By Hannah Beech and Rick Gladstone Delivering an unusual public rebuke, former Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico resigned Wednesday from a Myanmar advisory board on the Rohingya crisis, calling it a pro-government “cheerleading squad” and chastising the country’s civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he has long considered a friend. “She has developed an arrogance of power,” Mr. Richardson said by telephone during a layover in Tokyo on his way back to New Mexico from Myanmar. “I’ve known her a long time and am fond of her, but she basically is unwilling to listen to bad news, and I don’t want to be part of a whitewash.” Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State in western Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past five months. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has declined to speak out forcefully against the Myanmar military’s campaign of execution, rape and arson against the Rohingya, which the United Nations and United States have labeled ethnic cleansing. Mr. Richardson said that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had “exploded” at him when he raised the detention of two Reuters journalists, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, who are facing up to 14 years in prison under the country’s Official Secrets Act after they began investigating a mass grave of Rohingya in northern Rakhine. “Her face was quivering, and if she had been a little closer to me, she might have hit me, she was so furious,” Mr. Richardson said. Doctors Without Borders estimates that at least 6,700 Rohingya in Myanmar met violent deaths in a single month last year. Yet local investigations into the crisis, which began after Rohingya insurgents attacked Myanmar security posts last August, claim that not a single Rohingya civilian was harmed by the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has set up at least half a dozen commissions, panels and boards dedicated to the turmoil in Rakhine, including the Advisory Commission Board on Rakhine State, to which Mr. Richardson was named. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, chaired another panel, which was formed after an earlier military crackdown on the Rohingya in 2016. His commission recommended that the government of Buddhist-majority Myanmar allow unfettered humanitarian access to the epicenter of violence in northern Rakhine. To this day, however, the Myanmar government has refused to allow United Nations investigators and the international media to freely visit northern Rakhine. Aid groups have been similarly stymied. Last month, Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar who has been a vocal critic of the military crackdown, was denied a visa to the country. Mr. Richardson, a former United Nations ambassador under President Bill Clinton, has a reputation as a diplomatic troubleshooter. He said last week en route to Myanmar that during his visit he intended to secure the release of the Reuters journalists, who were seized in December. “One of my objectives in joining the advisory board was to be helpful and try to sort out real, long-term policy solutions,” Mr. Richardson said. “But I discovered that this board was being used as a cheerleading squad for the government.” Mr. Richardson said he had been “very shocked” by how Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and other board members had disparaged human rights groups, the United Nations and international media organizations over how the Rohingya disaster had been presented to the world. He was particularly critical of the advisory board’s chairman, Surakiart Sathirathai, a Thai politician who, Mr. Richardson said in a statement, had sought to “avoid the real issues at the risk of confronting our Myanmar hosts.” The board’s agenda, Mr. Richardson said in the statement, was “devoid of any meaningful engagement with the local communities in Rakhine, whose people the advisory board is meant to serve.” Mr. Surakiart could not immediately be reached for comment. A spokesman for Myanmar’s government, U Zaw Htay, said that Mr. Richardson did not understand the “rules and regulations” of the board’s meeting with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and accused him of overstepping his mandate. “He needs to understand clearly that he is supposed to give advice only about the Rakhine issue, not everything about Myanmar,” Mr. Zaw Htay said. “He cannot say whatever he wants to say.” The departure of Mr. Richardson could deeply damage the credibility of the advisory board. Mr. Richardson was among a powerful coterie of global leaders, human rights advocates, journalists and diplomats who had championed Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi for her principled stand against Myanmar’s military junta, which kept her under house arrest for more than a decade and a half. But ever since Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi entered a power-sharing agreement with the military in 2016, she has grown distant from her international supporters. She has refused to meet with some of her former advocates and complained about a “huge iceberg of misinformation” related to the Rohingya. Some of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s closest advisers are now former military men. She spends much of her time in Naypyidaw, the cloistered, largely empty Myanmar capital that was built by the generals to remove themselves from the thrum of life in Yangon, the nation’s largest city. “She is in a bubble where she has people always telling her how great she is,” Mr. Richardson said. “She’s in the classic situation that politicians and leaders get themselves in when they don’t want to listen to bad news and they have psychopaths around them who don’t want to tell them the real situation.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Richardson said later that he had meant “sycophants,” not “psychopaths.” While certain individuals, like her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Desmond Tutu and Malala Yousafzai, have publicly censured Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, others have cautioned that her authority is constrained by a military-drafted Constitution that keeps most of Myanmar’s power in the hands of the Tatmadaw. “I hope this will be a wake-up call for her,” Mr. Richardson said of his resignation. “But I sort of doubt it. I think she has added me to her enemy list, which includes the United Nations, the international media, human rights groups, Nobel laureates.” “I’m afraid,” he added, “it’s a very long list.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/world/asia/bill-richardson-myanmar-rohingya.html (c) 2017 The New York Times

