BY
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan joined the growing collection of Republicans who stand against congressional lawmakers' intent to reject the Electoral College vote count.
Ryan, who served as a Wisconsin congressman and ran for vice president in 2012, rarely shares public remarks as they relate to politics in the aftermath of his congressional term. However, Ryan broke his silence on the upheaval currently dividing GOP lawmakers in a statement obtained by Newsweek on Sunday.
"All our basic rights and freedoms flow from a fidelity to the Constitution and the rule of law. This principle is not only fundamentally American but a central tenet of conservatism," he said. "Under our system, voters determine the president, and this self-governance cannot sustain itself if the whims of Congress replace the will of the people. I urge members to consider the precedent that it would set."
Echoing arguments presented by other Republican critics, Ryan noted that questioning the electoral vote, in a presumed effort to reverse its outcome, risks harming the democratic election process, regardless of whether the dispute is successful.
"It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans," the former House Speaker continued. "The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy."
A group of Republican lawmakers plan to challenge President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory on Wednesday, when Congress is scheduled to certify results of the vote. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Biden's win against Donald Trump during the general election was invalid, some of the sitting president's supporters—including a handful of political allies—have backed his unfounded allegations of voter fraud manipulating results to his opponent's benefit.
After receiving a majority of the nation's popular votes during November's presidential contest, Biden earned 306 votes from the Electoral College when representatives formally cast their ballots in mid-December. His tally stood well above the 270-vote threshold necessary to win a presidential election, and exceeded Trump's 232 votes by a substantial margin.
Trump's campaign pursued an extended effort to discount election outcomes in states and counties that supported his Democratic competitor, filing lawsuits that objected to results and ultimately seeking to overturn them. The sitting president has not accepted his loss following the Electoral College vote several weeks ago, and repeatedly publicized unfounded claims about the election as recently as Sunday afternoon.
https://www.newsweek.com/paul-ryan-warns-electoral-objections-could-do-significant-damage-american-democracy-1558599
By PAUL ROSENBERG
Is Trump a threat to liberal democracy, as elite voices tell us — or a reminder that we've never gotten there?
If every cloud has a silver lining, Donald Trump's destructiveness offers this one: He has forced us to a point of reckoning about America. If we think all this chaos is just about him, we've missed the whole point. On that point, there's wide agreement. Beyond that, however, there's considerable disagreement, if not confusion. The vast majority of elite discourse sees this in terms of a challenge to liberal democracy — a challenge that's been unfolding worldwide over the past decade or so, sometimes characterized as a "third wave of autocratization."
There's a large body of knowledge and experience behind this point of view (see groups such as Varieties of Democracy for a global perspective, or Bright Lines Watch in the U.S.). But such an idealized view of American democracy has always been challenged by African Americans, for instance: See Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" or Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again.") Trump's election, in obvious response to Barack Obama's, has had the effect of pushing the longstanding Black critique of American democracy to the very center of our politics.
In contrast, University of Wisconsin political scientist Mark Copelovitch has been tweeting his observations of American politics under the rubric of "Today in life under competitive authoritarianism." The term comes from Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's 2010 book, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War" (introduced in an earlier paper here.) They cite "four minimum criteria" that modern democratic regimes meet, which these "hybrid regimes" (including most of the nations in the former Soviet Union) fail to meet on a systematic basis, thereby creating an uneven playing field between government and opposition. The first three of these criteria are that executives and legislatures are chosen through elections that are open, free, and fair; that virtually all adults posses the right to vote; and that political rights and civil liberties — including freedom of the press, freedom of association and freedom to criticize the government without reprisal — are broadly protected.
By systemically violating these criteria, and possibly a fourth — "elected authorities possess real authority to govern, in that they are not subject to the tutelary authority of military or clerical leaders" — competitive authoritarian regimes seek to maintain the general appearance of being democracy-like in order to claim legitimacy, but without practicing actual, substantive democracy. In a late October pair of tweets, Copelovitch summed up his view:
Arguably, the US has basically not fully met the 1st 2 of Levitsky & Way's democratic criteria since the failure of Reconstruction. Trump-era backsliding is mostly on criterion 3 But the problem now is additive. EC + increases in gerrymandering & malapportionment + Trump.
I actually do think this is what we are starting to realize & why the Court/Senate/statehood reforms have gained traction. The immediate authoritarian threat of Trump since 2017 has shined light on the enduring undemocratic nature of our political institutions.
