The Research Forum: Ukraine ultra-nationalist leader rejects Minsk peace deal, vows 'to continue war'.

Saturday, 14 February 2015

Ukraine ultra-nationalist leader rejects Minsk peace deal, vows 'to continue war'.

Ukraine’s Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh said his radical movement rejects the Minsk peace deal and that their paramilitary units in eastern Ukraine will continue “active fighting" according to their "own plans."

The notorious ultranationalist leader published a statement on his Facebook page Friday, saying that his radical Right Sector movement doesn’t recognize the peace deal, signed by the so-called 'contact group' on Thursday and agreed upon by Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia after epic 16-hour talks.

Yarosh claimed that any agreement with the eastern militia, whom he calls “terrorists,” has no legal force.

In his statement, Yarosh claimed that that the Minsk deal is contrary to Ukraine’s constitution, so Ukrainian citizens are not obliged to abide by it. Thus if the army receives orders to cease military activity and withdraw heavy weaponry from the eastern regions, the Right Sector paramilitaries, who are also fighting there “reserve the right” to continue the war, he said.

The Right Sector paramilitary organization continues to deploy its combat and reserve units, to train and logistically support personnel, while coordinating its activities with the military command of the Ukrainian army, paramilitary units of the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry, he said.

The breakthrough Minsk agreement was reached on Thursday following marathon overnight negotiations between Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia, and offer hope the fighting in Eastern Ukraine may come to an end. The talks were part of a Franco-German initiative. President Francois Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Kiev and Moscow before meeting the Russian and Ukrainian leaders at the negotiating table in Minsk.

Bluntly rejecting the German and French initiative, Yarosh said President Petro Poroshenko should have turned to the US or UK which “observe a consistent anti-Kremlin policy.”

“This could be devastating for the whole agreement,” Lode Vanoost, a former OSCE security consultant, told RT. “It could destroy it before it even starts. Now the fact that they announced it already one day ahead could of course mean that they sort of tried to force some kind of provocation so that the other side would react giving them an excuse to go on. But nevertheless this is indeed a very dangerous situation, yes.”

In March 2014, Yarosh appealed to Doku Umarov, Moscow's most wanted terrorist before he was reported dead, asking him “to take a chance and win over Russia.” He also later threatened to destroy Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory calling Moscow “an enemy.”

The Russian Investigative Committee started criminal cases against several members of the radical Ukrainian groups over charges of fighting against the Russian military in the Chechen wars of the 1990s. Right Sector’s Dmitry Yarosh also faced a separate criminal case over public calls for extremist activities. Moscow charged Yarosh in absentia, demanding his arrest.

In July last year the Interpol put Right Sector leader Yarosh on its wanted list. This January, Russia’s Supreme Court banned the activitiesof the Right Sector within the country.

The radical movement was formed as a coalition of nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations during the Maidan protests in Kiev at the end of 2013.While wearing Nazi insignia, Right Sector fighters used clubs, petrol bombs and firearms against Ukrainian police during the EuroMaidan protests.

Last year, Kiev organized the National Guard force comprising former and current Ukrainian troops and volunteers from EuroMaidan “self-defense” squads. The National Guard was enabled to carry out the functions of any law enforcement agency by a decree signed by then-acting President Aleksandr Turchinov.

However Yarosh denies any of his fighters joined the National Guard. He believes his own units are better organized.

A number of volunteer pro-government battalions were also organized in Kiev – among them Aidar, Azov and Donbass. Human rights group Amnesty International reported in September that Aidar members operating in the north of the Lugansk Region “have been involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion and possible executions.” Troops from the Ukrainian Azov and Donbass battalions were reportedly seen wearing Nazi paraphernalia such as swastikas and SS badges.

In March 2014, the extremist Right Sector decided to become a political party, nominating Yarosh for president. The same month over 1,500 nationalists from Right Sector circled the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev, threatening to storm it and capture Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

In May 2014, Right Sector radicals reportedly descended on Odessa, where a standoff with anti-Kiev demonstrators resulted in dozens of people being shot, burned alive and even butchered with axes in the city’s Trade Unions House massacre.

Despite his notoriety, Yarosh was elected to be a member of the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovnaya Rada) to head the Right Sector political party. The radical movement has refused to acknowledge the authority of the Kiev government and even threatened its top figures. In September 2014, Yarosh said he could oust Poroshenko “like Yanukovich” while Right Sector radicals staged a violent rally in front of the presidential HQ in Kiev.

In January, Poroshenko’s aide told national TV that Right Sector paramilitary units had refused to come under the command of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Yury Biryukov said that he “personally proposed a full legal clearance scheme to Right Sector,” but they “turned down this service,” expressing a wish to remain autonomous and report to nobody.

Meanwhile, the US military has recently announced it would deploy soldiers to Ukraine this spring to train the country’s National Guard.

Published time: February 13, 2015 15:45 RT

No comments:

About the Forum

The Forum initially started its work in December 1997 with the intention of promoting research culture and activities among doctoral candidates in one of the British universities in London. The Research Forum convened 8 sessions a year on humanities-related topics between 1997 and 2013.

The Forum now focuses on the production of self-taught courses, articles and commentary on some aspects of the news for students as well as the general public. The last meeting of the Forum took place in July 2015.

Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī and in the West simply as Rumi, was born on September 30, 1207 C. E. in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi descended from a long line of Islamic jurists, theologians, and mystics, including his father, who was known by followers of Rumi as “Sultan of the Scholars.” When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies. They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life.

