The Japanese government has taken some positive steps to improve the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. But the country’s legal gender recognition procedure – the law that allows transgender people to be recognized according to their gender identity – remains a stain on Japan’s record. By Kanae Doi and Kyle Knight Participants March during the Tokyo Rainbow Parade. On October 22, hundreds of activist groups throughout the world will gather to mark the 8th annual International Day for Trans Depathologization. Despite progress, governments around the world, including the Japanese government, propagate medical and policy paradigms that deem trans people "mentally ill." ©2015 Reuters/Thomas Peter In Japan, transgender people who seek legal gender change must appeal to a family court under Law 111 of 2003 that, when passed, represented a watershed moment in Japan, opening up public discussion on sexual and gender minority issues. However, the procedure is discriminatory, requiring applicants to be single and without children under 20, undergo a psychiatric evaluation to receive a diagnosis of “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID), and be sterilized. The law requires applicants to “permanently lack functioning gonads” before they can be legally recognized, which amounts to forced sterilization, a practise condemned by health and rights bodies across the globe, including the United Nations World Health Organization. In 2013, the UN special rapporteur on torture noted that transgender people being “required to undergo often unwanted sterilization surgeries as a prerequisite to enjoy legal recognition of their preferred gender” was a human rights violation, and called on governments to prohibit the practise. In 2016, a bipartisan group of members of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, planned to consider revisions to Law 111 to relax the requirements for legal gender recognition – but the discussion never took place. That same year, in response to a letter from the UN special rapporteurs on health and on torture about Law 111, Japan’s Ministry of Health wrote that it was proud of the country’s progress on LGBT rights. But the government defended the medical model and hid behind its stated need for “objectivity and certainty” in determining whether people were actually transgender – and therefore deserving of legal recognition or not. Forcing people to undergo unwanted surgeries to obtain documentation is contrary both to Japan’s human rights obligations and its reputation as a champion of LGBT rights. The government should urgently revise Law 111 to end forced sterilization. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch

By Katherine Gypson FILE - The U.S. Capitol building is seen lit at sunset in Washington, Dec. 20, 2016. The U.S. House of Representatives condemned the "ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya" on Wednesday, passing a resolution (423-3) by a two-thirds voice vote "calling for an end to the attacks" against the Muslim minority in Myanmar, also known as Burma. The resolution is the first step in congressional action that could eventually include a stand-alone sanctions bill aimed at putting financial pressure on the Burmese military and providing U.S. economic assistance for the resettlement of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh back to Myanmar. “This is a moral issue and a national security issue,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, a Republican from California, said on the House floor Tuesday. “No one is secure when extremism and instability is growing in this part of the world.” Hundreds of thousands flee An estimated 600,000 Rohingya have been displaced in recent months, fleeing into Bangladesh and creating a humanitarian crisis. “Hundreds have been killed,” Royce said as he described the scope of the crisis. “At least 200 villages have been burned to the ground, landmines have been placed inside Burma’s border with Bangladesh, maiming refugees who are seeking safe haven. There are reports of rapes and all types of violence committed against the Rohingya.” The bipartisan resolution - co-sponsored by Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley of New York and Republican Representative Steve Chabot of Ohio - calls for “an end to the attacks in and an immediate restoration of humanitarian access to the state of Rakhine in Burma.” FILE - Rohingya Muslim children, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, are squashed together as they wait to receive food handouts at Thaingkhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, Oct. 21, 2017. The resolution also calls on Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of Myanmar's government, and the Burmese military to work together to implement humanitarian aid and reconciliation. "The Burmese military's widespread brutality toward Rohingya civilians over the last few months and its attempts to drive them out of the country are deeply disturbing.” Chabot told VOA in a statement on the passage of the resolution. "That is why Congressman Crowley and I introduced H.Con.Res. 90, to condemn this ethnic cleansing and show the American people’s outrage at these attacks. "This resolution calls on Burmese authorities to work with the international community to resolve the crisis while also calling on Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson to impose sanctions on those responsible for human rights abuses," Chabot added. Tillerson shifted the U.S. approach to the crisis last month when he deemed the violence against the Rohingya ethnic cleansing, saying, “This violence must stop, this persecution must stop.” Sanctions effort A bipartisan sanctions bill introduced last month by New York Democratic Representative Eliot Engel, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and by Chabot would end U.S. military ties with Myanmar while imposing harsh sanctions on industries that fund the Burmese military. FILE - Rohingya Muslim refugees walk down a hillside in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazar on November 26, 2017. If passed, the bill also would reimpose sanctions on the lucrative Burmese gem trade that were lifted last year by then-president Barack Obama in an executive order. A companion bill in the U.S. Senate is sponsored by Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Todd Young of Indiana, and Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Ben Cardin of Maryland. “If they want to go back to the bad old days when we had all sorts of restrictions on them – economic restrictions, trade restrictions, political restrictions – then we’re forced to go back to those bad old days because if they’re going to perpetuate ethnic cleansing, we don’t want to be complicit,” Engel told VOA in an interview last month. Chabot told VOA the sanctions bill also provides key economic funding for Rohingya refugees returning to Myanmar. “The goal here is to get those who have been displaced and in general have gone to Bangladesh to allow them to return to Burma to return to their homes, although a lot of those homes have been burned to the ground by the military, so there’s an awful lot of economic development that’s going to be necessary,” Chabot said. A source on the House Foreign Affairs Committee told VOA there is strong bipartisan interest in the bill, but that it is still undergoing refinements with outside groups as it collects cosponsors. With just six working days left in the House legislative calendar and a full congressional agenda that includes funding the government, the bill is highly unlikely to move forward until next year. But passage of the resolution is a key first step for the U.S. Congress. “The United States certainly cannot solve every problem in the world,” resolution co-sponsor Crowley said Tuesday. “But there are some things that we can, and that we must do. And imposing sanctions against the perpetrators of atrocities in Burma is one of the things that we must do. Doing so will send an important signal that we are watching, and we are not standing by idly.” ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 VOA

