By Laura Drysdale Taliban fighters patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 19, 2021. © 2021 AP Photo/Rahmat Gul Six months after the Taliban takeover, attacks against former Afghan military and minority groups have continued. Despite announcing an amnesty , the Taliban’s consolidation of power has been characterized by revenge attacks and murders. Taliban militiamen have killed over 100 members of the former Afghan government security services since August. On August 20, 2021, Taliban forces murdered 13 Hazaras in the village of Kahor, Daykundi province. In September and October, officials carried out forced evictions against thousands of Hazara residents and redistributed their land to Taliban supporters. These measures mirror 1990s mass killings and forced displacements of Hazaras under the Taliban. Hazaras face a high risk of genocide under Taliban rule. Women’s rights have been curtailed since the Taliban takeover. On August 24, 2021, the Taliban ordered working women to stay at home . They introduced a strict dress code. They have prevented many women from returning to their jobs. Most women may not leave their homes without male accompaniment. Girls’ secondary schools remain closed. It is Taliban policy to confine women to their homes. On January 16, 2022, women’s rights protests in Kabul were met with brutal crackdowns, and several protesters have since been reported missing . This demonstrates a wider policy of arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances against civil rights activists and journalists . LGBTQ+ rights have deteriorated significantly under the Taliban. In line with their openly anti-LGBTQ+ stance , the Taliban have targeted LGBTQ+ individuals in a string of attacks . ISIS ( ISKP ) is a major threat in Afghanistan. It has targeted the Shi’a Hazara in widespread genocidal massacres and crimes against humanity. Suicide bombings by ISKP killed 72 people at a Hazara mosque in Kunduz on October 8, 2021, and 63 people at a Hazara mosque in Kandahar on October 15th. An ISKP suicide bombing at Kabul airport on August 26, 2021 killed 183 people trying to flee the country. Afghanistan’s economy has declined rapidly since the Taliban takeover. International aid was withdrawn in August 2021, sanctions were imposed, and Afghanistan’s overseas funds were frozen. These measures have created a catastrophic humanitarian crisis . The economy is on the verge of collapse. The country faces a severe food crisis, with 8.7 million people at risk of starvation. The UN Secretary-General has urged donor countries to finance massive emergency aid operations. On February 2, the US announced sanctions exemptions for humanitarian initiatives. Taliban suppression of women’s rights constitutes Stage 3: Discrimination . Taliban and ISKP attacks on minorities represent Stage 5: Organisation . Murders and forced displacement of Hazaras, former government employees, and attacks on LGBTQ+ people demonstrate Stage 8: Persecution . Genocide Watch recommends: The US should release funds from Afghan assets to support UN World Food Program relief. The Taliban government should be recognized only when it stops murdering Hazaras and former government employees and when women are allowed to return to their jobs. The UN Assistance Mission (UNAMA) mandate renewal in March 2022 should require resumption of human rights monitoring and monthly reports to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Hazaras should be accorded preferential asylum status in the US and Canada.

By Laura Drysdale Nepali youth light candles in memory of victims of the conflict. (REUTERS/Gopal Chitrakar) In February 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal launched a rebellion to overthrow the Nepalese monarchy and establish a communist republic. This escalated into a full-scale civil war from 1996 to 2006. Both sides of the conflict committed major human rights violations , resulting in over 13,000 deaths and 1,300 missing persons. The conflict ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord on November 21, 2006. It stipulated the creation of transitional justice mechanisms to address conflict-era abuses and facilitate reconciliation. The transitional justice process, however, has been marred by delays . The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) were not created until February 2015. Both have been criticized for their lack of transparency, and for failing to properly investigate the 60,000 complaints of conflict-era crimes. Victims of gender-based abuses have been largely excluded from government relief programmes. The failure to secure accountability for conflict-era crimes has created an atmosphere of impunity for past and present-day human rights violations. Minority groups are particularly vulnerable to this ongoing cycle of abuse. Tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples have been forcibly evicted from their lands under government programmes to establish national parks. The government did not provide compensation for these measures. Indigenous peoples are arrested and detained for entering ‘protected areas’ and are often exposed to ill-treatment and torture by national park security forces. Dalits remain one of the most marginalized groups in Nepal and face discrimination based on the Hindu caste system . 68 incidents of violence against Dalits were reported in 2021. Despite laws criminalizing caste-based discrimination, the government has failed to ensure accountability for ongoing abuses . Nepal faces a number of additional human rights challenges, including discrimination against women. The strict statute of limitation for rape in the Criminal Code promotes impunity for perpetrators. The incidence of rape increased from 2020-2021. Child marriage rates are also high, with almost 40% of girls under 18 married in Nepal. This figure has grown due to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although chhaupadi, the practice of sending women to ‘menstruation huts’ during their period, was criminalized in 2018, it remains common in Western Nepal. Chhaupadi kills several women each year. The marginalization of Dalits and women represent Stage 3: Discrimination . The state’s failure to provide compensation for forced evictions and other abuses against indigenous communities, and the lack of accountability for conflict-era crimes, constitute Stage 10: Denial . Genocide Watch recommends: The TRC and CIEDP should investigate complaints of conflict-era abuses with priority to break the existing pattern of impunity. The government of Nepal must recognize indigenous people’s rights and allow them to return to their lands. Compensation should be provided for previous damages. The government should collaborate with the National Human Rights Commission of Nepal to implement the national action plan on human rights and counter the ongoing discrimination against Dalits, women, and other marginalized groups. Nepalese citizens should oppose discrimination against Dalits. Civil society organizations should launch grassroots programs to combat their social exclusion.

