A team of counsel including President’s Counsel A.A.M. Illiyas and AALs Swasthika Arulingam, Jayantha Dehiattage, Sanjaya Wilson Jayasekera, and Tharindu Rathnayake appeared on behalf of Ahnaf. Although Criminal Investigations Department (CID) and TID officers were present for the prosecution, there was no representation from the Attorney General’s Department yesterday.
The case was fixed for 24 February.
Razmin added that they will be filing a fundamental rights petition before the Supreme Court in this regard, and Wilson Jayasekera noted that at present, the petition is being drafted. Article 14 (1) (a) of the Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech and expression including publication.
The complaint lodged with the mobile office of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) in Mannar by the family of Ahnaf, has been transferred for inquiries to the HRCSL head office in Colombo. Meanwhile, in opposition to the arbitrary arrest and detention of Ahnaf, the Sri Lanka Young Journalists’ Association has also lodged a complaint with the HRCSL seeking the latter’s intervention.
Nigerian military reshuffle belies serious security concerns
As Nigeria battles a domestic insurgency and wilting trust in its armed forces, President Buhari's overhaul has exposed exasperation with the military's ineffectiveness to guarantee security for the country.
Soldiers from 21 Brigade and Army Engineers clearing Islamic militant group Boko Haram camps at Chuogori and Shantumari in Borno State, Nigeria
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has replaced four of the country's top military heads following months of pressure over the nation's worsening security crisis.
Buhari, who took office in 2015 with a pledge to stamp out the Boko Haram Islamist insurgency, had long ignored advice to dismiss the commanders of Nigeria's army, navy and air force, as well as the chief of defense staff. He announced their resignation and replacements on Twitter on Tuesday.
A recent spate of skirmishes in south-eastern Nigeria between the army and the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra group (IPOB) has further deepened Nigeria's security woes.
Coupled with Boko Haram's continued presence in the north and a spike in armed banditry, swathes of Nigeria remain near-ungovernable.
Let's not forget the Fulani Herdsmen in the northwest.
"Nigeria is probably more insecure than it's been in recent history," Ryan Cummings, the director of analysis for the Africa-focused risk management consultancy Signal Risk, told DW.
New chiefs face 'high expectations'
The reshuffle saw Major General Lucky Eluonye Onyenuchea Irabor become Chief of Defense Staff and Ibrahim Attahiru become Chief of the Army. The air force and navy now have new leaders in Air Vice-Marshal Isiaka Oladayo Amao and Rear Admiral A.Z. Gambo, respectively.
Presidential spokesman Malam Garba Shehu said the reshuffle was "routine" and endorsed the new leaders.
"None have them have served less than 30 years in the armed forces," he told DW. "I think they are well-equipped to carry out the task at hand as long as the government gives them support."
General Ibrahim Attahiru has been appointed chief of the Nigerian Army
Kole Shettima from the Center for Democracy and Development told DW the new chiefs will be facing "high expectations, especially given that three of the four were at one point deployed to the north-east."
Shettima believes coordination and personal understanding between the new leaders would be a big factor in their potential success.
"I think everyone probably knew the previous service chiefs were not even on talking terms and that undermined their ability to prosecute the war against the insurgency," he says.
Good grief!
For Cummings, the reshuffle is a sign of Buhari's "exasperation and toughness." "The buck has been passed on to the four figures that have been removed from their respective offices rather than the president himself," he says.
Cummings adds that many of Nigeria's security threats are "rooted in systemic issues," such as resource challenges. "This is not an issue where a simple change in military leadership all of a sudden addresses both symptoms and causes of insecurity in the country," he explains.
Perhaps the most significant systemic issue is corruption, which runs rampant in the government and military. I think it is safe to say that a very small portion of the military budget makes it down the soldiers on the ground.
President Buhari reshuffled his defense chiefs, but securing lasting stability across Nigeria is proving elusive
Fighting ongoing in southern Nigeria
Developments in south-eastern Nigeria have taken a violent turn this week, with clashes between members of IPOB's newly formed armed wing, the Eastern Security Network, and the Nigerian military.
There are reports of deaths on both sides. The origin of the flare-up is disputed, but correspondents say the Nigerian army retaliated after IPOB members allegedly killed soldiers.
In the town of Orlu near the Imo state capital Owerri, eyewitnesses said there was sporadic shooting, with residents taking cover to avoid stray bullets. The Imo state government has since imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in affected areas.