By Justin Rowlatt Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, is determined that the perpetrators of the horrors committed against the Rohingya face justice. He's the head of the UN's watchdog for human rights across the world, so his opinions carry weight. It could go right to the top - he doesn't rule out the possibility that civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the armed forces Gen Aung Min Hlaing, could find themselves in the dock on genocide charges some time in the future. Earlier this month, Mr Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council that the widespread and systematic nature of the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar (also called Burma) meant that genocide could not be ruled out. "Given the scale of the military operation, clearly these would have to be decisions taken at a high level," said the high commissioner, when we met at the UN headquarters in Geneva for BBC Panorama. That said, genocide is one of those words that gets bandied about a lot. It sounds terrible - the so-called "crime of crimes". Very few people have ever been convicted of it. The crime was defined after the Holocaust. Member countries of the newly founded United Nations signed a convention, defining genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a particular group. It is not Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein's job to prove acts of genocide have been committed - only a court can do that. But he has called for an international criminal investigation into the perpetrators of what he has called the "shockingly brutal attacks" against the Muslim ethnic group who are mainly from northern Rakhine in Myanmar. But the high commissioner recognised it would be a tough case to make: "For obvious reasons, if you're planning to commit genocide you don't commit it to paper and you don't provide instructions." "The thresholds for proof are high," he said. "But it wouldn't surprise me in the future if a court were to make such a finding on the basis of what we see." By the beginning of December, nearly 650,000 Rohingya - around two thirds of the entire population - had fled Myanmar after a wave of attacks led by the army that began in late August. Hundreds of villages were burned and thousands are reported to have been killed. There is evidence of terrible atrocities being committed: massacres, murders and mass rapes - as I heard myself when I was in the refugee camps as this crisis began. What clearly rankles the UN human rights chief is that he had urged Ms Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar, to take action to protect the Rohingya six months before the explosion of violence in August. He said he spoke to her on the telephone when his office published a report in February documenting appalling atrocities committed during an episode of violence that began in October 2016. "I appealed to her to bring these military operations to an end," he told me. "I appealed to her emotional standing… to do whatever she could to bring this to a close, and to my great regret it did not seem to happen." Ms Suu Kyi's power over the army is limited, but Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein believes she should have done more to try and stop the military campaign. He criticised her for failing to use the term "Rohingya". "To strip their name from them is dehumanising to the point where you begin to believe that anything is possible," he said - powerful language for a top UN official. He thought Myanmar's military was emboldened when the international community took no action against them after the violence in 2016. "I suppose that they then drew a conclusion that they could continue without fear," he said. "What we began to sense was that this was really well thought out and planned," he told me. Image caption Myanmar general Min Aung Hlaing heads the country's armed forces The Myanmar government has said the military action was a response to terrorist attacks in August which killed 12 members of the security forces. But BBC Panorama has gathered evidence that shows that preparations for the continued assault on the Rohingya began well before that. We show that Myanmar had been training and arming local Buddhists. Within weeks of last year's violence the government made an offer: "Every Rakhine national wishing to protect their state will have the chance to become part of the local armed police." "This was a decision made to effectively perpetrate atrocity crimes against the civilian population," said Matthew Smith, chief executive of the human rights organisation Fortify Rights which has been investigating the build-up to this year's violence. That view is borne out by refugees in the vast camps in Myanmar who saw these volunteers in action, attacking their Rohingya neighbours and burning down their homes. "They were just like the army, they had the same kind of weapons", said Mohammed Rafique, who ran a successful business in Myanmar. "They were local boys, we knew them. When the army was burning our houses, torturing us, they were there." (c) 2017 BBC News

By Karen McVeigh Tens of thousands of Rohingya children have been left “trapped and almost forgotten” in remote, squalid camps and isolated villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, the UN has said. Stringent restrictions on the movement of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, which have worsened amid the increased violence over the past 15 months, have left an estimated 60,000 children stranded, in need of aid, and suffering from “high levels of toxic fear”, said Unicef, the UN children’s agency. The UN’s top human rights official has described Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya population as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Marixie Mercado, a Unicef spokeswomen who spent a month in the country in December, described the conditions in some of the most remote camps, five hours by boat in Pauktaw township, as appalling. Medical facilities in the camps were so poor that one man told a Unicef caseworker his daughter had killed herself because she could no longer bear a pain in her abdomen that existing camp services were unable to treat. “Parts of the camps are literally cesspools,” Mercado told a press conference in Geneva on Tuesday. “Shelters teeter on stilts above garbage and excrement. In one camp, the pond where people draw water from is separated by a low mud wall from the sewage. You can easily see how a little bit of rainfall would wash that filth over into the pond. “Children walk barefoot through the muck. One camp manager reported four deaths among children ages three to 10 within the first 18 days of December. His only ask was for proper pathways so they wouldn’t have to walk through their own waste.” Checkpoints, curfews and other travel restrictions make it “extremely difficult” for them to leave the camps for medical reasons, she said. As a result, people are turning to traditional healers, untrained physicians or self-medicating. A climate of fear in Rakhine state is also hampering medical treatment, said Mercado. “I was told by parents in one Rohingya village that they hadn’t had their children vaccinated against Japanese encephalitis because the government vaccinators were accompanied by security officers – and I was told by government workers that they dared not go to Rohingya communities without security.” Mercado, who spent most of her time in central Myanmar because access to northern Rakhine is limited, said she was deeply troubled by the deterioration of healthcare services there. “Unicef and our partners still don’t know what the true picture is of the children who remain in northern Rakhine, because we don’t have enough access,” she said. The agency estimates at least 100 children were separated from their parents during the violence in August. Before 25 August, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Rakhine state into Bangladesh, Unicef was treating 4,800 children with severe acute malnutrition, none of whom now get treatment. All 12 of the outpatient therapeutic treatment centres run by agency partners are closed. None of the five primary health centres Unicef supported are functioning, and there is not enough clean water or food aid being distributed, she said. Mercado said Rohingya children needed a political solution to the issue of legal identity and citizenship. “In the interim they need to be recognised first and foremost as children. The convention on the rights of the child guarantees rights to health, education and opportunities to learn and grow to all children, irrespective of their ethnicity or status or the circumstances in which they find themselves. Ways and means must be found to deliver these rights to Rohingya children in Rakhine state today.” https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/10/rohingya-children-left-stranded-garbage-muck-myanmar (c) 2018 The Guardian

By Lauren Gambino Three US senators have introduced a resolution that will force the chamber to vote for the first time on whether the US should continue to support Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, a conflict that has led to the deaths of at least 10,000 civilians there and driven the Middle East’s poorest country to the brink of famine. The joint resolution, sponsored by two senators from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, independent Bernie Sanders and Republican Mik e Lee, is a rare effort by Congress to claw back its war powers from the executive branch. