The New York Times - USA (2020-08-03)

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONALMONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020 N A

JALALABAD, Afghanistan —
Militants attacked a major prison
in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday,
detonating a car bomb and wag-
ing a gun battle against guards for
hours, as dozens of inmates man-
aged to escape, Afghan officials
said.
The attack in the city of Ja-
lalabad came at a time when the
issue of releasing insurgent fight-
ers from prison has moved to the
forefront of efforts to strike a
peace deal and end Afghanistan’s
long war.
Disagreement over the last
batch of a prisoner release has de-
layed the next steps of an agree-
ment reached in February be-
tween the United States and the
Taliban, and the start of direct
talks between the Taliban and the
Afghan government.

But other militant groups that are also fighting the government were not party to that agreement, and one of those, the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the attack on Sunday through its Amaq news agency. Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said the group was not behind the assault on the prison, which holds about 1,500 inmates. Whoever the attackers were, they could put a strain on a fragile peace process that has broken down several times, often with re- newed violence. The attack came during the fi- nal hours of a three-day cease-fire between the Taliban and the Af- ghan government for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. Afghan officials said that violence during the cease-fire had dropped significantly, with fewer than a dozen in- cidents reported over the first two days. At least two people were killed and 24 others wounded in the prison attack, according to Attaullah

Khogyani, a spokesman for the government of Nangarhar Prov- ince, and the gunfight was still un- derway Sunday night. Insurgents have repeatedly tried to stage prison breaks to free their compatriots during the war,

sometimes successfully. Nangarhar has been a strong- hold of the Islamic State in Af- ghanistan. Intense operations by Afghan forces, often backed by American air power, significantly shrank the group’s presence. Af-

ghan officials said Saturday that they had killed a senior leader of the group in the province. On Sunday, militants exploded a car bomb at the prison entrance in Jalalabad before engaging in a gunfight with guards. One official said militants were holed up in towers around the prison, while fighting was reported inside. The United States-Taliban deal called for the Afghan government to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for 1,000 Taliban-held members of the Afghan security forces. The swap was supposed to take place early this year over the course of 10 days, after which the Taliban and the government were expected to sit for direct negotiations. The Afghan government at first resisted the prisoner release, and then gave in to a phased release under much pressure from the Trump administration. More recently, President Ashraf Ghani said he would not release the last 400 of the 5,000 people on a list

provided by the Taliban, as they are accused of serious crimes. While the Taliban have com- pleted the release of the 1,000 prisoners they had committed to, Mr. Ghani has offered a compromise: He is releasing 500 other Taliban members instead of the 400 on the list presented by the insurgents, and he is calling a council of elders from across Afghanistan to con- sult on whether to free the 400 accused of grave crimes as well. The grand consultation, called a Loya Jirga, is expected to happen this month. It was not clear whether Mr. Ghani’s compromise was accept- able to the Taliban to open the way for direct negotiations, expected around Aug. 10.

At Least 2 Die as ISIS Fighters Wage Gun Battle at Afghan Prison, Freeing Dozens

By ZABIHULLAH GHAZI and MUJIB MASHAL

Zabihullah Ghazi reported from
Jalalabad, and Mujib Mashal from
Kabul, Afghanistan.

Caring for a man hurt in a prison raid in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

GHULAMULLAH HABIBI/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

Releasing compatriots

as a Taliban inmate

handover is stalled.

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican
federal authorities captured José
Antonio Yépez, the criminal boss
known as El Marro, on Sunday,
landing a major blow against a
cartel whose struggle for control
helped spur record violence in the
midst of the coronavirus pan-
demic.
After his arrest in an early-
morning raid, low-resolution pho-
tographs of his capture were re-
leased by law enforcement agen-
cies eager to highlight the latest
success in their campaign against
organized crime.
What is less clear is whether
Mr. Yépez’s imprisonment will
make any meaningful difference
in the violence that has subsumed
Mexico — or in the prevalence of
organized crime more broadly.
“This is basically a short-lived
P.R. victory, but it doesn’t provide
a solution,” said Falko Ernst, a
Mexico analyst for the Interna-
tional Crisis Group. “The big
worry is that there is no backing in

