The Washington Post - 19.03.2020

A16 eZ re THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAy, MARCH 19 , 2020

The World

ISRAEL

Watchdog: Settlement

activity kept rapid pace

I sraeli settlement activity in
the West Bank surged ahead in
2019, a watchdog group said in a
report Tuesday, maintaining a
rapid pace that has drawn
strength from the friendly
policies of the Trump
administration.
Peace Now, a monitoring
group that opposes the
settlements, said Israel’s average
annual construction rate has
risen 25 percent since President
Trump took office in 2017.
Perhaps more significantly,
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government last
year approved plans to build
thousands of new homes, laying
the groundwork for a sharp
spike in settlement construction
in the coming years. That
included an explosion in plans
for new settlement projects
approved early this year.
Most of the world considers
the West Bank, captured by
Israel in the 1967 Middle East
war, to be occupied territory and
Israeli settlements to be illegal.
In a break from his
Republican and Democratic
predecessors, who deemed the
settlements an impediment to
peace, Trump has taken a much
softer line. His administration
declared last year that it did not
consider the settlements illegal
under international law. Then,
in January, he unveiled a Middle
East peace plan that envisions
placing large parts of the West

Bank, including all of the

settlements, under permanent

Israeli control.

The Palestinians, with wide

international backing, seek all of

the West Bank and East

Jerusalem, also captured in 1967,

as part of a future independent

state.

According to Peace Now

figures, Israel began

construction on 1,917 new homes

in the West Bank last year. That

marked a slight dip from 2,

construction starts in 2018. But

overall, Israel has begun

construction on an average of

2,267 homes per year since

Trump took office, compared

with an annual average of 1,

units during the Obama

administration.

— Associated Press

GREECE

Clashes on border as

migrants try to enter

Clashes erupted on Greece’s

border with Turkey before dawn

Wednesday, after about 500

migrants attempted to break

down a border fence and enter

Greece.

Greek police said they used

tear gas to respond to the push

south of the Kastanies border

crossing. They said Turkish

authorities also fired tear gas at

the Greek border. The clashes

lasted about two hours.

An estimated 2,000 migrants

are still camped out on the

Greek-Turkish border, weeks

after Turkey declared its

borders to Europe open and

encouraged migrants and

refugees living in the country to

try crossing into Greece, a

member of the European Union.

Te ns of thousands of people

headed to the frontier despite

Greece’s insistence that its

eastern border, which is also the

E.U.’s external border, was shut.

The move came after months of

threats by Turkish President

Recep Ta yyip Erdogan that he

would allow millions of

refugees into Europe unless the

E.U. provided more support for

refugee care in Turkey.

The E.U. says it is adhering to

a 2016 deal with Turkey under

which it provides billions of

euros in funding in return for

Turkey caring for more than

3.5 million refugees from

neighboring Syria.

The violence on the border

came hours after Erdogan held

a video conference with the

leaders of France, Germany and

Britain on the migrant crisis.

— Associated Press

4 soldiers, 7 militants killed in

shootout in Pakistan: Pakistani

security forces raided a militant

hideout in a former Taliban

stronghold bordering

Afghanistan, triggering a

shootout that killed four soldiers

and seven militants, the military

said. A member of the raiding

team was wounded in the

exchange of fire in a district in

North Waziristan, in Khyber

Pakhtunkhwa province, the

military said. Security forces

later seized a cache of weapons

and guns, it said. Police and

intelligence officials said the

suspects belonged to a Pakistani

militant group and were

planning to carry out attacks.

Suspected militant leader on

trial in Indonesia: The

suspected leader of Indonesia’s

al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah

Islamiyah network has gone on

trial on charges of terrorism that

could result in a death sentence.

Prosecutors told the East

Jakarta District Court that Para

Wijayanto became leader of the

banned organization in 2009.

The group was blamed for the

2002 Bali bombings, which

killed 202 people, mostly foreign

tourists. Wijayanto and his wife

were arrested in July by

counterterrorism police in the

Jakarta satellite city of Bekasi.

— From news services

DIGEST

ABdUllAH rAsHId/reUTers

Volunteers search for people needing help in a flooded area of the Iraqi city of Mosul. Heavy rains fell

across northern Iraq on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the Iraqi Kurdish news outlet Rudaw. It said

five women in a family of displaced people were reported killed in Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of

Baghdad, when their house collapsed. Flooding also damaged homes in Dahuk, in the Kurdistan region.