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, also backed the bill. Aides to the senators say the resolution, which would trigger a vote over whether to end US participation in the conflict, is unprecedented in the Senate. The intent of the resolution is to revive the decades-long debate over defining – and in their view, reclaiming – Congress’s constitutional role in declaring war, according to aides to both senators. “This is about the process,” said an aide to Lee. “What decisions do we make for a country that has been at war constantly for almost 20 years? When do we say that something is worthy of intervening in and when do we make that determination? It’s about the how. “And it’s about who is involved in that decision. It’s not about who is in the White House but it’s about Congress reasserting its power and having it’s true control to make those authorizations.” Yemen’s conflict began in 2014, when the Houthis, Shia rebels from the country’s north, seized the nation’s capital and ousted the Saudi-backed ruler, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who lives in exile in Riyadh. In response, a Saudi-led Arab coalition began a bombing campaign in 2015, to restore the exiled government to power. While the US has not formally backed the Saudi coalition, it has provided targeted intelligence to the bombing campaign and has assisted with refueling coalition bombers. The United Nations has said the nearly three-year civil war has created one of the worst manmade humanitarian disasters, as millions of Yemenis have been displaced and the population faces famine with aid agencies struggling to supply assistance. As the humanitarian crisis deepens, lawmakers are increasingly questioning support for the Saudis, even as the Trump administration refuses to criticize the kingdom. The House voted overwhelmingly last year to adopt a resolution that declared the US military had not been authorized to assist Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen. The resolution, however, did not stop America from providing support to Saudi Arabia in its war. Sanders and Lee are working to win support from colleagues as well as the Senate leadership, aides said, and the White House has been made aware of the forthcoming resolution. If the Senate passed the resolution, the chances of which are very unclear, it would go to the president’s desk. According to material provided by the Senate offices, the legislation would remove “US armed forces from hostilities between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis in Yemen pursuant to the War Powers Resolution”, a law passed in 1973 as a check on the president’s war-making powers. The War Powers Resolution, passed in reaction to US involvement in Vietnam, requires the commander-in-chief to consult Congress when sending US combat troops into an armed conflict. But it also enables the president to act unilaterally in the event of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces”, a provision successive administrations have expanded – well beyond its limits, critics argue – to confront new international threats. “Support for this intervention began under a Democratic president and has continued under a Republican president. This is not meant to be a specific critique of either president,” said an aide to Sanders. “It’s about the left and right coming together about very basic questions of Congress’s responsibility in terms of oversight when the United States chooses to make war.” For decades, members of Congress have wrangled with how to restore its war-making powers from a succession of assertive administrations. Under the US constitution, the president cannot declare war without the approval of Congress. But recent administrations, through the use of drone strikes and so-called special operators, have expanded the interpretation of when a commander-in-chief can send US troops abroad. Congress approved an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) days after 9/11 to justify the war in Afghanistan. Since then, the executive branch has continued to use the 17-year-old authorization to justify new threats in the Middle East and around the globe, although a separate AUMF was passed for Iraq in 2002. Critics have argued that the powers of the post-9/11 AUMF have been stretched beyond their limits and have long demanded a serious debate over the authorization of US force, especially as it relates to the fight against the Islamic State. Aides to the senators said the debate over AUMF reauthorization, while important, is separate from the one they want to have over US involvement in the conflict in Yemen. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/28/yemen-saudi-arabia-war-us-support-senator-push-to-end (c) 2018 The Guardian

By Kai Schultz and Rajneesh Bhandari A 14-year-old Nepali boy in the doorway of his village home. Police say he was sexually assaulted by a Canadian humanitarian aid worker.CreditLauren DeCicca for The New York Times KARTIKE, Nepal — When Peter Dalglish, a lauded humanitarian worker, built a sleek cabin near a Nepalese village of rutted roads and hills ribbed with rice paddies, locals knew virtually nothing about him. But over several years, Mr. Dalglish, a Canadian, endeared himself to many in the community, greeting villagers in Nepali, offering chocolates from Thailand to children playing in the forest and helping people rebuild their homes destroyed by devastating earthquakes in 2015. The good will was shattered last month when the police swarmed around Mr. Dalglish’s home, placed a gun to his head and arrested him on charges of raping at least two boys, 12 and 14. Suddenly, villagers were on edge, worried about how far the betrayal — and abuse — may have stretched. “We trusted him,” said Sher Bahadur Tamang, who said he received hundreds of dollars from Mr. Dalglish to pay for his child’s education. “He treated us so well. We never knew what was inside his mind.” Mr. Dalglish’s downfall has been a shock partly because his work aiding street children around the world was so widely admired. In 2016, he was awarded the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. Nepal is one of Asia’s poorest countries, and thousands of nongovernmental organizations operate with limited government oversight. The absence of strict regulations means aid groups can be used as a cover for human traffickers and predatory behavior by humanitarian workers, said Pushkar Karki, the head of Nepal’s Chief Investigation Bureau, the agency overseeing the case against Mr. Dalglish. Earlier this year, the police arrested Hans Jürgen Gustav Dahm, 63, a German who was running a charity organization in Kathmandu that provided free lunches to children, many of whom accused him of sexual abuse. In the last two years, five other foreign men, including Mr. Dalglish, 60, have been arrested on suspicion of pedophilia, Mr. Karki said. “There have been some instances where they were found working with charities,” he said, noting that several of the men informally offered money, food and clothing to children. “Our laws aren’t as strict as in foreign countries, and there is no social scrutiny like in developed countries.” The arrest of such a notable humanitarian has added urgency to a new effort by aid workers around the world, who are saying it is now time to investigate themselves. Late last year, they started a #MeToo-like movement called #AidToo. In February, Oxfam, one of Britain’s largest charities, fired four workers and accepted the resignations of three others after an investigation found that senior officials for the organization had hired prostitutes in Haiti, including for sex parties. That same month, the BBC reported that men delivering aid on behalf of the United Nations and international charities had abused displaced women in Syria, trading food for sexual favors. “Peter Dalglish’s arrest should be a ‘teachable moment’ for the humanitarian community to understand and recognize how predators exploit the cover of ‘heroism’ to commit crimes,” Lori Handrahan, a veteran humanitarian worker, wrote in an essay published on Medium. “Let’s be clear. Peter Dalglish is not a hero. He never was.” Earlier this month, Mr. Dalglish was charged with pedophilia in a district court. He faces up to 13 years in prison. The village of Kartike, where the aid worker Peter Dalglish earned the trust of residents. Credit: Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times “He sexually abused children after giving them the false hope that they would be taken to a foreign country,” said Jeevan Shrestha, a spokesman for Nepal’s Chief Investigation Bureau. Over several decades, Mr. Dalglish, a lawyer from Ontario, built a reputation as a deeply committed advocate for children in war-torn corners of the globe. In the 1980s, he was a co-founder of Street Kids International, an organization that has helped homeless youths around the world find jobs, and which was recently absorbed by Save the Children. He also partnered with the American professional skateboarder Tony Hawk to empower children through sports, and worked with the United Nations in Liberian shantytowns after the 2014 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. But in Nepal, where he has lived off-and-on since 2002, some of those who knew him recalled unsettling requests. In Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, at a school which provides free education to children from mountain communities, Mr. Dalglish was a popular volunteer in the early 2000s until he asked administrators to change a rule barring students from staying overnight with teachers. Soon after, the relationship between the school’s staff members and Mr. Dalglish soured, a senior administrator said, and he was banned from the campus. The arrest of Mr. Dalglish was a shock because his work aiding street children around the world was so widely admired. In an interview last month with The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, Mr. Dalglish spoke from behind the bars of a jail cell in Kathmandu, denying the charges against him and pointing out he had never before been the subject of a criminal investigation. “But obviously, if you do the work that I do, with kids, you leave yourself open to criticism and suspicion,” he said. Mr. Dalglish declined further interview requests. Rahul Chapagain, Mr. Dalglish’s lawyer, said that evidence collected by the police could belong to visitors who rented the home through Airbnb. “Whatever they found, it does not necessarily belong to Peter,” he said. Mr. Dalglish markets his cabin online as a “Himalayan Hideaway," equipped with a Bose sound system, German bathroom fixtures