By Laura Drysdale Impact of a Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen in January 2022. Source: EPA via Shutterstock The civil war in Yemen continues to devastate the country. An estimated 233,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of hostilities in 2015. Seven years of conflict have decimated the country’s economy, infrastructure, and basic services, creating the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis. 24.1 million people in Yemen – over 80 percent of the population – require humanitarian assistance. 58 percent of Yemen’s population faces extreme poverty, and over 19 million people require emergency food assistance due to acute levels of food insecurity. The conflict has also triggered an internal displacement crisis : over 4.3 million people have been forced from their homes since 2015. Yemen’s conflict has developed into a proxy war between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government, which is supported by an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. has backed the Saudi-led coalition. Raytheon sells the Saudis the laser guided missiles that have killed thousands of Yemenis. The separatist Southern Transitional Council and Islamist terrorist groups further complicate the civil war. Both warring sides have obstructed humanitarian activity . Houthi authorities have restricted information about COVID-19 and impeded the distribution of vaccines in their areas of control. The Saudi coalition has enforced a blockade of ports since 2016, restricting the delivery of food and medical supplies and contributing to a growing food and healthcare crisis. Mwatana, a Yemeni Human Rights organization, has accused both the Houthi and coalition forces of using starvation as a weapon of war . These blockades of food violate international humanitarian law. Both sides in the conflict have repeatedly committed war crimes. Landmines planted by Houthi militias have caused hundreds of civilian deaths. Both Houthi and government forces have inflicted heavy civilian casualties through attacks against hospitals, schools, and residential areas. In January 2022, three coalition airstrikes killed 80 civilians and injured 156. Despite these attacks on civilians, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and other western states have continued to license arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The US, UK, France, and other western powers are complicit in the Saudi coalition’s war crimes. In October 2021, under Saudi pressure, the UN Human Rights Council voted to end the UN Group of Eminent Experts’ (GEE) investigation of war crimes in Yemen. Doing so removed the only independent international mechanism for investigating abuses by the warring parties, undermining the prospect of accountability for war crimes. The UN, US, and the West and Iran have abandoned the people of Yemen. In April 2022, the UN announced a two-month ceasefire between the Saudi-led coalition forces and the Houthi rebels. The truce was extended and largely held across the country, but it expired in October 2022. A renewed ceasefire and a negotiated settlement are the only hopes for an end to this brutal civil war. Attacks against civilians by both sides are war crimes and crimes against humanity and constitute Stage 9: Extermination . The removal of the UN Group of Eminent Experts represents Stage 10: Denial . Genocide Watch Recommendations: Both sides in the conflict must renew their ceasefire and permit entry of a UN peacekeeping force. Houthi forces should stop laying landmines. A UN mine clearance operation should be authorized. The Saudi air force must terminate all bombing in Yemen. Iran must end all support for the Houthis. The USA, the UK, France, and other states should stop all arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

By Julian Borger Sudan is in the grip of the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet. Photograph: El Tayeb Siddig/Reuters June 17, 2024: Sudan is facing a famine that could become worse than any the world has seen since Ethiopia 40 years ago, US officials have warned, as aid deliveries continue to be blocked by the warring armies but arms supplies to both sides continue to flow in. With much of the world’s attention focused on Gaza, the scene of another human-made famine, Sudan is already the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and is slipping towards a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions, with far less media coverage and global concern. A UN humanitarian appeal for the country has received only 16% of the funds it needs. “We need the world to wake up to the catastrophe happening before our very eyes,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, told reporters. She was speaking as El Fasher, the capital of the North Darfur region and a former humanitarian hub, faced its second month under siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The RSF is a paramilitary group that has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) since April 2023, when a power struggle between two rival generals, the SAF’s Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s de facto ruler, and the RSF’s Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, escalated into a conflict that has split the country. The civil war has already killed 14,000 people and forced 10 million to flee their homes. The UN security council adopted a UK-drafted resolution on Thursday, demanding an end to the El Fasher siege, but the fighting escalated on Friday with the SAF claiming to have repelled a major RSF assault, inflicting “huge losses”. The head of the US Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, said there were concerns over what would happen to the people sheltering in El Fasher if the town fell to the RSF. That force has largely been recruited from the Janjaweed militias, who carried out massacres while fighting on the Khartoum government’s side in the Darfur genocide of 2003 to 2005. “The RSF is on the march, and where the RSF has gone in the Darfur area historically, and in this conflict, mass atrocities have followed,” Power said, On Friday, she announced $315m in new US humanitarian assistance for Sudan, but said hardly any aid was reaching isolated populations. Both sides have been accused of using control over food access as a weapon. “The RSF has been systematically looting humanitarian warehouses, stealing food and livestock, destroying grain storage facilities, and wells in the most vulnerable Sudanese communities,” Power said. The USAID chief added: “The SAF completely contradicts its commitments, and its responsibilities to the Sudanese people by having shut down cross border access from Chad at the Adré crossing, which is the main route for assistance to enter the Darfur region.” Power said Gen Burhan could open the Adré crossing with “a stroke of the pen”. The SAF has offered another access point from Chad, the Tine crossing, but US officials say it is already obstructed and inadequate for the needs of the population and will become impassable with the coming rainy season. “The really clear message here is that it is obstruction, not insufficient stocks of food, that is the driving force behind the historic and deadly levels of starvation in Sudan,” Power said. She added that current data suggested the crisis is “comparable to and potentially worse” than a 2011 famine in Somalia that killed a quarter of a million people. “I would add that the most worrying scenario would be that Sudan would become the deadliest famine since Ethiopia in the early 1980s,” she added. The Ethiopian famine killed a million people between 1983 and 1985, according to UN estimates. Thomas-Greenfield said that in a worst-case scenario, a famine in Sudan could become even more lethal. “We’ve seen mortality projections estimating that in excess of 2.5 million people, about 15% of the population in Darfur and Kordofan – the hardest hit regions – could die by the end of September,” the ambassador said. “This is the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet. And yet, somehow, it threatens to get worse,” she added. While humanitarian aid has faced constant obstruction, both sides in the war continue to receive weapons, the US officials said: the SAF from Russia and Iran among others, the RSF in particular from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a US ally. Thomas-Greenfield said Washington had “engaged” with the UAE on the issue. However, a White House account of a “pull aside” meeting between Joe Biden and the UAE’s sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the G7 summit in Italy did not mention Sudan. The US faces accusations of hypocrisy from many countries, particularly in the Global South, as Washington calls for an end to weapons supplies to parties involved in the conflict in Sudan, while continuing to provide billions of dollars-worth of weapons to Israel during its offensive on Gaza. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

