ROTTERDAM, January 24 -- Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders is counting on concern over Paris militant attacks to help him "paralyse" the centre-right coalition government and stake a claim to greater national influence. Accused by critics of inflaming tensions in a land that has long welcomed workers from Morocco and Turkey, Wilders goes into local elections on March 18 with his Freedom Party commanding about 25 percent support -- far more than any other and enough, possibly, to give him a blocking vote in the Upper House. Wilders, who has lived under 24-hour security since the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh a decade ago by an Islamist militant, says he will make forays onto the street to campaign. But he will appear in public only briefly surrounded by bodyguards. His message to Dutch electors, couched with warnings of "islamisation" of Europe, was direct. "Vote, vote today. You can perhaps send the government home," Wilders said, in an interview with Reuters. "If not, you can paralyse the government. So those are very important elections." However, while Wilders may be able to block legislation in the Upper House, he would be hard pressed to find coalition partners to form any national government. At best he might increase his power to press anti-immigrant policies. Liberal Prime Minister Mark Rutte's cabinet nearly collapsed in December after losing a vote in the Upper House, where he lacks a majority. "Most people expect that he (Wilders) will gain some seats, and perhaps even a considerable number of seats," Henk te Velde, a political historian at Leiden University. "UNTRUSTWORTHY PARTNER" But Te velde said Wilders had gained a reputation as an untrustworthy partner by pulling out of government coalition talks in 2012 after months of negotiations, triggering snap elections. That experience, and his radical views, left him isolated from mainstream parties and made it unlikely he could lead a government after national-level elections any time soon. Wilders sees himself vindicated in his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas by Islamist militant attacks two weeks ago in Paris that killed 17 people. He accused Rutte of failing to jail militant jihadists and said the army should be deployed to protect potential Dutch targets. "If somebody makes an attack, you are not a perpetrator, Mr. prime minister, but you have blood on your hands, if somebody commits a terrorist act in the Netherlands." Wilders wants to block all Muslim immigration and take away the passports of criminal offenders of foreign descent. He is being prosecuted for alleged discrimination against Moroccans for comments made during campaigning last March which prompted 6,400 complaints to police. He asked supporters if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans, triggering the chant: "Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!" "It is damaging and painful," said Farid Azarkan, chairman of the Cooperative for Dutch Moroccans, a leading dialogue partner for the Dutch government. "The division in society has increased and Moroccans feel like second-class citizens." Wilders, on the same al Qaeda blacklist as the slain editor of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, said he would travel to all 12 provinces to meet voters. "There will be a lot of security, but I will do it anyway, even if it's just to let the other people, the terrorists, see that they will not be able to stop the democratic process." An opinion poll taken after the Paris attacks showed the Freedom Party winning 31 seats in the country's 150-seat parliament, more than doubling its showing in the 2012 elections and becoming by far the largest party. The governing Liberal-Labour coalition would win just 28 seats. "Wherever Islam gets its foot on the ground, you see less freedom, less freedom of speech, less freedom of anything," he said. "Of course not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims."
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DONETSK, January 23 -- A main leader of the Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine said on Friday that his soldiers were “on the offensive” in several sectors, building on their success in capturing a long-contested airport the day before. “We will attack” until the Ukrainian Army is driven from the borders of the Donetsk region, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic rebel group, said in comments carried by Russian news agencies. Referring to the Ukrainian government, he said, “Kiev doesn’t understand now that we can attack in three directions simultaneously.” Tanks rumbled down the snowy roads of rebel-held areas of eastern Ukraine on Friday, with soldiers in green and unmarked uniforms sitting on their turrets, waving at bystanders. Mr. Zakharchenko did not detail the rebels’ intentions, but any major offensive would clearly be a repudiation of the cease-fire signed on Sept. 5 and endorsed by the group’s main sponsor, Russia. That agreement had set the de facto borders of the rebel republic to encompass about one-third of the Donetsk region of Ukraine. PARIS, January 18 -- France quietly buried on Saturday the two brothers involved in the country’s worst terror attacks in decades and banned an anti-Islamist demonstration in Paris to head off possible civil unrest. Said Kouachi, the elder of the two brothers who together gunned down 12 people Jan. 7 in their attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was buried in the eastern city of Reims, 144 kilometers (89 miles) east of Paris. He