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‘He’s close to us’: Wheelchair users in Africa await pope

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1 year ago

January 28, 2023

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'He's close to us': Wheelchair users in Africa await pope

When Pope Francis arrives in Congo and South Sudan next week, thousands of people will take special note of a gesture more grounded than the sign of the cross. Watching from their wheelchairs, they will relate to the way he uses his.

The pope, who began using a wheelchair last year, is visiting two countries where years of conflict have disabled many, and yet they are among the world’s most difficult places to find accessibility and understanding. His visit is heartening Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

“We know that it’s a suffering, but it also comforts us to see a grand personality like the pope using a wheelchair,” said Paul Mitemberezi, a market vendor in Goma, at the heart of the eastern Congo region threatened by dozens of armed groups. “Sometimes it gives us the courage to hope that this isn’t the end of the world and one can survive.”

Mitemberezi, a Catholic and a father, has been disabled since he was 3 because of polio. He works to support his family because he can’t imagine a life of begging. On the way to market, his three-wheeled chair crunches the stones of unpaved roads. Without a ramp at home, he must leave the brightly painted vehicle outdoors, at risk of theft.

Every morning, before he leaves for basketball practice, he makes sure the chair’s still there before crawling out his front door. “It is my legs, which helps me to live,” he said. He applies a bicycle pump to the wheels and is off, weaving through traffic of motorcycles and trucks.

Pope Francis is still adjusting to a life that Mitemberezi has long accepted. The pope was first seen publicly in a wheelchair in May, with an aide pushing it. The pope, at age 86, never propels himself. Sometimes he walks with a cane, but he uses the chair for longer distances and has a wheelchair lift to get on and off planes.

Francis has insisted that his mobility limitations don’t affect his ability to be pope, saying “You lead with your head, not your knee.” He has lamented how today’s “throwaway culture” wrongly marginalizes disabled people. He makes it a point to visit places serving the disabled during his foreign trips, and routinely spends time greeting wheelchair users at the end of his general audiences.

“No disability — temporary, acquired or permanent — can change the fact that we are all children of the one Father and enjoy the same dignity,” Francis wrote in his annual message for the U.N. International Day of Persons with Disabilities in December. He said people with different abilities enrich the church and teach it to be more humane.

Such messages are warmly awaited by wheelchair users in South Sudan, where a five-year civil war killed hundreds of thousands of people. As in Congo, data is lacking on just how many people are disabled by conflict or other means.

While the road leading to the Vatican’s embassy in the South Sudan capital, Juba, was paved by city authorities this month for ease of travel, residents who use wheelchairs said they have long gone without easy access to schools, health centers, toilets and other public facilities.

South Sudan, unlike Congo, is yet to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Both countries, however, face vast challenges including underfunded health systems, poor infrastructure and conflicts that leave many disabled people vulnerable as others flee.

Even displacement camps and shelters often are not accessible, the United Nations has said, and wheelchairs are not always available.

Discrimination is another problem. “People see those who get around using a wheelchair as useless,” said James Moses, who leads a local organization in South Sudan for disabled people and uses crutches after being wounded by a land mine.

He and others called on South Sudan’s government to give them special consideration during the pope’s visit, and they hope that Francis will advocate for them. “He’s close to us,” said Susan Samson, a wheelchair user and mother.

They hope they will have a chance to greet the pope at the airport with congratulatory messages and flowers. ”Put us in front so the pope will see us,” urged wheelchair user Seme Lado Michael.

The Vatican’s ambassador to Congo, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, said he believed the sight of a wheelchair-using pope could be a powerful teaching moment in a culture where disabilities are often viewed with suspicion and superstition.

Families often abandon their disabled children, he said.

Seeing someone like the pope suffer should make Francis more approachable for people during his visit, Balestrero said. “They identify, in a way, even more with him.”

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World

India court extends pre-trial detention of opposition leader Kejriwal until May 20, Live Law says

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1 hour ago

May 7, 2024

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India court extends pre-trial detention of opposition leader Kejriwal until May 20, Live Law says

An Indian court extended the pre-trial detention of opposition leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal until May 20 on Tuesday, legal news website Live Law reported, weeks before the capital votes in national elections.

The country’s financial crime-fighting agency arrested Kejriwal – a staunch critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – on March 21 in connection with corruption allegations relating to Delhi’s liquor policy, charges his party has denied.

He has been in pre-trial detention since April 1.

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Al Jazeera to pursue legal action ‘until the end’ over Israel ban

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1 hour ago

May 7, 2024

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Al Jazeera to pursue legal action 'until the end' over Israel ban

Al Jazeera will look to pursue all possible legal action “until the end” to challenge Israel’s ban on its operations there, the TV network’s news director told AFP in an interview.

The Qatar-based station was taken off air in Israel after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government voted on Sunday to shut it down over its coverage of the Gaza war.

Speaking on Monday, Al Jazeera English news director Salah Nagm said the network would “follow every legal path”, adding: “If there is a possibility of challenging that decision we are going to pursue it until the end.”

Under a cabinet decision which Netanyahu said was “unanimous”, Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem offices were shuttered, its equipment confiscated and its team’s accreditations pulled.

“The equipment which was confiscated, the loss that we suffered from stopping our broadcast, all of that is subject matter for legal action,” Nagm said.

The Israeli government on Sunday said the order was initially valid for 45 days, with the possibility of an extension.