By Abdul Aziz Most of the tube wells in Cox’s Bazar Rohingya camps are out of order as the underground water level has been rapidly depleted in most places. The state of sanitation is also in shambles, with foul stench spreading from the camps due to inadequate sewage management. However, the local administration is blaming the situation on unplanned digging of tube wells and lack of toilets. Around 1.2 million Rohingya men, women and children are living in 12 camps in Teknaf and Ukhiya. They have spread to other areas as the 3,000 acres of forestland allocated by the government was not able to shelter them all. Most of these Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August last year escaping the atrocities unleashed by the security forces there. A number of international donor agencies and NGOs, including government and non-governmental organizations, are providing humanitarian assistance to the refugees. Along with relief material, the refugees are receiving food, housing, medicine and other facilities. As part of the relief efforts, tube wells were installed at the camps for pure drinking water and sanitation facilities were arranged. Mohammad Lokman, a resident of Kutupalong Modhur Chora Rohingya camp in Cox’s Bazar’s Ukhia said that the tube-wells were set up in an unplanned manner. “There is more than one tube well in some places while many other parts have none. This is causing huge suffering for the refugees. “Most of the tube wells are out of order. The tanks of many toilets have become full as they are not deep, forcing the refugees to answer nature’s call in the open,” he said. Minara Begum, a resident of Block D of Balukhali Rohingya camp, said the situation was the same there. “The sanitation is very bad. There is stench everywhere, which is making it very difficult to stay in the camp. The situation is particularly bad as most of the septic tanks have become full,” she said. Mohammed Jalil, an elderly Rohingya refugee in Ukhiya’s Thaingkhali Tajunirma camp, said: “The camp was all muddy during the rainy season. Now, in the dry season, it is overflowing with sewage water. “There is water stagnation in some parts, as the area is too cramped. In some places, there are no tube wells. Residents of these parts are forced to travel to other parts of the camps to collect water,” he said. Ukhiya’s Upazila Executive Officer (UNO) Md Nikaruzzaman said the installation of tube wells and sanitary system were done in an unplanned manner at the beginning as it was difficult to support the large number of the refugees. “It was very difficult for us to arrange proper sanitation facilities and set up tube wells. Also, the tube wells were set up during the rainy season when the groundwater level was high. But the water level has now dropped in the dry season,” he said. Abul Kalam, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner of Cox’s Bazar, said they were pulling out the out of order tube wells and installing deep tube wells in those areas. He also said that steps were being taken to build new toilets and sewage treatment facilities at the camps http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/nation/2018/01/13/water-sanitation-crisis-unfolds-rohingya-camps/ (c) 2018 Dhaka Tribune

By Abdul Aziz The refugees entered the Bangladesh territory by crossing the Naf River at five points from the morning till 5pm on Saturday. A fresh batch of 107 Rohingya refugees have crossed over to Bangladesh through the Teknaf border in Cox’s Bazar. The refugees entered Bangladesh territory by crossing the Naf River at five points from the morning till 5pm on Saturday. Teknaf police station Officer-in-Charge Md Moin Uddin said police and Ansar members had already sent the refugees to Hariakhali temporary army camp. There had been reports of another military crackdown on the Rohingya people in Sangudain village under Rachidong thana in Rakhine, and those who escaped the offensive entered Bangladesh through Dongkhali border, the OC added. http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2018/02/10/107-more-rohingya-refugees-enter-bangladesh/ (c) 2018 Dhaka Tribune

Can the Hollywood star’s Khmer-language film – with an all-Cambodian cast and crew – help a nation to confront the horrors of its past? By Julian Borger One sweltering afternoon last January on a film set in the Cambodian countryside, a local man approached Angelina Jolie with a large bucket of leeches. Jolie peered into the bucket and picked out one of the writhing creatures, studying it as it found its way to one of the prominent veins on the back of her hand and locked on. As it started to gorge on her blood, she carried it over to her nine-year-old lead actor, Sareum Srey Moch, who was sitting in a canvas chair in the shade of a tree. “This is what a real one looks like,” she said. Sareum wrinkled her nose and stared at the leech. “Does it suck your blood?” the girl asked. Jolie’s 13-year-old son, Pax, on crutches after breaking his foot in a jet-ski accident, hobbled over with his camera to take a closer look. “Yes it sucks your blood,” Jolie answered after a slight hesitation, already resigned to the likelihood that live leeches might be a step too far for this young actor. She ordered a return to plan A, a box full of dozens of pretend leeches made out of black vinyl and double-pinned to a cardboard backing like biological specimens. The crew experimented with gluing plastic worms of different shapes to Sareum’s leg until both the child actor and Jolie agreed that it looked right. Actor and director high-fived each other and the girl walked back to the paddy field for her next scene. Sareum plays the part of Loung Ung, who was only five when the Khmer Rouge, as Cambodia’s communist party was known, swept into the capitalPhnom Penh in 1975. Over the next four years, they drove its population out into the countryside, executing all those perceived as class enemies. More than two million people were killed, out of a total population of seven million. Ung’s father and mother and two of her sisters were executed. At nine, Ung escaped to Thailand with her older brother, and they arrived in the US as refugees soon afterwards, with the help of a church foundation. At 30, she wrote her autobiography, First They Killed My Father. On set, Loung Ung, now aged 46, watched playbacks on a screen with Jolie in a small black tent, next to a little corral where brown cattle were being kept for farm scenes. The two women have been friends for 16 years and Ung, who co-wrote the screenplay, was working as a consultant on the set. Jolie dates the beginning of her involvement in humanitarian issues to her experience making the fantasy action movie, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, in 2000. In that film, which was released in 2001, Cambodia was no more than an exotic backdrop for the action, but booby-traps and anti-personnel mines planted all over the country in the 1970s were still going off. There was a generation of orphans, then in their twenties, and a country still crushed by poverty, authoritarianism and mass trauma. Soon after filming Tomb Raider was over, Jolie returned as a volunteer for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and visiting mine clearance projects. She started giving large amounts of money to UNHCR and became a goodwill ambassador for the organisation. Jolie was planning to return to Cambodia with UNHCR later in 2001 when Ung’s autobiography landed on her desk. Ung at that time was working for a US Vietnam veterans’ organisation supporting landmine victims in the region. Her office had sent the book to Jolie on the off chance that she might publicise its cause. As soon as Jolie read the book she called Ung. It turned out the two women were to be in Cambodia at the same time. Jolie invited Ung to join her on a motorbike tour of the rugged countryside around the Battambang province in the north-west of the country. “We travelled to some very remote areas – there were no roads, or hotels or restaurants,” Ung said. “We stopped at the roadsides and ate in people’s homes. And I was so impressed because Angie didn’t travel with an entourage. She will eat whatever, she’ll hang her hammock wherever and get dirty and muddy in the torrential rain.” Ung taught Jolie the survival skills learned in the camp: how to check for leeches and catch frogs. “We very quickly became friends,” Jolie told me. “We got caught in a monsoon and stayed up at night sitting in hammocks in a pagoda in the rain, which is really fun for the first few hours and then it’s just freezing cold and relentless.” One day, Jolie spent time playing and talking to children in a school in Battambang. She had no children at the time and says it was at that moment that she decided to adopt a child from the country. “I asked Loung, as a Cambodian, as an orphan, what would she think about that. And she was very supportive about it,” Jolie said. “And we had a talk about what would be important, to make sure he always knew about himself.” Jolie adopted Maddox Chivan, aged seven months, from a Battambang orphanage a year later, in March 2002. “And Loung’s been in his life ever since,” she said. Jolie and Ung began adapting the book, but then shelved the project in part because Jolie was busy with other movies and because neither thought the political atmosphere in Cambodia was conducive to making a film about recent history. However, last year, Maddox, by then 14, persuaded them to make the film. “He was the one who just called it and said he was ready and that he wanted to