World

PRAGUE — Czech politics were thrown into uncertainty on Monday with the president being treated by an elite team of intensive care specialists and his chief ally, billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis, defeated in a general election.

Babis's populist ANO (YES) Party narrowly lost at the weekend to a three-party centre-right alliance called Together and led by right-winger Petr Fiala.

President Milos Zeman needs to convene parliament within 30 days of the election and name the next prime minister under the Czech constitution, besides mediating talks on the new government.

On Sunday, he had a brief meeting with Babis, but was then rushed to Prague's military hospital from his residence. Local media say that he is suffering from liver problems.

The hospital said in a statement on Monday that Zeman was hospitalised at the anesthesiology, resuscitation and intensive medicine clinic, the top level of intensive care.

"He is being treated by a team of health staff specialised in intensive care," said its spokeswoman Jitka Zinke.

The statement suggests Zeman is in a serious condition, but the hospital and his spokesman kept silent about his state.

Images of the 77-year-old head of state being taken out of an ambulance on Sunday with his head supported have cast doubt on his ability to lead talks on forming the next government.

"Tell us what is going on with Zeman!" shrieked a headline on the website of the Blesk tabloid on Monday morning.

Fiala 'must act fast' 

"I would be happy with basic information," independent political analyst Jan Kubacek told AFP.

"If they say he'll stay for weeks, we will roughly know what is happening and the situation will calm down."

Fiala's Together won 108 seats in the 200-seat parliament with an alliance of the liberal Pirates and the centrist Mayors and Independents, which looks set to oust Babis from power.

But Zeman had said earlier he would tap the leader of a party, not an alliance, to form the next government, suggesting his old political ally Babis would go first.

"If Fiala wants to be perceived as the prime minister by the broad public, he has to start acting like a prime minister," said Kubacek.

"He must act fast, build the government team and draft the policy statement. The more ready he will be when he meets the president, the more likely he is to succeed," the analyst said.

An EU and NATO member of 10.7 million people, the ex-communist Czech Republic has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Its economy largely depends on car production and exports to the eurozone, which it has yet to join.

Babis, a food, chemicals and media mogul, is facing EU anger over his conflict of interest as a politician and entrepreneur, as well as charges over EU subsidy fraud.

SYDNEY — Elated Sydneysiders were emerging from almost four months of "blood, sweat and no beers" early Monday as a long coronavirus lockdown was lifted in Australia's largest city.

Sydney's more than 5 million residents have been subjected to a 106-day lockdown, designed to limit the march of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

With new infections now falling — New South Wales state recorded 477 cases on Sunday — and more than 70 per cent of over-16s double vaccinated, Sydney was dusting off the cobwebs.

A handful of venues — including some bars and slot machine rooms — planned to open at 12:01 am local time to vaccinated customers.

"Be the first to have a cold schooner, and be the first to catch up with friends," said owners of Easts in the city's famed Bondi neighbourhood.

Hairdressers will be among those businesses throwing open their doors later in the day, although many have been booked out for weeks to come by shaggy-haired customers.

Since June, shops, schools, salons and offices have been closed for non-essential workers and there have been unprecedented restrictions on personal freedom.

There were bans on everything from travelling more than five kilometres from home, visiting family, playing squash, browsing in supermarkets to attending funerals.

"Very few countries have taken as stringent or extreme an approach to managing COVID as Australia," Tim Soutphommasane, an academic and former Australian race discrimination commissioner, told AFP.

There will still be limits on mass gatherings and international borders and schools will not fully reopen for a few weeks yet.

But otherwise daily life will look more like normal.

'You've earned it' 

For most of the pandemic, Australia successfully suppressed infections through border closures, lockdowns and aggressive testing and tracing.

But the Delta variant put paid to any dream of "COVID-zero", at least in the largest cities of Melbourne and Sydney which are now pivoting to "living with COVID".

"It's a big day for our state," said New South Wales' recently appointed conservative premier Dominic Perrottet.

After "100 days of blood, sweat and no beers", he said, "you've earned it."

But despite the celebratory mood, there are lingering concerns about what reopening will bring.

Perrottet encouraged patrons to treat staff with kindness, with fears that bans on the unvaccinated could lead to protests and confrontation.

There are also fears that reopening will inevitably bring a rash of new infections.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) this week pilloried Perrottet when he appeared to shift the focus away from health and onto the economic recovery.

"The AMA supports gradual opening up of the economy and the loosening of restrictions, but it is critical to observe the impact of each step on transmission and case numbers," the doctors' body said.

"Otherwise New South Wales may still see hospitals become completely overwhelmed despite high vaccination rates."

