the territories claimed by Moscow must either leave or accept Russian citizenship by September 10. This could potentially lead to mass deportations.

Lopata, meanwhile, can’t wait to leave, although not necessarily home.

“My house in Ukraine has been bombed. My parents have been killed, and I don’t know where to go,” he said.

In June, the Sudanese Armed Forces appointed Prime Minister Kamil Idris to lead the civilian cabinet in Port Sudan, the wartime capital on the Red Sea coast.

Idris wanted an overhaul, to appoint a team of technocrats to run the new government.

But Gebreil Ibrahim and Mini Arko Minawi – leaders of two powerful armed groups from Darfur  – refused to leave their posts, and army leader Abdelfattah al-Burhan overruled Idris to keep them there.

“Burhan’s concession to Ibrahim and Minawi allows them to keep ministries that control [government] revenue,” said Suliman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, a think tank.

Al Jazeera sent written questions to army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah, asking him why al-Burhan overruled Idris. No response had been received by the time of publication.

On the other side of the war is a coalition of armed groups that have, de facto, divided Sudan in half after more than two years of civil war.

The Rapid Support Forces paramilitary, which is battling the army, has formed an alliance with smaller armed factions and declared its intention to form a parallel government that will ostensibly represent all of Sudan.

The RSF-backed coalition has already unveiled its leadership council, on which the leaders of armed groups feature in prominent positions.

Analysts told Al Jazeera that SAF and the RSF are trying to meet the demands of powerful militias in a bid to keep their respective battlefield alliances intact.

A future parallel government

In February, the RSF announced that it had formed an alliance with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), an armed group from the Nuba Mountains led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu.

From the beginning of the war, it had remained neutral, shocking observers when it allied with the RSF to form a new alliance and parallel government, which they named Tasis (foundation).

The SPLM-N governs large swaths of South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, and has been at war with the army – as well as the RSF, which used to be the army’s ally before they turned their guns on each other – for 40 years.

SPLM-N was born out of the SPLM, which emerged in the early 1980s to fight for southern independence and to end its marginalisation by the elites of northern and central Sudan.

The Nuba – a group of about 50 communities from what was then central Sudan – was part of the SPLM.

But when South Sudan seceded in 2011, Nuba fighters rebranded as SPLM-N and continued their rebellion against Khartoum, fighting and defeating the RSF, which was deployed to fight them by former President Omar al-Bashir in 2016.

Nearly a decade later, on July 2, Tasis announced a 31-member senior leadership council, with Hemedti as its head and SPLM-N’s al-Hilu as deputy.

While the full list of the 31-member council is not yet public, it also includes Tahir al-Hajar, the head of the Darfur-based Sudan Liberation Gathering Forces (SLGF), according to an interview he gave Al Jazeera Mubasher.

Tasis will soon roll out a government to help the RSF and its allies in their fight against the army, Kholood Khair, Sudan expert and founder of Confluence Advisory think tank, believes.

The RSF wants to exploit the guise of a formal government to better profit from aid groups, buy sophisticated weapons such as fighter jets that can only be sold to states, and boost its stance in any future negotiations with the army, she explained.

“They do not want to go into any kind of mediation as a rebel group. They want to be seen as a government [to boost their legitimacy],” Khair said.

Al Jazeera asked Tasis spokesman, Alaa Nugud, to respond to accusations that the alliance was simply formed to garner international legitimacy for armed groups on the ground.

While he did not respond before publication, Tasis portrays itself as the cornerstone of a “New Sudan” seeking to protect historically neglected and persecuted communities, even as the RSF stands accused of committing ethnic killings and genocide against sedentary communities known as “non-Arabs” in Darfur.

However, “this is just a group formed out of war dynamics despite their entire narrative of it being a coalition of the marginalised,” said Hamid Khalafallah, an expert on Sudan and PhD candidate at the University of Manchester.

‘Poster children’

On the Port Sudan government’s side, Gebreil Ibrahim and Mini Arko Minawi lead the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Army – Mini Minawi (SLA-MM), respectively.

The two armed groups mainly comprised sedentary farming “non-Arab” communities from the vast western region of Darfur who came together to fight a rebellion against the central government in 2003.

