By Brook Larmer “Dance!” shouted the army officer, waving a gun at the trembling girl. Afifa, just 14 years old, was corralled in a rice paddy with dozens of girls and women—all members of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority. The soldiers who invaded her village that morning last October said they were looking for militants who had carried out a surprise attack on three border posts, killing nine policemen. The village’s men and boys, fearing for their lives, had dashed into the forests to hide, and the soldiers began terrorizing the women and children. After enduring an invasive body search, Afifa had watched soldiers drag two young women deep into the rice paddy before they turned their attention to her. “If you don’t dance at once,” the officer said, drawing his hand across his throat, “we will slaughter you.” Choking back tears, Afifa began to sway back and forth. The soldiers clapped rhythmically. A few pulled out mobile phones to shoot videos. The commanding officer slid his arm around Afifa’s waist. Rohingya refugees queue outside Kutupalong camp near the town of Cox’s Bazar, waiting to receive staples from the World Food Programme. About half a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. “Now that’s better, isn’t it?” he said, flashing a smile. The encounter marked only the beginning of the latest wave of violence against the estimated 1.1 million Rohingya who live, precariously, in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state. The United Nations considers the Rohingya one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. Muslims in a nation dominated by Buddhists, the Rohingya claim that they are indigenous to Rakhine, and many are descended from settlers who came in the 19th and early 20th century. Despite their roots, a 1982 law stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship. They are now considered illegal immigrants in Myanmar as well as in neighboring Bangladesh, the country to which as many as half a million have fled. Five years ago, clashes between Buddhist and Muslim communities left hundreds dead, mostly Rohingya. With their mosques and villages torched, 120,000 Rohingya were forced into makeshift camps inside Myanmar (also known as Burma). This time the assault was unleashed by the Burmese military, the feared Tatmadaw, which ruled over Myanmar for five decades before overseeing a transition that led last year to a quasi-civilian government. Early in the morning, family members warm themselves around a fire in an alley in Kutupalong. Refugees construct their huts from branches, leaves, and black plastic sheeting. Many of these flimsy shelters were ruined in May by a cyclone. What began ostensibly as a hunt for the culprits behind the border post attacks turned into a four-month assault on the Rohingya population as a whole. According to witnesses interviewed by the UN and international human-rights groups, as well as National Geographic, the army campaign included executions, mass detentions, the razing of villages, and the systematic rape of Rohingya women. Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, believes it’s “very likely” the army committed crimes against humanity. The full extent of what happened in northern Rakhine state is not yet known because the government has not allowed independent investigators, journalists, or aid groups unfettered access to the affected areas. Satellite imagery at the time showed Rohingya villages destroyed by fire. Amateur video appeared to show charred bodies of adults and children lying on the ground in the torched villages. Rights groups say hundreds of Rohingya have been killed. One incontrovertible truth is that the army assault triggered the exodus of more than 75,000 Rohingya into overcrowded refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. Nearly 60 percent are children. (An estimated 20,000 or more Rohingya have been displaced within Myanmar’s borders.) With no access to Bangladesh’s health facilities, Rohingya women with a malnourished baby wait to be seen by medical professionals who work for international non-profits. Before the soldiers left Afifa’s village that day, she says they set fire to the harvest-ready rice fields, looted houses, and shot or stole all of the cattle and goats. The devastation and fear compelled Afifa’s parents to split the family into two groups and escape in different directions—to improve their odds of survival. “We didn’t want to abandon our home,” Afifa’s father, Mohammed Islam, told me five months later, when five of the family’s 11 members staggered into Balukhali, a refugee camp in Bangladesh. “But the army has only one aim: to get rid of all Rohingya.” It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. More than a year ago, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi became Myanmar’s de facto leader, and international human-rights groups—as well as many Rohingya—hoped she would help move Rakhine toward peace and reconciliation. The daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero and martyr, General Aung San, she is celebrated for her fearless resistance to the country’s military dictatorship. After enduring more than 15 years under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi led her National League of Democracy to a sweeping electoral victory in 2015. (A clause in the military-drafted constitution prevented her from becoming president, so a loyal underling serves as president while she runs the government as “state counselor.”) “We had a very big hope that Suu Kyi and democracy would be good for us,” says Moulabi Jaffar, a 40-year-old Islamic cleric and shop owner from a village north of Maungdaw, sitting in his shack in Balukhali camp. “But the violence only got worse. That came as a big surprise.” Men pray at a mosque being built from bamboo at Balukhali, a refugee camp in Bangladesh. The Rohingya are Muslims, while Buddhism is the dominant religion in Myanmar. Buddhist firebrands have stirred up hatred for the minority Rohingya. Despite her reputation as a human-rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi has seemed unwilling or unable to speak about the violence against the Rohingya, much less bring perpetrators to justice. When reports of army atrocities emerged late last year, she broke her silence—not to rein in abusive soldiers but to scold the United Nations and human-rights groups for stoking “bigger fires of resentment” by dwelling on the testimonies of Rohingya who had fled to Bangladesh. It doesn’t help, she said, “if everybody is just concentrating on the negative side of the situation.” Aung San Suu Kyi has yet to visit northern Rakhine. But in a BBC interview in April, she said, “I don’t think there is ethnic cleansing going on.” Aung San Suu Kyi remains an immensely popular figure in Myanmar, where 90 percent of the population is Buddhist and the military still wields enormous power. But her role in shielding the army from scrutiny in Rakhine has tarnished her global reputation, even prompting a letter from 13 Nobel laureates upbraiding her for failing to protect the rights of the Rohingya. “Like many in the international community, we expected more of Suu Kyi,” says Matthew Smith, co-founder of Fortify Rights, a Bangkok-based human-rights group. “She is operating in a delicate situation politically, but that doesn’t justify silence or wholesale denials in the face of mountains of evidence. The army launched an attack on a civilian population, and nobody has been held accountable.” Myanmar set up three commissions to look into the turmoil in Rakhine state, but none is independent. The army’s report, released in May, proclaimed its innocence—except for two minor incidents, including one in which a soldier borrowed a motorbike without asking. A member of the main government inquiry dismissed reports of atrocities and contended that Burmese soldiers couldn’t have raped Rohingya women because they are “too dirty.” That commission’s final report, issued in early August, was another blanket denial, contending that “there is no evidence of crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.” Aung San Suu Kyi says her government will accept outside guidance only from an international commission chaired by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. Its report is also due this month, but its mandate is to make policy recommendations—not to investigate human-rights abuses. Young boys study the Quran inside a madrassa in one of the older parts of the Kutupalong camp. Most Rohingya children in Bangladesh do not have access to formal schooling because they are unregistered refugees. Most attend the many madrassas found throughout the camps. In June, when a newly formed UN fact-finding mission sought to investigate human-rights violations in Myanmar, including Rakhine, Aung San Suu Kyi’s government refused to grant visas to the team members. “We don’t accept it,” she said, arguing that the mission could exacerbate divisions between Buddhists and Muslims. When Lee, the UN special rapporteur, returned to Myanmar in July, she and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a warm embrace—before Lee excoriated the government for