News Analysis India

Tag: Poland

  • Denmark Latest To Mandate Compulsory Military Service To Women: List Of Nations Where 'Armed Service' Is A Must For Females | world news

    COPENHAGEN: In a significant move towards gender equality and national security, Denmark has embarked on a journey to mandate military service for women, making it the latest nation to do so. This decision, announced by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, aims to bolster the country's defense capabilities and ensure parity between genders in the realm of armed forces participation. Frederiksen emphasized that the extension of conscription to women and the elongation of service duration from four to eleven months for both genders signify Denmark's commitment to peace and preparedness rather than an inclination toward conflict.

    Denmark's Strategic Move

    Denmark, as a member of the NATO alliance and a staunch supporter of Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, has underlined the importance of a robust defense posture in the face of evolving geopolitical challenges. Despite Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen's assertion that Russia does not pose an immediate threat to Denmark, the government remains steadfast in its determination to fortify national security. With only 9,000 professional troops complemented by 4,700 conscripts currently undergoing basic training, Denmark seeks to augment its military strength by enlisting more individuals into its armed forces.

    Policy Reforms

    The proposed changes in Denmark's military conscription system entail a comprehensive restructuring of the recruitment and training process. Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen outlined the legislative adjustments required to implement the new system, with the anticipated timeline set for enactment in 2026. Under the revised framework, conscripts will undergo five months of basic training, six months of operational service, and supplementary training. This revamped approach aims to foster a more inclusive and comprehensive defense mechanism that is adaptable to contemporary security threats.

    International Comparisons: Mandatory Military Service For Women

    Denmark's decision to mandate military service for women aligns with global trends toward gender mainstreaming in defense policies. Countries such as Sweden and Norway have already embraced the concept of compulsory military service for both men and women, reflecting a broader shift towards gender parity in armed forces recruitment. Israel, despite its longstanding conscription policy, exempts certain segments of the population, highlighting the complexities inherent in balancing national security imperatives with individual rights and religious considerations. Eritrea's contentious conscription practices, characterized by forced military training for both genders, underscore the challenges associated with coercive recruitment strategies and their implications for human rights.

    Beyond Denmark, several other nations have either active or inactive policies regarding military service for women:

    Sweden: In 2017, Sweden reinstated conscription for both men and women amid concerns over regional security threats. This decision reflects Sweden's proactive approach to strengthening its defense capabilities.

    Norway: Since 2015, Norway has mandated national service for both men and women, making it a trailblazer in gender-inclusive military policies among NATO members.

    Israel: Military service is compulsory for Israeli citizens, with exceptions for certain groups, including ultra-Orthodox and Arab Israelis. While women are not obliged to serve, many choose to do so voluntarily.

    Eritrea: Eritrea has drawn international attention for its controversial conscription practices, which require both boys and girls to undergo military training. Despite legal limitations on service duration, many Eritrean youth face prolonged conscription periods.

    South Korea and North Korea: Both Koreas have longstanding traditions of compulsory military service, with recent adjustments to include women in mandatory conscription. In South Korea, women can now fulfill their military obligations alongside men, reflecting evolving societal norms.

    Switzerland: While military service is compulsory for men in Switzerland, women have the option to serve voluntarily. However, discussions are underway to potentially revise this policy and introduce mandatory conscription for women.

    Poland: Poland allows women to volunteer for military service, with certain professions requiring compulsory service. This approach reflects Poland's recognition of the valuable contributions women can make to national defense.

    Cuba: In Cuba, military service is mandatory for men, while women can choose to serve voluntarily. This distinction underscores Cuba's approach to gender roles within its armed forces.

    These diverse examples illustrate the varying approaches to female conscription worldwide, reflecting each nation's unique security challenges, cultural norms, and historical contexts. While some countries have embraced gender-inclusive military policies, others continue to grapple with questions of equality and national defense.

  • Cannes 2023: ‘In the Rearview’ spotlights Ukrainians escaping war & Polish efforts to help them

    By Associated Press

    WARSAW: When Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela first began evacuating Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war on their country, he wasn’t intending to make a film. He was one of the many Poles extending humanitarian aid to neighbors under attack, and had turned down an offer to film a television investigation there.

    But the reflections of the people he was transporting to safety in his van were so poignant that soon he began filming them. He asked a friend who is a director of photography to help him film — and drive — and directed his camera squarely back at his passengers as they traversed their war-scarred land.

    The result is “In the Rearview,” a documentary film being shown at the Cannes film festival in France as part of a parallel program devoted to independent cinema. It is not in competition.

    A Polish-French co-production, it takes place almost entirely in Hamela’s van, with the camera capturing the harrowed passengers, one group after another in countless journeys made between March and November of 2022.

    The result is a composite portrait of men, women and children traversing a devastated landscape of bombed-out buildings and past checkpoints with dangerous detours caused by mines and collapsed bridges and roads.

