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The Herald
13 hours ago
- Politics
- The Herald
'A man of unwavering principles': Ramaphosa delivers eulogy at activist cleric Tshenuwani Farisani's funeral
He developed an interest in liberation theology and its message that the true Christian faith demands active resistance to all forms of oppression and solidarity with the poor. He became involved with underground political organisations like the Black People's Convention, the black consciousness movement. It was at this time that Farisani travelled extensively across the country. In his many travels, he visited Mphaphuli High School, where Ramaphosa was a pupil. 'Farisani was a guest at our school's flourishing debating society, which a number of us, including Judge Raulinga, Tshifhiwa Muofhe and people like Willy Mudau, had set up. Farisani and I formed an immediate and lasting bond of friendship, comradeship and loyalty based on respect and love. He opened to me the radical interpretation of the Bible, which Farisani was later to become famous for. 'He argued the Lutheran church must turn away from political conservatism and become an instrument of opposition,' said Ramaphosa. He said Farisani was a courageous revolutionary who inspired a generation to reclaim their pride and to stand up for their rights. 'I was one of those who were hugely inspired by him. He was, in addition to everything else, a renowned academic, a prolific scholar whose writings gave voice to the voiceless. He was a guide and a mentor to many.' Ramaphosa said Farisani's activism continued into the democratic era, where he became an MEC and speaker of the legislature in Limpopo province. He said those roles placed him in a position of power and influence, yet did not change him. 'He was a servant leader who came, served and left. When he saw corruption being perpetrated by those who are trusted with public funds, he was vocal and scathing in his criticism, and that is why he was one of those when the VBS looting happened who spoke out. 'He spoke out to a point where a number of people started to hate him, but it never moved him. The foundation that bears his name continues to be an influential voice in the public space in advancing social justice. Neither beatings nor torture could make Farisani surrender his principles' . TimesLIVE
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Asian Headlines at 12:42 p.m. GMT
The Taliban leader slams Trump's travel ban on Afghans and calls the US an 'oppressor'
Daily Mail
5 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Phone smuggled out of North Korea reveals shocking details of Kim Jong-un's regime including 'scary' screenshot feature
A phone secretly smuggled out of North Korea has revealed the shocking details of Kim Jong-Un 's oppressive regime. Although it appears like a standard phone from the outside, the North Korean handset is part of the dictatorship's efforts to keep its citizens in the dark. The device includes a 'scary' screenshot feature which monitors users' every move, a BBC investigation revealed. Software automatically takes a screenshot every five minutes and locks the snips in a folder that users themselves can't access and can only be seen by the authorities. This allows North Korea's 'youth crackdown squads' to ensure citizens haven't been searching for illegal information or sharing anything critical of the government. In another Orwellian feature, the phone even prevents the user from typing certain popular South Korean terms. For example, the South Korean word 'oppa', which literally means 'big brother' but is used as a slang term for 'boyfriend', is automatically replaced by the word for 'comrade'. After replacing the word, the phone issues a chilling warning to the user saying: 'This word can only be used to describe your siblings'. Similarly, the BBC found that even the word for South Korea, 'Nampan', was automatically edited to say 'puppet state' - the government's term for South Korea. The phone, which was smuggled out of the country in 2024 by the news organisation Daily NK, shows just how much control Kim Jong Un has over his citizens' access to information. North Korea has extremely limited access to the global internet and all media including newspapers, radio, and television stations are owned and controlled by the state. However, some South Korean organisations are currently locked in a secretive information war with the oppressive regime. Each night, small broadcasters and non-profits transmit information over the border on short and medium-wave radio frequencies. Additionally, thousands of USB sticks and micro-SD cards are smuggled into North Korea each month. These contain South Korean music, television shows and movies alongside more dangerous information such as educational materials about democracy. The goal is to undermine the government's narrative about the outside world by showing how wealthy, happy, and free people are in South Korea. Things banned in North Korea Owning or distributing South Korean films and television shows. Using South Korean words or speaking with a South Korean accent. Wearing a white wedding dress. Having