and a lush garden. In his profile’s display picture, a beaming Mr. Dalglish embraces Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. On a recent day, the home was empty and locked, a ruffled comforter on the couch and board games tucked into an armoire visible through the windows. Around Kartike (pronounced kar-ti-kay), a sleepy village where farmers wield sickles in watery fields, many expressed horror that a possible predator had been living just up the hill. At a restaurant in town, the father of one of the boys in the case said he had worked as a laborer on Mr. Dalglish’s property for half a decade and had formed a warm bond with his boss. The father, Mr. Tamang, identifying himself only by his common last name to protect his family’s privacy, said he let his son, 14, occasionally spend the night at Mr. Dalglish’s home. On the morning of April 7, Mr. Tamang was jolted awake by nearly a dozen police officers, who escorted him up a snaking path of slate-colored tiles to Mr. Dalglish’s home, where his son was sleeping. The home belonging to Mr. Dalglish where police say the sexual assaults took place. Credit: Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times Inside the house, Mr. Dalglish spoke calmly to the police in English, a language Mr. Tamang did not understand. Later, Mr. Tamang learned that plainclothes police officers had befriended his son, who told the authorities that he, his 12-year-old cousin and at least two other boys had been abused by Mr. Dalglish. In an interview, Mr. Tamang’s son said Mr. Dalglish had sexually assaulted him over a period of seven years, promising him a better life abroad if he kept quiet. “I think the police were following Peter for a long time,” Mr. Tamang said. “The boys said they were asked to sleep naked and were raped.” Until the boys stepped forward, villagers said there had been no signs of improper behavior by Mr. Dalglish. He treated those who worked for him well and bought clothing, shoes and pencils for children in the village. It is unclear who initially tipped off the police about Mr. Dalglish. A few days after the arrest, Mr. Tamang said he was summoned by the authorities to Mr. Dalglish’s home. The police showed him a small, white box. Inside were dozens of photographs and film negatives of naked children, some of them playing in pools, Mr. Tamang said. Mr. Chapagain, the lawyer, said Mr. Dalglish told him they were “pictures of poverty-stricken children and nothing sexually exploitative.” But Mr. Tamang was unconvinced, characterizing the experience as a nightmarish episode in his family’s ordeal. “I never imagined Peter would do such a thing,” he said. (c) 2018 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/world/asia/nepal-peter-dalglish-aid-pedophilia.html

By Kate Lyons Uighur leaders have called on democratic governments to confront Chinaover its treatment of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, saying the government’s actions against the ethnic minority group are “precursors to genocide”. On a visit to Australia, leaders of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), based in Washington, said governments, businesses, academics and thinktanks all had a responsibility to stop “business as usual” relations with China. They also warned of China’s “extra-territorial reach”, which saw coercion and threats against Australian Uighurs, who were unable to escape the reach of the Chinese state. “It’s time for action, something horrific is happening on our watch,” said Nury Turkel, chair of the board for the UHRP. An estimated one million Muslims are being held in detention camps in Xinjiang by the Chinese government as part of a sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group. The authorities in Beijing call the camps “vocational training centres”, saying those detained within them are taught language, culture and vocational skills. In August, the UN called for the immediate release of people from the camps, saying they had received many credible reports that a million ethnic Uighurs were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.‘Mass murder cannot be ruled out’Turkel cited James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University, who called cultural cleansing of Uighurs “Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the Xinjiang problem”. Turkel said: “those of us who are students of history know what that means. We’ve seen how it ends when a government or an authoritarian leader promotes that sort of ideology”, saying the Communist party of China had likened Uighurs to “a cancerous tumour”.Asked whether he thought the Holocaust was the best historical comparison for the situation in Xinjiang, Turkel said: “The Chinese have not publicly shown any sign of gassing Uighurs” but that the few reports coming out of the camps suggested people were dying inside them. He added: “We may see mass murder.”Louisa Greve, director for external affairs for the UHRP, said: “Academics believe that when you look at the progression of policies that dehumanise ethnic groups, you have to say that mass murder cannot be ruled out. We see many, many of the precursors of cultural and possibly physical genocide.”Thomas Cliff, research fellow at the ANU college of Asia and the Pacific said what was going on in Xinjiang was “a form of genocide, although it’s not killing everybody”.“The objective seems to be to wipe out all traces of what’s distinct about being a Uighur,” he said. Some people are coming out of the camps and saying ‘kill me, I don’t want to bear this anymore’,” he said.Greve said government action needed to be taken in response to the repression of Uighurs, which included forcible separation of children from their parents, reports of forced marriage between Uighurs and Han Chinese, and the banning of Uighur language and culture.Greve said Uighurs, including herself and fellow panellists, had received threats and coercion from the Chinese government to infiltrate or spy upon members of the Uighur community in the US and had been threatened with reprisals against their families in China if they didn’t stop their activism.Australian Uighurs told the Guardian of China’s extra-territorial reach, with one woman saying she believed a Chinese spy came to her business in Sydney where he quizzed her about her political views, her opinion on the situation in Xinjiang and the ethnicity of her employees. Another Australian permanent resident said she is required by Chinese police to take a photo of herself holding her passport and the day’s paper and send it to them every few weeks.Sultan Hiwilla, a prominent Australia-Uighur activist based in Sydney, said he had not been able to speak to his family in Xinjiang since 2014 and does not know what has happened to them, but a message reached him a few months ago through a friend telling him to stop his activism because it was affecting his family.But he said he could not stop his work: “It’s not only affecting my family it’s affecting all Uighur people, if I stop, it will keep going, some one needs to make this sacrifice.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

By Kate Kellaway For Sama, a new documentary from award-winning Syrian journalist Waad al-Kateab, has won global acclaim. She talks about filming and family life on the frontline. The camera focuses on Sama’s face. She is the sweetest baby and looks, at first glance, as though her life might be ordinary. Her eyes are a transitory newborn colour, greyish green, waiting to turn brown. Her gold earrings look over-large in her tiny ears. Sama means sky in Arabic – a sky, as her mother imagines it, where no bombs fall, with ordinary clouds and sunshine. So far, this is footage that could be the work of any doting parent, but Sama’s mother is journalist Waad al-Kateab and this is her documentary For Sama, filmed during the Syrian war. In the film al-Kateab sings a lullaby that almost lulls us – if not Sama – into a false sense of security. Sama is chewing her toe investigatively, as babies do, when a tank shell explodes. It sounds like a nightmare next-door neighbour heaving heavy furniture about and there is a shout: “Downstairs, downstairs, there’s another one coming…” It is the summer of 2016, the beginning of the siege of Aleppo. The camera loses focus, swerves incoherently. Al-Kateab calmly asks someone to “take Sama”. By now, the shells are deafening. “This is insane – we’re getting this every day,” she goes on in her low, musical voice – her calm as abnormal as her situation (during the siege there were cluster bombs, chlorine gas, barrel bombs and air strikes). There is fire at the end of their corridor and smoke pours in. They live in the hospital that her husband, Hamza, has started from scratch. And now they are moving a baby on life support and Hamza is shouting: “Come on! We need to pump the ventilators by hand.” In the dark, al-Kateab calls out: “Who’s got Sama?” A UN spokesman recently said the world had become “numb to the carnage” in Syria after more than eight years of war and that even the rising death toll in Idlib – the country’s last rebel-held stronghold – was being met by “a collective shrug”. No wonder al-Kateab feared her film – which starts with the peaceful protests against President Bashar Al-Assad in 2011 and goes on through the Arab spring to the sacking of Aleppo by regime forces in 2016 – would be greeted with indifference. But the reaction has been unanimous and overwhelming: audiences in