By Julia Wallace Workers emptying a cassava truck in Malai, Cambodia, in February. The town has about a dozen cassava export firms, most headed by former Khmer Rouge soldiers. CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times For years, Tep Khunnal was the devoted personal secretary of Pol Pot, staying loyal to the charismatic ultracommunist leader even as the Khmer Rouge movement collapsed around them in the late 1990s. Forced to reinvent himself after Pol Pot’s death, he fled to this outpost on the Thai border and began following a different sort of guru: the Austrian-American management theorist and business consultant Peter Drucker. “I realized that some other countries, in South America, in Japan, they studied Drucker, and they used Drucker’s ideas and made the countries prosperous,” he said. The residents of this dusty but bustling town are almost all former Khmer Rouge soldiers or cadres and their families, but they have come to embrace capitalism with almost as much vigor as they once fought to destroy class distinctions, free trade and even money itself. Mr. Tep Khunnal helped lead the way, as a founder of an agricultural export company and a small microfinance bank for farmers before rising to become the district governor. From that position, he encouraged his constituents to follow suit. The market in Malai, run by a joint-stock company owned by a group of ex-Khmer Rouge officials.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times The local market, fronted by a bright green sign featuring flying United States dollar bills — an advertisement for a telecommunications firm — is run by a joint-stock company owned by a group of ex-Khmer Rouge officials. Inspired by Mr. Tep Khunnal’s original farmer’s bank, there are now six such organizations in Malai. The success of his agricultural venture has spawned about a dozen cassava export firms, most headed by former Khmer Rouge soldiers or followers. Every weekday afternoon, the town’s main road is choked by a queue of brightly painted trucks carrying cassava to the border. “We joined the communists, and now we have joined the capitalists, which is much better,” said Dim Sok, a local official. Mr. Dim Sok, 65, was a nearly illiterate farmer when he became a revolutionary in 1970, fighting in the jungles with the Khmer Rouge for five years before they seized power. In an effort to remake the country into an agrarian utopia, the Khmer Rouge government swept the urban population into the countryside to live like peasants and smashed up banks and schools. At least 1.7 million people died under their nearly four-year rule. When they were ousted in 1979, they retreated to strongholds like Malai on the western fringes of Cambodia along with thousands of soldiers and supporters. While Pol Pot continued to restrict free enterprise in areas under his control, residents of Malai were allowed to conduct some trade and amass personal property starting in the 1990s. The area broke away from the Khmer Rouge in 1996, in part to avoid Pol Pot’s attempts to recollectivize property, and soon after a few thousand ex-communists raised capital to build the market by issuing shares in a joint-stock company. Tep Khunnal was once the personal secretary of Pol Pot, staying loyal even as the Khmer Rouge collapsed in the late 1990s. He retired from government and business a few years ago and now spreads the ideas of the management theorist Peter Drucker across the country. CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times Each shareholder is entitled to quarterly dividends based on rents paid by vendors. The rate of return is high: Mr. Dim Sok said he reaps $10 every three months from an initial investment of around $50. “It is like a stock market,” he said, beaming. Mr. Dim Sok said he saw no contradiction between his current life and the years he spent enforcing an unstinting brand of communism. “In communist ideology they accuse capitalism of exploiting people,” he said. “But now we are in capitalist society, and there are actually two things that can happen: You can be exploited, but you can also prevent others from exploiting you.” Many here seem to have managed that nimbly. Nget Saroeun, 62, spent over two decades as a soldier, much of it waging guerrilla war in the hills around Malai. Today, he is a prosperous farmer who hobbles around his fields vigorously despite having lost a leg to a land mine. He is a fan of the English soccer team Arsenal and likes to check commodity prices and read about new agricultural techniques on his smartphone. “Previously, it was very difficult here,” he said. “It was full of forest. Now it is full of concrete houses.” He praised Mr. Tep Khunnal for teaching farmers “to meet the demands of the market” by growing new crops like cassava, a tuber that can be processed into starch or animal feed. Every weekday afternoon, Malai’s main road is lined with a queue of trucks carrying cassava to the border.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times Malai was still a malaria-infested jungle stronghold when Mr. Tep Khunnal moved here in 1998, bringing with him Pol Pot’s widow, whom he married shortly after his boss’s death. Along with a barely educated but savvy ex-soldier, Soom Yin, he took out a bank loan to test some of his ideas. Their company bought the area’s first corn-drying machine, imported a new breed of sun-resistant corn from Thailand and set up a quality-control system for the corn and cassava that moved through their warehouse. Today, Mr. Soom Yin owns the largest export firm in the area and can talk for hours about the minutiae of the cassava trade, from moisture levels to price fluctuations. In his spare time, he said, he reads books on management. The Khmer Rouge ways are “very old now,” he said. “Even me, I don’t even dream about that anymore. We just do business.” Mr. Tep Khunnal, 67, retired from government and business a few years ago and now devotes his time to spreading Drucker’s ideas across the country. He teaches at a university in a neighboring province and is translating the theorist’s work into Khmer. He has even compiled his favorite bits of Drucker’s wisdom into a small handbook. “I’m sure that if Cambodia embraces this idea, Cambodia will walk in the right way,” he said. He declined to discuss his finances, but he lives in a large gated compound surrounded by lush gardens. When his stepdaughter, Pol Pot’s only child, got married in 2014, he threw her a lavish reception featuring French liqueur and glass chandeliers hanging from pink-and-white tents. A funeral in Malai, where most residents are former Khmer Rouge soldiers or cadres and their families.CreditOmar Havana for The New York Times He said he began reading about economics while serving as a Khmer Rouge envoy to the United Nations in the 1980s. Although he liked Milton Friedman, the free-market economist, and Frederick Taylor, who pioneered scientific management, he was most drawn to Drucker’s insistence that employees were central to an enterprise’s success. “What I find interesting for me is that he talks about individuals, he gives power to individuals, not to collectivism,” he said of Drucker. “Frederick Taylor in the early 20th century, he talked about efficiency, but Drucker talked about effectiveness.” During a recent lecture, Mr. Tep Khunnal exhorted his students to remember that good management was just as important as good ideas. “In-no-vation,” he said, using the English word, “means a new idea, but to be successful you need strategy.” Some of his talking points might have been useful for the Khmer Rouge in its final days, when the movement disintegrated into multiple warring factions. Asked whether Pol Pot had been a good manager, his former aide demurred. “I don’t want to make any judgment on that,” he said. “Let history do it. I think about the future.” ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Josh Morency April is Genocide Awareness Month, a time for reflection and memorial and when the often repeated phrase of “never again” must be seriously assessed and recommitted to. Through the last century, April has continued to be a month of tragedy and atrocity, with many of the worst genocides having begun, occurred, or marked significant moments during this period. For example, on 24 April 1915, the Ottoman Empire began the process of the Armenian Genocide through mass arrests of notable Armenian intellectuals and community leaders on Red Sunday. To this day, 24 April is commemorated as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. It was also in April, decades later, that the Nazi regime began its systemic campaign of discrimination and oppression of European Jews in the form of business boycotts and exclusionary civil service laws. The date of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, also most often falls within April in the Gregorian calendar. Finally, on 17 April, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime seized control of Cambodia and began its systemic and brutal campaign of genocide that killed millions between 1975 and 1979. It is these tragedies, and others, that we remember, their millions of victims we commemorate, and the pledge of “never again” that we reflect upon during Genocide Awareness Month. Unfortunately, it is upon reflection that we remember the countless times “never again” has failed to be anything more than a pleasant turn of phrase, devoid of any meaningful action or obligation. Most powerfully, we recall that in the final decade of the 20th century the world saw further genocides that occurred without significant action or timely response by the international community. In both Rwanda and Srebrenica, the warning signs and risk indicators were present in the countries well before the massacres began, as were UN peacekeeping missions. Yet in both these tragedies, failure to pay attention to the indicators of risk and a lack of political will on the part of the international community resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. Prior to the outbreak of the genocide in April 1994, Rwanda was in a period of temporary and exceptionally fragile stability brought about by the signing of the Arusha Accords in August 1993, which were meant to bring an end to the country’s civil war. However, animosity between the belligerents, the primarily Hutu central government and the primarily Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), raged just below the surface. The UN Security Council saw fit to deploy the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993 to support the implementation of the Accords. Despite its presence, UNAMIR was constrained by a tight and unyielding mandate, as well as by a lack of support from UN member states and the offices of the UN in New York, and it was either incapable or disallowed from acting to prevent the violence within its UN-mandated capabilities. Even when an informant from the Hutu Interahamwe militia provided the UN force commander, Maj-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, with actionable intelligence that the government and military were providing the Interahamwe group with training and arms, as well as the location of the arms stockpiles in Kigali, the UN Secretary-General and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations prevented UNAMIR from taking action. When President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in the air over Kigali by unknown actors on 6 April 1994, killing him and the Burundian President, the perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide were already mobilized and their campaign of violence was instantaneous. By the end of the next day, hundreds of Tutsis, moderate Hutus, members of the political opposition, and ten Belgian peacekeepers escorting the Prime Minister were all killed by rampaging genocidaires. Over the next several days, tens of thousands of Rwandans were murdered while the UN and foreign states focused their own forces toward evacuating foreign nationals. UNAMIR command struggled to do what it could to protect civilian lives with its limited resources, such as numerous requests for additional troops and a clear mandate to end the bloodshed, but these calls remained unfulfilled. Instead, Belgium withdrew its contingent a week into the violence, and several days later the total force of UNIMAR was reduced to 270. In little over a month, half a million had been killed in a wave of genocidal violence that would continue until the RPF’s military victory in July. A year later in 1995, a similar scenario occurred with the genocide in Srebrenica, during which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males aged 12 to 77 were slaughtered by the Serbian forces under Ratko Mladic in less than a week. Again, like the situation in Rwanda, international actors remained inactive in the face of overwhelming evidence and warning signs of an impending massacre. When the Bosnian civil war began in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces quickly and brutally launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the east. The Bosnian Muslims that survived this first wave flooded into Srebrenica and two other towns. The advance of the Bosnian Serb army of paramilitaries on Srebrenica in 1993 prompted the commander of the UN forces in Bosnia to formally place Srebrenica, and the now tens of thousands of civilians being sheltered in the town, under the protection of the UN force. On 16 April of that year, Srebrenica was declared the first of six safe-zones in Bosnia. Yet despite these initial assurances, the enthusiasm of Member States to meaningfully commit to protecting Bosnian Muslims proved lukewarm at best. The number of troops requested to protect the safe areas was reduced from 34,000 to 7,600 as the Member States balked at the heavy commitment under the initial proposal. As a result of this decision, only a small and lightly armed UN force, the approximately 400 soldiers of the DUTCHBAT battalion, was present to protect Srebrenica when the forces of Ratko Mladic bore down on the small town in June 1995, which at that point was providing shelter to over 40,000 men, women and children. Despite significant warnings of the impending massacre, such as a public statement by Mladic and other leaders of the Bosnian Serbs declaring their intention to destroy the Bosnian Muslim population, as well as promises made by Mladic’s political counterpart, Radovan Karadzic, to the Bosnian Serb assembly a year prior that there would be “blood up to the knees” if his army marched on Srebrenica, the international community’s response was either far too late, wholly inadequate, or both. Mladic’s forces began shelling the town on 6 July. The bombardment lasted for two days while requests from DUTCHBAT for air support were denied. On 9 June, the Bosnian Serb forces began to move towards the town, taking 30 Dutch soldiers hostage and prompting DUTCHBAT forces to retreat. By the morning of 12 July, Srebrenica had been surrendered to the Serb paramilitary forces. Over the next 30 hours, buses arrived to deport 23,000 women and children while the Serb forces separated out all males between the ages of 12 and 77. About 15,000 men escaped into the mountains during this period but were subsequently shelled by Mladic’s forces. The next day, the massacre of the captured men and boys began at sites around Srebrenica, and Dutch forces exchanged 5,000 refugees sheltering at their base for 14 of their soldiers held hostage by the Bosnian Serbs. By 16 June, over 7,000 men and boys had been murdered, and more would be hunted down and killed in the surrounding countryside during in the following weeks. If any positivity can be found in the inability of the international community to prevent these mass murders, it is that such failure inspired the commissioning of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2000 and its subsequent report, The Responsibility to Protect, in 2001. The Responsibility to Protect is just as important and relevant to the world today as it was during those crises. Today, there are numerous concerning situations around the world from an atrocity prevention perspective and that urgently require action. In Burma, the current crisis faced by the Rohingya population in Rakhine State is marked by numerous risk indicators of genocide and crimes against humanity. Political and cultural conflict has locked both Sudan and South Sudan in a