By Hannah Beech The four young sisters sat in a huddle, together but alone. Their accounts were dramatic: Their mother had died when their home was burned by soldiers in Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Their father was one of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who had disappeared into official custody and were feared dead. Somehow, the sisters — ages 12, 8, 5 and 2 — made their way to refuge in Bangladesh. An uncle, who had been living for years in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, had taken them in, adding the girls to his own collection of hungry children. “My parents were killed in Myanmar,” said the eldest girl, Januka Begum. “I miss them very much.” I was reporting on children who had arrived in the camps without their families. An international charity, which had given financial support to the uncle, brought me to meet the girls. Within an hour, I had a notebook filled with the kind of quotes that pull at heartstrings. Little of it was true. After three days of reporting, the truth began to emerge. Soyud Hossain, the supposed uncle who had taken the girls in, was actually their father. He had three wives, two in Bangladesh and one in Myanmar, he admitted. The children were from his youngest wife, the one in Myanmar. In any refugee camp, tragedy is commodified. Aid groups want to help the neediest cases, and people quickly realize that the story of four orphaned sisters holds more value than that of an intact family that merely lost all its possessions. To compete for relief supplies distributed by aid groups, refugees learn to deploy women with infants in their arms. Crying babies get pushed to the front of the line. Such strategies are a natural survival tactic. Who wouldn’t do the same to feed a family? But false narratives devalue the genuine horrors — murder, rape and mass burnings of villages — that have been inflicted upon the Rohingya by Myanmar’s security forces. And such embellished tales only buttress the Myanmar government’s contention that what is happening in Rakhine State is not ethnic cleansing, as the international community suggests, but trickery by foreign invaders. The official narrative in Myanmar goes like this: Rohingya Muslims are illegal immigrants from an overcrowded Bangladesh. With Muslim men taking multiple wives, the Rohingya are reproducing faster than Myanmar’s majority Buddhists. Newly arrived Rohingya refugees waiting to be registered in Bangladesh in November.CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times There is plenty of evidence to counter this claim. Muslim roots in the region reach back generations. The ratio of Muslims to Buddhists in northern Rakhine has not changed much over the past half-century. But with the Myanmar government restricting access to the area where the Rohingya once lived, even refusing to let top United Nations officials into the country, it is impossible for investigators and journalists to gather firsthand evidence of atrocities. Local reporters for Reuters who tried to investigate a mass grave now sit in jail. That’s why in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, victims with physical manifestations of their trauma are simpler to interview. A fresh bullet wound in a child’s body is proof that something terrible happened. For every person quoted, I’d estimate that at least a dozen others were left in my notebooks. But a reporter’s necessary skepticism — which governs our work in every story — only contributes to the invasion of privacy. How must it feel for a Rohingya woman, who admits to a stranger that she was raped, when she realizes that her story is being doubted? Yet I have seen Rohingya people quoted in the foreign news media telling stories that I know are not true. Their accounts, in some cases, are too compelling, like a perfect storm of suffering. That is not to discount the collective trauma that has compelled nearly 700,000 Rohingya to flee for Bangladesh over the past five months. Doctors Without Borders estimates that 6,700 Rohingya met violent deaths in a single month last year. Even that number, the medical aid group says, is too low. For four days, I interviewed a 9-year-old boy named Noorshad, and his story had it all. In my notebook, he drew pictures of his house — and the tree from which his parents were hanged by Myanmar soldiers. Then he drew the jerrycan he clung to as he crossed the river into Bangladesh. He tied his flip-flops to his waist, he said, with a bit of vine. The sandals were from his dead mother. He glanced at them and sobbed. But there were inconsistencies. Noorshad said he liked cricket, a sport popular in Bangladesh but not in Myanmar. His grandparents were killed by the military, he told me, but then he admitted they had died of natural causes. I found locals from the village I believed he was from. It turned out that no one had been killed there, much less hanged from a tree. So where did Noorshad come from? He had been found crying in the market in the Kutupalong refugee camp. Other refugees took him to a school where a pair of women offered hugs and bowls of curry. Obviously, something bad had happened to him, but to this day, no one has figured out his real story. The Kutupalong refugee camp now ranks as the world’s largest. Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled for Bangladesh over the past five months. CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times At times, there is a benign explanation for children telling untruths. Young minds can process lived memories and secondhand ones in remarkably similar ways. “Even if some children have only heard of atrocities, fear has been instilled in them and it’s very hard for them to separate what they’ve seen from what they’ve heard,” said Benjamin Steinlechner, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. “It’s like watching a horror movie. Children experience it very differently from adults.” I have a better sense of the life of Mr. Hossain, the four girls’ father. His troubles, he said, began when he was briefly back in Myanmar and saw a 12-year-old girl with fair skin and delicate features. “She was so beautiful,” Mr. Hossain said. “I needed to marry her.” Child marriage is distressingly common among the Rohingya, and soon, Mr. Hossain began shuttling among his three wives. Not every wife knew about the other, but Mr. Hossain didn’t think three wives were too many. His own father, he said, had six wives and 42 children. Yet Mr. Hossain admitted that he was not adept at balancing family relations. When his four daughters sought shelter in Bangladesh after their village had been burned, Sajida, the wife with whom he has been living in the Leda refugee camp, was furious. “My husband is a bad man,” she announced, after she finally admitted the girls’ true provenance. “I am tired of all his lies.” Later, when I reached Mr. Hossain by phone, he was seething. “I beat her when you left,” he said. “I will beat her again tomorrow.” Mr. Hossain’s sister-in-law had also explained part of the family’s complicated truth. A neighbor later relayed that her candor had earned her a beating from her husband. Rather than highlight the plight of unaccompanied minors, my reporting had catalyzed domestic violence in two households. I regretted the days of questioning Ms. Sajida, who goes by one name. I had found her unsympathetic when she said she wished those girls would disappear back to Myanmar. But that night her husband would beat her. As I stood and judged her for not embracing these four girls from her husband’s youngest wife, a cockroach skittered across the floor. A rat followed. Ms. Sajida began crying. All around, through the bamboo slats that make up the walls of a Rohingya shelter, children’s eyes followed my movements, wondering what I was doing there and why I had made a grown woman weep. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-camps.html (c) 2018 The New York Times

By Hannah Beech and Saw Nang Senior Myanmar officials denied on Wednesday that the country’s military had committed any crimes against Rohingya Muslims, one day after a United Nations expert suggested that the government was implicated in “the crime of genocide” against the persecuted Muslim minority. “There is no ethnic cleansing or genocide in our country,” said U Aung Tun Thet, the chief coordinator of the Myanmar government body dedicated to the Rohingya crisis. “Accusations are very easy to make, but we are not involved in anything at all.” Some 700,000 Rohingya, a mostly stateless ethnic group from Rakhine State in western Myanmar, have fled a violent military campaign that began last August after Rohingya insurgents attacked government security posts. The military’s scorched-earth tactics resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings and rapes of Rohingya, according to the United Nations and international rights groups. On Tuesday, Adama Dieng, the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, spoke of “horrifying stories” he had heard from Rohingya survivors now sheltering in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. “All the information I have received indicates that the intent of the perpetrators was to cleanse northern Rakhine State of their existence,” Mr. Dieng said, “possibly even to destroy the Rohingya as such, which, if proven, would constitute the crime of genocide.” Mr. Dieng also accused the international community of having “buried its head in the sand.” But the Myanmar government maintains that the Rohingya burned down their own villages, and it rejects widespread testimony of executions and sexual violence by the military. U Aung Hla Tun, Myanmar’s deputy minister of information, said on Wednesday that the Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh was caused, in part, by threats from the Rohingya insurgents who carried out fatal raids on Myanmar security posts on Aug. 25. “According to the information from the reliable sources on the ground,” Mr. Aung Hla Tun said, “most of these people fled in panic just after the military operations following the terrorist attacks, for fear of being arrested for their involvement or on suspicion.” Many of the Rohingya “were persuaded to flee” by the prospect of “better livelihood at the camps in Bangladesh,” Mr. Aung Hla Tun said. The Myanmar government has not sent any investigators to the squalid Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, which now constitute the world’s largest mega-settlement of displaced people. With monsoon rains coming, aid groups worry that large sections of these settlements could wash away. Myanmar officials have rejected outright fact-finding reports that were submitted on Monday to the United Nations Human Rights Council that documented severe violations of the rights of ethnic minorities in Myanmar, including the Rohingya. Speaking to the council, Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said the military’s campaign against the Rohingya bore “the hallmarks of genocide” and urged international legal action against “the individuals who gave the orders and carried