Dubai princess, who tried to flee UAE, believed to be dead // Indian Action Under the Scanner as UN Rapporteur Probes Fate of Dubai Princess (Beti Bachao government in action)

By Dilip -
NB: Another case of murderous misogyny and organised crime by the rulers of the Arabian peninsula. And the Indian government shamefully assisted the bloodstained ruler of Dubai. 'Atithi Devo Bhava' applies only to robber barons with lots of cash, apparently. DS

Watch Latifa's video of her doomed attempt to escape:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN7OEFyNUkQ

The ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is under global scrutiny for alleged forceful confinement and perhaps even murder of his daughter Latifa. Reports said the princess was captured in a highly secretive operation last March, some 50 km away from the coast of Goa from a US flag carrier and forcibly taken back to the UAE.  She was said to be running away from oppressive confinement with her friend, an alleged French-born US spy.

Since then, there has been no news of the princess, and many fear that she may have been murdered. Before her escape attempt, she recorded a video in which she said that she was fleeing the Emirates due to restrictions imposed by her family.  Latifa, in her video, said she previously tried to flee UAE in 2002 when she was 16 but was captured at the border. She spent over three years in jail where she said she was beaten and tortured. "If you are watching this video then either I am dead or in a very very bad situation," she declared in the video. "I need to make this video in case I don't make it."

After plotting her escape for over seven years, she again fled the country in February 2018 with the help of Finnish national Tiina Jauhiainen and French-born US spy Herve Jaubert.  The UAE government's stand is that Herve Jaubert, the US spy, had conspired against the royal family using the Princess as leverage. Haigh said a similar rumour had been floated about him, accusing him of being a Qatari spy. He fears this episode will end up like the Khashoggi tragedy.
In February 2018, she escaped Dubai to Oman in a car then boarded a dinghy to international waters. She boarded the US flag carrier yacht anchored 30 miles off the coast of Oman. "The plan was to sail to India and fly from there to the USA, where she was planning to claim political asylum," Jauhiainen said. However, she was intercepted by the Indian coast guard off the Goa coast and Jauhiainen has not heard from her since March 4.  The UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other groups have been demanding information from the UAE about her whereabouts for over nine months. Two UN bodies have written to India about the secret operation conducted in international waters. 
https://www.dnaindia.com/world/photo-gallery-dubai-princess-who-tried-to-flee-uae-believed-to-be-dead-what-we-know-so-far-2696699

Indian Action Under the Scanner as UN Rapporteur Probes Fate of Dubai Princess
The enforced disappearance and possible execution of Dubai princess Sheikha Latifa after the boat she was travelling in near Goa was allegedly boarded by the Indian coast guard earlier this year has been referred to the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, a lawyer representing the missing princess said.

Latifa, daughter of Dubai ruler and UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, went missing on March 5, 2018, some 50 km off the coast of Goa, along with French-US national Hervé Jean Pierre Jaubert, and a third person, Tiina Jauhiainen, a long-time friend of Latifa. The three  were on a US-flagged yacht, Nostromo, which had set sail from Oman and was headed to Goa. Latifa was fleeing her father and trying to migrate to the United States via India. But the plan was reportedly put to an end by Indian forces acting upon a request from the UAE. The operation is said to have been cleared at the highest level of the Indian government.

UN special rapporteur: According to Toby Cadman from Guernica 37, the London-based law firm representing the princess and her two friends, the UAE and India have not responded so far to initial queries put to them by the UN. “The matter has now been referred to the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions as we have received reports that she may not be alive,” Cadman wrote in an email to The Wire. “This is because, court of the ruler of Dubai issued a statement a few days ago claiming Latifa was well and with her family. This is despite no one having seen her for nine months,” Cadman added.


Arab women before and after Islam

It was Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers that invoked the special procedures of the OHCHR, specifically the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the UN special rapporteur on torture, inhumane and degrading treatment requesting their urgent and immediate intervention in Latifa’s disappearance.

Jauhiainen, a Finnish national, had accompanied Latifa aboard Jaubert’s yacht. In a statement to Detained in Dubai, an international NGO, she recounted her role in Latifa’s escape and the terrifying events that followed... read more:
https://thewire.in/diplomacy/indian-action-under-the-scanner-as-un-special-rapporteur-probes-fate-of-dubai-princess

see also
The religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd
Arab women before and after Islam
More posts on Khashoggi's murder
More posts on Saudi Arabia


Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more