work on it, which he did. He read the script, helped with notes, and was in the production meetings,” Jolie said. In 2011, Jolie made a film about the Bosnian conflict, In the Land of Blood and Honey, for which the cast was entirely made up of people from the former Yugoslavia. The film adaptation of First They Killed My Father uses only Cambodian actors, and the language spoken throughout is Khmer, with occasional snatches of French, the imperial language of French Indochina, of which Cambodia was a part until the 1950s. “When I said I wanted to make this film and I want to make it in Cambodia, everyone said: you can’t make it in Cambodia. You have to make it in Thailand, like The Killing Fields,” Jolie said. Roland Joffé’s 1984 film was Hollywood’s one major attempt to tackle the Cambodian genocide. It tells the story of a Cambodian photojournalist stranded after the evacuation of his western colleagues, who provide the western point of view for the audience. Jolie’s film makes no such concessions. There are no white characters to explain events in English and she is quite clear that the primary audience is the Cambodian public. The cast and crew are Cambodian. The film will be launched across Cambodia in the middle of next month, seven months ahead of its release in the US. Jolie’s humanitarian work marks the third act of her career. Although not the first actor to take this route, she has thrown herself into the role. “I’m doing less film now,” she said. “Not walking away from it all, but ideally doing projects like this one, where you can pull together all that matters to you at the same time.” While filming scenes that took place in a Khmer Rouge camp for child labourers, Jolie – barefoot and wearing a T-shirt and a large straw hat – strode on to the dusty set after every few takes. It was mid-morning and the heat was still bearable. The atmosphere was of a sprawling, busy, extended family, particularly during the communal meals eaten under canvas. Jolie was relaxed and happy, laughing and joking. She was clearly in her preferred element, at work but surrounded by close friends and family, and protected – by the remoteness of location and light set security – from the world’s curiosity about her private life. She said later in the day that one of the things she most liked about being in Cambodia was that she would wander in the markets and those people who recognised her, knew her for her philanthropy. “Maybe they’ve seen Tomb Raider but they don’t really watch a lot of movies,” she said. “Really, I’m that odd nice lady who likes Cambodia. If I go to the market, they do recognise me – they just don’t bother me. They say hi.” The set, a cluster of open-sided wooden huts, was built around a large dirt drill yard hung with red flags. Long lines of young Khmer children in black pyjamas and red chequered bandanas marched up and down, in and out of shot. Others picked rice from a paddy as a drone camera hovered noisily above. Angelina Jolie, her son Maddox Chivan and Loung Ung on the set of First They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix Most of the time, Ung’s role was as an auntie figure to the child actors, particularly Sareum (who she called “Mini-Me”), dispensing bottled water and advice and spending hours in the Lego tent. Lego is largely unknown in Cambodia because of the country’s strict restrictions on imports, but Jolie brought a large amount of the plastic building bricks with her to keep the children in the cast amused. For Ung, the Lego tent symbolised the ultimate defeat of the Khmer Rouge. “Lego is brightly coloured, it’s fun and it’s laziness. In the camp you would be beaten or worse for laziness,” Ung said. Her sister, Chuo, witnessed a boy being beaten to death by camp guards who said he was idle. In solidarity with the girls in the cast, who had to wear their hair in the severe short crop imposed by the Khmer Rouge, Ung had cut her hair and wore black. In breaks in the filming, she and Sareum strolled around as two versions of the same person, 40 years apart. “When I met Mini-Me, we were both trying to suss each other out. We would walk around each other like roosters,” she said. But she is constantly surprised at how alike they are. “Mini-Me would do something and I would look at Angie and say: I do that!” In writing her autobiography, Ung sought to recapture what it felt like to experience the upheaval, chaos and horror of life in a child labour camp. The young Ung had only a fragmentary understanding of the events unfolding around her. The film seeks to do the same thing – to show conflict as seen through the eyes of a young girl. To allow the audience to see the world through the young Ung’s eyes, much of the footage is filmed from her point-of-view, four feet off the ground with a Steadicam. The pursuit of an authentic child’s-eye view had been the film’s defining technical challenge. “When filming adults you shoot over the shoulder and you frame each shot so that it’s interesting,” said Jolie. “With POV it is whatever Loung is focusing on at that moment. It has taken everyone, especially the cameramen, time to adjust and not to try to frame the shot as they normally would.” After a last minute change, Anthony Dod Mantle was hired as cinematographer just a few days before filming began in earnest in November 2015. “I felt like a Red Cross parcel thrown out of a B52 bomber,” Mantle said. He is known as one of the most insistent innovators in the business and won an Oscar for his work in Mumbai on Danny Boyle’s 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. “Me and Angie are trying to egg each other on, to be radical.” Watching her childhood experience of genocide played out on set had a visceral effect on Ung. After arriving in the US at the age of nine, Ung was dogged by a recurring dream of being chased by soldiers determined to kill her. She would wake up just as her pursuers grabbed her. She underwent the same torment night after night until finally, three years later, in a dream, she turned on one of her attackers. “In my dream, which I remember very vividly, I was in America and he was chasing me and I was running and running and running. I came into a house and there were no weapons there, but what I found was a knife. And I grabbed it and I was trying to cut his head off and it was a butter knife. And I had to really hack at it,” Ung said. “This was when I was about 12 or 13 years old.” Ung is short and slight, and her frequent smile and inclination to find the humour in almost any setting is at odds with the darkness of her life story. She described being happy as an act of will. As a young woman, she resolved that neither her parents nor her two lost sisters would want to see her spend her life consumed in misery. “So I have purposefully made myself not do that, and the great thing about habits is if you do it long enough, it sticks.” Even Ung’s choice of career has involved the pursuit of pleasure. She and her husband, Mark Priemer, set up a microbrewery because they couldn’t get decent beer in America. “I thought if I die tomorrow I don’t want to die drinking fizzy water,” Ung said. The couple now run two breweries and three restaurants in Cleveland, Ohio. Having my hand separated from my sister’s, and seeing my parents being pulled away from each other, that was brutal “It’s one of those things your girlfriend tells you, and you think: Oh what is she doing?” Jolie recalled. “And then I didn’t even ask about it for a few years because I was worried. We talked about other things like books, and I turn around and she has a crazy number of employees and she’s really successful. It’s Brad’s favourite beer so I have it in my house all the time.” (During the filming, Brad Pitt stayed much of the time in Siem Reap, the resort town close to the ruins of Angkor Wat, helping look after the couple’s children in what turned out to be the final months of their marriage.) But now that Ung was back in Cambodia for a long period, her hair cut short and dressed in black again after years of wearing the brightest colours she could find, her bad dreams were returning. Over the course of making the film, she had broken down many times on set.