blocking her access and intimidating witnesses, the same tactics used by the military junta. “In previous times, human rights defenders, journalists, and civilians were followed, monitored, and surveyed, and questioned—that’s still going on." Afia, her father, and siblings spent five months on the run inside Myanmar, sticking mostly to the forests to avoid the military, often going days without food. On their first attempt to cross the Naf River, which separates Myanmar and Bangladesh, a Burmese patrol boat opened fire, capsizing their boat and killing several refugees. It would be three months before they risked the crossing again. I met Afifa in March on the day that half of her family finally reached Balukhali camp, where more than 11,000 new arrivals have turned the forested hills into a dusty hive of bamboo huts and black tarpaulins. Afifa wore the same soiled brown shirt she wore the day she danced for the soldiers five months before. “It’s all I have,” she says. Another family from their home village of Maung Hnama offered food to eat and a safe place to sleep, but Islam wept quietly. His wife and their five other children were still in hiding in Myanmar. Rohingya from Shaplapur village, who work for local fishermen, shove a boat to sea, where some will spend the night.Right: Nur Haba dries fish at a factory in Cox’s Bazar, where she has worked for 10 years. She lives in Kutupalong refugee camp with four children and her husband, who has been unable to find work. The refugee camps that line Bangladesh’s border are a short drive from the Bangladeshi resort of Cox’s Bazar. Tourists there cavort on the wide beach, taking grinning selfies in the surf, while a few miles away, hundreds of thousands of refugees marinate in grief and neglect. In Kutupalong, a sprawling camp with some 30,000 Rohingya refugees, the wood and bamboo dwellings radiate from the center like rings on a tree, each layer marking a wave of violence the Rohingya have fled. Rozina Akhtar, 22, has lived here since she was seven years old. With no real hope of leaving—“we have no passports, no ID cards, so what can we do?”—she tries to help new arrivals adjust to their lives as refugees. “We can’t reject them,” she says. “These are our sisters and brothers.” Akhtar helps newcomers get medical care, plastic tarpaulins, and food rations, but what they really need are jobs. Men can occasionally get day jobs, fishing, harvesting rice, or laboring in the salt flats for a dollar or two a day, but many of the women beg for money along the road outside the camp. Under a sprawling fig tree in Kutupalong, new arrivals gather to talk about the atrocities they endured in Myanmar. Nur Ayesha, 40, pulls back her headscarf to reveal bleached-white burn scars across her forehead; soldiers set fire to her house while she was still inside, she says. Residents of Kyet Yoe Pyin say the Burmese soldiers who firebombed their houses also gunned down six women and a man who had stayed behind to attend the birth of a baby—the mother included. Minara, an 18-year-old in a black burqa, speaks about her missing family members before revealing that Burmese soldiers gang-raped her and several other young women in her village. Her voice barely rises above a whisper. As we talk, Minara, who, like many victims, didn’t choose to reveal her last name, bites the edge of her sleeve, pulling it over her face. By the end, only her eyes, darting back and forth, are visible. “We’re too scared to go back,” she says. Left: Nur Ayesha says she was burned on her face and arm when the Burmese military torched her house while she was in it. She has received treatment at Kutupalong.Right: Nurul Amain, who also lives at Kutupalong, was shot by soldiers multiple times in his arm, which had to be amputated when he finally found a doctor. Molia Banu, 60, arrived at Kutupalong about two months before this photograph. She and her daughters fled when the military began burning a house next to theirs. Still suffering from an operation to remove a tumor, Banu supports her family by begging on the main road. On a hill back in Balukhali camp, I meet a 14-year-old boy, Ajim Allah, getting his hair combed by a friend. Ajim shows me his shriveled left arm, shattered, he says, by a police bullet when he emerged from a madrassa last October; three of his friends died of gunshot wounds that night, he says. In a hut nearby, Yasmin, 27, recounts how soldiers burst into her home in Ngan Chaung village and took turns raping her at knifepoint in front of her five-year-old daughter. “When my daughter screamed, they pointed guns at her and told her they’d kill her if she made any more noise,” she says. The worst moment came after the soldiers left. Yasmin says she went out to look for her eight-year-old son, who had fled when the soldiers came into the village. She found him lying in a rice paddy, a bullet hole in his back. The Rohingya are caught between two countries—and welcome in neither. More than 500,000 Rohingya now live in Bangladesh. Only 32,000 are officially registered, however, and no new Rohingya refugees have been registered since 1992—an apparent attempt to dissuade more Rohingya from seeking refuge in Bangladesh. That strategy hasn’t worked, but it means that there are close to half a million undocumented Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh with no right or access to employment, education, or basic health care. Toward the end of day, a boy walks along a path past houses in through a more established section of Kutupalong camp toward a playground that attracts many children. Bangladesh, already poor and overpopulated, shows no enthusiasm for hosting the Rohingya. Conditions in the camps are miserable, but the government has declined many offers of humanitarian aid. It has even floated a plan to move the refugees to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal. The radical proposal seemed designed to keep Rohingya away from the tourist hub of Cox’s Bazar—and to push refugees to return to Myanmar. Many Rohingya, however, are too traumatized to go back to Rakhine, an area historically known as Arakan. One rape victim I spoke to recalled the chilling words of her army attacker: “He kept saying, ‘This kind of torture will continue until you leave the country.’” Children push a child in a wheelchair along a path in Kutupalong where enterprising refugees have set up shops and cafes. Almost two-thirds of the refugees who recently fled Myanmar for Bangladesh are children, raising concerns that they are at increased risk of being forced into child labor, early marriage or the sex trade. A few years ago, many Rohingya men, including Yasmin’s husband, risked a perilous sea journey to seek construction work in Malaysia or Indonesia. With no citizenship and no passport, travel had to be undertaken illegally. Smugglers packed the refugees onto unregistered ships and cycled them through secret jungle camps, beating or starving to death the ones whose families didn't pay exorbitant smuggling fees. A crackdown on human trafficking in Southeast Asia has closed off that route, leaving a lot of Rohingya men languishing in the refugee camps without any way to make a living. The mixture of despair and marginalization, experts warn, is a recipe for radicalization. Many refugees seek solace in religious faith. In the camps, clusters of young men armed with holy Korans go door to door, urging refugees to pray more devoutly. Out of sight, locals say, is something more ominous: A newly formed militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, is reportedly trying to recruit refugees to join a nascent insurgency against the Burmese army and its local government collaborators. The last time I saw Afifa, she was sweeping a rectangular patch of dirt on a hill near the refugee camp’s edge—the site of the family’s new shelter. Her father had borrowed $30 from a fellow refugee to buy a horse-cart full of bamboo poles and strips, and he’d already erected the thickest poles at the corners. Islam, a former Arabic teacher, was dressed in a white skullcap and a clean cream-colored tunic, getting ready to attend midday Friday prayers—the jumu’ah—for the first time since he left his village five months before. Just down the sandy path from their plot, barefoot men in sarongs scrambled to secure the bamboo scaffolding of Balukhali’s new mosque. It would be another week before the structure was finished, with palm fronds as the roof, but the muezzin sounded the call to prayer and dozens of bearded men in white caps gravitated to a small carpet in the center of the mosque. Islam found a spot in the first row and bowed in front of the imam, who stood on a red plastic stool. Later, as Islam walked back from the mosque, he smiled: “I feel better now.” The misery, however, has continued. In late May, a cyclone ripped through southern Bangladesh, destroying the family’s shelter and thousands of others in the camps. Nobody died in Balukhali, and Afifa’s mother and other siblings have since made it to Bangladesh, easing the girl’s anxiety. Still, food remains scarce, the monsoon rains continue, and there are troubling reports of renewed violence in Rakhine from both sides—military operations by the Burmese army and occasional attacks by Rohingya militants. In this predicament, it’s unclear when, or if, Afifa and her family will ever have a place to call home. Some Rohingya live outside the camps near Cox’s Bazar. This man lives in a settlement on the Bay of Bengal, near trees planted to prevent erosion and close to a hotel catering to tourists drawn by the beach. As one neighbor lamented: “Bad days for us never end.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 National Geographic