every country in which the film has been shown stand and clap (at Cannes in May, they apparently did so for six minutes). Al-Kateab started out as a citizen journalist for Channel 4 news and has already been acclaimed for her harrowing and human series of reports Inside Aleppo (for which she has won an Emmy and the foreign affairs prize at the British journalism awards). But this film, dedicated to her daughter, is more personal. This is a mother’s film in which the normal rhythms of parenthood become disrupted. Al-Kateab worries that nappies and baby formula will run out. Toddlers use a bombed bus as their playground, painting it all the colours of the rainbow (even little Sama is helped to wield a brush) and al-Kateab’s stoical best friend Afraa never loses the twinkle in her eye as she keeps quiet about weevils she finds in the rice. In the unreality of war, the domesticity startles: an ordinary cooking pot looks outlandish. But this is For Sama’s strength: the tender stuff of family life, often ignored in war reporting, is all there. Already garlanded with awards including best documentary at the Cannes and SXSW film festivals and a special jury prize at Hot Docs, For Sama also shows what it is to destroy a family. We see mothers in fierce, tearless overdrive, like figures from Shakespearean tragedy. One mother searching for her son, Mohammad, gives us the film’s most revealing line. On finding his dead body she postpones the evidence of what she sees, crying hysterically: “It’s Mummy, I’ve got your milk, wake up!” At this moment, she sees al-Kateab filming. What you expect her to say is: “How dare you?” Instead, she screams at the top of her voice: “Film this!” “My lens,” al-Kateab says now, “was, for her, the world outside. She wanted her grief witnessed.” Last week – three years later – a small girl skips along the corridor of a photographic studio in north London, holding the hand of a babysitter. “Where’s Mama?” she calls out. Sama is about to join her mother and have her picture taken. She does several experimental twirls in her flowery frock and puts on her shoes with satisfaction. The moment comes to comb her hair: Mama must do it. Sama prefers not to stand still. Asked how old she is, she holds up three fingers, eyes shining. She is an enchanting child, extraordinarily animated. Her mother, beautiful and immaculately dressed – responding to her daughter at every turn – is still by contrast. Looking at them after having seen the film, one feels a marvelling gratitude that they have survived. It seems bordering on unreal that she and her family have swapped east Aleppo for east London (she is currently employed by Channel 4 News/ITN). The family was compelled to leave Syria on 21 December 2016 (the city’s sixth month under siege). Hamza was recognised – as manager of the only surviving hospital and responsible for civilian healthcare in east Aleppo’s last besieged quarter – to be one of the most significant figures in the civilian administration area and it was he who received the phone call from the UN with a message from the Russians to say that if those remaining in Aleppo wanted to survive, they must surrender and go into exile immediately. Al-Kateab asks in the film: “Sama, will you remember Aleppo? Will you blame me for staying here? Or blame me for leaving now?” They had never intended to leave. And, in one sense al-Kateab (not her real name, she uses the pseudonym to protect her relatives) has never left: she brought Syria with her to the UK, arriving with a dozen hard drives initially cut down to 300 hours of footage – which she then spent two years, with fellow director Edward Watts (an independent film-maker who has made more than 20 documentaries), editing into their 95-minute film. Watching her having her picture taken, she seems professional and aloof – as if elsewhere (as she presumably feels she is). But as she sits down beside me on a small sofa, that changes. Attentive and warm, she pats my arm to emphasise her points. “I filmed everything,” she explains. Selecting material for the film, the challenge was to achieve a balance between “dark and light, life and death”. At first, she had felt adamant that showing the worst was what mattered: her footage was “evidence”. But then, as Watts explains on the phone, they ran an early test screening at Channel 4, for friends and family – “just 15 people or so” – and realised they had “gone too far into the darkness.” Their first cut was in chronological order. It started with hope, descended into despair. This, they realised, did not work. It is hard to imagine more devastating images than those shown in the film, but al-Kateab and Watts insist many were worse – including “a pile of very young children’s dead bodies” abandoned at a hospital. The audience could not cope and sometimes, during editing, Watts had found himself putting his hand in front of the screen. They had to think again. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the Syrian war and more than 10 million displaced, and while audiences needed to be aware of “carnage en masse”, this had not to be at the expense of individual dignity. The collaboration between al-Kateab and Watts started uncertainly because they were in different countries: she was in Turkey (where her family spent a year after fleeing Syria), he was in London. She applied for asylum in the UK on the basis that she and Hamza were targets for reprisals by the regime and on the strength of their work for Channel 4 news and in east Aleppo. Her story had received attention in parliament during the 2016 siege and with the backing of Channel 4 News, her case was swiftly processed. Making the film, al-Kateab had been understandably nervous that a foreigner might falsify or appropriate her emotional copyright. But nowadays, she happily declares that, while most collaborators “start together and end apart”, she and Watts went the opposite way. It was Watts who had the brainwave to make Sama the key to structuring the film and they discovered that, with a flashback format, they could move between dark and light, with Sama as their – and our – lifeline. And, by this stage, the film was becoming a love story. It begins with 18-year-old al-Kateab (she is 26 now) about to study economics at Aleppo university. Hamza is a close friend but married to someone else. She describes him as having the gift of making her feel safe with “a constant smile on his face”. One of the few doctors in Aleppo who is also an activist, his smile is to be tested in the years that follow. East Aleppo lacks schools and emergency and medical services – thus the urgent need for his hospital. We watch him at work: a confidence-inspiring hero – his makeshift hospital run, extraordinarily impressively, partly on willpower. In the weeks before they leave the country, the hospital (Hamza’s second after the first was destroyed by bombs) performed 890 operations in 20 days and received 6,000 wounded people. One scene shows a massacre in east Aleppo. Al-Kateab films the rows of bodies hauled out of a river – like a dormitory for the dead. Heads stick out of the tops of blue sleeping bags, awaiting identification. These civilians have been handcuffed, tortured and executed. Their crime? They lived in “areas opposed to the regime”. Hamza’s smile has gone but his composure is holding. As corpses are thrown in makeshift shrouds into a mass grave, there is high and defiant singing: “Our dead have gone to paradise.” When Hamza’s wife urges him to flee the country, he chooses Syria over his first marriage. Armed rebels by this point have freed the city but retaliation is intensifying. Al-Kateab’s camera repeatedly shows terrible smoke on the horizon, rising above the city’s brick buildings like grey plumage. She explains that she started filming on a mobile, graduated to a camera and even borrowed a drone from a friend (she had trouble learning to use it but eventually got superb results). Hamza has come up with a rule for the two of them: no crying in hospital. “He explained that people saw me as powerful because I was filming and believed in the revolution. If they saw me break down, however strong they might be, it would weaken them. And Hamza felt he had to have strength for everyone. He was a leader.” Hospital staff used to tell her: “We’re very strong because of Hamza – he is very cool.” But one day, watching an attempt to save a boy’s life, al-Kateab cannot help herself. Hamza ticks her off: “You can’t cry in here – get out.” But then he goes after her. It is striking how often in the film people ask one another: “What’s wrong?” It seems a redundant question, the answer everywhere to be seen. Al-Kateab agrees but explains: “It’s about care. Even though I might know you have lost your child, it’s my way of asking what’s going on in your heart.” Hamza told her: “Don’t you realise I’m in love with you? Will you marry me?” The film answers his question with footage of their wedding: Hamza in black suit and lilac tie, Waad in a veil with white silk roses in her hair. Confetti falls through the air, as though there might still be room for a fairytale in Aleppo. It is one of the rare times the camera is not in al-Kateab’s hands. They dance to Willie Nelson’s Crazy and Hamza tells her: “This is the road we’re taking, it is a long road full of danger and fear but freedom waits for us at the end.” The tenderness of the dancing is offset by what is, in a sense, their most dangerous wedding vow: “Come, let’s walk it together.” In the early days, friends would tease: “They’d say: Waad’s playing with her camera again…” This changed after one of their dearest friends, Gaith – a nurse – and his brother Mahmoud were killed in an air raid. “We had lost Gaith,” says al-Kateab. “We knew he was never coming back to this Earth but had this incredible footage of him laughing, working, sad… the life he’d shared was recorded.” Filming was remembering and the people who once mocked now apologised. Sama’s birth is an ordinary – and extraordinary – event, discreetly presented. We see her friends with ears pressed to the door of the hospital room, listening out for the baby’s first cry and jumping for joy when they hear it. Al-Kateab is then seen crying, holding Sama in her arms – and Hamza teasingly tells her to stop upsetting their baby. What was in her mind? “I was crying because this was a room where two of my friends – Gaith and Omar – used to work before they were killed. I was thinking: I’ve brought life to this place. I’d been terrified I’d not live to see Sama born. I was terrified about the future but also so happy. I could see Hamza’s and my story in Sama’s face. Yet I missed Gaith and Omar and wished they were alive.” If filming was remembering, it was also, crucially, about resistance. Al-Kateab emphasises new media’s role in the Arab spring: “Mobiles became the only way to show the world that we were fighting for our freedom.” Early student protests were peaceful and festive with fireworks and dancing in the streets. But by 2015, the security forces were beating up student protesters. “They’d turn up and five minutes later, the place would empty. A presenter from the official channel would ask: ‘Has anything happened here?’ ‘No, nothing,’ the remaining students would reply.” Al-Kateab’s footage would capsize that lie. Similarly, she would later secure evidence that Assad’s regime was using chemical weapons. Eventually, filming became her way of surviving: “It gave me a reason to stay in Aleppo. If I was killed, I’d be leaving something important behind.” Not that it gave her distance on what was happening. It was “doubly harrowing” and “brought everything closer”. But for many people, the camera represented hope. And while on the subject, I tell her that, strangely, it was the moments of hope in the film that undid me – all the more moving for being unexpected. A woman who is nine months pregnant is carried into hospital unconscious. An emergency caesarean is performed. We see the baby pulled out – lifeless. The misery of it is sickening. War has killed him. Capable gloved hands palpitate the little chest to start the lungs – surely in vain. The nurse briskly brushes his body with a sweeping movement. They hold him upside down and shake and slap and, just as we have given up on his slippery, grey body, he opens his eyes and cries – and everyone who sees it will join in. God be praised! His furious frown is a triumph, his cry defies Assad (they save the mother as well). “It is a miracle,” al-Kateab exclaims. “It gives us the strength to stay in the struggle.” But for her, too, hope is hardest to handle: “Whenever I watch the film, it is when everyone else is laughing that I cry. We were creating hope and it was destroyed by the violence of the regime and by the Russians. At the last screening, sitting next to Ed, I started crying as I watched the early days of the revolution. And he was asking me: “What’s the matter?” And I said: “It’s the hope.” But there has been another, more manageable, version of hope too – in people’s reactions to the film: “It’s been amazing – audiences have given me hope, shown me they really care. I’ve been to Nantucket, Washington, Toronto, and even film distributors, who normally sample a film for 10 minutes and then leave, have stayed and been very moved.” When people went “crazy” in Cannes, she says, “I can’t describe how proud and happy it made me.” It will be years before Sama is old enough to see the film made in her name. Al-Kateab addresses her in the film like this: “Sama, I know you understand what is happening. I can see it in your eyes. You never cry like a normal baby would. That’s what breaks my heart.” Now she confirms that, on some level, “Sama understood everything. That time I was looking for her during the bombing, I found her sleeping in a very quiet way”. Her second daughter, Taima (she became pregnant again while still in Aleppo, the baby was born in Turkey) reacts in a “totally different way. If a bottle of milk drops, she cries. Sama used to fall from a high bed and not make a sound. But I’d sometimes sense she was scared.” After leaving Syria, Sama used to wake in the night screaming. They consulted experts – she is doing better now. Better than her mother, who says: “I still suffer from nightmares. And whenever I hear a very loud sound – like a train – I feel it in my body. I tried to seek therapy but it did not work for me.” She has said in the past that her therapist (whom she now wants me to know is “amazing” and says she “loves”) herself needed therapy after their sessions together. The film’s most extraordinary achievement is that, instead of leaving one helpless, it creates resolve. Everyone who sees it feels the same. Al-Kateab says audiences come to her moved and energised and with one question: what can we do? The first step is “understanding”, she says – especially at a point where Idlib’s suffering is starting to resemble Aleppo’s. And she gets out her phone to play the infamous September 2016 interview with US presidential candidate Gary Johnson. Asked about his plans for Aleppo, he replies gormlessly: “What’s Aleppo?” It was this interview that stung Al-Kateab into making the banner seven-month-old Sama holds at the end of the film with their city of ash as a backdrop. It reads: THIS IS ALEPPO. WHAT’S JUSTICE? As well as the need for understanding, she hopes for support for the campaign she and Hamza plan to launch next month on forsamafilm.com, to “stop bombing hospitals”. She argues that the bombing of hospitals is now a “worldwide” problem. When Hamza’s hospital is bombed, it is observed with sober understatement: “Targeting hospitals breaks people’s spirits.” Meanwhile, Hamza plans to do a master’s degree in public health and has ambitions to reform the UN and World Health Organization’s approach to conflict areas: “He was put under a lot of pressure by the UN, she says, “to evacuate the hospital in a way that was not to the benefit of his patients. He believes the UN was simply implementing what Russia wanted them to do.” The film has now been seen at the UN and, at a recent briefing at the UK mission, with ambassadors in attendance. The issue of the bombing of hospitals (with the film as evidence) has also been raised at a security council meeting. And it is hoped that For Sama will be shown to the Russian government (although Watts is mindful of the risk that the Russian regime might “pirate, re-edit or misrepresent it”). And might not showing it in Russia be dangerous for al-Kateab? “It would but I don’t care. I could have been killed three years ago.” From an outsider’s point of view what seems most striking in the film – bordering on mystifying – is the intensity of the continuing allegiance to Aleppo itself, the wish, expressed repeatedly, to stay no matter what – a vote to put Aleppo before life itself. One of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world has had its medieval architecture destroyed by barrel bombs. Wouldn’t you run from the wreckage if you could? A boy, with quavering bravado, says he would stay in the city even if his family were to leave. A girl – no more than three – as she is compelled to depart, says in a startlingly adult tone: “Aleppo is gone.” Al-Kateab lets us know: “Saying goodbye is worse than death.” She nods mutely when I ask if the place itself is precious to her. “A journalist visiting Syria can leave any time. I started with Aleppo in my mind and heart.” She speaks eloquently about shared experience in conflict: “The people I lived with in Aleppo became closer to me than my own parents, sister and brother.” And she makes the point that she and Hamza recognised the necessity of their roles as doctor and journalist. “We live for the moment we can go back to Syria,” she says, “but it will never happen while the Assad regime rules. If he goes, in the same way that we smuggled ourselves back to Aleppo [after a visit to Turkey] in the film – two headstrong people with a seven-month-old child – we would smuggle ourselves back again.” The memory of their brave return makes her smile. What else can she find, looking back, that is positive? “Death was close. We knew we could be killed at any moment but lived as if each minute was our last. That’s why there is so much joy in the film. When death is all around you, life is cheap but very important. A lot of people in the UK don’t know the value of life. Or the value of minutes. If you enjoy doing something, do it. If you love someone, tell them as soon as possible because this life could end at any moment.” The world, she continues, is a “very dark place – with Brexit here, US policy, Russia – and you feel nothing will change. But if people keep pushing, things will be changed and there will be justice. And we will keep fighting – no matter how long it takes.” For Sama is released in cinemas on 13 September and on Channel 4 later in the autumn. Preview screenings including Q&A sessions with the film-makers are also happening nationwide. See full article here . The Guardian © 2020

