Steve Bannon is currently in Europe to advise far-right movements. He first went to Italy, where xenophobes recently won the parliamentary elections, and then visited the National Front in France. In fact, the European far-right does not need Bannon's advice. They are able to push racist and xenophobic slogans all by themselves, as was evident in the recent elections for Parliament in Italy.
The January 16th assassination of Oliver Ivanovic, the 64-year-old leading Serb political figure in Kosovo, may increase tensions within Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians. Many officials, knowing the tense climate in Kosovo, are already calling for calm.
Although the current President of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, long-time president of the Ecology Party, had been able to defeat his far-Right opponent in the presidential election of May 2016, he could not prevent the creation of a Conservative Party and far-Right coalition government as a result of the recent Parliamentary elections.
On December 5th, the U.N. Human Rights Council held a Special Session devoted to the conditions of the Rohingya of Myanmar fleeing to Bangladesh. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein highlighted that the Myanmar security forces "deliberately and massively targeted civilians." He added "Can anyone, can anyone, rule out that elements of genocide may be present?"
Feminist work tends to represent war as a continuum of violence from the bedroom to the battlefield, traversing our bodies and our sense of self. - Cynthia Cockburn
An independence referendum was held on September 25th in Iraqi Kurdistan in which 93 percent of voters supported independence. The recent vote points toward the long struggle for Kurdish independence.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019