By Emma Richards An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman pours water on her head from a paddy field as she waits to be taken to a refugee camp after crossing the Naf river at the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Palang Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh November 2, 2017. Source: Reuters/Adnan Abidi BURMA’s (Myanmar) military systematically raped and tortured women and girls as part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Northern Rakhine State, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released on Thursday. The 37-page report documents the gruesome stories of women who have fled the violence and are currently in refugee camps Bangladesh. Many women describe widespread gang-rape. They were also subjected to torture and humiliation and were, in many cases, forced to witness the murder of their young children, spouses, and parents. “Rape has been a prominent and devastating feature of the Burmese military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at HRW and author of the report, said in a statement. SEE ALSO: Rohingya crisis: Burmese military slammed after clearing itself of any wrongdoing “The Burmese military’s barbaric acts of violence have left countless women and girls brutally harmed and traumatised.” HRW spoke to 52 Rohingya women and girls who fled to Bangladesh, 29 of whom said they had been raped. All but one of the rapes were gang rapes, HRW said. A Bangladeshi army soldier hands over a relief card to Rohingya refugees, who fled from Myanmar a day before as they walk to a relief centre in Teknaf, near Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, on Oct 13, 2017. Source: Reuters/Zohra Bensemra Fatama Begum, currently in the Balukali refugee camp, Bangladesh, detailed how six men pinned her down and raped her. “They… grabbed me by the mouth and held me still. He stuck a knife into my side and kept it there while the men were raping me. That was how they kept me in place … I was trying to move and [the wound] was bleeding more. They were threatening to shoot me,” she said. The allegation in the report echoes an accusation by Pramila Patten, the UN special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, earlier this week. Patten said sexual violence was “being commanded, orchestrated and perpetrated by the Armed Forces of Myanmar.” Burma’s army, however, released a report on Monday denying all allegations of rape and killings by security forces, days after replacing the general in charge of the operation that drove more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. SEE ALSO: As Tillerson visits Burma, Holocaust Museum points to ‘mounting evidence of genocide’ HRW called on the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Burma and targeted sanctions against military leaders responsible for human rights violations, including sexual violence. The 15-member council last week urged the Burma government to “ensure no further excessive use of military force in Rakhine state.” It asked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to report back on the situation in 30 days Burma has said that the so-called military “clearing operation” was necessary for national security after Rohingya militants attacked 30 security posts and an army base in Rakhine state on Aug 25. The country has refused entry to a UN panel that was tasked with investigating allegations of abuses after a smaller military counteroffensive launched in October 2016. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Asian Correspondent

Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in Burma have told how the military targeted children and the elderly in sickening attacks. The Muslim minority refugees said soldiers and Buddhist leaders carried out a systematic campaign of murder and burning villages – accusations which military leaders have denied. Shawkat Ara, 38, said soldiers attacked her village in the middle of the night and she hid in the jungle with fellow villagers as they watched their houses burn. She said: “The military told the young boys to stand in a line and told them to run. When they were running they rushed them from behind and they were falling in ditches. “Some were cut into pieces and thrown into ditches. They were all between 10 and 12 years old. “The military were actually playing with the boys. They were telling them to run and then cutting them.” She added: “I broke my hand crawling into the jungle. When the soldiers started firing, people were running here and there, it was totally messed up. “Fathers were not staying with their sons and sons were not looking for their fathers, just running for their lives. “The small children were the worst affected because they can’t run.” Despite a recent agreement with the Burmese government for repatriation, refugees continue to arrive in Bangladesh, joining 646,000 who have braved the dangerous border crossing since the surge in violence after Rohingya militants reportedly attacked border posts in August. Alistair Dutton, director of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (Sciaf), which has raised more than £160,000 to help the refugees, said: ”I don’t know who’s guilty of what but what has happened are crimes against humanity. “The chopping people up, shooting them, burning bodies, torching villages, stealing belongings and driving people out their country – these are crimes against humanity whoever perpetrated them.” Mr Dutton warned the crisis could last for years, stressing that Sciaf and charity partner Caritas Bangladesh were planning for the long term as the average time a person spends as a refugee is 17 years. Mrs Ara, who saw her parents and one son die from hunger as she made the arduous journey to safety in Bangladesh, said she also witnessed soldiers attacking the elderly. She said her neighbour, an elderly imam, was shot and attacked with machetes before being burned. Kamal Hossain, 41, one of the Rohingya refugees who met the Pope on his recent visit to Burma and Bangladesh, said 80% of 9,675 people were killed in the district where he was leader. He said: “The military applied their tricks – they were killing the elderly and young people first so that the other people would do nothing to them. They apply these techniques. “Most people were burned and killed in fires set by the military. After the killing they threw the bodies into the ditches so people can’t take the water because it is full of blood. “The villagers had no food, so that made them flee.” He also said the military forced him to watch as they raped his daughter-in-law. (c) Daily Mail 2017

Those who went into exile have creatively adapted their rituals. Those who stayed have been just as innovative. By Cathy Otten BEHZANE, IRAQ—On a recent Friday afternoon, Yezidi musicians led a procession of worshipers toward a newly rebuilt temple on a hillside in northern Iraq. Women burned incense and the congregation threw handfuls of sweets at the flute and drum players. Hundreds of local Yezidis from the town of Behzane, near Mosul, had gathered to reopen one of the temples blown up by ISIS. “We are so excited to be back,” said a flute player, Arean Hassan. The spiraling, rhythmic music played by Yezidi musicians, known as Qawwals, had been absent from the hills of Behzane for three years under ISIS. Around the newly rebuilt temple stood the charred stumps of olive trees that ISIS had burned to the ground. Behzane fell to ISIS in the summer of 2014, after the group seized Mosul. In August of that year, ISIS massacred and kidnapped thousands of Yezidis in Sinjar, 90 miles west of Behzane. More than 6,000 women were enslaved, and men were lined up and shot outside their towns. Many more Yezidis died of dehydration and exhaustion during the siege of Sinjar mountain. Thousands of survivors remain displaced or in exile. Behzane was retaken by the Kurdish Peshmerga in late 2016. This autumn, its townspeople celebrated a return to their sacred place. “I’m so happy to dance again,” said Dilbreen Ibrahim, a 20-year-old worshiper who came home this summer. “It is victory against ISIS.” But there’s an unavoidable question at the heart of the happiness and defiance of the worshipers, who not long ago were targeted for genocide precisely because of these religious practices. How do you rehabilitate a religion that’s been singled out for such intense trauma and displacement? The encounter with ISIS dramatically accelerated changes that had been creeping up on the long-persecuted religious group over decades. It exacerbated tensions between the need to preserve tradition and the need to modernize. It necessitated innovations in the Yezidi