• Baroness Kennedy, who helped hundreds to safety after Kabul fell in 2021, says it is ‘not possible’ for people to reach Britain safely today
• She describes UK immigration legislation as ‘pretty disgusting’ and ‘full-frontal dismissal’ of rule of law

Updated 25 June 2023

Arab News

June 25, 2023 17:35

LONDON: A British human rights lawyer has described how she still receives “the most tragic, terrible text messages” from women trapped in Afghanistan.

The country fell to the Taliban almost two years ago, at which time hundreds of thousands of people attempted to flee.

Baroness Helena Kennedy KC helped 508 people escape, including 103 women threatened by the Taliban and who were on the group’s “kill list,” but many more were unable to leave.

Kennedy said the British government’s “dog whistle politics” on immigration had subsequently made it impossible to help people reach the UK from Afghanistan safely.

“It was possible then, then of course it was not possible anymore,” she told Metro newspaper. “I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying ‘please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn’t get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn’t leave at the time, but now they are after me,’ but all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry, they don’t provide visas to Britain from Afghanistan, you have to go to another country, Pakistan is the nearest, you have to get your kids across that border’.”

Kennedy launched an appeal to help legal professionals, human rights activists and their relatives flee Afghanistan as the country fell to the Taliban.

But she criticized the lack of legal routes for refugees into the UK, which she said had forced many to illegally cross the English Channel via small boats run by smugglers.

“Sometimes they are Afghanis who have worked for us … sometimes they are Afghanis of a particular minority called the Hazara, who get slaughtered as soon as the Taliban look at them,” she added.

Kennedy said recent legislation brought forward by the British government to “crack down” on illegal immigration was “pretty disgusting” and a “full-frontal dismissal” of the rule of law.

“I am a lawyer, and I believe in the rule of law,” she added. “I am afraid that the Home Office in this is prepared to break international law on the (UN) Refugee Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, because they are prepared to deport pregnant women.

“One of the fundamentals in Scots law and English law is the right to due process, that before you lose any of your rights that you should have the opportunity of putting your case.

“These people are not being allowed to put their own case as to why they might be entitled to asylum or refugee status here.”

She added: “It is being done because this is a government running out of policy and running out of road. You do have to have sensible policies around immigration and what we need in terms of immigration.”

A Home Office spokesperson told Metro: “Between 2015 and March 2023, we have offered a place to over half a million men, women and children seeking safety.

“Supporting the resettlement of eligible Afghans remains a top priority. We have so far welcomed over 9,113 arrivals under Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme, and we continue to work with the UNHCR, likeminded partners and countries neighbouring Afghanistan to identify at-risk people for resettlement in the UK.

“No one, however, should be risking their lives by crossing the Channel or taking dangerous and illegal routes to reach the UK.

“People should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach — that is the fastest route to safety.”

• Red Sea Gateway Terminal to operate Bangladesh’s newly built terminal
• Bangladesh hopeful Saudi company will take over by end of this year

Updated 25 June 2023

June 25, 2023 15:14

DHAKA: Bangladesh is banking on Saudi expertise to run a newly built terminal in the country’s largest port, authorities told Arab News, as negotiations are underway for Riyadh’s latest investment in the South Asian nation.

Saudi port developer Red Sea Gateway Terminal was selected by the Bangladeshi Ministry of Shipping to operate the new $240 million Patenga Container Terminal in Chittagong Port, making it the first foreign company to receive Dhaka’s offer to operate its ports.

“RSGT will operate the newly built Patenga Container Terminal,” Abul Bashar, director-general of programming and investment promotion in Bangladesh’s Public Private Partnership Authority, told Arab News.

This is the first time the government offers a foreign company the chance to operate the largest port in the country, Bashar said. 

“Hopefully, by the end of this year, RSGT will be able to take over the terminal operations,” he added.

Under the expected deal, RSGT will equip, operate and maintain the Patenga terminal, which covers between 5 and 7 percent of Chittagong’s entire operations, the rest of which are handled by the Chittagong Port Authority.