state of continued civil war, producing environments highly conducive for the development of atrocity crimes. Globally, the rise of large-scale radical extremism has mired many countries in similar states of unrest, conflict, and war crimes. Many of these country-specific situations, including those previously mentioned, are monitored by the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) due to their nature as potential atrocity crime scenarios and consequently their relevance to the responsibility to protect. As part of its monitoring effort, ICRtoP has produced updated crises summaries for each of the 15 country-specific situations in infographic format. In observance of Genocide Awareness Month, ICRtoP will be releasing several of these new summaries, beginning with South Sudan on 7 April, alongside ICRtoP’s regular weekly news update, the R2PWeekly. By drawing attention to and spreading knowledge of these crises before they devolve into occurrences of atrocity crimes, and by enabling civil society to effectively advocate for RtoP normalization and adherence, ICRtoP hopes to ensure that political actors will never again fail to protect populations from genocide or other atrocity crimes due to a lack of political will. Recalling the first address of Secretary-General Guterres to the Security Council in January 2017 in which he called upon Member States to “commit to a surge in diplomacy for peace,” it is important that during this Genocide Awareness Month we remember that “prevention is not merely a priority, but the priority” (emphasis added). As Secretary-General Guterres rightly indicated in his address, the international community, the UN and, most importantly, states must work to prevent conflicts and crises. When recalling the failures of prevention, intervention, and protection in Rwanda and Srebrenica, we are reminded of the importance of the Secretary-General’s call on the Security Council to be more active in its duty to assure world peace and to make better use of the options under Chapter VI and other resources at its disposal. ICRtoP is glad that the new Secretary-General is committed to prevention and recognizes its own importance in preventing atrocities. Moreover, ICRtoP hopes that when Member States, civil society, and other actors consider the Secretary-General’s statement that “if we live up to our responsibilities, we will save lives, reduce suffering, and give hope to millions,” they are reminded of the responsibility of all states to protect all populations from all forms of atrocity crimes. Let us hope that in observance of this Genocide Awareness Month and in memory of the millions of victims of genocide in the past century, all states will accept their responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes, and that the vow of never again may finally be realized. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 RtoP Weekly

By Jo Becker United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks during a press conference at the State Department in Washington, U.S. June 21, 2017. © 2017 Reuters Dozens of children were part of Burma’s armed forces as recently as last week. In Iraq, children have died fighting the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) with Iraqi government military units. But United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ignored these facts and took Burma and Iraq off the annual list, issued today, that identifies countries that use child soldiers or support militias that do. The US Child Soldiers Prevention Act requires the State Department to publish the list each year. The new list includes the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. In addition to Burma and Iraq, Afghanistan was again missing from the list, despite ongoing use of child soldiers by its security forces. Why does the list matter? Under the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, countries on the list are not eligible for certain forms of US military assistance unless they get a special waiver from the president. Human Rights Watch frequently criticized President Barack Obama for giving too many countries waivers, but the law has made a real difference. When the US withheld military training and financing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the government began making progress to end its use of child soldiers. The law influenced Chad to end child recruitment and Rwanda to cut off support for an abusive militia that recruited children. Tillerson reportedly overruled his own staff and US diplomats to take Burma and Iraq off the list this year. His decision flies in the face of evidence that both governments are still complicit in child soldier use, and undermines US leverage to influence change. The US provides Iraq with billions of dollars of military assistance each year; in exchange, it should insist the government put an end to child recruitment by its units. Instead, the State Department isn’t even acknowledging Iraq has a child soldier problem. Congress should ask tough questions about the State Department’s listing process. It’s one thing to assert that governments using child soldiers still require military aid, but it’s another to pretend the problem doesn’t even exist. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch

By Esther Hsutan Buddhist demonstrators on Wednesday protested the arrival of the U.N. human rights envoy to Myanmar for an information-gathering trip in troubled Rakhine state, where security forces have been accused of rights abuses against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Less than 100 protesters from the state's ethnic Rakhine Buddhist community shouted and held signs as Yanghee Lee passed in her car in Sittwe, the state capital, calling her unfair and unwanted. Lee has criticized the government's treatment of the Rohingya minority, who face severe discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. They were the targets of intercommunal violence in 2012 that killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people - predominantly Rohingya - from their homes to displacement camps, where most remain. Last October, the army launched counterinsurgency operations in Rohingya areas after assailants presumed to be Rohingya attacked police outposts along the border with Bangladesh, killing nine officers and seizing weapons and ammunition. U.N. human rights investigators and independent rights organizations charge that soldiers and police killed and raped civilians and burned down more than 1,000 homes during the operations. Lee is on a 12-day visit to Myanmar at the invitation of the government during which she is to discuss human rights issues with political and community leaders and civil society representatives. After her arrival in Sittwe, she visited a prison where hundreds of Rohingya men are detained on suspicion of having links with the assailants who carried out the October attacks. "Yanghee Lee has been here in Rakhine three or four times but every time she goes back and writes a report about her trip or has press conferences and never mentioned any good thing about either Rakhine people or the Myanmar government," said Than Tun, a leader of the Rakhine Buddhist community. "What Rakhine people think about Yanghee Lee is that she is too one-sided," he said. "This is why people in Rakhine state don't like Yanghee Lee's visit, because whether she comes here or not, nothing will change for us." Lee has been outspoken in her criticism of the government on previous visits, and recommended the establishment of a special U.N. mission primarily to investigate the problems in Rakhine. The U.N. Human Rights Council approved the mission by consensus in March and in May appointed three legal experts and human rights advocates to lead it. In June, however, Myanmar officials announced that the mission's members would not be allowed into the country. They insisted that their own efforts to deal with the problem - including an advisory committee appointed by Myanmar's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and led by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan - are adequate. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2017 The Associated Press.