out violations against individuals and entire ethnic and religious groups.” On Monday, Amnesty International accused the Myanmar government of destroying the remains of Rohingya villages in a campaign dedicated to “erasing evidence of crimes against humanity.” Using satellite imagery, Amnesty documented how new security bases were being built on land that had once housed Rohingya communities. Separately, rights groups have documented more than 300 Rohingya villages in northern Rakhine that were razed by fire since last August. The Myanmar government says that any recent bulldozing has been for benign purposes. “We are clearing the land to make it suitable for rebuilding for the refugees,” Mr. Aung Tun Thet said on Wednesday at a news conference in Naypyidaw, the Myanmar capital. Both the Bangladesh and Myanmar governments have talked up voluntary repatriations as a solution to one of the world’s most urgent refugee crises. So far, only 8,032 of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya now crowded into the Bangladesh camps have said they are willing to be repatriated, according to a list drawn up by the Bangladeshi authorities last month. On Wednesday, U Myint Thu, Myanmar’s permanent secretary for foreign affairs, said that Bangladesh’s repatriation list was missing “essential information” needed to verify that those people had indeed fled from Myanmar. Consequently, only 374 of the 8,032 applicants had been verified and approved by his government, he said. “They can come back anytime at their convenience,” Mr. Myint Thu said, without specifying a timeline. Multiple deadlines to begin the repatriation process have passed without any movement. Each government has blamed the other for the delay. Any returnees would be sent first to dismal transit centers. Human Rights Watch has called those internment camps, with their long houses and barbed-wire fences, “open-air prisons.” U Zaw Htay, a Myanmar government spokesman, said on Wednesday that repatriated individuals would spend no more than a month in the camps. “Then they can move to their original homes, or to the nearest places,” Mr. Zaw Htay said. But about 120,000 Rohingya who were displaced during violence in 2012 are still confined to internment camps in central Rakhine State. Mr. Zaw Htay said on Wednesday that, more than five years later, the “process of moving them to their original places” had finally begun. “We are trying our best,” he said. United Nations officials were not as sanguine. “Under the present conditions, returning to Myanmar will put the Rohingya population at risk of further crimes,” said Mr. Dieng, the genocide prevention expert at the United Nations. “We must not fail the Rohingya population again,” he said. “They have endured what no human beings should have to endure.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/world/asia/un-myanmar-rohingya-genocide.html?mtrref=www.google.com (c) 2018 The New York Times

By Dr. Gregory Stanton A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon. I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence. The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays. The Nazis published a children’s book of the Protocols that they required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany. The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer (derived from the German word for “Storm”) spread the Blood Libel. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his narcissistic autobiography and manifesto for his battle against the Jewish plot to rule the world, copied his conspiracy theories from the Protocols. The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the Leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot. Nazi “storm troopers” (“storm detachment” - Sturmabteilung) helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people. America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocols on national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews. QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. QAnon purveys the fantasy that a secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American Presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a “Deep State” financed by Jews, including George Soros, and Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights, and homosexuality. They want open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race. QAnon true believers think Donald Trump will rescue America from this Satanic cabal. At the time of “The Storm,” supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed. The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany, where over 200,000 German QAnon accounts infest the internet. A faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, orchestrated a brief storming of Parliament on Aug. 29. Many people are perplexed at how any rational person could fall for such an irrational conspiracy theory. But modern social science shows that people in groups don’t always think rationally. They respond to fear and terror. They blame their misfortunes on scapegoats. They support narcissistic demagogues they hope will rescue them. In the 1930’s, millions of Europeans were unemployed. Violent battles between Nazis and Communists raged in city streets. Democratic governments were powerless. Fascist dictators ruled Spain and Italy. Hitler took power in Germany and conquered Western Europe. Stalin’s Communists conquered the East. The Hitler-Stalin Pact sealed totalitarian rule over most of Europe. It took World War II and the deaths of millions to defeat the Nazis’ genocidal tyranny, and another fifty years to free the gulags of the Soviet Union. Today the American people suffer from a Plague. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Angry mobs roam American cities and battle militarized police and heavily armed militias. The American government seems to be paralyzed. Dictators rule Russia and China. Islamic fascists rule Saudi Arabia and the old Ottoman and Persian empires. The American President appeases Russia, scapegoats China for the pandemic, and looks the other way as Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman murder their opponents. In July, the Texas Republican party unveiled a new slogan, “We Are the Storm.” Over a dozen Republicans running for Congress have signaled support for the QAnon movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate from Georgia who has endorsed QAnon’s views, is likely to win a seat in Congress. The President praises her as a “future Republican star.” The Trump campaign welcomes QAnon supporters to his rallies. When asked about QAnon on national television, the President replied, “I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.” Some leading Republicans have begun to speak out against QAnon. Rep. Liz Cheney, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, has denounced QAnon as “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.” Republican leaders such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Sen. Ben Sasse have also denounced QAnon. Former Gov. Jeb Bush has said of QAnon,“Nut jobs, racists, haters have no place in either Party.” The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback. Gregory Stanton is the Founding President of Genocide Watch.

Published in Just Security, September 9, 2020 By Dr. Gregory H. Stanton A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon. I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence. The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Nazi ideology combined the conspiracy theory in the Protocols with the ancient antisemitic mythology of the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays. The Nazis published a children’s book of the Protocols that they required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany. The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer (derived from the German word for “Storm”) spread the Blood Libel. Hitler’s Mein Kampf , his narcissistic autobiography and manifesto for his battle against the Jewish plot to rule the world, copied his conspiracy theories from the Protocols . The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the Leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot. Nazi “storm troopers” (“storm detachment” – Sturmabteilung ) helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people. America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocols on national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews. QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion combined with the Blood Libel. It is Nazism for the 21st century. QAnon purveys the fantasy that a secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world. Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American Presidency under the Clintons and Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a “Deep State” financed by Jews, including George Soros, and in Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights, and homosexuality. They want open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race. QAnon true believers think Donald Trump will rescue America from this Satanic cabal. At the time of “The Storm,” supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed. The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany, where over 200,000 German QAnon accounts infest the internet. A faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, orchestrated a brief storming of Parliament on Aug. 29. Many people are perplexed at how any rational person could fall for such an irrational conspiracy theory. But modern social science shows that people in groups don’t always think rationally. They respond to fear and terror. They blame their misfortunes on scapegoats. They support narcissistic demagogues they hope will rescue them. In the 1930’s, millions of Europeans were unemployed. Violent battles between Nazis and Communists raged in city streets. Democratic governments were powerless. Fascist dictators ruled Spain and Italy. Hitler took power in Germany and conquered Western Europe. Stalin’s Communists conquered the East. The Hitler-Stalin Pact sealed totalitarian rule over most of Europe. It took World War II and the deaths of millions to defeat the Nazis’ genocidal tyranny, and another fifty years to free the gulags of the Soviet Union. Today the American people suffer from a Plague. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Angry mobs roam American cities and battle militarized police and heavily armed militias. The American government seems to be paralyzed. Dictators rule Russia and China. Islamic fascists rule Saudi Arabia and the old Ottoman and Persian empires. The American President appeases Russia, scapegoats China for the pandemic, and looks the other way as Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman murder their opponents. In July, the Texas Republican party unveiled a new slogan, “We Are the Storm.” Over a dozen Republicans running for Congress have signaled support for the QAnon movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate from Georgia who has endorsed QAnon’s views, is likely to win a seat in Congress. The President praises her as a “future Republican star.” The Trump campaign welcomes QAnon supporters to his rallies. When asked about QAnon on national television, the President replied , “I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.” Some leading Republicans have begun to speak out against QAnon. Rep. Liz Cheney, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, has denounced QAnon as “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.” Republican leaders such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Sen. Ben Sasse have also denounced QAnon. Former Gov. Jeb Bush has said of QAnon, “Nut jobs, racists, haters have no place in either Party.” The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback.