Their stated aim was to end the persecution and neglect of their communities, but like most of Sudan’s armed groups, they ended up using their weapons to negotiate access to state coffers and prominent posts in government instead.

“What this whole war has shown is if you pick up a gun, then you can get power,” Khair said.

“The RSF are really the poster children for this model,” she added.

The RSF in its current form was born during the Darfur war, which started in 2003, when al-Bashir tapped Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo and his feared “Arab” Popular Defence Forces (Janjaweed) militia to crush the rebellion there.

Al-Bashir rewarded Hemedti, who took part in countless atrocities against “non-Arabs”, by repackaging the Janjaweed into the RSF in 2013, with Hemedti at its head and a place with the army.

As part of the state, Hemedti was able to consolidate control over lucrative gold mines, expand recruitment and lease out fighters to partake in regional wars for tens of millions of dollars.

When al-Bashir was deposed by a popular uprising in April 2019, a wealthy, powerful Hemedti became al-Burhan’s deputy in the Transitional Military Council.

A militia state with a war economy?

Tasis, as well as the army-backed government in Port Sudan, are beholden to armed actors, which means more local commanders could expand recruitment and acquire weapons, hoping to get strong enough to gain political power, analysts warn.

Mohamed “al-Jakomi” Seid Ahmed, an army-aligned commander from northern Sudan, made a statement a few weeks ago that hinted at his aspirations, Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker’s Baldo said.

Al-Jakomi said that he would be training a whopping 50,000 men in Eritrea to protect Sudan’s Northern State from possible incursion by the RSF. He confirmed his plan in an interview with Al Jazeera Mubasher.

In addition, Baldo referenced Abu Aqla Keikel, whose force was instrumental in helping the army recapture the agricultural heartland of Gezira state three months after defecting from the RSF to the army in October 2024.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Al Jazeera’s reporting point to atrocities committed by Keikel’s fighters, prompting the European Union to sanction him on July 18.

Still, analysts say his power is growing and he may harbour ambitions to secure some form of political power.

“These are individuals who can hold the army hostage through their autonomous militias … as a way to secure seats around the cake when it is divided,” Baldo told Al Jazeera.

To appease armed actors that they want to keep onside, the army-backed government will likely create new positions as rewards, Jawhara Kanu, an expert on Sudan’s economy, said.

“The government will just have to keep swelling … with as many ministries as possible to reward as many people as possible,” she told Al Jazeera.

However, neither Port Sudan nor Tasis will be able to hand out political posts forever, especially if the war continues and more powerful militias emerge.

The army doesn’t have enough revenue – a result of losing control of nearly half the country, which encompasses profitable gold mines and agricultural lands, according to Khair.

She added that Hemedti and his family are unlikely to cede much of their private wealth to pay recruits. Throughout the war, the RSF incentivised its fighters by allowing them to plunder the cities and villages they attacked.

But as loot runs dry, militias may resort to building their fiefdoms by setting up checkpoints to heavily tax people and goods passing through, warns Khair.

“The new predatory behaviour, supported by the state in RSF and army areas, will be checkpoints. And these checkpoints will mark one rebel leader’s area from another,” she told Al Jazeera.

The United Nations’ highest court has ruled that nations must fulfill their climate obligations and that failing to do so could violate international law, potentially allowing the affected countries to file for reparations in upcoming legal proceedings.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) urged states to take action urgently to combat the “existential threat” of climate change, including implementing global climate agreements, preventing harm to vulnerable populations and ecosystems, in a groundbreaking advisory opinion released on Wednesday at the Peace Palace in The Hague.

According to Yuji Iwasawa, president of the ICJ, greenhouse gas emissions are “unquestionably caused by human activities” and have transnational effects.

Iwasawa argued that failing to take appropriate action to protect the climate system could be a legally wrongdoing action. He referred to the climate crisis as “an existential problem of planetary proportions that threatens all forms of life and our planet’s very health.”

Notably, the court stated that a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is a human right. That opens the door to additional legal proceedings, including domestic legal proceedings as well as states’ ICJ requests to hold each other accountable.

Countries themselves are required to take legally binding measures in order to adhere to climate treaties, according to the ICJ’s ruling, which is not binding. However, the ICJ held that industrialized countries have a legal obligation to take the lead in battling climate change because they have a longer history of emissions responsibility.

