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War Crimes Prosecution Watch Editor-in-Chief Taylor Frank FREDERICK K. COX Volume 13 - Issue 10 INTERNATIONAL LAW CENTER June 25, 2018 Technical Editor-in-Chief Ashley Mulryan Founder/Advisor Michael P. Scharf Managing Editors Sarah Lucey Lynsey Rosales
War Crimes Prosecution Watch is a bi-weekly e-newsletter that compiles official documents and articles from major news sources detailing and analyzing salient issues pertaining to the investigation and prosecution of war crimes throughout the world. To subscribe, please email [email protected] and type "subscribe" in the subject line.
Opinions expressed in the articles herein represent the views of their authors and are not necessarily those of the War Crimes Prosecution Watch staff, the Case Western Reserve University School of Law or Public International Law & Policy Group.
Contents
AFRICA
CENTRAL AFRICA
Central African Republic
ICC court launches fund for CAR victims of BEMBA militia (News 24) CAR says Boris Becker’s diplomatic passport is ‘fake’ (News 24) US, UK, France Block Central African Republic’s Request for Chinese Arms (Geopolitics Alert, originally from Pan African News Wire)
Sudan & South Sudan
South Sudan's latest civil war atrocities kept out of sight (New Jersey Herald) In South Sudan's war, thousands suffer rape and sex attacks (Aljazeera) Warring leaders meet for 1st time since 2016 (Washington Post) War-ravaged South Sudan at a glance (News24) Tens of thousands killed, millions displaced in war-torn South Sudan (The Citizen)
Democratic Republic of the Congo Jean-Pierre Bemba: ICC orders release of Congo 'warlord' (BBC News) Belgium prepared to receive Bemba after ICC acquittal (African News) WEST AFRICA
Lake Chad Region — Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon
Suspected Boko Haram jihadists behind deadly suicide blasts in Nigeria (Business Day) Hunger, Death Stalk Millions in Forgotten Lake Chad Basin (Voice of America) Army kills 23 Boko Haram Fighters (Vanguard)
Mali
10 'terrorists neutralised' in central Mali: army (E NCA) Malian soldiers implicated after mass graves found (Africa News) Coordinated Response Key to G5 Sahel Joint Force Success (Relief Web) EAST AFRICA
Kenya
Corruption in Kenya threatens to engulf government (Africa News) Arati backs war on corruption, claims MP behind contraband sugar (The Star) Knchr Report Says Police Raped During 2017 Polls (Daily Nation) Following pride event, Kenya's gay refugees fear for their lives (NBC News)
Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda)
Norway suspects Rwandan-born man over 1994 genocide (The Seattle Times) Biggest Relocation Of Genocide Remains Takes Place In Ex-President's Birthplace (KT Press) CNLG condemns Belgian court ruling on withdrawal of peacekeepers (The New Times)
Somalia
Kenya Urged to Prevent Al Shabaab Cross-Border Attacks (All Africa) Over 250,000 refugees return to Somalia, others vow not to leave (Citizen Digital) Al-Shabab Militant Group Getting Lucky, Not Stronger in Somalia (VOA) NORTH AFRICA
Libya
UN OHCHR expresses concern over safety of civilians in Derna (The Libya Observer) UN imposes sanctions on six human traffickers in Libya (The Libya Observer) Amnesty International calls on Haftar to end siege and protect civilians in Derna (The Libya Observer)
EUROPE Court of Bosnia & Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber
Acquitted Bosnian Serb Soldier Sues for Compensation (Balkan Insight) Bosnian Serb Soldiers’ Srebrenica Genocide Trial Opens (Balkan Insight) Bosnian Serb Ex-Minister Misses Srebrenica Trial Opening (Balkan Insight) Germany Extradites Serb War Crimes Suspect to Bosnia (Balkan Insight) Bosnian Wartime Detention Camp Guard’s Sentence Reduced (Balkan Insight) Bosnian Constitutional Court ‘Under Pressure’, New Chief Says (Balkan Insight)
Domestic Prosecutions In The Former Yugoslavia
Albania Agrees to Start Search for Communists’ Victims (Balkan Insight) Wiretaps Could Change Course of Macedonia Murder Trial (Balkans Insight) Serbia Restarts Lovas War Crimes Trial from Beginning (Balkans Insight) Kosovo Tries Servian Reservist for War Crimes (Balkan Insight) Serbia ‘Used Yugoslav Army for War Goals’ (Balkans Insight)
MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA
Iraq
Iraq launches air strike against Islamic State in Syria (Reuters) Court orders Denmark to compensate 18 Iraqis over torture (Al Jazeera) Policeman killed, Islamic State attack foiled, northeast of Baquba (Iraqi News) Islamic State fighters buried without identification in Iraq (Al Monitor) Iraqi military foils attempt to blow mosque, kill Islamic State members, west of Anbar (Iraqi News) Iraqi forces deny selling Islamic State leaders' corpses in return for money (Iraqi News)
Syria
Germany seeks arrest of leading Syrian general on war crimes charges (Washington Post) West's weak response to war crimes in Syria 'encouraged Russia's aggression' (Kyiv Post) Both sides committed war crimes during siege of Syria's Ghouta (Reuters) Syria war: War crimes committed in Eastern Ghouta battle (BBC)
Afghanistan
Australia's elite special forces face war crimes probe (The Straits Times) Will Australia Provide Justice for Afghanistan War Crimes? (Human Rights Watch)
Yemen
Army: 20 Houthis killed in eastern Yemen (Middle East Monitor) Heavy clashes near Yemen's Hodeidah as U.N. seeks ceasefire (Reuters) Heavy fighting on Yemen's west coast kills hundreds (The Washington Post) Saudi Arabia-led military coalition launches offensive on Yemeni port city of Hodeida (The Washington Post) Yemen war: Battle rages over Hudaydah airport (BBC) Yemeni prisoners say UAE officers sexually torture them (Aljazeera)
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia Special Tribunal for Lebanon
Sayyed concludes testimony, refuses to be cross-examined (The Daily Star) Aftermath of former Lebanon security chief's combative special tribunal testimony (The National) After four months, STL appoints new defense head (The Daily Star)
Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal
War crimes trial greatest success of govt: Muhith (New Age) War crimes witness found dead with throat slit in Khilgaon (Dhaka Tribune) When will we get witness protection law? (Dhaka Tribune) Sumon Zahid was murdered for his testimony in a war crimes case: Wife (bdnews24.com)
War Crimes Investigations in Burma
Religious cleansing spreads from Muslims to Christians in Myanmar (Premier) Plight of Christian group massacred by Myanmar Army highlighted in House of Lords (Premier)
Israel and Palestine
Apparent War Crimes in Gaza (Human Rights Watch)
AMERICAS
North & Central America
Mexican groups seek ICC probe of drug war crimes by military (The Monitor) The disappeared of Guatemala: a family’s search for their murdered son (The Guardian)
South America
The Stunning Scale of Latin America's Migration Crisis (America’s Quarterly)
TOPICS
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
To tell the truth (Daily Times) Vancouver plazas get new Indigenous names as part of reconciliation process (Global News) Peace Regimes (Boston Review)
Terrorism
‘Jihadi Brides’: Shrinking Violets or Grownups with Agency? (Al Bawaba) Court grants detained 8 Jewish worshippers bail (Vanguard) Piracy
ICC, BASCAP Move against Piracy, Counterfeiting in Nigeria (This Day) India seeks intelligence info from east Asian nations to combat sea pirates (Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide) Pirates’ Strategies and Countermeasures in the South China Sea (The Epoch Times)
Gender-Based Violence
Former Congolese Vice President Cleared Of War Crimes Conviction On Appeal (NPR) Do abused women need asylum? 4 essential reads (WTOP) ‘Comfort Women’ Statues? Build Them for All, Not Just Some, Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence (Japan Forward) Bangladesh Rights Body Readies Sexual Violence Cases Against Myanmar for ICC (The Irrawaddy)
Commentary and Perspectives
Global leaders, beware: Russia will use the World Cup to whitewash its war crimes (Washington Post) In our opinion: US must confront North Korea's crimes against humanity (Deseret News) What Jean-Pierre Bemba's acquittal by the ICC means (Al Jazeera)
AFRICA
CENTRAL AFRICA
Central African Republic
Official Website of the International Criminal Court ICC Public Documents - Cases: Central African Republic
ICC court launches fund for CAR victims of BEMBA militia (News 24) June 13, 2018
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched a $1.18m fund for victims of a militia once run by former Congolese vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba, it said on Wednesday.
The fund - announced after Bemba was acquitted on war-crimes charges - will be dispensed to people who suffered at the hands of Bemba militia in the Central African Republic (CAR), the ICC's director in CAR, Mike Cole, told a press conference.
The serious crimes committed in CAR "have not been forgotten," he said.
The violence took place over a timeframe of five months in 2002-2003, at a time when the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was in the grip of a war that sucked in neighbouring countries.
Bemba at that time was leader of a militia called the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) - a 1 500-strong force backed by neighbouring Uganda and opposed to DRC President Joseph Kabila. He sent his men into CAR October 2002 to quash a coup against the then president, Ange-Felix Patasse.
There, they committed murder, rape and looting - crimes for which Bemba was later convicted at the ICC. His sentence was overturned on appeal last Friday.
Bemba left the ICC detention centre on Wednesday after being given provisional release pending sentencing in a different case involving witness tampering.
The ICC's Trust Fund for Victims in the CAR was initially unveiled in 2013 but failed to become operational because of the "security situation" there, its board said on Wednesday.
It said it now planned to "accelerate the launch" of the programme, and appealed for voluntary commissions to boost coffers.
Aid will take the form of "physical and psychological rehabilitation, as well as material support," for victims and their families.
"You are not forgotten. The harms you have suffered are recognised and urgently call for a meaningful response," the Trust Fund for Victims said in a message to victims.
CAR says Boris Becker’s diplomatic passport is ‘fake’ (News 24) June 19, 2018
The Central African Republic (CAR) said on Tuesday that a diplomatic passport that tennis star Boris Becker claims entitles him to immunity in bankruptcy proceedings in Britain "is a fake."
"The diplomatic passport that he has is a fake," foreign ministry chief of staff Cherubin Moroubama told AFP.
The document's serial number corresponded to one of a batch of "new passports that were stolen in 2014," he said.
In addition, the passport - a copy of which has been seen by AFP, and bears the date of March 19, 2018 - does not carry the signature or the stamp of the foreign minister, Charles Armel Doubane, Moroubama said.
On Friday, lawyers for Germany's three-time Wimbledon champion lodged a claim in the High Court in Britain saying that he had been appointed a sports attache for the CAR to the European Union (EU) in April.
This, they argued, granted him immunity under the 1961 Vienna Diplomatic Convention on Diplomatic Relations from bankruptcy proceedings over failure to pay a long-standing debt.
"Becker's job profile does not exist" in the CAR's records, Moroubama said.
Furthermore, the passport says that Becker's diplomatic function is "financial charge de mission," a role that "has nothing to do with sporting questions," he noted.
In April, the 50-year-old former tennis star had tweeted a picture of himself shaking hands with CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadera at a meeting in Brussels.
Becker shook up the tennis world at Wimbledon in 1985 when, as an unseeded player, he became the then youngest-ever male Grand Slam champion at the age of 17, defending the trophy the following year.
The German went on to enjoy a glittering career and amassed more than $25m in prize money.
Shadowy reputation
The CAR is one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking at the very bottom of the 188 nations in the UN Development Programme's 2016 Human Development Index.
Landlocked, rich in gold, diamonds, oil and uranium, the country of 4.6 million people has been chronically unstable since it gained independence from France in 1960.
Presidents have traditionally been surrounded by "sleazy courtesans" and "dodgy counsellors who talk loud," French writer Jean-Pierre Tuquoi describes in a book published last year.
Its modern history has been studded with coups, foreign mercenaries, assassination attempts, shadowy business deals and improbable figures, he says.
They include Jean-Bedel Bokassa, a former army corporal and fan of Napoleon who became president, then president for life - and finally declared himself emperor before being ousted by France in 1979 after a massacre of school children.
One of his successors, Francois Bozize, was named in a law suit filed in France in 2015 by the CAR government, which said that during his tenure, "numerous advisors and relatives... benefitted from passports of convenience" in exchange for money.
These including a Kazakh opposition figure, Mukhtar Abiazov, a female advisor to former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, and an Israeli businessman, according to the suit filed by the CAR's attorney, William Bourdon.
Bozize was overthrown in 2013 by a mainly Muslim rebel alliance, the Seleka. His elected successor, Faustin- Archange Touadera has effective rule over only a fraction of the country as most of it is in the hands of militias.
Poor governance and a tradition of graft make for a toxic mixture, says Thierry Vircoulon, a CAR specialist at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI).
"Given the authorities' extreme weakness and corruptibility, crooks and conmen of every stripe always find a way to gain access to the president and make money," he says. ""This country is perfect for business pirates."
US, UK, France Block Central African Republic’s Request for Chinese Arms (Geopolitics Alert, originally from Pan African News Wire) June 19, 2018
All the three nations have raised concerns about the use of lethal equipment CAR requested that include Chinese-made armored vehicles, machine guns, tear gas grenades and other weaponry for its army and police.
The CAR’s defense minister has asked UN sanctions committee on June 5 to grant an exemption to an arms embargo and allow the shipments, AFP reported Friday.
France said it had “concerns concerning some lethal equipment included in this exemption request,” citing anti-aircraft weapons and ammunitions, according to a document obtained by AFP.
The French mission to the United Nations requested “additional justifications concerning this lethal equipment in order to be able to take a decision.
The United States noted that there was “no threat of an air attack in CAR” and questioned deliveries of eight grenade launchers, four anti-aircraft machine guns as well as anti-personnel grenades and rockets.
Britain said it was concerned that the shipments would pass through Cameroon unescorted to the border with CAR.
The council imposed an arms embargo on the Central African Republic in 2013 when the country descended into bloodshed but its sanctions committee last year gave the green light for Russia to supply weapons to the national forces.
China wants to donate military equipment which includes 12 armored vehicles and four assault vehicles, 50 pistols, six sniper rifles, ten submachine guns with silencers and some 30 machine guns of various calibers.
The list of equipment from China’s Poly Technologies also includes 300 rockets, 500 anti-tank grenades, some 725,000 rounds of ammunition of various types and 15,000 tear gas grenades.
[back to contents] Sudan & South Sudan
Official Website of the International Criminal Court ICC Public Documents - Situation in Darfur, Sudan
South Sudan's latest civil war atrocities kept out of sight (New Jersey Herald) By Sam Mednick June 6, 2018
The accounts are horrific. A young girl strangled and gang-raped. Children burned alive as government soldiers blocked the door of their hut and set it aflame.
These are some of the atrocities revealed in 14 reports, seen by The Associated Press, that have not yet been released by the independent body charged with monitoring a failed cease-fire imposed in December in South Sudan, where civil war is now well into its fifth year.
The reports should have been released last month at a meeting led by the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission but South Sudan's government did not attend, preventing the accounts of abuses from being made public because there was not a quorum.
"The reports contain evidence that soldiers continue to kill, rape and destroy property. The decision to keep these ongoing atrocity crimes secret sends the wrong message," Jehanne Henry, senior Africa researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the AP. Only five such reports have been released this year.
The African Union and the East African regional bloc that mediates South Sudan's peace talks should take action, said Edmund Yakani, executive director for the local advocacy group Community Empowerment for Progress Organization.
"Silence on the violations only encourages further violations," he said.
While people attending the meeting said copies of the reports on atrocities were distributed to diplomats from the United States, the United Nations, Britain and elsewhere, none have released them publicly or made public the reports of abuses.
South Sudan's government didn't respond to multiple requests for comment on why it didn't attend last month's meeting.
The unpublished reports describe violations by both government and opposition forces but most of the accounts blame government troops for instigating attacks and deliberately targeting civilians.
During an attack in February on a school in the town of Modit, children fled into a hut to hide. Government soldiers blocked the door and set it on fire, burning the children to death, said one report.
A young girl fetching water from a river in the town of Yei was strangled before she and her mother were gang-raped by government soldiers, another report said. More than 30 cases of sexual assault were recorded in Yei and surrounding areas in the three months following December's cease-fire agreement.
And in the nearby town of Morobo, a woman was raped and beaten so badly that she lost sight in one eye. A disabled woman, unable to flee the fighting, was thrown into a burning house by government soldiers, the report said.
The group that compiled the reports, the Ceasefire and Transitional Security Arrangements Monitoring Mechanism, told the AP its mandate doesn't require it to publish reports and that releasing them had been the task of its parent body, the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission. The commission reports to the East African regional bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. Neither responded to several AP requests for comment.
The concealing of the atrocities comes as the international community loses patience with South Sudan's civil war, which has killed tens of thousands and created Africa's largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The U.S., South Sudan's largest aid donor, has increased pressure on the Juba government amid widespread allegations that its officials are profiting from the conflict instead of working to end it.
Last week the U.N. Security Council adopted a U.S.-sponsored resolution that warns of an arms embargo and sanctions against six high-ranking officials if the fighting doesn't stop.
The U.S. and others, however, insist that the East African regional bloc, along with the African Union, should take the lead in finding peace and holding perpetrators of abuses accountable.
The U.S. urges the monitoring bodies to release the reports of atrocities as soon as possible and regrets that the South Sudan government's "refusal to attend the plenary on May 14 prevented those reports from being made public at that time," embassy spokesman Mark Weinberg told the AP.
Chris Trott, U.K. special representative for South Sudan, concluded that "it's important, for the sake of ordinary South Sudanese who are again falling victim to the violence and for the credibility of the peace process, that violators are held to account."
In South Sudan's war, thousands suffer rape and sex attacks (Aljazeera) June 19, 2018
A pile of firewood lies next to a run-down bed inside the tent that these days serves as home for Nyakouth Bul.
The wood is a lifeline for the 27-year-old. It's the only commodity to sustain herself and her five children living in this United Nations-run displaced people's camp in war-torn South Sudan's capital, Juba.
But gathering firewood outside the camp can be dangerous.
"We were a group of women and went to collect firewood," Bul recalled.
"Five soldiers found us and we ran. I fell and they pointed their guns at me and then raped me and left me there. I came back to the camp and was too ashamed to get treatment," she told Al Jazeera.
Bul says she hopes that one day she will get justice for the crimes committed against her. She is one of thousands of women in the camp who have been raped during South Sudan's five-year civil war.
The conflict, which began after President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup, has killed thousands and displaced four million - about a third of the population.
Nearly all warring sides in South Sudan's war have been accused of committing sexual violence. The UN, which has designated June 19 as the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict, and the African Union say the attacks in some cases amount to crimes against humanity
"There's a massive problem of violence," UN relief chief Mark Lowcock told Al Jazeera in Juba.
"The displaced people themselves, as well as those who fled, are subject to atrocious levels of sexual abuse, murder and killing on a rampant scale," he added.
According to UNICEF, more than a 1,000 children were sexually assaulted in South Sudan in the first three years of the conflict.
Meanwhile, 72 percent of women living in so-called protected sites in the capital Juba say they have been raped, mostly by police and soldiers.
"Although thousands of women have reported rape and other sexual atrocities in South Sudan's war, rights organisations say the figure is likely much higher," Al Jazeera's Hiba Morgan, reporting from Juba, said.
"That is because many do not report, out of fear."
Warring leaders meet for 1st time since 2016 (Washington Post) June 20, 2018
South Sudan’s warring leaders met face to face for the first time in almost two years on Wednesday amid efforts to end a five-year-old civil war, shaking hands but making no public comments.
South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar were expected to continue talks on Thursday in neighboring Ethiopia, which invited them for talks as pressure grows to end a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and created Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Machar fled South Sudan after new fighting erupted in the capital in July 2016, ending a brief attempt at peace in which he returned to his role as Kiir’s deputy. He later was put under house arrest in South Africa.
Both sides in South Sudan’s civil war have been accused of abuses against civilians.
War-ravaged South Sudan at a glance (News24) June 20, 2018
South Sudan, the world's newest country, has been mired in a devastating civil war for more than four years, with tens of thousands of people killed, nearly four million displaced and its economy in ruins.
War broke when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup just two years after the country gained independence from Sudan in 2011. With the two men to meet on Wednesday in the latest international effort to stop the fighting, here is some background.
World's youngest state
Before independence, the south of Sudan was ravaged by two civil wars (1956-1972 and 1983-2005) that pitted mainly Christian and animist insurgents in the south against Khartoum's Arab-dominated government.
Millions died in the conflicts.
A peace accord signed in 2005 by the government and southern rebels exempted the south from Islamic Sharia law and granted it six years of self-rule ahead of a referendum on independence.
The 2011 referendum went nearly 99 percent in favour of secession from the north and on July 9 that year, South Sudan proclaimed its independence. Kiir was sworn in as the country's first president with Machar as his deputy.
The international community - led by the United States, China, Russia and the European Union, as well as Sudan - quickly recognised the new African state.
Former allies turn enemies
Kiir and Machar were on the same side in the push for independence from Khartoum, but were separated by ethnic and political rivalries.
Tensions spiked when Machar - from the country's second-largest ethnic group, the Nuer - was fired as vice president in 2013.
His sacking came after Kiir, from the majority Dinka people, accused him of a failed coup. Machar rejected the charge, in turn accusing the president of purging political rivals.
Civil war erupts
By December 2013 the new country had descended into civil war, including fighting within the national army, undermined by differences fuelled by the rivalry between Kiir and Machar.
The conflict spread to several states and was characterised by ethnic massacres, attacks on civilians, widespread rape, the recruitment of child soldiers and other forms of brutality and human rights violations.
A 2015 peace deal saw Machar reinstalled as vice president and return to the capital, but fighting broke out in the capital Juba in July 2016, and Machar and his forces fled.
In February 2018 the United Nations said there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 South Sudanese senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Economy ruined
Following more than four years of civil war, the Juba government is broke and hyperinflation - which peaked at around 500 percent in 2016, decelerating to 155 percent in 2017 - has sent prices soaring. The South Sudanese pound has collapsed.
Oil production - from which South Sudan gained 98 percent of its revenues on its independence - has plummeted to about 120 000 barrels a day from a peak of 350 000, according to the World Bank.
Juba, which inherited three-quarters of the former Sudan's oil reserves during independence, depends on its northern neighbour's oil infrastructure - refineries and pipelines - for its exports.
The conflict has also heavily disrupted agriculture, sparking a major food crisis. In 2017 South Sudan went through four months of famine, which affected around 100 000 people.
Seven million South Sudanese, more than half of the population, will need food aid in 2018, according to the UN.
Tens of thousands killed, millions displaced in war-torn South Sudan (The Citizen) AFP June 20, 2018
The world’s youngest country has so far been enduring an extremely troubled childhood.
South Sudan, the world’s newest country, has been mired in a devastating civil war for more than four years, with tens of thousands of people killed, nearly four million displaced and its economy in ruins.
War broke out when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup just two years after the country gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
With the two men to meet on Wednesday in the latest international effort to stop the fighting, here is some background.
World’s youngest state
Before independence, the south of Sudan was ravaged by two civil wars (1956-1972 and 1983-2005) that pitted mainly Christian and animist insurgents in the south against Khartoum’s Arab-dominated government.
Millions died in the conflicts.
A peace accord signed in 2005 by the government and southern rebels exempted the south from Islamic Sharia law and granted it six years of self-rule ahead of a referendum on independence.
The 2011 referendum went nearly 99 percent in favour of secession from the north, and on July 9 that year, South Sudan proclaimed its independence. Kiir was sworn in as the country’s first president, with Machar as his deputy.
The international community – led by the United States, China, Russia and the European Union, as well as Sudan – quickly recognised the new African state.
Former allies turn enemies
Kiir and Machar were on the same side in the push for independence from Khartoum, but were separated by ethnic and political rivalries.
Tensions spiked when Machar – from the country’s second-largest ethnic group, the Nuer – was fired as vice-president in 2013.
His sacking came after Kiir, from the majority Dinka people, accused him of a failed coup. Machar rejected the charge, in turn accusing the president of purging political rivals.
Civil war erupts By December 2013, the new country had descended into civil war, including fighting within the national army, undermined by differences fuelled by the rivalry between Kiir and Machar.
The conflict spread to several states, and was characterised by ethnic massacres, attacks on civilians, widespread rape, the recruitment of child soldiers and other forms of brutality and human rights violations.
A 2015 peace deal saw Machar reinstalled as vice-president and return to the capital, but fighting broke out in the capital Juba in July 2016, and Machar and his forces fled.
In February 2018, the United Nations said there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 South Sudanese senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Economy ruined
Following more than four years of civil war, the Juba government is broke and hyperinflation – which peaked at around 500 percent in 2016, decelerating to 155 percent in 2017 – has sent prices soaring. The South Sudanese pound has collapsed.
Oil production – from which South Sudan gained 98 percent of its revenues on its independence – has plummeted to about 120 000 barrels a day from a peak of 350 000, according to the World Bank.
Juba, which inherited three-quarters of the former Sudan’s oil reserves during independence, depends on its northern neighbour’s oil infrastructure – refineries and pipelines – for its exports.
The conflict has also heavily disrupted agriculture, sparking a major food crisis. In 2017 South Sudan went through four months of famine, which affected around 100 000 people.
Seven million South Sudanese, more than half of the population, will need food aid in 2018, according to the UN.
[back to contents]
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Official Website of the International Criminal Court ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Jean-Pierre Bemba: ICC orders release of Congo 'warlord' (BBC News) June 12, 2018
Last week, appeal judges overturned his 2016 conviction on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Bemba is yet to be sentenced for the separate charge of bribing witnesses.
Judges ruled that he could join his family in Belgium, while he awaits sentencing in that case.
He had already served more than 80% of the maximum possible sentence of five years for bribing witnesses, so it would be "disproportionate" to keep him in custody, judges said.
Bemba was arrested in Belgium in 2008 after the ICC issued an international arrest warrant for him.
He was accused of failing to stop his rebel forces from killing and raping people in neighbouring Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003.
Bemba was convicted in 2016, and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
The trial was the first before the ICC to focus on sexual violence as a weapon of war. Bemba is expected to contest presidential elections
Bemba waged a long legal battle to overturn his conviction and last week appeal judges finally ruled in his favour.
They said he could not be held criminally responsible for crimes committed by his troops.
Human rights group Amnesty International said his acquittal was a "huge blow" for the victims of a "horrifying campaign of rape and sexual violence".
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda described the ruling as "regrettable and troubling".
The judges ordered what they called Bemba's "interim release" under specific conditions, including barring him from making public statements on the case, changing his address without prior notice, and contacting witnesses.
He is due to be sentenced on 4 July after being convicted in a separate case of corruptly influencing witnesses and falsifying evidence during his war crimes trial.
Bemba's release could have an impact on politics in DR Congo, where he maintains a loyal support base, reports the BBC's Anna Holligan from The Hague.
One member of his party told our correspondent that Mr Bemba now hopes to run for president in elections scheduled for December.
Belgium prepared to receive Bemba after ICC acquittal (African News) By Eric Oteng June 15, 2018
Belgium is prepared to accept former Democratic Republic of Congo vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba, after he was cleared of war crimes last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Didier Reynders disclosed on Thursday.
“The Belgian authorities have responded favourably to the court’s request to allow Mr Bemba to stay in Belgium, where his family lives, following his release on bail,” Reynders said in a statement, adding that the handover would be finalised in the coming days.
Bemba left the detention centre of the International Criminal Court on Wednesday following his acquittal of war crimes after a decade behind bars, his lawyer said.
He was acquitted on appeal last Friday in a surprise decision, with the International Criminal Court in The Hague saying he could not be held criminally liable for crimes committed by his troops in the Central African Republic in 2002-2003.
Bemba, 55, had been sentenced unanimously to 18 years in 2016 by ICC trial judges after a decade behind bars following his arrest in Belgium.
Bemba has requested a short-stay visa, which would allow him to remain for 90 days in Belgium at first, said a spokesman for Belgium’s migration minister Theo Francken.
That request is being considered by the foreign office.
Sources said Bemba’s wife and children already live in the Brussels suburb of Rhode-Saint-Genese, from where he was seized back in 2008 at the international court’s request.
Judges had initially found Bemba guilty on five counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his private army during a five-month rampage in the neighbouring CAR.
Bemba had sent his militia, the MLC – a rebel force that he later transformed into a political organisation — into the DR Congo’s northern neighbour in October 2002 to quash a coup against then president Ange-Felix Patasse.
Bemba had unsuccessfully opposed President Joseph Kabila in elections in 2006. After his militia clashed violently with government forces in 2007, he was forced out of the DR Congo but retains a groundswell of support.
[back to contents]
WEST AFRICA
Lake Chad Region — Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon
Suspected Boko Haram jihadists behind deadly suicide blasts in Nigeria (Business Day) June 18, 2018
Suspected Boko Haram jihadists killed at least 31 people in a twin suicide bomb attack on a town in northeast Nigeria, a local official and a militia leader told AFP on Sunday.
Two blasts ripped through the town of Damboa in Borno state on Saturday evening targeting people returning from celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holiday, in an attack bearing all the hallmarks of Boko Haram.
Following the suicide bombings, the jihadists fired rocket-propelled grenades into the crowds that had gathered at the scene of the attacks, driving the number of casualties higher.
"There were two suicide attacks and rocket-propelled grenade explosions in Damboa last night which killed 31 people and left several others injured," said local militia leader Babakura Kolo.
Two suicide bombers detonated their explosives in Shuwari and nearby Abachari neighbourhoods in the town around 10.45pm (9.45pm GMT), killing six residents, said Kolo, speaking from the state capital Maiduguri, which is 88km from the town.
"No one needs to be told this is the work of Boko Haram," Kolo said.
A local government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the death toll. "The latest death toll is now 31 but it may increase because many among the injured may not survive," said the official.
"Most of the casualties were from the rocket projectiles fired from outside the town minutes after two suicide bombers attacked," he said.
The attack was the latest example of Boko Haram’s continued threat to Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, said Ryan Cummings, Africa analyst at the Signal Risk consultancy in SA. "Boko Haram still maintains both the intent and operational capacity to launch mass casualty attacks in parts of northeastern Nigeria," Cummings said, despite the government’s repeated claims that the group is on the back foot. The use of the rockets was "particularly conspicuous", Cummings said, as it "indicates that the sect continues to have access to military-grade weaponry".
"The Boko Haram insurgency is not showing any immediate signs of" easing, said Cummings.
The jihadist group has regularly deployed suicide bombers — many of them young girls — in mosques, markets and camps housing people displaced by the nine-year insurgency.
On May 1 at least 86 people were killed in twin suicide blasts targeting a mosque and a nearby market in the town of Mubi in neighbouring Adamawa state.
The attacks have devastated Nigeria’s northeast, one of the country’s poorest regions where illiteracy and unemployment are rampant. Seeking purpose and money, disillusioned and jobless young men have turned to the radical Islam of Boko Haram, which decries western colonialism and the modern Nigerian state.
In their quest to carve out a caliphate, the jihadists have razed towns to the ground, kidnapped women and children and slaughtered thousands of others, putting many more on the brink of starvation. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari came into power in 2015 vowing to stamp out Boko Haram but the jihadists continue to stage frequent attacks, targeting both civilians and security forces. The militants stormed the Government Girls Technical College in Dapchi on February 19, seizing more than 100 schoolgirls in a carbon copy of the abduction in Chibok in 2014 that caused global outrage.
The deadly violence has put Buhari under pressure as elections approach in February next year. Along with Boko Haram, Buhari faces the continued threat of militants in the oil-rich south, separatists in the southeast and an upsurge in communal violence in the country’s central region.
Hunger, Death Stalk Millions in Forgotten Lake Chad Basin (Voice of America) By Lisa Schlein June 08, 2018
GENEVA — The United Nations is asking the international community to help millions of refugees and displaced people in Africa's Lake Chad Basin. The Boko Haram insurgency is mainly responsible for a crisis that has left huge numbers vulnerable to hunger, malnutrition and violence.
The Lake Chad Basin is into the ninth year of a humanitarian crisis that does not appear to be easing.
The United Nations has appealed for $1.5 billion to provide life-saving aid for some 7.8 million people in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. Though half of the year has gone by, only one third of this urgently- needed money has been received.
The region's four U.N. humanitarian coordinators came to Geneva this week to brief member states about the emergency facing people in the area and to plead for them not to be neglected and forgotten.
Humanitarian coordinator for Niger, Bintou Djibo, described the suffering of civilians who lack protection and run many risks in this insecure, lawless region.
"Millions of innocent women, children and men are at risk of human rights violations including kidnappings, killings, rape and sexual exploitation and abuse," he said. "Across the region, people continue to be displaced from their homes either due to conflict, food insecurity or the effect of climate change."
The United Nations reports 2.4 million people remain displaced because of the nine-year-old Boko Haram insurgency. It said five million people are seriously short of food and require assistance.
Djibo said malnutrition is widespread and life-threatening.
"Children are always the most vulnerable in any humanitarian crisis," he said. "Nearly half a million children under five years are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.Without treatment, they risk death."
Protection needs are particularly acute within Nigeria, where Boko Haram militants continue to wreak havoc with the population.
The humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria, Edward Kallon, told VOA Boko Haram is still very active, though it has changed its tactics, concentrating on suicide bombings instead of large-scale attacks.
"Boko Haram is still a potent force," he said. "There is a lot of rhetoric that the war has been won, but the practical experience we have in the field is that it is becoming very much asymmetrical warfare and they are all scattered in small splinter groups, which makes them more potent and very risky for international staff."
The U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Cameroon, Allegra Balocchi, said all countries in the Lake Chad Basin are affected in different degrees by this group.
"All our countries have had several hundreds if not thousands of surrender-ees — Boko Haram coming out and wanting to be given another option.I think the countries have taken advantage of this in different ways," she said. "I speak for Cameroon and I think we are a bit late in trying to pull together a demobilization and a stabilization strategy. So, that remains a priority."
U.N. officials agree Boko Haram will not be defeated militarily. They say the root causes must be tackled, especially the poverty and lack of development in the four countries that have pushed many into joining the militant group. Army kills 23 Boko Haram Fighters (Vanguard June 13, 2018
At least 23 Boko Haram fighters have been killed and their weapons recovered during a clearance operation in villages in the Lake Chad region by the military. Brig.-Gen. Texas Chukwu, the Director, Army Public Relations, who disclosed this in a statement in Maiduguri on Tuesday, said many terrorists escaped with gunshot injuries during the encounter with troops on Monday.
He stated that the operation was conducted by troops of 153 Task Force Battalion in conjunction with the support of its Cameroonian Defence Forces counterpart. He listed items recovered during the operation to include six AK 47 rifles, two FN rifles, eight AK 47 rifle magazines, 33 rounds of 7.62 mm NATO ammunition, one link of 7.62mm NATO and two motorcycles. He added that the troops had earlier cleared numerous villages in the Lake Chad region, including Bulakeisa, Tumbuma Babba, Abbaganaram and Dan Baure, among others Also Boko Haram fighters have attacked Kaya village in Madagali Local Government Area of Adamawa state, but have been repelled by the military. One of the terrorists was killed in the process and a vigilante member injured.
The Boko Haram terrorists which attacked the community at 9:00 pm on Monday had already burnt 13 houses before the military and vigilantes intervened. Adamawa State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Ahmad Sajoh, confirmed the attack. Although the military has curtailed the activities of the insurgents in Adamawa, Madagali has continued to witness attacks. These attacks have led to the loss of lives and destruction of properties with the terrorists believed to be looking for food items. The Chairman of Madagali LGA, Mr Mohammed Yusuf, also confirmed the attack.
Although the military has curtailed the activities of the insurgents in Adamawa, Madagali has continued to witness attacks. These attacks have led to the loss of lives and destruction of properties with the terrorists believed to be looking for food items. The Chairman of Madagali LGA, Mr Mohammed Yusuf, also confirmed the attack. He called for the deployment of more security personnel, especially now that farming activities are picking up. He warned that further attacks may expose the communities with famine. Monday’s attack comes two weeks after another Madagali community – Mildu – was attacked by Boko Haram insurgents.
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Mali
10 'terrorists neutralised' in central Mali: army (E NCA) June 13, 2018
Ten suspected jihadists were "neutralised" in troubled central Mali on Tuesday after clashes with the military, Defence Minister Tiena Coulibaly said in a statement.
The Malian military "neutralised 10 terrorists, recovered weapons, explosive devices and other war materials," after fighting in Karakinde in the Mopti region, Coulibaly said.
He asked locals "to continue backing defence and security forces in the fight against terrorism in all its forms".
The Malian army has recently regularly spoken about the "neutralisation of terrorists" in the region but rights groups have raised the alarm saying they were extra-judicial killings.
On May 19, the army said three Malian soldiers and 12 "terrorists" were killed in fighting at an army camp near the border with Burkina Faso. But locals alleged the dead were all civilians and the army later put out a new statement that spoke of 12 "people" killed.
Tensions and violence have intensified in the troubled area over the past three years with clashes between Fulani herdsmen and farmers from the Bambara and Dogon ethnic groups who accuse the pastoralists of colluding with jihadists.
Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north of Mali in early 2012, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013.
Malian soldiers implicated after mass graves found (Africa News) June 20, 2018
Mali said on Tuesday that some of its soldiers were implicated in “gross violations” after the discovery of some mass graves in its troubled central region plagued by violence between security forces and Islamist militants.
The statement from the Defence Ministry followed local media reports that 25 bodies had been found in mass graves after a military crackdown on suspected jihadists and allied ethnic militia in central Mali.
Human rights groups accuse the Malian military of conducting extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture and arbitrary arrests against suspected sympathisers of jihadist groups, charges it has promised in the past to investigate.
“The Defence Ministry confirms … the existence of mass graves implicating certain persons in FAMA (Malian armed forces) in gross violations that caused deaths in Nantaka and Kobaka in the region of Mopti,” a statement posted on the Defence Ministry website on Tuesday said.
It added that the defence minister instructed the public prosecutor to open an inquiry.
The ministry “reiterates its determination … to fight impunity and engage its forces in the strict respect of human rights”, the statement added.
‘Promises are not enough’
In April, Amnesty International raised the alarm over reports that six people were found dead in a mass grave in the Mopti region. In February the government said it was investigating accusations that the army had abducted and executed suspected jihadist sympathisers.
The military frequently reports having killed several “terrorists” in its security campaign.
“The announced investigation is good news, but promises aren’t enough,” Human Rights Watch associate director for West Africa Corinne Dufka said in an email to Reuters.
“Since 2017, I’ve documented over 60 alleged executions by the army of suspects who are buried in at least 7 common graves, none of which have resulted in justice for the families.”
The West African country has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied Islamists took over its north in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year.
Growing violence across the country has raised doubts about whether Mali will be able to hold credible elections scheduled for the end of next month, in which President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita will seek a second term.
Coordinated Response Key to G5 Sahel Joint Force Success (Relief Web) By Aissata Athie June 20, 2018
Last month, the Joint Force of the G5 Sahel—Force Conjointe du G5 Sahel (FC-J5S) — announced its readiness to deploy operations. To date, the FC-J5S has conducted three military operations aimed at neutralizing terrorist groups, with the first two conducted with the support of French Barkhane counterterrorism forces. Yet, the operationalization of the FC-J5S raises questions about its role in a region marked by a “security traffic jam,” where multiple security forces are present, including those from France, the US, a UN peacekeeping mission, and an EU training mission. The militarized approach of the FC-J5S has yet to help the security situation in the Sahel, and the complexity of the crisis in the region suggests the response needs a more multi-pronged approach. The force was established in 2014 by five states in the region: Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad. Its first operation, Operation Hawbi, was conducted in November 2017 in the border zone between Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso and led to the arrest and detention of nine members of the Coordination des mouvements de l’Azawad, who were suspected of being terrorists but were all later released for lack of evidence. The force’s second operation, Pagnali, was conducted in January 2018 in the border zone between Mali and Burkina Faso, with the objective of “destroying the supply chains of armed terrorist groups and to contain their movements.” As a result, small caliber munitions and equipment for manufacturing improvised explosive devices were found and destroyed. These two operations fall within the force’s mission of addressing transnational and organized crime and terrorism along shared borders, in particular through cooperation, cross-border joint military patrols, and counter-terrorism operations (a third operation is currently underway at the border of Mali and Niger). The region’s porous borders have indeed facilitated arms and drug smuggling as well as human trafficking.
The announcement of the FC-J5S’ readiness by the Nigerien Minister of Defense, Kalla Moutari, was made despite the fact that the force has not reached full capacity nor financing. While the force has budgeted for $423 million to operate in its first year, only 100 million of the 420 million euros pledged by the international community has been received so far, causing significant delays and deficiencies in training and equipment. The United States’ refusal once again to authorize the force to receive direct funding from the UN will make the force even more dependent on individual pledges and donations. With this reliance on unsustainable funding it is likely that the force will focus on its military component by optimizing high- impact military operations to neutralize armed groups. Indeed, the response to the instability in the Sahel region is increasingly dominated by a security focus—at the expense of development initiatives and cooperation with other political aims.
Yet this overly-securitized approach is insufficient as it fails to address other long-standing challenges. Issues of weak political, financial, and security governance; lack of access to basic social services; under- development; marginalization; and the impact of climate change on livelihoods have fueled the rapid growth and expansion of violent extremist groups across the region, who exploit them. The limited presence of the state in remote areas has created “voids,” such as in northern and central Mali and northern Burkina Faso, where extremist groups have established presence and in some cases parallel administrations by providing “protection” and basic services to the population. By demonstrating their entrenchment and “utility” to the population, these armed groups are undermining state authority, legitimacy, and relevance for disenfranchised citizens. If left unaddressed, these factors could further spread violence and instability.
Furthermore, the trust and support of local populations will be harder to regain if abuses and human rights violations are committed by national armed forces while conducting counter terrorism operations. Adding to existing grievances, abuses and arbitrary arrests by Malian and Burkina Faso forces have been widely reported by local populations and further affect the legitimacy of state forces. In late May, an incident involving Malian forces operating under the FC-J5S resulted in civilian casualties and raised questions regarding the justification provided by the Malian Ministry of Defense, which argued that these forces were under the command of the FC-J5S. This lack of accountability could affect the already fragile legitimacy of the force.
Existing multinational forces such as the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), launched by Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad in 2012 to fight Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin, have demonstrated the impact misconduct and abuse against civilians during counter-insurgency operations can have. Through a reverse effect, violations may discourage cooperation with the force and incite people seeking revenge or protection to join radical groups. With each national force of the FC-J5S set to operate within its own country, the G5 Sahel force will need to ensure that its own members do not constitute threats to local populations. The endorsement of a human rights compliance framework by the force earlier this year which emphasized “the protection of the rights of women, young people and children” is a welcome step in this regard.
However, it remains unclear exactly how the compliance framework will be put into practice in a context of constrained funding and limited ability to implement accountability measures. The FC-J5S’s civilian component —although limited—could facilitate the implementation of the framework through monitoring, while the force’s police component could play a role in strengthening the justice sector and accountability through its investigation unit. These two components should play an important role, especially as it is unlikely that the UN will be able to monitor implementation of the framework in areas where it does not have access (outside of Mali). Yet the limited resources and capacities dedicated to these two components— with the priority being on the military—could constrain their ability to act as such. Beyond demonstrating the return of state presence, the FC-J5S must also be able to demonstrate the state’s utility. As the FC-J5S prepares to fully operationalize, it is crucial that its military efforts be complemented with initiatives that address the grievances of local populations and that its response fit within political and development perspectives. The Sahel region is already subject to several political and development initiatives, such as the Alliance for the Sahel, which the FC-J5S should seek to cooperate with.
Launched in July 2017 by France, Germany, the European Union, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, and the African Development Bank, with further support from Italy, Spain, and the UK, the Alliance for the Sahel serves as a development platform for the coordination of donor assistance and rapid and effective financing of projects in the Sahel. The alliance has six priority areas: youth employment; rural development, agriculture, and food security; climate, notably energy access, green energy, and water; governance; support for return of basic services throughout the territory, including through decentralization; and security. These objectives will be pursued through more than five hundred different development projects spread throughout the region. The objective of this alliance is to recalibrate security and development and avoid approaches that prioritize one over the other. Yet, it is unclear how exactly these development projects will be carried out in remote areas where insecurity prevents state services from operating. With the FC-J5S’ slow operationalization, these concerns are even more relevant. Nevertheless, the force’s military operations should be coordinated with these development initiatives. For example, illicit economic activities managed by armed groups can constitute a source of revenue for local populations. By disrupting these activities without providing alternative sources of revenue for locals, national armed forces of the FC-J5S could be further alienated.
Additionally, political initiatives of the G5 Sahel’s Permanent Secretariat —supported by the technical assistance of the UN Office for West Africa—should also accompany the FC-J5S’s operations. They can include local mediation, peacebuilding, and outreach initiatives seeking to open lines of communication where possible. Local and intercommunal tensions are indeed a “breeding ground” for terrorist groups, who seek to exploit and thrive on these local conflicts, as demonstrated in central Mali and northern Burkina Faso. Efforts should thus focus on de-escalating these tensions through political means before they transform into large-scale conflicts. Finally, reviving the Malian peace process, three years since its signature and ahead of the July presidential elections will also be crucial to address political, economic, and social grievances triggering radicalization and spreading throughout the region.
Instability in the Sahel region undeniably calls for a security response, however this response must not trump political and development responses. It must be accompanied and coordinated with initiatives that address the grievances of local populations. Not only will this reduce the appeal of extremist groups, but it will also contribute to building the resilience of states in the Sahel region, upon which the success of the FC- J5S highly depends.
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EAST AFRICA
Kenya
Official Website of the International Criminal Court ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Republic of Kenya
Corruption in Kenya threatens to engulf government (Africa News) By Eric Oteng [DATE (Month #, Year)]
Kenyan media have reported on dozens of graft scandals involving public officers conspiring to steal from state coffers since President Uhuru Kenyatta took office in 2013. Some officials have been tried, but none have been convicted.
"If we don't watch out, it will engulf us," Edward Ouko told Reuters in an interview, describing the level of graft as shocking.
His audits suggest that collusion by civil servants and other officials to steal billions of Kenyan shillings annually is coordinated at a high level, he said.
Ouko, an accountant appointed in 2011, said that overhauling a Byzantine procurement and payments system that is easily tampered with is central to halting the looting.
Promoting transparency
The mandate of his office is to promote accountability and transparency in the public sector.
He expressed frustration that the recommendations he made in 2014 for reforming that system were ignored by parliament and never implemented.
"It makes me angry that the weaknesses which we had revealed about IFMIS' potential abuses were not acted upon," Ouko said, using the acronym for the government's payments system, the Integrated Management Information System.
Kenya is currently being roiled by a new spate of scandals involving bogus tenders and suppliers that allegedly resulted in the theft of hundreds of millions of shillings by state officials from several government bodies.
Corruption scandal
Dozens of officials and business people are in custody over theft at one agency, the National Youth Service, which aims to train young people and help create jobs.
The auditor said he produced a report for parliament on a scandal that emerged at the same agency in 2015 in which he documented how roughly 1.6 billion shillings ($16 million) "had gone out of the window" and named officials and companies involved in the phoney contracts.
Parliament studied the report for months but to his knowledge no action was taken to tackle what Ouko identified as the enabler of the theft: faulty procurement and payments systems.
"My report was completely ignored", he said.
Nearly two dozen officials were ultimately tried over the alleged theft of a fraction of the total documented by the auditor. All were acquitted earlier this year.
Kenyatta, who was elected for a second term after a protracted elections season last year in which more than 100 people were killed by police during protests, has spoken out recently against graft and urged the judiciary "to ensure fair trials and justice".
"The tone is correct right now," said Ouko.
Sceptical of reform
He expressed scepticism, however, that the various institutions involved in the investigation and prosecution of corruption-related crimes would achieve justice or reform the system.
He said this was because some of the institutions, such as the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, are poorly run with too wide a remit to operate effectively and also because of threats from vested interests.
In 2014, Ouko said, lawmakers launched an investigation into him that led to allegations of procurement fraud when he introduced software that allowed his office to track suspect transactions through IFMIS.
"The intention was to remove me", he said, explaining that the investigation highlighted the resistance to change from some camps.
Arati backs war on corruption, claims MP behind contraband sugar (The Star) By Patrick Vidija June 15, 2018
Counterfeit products will "wipe out an entire generation" if the fight against them is not taken seriously, Dagoretti North MP Simba Arati has said.
He cited the confiscation of contraband sugar in Eastleigh, Nairobi, and claimed a "well-known parliamentarian" was linked to it.
"Sisi tunajua na tuko na ushahidi kwamba hiyo sukari ni ya mmoja wetu katika bunge (We know and have evidence showing that the sugar belongs to one of us in Parliament)," he told his constituents.
"It is unfair for parliamentarians to betray the electorate, who braced the morning cold to vote for them, by selling expired goods to them."
He added: "Hatuwezi kukubali muamke asubuhi kutupigia kura kisha tupitie mlango wa nyuma kuwauzia bidhaa ghushi zilizo na madini kama mercury. Sasa nyinyi wote mkikufa nani ataamka kupiga kura ule wakati mwingine (We cannot let you wake up very early to vote for us and then use the back door to sell you products with elements such as mercury. If you all die, who will vote for us next time)?
"We would rather eliminate individuals with the intention of killing us all."
The MP did not give details and the investigation has not been completed.
Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet earlier said that three Somalis were the suspects in the illegal trade. They were taken to court, where the prosecution asked for more time to finish investigations.
Interior CS Fred Matiang'i assured that all those behind the crime will be punished.
Arati asked the DCI to speedily reveal the owners of companies in Eastleigh said to be transporters of the sugar. He said that once the report is handed to the President, he and others will demand its tabling in Parliament where "it will not be business as usual".
Arati also backed Uhuru's directive for lifestyle audits on all government officers including MPs. He demanded stringent measures by the government against those found to be behind corruption deals.
Arati's sentiments came after National Assembly Majority leader Aden Duale refuted claims that most Somali businessmen are involved in illegal trade
Duale said this earlier today, while noting that Muslims support Uhuru's directive for public servants to undergo lifestyle audits.
The Garissa Town MP noted that Islam does not condone the illegal accumulation of wealth.
Knchr Report Says Police Raped During 2017 Polls (Daily Nation) By Pauline Kairu June 19, 2018
Majority of sexual violence cases reported during the 2017 General Election were perpetrated by security personnel, a human right report revealed on Tuesday.
The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) report showed that 60 per cent of those cases were committed by security officers.
KNCHR Commissioner George Morara said most of the sexual violence victims did not bother to report the crimes because they have low confidence in law enforcement agencies.
Their lack of confidence, Mr Morara said, stems from lack of investigations and conviction of suspects in similar cases reported against security agents.
At the same time despite having identified their perpetrators as either security agents or community members, the survivors are not willing to disclose this information due to fear of security repercussions and victimisation by the alleged perpetrators.
Mr Moraa said in such times of electoral crisis, the main challenges included poor collection of evidence since health centres are inaccessible.
On Tuesday, survivors of sexual violence during the 2007/8 post-poll chaos marked 10 years of raising children who were conceived from the anarchy that ensued after the disputed presidential election results.
The survivors said they have been raising the children without any support from the national government.
Following pride event, Kenya's gay refugees fear for their lives (NBC News) By Brooke Sopelsa June 20, 2018
The Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya held its first LGBTQ pride event on Saturday, but now the event's organizers are in fear for their lives.
After the event, which organizers said drew approximately 600 people, threatening messages were "pinned all over the camp on notice boards," according to Mbazira Moesa, a Ugandan refugee and one of the event's organizers.
Moesa said he does not know who wrote and posted the threats — which warned LGBTQ refugees to "leave the camp" or "we are going to kill you one by one" — but he said they made him "anticipate danger that may happen to me and all the LGBTIQ refugee members in Kakuma Refugee Camp."
Kakuma, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, was established in 1992 and is run by the U.N. Refugee Agency. The camp, along with its 2015 expansion site, the Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, have a cumulative population of about 185,000 people, according to refugee agency. The refugees and asylum- seekers living at the two sites come from 19 countries, though more than half are South Sudanese.
Moesa said he was inspired to organize Saturday's pride event along with other members of Refugee Flag Kakuma to address "the ignorance" and "myths" about LGBTQ people among the camp's residents. Moesa said the Kakuma camp is "mainly populated by Islamic settlers and refugees" from South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia who are intolerant of homosexuality.
While he considered Saturday's turnout "huge," Moesa said homophobic violence at the event led to a lesbian and a transgender person sustaining "serious injuries."
Despite that, Moesa said he hopes Kakuma has a pride event next year and "every year" after that.
Moesa, 25, said he left Uganda — one of the world's most notoriously anti-gay countries — in 2016 following multiple arrests and beatings by law enforcement due to his sexuality. He recalled an August 2016 incident in which police raided a gay social event at a bar in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, that finally made him flee his home country.
"They closed all the doors and beat people up very badly," he said. "One guy jumped off the stairs, broke his legs and died. We were arrested, and the following morning we were loaded into a police van. The press came and took our pictures and publicized our story on the TV, radio and local newspapers."
The publicity made staying in Uganda even more precarious, so he headed for Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2016. He said he was transferred to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in February 2017 after approaching the U.N. agency seeking refugee status. However, he said his situation has not improved much since fleeing Uganda.
"I feel myself to be under constant threat," Moesa told NBC News, saying life in Kakuma is "a dire situation" for gay refugees because of "consistent persecutions" from other refugees and the "lack of proper protection" from police.
The U.N. Refugee Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Maria Sjödin, deputy executive director for the LGBTQ human rights organization OutRight Action International, said Moesa's experience is not uncommon.
"Many individuals who face persecution and violence at home because of their sexual orientation or gender identity end up in refugee centers surrounded by people from the very same homophobic and transphobic cultures and countries from which they fled," Sjödin said.
"The systems set up are often not equipped to provide the necessary protection. The situation can be further exacerbated in a place like Kenya, which has anti-sodomy laws on the books. These refugees need immediate protection so they can live free from fear of violence," Sjodin added. According to the Organization for Refuge, Asylum and Migration (ORAM), LGBTQ people "are among the most persecuted individuals in the world today." More than 70 countries around the world — including Uganda and Kenya — criminalize homosexual activity, and, according to the organization, in many more countries, sexual and gender minorities "regularly face harassment, arrest, interrogation, torture and beatings."
"These human rights violations propel thousands to flee their countries. Yet without focused attention and assistance from the international humanitarian community, these refugees continue to be deprived of basic safety or protection," according to ORAM.
There are currently 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, including 25.4 million refugees and 3.1 million asylum-seekers, according to the U.N.'s latest data. However, the number of LGBTQ refugees and asylum-seekers around the world is not readily available.
Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda)
Official Website of the ICTR
Norway suspects Rwandan-born man over 1994 genocide (The Seattle Times) June 7, 2018
Police in Norway say they have arrested a man suspected of participating in the murder of mainly Tutsis in the 1994 genocide in his African homeland.
The National Criminal Investigation Service says the man in his 50s was arrested Tuesday. His name was not disclosed.
The NCIS said Thursday the man arrived in Norway in 2006 as a refugee and became a Norwegian citizen in 2014.
Prosecutor Espen Hanken said there is still a lot of investigation ahead, adding the case has been built on information from Rwanda and "investigative trips" to the African country. The aim, he said, is to have it prosecuted in Norway.
Some 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were killed by Hutu extremists during the Rwandan genocide, according to the U.N.
Biggest Relocation Of Genocide Remains Takes Place In Ex-President's Birthplace (KT Press) June 10, 2018
In early April 1994, when mass killing of the Tutsi erupted across the country, former Butare Prefecture remained untouched until April 19 when interim President Theodore Sindikubwabo drove to his birthplace in Gisagara district and gave a key word, "work".
The word was being used in other parts of the country, and it meant: "kill the Tutsi".
When Sindikubwabo gave his incendiary speech warning the "Hutu that are adamant to work", Butare prefecture-Gisagara inclusive turned against the Tutsi and massacred them mercilessly without sparing women and children.
Gisagara district saw thousands of Tutsi massacred.
When the Genocide was halted in July 1994 by the RPF, the government led by the former rebels put together the little resources that were available to bury the victims in dignity, but this was a tough job; over one million Tutsi massacred in three months, finding a decent resting place to all of them, at once. In Gisagara district, more than 50,000 bodies were buried in a temporary Genocide memorial in Kabuye, Ndora sector, at the place where Sindikubwabo made the incendiary speech. It is one among 9 memorials in the district.
According to Emmanuel Uwiringiyimana – head of Ibuka – an umbrella organization of Genocide survivors at Gisagara, "In 1995, mass graves were established in Kabuye in which the remains were laid to rest. But their conditions had deteriorated recently, which pushed the district to construct a new Genocide memorial site," he said.
On June 9, residents of Gisagara district, genocide survivors who lost their relatives after an order of Sindikubwabo and several officials converged to Gisagara to relocate the remains in a newly built Genocide memorial.
It is built adjacent to the previous memorial.
Genocide planners and deniers can tell if in Rwandan history there have been any such funerals, any such pictures, a part from those linked to their plan to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda-the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi.
CNLG condemns Belgian court ruling on withdrawal of peacekeepers (The New Times) June 17, 2018
A Belgian appeals court ruling on Friday that cleared their government of recalling its peacekeepers from Rwanda during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi which left 2,000 people to face death, is seen by the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) as being politically motivated.
On April 11, 1994, Belgian soldiers abandoned thousands who had sought refuge at ETO in Kigali, then the main cantonment of the Belgian UN troops, to be murdered in cold blood by Interahamwe militia and government soldiers.
Fourteen years after the 1994 Genocide, in 2008, families of survivors filed a lawsuit in Brussels against the Belgian government for having withdrawn its peacekeeping troops from Rwanda at the peak of the Genocide, and causing the death of innocent civilians.
During the initial hearing, court ruled in favor of the families but the decision was overturned on Friday at the appeal level, with the court reportedly ruling that it is, instead, the United Nations that recalled the peacekeepers.
CNLG Executive Secretary Jean Damascène Bizimana said: The court made a mistake because the decision to recall Belgian troops from Rwanda was made in a unilateral manner by the Belgian government which then notified the UN Security Council on April 8, 1994 and Belgium actually immediately sent additional 300 troops to Rwanda to carry out the evacuation of foreigners from Rwanda. This is what they called Operation Silver Back.
"That judgment by the court I believe is based on political reasons and not the law. The court could have wanted to avoid a situation whereby the ETO victims would be many in asking for reparations".
"We saw the news in the media, we haven't seen the judgment. We need to see and study it first," Justice Minister Johnston Busingye said while declining further comment.
The trial before the Court of Appeal in Brussels, almost 24 years after the Genocide, resumed earlier in March.
It was a civil appeal against the Belgian State and two of its military officers (Luc Marchal – deputy to Gen Roméo Dallaire, the commander of the UN Mission in Rwanda in 1994 – and the highest ranked Belgian officer in charge, in addition Col Dewez, who was the Commander of Kibat (Kigali Battalion) that begun on March 2, 2018.
They stood accused of war crimes by failing to act.
In March, Alain Destexhe, the Belgian Senator who initiated the 1997 Belgian Senatorial Commission of Inquiry into the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, described as "exceptional" the then ongoing trial in Brussels in which the Belgian State and two of the most senior military officers who led a Belgian peacekeeping contingent in Rwanda in 1994 were defendants. According to the Belgian Senator, Belgian officers were not unaware of the fate that awaited the helpless refugees they were leaving behind, as they were surrounded by the then Rwandan army (FAR) and extremist militias who were openly threatening the refugees from outside the school compound.
To evacuate the camp, Destexhe wrote, the Belgian troops even had to trick the starving and desperate refugees by lying to them that there was food in the refectory only to take advantage of the moment to leave in a hurry.
The Belgian troops reportedly shot in the air and drove off in their jeeps.
Destexhe noted that shortly after they left the cantonment, the school was attacked by the killers who forced the refugees out of the school and forced them to march to Nyanza (a few kilometres away) where they slaughtered them with machine guns, grenades and machetes.
They did it deliberately
Genocide researcher Tom Ndahiro said he is not surprised by what has happened in the Belgian court.
"The Genocide Convention requires state parties to the instrument to do whatever possible to prevent and punish the crime," Ndahiro said, adding: "Belgium is party to the Convention but also part of the history of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda."
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948.
"I am not surprised at all. They did it deliberately, and the court had to side with its government's act of indifference by abandoning the people who had put their trust in the Belgian contingent," Ndahiro added.
"Colonel Luc Marchal, was the Commander of the Belgian contingent. Ever since he left thousands of Tutsi under the authority of Interahamwe militia and genocidal military, has become a friend of those mass murderers. What a coincidence!"
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Somalia
Kenya Urged to Prevent Al Shabaab Cross-Border Attacks (All Africa) June 20, 2018
Five MPs from Northeastern yesterday urged the government to strengthen security on the Kenya-Somalia border to prevent more attacks by al Shabaab.
On Sunday eight security officers were killed after their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in Bojigaras, Wajir. They were five Administration Police officers and three police reservists.
The militants made off with six AK-47s, two G3 rifles and at least 540 bullets.
Al Shabaab militants have claimed responsibility for the attack. In a video released on Monday night, they claimed they had killed more than 10 security officers and injured 23.
The one-hour-long video in Arabic features multiple attacks over six months in Lamu, Mandera and Wajir. The purpose of the video, it said was "to honour slain fighters". They include an unidentified Briton killed while fighting alongside them.
The life of militants in Boni Forest is also featured.
Militants launch attacks in Kenya to pressure the government to withdraw its troops from Amisom, the peacekeeping force in Somalia. They attack police and security agents, non-local teachers and quarry workers, among others.
Those calling for more security included legislators Adan Keynan (Eldas), Rashid Amin (Wajir West), Mohammed Omar (Wajir South), Amed Kolosh (Wajir East) and nominated Senator Farhiya Haji.
They spoke during a press conference at Parliament Buildings.
"Security agents have done a good job in Somalia in dealing with al Shabaab and we should not allow remnants of the militant group to cause havoc in our country," Keynan said.
He said leaders from Northeastern support all government efforts to fight the criminals.
"We are ready to work with the state to secure the lives of our people. We are also asking the locals to cooperate with the security agencies and report to authorities whenever they see people they suspect to be criminals," Keynan said.
Senator Haji said anyone facilitating the movement of the militants should be punished. She urged residents to share information with security officials.
Omar said the Police Service should replicate the good work of the KDF in Somalia.
Over 250,000 refugees return to Somalia, others vow not to leave (Citizen Digital) By Amos Sambu June 20, 2018
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) has voluntarily repatriated a total of 254,811 in the last seven years.
The repatriation to Mogadishu and Kismayu was mainly done by air after the use of buses was suspended due to poor roads occasioned by heavy floods along Dadaab-Liboi-Dhobley road.
According to a security expert at the UNHCR who sought anonymity, the terror group Al Shabaab has planted a lot of improvised explosive devices (IED) along the same road putting the lives of refugees at risk.
Speaking during a Refugee market day in Dadaab town, head of operations in the UNHCR Dadaab Sub-office Jean Bosco Rushatsi said another 4,949 non Somali refugees have been relocated to Kalobeyei in Kakuma camp.
He said his office was in a constant contact with their office in Somalia which takes over the refugees as soon as they cross over the Kenyan border in line with a tripartite agreement signed by Kenya and Somalia government together with UNHCR in November 2013.
However refugees interviewed were reluctant to return to their countries of origin through voluntary repatriation citing lack of social amenities such as proper health care and education system as well as insecurity.
Halima Mahat a Somali bantu who came to the camp in 2004 and sells vegetable including kales, eggplant, pumpkin, sugar cane, tomato, amongst other items said the health and education standards in Somalia cannot be compared to that of Kenya.
She added that her children are schooling in Kenya and the small business she is doing was to cater for their schools fees.
Mohammed Abdi an officer working with Refugees Education Trust (RET) who trained the refugee women on farming said it has greatly boost their health status as they can have balanced diet at their disposal despite making small money out of it.
Majority of them have been trained by UN agencies in various livelihood skills that they said will help them in self-reliance when they return to their country of origin.
Parach Machar from South Sudan, who graduated in electrical installation, said he too was not ready to go back home owing to civil war in his country but hopes one day he will. He was grateful to UNHCR implementing partners for imparting him with knowledge and skills that will be of use once he returns to his country.
Over 50% of the current population of 208,616 in Dadaab refugee complex do some small businesses to supplement what the UNHCR provide them with which has since reduced drastically.
They now receive food rations once a month as compared to twice a month before since the funds for Dadaab humanitarian operations were reduced significantly to about 25% of what they used to receive in 2011/2012.
Al-Shabab Militant Group Getting Lucky, Not Stronger in Somalia (VOA) By Jeff Seldin June 20, 2018
Somalia's most dangerous terror group is likely not getting any stronger despite a series of deadly attacks, including one that claimed the life of a U.S. special operations soldier earlier this month.
The assessment, by U.S. military and counterintelligence officials, runs contrary to the conclusions of some analysts and comes as al-Shabab has been flexing its military might in recent weeks, highlighting attacks on both Somali and African Union forces.
One of the most publicized of these was a brazen June 8 attack on an outpost under construction two kilometers north of the town of Sanguni, in the Lower Jubba region of Somalia.
The al-Qaida-linked militants skirmished with a force of 800 Somali and Kenyan forces accompanied by U.S. special operations soldiers, one of whom was killed by mortar fire.
US: June 8 attack was 'lucky shot'
U.S. officials are still trying to determine the size of the al-Shabab force at the time of the attack but say there is no indication of any increased capability.
"It was a lucky shot," a U.S. military official told VOA on condition of anonymity. "I wouldn't consider this a well-executed attack."
Another military official said, in many ways, the deadly attack was typical of al-Shabab operations.
"Historically, al-Shabab has been willing to engage large forces, often using surprise and asymmetric tactics to improve their chances for success," said Lt. Cmdr. Desiree Frame, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command. "We expect to see more conflict in southern Somalia as Somali Government Forces, AMISOM, and their partners make in-roads into al-Shabab-held territory."
Still, accounts from Somalia indicate the al-Shabab forces were not deterred by the presence of U.S. special operations forces using armored vehicles and armed drones, as the June 8 deadly mortar strike was part of a three-day long assault on the outpost that included a failed attack using a vehicle-borne bomb.
"They know our movements," an official with the Somali forces in Sanguni told VOA Somali. "It's an open secret."
Another Somali commander said al-Shabab also took advantage of the terrain, striking after recent flooding forced the Somali, Kenyan and U.S. forces to build the outpost in the open.
U.S. counterterrorism and military officials say there is no doubt the group remains the biggest threat to security in Somalia. But they have resisted attributing the increased pace of al-Shabab attacks to anything more than their annual Ramadan campaign.
"We do not assess that al-Shabab has recently increased their capabilities or their willingness to engage their enemies," according to Africa Command's Frame.
A senior U.S. counterterrorism official described al-Shabab's activity as routine, noting its public statement "promote the virtue of waging jihad during Ramadan."
Differing assessment of al-Shabab's strength Still, some analysts warn it is wrong to downplay the strides al-Shabab has made since being kicked out of its last urban stronghold, the port city of Kismayo, in 2012.
"It's clear that we're not just seeing a spike in attacks related to the Ramadan campaign," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior analyst at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "It's clear that the organization has gotten stronger."
And while Gartenstein-Ross thinks it is unlikely al-Shabab is strong enough to consistently challenge U.S. forces in the region, it has shown it can be potent against both Somalia and African Union forces in the area.
"They've been able to kill very high numbers and you didn't see that five years ago. They've been able to actually overrun bases at times," he said. "The danger is as African Union forces draw down, they may retake major urban areas. I think there's a good chance of that."
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NORTH AFRICA
Libya
Official Website of the International Criminal Court ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
UN OHCHR expresses concern over safety of civilians in Derna (The Libya Observer) By Safa Alharathy June 8, 2018
The spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Elizabeth Throssell, has expressed deep concern about the mounting threats that face the population of Derna.
In a statement issued Friday, June 8, Throssell referred to concerns regarding alleged incidents involving the arbitrary arrest and detention of civilians while others were prevented from leaving the city.
She also raised concerns about the humanitarian situation of civilians caught in the fighting, with shortages of food, water, and medicine, in addition to the closing of the only hospital in the city, pointing out that the UHCHR has documented at least the deaths of three women as a result of the lack of oxygen supplies.
"Our concern for civilians and fighters who have surrendered, laid down their weapons, are sick or wounded, or otherwise hors de combat is all the greater given the serious violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law that we documented during fighting for control of the eastern oil crescent and in parts of the city of Benghazi, both in early 2017," Throssell explained in the statement.
She urged all parties to take all possible measures to ensure the security of civilians and to guarantee a safe passage to those who wish to leave including medical evacuations to the wounded.
"All commanders should take effective steps to ensure that their forces comply with their obligations under international law", Throssell stressed, underlining that the population of Derna must be protected and treated with dignity and respect.
UN imposes sanctions on six human traffickers in Libya (The Libya Observer) By Safa Alharathy June 9, 2018
The United Kingdom said that it had succeeded to impose UN Security Council sanctions against six main actors, four Libyans and two foreigners, involved in human trafficking in Libya.
The United Kingdom said that it had succeeded to impose UN Security Council sanctions against six main actors, four Libyans and two foreigners, involved in human trafficking in Libya.
The British Foreign Office said that the step was with the full support of the Libyan government, clarifying that the sanctions included an assets freeze and a global travel ban.
"This is the first time the UN imposes sanctions against human traffickers", the British Foreign office stated, explaining that this was the result of the continuing efforts carried out by the UK since 2017.
The British Foreign Office stressed that Britain is ready to work with its partners to impose further sanctions against other people who threaten the peace, stability, and security in Libya, and those who undermine a peaceful political transition process.
The six traffickers are:
1- Ahmed Al-Dabbashi, Commander of Anas al-Dabbashi Brigade.
2- Musab Abu Grain, Leader of a transnational trafficking network.
3- Mohammed Keshlaf, Commander of the Shuhada al-Nasr brigade, Head of the Petrol Refinery Guard of Zawiya's refinery.
4- Abdul-Rahman Milad, Commander of the Coast Guard in Zawiya.
5- Fitiwi Abdelrazak – Eritrean, a leading human trafficker from the Horn of Africa to Libya.
6-Ermias Ghermay – Eritrean, a leading human trafficker from the Horn of Africa.
Amnesty International calls on Haftar to end siege and protect civilians in Derna (The Libya Observer) By Abdulkader Assad June 11, 2018
Amnesty International said it had received alarming reports from individuals from inside Derna saying that Haftar's forces are deliberately blocking any aid from entering the city, as well as blocking the exit of those seeking permission to leave to access care outside Derna.
Amnesty International has called on the commander of the self-styled army Khalifa Haftar and all parties involved in the fighting in Derna to urgently open humanitarian corridors to give impartial assistance and save the lives of civilians still trapped in the city as this forces advance.
"We are receiving horrifying reports from Derna, where a prolonged siege and heavy fighting have left the city on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe." Said Heba Morayef, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.
She added in a report on Monday that Haftar's blockade tactics are being used to cause unnecessary suffering to ordinary men, women and children, who are now surrounded, with dwindling food, water and medical supplies, and no way out of this desperate situation.
Morayef added that given the escalation of military action done by the so-called army, all the parties have an obligation under international humanitarian law to facilitate unimpeded access for impartial humanitarian relief, including medical supplies and food, and to allow civilians to flee the fighting without fear of arbitrary detention, harassment, intimidation and unlawful killings.
Amnesty International said it had received alarming reports from individuals from inside Derna saying that Haftar's forces are deliberately blocking any aid from entering the city, as well as blocking the exit of those seeking permission to leave to access care outside Derna.
"Residents say they fear trying to flee from the city because the LNA is known to profile, arbitrarily detain and disappear people they perceive as opponents, especially young men." The human rights group reported. Derna has been under a fierce military operation since last May with the forces led by Haftar advancing on the city causing numerous deaths and injuries among civilians and a wave of displacement along the way.
The UN Security Council called last week on all parties of the fighting in Derna to protect civilians and exercise restraint.
Meanwhile, many Libyans took to the Tripoli Martyrs Square on Monday protesting the war on Derna and the silence of the official authorities in Tripoli: Presidential Council and others.
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EUROPE
The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber
Official Court Website [English translation]
Acquitted Bosnian Serb Soldier Sues for Compensation (Balkan Insight) By Emina Dizdarevic June 11, 2018
Ilija Vukasinovic, who was cleared of expulsions, looting and killings in the Rogatica area in 1992, launched his case for compensation from the state at a preliminary hearing on Monday.
Vukasinovic’s lawyer said he wants to call a neuro-psychiatrist to offer an opinion about the mental distress caused to his client by the 199 days he spent under house arrest, when he was visited and checked up on by police officers twice a day without prior notice.
The amount of compensation that the ex-solder is claiming has not been specified.
Assistant state attorney Jelisaveta Plasto said she objected to the defence proposal to examine the expert witness and Vukasinovic himself.
In May 2017, the Bosnian state court’s appeals chamber Vukasinovic of crimes against humanity, along with ex-soldiers Radomir Markovic, Mile Kusic, Dragan Bozovic, Sasa Perkovic, Radomir Gluhovic, Pero Radovic and Milos Vukasinovic.
The court found the eight ex-servicemen not guilty of taking part in expulsions and looting, as well as killing around 20 civilians including women and children in a barn in the village of Karacici in the Rogatica area in September 1992.
Markovic was the commander of the Socici unit of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Rogatica brigade, while the other defendants were members of the unit.
The verdict said that the prosecution only proved during the trial that the defendants were members of Bosnian Serb forces in Rogatica, while the other allegations in the indictment “remained in the domain of assumption”.
The main hearing in the case has been scheduled for October 3.