This framework of "competitive authoritarianism" offers a more realistic description of America's actually existing political system than calling it a backsliding liberal democracy. Our problem is not primarily a flaw in liberal democracy as such, but in the United States' consistent failure to actually embody what it pretends to be.
I asked Copelovitch about his "competitive authoritarianism" tweets, and he responded that the "most proximate reason" for writing them was his state of residence: "I have lived since 2006 in Wisconsin, which has been the canary in the coalmine for all of the developments and risks to American democracy that we've seen since 2016. ... What we're seeing at the national level under Trump is simply the extension of what's happened in Wisconsin, under [former governor] Scott Walker and [State Assembly Speaker] Robin Vos, to the U.S. as a whole." The fullest description of this can be found in Dan Kaufman's book, "The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics."
But there's also Copelovitch's own background, as he explained by email.
I come at all of this as a scholar of international political economy (the politics of international trade, money, and finance). For the last decade, I've been studying the causes and consequences of the Great Recession and the Eurozone financial crises and quite a bit of time collaborating with (and reading) comparative politics scholars focused on the rise of far right and populist nationalist parties. I've also spent a lot of time studying the politics of the interwar era, especially in the wake of the economic and financial crises in Weimar Germany (see my recent book), and it should come as no surprise that I, like many, see many similarities between that era and ours.
This approach fits well with Levitsky and Way's concept of "competitive authoritarianism," which they define in contrast with democracy on the one hand and outright authoritarianism on the other: "In competitive authoritarian regimes, formal democratic institutions are widely viewed as the principal means of obtaining and exercising political authority. Incumbents violate those rules so often and to such an extent, however, that the regime fails to meet conventional minimum standards for democracy."
Modern functioning democracies meet the four criteria named above. While there may be violations of any of the four criteria, "such violations are not broad or systematic enough to seriously impede democratic challenges to incumbent Governments," the authors write. "In other words, they do not fundamentally alter the playing field between government and opposition." But that's precisely what those violations are doing in America today — and have been doing since the demise of Reconstruction in the late 19th century, when it comes to free and fair elections with universal suffrage.
Passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 represented a giant step forward, but significant participation gaps have persisted, among minority groups in particular and low-income people in general, as documented in "Why Americans Don't Vote," which led to the passage of the 1993 "motor voter" law and "Why Americans Still Don't Vote," a sequel of sorts describing the continued obstacles. Since then, moreover, the Republican Party has increasingly shifted from passive obstruction of expanded voting rights to strategies of active voter suppression.
This fits within the "competitive authoritarian" framework Levitsky and Way describe:
Rather than openly violating democratic rules (for example, by banning or repressing the opposition and the media), incumbents are more likely to use bribery, co-optation, and more subtle forms of persecution, such as the use of tax authorities, compliant judiciaries, and other state agencies to "legally" harass, persecute, or extort cooperative behavior from critics.
Both the sweeping gerrymandering described in "Ratf**ked" by former Salon editor David Daley, and the Supreme Court's refusal to remedy the situation, are crucial examples of how this unfolds in America today. The same could be said of the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, striking down the crucial pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act by invalidating the jurisdictional maps. It also applies to voter-suppression strategies such as voter ID laws, which disproportionately affect Democratic voters.
Race, even more than class, stands at the center of most of these voter suppression and disenfranchisement efforts, which descend from America's founding as a Herrenvolk democracy or republic (experts have argued for both). Today's Republicans certainly didn't originate this practice, but they energetically took it over, as described in "The Long Southern Strategy" (Salon author interview here), for example. Other anti-democratic aspects of our political system have more mixed origins: "Ratf**ked," for example, shows how the GOP took traditional gerrymandering to a level never imagined before.
Copelovitch told me he began tweeting about "life under competitive authoritarianism" as a way of "linking these three things together: the anti-democratic institutional biases of U.S. politics, the unprecedented lawless authoritarianism of Trump and the GOP's active embrace of restricting democracy. I've kept it going largely because the developments have continued throughout the last several years, to the point that I believe there are real, serious concerns about the state of American democracy."
This is an especially important point: Copelovitch sees the awareness of these concerns as a real dividing line "between people arguing that 'the system has worked' over the last two months to prevent Trump's attempts to steal the election, and those of us still warning that the unprecedented authoritarian threat to U.S. democracy persists, despite Biden's victory."