In keeping with the treaty’s goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1, the judges also affirmed that nations that signed the 2015 Agreement in Paris must ensure their individual national climate plans, according to their national contributions (NDCs), are “progressive” and reflect the “highest possible ambition”. 2 degrees Celsius) . a temperature of 7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Environmental organizations immediately embraced the opinion.   Nafkote Dabi, the head of Oxfam’s climate change policy, stated: “This ruling strengthens national climate commitments everywhere by confirming that nations must reduce emissions in sufficient quantities to safeguard the rights to life, food, health, and a clean environment.

All nations, especially wealthy ones, must now reduce their emissions more quickly and gradually. To help reduce emissions and protect their populations from past and future harm, rich nations must increase their funding of Global South nations. This is international law, not just a wish list. ”

The opinion, according to Danilo Garrido, Greenpeace International’s legal representative, marked the “beginning of a new era of climate accountability at a global level.”

The court’s message is clear: fossil fuel production, consumption, and granting licenses and subsidies could violate international law, he said. Polluters must stop making emissions and be held accountable for the harm they have caused. ”

fundamental two questions

The UN General Assembly requested an advisory opinion in 2023, a non-binding but crucial foundation for international obligations, after years of lobbying by vulnerable island nations who feared they might be submerged beneath rising sea waters.

The landmark decision of the ICJ’s 15 judges, who all voted in favor, will have both legal and political weight and likely will determine how much global climate change will occur in the future, including whether polluters should be required to pay for their actions.

As they sought to bring together various strands of environmental law into a definitive international standard, judges sifted through tens of thousands of pages of written submissions and listened to two weeks of oral arguments during the ICJ’s biggest-ever case.

Two crucial questions were asked by the UN to address the ICJ, a UN court that hears international disputes. What obligations do states have under international law to carry out to protect the environment from future generations’ greenhouse gas emissions? And what are the effects of the emissions of states, particularly those that are vulnerable on islands?

Vanuatu, a Pacific island nation, spearheaded the investigation and received support from more than 130 nations.

What do climate activists want, supporters of the ruling gathered outside the court to chant it. Climate justice What time do we require it? Now! ”

Agreement in Paris

In two weeks of hearings last December at the ICJ, the United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, along with other top polluters, told the judges that existing climate treaties like the 2015 Agreement in Paris, which are largely nonbinding, should be the basis for determining their responsibilities.

The Agreement in Paris does not explicitly provide for direct compensation for past damage caused by pollution, although at UN talks in 2022, wealthy nations did agree to create a fund to help vulnerable countries deal with current impacts caused by past pollution.

The Agreement in Paris saw more than 190 countries commit efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

However, it hasn’t succeeded in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, and the UN warned in a report last year that current climate policies will lead to a global warming of more than 3C (5). By 2100, 4F) above preindustrial levels.

According to legal experts, the decision is a victory for small- and mid-sized states that had requested clarification of their obligations.

“The ICJ rejected arguments by the likes of the US and UK that governments are bound only by climate treaties such as the Agreement in Paris and did not have stronger obligations under international law,” Dabi said.

Bret Stephens is in no way owed a favor by the Israelis.

The opinion columnist for The New York Times took to The US newspaper of record’s pages yesterday to make his most recent bizarre claim, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.”

Nevermind that numerous international organizations, including Amnesty International and various UN organizations, have determined that Israel is doing exactly that. Stephens is more knowledgeable than most of these organizations, which hardly ever take the G-word seriously. And he’ll explain why.

Stephens makes a clear request in the very first sentence of his Times article, which should perhaps be followed by an aneurysm-provoking trigger warning for readers who are aneurystically prone. “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal, if it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans, why hasn’t it been more methodical and significantly more deadly”?

Of course, it would seem that the Israeli military’s nearly comprehensive destruction of the Gaza Strip would be somewhat “methodical” due to the bombardment of homes, hospitals, schools, and anything else that could be bombed. Stephens cites the official Palestinian death count of “nearly 60, 000” in less than two years and wonders why there are “not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths” because of the perceived insufficient deadlines of Israel’s ongoing “actions.”

