JOHANNESBURG �At the height of the current xenophobic violence in South Africa, new research has shown that immigrants make substantial contributions to South Africa's economy. A report released by the South African Institute of Race Relations, or IRR, shows that instead of attacking immigrants, South Africans could learn entrepreneurial skills from them.

The report, titled "South Africa's Immigrants, Building a New Economy," reveals that most immigrants have relied on their entrepreneurial skills and hard work to survive in the country. The report says the immigrants, largely from Somalia, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Pakistan, operate 80 percent of the backyard grocery shops at homes owned by South Africans.

For South African homeowners living in poor townships, these grocery shops provide a source of income from the rent the immigrants pay to run the businesses.

Other immigrants have combined their financial resources to start small businesses. Some of these have grown into large wholesale stores that are now competing with well-known establishments.

Rian Malan, author of the report and research fellow at the IRR, says that through such self-created employment, only a few foreigners compete with locals for formal jobs.

"Foreigners arrive here. They have no right to be here. They have no papers, et cetera. They are desperate. They have no choice. They can't go back home," Malan said. "And, against all odds, they have created a situation where their unemployment rate is half of what South Africa's unemployment rate is. By virtue of hard work and keeping their prices low and providing good service to the people, they are making inroads in the market."

The research also found that immigrants who are not able to become self-employed have opted to work in restaurants, construction and farms where they are paid very low wages. The report, however, says even in these jobs, they have improved their economic conditions, as well as the country's.

Kerwin Lebone, analyst at IRR and head of the Center for Risk Analysis, says if South Africans commit to learning from these foreigners, they will succeed despite difficult economic conditions.

"Very, very industrious also in finding opportunities," Lebone said. "There is no sense of entitlement. When there is competition they fight it economically, positively by offering lower prices rather than resorting to violence when there is encroachment of territory in terms of competition, but they are showing industriousness in response to market conditions."

Foreigners targeted

In 2008, 2015 and this year, xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa with locals accusing foreigners of taking their jobs and committing crimes. Last month, numerous shops and homes were looted and burned in Pretoria, and foreign residents were attacked. Nearly 140 people were arrested.

Immigrants also come from Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi and Nigeria. Many Pakistanis are now competing with Somali nationals in running small grocery shops throughout the country.

Most of these immigrants have fled political instability, war and poor economic conditions in their home countries.

The report urges policymakers in South Africa to set up systems that will help citizens benefit from the immigrants who appear to have adapted so well in a country with 27 percent unemployment.

Source: Voice of America

The Department of State is pleased to announce the U.S. delegation to the 61st Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), to be held March 13 through 24, 2017 at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The CSW's annual two-week session is the most important annual meeting on women's issues at the United Nations. Representatives of the CSW's 47 member governments convene to discuss ways to improve women's lives at an event that also features the active participation of civil society representatives from around the world. The theme of this year's session is Women in the Changing World of Work.

Ambassador Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will serve as the Head of Delegation. Ambassador Michele J. Sison, Deputy U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, will serve as the Deputy Head of Delegation.

They will be accompanied by two Public Delegates:

Lisa Correnti, Executive Vice President, Center for Family & Human Rights (C-FAM); and Grace Melton, Associate for Social Issues at the United Nations, The Heritage Foundation.

Other members of the U.S. Delegation include technical experts from the Department of State, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the United States Agency for International Development.

Source: US Department of State

Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Raja Farooq Haider Khan has asked the international community to take notice of unprovoked Indian shelling on civilian population. In a statement, he strongly condemned unprovoked Indian shelling at Abbas Pur se...

ISLAMABAD � Officials in Pakistan say that arrangements are in place to conduct a national census for the first time in 19 years starting Wednesday, and more than 200,000 troops will assist civilian enumerators in collecting the data.

Information minister Maryam Aurangzeb told a news conferences in Islamabad Sunday the 70-day door-to-door campaign will be concluded in two phases at a financial cost of around $185-million.

The minister explained that nearly 120,000 specially trained government workers have been deployed to undertake the much-needed census. She called on citizens to cooperate with the counters and warned against willfully giving false information, saying those found guilty would face a six-month jail term and a financial penalty of around $500.

Pakistan is ready for the sixth housing and population survey ... As we all know it has been after 19 years that we are going into this census process. We all know how distribution of resources, evidence-based legislation and policy-making are important for policy of the country for social service provisions, she said.

Army spokesman Major-General Asif Ghafoor told reporters that his institutions has been tasked to provide security and ensure the census is conducted in a smooth and transparent manner.

A solider will accompany every civil enumerator and will also collect his own data during the door-to-door campaign. We have put in place a system to immediately verify the information, Ghafoor said. He added that more than 200,000 soldiers involved in the activity have undergone special training sessions.

Pakistan's population has exploded since its first consensus in 1951, when it had around 34 million inhabitants.