Bosnian Serb Soldiers’ Srebrenica Genocide Trial Opens (Balkan Insight) By Emina Dizdarevic June 12, 2018 Mile Kosoric, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Vlasenica Brigade, and Momcilo Tesic, a member of the brigade’s Military Police Squad went on trial at the Bosnian state court on Tuesday on charges of committing genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.
According to the charges, on the morning of July 12, 1995, members of the Vlasenica Brigade demined a road in the village of Luke, near Vlasenica, so that buses and trucks transporting Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica could pass, and set up a checkpoint.
The indictment alleges that the defendants and other Vlasenica Brigade troops stopped vehicles at the checkpoint from July 12 to 17, 1995 and seized money and golden jewellery from Bosniaks.
Vlasenica Brigade soldiers separated the women from the Bosniak men, took the women away and raped them, and tied up the men and detained them in a school building where they were abused, the charges claim.
“On the night of July 13 to 14, they took out 22 male detainees and took them to Mrsici, where they shot 21 of them. Only one detainee survived,” prosecutor Predrag Tomic told the court.
The first prosecution witness in the trial testified on Tuesday that she was transported from Potocari near Srebrenica to the village of Luke, where she men being taken away towards a “big house”.
Witness Sehida Abdulrahmanovic said she was taken by truck from a former battery factory in Potocari to an unknown destination on July 13, 1995, together with her daughter and other civilians.
“Buses and trucks were parked on the road. Everything was ready for us. We were not told where they were taking us,” she said.
While getting off the truck, Abdulrahmanovic said she saw a friend of hers, Rizo Mustafic, as well as the son of another acquaintance whose surname was Ahmic.
“A soldier was pushing them with a rifle, directing them towards the big house. I did not recognise the other men who they were escorting, because they were facing away from me… Those who were taken away never came back,” Abdulrahmanovic said.
Two other former Bosnian Serb soldiers, Borislav Stojisic and Rajko Drakulic, were originally indicted in the same case, but the proceedings against them were separated from the others because they were on the run in Serbia.
The trial is due to continue on July 10.
Bosnian Serb Ex-Minister Misses Srebrenica Trial Opening (Balkan Insight) By Albina Sorguc June 13, 2018
Judge Halil Lagumdzija said on Wednesday that Kovac does not live in Bosnia and Herzegovina and he had been informed about the plea hearing via international legal assistance, but still did not appear in court.
Kovac’s lawyer Nina Kisic said that she was told that her client - who lives in Serbia - has health problems.
“I was informed he had medical issues and we will send the court the medical evidence,” Kisic said.
The Bosnian prosecution charged Kovac with genocide, alleging that as interior minister of Bosnia’s Serb- dominated entity Republika Srpska and commander of its police force, he controlled all the police forces involved in war crimes against Bosniaks from Srebrenica.
The indictment alleges that police units under his control participated in the capture of Bosniak men and boys, their forcible imprisonment, transportation to and mass executions in several locations.
The execution sites included Kravica, Cerska, the House of Culture in Pilica, Branjevo farm, Sandic, Konjevic Field, and other locations where mass and individual shootings of captured Bosniak civilians were carried out. Kovac currently lives in the Serbian capital Belgrade and has citizenship of both Serbia and Bosnia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
More than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in July 1995 after Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN- protected ‘safe zone’ of Srebrenica - a crime which has been classified by international court verdicts as genocide.
Judge Lagumdzija said the court will wait for Kovac’s medical documents and then ask for the prosecution’s opinion on them.
Germany Extradites Serb War Crimes Suspect to Bosnia (Balkan Insight) By Albina Sorguc June 14, 2018
The Bosnian prosecution said on Wednesday that the German authorities have extradited Bosnian Serb ex-fighter Milorad Obradovic, alias Stiven, who is suspected of committing war crimes in Miska Glava in the Prijedor municipality in July 1992.
Obradovic was flown to Bosnia and Herzegovina after he was located, identified and arrested in Munich.
He is suspected of taking part in the illegal arrests and torture of 120 Bosniaks in Miska Glava near Prijedor, who were later killed in the nearby town of Ljubija.
“He is personally suspected of killing three Bosniaks,” said the Bosnian prosecution.
The Bosnian state court is currently trying ten people for war crimes in Miska Glava.
Slobodan Taranjac, Slobodan Knezevic, Milodrag Glusac, Ranko Babic, Ranko Dosenovic and Rade Zekanovic are charged with with ordering or failing to stop or punish the detention of civilians who were held in inhumane conditions in the culture house in Miska Glava and tortured.
Zdravko Panic, Trivo Vukic, Milan Vukic and Marinko Prastalo are also charged with killing 11 men. Taranjac, Glusac, Babic and Dosenovic are accused of concealing the crime.
Taranjac was charged as president of the Crisis Committee in Ljubija and head of the local civil authorities, Glusac as deputy commander of the Sixth Ljubija Battalion of the Bosnian Serb Army’s 43rd Brigade, Babic as first operative officer of the Sixth Ljubija Battalion, and Dosenovic as the battalion’s assistant commander for security.
The others were charged as members of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Miskoglavska Company and the military and civil police.
Bosnian Wartime Detention Camp Guard’s Sentence Reduced (Balkan Insight) By Admir Muslimovic June 14, 2018
The state court’s appeals chamber on Thursday cut Ivan Medic’s prison sentence from 14 to 12 years and overturned part of an acquittal verdict that had initially freed another guard at the wartime Dretelj camp in Capljina, Tonco Rajic.
Rajic will now face a new trial.
In November 2017, the state court convicted Medic of participating in the inhumane treatment of Serb civilian prisoners and of forcing them to have sexual intercourse with each other.
He was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for these offences, but because he had been sentenced to seven years for war crimes in another case, a cumulative sentence of 14 years was pronounced.
Rajic meanwhile was initially acquitted in November 2017 of war crimes against civilians held at the Dretelj camp.
Bosnian Constitutional Court ‘Under Pressure’, New Chief Says (Balkan Insight) By Haris Rovcanin June 20, 2018 In his first interview since his appointment as president of the state-level Constitutional Court, Zlatko Knezevic told BIRN that its judges are exposed to some form of pressure on an everyday basis.
He cited media reports of politicians’ criticism of various decisions made by the Constitutional Court, such as the rulings against the Bosnian Serbs annual Day of Republika Srpska and the country’s Electoral Law, both of which it deemed unconstitutional and discriminatory.
“If you think justice has triumphed, ask the losing party,” Knezevic said, quoting a Latin proverb to highlight how in ethnically- and politically-divided Bosnia and Herzegovina, one side always applauds the court’s decisions while the other side cries foul.
He said that there have even been attempts to “undermine the integrity of individual judges in an ugly manner and at a personal level”.
“It is not classic political pressure when ‘a certain politician calls one of the judges’, but it is rather the pressure of the [general level of] politicisation in a country in which elections are due to be held in four months,” he explained.
The Constitutional Court has come under fire after politicians failed to come up with a solution to address its ruling on elections to the Federation entity’s upper chamber, the House of Peoples. If the country’s squabbling political parties fail to agree on new electoral legislation, it could mean that October’s polls will be partly invalid, sparking an institutional crisis in the country.
Knezevic, a Serb born in Bosanski Novi, rejected the allegation that Constitutional Court judges sometimes act politically because the court’s six Bosnian members have voted differently on cases according to ther ethnic backgrounds.
He argued that the discrepancy could be explained by the fact that “some of them have a milder interpretation of the existing construction of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the others have a stronger one”.
Bosnia’s Serbs favour a weaker central state and more power for the country’s Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska - or even outright secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina - while Bosniaks generally want stronger central institutions.
But Knezevic insisted that the differences between the judges’ stances led to higher-quality rulings.
“Some are inclined towards a more functional or stronger role for the state, while others prefer a more functional role for the entities [Republika Srpska and the Bosniak- and Croat-dominated Federation entity] and the Brcko District,” he explained.
“Therefore it is not about ethnic division. It is a slight difference between various perceptions of the constitutional structure. And that is a positive thing. My predecessor, judge Mirsad Ceman, used to say: ‘Where everyone thinks alike, no one thinks.’”
Bosnian Serbs celebrate the Day of Republika Srpska despite a ruling that the holiday is discriminatory against other ethnic groups. Photo: Anadolu. Knezevic said that more than 99 per cent of cases at the Constitutional Court are handled by the six domestic judges, while the two foreign judges at the court are only involved in a very small number of cases.
Officials from Republika Srpska have often called for the foreign judges to be removed from the Constitutional Court, alleging that they work in Bosniaks’ interests and against those of the country’s Serbs.
However, Knezevic did not want to comment on whether it is time for the foreign judges to leave the Constitutional Court.
“It is simply not for us to decide,” he said.
Before being appointed to the Constitutional Court, Knezevic was a member of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, the country’s judicial overseer, and of the Republika Srpska Bar Association.
He argued that failures to execute the Constitutional Court’s decisions represent “a direct attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as on its entities [Republika Srpska and the Federation”.
For instance, a court ruling that Mostar’s electoral statute was unconstitutional has led to the town repeatedly failing to hold municipal elections.
“I would rather be attacked due to Constitutional Court’s decisions every day if those decisions are being executed than be praised for non-executed ones,” Knezevic said.
He explained that the court faces problems with resources and manpower because it receives between 620 and 660 appeals a month and has to solve them within specific deadlines, but its budget has remained the same for years.
“If we continue at the same pace, the Constitutional Court will be put under far greater pressure to complete cases, not to have a lot of unsolved cases, and to do all that within the set deadlines,” he warned.
He argued that more resources are necessary because Bosnians have “huge confidence” in the Constitutional Court to do its job properly and deal with their cases efficiently.
“Whether they are right or wrong, they expect a lot from us,” he said.
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Domestic Prosecutions In The Former Yugoslavia
Albania Agrees to Start Search for Communists’ Victims (Balkan Insight) By Gjergj Erebara June 7, 2018
The government agreed on Wednesday evening to engage the International Commission on Missing Persons to help the authorities to investigate the whereabouts of some of the almost 6,000 Albanians who were killed or disappeared during the 45 years of Communist rule in the country, search for their remains and identify them.
The process is starting almost three decades after the fall of the Communist regime, amid scepticism that it is too late and so far has too little funding.
The EU has granted the ICMP about 450,000 euros for the start of the work, which will cover research in two known grave sites believed to contain unnamed victims. There are dozens more suspected burial sites around the country.
The ICMP, which has worked successfully in several post-conflict countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, opened negotiations with Albania in 2010, after a BIRN investigation showed how families of Communist regime victims struggled to find their loved ones while the authorities ignored their pleas to provide information or help.
However, it took eight years to reach the agreement, which is not yet final. After Wednesday’s approval by the Council of Ministers, the agreement must be approved by parliament before entering into force.
The search will start in the infamous secret graveyard known as Barracks 313 near Tirana, where scores of people were executed or buried during the last decades of Communism.
According to the BIRN investigation, Jovan Plaku, the son of an oil engineer executed in 1976, discovered about a dozen human remains while searching for his father. Eight years later, none of the remains discovered have yet been identified.
The ICMP will start to collect DNA samples from the families of those disappeared to match them with those of the remains.
Another research site will be a graveyard near an oil refinery in Ballshi in south Albania. The graveyard is believed to contain remains of those who died in the labour camp built to serve the refinery.
After taking power in 1945, the Communist government used prisoners as cheap labour in mines, agriculture and construction.
It refused to hand over the bodies of those who executed to their families for a decent funeral. Those who died in prison were often buried nearby in unmarked graves.
Wiretaps Could Change Course of Macedonia Murder Trial (Balkans Insight) By Sinisa Jakov Marusie June 12, 2018
As the retrial in the case that raised ethnic tensions in Macedonia continues on Tuesday at Skopje Criminal Court, the defence for six ethnic Albanians accused of the murders hopes that new witnesses and wiretap evidence expected to be presented to the court could exonerate the accused.
“We have new witnesses who were with the accused when the murders took place and with their testimonies, we will prove that they [the accused] could not have been at the scene of the murder,” defence lawyer Naser Raufi said.
In June 2014, Skopje Criminal Court found Alil Demiri, Afrim Ismailovic, Agim Ismailovic, Fejzi Aziri, Haki Aziri and Sami Ljuta, guilty of killing the five ethnic Macedonians in 2012 during Orthodox Easter.
They were given the longest possible sentence for terrorism offences, life in prison. They have since appealed against the verdict in higher courts.
The retrial started last month after the prosecution asked the Supreme Court in October 2017 for the life sentences to be quashed, citing new circumstances and questionable evidence in the case.
In March, Macedonia’s Special Prosecution, SJO, took jurisdiction over the case from the regular prosecution and said it will present new evidence to the court.
The defence which hopes that the content of wiretapped conversations between former top state officials - which the SJO is in charge of investigating for possible high-level crimes - will shed more light on the case and may even result in acquittal for the defendants.
The defence has long been insisting that the accused may have been scapegoats, and that the previous government led by the right-wing VMRO DPMNE party might have been involved, in an attempt to show that state institutions could clear up the case efficiently.
“Depending on the [wiretapped] conversations, we will propose our defence [to the court]. I don’t know which people are involved in the [wiretapped] conversations,” Raufi said.
He added that “depending on the content of the wiretaps, new witnesses may emerge”.
The SJO, set up in 2015 amid a deep political crisis in the country, was specifically tasked with investigating high-level crimes stemming from the content of the illegal wiretaps that were released by the then opposition Social Democrats.
The Social Democrats accused Nikola Gruevski, who was the prime minister and VMRO DPMNE leader at the time, of masterminding the massive wiretapping scheme.
Gruevski and his party, who were ousted from power in May last year, denied the allegation.
The corpses of Filip Slavkovski, Aleksandar Nakjevski, Cvetanco Acevski and Kire Trickovski, all aged between 18 and 20, were discovered on April 12, 2012. Their bodies had been lined up and appeared to have been executed.
The body of 45-year-old Borce Stevkovski was found a short distance away from the others. News of the murder raised ethnic tensions, after groups of ethnic Macedonians staged protests, some of which turned violent, blaming the killings on members of the country’s large Albanian minority community.
The trial on Tuesday is expected to continue with testimonies from some of the eyewitnesses, while the SJO and the defence are expected to present new evidence at a later stage of the trial.
Serbia Restarts Lovas War Crimes Trial from Beginning (Balkans Insight) By Filip Rudic June 14, 2018
Belgrade Higher Court decided on Thursday to restart the Lovas trial because of previous decisions by an appeals court, ruling that the deputy war crime prosecutors did not have the right to act on behalf of the prosecutor's office while the chief prosecutor's seat was vacant.
The position of chief war crimes prosecutor was vacant from December 2015, when the previous incumbent's term expired, until May 2017 when a new one was elected.
During that time, the deputy prosecutors acted on behalf of the prosecutor's office in trials, but the appeals court said that this practice was unlawful.
Despite numerous hearings being delayed, defendants in the Lovas trial were ready to make their closing statements, and were caught off guard by the trial's restart.
Ten former members of the police, Serbian territorial defence forces, the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Dusan Silni (Dusan the Great) paramilitary unit are accused of committing war crimes against civilians and of killing 70 of them in the Croatian village of Lovas in October 1991.
The indictment says Serbian forces captured Lovas on October 10 that year, after which the beatings and torture of civilians started.
On October 17, the forces allegedly rounded up around 70 men from Lovas, aged 18 to 65, detained them and tortured some of them.
The next day, defendants Radovan Vlajkovic and Radisav Josipovic, who were military officials with Serbian territorial defence forces, were ordered to use the civilians as a human shield in a minefield, according to the indictment.
Vlajkovic and Josipovic are said to have chosen around 50 civilians and told them to walk towards a nearby field to check where the mines were.
When they got there, members of the Dusan Silni paramilitary unit told the civilians to walk in a line and to check with their feet where the mines were; Vlajkovic and Josipovic allegedly participated in this.
When one man fell over, a mine exploded, and at the same time a number of soldiers started shooting at the Croatians, 19 of whom were killed.
The prosecution said that 20 civilians were killed on October 10, when the village was captured, while the other victims were killed at other times.
All the former fighters were convicted in 2012, but Serbia’s appeals court annulled the verdict and sent the case for retrial in 2014.
Four of those who were initially convicted - Ljuban Devetak, Dragan Bacic, Aleksandar Nikolaidis and Milan Radojcic - have since died.
Serbia's deputy war crimes prosecutor asked in March 2017 for the ten defendants to be jailed for a total of 83 years.
Kosovo Tries Servian Reservist for War Crimes (Balkan Insight) By Tringa Rruka, Die Morina June 15, 2018
Serbian ex-reservist Darko Tasic appeared before Prizren Basic Court on Thursday at his trial for allegedly committing war crimes in cooperation with others in the Kosovo village of Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusa in March 1999.
According to Kosovo’s Special Prosecution, Tasic, in his capacity as a member of the reserve forces of the Yugoslav police or paramilitary forces, in co-perpetration with others whose identity is not known, participated in the confiscation of property, robberies, and illegal and deliberate destruction of property which was not justified by military objectives.
The crimes, which included the burning of houses in the village, were committed between March 15 and 26, 1999, the prosecution said.
Tasic is also accused of taking vehicles, agricultural machinery and other valuable items belonging to a man called Kasum Hajdari and other villagers.
He is further charged with participation in burning unidentified dead bodies and throwing them in the Drina river.
The prosecution said that Tadic’s actions constituted criminal offences of looting, illegal destruction and a serious and cruel attack on human dignity.
Tadic’s defence lawyer told the hearing that he could not immediately provide all the evidence he will present because there is a mass of material on the events in Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusa from trials at the Hague Tribunal, which he will file later in the trial.
Tadic was arrested in November 2017 at the Brnjak border crossing between Kosovo and Serbia.
Serbia ‘Used Yugoslav Army for War Goals’ (Balkans Insight) By Filip Rudic June 15, 2018
The Humanitarian Law Centre presented a report on Friday in Belgrade documenting the role of Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, after the Serbian leadership headed by Slobodan Milosevic took over control of the army in order to accomplish its wartime goals.
The HLC’s dossier, entitled ‘The JNA in the Wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’, gives examples of war crimes perpetrated or assisted by the JNA, but does not seek to give a full list of all its wartime operations.
“The intention was… to point out the pattern by which the supposedly Yugoslav army participated in achieving the war goals of only one side, the Serbian one,” the HLC said in the dossier.
According to the HLC’s research, by the early 1990s the ethnic composition of the JNA was heavily restructured, with the number of Serb officers rising and officers of other ethnicities leaving the army.
“In the spring of 1992 Bosniaks and Croats were fired from high-ranking positions, and in some cases they were pressured to retire from duty,” the report says.
By April 1992, around 90 per cent of all JNA officers were Serbs and Montenegrins, while by the start of that same year 90 per cent of all recruits were Serbs, according to the report.
The first part of the HLC’s dossier addresses the war in Croatia, showing how the JNA initially created buffer zones between the battling sides, only to relinquish control over those zones to enable the leadership of rebel Croatian Serbs to take over.
After that, the JNA sided openly with the Croatian Serb rebel forces, shelling Croatian cities and participating in battles together with Serb paramilitaries and the army of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, a self-proclaimed wartime Serb-led statelet in Croatia, the report says.
The dossier describes examples of military operations from 1991 in which the JNA committed war crimes or “prepared the field” for crimes committed by Serb units with which it cooperated, the HLC says.
These include the indiscriminate shelling of Croatian towns and cities such as Dubrovnik, Vukovar, Zadar and Sibenik, as well as attacks on areas of Croatia during which ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs was carried out.
The report says that the JNA, while still involved in conflicts in Croatia, established cooperation with the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina, SDS, which was founded by Radovan Karadzic.
“After retreating from Croatia in the first months of 1992, the JNA shifted its military activities to Bosnia,” the HLC says.
The second part of the dossier describes how the JNA helped the SDS take power in six Bosnian municipalities that would be included in the territory of the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, later renamed Republika Srpska.
The Army of Republika Srpska’s command was formed mostly of members of the JNA’s 2nd Military District Headquarters, whose commander Ratko Mladic was named commander in chief of the Bosnian S Erb military forcce.
Documents gathered by the HLC show how JNA units changed names and became units of the Army of Republika Srpska without changing leadership or unit strength.
“In this way, the newly-formed Bosnian Serb army started out from significantly stronger positions than any other military structures [led by other ethnic groups] in Bosnia,” the report says.
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MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA
Iraq
Grotian Moment: The International War Crimes Trial Blog
Iraq launches air strike against Islamic State in Syria (Reuters) By Ahmed Aboulenein and Michael Georgy June 7, 2018
Iraq launched an air strike on an Islamic State target inside neighbouring Syria on Thursday, the military said.
F-16 fighter jets destroyed a building where members of the ultra-hardline Sunni group's leadership were operating, it said in a statement.
Islamic State, which once occupied a third of Iraq's territory, has been largely defeated in the country but still poses a threat along its border with Syria.
"Iraqi F-16 jets bombed this morning on Thursday a so-called command and control centre containing leaders and fighters belonging to the Daesh (Islamic State) terrorist gang in the Hajin inside Syrian territory," the statement said.
The Iraqi air force has carried out several air strikes against Islamic State in Syria since last year, with the approval of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State.
Iraq has good relations with Iran and Russia, Assad's main backers in the Syrian civil war, while also enjoying strong support from the U.S.-led coalition. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared final victory over Islamic State in December but it still operates from pockets along the border with Syria and has continued to carry out ambushes, assassinations and bombings across Iraq.
Islamic State has resorted to guerrilla tactics since it abandoned its goal of holding territory and creating a self-sufficient caliphate that straddles Iraq and Syria.
Court orders Denmark to compensate 18 Iraqis over torture (Al Jazeera) June 15, 2018
A court in Denmark has ordered the government to compensate 18 civilians who were tortured during the Iraq war in an operation carried out by Iraqi security forces along with a Danish battalion.
In total, 23 plaintiffs had sued Denmark after they were arrested and subjected to "torture and inhumane treatment" in 2004 during operation 'Green Desert' near Iraq's main port city of Basra.
The appeals court in Denmark's capital, Copenhagen, ruled on Friday that although the Danish soldiers did not join in the torture, they failed to prevent the abuse.
"The soldiers of the Danish battalion who were sent to Iraq in 2004 and partook in the operation were not found guilty of violence against the Iraqis," the court said.
However, they were aware that the prisoners faced a "real risk" of being physically abused by the Iraqi security forces, judges said.
There was no evidence that the Danish battalion could have predicted the "systemic torture and violence" that took place, the court added.
Eighteen plaintiffs were awarded 30,000 danish kroner (roughly $4,600).
Defence Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said he was "satisfied" by the ruling exonerating the soldiers from torture, but added he would appeal the verdict because it placed Denmark "in a difficult situation".
"This means that we can no longer contribute to improving security - and therefore guaranteeing human rights - in countries engaged in armed conflict," he said in a statement.
Denmark has faced controversy over its role in Iraq on numerous occasions.
In 2015, Denmark's Military Prosecution Service announced they would investigate Danish troops' handling of Iraqi war prisoners after Politiken newspaper reported that their actions may have violated the Geneva Convention, Danish media reported at the time.
A document obtained by Politiken through a freedom of information request revealed that the Danish military handed over at least 12 Iraqi prisoners of war to local authorities despite receiving orders not to do so in 2004, fearing that they would be sentenced to death by the new Iraqi government.
Also in 2015, according to local media, newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a document that it said proved that former Danish Defence Minister Soren Gade tried to hide the Danish military's agreement with security company Blackwater whose contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded 20 in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007.
The same year the Military Prosecution Service reportedly placed a group of five Danish soldiers under investigation after they were accused of taking "trophy photos" of dead Iraqis.
Denmark was a member of the coalition of occupying countries including the US and UK which invaded Iraq in 2003.
According to The Local Denmark, the small Scandinavian country still has around 180 troops at the al-Asad airbase near Baghdad where they have been training Iraqi and Kurdish forces.
Last month Denmark announced that it would withdraw around 60 special forces by late autumn since most areas in Iraq once controlled by the Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) have been liberated. Policeman killed, Islamic State attack foiled, northeast of Baquba (Iraqi News) By Nehal Mostafa June 19, 2018
A policeman was killed by a sniper, while an Islamic State attack against a security checkpoint was foiled, northeast of Baquba, a local source from Diyala said on Tuesday.
Speaking to Alghad Press, Awwad al-Rubaie, head of the security committee of Abu Sayda town, said "a policeman was injured in the evening by a sniper while being near a mosque at the outskirts of abu Karma village, northeast of Diyala, which caused his immediate death."
Moreover, Rubaie said, "Islamic State members attempted attacking a checkpoint for police at the outskirts of the same village, however, security troops foiled the attack."
A total of 68 Iraqis were killed and another 122 injured in acts of terrorism, violence and armed conflict in Iraq in April, according to casualty figures recorded by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).
As many as 3,298 civilians were killed and 4,781 others were wounded in 2017, excluding Anbar civilian casualty figures for November and December, which are not available, UNAMI said in a report in December.
Islamic State continues to launch sporadic attacks across Iraq against troops. Security reports indicate that the militant group still poses threat against stability in the country.
Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled "caliphate" from Mosul in June 2014.
Islamic State fighters buried without identification in Iraq (Al Monitor) By Judit Neurink June 19, 2018
Maj. Ahsan Rasem recognizes members of the Islamic State (IS) by their clothes and explosives belts. Rasem is the team leader of the Civil Defense unit that is recovering bodies in the Meydan neighborhood of Mosul. A year after the liberation of Iraq's second-largest city, Rasem and his men have been sent to free this last, largely destroyed neighborhood from the sickening stench of death so civilians can return and rebuild their houses.
"These are the bodies that no family members have come forward to claim," Rasem said during a break from his gruesome task. White body bags are waiting to be collected, and the remains of explosives belts, clothes and blankets are scattered around in the dust. Rasem's team members have removed their nose coverings to take a breath of fresh air beside the Tigris River.
This is where they started last month, at the river, removing the floating corpses of dozens of IS fighters who were shot here last year while trying to escape the carnage by crossing the river. After that, they started working on the rubble. In just three weeks, some 1,300 bodies that had lain here for almost a year have been recovered.
"Most of them are not Arabs. They are from Holland, Georgia, Chechnya and other countries," Rasem said. Some identity papers have been found, some with the bodies, some just lying around. Rasem delivers the bodies to the morgue in Mosul. He does not take pictures either of the place where they were found or of their faces for possible identification. "Usually, there is hardly anything left," he said
According to Iraqi media citing government sources, some 9,000 civilian corpses have been recovered since the liberation. Much of the work has been done in response to pleas from family members. Because nobody asked for the bodies of the IS fighters, most of them remained under the rubble. They were only recovered after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told the Civil Defense to clean up the last remaining areas of Mosul, the neighborhoods that were IS' last strongholds in the city.
Some civilians have been found who were probably members of IS families, but most of the recently recovered bodies belong to IS fighters, said Rasem's boss and the head of the Ninevah Civil Defense force, Col. Husam Ghalil. He said Russia and Georgia are countries where a lot of the fighters originated. Ghalil said he is not aware of anyone from the Netherlands (Holland) being found and does not know why Rasem mentioned the find. "Every country is looking for its own people. But that's not our responsibility."
It is a phrase he repeats a couple more times when asked about the IS bodies. They are taken to the morgue and what happens there is not his business, nor where they are buried. Any identity papers found are delivered to military intelligence. But does he warn embassies? Is DNA taken and stored? "That is not our business," he said.
Ghalil refers to the military authorities in Mosul, but Col. Firas Bashar, a spokesman for the Ninevah operations, said he can neither confirm the nationalities of IS bodies found nor that anything is being done to identify them.
A well-informed policeman in Mosul, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, said that IS bodies are simply taken from the morgue to a special mass grave where they are buried. The morgue is overwhelmed with all of the bodies that are still being recovered. According to the policeman, the fighters' original passports have only come to light by chance, because IS exchanged them for caliphate identity cards. This makes it harder to know the nationality of those found.
As a result, Western family members of IS members who were in Iraq will probably never know if they are still alive, and neither will Western security services who are trying to prevent fighters from returning home. For most Iraqis, this is of no significance, as these foreigners came to fight in a country that was not theirs and destroyed it in the process. They are deeply hated because of this.
Yet international agreements stipulate that countries should work to make identification possible. Both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) have trained Iraqis to do just this. The ICMP even signed an agreement with four Iraqi ministries in 2012 that stated that the authorities acknowledge a family's right to know the fate and whereabouts of their missing relatives, that the government is directly responsible for efforts to locate and identify the missing persons and that an identification process based on DNA and complemented by other forensic methods is most appropriate.
Even though Hayman Awrahim, the ICMP's Iraq program's communications officer, confirmed to Al- Monitor that there have been meetings with the Medical Legal Directorate in Mosul and that the ICMP "has urged it to ensure the appropriate recovery, collection and documentation of the remains in order to enable scientific identifications in the future," he said nothing is happening. "It is not yet clear that the necessary political will exists that will make it possible to marshal administrative and other resources to undertake this task."
The ICMP cannot work by itself and "intends to undertake additional research to have a better understanding of the situation on the ground."
The frustration is evident in his diplomatic reply when Awrahim stressed that an effective strategy for identifying missing people requires much more than simply exhuming human remains. "The location of graves, exhumation and identification must be done using robust chain-of-custody procedures that are embedded in the domestic judicial system. Location, exhumation and identification must be documented to the highest possible standard, so that evidence gathered in the process can be used in court if perpetrators are brought to justice."
Like the ICMP, the ICRC is in contact with the Iraqi authorities about the missing people, but its privacy rules only allow it to share information about those known to have been found with their families.
States should be informed when their nationals are found. But even though Germans are known to have been fighting with IS, the German Foreign Office in Berlin told Al-Monitor, "We have not been contacted about any bodies of German nationals, but expect and believe the Iraqi authorities will do so if they are found."
Whether Rasem's mention of a Dutch body found in Mosul was a slip of the tongue or not, the Dutch Foreign Ministry said it has not been notified about the bodies of any Dutch IS members found in Iraq. "The Netherlands asked Iraq at an earlier stage to be kept in the loop about these cases," ministry spokeswoman Willemien Veldman said in The Hague. But she added, "In practice, it will not be simple to make a well- founded assumption of nationality in relation to the remains now being found in Mosul." Iraqi military foils attempt to blow mosque, kill Islamic State members, west of Anbar (Iraqi News) By Nehal Mostafa June 20, 2018
The Iraqi military intelligence announced killing two Islamic State members and foiling an attempt to blow a mosque, west of Anbar.
In a statement on Wednesday, the department said troops of the 29th brigade of the seventh division managed today to foil an attempt to plant bombs near al-Sedeeq mosque in Hit town, west of Anbar.
Moreover, the department added that troops "managed, after thwarting the attempt, to arrest two Islamic State members who were going to carry out a terrorist attack."
Last month, Eight Islamic State members were killed in airstrike launched by the Iraqi army in al-Ogeirsha region in the desert of Hit town, west of Ramadi. Earlier in May, the Iraqi military intelligence department announced foiling a terrorist scheme against troops in the desert of Anbar province. On the same day, a paramilitary leader was quoted saying that Iraqi army warplanes killed seven Islamic State militants after bombarding their locations in Wadi Jaal in Hit, west of Anbar.
Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled "caliphate" from Mosul in June 2014.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, in December, full liberation of Iraqi lands, declaring end of war against IS members.
Iraqi forces deny selling Islamic State leaders' corpses in return for money (Iraqi News) By Nehal Mostafa June 20, 2018
The Nineveh Operations Command has denied news on selling the dead bodies of Islamic State members in return for money.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. Najm al-Jabouri, the commander, said the news circulated by some media channels," which he described as 'yellow journalism' over selling corpses of Islamic State leaders in return for huge amounts of money are untrue.
Jabouri urged the 'yellow media' in Mosul to stop circulating the untrue news and stick to accuracy.
Last week, news reports quoted sources as saying that some teams and volunteers working on extracting dead bodies from the Old City in Mosul have been confirmed to have sold Islamic State militants' corpses to their relatives for between USD2000 and USD5000.
Cap. Amir Wathiq, of Nineveh police, told BasNews, on Wednesday, that 167 bodies of Islamic State members, including foreign and Arab leaders, who were killed by their leaders during the liberation battles of Mosul, were found in the city.
Thousands of Islamic State militants as well as Iraqi civilians were killed since the government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition was launched in October 2016 to fight the militant group, which declared a self-styled "caliphate" from Mosul in June 2014.
In December, the Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced gaining control on all the territories that were captured by Islamic State, since 2014. However, the group still has dormant cells, through which it carries out attacks, across Iraq like it used to do before 2014.
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Syria Germany seeks arrest of leading Syrian general on war crimes charges (Washington Post) By Louisa Loveluck June 8, 2018
Germany's chief prosecutor has issued an international arrest warrant for one of Syria's most senior military officials, lawyers said Friday, in a landmark step for legal efforts against members of President Bashar al-Assad's security apparatus.
The move against Jamil Hassan, head of Syria's powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate, marks an important milestone for prosecutors and other lawyers who are trying to bring senior members of Assad's security apparatus to trial in Europe on charges of war crimes.
The detention centers run by Air Force Intelligence, where thousands are believed to have died because of torture or neglect, are among the most notorious in Syria. The charges filed with Germany's Federal Court of Justice claim that Hassan had command responsibility over Air Force Intelligence facilities and that he must have known of the abuse.
With Syria's military on a path to victory in the country's long civil conflict and few indications that those responsible for alleged war crimes will be tried at an international tribunal, lawyers have turned to the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national courts to investigate certain international crimes. Most cases brought so far focus on a culture of torture and abuse inside government-run detention centers.
Although few suspects, if any, are likely to stand trial in European courts, those bringing the cases hope that they will cast a chill throughout the upper echelons of the Syrian government, making it increasingly tough to travel outside of friendly capitals and dogging suspects with a permanent threat of arrest.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office declined to comment publicly on the Hassan case but did not deny that an arrest warrant had been issued.
The German arrest warrant is likely to be extended as an Interpol red notice, lawyers said, which would require the organization's member states to arrest Hassan on arrival in their territories and extradite him to Germany.
"For us, this is huge. Historical," said Patrick Kroker, a lawyer with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a Berlin-based legal organization that brought the suit, along with several Syrian lawyers. "That this arrest warrant has been signed off by the highest criminal court in Germany shows that they deem the evidence presented to the prosecutor is strong enough to merit urgent suspicion of his involvement."
Often described as a member of Assad's inner circle, Hassan has led Syria's Air Force Intelligence since 2009. The U.S. Treasury has frozen the general's assets because of his role in the crackdown that followed Syria's 2011 uprising.
Recently released court documents from a parallel suit brought against the Syrian military for its alleged targeted assassination of the American journalist Marie Colvin shed light on the state's uncompromising effort to extinguish dissent from the start of the uprising, arresting and interrogating many who had joined the demonstrations or signaled support through their Facebook accounts.
In a 2016 interview, Hassan suggested that the state's tactics should have been tougher still, suggesting that the Syrian army should have used all-out force to crush the uprising from the beginning.
Former inmates from the largest Air Force Intelligence branch in Damascus have described interrogations replete with sadism. One man said that a cellmate's eye was almost gouged out. Another had scars along his abdomen and groin line from where he said interrogators had dripped molten plastic when he refused to give up the names of friends who had joined demonstrations.
Reacting to the news Friday, survivors of several Air Force Intelligence branches described cautious optimism, and relief. "This announcement hasn't changed the world, but it has given me something like hope," said one man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for the safety of relatives still in Syria.
He said the news had made him recall a night while in custody when the guards shouted at the inmates to look away and then placed a body among them.
"It was my friend. I sat with him until dawn, talking like he was still with me and telling him that they would not get away with this. Maybe today we are one step closer to that promise," the former detainee recalled.
The Syrian government did not respond to a request for comment on the German lawsuit or historical allegations of torture. Assad has previously described photographs of bodies in government-run prisons as "fake news."
"You can forge anything these days," he told Yahoo News in an interview last year.
Kroker said the suit included evidence of the organization's command structure, as well as high-resolution images showing the bodies of men and women who had been tortured to death inside the detention centers.
Scott Gilmore, a Washington-based attorney with the Center for Justice and Accountability, which has also brought cases against Syrian military officials on behalf of torture survivors, described Friday's news as a "decisive moment in the push for Syrian accountability."
"Even if Hassan is not extradited and tried, a cloud will hang over him and restrict his international movements," he said. "The arrest sends a powerful signal that Germany, which is now the seat of the Syrian diaspora, will pursue the regime leadership for mass atrocity crimes regardless of Assad's clinging to power."
West's weak response to war crimes in Syria 'encouraged Russia's aggression' (Kyiv Post) By Illia Ponomarenko June 18, 2018
The West's weak response to war crimes in Syria encouraged the Kremlin to launch military interventions beyond Russia's borders, first in Ukraine, and then in Syria to save the regime of its president, Bashar al-Assad.
And the perception that Russia has succeeded in its military adventures will tempt other actors to launch their own interventions, warned panelists at the Kyiv Post's Bringing Peace to Ukraine & Syria conference, held in Kyiv on June 18.