By Esther Htusan Myanmar’s military has a big public relations problem: It stands accused of committing genocide. Which is why I was among 14 international journalists escorted to a village in northern Rakhine state this past week on a guided press tour — the first time we were allowed into this area since last October, when the army began an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign in the heartland of the country’s oppressed Muslim ethnic Rohingya minority. The idea was to show that the army’s hands are clean and to display openness, even as the government refuses to allow a human rights fact-finding team from the United Nations to enter the country. It was hard to reach many conclusions. Our government handlers placed limits on how much we saw and heard. There were time constraints, guards and informers shadowed us, and official briefings mostly repeated familiar talking points. Reporting also was a challenge because many Rohingya villagers speak only their own language and only a few of the reporters even spoke Burmese. But I learned enough to get at least a dim outline of an ongoing battle for hearts and minds. ___ Our five-day trip ended Sunday. Everywhere we went, I could see fear in people’s faces, especially when police were with us. I learned how little access the Rohingya have to even basic services. The school attendance rate is less than one in 10; some schools exist but the transportation infrastructure to get children to them doesn’t exist. The five villages we visited in northern Buthidaung township are very remote; we spent much more time traveling to them — by boat and car — than actually in them. Farmers and fishermen live in bamboo houses in settlements bracketed by rice paddies. Many small children don’t wear clothes. The only boats visible in the nearby river were dugout canoes, nothing more elaborate. Their lives are simple. Men plow the fields with their draft animals. Women stay home and cook and wash clothes and fetch the water. It all seemed so normal. But when we walked around, people’s expressions made it clear they wanted to tell us something. We were on occasion able to get away from our security escorts — ostensibly there for our own protection — and talk to some. The army is accused of carrying gross human rights violations against Rohingya villagers during a counterinsurgency operation launched after October’s nighttime attacks by insurgent-led mobs resulted in the deaths of nine border guards and the theft of a cache of weapons. Human rights groups accuse the government’s security forces of mass killings, gang rapes and burning down villages. There is evidence to support the allegations. Advocates for the Rohingya, working with a network of activists in Rakhine, circulated many photos and detailed accounts of alleged atrocities, mostly impossible to verify but not refuted either. In Kyar Gaung Taung, one 20-year-old woman told us what happened when soldiers arrived in her village when the counterinsurgency sweeps began last year. Her story was very similar to accounts that circulated at that time but that we heard mostly secondhand. When the troops arrived at her villages, she said, they seized her 60-year-old father and tied his hands behind his back. They then set fire to the family home and tossed her father in, she said. She spoke to journalists at the graveyard where her father’s remains were buried. The army was prepared with a response. “There are less than 10 cases involving killings by the Border Guard Police, and we have explanations in each case,” Brig. Gen. Thura San Lwin told us later. “Even out of these 10 cases filed to the court involving killings, some of the complaints were fake and lies.” ___ The U.N.’s human rights agency collected testimony from hundreds of Rohingya who fled to neighboring Bangladesh, concluding that rape was widely used by the army as a weapon of war and that civilian deaths were in the hundreds. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch used before-and-after satellite photos to demonstrate that more than 1,500 houses and other structures had been burned down as part of the counterinsurgency operation. Less convincingly, the government attributed the arson to the insurgents and their sympathizers. The allegations of abuse are credible not only because the army is historically notorious for mistreatment of other minority groups in the eastern side of the country, but also because there is a well-established pattern of hostility and violence directed by Buddhist ethnic Rakhines at the Rohingya population, estimated at upward of 1 million, most settled in this region. The Rohingya were the targets of inter-communal violence in 2012 that killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people — predominantly Rohingya — from their homes to camps for the internally displaced, where most remain. Many others have been taken into custody. At one point, a group of women from another village glimpsed us and crossed some paddy fields to talk. The women from War Pait village — I interviewed eight of them — said more than 60 men from their community were arrested for suspected links to the group that carried out the October attacks. Many were under 18, some as young as 13, they said. They’ve visited Buthidaung Prison a couple of times to see their sons, but none of the women knew exactly what charges their loved ones face or how long they will be held. The violence is not one-sided, although the alleged brutality and scale of last year’s army sweep tends to overshadow other ominous developments. The government claims, and the pattern of several dozen similar killings suggests, that these acts — some involving beheadings — have been carried out by the insurgents, targeting suspected informers or government collaborators. It’s evident that such activity is blowback from the army’s vigorous counterinsurgency campaign, which had the predictable effect of serving as a recruiting tool for the militants. Last year’s presumed attackers of the border posts, relatively obscure at the time, have become very active on messaging networks such as WeChat to spread their propaganda. In March, they declared themselves the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. And as the conflict gains more traction in the public eye, the government is grappling with how to get its message out — all while restricting access to the region. Included in this trip were four journalists from state-owned media. Their only job, it seemed, was to document journalists from the international media — to keep track of us as we tried to tell the stories of others. We were on the front page of the government’s English-language mouthpiece, The Global New Light of Myanmar, three mornings in a row. As far as they were concerned, we were the news. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Associated Press

By Esther Htusan The Myanmar government's inquiry into violence in northern Rakhine state last year that forced tens of thousands of Muslim Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh and led to U.N. accusations of crimes against humanity by the army has concluded that no such crimes happened. Speaking at the release of the Rakhine Investigative Commission's final report, Vice President Myint Swe - a former general - told reporters Sunday that "there is no evidence of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights claimed." He also denied charges that there had been gang rapes by the military as it swept through Rohingya villages in a security clearance operation. The army was reacting to deadly attacks against border police posts by a previously unknown insurgent group in October 2016 in the Maungdaw area of Rakhine. AP Photo/Thein Zaw The commission's report did accept that some things might have happened that broke the law, attributing it to excessive action on the part of individual members of the security forces. Rights groups have previously expressed their doubts over the commission's work, saying it lacked outside experts, had poor research methodologies and lacked credibility because it was not independent. The U.N. has mandated its own fact-finding mission to travel to the Maungdaw area to conduct its own inquiry, but the government has said its members will not be allowed to go. Zaw Myint Pe, a senior member of the government commission, said the report released by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Of in early February, which included accusations of rights abuses by security forces, had failed to take into consideration violent acts committed by Muslim groups. "The report does not contain forward-looking constructive recommendations but instead accuses Myanmar of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing by killing Muslims and it is terribly affecting our country's image," said Zaw Myint Pe. The government has shut down northern Rakhine, where the allegations of right abuses are ongoing, to independent journalists, rights experts and humanitarian workers for almost nine months. The security forces launched an aggressive clearance operation in Rakhine in October 2016 after shadowy insurgents killed nine border guard police officers. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2017 The Associated Press