religion, like an exception, for the women who managed to escape from ISIS captivity, to the rules against marrying outside the faith. It gave Yezidis a stronger sense of religious identification over ethnic, Kurdish identification. And it required thousands of Yezidis to take their customs into exile—which, inevitably, involves adapting them. * * * Yezidism is a monotheistic faith that retains vestiges of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian sun-worshiping religions, later fused with the teachings of a 12th-century Sufi mystic, Sheikh Adi. Practices such as worship of the elements were among the departures from Islamic orthodoxy that led to the group’s rejection from the Islamic community over time. Nor do the Yezidis consider themselves Muslim, despite the Muslim faith of their prophet Sheikh Adi, whose memory is also the focus of a debate about tradition and modernization. Some Yezidis call for a rejection of the mystic and a return to a pre-Islamic version of the faith. But to this day, the valley of Lalish in northern Iraq, where Sheikh Adi is buried, is the holy center for Yezidis. Each Yezidi must make a pilgrimage to Lalish in his or her lifetime. Worshipers gathering at the temple complex there perform blessings and take part in festivals with feasts, music, and songs. ISIS fighters were merely the latest in a long line of Muslim forces to attack the Yezidis and label them infidels. Yezidis pay homage to the peacock angel, whom they regard as the chief of angels and God’s representative on earth. The peacock has often been misconstrued as the devil of other religions, leading to the persecution of Yezidis as devil worshipers. Western missionaries had also tried to convert Yezidis to Christianity. The religion claims just under one million adherents worldwide, with most living in northern Iraq. One of the main ways that the small faith group has preserved itself over the centuries has been through strict rules preventing Yezidis from marrying outside the religion, or even marrying Yezidis from a caste other than their own. Yezidis have three castes: the laypeople known as Murids, and the priestly Sheikhs and Pirs. In the past, Yezidis who left their religion—even through forcible conversion—couldn’t return to the faith. But this changed in late summer 2014, when Yezidi women and girls began escaping from ISIS enslavement across the Caliphate. ISIS fighters had forced Yezidi women and girls to convert to Islam, kept them in prisons, sold them at slave markets, and raped them. Baba Sheikh, the Yezidi spiritual leader, along with the Yezidi spiritual council, ruled that the faith group would welcome back former captives using a baptism rite in Lalish. Former captives are re-baptized in the White Spring near Sheikh Adi’s tomb, representing a return to the religious community. This innovation has been a hugely psychologically important to the former ISIS captives, who described to me with great relief the acceptance and renewal they experience after being re-baptized. This ruling, along with the agony of ISIS attacks, has intensified the ongoing debate among the Yezidis about the future of their people. It’s one that tends divide along generational lines. One side argues that the religion must modernize to endure—the other that modernization is precisely what will threaten the religion’s survival. The Yezidi psychologist Jan Kizilhan told me the ruling didn’t go far enough, since it only applied to women who were forced to convert and raped by ISIS, without allowing Yezidis in general to marry outside the faith. Kizilhan told me via phone from Germany that without further loosening of the restrictions, young people might leave. Hakar, a 26-year-old who asked me not to use his last name, was a case in point. “[Not marrying outside the religion] kept us alive and meant we didn’t melt into other traditions, but now it needs updating,” he told me over coffee in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. But Gule Haji, a 75-year-old I met in Bekhane, said the ISIS attacks were punishments for abandoning tradition. “It will be worse if we don’t follow our religion,” she said. When I met Hakar, he described attending the opening of the new temple in Behzane the week before. For him, “It wasn’t about religion, it was about ancestry: We are back, we are here, and we will be here.” * * * Even when Yezidis are not “here,” but rather elsewhere, many hold fast to their traditions. One Yezidi family told me how they gathered small balls of holy earth from Lalish and carried them inside a purse when they fled from Iraq to the U.S. When they reached their new home in Texas, they hung the purse on a wall. Now, they pray toward it. Likewise, in his book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, the author Gerard Russell describes Yezidi refugee Mirza Ismail facing the sun as he prays at dawn in a Canadian apartment block. This exiled refugee is using prayer to move beyond the problems of space and time. In Germany, which is home to Europe’s largest Yezidi diaspora community, Yezidi refugees fleeing ISIS join an already established group that dates from prior waves of persecution. (Although accurate figures are scarce when it comes to the size of the pre-ISIS Yezidi community, Kizilhan said it has grown significantly, with 120,000 Yezidis now in Germany.) And in the U.K., the Yezidi activist Rozin Khalil recently announced that the Rozi Ezi, a winter celebration that usually takes the form of a three-day fast, would be held in the city of Birmingham. In the Caucasus, Yezidi identity construction has taken a different course. The journalist Allan Kaval has written about how Yezidis living in Armenia strengthened their own identity in opposition to Muslim Kurdishness during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1980s and ’90s. Muslim Kurds “were compelled to flee” to their coreligionists in Azerbaijan, and Yezidis “increasingly felt the need to dissociate themselves from the Muslim Kurds who were, in Armenians’ nationalist narrative, represented as active perpetrators of the Armenian massacres in the Ottoman empire in 1915,” Kaval wrote. The centenary of the Armenian genocide only increased this trend toward Yezidi religious identification. In Tbilisi, Georgia, a Yezidi cultural center opened in 2015. In Armenia, a new Yezidi temple is under construction outside Yerevan. News of the ISIS attacks further changed Yezidism in the diaspora. Because Yezidis in the Middle East had been attacked on account of their religion, it gave Yezidis around the world a stronger sense of religious identification over ethnic, Kurdish identification. Traditionally, Yezidis had passed down the stories of their religion orally via singers—the Qawwals—who toured through Yezidi towns and villages in Iraq, Syria, Eastern Anatolia, and the Caucasus. In the Yezidi creation story, after a pearl is split by divine power, bringing forth the universe, the first man’s soul cannot enter his body without the help of the accompanying music of the Qawwals, explained Qawwal Barzad, the chief of the Yezidi musicians. After ISIS occupied their towns, the Qawwals scattered and stopped performing. Now that ISIS is in retreat and some Yezidis have returned home, the songs of the Qawwals have also returned. “Before, we were the only ones who knew the stories, but [after ISIS] our role is even more important,” said Qawwal Arean. But not all Yezidis agree that adherence to the old customs will guarantee the future of the faith, as more and more Yezidis leave their former homes and tens of thousands more remain displaced in Iraq. For some, the importance of the written word is increasing. “The question of whether to collect the sacred texts in a new ‘holy book’ is now being discussed,” Philip Kreyenbroek, a scholar of Yezidism, told me in an email. “Among other things, this means that the sacred texts, which previously were the province of Qawwals and theoretically Sheikhs and Pirs [holy castes of the religion], are now accessible in written form to modern Yezidi intellectuals, who are rapidly replacing the traditional ‘men of religion’ as sources of authority.” In this way, the Yezidis may be following a trajectory similar to that of ancient faiths like Judaism, which started out with an oral religion but, as a result of exile, turned to writing to codify their beliefs and customs. A trauma like the encounter with ISIS could, Kizilhan said, have the effect of wiping out a small group like the Yezidis. But, as in the case of other faiths, it could also galvanize them to creatively transform their religion into something well suited to a new world. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/how-isis-changed-the-yezidi-religion/548651/ (c) 2017 The Atlantic