The anti-Israel genocide chorus should be asked, “Why isn’t the death count higher, he continues, saying””” in his ode to a higher standard.

While Stephens himself needs to know why he thinks killing 60 000 people is a big deal, one of the many questions is. Israel killed at least 17, 400 children in Gaza as of November 2024, but it appears that this is not “malevolent” enough. Additionally, a study that was published in the Lancet medical journal more than a year ago suggested that Gaza’s actual death toll could already be higher than 186, 000. How does “hundreds of thousands” work?

Stephens presents his own statement, which states that “Israel is clearly not committing genocide,” rather than waiting for an answer from the “anti-Israel genocide chorus.” Stephens then goes on to say that “I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians” in response to the UN’s definition of the term “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.

Objectively speaking, this is equivalent to saying that there is no proof that the owners of a chicken slaughterhouse intended to deliberately end the lives of the poultry therein. If you don’t intentionally aim to kill civilians, you don’t kill 17,400 children in 13 months by accident, and you don’t bomb hospitals and ambulances repeatedly.

However, bombs are not the only thing to worry about. Genocide is also committed by forced starvation. Another question that Stephens might address is how intentionally denying a population of two million people the food and water needed for human survival does not mean that they are trying to “destroy” that group. Four children among the at least 15 Palestinians who died from starvation were reported by Gaza health officials alone on Thursday.

More than 1, 000 Palestinians have died in attempts to purchase food from the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since the end of May. This obscene organization, supported by Israel and the US, not only concentrates large numbers of Palestinians who are starving in one location for the Israeli army to use it to mowing them off, but it also advances Israel’s US-backed plan to forcefully expel the remaining Palestinian population.

Stephens does not even bother to mention Gaza’s “chaotic food distribution system,” but he contends that “bungled humanitarian schemes, trigger-happy soldiers, strikes that hit the wrong target, or [Israeli] politicians reaching for vengeful sound bites” do not even come close to being considered a genocide.

Yet Stephens refuses to acknowledge that Israel itself has always been a genocidal endeavor in his campaign against the use of the G-word in the Gaza area. Before the formal establishment of the state of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948, a process that involved mass murder and the destruction of hundreds of villages, Zionists were well aware of the necessity to evict the majority of Palestine’s indigenous population. A quarter of a million people were converted into refugees.

Israel has since then engaged in what is essentially a genocidal strategy, as evidenced by Golda Meir’s famous claim that the Palestinians “did not exist” in her famous attempt to annihilate them both physically and conceptually. In fact, Israel’s status as a Jewish settler-colonial state is based on the statement that it has the intention to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such.”

Let’s disregard history and reality, though. Stephens warns against using the term “genocide” as a pretext for any military situation we don’t like if the word still refers to itself as a uniquely horrific crime.

The Israeli military has long been associated with The New York Times and a number of other US corporate media outlets, both of which attempt to sanitize Israeli atrocities as self-defense. However, Stephens’ genocidal journalism is also uniquely horrific because Israel is now carrying out a uniquely horrific crime in Gaza with the firm support of the world superpower.

A coalition of 109 humanitarian and human rights organizations, including Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Refugees International, has issued a stark warning that Gaza is currently experiencing widespread starvation and that access to critical aid is still restricted just outside the area.

The organizations called for a complete end to all restrictions on aid delivery in their joint statement. They criticized the Israeli government’s occupation for causing “chaos, starvation, and death” and claiming that severe access restrictions prevent the distribution of food, clean water, and medical supplies to those in need.

According to the territory’s Ministry of Health, at least ten Palestinians have died from forced starvation in Gaza over the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll from hunger to 111, including at least 80 children.

In recent weeks, more than 800 Palestinians have been shot while attempting to get food, most of them in mass shootings by Israeli forces close to GHF distribution points supported by Israel and the United States. For its lack of neutrality and for allowing military involvement in the distribution of aid, the organization has drawn harsh criticism, including from the UN.

Palestinians in Gaza claim that their only source of food and freedom has been destroyed by Israel’s ban on sea access. Any civilian who lives close to the shore is now regarded as a threat by the military, which is enforcing the sea blockade with deadly firepower.