a South Korean haircut. Wearing 'un-revolutionary' clothing such as sunglasses or jeans. Making international calls. Accessing foreign media and news. Possessing a shortwave radio. Criticising the government or making jokes about Kim Jong Un. Those risking their lives to get this information into the country say that it has a real impact on the North Koreans who get a glimpse of the outside world. Sokeel Park, whose organisation Liberty in North Korea works to distribute this content, told the BBC: 'Most recent North Korean defectors and refugees say it was foreign content that motivated them to risk their lives to escape.' In response, Kim Jong Un has stepped up his crackdown on culture with a particular focus on South Korean influences. Starting in the pandemic he ordered the installation of electric fences on the border with China, which makes it harder to smuggle goods into the country. In 2020, the punishments for those caught consuming or distributing foreign information were increased. One law stated that anyone found distributing foreign media could be imprisoned or even executed. Then, in 2023, Kim Jong Un made it a crime for people to use South Korean phrases or speak in a South Korean accent. These restrictions were swiftly implemented into the software of devices produced in the country, such as the smuggled smartphone, to prevent anyone from using popular South Korean terms. Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center and an expert in North Korean technology and information, says: 'Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people.' Following these recent crackdowns, Mr Williams warns that North Korea is 'starting to gain the upper hand' in the information war. Kang Gyuri, 24, who escaped from North Korea in late 2023 told the BBC that so-called 'youth crackdown squads' patrol the streets to monitor young people's behaviour. These squads would confiscate her phone and check her messages to see if she had been using any South Korean terms. Ms Kang also says she was aware of young people who had been executed for being found with South Korean content on their devices. A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN NORTH KOREA AND SOUTH KOREA In June 1950 fighting broke out between the communist North and capitalist South, sparking a brutal war that killed between two and four million people. Beijing backed Pyongyang in the three-year conflict, while Washington threw its support behind the South -- alliances that have largely endured. The Koreas have been locked in a dangerous dance ever since that conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a formal peace treaty, leaving them technically at war. Pyongyang has tested the fragile ceasefire with numerous attacks. The secretive nation sent a team of 31 commandos to Seoul in a botched attempt to assassinate then-President Park Chung-Hee in 1968. All but two were killed. In the 'axe murder incident' of 1976, North Korean soldiers attacked a work party trying to chop down a tree inside the Demilitarized Zone, leaving two US army officers dead. Pyongyang launched perhaps its most audacious assassination attempt in Myanmar in 1983, when a bomb exploded in a Yangon mausoleum during a visit by South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan. He survived but 21 people, including some government ministers, were killed. In 1987 a bomb on a Korean Air flight exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 people on board. Seoul accused Pyongyang, which denied involvement. The North's founding leader Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, but under his son Kim Jong-Il it continued to prod its southern neighbor. In 1996 a North Korean submarine on a spying mission ran aground off the eastern South Korean port of Gangneung, sparking 45-day manhunt that ended with 24 crew members and infiltrators killed. A clash between South Korean and North Korean naval ships in 1999 left some 50 of the North's soldiers dead. In March 2010 Seoul accused Pyongyang of torpedoing one of its corvette warships, killing 46 sailors. Pyongyang denied the charge. November that year saw North Korea launch its first attack on a civilian-populated area since the war, firing 170 artillery shells at Yeonpyeong. Four people were killed, including two civilians. North Korea has steadfastly pursued its banned nuclear and ballistic missile programs since its first successful test of an atomic bomb in 2006, as it looks to build a rocket capable of delivering a warhead to the US mainland. Its progress has accelerated under leader Kim Jong-Un, culminating in its sixth and biggest nuclear test in September 2017. Kim has since declared the country a nuclear power. Despite the caustic effect of clashes and the battery of conventional weapons that the North has amassed at the border to threaten Seoul, the two nations have held talks in the past. Then North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il held two historic summits with counterparts from the South in 2000 and 2007, which eased tensions between the neighbors. Lower-level talks since then have been much hyped but failed to produce significant results.