A crucial turning point came in August 2013, when the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama failed to take firm action after Assad's forces used chemical weapons against civilians. The use of such weapons was supposed to have been a "red line," which, if crossed, would lead to direct U.S.-led military intervention in Syria.
But when the line was crossed, Obama failed to act, and this brought far-reaching dire consequences, conference speakers agreed.
"There was no appetite for intervention in Syria (within the U.S. administration), that was pretty clear," Anna Borshchevskaya, a Middle East studies fellow at the Washington Institute, said during the "Russian Intervention" panel discussion, the first of three held during the one-day conference.
"Frankly, Obama… knew he would not get the authorization to use force (against the Syrian regime). And it is highly unfortunate, because (Russian President Vladimir Putin) perceived weakness, he read all these moves as weakness, and it was easy for him to step in and take advantage."
Moreover, this impunity for committing war crimes and waging undeclared wars also prompted other actors, such as Iran and the numerous Shia militias it backs to expand their activities, thus breeding more violence and destruction in global hotspots, primarily Syria.
"All (of these actors) look at the example of Russia in Ukraine and Syria, and say – if Russia can do that, why can't we?" said Kristina Dobrovolska, a representative of a open-source investigating community Inform Napalm.
Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, the ongoing multi-sided war in Syria has claimed at least 500,000 lives and uprooted over 11 million people. Russia, which intervened the conflict in late September 2015 to back the Assad regime, still continues delivering destructive air strikes on the last remaining Syrian resistance forces, as well as on civilian targets. Due to the Kremlin's military and financial support for the Damascus regime, the devastating war in Syria continues, with few hopes that it might end in the near future.
Tobias Schneider, a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute, a think tank, said he was pessimistic that a peace settlement would be found soon to the Syrian war. The best thing the global community can do try to save as many lives of Syrian civilians as possible, he said.
"(Russian intervention) has transformed the nature of the conflict in Syria," he said.
With the West unable to bring about an end to the war, it should concentrate on making the lives of those worst affected by the fighting more bearable, Schneider said.
"Peace in Syria might not come in our generation, but the lives of refugees can be made better. Bringing peace to Syria is unrealistic — both in terms of political will and actual capacity."
Both sides committed war crimes during siege of Syria's Ghouta (Reuters) By Stephanie Nebehay June 20, 2018
Syrian government troops and affiliated forces committed war crimes and a crime against humanity in their long siege of eastern Ghouta through heavy bombardment and "deliberately starving" 265,000 people, U.N. investigators said on Wednesday.p>
About 20,000 rebel fighters entrenched in the besieged area, some belonging to "terrorist groups", shelled the nearby capital of Damascus in attacks that killed and maimed, amounting to war crimes, they said.
The latest report by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria, led by Paulo Pinheiro, is based on 140 interviews as well as photographs, videos, satellite imagery, and medical records.
"Even if pro-Government forces are bombing and starving the civilian population of eastern Ghouta into submission, there can be no justification for the indiscriminate shelling of civilian inhabited areas in Damascus," panel member Hanny Megally said in a statement.
Pro-government forces encircled Ghouta in April 2013 and "laid the longest running siege in modern history, steadily wearing down both fighters and civilians alike through a prolonged war of attrition", the report said, denouncing a "medieval form of warfare".
From February to April 2018, their tactics to recapture the enclave were "largely unlawful in nature, aimed at punishing the inhabitants of eastern Ghouta and forcing the population, collectively, to surrender or starve".
"Through the widespread and systematic bombardments of civilian inhabited areas and objects, and the continued denial of food and medicine to besieged civilians during the period under review, pro- Government forces perpetrated the crime against humanity of inhumane acts causing serious mental and physical suffering," the report said.
Syrian and Russian air forces controlled the skies over Ghouta and carried out heavy air strikes on residential areas where families huddled in dark, overcrowded basements lacking toilets, it said.
Warplanes hit hospitals, depriving wounded of health care, it said, adding: "This pattern of attack strongly suggests that pro-Government forces systematically targeted medical facilities, repeatedly committing the war crime of deliberately attacking protected objects, and intentionally attacking medical personnel."
The U.N. experts cited evidence that chlorine had been used in Ghouta at least four times this year but said their investigations continued.
Armed groups including Jaish al-Islam, the region's largest, Faylaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham exercised control over Ghouta.
They operated tunnels and deep trenches, and regularly arrested and tortured members of religious minority groups, the report said.
Government attacks were "regularly met with brutal acts of reprisal", it said, saying the rebels' use of improvised rockets that could reach parts of Damascus aimed to "spread terror".
By mid-March, pro-government forces implemented negotiated local truces and "evacuation agreements", the report said. Tens of thousands left via humanitarian corridors amid chaos and many civilians remain "interned".
Syria war: War crimes committed in Eastern Ghouta battle (BBC) June 20, 2018
Syrian pro-government forces committed a crime against humanity and war crimes during their siege of the Eastern Ghouta region, UN investigators say.
A new report says troops caused serious mental and physical suffering to the rebel enclave's residents by bombarding their homes and denying them food.
They also allegedly attacked protected objects like hospitals deliberately.
Rebel forces are accused of committing a war crime by indiscriminately shelling civilians in nearby Damascus.
But the investigators are still looking into whether chemical weapons were used in an attack in April on what was then the last rebel town in the Eastern Ghouta.
They said the evidence pointed to the use of chlorine in Douma, but that some people had exhibited symptoms more consistent with exposure to a nerve agent.
The US, UK and France have said they are confident the government used chemical weapons but it has accused them of "staging" the incident.
The five-year siege of the Eastern Ghouta, an agricultural region outside the capital where at least 265,000 civilians lived, was the longest in modern history.
It came to an end in April, after a two-month offensive by pro-government forces, backed by Russian air strikes, that decimated homes, markets, and hospitals and reportedly left more than 1,700 men, women and children dead.
The report published by the UN's Commission of Inquiry on Syria on Wednesday condemned the government's method of warfare as "barbaric and medieval" and painted a graphic picture of the misery of civilians who lived there.
With power and water cut off, they resorted to burning plastic to generate electricity and dug hundreds of wells in the hope of finding clean water. As the bombardment intensified, they retreated to overcrowded basement shelters lacking toilets.
"It is completely abhorrent that besieged civilians were indiscriminately attacked, and systematically denied food and medicine," said the chairman of the commission, Paulo Pinheiro.
The report finds that through the widespread and systematic bombardment of civilian areas and objects, and the continued denial of food and medicine to besieged civilians, pro-government forces "perpetrated the crime against humanity of inhumane acts causing serious mental and physical suffering".
The report also concludes that the frequency of attacks on official and makeshift hospitals "strongly suggests that pro-government forces systematically targeted medical facilities, repeatedly committing the war crime of deliberately attacking protected objects, and intentionally attacking medical personnel".
There was no immediate response to the report from the Syrian government or its allies but at the time of the offensive they denied targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure, and blamed rebel fighters for operating in residential areas.
Rebel groups, including Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, along with the al-Qaeda-linked jihadist alliance Hayat Tahrir al-Sham relentlessly fired unguided mortars into neighbouring Damascus and other nearby areas, killing and maiming hundreds of civilians, according to the report.
"Even if pro-government forces are bombing and starving the civilian population of Eastern Ghouta into submission, there can be no justification for the indiscriminate shelling of civilian inhabited areas in Damascus," said commission member Hanny Megally.
The report says rebels also regularly arbitrarily arrested and tortured civilians, including members of religious minority groups, which constituted the war crimes of cruel treatment and torture, and outrages upon personal dignity.
The report notes that by the time the government declared the Eastern Ghouta successfully recaptured, some 140,000 people had been displaced from their homes, tens of thousands of whom are still being unlawfully interned by government forces in managed sites.
Another 50,000 civilians were bussed to rebel-held areas in Idlib and Aleppo provinces under "evacuation agreements" that the commission has in the past warned could constitute forced displacement.
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EUROPE
The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Chamber
Official Court Website [English translation]
Acquitted Bosnian Serb Soldier Sues for Compensation (Balkan Insight) By Emina Dizdarevic June 11, 2018
Ilija Vukasinovic, who was cleared of expulsions, looting and killings in the Rogatica area in 1992, launched his case for compensation from the state at a preliminary hearing on Monday.
Vukasinovic’s lawyer said he wants to call a neuro-psychiatrist to offer an opinion about the mental distress caused to his client by the 199 days he spent under house arrest, when he was visited and checked up on by police officers twice a day without prior notice.
The amount of compensation that the ex-solder is claiming has not been specified.
Assistant state attorney Jelisaveta Plasto said she objected to the defence proposal to examine the expert witness and Vukasinovic himself.
In May 2017, the Bosnian state court’s appeals chamber Vukasinovic of crimes against humanity, along with ex-soldiers Radomir Markovic, Mile Kusic, Dragan Bozovic, Sasa Perkovic, Radomir Gluhovic, Pero Radovic and Milos Vukasinovic.
The court found the eight ex-servicemen not guilty of taking part in expulsions and looting, as well as killing around 20 civilians including women and children in a barn in the village of Karacici in the Rogatica area in September 1992.
Markovic was the commander of the Socici unit of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Rogatica brigade, while the other defendants were members of the unit.
The verdict said that the prosecution only proved during the trial that the defendants were members of Bosnian Serb forces in Rogatica, while the other allegations in the indictment “remained in the domain of assumption”.
The main hearing in the case has been scheduled for October 3. Bosnian Serb Soldiers’ Srebrenica Genocide Trial Opens (Balkan Insight) By Emina Dizdarevic June 12, 2018
Mile Kosoric, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Vlasenica Brigade, and Momcilo Tesic, a member of the brigade’s Military Police Squad went on trial at the Bosnian state court on Tuesday on charges of committing genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.
According to the charges, on the morning of July 12, 1995, members of the Vlasenica Brigade demined a road in the village of Luke, near Vlasenica, so that buses and trucks transporting Bosniak prisoners from Srebrenica could pass, and set up a checkpoint.
The indictment alleges that the defendants and other Vlasenica Brigade troops stopped vehicles at the checkpoint from July 12 to 17, 1995 and seized money and golden jewellery from Bosniaks.
Vlasenica Brigade soldiers separated the women from the Bosniak men, took the women away and raped them, and tied up the men and detained them in a school building where they were abused, the charges claim.
“On the night of July 13 to 14, they took out 22 male detainees and took them to Mrsici, where they shot 21 of them. Only one detainee survived,” prosecutor Predrag Tomic told the court.
The first prosecution witness in the trial testified on Tuesday that she was transported from Potocari near Srebrenica to the village of Luke, where she men being taken away towards a “big house”.
Witness Sehida Abdulrahmanovic said she was taken by truck from a former battery factory in Potocari to an unknown destination on July 13, 1995, together with her daughter and other civilians.
“Buses and trucks were parked on the road. Everything was ready for us. We were not told where they were taking us,” she said.
While getting off the truck, Abdulrahmanovic said she saw a friend of hers, Rizo Mustafic, as well as the son of another acquaintance whose surname was Ahmic.
“A soldier was pushing them with a rifle, directing them towards the big house. I did not recognise the other men who they were escorting, because they were facing away from me… Those who were taken away never came back,” Abdulrahmanovic said.
Two other former Bosnian Serb soldiers, Borislav Stojisic and Rajko Drakulic, were originally indicted in the same case, but the proceedings against them were separated from the others because they were on the run in Serbia.
The trial is due to continue on July 10.
Bosnian Serb Ex-Minister Misses Srebrenica Trial Opening (Balkan Insight) By Albina Sorguc June 13, 2018
Judge Halil Lagumdzija said on Wednesday that Kovac does not live in Bosnia and Herzegovina and he had been informed about the plea hearing via international legal assistance, but still did not appear in court.
Kovac’s lawyer Nina Kisic said that she was told that her client - who lives in Serbia - has health problems.
“I was informed he had medical issues and we will send the court the medical evidence,” Kisic said.
The Bosnian prosecution charged Kovac with genocide, alleging that as interior minister of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Republika Srpska and commander of its police force, he controlled all the police forces involved in war crimes against Bosniaks from Srebrenica.
The indictment alleges that police units under his control participated in the capture of Bosniak men and boys, their forcible imprisonment, transportation to and mass executions in several locations. The execution sites included Kravica, Cerska, the House of Culture in Pilica, Branjevo farm, Sandic, Konjevic Field, and other locations where mass and individual shootings of captured Bosniak civilians were carried out.
Kovac currently lives in the Serbian capital Belgrade and has citizenship of both Serbia and Bosnia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
More than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in July 1995 after Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-protected ‘safe zone’ of Srebrenica - a crime which has been classified by international court verdicts as genocide.
Judge Lagumdzija said the court will wait for Kovac’s medical documents and then ask for the prosecution’s opinion on them.
Germany Extradites Serb War Crimes Suspect to Bosnia (Balkan Insight) By Albina Sorguc June 14, 2018
The Bosnian prosecution said on Wednesday that the German authorities have extradited Bosnian Serb ex-fighter Milorad Obradovic, alias Stiven, who is suspected of committing war crimes in Miska Glava in the Prijedor municipality in July 1992.
Obradovic was flown to Bosnia and Herzegovina after he was located, identified and arrested in Munich.
He is suspected of taking part in the illegal arrests and torture of 120 Bosniaks in Miska Glava near Prijedor, who were later killed in the nearby town of Ljubija.
“He is personally suspected of killing three Bosniaks,” said the Bosnian prosecution.
The Bosnian state court is currently trying ten people for war crimes in Miska Glava.
Slobodan Taranjac, Slobodan Knezevic, Milodrag Glusac, Ranko Babic, Ranko Dosenovic and Rade Zekanovic are charged with with ordering or failing to stop or punish the detention of civilians who were held in inhumane conditions in the culture house in Miska Glava and tortured.
Zdravko Panic, Trivo Vukic, Milan Vukic and Marinko Prastalo are also charged with killing 11 men. Taranjac, Glusac, Babic and Dosenovic are accused of concealing the crime.
Taranjac was charged as president of the Crisis Committee in Ljubija and head of the local civil authorities, Glusac as deputy commander of the Sixth Ljubija Battalion of the Bosnian Serb Army’s 43rd Brigade, Babic as first operative officer of the Sixth Ljubija Battalion, and Dosenovic as the battalion’s assistant commander for security.
The others were charged as members of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Miskoglavska Company and the military and civil police.
Bosnian Wartime Detention Camp Guard’s Sentence Reduced (Balkan Insight) By Admir Muslimovic June 14, 2018
The state court’s appeals chamber on Thursday cut Ivan Medic’s prison sentence from 14 to 12 years and overturned part of an acquittal verdict that had initially freed another guard at the wartime Dretelj camp in Capljina, Tonco Rajic.
Rajic will now face a new trial.
In November 2017, the state court convicted Medic of participating in the inhumane treatment of Serb civilian prisoners and of forcing them to have sexual intercourse with each other.
He was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for these offences, but because he had been sentenced to seven years for war crimes in another case, a cumulative sentence of 14 years was pronounced. Rajic meanwhile was initially acquitted in November 2017 of war crimes against civilians held at the Dretelj camp.
Bosnian Constitutional Court ‘Under Pressure’, New Chief Says (Balkan Insight) By Haris Rovcanin June 20, 2018
In his first interview since his appointment as president of the state-level Constitutional Court, Zlatko Knezevic told BIRN that its judges are exposed to some form of pressure on an everyday basis.
He cited media reports of politicians’ criticism of various decisions made by the Constitutional Court, such as the rulings against the Bosnian Serbs annual Day of Republika Srpska and the country’s Electoral Law, both of which it deemed unconstitutional and discriminatory.
“If you think justice has triumphed, ask the losing party,” Knezevic said, quoting a Latin proverb to highlight how in ethnically- and politically-divided Bosnia and Herzegovina, one side always applauds the court’s decisions while the other side cries foul.
He said that there have even been attempts to “undermine the integrity of individual judges in an ugly manner and at a personal level”.
“It is not classic political pressure when ‘a certain politician calls one of the judges’, but it is rather the pressure of the [general level of] politicisation in a country in which elections are due to be held in four months,” he explained.
The Constitutional Court has come under fire after politicians failed to come up with a solution to address its ruling on elections to the Federation entity’s upper chamber, the House of Peoples. If the country’s squabbling political parties fail to agree on new electoral legislation, it could mean that October’s polls will be partly invalid, sparking an institutional crisis in the country.
Knezevic, a Serb born in Bosanski Novi, rejected the allegation that Constitutional Court judges sometimes act politically because the court’s six Bosnian members have voted differently on cases according to ther ethnic backgrounds.
He argued that the discrepancy could be explained by the fact that “some of them have a milder interpretation of the existing construction of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the others have a stronger one”.
Bosnia’s Serbs favour a weaker central state and more power for the country’s Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska - or even outright secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina - while Bosniaks generally want stronger central institutions.
But Knezevic insisted that the differences between the judges’ stances led to higher-quality rulings.
“Some are inclined towards a more functional or stronger role for the state, while others prefer a more functional role for the entities [Republika Srpska and the Bosniak- and Croat-dominated Federation entity] and the Brcko District,” he explained.
“Therefore it is not about ethnic division. It is a slight difference between various perceptions of the constitutional structure. And that is a positive thing. My predecessor, judge Mirsad Ceman, used to say: ‘Where everyone thinks alike, no one thinks.’”
Bosnian Serbs celebrate the Day of Republika Srpska despite a ruling that the holiday is discriminatory against other ethnic groups. Photo: Anadolu. Knezevic said that more than 99 per cent of cases at the Constitutional Court are handled by the six domestic judges, while the two foreign judges at the court are only involved in a very small number of cases.
Officials from Republika Srpska have often called for the foreign judges to be removed from the Constitutional Court, alleging that they work in Bosniaks’ interests and against those of the country’s Serbs.
However, Knezevic did not want to comment on whether it is time for the foreign judges to leave the Constitutional Court.
“It is simply not for us to decide,” he said.
Before being appointed to the Constitutional Court, Knezevic was a member of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, the country’s judicial overseer, and of the Republika Srpska Bar Association.
He argued that failures to execute the Constitutional Court’s decisions represent “a direct attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as on its entities [Republika Srpska and the Federation”.
For instance, a court ruling that Mostar’s electoral statute was unconstitutional has led to the town repeatedly failing to hold municipal elections.
“I would rather be attacked due to Constitutional Court’s decisions every day if those decisions are being executed than be praised for non-executed ones,” Knezevic said.
He explained that the court faces problems with resources and manpower because it receives between 620 and 660 appeals a month and has to solve them within specific deadlines, but its budget has remained the same for years.
“If we continue at the same pace, the Constitutional Court will be put under far greater pressure to complete cases, not to have a lot of unsolved cases, and to do all that within the set deadlines,” he warned.
He argued that more resources are necessary because Bosnians have “huge confidence” in the Constitutional Court to do its job properly and deal with their cases efficiently.
“Whether they are right or wrong, they expect a lot from us,” he said.
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Afghanistan
Australia's elite special forces face war crimes probe (The Straits Times) By Jonathan Pearlman June 14, 2018
Australia's elite special forces have long been the pride of the military, but the reputation of the secretive units is under question over claims that they engaged in widespread misconduct, including unlawful killings.
The Defence Department has confirmed that the special forces are facing two inquiries after numerous allegations emerged of serious misconduct and potential war crimes in Afghanistan.
An investigation by Fairfax Media uncovered multiple claims of unsanctioned conduct involving the special forces, which is principally made up of two elite units - the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) and the Commandos.
In one case, a trooper was reportedly pressured to kill an elderly unarmed detainee in Afghanistan as part of an initiation ritual. In another, a soldier allegedly kicked a handcuffed Afghan detainee off a cliff and then executed him. The soldiers also allegedly removed the prosthetic leg from a man killed in battle and took it back to Perth to use as a souvenir drinking vessel.
Defence Minister Marise Payne said the allegations were being investigated by an inquiry started in May 2016 after a request by the former chief of the army.
Special forces troops in Afghanistan often worked undercover, performing dangerous raids and reconnaissance in enemy territory. The brewing concerns over their conduct prompted the commander of the special forces to order a review of the SAS by a consultant. The review found there had been "unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations" and a "complete lack of accountability".
The government has launched a second inquiry by former spy chief David Irvine. He is reportedly investigating efforts by the special forces units to improve their culture and practices following the concerns about misconduct.
The revelations have cast a cloud over some of Australia's most prestigious and best-trained units.
In 2016, former commando Kevin Frost broke his cover and spoke out publicly about his activities in Afghanistan, saying he was involved in the shooting of a captured prisoner of war in the head and was ready to go to jail for his crime. Mr Frost said he believed this was not an isolated case, though his credibility was questioned because of his problems with drugs and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Some analysts believe Australia has relied too heavily on the special forces, which have undergone repeated deployments around the world, especially in Afghanistan. This has required the units, which are relatively small, to engage in intensive action with insufficient respite.
Head of the Australia Defence Association Neil James said the special forces have a cultural problem but it is "not as bad as it has often been painted".
"The deeper problem is governments have an aversion to casualties," he told ABC News.
"Therefore they use the special forces when they could have used other parts of the (Australian Defence Force) and given the special forces more respite between rotations."
Others suggested the alleged crimes involved only a small number of troops and praised the other soldiers for helping to expose the misconduct.
Mr Brendan Nicholson, an editor for The Australian Strategic Policy Institute's blog The Strategist, noted that Australia is not the only nation to be examining the conduct of its special forces. He said investigations are being conducted or planned in Britain, the United States, New Zealand and the Netherlands.
"As wars have become more complex, special forces from many nations have increasingly been called on to fight in the shadows, with no front lines and amid civilian populations," he wrote yesterday.
"With soldiers sent repeatedly to fight in wars far from scrutiny and rewarded for acting on their own initiative, that sort of responsibility and stress was bound to take its toll."
Will Australia Provide Justice for Afghanistan War Crimes? (Human Rights Watch) By Patricia Gossman June 20, 2018
The accounts are both shocking and horribly familiar.
Soldiers acting as if they were above the law assault and murder civilians in a barbaric competition to outdo each other. New recruits compelled to prove themselves by killing. The victims are not enemies in battle but the elderly, men with disabilities, a farmer on his way to buy flour – essentially anyone who can't fight back.
The accused? Members of Australia's elite special forces, the Special Air Services (SAS).
The SAS are under investigation in Australia in a case that may be involve the "most serious and high- profile allegations" the force has faced. According to a Fairfax Media report, such crimes became a routine part of SAS operations in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province between 2006 and 2013. One soldier shot dead an elderly unarmed man in an initiation ritual. Another kicked a handcuffed Afghan civilian off a cliff and then executed him. Other soldiers removed a man's prosthetic leg and took it back to Perth to use as a souvenir drinking vessel.
These and other alleged SAS crimes committed in Afghanistan are under investigation by New South Wales Judge Paul Brereton. Those familiar with the charges describe a culture of competitive violence and a "complete lack of accountability" within the elite force. Witnesses in the investigation, including SAS soldiers who have agreed to testify, have received threats warning them of retaliation if they do. Australia's SAS join the ranks of other ostensibly elite forces whose crimes are emblematic of the worst aspects of the international coalition's involvement in Afghanistan. In 2015 the US reopened a criminal inquiry into the alleged torture and murder of 17 civilians by an army Special Forces unit between 2012 and 2013 – no information has been released since the inquiry began. Since early 2016, the UK authorities investigated allegations that British Air Services troops murdered at least 53 civilians between 2009 and 2011, snatching some from their beds, handcuffing and hooding them before shooting them dead. The inquiry into these allegations was shut down.
Australia needs to do better, most importantly by ensuring the protection of witnesses who come forward and by prosecuting those threatening retaliation against them. Only by transparently investigating the alleged war crimes and prosecuting those responsible can Australia bring some measure of justice to the victims and end impunity in the SAS.
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Yemen
Army: 20 Houthis killed in eastern Yemen (Middle East Monitor) June 8, 2018
At least 20 Houthi fighters have been killed fighting the Yemeni army in the Serwah Directorate in the eastern Marib province, the army said in a statement today.
"Fierce fighting erupted Thursday after a group of rebels attempted to infiltrate army positions in southern Serwah," the statement quoted an unnamed military source as saying.
"The fighting left at least 20 Houthis dead and a number of others injured," the source added.
Army artillery, the source said, had targeted Houthi sites and concentrations throughout southern Serwah, leading to heavy casualties and material losses among the ranks of the rebel group.
The Anadolu Agency was unable to obtain comment from a Houthi spokesmen regarding the army's claims.
The Houthis have controlled the centre of the Serwah Directorate since April 2015 and the area remains the scene of frequent clashes between the two sides.
Impoverished Yemen has witnessed violence since 2014, when the Shia Houthis overran much of the country, including capital Sana'a.
The conflict escalated in 2015 when Saudi Arabia and its Sunni-Arab allies – who accuse the Houthis of serving as Iranian proxies – launched a massive air campaign in Yemen aimed at rolling back Houthi gains.
The following year, UN-sponsored peace talks held in Kuwait failed to produce any tangible breakthroughs.
The ongoing violence has devastated Yemen's infrastructure, including water and sanitation systems, prompting the UN to describe the situation as one of "the worst humanitarian disasters in modern times".
Heavy clashes near Yemen's Hodeidah as U.N. seeks ceasefire (Reuters) June 10, 2018
Clashes between troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition and the Iran-aligned Houthis intensified near Yemen's Hodeidah over the weekend as the United Nations tries to negotiate a ceasefire to avert a possible assault on the main port city, military sources said.
A military attack or siege on the Houthi-held western city, long a target in the war, could cost up to 250,000 lives, a senior U.N. humanitarian official has warned. The Red Sea port is a lifeline for eight million Yemenis, handling most of the country's commercial imports and aid supplies.
Heavy fighting erupted on Friday and Saturday in al-Durayhmi, a rural area where Emirati-led troops are now 10 km (6 miles) south of Hodeidah, and in Bayt al-Faqih, 35 km from the city, local military sources said. Coalition warplanes and warships launched strikes targeting the Houthis, they added.
A spokesman for the Western-backed alliance of mostly Gulf states did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
U.N. Yemen mediator Martin Griffiths has been holding talks with the Houthis to hand over control of the port to the United Nations, Yemeni political sources have said.
A broader U.N. peace plan calls on the Houthis to give up their missiles in return for an end to a coalition bombing campaign and a transitional governance deal, according to a draft document and sources.
Previous U.N. efforts have failed to end the more than three-year-old conflict which pits the Houthis, who seized the capital Sanaa in 2014, against other Yemeni forces backed by the alliance loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and led by U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Three civilians were killed in the south of Saudi Arabia from a missile launched from Yemen, state media reported on Saturday night, the latest in a series of ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis into the kingdom.
Riyadh says the Houthis use Hodeidah to smuggle Iranian-made arms into Yemen, accusations denied by the group and Tehran.
The alliance has conducted thousands of air strikes since it intervened in the war in 2015 and has often hit civilian areas, although it denies ever doing so intentionally.
The war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced three million and unleashed the world's most urgent humanitarian crisis in the impoverished Arab state which is struggling with a famine and cholera epidemic, according to the United Nations.
Heavy fighting on Yemen's west coast kills hundreds (The Washington Post) By Ahmed al-Haj June 11, 2018
Heavy fighting in Yemen between pro-government forces and Shiite rebels has killed more than 600 people on both sides in recent days, security officials said Monday.
Government forces, backed by a Saudi-led coalition, have been advancing along the western coast in recent weeks as they battle the Iran-allied rebels known as Houthis. The fighting has escalated as government forces close in on the Red Sea port of Hodeida, a vital lifeline through which most of Yemen's food and medicine enters.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media. Witnesses, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the fighting has forced dozens of families to leave their homes.
Mark Lowcock, the top United Nations official for humanitarian affairs and relief coordination, said Monday that it is critical to prevent "a battle" for Hodeida. He said that "90 percent of food, fuel and medicines in Yemen are imported" — and 70 percent come through the port, including desperately needed aid for more than 7 million people.
The aid group Oxfam said humanitarian organizations received warnings over the weekend for staff to evacuate Hodeida by Tuesday ahead of an offensive.
The United Nations warned Friday that an attack on or siege of Hodeida would affect hundreds of thousands of civilians. Some 600,000 people live in and around the city.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday that there has been a recent lull in the fighting and that Martin Griffiths, the U.N. envoy for Yemen, "is shuttling between Sanaa and also the UAE and Saudi Arabia to hope that there will be a way to avoid the military confrontation in Hodeida."
The international aid group Doctors Without Borders said Monday that the Saudi-led coalition attacked a cholera treatment center in the northern province of Hajja. The group has temporarily frozen its activities in the area, "until we guarantee the safety of our staff and patients," João Martins, its head of mission in Yemen, tweeted.
Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war pitting the coalition against the Iran-backed Houthis since March 2015. The coalition aims to restore the government of self-exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
The stalemated war has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 3 million. It has damaged Yemen's infrastructure, crippled its health system and pushed the Arab world's poorest country to the brink of famine.
Saudi Arabia-led military coalition launches offensive on Yemeni port city of Hodeida (The Washington Post) By Kareem Fahim and Missy Ryan June 13, 2018
A Saudi Arabia-led military coalition and its local allies launched a long- anticipated offensive on the Yemeni port city of Hodeida early Wednesday, opening a new front in the country's intractable civil conflict and raising fears for millions of civilians.
The offensive, which was announced by Yemen's government, is aimed at dislodging an Iranian-allied rebel group known as the Houthis that controls Hodeida on Yemen's Red Sea coast. The port is the main entry point for food and humanitarian aid supplies that millions rely on in Houthi- controlled areas.
The government and its Persian Gulf allies argue that defeating the Houthis in the city would force them to the negotiating table more than three years after they took over much of Yemen's north, setting off a civil war and a devastating humanitarian crisis in the Arab world's poorest country.
"The liberation of the port of Hodeida is a turning point in our struggle to take back Yemen from the militias that hijacked it," a Yemeni government statement said, adding that the offensive "represents the beginning of the fall of the Houthis."
Aid agencies have warned that the Hodeida offensive would almost certainly deepen civilian suffering, threatening nearly half a million people who live in the city while cutting off critical aid at a time when a third of Yemen's citizens are on the brink of famine.
The United Nations had led an intensive diplomatic push to avert the offensive, which the Saudi-led coalition, and especially the United Arab Emirates, had long been determined to pursue.
Yemeni security officials quoted by the Associated Press said that 2,000 troops had crossed the Red Sea from a UAE naval base in Eritrea, with plans to seize the port at Hodeida. A separate Yemeni-UAE force was advancing from the south, near the city's airport, the officials said.
There were signs the rebels were intending to defend the city. Hazaa Alsilwi, a 25-year-old resident, said Houthis were mobilizing tanks and armored vehicles about 6 miles from the airport, which sits on the city's southern edge.
The Trump administration, which provides military support to the coalition, had asked the Emirates to hold off on an operation until after U.N. envoy Martin Griffiths presented a new plan for jump-starting peace talks.
But once it became clear the Emirates would not hold back its allied Yemeni forces, U.S. officials said they were focused instead on trying to ensure that the operation did not damage key infrastructure, such as the port, and that civilian sites did not become targets. Officials also want to make sure aid is provided immediately.
"Further military escalation will have serious consequences on the dire humanitarian situation in the country and will have an impact on my efforts to resume political negotiations to reach an inclusive political settlement to the conflict in Yemen," Griffiths said in a statement. "I cannot overemphasize that there is no military solution to the conflict," he said.
Amanda Catanzano, the director for policy and advocacy at the International Rescue Committee, which operates in Yemen, said the fighting did not appear to have reached the city center on Wednesday. The port remained open, and a World Food Program ship had been able to offload supplies of grain, she said.
But any interruptions to the port's operation, "even short ones, are catastrophic," she said. "There is no give in this system."
On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of senators, including Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Robert Menendez (D- N.J.), the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to express their "grave alarm" about circumstances in Hodeida.
They said civilian harm and damage to the port were "unacceptable consequences for any responsible member of the community of nations."
The United States has provided military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition since it first intervened in Yemen's civil conflict in March 2015. The support has continued despite international alarm over the coalition's air campaign against the Houthis, which has killed thousands of civilians in airstrikes that human rights groups have alleged are frequently indiscriminate.
The Trump administration has become an increasingly vocal backer of the coalition, sharing its concerns about Iranian support for the Houthis and showing deference to close military partners such as the United Arab Emirates. UAE forces fight alongside U.S. Special Operations forces in a separate counterterrorism mission in Yemen focused on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
U.S. officials, however, have been skeptical of coalition assertions that Iranian missiles are being smuggled to the Houthis through Hodeida's port, which is subject to a U.N. inspections program.
At the same time, the Trump administration has been seeking ways to demonstrate a tough stance toward Tehran's support of armed groups across the Middle East. Yemen, where Iran has provided only limited support for the Houthi movement, is seen as an easier starting point for that campaign than countries where Iran's proxy support is more established.
A statement by Pompeo on Monday about Hodeida appeared to signal that the United States was content to allow the Emirati-led offensive to proceed. "I have spoken with Emirati leaders and made clear our desire to address their security concerns while preserving the free flow of humanitarian aid and life- saving commercial imports," it read.
Speaking to reporters this week, Mattis said that U.S. support would continue at its current levels and suggested that U.S. aerial refueling, which lengthens flight times, increased the accuracy of Saudi and UAE bombing raids and so cut down on civilian casualties.
Yemen war: Battle rages over Hudaydah airport (BBC) June 17, 2018
Pro-government forces in Yemen, backed by a Saudi-led coalition, have launched air strikes on the airport that serves the key port city of Hudaydah.
They have also been fighting Houthi rebels on the ground with mortar fire.
The pro-government forces said they had taken control of the airport on Saturday, but the rebels denied this.
Meanwhile the UN envoy to Yemen is holding a second day of talks in the capital Sanaa, aimed at securing a rebel withdrawal from Hudaydah.
Martin Griffiths is believed to have put forward a plan guaranteeing the safety of Houthi fighters if they pull out, leaving the harbour to be operated by the UN. The only major port controlled by the Houthis, Hudaydah is seen as a lifeline for millions of Yemenis at risk of famine.
The Houthis' Saba news agency said the coalition had carried out five air strikes on the city. Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV also said the airport had been hit.
The Houthis are demanding an end to the air strikes.
The Hudaydah offensive, which is being directed by the United Arab Emirates, began on Wednesday.
AFP news agency quotes medical and military sources as saying at least 139 fighters - most of them rebels - have been killed. Houthi news sources say more than 50 pro-government forces have been killed.
The government has said it will not attack the port and will seek to preserve key infrastructure.
Meanwhile UAE military sources say a major force made up of Yemeni, UAE and Sudanese troops is on standby in Eritrea to take part in a final effort to capture Hudaydah.
Yemen has been devastated by a conflict that escalated in early 2015, when the Houthis seized control of much of the west of the country, including the capital Sanaa, and forced President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to flee abroad.
Alarmed by the rise of a group they saw as an Iranian proxy, Saudi Arabia and eight other Arab states intervened in an attempt to restore Mr Hadi's government.
Almost 10,000 people - two-thirds of them civilians - have been killed and 55,000 others injured in the fighting, according to the United Nations.
The conflict and a partial blockade by the coalition have also left 22 million people in need of humanitarian aid, created the world's largest food emergency, and led to a cholera outbreak that is thought to have killed 2,290 people.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said it expects tens of thousands of people to flee Hudaydah in the coming days. Those who plan to stay have been stocking up on food and fuel in anticipation of a siege, it says.
In addition to being one of Yemen's most densely populated areas, with an estimated population of 600,000, Hudaydah is the single most important point of entry in Yemen for the food and basic supplies needed to prevent a famine.
The UN has warned that in a worst-case scenario, the battle for the city could cost up to 250,000 lives, as well as cut off aid supplies to millions of people elsewhere.
Yemeni prisoners say UAE officers sexually torture them (Aljazeera) June 20, 2018
The 15 officers who arrived at the prison in southern Yemen hid their faces behind head dresses, but their accents were clearly foreign - from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
They lined up the detainees and ordered them to undress and lie down. The officers then searched the anal cavity of each prisoner, claiming that they were looking for contraband mobile phones.
The men screamed and wept. Those who resisted were threatened by barking dogs and beaten until they bled.
Hundreds of detainees suffered similar sexual abuse during the event on March 10 at Beir Ahmed prison in the southern city of Aden, according to seven witnesses interviewed by the Associated Press news agency.
Descriptions of the mass abuse offer a window into a world of rampant sexual torture and impunity in UAE-controlled prisons in Yemen. The UAE is a key United States ally whose secret prisons and widespread torture were exposed by an AP investigation last June.
The news agency has since identified at least five prisons where security forces use sexual torture to brutalise and break inmates.
The AP first asked the Pentagon about grave rights abuses committed by the UAE one year ago.
But despite well-documented reports of torture reported by the AP, human rights groups and even the United Nations (UN), Marine Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Pentagon spokesperson, said that the US has seen no evidence of detainee abuse in Yemen.