Part of what defines that division is a deeper sense of how the system isn't working. Copelovitch has written earlier tweets referencing Robert Dahl's 1989 book "Democracy and its Critics" and noting that the U.S. basically violates the core criteria of democratic process that Dahl defines, especially relating to voter suppression, gerrymandering and the apportionment of U.S. Senate seats. "When you start to compare the U.S. by these criteria, to other countries' political systems, you quickly notice that we don't stack up well at all," he told me. "If you look at, say Germany or New Zealand, which have mixed-member proportional representation systems, you realize that our electoral institutions have institutionalized minority rule and locked in policies at odds with what large majorities of Americans seem to want on almost every issue." The $2,000 stimulus checks blocked by Mitch McConnell last week are merely the most recent high-profile example.
"In this sense, U.S. politics isn't really fully democratic," Coplevitch continued. "At the moment, every single branch of the government is currently controlled (or partially controlled) by the representatives or appointees of a party representing a minority of Americans and supporting a wide range of policy positions that are deeply unpopular with the median voter."
It's not that we don't know what to do, at least in theory. But the lessons are drenched in historical irony. "I've long been of the position that the U.S. got constitutional design mostly right in 1949, when we helped oversee the establishment of Germany's mixed-member proportional representation system at the founding of the Federal Republic," Copelovitch said. "New Zealand adopted this system in 1996, and it has been very successful. If one were starting from scratch and looking for the ideal federal system, this is the model we'd look to follow."
That might be politically impossible in the U.S. anytime soon, he admits. but there are other options. Copelovitch cites Lee Drutman's book "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop," which advocates ranked choice voting, multi-member districts, enlarging the House of Representatives, automatic universal voter registration, statehood for both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and fixed terms for Supreme Court justices, among other reforms.
The first bill passed by the Democratic House majority in 2019, H.R. 1, the "For the People Act," was a direct attempt to address this situation — even if it didn't go nearly far enough. Mitch McConnell's response was telling, characterizing the law as "a package of urgent measures to rewrite the rules of American politics for the exclusive benefit of the Democratic Party." Aside from the obvious projection involved, the Senate majority leader came awfully close to acknowledging the inconvenient truth that elite Republican positions are either profoundly unpopular or profoundly impractical. (This same contradiction, to a large extent, enabled the ascendancy of Donald Trump.) It's certainly possible that Republicans could find ways to compete on a more level playing field, but only by abandoning the extremist politics they've increasingly embraced over the past 40 years.
Recognizing that America is, or is becoming, a competitive authoritarian regime is undoubtedly painful and unsettling. But that's the critical first step in becoming the liberal democracy this nation has always pretended to be. As with addiction or mental illness, you can't fix a problem until you finally admit you have one.
BY JUSTINE COLEMANA senior adviser for President-elect Joe Biden said Sunday that the recording of President Trump’s conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) "captures the whole, disgraceful story" of the president’s "assault on American democracy." The Washington Post on Sunday released audio from an hour-long Saturday phone call in which Trump repeatedly asks Raffensperger to "find" more than 11,000 ballots and hand the president a win against President-elect Joe Biden in the state. "We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state's lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,” Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer said in a statement. “It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump's assault on American democracy." The phone call represents the first tangible proof that Trump himself has attempted to pressure a state official to change the results of the 2020 election. During Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state, the president told Raffensperger that, “the people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.” "All I want to do is this," Trump added. "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” The president, who has declined to concede to Biden, had previously requested Georgia officials to initiate a special legislative session with the goal of overturning Biden’s election win. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) declined, prompting Trump to publicly condemn him and call for his resignation. Raffensperger, Kemp and other Republican Georgia officials have maintained that Biden won the state and that claims that widespread election fraud affected the election are unfounded.
Biden has widely been recognized as the president-elect since Nov. 7, and the Electoral College made that victory official last month. But Trump’s legal team, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, launched several efforts to contest the votes, including unsuccessful lawsuits in battleground states.Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992. The president-elect has condemned Trump's efforts to alter the election results, saying last month that his win represented the "clearest demonstration of the will of the American people." Dozens of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate are expected to challenge the Electoral College results on Wednesday in the hopes that Congress will back the objections and send the matter to the mostly Republican state legislatures. But the effort will almost certainly prove fruitless. Congress is unlikely to back these objections as Democrats control the House and several Republican party leaders in the Senate are against the move. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/532445-biden-adviser-trump-recording-irrefutable-proof-of-trumps-assault-on
By Josephine Harvey
Audio of the president trying to persuade a Georgia official to change election results is “the ultimate smoking gun tape,” the Watergate journalist said.The leaked tapes of Donald Trump trying to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the president’s election defeat are “far worse” than what occurred in the Watergate scandal, journalist Carl Bernstein said Sunday. Bernstein, whose reporting of the 1972 political scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, said the bombshell tapes of Trump were evidence of an attempted coup. “It’s not déjà vu. This was something far worse than occurred in Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time in this one person.” In audio recordings published by The Washington Post Sunday, Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” exactly enough votes to overturn his loss in that state to President-elect Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 election. Trump repeatedly insisted he had won. At one point, Trump seemed to threaten legal consequences if Raffensperger did not investigate his baseless claims.