Resident Nawwal Yusuf placed the blame on IPOB "agitators." "They attacked the northerners and killed four of them," he told DW. "We discovered four dead bodies. They have already been buried."
Peter Uche, a member of IPOB, told DW the separatist group had been repeatedly harassed by the government since starting a security outfit in their region.
"The soldiers and this government have been kicking against the IPOB members," he said. "I am not happy about it. Other regions in this country have their own security outfit. But we have been fighting, they have been fighting us, trying to eliminate us."
The Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970 came after the secession of Biafra
Separatist movement remains active
Historically, south-eastern Nigeria has been a hotbed for Biafran separatist agitation.
The Nigerian Civil War, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, pitted southern separatists — who wanted to form the independent nation of Biafra — against the Nigerian government.
There are also religious divisions between predominantly Muslim northerners and southerners, who are largely Christian.
Currently, numerous splinter groups in south-eastern Nigeria are loosely united, demanding the right to form their own state. IPOB's leader, Nnamdi Kanu, is in exile.
The region is one of Nigeria's richest in terms of mineral resources, specifically oil. But with oil prices currently low, the Nigerian government is struggling to finance its budget.
"You have a population and Igbo population that feels somewhat disconnected from Nigeria's federal government structures," says Cummings. "They feel that President Buhari does not specifically represent their interests."
But despite the increasingly loud calls from the IPOB for the formation of the state of Biafra, Cummings adds that, despite dissatisfaction with the Nigerian government, wider polls show there is "not much resonance" for separatism in the region.
Inside France’s pioneering deradicalisation programme
Other governments fear that imprisoning extremists gives them the opportunity to
convert other inmates. The French claim to have devised the best system of prevention,
largely because of their greater experience of terrorist attacks
France has been on high alert since October, when a teacher was beheaded in an Islamist attack
KIRAN RIDLEY/GETTY IMAGES
Adam Sage, Paris
Wednesday January 27 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times
Three years after leaving France for Syria to become the second wife of a polygamist Islamic State terrorist, Leila had had enough of the bloodshed and the brutality.
She fled across the border into Turkey from Syria with her two young children, now eight and six, along with her “husband” and his existing wife. She spent four months in a Turkish jail and was flown to Paris, where she was met by an elite police unit at the airport. She was charged with belonging to a terrorist group and remanded in custody.
During the 16 months Leila, which is not her real name, was detained in Fleury-Mérogis prison outside the capital before being granted bail, she met a Muslim chaplain who invited her to reflect on her hitherto fundamentalist approach to religion.
‘You have a brain. You can think for yourself,’
France has been forced to address the issue because of its long experience of terrorism,
including the Bataclan attacks in 2015
PHILIPPE WOJAZER/REUTERS
“He simply said to me, ‘You have a brain. You can think for yourself,’” she said.
She said she started to question what she had been told about women being inferior to men, about them “thinking with their hearts rather than their heads” and about them being “cursed all night if they refuse intercourse when their husbands want”.
“Prison was very hard because I was separated from my children,” she said in a telephone interview with The Times. “But I think I had to go there to be liberated from all that. With hindsight, I think it did me good.”
Leila, 26, who is now living with her two sons in her native northern France while awaiting trial, is among several hundred inmates to have endured what the French authorities claim is a pioneering scheme to wean Islamists off their violent radicalism.
Leila was detained in Fleury-Mérogis prison outside the capital
ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
It is a question with which many countries are struggling.
Other governments fear that imprisoning religious extremists gives them the opportunity to convert other inmates. However, locking them in special units — jails within the jail — often leads to them becoming even more extremist.
Both Britain and France employ a range of professionals, including religious mentors, to try to limit the risk that terrorists reoffend.
But the French argue that they are succeeding where others are failing, largely because their greater experience of terrorist attacks has enabled them to develop a more sophisticated procedure to identify risks and to turn inmates away from jihadist gurus.
Jules Boyadjian, justice department director for Groupe SOS Solidarités, an association involved in the programme, said that the specificity of the French approach involved the “deconstruction of the references of jihad”.
In Britain Jonathan Hall, QC, the government’s reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the prison service was failing with convicted terrorists preaching radicalism and inciting violence inside jail. He has announced an inquiry. In November 2019 and last February convicted Islamist terrorists freed on licence carried out attacks in London and were shot dead by the police.