terms of a more cohesive security strategy.” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been dogged by criticism that he al- most completely lacks a security strategy. When challenged about rising violence and the government’s response to it, Mr. López Obrador has always said he would take a nonconfrontational ap- proach that focused on the causes of crime: hugs and not bullets, in the president’s words. The strategy, such as it is, is at its core a reaction to the failed strategies of his predecessors. Since 2006, when the Mexican government declared a war on drugs, it has focused on arresting and killing traffickers. And yet in the first months of this year, Mex- ico registered more homicides than at any point in the last two decades. The president, also known by his initials, AMLO, vowed not to conduct arrests as public specta- cles, or otherwise continue on the same path as previous leaders. But the sudden arrest of Mr. Yépez, the leader of the Santa

Rosa de Lima cartel, seems to run contrary to that mantra. “It shows how desperate AMLO is to show he is doing something,” said David Shirk, a professor of political science at the University of San Diego. “The fact is he just did something that he said he would never do. It’s the same old playbook as before.” The Santa Rosa de Lima cartel

began its reign in the state of Gua- najuato, pilfering oil from pipe- lines that crisscross that area of central Mexico and siphoning off amounts estimated at one point to be valued at nearly $2 million a day. As the head of a small start-up cartel, which analysts say was run largely as a family crime group, Mr. Yépez showed uncharacteris-

tic pluck, challenging both the government and much larger and more diversified criminal groups. In emotional videos, Mr. Yépez has often lashed out at his ene- mies and even threatened the president himself if federal troops were not withdrawn from his na- tive state, where they had been sent to fight fuel theft. But the government of Mr. López Obrador, which has placed paramount importance on the oil economy, kept targeting the oil racket. Already this year, the authorities had arrested Mr. Yépez’s mother and sister, prompting ad- ditional emotional videos. The revenue from the oil theft, meanwhile, was too lucrative for other criminal organizations to re- sist — specifically the much larger and more prominent New Genera- tion cartel of Jalisco. The fight between the two groups made Gua- najuato the country’s deadliest state last year, with more than 3,000 killings. This year, it is on track to exceed that figure. “We are talking about a state with 12 homicides a day, and 360 murders in the last month alone,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security

analyst in Mexico City. “That’s 15 percent of the nation’s homicides.” The New Generation cartel also tried to assassinate the head of security in Mexico City in a brazen daytime fusillade in June. Mr. Yépez’s arrest is certain to set off the shifting of key criminal players in the state of Guanajuato, the forging of new alliances and a splintering of groups. Past captures of kingpins have seldom improved the dynamic in Mexico. New players enter, old ones exit, and the same patterns repeat on a loop. Drugs flow north of the border, guns flow south and Mexicans die in the arbitration of who gets to control what. The authorities similarly crowed about the conviction of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, who was sentenced last year to life in prison in the United States. And yet the fight waged by the New Gen- eration cartel for primacy since his departure has left more bodies than ever in its wake. No one knows what will follow this most recent arrest. Analysts are split.

In one possible outcome, in- fighting among the remnants of the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel could lead to a greater fracturing and diffusion — and therefore in- creases — in violence. In another, the New Generation takes over, gains control over the state, and violence drops because it has no rivals. “A reduction in violence there would be a very important achievement for the federal government,” Mr. Guerrero said.

Mexico, Veering From ‘Hugs Not Bullets,’ Captures Boss of Oil-Stealing Cartel

By AZAM AHMED

Natalie Kitroeff and Paulina Ville-
gas contributed reporting.

José Antonio Yépez on Sunday.

GUANAJUATO STATE ATTORNEY’S OFFICE

A government is under

pressure to combat

record violence.