“People are always asking me about war as a survivor,” she said. “They always ask about the bombing, the deaths, the soldiers. And I’ve always wanted to say that yes, those were horrible difficult moments, but having my hand separated from the clasp of my sister’s, and seeing my parents being pulled away from each other, and having to walk away from my brothers and sisters – that was brutal. “I hope people see not just the horror of war but the love it takes to survive.” The Khmer Rouge grew out of the communist ferment in south-east Asia that followed the second world war. The Cambodian communist party was taken over in the 1960s by a group of hardline ideologues who had studied in Paris, led by a radio engineer named Saloth Sar – a man who would later take the nom-de-guerre Pol Pot. The communist rebellion was seized upon by Lieutenant General Lon Nol, who ousted the country’s post-independence leader, Prince Sihanouk, in 1970, and countered the communist insurgency with heavy support from the US, which was conducting a secret and devastating bombing campaign along the country’s eastern border aimed at Viet Cong bases. In its opening sequence, Jolie’s film uses news reports from the time to suggest that the US bombing campaign boosted support for the Khmer Rouge and contributed to the eventual collapse of Lon Nol’s forces in 1975. Loung Ung’s father was a conscripted military police officer in Lon Nol’s army and high on the Khmer Rouge hit list. Those marked for death included anyone educated and therefore corrupted by western ways. Through mass murder, the Khmer Rouge intended to restart civilisation and turn back the clock to “Year Zero”. Last year, while Jolie was filming, I visited the grave of Pol Pot – the man who had presided over the killing fields. The forlorn and derelict site is in Anlong Veng, on Cambodia’s western border with Thailand, the location of the Khmer Rouge’s prolonged last stand against Vietnamese forces. He died in April 1998, aged 73, waiting for a car that was supposed to be taking him out of the country to appear before an international tribunal. According to the official account, the cause of death was heart failure, though other versions point to suicide or murder. A makeshift memorial stands over the spot where his body was cremated, amounting to no more than a strip of corrugated metal held up by two posts. A faded blue sign appeals to visitors to “preserve this historic site”, and it has been neither vandalised nor maintained. Dry grass has grown up around it. The only signs of recent human presence were a small wilted bunch of lotuses, a couple of red candles and a small, locked red tin box. According to a watchman, the only regular visitor is a Thai businessman and gambler, to whom Pol Pot appeared in a dream 10 years ago and provided the winning lottery numbers. The watchman said the gambler comes once a month, taking a break from a new casino built on the border nearby, to leave flowers and fruit. More Thai gamblers have followed his example, hoping to emulate his luck, and recently visitor figures have risen to about 50 a month. With traffic on the rise, a new concrete booth is planned for the watchman. Anlong Veng was a Khmer Rouge stronghold for more than a decade. Most of the residents are either former regime officials or their descendants, but the vestiges of Kampuchea – as the Khmer Rouge renamed Cambodia – seem to excite no local interest today. A few miles from the neglected grave is the house of Ta Mok, Pol Pot’s military enforcer, and later his rival, jailer and possibly his killer. The squat concrete shell of the house looks out on to an artificial lake that Ta Mok had built, and he decorated the walls with murals of the Angkor Wat temples. The murals are now covered with graffiti scrawled by lovers inspired by the romantic views. Angelina Jolie with Loung Ung on the set of First They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix The local government half-heartedly advertises the place to sightseers and a handful pass by each day. Kearn Sarin, a stocky man in a military jacket and a chequered Khmer scarf around an olive green cap, works there as a guide. Kearn was a bodyguard for Ta Mok until he was arrested in 1999. Ta Mok died in 2006 awaiting trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. Kearn remains a staunch defender of the Khmer Rouge, which he first joined as a teenager. He had heard about Ung’s book and the film, but dismissed it as “one person’s propaganda”. “It doesn’t tell the good actions done by the Khmer Rouge,” he said. “In Kampuchea, there was no rich or poor. Everyone was on the same simple level. Now the gap between rich and poor is big again.” There are various small-scale shrines and memorials to the genocide around Cambodia, but there is only one war museum, in Siem Reap, where the hulks of ruined Soviet-era armoured cars, tanks and helicopters sit under a grove of mango trees. On either side, there are old guns stacked on wooden stands and a rather patchy account of the country’s long nightmare. Behind a pane of glass, a one-page summary of the Khmer Rouge regime makes no mention of the killing fields and the two million dead, just “a radical attempt at social engineering”. Other pictures on display are Khmer Rouge propaganda shots, most of them labelled: “Khmer Rouge troops go from place to place.” Very few Cambodians come to the museum. “People don’t talk about the war. They don’t want to,” said Moun Sinath, who works as a guide at the museum. “It is difficult to talk about because there are some of the Khmer Rouge people still running the government.” Aforeigner coming to Cambodia to make a film about such an excruciatingly painful episode in the country’s history faces a delicate task. Every step along the way, from securing permission to film, to arranging movie screenings, has required patient negotiation. Not only are many former Khmer Rouge members still in positions of influence, Jolie had to navigate deep scepticism about foreigners in general. As Youk Chhang, the executive director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (an NGO dedicated to researching the history of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge), points out, between occupation by the French, the later invasion by the Vietnamese and repeated bombing raids by the US, there is a lot for Cambodians to be wary about. Chhang is a supporter of Jolie’s film, but he said there were some, including the country’s young film-makers, who felt they were better placed to tell the defining story of their parents’ lives. “It has to be understood that Cambodians’ mistrust of foreigners has deep roots,” he said. However, Jolie is a Cambodian citizen – she was awarded the honour in 2005 in recognition of her conservation work – and she has a Cambodian son. Furthermore she undertook the project as part of a team with Ung, her co-producer Rithy Panh, who is an internationally celebrated film-maker in his own right, and an all-Cambodian cast. “Because I did it in partnership with Luong and Rithy, it really wasn’t me leading it. It never was. And every day on set, it really wasn’t. I had to always defer to the Cambodian people who were there,” Jolie told me. “It’s not my story.” These partnerships, and Jolie’s own diplomatic skills, also helped smooth the way with the government in Phnom Penh. Cambodia’s quiet ambivalence about its own genocide goes to the heart of the establishment. Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister since 1985, was a battalion commander in the Khmer Rouge but fled with his unit to Vietnam to escape a party purge in 1977. He was subsequently a commander of Cambodian rebels that formed part of the Vietnamese invasion force two years later, and was originally part of the government set up under the Vietnamese occupation. Since then he has presided over a managed semi-democracy, in which elections are held, but with a carefully controlled media and widespread allegations of vote rigging. A joint UN-Cambodian court was set up in 2006 to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders, but Hun Sen’s government limited its scope. Just five former leaders have been indicted – three were convicted and two died during their trials. Wider public debate on the genocide has been discouraged by the government until recently. The basic facts of what happened under Khmer Rouge rule only began to be taught in Cambodian schools four years ago. Jolie’s film is being made at a moment of transformation. “A decade ago to talk about certain things [felt] very different than it does today. I don’t know what that is attributed to. It could be because it’s a certain generation change,” Jolie said. “But I wondered if there were would be restrictions over making the film. I wondered if they’d say: You can’t do this here or here, because the country is too sensitive and we don’t want to see this in the streets. Or maybe someone would say, “Oh it wasn’t as bad as this – it’s blown out of proportion”; or some kind of advice to tone it down. But quite the opposite – we’ve had encouragement to be as accurate as possible.” The world premiere of First They Killed My Father will be held in Siem Reap on 18 February, seven months before its global release via Netflix. “I went to [Netflix] directly,” Jolie said, “because I want to make the kind of film where I don’t have to compromise and put a famous Chinese actress in as the mother, or make it in a different language in order to get people in the theatres on the first weekend.” After all the labour camp scenes had been filmed, the crew had to set fire to the wooden huts for one of the climactic moments of Ung’s story, an attack on the camp during the Vietnamese offensive of 1979. Pyrotechnic specialists spent an afternoon rigging up burners and priming the straw roofs of the huts with fuel. There would be just a narrow window for filming a long tracking shot following the young Ung into the blaze, and Jolie was in her black tent planning it. She had been violently sick the night before and looked frail but insisted she had “stabilised”. The shoot only had a few “insurance days” to cover the cost of over-runs, so nobody, least of all the director, could afford to be sick for long. Other crew members had collapsed or succumbed to hallucinations while trying to work through sickness. Jolie was trying to determine whether