US navy interaction in Gulf waters with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) remains unchanged despite Washington’s decision to blacklist the elite force as a “foreign terrorist organisation” and clampdown on oil exports, an Iranian general said.

Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, Major-General Mohammad Baqeri, said on Sunday the IRGC – which ensures security in Gulf waters and the Strait of Hormuz for Iran – had not observed any change in the US military’s behaviour towards the force after the blacklisting.

“US warships are obliged to respond to the IRGC on the passage of the Strait of Hormuz … and until yesterday they have been answering IRGC questions, and we have not seen change in their procedures,” Baqeri was quoted as saying by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.

Earlier this month, the United States designated the revolutionary guards a “terrorist group” and demanded buyers of Iranian oil – including India, China and Turkey – to stop purchasing by May or face sanctions in a bid to bring “Iran’s oil exports to zero” and deny Tehran “its principal source of revenue”.

‘Oil of others’

Washington’s decision on April 22 to end oil waivers that allowed some of Iran’s largest customers to import fuel without facing financial penalties prompted senior officials in Tehran to threaten closing the strait in the event Iran was prevented from using the waterway.

The Strait of Hormuz carries about one-third of the world’s seaborne oil every day and links Middle East crude producers – including Iran – to markets in Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America and beyond. 

On Sunday, Fars quoted Baqeri as saying Iran did not intend to close the strait “unless hostilities reach a level where this cannot be avoided”.

“If our oil does not pass, the oil of others shall not pass the Strait of Hormuz either,” Baqeri said.

A spokeswoman for US Naval Forces Central Command, meanwhile, warned threats to close the waterway “impact the international community and undermine the free flow of commerce”.

“The US, along with our allies and partners, is committed to freedom of navigation and remains well positioned and postured to preserve the free flow of commerce, and we are prepared to respond to any acts of aggression,” Lieutenant Chloe Morgan told Reuters news agency in an emailed statement.

Iran-US tensions rise

Tensions between Tehran and Washington have steadily escalated since US President Donald Trump withdrew the United States last year from a nuclear deal brokered with Iran and other world powers in 2015 and reimposed punitive financial measures on the Islamic Republic, suggesting the country was a destabilising actor in the Middle East.

Under the deal signed in Vienna with the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union, Iran scaled back its uranium enrichment programme and promised not to pursue nuclear weapons.

In exchange, international sanctions were lifted, allowing it to sell its oil and gas worldwide.

Since the US withdrawal, Washington has pursued a “maximum pressure strategy” aimed at crippling Tehran’s revenue streams. On April 8, it branded the IRGC a “terrorist” group.

The decision marked an unprecedented step by the US against an entire institution of a foreign government and drew an immediate tit-for-tat response from Iran, with Tehran designating the United States as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

‘Absurd’

On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif called the IRGC blacklisting “absurd”, but suggested Iran did not plan to respond militarily unless the US changed the rules of engagement guiding how it interacts with Iran’s forces.

The Revolutionary Guard was set up to protect the country’s Shia clerical ruling system after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which toppled the Western-allied secular monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and led to the formation of the Islamic Republic headed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

With an estimated 125,000 personnel comprised of army, navy and air units, it is Iran’s most powerful security organisation.

The force controls the country’s ballistic missiles and nuclear programmes, answers directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and owns a vast network of businesses ranging from oil and gas projects to construction and telecommunications.

As protests spread across the Arab world in 2011, Egypt became a beacon of hope in the region.

But this glimmer of light quickly dimmed, rights groups say, pointing towards a widespread crackdown on dissent, with recent constitutional amendments only deepening the the country’s human rights woes.

In 2013, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the then defence minister who ousted the country’s first elected president in a popularly supported coup, promised to keep to two four-year terms mandated by the Egyptian constitution. 

But on Tuesday, electoral authorities announced that Egyptians had overwhelmingly (89 percent) backed constitutional changes, allowing President el-Sisi to extend his current four-year term to six years and run for another six-year term in 2024.

The amendments also bolster the role of the military and expand the president’s power over judicial appointments, further raising analysts’ concerns over the country’s judicial independence and human rights situation.

“The human rights trajectory in Egypt has been in a deep descent for several years now. The litany of serious abuses during President el-Sisi’s rule … appears set to continue with the constitutional amendments enshrining long-term autocratic rule,” Michael Page, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera.