The World Bank estimated in 2015 the country's population at 190 million, but Pakistani officials still use the figure of 134.7 million from the census conducted in 1998 for planning development programs. An estimated 60 percent of Pakistanis are under the age of 30.

Activists blame the lack of census, among major factors, for depleting health and education services, increasing malnutrition and stunting and pressure on scarce water resources.

Pakistan has been battling an Islamic militancy for more than 13 years that officials cite as a major reason for the long delay in holding the census.

The population census is also used to assign electoral seats in Pakistan's parliament.

Critics say mainstream and regional political parties have influenced previous census exercises in the country, leading to over-representations of some regions in the parliament.

Officials say that around three million registered and unregistered Afghan refugees in Pakistan will also be counted in the census.

The decision has outraged leaders, particularly in southwestern Baluchistan province where the ethnic Baluch population fears it would turn them into a minority in their native region.

Parities in southern Sindh province, particularly in its capital, Karachi, have also opposed the inclusion of Afghans and have demanded the census be postponed until all the refugees return to their country.

But government officials have dismissed those concerns as unfounded and politically-motivated.

Pakistan's transgender community would also be included in the census for the first time in the country's history. Officials say the U.N. Population Fund has agreed to assign international observers to oversee the administration of the census.

Source: Voice of America

Baltimore City, Maryland (IINA) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Sunday will hold a rally here in Maryland State, in partnership with a number of advocacy and interfaith groups, including CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) and...

NANGARHAR, WASHINGTON � A group of Afghan women who were held captive by Islamic State in eastern Afghanistan finally broke their silence and spoke about IS torture and mistreatment. They said the terror group kept them in confined quarters for days at a time.

We were kept in dark places, not allowed to pray and our children could not cry or make noise, one of the women told VOA's Afghanistan Service last week.

The women were captured by IS fighters in Nangarhar province in early 2016 and were held captive for more than four months before they were released as part of a prisoner-swap deal negotiated by tribal elders in the region.

Fearing retribution from IS fighters, the women did not disclose the atrocities of the terror group for almost a year, and they finally revealed their ordeal at an event in the provincial capital Jalalabad last week, where provincial officials and citizens celebrated International Women's Day.

For security reasons, all women requested anonymity while speaking to VOA's reporter in eastern Afghanistan.

The prisoner swap reportedly had been approved by the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, according to the head of the local uprising forces in Nangarhar.

Afghan security forces reportedly had captured families of local fighters loyal to Islamic State when they conducted a military operation against the group in the region in 2016. Government took them into custody for investigation.

In response, IS fighters attacked a village in the restive Kot district that supported the government and abducted several women and children after executing the men of the families.

'We were starved'

The women told VOA that IS starved them in dark cells operated by the terror group in eastern Afghanistan. The group accused villagers of becoming infidels by supporting the Afghan government and living in government-controlled areas.

They kept beating us and telling us that they would kill us because we became Kaafir [non-Muslim], one of the women said.

She added that militants were fearful of airstrikes and used relocation as a tactic to circumvent the potential threat.

They kept us moving from one place to another and at last they relocated us to Momand Dara in the Achin district, another woman said, adding that their captors showed them videos of how their husbands were executed.

One woman from the group, who was captured along with two of her young daughters, said the vast majority of IS members were foreigners because they spoke in different languages.

The militants had long hair, and wore masks on their faces and spoke different languages, she said.

The women's accounts of their captivity were confirmed to VOA by the head of the Afghan Human Right Commission in Nangarhar.

These women whose husbands were killed by the IS lived in the group's captivity, Sabrina Hamidi, head of the human rights commission in Nangarhar told VOA.

After losing their husbands, these women are on their own now and have to provide for their children. Traditionally, men are the primary breadwinners in Afghanistan, particularly in rural areas. When they die, in many cases women are not allowed to remarry or go back to their parents.

They urged the Afghan government to assist them and their children.

IS expansion

IS fighters have made inroads into Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province in recent years and are active in several districts, particularly the Kot district, which has a border with Pakistan.

Last summer, the group launched a massive surprise attack against the district, killing dozens and displacing thousands of civilians from the area.

Over the years, the terror group has attacked several government installations and villages in several other districts of the province, as well. In some areas, they closed public schools and replaced them their own religious seminaries.

Recently, IS seems to have expanded it activities from its stronghold in eastern Afghanistan to other parts of country.

The group has taken responsibility for several deadly attacks in capital Kabul in recent months, including last week's deadly attack on a military hospital that killed 31 people and wounded more than 80 others.

They set on fire two shrines in northern Jowzjan province last week, calling them heretic and blasphemous.

But U.S. forces in Afghanistan say the Afghan government has had recent victories against the group, and the number of IS fighters has been reduced substantially � from nearly 3,000 fighters to several hundred � because of joint U.S.-Afghan operations over the past year.