    The 84-minute film shows a little girl so traumatized that she stopped speaking. There is a Congolese woman who was so badly injured that she has undergone 18 operations since Hamela evacuated her. A mother with two kids who pass by the Dnieper River; believing it to be the sea, the kids ask their mother if she will take them there after the war.

    “The way we set up the film was to see the reflection of the war in these very small details of ordinary life and the life that we all have,” Hamela told The Associated Press in an interview in Warsaw before he flew to Cannes.

    There is also some humor, with one woman commenting ironically that she had always wanted to travel. A woman escaping with her cat saying it needed a bathroom break.

    The crew of the documentary ‘In the Rearview’, Maciek Hamela, from left, Kseniia Marchenko, Larysa Sosnovtseva, Yura Dunay, and Anna Palenchuk stand on a rug damaged by a bomb in the town of Lukashivka in Ukraine on the Boulevard de la Croisette during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, Sunday, May 21, 2023. (Photo | AP)

    In order not to exploit the people he was helping, Hamela told them a camera was in a car before he picked them up. And they only signed forms giving him permission to use the footage after they had arrived safely at their destinations so they would never feel that was a condition for his help.

    “In the Rearview” also documents one of the many Polish efforts to help Ukraine. When Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, there was a massive grassroots effort to help across Poland, with regular people taking time off work to travel to the border with Ukraine to distribute food. Some picked up strangers and took them to shelters or even into their own homes.

    Hamela began on day one to raise money for the Ukrainian army. By day three he had bought a van to transport Ukrainians from the Polish border and convinced his father to open his beloved summer home to strangers.

    Soon Hamela heard from a friend of people in eastern Ukraine needing to be rescued, and he began driving to the front lines of the war to pick them up. Some emerged from basements where they had been sheltering in terror.

    When the war began, Hamela had been working on a documentary about a crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. Large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa had been trying to cross that border in 2021. Poland and other European Union countries viewed that as an effort organized by Russia’s ally Belarus to destabilize Poland and other EU countries.

    Poland reacted by building a wall to stop the migrants, resulting in some dying in the forests and bogs of the area.

    The war in Ukraine led Hamela to drop that project, which was to have focused on the indifference in some Polish border communities to the plights of the migrants and refugees.

    Having observed both crises up close, he sees a connection.

    “This is my personal take on this, but I really think it was meant to antagonize Poles against all refugees in preparation for the war with Ukraine,” he said.

    Hamela, who is now 40, was also active in supporting Ukrainians involved in the pro-democracy Maidan Revolution of 2014, which led to Russia’s initial incursions into Ukraine.

    He says the world shown in his documentary could hardly be further from the glamorous world of Cannes, and he hopes it will remind people of how high the stakes are in Ukraine.

    “We’re trying to use this coverage to remind everybody that the war is still going on and lives need saving. And Ukraine is not going to win it without our help,” he said. “So that’s the ultimate task with this film.”

    WARSAW: When Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela first began evacuating Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war on their country, he wasn’t intending to make a film. He was one of the many Poles extending humanitarian aid to neighbors under attack, and had turned down an offer to film a television investigation there.

    But the reflections of the people he was transporting to safety in his van were so poignant that soon he began filming them. He asked a friend who is a director of photography to help him film — and drive — and directed his camera squarely back at his passengers as they traversed their war-scarred land.

    The result is “In the Rearview,” a documentary film being shown at the Cannes film festival in France as part of a parallel program devoted to independent cinema. It is not in competition.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });

    A Polish-French co-production, it takes place almost entirely in Hamela’s van, with the camera capturing the harrowed passengers, one group after another in countless journeys made between March and November of 2022.

    The result is a composite portrait of men, women and children traversing a devastated landscape of bombed-out buildings and past checkpoints with dangerous detours caused by mines and collapsed bridges and roads.

    The 84-minute film shows a little girl so traumatized that she stopped speaking. There is a Congolese woman who was so badly injured that she has undergone 18 operations since Hamela evacuated her. A mother with two kids who pass by the Dnieper River; believing it to be the sea, the kids ask their mother if she will take them there after the war.

    “The way we set up the film was to see the reflection of the war in these very small details of ordinary life and the life that we all have,” Hamela told The Associated Press in an interview in Warsaw before he flew to Cannes.

    There is also some humor, with one woman commenting ironically that she had always wanted to travel. A woman escaping with her cat saying it needed a bathroom break.

    The crew of the documentary ‘In the Rearview’, Maciek Hamela, from left, Kseniia Marchenko, Larysa Sosnovtseva, Yura Dunay, and Anna Palenchuk stand on a rug damaged by a bomb in the town of Lukashivka in Ukraine on the Boulevard de la Croisette during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, Sunday, May 21, 2023. (Photo | AP)

    In order not to exploit the people he was helping, Hamela told them a camera was in a car before he picked them up. And they only signed forms giving him permission to use the footage after they had arrived safely at their destinations so they would never feel that was a condition for his help.