As a teenager, Rumi was recognized as a great spirit by the poet and teacher Fariduddin Attar, who gave him a copy of his own Ilahinama (The Book of God). When his father died in 1231, Rumi became head of the madrasah, or spiritual learning community. The school reportedly had over ten thousand students, including masons, grocers, weavers, hatmakers, carpenters, tailors, and bookbinders.

Rumi’s oldest son, Sultan Velad, managed to save 147 of Rumi’s intimate letters, which provide insights about the poet and how he lived. Rumi often involved himself in the lives of his community members, solving disputes and facilitating loans between nobles and students. The letters are described as having lines of poetry scattered throughout.

In 1244, Rumi met Shams Tabriz, a dervish “God-man” who had taken a vow of poverty. Their meeting is considered a central event in Rumi’s life. Though accounts of their meeting differ, one story claims that Rumi was teaching by a fountain, and Shams walked up through the crowd of students and pushed Rumi’s books into the water, including his father’s spiritual diary. “You must now live what you have been reading about," Shams told Rumi. Rumi believed both his real life and his real poetry began when he met Shams. “What I had thought of before as God," Rumi said, “I met today in a human being.”

Shams and Rumi were close friends for about four years. Over the course of that time, Shams was repeatedly driven away by Rumi’s jealous disciples, including one of Rumi’s sons, Ala al-Din. In December of 1248, Shams again disappeared; it is believed that he was either driven away or killed. Rumi left the madrasah in search of his friend, travelling to Damascus and elsewhere. Eventually, Rumi made peace with his loss, returning to his home believing Shams to be a part of him: “His essence speaks through me.”

Rumi’s mourning for the loss of his friend led to the outpouring of more than 40,000 lyric verses, including odes, eulogies, quatrains, and other styles of Eastern-Islamic poetry. The resulting collection, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi or The Works of Shams Tabriz, is considered one of Rumi’s masterpieces and one of the greatest works of Persian literature.

In his introduction to his translation of Rumi’s The Shams, Coleman Barks has written: “Rumi is one of the great souls, and one of the great spiritual teachers. He shows us our glory. He wants us to be more alive, to wake up... He wants us to see our beauty, in the mirror and in each other.”

For the last twelve years of his life, beginning in 1262, Rumi dictated a single, six-volume poem to his scribe, Husam Chelebi. The resulting masterwork, the Masnavi-ye Ma’navi(Spiritual Verses), consists of sixty-four thousand lines, and is considered Rumi’s most personal work of spiritual teaching. Rumi described the Masnavi as “the roots of the roots of the roots of the (Islamic) Religion," and the text has come to be regarded by some Sufis as the Persian-language Koran.

In his introduction to an English edition of Spiritual Verses, translator Alan Williams wrote: “Rumi is both a poet and a mystic, but he is a teacher first, trying to communicate what he knows to his audience. Like all good teachers, he trusts that ultimately, when the means to go any further fail him and his voice falls silent, his students will have learnt to understand on their own.”

Rumi fell ill and died on December 17, 1273 C. E., in Konya, Turkey. His remains were interred adjacent to his father’s, and the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb) was erected above their final resting place. Now the Mevlâna museum, the site includes a mosque, dance hall, and dervish living quarters. Thousands of visitors, of all faiths, visit his tomb each month, honoring the poet of legendary spiritual understanding.

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jalal-al-din-rumi

Your Life Discourse!

It is soooo good when you realize that your life and every road you have taken made and makes sense... Even when you feel that the world will not applaud you for what you are doing, you find you have to do it yourself and clap your own hands. Later everything falls into place. In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the self-discourse is constructed along history. It is a fact that we describe our past like a coherent story. Even though we know that the discourse of our life is a construction, our life is actually built by roads and paths we accept, that come and go, and later make all sense because they are part of our own being. Once in a while we feel that our past is actually part of us.

Marcia Neme Buzalaf
marciabuzalaf@gmail.com.

Scholarship and Academia

Benedit Spinoza is one of the original thinkers among Western philosophers. When he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University at age of 31, he turned it down arguing that he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophising “in accordance with his own mind”. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes and telescopes – at the time a new profession.

Being a great philosopher and academic is a rare development: Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Mill or Nietzsche did not teach philosophy. The exceptions are Kant and Hegel.

Nothing much has changed since: academia is still not the right place for real scholars today. Mottos such as ‘publish or perish’ have mainly resulted in the production of shallow, regurgitated or ego-boosting publications. Universities are also no different from other corporate capitalist entities that seek to maximize their profit at the cost of quality service. They neither provide the scholar nor the student with a conducive environment for their development or self-fulfilment.

Thoughtful Sentences

Integrity: When the thoughts we think are the same as the words we speak, others will feel our integrity.

Enthusiasm: Those who are fired with an enthusiastic idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new worlds open for them. As long as enthusiasm holds out, so will new opportunities.

No Task Too Difficult: If you do everything with the feeling of happiness, there will be no task too difficult to perform.

A Long And Healthy Life: There are three ingredients for a long and healthy life: live with attention but without worry, use time in a worthwhile way, keep your thoughts pure, positive and filled with strength.

Saturday, 14 February 2015

Ukraine ultra-nationalist leader rejects Minsk peace deal, vows 'to continue war'.

No comments:

Post a Comment