KARACHI: Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered authorities on Saturday (May 13) to identify and arrest all those involved in violent acts after former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s arrest this week sparked deadly unrest.

Khan departed the court premises late Friday night and headed towards his hometown Lahore amidst high security after a court granted him bail. His arrest in a land fraud case on Tuesday, which the Supreme Court ruled “invalid and unlawful” on Thursday, sparked violent protests by his supporters.

They stormed military establishments, set ablaze a state broadcaster building, smashed buses, ransacked a top army official’s house and attacked other assets, leading to nearly 2,000 arrests and the army being deployed in multiple cities.

At least eight people were killed in the violence, a spasm of unrest in a country that is facing an economic crisis, with record inflation, anaemic growth and delayed IMF funding.

Khan, who was expected to address his followers virtually later on Saturday, on Friday welcomed the court’s bail order and said the judiciary was Pakistan’s only protection against the “law of the jungle”.

“I must say I expected this from our judiciary because the only hope now left – the only thin line between a banana republic and a democracy is the judiciary,” he told journalists inside the court premises.

Khan, 70, is a cricket star-turned-politician who was ousted as prime minister in April 2022 in a parliamentary no-confidence vote and who is Pakistan’s most popular leader according to opinion polls.

Many cities in Pakistan saw violent protests following his arrest by the anti-graft agency. Khan denies any wrongdoing.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were inaccessible in Pakistan on Saturday after having been restored late on Friday, Reuters journalists said.

The Ministry of Interior had instructed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to suspend mobile broadband services across the country and blocked access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter on Tuesday night

The services were available again on Friday night but on Saturday were again inaccessible, the journalists said.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Thursday (May 11) declared the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan unlawful, two days after his detention sparked deadly clashes and huge protests nationwide.

Khan was ordered to remain in the bench’s custody under police protection for his own safety until Friday, when he will return to the court where he was detained earlier this week.

“Your arrest was invalid so the whole process needs to be backtracked,” Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial told Khan at a hearing in the capital Islamabad.

Since being ousted from office last April, Khan has waged a tempestuous campaign for snap elections and fired unprecedented criticism at Pakistan’s leaders and powerful military elite, even accusing them of plotting a November assassination attempt which saw him shot in the leg.

Meanwhile he has become tangled in a slew of legal cases – a frequent hazard for opposition figures in Pakistan, where rights groups say courts are used to quash dissent.

The onetime cricket star, who was surrounded by dozens of paramilitary troops on Tuesday and manhandled into custody on graft charges at Islamabad High Court, said he had been “treated like a terrorist”.

Arrests should not take place on court premises, Bandial said on Thursday.

Khan, 70, was ordered back to the same police headquarters where he has been sequestered for the past 48 hours on the condition it should be treated as a “residence”.

“What we propose is that Islamabad police need to provide security, and he (Khan) will provide a list of his immediate family members and lawyers that should meet him at police lines headquarters,” said Bandial, denying Khan’s request to return to his farm house on the outskirts of Islamabad.

“We will arrest him again,” interior minister Rana Sanaullah told Dunya TV, in a stark admission of the grudge between the administration and Khan.

“If he gets bail from the High Court tomorrow, we will wait for the cancellation of bail and arrest him again.”

WASHINGTON: US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi met in Vienna this week, Washington and Beijing announced on Thursday (May 11), as the two powers seek to maintain communication amid soaring tensions, especially over Taiwan.

The two held eight hours of talks stretching over Wednesday and Thursday in the Austrian capital, ending an unofficial pause in high-level contacts since the United States shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon that had travelled across the country in January and February.

Both sides described the previously unannounced meeting as “candid, substantive and constructive”, covering topics including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Taiwan, according to the White House – two of the most sensitive subjects in the frosty relationship between the world’s top two economies.

Washington has repeatedly warned China against offering any military assistance to Russia, and is closely watching its moves over Taiwan – which Beijing claims as its own territory.

The self-ruled island lives under the constant fear of a Chinese invasion, and Beijing has stepped up its rhetoric and military activity around it in recent years.