“This is the ultimate smoking gun tape,” Bernstein said. “It is the tape with the evidence of what this president is willing to do to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally try to instigate a coup.”
In any other presidency, this tape would be evidence enough to result in impeachment, a conviction in the Senate and a call by members of Congress ― Republicans included ― for the president’s immediate resignation, Bernstein said.
“We’re not going to hear that,” Bernstein added. “We might from a few Republicans, but that’s what’s really called for here. And the one thing we should recall from Watergate was that the heroes of Watergate were Republicans who would not tolerate Richard Nixon’s conduct.”
The president vaguely warned of a “criminal offense” as he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call, according to audio excerpts.President Trump demanded that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election, and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense,” during an hourlong telephone conversation with him on Saturday, according to audio excerpts from the conversation. Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that Mr. Raffensperger should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump would win the state’s 16 electoral votes. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said on the call, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post, which published excerpts from the audio on its website Sunday. “Because we won the state.” Mr. Raffensperger rejected the president’s efforts to get him to reverse the election results, which are set to be certified by Congress during a session on Wednesday. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and the Senate have said they will object to the results of the elections in several states, including Georgia. But Mr. Raffensperger told Mr. Trump that he stood by the results. “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said, according to the audio recording. During the call, the president offered several false conspiracy theories, including debunked charges that ballots in Fulton County were shredded and that voting machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with and replaced. Ryan Germany, the legal counsel in Mr. Raffensperger’s office, can be heard telling the president that such charges are untrue. “You should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger, who replied that “we believe that we do have an accurate election.” Mr. Trump responded: “No, no, no, you don’t, you don’t have, you don’t have, not even close. You guys, you’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.” Then the president suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could be prosecuted criminally. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.” The president confirmed the call in a tweet Sunday morning, claiming that Mr. Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!” In a response on Twitter, Mr. Raffensperger wrote: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
This article was originally published in Dawn on Jan 4, 2011.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/24251/
The report, released by the US Treasury Department Thursday, stated that $342,000 in funds of Lashkar-e-Taiba and $ 1,725 of Jaish-e Mohammed were blocked.The US blocked USD 63 million in funds of designated terrorist groups, including Pakistan-based outfits, in 2019 as part of its crackdown on foreign terrorist organisations, according to an annual report by the treasury department.The report released by the US Department of Treasury on Thursday states the US blocked USD 342,000 in funds of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), USD 1,725 of the Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM) and USD 45,798 of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen-al-Islami. All the three groups are Pakistan-based terror outfits. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen-al-Islami is a Islamic jihad group operating primarily in Kashmir. Another Pakistan-based Kashmir centric terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen has USD 4,321 blocked by the US in 2019 as against USD 2,287 the previous year, the report said. For the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, the US blocked USD 5,067 in 2019 as against a paltry USD 318 in 2018. The Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is the leading US Government agency responsible for implementing sanctions against the assets of international terrorist organisations and terrorism-supporting countries. The federal body implements these sanctions as part of its general mission to administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals. According to the report, in 2019 the US blocked USD 63 million in funds of nearly 70 designated terrorist organisations, with the highest being USD 3.9 million of the al-Qaeda group. While the total blocked funds in 2018 was USD 46 million, that of the al-Qaeda was USD 6.4 million that year. The list includes the Haqqani network (USD 26,546). It is a significant increase from USD 3,626 in 2018. The US continues to block USD 580,811 in funds of the Sri Lanka-based Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has remained the same for two years — 2018 and 2019. The report indicated a significant drop in Taliban funds being blocked by the US from USD 296,805 in 2018 to USD 59,065 in 2019.