As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I grew up feeling a strong connection to my family history. The Holocaust formed part of my identity, and served as a unique entry point to understanding Jewish history, and the world at large. As I reached my late 20s, I increasingly wanted to connect with others who felt the same. In 2005, I searched for such a platform. I perused the program guides of Jewish institutions, such as the JCC in Manhattan and the 92nd Street Y, and looked around elsewhere. But I discovered that there were no programs specifically for the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Among the lesser known, yet most influential leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood is the Egyptian-born British national Ahmed Ibrahim Munir. I felt this was a void in the Jewish community, so I sent out an e-mail calling for the grandchildren of survivors to come together. A few weeks later, five grandchildren of Holocaust survivors responded to my call, and gathered to share their family stories and discuss their legacy. Although we didn’t know each other, and came from diverse backgrounds and worked in various fields, we felt an immediate bond. We soon came to a consensus on our mission: to provide a forum for the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and to preserve and pass on our family histories to the next generation. We established 3GNY (Third Generation New York) as an educational nonprofit organization. Today, we proudly count more than 2,000 members. We’ve created diverse programming, such as Shabbat dinners, discussion groups, genealogy and writing workshops, museum tours, book talks, film screenings and happy hours. One of our most popular events is our Annual Family Brunch, where members bring parents and grandparents, and even the fourth generation — to share our successes of the year, and plans for the future. As the population of survivors declines, their stories should not be lost with them. Our generation is primarily the last living link to Holocaust survivors. It is through us that future generations will hear the actual stories of our grandparents’ survival, and the unimaginable losses of that generation. In 2010, we launched an educational initiative called WEDU (We Educate). Developed in conjunction with Facing History and Ourselves, WEDU empowers the descendants of survivors to learn and share their family stories and the lessons of the Holocaust in school classrooms. This is a concrete way for the next generation to take ownership and responsibility for our legacy. By acting as a conduit for our grandparents’ stories, we make history more personal and relatable. We are in a special position to spotlight the individual experience of the Holocaust, and provide students with an entry point to examine prejudice today. The dialogue that we have with students has inspired them to explore their own family history, as an entry point to understanding world history and current events. To date, we’ve trained more than 150 descendants of survivors, who have visited over 100 classrooms and impacted at least 5,000 students, as well as numerous community groups. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but when you consider there are more than one million students in New York City, we know that we’ve only begun. The stakes are high. Hate crimes are up, especially against Jews. Holocaust references are now routine in political discourse, and Holocaust denial is increasingly presented as an “alternative fact.” Our community has a vitally important role to play as educators of the Holocaust, and ambassadors for universal tolerance. https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/12/26/survivors-grandchildren-teach-lessons-of-the-holocaust/ (c) 2017 The Algemeiner

By Erin Handley A memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge’s policy of forced evacuation has been unceremoniously removed just weeks after it was inaugurated at its designated site next to the French Embassy. The sculpture, part of a memorial entitled For Those Who Are No Longer Here by French-Cambodian artist Séra Ing, was one of the reparations projects outlined in the 2014 judgment handed down by the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Case 002/01 against former Brother Number Two Nuon Chea and former head of state Khieu Samphan. The work, a mottled bronze figure frozen mid-air as it tumbles backwards with its hands pressed into a sampeah, evokes the displacement of the victims of the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975. Workers install a sculpture commemorating Khmer Rouge victims that was quietly taken down and moved to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. Photo supplied The number of deaths stemming from the forced evacuation is imprecise, but evidence presented at the court suggests anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 people perished. The sculpture was inaugurated on December 7 with much fanfare and 20 civil parties – recognised victims of the regime who take part in the legal proceedings and are entitled to reparations – attended, along with lawyers and government officials. By early January, however, the statue had been quietly removed by municipal authorities and is currently residing at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Muesum, where it will later be installed. Civil party lawyer Marie Guiraud said she had not received “any official notification or explanation” for the sudden removal. She said the court, in its judgment, “noted that the Municipality of Phnom Penh had agreed to the proposed location of the memorial” in front of the French Embassy. “We then learned that the Memorial had been moved to Tuol Sleng, which is not a location one would think of for a memorial aimed at honoring the victims of forced evacuations,” Guiraud said in an email. “We are about to inform the Trial Chamber and the civil parties about that unexpected development.” But “on a positive note”, she said the sculpture would be included in the museum’s audioguide and a plaque would explain its meaning to visitors. The artist, Séra, said the position next to the French Embassy held deeply personal significance. It was the last place he saw his father, who was killed in 1978. While Séra’s mother and siblings took refuge at the embassy and later fled the country, his Cambodian-born father was refused entry. “It is here that I saw with my eyes the last inhabitants of Phnom Penh forced to leave too,” he said in an email. “This place was also symbolically charged for me; it is here that I saw for the first time in my life heaps of calcined human bodies, after the destruction of the bridge in 1972. In this mass of bodies, we no longer recognised the men or women.” Phnom Penh Governor Khuong Sreng said the statue was removed “because at that place, it needs to be turned into a park”. But when probed on why the municipal authorities acted against the court’s decision, Sreng deferred questions to the French Embassy. French Embassy spokesperson Mathilde Teruya said in an email that “the Municipality, after having informed the French Embassy, is in the process of installing this Memorial in Tuol Sleng, where exposure will be greater and the upkeep easier”. Youk Chhang, of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, said the Khmer Rouge’s crimes happened all over the country, and it was important to mark those sites to “unpack” the immensity of the loss, rather than “packing it all in” at Tuol Sleng, the former site of an infamous torture centre. He said the sculpture project had been years in the making, and to remove it in such a short time “undermines all that effort – all that hard work seems to have vanished”. “If you can remove or replace part of a legal judgment, what is the impact?” he said. “It is a major loss in terms of victims’ perceptions of the power of the judgment at the ECCC.” Séra stressed the memorial was not yet complete, and still required a dark marble pool of water and an abstract wall. It remained unclear how that would be realised within the walls of Tuol Sleng. “On this surface, I would wrinkle, scratch in the earth, to talk about the suffering of those who are no longer there,” he said. “I wanted the city where I was born and where I grew up [to] not forget its history, even when it was tragic.” http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/khmer-rouge-reparations-statue-quietly-removed (c) 2018 The Phnom Penh Post