"US forces are required to report credible allegations of detainee abuse," he said.
"We have received no credible allegations that would substantiate the allegations put forth in your line of question/story."
US officials have acknowledged that American forces receive intelligence from UAE partners and have participated in interrogations in Yemen.
But Rankine-Galloway said he could not comment on intelligence sharing with partners.
"Department of Defense personnel are expected to adhere to the highest standards of personal and professional conduct," he said.
UAE officials did not respond to requests for comment.
In Yemen's three-year civil war, UAE forces that are purportedly fighting on behalf of Yemen's government have overtaken wide swaths of territory, towns and cities in the south.
They have swept up hundreds of men into a network of at least 18 hidden prisons on suspicion of being al-Qaeda or ISIL fighters. The prisoners are held without charges or trials.
Witnesses said Yemeni guards working under the direction of Emirati officers have used various methods of sexual torture and humiliation.
They raped detainees while other guards filmed the assaults. They electrocuted prisoners' genitals or hung rocks from their testicles. They sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.
"They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomising starts," said one father of four.
From inside the prison in Aden, detainees smuggled letters and drawings to the AP about the sexual abuse. The drawings were made on plastic plates with blue ink pen.
The artist told the AP that he was arrested last year and has been in three different prisons. "They tortured me without even accusing me of anything. Sometimes I wish they would give me a charge so I can confess and end this pain," he said.
"The worst thing about it is that I wish for death every day and I can't find it."
He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of further abuse.
The drawings show a man hanging naked from chains while he is being electrocuted, another inmate on the floor surrounded by snarling dogs as several people kick him, and graphic depictions of anal rape.
"Naked after beating," one Arabic caption says. Another drawing shows a man's rectum being forced open.
"This is how they search the prisoners," the caption reads.
Of the five prisons where the AP found sexual torture, four are in Aden, according to three Yemeni security and military officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
One is at the Buriqa base - the headquarters for the Emirati forces. A second is at the house of Shallal Shaye, the Aden security chief closely allied with the UAE, and a third is at a nightclub-turned-prison called Wadah. The fourth is at Beir Ahmed, where the March atrocities occurred.
US personnel have been seen at the Buriqa base, along with Colombian mercenaries, according to two prisoners and two security officials.
The detainees could not say whether the Americans, some of whom wear military uniforms, are members of the US government or mercenaries.
Yemen's war began in 2015, after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels took over much of northern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and forced out the government of Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.
The Saudi-led coalition, armed and backed by the United States, has sought to bomb the rebels into submission with a relentless air campaign in support of the Hadi government.
But it is the UAE that has taken the lead in southern Yemen.
'You are killing my dignity'
The humiliation of the entire prison population in March may have been triggered by a series of hunger strikes among prisoners, who are held for months or years.
At least 70 detainees were ordered to be released earlier this year by state prosecutors but most remain in detention.
The Yemeni government has said that it has no control over the UAE-run prisons and Hadi has ordered an investigation into reports of torture.
The incident in March began when soldiers opened cells at 8am, ordered all detainees out to the prison yard, then lined them up and forced them to stand under the sun till noon.
When the Emirati force arrived, the detainees were blind-folded, handcuffed and led in groups or individually into a room where the Emiratis were present.
The Emiratis told them to undress and lie down. The UAE officers then spread their legs open, touched their genitals and probed their rectums.
"You are killing my dignity," one prisoner was heard crying. A second screamed to the Emiratis, "Did you come to liberate us or strip our clothes off?"
The Emiratis shouted back: "This is our job!"
One prisoner said that when the Emiratis forced them to stand naked, "all I could think of was Abu Ghraib" - referring to the prison outside Baghdad where US soldiers committed abuses against detainees during the Iraq war.
"They were searching for mobile phones inside our bodies," another witness told the AP. "Do you believe this! How could anyone hide a phone in there?"
In the same city, at the UAE-run prison inside the Buriqa military base, two prisoners told the AP they think that American personnel in uniform must be aware of the torture - either because they have heard screams or seen marks of torture."
Prisoners said that they haven't seen Americans directly involved in the abuse.
"Americans use Emiratis as gloves to do their dirty work," said one senior security official at the Riyan Prison in the city of Mukalla. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
Two other security officials, who were once close to the Emiratis, said that mercenaries including Americans are present at all the Emirati military camps and sites, including the prisons. Their mission is mainly to guard.
The father of four said that sometimes the screaming from the beatings is so intense that he can feel his cell shake. "It's beyond imagination," he said.
Rape and blackmail
A former security chief who himself was involved in torturing detainees to extract confessions told the AP that rape is used as a way to force detainees to cooperate with the Emiratis in spying.
"In some cases, they rape the detainee, film him while raping, use it as a way to force him to work for them," he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity, because of security concerns.
Based on the AP investigation last year, the House of Representatives voted on May 24 to require Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to determine whether US military or intelligence personnel violated the law in interrogations of detainees in Yemen.
The House adopted the measure as part of the 2019 defense authorisation bill. The amendment was sponsored by Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California.
The Defense Department has to submit a report within 120 days to Congress.
"We hope for a clear answer," Khanna said. "This is not the American way of doing business."
The US provides arms worth billions of dollars in addition to logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition.
The US has also intensified its drone campaign against al-Qaeda and the ISIL group in Yemen. The Pentagon has said that American forces are helping UAE and Yemeni forces in driving al-Qaeda fighters from southern Yemeni cities.
The war has left over 10,000 people dead, displaced millions, and pushed the already poor country to the edge of famine.
Yet instead of restoring President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi's power in the southern Yemen regions liberated from the Houthis, Saudi Arabia kept him in Riyadh for more than a year.
He was only allowed to return to Yemen Thursday at the beginning of an offensive led by the UAE to take control of the major port city of Hudaida, the key entry point for humanitarian aid.
The UAE's control over southern Yemen, and the prisons, has left many Yemenis worried that innocent civilians are being pushed into the arms of the very people that Emirati forces claim they are fighting.
"In the prisons, they are committing the most brutal crimes," said a Yemeni commander currently in Riyadh. "Joining ISIS and al-Qaeda became a way to take revenge for all the sexual abuses and sodomization. From here, the prisons, they are manufacturing ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS)."
He spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from the Emiratis.
Hunger strikes
One middle-aged man said he has been in prison since 2016, and has been moved across the network of secret prisons multiple times.
He said he was interrogated 21 times, during which he was tortured with electricity, beatings, and attack dogs while he was blindfolded and chained.
"They beat me up with electric wires, with steel, an electric shock, or they take off the clothes except for the underwear and stomp on my body and face with their boots.
The soldiers would carry you up in the air and dump you on the ground."
The AP previously confirmed 18 detention sites, but he named 21, including 13 prisons and 8 military camps.
Another prisoner gave the AP what he said were the real names of five Emirati torturers. UAE officials did not respond to requests for comment about the men.
One of the most brutal torturers is Yemeni, a former prisoner called Awad al-Wahsh, who was arrested and tortured before agreeing to work with the Emiratis, four witnesses told the AP.
His supervisor, Yosran al-Maqtari, could not be reached for comment. Al-Maqtari is Aden's chief of anti- terrorism.
Other torturers named by detainees are Emirati officers known to prisoners by their noms de guerre: Abu Udai, Abu Ismail, and Hitler.
The prisoners who were sexually abused in March had tried to fight back. They had organised three hunger strikes to protest their treatment.
They had launched a campaign with their families to get human rights groups to secure their release.
That's when the 15 Emirati officers showed up with their dogs.
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Special Tribunal for Lebanon
Official Website of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon In Focus: Special Tribunal for Lebanon (UN)
Sayyed concludes testimony, refuses to be cross-examined (The Daily Star) By Victoria Yan June 8, 2018
Former Director of General Security Jamil al-Sayyed concluded three days of testimony for the defense Thursday at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, pointedly refusing to be cross-examined by Nigel Povoas, counsel for the prosecution. "For personal, emotional and ethical views I cannot be questioned by such a person," the newly elected MP said in reference to Povoas.
"If there are going to be any questions put forth by any of [the prosecutors], I will leave."
Sayyed's resentment toward the STL prosecution was clear throughout his three-day testimony. He attacked the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission Tuesday for its investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, arguing that the work should have been carried out by Lebanon's security apparatus.
Sayyed has previous bad blood with the UNIIIC and the STL prosecution. After stepping down as the head of General Security in April 2005 following the assassination, Sayyed was arrested by Lebanese authorities alongside four other generals. During the period of the UNIIIC investigations, the five individuals were detained for suspected involvement in the attack.
While no concrete evidence was provided by the investigative team, the five officials were detained for four years. The arbitrary arrests were condemned in a 2007 report from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2009, when the UNIIIC handed over the investigation to the newly opened STL, Sayyed and his colleagues were released and exonerated.
President of the Trial Chamber Judge David Re criticized Sayyed's unjust detainment by the former investigative team. Still, he informed the witness that he could not reserve the right to pick and choose for whom he wished to testify.
Furthermore, Re added, Sayyed's anger should not have been directed toward the current prosecution team as it had fully replaced that working under the UNIIIC.
"We understand the emotions are based on your incarceration, and we understand it's difficult for you to disassociate the ongoing tribunal to what had happened to you. But understand that Povoas had come [to the STL] in 2012 after you were released," Re said.
"You did mention at some point that you wanted to set the historical record straight, but this is not a truth and reconciliation," the judge added, emphasizing that the trial was about the assassination of Hariri, not Sayyed's arbitrary detention.
The point was rendered moot when Povoas stated that he had no questions for the MP, concluding Sayyed's time at the stand.
With his testimony concluded, the MP spoke to Lebanese TV outlets outside the STL courtroom in the Netherlands, reiterating his issues with the investigation. His testimony, he said, would hopefully reveal the gaps the prosecution had missed.
Thursday's sessions were the third day of Sayyed's testimony for the defense, in which he discussed a meeting held by Lebanese figures opposed to the 2004 extension of Syrian government-backed Emile Lahoud's presidency. Referred to as the "Bristol Group," several opposition parties and movements including Progressive Socialist Party head Walid Joumblatt and former MP Boutros Harb gathered at Beirut's Bristol Hotel in December 2004 to discuss an end to the Syrian occupation and the implementation of U.N. Resolution 1559, which called for the withdrawal of Syrian troops.
"Walid Joumblatt was a main figure of that group and of course, he was one of Hariri's friends," Sayyed said. "I never heard at any point that Hariri met with [the Bristol Group] or intended to be a member of that group. In the end, it was just a phase when that group was established where Hariri was prime minister of the country."
The former prime minister's relationship with Syria has been a key point of contention throughout the trial. According to many leaders, including Joumblatt, the relationship between the Lebanese prime minister and Syrian President Bashar Assad had grown increasingly strained and even violent in the months leading up to Hariri's assassination.
The STL prosecution has sought to tie both Syria and its ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to the assassination.
Sayyed, however, has steadfastly rejected allegations of a souring relationship between Hariri and the Syrian leadership. During Wednesday's hearing, the MP said that Hariri "had always been disposed to work with Syria." Sayyed has maintained that Israel and the United States were the principal orchestrators of the assassination.
Aftermath of former Lebanon security chief's combative special tribunal testimony (The National) By David Enders June 10, 2018
During last week's appearance before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Jamil Al Sayyed was a combative witness, questioning both the legitimacy of the trial and the investigation into the 2005 killing of former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
As the head of the country's general security at the time of the assassination, Mr Al Sayyed was initially tasked with scrutinising the murder before international investigators were brought in.
"If they had left the matter in our hands, we would have been able to reach a better result," he said during his testimony.
Instead, the case was transferred to the UN International Independent Investigation Commission.
Mr Al Sayyed's contempt for the commission was clear last week. "When I look into your glassy eyes, I realise that Hitler isn't dead. He's still living in you," he told judges as he recounted an encounter with a member of the UN investigation.
Mr Al Sayyed and three other Lebanese security officials associated with Syria's occupation of Lebanon were held in custody for four years in connection with the case, being released only after an order by a judge at the tribunal.
In 2011, four years after being established, the tribunal indicted five men — Mustafa Amine Badreddine, Hussein Hassan Oneissi, Salim Jamil Ayyash, Assad Hassan Sabra, and Hassan Habib Merhi — on charges of terrorism and murder.
The five were all believed to be high-ranking members of Hezbollah, and all are being tried in their absence.
Hezbollah, with whom the 68-year-old Mr Al Sayyed is politically allied, has called the tribunal an illegitimate Zionist plot.
During his testimony, Mr Al Sayyed also recognised Lebanon's most significant political fissure.
"Almost half of Lebanon is with Syria and the other half is against Syria, but Lebanon cannot be governed without the other half. This is the nature of the country," Mr Al Sayyed said.
Such polarisation is one of the possible reasons for the apparent lack of public interest.
"No matter what the outcome, a good portion will continue to think what they think," said Joe Macaron, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington DC. "I think people have their minds set."
Lebanon's various sects each have their own stories — Mr Al Sayyed last week testified that Mr Hariri had never supported UN resolution 1559, which called for a full Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon as well as the disarmament of Hezbollah.
It ran contrary to the notion that he had been killed because of his support for it, he said. Mr Al Sayyed also presented Mr Hariri as someone who remained supportive of Syria until his assassination, and blamed Israel and the US for his death.
"There is no doubt that this is highly politicised and the fact that it took so much time — I was in the first delegation that was invited to visit the tribunal five or six years ago. We were expecting tangible results before that," said Sami Nader, who directs the Levant Institute for Strategic Affairs in Beirut.
"It can serve as a benchmark for the Lebanese justice system, and it hasn't done that either," Mr Nader said.
But the time the STL has taken is not exceptional said Benjamin Durr, an expert on international criminal proceedings.
"That's one of the problems of international law and the tribunals — it takes so long and the people who were affected by the crimes and the communities and the countries very often have moved on," he said. "The tribunal for Yugoslavia closed last year — that lasted 25 years."
However, the STL is unique among international tribunals as "terrorism … has never been a charge, it's not a core international crime", Mr Durr said.
"It's also never happened before that trials have been held [for defendants] in absentia."
Mr Al Sayyed turned down a request from The National to comment further on his testimony. After four months, STL appoints new defense head (The Daily Star) June 19, 2018
Dorothee Le Fraper du Hellen was appointed as the new head of defense for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Monday, nearly four months after the resignation of former head Francois Roux. According to a press release from the tribunal's press office, the French lawyer was chosen by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Thanking him, Le Fraper du Hellen quoted Italian writer Silvio Pellico, saying, "Whenever accusations are preferred, do not you disdain to hear a defense." No stranger to the STL, Le Fraper du Hellen has served as defense counsel for Hassan Merhi since 2013. Merhi is one of four individuals accused of carrying out the 2005 Beirut assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Twenty-one others were also killed in the bombing. STL President Judge Ivana Hrdlickova congratulated Le Fraper du Hellen, wishing her "all the best" in her new role.
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Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal
War crimes trial greatest success of govt: Muhith (New Age) June 8, 2018
Finance minister AMA Muhith on Thursday said that the present government's greatest success was the holding of the trial of those who carried out crimes against humanity in the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh.
'The greatest success of our government, in my opinion, is bringing the war criminals who committed heinous crime against humanity during our liberation war to justice and the execution of the punishment given to the main perpetrators,' Muhith said in his budget speech on Thursday at Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban.
'So far, a total of 53 cases were taken into cognisance for trial by the International War Crime Tribunal constituted for the purpose. Out of this, judgements were delivered in 31 cases while the rest are still under trial. Six out of seven death sentences upheld by the Appellate Division have been executed. Besides, 25th March has been declared National Genocide Day,' he added.
Referring to the last Bangladesh Nationalist Party-Jamaat alliance government which had made war criminals like Matiur Rahman Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Muzahid ministers, Muhith said, 'We were upset and the nation was disgraced when these notorious criminals became part of the state machinery and moved around hoisting our national flag in their official cars. Prime minister Sheikh Hasina did not bow down to any undue domestic or international pressure in the question of holding the trial of war crimes.'
'Her extra-ordinary bold steps freed our nation from indelible stigma. This, to some extent, has lessened the incalculable debt that we owe to the martyrs and heroes of our liberation war,' he further said.
War crimes witness found dead with throat slit in Khilgaon (Dhaka Tribune) By Ashif Islam Shaon June 14, 2018
Shumon Zahid, the son of martyred journalist Selina Parvin, had testified against Al-Badr leaders Chowdhury Mueen Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan.
While police suggest that he may have died in a train accident, Shumon Zahid's family believe he was murdered.
The body of Shumon Zahid, a witness in a 1971 war crimes case, has been recovered from near a railway track in Dhaka's Khilgaon.
The 55-year-old was the only son of martyred journalist Selina Parvin.
Locals found Shumon's body with his throat slit near Bagicha Mosque level crossing around 8am on Thursday.
On receiving the information, police recovered the body from the spot about two hours later, which was first taken to the Government Railway Police (GRP) Station at Kamalapur, and then sent to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) for an autopsy.
After an inquest, Kamalapur GRP OC Yasin Faruk said: "Shumon may have been run over by the Rangpur Express as he was crossing the railway lines."
Sub-Inspector Anwar Hossain also said that the victim's throat might have been slit as he was run over. There were signs of injury on his right ear and forehead as well.
His family, however, said they believe Shumon, who worked at Farmers Bank Limited's Shantinagar branch up until four months ago, was murdered.
His brother-in-law Kazi Md Bakhtiar told reporters that Shumon might have been murdered by those who had threatened to kill him earlier to stop him from testifying in the war crimes case against Al-Badr leaders Chowdhury Mueen Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan.
Mueen and Ashraf were tried in absentia and sentenced to death in November 2013 by the International Crimes Tribunal-2, for killing 18 intellectuals during the 1971 Liberation War.
Bakhtiar also said Shumon's house at Shahjahanpur was about a 10-minute walk from the spot where his body was found. He lived there with his wife and two sons.
He said that police were aware of the death threats Shumon had received and maintained contact with him.
Shumon had also become careful about his day-to-day movements after testifying against the war criminals and receiving the threats. He generally rode a motorcycle, but he did not take it out on Thursday.
Meanwhile, DMCH Forensic Medicine Department Associate Professor Dr Sohel Mahmud said they have completed the autopsy.
"There are wounds on the back, head, face and nose. Perhaps the head was severed under the wheels of the train, but we are not sure yet," he told reporters.
Asked whether it was possible that Shumon was drugged and left on the railway tracks premeditatedly, Sohel said: "That is possible. It could also have been that he was run over by the train. We have done viscera tests and will be able to confirm the cause of death once the test reports are ready."
Police said they had started investigating if Shumon's death was an accident or murder.
Shumon was an eight-year-old when members of Al-Badr, a militia which collaborated with the Pakistan Army against Bangladesh's independence, had picked up his journalist mother Selina Parvin from their home at New Circular road in Dhaka on December 13, 1971, similar to other intellectual martyrs, just three days before Bangladesh won the war.
Selina was murdered along with other intellectuals on December 14. Her body was found at the Rayerbazar killing fields four days later.
Towhid Reza Noor, son of another martyred journalist Siraj Uddin Hossain and one more witness against Al-Badr leaders Mueen and Ashraf, suspected that Shumon's body was planted on the railway tracks after he was murdered by the anti-liberation forces.
Towhid's father Siraj was also killed by Al-Badr members, just before independence in 1971.
Family members said Shumon Zahid had worked as a journalist before he went to work at the Farmers Bank.
Later in the day, Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee in a statement demanded a prompt investigation to ascertain whether his death was a planned killing or an accident.
When will we get witness protection law? (Dhaka Tribune) By Syed Samiul Basher Anik June 15, 2018
Three prosecution witnesses were murdered in 2013, while the house and shop of another witness were bombed.
The necessity for a law to protect the witnesses and victims who testify in war crimes cases returned to the spotlight when Shumon Zahid was found dead in Dhaka.
Despite repeated demands by various stakeholders and the murder of witnesses since 2010 – when the government set up a special tribunal to try suspected war criminals – Bangladesh is yet to formulate such a law.
Three prosecution witnesses were murdered in 2013, while the house and shop of another witness were bombed. The village home of Justice ATM Fazle Kabir, the then chief of the International Crimes Tribunal 1, was also bombed that year.
Fifty-two-year-old Shumon's body was recovered from a railway track on Thursday morning with his throat slit. Police suggested that he may have died in a train accident.
His family members say they suspect Shumon, the son of martyred journalist Selina Parvin, might have been killed by people who had threatened him for testifying against Al-Badr leaders: Chowdhury Mueen Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan.
• Wahidul Alam Junu, a key witness against war criminal Salauddin Quader Chowdhury, had gone missing in February 2013. He was found dead in Chittagong under suspicious circumstances hours later.
• On March 10, 2013, Ahmed Miraz, a key prosecution witness against former Jamaat chief Ghulam Azam, was killed by unidentified assailants. He was the brother of renowned musician and freedom fighter Ahmed Imtiaz Bulbul.
• Prosecution witness Mustafa Hawlader, who testified against war criminal Delwar Hossain Sayedee, was killed on December 8, 2013. Unidentified miscreants entered Mustafa's home by digging through the mud floor at midnight and hit his head with a crowbar.
• On December 12, 2013, unidentified miscreants hurled a Molotov cocktail and four improvised bombs at the village home of former ICT 1 chief Fazle Kabir in Chapainawabganj Sadar upazila.
• On December 15, 2013, Molotov cocktails were hurled at the house and shop of Ranjit Kumar Nath, who testified against war criminal Jamaat leader Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid.
Shahriar Kabir, who heads the Ekattorer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee, said the failure to protect witnesses was "quite unfortunate."
"Witness protection is very important," he told the Dhaka Tribune, adding that the deaths of the war crime witnesses should be investigated properly.
"There should be proper security arrangements for protecting not only the witnesses but also the judges and people associated with the process," he added.
He also emphasized reforming the tribunal before the trial of Jamaat-e-Islami—which openly opposed Bangladesh's independence for its role during the Liberation War.
National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Chairman Kazi Reazul Hoque said a witness protection law was needed to safeguard the witnesses of war crimes and other cases.
"No matter where you are testifying, the risk of harassment always remains. The enactment of the law is urgent since those accused of war crimes are [usually] powerful," he said. The International Crimes Tribunal Rules of Procedure, 2010, has a separate section to deal with the witness and victim protection.
Section 58A (1) of the procedure says the ICT, by its own initiative or an application by either party, may pass necessary orders directing the concerned authorities of the government to ensure protection, privacy and well-being of the witnesses and/or victims.
"This process will be confidential and the other side will not be notified," it says.
Section 58A (2) says the government shall arrange accommodation of witness(s)/victim(s), if so desired to ensure security and surveillance during the stay of witnesses/victims as directed by the Tribunal— and take necessary measure to escort the witnesses/victims to the courtroom by the members of the law enforcement agency.
The NHRC chief also said the witness protection law shall also be applied to human rights defenders and it is the duty of the state to ensure everyone's protection.
The Law Ministry in 2011 drafted the 'Witness Protection Act 2011' but it is yet to see the light of the day.
Law Minister Anisul Huq said the protection of the witnesses in war crimes cases was the state's responsibility—and noted that the law enforcement agencies had been providing protection to the witnesses whenever they were asked to.
"We need to protect them in any way necessary. We have been emphasizing witness protection for a long time and are considering formulating a law because of the threats made against the witnesses," he said, replying to a question.
The minister, however, failed to come up with a timeframe for when the law will be enacted.
Sumon Zahid was murdered for his testimony in a war crimes case: Wife (bdnews24.com) By Golam Mujtaba Dhruba June 19, 2018
Sumon Zahid, son of martyred intellectual Selina Parvin, has been murdered for being a witness in a war crimes case, his wife Kazi Dreakshinda Zabin has alleged.
Sumon, 57, had testified as the third prosecution witness against war crimes convicts Chowdhury Mueen- Uddin and Ashrafuzzaman Khan.
Both were sentenced to death and are now living in the UK.
Also, Sumon used to write against those who committed crimes against humanity in 1971. Police found Sumon dead beside a railroad in Khilgaon area in Dhaka on Jun 14.
"Sumon died after jumping into a moving train," police said citing witnesses. However, they are investigating his death.
Disagreeing with the police statement, Dreakshinda Zabin said: "We have lived our lives in a constant sense of insecurity since the testimony by Sumon in the International Crimes Tribunal. We always lived our lives in anxiety and fear."
"Sumon was mentally strong even after all such things. He was murdered because of being a witness in the case."
Sumon's brother-in-law Kazi Mohammed Bakhtiar was also sceptical over the media reports that cited a child as a witness to the death.
"Some people claimed they saw Sumon drinking tea, which isn't true, as he was never a tea drinker. They also claimed he used to roam around the neighbourhood for days in depression, which can't be true either; he had no reason to go there," Bakhtiar said.
"There are also inconsistencies in the statements provided by the witnesses. We can never accept that Sumon committed suicide. There could be other reasons."
Referring to the murder of the younger brother of musician Ahmed Imtiaz Bulbul, another witness in the same case, Bakhtiar said: "Someone has murdered Sumon too, and is now trying to portray it as a suicide."
Railway Police had recovered the body of Bulbul's younger brother Miraj near the Kuril flyover in the city within seven months of his testimonies against Jamat-e-Islami former Ameer Golam Azam in March 2013. Forensic experts said Miraj was strangled.
A report published in a newspaper citing Railway Police said Sumon had invested his relatives' money in Shantinagar Branch of Farmers Bank where he was a second officer. The branch was closed five months back. He even lost his job. Police have been investigating any influence of these on his death, according to the media report.
"Some of Sumon's acquaintances deposited money into Farmers Bank on his request and they later asked him to withdraw the funds. However, they have never put any pressure on him; it can never lead to his suicide," Dreakshinda Zabin told bdnews24.com.
Sumon's cousin Zahid Hossain said he was supposed to join another organisation after he left the bank. "Sumon used to live in his own house and had good relations with his family members."
Sumon's brother-in-law Bakhtiar said he never had a financial crisis after losing his job that will instigate him to commit suicide.
"The media report that cited a child as a witness has no credibility. They should be careful in publishing such news," Kazi Sarwar, another brother-in-law of Sumon told bdnews24.com.
"We request the media not to publish anything that tarnish the image of a freedom fighter's family," he said.
"A child present on the scene described the incident to the police. The witness claimed he was run over by a train," Kamalapur Railway Police Station Chief Yasin Faruque told bdnews24.com. "An investigation is underway."
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War Crimes Investigation in Burma
Religious cleansing spreads from Muslims to Christians in Myanmar (Premier) Bye Tola Mbakwe June 6, 2018
Release International, which supports persecuted Christians worldwide, said the military stepped up its campaign against the mainly Christian Kachin people in April.
They launched attacks using artillery, helicopter gunships and infantry. Troops have displaced thousands, driving them from their burning homes.
The military have also occupied churches and interrogated entire congregations.
There are reports that the soldiers are using rape as a weapon of war and are deliberately targeting camps for the displaced, which is a war crime. They are also said to be sowing landmines to make villages uninhabitable.
Andrew Boyd, spokesperson for the charity, told Premier the oppression amounts to war crimes. "We're talking about something like 10,000 people displaced and what we saw happening with the Rohingya Muslims, all of the brutality of that, exactly the same kinds of tactics, we're now seeing happening with the largely Christian Kachin people," he said.
"People have been displaced. They've been moved from their homes to camps, they've been moved from one camp to another camp. If that's true, and the evidence certainly points in that direction, these are war crimes."
According to Release International, conflict between the controlling Myanmese people and other peoples erupted after World War Two. Some Christian tribes, who sided with the British against the Japanese, expected a homeland of their own in return. Instead they have faced 60 further years of conflict.
Christians make up around nine per cent of the population and have long been targets for religious persecution in Myanmar.
Release International said Buddhist monks have led violent attacks against churches and church leaders, house churches have been banned and there have been attempts to outlaw religious conversion. There have also been legal moves to enforce the notion that to be Burmese is to be Buddhist.
Boyd added: "There is a very powerful movement within Burma to say that if you are Burmese, you must be a Buddhist. In fact there have been moves to try to enshrine that in law and prevent religious conversion there."
Release International is working with partners in Burma to support families impacted by persecution. Release is also supporting efforts by the International Christian Association to train Christians and supply Bibles - the authorities have outlawed Bibles translated into the languages of the indigenous tribes.
Plight of Christian group massacred by Myanmar Army highlighted in House of Lords (Premier) By Tola Mbakwe June 13, 2018
Lord Alton of Liverpool tabled a debate in the House of Lords on 12th June, drawing attention to reports of the Myanmar Army attacking Christians in Myanmar's Kachin State.
Lord Alton asked about the UK government's response, including "what consideration they have given to the case for referring the government of Burma to the International Criminal Court?"
According to the United Nations (UN), renewed fighting between the Myanmar Army and Kachin Independence Army has led to the displacement of at least 4,000 civilians since early April.
In a statement on 9th June, to mark the seventh anniversary of the resumption of conflict in Kachin State, Global Kachin Communities claimed as many as 7,000 have been displaced in the past two months.
In his response, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), expressed the government's "deep concern" at the situation.
"We have called upon the Burmese military and all parties to cease hostilities and allow the humanitarian access that is required to be provided to displaced people.
"Turning to Rakhine, the Burmese authorities must show that the commission of inquiry can deliver accountability for the perpetrators of atrocities. If not, the Government will consider supporting international routes to justice," he said.
Rt Rev Alan Smith, Lord Bishop of St Albans noted that "the reported atrocities against the Rohingya have been described as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide", and asked "whether the human rights violations in Kachin and Shan states meet the criteria of at least crimes against humanity and war crimes?"
Lord Ahmad agreed that ethnic cleansing has taken place against both people groups "but because of the lack of access for international agencies it is difficult to determine the issue of genocide".
He added that there is hope for Myanmar because the UN has now gained access to parts of country for the first time.
"We will continue to impress on both the civilian and military authorities for that access to be applicable universally across the country," he said.
Religious freedom charity Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) has welcomed the debate and said the world needs to pay attention.
Benedict Rogers, CSW's East Asia team leader: "Seven years after the Burma Army broke a ceasefire with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the humanitarian consequences of this conflict are very grave and the human rights violations continue to be perpetrated with impunity.
"The world has, understandably, focused on the terrible suffering of the Rohingyas, but it is essential that the Kachin and others in northern Burma are not forgotten, and that urgent steps are taken to end this conflict, bring about a genuine, meaningful and inclusive peace process through political dialogue, ensure unrestricted access for humanitarian aid to reach those displaced by war, and address impunity."
On 26th April, the UN announced the appointment of Christine Schraner Burgener of Switzerland, an experienced diplomat, as his new Special Envoy on Myanmar.
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Israel and Palestine
Apparent War Crimes in Gaza (Human Rights Watch) June 13, 2018
Israeli forces' repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 protesters in Gaza and wounded thousands with live ammunition.
The United Nations General Assembly should support a resolution that calls for exploring measures to guarantee the protection of Palestinians in Gaza, and a UN inquiry mandated to investigate all violations and abuses should identify Israeli officials responsible for issuing unlawful open-fire orders. The killings also highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Third countries should impose targeted sanctions against officials responsible for ongoing serious human rights violations.
"Israel's use of lethal force when there was no imminent threat to life has taken a heavy toll in life and limb," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The international community needs to rip up the old playbook, where Israel conducts investigations that mainly whitewash the conduct of its troops and the US blocks international accountability with its Security Council veto, and instead impose real costs for such blatant disregard for Palestinian lives."
Kuwait has brought a resolution to the UN General Assembly that deplores Israel's use of live ammunition against protesters in Gaza, as well as rockets launched by Palestinian armed groups at Israeli population centers, and calls for an end to the closure of Gaza and for the UN Secretary General to consider options to better protect Palestinians in Gaza. Kuwait sought General Assembly action after the US vetoed this resolution at the Security Council on June 1.
Human Rights Watch interviewed nine people who witnessed Israeli forces shooting protesters in Gaza on May 14, the day with the highest toll of deaths and injuries so far when more than 60 people were killed, and another who saw a journalist shot and killed on April 6. Seven of these interviewees not only witnessed people being shot, but were also themselves shot. The shootings happened at places where protests were held near the perimeter fences that separate the Gaza Strip from Israel, including east of Jabalya, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. Their accounts, along with photographs and videos, show a pattern of Israeli forces shooting people who posed no imminent threat to life with live ammunition. Israel should pay adequate compensation in all cases in which its forces unlawfully shot people or killed their family members.
Six of the witnesses Human Rights Watch interviewed said they were 200 to 300 meters from the two parallel fences, that in most places separate Gaza's eastern periphery and Israel, on May 14 when Israeli forces shot them or people close to them with live ammunition. The victims include journalists, civil defense workers, and volunteers trying to evacuate the wounded, and a child running away from the fences.
Three other witnesses said that soldiers shot them when they were between 30 and 40 meters from the fences. These three include a 14-year-old boy and a 48-year-old man, shot in separate incidents, who said they had not thrown stones or otherwise tried to harm Israeli soldiers. A third man said he had approached the fences and thrown stones at Israeli forces, but that he was shot later, while attempting to evacuate another man who was shot and wounded. The accounts are consistent with numerous news reports and videos that show Palestinians being shot while standing still or running away from the fences.
Those Human Rights Watch interviewed said most of the shooting incidents they witnessed during the May 14 protests involved Israeli forces shooting people in the legs. But witnesses also described seven additional cases in which Israeli forces shot protesters who posed no imminent threat to life in the upper body, indicating that Israeli soldiers may have intended to kill them. One witness said he was shot in the back at a distance of 200 meters from the fences, with the bullet exiting his chest. Another said he saw a civil defense worker fatally shot in the chest 200 meters from the fences. Another witness said he saw a man in his 50s who was shot in the head when he approached to within 15 meters of the fences while holding a Palestinian flag. Two witnesses said they saw a man who was fatally shot in the head while being evacuated from close to the fences after being shot in the arm.
From March 30 to June 8, Palestinians have engaged in weekly demonstrations near the fences between Gaza and Israel to protest against the 11-year closure of Gaza and to commemorate the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees when Israel was established in 1948. Protests held on May 14 were also against the opening of the US embassy that day in Jerusalem. During the protests in this period, Israeli forces fired on demonstrators and killed 118 people during demonstrations, including 14 children, and wounded 3,895 with live ammunition who required hospitalization. At least 40 have needed to have limbs amputated, and hundreds more suffered severe injuries, medical officials reported.
The Israeli closure of Gaza, backed by Egypt, as well as disputes over funding between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have left medical facilities struggling to operate due to severe lack of electricity and essential drugs, medical disposables, and equipment. Doctors in Gaza have told Physicians for Human Rights–Israel they are powerless to provide needed treatment to many wounded patients. Israeli military authorities should reverse their policy of denying medical exit permits for Palestinians who were wounded in the protests. The Palestinian Authority should promptly issue required approvals for patients' medical treatment.
During the weekly protests, the Israeli military shot and killed protesters on the basis of a policy, according to public statements by Israeli officials and a submission to Israel's supreme court, to use live ammunition against people who approached or attempted to cross or damage the fences. Israeli leaders rejected repeated calls from the UN and the EU and petitions by human rights groups to change those orders and praised the military's actions.
Israeli officials, including military commanders, apparently greenlighted the use of live ammunition against demonstrators. The officials include the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The vast majority of protesters were unarmed. Some threw rocks and "Molotov cocktails" (improvised gasoline bombs), used slingshots to hurl projectiles, launched kites with incendiary materials, and sought to damage the fences between Gaza and Israel. In one instance, four armed men fired at Israeli soldiers during a protest in northern Gaza on May 14, a witness said.
The UN reported that four Israeli soldiers have been wounded during the Gaza protests from March 30 to June 7, the first of whom was a soldier who was lightly wounded on May 14. An Israeli military spokesperson told the Guardian that no one had crossed the fences on May 14. "Our troops have not taken any sustained direct fire," the spokesperson was quoted as saying.
International human rights law standards on the use of force, which apply to law enforcement situations such as the Gaza protests, permit the use of live ammunition only as a last resort to prevent the imminent threat of death or serious injury. Israeli officials explicitly rejected human rights standards and argued that live ammunition was necessary to stop protesters from breaching the fences, because Hamas organized the protests so armed fighters could exploit the breaches to kill or capture soldiers or civilians. The use of live ammunition cannot be justified by automatically deeming every Palestinian who attempts to breach the fences to be an imminent threat to life, and in fact Israeli forces also shot medics, journalists, children, and others who were hundreds of meters away from the fences, Human Rights Watch said. In addition, because Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions as an occupied people, any wilful killing of them would constitute a war crime.
A senior Israeli military official told the Washington Post that the only weapons Israeli forces used were live ammunition and tear-gas, not water cannon or other measures that Israel uses in the West Bank, which the official said lacked adequate range.
In addition to the barbed wire fence separating Gaza and Israel, the two-meter-high fencing with electronic sensors, ditches, and military watchtowers along the Gaza periphery, in 2015 the Israeli military built fences around 12 Israeli communities near Gaza with electronic sensors that detect any contact with the fence and automatically alert the military. This further undercuts the claim that the protesters posed an imminent threat.