BY EMILY RAUHALA

The world is gripped by a
health crisis. The global economy
is on the brink. And the relation-
ship between Beijing and Wash-
ington has rarely looked worse.
Amid all this, China an-
nounced Tuesday that it will
expel about a dozen American
journalists working for The
Washington Post, the New York
Times and the Wall Street Jour-
nal in the country and force these
outlets and two others to register
as “foreign missions.”
China’s move will almost cer-
tainly elicit a response from the
United States, in a cycle of escala-
tion at a particularly delicate
moment. So why, many wonder,
would China do this now?
One answer: to show it can.
China cast Tuesday’s move as a
matter of reciprocity: The Trump
administration implemented
new rules for Chinese state
m edia operating in the United
States, so China, its Ministry of
Foreign A ffairs said, would do the
same.
But the scope of Beijing’s re-
sponse was “unprecedented and
extraordinary,” said Jude Blanch-
ette, head of China studies at the
Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies in Washington.
“The message is: We won’t play
by the old rules.”
For China, that messaging
makes sense.
The coronavirus outbreak,
which originated in the Chinese
city of Wuhan, has shaken China
and rattled its leadership. In
recent weeks, officials have
waged a campaign to erase a
deadly coverup and recast the
crisis as a victory for the Chinese
Communist Party and President
Xi Jinping.
In this alternative version of
history, being written in real
time, the party moved quickly
and decisively, marshaling tech-
nical prowess to vanquish the
virus and diplomatic might to
keep foreign critics in line.
Silencing and discrediting re-
porters is part of this.
In January, after a mysterious
virus swept across the Chinese
heartland, reporters traveled to
Hubei province to cover the story,
filing bracing reports from the
ground.
As the situation worsened, the
authorities censored some path-
breaking Chinese reporting and
tried to discount foreign cover-
age as an “anti-China” plot.
This sensitivity to foreign cov-
erage is not new. Over the past
decade, Beijing has delayed ap-
proving or revoked press creden-
tials to punish news outlets for
coverage it does not like.
But the pace of these revoca-
tions seems to be quickening,
according to the Foreign Corre-
spondents’ Club of China, partic-
ularly in the aftermath of the

outbreak in Wuhan.

“People in the Chinese govern-

ment have come to believe that

the Western media deliberately

tried to undermine this narrative

of a great Chinese victory in

Wuhan,” said Victor Shih, an

associate professor at the Univer-

sity of California at San Diego’s

School of Global Policy and Strat-

egy. “This is a product of its own

propaganda.”

The Chinese Ministry of For-

eign Affairs i s also going on the

offensive. A spokesman for the

department went so far as to float

a conspiracy theory that the U.S.

military brought the novel coro-

navirus to Wuhan.

“This is a diversionary war,”

said Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st

Century China Center at UC-San

Diego. “You stimulate an interna-

tional conflict to divert t he public

from your domestic failures.”

It is also part of a broader

conflict between two superpow-

ers that have clashed on trade

and technology.

China has targeted U.S. jour-

nalists for many years. Past U.S.

administrations have been wary

of responding in kind, fearful

that taking aim at Chinese state

media workers would send the

wrong message on press freedom

or put American journalists in

China at risk.

The changed in February,

when the Trump administration

decided to designate the U.S.

operations of five Chinese state

media outlets as “foreign mis-

sions,” not newsrooms.

The next day, China hit back,

announcing that it would expel

three Wall Street Journal report-

ers — two American, one Austra-

lian — over an Opinion-section

headline t hat referred to China as

“the sick man of Asia.”

In early March, the Trump

administration limited to 100 the

number of Chinese nationals

who can work in the United

States for the five state-

controlled Chinese news organi-

zations, effectively forcing 60

Chinese citizens to leave the

country.

“We are in a downward spiral

with two sides that are not look-

ing for an off-ramp,” Blanchette

said.

“The U.S. will respond, Beijing

will respond, and then the U.S.

will respond to that,” he contin-

ued.

“Right now the politics are

good for both administrations to

look tough,” he said.

Still, Tuesday’s expulsions

caught the United States by sur-

prise, according to a senior State

Department official who spoke to

reporters on the condition of

anonymity, under customary

protocol, on Wednesday.

The official implied t hat Wash-

ington would respond but did not

specify how or when. “We have a

lot of other things we can do,” the

official said.

Asked about the expulsions

during the daily White House

coronavirus task force briefing,

President Trump told reporters

Wednesday that he was “not hap-

py” to see American journalists

banished from China, even if he

does not think much of the affect-

ed newspapers.

“I have my own disputes with

all three of those media groups. I

think you know that very well,”

he said. “But I don’t like seeing

that at all.”

[email protected]

Carol morello and felicia sonmez

contributed to this report.

China doubles down in m edia war with U.S.

For Beijing, expelling reporters for The Post and other outlets this week was a matter not only of reciprocity but of showing its clout

Andy Wong/AssoCIATed Press

greg BAKer/AgenCe frAnCe-Presse/geTTy ImAges

TOP: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing. ABOVE:

Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang at a briefing in Beijing on

Wednesday. China is going on the offensive as it seeks to change

the narrative surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.