By Daniele Hamamdjian In an effort to show the world Myanmar is ready to take back hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees, its government is finally granting foreign officials access to Northern Rakhine State, the site where atrocities against the Muslim minority were committed. Canada’s special envoy to Myanmar, Bob Rae, was among diplomats and UN staff taken on a government-organized helicopter trip across the territory earlier this month. “The level of destruction which you can see from the air, hundreds of villages which have been completely destroyed,” Rae described to CTV News. “I continue to be very struck by the level of deep hostility to the Rohingya, the degree of that hostility is the underlying problem,” he went on to say. The Myanmar military has been accused of carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, an accusation it continues to deny. In mid-January, Myanmar and Bangladesh, where nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to, signed a deal that would see a complete repatriation of the refugees within two years. By the time the process was to begin the following week, it had already been delayed. “There is no substitute for actually seeing and being there,” Rae said. He visited one village that was in the process of being rebuilt by the Myanmar government. But Rae denies he only saw what the government wanted him to see. “What they wanted us to see were the transition centres that are being built near the border,” he said, “but in order to get there, you had to fly over all this territory.” Technically, Myanmar has a plan for the repatriation of Rohingya, said Rae. “In terms of what will be the pace at which people will cross, they will be monitored and admitted, fingerprinted and ID’ed then given a card, given a National Identification Card,” he went on to say. But the problem is not the infrastructure, Rae told CTV News, “the problem is the enormity and size and scope of the number of people who have to be admitted. And what will be the conditions in terms of their safety and security when they come back?” There is another, underreported problem, Rae said: the growing presence of a well-armed guerrilla faction of the Arakan Nationalist movement, comprising ultranationalist Buddhists. “That army has inflicted quite a lot of damage on the Myanmar army,” he said.“They will form a body of serious resistance to the return of the Rohingya to the northern parts of Rakhine, in which they live.” Rae believes there has to be a reality check for everybody. “One of the things that’s troubling, the extent to which there is, I think on all sides, an underestimation as to how serious a challenge this is going to be.” Rae also met with two senior generals in the Myanmar military and pressed upon them the importance of an independent probe into the crisis in Northern Rakhine state. There are growing calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch an investigation into crimes against humanity. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/hundreds-of-villages-destroyed-bob-rae-says-after-touring-northern-rakhine-state-1.3803061 (c) 2018 CTV News

By Rev. Dr. Francis Ujunwa Simeon Apart from the Boko Haram sect, the other group that constantly sheds innocent blood across the country is the Fulani herdsmen group. It is said to be the fourth most dreaded terrorist organisation in the world. In order to secure grazing land for their cattle, the Fulani herdsmen sack whole communities, burn their houses, rape their women, slaughter human beings in the most barbaric and sadistic manner, and take over their land as an army of occupation. Consequently, the farmers are prevented from working on their farms. What bothers most Nigerians is the seeming helplessness of the Federal Government and its security personnel in curbing these herdsmen’s menace. For example, according to the Taraba State Government, the herdsmen kill and maim at will with their AK 47 guns and nobody arrests or disarms them. Rather, the locals that have only cutlasses and knives are being disarmed by the military. Some of the locals also alleged that the military personnel who are predominantly Hausa – Fulani, look the other way while the herdsmen attack them. The military has, however, denied that allegation. This has given rise to the conspiracy theory that the security operatives might be colluding with the herdsmen. Why is it difficult for the government to deal with the Fulani herdsmen? Some reasons have been adduced. The rich and powerful Fulanis own the over 20 million heads of cattle valued in trillions of Naira. They include Emirs, top and influential politicians, military chieftains, business moguls, and religious leaders. We can somehow understand why the government is dithering on the herdsmen’s menace. The cattle owners must allow their consciences to work at this time. Can’t they carry on their own business without displacing the farmers and shedding innocent blood? Spiritually speaking, any business that is tainted with human blood will yield blood money which is cursed money. So, the cattle owners should put their herdsmen on a short leash while exploring amicable solutions to the crisis. They should accept the vast expanse of grazing land offered by Gov. Ganduje of Kano State instead of fighting in places where land is in short supply. Why can’t they go for ranching as many experts have suggested? The President is the only one who can stop these herdsmen’s menace. But he is faced with a conflict of interests. Can he wield a big stick against the blood-thirsty herdsmen without stepping on the big toes of his powerful kinsmen and thus losing face with them? On the other hand, he swore an oath before God and Nigerians to devote himself to the security and wellbeing of all Nigerians, not just his tribesmen alone. If the President [Muhammadu Buhari - GW] wants to be remembered in history as a statesman, he must rise above ethnic interest and stop further bloodshed of the innocent by the Fulani herdsmen without further delay. He must disarm, arrest, prosecute and punish them severely according to law as a deterrent to other blood shedders. The Bible says, “Whoever sheds man’s blood by human shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind” (Gen. 9: 6). If blood shedders are treated with kid gloves for whatever reason, the President is ultimately answerable to God for the blood of the innocents under his watch. (c) The Independent (Nigeria) https://independent.ng/buhari-and-the-menace-of-fulani-herdsmen/

Freedom of speech came to Iraq with the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. But Iraqis have been blindsided since then by incendiary social media. BEIRUT—One weekend two years ago, in the middle of the security crisis caused by the extremist Islamic State group, fighting broke out in northern Iraq around the town of Tuz Khurmatu between members of the Iraqi Kurdish military and fighters from Iraq’s Shiite Muslim militia. Never mind that they were supposed to be allies fighting ISIS. This kind of tussle wasn’t something new in Tuz Khurmatu. The two groups held long-standing grudges and shots had been fired in anger before. What was new was the role that Facebook played. Cheerleaders for both sides had been posting pictures and videos, allegedly from Tuz Khurmatu: burning tanks, battle action and a truck filled with dead men. Various mainstream Iraqi media picked up on those posts; some broadcast them on television. Then, as Khalif Awaf, one of the leaders of the local Shiite militias there, recalls he and his men read on Facebook that the Kurds were sending tanks and special counter-terrorism forces.Things were looking bad. Really bad. And Awad’s men geared up to keep fighting. But just to make sure he knew what was happening in the real world, not the Facebook world, Awaf called the mayor of Tuz Khurmatu to confirm that the Kurds were indeed sending in heavy artillery. “He told us it was a lie,” as Awaf told a journalist from nearby Kirkuk. The shooting stopped and eventually, Awaf says, “We asked the Iraqi Commission for Media and Communication to block social media within Kirkuk and Tuz Khurmatu because the sites were just being used to spread lies about both sides.” Afterwards soldiers from the Kurdish and Shiite forces all said they believed that the false reports on Facebook may have prolonged a conflict that, in the end, killed some 60 people. That wasn’t the first such incident in Iraq and it wouldn’t be the last, as Iraq, like other fledgling democracies, learns just how dangerous social media can be in environments where fake news, especially on Facebook, can have fatal consequences. The most conspicuous case is in Myanmar (Burma), where many human rights organizations blame racist rabble rousing and conspiracy theories spread on Facebook for the campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that has reached nearly genocidal proportions. When Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress, he faced a few questions about whether his company was complicit in Myanmar’s tragedy, and Zuckerberg, continuing his mea culpa tour, conceded there was a problem and vowed to work harder to block hate speech—there. But this is not a Burmese issue, this is a global problem. And nobody knows that better than the people of Iraq, who were given freedom of speech by the U.S.