By Joe Freeman FILE - Nationalist Buddhist monk Wirathu, center, marches to celebrate newly imposed restrictions on interfaith marriages in Mandalay, the second largest city in Myanmar, Sept. 21, 2015. One of the Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar who joined an anti-government protest encampment outside Yangon’s famed Shwedagon Pagoda late last week has vowed that he and other demonstrators were in it for the long haul. “If we get three demands, we will stop our boycott,” the monk, Pyinyar Wuntha, told journalists on Friday, two days into the sit-in. “Otherwise we will keep fighting until the government steps down." By Sunday evening, however, they had abandoned their position, and local residents were using a traditional disinfectant to clean up the area. Hours earlier, police broke up an affiliated protest camp in Mandalay, arresting at least half-a-dozen monks and charged them with a form of incitement. A third location in the Shan State capital of Taunggyi also emptied out. The office of State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi expressed "heartfelt thanks" to members of the public for not joining the action, and the appreciation was later published on the front page of the state-backed Global New Light of Myanmar. NLD hard line against nationalists Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which came to power more than a year ago as part of a transition away from decades of junta rule, has taken a decidedly harder line against Buddhist nationalists than the previous military-backed administration, earning cautious praise at a time when it is in desperate need of success stories. FILE - Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi speaks during the opening ceremony of the second session of the 21st Century Panglong Union Peace Conference at the Myanmar International Convention Centre in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, May 24, 2017. “You could say that governments being the way they are, you need some pluses. Because things haven’t been going well for the present NLD government generally," said Khin Zaw Win, director of the Yangon-based think tank the Tampadipa Institute. “So I think moving against the extremist monks is popular.” He added that the crackdown was only the latest move in an ongoing contest between the two forces. “You still have to finish this game, it’s not finished yet. And they’ve got to play their cards carefully,” he said. Buddhist nationalists on the defensive The former pro-democracy activists have faced withering criticism in their new roles as politicians. The economy is not exactly booming. There's a sputtering peace process, and Myanmar's military still has an uncomfortable amount of control in national affairs. Buddhist nationalists protest, Aug. 3, 2017, in Yangon, Myanmar. But the NLD has also stepped up efforts, in concert with the state Buddhist leadership, to isolate Buddhist nationalist movements, which proliferated amid religious violence that has plagued Myanmar’s transition to democracy since 2011. The political winds have helped them. Support for the groups waned after historic elections in 2015, when the NLD won a resounding victory against the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which had been touted as the right pick by some of the more vocal nationalist figures such as Ashin Wirathu. The declining influence was on full display during the protest encampments, which produced a small turnout. A group calling itself the Myanmar Boycott Organizing Committee circulated a call to action on Facebook that, even though it could not be independently verified, highlighted the embarrassingly poor attendance. “We would like to remind nationalists across Myanmar who are protecting race and religion. Our committee is now contacting you by phone as we need more people,” the statement said. “We would like to remind you to confirm whether you can come and support or not when we call. We would like to remind nationalists who said that they would sacrifice their lives for race and religion that you should pick up phone calls after taking expenses.” The protesters had three demands: to release other nationalists held by authorities; to remove the NLD's religious affairs minister Aung Ko; and to formally announce that the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group in Rakhine State, do not exist and are illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Concerns remain about NLD government More than 120,000 Rohingya live in internal displacement camps since anti-Muslim clashes with Buddhists in 2012. The military stands accused of widespread rights abuses that allegedly occurred in the northern part of Rakhine during a hunt for Rohingya militants who attacked police border guard posts in October. The government denies the allegations. At a press conference over the weekend the religious affairs minister dismissed the suggestion that the government step down as unreasonable. But while many welcome a tougher position in general, concerns remain over the way the government handled the incident and whether the sit-in actually amounted to hate speech, which authorities have struggled to control with the explosion of internet access in the country over the past few years. “There's a fine line here between combating extremists and violating freedoms of expression and assembly. The mark of a liberal democracy is its ability to tolerate and even protect illiberal voices,” Matthew Smith, a co-founder of the NGO Fortify Rights, said in an email. “We don't agree with what they stand for but we'll protect their right to stand for it, so long as they don't incite violence or use hate speech. Those who incite violence should be prosecuted and held accountable and the authorities really need to do more to combat hate speech. It's a deadly serious national problem.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 VOA

By Judith Vonberg Poland's senate has approved a controversial bill that makes it illegal to accuse the nation of complicity in crimes committed by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust. The bill, which passed with 57 votes to 23 (with two abstentions) early Thursday morning, also bans the use of terms such as "Polish death camps" in relation to camps such as Auschwitz, which were located in Nazi-occupied Poland. To become law, the bill must now be signed by Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has previously expressed his support. Violations will be punished by a fine or a jail sentence of up to three years. While there is a consensus among historians that certain Polish individuals and groups did collaborate with the Nazi occupiers, recent Polish governments have sought to challenge that narrative. This legislation, which will outlaw any remark that attributes responsibility to Poland for the Nazi crimes, marks the most significant victory for those seeking to defend "the good name of Poland," a stated aim of the bill. Jews deported from Hungary exit a German boxcar onto a crowded railway platform at Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland, in 1944. 