“What’s especially concerning in these now-approved amendments is how they further the undercut what’s left of the concept of an independent judiciary in Egypt, as well as how the amendments grant further license for Egypt’s military to intervene in civilian affairs,” he added. 

‘Subordinated judiciary, stronger military’

Under amended articles 185, 189 and 193, the president will have the authority to appoint the heads of the judicial bodies and authorities, select the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court, and appoint the public prosecutor. 

At the same time, amended article 200 vastly expands the power of military giving it the duty to “protect the constitution and democracy, and safeguard the basic components of the State and its civilian nature, and the people’s gains, and individual rights and freedoms.”

Commenting on these amendments, Said Benarabia, Middle East and North Africa director of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), said that the amendments enshrine executive control of the judiciary and interference in judicial matters, while placing the military above the law and Constitution.

“Egypt’s military and executive have subordinated the judiciary and the office of the general prosecutor to their political will, making them a docile tool in their on-going, sustained crackdown on human rights in the country,” Benarabia told Al Jazeera. 

According to Benarabia, the amendments run against international standards on judicial independence and undermine Egyptians’ basic rights. 

“The amendments will undermine Egyptians’ right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, including to freely determine their political status and to choose the form of their constitution or government free from any interference by, or subordination to the military,” explained Benarbia. 

Benarabia added that these amendments “will also undermine Egyptians’ right to a fair trial before a competent, independent and impartial court of tribunal.”

Lead up to vote

Concerns among observers had heighted in the weeks leading up to the referendum as a campaign of intimidation, ongoing mass arrests and a deepening crackdown on fundamental freedoms by the Egyptian authorities attempted to silence any opposition. 

According to a Human Rights Watch report published ahead of the vote, mass arrest and smear campaigns targeted activists calling for boycotting or rejecting the amendments, including members of a coalition of 10 secular and leftist political parties and several activists and famous actors. 

According to local newspapers, opposition figure and former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi was under investigation by the authorities for “instigating chaos” over his opposition to the amendments. 

Meanwhile, award-winning actors Amr Waked and Khaled Abol Naga, both of whom are based abroad, were expelled from the Egyptian actors’ union. The Egyptian authorities are also investigating them over accusations of treason after they spoke out against Sisi.  

According to HRW, 160 dissidents were arrested or prosecuted in Egypt during February and March alone. The authorities blocked independent campaign website ‘Batel’, which translates to ‘void’, ahead of the referendum, along with seven other alternative websites that campaigned against the amendments, said the report. 

The referendum itself therefore took place amidst “widespread suppression of fundamental freedoms, including freedoms of expression, association, and assembly and the right to political participation,” said HRW in its report. 

Years of suppression 

Since el-Sisi was still defence minister, security forces embarked on a nationwide crackdown which began with the killing of around 1000 protesters as they cleared Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo in August 2013. 

Following el-Sisi’s election as president in 2014, the government “committed widespread and systematic human rights violations, including mass killings of protesters, arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings of detainees, and torture and other ill-treatment in detention,” according to HRW.

Commenting on this issue, Dalia Fahmy, associate professor of political science at Long Island University told Al Jazeera: “Hundreds of political activists and protesters have reportedly been arrested for unauthorized protests or for criticizing the president online.  Mass unfair trials… sweeping death sentences and using death sentences to settle scores… have further tightened the noose.”

“The youth that Amnesty International once referred to as ‘Generation Protest’ is now ‘Generation Jail’.”

Although the crackdown initially targeted el-Sisi’s Islamist opponents, it quickly expanded to include a vast array of political dissidents, human rights lawyers, members of the LGBTQ community, and journalists.

Among them was Al Jazeera’s reporter Mahmoud Hussein, who was detained in 2016 upon his arrival in Cairo to visit his family. Hussein completed two years in prisonwithout charges, trial or conviction, in December last year, which experts say is a violation of Egyptian and international law. 

An NGO law issued by Egyptian authorities in 2017 effectively banned independent work by nongovernmental groups, allowed for the prosecution of dozens of Egyptian NGO workers, froze the assets of many human rights defenders in the country, and issued travel bans against them, according to a HRW report published earlier this month. 

That same year, Egypt imposed a state of emergency which has, according to experts, allowed the state to abuse counterterrorism and media laws to suppress basic freedoms. 

Since el-Sisi secured a second term in 2018, HRW says his security forces further escalated their “campaign of intimidation, violence, and arbitrary arrests against political opponents, activists.”