Irish Times
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Ramaphosa stays calm with golf diplomacy in face of Trump's latest Oval Office ambush
'Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,' Nelson Mandela said in the summer of 2003, when post-apartheid South Africa was in its fledgling state. In the White House on Wednesday came a crash course history lesson on oppression and violence in that complex country, delivered to South Africa's president, courtesy of the US president Donald Trump . 'Death. Death. Death,' he declared in what sounded like an impromptu haiku for his guest, Cyril Ramaphosa , the latest international statesman to find himself the subject of a diplomatic mugging in the Oval Office, again broadcast on live television. The president was scrolling through sheaves of documents listing the crimes South Africa has perpetrated. 'Horrible deaths. I dunno. White South Africans are fleeing because of the violence and racist laws. So, when you say 'what would I like to do?' I don't know what to do. Look at this!, he continued, holding a photocopied article of unknown provenance. 'White South African couples say they were attacked violently.'' The Oval office lights had already been dimmed so everyone could enjoy a video of South African politicians shouting the rally cry of 'Kill the Boer.' Another clip showed a straight road lined with cars which, president Trump explained to his guest, were mourners visiting the graves of the white farmers murdered in a land reclamation and murder which, he inferred, was a genocide in the making. READ MORE 'Burial sites. Over a thousand. Those cars are lined up to ... pay love on a Sunday morning. I've never seen anything like it. Both sides of the roads you have crosses.' 'Have they told you where this is?' Ramaphosa asked. 'South Africa,' Trump clarified. 'We need to find out where,' the president of that country said softly. The morning meeting had begun warmly. Ramaphosa, with his old-school gravitas and deliberate speaking style, buttered Trump up by pointing out that he had brought with him the champion golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els – although Trump was unimpressed to learn that 89-year-old Gary Player had sent his apologies. The visitor thanked the president for the 150 respirators Trump had sent South Africa during the pandemic. 'We became the respirator kings,' Trump reminisced. Wisely, the South Africans came bearing gifts even if they seem to have woefully underestimated the lavishness of the going fare. 'I brought you a really fantastic golf..' Ramaphosa said cordially and slowly. Gold Coast luxury club? Tournament? '… boo .... It ighs fourteen kilograms'. If the prospect of curling up with this weighty tome thrilled president Trump, he hid it well. But then, he had a history lesson to give. A Maga fascination with the persecution of white Afrikaners has been simmering as a background issue since the beginning of the month when the White House announced some 48 white South Africans, including entire families, had arrived in the US as refugees fleeing attack. In February, Trump signed an executive order cutting financial assistance to South Africa, citing 'unjust racial discrimination.' Recently, the US State Department reported that some 8,000 inquiries have come from other Afrikaans looking to leave their country. The Oval Office guest list for Wednesday's visit was a motley crew. Elon Musk, not so long ago the most celebrated South African in the Trump administration, stood behind the sofa where vice-president Vance, defence secretary Hegseth and commerce secretary Lutnick sat dressed in their best. Musk had no seat, nor had he a voice. Instead, he fixed a glassy stare on the South African president as Trump continued to explain to his guest that he was the head of state of a country where it was open season on white people. Trump's rebuke generated ecstatic reviews even as it unfolded among the strain within the Maga movement who believe the white race to be under siege. The notion of a genocide against white Afrikaners fuels their wildest paranoias of what could happen in open-borders USA. It's a myth that South Africa's tech fraternity like Musk and Peter Thiel have fed into. 'There is literally nothing better than president Trump calling out foreign leaders at the White House,' wrote David Sack, a Cape Towner who has made his fortune in the US on Musk's X platform. In 1995, Thiel and Sack co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalis and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. 