Wang “comprehensively expounded upon China’s solemn position” on Taiwan, Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua said, adding the two diplomats “agreed to continue to make good use of this strategic channel for communication”.

GETTING PAST BALLOON INCIDENT

The balloon incident, which China labelled an accident but which Washington viewed as an act of espionage, caused Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a long-planned trip to meet his counterpart in Beijing.

Just after the incident, Blinken met with Wang on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, during which he warned China not to repeat such an “irresponsible act”.

Wang in turn said that their countries’ relations had been damaged by how Washington reacted.

But the apparent diplomatic thaw in Vienna is likely to reignite speculation about a rescheduling of Blinken’s trip or potential meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The pair last spoke on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia in November 2022.

Asked about the issue on Wednesday, Biden said there had been progress.

NURSES TEMPTED BY JOB OFFERS

Since the 1950s, money sent home by nurses abroad has been a big earner for the Philippines economy. At the end of 2021, around a third of the more than 900,000 registered nurses in the Philippines were working abroad, according to the advocacy group Filipino Nurses United.

Remittances from nurses bring in around US$8 billion to the economy every year, about 25 per cent of all remittances, which together account for some 9 per cent of gross domestic product.

At the end of 2022, some 170,000 nurses were working in private and public health facilities in the country, while more than 290,000 licensed nurses had left for other careers, the Health Ministry said.

Despite domestic shortages, the Philippines is not included in the WHO’s list of countries with a shortage of healthcare workers. Foreign employers are discouraged from recruiting nurses from nations on the list.

Jocelyn Andamo, secretary-general of Filipino Nurses United, said that recruitment practices of importing countries had become more creative after the pandemic.

She said German recruiters had proposed sponsoring students before they had qualified as nurses, and relocating them and their families.

“Who would say no to that kind of offer?” Andamo asked.

The German ambassador to the Philippines has defended her country’s programme to recruit nurses abroad, calling it a “great success”. Germany’s development agency says the programme “takes into consideration those countries which have a surplus of well-trained nurses”.

Howard Catton, chief executive officer of the International Council of Nurses, a global federation of nurses’ associations, was alarmed that even health officials in the Philippines are now “expressing concern about shortages at home”.

India and the Philippines are the top two sources of foreign nurses in Britain, which is seeking to fill staff shortages in its National Health Service.

“A lot of countries that the UK has looked to recruit from already have worse shortages, and that means that when they lose nurses, it really can have a detrimental impact on the ability of those countries to provide healthcare to their own people,” said Catton.

Even when a government-to-government agreement allows active recruitment from certain countries, Catton said “that doesn’t automatically mean that it compensates the source country for the loss that they experienced”.

Jean Franco is a political science professor at the University of the Philippines who has studied nurse migration in Asia. She said inter-governmental agreements could be useful in setting ethical recruitment standards.

However, she believes most of them “are just really focusing on facilitating recruitment” and often lack provisions on reducing the impact of the brain drain in the Philippines.

“Is the government really monitoring these bilateral agreements? Perhaps we need to enhance them with greater transparency and cooperation with Filipino nurses’ unions and migrant groups to ensure that their concerns are being addressed,” she said.

“Because he’s the leader of the government, any success that belongs to the government belongs to General Prayut,” he said.
 
“But the vote is deciding whether you are happy with the success of the government or not. I think it is very simple. For us, we are basically building on the success of this government, with the addition of the new force that comes with the United Thai Nation Party.”

REACHING THE EIGHT-YEAR TERM LIMIT

But there is another hurdle, as General Prayut will reach his eight-year term limit in 2025, or halfway in a possible second term if elected.

SITTWE: Thousands fled Myanmar’s west coast and officials in neighbouring Bangladesh raced to evacuate Rohingya refugees on Saturday (May 13) as the most powerful cyclone in the region for over a decade churned across the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Mocha was packing winds of up to 220 km/hr, according to India’s meteorological office, equivalent to a category four hurricane.

It is expected to weaken before making landfall on Sunday morning between Cox’s Bazar, where nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in camps largely made up of flimsy shelters, and Sittwe on Myanmar’s western Rakhine coast.