PRAGUE — Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis is set to meet the country’s president on Sunday, with the populist billionaire hoping to hold on to power despite a narrow election defeat at the hands of a centre-right alliance.

Babis, a long-time political ally of President Milos Zeman, on Saturday lost the cliffhanger vote to the Together alliance, which is ready to form a majority government with another grouping.

But Zeman made it clear earlier that he would appoint the head of a party, not an alliance, following the election, suggesting Babis would get the first attempt at negotiating a viable Cabinet.

“I can’t see many reasons why he would do something else,” Tomas Lebeda, an analyst at Palacky University in the eastern Czech city of Olomouc, told AFP.

Zeman is due to receive Babis in his residence outside Prague for an informal meeting on Sunday morning, before a more formal encounter scheduled for October 13.

“We’ll see what the president will say,” Babis said as he conceded defeat.

The president cast his ballot in the residence because of poor health, with Czech media suggesting rather serious liver problems.

Zeman’s office has been secretive about his illness, giving no details for weeks.

The Together alliance of the right-wing Civic Democrats, the centre-right TOP 09 and the centrist Christian Democrats won 27.79 per cent of the vote, while Babis’s ANO Party earned 27.13 per cent.

The alliance would have a majority of 108 seats in the 200-seat parliament together with another grouping comprising the anti-establishment Pirate Party and the centrist Mayors and Independents.

Together leader Petr Fiala said on Saturday that the two alliances would only talk about a government with each other and ask Zeman to tap him to form the government.

“It seems that both democratic coalitions will manage to get a parliamentary majority, which most likely means Babis will have to go,” said Otto Eibl, head of the political science department at Masaryk University in Brno.

But Lebeda was more cautious, saying that “we have known [Zeman] for some time, we know how he thinks, how he acts”.

“Given his health, he may reconsider the situation and arrive at a different conclusion, but I wouldn’t bet much on that as things are.”

The two alliances and ANO will be joined in parliament by the far-right, anti-Muslim Freedom and Direct Democracy movement led by Tokyo-born entrepreneur Tomio Okamura which scored almost 10 per cent.

Turnout in the vote reached over 65 per cent, up from 60.84 per cent in the previous general election in 2017.

Babis currently leads a minority government with the left-wing Social Democrats, which was until recently tacitly backed by the Communist Party that ruled the former totalitarian Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.

But the Communists were ousted from parliament at the polls for the first time since World War II, failing to meet the 5 per cent threshold for any party to enter parliament.

The 67-year-old Babis, a food, chemicals and media mogul, is facing police charges over alleged EU subsidy fraud and the bloc’s dismay over his conflict of interest as a businessman and a politician.

Babis won the previous general election in 2017, but it took him nine months to put together a minority government with Zeman giving him all the time he wanted.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil on Friday surpassed 600,000 deaths from COVID-19, the health ministry said. The country of 213 million has also recorded more than 21.5 million cases of the deadly virus.

It is the second worst affected country in the world by COVID deaths after the United States, although many experts consider the official numbers to be underestimates.

The US recently passed 700,000 deaths, although its population is 35 per cent larger.

Brazil registered 615 new deaths on Friday, as well as 18,000 cases in the previous 24 hours.

"The situation has improved but we cannot lower our guard," Margareth Dalcolmo, pulmonologist and researcher at the prestigious Fiocruz research institute, told AFP.

She said the pandemic could only be considered under control once "we have 80 per cent of the population vaccinated".

So far 71.4 per cent of Brazilians have received at least one vaccination dose but only 45.9 per cent are fully immunised.

Brazil’s vaccination programme began in late January, several weeks after the likes of Argentina and the US, something specialists blamed on a lack of government planning.

Things have dramatically improved from three months ago, though, when the immunisation drive was crawling along and 2,000 Brazilians a day were dying from COVID.

That death rate dropped below 1,000 at the end of July and kept shrinking until it stabilised around 500 in September.

Brazil is far from seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel, the situation remains worrying”, said Domingos Alves, a researcher at the Sao Paulo University’s faculty of medicine.

Despite these concerns, major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo continue with their push to return to normal life.

Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes has even said February’s carnival, one of the most popular in the world, will take place “without restrictions”.

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Mourners from Afghanistan's minority Shiite community buried their dead on Saturday after a suicide attack on a mosque killed more than 60 people, marking the bloodiest assault since US forces left the country in August.

A gravedigger in the Shiite cemetery overlooking the northern city of Kunduz told AFP they had handled 62 bodies, and local reports suggested the final toll could be up to 100.