The Saudi company will take over Patenga’s operations for 22 years. The first two years will be dedicated to preparing and installing equipment, Bashar said, adding that Dhaka is expecting RSGT to “use all ultra-modern equipment and technology.”

Bashar said: “RSGT has a proven track record in Saudi Arabia and other countries for managing port operations smoothly.

“The Bangladeshi government believes that if a company like RSGT joins the port operations activities here, in the future there will also be an opportunity for technology transfer.”

RSGT CEO Jens O. Floe previously said the company’s “proposed investment is a vote of confidence in Bangladesh’s future.”

The Saudi firm also said Chittagong’s rapid growth and RSGT’s competencies are a good match.

“The rapid growth of Chittagong Port’s cargo volumes necessitates further investment in modern equipment, advanced technology and building new human capacity. This project fits well with Red Sea Gateway Terminal’s competencies and its expansion strategy for emerging markets,” Gagan Seksaria, RSGT’s director of global investments, said in a statement issued last August.

“We are very confident that, through this investment, we will be able to contribute significantly to Bangladesh’s fast-growing trade and economy.”

Chittagong Port is the busiest container port on the Bay of Bengal, which handled about 3.2 million 20-foot equivalent units in the 2021 fiscal year and served as the main gateway for Bangladesh’s ocean cargo import and export. This included products from its garment sector, which accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports and 11 percent of its gross domestic product. 

Updated 25 June 2023

AP

June 25, 2023 08:24

• Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former prison inmate, owned a hot dog stand and then fancy restaurants that drew interest from Russian President Vladimir Putin
• With the help of Putin, Prigozhin cornered government contracts and availed himself of generous loans by a state bank to build a business empire
• He then organized the Wagner Group, a mercenary force that has come to play a central role in Putin’s projection of Russian influence in trouble spots around the world

Updated 25 June 2023

AP

June 25, 2023 05:08

The millionaire mercenary chief who long benefitted from the powerful patronage of President Vladimir Putin has moved into the global spotlight with a dramatic rebellion against Russia's military that challenged the authority of Putin himself.

Yevgeny Prigozhin is the 62-year-old owner of the Kremlin-allied Wagner Group, a private army of inmate recruits and other mercenaries that has fought some of the deadliest battles in Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, Prigozhin abruptly escalated months of scathing criticism of Russia’s conduct of the war, calling for an armed uprising to oust the defense minister, and then rolling toward Moscow with his soldiers-for-hire.
As Putin's government declared a “counterterrorism” alert and scrambled to seal off Moscow with checkpoints, Prigozhin just as abruptly stood down the following day. As part of the deal to defuse the crisis, he agreed to move to Belarus and was seen late Saturday retreating with his forces from Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia where they had taken over the military headquarters.
It was unclear what was next for Prigozhin, a former prison inmate, hot-dog vendor and restaurant owner who has riveted world attention.
‘Putin's chef’
Prigozhin and Putin go way back, with both born in Leningrad, what is now St. Petersburg.
During the final years of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin served time in prison — 10 years by his own admission — although he does not say what it was for.

Afterward, he owned a hot dog stand and then fancy restaurants that drew interest from Putin. In his first term, the Russian leader took then-French President Jacques Chirac to dine at one of them.
“Vladimir Putin saw how I built a business out of a kiosk, he saw that I don’t mind serving to the esteemed guests because they were my guests,” Prigozhin recalled in an interview published in 2011.
His businesses expanded significantly to catering and providing school lunches. In 2010, Putin helped open Prigozhin’s factory, which was built on generous loans by a state bank. In Moscow alone, his company Concord won millions of dollars in contracts to provide meals at public schools. He also organized catering for Kremlin events for several years — earning him the nickname “Putin’s chef” — and has provided catering and utility services to the Russian military.
In 2017, opposition figure and corruption fighter Alexei Navalny accused Prigozhin’s companies of breaking antitrust laws by bidding for some $387 million in Defense Ministry contracts.
Military connection
Prigozhin also owns the Wagner Group, a Kremlin-allied mercenary force that has come to play a central role in Putin’s projection of Russian influence in trouble spots around the world.
The United States, European Union, United Nations and others say the mercenary force has involved itself in conflicts in countries across Africa in particular. Wagner fighters allegedly provide security for national leaders or warlords in exchange for lucrative payments, often including a share of gold or other natural resources. US officials say Russia may also be using Wagner’s work in Africa to support its war in Ukraine.

