17, February 2017
Militants in Central African Republic executed 32 civilians in December 1
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has revealed details of the execution of at least 32 civilians by an armed group in the lawless heart of the Central African Republic late last year. The HRW said in a report on Thursday that militants from the Union for Peace in the Central African Republic (UPC), a splinter group from a rebel force in neighboring Chad, had killed 32 civilians and captured fighters in the town of Bakala in December 2016.
The New York-based rights group said 25 people had been killed after they were called to a school for an alleged meeting, while seven other men were executed as they were returning from a nearby gold mine. “Accounts of the incidents were provided by a survivor and eight witnesses, including five men who were forced to help dispose of the bodies,” said the HRW in a statement.
A representative of the rights group in the Africa region also denounced the killing as “brazen war crimes by UPC fighters who feel free to kill at will.” In January, the UPC denied that its militants had been involved in any form of killing in Bakala region. “Soldiers in the UPC cannot execute civilians or prisoners … What you have heard about the UPC are lies,” said Ali Darassa, UPC’s commander since the formation of the group in September 2014.
Experts from the United Nations had earlier warned that armed groups were using the lawlessness in tracts of the CAR to maintain their interests, ranging from control of gold and other mines, cattle rustling and highway robbery. “They have taken the place of the judicial apparatus and [they] terrify the population,” Marie-Therese Keita-Bocoum, an independent UN expert on human rights in the CAR said, adding that “armed groups reign as masters over more than 60 percent of the territory, benefiting from total impunity.”
France and the UN’s mission in the CAR, known as MINUSCA, have intervened militarily in the African country to end large-scale massacres and restore relative order to the capital, Bangui. However, insecurity continues to grip swaths of the territory.
Presstv
18, February 2017
Obama rated America’s 12th best president 0
Barack Obama has been rated as the 12th best American president a month after leaving the office, according to a new survey. C-SPAN’s 2017 presidential historians survey published on Friday put the first African American president between former heads of state Woodrow Wilson (No. 11) and James Monroe (No. 13) and outranking Bill Clinton (No. 15)
The 91 historians who were consulted for the survey gave Obama and 42 other commanders in chief a score of one to 10 on 10 different “qualities of presidential leadership,” including “economic management,” “vision/setting an agenda,” “relations with Congress,” “crisis leadership” and “public persuasion.”
He ranked 10th on public persuasion, 15th on crisis leadership, 8th on economic management, 7th on moral authority, and 24th on international relations. Obama was the 19th president in terms of administrative skills and 39th in terms of relations with Congress. The former president, who left the office with a notable 57 percent job approval rating, ranked third when it came to pursuing equal justice for all.
“Although 12th is a respectable overall ranking, one would have thought that former President Obama’s favorable rating when he left office would have translated into a higher ranking in this presidential survey,” said Edna Greene Medford, a Howard University history professor and one of the survey’s advisers.
“But, of course, historians prefer to view the past from a distance, and only time will reveal his legacy,” she added. Topping the overall list was Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American 16th president known for abolishing slavery and leading the Union through the Civil War.
George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower ranked below Lincoln. The country’s 15th president James Buchanan, whose presidency preceded the Civil War, took the bottom spot.
Presstv