This morning's key headlines from
GenerationalDynamics.com:
- Iran begins annual war games in Strait of Hormuz
- Sunnis hold mass protests in Iraq against Shia-majority government
- Gang-raped victim sparks nationwide protests in India
Iran begins annual war games in Strait of Hormuz
Iran launched the Velayat-91, six days of major naval exercises around
the Strait of Hormuz on Friday. The exercises will involve warships,
submarines, jet fighters and hovercraft while testing the navy's
missile systems and electronic warfare capabilities. Iran has
frequently threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint
through which about a third of the world's tanker-borne oil passes,
linking the Gulf's petroleum-exporting states of the UAE, Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. The exercises come just after the
Gulf Cooperation Council (BCC) of Arab states said that it "rejects
and denounces" Iran's "continued interference" in their internal
affairs. The National (UAE) and Payvand (Tehran)
Sunnis hold mass protests in Iraq against Shia-majority government
Tens of thousands of protesting Sunnis have shut down highways
providing vital trade routes carrying government supplies between
Baghdad to and from Jordan and Syria. The protests were on their
fifth day on Friday. Iraq's army forces are preventing protesters
from other provinces from arriving to join in the protests. The army
is also preventing journalists from covering the event, and is
confiscating journalists' transmission equipment. The latest protests
were triggered by the arrest, last week, of nine bodyguards of Iraq's
finance minister, who is one of the governments most senior Sunni
officials in the Shia-majority government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki. This is also the one-year anniversary of the complete
withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, and the immediately
subsequent arrest of Sunni Arab Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who
is currently hiding in exile. Sunni protesters are complaining of
massive discrimination against Sunnis by the Shia-led government, and
some activists are demanding that Sunnis should have autonomy in their
own region, along the model of the Kurdish region in the north.
Al-Jazeera and Aswat Al-Iraq
Gang-raped victim sparks nationwide protests in India
An unnamed 23-year-old girl who was gang-raped last weekend died on
Saturday in a Singapore hospital from her injuries. The girl had been
coerced onto an off-duty bus, where the bus driver and six other males
gang-raped her for half an hour, beat her and her male companion with
an iron bar, and then threw them off the bus while it was in motion.
The attack has triggered widespread protests all week in Delhi and
across the country.
There's a lot more going on here than the mainstream media are
talking about, and in India, that would be caste. Apparently the girl
who was raped was from an upper caste, while the six men were from a
lower class, such as the "untouchable" Dalit caste. Dalit activists
say that they're forced to take the worst jobs, if they can get
employment at all, that they're subject to repeated discrimination and
harassment, and that Dalit girls are frequently raped and then ignored
by the police. If a Dalit girl brings charges, then the alleged
perpetrator is almost always acquitted.
So this is only tangentially a story about rape. The real story here
is that India's caste system is far from dead, and that there will
almost certainly be another war among India's castes and many ethnic
groups. AFP and Guardian and Eurasia Review
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