it would have been a mortar or rocket that set the camp alight, and how each would make it burn. An added complication was the fact that the local farmer did not want any damage done to his wooden hut. A fire truck would be parked nearby in case it was ignited by stray sparks. Huts are set alight for the climactic scene of First They Killed My Father. Photograph: Pax Thien Jolie Pitt/Netflix As the evening darkened on the set, the wooden huts were set alight, and Sareum, playing the young Ung, was filmed running across the parade ground surrounded by flames, calling for her sister. In a nearby field, children were running away from the flames, followed noisily by a pig. Actors playing Khmer Rouge soldiers ran the other way across the open field carrying AK-47s. A row of latex corpses of dead fighters had been lined up under a tree ready for dispersal around the battlefield. Off to the side of the field, most of the crew had turned up to watch the set go up in flames. Brad Pitt, in a flat cap and T-shirt, had come with four of the couple’s children. It is hard to predict what the emotional response of Cambodians to the film will be, but for those of the cast and crew old enough to remember the Khmer Rouge, the effect of making it has been devastating. “Here everyone has been through it. Everybody is standing 10 feet away from someone else who has been through it. They’ve been helping each other as they always have,” Jolie told me. Before shooting started, she had made sure there was a Cambodian nurse with on set with experience of working with post traumatic stress. “People were so badly treated and so dehumanised,” said co-producer Rithy Panh, “they had no great desire to recall what happened, to talk about when they had to eat roots and insects to survive. And what could they say? I am alone, I survived but I couldn’t save my parents? I find this long silence normal.” Panh was 11 in 1975. He too lost his parents and siblings and ended up in a Thai refugee camp in 1979. Out of a dozen-strong household in Phnom Penh when the city fell, only he and one older sister survived. Now aged 52, Panh is a softly spoken man with round head and a goatee shielded by a wide-brimmed hat. He was seated at a desk in a recreation of a Khmer Rouge classroom with a straw roof and no walls. Panh’s documentaries were the first to break the Cambodian silence. In his 2003 film about Tuol Sleng, the most murderous of Khmer Rouge prisons, known as S-21, the handful of survivors from the jail confronted their former prison guards. His films won prizes abroad, but were barely seen in Cambodia. “People were saying I should make films about how beautiful the country is,” he said. “It’s only the young who watch my films.” “The film that Angelina is making is important because it perhaps permits a new generation of young people to find out what happened to their grandparents. It’s not the sole solution. It’s just images, but it makes them able to face up to their history and understand.” Finally, Panh added, the film demonstrates his country’s resilience. “They couldn’t destroy us. This creative act shows that we are able to express our history. There are those who say that after all that happened here, poetry is not possible any more. But I say we need more poetry. We need poetry, for creation, for imagination, to allow people to come through all this, turn their back on it and move forward.” With a month to go before the film is shown in Cambodia, Jolie was at home in California, fretting about the complication of what “general release” might mean in a country largely without cinemas and a population that has not confronted the realities of its genocide. “There are many smaller screenings we are going to be doing, which I am most excited by. It may just be a sheet and a projector out in a pagoda in the more remote areas,” she told me in a recent telephone interview. Whether it will be possible to show such a film in the Cambodian countryside will depend on the availability of monks or therapists to help organise the screening and deal with the fallout. There will be time set aside for discussions after the screenings, and in some places Jolie plans to set up town hall meetings the morning after so that she and the cast can answer questions. Judging from the experience of making the film, the reaction among ordinary Cambodians will be highly charged and emotional. In the best cases, it will also be hopeful. “I tried very hard to make a film that is not just about policies or politics or war,” Jolie said. “It is a film at its core about the Cambodian people and family, and love, and survival. I hope that there will be a sense of pride for the Cambodian people when they see it, about what they survived, and who they are.” © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

By Joshua Berlinger and Lauren Said-Moorhouse (CNN)-Thousands of people have been hanged at a Syrian prison in a secret crackdown on dissent by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a report by Amnesty International alleges. The human rights group says as many as 13,000 people have been executed at Saydnaya prison, north of the capital Damascus in a "hidden" campaign authorized by senior regime figures. Amnesty's report, Human slaughterhouse, says prisoners are moved in the middle of the night from their cells under the pretext of being transferred. They are taken to the grounds of the prison, where they are hanged, likely unaware of their fate until they feel the noose around their neck, Amnesty alleges. The report is the culmination of a year-long investigation, including interviews with 84 witnesses including security guards, detainees, judges and lawyers, Amnesty says. Most of those hanged were civilians "believed to be opposed to the government," the report finds. "The horrors depicted in this report reveal a hidden, monstrous campaign, authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government, aimed at crushing any form of dissent within the Syrian population," Lynn Maalouf, the deputy director for research at Amnesty's Beirut office, said in a statement announcing the report. Amnesty International says there are two detention centers at Saydnaya prison. In the "red building," the majority of detainees are civilians who have been arrested since the beginning of the conflict in 2011, according to the organization. In the "white building," the detainees are mainly military officers and soldiers. CNN has asked the Syrian government for comment. The report contends that the executed detainees were given a sham trial by "a so-called Military Field Court." "The judge will ask the name of the detainee and whether he committed the crime. Whether the answer is yes or no, he will be convicted ... This court has no relation with the rule of law. This is not a court," a former judge said, according to Amnesty. Nicolette Waldman, an Amnesty International researcher, elaborated on the horrific conditions prisoners allegedly face. "They have been actually dying in massive numbers as a result of repeated torture in combination with the systematic deprivation of food, water, medicine and medical care," she told CNN. "(The report) has gotten the attention it deserved," Waldman said. "It's a big story. But for people who work on Syria, it was almost a test case for 'Does the world still care, not just about death but the fact that it was organized, systematic?'" In light of its findings, she said Amnesty is calling for investigation without delay and for the UN to act immediately. "I want to be very clear that these practices are unacceptable, and they have to stop. They have to be brought to an end. Mass killings of civilians and extermination so that people are dying of starvation, of illness, of treatable diseases must stop, and Russia has a very special responsibility to uphold peace and security in the world," Waldman said. "We are calling on them to use their influence with the Syrian authorities to push for access to independent monitors to all of the prisons in Syria run by the government where these atrocities are taking place so the perpetrators can be held to account." Speaking at the UN, UK Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative Peter Wilson responded to the report's allegations. "We have seen the report of Amnesty International on atrocities in Syria," he said. "Our foreign secretary has said he is sickened by that report. We strongly condemn these atrocities, and we continue to effort to shine a light on what's happening in Syria and to hold people accountable for these actions." 'Just a headline' President Assad's regime has previously been accused of extrajudicial killings and war crimes during the country's civil war, which broke out in 2011. In 2014, CNN was given a copy of a report that found "direct evidence" of "systematic torture and killing" by the Syrian government, based on photographs leaked by a Syrian defector. One of the report's authors called it a "smoking gun" proving the use of torture. But Assad has steadfastly maintained that many of the accusations leveled against him are politically motivated. "I'm just a headline -- the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys," Assad told a group of western visitors, including The New York Times, in November. "You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn't fit the criteria of the United States." The UN estimates that about 400,000 people have been killed since the start of the war and another 4.8 million have fled the country. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 CNN