Photographs, videos, and statements by surgeons indicate that Israeli forces fired on protesters using military assault rifles that fire bullets at high velocity. Medical journal articles, including by Israel Defense Forces trauma surgeons, have documented that gunshot wounds from assault-rifle bullets cause severe soft tissue damage, have a high incidence of complications, and that "any delay at the scene of injury might jeopardize limb survival."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, is examining alleged serious crimes committed in Palestine since June 13, 2014, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. On May 22, Palestine submitted a "referral" requesting the prosecutor investigate crimes under the ICC's jurisdiction, including crimes against humanity and the war crimes of willfully killing or willfully "causing great suffering, or serious injury" to civilians and the residents of an occupied territory. Crimes against humanity are criminal acts committed on a widespread or systematic basis as part of an "attack on a civilian population," involving a plan or policy to commit the crime. Such acts include murder, persecution on political grounds, and "other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health," according to the Rome Statute.
Given strong evidence that serious crimes have been committed in Palestine since 2014, including new population transfers into occupied territories, Human Rights Watch has called on Bensouda to open a formal probe consistent with the ICC's Rome Statute.
"Impunity for unlawfully killing and maiming people in Gaza risks continuing the cycle where still more lives and families will be torn apart in the future," Whitson said. "The UN Human Rights Council inquiry should identify and call for sanctions against officials implicated in ongoing serious human rights violations."
The Gaza Protests and Israel's Use of Live Ammunition
Palestinians have held weekly protests beginning on March 30 near the fences along the eastern perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The protests were against Israel's 11-year closure of the Gaza Strip and to commemorate the expulsion and flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during Israel's establishment, which Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe."
Dr. Ayman al-Sahabani, the head of the emergency department at al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, told Human Rights Watch that on May 14 alone the hospital received about 500 patients, most with bullet wounds to the legs, and 18 people who were dead on arrival. The emergency department's capacity is 20 beds.
Many of the injuries are life-changing, according to medical personnel. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stated on April 19 that their clinics in Gaza had treated more than 250 people "where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverized the bone," many of whom would require additional surgery. From March 30 to May 23, 40 people shot by Israeli forces, including at least three children, needed a limb amputated, 10 of whom lost a leg above the knee, according to information reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical sources to the World Health Organization.
Prior to the first mass weekly demonstration in Gaza on March 30, the Israeli government security cabinet – which consists of the prime minister, defense minister, and other senior officials – held two meetings to discuss the army's planned response. The Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, briefed the security cabinet and later told Israeli media that "a big portion of the army" as well as more than 100 snipers would be present and that "the orders are to use a lot of force." On March 29, Netanyahu's Arabic spokesman posted a video of a man shot in the leg, stating, "This is the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face."
On March 30, the Israeli military, using live ammunition, killed 17 Palestinians, 12 of them demonstrators, and wounded hundreds. The next day, the chairperson of Meretz, a left-leaning Israeli political party, the EU, and the UN secretary-general separately called for an independent investigation into the events. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman rejected those calls and said that "the IDF soldiers" at the Gaza fences "have my full backing." Netanyahu thanked "our soldiers who are protecting the country's borders."
Protesters announced further demonstrations for the following Friday, April 6. Ahead of those protests, an Israeli military spokesperson stated that people "could potentially be shot" if they approached the fences or tried to damage them, and Lieberman stated that "anyone who comes close to the fence endangers his life." During the April 6 protests, the Israeli military killed nine Palestinians in Gaza and injured hundreds more, according to the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, which had called on soldiers to disobey unlawful orders to fire on protesters who posed no threat to life. At a cabinet meeting on April 11, Netanyahu chastised critics of the military's actions and said "we will give [Israeli soldiers] all the backing they need to do their holy work."
International Law and Israeli Claims
The use of force outside of active armed conflict is governed by international human rights standards set out in the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. These standards, which apply to the Gaza demonstrations, prohibit shooting live ammunition except to prevent "the imminent threat of death or serious injury" or "the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life," and "only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives."
The military did not publish its rules of engagement, but Israel's state attorney disclosed some information in an April 29 response to a petition by Israeli human rights groups against the military's use of lethal force against demonstrators in Gaza. The government response rejected applying human rights law applicable in law enforcement to the demonstrations, and claimed that only international humanitarian law, applicable in fighting in armed conflicts, applies, because the protests were "organized, coordinated and directed by Hamas, a terrorist organization engaged in armed conflict with Israel." But even where the laws of armed conflict on targeting do apply, in any case where there is doubt as to a person's civilian status, they must be presumed to be a civilian and may not be targeted.
Israeli officials argued that Hamas directed protesters to cross the fences so that armed fighters could run through the breach to kill or kidnap Israeli civilians or soldiers. The Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, said on May 15 that there was "no dilemma" in deciding between "having a lower amount of Palestinian casualties," and using lethal force in order to "defend Israeli communities immediately behind the [Gaza perimeter fences]." The government's April 29 court response elaborated that soldiers could use "potentially lethal force" to prevent protesters from breaching the fences and crossing from Gaza to Israel if "the evaluation is that the force is necessary at that time to remove the danger before it is realized, even if the danger itself has not yet become imminent," and that shooting demonstrators before they reach the fences is justified because if crowds breached them, it would "operationally require live fire on a massive scale."
In its efforts to justify the use of live ammunition to prevent Palestinians from crossing the fences, the government claimed in court to be following an open-fire policy that does not appear to account for the amounts of live ammunition used. The government stated to Israel's supreme court that the orders only permit "accurate shooting towards the legs of a 'major agitator or instigator'," after giving verbal warnings and using non-lethal means to disperse demonstrations, "as a last resort only and subject to stringent requirements" of proportionality. The government stated that the orders do not permit live fire against a person because he is near the fences, took part in demonstrations, or supports Hamas.
In fact, Israeli forces appear to have routinely exceeded these restrictions, firing from behind sand mounds and the fences separating Gaza and Israel at demonstrators in many cases more than 200 meters away.
Netanyahu referred to a May 15 statement by a Hamas leader, Salah al-Bardawil, that 50 of 62 people killed by Israeli forces on May 14 were Hamas members – "in other words, members of a terrorist organization," Netanyahu said. Israeli military and political officials also claimed that Hamas "strategically placed [civilians] in harm's way" because graphic media coverage of their injuries would harm Israel's image. Hamas's encouragement of and support for the protests and the participation of Hamas members in the protests do not justify the use of live ammunition against protesters who posed no threat to life.
On May 25 Israel's supreme court rejected petitions by human rights groups against the military's live- fire orders without applying the clear standard on the use of lethal force set out in international human rights law, and substantially deferring to the government's discretion. The court's unwillingness to apply international law and to challenge a policy that authorizes lethal force even when there is no imminent threat to life highlights the importance of the International Criminal Court prosecutor opening a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.
Palestinians in Gaza are protected persons under the Geneva Conventions. Willful killings of protected persons by the occupying power outside what is permissible under human rights standards would constitute a grave breach of the laws of occupation. The prohibition of war crimes and crimes against humanity can be the basis for individual criminal liability in international courts, as well as in domestic courts in many countries under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
Accounts from Witnesses
In total, from March 30 to June 2, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported that hospitals in Gaza received 530 Palestinians who were wounded in the head or neck, and 311 in the chest or back. News media reported that a 14-year-old girl who had tried to breach the fences with wire-cutters was fatally shot in the head.
The protesters were separated from the soldiers by the two fences and electronic sensors. Protesters had reached and torn down some of the barbed wire fence on April 27, and witnesses at the May 14 protests said that some protesters had cut or damaged sections of the barbed wire fence east of Gaza City, but that none had reached the electric fence beyond it.
One witness said he was aware of a person who had joined the May 14 protests while carrying a firearm, but apparently did not fire it because members of Hamas warned him that doing so could prompt Israeli soldiers to target the area. Another man said that four members of an armed group had attempted to attack Israeli forces east of Jabalya, by concealing guns until they reached the first fence, where they fired at Israeli forces positioned behind sand mounds about 80 meters away, before being shot fatally. Israeli forces killed at least 17 people in that area on May 14. Israeli concerns that members of armed groups would use the protests as cover to fire at Israeli soldiers or plant explosives near the fences do not justify the repeated use of live ammunition, including with apparent lethal intent, against protesters who posed no imminent lethal threat, Human Rights Watch said.
Witnesses consistently described the positioning of Israeli soldiers across the fences that separate Israel and Gaza, atop large earthen mounds overlooking the area where protesters congregated. The mounds were 10 to 30 meters apart, with 5 to 10 soldiers on each one. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan reported that Israeli forces entered Gaza at 3 a.m. on May 14 and leveled the land in front of the fences in multiple areas, apparently to eliminate protesters' cover.
A freelance photojournalist, Mahmoud Abu Salama, 33, was covering demonstrations in an area east of Jabalya called Abu Safiyya, in the northern Gaza Strip, about 200 meters from the fences, where he saw a man shot in the groin at around noon on May 14, and a boy shot in the leg at about 3:30 p.m. Human Rights Watch has a photo he took of the boy. Abu Salama said: I still hear the voices of people who were screaming after being shot. One man was launching stones with a slingshot, he was just a meter-and-a-half from me when he was shot in the groin. He was bleeding so badly that the paramedics didn't know how to deal with him, his face color went between yellow and blue. The boy was also close to me when he was shot in his leg. I saw him while he was escaping from the teargas and running away with his back to the fence when they shot him.
Mohammad Meqdad, 39, a civil defense worker, spoke to Human Rights Watch while awaiting surgery at al-Shifa hospital on May 15. Wearing an orange, reflective vest, like other civil defense workers, he had been evacuating wounded people east of Gaza City to ambulances throughout the morning on May 14, he said. At around 1:30 p.m., he was walking back toward the fences after evacuating a casualty, and was about 300 meters away when he was shot in the leg:
My face was toward the fence. I was able to see soldiers on hills of sand and those hills were higher [on May 14] than they were on previous protest days. On each of the hills, there were about 10 soldiers. There were guys closer to the fence who were burning tires, chanting for Jerusalem, and throwing stones, but others were shot who were much farther away. The last people I evacuated before I was shot were three women, all in their late 20s, who were shot in the neck or in the head. They had been carrying flags and chanting, they were in a group of women that was about 150 meters from the fence, behind a group of men who were closer than they were to the fence. I evacuated one, and then another got shot, and then the other, over 5 or 10 minutes. One of them died immediately, but I don't know what happened to the other two.
Mohaweya al-Ay, a 20-year-old student from the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, spoke to Human Rights Watch on May 17, after surgery at al-Shifa hospital. He said that he had been helping three civil defense workers evacuate wounded protesters east of Gaza City at 1 p.m. on May 14 when Israeli forces fatally shot one of the civil defense workers, Mousa Abu Hassanein, in the chest. They were about 200 meters from the fences at the time, al-Ay said. A Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, told Human Rights Watch that Abu Hassanein had helped rescue him when he was shot in the legs about an hour before Abu Hassanein was killed. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan reported that four paramedics were shot with live ammunition on May 14. On June 1, Israeli forces shot Razan al-Najjar in the chest, while the 21- year-old volunteer paramedic was wearing a white coat and treating wounded people at that day's protest. The Israeli army has said "no shots were deliberately or directly aimed towards her."
Al-Ay was shot in the back later that afternoon in the same area, while he was trying to reach a young man who had been shot, who he later learned was an 18-year-old named Ahmad al-Zarqa:
I saw a man was bleeding and walked toward him slowly. My back was toward the fence, no one was around me, throwing stones or anything else. Then a bullet hit my back from the right side and exited through my chest. I was about 200 meters away from the fence. There were no ambulances, they couldn't come to us because of the shooting. Two civil defense men were near me and pulled me behind a wall [for cover from gunfire], and another guy took my phone and called my family.
Al-Ay said that he did not burn tires or throw stones. Israeli forces in that area had begun firing earlier in the day on a group of protesters who had reached the barbed-wire fence, tied a rope to it, and begun to pull it away, he said: "No one reached the electric fence. There were a large number of martyrs. The soldiers were on high hills of dirt and the first shootings were toward the top of people's heads."
The International Federation of Journalists identified nine journalists who were wounded on May 14, including photojournalist Farhan Abu Hadayed, 26, who was shot at around noon. He and two other witnesses, whom Human Rights Watch interviewed separately, said that he was about 150 meters from the fences wearing a flak jacket marked "Press" when he was shot in the leg. Abu Hadayed said that about 15 journalists had begun to follow a large group of demonstrators who were walking in the direction of the fences when "without any prior warning, and no firing of tear gas, they shot four people in the legs, and I was the fifth."
A freelance photojournalist, Mohammad Qandil, said he also saw the shooting and held onto Abu Hadayed's camera when he was evacuated to an ambulance. Abu Hadayed had gone to the protests with Ramzi al-Shakhreet, the supervisor at his media company, Truth Pioneers Network. Al-Shakreet, 34, said he was five meters away when Abu Hadayed was shot, and that "there was a clear line of sight from him to the soldiers at the fence. He was shot while he was taking photos."
Al-Shakhreet also told Human Rights Watch that he saw two other protesters shot at around 1 p.m. A man in his 50s had approached to within 15 meters of the steel fence, waving a Palestinian flag, when he was shot in the head and apparently died instantly. A man in his mid-20s was about 150 meters from the fences when he was shot in the left leg: "He was seven or eight meters from me, I was to his right side, and he was shot while standing in the middle of the group of protesters, not doing anything except watching," said al-Shakreet.
On April 6, Israeli forces had fatally shot another journalist, Yasser Murtaja, in the abdomen between 1:30 and 2:30 in the afternoon while he was covering demonstrations east of Khan Yunis. Another journalist, Muthana al-Najar, said that Murtaja "stepped forward to film someone who was injured on the ground, he had just turned to his right when he was shot in the left side of his waist."
Al-Najar said that there was thick smoke near the fences because protesters had been burning tires, but that he had a clear view of some snipers on a hill of dirt on the opposite side of the fences. Murtaja was more than 200 meters from the fences and was wearing a vest marked "Press" when he was shot. Murtaja was holding a digital camera and had told al-Najar he was filming a documentary about the weekly demonstrations. The Israeli military has opened an internal inquiry into some specific deaths, including Murtaja's.
Human Rights Watch interviewed Abd el-Rahman Abu Qamar, a 14-year-old boy, at his bedside at al- Shifa hospital on May 17. He said he was running away from teargas and shooting and was about 200 meters from the fences east of Gaza City when he was shot in the leg at about 2 p.m. on May 14. His brother, Malek, 18, who went with his brother to the demonstration, said they were in a large group "chanting for Jerusalem." Malek said Israeli forces fired on the group and he hit the ground to avoid the bullets, and then saw a paramedic and a civil defense worker evacuating Abd el-Rahman.
Defense for Children International-Palestine reported the names of six boys and a girl who were killed with live ammunition on May 14, the youngest being 13-year-old Izz al-Samak. Five were shot in the head or neck, and two in the abdomen.
Samer Nasser, 23, said he was part of a group east of Jabalya that was throwing stones and trying to approach the barbed-wire fence to cut it with wire-cutters when a man near him was shot in the arm. Nasser had driven a "tuk tuk," a three-wheeled motorized vehicle, to the area. He loaded the wounded man onto it and was driving away to reach medical treatment when Israeli forces "started shooting heavily," Nasser said. "The injured man in my tuk tuk was shot again in the head and immediately died, and I was shot in the thigh. I was bleeding for 15 minutes, and had to crawl until I reached a woman who helped me."
Human Rights Watch obtained a video from another Gaza resident, Jamil Barakat, who said he filmed the woman who helped Nasser. In the video she is shown seeking cover behind a rock, gesturing to Nasser and encouraging him to crawl toward her. Barakat was also taking shelter behind the rock. "We were luckily not shot, but we were unable to move forward or backward for half an hour because they opened fire at us," Barakat said. Barakat confirmed that the wounded man whom Nasser had put on his tuk tuk died before he could be evacuated. Nasser said that he participated in the demonstration to protest the US embassy move to Jerusalem (which happened on the same day as the 14 May protest), and Israel's closure of Gaza.
Maher Harara, a 48-year-old from al-Shujaiya, a neighborhood east of Gaza City, said he saw a woman's finger shot off as she was making a victory sign while facing the fences east of Gaza City at around 1 p.m. on May 14. She was about 40 meters from the fences. Harara was himself shot a few hours later. He had attended each of the protests since March 30 without being injured but was shot in his left leg at about 5 p.m. on May 14 in the same area, 40 meters from the fences: "I was not holding anything, even my mobile phone was in my pocket, and I was standing by myself, but maybe they shot me because I was wearing black trousers and a black t-shirt so they thought I was a leader, but I wasn't."
An 18-year-old youth said he was shot in the ankle in the Malaka area east of Gaza City, about 30 meters from the fences, in the afternoon of May 14:
There were about 50 people in front of me, they were the front group of protesters. I was watching them. Suddenly I fell down on the ground, shot in the leg. I was completely peaceful, doing nothing, just there because of the situation [the opening of the US embassy] in Jerusalem. I stood behind the main group assuming that would be safe, but they hit me. Around me there were a few guys throwing stones, and others burning tires, flying kites, and using slingshots. I also saw an old man get shot in his leg, he was 15 meters in front of me toward the fence, but also just standing and watching.
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AMERICAS
Mexican groups seek ICC probe of drug war crimes by military (The Monitor) By Mike Corder June 11, 2018
Human rights organizations called on International Criminal Court prosecutors Monday to investigate atrocities allegedly committed by the Mexican military in a crackdown on drug crime in the Chihuahua region.
The rights groups presented a dossier to prosecutors documenting alleged slayings, torture, rapes and forced disappearances involving 121 victims during 2008-2010, saying they amounted to crimes against humanity.
The groups allege that military vehicles and facilities were used during the crimes and that the cases "reveal the existence of a clear organized policy by the authorities against the civilian population."
They want ICC action because of the "lack of independence and impartiality" of Mexican judicial authorities and the absence of "authentic national procedures," the groups said.
It is the third time the rights groups have sought ICC action on Mexico. Previously, they presented cases from Coahuila and Baja California.
The court has not yet opened a preliminary investigation into any of the cases.
Even so, activists see progress in some judicial reforms in Mexico since they began submitting their evidence to the ICC several years ago.
When we started the work on submitting the communication, the issue of international crimes being committed in Mexico was not an issue," said Jimena Reyes, Director for the Americas for the International Federation for Human Rights. "So right now it is on the table, on the agenda."
However, she added when it comes to investigating allegations of atrocities leveled at the armed forces, "the state of Mexico is in complete denial. They don't want to hear about crimes against humanity."
The military has played a central role in the war on drug cartels since at least late 2006, when the then- newly installed President Felipe Calderon deployed soldiers across the country to fight the gangs. The militarized offensive has continued under current President Enrique Pena Nieto.
A study published last year by the Washington Office on Latin America concluded that the vast majority of human rights abuses allegedly committed by soldiers in Mexico's war on drug gangs go unsolved and unpunished despite reforms letting civilian authorities investigate and prosecute such crimes.
The study found there were just 16 convictions of soldiers in the civilian judicial system out of 505 criminal investigations from 2012 through 2016, a prosecutorial success rate of 3.2 percent. Moreover, there were only two "chain of command responsibility" convictions for officers whose orders led to abuses, it said. One was of an officer involved in a forced disappearance case in Chihuahua.
The ICC is a court of last resort, set up to prosecute the most senior perpetrators of serious crimes when local authorities cannot or will not take on cases.
When it comes to responsibility of the armed forces, we have not had a single positive development. There is almost 100-percent impunity for the crimes by the (Mexican) armed forces," said Jose Antonio Guevara Bermudez, Executive Director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human
The disappeared of Guatemala: a family’s search for their murdered son (The Guardian) By Nina Lakhani June 14, 2018
As the court delivered the damning verdict convicting powerful ex-military officers of crimes against humanity, sexual violence and the forced disappearance of 14-year-old Marco Antonio Molina Theissen, his three older sisters and mother clung to each other and wept.
It’s almost 37 years since the schoolboy was bundled into a sack by officers after they had ransacked the family home looking for his sister, Emma Guadalupe, who had managed to escape a military torture chamber.
Marco Antonio’s family has never stopped looking for him, but the boy who dreamed of becoming an engineer was disappeared by a military regime that considered children fair game in its quest to crush political dissent.
The guilty verdicts handed down in Guatemala City last month satisfied the Molina Theissen family’s pursuit for justice against the former “untouchables” – the high command that ordered the systematic persecution, torture, murder and disappearance of civilians considered enemies of the state.
Peacetime efforts to tackle impunity have been impeded by the domination of post-war governments by military strongmen. Now is no exception. In the aftermath of the verdict, as rescue workers searched for victims of the Fuego volcano, politicians with military links attempted to sneak through a reform guaranteeing impunity for officers accused of crimes against humanity.
The convictions in Marco Antonio’s case were a victory not just for his family but for thousands of Guatemalans whose lives were destroyed by a US-backed counterinsurgency war masquerading as a legitimate national security policy.
“The verdict is in our name but belongs to all the people like us, who were terrorised and bereaved just for thinking differently,” Maria Eugenia Molina Theissen, one of Marco Antonio’s sisters, tells the Guardian.
However, the legal win was bittersweet. An unofficial military pact of silence means the fundamental question remains unanswered: where is Marco Antonio?
“The verdict validated our testimonies as part of Guatemala’s historical truth, and to get justice after years of struggle is hugely satisfying. But we are left crying because the pain and bitterness over Marco Antonio’s disappearance are still with us,” says Emma Guadalupe, who was 21 when she was captured, in September 1981, after attending a political meeting.
The young activist was taken for interrogation to a military base in Quetzaltenango, western Guatemala, but refused to collaborate. She was given electric shocks to the eyelids, was raped by her captors, and deprived of food and water to create sensory disorientation. Emma escaped by slipping through the cell railings because she had lost so much weight. She fled to Mexico a few weeks later, unaware that her little brother had been taken, most likely in retaliation for her audacious escape.
“Those men know what happened to Marco Antonio, they know where he is, but they won’t tell us,” she says.
Fighting back tears, her mother, Emma Theissen Álvarez de Molina, 84, adds: “It’s very unlikely they will tell us. What I hope is that one day, one person who saw what they did and where they buried my son [will come] forward. Perhaps I won’t be here to see that day, but that’s my hope.”
An estimated 45,000 civilians were forcibly disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict, including 5,000 children who, like Marco Antonio, were snatched and never returned. The whereabouts of most victims remains a torturous mystery for their families.
The armed forces and allied paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of violations during the conflict, which includes more than 150,000 murders in addition to the disappearances, according to the post-war Commission for Historical Clarification.
Indigenous Mayans accounted for 83% of the victims. For Mayans, the burial ritual represents a crucial step between life and death. Mayans believe that until this has taken place, the deceased cannot enter the spiritual world and the survivors will be tormented by their frightened spirits.
The state has shown little interest in tackling this anguish despite various international court rulings. A civil society initiative to establish a national commission to search for the disappeared has been blocked by congress since 2006.
Instead, the search has been left to courageous families, backed by tenacious prosecutors and scientists who have vowed to uncover the truth.
In an inconspicuous colonial house-turned-high-tech lab on the northern outskirts of the capital, the independently funded Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) is dedicated to identifying and returning disappeared loved ones to their families.
Laid on one table are the bones of two women found buried together, which have been cleaned, X-Rayed and arranged in the correct anatomical position. The younger woman was found with shoes but no clothes. The older woman’s cranium was shattered by a single bullet; she was still wearing a threadbare huipil, or embroidered blouse. A handful of coins give clues to the date of death. On another table sits a set of milk teeth from a different grave.
Tissue samples sent for DNA profiling will take several months to process. Then, quality permitting, the profiles will be digitally crosschecked with the 14,000 samples on the FAFG genetic database. From excavation to identification, this is painstaking, expensive work hindered by the military’s refusal to share information.
In spite of this, the FAFG says it has so far uncovered graves in 37 of the 44 military bases its archaeologists have exhumed. Of the 1,510 victims recovered, many were found blindfolded, gagged, with hands tied.
“In the few bases where we’ve not found bodies, it’s because we’ve not yet looked in the right place,” says José Suasnavar, deputy director of FAFG.
There were secret military installations in most of the 300 or so municipalities – like councils – during the conflict, some spread out over acres of private farmland. Without leads from witnesses, it’s like looking for a yellow needle in a giant haystack.
Executed victims were also buried in public cemeteries. In La Verbena, a big cemetery in the capital, FAFG archaeologists discovered 16,000 unidentified bodies in common graves. The cemetery register lists 879 unidentified bodies from 1980 to 1984 – the war’s bloodiest period – with at least one execution- style bullet wound.
It’s possible that Marco Antonio is among the victims, but only 10 people have so far been identified. It’s a matter of resources and military secrets.
“For us to move forward with the search for Marco Antonio, information from the armed forces about where to look is essential … but they won’t give it up,” says Suasnavar.
The Molina Theissen case is the 14th criminal prosecution of civil war crimes since the 1996 peace accords – and the first against high-ranking officers since the 2013 genocide verdict was controversially returned to trial.
The family’s eldest sibling, Ana Lucrecia, 63, who spearheaded the legal chase, explains why she could never let it go. “They were my youngest siblings … I’ve been driven by an absolute conviction that something so atrocious, so cruel, so perverse and ruthless could not go unpunished.”
The four military men were sentenced to between 33 and 58 years in jail. The court has since ordered an array of reparations, including the long-awaited national commission, financial rewards for individuals who turn in credible information about clandestine graves, and the conversion of the base where Emma was tortured into a museum of memory. Those found guilty in the Molina Theissen case will appeal against the verdict, but for the family, justice has been served no matter what the court rules. Now, they just want Marco Antonio back.
“Like thousands and thousands of other families, all we want is a chance to give him one last hug and bury him so we have a place to go and cry, and to leave flowers,” says Emma.
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South America
The Stunning Scale of Latin America's Migration Crisis (America’s Quarterly) By Robert Muggah, Maiara Folly and Adriana Abdenur June 20, 2018
The images of children being forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.- Mexico border are shocking by any standard. At least 2,300 children have been separated from their parents over the past two months alone, many of them fleeing unspeakable violence in Mexico and Central America. Their parents have been marched to detention centers where they languish for weeks. Stories are emerging of breastfeeding babies, toddlers, adolescents and teenagers penned up in cages. There are another 10,700 unaccompanied minors also languishing in U.S. custody.
As grim as the domestic situation is, it is just the tip of the international iceberg.
The world is in the grips of a monumental forced migration crisis. More than 68 million people are on the move, running away from armed conflicts and other forms of persecution and human rights violations. Over 25 million of them are refugees; the rest are internally displaced and stateless people. The last time so many humans were on the run was during World War II. And people are not just fleeing war zones in Africa and the Middle East, but from organized crime across the Americas.
As the recently introduced zero tolerance immigration policies in the U.S. amply show, there are signs of growing intolerance for asylum seekers and other migrants. In the U.S., refugee admissions have fallen by over 85 percent, from more than 200,000 in 1980, when the U.S. Federal Refugee Resettlement Program was created, to less than 28,000 in 2017. The new strategy launched by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April is draconian: virtually all people arriving illegally are to be apprehended, detained and prosecuted. Some 226,000 immigrants were deported from the U.S. in the 12 months ending September 30, 2017. The relief organization Doctors Without Borders called the new policy a “death sentence” for Central Americans fleeing violence.
Europeans are also hardening their attitude toward new arrivals. Some countries are barricading their borders to prevent migrants from entering and making it harder for those already there to remain. Italy’s newly elected coalition government says it will deport an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 undocumented immigrants during its term, despite a sharp decrease in migration credited to a highly controversial deal between the European Union and the Libyan government (migrants are being rounded up by the coast guard and returned to detention centers in their countries of origin).
Western politicians’ complaints about “floods” of refugees and illegal migrants are seldom backed by evidence. The U.S. accepts no more than 0.6 percent of the world’s refugee population annually. Europe does marginally better: Germany is the only OECD country that ranks among the world’s top 10 refugee- hosting nations, accepting 1 percent of all refugees in 2016. In fact, the vast majority of refugees and migrants are not moving from the poorest to wealthiest countries but rather moving between one poor country and another. The burden assumed by countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iran, Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Democratic of Republic of the Congo is an order of magnitude larger than that borne by the U.S. In other words, the daily responsibility to care for and support the world’s forced migrants falls squarely on the poor. In the meantime, Latin America is experiencing another, silent, displacement crisis. Organized crime and violence is forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes every year. At least 17 of the top 20 most homicidal countries in the world are in Latin America and the Caribbean. And while the region has traditionally been welcoming to new arrivals, that spirit of solidarity is dissipating in part from the sheer scale of population displacement, which has overwhelmed response capacity at the national and municipal levels.
South America’s displacement crisis
It is neither Syria nor South Sudan that faces the world’s largest displacement crisis, but Colombia, where there were 7.3 million registered internally displaced people as of early 2017. Another 340,000 Colombian refugees are still abroad, mainly in Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama and Costa Rica, despite a peace deal in 2016 that effectively ended the war between FARC guerrillas and the Colombian government. Some would-be returnees are still wary of reprisal violence and threats from National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels and rump factions of the FARC who have yet to lay down their weapons.
Right next door, Venezuela’s prolonged political, economic and security crisis has also created a massive displacement emergency, as over 1.5 million Venezuelans have fled the country. Roughly one million of them have relocated to Colombian border towns, causing levels of intolerance and xenophobia to skyrocket. As of March, 146,000 Venezuelans had filed asylum claims worldwide and another 444,000 had been granted temporary and permanent residence permits abroad, a 2,000 percent increase from just three years ago. They are escaping threats of political persecution and criminal violence, but are also in search of food, medicine and basic services.
Brazil is hardly immune from displacement. Although fewer than 5,000 Brazilians have requested refugee asylum in other countries since 2014, Brazil is also suffering from a monumental internal displacement emergency. A combination of development projects (e.g. hydro-electric dams, mining concessions, federal highways), natural disasters and organized violence has resulted in the displacement of 7.7 million Brazilians since 2000. Added to this are close to 10,000 refugees in the country and over 35,000 asylum seekers. One reason for the spike in new arrivals is the 53,000 Venezuelans who have sought sanctuary in Brazil since the beginning of 2017, roughly half of whom are seeking asylum. Despite ongoing humanitarian operations in border areas, most new Venezuelan arrivals face precarious living conditions, and Brazilians are growing impatient for a solution.
Central America’s displacement nightmare
The Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are experiencing the most severe displacement crises since their civil wars of the late 20th century. Roughly 130,000 people applied for asylum from these three countries in 2017 – a 1,500 percent increase since 2011. Most of them are seeking protection in Mexico and the U.S., but the majority are being denied. Indeed, efforts such as Programa Frontera Sur, a U.S.-backed plan to militarize Mexico’s southern border, have sought to stem the northward migration of Central Americans. Those who cannot afford to flee north have been internally displaced, often repeatedly. Honduras has roughly 190,000 internally displaced people, equivalent to 4 percent of the country’s population. In El Salvador, at least 71,500 people were displaced due to violence between 2006 and 2016. Similar to their Northern Triangle neighbors, they face threats of aggression, homicide, targeted assassination, extortion and child recruitment by gangs.
Complicating matters, the U.S. increased deportations of undocumented immigrants arriving from Central America and Mexico and tightened restrictions on new would-be asylum claimants. In fiscal year 2017 alone, the U.S. deported 75,000 nationals from the Northern Triangle countries. With the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) this year for Salvadorans, nearly 200,000 people risked of deportation; 57,000 Hondurans will face the same fate in 2020. The mass deportation of illegal migrants and convicted felons from Mexico and Central America was not started by the current administration, although President Donald Trump has dramatically ratcheted up those efforts since coming into office.
Mexico’s spiraling cartel violence and the government’s militarized response have also triggered unprecedented levels of displacement. The threat of organized crime, kidnappings, forced recruitment into drug trafficking organizations and gangs, as well as other forms of intimidation, are forcing people to pack their bags and seek safer ground. At the end of 2017, an estimated 345,000 Mexicans were internally displaced. Another 64,000 had applied for asylum and more than 10,000 were recognized as refugees, mostly in the U.S. At the same time, asylum applications by those entering Mexico have soared by 150 percent since 2017, most arriving from Central America and Venezuela. A regional response is needed
Latin America’s interlocking displacement crises cannot be solved by a single state: they require a combination of regional and national responses. The good news is that governments across the region have offered rhetorical support for refugees in the 1984 Cartagena Declaration, the 1994 San José Declaration on Refugees and Displaced Persons and the 2014 Brazil Declaration and Plan of Action. Most Latin American countries have ensured that their national legislation is in line with international standards. This means they’ve introduced policies to facilitate the free movement of people and have taken steps to promote local integration, including through the formation of emergency assistance committees and the voluntary relocation of asylum seekers from poorer to wealthier areas.
Even so, the region is struggling to mount a coordinated and collaborative response. Approaches are fragmented and piecemeal. The development of a comprehensive regional approach – with support from partners such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Bank, among others – could facilitate more collective action. Given the sheer scale of the displacement crisis, Latin American governments will need some kind of Pan-American mechanism to set priorities, pool resources, scale up humanitarian action, and promote local integration measures for housing, education, health and work for both refugees and internally displaced people. They could do worse than to double down on the Regional Solidarity Resettlement Program, the Cities of Solidarity Initiative and the Borders of Solidarity program established over a decade ago.
Ultimately, the region’s governments, private sector and civil societies will need to take concrete efforts to tackle the underlying causes of forced migration, rather than responding to emergencies after the fact. This means tackling long-standing problems related to the structural inequality, grinding poverty, corrosive impunity and spiraling criminal violence shaping patterns of forced migration. Such actions should be backed by a regional data collection and sharing mechanism to help governments and service providers adapt to rapidly changing migration dynamics on the ground. Some of these priorities are expected to be addressed in two new global compacts – one for safe, orderly and regular migration and another for refugees – currently being negotiated in the United Nations. They also feature prominently in recently agreed-upon Sustainable Development Goals. The task now is to convert bold intentions into outcomes on the ground.
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TOPICS
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
To tell the truth (Daily Times) By Salman Tarik Kureshi June 15, 2018
On that fateful August day, nearly thirty years ago, by chance I had stayed home from work owing to an upset stomach. Apart from that, my telephone was out of order (these were the days before cell phones). Feeling better towards tea-time, I made myself comfortable on the sofa in my lounge, where my little daughter brought the classwork project on which she wanted my help and that of my wife. The TV was on and it displayed the snarling face and hooded eyes of the dictator- of-the-day, as it too frequently did. I turned it off and, through that evening, cut off from communication with the outside, we concentrated on my daughter’s project. Thus it my family and I were unaware of the huge events that transpired that day. When I went out for my morning paper the next morning. Ziaul Haq had been killed in an air crash. The reign of the satanic dictator was over. Possibilities… and hopes… could come alive again.
However, there was a big question: Who had killed him? Could it have been Al-Zulfikar? Or members of a disgruntled minority sect? The Americans (sacrificing their own Ambassador)? The Indians? The Russians? The Iranis? Who? We did not know. And we still do not know. The truth about that assassination has never been told, perhaps never will be.
For that is the way of things in this country. The truth is too seldom told. Consider the Bhutto hanging. How did Bhutto actually die? Was he hanged or beaten to death or starved? And (since the case against Bhutto is generally regarded as false), who actually murdered Nawab Mohammed Ahmed Khan? And why?
This is a land of lies and secrets, the lies we tell ourselves and the secrets we keep from our people. To begin with, even the very narratives of the Independence movement were contrived well after the event, with concepts like ‘the ideology of Pakistan’ being promoted by Yahya Khan’s fanatical Information Minister General Sher Ali Khan as late as 1969. In the poisonous Zia era, the wholesale rewriting of the history of this region achieved the seal of completion. As a result, our origins and identities have become confused and lost in a non-historical melange of half-truths and outright lies.
Who were the assassins of Liaquat Ali Khan? Hayat Sherpao? Benazir Bhutto? Akbar Bugti? How did Hassan Nasir die? Or Shaheed Suhrawardy? Or Shahnawaz Bhutto? Or Murtaza Bhutto? Or Saleem Shahzad? One could go on in this refrain forever.
The worst examples are the lies we tell ourselves regarding the wars we have fought. We celebrate the 1965 war as a victory, whereas the valour and fighting ability of our officers and men was squandered in defending Lahore and Sialkot when we had set out to conquer Kashmir. Worse still was the 1971 war when, unable to accept the confederal arrangement for which our then largest province had voted, and unwilling to negotiate with them, the dictator of the day unleashed unspeakable violence upon our former nationals and handed over half the country to the Indian army.
The Zia regime spun every kind of confusing fog around the origins and purpose of the so-called ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union, we were told, had this inexplicable thirst for warm waters that was driving them southwards to conquer first Afghanistan and then Pakistan. And the Afghan ‘jihad’ had arisen in ‘spontaneous’ resistance against this. Looking back at what proved to be one of the most fateful decision points in Pakistan’s history, it is doubtful we will ever know the truth about what happened back then.