Police are now stopping random people on the streets. A group of secret informers has reappeared. The killings continue, but so does the resistance. By Hannah Beech Protesters running as security forces arrive during a crackdown, in Ahlone township, in April. Credit...The New York Times Every night at 8, the stern-faced newscaster on Myanmar military TV announces the day’s hunted. The mug shots of those charged with political crimes appear onscreen. Among them are doctors, students, beauty queens, actors, reporters, even a pair of makeup bloggers. Some of the faces look puffy and bruised, the likely result of interrogations. They are a warning not to oppose the military junta that seized power in a Feb. 1 coup and imprisoned the country’s civilian leaders. As the midnight insects trill, the hunt intensifies. Military censors sever the internet across most of Myanmar , matching the darkness outside with an information blackout. Soldiers sweep through the cities, arresting, abducting and assaulting with slingshots and rifles . The nightly banging on doors, as arbitrary as it is dreaded, galvanizes a frenzy of self-preservation. Residents delete their Facebook accounts, destroy incriminating mobile phone cards and erase traces of support for Myanmar’s elected government. As sleep proves elusive, it’s as if much of the nation is suffering a collective insomnia. Little more than a decade ago, the most innocuous of infractions — owning a photograph of pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or an unregistered cellphone or a single note of foreign currency — could mean a prison sentence. Some of the military’s Orwellian diktats rivaled those of North Korea. Security forces search for protesters as they crack down on a peaceful demonstration against the military coup in Yangon, in April.Credit...The New York Times Three months after Myanmar’s experiment in democracy was strangled by the generals’ power grab, the sense of foreboding has returned. There is no indication that it will ease. For the better part of 60 years, the military’s rule over Myanmar was animated not by grand ideology but by fear. Today, with much of the population determined to resist the coup-makers, a new junta is consolidating its grip by resorting, yet again, to a reign of terror. What We Know Why is there unrest in Myanmar ? “Myanmar is going back to the bad old days when people were so scared that their neighbors would inform on them and they could get arrested for no reason at all,” said Ko Moe Yan Naing, a former police officer who is now in hiding after opposing the coup. Prisons are once again filled with poets, Buddhist monks and politicians. Hundreds more, many young men, have disappeared, their families ignorant of their whereabouts, according to a group that tracks the military’s detentions. More than 770 civilians have been killed by security forces since the putsch, among them dozens of children . As they did years before, people walk the streets with the adrenaline-fueled sense of neck hairs prickling, a glance from a soldier or a lingering gaze from a passer-by chilling the air. Protesters fight with security forces in Yangon in March. Credit...The New York Times Yet if the junta is reflexively returning to rule by fear, it is also holding hostage a changed country. The groundswell of opposition to the coup, which has sustained protests in hundreds of cities and towns, was surely not in the military’s game plan, making its crackdown all the riskier. Neither the outcome of the putsch nor the fate of the resistance is preordained. Myanmar’s full emergence from isolation — economic, political and social — only came five years ago when the military began sharing power with an elected government headed by Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. A population that barely had any connection to the internet quickly made up for lost time. Today, its citizenry is well versed in social media and the power of protests tethered to global movements. They know how to spot a good political meme on the internet. Their resistance to the coup has included a national strike and a civil disobedience movement, which have paralyzed the economy and roiled the government. Banks and hospitals are all but shut. Although the United Nations has warned that half the country could be living in poverty by next year because of the pandemic and the political crisis, the democratic opposition’s resolve shows no sign of weakening. More than 770 civilians have been killed by security forces since the putsch. Credit...The New York Times In late March, Ma Thuzar Nwe, a