In Ukraine, Prigozhin’s mercenaries have become a major force in the war, fighting as counterparts to the Russian army in battles with Ukrainian forces.
That includes Wagner fighters taking Bakhmut, the city where the bloodiest and longest battles have taken place. By last month, Wagner Group and Russian forces appeared to have largely won Bakhmut, a victory with strategically slight importance for Russia despite the cost in lives. Prigozhin has said that 20,000 of his men died in Bakhmut, about half of them inmates recruited from Russia’s prisons.
What is the group's reputation?
Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses throughout Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.
In December 2021, the European Union accused the group of “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,” and of carrying out “destabilizing activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
Some of the reported incidents stood out in their grisly brutality.
In November 2022, a video surfaced online that showed a former Wagner contractor getting beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he allegedly fled to the Ukrainian side and was recaptured. Despite public outrage and a stream of demands for an investigation, the Kremlin turned a blind eye to it.
Raging against Russia's generals
As his forces fought and died en masse in Ukraine, Prigozhin raged against Russia’s military brass. In a video released by his team last month, Prigozhin stood next to rows bodies he said were those of Wagner fighters. He accused Russia’s regular military of incompetence and of starving his troops of the weapons and ammunition they needed to fight.
“These are someone’s fathers and someone’s sons,” Prigozhin said then. “The scum that doesn’t give us ammunition will eat their guts in hell.”
Criticizing the brass
Prigozhin has castigated the top military brass, accusing top-ranking officers of incompetence. His remarks were unprecedented for Russia’s tightly controlled political system, in which only Putin could air such criticism.
In January, Putin reaffirmed his trust in the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, by putting him in direct charge of the Russian forces in Ukraine, a move that some observers also interpreted as an attempt to cut Prigozhin down to size.
Asked recently about a media comparison of him to Grigory Rasputin, a mystic who gained influence over Russia’s last czar by claiming to have the power to cure his son’s hemophilia, Prigozhin snapped: “I don’t stop blood, but I spill blood of the enemies of our Motherland.”
A ‘bad actor’  in the US
Prigozhin earlier gained more limited attention in the US, when he and a dozen other Russian nationals and three Russian companies were charged with operating a covert social media campaign aimed at fomenting discord ahead of Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory.
They were indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference. The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned Prigozhin and associates repeatedly in connection with both his election interference and his leadership of the Wagner Group.
After the 2018 indictment, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Prigozhin as saying, in a clearly sarcastic remark: “Americans are very impressionable people; they see what they want to see. I treat them with great respect. I’m not at all upset that I’m on this list. If they want to see the devil, let them see him.”
The Biden White House in that episode called him “a known bad actor,” and State Department spokesman Ned Price said Prigozhin’s “bold confession, if anything, appears to be just a manifestation of the impunity that crooks and cronies enjoy under President Putin and the Kremlin.”
Avoiding challenges to Putin
As Prigozhin grew more outspoken against the way Russia’s conventional military conducted fighting in Ukraine, he continued to play a seemingly indispensable role for the Russian offensive, and appeared to suffer no retaliation from Putin for his criticism of Putin’s generals.
Media reports at times suggested Prigozhin’s influence on Putin was growing and he was after a prominent political post. But analysts warned against overestimating his influence with Putin.
“He’s not one of Putin’s close figures or a confidant,” said Mark Galeotti of University College, London, who specializes in Russian security affairs, speaking on his podcast “In Moscow’s Shadows.”
“Prigozhin does what the Kremlin wants and does very well for himself in the process. But that’s the thing — he is part of the staff rather than part of the family,” Galeotti said.