'Serious distortion' The news from Poland's upper house came just days after a public spat between Poland and Israel over the proposed legislation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the bill "baseless," saying: "One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied." Israel's Holocaust museum and the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Yad Vashem, said in a statement the new legislation risked blurring "the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust." The statement went on: "There is no doubt that the term "Polish death camps" is a historical misrepresentation!... However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion." 'Sloppy attitude' about Polish history While critical of the legislation, historian Anita Prazmowska from the London School of Economics has some sympathy for Poland's position. "Successive governments have been trying to persuade journalists and politicians to stop using the phrase 'Polish death camps,'" she told CNN. "It comes down to a rather sloppy and cavalier attitude towards Polish history... towards one of the most painful periods in Polish history." At least three million Polish Jews and 1.9 million non-Jewish citizens were killed during the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The issue has come to a head in recent years with the growth of the right-wing Law and Justice Party in Poland and several high-profile controversies. In 2012, then US President Barack Obama used the phrase "Polish death camp" during a Medal of Freedom ceremony, sparking immediate condemnation from Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister at the time. "When someone says 'Polish death camps,' it is as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, as if there was no Hitler," Tusk said. "That is why our Polish sensitivity in these situations is so much more than just simply a feeling of national pride." Speaking at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum three years later, then FBI director James Comey referred to "the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary," again arousing ire in Poland. The phrase "Polish death camp" is also often used in news reports about Auschwitz and other camps that were located in Nazi-occupied Poland. Misleading remarks such as these are "extremely irritating for the Poles," said Prazmowska. Academic freedom 'in danger' But Prazmowska is also concerned about trying to tackle the problem by enacting a law. "Legislation shouldn't be used to force a particular historic interpretation," she said. She sees the move as part of a broader attempt to revise negative aspects of Polish history to serve a nationalist agenda today. "The government is trying to present itself as a defender of Polish dignity," she said. "It's part of the government's agenda to appeal to people, to present itself as a defender of the Polish nation." Svenja Bethke, member of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, described the legislation as a "tragedy" and a "scandal." She is concerned about the potential impact on historians such as herself. Many of her colleagues are "very concerned," she told CNN. "They're worried about not being able to work as a historian on this period in Poland anymore." "When powerful institutions are able to put certain limitations on historical research," academic freedom "is in danger," she said. https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/01/europe/poland-passes-holocaust-bill-intl/index.html (c) 2018 CNN

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis President Trump at the California Sanctuary State Roundtable in the Cabinet Room on Wednesday. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting on Wednesday, warning in front of news cameras that dangerous people were clamoring to breach the country’s borders and branding such people “animals.” Mr. Trump’s comments came during a round-table discussion with state and local leaders on California’s so-called sanctuary laws, which strictly limit communication between local law enforcement and federal immigration officers, and which the Trump administration is suing to invalidate. It was hardly the first time the president has spoken in racially fraught terms about immigrants, but it underscored his anger about unchecked immigration — the animating issue of his campaign and his tenure so far — and his frustration that he has not been able to do more to seal the nation’s borders. As he has in numerous private meetings with his advisers at the White House, Mr. Trump used the session to vent about the nation’s immigration laws, calling them “the dumbest laws on immigration in the world.” He exhorted his administration to “do much better” in keeping out undesirable people, including members of transnational gangs like MS-13. “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room during an hourlong meeting that reporters were allowed to document. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. Mr. Trump’s remarks came as the local officials invited for the event took turns praising his immigration policies and lamenting California’s law, arguing that it was making it more difficult for their communities to find and deport criminals. Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County said the statute barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities from using her databases “to find the bad guys,” or from entering prisons to locate people who might be in the country illegally. “It’s really put us in a very bad position,” Sheriff Mims said. “It’s a disgrace,” Mr. Trump answered, “and we’re suing on that.” The president’s language and his focus on California drew a sharp rebuke from Jerry Brown, the state’s Democratic governor. “Trump is lying on immigration, lying about crime and lying about the laws of California,” Mr. Brown said in a statement. “Flying in a dozen Republican politicians to flatter him and praise his reckless policies changes nothing. We, the citizens of the fifth-largest economy in the world, are not impressed.” During the session, Mr. Trump suggested that the mayor of Oakland, Calif., should be charged with obstruction of justice for warning her constituents in February of an impending large-scale immigration raid and arrests. “You talk about obstruction of justice,” said the president, who is himself the subject of a special counsel’s investigation into whether he sought to thwart a federal examination of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections. “I would recommend that you look into obstruction of justice for the mayor of Oakland.” Turning to Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, who sat at the other end of the large wooden conference table, Mr. Trump said: “Perhaps the Department of Justice can look into that.” The round table took place exactly one week after Mr. Trump used a closed-door cabinet meeting to castigate Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, for failing to do enough to crack down at the border. On Wednesday, Ms. Nielsen said little when called upon to speak, other than to thank Mr. Trump for his leadership on the issue. “You’re doing a good job, and it’s not an easy job,” Mr. Trump told Ms. Nielsen. He alluded to a recent push by his administration that parents be separated from their children when families cross illegally into the United States, but blamed Democrats — many of whom have vehemently opposed the practice — for the new policy. “I know what you’re going through right now with families is very tough, but those are the bad laws that the Democrats gave us,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to break up families. The Democrats gave us that law.” The president also took aim at Mexico as unhelpful on immigration. “Mexico does nothing for us,” Mr. Trump said. “Mexico talks, but they do nothing for us, especially at the border. Certainly don’t help us much on trade, but especially at the border, they do nothing for us.” His harsh criticism came as American and Mexican officials were at a critical stage in their efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Trump’s heated remarks on immigration, both private and public, appear to have resonated with his advisers, who have been moving to put in place ever-stricter policies in line with the president’s vision. Mr. Sessions said the Department of Justice would be adding immigration judges and prosecuting twice as many immigration cases this year. “The president has made clear to all of us that we have to do better,” he said. “We are going to do better.” The attorney general, a former senator who helped to derail previous attempts at revamping immigration laws, also expressed hope that a legislative overhaul could be enacted this year, although Republicans on Capitol Hill have shown little appetite for undertaking one. “This is the year that we have to move Congress,” Mr. Sessions said. (c) 2018 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/trump-undocumented-immigrants-animals.html