Analysts believe this campaign is likely to continue following the amendments,“even if currently the civil and political space in already incredibly restricted, and there are tens of thousands of people languishing in Egyptian jails on political grounds,” explained HRW’s Page.     

Colombo, Sri Lanka – A week after suicide bombers killed at least 253 people in Sri Lanka as they celebrated Easter, churches remain closed and people remained in their homes to observe mass, which was broadcast live on national television.

The Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith led the multi-lingual service from his official residence in the south of the capital. “Every human being is unique,” he told the congregation watching from home. “Each and everyone is special.”

A two-minute walk from St. Anthony’s, one of the three churches targeted in the attacks, brother and sister Velusamy Rajaratnam and E Puvaneswari were watching the service. Although Hindu, they regularly visited St. Anthony’s.

Last Sunday, their 49-year-old sister Sarojini Velusamy went there to celebrate mass. They have been searching for her since.

“I can’t feel anything watching the mass when the person I am looking for is still not here,” 55-year-old Velusamy said. “I just want to know whether she’s alive or dead.”

High alert

Sri Lanka has been on heightened alert since the bombers, stooping with the weight of the grey backpacks they had packed with explosives, walked into St. Anthony’s, two other churches and three luxury hotels in Colombo to set off their bombs.

At least 253 people were killed and hundreds wounded. The government has blamed a local hardline group, National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) for the attacks and has banned the organisation.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility in a video released two days after the attacks on Tuesday.

At St. Anthony’s on Saturday, the wooden pews remained piled up on the road next to the church as workers removed the last of the debris from inside. Men in wellington boots and hard hats were hosing down the walls with jets of foamy water from high-pressure fire hoses.

“This is to clean off the spots of blood,” Father Jude Fernando, the priest incharge of St Anthony’s, told Al Jazeera, looking as if he had not slept all week.

The workers, deployed by the Sri Lankan navy, washed the street outside the shrine in preparation for a visit on Sunday by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Fear and mourning

Father Fernando was in his office next to the church when the bomber detonated his device. The priest conducting the Tamil language service was Father Jude Joseph Joy Mariaratnam.

That Easter morning, as Father Mariaratnam welcomed the people to church, the mood was festive and many of the congregation members were wearing their best clothes. There was a feeling of joy and hope, he remembered. 

But halfway through the mass, as a member of the choir was reading the 4th Prayer of the Faithful, the bomber pushed his way into the church near the candle shop at the back. There was a massive explosion and the clock on the church tower stopped.

From his position at the altar, Father Mariaratnam at first thought the electrical transformer had blown.

“But it did not take me seconds to realise it was a bomb blast,” he told Al Jazeera. “I saw a head-like thing flying and could hear people screaming. But I was terribly shocked and for a couple of minutes I did not move, to be honest, not because I was in a sense frightened, but because I was shocked.”

He tried to get to the place where the bomb had gone off.

“I saw bodies scattered here and there, pieces of flesh everywhere,” he said. “There was screaming and shouting and crying.”

At Alley 23, the first alleyway down from the church, residents mostly make a living driving three-wheelers or selling candles to people who visit St. Anthony’s. The church was “theirs” they said, regardless of religion or ethnicity. It was a place they all felt welcome.

When they heard the bomb go off, they rushed to help.

Ravi Chandran, 52, had just sold candles to a father and son and started to walk home to Alley 23. He ran back to help the injured, commandeering three-wheelers to ferry the wounded to hospital.

He realised that wasn’t going to be enough and managed to flag down a bus, but as he went back to the church to see what else he could do, he saw what he thought was the head of a child lying close to the front door.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said, shaking his head with despair. “I just had to leave.”

The attacks revealed the dysfunction at the heart of Sri Lanka’s government, where the president and prime minister barely appear to be on speaking terms.

A tip-off from foreign intelligence agencies that churches and hotels were at risk of attack over Easter, giving names, addresses and potential targets, was ignored. Government officials then sought to blame each other for the catastrophic error.

“It was not an intelligence breakdown,” investigative journalist and political analyst Lasantha Ruhunage said. “It was either a feigning of ignorance or a failure of the ability to assess the risks properly.”

Scores of people have been detained since parliament approved sweeping emergency powers for the police and military, and the president has vowed that every house on the island will be searched.

In Colombo, the pregnant wife of one of the bombers blew herself up – along with her son – when police arrived at her house on Sunday night.