Activists and experts welcome landmark move to criminalise group as positive first step against European fascism. By Katy Fallon Athens, Greece – Following guilty verdicts against the Golden Dawn group over a series of crimes including murder, Athens has seen a day of jubilation, tears and tear gas. As a landmark trial spanning more than five years concluded, Golden Dawn was found guilty of four charges – significantly of being a criminal organisation. Once the third-largest party in Greece, the leadership of Golden Dawn, including its leader Nikos Michaloliakos and current MEP Ioannis Lagos, now face lengthy prison sentences. Giorgos Roupakias, a self-professed follower of Golden Dawn, was also found guilty of the murder of anti-racism campaigner and rapper Pavlos Fyssas, known as “Killah P”, and Golden Dawn members were also found guilty of the attempted murder of a group of Egyptian fishermen in Athens in 2012. Wednesday marks an historic day for the country, which saw the biggest trial of self-professed fascists since the Nuremberg trials. About 10,000 people gathered outside the court to hear the verdict, hoping for judges to find the 68 people on trial guilty. Police buses were parked bumper-to-bumper outside the court to prevent any of the protesters from getting near the building, but the atmosphere outside was largely peaceful. A moment of quiet came over the crowds as the news emerged – first that Roupakias had been found guilty of murdering Fyssas and then that the infamous neo-Nazi group would be indicted as a criminal organisation. People hugged, chanted and clapped at the news, and there was a sense of relief as well as joy in the air. Up until the last minute, many in Greece still believed that Golden Dawn could escape justice. In emotional scenes, Pavlos Fyssas’s mother, Magda, who has waited for more than seven years to see justice served for her son, punched the air outside the court and said “you did it, my son,” while members of his family cried and hugged each other nearby. Protesters young and old embraced and chanted the names of Golden Dawn’s victims – Pavlos Fyssas and Shehzad Luqman, who was 27 when he was stabbed to death by Golden Dawn affiliates in 2013. The joy was cut short, however, by the use of tear gas and a water cannon against the largely peaceful group. A small number of people had reportedly started throwing objects at the police, but after dancing and clapping, many who had gathered outside the court were left struggling to breathe amid copious waves of tear gas. Gas canisters were, however, not enough to dampen the protesters’ spirits as they left the court and headed towards Syntagma Square, chanting anti-fascist songs. “Pavlos Lives,” were the words on everyone’s lips, from old men to young children on their father’s shoulders. However, some warned that the far right would live on, despite the verdict. “There are still fascists and Nazi groups everywhere,” said two men in their early twenties, who did not want to be identified. “This is only the start.” Reading the verdict, presiding judge Maria Lepenioti said Golden Dawn founder and leader Nikos Michaloliakos and other senior members were guilty of running a criminal organisation. None of the party’s senior members was present in the court. “It is really a very important day for Greek democracy,” said Daphne Halikiopoulou, a professor of comparative politics from Reading University. “It is a decision that proves that there is a democratic system, that the institutions are independent and that our judicial systems work and that this criminal organisation can actually be indicted for crime.” Halikiopoulou said that it was still important to frame this as a “first step,” against the far right in Greece and beyond. “I think that while the Golden Dawn verdict is a good thing, we now need to take a step back as a country and to understand why we voted this criminal organisation into our parliament. There are underlying reasons why these kinds of ideas became supported and why they were widespread. Unless we deal with that as well, then obviously there will be other Golden Dawns at the next crisis.” Manos Moschopoulos from the Open Society Foundations said it was important to monitor far-right narratives in politics. “The Golden Dawn grew at a time when people had lost faith in Greece’s democratic system and its ability to protect them during the severe austerity crisis. Their slogans were designed to put the blame on the most vulnerable. It wasn’t migrants who threatened the livelihoods of Greeks in 2012 when the Golden Dawn entered parliament. As was the case then, today racist politics pose a larger threat to the wellbeing of our community than any of the far right’s scapegoats.” Eva Cosse, the Western Europe researcher from Human Rights Watch, said it was a significant day for all those who had suffered because of Golden Dawn’s actions. “This historic verdict sends a clear message that hate-mongers will not be tolerated and have no place in a democratic society. It’s an important day for victims, their families and Greece as a whole.” See full news release here © 2020 Al Jazeera

By Lauren Salim Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986. In February 2021 Uganda will hold elections. Museveni circumvented term limits in the Constitution to run for his sixth term. In June 2020 the Electoral Commission of Uganda declared that due to COVID-19, the campaign for the 2021 Presidential and General Election will be held digitally as a “ scientific election process .” Museveni is far better equipped than opposition groups to disseminate digital information because of his access to the internet, radio, and television media. Voter Demographics & Access to Information : Uganda’s 2020 population is 45.7 million with roughly 50% of the population 18 years of age or older and thus eligible to vote. According to the Electoral Commission, 17,782,594 people have registered to vote in the 2021 election, approximately 2.5 million more than in the 2016 elections. Figure 1: map of ethnic regions in Uganda by Dr. Stefen Lindemann of the London School of Economics 75.6% of the Ugandan population lives in rural areas that have limited access to digital technologies. According to the World Bank only 42.6% of the population has electricity in their homes. Groups that have opposed Museveni in past elections, such as the Acholi in the north and the Bakonjo peoples in the southwest have limited access to electricity. Museveni’s traditional supporters, urban Ugandans from the Baganda group, are much more likely to have access to TV, radio, and the internet. They will therefore have disproportionate weight in a “digital election.” Figure 2: Ugandan Population Density 2020 with data from ESRI Access to electricity and digital communications Figure 3 Lighting and electricity data courtesy of Energy Sector GIS Working Group Uganda Ugandans must have a national identity document to obtain access to phones, bank loans, and the ability to vote. Around 80% of Ugandan women have national identity documents. 70% of Ugandans have mobile phone subscriptions. 82% of men and 63% of women own a phone . Rural women are the least likely to own a phone . 17 million of the 26 million Ugandan telephone subscribers have phones that have at least rudimentary abilities to surf the internet . During the 2016 election, President Museveni shut down access to social media sites, ostensibly to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation. It can be anticipated that a similar restriction will be imposed during the 2021 election. In July 2018, an ‘ idle talk’ tax was imposed, ostensibly to combat online “gossip” in the country. To visit social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter, Ugandans have to pay a tax of 200 shillings per day. 41% of Ugandans live below the poverty line of $1.90 USD/day or 6,971.82 shillings. The tax constitutes at least 3% of the daily income for 41% of the population. In Uganda, radio is the most accessible mass medium, particularly in rural areas, as batteries can power radios even where there is no electricity. The cost of the radios (around 20,000 shillings), however, is a barrier to ownership. To keep broadcasting, many Ugandan stations receive government subsidies and donations to stay afloat, which compromises a station’s ability to disseminate unbiased information. In Uganda, popular stations CBS FM and Akaboozi FM have government ties. Television is another source of news that will be used for campaigning. Uganda has 1.6 million TV subscribers. Figure 4: radio ownership data courtesy of Energy Sector GIS Working Group Uganda Most TV and radio stations in the country are pro-Museveni , so Ugandans cannot get unbiased information about opposition candidates. The state police and military function as protection for Museveni against political rivals and ethnic opposition groups. Radio and TV stations are now asked to submit details to police on which politicians they will invite to their shows so that police presence and curfew enforcement can be organised in advance. Opposition candidates have complained about being excluded from shows in rural areas as security agencies bar them from attending. Early Signs of Violence and Intimidation : Over twenty candidates have expressed interested in running for president. In August 2020, one of Museveni’s