By Jonathan Pedneault A boy watches sacks of food drop to the ground during a United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) airdrop close to Rubkuai village in Unity State, northern South Sudan, February 18, 2017. © 2017 Reuters Thirty to forty percent of body weight loss. That’s what doctors define as starvation. Beyond that threshold, death is almost certain. As your stomach empties, the body consumes whatever else is available – fat, then tissues. Death slowly settles in. The UN has just declared famine in parts of war-torn South Sudan. Some 100,000 people face starvation, and a million more may die from hunger if aid does not come quick. A million of children across the country are already acutely malnourished, in what the UN is calling the “worst hunger catastrophe” since civil war erupted there three years ago. While the causes of famine are complex in a place like South Sudan, the current situation is clearly man-made: a result of the conflict, warring parties blocking access for aid workers, and large-scale human rights violations that have torn the country apart. It underscores the complete failure by government, opposition forces, and international actors to end the cycle of abuse. Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese have fled the country to seek safety. Currently some 4,000 South Sudanese cross the border to Uganda every day. Throughout the country, roughly 3.3 million people - more than a quarter of the population - have been displaced by the war and abuses. These abuses have been extensively documented: large-scale unlawful killings of civilians across the country, including Unity state; the forced recruitment of child soldiers; and abusive counterinsurgencies marked by extrajudicial killings, rapes, arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearance in Yambio, Wau and most recently in Yei. Yet, time and again, both sides have shrugged off international pressure, and spared themselves from any meaningful consequences, be they diplomatic, financial or legal. In December, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution imposing a punitive arms embargo and additional individual sanctions on senior commanders. Meanwhile, the warring sides are free to continue to their devastating abuses with complete impunity. The p __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch

By Julia Wallace A tribunal charged Im Chaem, 74, who lives in northwestern Cambodia, with crimes against humanity. The case was dropped, raising questions about whether the inquiry had yielded to pressure from the Cambodian government. CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times In this dusty mountain hamlet on the Thai border, she is known as Grandma Chaem. The tiny 74-year-old lives peacefully in a snug, stilted house surrounded by papaya, lime and custard-apple trees. Her children and grandchildren live nearby. She grows cucumbers and donates to her local pagoda, chews betel leaf and tends her cows. But Im Chaem, the woman enjoying this apparently idyllic retirement, is accused of overseeing the killing of tens of thousands of people as a Khmer Rouge official in northwestern Cambodia in 1977 and 1978. In 2015, a United Nations-backed tribunal charged her with crimes against humanity, including mass murder, extermination and enslavement. On Wednesday, the tribunal’s investigating judges quietly dropped the charges, raising questions about whether they had yielded to pressure from the Cambodian government, which opposed the prosecution. The tribunal, set up to try those accused of being responsible for the worst crimes committed during the nearly four years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, is a joint project of the United Nations and the Cambodian government. The government, however, has fought efforts to prosecute anyone beyond the Khmer Rouge’s senior leaders and one notorious prison chief. The case was dismissed, the tribunal said in a statement, because Ms. Im Chaem “was neither a senior leader nor otherwise one of the most responsible officials of the Khmer Rouge regime.” Schoolchildren on the outskirts of Anlong Veng, where Ms. Im Chaem lives. Many residents of her neighborhood were foot soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times Ms. Im Chaem said she had never planned to go to court anyway. “I do not like what they accuse me of,” she said in a recent interview at her home in Anlong Veng, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold. “I don’t want to think about that. There’s no reason for it. I don’t want to have any trouble. I just want to live in peace.” As many as 2.2 million people died in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule, and there have been battles over whom to prosecute since the tribunal’s inception. Since it opened in 2006, the tribunal has convicted only three people: two senior leaders and the regime’s chief jailer. A fourth elderly suspect died during prosecution, while another was declared unfit for trial because of dementia. Three midranking suspects are also under investigation but have not been arrested. The government — whose nucleus is a group of former Khmer Rouge officials and soldiers who defected early on — has effectively blocked the tribunal from reaching further into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge, many of whom gained positions in the army or local government when they agreed to reintegrate in the 1990s. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, has repeatedly warned that more trials would cause fresh outbreaks of civil war and chaos. A United Nations prosecutor, Nicholas Koumjian, said in a December statement that “Im Chaem played a key role in the commission of crimes which led to many thousands of deaths,” and that she clearly fell under the court’s purview. The cremation site of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, in Anlong Veng.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times Anne Heindel, a co-author of “Hybrid Justice,” a book about the court, said the dismissal of the case was hard to understand in light of the evidence. “What a farce and pretense of justice to spend so much money convicting only the three — a foregone conclusion — while pretending that the process was independent and not limited by politics for a decade,” Ms. Heindel wrote in an email. The tribunal has cost the United Nations and international donors about $300 million so far. According to a confidential document submitted by prosecutors in 2008, Ms. Im Chaem and another official, Yim Tith, were sent to the country’s northwest in 1977 to purge cadres seen as traitorous, often because they could not meet the regime’s hefty rice quotas with their starving labor forces and primitive technology. They killed many others along the way, collateral damage in the quest to enforce a radical communist vision. Together, they may have been responsible for as many as 560,000 deaths, the prosecution document said. Prosecutors estimated that 40,000 people had died at the largest prison in the district that Ms. Im Chaem ran, Phnom Trayoung, which was allegedly under her direct control. Some were executed by night, while others died doing heavy labor at the prison’s quarry while eating meager rations of rice porridge. An entire village of 400 people, Chakrey, was virtually eliminated; fewer than 10 men were alive by the end of 1978. At a nearby jail, around 6,000 people were killed, 20 or 30 every night. Kaing Rin, Ms. Im Chaem’s daughter. “She can’t even kill a fish,” Ms. Kaing Rin said of her mother, “so how could she kill a human being?” CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times “In Chakrey village we could hear the screams from the forest nearby,” said one survivor cited in “The Pol Pot Regime,” a book by the historian Ben Kiernan. “The victims’ clothes were distributed to us the next day.” Ms. Im Chaem also supervised construction of huge waterworks to increase rice production, including two dams. According to prosecutors, one was built entirely by hand in three months by 1,300 slave laborers subsisting on tiny portions of rice porridge. She tells the story differently. In a 2012 interview with the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent research group, she said she had been called upon to “solve problems” because she had a knack for organizing workers and supervising rice cultivation. She said that poor conditions were endemic before she arrived in the area, and that she had improved things. Coincidentally, the head of the Documentation Center, Youk Chhang, labored under her command. At age 14, he was forced out of his home in the capital, Phnom Penh, and sent to the northwest, where he became a dam digger. He said that conditions there had been brutal, and that workers had lived in fear of being killed. “She forced us to work without food, without water,” he said. “For me, even though the court dismissed the case, the criminal remains the criminal until she is punished.” Anlong Veng, about a seven-hour drive northwest of Phnom Penh, is dominated by a huge swampy lake, a defense around the last home of Ta Mok, the warlord known as the Butcher, who was Ms. Im Chaem’s direct superior. Visitors inside Ta Mok’s house in Anlong Veng. The charges against Ms. Im Chaem stem from her role as a favored administrator under Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge warlord nicknamed the Butcher.