    “In the Rearview” also documents one of the many Polish efforts to help Ukraine. When Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, there was a massive grassroots effort to help across Poland, with regular people taking time off work to travel to the border with Ukraine to distribute food. Some picked up strangers and took them to shelters or even into their own homes.

    Hamela began on day one to raise money for the Ukrainian army. By day three he had bought a van to transport Ukrainians from the Polish border and convinced his father to open his beloved summer home to strangers.

    Soon Hamela heard from a friend of people in eastern Ukraine needing to be rescued, and he began driving to the front lines of the war to pick them up. Some emerged from basements where they had been sheltering in terror.

    When the war began, Hamela had been working on a documentary about a crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. Large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa had been trying to cross that border in 2021. Poland and other European Union countries viewed that as an effort organized by Russia’s ally Belarus to destabilize Poland and other EU countries.

    Poland reacted by building a wall to stop the migrants, resulting in some dying in the forests and bogs of the area.

    The war in Ukraine led Hamela to drop that project, which was to have focused on the indifference in some Polish border communities to the plights of the migrants and refugees.

    Having observed both crises up close, he sees a connection.

    “This is my personal take on this, but I really think it was meant to antagonize Poles against all refugees in preparation for the war with Ukraine,” he said.

    Hamela, who is now 40, was also active in supporting Ukrainians involved in the pro-democracy Maidan Revolution of 2014, which led to Russia’s initial incursions into Ukraine.

    He says the world shown in his documentary could hardly be further from the glamorous world of Cannes, and he hopes it will remind people of how high the stakes are in Ukraine.

    “We’re trying to use this coverage to remind everybody that the war is still going on and lives need saving. And Ukraine is not going to win it without our help,” he said. “So that’s the ultimate task with this film.”

  • Miss World 2021: Indian-American Shree Saini, representing USA becomes 1st runner-up

    By ANI

    SAN JUAN: Karolina Bielawska from Poland won the title of international beauty pageant Miss World 2021.

    Indian-American Shree Saini from the United States bagged the first runner-up title, followed by Olivia Yace from Cote d’Ivoire as the second runner-up. The pageant took place on March 16 (March 17 IST) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after it was delayed in 2020 due to Covid-19.

    Femina Miss India World 2020 Manasa Varanasi represented India at the Miss World 2021. She reached the Top 13 contestants but could not make it to the Top 6 finalists.

    The newly crowned Miss World is preceded by Miss World 2019 Toni-Ann Singh from Jamaica. India last bagged the crown in 2017, represented by model-actor Manushi Chhillar.

  • Forces at border used stun guns, batons and fired in the air: Student

    Express News Service

    NEW DELHI:  Walked nearly 50 kilometres in the cold for four days – sometimes alone, hungry and almost on the verge of collapse. Nineteen-year-old Asha (name changed), a second-year medical student in Ukraine, finally had a good night’s sleep at a hotel in Poland on Monday. 

    Terrified after her harrowing time at the border where she was among the hundreds of Indian students, who were beaten, tortured, and harassed, she finally heaved a sigh of relief when she was reunited with friends she had separated from while walking towards the Ukraine-Poland border at the hotel arranged by the Indian Embassy in Poland in cooperation with Indo-Polish Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

    “I started walking with my friends on February 25 morning. Last night, we had reached this hotel (in Poland). We were constantly walking in the minus five degree temperature with luggage. We had carried food and water with our us,” she told this newspaper over the phone about her journey after Russia attacked Ukraine. She is now staying with over 400 Indian students at the Hotel Prezydenckie in Poland and is waiting for flights back home tonight.

    Sharing her experience at the Ukraine-Poland border where Indians were beaten up, she said, “We were stopped at the border for close to eight hours without reason. The Ukrainian army suddenly turned violent. They started beating up people, especially Indians.” “They used batons, stun guns, and even fired in the air. It was a terrifying sight which I will never forget,” she said. Her other friends, who also requested not to be identified, and were injured at the border, agreed that the memory would permanently be etched in their minds. 

    Nehal Singh from Ahmedabad, a third-year student from the same college, said he is happy to be alive and doesn’t want to remember the horror they witnessed at the border where Indians were beaten up mercilessly. During her journey towards the Polish border, Asha was separated from her friends and walked alone for miles. “I was lucky to find another group of Indian students who were walking towards the border. Many of us also suffered from hyperthermia.”

    “I walked for 40 to 50 kilometres in these four days. My legs are swollen, my skin is peeling. I have cuts and bruises. It’s the same with my friends,” she constantly coughed as she spoke. “Now, I am in a safe place. The arrangements here are fantastic,” she said as she praised Amit Lath, vice-president of the Chamber, who is helping the Indian Embassy in Poland in making arrangements for the evacuees. “He is also helping us in trying to locate other Indian students who are similarly stranded.”