opponents, pop star Bobi Wine, stated that Ugandan police fired tear gas and bullets into crowds in Mbale that were greeting him before a radio talk show. A police spokesperson has since stated that “violence suppression units” have been created to “control demonstrations and all acts of violence during the elections”. Thus far these police units have only targeted groups opposing Museveni. In 2018 Wine was arrested following some party gatherings . Police intervened with gun fire, resulting in civilian fatalities. Many have likened the treatment of Wine to the treatment of former presidential candidate, Kizza Besigye, who was repeatedly arrested during his campaigns in 2006 and 2011. Since the beginning of 2020, Uganda has suffered its highest levels of violence in over a decade . The lead up to the 2021 election is likely to result in an increase of state repression. Genocide Watch expects to see Museveni’s government targeting political opponents, their supporters, and ethnic minorities like the Bakonjo and Acholi that oppose Museveni’s rule. COVID-19 and the 2021 Digital Election Museveni has imposed COVID-19 restrictions that limit access to political information, especially in rural areas of Uganda. The restrictions prohibit mass rallies . Since the ban on campaign rallies, eligible voters can learn about the presidential candidates only through internet, radio, or television sources. This limitation favors urban over rural voters and supporters of Museveni over his opponents. According to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), incidents of state violence against civilians have markedly increased since March 21, 2020, when Uganda had its first COVID-19 case. In March 2020 state police reportedly used excessive force to impose COVID lockdown measures and targeted political opponents and ethnic groups that are at odds with Museveni’s government. Repressive measures have included forcefully breaking up demonstrations and targeting market traders. According to the ACLED COVID-19 Disorder Tracker , 47% of the incidents of police violence in Uganda since March 2020 have been cases of state repression of civilians. Ugandan security forces have cracked down on writers and journalists for criticizing the president . Figure 5: incidents of state repression are occurring at the highest frequency in over a decade Conclusion The 2020 – 2021 campaign season in Uganda will likely see increased violence and state repression as Museveni’s ruling party seeks to maintain power. At-risk groups include political and civilian groups opposed to Museveni and his re-election, and ethnic minorities from the North and West that are excluded from power. In their campaigns they will emphasize the corruption of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. Access to information during this so-called “scientific election” will be directly linked to unequal access to electricity and mobile phone subscriptions. Electricity in homes is largely restricted to homes near Kampala, which limits rural voters in accessing information via TV and the internet. Radios, despite state restrictions on content, will likely be the best way for opposition candidates to reach the population. But even radio stations are now subject to police control. With the backing of state sponsored media, the Ugandan Defense Forces, and the police, Museveni will have the upper hand during this election season. Violent suppression of anti-Museveni protesters may result in riots. Heavy-handed moves to enforce COVID-19 restrictions frame an increasingly violent election year in Uganda. If the official result of the election is another victory for Museveni, Uganda could erupt into violent demonstrations. Repression by the Ugandan police and military could result in crimes against humanity that target minority ethnic groups. Genocide Watch considers Uganda to be at Stage 6: Polarization. Genocide Watch recommends: - The Ugandan government must ensure that as many Ugandans as possible can connect to the internet during the election period. Freedom of expression and access to information are rights enshrined in Uganda’s constitution as well as in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Uganda is a state party. - The Ugandan government should ensure that all presidential candidates receive airtime on radio and television stations without restrictions or police interference. - The African Union, The Carter Center, The European Union, and other organizations should monitor the preparations for and conduct of the 2021 Ugandan election.

By Keminni Amanor The U.N. children’s fund has strongly condemned the killing of at least 17 minors among scores of others slain in a weekend massacre in Niger. UNICEF says unofficial sources put the death toll from Saturday’s attack in Tchomo-Bangou and Zaroumadareye villages at more than 100. A UNICEF statement Tuesday said the victims include 10 boys and seven girls, who were believed to be under the age of 16. Gunmen surrounded the villages in the southwestern Tillaberi region and began killing people. Some children were burned to death, UNICEF said. There has been no claim of responsibility. “Such wanton violence and disregard for the lives of children and families must be condemned in the strongest possible terms,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF executive director. She said these “heinous acts are grave violations of children’s rights and of international humanitarian and human rights law.” The attack on the villages near the Mali border came on the same day election officials announced results for the first round of Niger's presidential vote, showing ruling party candidate and former government minister Mohamed Bazoum with a clear lead. A runoff is set for next month. The villages are in a volatile area where Islamist militant groups are active. Seven Nigerien soldiers were killed in an ambush in Tillaberi on December 21. Travel by motorbike has been banned in Tillaberi since the first of January in a bid to prevent incursions by highly mobile fighters. On the other side of Niger, Toumour in the Diffa region was the target of a December attack that left 45 people dead, including 10 children. UNICEF said the attackers destroyed “vital food stocks, water infrastructure, and two classrooms, affecting nearly 21,000 people.” That attack too came the day before municipal and regional elections that had been repeatedly delayed because of poor security. In total, about 4,000 people across Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso died in 2019 in violence and ethnic bloodshed stirred by Islamists, according to the U.N. Fore said “UNICEF stands ready to support the government of Niger in assisting survivors and affected populations, and in protecting the rights of all children.” © Voice of America 2021

Troubling Trend of Anti-LGBT Actions By Kyle Knight Authorities in Indonesia’s Aceh province publicly flogged two gay men 77 times each on Thursday after a vigilante mob raided their apartment in November, allegedly caught them having sex , and handed them over to the police. The whipping—recognized as torture under international law—was punishment under the province’s Sharia (Islamic law) regulations, which forbid same-sex conduct. The floggings are part of a longstanding pattern of targeted abuse by Acehnese authorities against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In 2012, then-Banda Aceh deputy mayor Illiza Saaduddin announced a “special team” to make the public more aware of the “threat of LGBT," posting an image of herself on Instagram holding a handgun and vowing to flush gays out of Aceh. In October 2015, special Sharia police arrested two women , ages 18 and 19, on suspicion of being lesbians for embracing in public, and detained them for three nights before sending them to religious “rehab.” An episode nearly identical to this week's flogging happened in 2017 – including vigilantism, police involvement, prosecution under grossly discriminatory Sharia regulations, and public flogging. The abuse also is part of a five-year anti-LGBT campaign driven by many of Indonesia’s national and local leaders with harmful rhetoric and repeated failure to punish abusers. Aceh is the only one of Indonesia’s 34 provinces that can legally adopt bylaws derived from Sharia (though such provisions are spreading elsewhere in the country). Over the past decade, Aceh’s parliament has adopted Sharia-inspired ordinances that criminalize everything from non-hijab-wearing women, to drinking alcohol, to gambling, to extramarital sex. The province’s 2014 Criminal Code bars both male and female same-sex behavior. And while the spectacle of public torture in Aceh is horrific, authorities across the country continue to lead or participate in arbitrary raids and arrests in private spaces. Increasingly, authorities are using a discriminatory pornography law as a weapon to target LGBT people. The crackdown has contributed to a major public health crisis : HIV rates among men who have sex with men were already spiking, and the attacks of the last five years have stoked fear and inhibited vital HIV prevention work. The Indonesian government has made commitments in principle to protect LGBT people . But it seems President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s slogan of "unity in diversity" does not genuinely extend to protecting everyone – including the two men mercilessly flogged today. © Human Rights Watch 2021