Narratives about how and why Mullah Omar’s Taliban warriors went into Afghanistan from Pakistan in 1994 also remain murky. This was an event which had serious repercussions for Pakistan, Afghanistan and the world at large. What actually happened at Ojhri Camp? What gives the Lal Masjid preachers the fortitude to sustain their verbal aggression?
More recent still is the Osama mystery. Beyond the issue of violation of our sovereignty by the US armed forces, the reality is that the most wanted man in the world was living here among us for nine years. This presumed fugitive enjoyed the ministrations of three (no less) wives, numerous children, and assorted servants. Yet no one spotted one of the world’s most recognisable faces as he moved his substantial entourage to Peshawar, Karachi, Haripur, and finally Abbottabad?
The purpose of this article is not to speculate about these mysteries, only to point at some of the secrets around us and the fogs that surround them. We are not helped by the smokescreens created by many of our political leaders, media personalities and so-called ‘analysts’. It is more than being in a state of denial; it is active collusion in spreading the web of lies that is strangling the people of Pakistan.
Former Prime Minister (PM) Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has proposed a Truth and Reconciliation commission. This could certainly be a starting point, but the actual materialisation of such a commission remains doubtful. Even his own Party’s maximum leader would have difficulty accepting such a concept.
The point is that it is long past time that our various leaderships and authorities ‘came clean’ before the people. Corruption, mass murder, and outright treason have been perpetrated upon the citizens of Pakistan. They deserve to know the truth. It is necessary to point fingers and name names, rather than continually sputter on about ‘conspiracies’.
Having come clean, we must ‘clean up’. I do not believe there is any ambiguity about what has to be done and, clearly, the process of deep disinfection has to be complete. Nevertheless, and this is the point, the people first need to know the truth of where things have gone wrong, and they need to endorse and participate enthusiastically in the processes of rectification.
It is necessary to tell the truth… before the processes of history render both the truth and ourselves redundant.
Vancouver plazas get new Indigenous names as part of reconciliation process (Global News) By Neetu Garcha June 18, 2018
A couple of busy Vancouver outdoor spaces have been given new Indigenous names as part of the city’s ongoing reconciliation process with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
The plaza in front of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is now known as šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl’a7shn, which refers to a place one is invited to celebrate and is connected to the past use of the plaza as a gathering place for the Walk for Reconciliation, according to a City of Vancouver news release.
The north plaza of the Vancouver Art Gallery is now called šxʷƛ̓ənəq Xwtl’e7énḵ Square, referring to a place where a cultural gathering, like a wedding or funeral, occurs.
“The celebrations that happen in this square are among the most important in our city and certainly in history, so thank you very much [to] the people who have given us these new names to the square to honour the square and to make sure our local languages are first and foremost in this central gathering place,” Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson said at a ceremony held to announce the name changes.
Robertson said these name changes, announced at Vancouver’s Walk for Reconciliation last summer, have been in the works for a long time and are all part of a process that began years ago with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Today this naming and renaming ceremony is an important next step,” Robertson said.
“We are a city with many immigrants and we have a lot of work to do to not only acknowledge and heal from all of the challenges and troubles of the past, but to build this future together,” he added.
Many Vancouverites are going to have to learn the new names and struggling to pronounce them is all part of the process, according to B.C. Minister of Citizens’ Services, Jinny Sims.
“Just imagine what it was like for the First Nations and the Indigenous people who lived here when people arrived from Europe and suddenly started to put English names everywhere, using the English language, and how challenging it must have been for them,” Sims said at the event on Monday.
Signage for each of the plazas, expected to be installed sometime in the fall, is being designed by city staff collaborating with Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.
Peace Regimes (Boston Review) June 20, 2018
Peace has always been a tortured, malleable term. Similar to “democracy” or “freedom,” its political usage has been stretched beyond the breaking point. Consider most recently when President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un met at a luxury resort in Singapore, the site of a former British colonial post, and signed a short statement promising that “The United States and the DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”
“Peace regime” is a particularly contrived usage, instructive in its tensions. A regime is imposed from without, which begs the questions: whose peace, in this peace regime, is being insured, and who is subject to its imposition? To insist that such a regime is a kind of peace is to willfully forget the violence you are, in fact, wreaking. Nonetheless, the idea of a “peace regime” has long been employed in U.S.–Korean relations. The many meanings have, in this context, been the battleground for discussing U.S. power, wartime violence, and U.S. racial politics. The U.S. military occupation in South Korea after partition (1945–1948) kept the Cold War peace through suppressing dissent. The Korean War—which was devastatingly violent for all sides— was described as a “war for peace” by President Truman. And most tellingly, during the Korean War, U.S. antiwar sentiment organized around the war and Jim Crow through a competing version of “peace.”
As we potentially enter the fourth “peace regime” for Korea, it is important to understand the competing claims that have been made and to ask what a true peace on the peninsula might entail. As Korean activists have themselves argued repeatedly, a truly democratic reconciliation isn't going to come from either Trump or Kim, but from a real reckoning with the civil war violence and division that has been wrought on the peninsula in peace’s name.
The first U.S. peace regime in Korea was a military occupation. After the end of World War II, Korea— which had been a Japanese colony—was divided at the 38th parallel into two states, with the Soviet Union overseeing the north and the United States, the south. On August 15, 1945, the United States Army’s 24th Corps moved from Okinawa to take over from the departing Japanese colonial government in Seoul.
The country’s division, which was decided without Korean input, prompted thousands of Koreans to enter mass democratic politics, since many Koreans had hoped the end of colonialism would mean an independent, unified Korean state. A network of people’s committees rapidly formed a provisional government and called for progressive reforms, including land redistribution and women’s rights.
U.S. foreign policy, however, was interested in the fitful peace of communist containment, not popular democracy. The “basic principle” of U.S. forces in Korea was, as an official Army history expounded in 1947, “an orderly, efficiently operated, and politically friendly Korea,” which was “more important than pleasing and winning the enthusiastic cooperation of all the Korean people.”
The character of the first peace regime was colonial. Commanding U.S. General John Hodge quickly set the tone by calling Koreans “the same breed of cats” as the Japanese. In his initial statement to the Korean people, Hodge warned that “Hasty and ill-advised acts on the part of its residents will only result in unnecessary loss of life [and] desolation.”
Hodge told Koreans that Americans’ “long heritage of democracy” would guide their transition toward a new government, but the new military government’s peace regime borrowed much from Japanese colonial institutions. One of Hodge’s first acts was to set an 8pm curfew for Koreans celebrating their liberation from thirty years of colonial control.
After several popular revolts threatened the military government’s legitimacy, Hodge instituted highly systematized surveillance, the prohibition of political meetings, counterinsurgency tactics in the countryside, and mass preemptive arrests. As a U.S. officer told journalist Mark Gayn in 1946, “The machine is the same we found when we got here. For our purposes, it’s an ideal setup. . . . All you have to do is push the button, and somewhere some cop begins skull cracking. They’ve been learning the business under the Japs for thirty-five years.”
In insisting that U.S. military officers knew how to run the government better than Koreans, the peace regime was white man’s burden redux. As Hodge once wrote, “our imperialism hasn't been a bad imperialism”—and to the cold warriors in Washington, that imperialism kept the peace.
By 1947, President Truman declared in his famous “Truman Doctrine” speech that U.S. military force would be employed to prevent communism anywhere in the world, even if it meant supporting corrupt or dictatorial regimes.
“The free peoples of the world,” Truman argued, “look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.” To keep the peace, U.S. military bases spread rapidly around the globe.
The official military occupation in Korea lasted three years (though U.S. soldiers are still stationed there to this day). By late 1947, Washington turned the Korea situation—still mettlesome with popular unrest— over to the United Nations. The UN sponsored a series of elections that helped elect the conservative Korean diplomat Syngman Rhee, who had built a sycophantic career in the halls of Washington rather than the streets of Seoul. Under Rhee, the nominally independent new Republic of Korea developed into an authoritarian state built around a proto-fascist political philosophy of Korean racial purity and a reliance on U.S. military forces and rightist vigilante youth groups. The United States relied on the continuance of the peace regime and Rhee supplied it, as his authoritarian successors would do until South Korea’s mass movement for democracy swept them from power in 1987.
The second U.S. peace regime in Korea was a war.
The Korean War was essentially a civil war over the fate of the newly independent Korea. But it was overlain by the U.S.–USSR global rivalry, and it soon involved a newly communist China fighting alongside North Korea. This was a war fought by the United States from 1950–1953 to maintain a western sphere of influence in East Asia: militarization was the method of the peace’s export.
Several months after the start of the war, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations called on the General Assembly to “unite for peace” against the Soviet threat. They did, and this language of a war for peace appeared throughout all three years of official communications, wartime newsreels, and television news specials.
But the peace secured through wartime violence was not meant for Korean civilians, on any side of the conflict. This was a war fought for territory and control, and—because of the prevalence of communist guerillas in the South and North Korea’s use of guerrilla tactics—it quickly became a counterinsurgent war. In the first few months of the war, the lines of battle moved up and down the peninsula. Seoul changed hands four times and was left in ruins.
For those living in the battle zones, which was everyone at some point, it meant you were on the wrong side at least part of the time. U.S. and South Korean forces began forcibly evacuating towns thought to be sympathetic to communist guerillas, a tactic later used in Vietnam.
Eventually, “no man’s land” zones of destruction were created around all United Nations lines to ensure the absence of guerrilla troops. Sometimes, whole villages were burned to keep them safe. As the New York Times reported, U.S. soldiers used their cigarette lighters on the thatched-roof huts while occupants were still inside. The U.S Air Force was ordered to shoot any refugees moving toward military positions. They did. Chun Choon-ja, who was ten years old when U.S. warplanes strafed her evacuating village, said, “It looked like heaven crashed on us.”
The South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission study, begun in 2005, found evidence of 1,461 massacres of Korean civilians by all military forces during the war. “My Lais,” U.S. intelligence chief General Charles Willoughby later argued, happened “all the time” in Korea.
Unlike the ground combat in the South, in the North the United States fought the war through massive bombing campaigns that specifically targeted infrastructure. By 1952, nearly all of northern and central Korea was destroyed, and the surviving North Korean population had to form an underground society in caves, creating complexes of schools, factories, hospitals, and living spaces. An estimated 3 million Koreans were killed in the war—roughly 10 percent of the total population—with five million more displaced.
Nor did the war ensure a peace for the U.S. soldier. Young, largely untrained, exhausted, frightened, and dropped in the middle of a guerrilla war, the majority of U.S. combat troops were said to get “the combat spooks” or “bug out” and to fall into the habit of shooting at any perceived threat.
African American soldiers, though in a technically “integrated” U.S. military, were ordered into dangerous combat more often and with less time for psychological rest. When they tended to “bug out,” racism helped make sense of the situation, as superiors chalked up their reaction to racial cowardice.
Racism also structured the Korean War’s violence. As British war journalist Reginald Thompson drove out of Seoul in a U.S. Army jeep that plowed through Korean refugees, he realized that, to the Americans, the Koreans “had to be ‘Gooks’, for otherwise these essentially kind and generous Americans would not have been able to kill them indiscriminately or smash up their homes and poor belongings.”
The stress of the early months of the war was palpable: between inexperience, fear, and racist terror, many soldiers panicked, shot in fear, or shot civilians in a frenzy. The work of LIFE photographer David Douglas Duncan, who died last week, portrayed the psychic toll on young Americans as the most meaningful experience of the war. The psychic toll was certainly prevalent: in the first month of the war, more U.S. soldiers were evacuated for psychiatric casualties than for bodily wounds. In 1987, a survey by the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs found that 35 percent of diagnosed PTSD patients who fought in Korea had attempted suicide, four times the rate of those from World War II.
After armistice in 1953, the Cold War peace regime in South Korea was an alliance reliant on a substantial U.S. military presence in South Korea. Since the earliest occupation days, the Pentagon had trained, bankrolled, and maintained South Korea’s military (and, later, its CIA), and the United States maintained its political and practical support of the dictatorial regimes of Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan—all of whom used repressive force against their own people.
When, in 1980, pro-democracy protests in the southwestern city of Gwangju were brutally attacked by national troops, many activists hoped the United States might intervene on their behalf, given President Carter’s emphasis on human rights. The peace regime, however, did not allow it.
As journalist Tim Shorrock’s painstaking research shows, the United States was informed of the events and chose not to prevent, comment, or apologize for them, instead preferring to maintain, in the words of U.S. officials, “law and order.”
Official figures put Gwangju’s death toll at 200, but critics have argued it is more likely in the thousands.
The third U.S. peace regime took place in the United States; it was known as anticommunism.
After World War II, U.S. peace activists—including a diverse array of concerned scientists, civil rights organizers, labor leaders, communists, and liberals—joined together to oppose nuclear weapons and Cold War militarization. Some saw new international organizations such as the United Nations as the best arena for this work. Others worked through the global network of World Peace Congresses established by local Communist Parties—an initiative begun in Moscow that quickly became broad left centers for activism. The anti-nuclear Stockholm Appeal, signed by 100 million people around the world (including 1 million Americans) was one measure of their reach.
When Chinese forces entered the Korean War, in late fall of 1950, Truman threatened the use of nuclear weapons to protect “a just and peaceful world order.” What had seemed like a quick U.S. victory in Korea now began to stretch into a bloody and violent stalemate, and public opinion began to turn. Radical peace activists organized protests for an immediate cease-fire in Korea.
In late November 1950, Paul Robeson, the famous concert singer and communist, led a sit-in of 150 teenagers at the United Nations headquarters at Lake Success. That same afternoon, an additional twenty-one busloads of women and children unloaded and demanded to be heard in the Economic and Social Council meeting.
“Housewives from all five boroughs of New York City, the majority of them Brooklynites,” the New York Times reported, “filled every seat and packed the aisle,” while “children holding colored balloons stamped ‘Peace’ chased one another.”
This second protest was the work of American Women for Peace, a coalition that emphasized women’s particular stake in peace activism as mothers and potential mothers. AWP began framing peace as an issue of class and social welfare. Eleanor Roosevelt called the day’s protests “silly” and told the women and children to “go home and be quiet.” The AWP argued that they could not: “Every penny spent for war preparations and atom bomb stockpiling means food and shelter and adequate schools taken from our children.”
The peace regime, they argued, was not securing peace for their families. They urged women to send the President Mother’s Day postcards lobbying an end to the war in Korea and the stockpiling of bombs.
Black women were most consistently against the war than any other part of the U.S. population. Leading activists and cultural figures such as Beulah Richardson, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, and Claudia Jones became leaders in the AWP and formed other organizations (such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice and the Harriet Tubman Association) to connect U.S. militarism with U.S. racism. Thousands of buttons reading “Bring the Boys Home to fight Jim Crow” were sold in these years. One year into the war the AWP’s newsletter, the Peacemaker, reported that “One elderly Negro woman, when polled on the Korean War, said ‘Young woman, you need not ask me how I feel about peace. Why, we Negro people have been at war all the time.’”
It didn’t take long for this anti-militarist, progressive activism to be seen as inherently subversive. Peace activists were arrested, picketed, harassed, and accused of being Communist Party members. Some were Party members and some were not, but it was the isolation of the threat and the legitimation of its suppression that was the point of this particular peace regime.
Two months into the war, a handful of activists were jailed for six months for painting “Peace” and “No Hydrogen Bombs” in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. When the New York City Labor Conference for Peace held a rally of several thousand (the police estimate was 2,000; organizers counted 15,000) the crowd was charged by horse-mounted police swinging clubs.
The McCarran Internal Security Act passed in September 1950 legally allowed the arrest and deportation of foreign-born leftists, and required any agencies suspected of communist sympathies to register with the Attorney General as foreign agents. “Subversives” such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, and Claudia Jones were denied travel visas, and existing communist and pacifist peace organizations alike were forced to register as foreign agents, leading to their dissolution. The House Committee on Un- American Activities, which infamously and zealously investigated those suspected of being “disloyal,” published a 1951 report in the “Communist Peace Offensive,” describing it as “the most dangerous hoax ever devised.”
The legalization of political suppression quickly turned into vigilante violence. Two UAW members at a plant in Linden, New Jersey, were beaten and chased by fellow workers for handing out peace pamphlets. When one 55-year-old worker in Milwaukee handed out the Stockholm Appeal he was carried from his factory and dropped from a third-story window, fracturing his back. In a “Georgia country town” one anonymous writer to activist centers in New York described collecting Stockholm Appeal signatures and receiving a beating from the Ku Klux Klan.
In The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), muckraking journalist I. F. Stone drew exclusively from military communiqués and news reports to explore the lies and evasions of the wartime peace regime. The story of the Korean War, he argued, was actually one of “keeping the peace from breaking out.” Though Stone meant to emphasize the warmongering push of U.S. policymakers and military officials, he was right in one other aspect: the peace regime at home was also meant to contain this other, alternate peace, from surfacing.
The curious thing about the peace regimes in Korea, from a U.S. perspective, is that stories of their violence were told as they were happening—from inside the State Department, from the mainstream press, on the floor of the United Nations, by leftists, pacifists, radicals of all stripes.
During the occupation period, LIFE photojournalist Carl Mydans portrayed the leftist rebels who had been savagely beaten and imprisoned by the South Korean National Police in Yeosu and Sunchon. Mydans mourned alongside families whose relatives had been left as “charred corpses” in the street.
As early as 1945, State Department Korea hand and respected scholar George McCune had scribbled “white man’s burden” in the margins of a memo on potential trusteeship schemes for post-independence Korea, and in a posthumous publication in 1950 decried the “prolonged and deepening antagonism” U.S. policies had created in Korea.
Writing for the New York Times in spring 1950 just before the war broke out, Walter Sullivan reported that the impending civil war dynamic in Korea was a “cloud of terror that is probably unparalleled in the world.” In the middle of the war, Nation journalist Freda Kirchwey termed the war an “orgy of agony” and “liberation by death.”
An international group of progressive women who toured wartime North Korea brought their report of bombings, civilian devastation, and sexual violence by U.S. and South Korean troops to the floor of the United Nations. A visiting Danish doctor reported that a U.S.-run refugee hospital in Korea was an “inconceivable sight,” while Greg MacGregor of the New York Times wrote that refugees in the military camps “are forced to live worse than any animal kept by an American farmer.”
In March 1951, Harold Ickes reported on the strafing of Korean civilians in The New Republic: “We were deliverers, bringing aid and comfort and unity. Apparently we were bringing other things—wounds and dismemberment and death.” One truth, of course, is that bringing devastation to light doesn’t necessarily condemn its authors. Another is that the language of the peace regime became a conceptual strategy for disavowal. To use peace to describe policies reliant on violence is to craft a story about ends that justifies all possible means.
Another truth, though, is that peace was always contested terrain. As much power as these peace regimes had, the fractious and shifting cohorts of journalists and activists and veterans, of dissident officials and refugees and civilians, of scholars and historians and photographers, of Korean survivors and adoptees and their children, hold out the possibility of peace as a future to struggle toward.
This other peace is not found in the slick videos and toothless statements of the Singapore Summit, nor in an emboldened U.S.–South Korean military partnership. It is embodied in the messages South Koreans write to loved ones on ribbons and hang on the barbed fences of the demilitarized zone; it is in the testimony of the thousands of Koreans to the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission; it is the gardens and community centers of Korean farmers displaced by the building of U.S. military bases; it is courageous Korean scholars like Kim Dong-choon and Lee Jae-eui who document the violence of the successive peace regimes.
It is both the U.S. soldier who refused orders to shoot, and the one who did shoot and later gave voice to his complicity. The possibility of peace is in all who look and do not refuse to see. This is no regime: this is the peace yet to come.
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Terrorism
‘Jihadi Brides’: Shrinking Violets or Grownups with Agency? (Al Bawaba) By Eleanor Beevor June 11, 2018
Despite the fact that women have been involved in combat and terrorism ever since these phenomena have existed, the world is still not sure how to treat female members of terrorist groups. Nowhere is this more contentious than in the case of ISIS.
Especially in western eyes, stereotypes of female disempowerment in Islam clash with the real and disturbing crimes that women have committed in the group’s name. And the usual story is one in which women tend to have their responsibility for crimes downplayed, or even excused.
But now that Iraq is deciding the fate of over a 1000 women suspected of being members of ISIS, the tables seemed to have turned, although not exactly for the better.
It is no surprise that Iraq, having suffered as it did from ISIS’s violence, is taking a hard line on suspected members. But the 1000 or so women, captured in the towns where ISIS experienced defeats, are being tried in the courts of Baghdad with chilling uniformity.
The Guardian reported that these women, but particularly foreign women who had travelled far to join ISIS, were being “…processed with an uncompromising efficiency rarely seen in other parts of Iraq’s judicial system.” And being “processed” usually meant receiving the harshest possible sentences. Death penalties were reportedly handed down within the space of 10 minute hearings.
This is a disturbing development for human rights. But it is also a stark departure from the more common tendency to treat women involved in terrorism much more leniently. And during the time of the exodus of foreign fighters leaving their western homelands to join ISIS, the nature of women’s involvement in the movement was one of the most hotly debated topics, in the media, and among researchers.
The level of public shock at these three straight-A students swapping school for a war zone was matched only by the splits in public opinion. Whilst some women had already joined ISIS, the three girls from Bethnal Green were the first to travel to Syria alone. The girls were minors when they were left, which begged the question of how they should be treated before the law. Should they be seen, it was asked, as victims who had been groomed by online recruiters, in a similar manner to how sex offenders target children online?
There were stiff arguments that the girls must have known what they were doing - they had carefully executed their own departure, and could hardly have missed the news about the horrific violence that ISIS was committing. However, some counter-extremist practitioners argued that ISIS used targeted, sanitized propaganda to recruit women. This propaganda emphasized promises of romance and marriage, alongside theological arguments for why they must join the jihadists.
Though notions of romance and marriage are strong in ISIS propaganda directed at women, public discussion of the group’s female members became almost obsessively fixated on it. And this fixation risks the assumption that women in terrorist groups have little or no agency beyond their relationship to a man. Dr. Jennifer Eggert, an expert in women’s participation in Islamist extremism at the University of Warwick, told Al Bawaba:
“This focus on marriage was (and still is) a huge problem in the coverage of women who went to join ISIS. I particularly dislike the term "jihadi brides". For every woman who gets married, there is a man - yet I have never heard anyone speak of "jihadi grooms".
The term also stresses that women were supposedly mostly motivated to join ISIS by romance and their ties to a man. While we know that this played a role in some cases, it is often not the whole story. Instead, existing research on the topic stresses that women and men largely went to join ISIS for very similar reasons, such as feelings of isolation and marginalisation in their home countries, the war in Syria, the belief in ISIS ideology and so on.”
Nevertheless, this perception of women as in some way less culpable for their actions than men has continued to inflect their treatment at the hands of the law, in one way or another. For instance, the Metropolitan Police announced that should any of the Bethnal Green girls succeed in returning home, they would be treated as victims and would not be tried. Here Dr. Eggbert points out that gender stereotypes as constructed in the United Kingdom may not be entirely helpful when forming policy.
"I think it is important to deal with all suspected ISIS members on a case by case basis. That should be case for both men and women. There is a risk of women being treated more leniently - not because there roles were indeed less important in ISIS, but because of dominant gender stereotypes, according to which women are less threatening, more innocent and less prone to violence. We know from other conflict contexts that women do get disproportionately less often convicted for their involvement in political violence, because of these gender stereotypes, and that can be a problem."
Yet in Iraq now, the opposite seems to be proving true. And perhaps that impression that women will be let off lightly in comparison to men is exactly what the Iraqi courts are trying to fight.
Iraq is understandably desperate to deter people from joining terrorist groups, and it sees the stiffest possible sentences, for both Iraqis and foreigners, as necessary to send a strong message. Yet in the process, basic tenets of a fair hearing are being lost. Defence lawyers for those accused are either unavailable, or too overwhelmed with cases to be able to study each case with care.
French citizen Djamila Boutoutaou was sentenced to life imprisonment in April. With her during the sentencing was her two-year-old daughter. The little girl is one of 820 infants belonging to the women on trial, and no one seems to know what will happen to them all.
There may be more hope for children born to foreign parents. European and central Asian countries are struggling to work out how much to try and defend citizens accused of joining ISIS. Most nations have not tried to stop those citizens facing local justice. Letting Iraqi courts handle the matter would certainly relieve them of the thorny question of whether or not to bring these suspects home. This is not only a lightning rod for public anger, but also raises security questions.
And yet for those countries to leave their suspected citizens to an overwhelmed justice system, one that is liberally using the death penalty, is also a neglect of their responsibilities. Dr. Eggert continued:
“I think foreign countries have a responsibility towards their citizens, regardless of which (suspected) crime there are on trial for in Iraq (or elsewhere in the world). In my mind, the same assistance that would be provided for citizens who are on trial or in prison for other offenses abroad should be given to them. That involves bringing them home, whenever possible.
Of course, a careful assessment of the security risk would need to take place. Especially in the case of women, we shouldn't assume that just before they are women, they are innocent and non-threatening and non-violent. But there are huge concerns with the regards to children, and especially orphans, who are stuck in Syria or Iraq at the moment. These children didn't choose to join ISIS, so we should do all that we can do get them out of there and provide them with the support they need.”
Whether the foreign suspects and their children get substantial help remains to be seen. But for Iraqis on trial, there is little respite to be had, and any innocent parties swept up in the arrests are now at serious risk of losing their life.
Court grants detained 8 Jewish worshippers bail (Vanguard) By Anayo Okoli June 12, 2018
Two High Courts sitting in Umuahia, Abia State, have granted bail to eight of the nine Judaism worshippers arrested last month at the Afaraukwu, Umuahia home of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, where they claimed to be holding a prayer session.
They were arrested on May 13, 2018, and were remanded at the Afara Prison after their arraignment at the Magistrate Court on May 14, where they were charged for terrorism.
Presiding Magistrate, Mr. O. U Ugwu, had ordered that they be remanded in prison custody pending their arraignment in High Court because the magistrate could not entertain terrorism matters.
The Chief Magistrate had expressed displeasure with the police for charging the accused before a magistrate court when they were aware that the court does not have the jurisdiction to entertain such a matter.
Six of the accused were arraigned before the Acting Chief Judge of Abia state, Justice Onuoha Ogwe of the High Court 1, who granted them bail in the sum of N1 million each.
Three other suspects were arraigned before Justice O. A Chijioke of High Court 3, who granted two of them bail in the sum of N200,000 each, and said that their surety must have verifiable residence and should also deposit two copies of his recent photographs with the court.
However, one of the suspects was not granted bail as the prosecution officer claimed that his file has “gone missing”. But their lawyer, Mr. Alloy Ejimakor, said he would get to the root of the alleged missing file and ensure that the suspect also got bail.
Ejimakor however, expressed happiness that the suspects were able to get justice at last after one month detention. He commended the courts for their wisdom in granting bail to the suspects but he expressed concern over the stringent bail conditions stipulated by Court 1. According to him, he would initiate “fait inquiry” to find out why the file of one of the accused suddenly went missing. Ejimokor maintained that the accused persons are not terrorists as claimed by the police.
He disagreed with the police on the terrorism charge clamped against the suspects, saying the trial was “a religious persecution against the accused.”
Beijing guidelines specify crime of inciting terrorism (The Straits Times) June 19, 2018
China has issued guidelines on the persecution of those who use online platforms to promote or incite terrorism or extremism, three years after the country named the acts as a criminal offence.
People who write, publish, print, spread or broadcast terrorist-related materials, including books, pictures or videos, will be charged with the crime of advocating or inciting terrorism or extremism, according to the guidelines released last Friday by the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the public security and justice ministries. Those who use websites, forums or blogs to post, copy, send, broadcast or present terrorist-related materials will face the same charge, according to the guidelines.
Digital data can be used as evidence, the guidelines stated.
"Our aim is to maintain national security, maintain social stability and protect people's safety by strictly fighting and punishing terrorists and related activities," a statement from the top court said on Friday.
While China's top legislative body formally criminalised the promotion of terrorism or extremism in 2015, what exactly constitutes the crime had not been clear until now.
"The guideline, with 16 articles, gives the answer," said the top court in its statement.
"It specifies the crime and some other new terrorist-related charges in the law, as well as clarifies how the four authorities - police, prosecution, justice ministry and courts - should cooperate with each other to combat terrorism."
Several new terrorism-related crimes, such as aiding terrorist activities and preparation for terrorism, were also detailed in the guidelines.
For example, people who provide money or facilities for terrorists, or those who assist in their illegal entry and exit, will be charged with aiding terrorist activities.
In addition, people who make, buy, store or transport explosives, or who conduct training classes or organise people to watch terrorism-related videos with the aim of promoting terrorist activities, will face the charge of preparing for terrorist activities.
The guidelines also name the intermediate courts around the country that will try cases related to terrorist activities.
Although the guidelines are designed to punish terrorists, they also highlight the importance of education in handling terrorism-related cases, the statement added.
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Piracy
ICC, BASCAP Move against Piracy, Counterfeiting in Nigeria (This Day) June 8, 2018
Investors in Nigeria can now heave a sigh of relief as the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has now taken a drastic step against piracy and counterfeiting in the country. The global body has engaged a working group that would give the fight against the social vices an effective backing in Nigeria.
The ICC delegation drawn from France; Middle East, Africa, Pakistan, UAE; Sweden and Nigeria converged at Eko Hotel, Lagos on Wednesday, where the dangers of counterfeiting and piracy were again examined and solutions proffered.
In his address at the forum, Chairman, International Chamber of Commerce Nigeria, Mr. Babatunde Savage said counterfeiting damages the market dynamics, as it undermines the revenue generation through custom duties and taxes.
Represented at the occasion by Mrs. Olubunmi Osuntuyi, Secretary General, ICC Nigeria, Savage stated that the menace exposes consumers to serious health and safety risks. His words: “Counterfeiting and piracy have become a global epidemic, leading to a significant drain of the global economy, jeopardising investments in innovation and risking consumer health and safety; thereby resulting in loss of jobs.”
In response to this epidemic, the chairman said ICC launched the BASCAP initiative to unite the global business community across all product sectors in order to address issues associated with intellectual property theft and to petition for greater commitments by local, national and international officials in the area of enforcement and protection of intellectual property rights.
He observed that the volume and value of counterfeiting and piracy is increasing rapidly; thereby threatening governments, and civil society with unsafe and ineffective products.
Savage therefore charged the audience at the forum that business needs to play its role in ensuring that open economies and the rule of law work for the benefit of all countries and their nationals. He advised that they should find lasting solutions that would create equitable opportunities for every willing person to participate in growth.
Corroborating his view, Sophie Peresson, the Paris, France-based BASCAP Director, said BASCAP has, since its inception, created a powerful voice for businesses and compelled government actions and allocation of resources towards strengthened intellectual property rights enforcement.
Represented by Tracy Faustin, BASCAP Project Manager, Peresson disclosed that the opportunity to engage on the African continent started with a BASCAP invitation to speak at a conference hosted in Kenya by the East African Business Community (EABC).
The forum, she revealed, developed into collaborative partnerships with the Kenyan Anti-Counterfeit Agency, a government established association overseeing matters related to counterfeiting and piracy.
She stated: “Nigeria was later selected as a priority country to start building a BASCAP presence on the ground, which prompted the meeting.
Other dignitaries present at the meeting include: Uche Nwokocha, Partner & Head, Intellectual Property Department, Aluko and Oyebode & Anti-Cpounterfeiting Collaboration (ACC) of Nigeria; Adeola Akinnibosun, Manager, Corporate Affairs & Communications, Japan Tobacco International; Wael Adhami, Head, Brand Protection, Middle East, Africa Pakistan & UAE; Felix Ologbonyo, Corporate Counsel, Nestle Nigeria; Staffan Holmberg, Brand Protection Manager, SKF, Sweden; and Margaret Olele, CEO/Executive Secretary, American Business Council Nigeria.
The ICC is the world’s business organisation, representing over six million companies of all sizes and sectors and chambers of commerce in more than 100 countries. Nigeria became a member over 30 years ago, sequel to the realisation of the benefits accruable fom becoming a member.
India seeks intelligence info from east Asian nations to combat sea pirates (Hellenic Shipping News Worldwide) June 11, 2018
Stressing on security co-operation at the East Asia Summit (EAS), India on Friday sought intelligence sharing to combat sea piracy, terrorism, and sea-based human smuggling.
“Security cooperation is important for EAS countries.
India and other EAS countries, individually and collectively, could make arrangements on intelligence sharing to combat piracy at sea, terrorism, and sea-based human smuggling as well as narcotics trafficking”, Anurag Bhushan, joint secretary (ASEAN) at the ministry of external affairs said at the 3rd EAS conference on maritime security and co-operation held here.
EAS is a unique leaders led forum of 18 countries comprising of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam , Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, the United States and Russia formed to further the objectives of regional peace, security and prosperity.
This year’s conference was attended by all the countries barring Brunei and New Zealand.
Bhushan said, among areas in maritime cooperation that India hopes to explore with EAS is disaster risk reduction and management, joint patrols and exercises, and other maritime capacity-building activities.
It may be noted that maritime security and cooperation had received a special mention in the Delhi Declaration of the ASEAN-India Commemorative Summit, which was held on 25 January 2018 at New Delhi to mark the 25th anniversary of ASEAN-India Dialogue Relations. Mentioning that the concept of Blue Economy is now increasingly gaining worldwide acceptance, the official said that the Indian government stands committed to promote the Blue Economy.
Indian Prime Minister has endorsed Blue Economy as a new pillar of economic activity in the coastal areas and linked hinterlands through sustainable tapping of oceanic resources and announced his vision for the seas through “Security And Growth for All in the Region” (SAGAR), he said in his address on the inaugural day of the two day summit.
Speaking at the inauguration, Union Minister for Oil and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said East Asian countries should work together to deal with the insecurities associated with maritime terrorism and crimes including trafficking of humans and drugs.
“The regional countries should work together to deal with the insecurities associated with maritime terrorism, maritime crimes, including trafficking of humans and drugs; the smuggling of small arms, other light weapons and weapons of mass destruction”, he stressed.
He pointed out that cooperation in the energy sector will help EAS countries to strengthen national energy security, reduce the costs of energy supplies, and minimize adverse impacts from energy price volatility.
Cooperation in energy sector may also cover energy pipelines, trade in energy products and technology transfer and joint Research and Development. India could be a major source of training and capacity building in energy services for EAS countries, added Pradhan who also holds the portfolio of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. Source: Business Standard.
Pirates’ Strategies and Countermeasures in the South China Sea (The Epoch Times) By Morgan Deane June 18, 2018
Except for a brief spike along East Africa that gained national attention with the capture of Captain Richard Phillips—and resulting Hollywood movie—pirates remain active in the South China Sea and around the world.
The South China Sea averages about 150 piracy incidents per year but can see spikes of activity that push it up to 550. The exact numbers are hard to decipher because victims want to avoid time-consuming investigations, bad publicity, accusations of lax security, and higher insurance premiums.
The area is such a prime target for many of the same reasons there are disputes over islands. Almost 30 percent of worldwide maritime traffic travels through the area. This includes all of the European goods to China, and almost all of the oil from the Persian Gulf to South East Asia. The port of Singapore and its nearby strait sees a ship every four minutes. There are many small islands, narrow channels, and places to hide.
Pirates like Blackbeard, Mary Reed, and Steed Bonnet used similar geography off the outer banks of North Carolina to the same effect. Territorial disputes in the region often hamper enforcement and coordination. Finally, automation means that incredibly large tankers can have crews as little as 15 people, meaning that very small pirate crews can capture entire crews and gain lucrative prizes.
There are some differences in piracy based on regions. Around Indonesia and Nigeria, for example, most of them occur near ports. Malaysia witnesses attacks more on the high seas. The former two have a lower standard of living, so attacks usually come from poor fishermen seeking a little boost of cash and staples. Their targets are usually small ships with scrap metal, or small tankers with liquid fuel, as both are easier to sell on the black market. Under the cover of night, they use ropes and grappling hooks to climb aboard with knives and machetes. If alerted in time, the crews fight back, often with crowbars in nasty hand-to- hand combat.
Except for a brief spike along East Africa that gained national attention with the capture of Captain Richard Phillips—and resulting Hollywood movie—pirates remain active in the South China Sea and around the world.
The South China Sea averages about 150 piracy incidents per year but can see spikes of activity that push it up to 550. The exact numbers are hard to decipher because victims want to avoid time-consuming investigations, bad publicity, accusations of lax security, and higher insurance premiums. The area is such a prime target for many of the same reasons there are disputes over islands. Almost 30 percent of worldwide maritime traffic travels through the area. This includes all of the European goods to China, and almost all of the oil from the Persian Gulf to South East Asia. The port of Singapore and its nearby strait sees a ship every four minutes. There are many small islands, narrow channels, and places to hide.
Pirates like Blackbeard, Mary Reed, and Steed Bonnet used similar geography off the outer banks of North Carolina to the same effect. Territorial disputes in the region often hamper enforcement and coordination. Finally, automation means that incredibly large tankers can have crews as little as 15 people, meaning that very small pirate crews can capture entire crews and gain lucrative prizes.