-led invasion that toppled totalitarian tyrant Saddam Hussein in 2003 only to be blindsided by the rise of wildly irresponsible posts on social media. Since 2003 there has been an explosion of media outlets in Iraq, resulting in a plethora of published and broadcast opinion and hugely differing reporting standards. Moreover, because there is no real advertising industry and no significant way for Iraqi media to generate revenue, a lot of local outlets are funded by individuals or groups with specific religious, political or ethnic agendas. The content reflects that. Iraqis are well aware of the problems with what pass for their mainstream media, which is why, even though TV is still the most popular conveyor of information in the country, reports shared by friends and relatives via Facebook are often just as important—possibly even more important Over half of all Iraqis go online regularly and around a third of the population—an estimated 14 million Iraqis—are on Facebook. The real figure may be even higher because, according to 2016 numbers, about half of Iraqis use smartphones to access the Internet. One of the biggest mobile service providers in Iraq, Zain, makes a point of telling users it offers Facebook for free. As a result, in Iraq Facebook is not just an adjunct to online life, it is online life. Up until recently, when YouTube started to compete, Facebook had a monopoly on Iraqi social media. It is used to catch up on current affairs, message friends, order meals, and to shop for everything from lingerie to guns. But as a business, Facebook obviously has an agenda that is about more than just connecting people. Facebook’s “core functions are to deploy its algorithms to amplify content that generates strong emotional responses among its users and then convert what it learns about our interests and desires into targeted ads,” writes Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. In Iraq, those strong emotional responses can easily result in a shooting match. Belief in Facebook posts is almost a matter of faith. “Unlike in Europe, there is only a small increase in skepticism about what we see on Facebook,” notes Mustafa Habib, a Baghdad-based journalist who writes regularly about his country’s fake news problem. “But that’s mostly among over-30s. Many younger Iraqis, especially teenagers, see Facebook as their primary source of information. And that’s important because they are the largest age group in the country. Equally critical: Iraq’s mainstream media regularly re-publish social media posts for their millions-strong audiences. Often, nobody checks the provenance. This may be because the media outlet did not have reporters on the ground. Or it may be because the misleading post supports the media outlet’s own bias. There’s no media watchdog with any teeth in Iraq and usually no reprimand if somebody gets it wrong. Misleading news items, based on misleading social media, stay online for days; sometimes they’re never corrected. The events of last October in and around Iraqi Kurdistan are yet another example of that perfect online storm: A combination of wider digital trends, bad actors, locals in filter bubbles with long-entrenched opinions, a loss of trust in legacy media (or in Iraq’s case, the almost complete absence of it) and a business based thousands of miles away that takes no real responsibility for its impact in-country. After the country’s Kurdish minority held a much-debated referendum in September on whether to secede from the rest of Iraq or not, the Iraqi government pushed back. In mid-October, Baghdad sent troops north to re-take territory the Kurds controlled and defended during the ISIS security crisis. Propagandists from both sides of the argument went nuts, as did local media outlets with an agenda. In fact, there are indications that multiple, smaller versions of “troll factories” now exist in Iraq, where individuals with an agenda hire young, Internet-savvy Iraqis to put out disinformation that causes chaos which they can then exploit for their own ends. For instance, last October, videos on Facebook and YouTube showed a huge convoy of Iraqi military vehicles heading north. At the same time, Kurdish leaders were busy blaming one another for the debacle of the independence referendum. Local TV backed their owners—the very politicians who were arguing—and couldn’t be trusted. So posts like the military convoy video were widely shared on social media. In some places confused Kurdish soldiers fought back, in others they didn’t. In some places civilians armed themselves and went to fight the incoming “oppressors.” In others, they packed up their houses and fled. This is all despite the fact that the video showing troop movements that actually took place several months before—a clip of the Iraqi army heading to Mosul to fight the Islamic State. “Media bias, photo-shopped pictures and fake pictures are flooding in because the situation is so tense,” Karim al Nouri, a spokesperson from the Shiite Muslim militias in the area, told journalists at the time. “This has led to increased tensions and a surge in fighting between us. At the same time, it has also created a lot of fear and anxiety for civilians and has led, in some cases, to people fleeing their homes.” So can Facebook be blamed for all that? Not all of it, or course. Iraq has its own politics, history, indigenous conflicts and almost 40 million human beings, all of whom also have agency. But Facebook’s “attention economy” business model—which gets users to react to posts so it can gather their data —certainly gets results in Iraq when those pre-existing social divisions are exploited. The problem is extremely difficult for the Iraqi government to regulate and it has tended to react with blunt force. For example, last year it “turned off” the Internet for everyone, just by switching off servers, to prevent students from cheating on exams. In 2014, it did the same to prevent the spread of ISIS propaganda on platforms like Facebook and YouTube. As Mark Zuckerberg told the US Congress, Facebook will try to “do better” by changing its algorithms. In the past, the tech giant has said it would fight “fake news” by promoting more “trusted sources” on its platform, legacy media like the New York Times and the BBC. But it’s unclear how that would help in Iraq, where one would be hard pressed to find an outlet that has equivalent editorial standards. Two weeks ago, Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie put his finger on the problem when he told the British parliament that his former employer, working with Facebook, “undermines civic institutions of countries that are struggling to develop those institutions.” Iraq is holding all-important federal elections in May. Given that Facebook has announced plans to expand further into unexploited territories like Iraq, and considering that young people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are some of the most enthusiastic, uncritical users of social media, Facebook’s problems are likely to get a lot worse in those parts of the world before they get better, and so are the risks those problems pose to the public. (c) 2018 Daily Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/where-facebooks-fake-news-has-deadly-consequences

Dominic Raab, First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs walks in Downing Street on September 3, 2019 in London, England. Leon Neal | Getty Images News | Getty Images LONDON — The U.K. has introduced new measures to root out the presence of alleged forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region in British supply chains. China is accused of extrajudicially detaining over 1 million Uighur Muslims and other minorities in political re-education camps in the northwestern autonomous region, along with invasive surveillance, restrictions on Uighur culture and the use of forced labor. China staunchly denies the allegations, claiming that the centers are aimed at combating extremism and encouraging the development of vocational skills. Companies with annual turnover of more than £36 million ($49.2 million) that fail to demonstrate adequate due diligence in ensuring their supply chains are free from forced labor under the Modern Slavery Act, will now be subject to fines, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab announced in the House of Commons on Tuesday. “We must make sure that U.K. businesses are not part of the supply chains that lead to the gates of the internment camps in Xinjiang, and to make sure that the products of human rights violations that take place in those camps do not end up on the shelves of supermarkets that we shop in here at home, week in, week out,” Raab said. The government will also initiate an urgent review into export controls to prevent exports which could aid in human rights abuses, issue new guidance to businesses operating in the region, and extend the Modern Slavery Act to the public sector, barring any company shown to have forced labor ties from public procurement contracts. ‘Truly horrific’ Raab claimed the evidence is now “far reaching” and “paints a truly harrowing picture,” accusing China of operating “internment camps, arbitrary detention, political re-education, forced labor, torture and forced sterilization, all on an industrial scale.” “It is truly horrific — barbarism we had hoped was lost to another era being practiced today as we speak in one of the leading members of the international community,” he added. Raab cited first-hand accounts from diplomats and escaped victims, satellite imagery showing factories within internment camps and the destruction of mosques, and third party reports from the UN Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Raab highlighted that China’s refusal to allow access to a UN human rights commissioner or other credible outside authority was not reconcilable with these contentions. “China cannot simply refuse all access to those trusted third-party bodies who could verify the facts, and at the same time maintain a position of credible denial,” he added. A protester outside the White House urges the United States to take action to stop the oppression of the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples, on August 14, 2020 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images News | Getty Images Raab’s measures stopped short of sanctioning individual Chinese officials over their involvement in the alleged atrocities, and Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, claimed her counterpart had not gone far enough, likening Raab’s actions to “tinkering around the edges.” The presence of Uighur forced labor in international supply chains has been the target of a number of major governments in recent years. In late 2020, several U.S. companies came under fire for allegedly lobbying to weaken a bipartisan bill banning imports from Xinjiang. “Some US. politicians have concocted disinformation of so-called ‘forced labor’ in order to restrict and oppress relevant parties and enterprises in China as well as contain China’s development,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told CNBC in December. “All ethnic groups in Xinjiang choose their occupations according to their own will and sign ‘labor contracts’ of their own volition in accordance with law on the basis of equality.” © 2021 CNBC LLC