On Saturday Sittwe residents piled possessions and pets into cars, trucks and tuk-tuks and headed for higher ground, according to AFP reporters.

“We have our grandma in our family and we have to take care of her,” Khine Min told AFP from a truck packed with his relatives on a road out of the state capital.

“There is only one man left in Sittwe to take care of our homes.”

Shops and markets in the town of about 150,000 people were shuttered, with many locals sheltering in monasteries.

Kyaw Tin, 40, said he could not leave the area as his son was in a local hospital.

“I hope this cyclone won’t come to our state. But if this fate happens we can’t ignore it,” he said.

“I’m worried that this cyclone will affect our state just like Nargis did,” he added, referring to a 2008 storm that killed more than 130,000 people in southern Myanmar.

Myanmar’s junta authorities were supervising evacuations from villages along the Rakhine coast, state media reported Friday.

Myanmar Airways International said all its flights to Rakhine state had been suspended until Monday.

PANIC

In neighbouring Bangladesh, officials moved to evacuate Rohingya refugees from “risky areas” to community centres, while hundreds of people fled a top resort island.

“Cyclone Mocha is the most powerful storm since Cyclone Sidr,” Azizur Rahman, the head of Bangladesh’s Meteorological Department, told AFP.

That cyclone hit Bangladesh’s southern coast in November 2007, killing more than 3,000 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.

Bangladeshi authorities have banned the Rohingya from constructing permanent concrete homes, fearing it may incentivise them to settle permanently rather than return to Myanmar, which they fled five years ago.

“We live in houses made of tarpaulin and bamboo,” said refugee Enam Ahmed, who resides at the Nayapara camp near the border town of Teknaf.

“We are scared. We don’t know where we will be sheltered. We are in a panic.”

Forecasters expect the cyclone to bring a deluge of rain, which can trigger landslides. Most of the camps are built on hillsides, and landslips are a regular phenomenon in the region.

Mocha is also predicted to unleash a storm surge up to four metres high, which could inundate low-lying coastal and riverine villages.

Officials said thousands of volunteers were evacuating Rohingyas from “risky areas” to more solid structures such as schools.

But Bangladesh’s deputy refugee commissioner Shamsud Douza told AFP: “All the Rohingyas in the camps are at risk.”

Panic has also gripped about 8,000 people in Bangladesh’s southernmost island of Saint Martin’s, with the tiny coral outcrop – one of the country’s top resort districts – right in the storm’s path.

Resident Dilara Begum travelled to Teknaf to wait out the storm.

“Many have also left,” she said. “It is an island in the middle of the sea. We have been living in fear over the past few days.”

Officials said around 1,000 Saint Martin’s islanders had done the same.

Operations were suspended at Bangladesh’s largest seaport, Chittagong, with boat transport and fishing also halted.

The polls suggest that their ballots could end nearly a decade of governments either led or backed by a military and conservative forces.

On the back of a bright red car, Paetongtarn Shinawatra and Srettha Thavisin – two prime ministerial candidates for Pheu Thai – waved to onlookers.

“I would like to ask first time voters to choose Pheu Thai,” Paetongtarn told reporters as she stepped off the vehicle. “We have a 20 year history and we have had success.”

Pheu Thai, which is leading opinion polls, is backed by the billionaire Shinawatra family, whose parties have won elections since 2001 on populist platforms. Its governments have been ousted through military coups or judicial rulings. 

Another opposition party, the youth-driven and progressive Move Forward, is seeing a late boost in popularity.

“Sleep early tonight and wake up early to vote for Move Forward,” its prime ministerial pick Pita Limjaroenrat said through a loudspeaker from a truck. 

Across town, a truck carrying members of Prayuth’s United Thai Nation party stopped occasionally as supporters took selfies and gave flowers.

This type of spending is of concern, according to Wannaphong from Ramkhamhaeng University. The cost of the state welfare program could fund an entire national semiconductor industry, he argued.

“The current government has paid about 20 per cent of the population for about five years. And there’s no evidence so far that this policy works, but they’re going to continue it,” he told CNA.