We believe that there are approximately 700 members of ISIS, perhaps even less now based on the operations, that are still contained to less than three districts down in [eastern] Nangarhar, U.S. Brigadier General Charles Cleveland, a spokesman for NATO's Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan, told reporters in Kabul last week.

Source: Voice of America

ISLAMABAD � The attack in Kabul that killed at least 30 people this week, claimed by the Islamic State militants, was different in strategy from the group's past assaults.

Those, like the one on a Shi'ite Hazara minority group protest in Kabul last year, had been simpler. Large public gatherings are easy targets for a suicide bomber.

An attack on a military hospital in a city like Kabul, where security is so tight one cannot get into a shopping mall without going through metal detectors, requires complex reconnaissance and pre-planning. It pointed to the group's ability to carry out a sophisticated, intelligence-driven operation, according to Barnett Rubin, associate director of the Center on International Cooperation.

[T]hey were able to reconnoiter the hospital very well to figure out how to get into it, to smuggle all of the explosive material into Kabul, to have a safe house where they could set up everything, they obtained the proper clothing in order to disguise themselves as doctors and so on, Rubin said.

NATO and the Afghan government like to point out that their security operations have reduced IS's numbers in Afghanistan from several thousand to now under a thousand, and their territorial control from more than 10 districts to fewer than five.

Gone underground

However, some analysts think this may not be the right approach to gauging the strength of a militant group like IS, which seems to have adapted and adjusted its strategy.

I don't think we know that their numbers have diminished, according to Rubin. We know that maybe the numbers of them fighting in a military way have diminished but they have changed tactics. They have gone underground. We don't know what their numbers are, he said.

Security forces inspect the site of an Islamic State-claimed attack on a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 8, 2017.

Kabul-based political analyst Intizar Khadim expressed similar thoughts.

I'm not talking about the number of IS increasing, he said. I'm talking about the resources that is enabling Daesh (IS) to have increased.

General Nicholson, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged in a briefing to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that IS Khorasan Province, as IS calls its local chapter, had shown an ability to conduct attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in the country despite its battlefield losses.

The Kabul attack involved five suicide bombers. But for those five to operate, they probably required many more as support staff. That indicated that ISKP had managed to set up support networks inside Kabul.

The Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, in a dispatch published on its website last year, claimed to have some evidence of at least three ISKP cells operating in Kabul.

Over the past eighteen months, AAN has been consistently hearing stories of young men from Kabul having adopted the IS ideology and joining its 'battlefields' in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq and Syria, the dispatch published in October of last year claimed.

While most Afghans reject IS ideology as too cruel and alien to their culture, high unemployment and lucrative salary offers are a significant draw for former fighters without jobs, according to Khadim.

In Middle East you see Daesh [IS] is giving food for war. In Afghanistan they are paying high prices for any warrior that is joining this group. They are paying high wages for their fighters for grabbing guns and fighting for them, Khadim said.

The withdrawal of most of the international security forces from Afghanistan led to a significant decline in economic activity in the country. The growth rate plummeted to 1.3 percent in 2014 while the rate of poverty climbed to 39.1 percent in 2013-14, according to the World Bank.

The resultant high unemployment gave a boost to the recruitment efforts of groups like the Afghan Taliban and the IS that had the ability to pay lucrative salaries compared to the local market place.

However, money was not the only factor driving young men to the IS.

FILE - Afghan police walk past Islamic State militant flags on a wall, after an operation in the Kot district of Jalalabad province east of Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 1, 2016. Diminishing in numbers, the group has turned to more sophisticated terrorist attacks in cities.

Propaganda effort

ISKP operates a deft propaganda machine including social media, videos and literature, as well as an FM radio channel that keeps popping back up every time it is knocked down by NATO or Afghan forces. The FM can be heard in parts of the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar.

ISKP's romanticization of living as one of its fighters is unparalleled in the jihadist media in Afghanistan, according to another dispatch published on AAN's website.

Anecdotal evidence from various parts of Afghanistan suggests a slow but steady stream of new IS recruits.

Local journalists in Nangarhar told VOA that the voice of one IS radio broadcaster sounded too much like a local journalist they knew who had disappeared from the scene.

Khadim also pointed to the Afghan government's failure in providing good governance in many parts of the country as a reason for people to turn to militant outfits.

On the other hand, the threat of IS was leading regional players like Russia and Iran to increase their efforts to get the Taliban onboard for a political settlement.

Iran, a mainly Shi'ite country, was afraid of anti-Shi'ite IS getting too close to its borders and Russia wanted to keep IS influence away from the Muslim population in its backyard.

Another silver lining on the horizon was the increased economic activity in the region. China wanted to expand its Belts and Roads initiative, including a portion in Pakistan involving investments of more than $40 billion. India and Japan were collaborating on a seaport in Iran at Chabahar.

All of this means that the cost of instability in Afghanistan has gone up and regional players have a greater incentive to help find solutions to the country's security problems.

Source: Voice of America