was buried overnight despite Reims city officials’ objections and concerns that the grave could become a shrine for extremists. Antoine Flasaquier, a lawyer for the elder brother’s widow, said the burial took place overnight “in the greatest discretion and dignity.” Flasaquier said the widow did not attend the burial for fear she’d be followed by reporters and give away the location of the grave. Said lived in Reims before police killed him and his brother Jan. 9. “I don’t want a grave that serves to attract fanatics. I don’t want a place that promotes hate,” Reims Mayor Arnaud Robinet said in an interview on France Info radio Thursday. City officials say they wanted to avoid “all useless and indecent polemic” over the burial and said Kouachi would be buried in an anonymous grave “to avoid all risk of disturbance to the peace and to preserve the town’s tranquility.” Meanwhile, a local mayor told AFP on Sunday that Cherif has been buried amid tight security outside of Paris. He was buried just before midnight Saturday at a cemetery in Gennevilliers, where he used to live, officials said. No relatives attended the funeral and the grave is unmarked. Earlier in the week Robinet said he’d “categorically refuse” a request by Kouachi’s family to bury Said and Cherif. Other burial Two other terrorists killed in shootouts with police following last week’s attacks await burial. There has been no word of plans for burying Amedy Coulibaly, who killed five people including four hostages at a kosher market in Paris before he was killed by police Jan. 9. The debate over the burials echoed the one nearly three years ago over Mohamed Merah, who killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in Toulouse in 2012. Then-President Nicolas Sarkozy intervened to allow the burial over the objections of Toulouse's mayor. France bans anti-Islamist protest Also Saturday, the Paris administrative tribunal ruled that Paris police were authorized to ban an “Islamists out of France” rally planned Sunday by two groups that promote secular and republican values. One organizing group, “Secular Riposte,” said on its Web site that it would instead hold a news conference on Sunday. Resistance Republicaine, another organizer, said it would still hold similar rallies in the southern cities of Bordeaux and Montpellier on Sunday. JAKARTA, January 18 -- The Netherlands says it is "outraged" by the execution of one its citizens in Indonesia for drug trafficking. Ang Kiem Soei, 52, was arrested in 2003 after police at Jakarta airport found 13.4 kg of cocaine hidden in his hang glider. The Netherlands says he was the first Dutch national to be executed abroad and has warned it will damage relations. Five other convicts from Indonesia, Malawi, Nigeria, Vietnam and Brazil, were executed on Sunday. Convicted of drugs charges, they faced a firing squad in Central Java province shortly after midnight local time. Five were executed on the island of Nusa Kambangan and the other one, a Vietnamese woman, was executed in the small central Javanese town of Boyolali. The Netherlands has also recalled its ambassador, after Foreign Minister Bert Koenders called the execution of Dutch citizen Ang Kiem Soe, "an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity". Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws. The country resumed executions in 2013 after an unofficial four-year moratorium. The country's Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo said "hopefully, this will have a deterrent effect". JAKARTA, January 13 -- Indonesian divers have retrieved voice recorder, key to determining why plane crashed, from bottom of Java Sea. Indonesian divers have pulled out the cockpit voice recorder from the sunken wreckage of an AirAsia passenger jet, a key step towards determining the cause of the crash that killed all 162 people aboard. The cockpit voice recorder, which retains the last two hours of conversation between the pilots and air traffic controllers, was found close to where the flight data recorder was recovered from the bottom of the Java Sea on Monday. "Today we have completed searching for the main things that we have been looking for," Rear Admiral Widodo, the commander of the navy's western fleet, told reporters after handing over the cockpit voice recorder to investigators on Tuesday. "But the team will still try to find the body of the plane in case there are still bodies inside." Together the black boxes, which are actually orange, contain a wealth of data that will be crucial for investigators piecing together the sequence of events that led to the Airbus A320-200 plunging into the sea. Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen, reporting from Jakarta, said the voice recorder was found 20m from where the flight data recorder was located and will be sent to the Indonesian capital to be analysed. "First they have to download all the data and then analyse. There is a lot of information on these instruments. On the voice recorder there are around two hours of conversations. It will probably take a couple of months before we really know what had happened," Vaessen said. The Airbus A320-200 airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather conditions on December 28, less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. The Indonesian meteorological agency has said that stormy weather likely caused the crash, but a definitive answer is impossible without the black box, which should contain the pilots' final words as well as various flight data. |
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