The French are familiar with such difficulties. François Toutain, the head of the Mission for the Fight Against Violent Radicalisation at the Direction of the Penitentiary Administration in Paris, said: “Even in jail, the Salafist jihadist continues to be impregnated with his ideology and continues to try to contaminate other inmates. No matter who he has in front of him, he will try to promote his ideology. Even if he is faced with a white supremacist, he will try to do it.”
He said such inmates were also dangerous because they continued to heed Islamic State calls to “strike wherever you are”, including within jails, where Islamist radicals have conducted six attacks, notably on officers, since 2016.
Yet French officials claim they have developed a scheme that reduces the radicalisation risk. It involves assessing Islamist inmates before placing the most fanatical in solitary confinement, those who are marginally less extreme in “radicalisation prevention” units where they are kept apart from other prisoners, and the least dangerous in ordinary cells.
The assessment is followed by a deradicalisation programme during which religious extremists are overseen by a dedicated team of probation officers, psychologists, counsellors and Islamic studies experts — often Muslim chaplains — who seek to lead them towards moderation and re-integration in society.
Sceptics worry that this represents an unrealistic attempt to re-educate terrorists before letting them loose again.
But officials in Paris claim that the approach appears to be working. Three years after the launch of the deradicalisation programme, none of the inmates put through it has been charged with or convicted of another terrorism offence, they told The Times.
People gather and lay tributes on the Promenade des Anglais after the Nice attack in 2016
PATRICK AVENTURIER/GETTY IMAGES
“We are containing the risk,” said Naoufel Gaied, the deputy head of the Mission for the Fight Against Violent Radicalisation, adding that France had been forced to address the issue because of its long and painful experience of terrorism, with more than 260 people killed in Islamist attacks since 2015.
“Its France’s misfortune that has produced our expertise,” he said.
French jails contain about 1,100 Islamist radical inmates, just under half of whom have been incarcerated in connection with terrorism offences. The most dangerous include Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the group which carried out the Bataclan attacks that killed 131 people in Paris in November 2015, who is due to go on trial with 17 others this autumn.
In addition, at least 700 Islamists are being followed by the probation service after being released on bail or probation.
Of these, about 90 have been ordered to go on a programme organised by Groupe SOS Solidarités, which has been chosen by the government to continue working on the deradicalisation of inmates after they leave prison.
“We get a lot of different types of people, from trained fighters to adolescents keen on radical religiousness to girls dreaming of bearded princes,” Mr Boyadjian said.
He said that a central aim was to tackle the Islamist doctrine that Muslims can “only live their faith in a country that practises Sharia law and that where there is Sharia law there is corporal punishment”.
Those on the programme are taken to the Islamic Arts Department at the Louvre to “show them that there is room for Islam in France”, for instance. They are also seen by Islamic studies experts who offer another interpretation of the Quran to show how the radicals “truncate its verses and take them out of context”, Mr Boyadjian said.
A Republican Guard lowers the French flag at half-mast at the Élysée Palace on the day after the Nice attack
CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/REUTERS
“The aim is not to make them less Muslim, it is to accompany them towards intellectual autonomy and away from their habit of repeating slavishly what they have been told,” one person involved in the project said.
The source rejected suggestions that Islamists could exploit the system by pretending to have abandoned extremism whilst secretly maintaining a commitment to violence. He said the radicals on the Groupe SOS Solidarités programme were seen by a range of team members for between three and 20 hours a week for many months, adding: “You have to be particularly talented to fool everyone all the time.”
Leila, for her part, insists that she has changed since the days in 2013 when she went on to a Facebook group for disabused French Muslims and started chatting to a woman who had left France for Syria. The woman explained that she could now practise Islam without hindrance and was living a peaceful life unaffected by the war. She asked Leila if she wanted to join her to become her husband’s second wife. Leila accepted because “I was very naive at the time and I saw men like him as heroes” and within a month she had left France with her 14-month-old son to join the man and his wife in Syria.
It did not progress as expected. Not only did she find herself in the midst of bombings but she was surprised that the Islamic State was a violent, brutal network given to using slaves “which particularly shocked me because I am partly of African origin”. She says she was relieved when her husband announced that they should leave Syria, telling his two wives: “We’ve made a big mistake. Islamic State is evil.”
“We’ve made a big mistake. Islamic State is evil.”
During her time in Syria, she bore a second child to her husband.
Leila, who faces up to ten years in jail for belonging to a terrorist group, said: “I used to think that France didn’t want me. But it held out its hand to me when I needed it [on her return from Syria]. I dread to think what would have happened to me in many other countries.”