Scores more victims were also wounded in Friday's blast, which was claimed by the Daesh terror group and appeared designed to further destabilise Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

The regional branch of the sectarian Daesh, known as Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), has repeatedly targeted Shiites in Afghanistan. It is a Sunni Islamist group like the Taliban, but the two are bitter rivals.

IS-K said the attack was carried out by a Uyghur Muslim suicide bomber who had “detonated an explosive vest amid a crowd” of Shiite worshippers.

The attack happened during Friday prayers — the most important of the week for Muslims — and residents of the city told AFP that hundreds of worshippers were inside.

In a heart-wrenching scene, relatives gathered around the newly-dug graves in Kunduz wailed inconsolably over their loved ones.

“We are really hurt by what happened,” Zemarai Mubarak Zada, 42, told AFP as he mourned his 17-year-old nephew, who he said had wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a doctor.

“He wanted to get married. He wanted to go to university,” he said.

‘Terrifying’ 

Images from the scene of the attack on Friday showed debris strewn inside the mosque, its windows blown out by the explosion. Some men were seen carrying a body draped in a bloody sheet to an ambulance.

“It was a very terrifying incident,” said a teacher in Kunduz, who lives near the mosque.

“Many of our neighbours have been killed and wounded. A 16-year-old neighbour was killed. They couldn’t find half of his body.”

Aminullah, an eyewitness whose brother was at the mosque, said: “After I heard the explosion, I called my brother but he did not pick up.”

“I walked towards the mosque and found my brother wounded and faint. We immediately took him to the MSF hospital.”

‘Horrific attack’ 

The Taliban’s efforts to consolidate power have been undermined by a series of deadly IS-K attacks.

The Taliban security chief in the northern city accused the mosque attackers of trying to foment trouble between Shiites and Sunnis.

“We assure our Shiite brothers that in the future, we will provide security for them and that such problems will not happen to them,” Mulawi Dost Muhammad said.

The attack was met with broad international condemnation, with UN chief Antonio Guterres calling for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.

Guterres “condemns in the strongest terms today’s horrific attack”, the third against a religious institution in Afghanistan in a week, his spokesman said.

Viewed as heretics by Sunni extremists such as Daesh, Shiite Muslims have suffered some of Afghanistan’s most violent assaults, with rallies bombed, hospitals targeted and commuters ambushed.

Shiites make up about 20 per cent of the Afghan population. Many of them are Hazara, an ethnic group that has been persecuted for decades.

In October 2017, an Daesh suicide attacker struck a Shiite mosque in the west of Kabul, killing 56 people and wounding 55.

And in May this year, a series of bombings outside a school in the capital killed at least 85 people, mostly young girls. More than 300 were wounded in this attack on the Hazara community.

US-Taliban talks 

Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, told AFP the Taliban would find it difficult to consolidate power unless they tackle terrorism and the growing economic crisis.

“If the Taliban, as is likely, is unable to address these concerns, it will struggle to gain domestic legitimacy and we could see the emergence of a new armed resistance,” he said.

The United States was meanwhile holding its first face-to-face with the Taliban since its troops withdrew, at a meeting in Doha on Saturday.

The US delegation would press the Taliban to ensure terrorists do not create a base for attacks in the country, a State Department official said.

It was also pressuring Afghanistan’s new rulers to form an inclusive government and to respect the rights of women and girls, the official said, stressing the meeting did not indicate Washington recognised Taliban rule.

“We remain clear that any legitimacy must be earned through the Taliban’s own actions,” the official said.

The Taliban are seeking international recognition, as well as assistance to avoid a humanitarian disaster and ease Afghanistan’s economic crisis.

PRAGUE — Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis won a general election on Saturday, but will struggle to put together a parliamentary majority, meaning any new government could be weeks or even months away.

Preliminary results showed the populist billionaire’s ANO Party came first with 28 per cent of the vote.

The Together alliance of the right-wing Civic Democrats, the centre-right TOP 09 and the centrist Christian Democrats came in second with 26 per cent with just over 80 per cent of the votes counted.

A grouping of the anti-establishment Pirate Party with the Mayors and Independents (STAN) movement scored 15 per cent.

The two alliances would be able to form a majority in the 200-seat parliament, garnering 103 seats together to ANO’s 75, according to a projection by Czech TV.

A potential partner for ANO could be the far-right, anti-Muslim Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) movement led by Tokyo-born entrepreneur Tomio Okamura which scored 10 per cent.

With most of the almost all ballots counted, turnout had reached nearly 65 per cent, up from 60.84 per cent in the previous general election in 2017.

The 67-year-old Babis, a food, chemicals and media mogul, is facing police charges over alleged EU subsidy fraud and the bloc’s dismay over his conflict of interest as a businessman and a politician.