Two days ago, 15 people, six of them children, were killed in a ferocious gunfight between police and suspected attackers in a town at the east coast. Police said the dead included three suspected suicide bombers and the wife and child of Mohamed Zahran, NTJ leader and alleged mastermind of the attacks.

Weapons, swords and bomb-making equipment have also been seized in raids across the island, with the authorities saying they also found a black ISIL flag dark grey robes the bombers had worn in their video.

On Sunday, Jesudasan Pushparani, 52, came out onto the street outside St. Anthony’s to join scores of other local residents saying prayers and lighting candles for the dead, in defiance of warnings about the security risks.

Dressed in white and clutching a pink handkerchief, Pushparani said she had come to remember her brother, a 38-year-old fisherman from Mullaitivu in the northeast, who had arrived in Colombo two days before Easter. A Catholic, he had decided to celebrate the mass at St. Anthony’s on Sunday.

“He was a highly respected member of his community,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Even when the soldiers saw him, they would salute him as they went past. He was always there for everyone.”

Black and white streamers have fluttered across the street since Sunday in remembrance of those who lost their lives. Above alleyways and on street corners, flower-filled shrines to St. Anthony have long watched over the tightly-knit community of Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.

“Honestly, I do not know how to console them,” said Father Mariaratnam. “But I do say not to lose hope … It is not easy to rationalise, but I am strong and convinced something good will happen.”

One of the two top Saudi royal officials linked to journalist Jamal Khashoggi‘s killing have been absent in the closed-door trial of 11 suspects, multiple sources told the AFP news agency.

Saudi prosecutors have said that deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri oversaw the Washington Post columnist’s killing in the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate last October and that he was advised by the royal court’s media tsar Saud al-Qahtani.

Both aides were part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman‘s tight-knit inner circle and have formally been sacked over the killing but only Assiri has appeared in the five court hearings since January, according to four Western officials privy to the information.

“Qahtani is not among the 11 facing trial,” one of the Western officials told AFP. “What does his absence mean? Are the Saudis eager to protect him or discipline him separately? No one knows.”

The kingdom’s public prosecutor last November indicted 11 unnamed suspects, including five who could face the death penalty over the murder.

Diplomats from the UN Security Council’s permanent members, the US, Britain, France, China, Russia, as well as Turkey are allowed to attend as observers of the legal proceedings that are held entirely in Arabic.

They are not allowed to bring interpreters and are usually summoned at short notice, the sources said.

Maher Mutreb, an intelligence operative who frequently travelled with the crown prince on foreign tours, forensic expert Salah al-Tubaigy and Fahad al-Balawi, a member of the Saudi royal guard, are among the 11 on trial who could face the death penalty, the officials said.

The defendants are allowed legal counsel.

Many of them have defended themselves in court by saying they were carrying out orders by Assiri, describing him as the “ringleader” of the operation, according to the officials.

Qahtani missing 

Assiri, lionised in Saudi military ranks as a war hero, does not face the death penalty, the Western officials added.

Believed to have previously worked closely with US intelligence, he is also not named in two US sanctions lists of Saudis implicated in the murder.

Qahtani, who led fiery social media campaigns against critics of the kingdom and was seen as a conduit to the crown prince, is on both lists.

He met the Saudi hit squad team before they left for Turkey to share “useful information related to the mission based on his specialisation in media,” according to the Saudi prosecutor’s office.

But he has not appeared publicly since the murder and his current whereabouts are a subject of fevered speculation.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported earlier this year that Prince Mohammed continues to seek his counsel, citing US and Saudi sources.

“Qahtani holds a lot of files and dossiers,” Ignatius quoted one American who met the crown prince as saying.

“The idea that you can have a radical rupture with him is unrealistic.”

‘Prince Mohammed’s order’

The CIA has reportedly said the murder was likely ordered by Prince Mohammed, the de facto ruler and heir to the throne.

Saudi authorities strongly deny the allegation, and in private conversations with Western officials they have instead criticised Turkish authorities for failing to stop the killing.

“Their intelligence knew that a (Saudi) hit squad was coming. They could have stopped them!” one of them quoted a Saudi official as saying.

Turkish officials were the first to report Khashoggi’s murder and have continued to press Saudi Arabia for information on the whereabouts of his dismembered body, which has yet to be found.

Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur conducting an independent inquiry into the killing, last month condemned what she called a lack of transparency in the legal proceedings and demanded an open trial.