By Ivan Watson, Rebecca Wright, and Ben Westcott Hong Kong (CNN) Chinese officials have officially acknowledged birth rates in Xinjiang dropped by almost a third in 2018, compared to the previous year, in a letter to CNN in which they also denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide by authorities in the far western region. The Xinjiang government sent CNN the six-page fax in response to questions for an article published in July that documented a campaign of abuse and control by Beijing targeting women from the Uyghur minority, a Muslim ethnic group numbering more than 10 million people. The fax didn't arrive until September 1, a month after the story was published. These aren't the first accusations of widespread human rights abuses by the Chinese government in Xinjiang. Up to 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been placed in mass detention centers in the region, according to the US State Department , where they have allegedly been subject to indoctrination and abuse . Beijing claims that these centers are voluntary and provide vocational training as part of a de-radicalization program in Xinjiang, which saw a spate of violent attacks in recent years . But CNN's reporting found that some Uyghur women were being forced to use birth control and undergo sterilization as part of a deliberate attempt to push down birth rates among minorities in Xinjiang. The article was based on a report by Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation known for his research on Xinjiang, who quoted official Chinese documents showing a surge in the number of sterilizations performed in the region -- from fewer than 50 per 100,000 people in 2016 to almost 250 per 100,000 people in 2018. Zenz said that these actions fell under the United Nations definition of "genocide" specifically "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." In its response, the Xinjiang government strongly denied the claims of genocide, arguing instead that the Uyghur population has been "growing continuously" during the past decade and that Zenz's report was not "in line with the real situation in Xinjiang." According to the government, the population of Xinjiang rose by more than 3 million people, or almost 14%, between 2010 and 2018, with the Uyghur population growing faster than the region's average rate. "The rights and interests of Uyghur and other ethnic minorities have been fully protected," the response said. "The so-called 'genocide' is pure nonsense." Birth rate plunges But the government didn't dispute the rise in sterilizations or the gap in the ratio of new intrauterine devices (IUDs) between Xinjiang and the rest of mainland China. While IUD implants have plunged in China overall, falling to just 21 per 100,000 people in 2018, in Xinjiang they are becoming increasingly common. According to local government statistics, there were almost 1,000 new IUD implants per 100,000 people in Xinjiang in 2018, or 80% of China's total for that year . The Xinjiang government said in its response that the birth rate in the region had dropped from 15.88 per 1,000 people in 2017 to 10.69 per 1,000 people in 2018. The fax said that the drop was due to "the comprehensive implementation of the family planning policy." Up until 2015, the Chinese government enforced a "one-child" family planning policy countrywide, which allowed most urban couples no more than one baby. Ethnic minorities, such as the Uyghur people, were typically allowed to have up to three but Xinjiang expert Zenz said that families from these groups often had many more children . When China officially began the two-child policy in January 2016, Uyghur citizens living in cities were limited to two children for the first time as well -- their rural counterparts could still have up to three . The Xinjiang government attributed the sudden drop in population to Beijing's family planning policies finally being properly implemented in the region after 2017. "In 2018, the number of newborns decreased by approximately 120,000 compared with 2017, of which about 80,000 were because of better implementation of family planning policy in accordance with law, according to estimates by the health and statistics department," the response to CNN said. The government insisted that those who complied with the family planning policies did so voluntarily. The government attributed the remaining 40,000 fewer babies to increased education and economic development, resulting in fewer children in the region. The Xinjiang government did not include the 2019 birth figures for the region. "As a part of China, Xinjiang implements family planning policies in accordance with national laws and regulations, and has never formulated and implemented family planning policies for a single ethnic minority," the response said. But Zenz pointed out that changes to the natural birth rate should take place over several years or even a decade, not in the space of 12 to 36 months. In reference to the government's claims that compliance with the family planning policies were voluntary, Zenz questioned how likely it was that "17 times more women spontaneously wanted to be sterilized." "Han Chinese academics from Xinjiang have themselves written that the Uyghurs resist any type of contraceptive (and especially sterilization)," he said in a statement to CNN. In their fax, the Xinjiang government also attacked Zenz personally, saying that he was "deliberately fabricating lies" and accused him of being a religious fanatic who believed he was "led by God" to oppose China. Zenz dismissed the Chinese government's allegations, saying they were "resorting to personal attacks" because they couldn't disprove his research. "Far more egregious than these personal attacks on me are Beijing's smears against the Uyghur witnesses," he said in a statement. Attacks on women The Xinjiang government also zeroed in on claims made by two female Uyghurs quoted in CNN's article -- Zumrat Dawut and Gulbakhar Jalilova. Dawut said she had been forced into sterilization by the local government in Xinjiang when she went to a government office to pay a fine for having one too many children. Dawut also said she had been in a detention center in Xinjiang for about three months from March 2018. In their response, the government said that Dawut had never been inside a voluntary "education and training center," the name used by the Chinese government for the alleged detention centers, and that she had signed a form agreeing to the procedure known as tubal ligation. In CNN's article, Jalilova, who is a citizen of Kazakhstan and an ethnic Uyghur, said she was held in a detention center for 15 months after being arrested suddenly and without explanation during a business trip to Xinjiang in May 2017. Jalilova claimed she suffered humiliation and torture while inside the camps and said she was raped by one of the guards. The Xinjiang government confirmed Jalilova's claims that she had been detained for 15 months from May 2017, alleging she was arrested "on suspicion of aiding terrorist activities." In August 2018 she was released on bail, after which she returned to Kazakhstan. In their statement, the government denied that Jalilova had been raped or tortured, saying that all of her "rights were fully guaranteed" and the staff who were in her cell could prove it. When asked to respond to the Chinese government's statement, Jalilova stood by her claims and demanded the Xinjiang authorities provide their proof. "Why don't they show a video? Why don't they show a photo during my time in prison showing that I was well fed and not beaten. The cameras were working 24 hours," she said. "I am a citizen of Kazakhstan, what right did they have to detain me for a year and a half?" © 2020 Cable News Network. A Warner Media Company. All Rights Reserved.