There are some differences in piracy based on regions. Around Indonesia and Nigeria, for example, most of them occur near ports. Malaysia witnesses attacks more on the high seas. The former two have a lower standard of living, so attacks usually come from poor fishermen seeking a little boost of cash and staples. Their targets are usually small ships with scrap metal, or small tankers with liquid fuel, as both are easier to sell on the black market. Under the cover of night, they use ropes and grappling hooks to climb aboard with knives and machetes. If alerted in time, the crews fight back, often with crowbars in nasty hand-to- hand combat.
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Gender-Based Violence
Former Congolese Vice President Cleared Of War Crimes Conviction On Appeal (NPR) By Colin Dwyer June 8, 2018
More than two years after an international tribunal convicted Jean-Pierre Bemba of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the former vice president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen those convictions overturned on appeal.
The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court ruled Friday that the lower court decision had "made serious errors" when it found Bemba responsible for the violent crimes his militia carried out in the Central African Republic in the early 2000s. That original verdict, rendered in March 2016, had determined that Bemba "failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures to prevent or repress the commission of crimes by his subordinates."
During unrest in the CAR between October 2002 to March 2003, troops with Bemba's Congolese Liberation Movement, or MLC, were found to have committed "the crimes against humanity of murder and rape and the war crimes of murder, rape and pillaging." Bemba — a militia leader, businessman and later, a failed candidate for the DRC presidency — had sent the more than 1,000 soldiers to help put down an attempted coup against the CAR's president at the time.
And the court found that Bemba bore the bulk of the responsibility for their actions. He was one of just four people convicted by the war crimes court in its 16-year history, Reuters notes, and he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Ex-Congolese Vice President Convicted Of Rape, Murder And Pillage
THE TWO-WAY
Ex-Congolese Vice President Convicted Of Rape, Murder And Pillage But a majority of appeals judges decided Friday that the verdict did not fairly account for Bemba's efforts to stop his troops' crimes once he became aware of them — and that since he was acting as a remote commander, his power to do so was limited.
"Mr Bemba cannot be held criminally liable ... for the crimes committed by MLC troops during the CAR operation," reads the judgment's summary. The decision was met with a mix of frustration, cheers and concern for what this spells for Central Africa's political future.
"While the Appeals Chamber has held that Mr Bemba was entitled to an acquittal," said Solomon Sacco, head of Amnesty International's international justice team, "the decision will be felt as a huge blow for the many victims of the 'war against women' waged in the Central African Republic (CAR) through a horrifying campaign of rape and sexual violence."
Bemba's supporters back in the DRC, meanwhile, celebrated the decision as a vindication. Reuters reports "a crowd of hundreds of supporters cheered outside Bemba's party headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa, shouting 'Our president is free!' and 'Jean Pierre Bemba is our candidate!' "
The mention of candidacy raises the specter of a renewed rivalry between Bemba and the man who defeated him in that 2006 election, DRC President Joseph Kabila, who has spent 17 years in power. Congolese residents have increasingly pressed for him to step down, even gathering protests that Kabila has responded to with violence in recent months.
It remains unclear whether Bemba intends to return to the country after his release.
But what is clear is that this release will not be immediate: He was also convicted of a separate charge, witness tampering, and his appeal of that verdict remains in process.
Do abused women need asylum? 4 essential reads (WTOP) June 12, 2018
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on June 11 reversed an appeals court ruling that granted asylum to a Salvadoran woman who had fled sexual, emotional and physical abuse back home, upending nearly a decade of legal precedent about who should qualify as a refugee.
In 2009, the Obama administration determined that foreign women who suffer severe sexual or domestic abuse from which they are unable to escape, in countries where the government cannot protect them, may deserve asylum as members of a persecuted “particular social group.”
This ruling opened the door for women who feared dying at their partners’ hands to seek the same protection as those fleeing, for example, female genital mutilation – though in practice only a handful of asylum-seekers have successfully argued a domestic violence case in U.S. immigration court.
Sessions’ decision, which immigration experts say will primarily impact immigrant flows from Central America, reopens a long-running argument over what constitutes a need for asylum.
Here, The Conversation’s scholars illuminate this complex immigration debate.
Under international law, countries must offer asylum to migrants who can prove they have a “credible fear” of certain kinds of violence at home. Asylum-seekers must have suffered persecution related to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or their particular social group.
“The rights of refugees – those forced to leave their country because of war or persecution – are enshrined in the 1951 Convention for Refugees and its subsequent 1967 protocol,” explains Parvati Nair of the United Nations University.
But individual countries may decide how to interpret these U.N. agreements. With Sessions’ ruling, the Trump administration has taken the position that domestic abuse is “private violence,” not persecution.
The boundary between migrant and asylum-seeker can indeed be blurry, Nair says. “Many displaced people today defy the parameters used by policymakers to define who is entitled to what rights.”
Those parameters, passed in the aftermath of WWII, are more than a half-century old.
Persecution also looks different for men and women, says Ariadna Estévez, a North American studies scholar at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“According to my research, Mexican men are usually displaced for reasons of criminal and state violence,” she says. They are police informants who have been exposed, business owners who refuse to pay extortion to cartels, journalists, activists or victims fleeing drug-related crime.
“For women, however, sexual violence is the major push factor,” Estévez explains. Her studies find that rape, gender-based violence and sex trafficking are the main reasons Central American and Mexican women are forced to migrate.
That is not surprising since, as Estévez writes, “several studies have shown that Latin America is the worst place in the world to be a woman.”
She cites a 2014 Gallup survey showing that Latin Americans were the least likely in the world to say that women are treated with respect and dignity. The study attributes these feelings to widespread sexual violence and harassment against women and children, in combination with “machista” culture.
For the past few years, El Salvador has been listed among the world’s deadliest countries for women. And in Mexico, Estévez says, “the systemic killing of women since the mid-1980s has been so severe that it led to the coining of the word ‘feminicide,’ and its codification as a serious crime.”
Rampant violence against women persists in Mexico despite the launch of a national institute for women’s issues, the establishment of official protocol for investigating gender-based crimes and legislation against domestic abuse. According to a 2016 joint report by the Mexican government and the U.N., a “good part” of the 40,000 female homicides that occurred between 1985 and 2014 in Mexico were never even investigated.
Sessions’ June 11 ruling specifically rejects the Obama-era notion that women abused in a such a context – places with pervasive violence against women, which the government cannot or will not control – have a “credible fear” of violence.
Abused women were not the only refugee group Sessions has specifically excluded. The attorney general also said that violent recruitment by gangs is not grounds for asylum in the U.S.
“An increasing number of individuals are now arriving at the U.S. southwest border because of crime, violence and insecurity in Central America,” says Jonathan Hiskey, a migration scholar at Vanderbilt University.
With 60 murders per 100,000 people in 2017, El Salvador was one of the world’s deadliest places. Almost 4,000 people were killed there last year.
Honduras’ murder rate has dropped markedly in recent years, but with 42.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2017, it is still one of the world’s most dangerous places that’s not a war zone.
Hiskey’s research shows that fear – not American jobs, as Trump has often suggested – is what drives many migrants to leave home.
“The strongest predictor of someone having an ‘intent to emigrate,’” he writes, “was whether they had been the victim of crime multiple times in the previous 12 months.”
Rather than trying to sneak across the U.S. border, Hiskey says, these migrants typically voluntarily surrender and request asylum in the United States.
The odds of getting it were always incredibly slim. Now, these refugees stand no chance.
‘Comfort Women’ Statues? Build Them for All, Not Just Some, Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence (Japan Forward) By Earl Kinmonth June 14, 2018
At 10 A.M. on the morning of May 14, a Buddhist memorial service presided over by three priests took place in an unusual venue—the parking lot of the Musashien Hospital in Futsukaichi, a resort town south of the port city of Hakata in Kyushu.
The memorial service was for the spirits of the hundreds of aborted fetuses said to have been buried in an area beneath what is now the hospital parking lot. These mizuko or water children, as aborted fetuses are called in colloquial Japanese, came from Japanese women who had been raped, often multiple times, primarily but not exclusively by Red Army soldiers, who terrorized the Japanese population in Manchuria and what became North Korea after the Soviet Union under Stalin broke its treaty with Japan on August 9, 1945. The Red Army invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria and made a territorial grab under the guise of helping the Allies defeat Japan.
Treating the Victims
The facility was called Futsukaichi Rest Home (Futsukaichi Hoyojo). It was one of at least three such institutions that performed abortions and offered treatment for sexually transmitted diseases to Japanese women and girls who had been raped before they could safely flee to Japan. The other facilities were in Sasebo and Senzaki port cities that, like Fukuoka, had reception centers for the hikiagesha—the uprooted—as returnees from Japanese-controlled areas were called.
The pregnant and diseased women and girls treated by these centers are an unknown fraction of all those raped by Red Army soldiers. Rape was often followed by murder. Some victims committed suicide out of shame or died from other causes before managing to return to Japan. There were also numerous accounts of group suicide (shudan jiketsu) and individual suicide when it appeared rape was imminent.
The facilities that performed the operations and offered treatment for STDs were inherently not well- documented. Conditions in Japan were chaotic at best during the years just after surrender. At least one- fifth of Hakata had been leveled by U.S. fire-bomb raids. Photographs of the Hakata port area taken shortly after surrender look remarkably like photographs of Hiroshima after it was devastated with a single nuclear weapon.
Since neither anaesthetics nor antibiotics were available, and many of the abortions were late-term, women and girls had to endure extreme pain and faced the distinct possibility of death.
An even more important factor in the sparse documentation is the fact that abortion was illegal in Japan at the time. Consequently, advertisements and flyers describing services provided by the Futsukaichi facility were couched in deliberately vague language. Despite Futsukaichi or other facilities being engaged in an illegal activity on a large scale, there was no official interference with their operation from either the Japanese or the American authorities.
Quite to the contrary, there is evidence that both offered tacit cooperation and followed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
The driving force behind the Futsukaichi facility was Seiichi Izumi (1915-1970), a major figure in Japanese anthropology known primarily for his field work in Peru. Having been a Japanese resident of Korea, he had direct knowledge of the depredations being done by the Soviet Red Army and used his connection to the Keijo Imperial University in the capital of Japanese-controlled Korea to assemble a group of medical professionals capable of performing abortions.
Plight of Orphans
The Red Army sweep into Manchuria and what is now North Korea also resulted in a large but indeterminate number of orphans. Some were left behind and grew up as Chinese. Generally called zanryu koji, or abandoned war orphans, many sought to return to Japan in the 1980s, sometimes to a warm welcome, but not always. Other orphans were mixed in with the adults and families that landed in Hakata.
One of the notable photographs from this period shows a young girl of perhaps nine or 10 years carrying the ashes of her mother. The girl’s hair is cut in a boyish style, as is the hair of other young girls appearing in photographs of war orphans. This was not fashion but camouflage. Dressing girls and young women as boys and giving them boyish haircuts had been part of an often-vain effort to keep them from attracting the attention of Red Army and other rapists.
A facility for orphans called Seifukuryo was located on the grounds of a temple in Hakata and managed by a singularly able woman named Nobuko Ishiga. A documentary television program produced in 1978 by RKB Mainichi featured a reunion of residents of this facility who provided moving testimonials to the care and dedication of Ishiga and the other women who staffed the facility.
Middle School Students’ Impressive Video
In a symposium following the memorial itself, there were two video screenings. One was the above- mentioned documentary, which cannot easily be rebroadcast because of copyright and personal data protection issues.
The other was a recording of a drama written and produced by middle school students in the Futsukaichi school district. Aside from the strong impression created by middle-school girls talking about mass rape and abortion, I kept thinking how different their production was from the all too common foreign stereotype of Japanese education as nothing but the rote memorization of facts and the passive acceptance of a whitewashed historical narrative.
Omissions in the Public Narrative
While the mass rape perpetrated by the Red Army against Japanese, German, and women of other nationalities is not entirely unknown, it has received scant attention compared to the so-called “comfort women.” Lori Watt, in her When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reinterpretation in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 2009), has a section in which she touches on the Futsukaichi facility and the issue of mass rape by the Red Army, although its actions are very much in the background.
Mariko Asano Tamanoi, in Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2009), gives the subject a few pages, but mostly in terms of the narrative style, not as a mass atrocity directed at women.
Even Japanese feminists have done little with this subject. The Japanese government has never made the rapes an issue. Various explanations are possible. For some decades following Japan’s surrender, the historical narrative was largely dominated by leftist writers who cut the Soviet Union quite a bit of slack. Lori Watt has observed that some would say that the comfort women system gives the Japanese little basis for claiming the high moral ground on sexual violence against women.
This is not a persuasive argument. It might even be styled a “what aboutism” argument. And, it is profoundly anti-feminist. The comfort women system was created by males for males. The Japanese women who were in Manchuria and Korea had no political power whatsoever in Imperial Japan. With some exceptions, they were there at the convenience of men and what Japanese men had done in no way invalidates the need for accountability. Children had no responsibility whatsoever for their situation.
Victims are Victims, Regardless of Nationality
To accept this argument would invalidate Dutch claims against the Japanese. Jan Ruff O’Herne, who has given such prominent testimony on her experiences after being forced into an unsanctioned and unofficial “comfort station” and made to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers, was part of the much-hated Dutch colonial occupation of what later became Indonesia. Her position is analogous to that of Japanese women in Manchuria and Korea. The Japanese women in Manchuria were no more responsible for their situation than O’Herne was for hers.
Masaharu Shimokawa—former Mainichi Shimbun reporter, university lecturer, organizer of the symposium I attended, and author of a detailed book on the Futsukaichi facility—has suggested that contemporary feminists shy away from the mass rape issue because they are afraid of being branded historical revisionists by altering the narrative that makes Japan and Japan alone evil with respect to the sexual abuse.
This is quite possibly a significant factor, but I also see another factor at work: anti-Japanese sentiment that lumbers contemporary Japanese—even those born well after the comfort women system was long gone—with guilt for what their predecessors had done.
Role of Anti-Japanese Sentiment
It is one thing for Koreans to bring up this issue because it serves domestic political purposes and a significant, although unknown fraction, of the comfort women was Korean.
It is another thing for Chinese and Chinese Americans to bring this issue up. This came up in 2007-2008 in the aftermath of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s poorly-worded statement about coercion and recruitment of the comfort women. It also came in the context where Mike Honda—who was heavily dependent on Chinese-American financial support to stay in office—was pushing his resolution calling on the Japanese to apologize and compensate the comfort women, something Japan had already done. The spokesmen for Chinese opposition to giving Japan a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council offered up the unresolved comfort woman issue as something disqualifying Japan.
But when one looks at the Anglophone press, those who have brought up the comfort women issue and kept it in the news have been primarily Americans with no personal ethnic or historical connection to the comfort women and no connection to any country from which they were recruited.
Although some assert that they are not anti-Japanese and claim that the real issue is violence against women, their single-minded focus on Japan is hard to explain in terms other than anti-Japanese sentiment that extends to contemporary Japanese with no connection to the wartime system. European nations get exonerated; the Japanese, even those Japanese who were born decades after the end of the comfort women system, are forever tainted.
Books dealing with Red Army rape in Eastern Europe and Germany have appeared, attracted a brief flurry of interest, and then the subject was dropped by the chattering classes in the U.S. and the U.K. Books on the rape by American GIs in France and Germany— such as What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (by Roberts, University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War (by Gebhardt, Polity, 2017) —have suffered the same fate.
That both France and Germany had prostitute corps that served their military is known, but only at the footnote level. That American GIs made use of a post-war extension of the comfort women system has been documented by historians, such as John Dower and Yuki Tanaka, but almost never figures in English-language journalism about this issue.
Giving Due Attention to All Victims
The Korean literary scholar Park Yuha and the Korean-American anthropologist C. Sarah Soh have produced thoroughly documented works that describe the comfort women system in terms quite different from the usual description appearing in the English-language press. However, they have been almost totally ignored by the scores of journalists and pundits who have written on this issue.
Even more telling is that only a tiny fraction of the mostly foreign scholars, who signed an “Open Letter in Support of Historians in Japan” that condemned alleged but non-existent suppression of the debate on the comfort women in Japan, have come out to support Park Yuha—the victim of very real suppression efforts in Korea.
Korean-American cooperation during the Park Chung-hee regime to provide sexual comfort for American troops stationed in South Korea have received only passing attention in journalism, although both have been thoroughly documented in such works as Katherine Moon’s Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University Press, 1997).
A recent South Korean court ruling that the government had used coercion on women serving American GIs in the so-called camp towns that provide sexual services for American troops in Korea received scant attention.
Similarly, an apology by current South Korean President Moon Jae-in for war crimes and atrocities by Korean troops in Vietnam appears to have been ignored by the New York Times and the Washington Post, two major American newspapers that have long given prominent attention to the comfort women system and Japanese military atrocities of 70-80 years ago.
To start toward correcting this biased omission of most victims from the public consciousness, those putting up “comfort women” statues should make those inclusive of all wartime sexual abuse of women rather than focused solely on Japan as the perpetrator.
Bangladesh Rights Body Readies Sexual Violence Cases Against Myanmar for ICC (The Irrawaddy) By Muktadir Rashid June 18, 2018
Bangladesh’s National Human Rights Commission has urged the country’s Foreign Affairs and Law ministries to assist the International Criminal Court (ICC) in prosecuting Myanmar over its alleged crimes against the Rohingya in Rakhine State last year and identified 53 alleged victims of sexual violence. In separate letters to each ministry on June 10, commission Chairman Kazi Reazul Hoque said the rights body firmly believed that — apart from ongoing bilateral initiatives between Bangladesh and Myanmar to reach a permanent solution to the Rohingya crisis — it was “very important to approach the ICC.”
The letters said the commission had conducted investigations separate from the government’s initiatives to resolve the crisis.
“A group of researchers trained by international experts secretly documented the testimonies of 53 women who experienced sexual violence in Myanmar,” the letters said, adding that the commission was willing to share its evidence if and when a case against Myanmar at the ICC begins.
The letters followed the ICC’s request that Bangladesh opine on whether Myanmar could be prosecuted at the court over its alleged crimes last year in Rakhine State, where a military crackdown has driven some 700,000 mostly Rohingya to Bangladesh with reports of arson, rape and murder in what the UN has called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.
Though Bangladesh recognizes the ICC, which is based in The Hague, Myanmar does not.
Dhaka-based daily the New Age reported that Bangladesh submitted its comments to the ICC on June 11 to help the court decide whether it has jurisdiction to investigate Myanmar for forced deportation across an international border. It reported that Bangladesh tacitly stressed the need to hold the perpetrators accountable.
The court was scheduled to hold a closed-door hearing on the matter on June 13, diplomats told the New Age, as ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was seeking an expedited decision both on its jurisdiction and for permission to launch a preliminary examination.
Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a repatriation deal in late November for the voluntary return of “forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals” sheltering in Bangladesh since October 2016, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Rakhine State during another outbreak of violence at the time.
At a public seminar in Dhaka on June 4, former ICC Prosecutor Kate Vigneswaran stressed the need to maintain international standards while collecting and recording evidence of crimes against humanity against Rohingya and to identify the individuals involved in Rakhine State, according to the New Age.
In a June 4 activity report, Doctors Without Borders said it treated 377 survivors of sexual and gender- based violence between Aug. 27 and April 30 involving victims ranging from 9 to 50 years of age. But it said the actual number of victims of such attacks was likely higher.
“Sexual violence is often underreported due to the shame and stigma associated with sexual assault, limited knowledge about medical and psychological support available, and the fact that access to health care in Myanmar was restricted heavily,” the report said.
The aid group said it was also stepping up its mother-and-child and reproductive health care services in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, where many births take place at home in unsafe and unhygienic conditions. But it said many women and girls were seeking medical care for pregnancies resulting from rape, which could lead to unsafe abortions and death without support.
Doctors Without Borders said some women carrying babies from rape feared returning to their communities and were being sent to shelters run by other organizations, though space was very limited.
“We do know that there are a number of women/girls of child-bearing age within the settlements of Cox’s Bazar District. We expect deliveries to continue but it is not possible for [us] to predict or speculate about the number of expected deliveries at any one time” the report said.
Refugees Protest for Safe Repatriation
On Saturday, on the Muslim holiday of Eid ul-Fitr, several hundred Rohingya residing of the Cox’s Bazar camps held peaceful protests to reiterate their conditions for returning to Myanmar and to insist they be included in the negotiations.
The Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights said it organized protests in 24 locations across the camps. The protesters held up banners and posters in English that read “Include Rohingya in Agreements About Rohingya,” “Dignified Repatriation Must Include Full Citizenship Rights as Rohingya Ethnic Group” and “UNHCR Please Talk to Us About the MoU.”
The UN refugee agency signed a memorandum of understanding with Myanmar earlier this month offering its assistance with the repatriation. It said the deal creates a “framework of cooperation” to achieve the “voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable” repatriation of Rohingya refugees, but few details have been made public.
Video footage of the protests shared with The Irrawaddy by participants shows them wearing white plastic bags while marching through the camps and chanting “Yes Dignity, Dignity, Dignity,” ‘Yes Security, Security, Security” and “Yes Rohingya Citizenship.”
“We wear white bags because white means that we want peace, security and safety,” said Mohamed Eleyas, one of the organizers.
Many refugees say they fear returning to Myanmar — which refuses to recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group or grant citizenship to those who identify as such — without international monitors on the ground.
Rights activist Nur Khan Liton said it was important to include Rohingya representatives in bilateral and multilateral deals on their repatriation because they were the victims.
“If it is not done, it will create many complexities in the future,” he told The Irrawaddy.
A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press, said security and intelligence agencies suspect others were involved behind the scenes in organizing the protests to coincide with the religious holiday and were searching for them.
A rights activist, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said he received phone calls from some of those agencies asking after the organizers.
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Commentary and Perspectives
Global leaders, beware: Russia will use the World Cup to whitewash its war crimes (Washington Post) By Kenneth Roth June 7, 2018
As the World Cup begins next week in Russia, 2.3 million civilians in Syria’s Idlib province are facing an endgame of their own. The two events are linked because the Russian government could play a central role in avoiding mass atrocities in Syria but so far has played the role of accomplice.
World leaders should avoid the spectacle of celebrating the World Cup’s opening alongside the Kremlin leadership unless it stops the slaughter of civilians in Syria. The opening ceremony will be marked with pomp and fireworks on June 14.
The Syrian conflict has been characterized by the government’s deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian institutions such as hospitals and schools in areas controlled by anti-government forces, and its indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighborhoods in those areas, in flagrant violation of the laws governing armed conflict. This war-crime strategy is a major reason that the conflict has killed almost half a million people and has displaced some 60 percent of Syria’s prewar population, roughly half within the country and half as refugees.
Rather than oppose this war on civilians, the Russian government has joined it. Russian bombers provide indispensable military support and regularly fight alongside Syrian aircraft — a key reason that President Bashar al-Assad, whose battlefield position had been tenuous, now looks increasingly likely to prevail. For example, Russia played a central part in the Syrian government’s indiscriminate bombing of the civilian populations of Eastern Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta the two most populous enclaves held by anti-government forces — while pro-government forces starved them through crippling sieges. The ensuing slaughter was sufficient to force both enclaves to fall.
Similarly, Russian arms companies are the biggest weapons suppliers to the Syrian government. Russian diplomats provide overt political support, blocking efforts to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court and vetoing an investigation that could have identified the perpetrators behind the Syrian government’s apparent use of sarin and chlorine as chemical weapons. And Russian state-affiliated media have been at the forefront of whitewashing these atrocities.
Today, the biggest remaining region held by anti-government forces is Idlib, where the civilian population is divided roughly evenly between local residents and those who have been displaced from elsewhere in the country. Idlib has been the dumping ground for civilians and fighters who have been forced out of other areas held by anti-government forces, but there is now nowhere else inside Syria for them to go as they are squeezed between Syrian forces on the ground, Turkish forces along the northern border, and Syrian and Russian bombers firing from above.
For 3.5 million Syrian refugees, Turkey has been a haven, but it has since closed its border to new arrivals. Turkish security forces have been firing at asylum-seekers trying to cross the border irregularly and have summarily deported thousands from border areas. But Syrian refugees are still reaching European Union territory, despite the E.U.-Turkey migration deal designed to restrict that route, and those numbers could increase, particularly if there is a big influx from Idlib.
A far preferable solution to potentially forcing another 2 million Syrians from their country would be for the Russian government to force an end to the war-crime strategy of targeting civilians. That does not mean giving a break to the armed groups that now control Idlib, many of which have their own record of atrocities. But it means fighting them in accordance with international humanitarian law, targeting only combatants and no longer targeting, or firing indiscriminately upon, the civilians living nearby or on protected institutions such as hospitals and schools.
Russia clearly has the leverage to secure an end to these atrocities. Its bombers could refuse to take part in them or to back the Syrian military while it commits them. Its arms companies could stop supplying weapons while the atrocities continue. Its diplomats could stop shielding Syrian officials from international prosecution of their war crimes and international investigations that would expose them as users of chemical weapons. The key is getting Russia to use that leverage.
The World Cup provides an opportunity. No one objects to the players taking the field and the public enjoying the competition, or to officials going to Russia to cheer on their teams. But opening ceremonies are almost always a pageant to glorify the leadership of the host country. Unless there are concrete indications of change, government representatives should announce that they will not join Kremlin leaders in this spectacle, as long as those same Kremlin leaders underwrite mass atrocities in Syria. The Russian-Syrian war-crime strategy is simply too dire and deadly to paper over with a change-the-subject champagne toast.
In our opinion: US must confront North Korea's crimes against humanity (Deseret News) June 12, 2018
Feelings of goodwill abound from the first-ever meeting between a North Korean leader and a president of the United States. While the signed agreement has many sweeping generalizations and no language specifying verification or compliance, many are cautiously optimistic about the possible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. But Americans cannot let that feeling blind them to the harsh reality of Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship.
By some estimates, 130,000 people are imprisoned in North Korea because of their religion or political opinion. Conditions in these prisons are so bad an investigation by the International Bar Association War Crimes Committee said Kim should be prosecuted for as many as 10 separate crimes against humanity.
One member of the panel that conducted that investigation was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp in World War II. He told the Washington Post Kim’s prison camps are as bad, or worse, than what the Nazis set up during the war. Survivors who escaped have described starvation, torture, rape, forced abortions and death. None of this was expected to be a topic of discussion between President Donald Trump and Kim on Tuesday. Some experts even cautioned it makes sense to build a relationship first before exploring this topic.
We disagree. The sooner Mr. Trump confronts Kim about this dreadful situation, the better. Human rights reforms must be a part of any potential disarmament agreement that results from talks.
The reason for that is practical as well as humanitarian. Inspectors would have a hard enough time verifying a disarmament pact without worrying that the North Korean officials they encounter fear being sent to the Gulag for giving honest answers.
More importantly, however, the United States owes as much to the world, and to its traditional role as a beacon for liberty. As Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch wrote this week in an op-ed for Fox News, “… by staying silent on this matter, we display a lack of seriousness about our intentions for North Korea and for the future of the Korean Peninsula. We also show a lack of seriousness about ourselves and our history, having faced but remained silent amid such crimes against humanity in the past.”
President Trump has drawn attention to North Korea’s human rights record in the past, including at his speech last year to the United Nations.
Diplomacy is to be applauded, and a process leading toward peace is always worth pursuing. However, dictators seldom change their hearts, and Kim undoubtedly frets over maintaining his power, which is built on intimidation, torture and fear. But if any nation has the clout to confront those practices and stand up for the thousands who are suffering, it is the United States. The opportunity must not pass.
What Jean-Pierre Bemba's acquittal by the ICC means (Al Jazeera) By Oumar Ba June 13, 2018
On June 8, the International Criminal Court (ICC) shocked the international justice community and the world by overturning the war crimes conviction of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba. Bemba's acquittal is a major event that will have significant consequences for the ICC, the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Bemba had been in custody in The Hague for 10 years and was convicted in 2016 under the command responsibility legal doctrine for having failed to prevent his militia from committing crimes in the CAR that included murder, rape, and pillaging. He had been sentenced to 18 years in prison.
By a majority ruling, the panel of five judges in the ICC Appeals Chamber (two judges dissenting) reversed the previous conviction earlier this month and acquitted Bemba of all charges against him. The Appeals Chamber found that the Trial Chamber had erred in declaring that Bemba did not take enough measures to prevent the crimes committed by his militia in the CAR.
The judges argued that the Trial Chamber had failed to appreciate the limitations that Bemba faced. He was a "remote commander" of his troops, the majority argued, and he faced "logistical difficulties" as his men were operating in a foreign country. The majority ruling also declared that the Trial Chamber had convicted Bemba based on crimes that went beyond the scope of those confirmed during the pre-trial phase.
This acquittal is a major setback for the Office of the Prosecutor, which has had its fair share of blunders and shortcomings over the years. With the failed prosecution of Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy Wiliam Ruto, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir still at large, and Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo's trial dragging on, Bemba was the highest profile politician to have been convicted by the Court.
As the leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) - a rebel group turned political party - Bemba even forced incumbent President Joseph Kabila to a runoff in 2006, in the end losing with no less than 48 percent of the votes.
In 2002, Bemba had sent MLC fighters to the CAR, at the request of then-President Ange-Felix Patasse, who was fighting off an attempted coup by his army Chief of Staff Francois Bozize. It was in that conflict that the MLC fighters were accused of committing the atrocities that led to Bemba's arrest and indictment.
Bemba's conviction under the command responsibility doctrine was a landmark conviction for the ICC, as it was the first instance in which the court prosecuted someone for rape as a weapon of war.
Now, his acquittal made his case all the more consequential for many actors and constituencies in international criminal justice.
Undeniably, Bemba's acquittal is a major disappointment for the victims of the CAR conflict. However, in this era of unprecedented human rights activism and judicialisation of conflicts, the fact that the ICC is not a human rights court is often lost in the noise.
Seeing Bemba walk free is disheartening to those who are still suffering in the Central African turmoil, but it is worth keeping in mind that the role of the ICC is not to make history, or restore historical injustices, or to end conflicts. The court is simply not equipped to do that, nor does its founding treaty assign those tasks to its judges.
Since the material jurisdiction of the ICC is atrocity crimes, which tend to occur within conflicts with many actors and complex dynamics, the ICC is simply a criminal court. As such, it cannot and does not indict rebel groups, militias, organisations, institutions, or states. Only individuals sit on the ICC's dock. Those individuals must be charged with specific crimes, and the evidenced against them must be weighted by the judges, who are tasked with issuing a ruling.
The ICC prosecutor has made victims' participation in trial proceedings a priority, which is also echoed by many human rights organisations. But the Appeals Chamber determined that many victims who participated in the trial against Bemba were victims of crimes that were not included in Bemba's case.
The Office of the Prosecutor and the human rights NGOs ought to rethink the zeal with which they oversell promises of "justice" to victims of conflicts. This does not serve the interests of the victims who are promised more than what the ICC is able to grant them in the end.
The acquittal means also that countless victims will have their hopes for reparations evaporate. A not guilty verdict means that the ICC cannot issue a judgment for reparations. This is certainly a painful reminder to the victims that the ICC, with its very slow pace, also holds a very uncertain promise to deliver justice.
The Bemba case stems from the ICC investigation of the 2002-2003 conflict in the CAR. The Prosecutor's strategy in this case was risky from the start because it indicted only one individual for command responsibility.
There is another active ICC investigation in the CAR, which opened in 2014 and focuses primarily on war crimes and crimes against humanity committed since the renewed violence of 2012. This means that the prosecutor may bring charges against other individuals in the context of the CAR crisis.
Furthermore, victims of violence in the CAR will have another venue to seek justice, namely the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic (SCC). This is a hybrid tribunal that will combine local and international staff and work within both domestic and international law. The SCC is expected to launch its investigations this year and trials may start soon.
Bemba is still awaiting re-sentencing for his conviction for witness tampering, but a panel of judges ordered this week that he be released from prison. The maximum sentence for that charge cannot exceed five years, and he has already been in custody for almost five years since that charge was brought against him.
Therefore, following his acquittal last week, the judges found that it would be disproportionate to keep him in custody in the meantime. Bemba's acquittal and release from prison will have major ripple effects on an already volatile situation in the DRC.
Although he has spent 10 years in prison in The Hague, Bemba remains a key political figure in his country. In a political landscape already marred with uncertainty, Bemba's return will pose a serious challenge to President Kabila who's trying to cling to power despite having finished his second term in December 2016. Following the death of Etienne Tshisekedi - who was the leading Congolese opposition figure since the 1980s - Bemba will rightfully claim the mantle of main challenger to President Kabila. The presidential elections are scheduled to take place in December 2018, after Kabila postponed them several times.
Civil society groups and leaders, including the very influential Catholic bishops have called for the president to hold elections and step aside. Kabila's forces have instead violently repressed these popular protests.
The exiled opposition leader Moise Katumbi has welcomed the news of Bemba's acquittal and called for the opposition to face Kabila with a united front. Katumbi had already been in talks with Felix Tshisekedi, Etienne's son and current leader of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress.
Bemba joining that united opposition front makes a win against Kabila very likely. The question then becomes whether Kabila will hold the presidential elections later this year nor not. Postponing them yet again will certainly lead to an escalation of political violence.
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War Crimes Prosecution Watch Staff
Founder/Advisor Dean Michael P. Scharf
Editor-in-Chief Taylor Frank
Managing Editors Sarah Lucey Lynsey Rosales
Technical Editor-in-Chief Ashley Mulryan
Senior Technical Editors Lysette Roman Jaclyn Cole
Associate Technical Editors Demari Muff Kurt Harris
Emerging Issues Advisor Judge Rosemelle Mutoka Contact: [email protected]
Africa
Central African Republic Amy Kochert, Senior Editor Megan Maccallum, Associate Editor
Sudan & South Sudan Amy Kochert, Senior Editor Vito Giannola, Associate Editor
Burundi Alexandra Hassan, Senior Editor Regen Weber, Associate Editor
Democratic Republic of the Congo Amy Kochert, Senior Editor Elizabeth Connors, Associate Editor
Kenya Stephen Keller, Senior Editor Aji Drameh, Senior Associate Editor Alexandria Serdaru, Associate Editor
Libya Alex Lilly, Senior Editor Jessica Sayre Smith, Associate Editor
Rwanda (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) Stephen Keller, Senior Editor Aaron Childs, Senior Associate Editor Lauren Garretson, Associate Editor
Mali Alexandra Hassan, Senior Editor Alayna Bridgett, Associate Editor
Lake Chad Region Taylor Frank, Senior Editor Alexandra Hassan, Associate Editor
Somalia Stephen Keller, Senior Editor Angela Kengara, Associate Editor
Uganda Stephen Keller, Senior Editor John Dagon, Senior Associate Editor Logan O'Connor, Associate Editor
Europe
Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, War Crimes Section Mary Preston, Senior Editor Mark Antiporda, Senior Associate Editor Julia Ozello, Associate Editor
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Mary Preston, Senior Editor Benjamin Boggs, Associate Editor
Domestic Prosecutions in the Former Yugoslavia Mary Preston, Senior Editor Andreana Paz, Associate Editor
Middle East and Asia
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia Morgan Austin, Senior Editor Ariana Pike, Associate Editor
Special Tribunal for Lebanon Mary Preston, Senior Editor Mark Antiporda, Senior Associate Editor Mary Preston, Associate Editor
Iraq Alex Lilly, Senior Editor Gloria Neilson, Associate Editor
Afghanistan Morgan Austin, Senior Editor Ariana Pike, Associate Editor
Syria Alex Lily, Senior Editor Elen Yeranosyan, Associate Editor
Bangladesh Estefanía Sixto Seijas, Special Senior Editor Chris Lauer, Associate Editor Sofia Panero, Associate Editor
War Crimes Investigations in Burma Estefanía Sixto Seijas, Special Senior Editor Nicolette Creegan, Senior Associate Editor
Yemen Morgan Austin, Senior Editor James Nichols, Senior Associate Editor
Israel/Palestine Morgan Austin, Senior Editor Arne Bussare, Senior Associate Editor Teresa Azzam, Associate Editor
Americas
North and Central America Morgan Austin, Senior Editor Julie Menke, Associate Editor
South America Amy Kochert, Senior Editor Shelby Wade, Senior Associate Editor
Topics
Terrorism Richard Urban, Senior Editor Jordan Dinsmore, Associate Editor
Piracy Richard Urban, Senior Editor Fritz Darnell, Senior Associate Editor
Gender-Based Violence Estefanía Sixto Seijas, Special Senior Editor Rachel Adelman, Associate Editor
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Richard Urban, Senior Editor
Commentary and Perspectives
Richard Urban, Senior Editor Tia Garcia, Associate Editor
Worth Reading
Taylor Frank Andrew Schiefer, Associate Editor
War Crimes Prosecution Watch is prepared by the International Justice Practice of the Public International Law & Policy Group and the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center of Case Western Reserve University School of Law and is made possible by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Institute.
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