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times The Khmer Rouge retreated here after the regime’s defeat and continued to hold sway until 1998. Today it is something of a retirement community for former Khmer Rouge fighters, and has recently filled up with S.U.V.s, hair salons and even a coffee shop selling cappuccinos. Villagers emphasized that an important part of local culture was never to pry into other people’s pasts. “Everyone knows Grandma Chaem, knows that she is living in this village, but we don’t know her background, what she did,” said Keo Khuot, 56. He said that at one time, people who asked too many questions could have had their property seized or been “summoned for questioning” by Ta Mok and never come back. Up the road, Ms. Im Chaem’s compound is the largest in her neighborhood, dotted with flowers and decorative cactuses and presided over by her eldest daughter, Kaing Rin, who keeps house. After dinners of fish or pork and homegrown vegetables, her family often sits down together to watch Thai soap operas. Ms. Kaing Rin spent much of her childhood in a work brigade under Ta Mok in the Southwest Zone, the first part of the country to be forcibly collectivized. When her parents were sent to purge the northwest, they left her behind and did not see her again for over a decade. Four of her seven siblings died during those years. Fishing near the remains of a dam built by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. According to prosecutors, it was built entirely by hand in three months by 1,300 slave laborers under Ms. Im Chaem’s supervision.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times Despite the privations of her youth, Ms. Kaing Rin mounted a spirited defense of Ms. Im Chaem. “She can’t even kill a fish, so how could she kill a human being?” she asked. Ms. Kaing Rin said her family’s patron, Ta Mok, was “only strict with bad people, people who made mistakes.” Her mother, she said, became a respected local leader for the governing Cambodian People’s Party after the disintegration of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. “The people who accused her never saw her face,” Ms. Kaing Rin said. “Everyone who sees her face and knows her really loves her.” Still, when asked where Ms. Im Chaem could be found, Ms. Kaing Rin claimed her mother was on a long journey and would not return for days. In fact, Ms. Im Chaem was just down the road in a second home. Tipped off by a neighbor, journalists found her listening to Buddhist talk radio. She said she spent most of her time at the compound, cultivating cucumbers and melons, contemplating the scriptures and waiting to die. “I just learn the Buddha’s advice and keep the holiness within myself for my own sake,” she said. “Having the holiness in myself makes me good, not killing anyone or criticizing anyone. That is the holiness in myself: to make myself good.” Did she know all the crimes she was accused of: the murder, the slavery, the extermination? “You don’t need to ask me. You know it,” she shot back. “If you know it, you know it.” At that moment, her husband arrived. Nob Nhem, 78, still wears the all-black uniform and red checked scarf of the Khmer Rouge, for whom he was also a district chief. He rarely speaks, but every time he appears, his family grows silent. “I need to tend to my cows,” Grandma Chaem said, and slipped away. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Joe Stork Hundreds of Egyptian Coptic Christian families have fled their homes in the northern Sinai Peninsula since late February, fearing for their lives in the wake of seven murders between January 30 and February 23. No group claimed responsibility for the killings, but families who abandoned the city of al-Arish for Ismailia west of the Suez Canal told Egyptian rights activists that these attacks – carried out by armed masked men in unmarked vehicles – fit the pattern of those claimed by Islamic State (also known as ISIS). On February 19, ISIS released a video featuring the suicide bomber who claimed responsibility for the December attack on an annex to Cairo’s St. Mark’s Cathedral that killed 29 worshippers. Violence between Muslims and Christians is not new to Egypt. Historically, in areas like Minya and Assiut, which have large Coptic populations, violence erupts when personal feuds get out of hand or Muslim crowds respond violently to Christian construction (or reconstruction) of churches. In July and August 2013, Islamists torched and looted Christian buildings in response to perceived support by Coptic Christian clerical leaders for the overthrow of Mohamed Morsy, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a Muslim Brotherhood leader. A nun cries as she stands at the scene inside Cairo's Coptic cathedral, following a bombing, in Egypt December 11, 2016.© 2016 Reuters The recent attacks in al-Arish – and earlier killings there and in northern Sinai towns such as Rafah and Sheikh Zuwayd – are not communal, or provoked by a particular incident. Gunmen targeted Christians apparently not for who they were – a veterinary surgeon, pharmacist, teacher, shoe merchant – but apparently to frighten the small Christian communities to flee en masse. And in the context of protracted fighting between Egyptian security forces and ISIS, to demonstrate Egypt’s incapacity to protect lives and property. Several families told Egyptian rights activists that they fled only after the “apathetic” response from Egyptian security officials. They say they want to return to their homes but are skeptical this will be possible. Egyptian journalists and rights activists say some local families have opened their homes to the al-Arish families, and as many as 100 other al-Arish families are in Port Said and cities further west. Local Ministry of Social Solidarity and Coptic Church officials are coordinating relief efforts, the activists say, but a government promise to make five apartment buildings available remains unfulfilled. The message from the displaced families is that Egyptian authorities need to respond to their calls for protection and provide people with adequate shelter. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) Human Rights Watch

By Ester Htusan Hundreds of hard-line Buddhists in a Myanmar state wracked by religious violence protested Sunday against the government’s plan to give citizenship to some members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority community. Rakhine state’s dominant Arakan National Party led the protest in Sittwe, the state capital, where many Rohingya lived before an outbreak of inter-communal violence in 2012 forced them to flee their homes. “We are protesting to tell the government to rightfully follow the 1982 citizenship law and we cannot allow the government giving citizenship cards to these illegal migrants,” said Aung Htay, a protest organizer. The Rohingya face severe discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, with many in Rakhine and elsewhere considering them to be illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, even though Rohingya have been in Myanmar for generations. The 2012 violence killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people — predominantly Rohingya — from their homes to camps for the internally displaced, where most remain. Hard-line Buddhists walk by a mosque during a protest march, led by Rakhine State’s dominant Arakan National Party, against the government’s plan to give citizenship to some members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority community in Sittwe, Rakhine state, Myanmar, Sunday, March 19, 2017. Many Rohingya lived in Sittwe, the state capital, before an outbreak of inter-communal violence in 2012 forced them to flee their homes. (AP Photo/Esther Htusan) Rakhine, one of the poorest states in Myanmar, is home to more than 1 million stateless Rohingya. Sunday’s protest took place three days after the Rakhine Advisory Commission, led by former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, urged Myanmar’s government to reconsider a failed program to verify Rohingya for Myanmar citizenship and to remove restrictions on freedom of movement. “We also look at the question of citizenship, and we also call for all those who have been recognized as citizens to have all the rights attached to that citizenship,” Ghassan Salame, a member of the commission, said last week. Myanmar’s new civilian government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, welcomed the commission’s proposal. Suu Kyi’s office said that most of the commission’s recommendations would be “implemented promptly.” The government withdrew the Rohingya’s so-called white cards two years ago as part of a plan to expel them from the country and cancel their citizenship under the 1982 law. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Associated Press