By José Miguel Vivanco El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, accompanied by members of the armed forces, speaks to his supporters outside Congress in San Salvador, El Salvador. © 2020 AP Photo/Salvador Melendez On the morning of September 21 , a judge arrived at military headquarters in San Salvador with a warrant to review the military’s records regarding the  1981 El Mozote massacre , one of the largest  mass killings in modern Latin American history . Soldiers blocked the judge from entering, blatantly refusing to comply with the judicial order. The judge went to  six other military facilities in the following weeks. Each time, soldiers prevented the judge from examining the records. It came as a slap in the face to Salvadorans reckoning with one of the most horrific episodes in the country’s 12-year civil war. It also signaled a reversal of President Nayib Bukele’s commitment to guarantee access to military records. Three days after the judge’s first attempt to execute the order, President Bukele explicitly backed the military’s refusal . The judge, he said, “ha[d] no jurisdiction over the Armed Forces.” Bukele also asserted that the president was the only authority entitled to declassify military files. To deflect attention from the military’s disregard for the order, President Bukele accused the judge of responding to “political interests.” Nearly 40 years after the massacre, the memory of its brutality still shakes Salvadorans. The massive scale of the atrocity is part of the horror. Between December 11 and December 13, 1981, the Salvadoran Army killed  978 people, including 533 children,  in and around the town of El Mozote. The  Atlacatl Battalion , a US-trained military force that had been dispatched to the area to fight leftist guerrillas, took unarmed civilian villagers from their houses in the middle of the night and killed almost all of them. Many were raped and tortured. President Bukele then made the shocking allegation that many of the records related to the massacre had been destroyed. He said he would hand “all of the existing military records”  over to the judge. However, he did not provide any details about the alleged destruction of the files, nor did he request an investigation. On October 27, the court reported it had received the military records that Bukele said he had found after conducting a search of the barracks. However, the information they contained was almost identical to the records the previous government had provided to the courts, stating that the presidency had no additional information on the massacre. In any case, because the judge cannot enter military headquarters himself to examine the records, there is no way to verify that all the relevant files were handed over. Justice has long been denied to the victims and family members of the El Mozote massacre. In 1990, almost 10 years after the killing, a judge finally opened an investigation , but a 1993 Amnesty Law halted proceedings. Fortunately, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that the amnesty law should not be applied to human rights violations. The court found El Salvador responsible for the massacre and ordered that it conduct investigations to hold those responsible to account and provide reparations to the victims.  In 2016, El Salvador’s own Supreme Court ruled that  the Amnesty Law  was unconstitutional and a judge resumed proceedings. So far, 17 former Army commanders and a former defense minister have been charged with  murder, rape, forced disappearance, torture , and other crimes. Upon taking office, Bukele pledged that his government would respect the rights of the massacre’s victims even “without a judicial order.” In fact, his first order as president was to remove the name of Colonel Domingo Monterrosa , the commander of the battalion responsible for the El Mozote massacre, from a wall at an army barracks. The gesture suggested a turning point in the government’s commitment to justice. However, the army is now openly obstructing justice with Bukele’s backing, contributing to ensure the impunity of those responsible for these heinous crimes. Almost 40 years after the massacre, the victims are still waiting for their day in court. © 2020 Human Rights Watch

GERA, Germany (Reuters) - Should former members of the Syrian security forces who have defected from President Bashar al-Assad’s government be prosecuted for war crimes, or should they serve as key witnesses in an effort to bring senior officials to justice? By Joseph Nasr FILE PHOTO: Syrian defendant Anwar Raslan (2nd R), 57, accused of crimes against humanity, in the first trial of its kind to emerge from the Syrian conflict, arrives at court, in Koblenz, Germany June 4, 2020. Thomas Lohnes/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo The question has divided Syrian refugees and exiles who have fled a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and that has been marked by atrocities since it broke out in 2011. In Germany, home to 600,000 Syrian refugees, prosecutors have used universal jurisdiction laws that allow them to prosecute crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world to seek justice for victims of alleged torture and extrajudicial killings by Assad’s forces. In the first case to be brought to a German court, the trial opened in April of two former Syrian intelligence officers on charges of torture and sexual assault. The two suspects had defected in 2012 and were granted asylum in Germany. Many of the Syrians now in Germany are asking if the defectors are friends or foes. “The trial in Germany is wrong, strategically and morally. Defectors risked their lives to join the opposition and discredit the regime,” said Fawaz Tello, a veteran Syrian dissident. “Who in their right mind is going to defect now when they see that people who had defected in the first months of the revolution are being put on trial?” The Syrian government has regularly rejected reports of torture and extrajudicial killings documented by international human rights groups. JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS Mahmoud Alabdulah, a former colonel in the Syrian army’s elite 4th Division, is one of hundreds of defectors who have given testimonies to German and French judicial officials collecting evidence of alleged war crimes by the Syrian government during the still-unresolved war. He says a military card identifying his rank is the most valuable item of the few belongings he carried when he left Syria six years ago. The pink, plastic-covered piece of paper has given more credence to testimonies he delivered in France and Germany against the Syrian government, he says. “I saw soldiers being executed for refusing to open fire on protesters and heavy artillery fired toward civilian areas,” said Alabdulah, a 56-year-old father of five, rolling a cigarette in a modest apartment in the eastern German city of Gera where he lives with his wife. “I remember the night I decided to defect: February 13, 2012,” Alabdulah said. “I was praying in my room, lights off, at the Saboura military base (west of Damascus) and I said, ‘God, I don’t want to take part in such crimes, please help me get out of here’.” Campaigners have hailed the process in Germany as a first step toward justice for thousands of Syrians who say they were tortured in government facilities after attempts to establish an international tribunal for Syria failed. “No one has the right to tell victims they should not seek justice,” said Anwar al-Bunni of the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) which is representing victims in the torture trial. “Ignoring suspected war criminals is equivalent to white-washing the Assad regime.” The main defendant in the trial, Anwar R., is charged with 58 murders in a Damascus prison where prosecutors say at least 4,000 opposition activists were tortured in 2011 and 2012. He has denied all the charges. He was an intelligence colonel in Assad’s security apparatus but defected in 2012 to Turkey, where he became active in the opposition Free Syrian Army. He came to Germany in 2014 and was granted asylum. The dissident Tello said Anwar R. was a member of an opposition delegation at U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva six years ago aimed at ending the conflict, which makes his trial a “humiliation” for opposition groups marred by infighting. Former army colonel Alabdulah questioned whether it was realistic for everyone who committed a crime to face justice. Asked if he feared charges could be filed against him, Alabdulah told Reuters his conscience was clear. He fought against Assad’s forces and Islamic State militants before he fled to Turkey, he said. “We are not even close to winning the war. Even if we did, there should be some kind of a general amnesty,” he said. “The Assad family and its most loyal lieutenants should be tried.” (Story refiles to correct spelling of Assad’s name in lead) Editing by Angus MacSwan © 2020 Reuters. All Rights Reserved.