“If you look at the broad theme of the policy, they’re going to deal with the ageing society, the poor and increase the welfare state. So overall, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are alternative policies that are more creative and can have more potential for jobs and innovation.

“Thailand is a middle-income country and we cannot spend all our money on the cash handouts,” he said.

The details and costings of many of the policies are scarce. They may also be impossible to deliver given Thailand’s budget restraints, the economists agreed.

At the same time, they said that the maturity of Thailand’s democracy has taken a hit following a series of military coups in recent decades. It means the consolidation of power is of greater importance than the contest of big ideas.

Wannaphong said that promoting policies that attempt to make structural economic reforms on a wide scale over an extended period of time, while potentially more productive, are more difficult to sell in a crowded election race. 

Those might include promoting the national business environment, open trade policies and boosting critical industries like manufacturing and agriculture.

“Those policies are not attractive to people. Politics is politics. I mean, when it comes to elections, they want to win … more than the intention to really reform the country,” Wannaphong said.

“As populism is on the rise in Thailand, I’m not surprised when I see this,” he said. “(But) it doesn’t mean that they cannot come back to fix the core structure of the economy after the election.”

Additional reporting by Jarupat Buranastidporn.

But so was a model Pakistan Air Force jet, army installations in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and even the house of the senior military officer in Lahore once owned by Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. There’s no doubt in the protestors’ minds of who is to blame for Khan’s arrest: Pakistan’s military, which has run the country openly and from the shadows for most of its independent history.

We don’t know the truth of the many corruption allegations against Khan. The one he was arrested for involves Pakistan’s largest construction magnate, who was supposed to hand over £190 million (US$238 million) to the treasury, but was allowed to use it to pay down his tax debt instead. The government has accused Khan of receiving “donations” for one of his university projects as a payoff.

FROM BEING THE ARMY’S CHOICE TO ITS BANE

Unfortunately, however, the facts of this or other cases don’t matter. Khan’s supporters will argue that his troubles are all because the military wants him out. And that is undeniably true. It’s equally undeniable, however, that the military wanted him in first. 

Khan’s two decades in the political wilderness only ended when the army put its massive thumb on the electoral scales in 2018, jailing and intimidating Khan’s opponents and ushering him into the prime minister’s office.

That it’s the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) being used against Khan is particularly telling, since it was originally set up by a former military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, to “put the fear of God” into Pakistan’s political elite. And it was, most recently, used to go after the military’s previous public enemy number one, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, as well as his brother, the current PM.

The military succeeded in pushing Nawaz Sharif out of politics to get Khan in; and now they have made peace with his brother, in order to push Khan out. They have used the NAB, the media, and even judges to keep Pakistan’s politicians under control.

STOCKHOLM: European Union ministers on Friday (May 12) backed reducing the bloc’s economic dependence on China but will now have to figure out how to make that a reality, foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.

Borrell said foreign ministers gave broad backing to a plan to adjust policy on China to place greater emphasis on its role as a political rival, while continuing also to see Beijing both as a partner on global issues and an economic competitor.

“Colleagues welcomed the paper that we presented. They agree on the basic lines of this re-calibration of our strategy on China,” Borrell told reporters after their meeting in Stockholm.

“When a dependency is too big, it’s a risk,” he declared.

Borrell said the EU had to learn from the “strategic mistake” it made in the years before Moscow’s war in Ukraine of becoming too dependent on Russian gas.

He said the EU today was even more dependent on China for key technologies such as solar panels and for critical materials than it had been on Russian energy.

“De-risking is just a word. But behind this word, there is a lot of work that will take time, to review all our economic relations with China,” he said.

Borrell stressed the aim was not to “de-couple” the European and Chinese economies but to rebalance the relationship.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis warned that even if the EU did not want to de-couple from China economically, it needed to be prepared for such a scenario.

“Somebody has to devise a possibility that a de-coupling might happen – not because we wished it, like with Russia, not because we willed it but because the situation, for example in the Taiwan Strait, has been changed by force,” he said.