The kingdom “is grievously mistaken if it believes that these proceedings, as currently constituted, will satisfy the international community,” she said.

It was unclear when the Saudi trial will conclude.

Meja, Kosovo – Hundreds of people on Saturday braved a spring downpour to remember the victims of the largest mass killing of the Kosovo War.

The Meja massacre on April 27, 1999, came during the last conflict fought in Europe in the 20th century that killed more than 13,000 people.

Sali Alijaj, 52, was one of the 376 ethnic Albanian Muslims and Catholics killed by Serbian police and army forces as families fled to neighbouring Albania to seek refuge from the brutal war in Kosovo, then a province of Serbia.

Men were separated from the women and children and executed in a nearby field.

“I lost my father in this massacre. It was a dangerous day; they could’ve taken me too. But thank God I survived,” said Alijaj’s son, 35-year-old Muharrem, at the Meja memorial complex in western Kosovo.

He still remembers seeing his father for the last time in the Albania-bound refugee convoy.

“He just looked at us sadly. But he was kind of happy that they didn’t take me – at least one of us could be saved. But he still had a sad expression on his face,” Muharrem said at his father’s grave.

He had travelled from Germany, where there is an Albanian diaspora community, to Meja.

Sali Alijaj was taken from a tractor that he was driving with his family to escape the Serb forces surrounding his village.

“I will never forget my brother. He was driving the [tractor] and the Serbs surrounded him. I had two of my nephews hidden in my clothes. One of them was the son of my brother that the Serbs took,” said Sali Alijaj’s 92-year-old sister, Sofe. “They pointed the gun at him on his back. We yelled and cried. But we couldn’t do anything.”

Twenty years later, Sofe sill mourns the loss of her brother. 

“[Those who were killed] will always be remembered. Any of us who had lost someone in the war has a wound in their hearts forever. You learn to live like that even though it’s hard.”

Government officials and members of the international community in Kosovo also attended the twentieth anniversary of the commemoration of the massacre, including Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj – both high-ranking members of the Kosovo Liberation Army that fought for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia – and the US Ambassador to Kosovo, Philip Kosnett, laying wreaths at the memorial.

The US remains one of Kosovo’s biggest supporters in post-war recovery and rebuilding of the nation after leading NATO’s intervention that eventually removed Slobodan Milosevic’s forces from Kosovo.

“The trauma of Kosovo’s own past touches every corner of this country – north and south – and extends beyond its borders. I have seen the same pain we see here today in the faces of the families of missing persons, and of survivors of wartime violence, from many regions and communities,” Kosnett told mourners huddling under umbrellas.

Spring in Kosovo brings back painful memories in Kosovo – the majority of war crimes took place during the season, when NATO launched 78 days of air attacks targeting Serbian military installations. Serb forces retaliated against the ethnic Albanian population and thousands were killed on both sides. 

April 27 also marks the national day of missing people in Kosovo. Kosovans travelled from around the country to Meja with framed photos of their missing loved ones.

Today, 1,650 people remain missing and unaccounted for since the end of the war.

Despite the long-standing presence of EULEX, the EU’s rule of law mission in Kosovo, and UNMIK, the UN mission in Kosovo, hundreds of Serbian war crimes cases are still unresolved. EULEX’s mandate ended last year. Previously, it had inherited more than a thousand war-crime cases from UNMIK before handing over around 900 of them to Kosovo institutions.

Shemsie Hoxha, 60, lost her husband and two sons at Meja. 

“The youngest one was 16 and they took him from my hands. The eldest was 18 years old. My husband was 44. Ardian, the youngest was very tall and they took him from my hands. I insisted that my son is very young and that they don’t have to take him, but they beat me and took him anyways,” Hoxha said next to the three graves of her sons and husband. 

“We were walking in the column, they didn’t ask the age, they just separated men from us. They took them to a field. I stayed for an hour at the place they took my family members. I was hoping for a miracle. I was waiting for them to come back. [When they didn’t return] we continued the road to Albania.”

Hoxha remained hopeful that her sons and husband would return. Immediately after the war ended in June 1999, she returned to the same field where she last saw her husband and sons.

“The field was almost empty, but there were still some bodies in the field. But I couldn’t find my children.”

A few years later, in 2005, the human remains of her sons and husband were found in a mass grave in Serbia, with the help of DNA testing, and returned to Meja to be buried. But the suffering has not ended. 

“The pain and memories are the same 20 years later.”