HONG KONG — When Tian
Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong
as demands for free elections
were on the rise, he said he felt
sympathetic toward a society that
seemed to reflect the liberal politi-
cal ideas he had studied as a grad-
uate student in Beijing.
Then, as the calls escalated into
protests across Hong Kong in
2014, he increasingly embraced
Chinese warnings that freedom
could go too far, threatening na-
tional unity. He became an ardent
critic of the demonstrations, and
six years later he is a staunch de-
fender of the broad national secu-
rity law that China has imposed on
the former British colony.
Mr. Tian has joined a tide of Chi-
nese scholars who have turned
against Western-inspired ideas
that once flowed in China’s univer-
sities, instead promoting the
proudly authoritarian worldview
ascendant under Xi Jinping, the
Communist Party leader. This
cadre of Chinese intellectuals
serve as champions, even official
advisers, defending and honing
the party’s hardening policies, in-
cluding the rollout of the security
law in Hong Kong.
“Back when I was weak, I had to
totally play by your rules. Now
I’m strong and have confidence,
so why can’t I lay down my own
rules and values and ideas?” Mr.
Tian, 37, said in an interview, ex-
plaining the prevailing outlook in
China. Witnessing the tumult as a
visiting scholar in Hong Kong in
2014, Mr. Tian said, he “rethought
the relationship between individ-
ual freedom and state authority.”
“Hong Kong is, after all, China’s
Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s up to the
Communist Party to clean up this
mess.”
While China’s Communist Party
has long nurtured legions of aca-
demics to defend its agenda, these
authoritarian thinkers stand out
for their unabashed, often flashily
erudite advocacy of one-party
rule and assertive sovereignty,
and their turn against the liberal
ideas that many of them once em-
braced.
They portray themselves as for-
tifying China for an era of deep-
ening ideological rivalry. They de-
scribe the United States as a dan-
gerous, overreaching shambles,
even more so in the wake of the co-
ronavirus pandemic. They oppose
constitutional fetters on Commu-
nist Party control, arguing that
Western-inspired ideas of the rule
of law are a dangerous mirage
that could hobble the party.
They argue that China must re-
claim its status as a world power,

even as a new kind of benign em- pire displacing the United States. They extol Mr. Xi as a historic leader, guiding China through a momentous transformation. A number of these scholars, sometimes called “statists,” have worked on policy toward Hong Kong, the sole region under Chi- nese rule that has been a stubborn enclave for pro-democracy defi- ance of Beijing. Their proposals have fed into China’s increasingly uncompromising line, including the security law, which has swiftly curbed protests and political de- bate. “We ignore these voices at our own risk,” said Timothy Cheek, a historian at the University of British Columbia who helps run Reading the China Dream, a web- site that translates works by Chi- nese thinkers. “They give voice to a stream of Chinese political thought that is probably more in- fluential than liberal thought.” As well as earnestly citing Mr. Xi’s speeches, these academics draw on ancient Chinese thinkers who counseled stern rulership, along with Western critics of liberal political traditions. Traditional

Marxism is rarely cited; they are proponents of order, not revolu- tion. Many of them make respectful nods in their papers to Carl Schmitt, the German legal theo- rist who supplied rightist leaders in the 1930s and the emerging Nazi regime with arguments for extreme executive power in times of crisis, Ryan Mitchell, an assist- ant professor of law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, docu- mented in a recent paper. “They’ve provided the reason- ing and justification,” Fu Hualing, a professor of law at the Univer- sity of Hong Kong, said of China’s new authoritarian scholars. “In a way, it’s the Carl Schmitt moment here.” China’s ideological landscape was more varied a decade ago, when Mr. Tian was a graduate student at Peking University, a tradi- tionally more liberal campus. Cen- sorship was lighter, and universi- ties tolerated guarded discussion of liberal ideas in classrooms. Many scholars, including Mr. Tian’s dissertation adviser, Zhang Qianfan, argued that Hong Kong, with its robust judicial independ-

ence, could inspire similar steps in mainland China. “I had also been nurtured by liberal scholars,” Mr. Tian said. Such ideas have gone into sharp retreat since Mr. Xi took power in

