Right of returning threatened
ZIMBABWE: President Emmerson Mnangagwa yesterday praised the re-introduction of the Zimbabwe dollar as the sole legal tender in the troubled country as a “return to normalcy”.
Zimbabwe had for 10 years used the US dollar and other foreign currencies after the Zimbabwean currency was dogged by hyperinflation.
Mnangagwa said it was the right time to scrap the use of foreign currencies, saying Zimbabwe’s economy was “now functional” enough to adopt the use of a single, local currency.
Mnangagwa said the possession of foreign currency was not outlawed, but people would not be able to use it to buy items locally.
Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube on Monday announced the Zimbabwe dollar as the sole legal tender. Before Ncube’s notice, Zimbabweans were using a multicurrency system dominated by the US dollar after abandoning its own currency in 2009. Zimbabwe later introduced a local currency called the bond note in 2016. A US Middle East peace plan is stirring anger and apprehension in Palestinian refugee camps around the region by raising the prospect that a long-cherished dream of returning to former homes in what is now Israel will be forever crushed.
In camps around the region, Palestinians staged strikes, burned Israeli and US flags and played nationalist songs from loudspeakers to protest against a plan they say could result in their permanent expulsion from ancestral homes.
US President Donald Trump’s administration launched a $50 billion (R715bn) economic initiative at an international meeting set to start in Bahrain yesterday as the first part of its broader political blueprint to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While the plan’s political details remain secret, for many Palestinians the project has reawakened fears that leaders of Arab countries, including of those that host the refugee camps, could reduce support for the Palestinian cause in return for economic incentives.
In Baqaa, home to more than 150 000 people, many shops heeded calls by local activists for a general strike to protest against Trump’s plan.
Many fear the US administration’s effort to strip refugee status from Palestinians by cutting aid to the UN agency that supports over 5 million Palestinians across the region was an attempt to liquidate their cause.
The two-day international meeting, led by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, has been billed as the first part of Washington’s broader political blueprint to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the political details of the plan, which has been almost two years in the making, remain a secret. Neither the Israeli nor Palestinian governments will attend the curtain-raising event in Manama, Bahrain, which Lebanon and Iraq are staying away from. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was scathing about its prospects of success. “Money is important. The economy is important. But politics are more important. The political solution is more important.”
Washington will be hoping that attendees in Manama such as wealthy Gulf states will show a concrete interest in the plan, which expects donor nations and investors to contribute $50bn to Palestinian territories, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia – a close US ally which shares a common foe with Israel in Iran – voiced support yesterday for “international efforts aimed at improving prosperity, investment and economic growth in the region”. But Riyadh reiterated that any peace deal should be based on the Saudi-led Arab peace initiative that has been the Arab consensus on the necessary elements for a deal since 2002.
That plan calls for a Palestinian Michael”.
Fans gathered at Jackson’s last home the Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, where he died after a fatal dose of anaesthetic.
They also held a vigil at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, where Jackson was laid to rest two months later.
Others gathered around Jackson’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The anniversary comes a few months after the HBO documentary state drawn along borders which predate Israel’s capture of territory in the 1967 Middle East war, as well as a capital in East Jerusalem and refugees’ right of return – points rejected by Israel.
Kushner said the plan would not adhere to the Arab initiative. “It will be somewhere between the Arab Peace Initiative and between the Israeli position,” he told Al Jazeera TV.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Kushner is “committed to the initiatives of Israel’s colonial settlement councils”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close Trump ally, said Israel was open to the plan. “We’ll hear the American proposition, hear it fairly and with openness,” he said on Sunday. Expectations for success are low. The Trump team concedes the economic plan – billed “Peace to Prosperity” – will be implemented only if a political solution to one of the world’s most intractable conflicts is reached. | Reuters Leaving Neverland brought back child molestation allegations against Jackson and threatened to upend an image that had been largely rehabilitated since his death. | AP