According to the report, the combination of sanctions programmes targeting international terrorists and terrorist organisations with those targeting terrorism-supporting governments constitute a wide-ranging assault on international terrorism and its supporters and financiers. The US also blocked USD 200.19 million in funds of countries designated as sponsors of terrorism — Iran, Sudan, Syria and North Korea.https://theprint.in/world/us-blocked-63-mn-in-funds-of-global-terrorist-groups-including-let-jem-in-2019-report/577558/
By Smriti ChaudharyEarlier, 7 Pakistani troops were shot dead in Harnai, Balochistan. “Terrorist fired on Frontier Corps Balochistan post in Sharig, Harnai, Balochistan late Saturday night,” Pakistani Army said in a statement. Balochistan was once again rocked by a deadly terror attack after eleven coal miners were killed in the Mach area of Balochistan after militants abducted and shot the miners, point-blank. The incident took place in the remote Mach area of the southwestern Balochistan province, a key route to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, according to Murad Kaas, the deputy commissioner of the provincial capital Quetta.Kaas told reporters that four miners were also injured in the incident, who were taken in critical condition to a local hospital. He said the miners were on their way when kidnapped by a group of armed militants who took them to nearby mountains and later shot them before escaping. Terror Attacks in Balochistan In October, the Baloch ethnic terror outfit attacked a convoy carrying State-run Oil & Gas Development Company Ltd (OGDCL) workers in Ormara town in Gwadar district killing 14 people, including seven soldiers. Baloch Raji Ajoi Sangar (BRAS), a banned terrorist organization formed with the coalition of several extremist outfits, took the responsibility for the attack, local media reported. In June, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) carried out an attack on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in the city of Karachi. Two guards and a policeman were killed along with seven people wounded before security forces killed all four attackers.The police chief of Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and financial hub, Ghulam Nabi Memon, told Reuters the gunmen attacked with grenades and guns after pulling up in a silver Corolla car. These attacks are a pushback against Beijing backed China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Balochistan province remains one of the poorest in Pakistan and now with the Chinese investment taking over, the ethnic Balochis have expressed anguish over it. They believe that Pakistan and China are exploiting resources in the region in a bid to colonize the province. In response, the Balochi separatists have waged a guerilla war against the ‘occupants’. They have accused the successive government of benefiting from Balochistan’s resources and making the rich Punjab province even richer. Insurgency continues till the day, with the most recent attack resulting in the death of numerous Pakistani soldiers. Kidnapping Of Doctors & Women In Balochistan Another dangerous ring of kidnapping has been happening in the region of targetting doctors. 33 doctors were kidnapped, 18 target killed and more than 90 abandoned in Balochistan during the past decade, according to the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA) reported The Dawn. Local media has reported several kidnappings of doctors, businessmen and politicians from different parts of Balochistan including Quetta. According to a report in BBC, the kidnappers target doctors based on their bank account and transaction information. It further added that most doctors in Quetta practice in private hospitals and are accused of earning more than their salaries in these hospitals. While the government agencies have never provided any details of these kidnappers in Balochistan, BBC said that some sources allege the involvement of key figures including politicians who sponsor these kidnapping groups.Not just doctors, reports of abduction of women have also been on the rise for the region. The World Baloch Women Forum has alleged that the Pakistani Army is behind these abductions. Reportedly, earlier families of activists were targetted but now the “they take people more or less randomly, behaving more like goons than like the army of a civilized country,” said a report in Business Standard.“The Pakistan army has well-documented brutal use of heavy artillery against unarmed innocents, along with helicopter gunships, and its merciless acts of burning village hutments, the slaughter of unarmed civilians, rape, kidnap, torture, and extra-judicial killings are utterly incomprehensible acts of inhumanity,” read a statement released by the World Baloch Women Forum (WBWF). Imran Khan’s Move In a bid to woo the people and garner support for Xi Jinping’s flagship CPEC under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Khan announced a mega-development project for South Balochistan. During a visit to Turbat last month, Khan announced that the project featured the construction of 1,100-kilometre roads, skill training to 35,000 youth and expansion of power and gas supply networks. The project is expected to cost 10 billion Pakistani rupees. However, critics have raised questions on the feasibility of the project given the cash strapped government. Islamabad has repeatedly blamed India for supporting the insurgents in the region by training and funding the Baloch Republic Army (BLA), a separatist group. Reportedly, the Baloch people have been struggling to gain independence from the Pakistan occupation and have expressed solidarity with India on several occasions. https://eurasiantimes.com/has-balochistan-toppled-kashmir-to-emerge-as-the-most-dangerous-place-in-south-asia/
Attackers identify miners from the Hazara Shia minority community and take them away for execution, leaving others unharmed, probe suggests.