Hours later, screens in Israel carrying Al Jazeera’s Arabic and English channels went blank, apart from a message in Hebrew saying they had “been suspended in Israel”.

‘An action from the 60s’

The shutdown does not apply to the Israeli-occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip, from which Al Jazeera still broadcasts live on Israel’s war with Hamas.

Al Jazeera immediately condemned Israel’s decision as “criminal”, saying on social media site X that it “violates the human right to access information”.

But Najm downplayed the ban’s impact on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war and on the public’s ability to access its content, even with its website now blocked in Israel.

“It’s an action from the 60s rather than the 21st century to take such a decision of shutting down,” he said, explaining the channel could rely on other sources for information without “people on the ground”.

“I know people that have VPN can see us online anytime,” the news director said referring to virtual private networks that establish protected internet connections and can allow users to access the internet as if they were in a different country.

The decision came after Israel’s parliament last month voted to pass a new national security law granting senior ministers powers to ban broadcasts by foreign channels over threats to security.

In his statement on Sunday, Netanyahu charged that “Al Jazeera correspondents have harmed the security of Israel and incited against IDF (Israeli military) soldiers”.

‘Arbitrary decision’

But Nagm questioned which Al Jazeera broadcasts the Israeli government considered a security threat, calling the ban an “arbitrary decision”.

Since the start of the Gaza war, Al Jazeera’s office in the Palestinian territory has been bombed and two of its correspondents killed.

“Al Jazeera has lost a few people, their families have suffered so that’s really different from other conflicts in this sense,” Nagm said.

Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh was wounded in an Israeli strike in December that killed the network’s cameraman.

Dahdouh’s wife, two of their children and a grandson were killed in October in a bombardment of central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

And Dahdouh’s eldest son, an Al Jazeera staff journalist, was killed alongside another journalist in Rafah in January when an Israeli strike targeted the car they were travelling in.

At least 97 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began, among them Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“That’s not something that we can just report politely,” Nagm said.

“We have to be wary and careful and alert the people of the nature of the war that’s going on and how deadly it is for the people and also for us as a profession.”

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World

Arman and the war against journalists: A year of pain and loss

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1 hour ago

May 7, 2024

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Arman and the war against journalists: A year of pain and loss

The killing of the brilliant young AFP journalist Arman Soldin on the front lines in Ukraine one year ago remains a uniquely traumatic event for all of us.

There is nothing more painful for a newsroom than to lose a friend and colleague in the line of fire.

Arman had proved both his talent as a video storyteller and his unbridled commitment to his craft. He was passionate about giving a voice to the ordinary people caught up in the tumult of war.

His death at 32 was not just a crime, it was a great loss to journalism.

At AFP we try to honour his memory every day with our continued commitment to reporting from Ukraine as well as Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and many other conflicts on our increasingly fragile planet. It is our mission, it is in our DNA, we do not consider it a choice.

But that does not mean we can accept a growing global culture of impunity around the killing, maiming and imprisonment of journalists. The statistics are profoundly shocking.

Killed and detained

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) records over 950 journalists worldwide murdered for doing their job since 1992. It has documented over 90 journalists killed in Gaza over the past seven months alone, an unprecedented assault on press freedom that has passed largely under the radar.

The CPJ also notes over 350 journalists detained worldwide last year including Russia-based Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, a former AFP colleague with many friends in our newsroom.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also stated last week in their annual Press Freedom Index that the primary culprits in the failure to protect journalists are governments and politicians. The tilt towards authoritarianism and populism is systematically undermining a culture where journalists are valued in society.

The lack of outrage and concrete action over this unacceptable state of affairs cannot be allowed to stand. It is essential the media industry rallies together and uses every lever available to push back against this creeping and existential threat.

Those responsible for this unprecedented attack on civil society should be named, held to account and ultimately brought to justice. It may take time, but we need to be resolute and stay the course.

Arman was killed by a Russian Grad rocket attack as he reported with colleagues on the bloody battle for the town of Bakhmut on May 9, 2023. The group, which included several Ukrainian soldiers, appears to have been directly targeted, but we don’t know yet whether they were targeted because journalists were present.

War crimes investigation

We are encouraged that French anti-terrorism prosecutors have opened a war crimes investigation to determine the exact circumstances of Arman’s death. We hope this will bring some answers and accountability.

We are also working to bring clarity to the circumstances around the horrific attack by an Israeli tank on a group of journalists in southern Lebanon on October 13. The attack killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and wounded six other journalists including AFP photographer Christina Assi and video journalist Dylan Collins. Christina had a leg amputated and spent five months in intensive care in hospital.

One of our strongest weapons in our fight against impunity is our own journalism. The rise of open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques has given digital investigators tremendous resources to track down culprits and provide facts to counter false narratives and misinformation. The combination of this digital sleuthing with old-fashioned on-the-ground evidence gathering is a powerful cocktail.

In southern Lebanon, the investigative journalism of AFP and Reuters has produced facts to prove that Israeli tank fire was responsible. Military experts say it is evident the group, who were all clearly identified as press, were deliberately targeted. This was not about the fog of war. Something went terribly wrong, and we must now have answers.

This is a tough and unsettling anniversary for all Arman Soldin’s family, friends and colleagues. His force of personality, humanity and humour left deep traces and memories which cannot be erased. We grieve deeply for his loss. And we shall continue to seek justice for his killing.