The Czech economy, heavily dependent on car production and exports to the eurozone which the EU member of 10.7 million is yet to join, is on the mend after the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the pandemic and increases in pensions and public sector wages, recently approved by Babis’s cabinet, have made the public finance gap soar.

Babis currently leads a minority government with the left-wing Social Democrats, which was until recently tacitly backed by the Communist Party that ruled the former totalitarian Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989.

But The Communists were ousted from parliament at the polls for the first time since World War II, scoring less than 4 per cent according to the preliminary results, thus failing to meet the five-percent threshold for any party to enter parliament.

It will be up to the pro-Russian President Milos Zeman, Babis’s old ally, to tap the new prime minister.

“He will do his best to keep ANO in power,” said Josef Mlejnek, an analyst at Charles University in Prague.

But Zeman is grappling with health problems that have confined him to his residence for the vote as local media speculate he may struggle to even nominate the prime minister.

By Emmanuel Duparcq
Agence France-Presse

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Afghan student Fauzia used to make ends meet voicing ads on a radio station in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar, but that came to an abrupt end when the Islamists swept to power in August.

Their order was clear: no female voices on the air.

Afghanistan’s new rulers have promised more moderate governance than their last stint in power, when women were all but barred from work and education, and prohibited from leaving the house unchaperoned.

But there is widespread mistrust in their women’s rights pledge. Most girls around the country have been barred from attending secondary school, and most women have been unable to return to work.

When AFP visited Kandahar last month, only a few women were visible in the dusty shopping streets of the southern city, hastily lugging bags from store to store while wearing the head-to-toe burqa.

The Taliban “posted messages on Facebook saying they did not want to hear any more music or female [voices] on air” said Fauzia, who asked not to use her real name.

The 20-year-old medical student’s situation has become increasingly desperate after losing her income from radio ads — Fauzia and her four younger siblings are orphans, and she is struggling to put food on the table.

Despite Taliban promises of a softer rule this time around, women remain depressed and unclear about their place in society, while businesses that once employed them are wary of upsetting the Islamists.

Fauzia’s former boss said the radio station felt forced to stop airing ads with women’s voices.

She has been handing out our resumes all over Kandahar, without any luck.

“I am told to wait,” she said.

‘Bad looks 

from the Taliban’ 

Since taking power, the Islamists have repeatedly said they will respect women’s rights in the confines of Islamic law, without elaborating.

Women, with some exceptions, have been barred from returning to work or education, and told that they must hold off until arrangements have been made, including the segregation of men and women.

So far, “we haven’t banned anything for women”, Mullah Noor Ahmad Saeed, a Taliban official in Kandahar province, told AFP

“If they don’t feel secure or don’t go back to work, it is their fault.”

But many are sceptical.

“In the streets, people don’t say anything, but we noticed bad looks from the Taliban,” said Fereshteh Nazari, who has been able to return to work as the head of a girls-only primary school.

Women teachers and girls, however, have been excluded from returning to secondary school.

“Before we used to be happy to come to school. Now we’re under stress,” Nazari told AFP at the school.

On the day AFP visited, some 700 students were present, less than a third of the 2,500 girls enrolled.

“Most parents don’t send their girls to school after the age of 10 because they don’t feel secure,” Nazari said.

Zohra, a mathematics major in her 20s who asked not to use her real name, is among the students staying away, her fear compounded by rumours of a looming violent Taliban crackdown.

“For me, life is more important than anything else,” she told AFP by phone.

For many women, the ability to work is crucial now more than ever as Afghanistan suffers a worsening economic crisis.

It has had a severe impact even on the few women still allowed to work — Nazari and her teacher colleagues have not received their salaries since the Western-backed government collapsed in August.

“Before, we had a good life. Now we might have to go and beg at the bazaar,” said the headmistress, who is in her 20s.

“My husband is jobless, and we have to feed our two kids.”

‘We want freedom’ 

The Taliban have promised all Afghans security and peace, including women.

But for Fauzia, the mere presence of the Islamists puts social pressure on women to stay away.

“Except [for] groceries, we don’t go anywhere else,” she said, and even then, women “come back home very quickly”.

“Even my little brother tells me to cover my face, to not see friends anymore, and not to go anywhere except classes,” Fauzia said.

It is a jarring change for many young Afghan women, who benefited from the previous government’s push for girls’ education.

“We want freedom,” said a 12-year-old girl in the yard of Nazari’s school.

But she added that with the Taliban now in power, girls and women will have to do “whatever they say”.

“If not, we’ll face problems.”