'Zelenskiy didn't have the cards. Ramaphosa is playing dumb about genocide. President Trump brings the receipts.' White farmers have indeed been attacked and murdered in South Africa and many Afrikaners have expressed apprehension about the future of their language and traditions. But the idea of a programme of persecution against white farmers have been widely discredited. Still, Trump pressed on, casting a brief glance at the wider sweep of South Africa's notorious history of white supremacy. 'Now I will say – apartheid ... terrible. That was reported all the time. This is sort of the opposite. Nobody knows about it. Marco Rubio was telling me he has never seen anything like it – the numbers of people that want to leave South Africa because they feel they are going to be dead pretty soon.' The South African contingent may be accused of naivete for arriving at the White House without anticipating this line of attack. But bewildering as it must have been – videos and documents – the visitors succeeded in penetrating the fantasia with a few coolly delivered counterpoints. Ramaphosa held his nerve and calmly, politely, explained to Trump that South Africa, as a multiparty democracy, allows conflicting voices. He allowed that the country has problems of violent crime but that it is not concentrated on the 7 per cent of the population who are white. (PBS reported on Wednesday the statistic that white farmers, who own over 50 per cent of the land, account for less than 1 per cent of the 27,000 annual murders in South Africa). Ramaphosa introduced his agriculture minister, John Steenhuisen, who is white and who is a member of an opposition party. The minister respectfully told president Trump that, indeed, South Africa needed to 'start making farm attacks and stock theft a priority crime'. 'And it affects all farmers – particularly stock theft has a disproportionate effect on small elder black farmers.' Patiently it was explained that Julius Malema, the Economic Freedom Fighter leader leading the anti-Boer chant, had been expelled from the ANC over a decade ago. 'The reason we chose to join hands was to keep those people out of power,' Steenhuisen said. 'We can't have those people sitting in the union buildings making decisions. That is why after 30 years of us exchanging barbs across the floor, we have decided to join hands. Need support of allies around the world. Shut the door forever on that rabble.' Ernie Els spoke and gave a succinct if ambivalent account of the difficult years of the post-apartheid transition and of what Nelson Mandela represented. Goosen followed with an account of the difficulties his parents, who are white and farmers, had faced, including home attacks. Trump listened gravely to this more nuanced version of South Africa's history as told by those living, breathing and shaping it. He brooded. He may have been thinking about his – America's – blingy new jet plane from Qatar, which the Pentagon officially accepted on Wednesday. To the president's obvious exasperation, some US media seemed more interested in asking him about that acquisition than discussing the evidence of murders and persecution he had just exposed. At one point, he turned to Ramaphosa to lament the state of the US fake news media who just want to talk about 'jets'. 'I am sorry I don't have a plane to give you,' Ramaphosa said. 'I wish you did, said the president of the United States. 'I'd take it.' The occasion once again demonstrated Trump's contempt for the politesse of statecraft. It was a blatant piece of theatre designed to thrill the Maga heartland. But Ramaphosa is a veteran of the formative days of a country of which Trump knows nothing. Mandela was his mentor. The visitor remained unflappable. He kept his counsel on South Africa's vociferous pro-Palestinian stance, declining to elaborate on his views on the genocidal conditions there. And the presence of two fading golf stars brought to the White House a version of golf diplomacy. Ramaphosa left the weighty golf book behind and promised Trump he has been practising his game and joked that he is ready to play a round – maybe at the G20 summit in Johannesburg in November. Had he been in the Oval Office, Gary Player could but admire his countryman's coolness under pressure.
Al Jazeera
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Dozens of white South Africans welcomed to US as refugees
NewsFeed Dozens of white South Africans welcomed to US as refugees A group of white South Africans granted refugee status have arrived in the US. The Trump administration says white South Africans suffer oppression. The welcome for white South Africans contrasts with an aggressive deportation policy for other ethnic groups.