‘I now know the choking effect of tear gas and the sounds of live bullets.’ I long for a Cameroon where anglophone children no longer mimic the sound of gunfire, and Mondays are no longer “stay-at-home” days decreed by armed men. I want to go back to a time – not so long ago – when education was a religion in every household, and schools were places children were eager to attend, promising a brighter future. These days, we have school massacres , boycotts , kidnappings . We have more than 80 percent of schools closed , and over 1.1 million children out of class. We have teachers and students stripped naked , terrified, jeered at by gunmen, and those images posted to social media. We have stay-at-home days – ordered by separatist fighters to demonstrate anglophone solidarity – that merely impoverish us all. There has been four years of war, but all that suffering seems to be largely ignored by the rest of the world. That’s why, as an investigative human rights journalist, I feel compelled to write this. Schools become a target “ Ambazonia” secessionists took up arms in 2017 to protest the marginalisation of the anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions by the majority French-speaking Cameroon – an issue keenly felt in those zones at the time. Much of the killing and violence in this conflict has been by the government security forces – their abuses well documented by rights groups . The counter-insurgency campaign fuels the cycle of violence, and the alleged impersonation of separatist fighters adds confusion to the tragedy. But lately, trust in the separatist fighters has also begun to fade. They have enforced an unpopular school boycott since 2016 to protest what they see as the dismantling of the region’s separate education system, and its assimilation within French-speaking Cameroon. The turning point for public sympathy came in October 2020, when armed men stormed a school in Kumba in the Southwest region and killed seven children and wounded 13 others . Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, although the government blamed the separatists. The Kumba killing became just one in a series. In November, gunmen attacked Kulu Memorial College in the Southwest, and to punish the teachers and students for attending school, stripped them naked and beat them. Barely 24 hours later, 11 teachers were kidnapped by armed men from a mission school in Kumbo, in the Northwest region. They were released after two days, following pressure from civil society groups and the Presbyterian church. Intimidated, the local population sits on the fence for fear of being tagged as sympathisers by either side. Others are packing up and leaving the conflict zones. Evolution of the crisis Like nearly all the children from these regions, I now know the choking effect of tear gas and the sounds of live bullets. At the start of the crisis in 2016, I was an eager journalism and mass communication student at the University of Buea – Cameroon's most prestigious English-speaking university – in the capital of the Southwest region. It was a time of high tension. Student protests against alleged corruption by the vice chancellor turned into much more serious anti-government demonstrations – and the security forces responded with beatings and violence. The iconic image of those days is shaky cellphone footage from the Buea campus of the security forces deliberately humiliating female students, forcing them to roll in the mud. As students, we were unsure whether it was worth the risk to continue with our studies. But the idea of missing our final exams after three tough years was an even more painful thought. That was then: Things now are far worse. Women and girls have been hardest hit by the school closures and lockdowns imposed by the separatists – with a spike in teenage pregnancy, rape, and transactional sex. In Kumbo, a hotbed of the crisis in the Northwest region, a government health survey of girls aged between 15 and 19 found that the majority were out of school and almost half had become teen mothers. Yaoundé and major cities like Douala and Bafoussam have seen a huge influx of displaced people. The streets are full of young anglophone children hawking goods. In private homes, young girls are employed as domestic workers, earning as little as $35 a month. And then came COVID-19 last year. It shut down the world but not the war, and has made the struggles of already poor and vulnerable households so much worse. Even if parents wanted to send their children to school, the fees are a burden that many can no longer afford. Change of heart? I sometimes wonder what would have become of me if I hadn’t mustered the courage to ignore the unrest and complete my studies at the University of Buea. I have opportunities now – working in Yaoundé – that so many children from the conflict zone will never have; children who these days can barely count to 10, let alone read. That is leading to some rethinking among separatist leaders in the diaspora – where nearly all are based – over the continuation of the school boycott. After championing the ban for the past four years, activists like Mark Bareta and Eric Tataw , for example, have pressed for armed fighters to allow children to go back to school. That is good news. But how does the damage of four lost years get repaired? There was a time when schools in the anglophone region were famous throughout the country as bastions of quality education. This war was supposedly waged to liberate and raise up our children. Poverty and illiteracy seem the only winners. © The New Humanitarian 2021

Aruká Juma's death comes amid a failure to protect native communities from the pandemic. The last surviving man of an exterminated Brazilian indigenous group has died from complications linked to Covid-19. Aruká Juma, who died on Wednesday aged between 86 and 90, was the last Juma man left from a tribe that once numbered 15,000. Repeated massacres in the 20th century meant that by 2002, just five Juma people were left – Mr. Juma, his three daughters, and a grandchild. Brazil’s indigenous groups are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19 because of their isolation, communal way of life, and poor healthcare provisions. At the beginning of the pandemic, many indigenous groups sought to cut themselves off from the outside world by closing roads and turning away visitors. Those efforts failed, however, and the virus is now widespread among indigenous communities, with almost 49,000 cases and 969 deaths, and 162 tribes affected, according to Government figures. Part of the blame may lie with the federal indigenous health service, known as Sesai. According to the Emergencia Indigena campaign, in at least three regions the virus was introduced by infected Sesai workers, while a New York Times investigation last year uncovered over a thousand infections among Sesai officials who were forced to work without adequate protective equipment or access to enough tests. Indigenous groups, many of whom remain officially “uncontacted”, also face threats from the encroachment of miners and agricultural businesses, which have grown worse under the populist, Right-wing government of president Jair Bolsonaro. As a teenager in the 1960s, Mr. Juma witnessed the worst massacre of his people, when rubber tappers and tropical nut traders intruded on their land. Over 60 Juma are thought to have been killed, with just seven remaining alive. Over subsequent decades he campaigned for federal recognition for the Jumas’ land, but the effort was complicated by the lack of other Juma men and his family’s decision to move in with another group, the Uru-eu-wau-wau, where his daughters married. Mr. Juma’s eldest daughter, Borehá Juma, said that she intended to follow in her father's footsteps. “I want to become like him now to fight like my father. My father was a warrior. He was chief, I was chief and now the lineage is over ”, she told Amazonia Real. The Telegraph © 2021 Access the full article here .