He began a drive to discredit
ideas like universal human rights,
separation of powers and other
liberal concepts.
Dissenting academics are ma-
ligned in the party-run news me-
dia and risk professional ruin. Xu
Zhangrun, a law professor at Ts-
inghua University in Beijing, was
detained in July and dismissed
from his job after writing a stream
of essays condemning the party’s
direction under Mr. Xi.
The education authorities gen-
erously fund pro-party scholars
for topics such as how to introduce
security laws in Hong Kong. Chi-
nese and foreign foundations that
once supported less orthodox Chi-
nese scholars have retrenched be-
cause of tightening official restric-
tions.
More than fear and career re-
wards have driven this re-
surgence of authoritarian ideas in
China. The global financial crisis
of 2007, and the United States’

floundering response to the coronavirus pandemic, have re- inforced Chinese views that liberal democracies are decaying, while China has prospered, defy- ing predictions of the collapse of one-party rule. “China is actually also following a path that the United States took, seizing opportunities, developing outward, creating a new world,” Mr. Tian said. “There is even a fer- vent hope that we’ll overtake the West in another 30 years.” China’s authoritarian academics have proposed policies to as- similate ethnic minorities thor- oughly. They have defended Mr. Xi’s abolition of a term limit on the presidency, opening the way for him to stay in power indefinitely. They have argued that Chinese- style “rule by law” is inseparable from rule by the Communist Party. And more recently they have served as intellectual war- riors in Beijing’s efforts to subdue protest in Hong Kong. “For them, law becomes a weapon, but it’s law that’s subordi- nated to politics,” said Sebastian Veg, a professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sci- ences in Paris who has studied the rise of China’s statist thinkers. “We’ve seen that at work in China, and now it seems to me we’re see- ing it come to Hong Kong.” For Hong Kong, these scholars have supplied arguments advanc- ing Beijing’s drive for greater central control. Under the legal framework that defined Hong Kong’s semi-auton- omy after its return to China in 1997, many in the region assumed that it would mostly manage its own affairs for decades. Many be- lieved that Hong Kong lawmakers and leaders would be left to de- velop national security legislation, which was required by that framework. But Mr. Xi’s government has pushed back, demanding greater influence. The authoritarian scholars, familiar with both Mr. Xi’s agenda and Hong Kong law, have distilled those demands into elaborate legal arguments. Several Beijing law professors earlier served as advisers to the Chinese government’s office in Hong Kong, including Jiang Shigong and Chen Duanhong, both of Peking University. They declined to be interviewed. “I don’t think they’re necessar- ily setting the party line, but they’re helping to shape it, finding clever ways to put into words and laws what the party is trying to do,” said Mr. Mitchell, of the Chi- nese University of Hong Kong. “This is all happening through legislation, so their ideas matter.” A Chinese government paper in

2014, which Professor Jiang is widely credited with helping write, asserted that Beijing had “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong, dismissing the idea that China should stay hands off. The framework that defined Hong Kong’s status was written in the 1980s, when China was still weak and under the sway of foreign liberal ideas, he later said. “They treat Hong Kong as if it

were part of the West, and they treat the West as if it were the en- tire world.” Professor Jiang recently said of Hong Kong’s protesters. “China’s rise has not, as some imagined, drawn Hong Kong society to trust the central authorities.” After protesters occupied Hong Kong streets in 2014, he and other scholars pressed the case that China had the power to impose national security legislation there, rejecting the idea that such legislation should be left in the hands of the reluctant Hong Kong authorities. “The survival of the state comes first, and constitutional law must serve this fundamental objective,” Professor Chen, the Peking Uni- versity academic, wrote in 2018, citing Mr. Schmitt, the authoritarian German jurist, to make the case for a security law in Hong Kong. “When the state is in dire peril,” Professor Chen wrote, leaders could set aside the usual constitutional norms, “in particular provi- sions for civic rights, and take all necessary measures.” Professor Chen submitted an internal study to the party’s poli- cymakers on introducing security legislation for Hong Kong, according to a Peking University report in 2018, over a year before the party publicly announced plans for such a law. Since China’s legislature passed the security law in late June, he, Mr. Tian and allied Chinese scholars have energetically defended it in dozens of articles, interviews and news conferences. Chinese intellectuals, Mr. Tian suggested, will next confront worsening rela- tions with the United States. “We have to choose what side we’re on, including us scholars, right?” he said. “Sorry, the goal now is not Westernization; it’s the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Rejecting Liberalism, Chinese Political Thinkers Endorse Xi’s Hard Line

Tian Feilong, a Chinese intellectual, has spoken in favor of Hong Kong’s new national security law.

GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Amber Wang contributed research
from Beijing.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Helping to shape the

stringent policies of

the Communist Party.

The New York Times - USA (2020-08-03)

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