history teacher, branded her skin with defiance. The tattoo on the nape of her neck reads: “Spring Revolution Feb. 2021.” The police are now stopping people on the streets, looking for evidence on their phones or bodies of support for the National Unity Government , a civilian authority set up after the elected leadership was expelled by the military. A popular tactic is to affix an image of Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader , on the sole of a shoe, smashing his face into the ground with each step. During spot checks, the police now demand that people show their soles. Ms. Thuzar Nwe says she wears her hair down to cover her tattoo, hoping the police won’t be too inquisitive. “In Myanmar culture, if a woman has a tattoo, she’s a bad girl,” she said. “I broke the rules of culture. This revolution is a rare chance to eradicate dictatorship from the country.” But the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has built an entire infrastructure dedicated to one purpose: perpetuating its power for power’s sake. Its bureaucracy of oppression is formidable. An army of informers, known as “dalan,” has reappeared, monitoring whispers and neighbors’ movements. The blandly named General Administration Department, a vast apparatus that remained under military control even after the army had started sharing authority with the civilian government, is once again pressuring administrators to keep tabs on everyone’s political views. And local officials have taken to banging on doors and peering in homes, as a dreaded system of household registration is reintroduced. Military vehicles during the national Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, in March. Credit...Associated Press Each morning, as residents count the dead and missing, the military’s media present its version of reality, all the more pervasive since the junta has revoked the publishing licenses of major private newspapers . Democracy will return soon, the military’s headlines insist. Banking services are running “as usual.” Health care with “modern machinery” is available. Government ministries are enjoying English-proficiency courses. Soft-shell crab cultivation is “thriving” and penetrating the foreign market. The Tatmadaw may have modernized its military arsenal, acquiring Chinese-made weapons and Russian fighter jets . But its propaganda is stuck in a time warp from back when few challenged its narrative. There is no mention in its media of the military’s killing spree, the broken economy or the growing armed resistance. On Wednesday, the State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, banned satellite TV. For all the fear percolating in Myanmar, the resistance has only hardened. On Wednesday, the National Unity Government said it was forming a “people’s defense force” to counter the Tatmadaw. Two days before, ethnic insurgents fighting in the borderlands shot down a Tatmadaw helicopter. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing in 2016. Credit...Hein Htet/European Pressphoto Agency Ignoring such developments, the Tatmadaw’s media instead devote space to the supposed infractions of thousands of civilians who must be locked up for “undermining state peace and stability.” Among them are AIDS patients so weak they can barely walk. More than for the civilian population, such propaganda is meant to convince the military ranks that the coup was necessary , Tatmadaw insiders said. Sequestered in military compounds without good internet access, soldiers have little ability to tap into the outrage of fellow citizens. Their information diet is composed of military TV, military newspapers and the echo chambers of military-dominated Facebook on the rare occasions they can get online. Still, news does filter in, and some officers have broken rank. In recent weeks, about 80 Myanmar Air Force officers have deserted and are now in hiding, according to fellow military personnel. “Politics are not the business of soldiers,” said an air force captain who is now in hiding and does not want his name used because his family might be punished for his desertion. “Now the Tatmadaw have become the terrorists, and I don’t want to be part of it.” Myanmar’s citizens are now well versed in social media and the power of protests tethered to global movements, since the country opened up a few years ago. Credit...The New York Times In the cities, almost everyone seems to know someone who has been arrested or beaten or forced to pay a bribe to the security forces in exchange for freedom. Last month, Ma May Thaw Zin, a 19-year-old law student, joined a flash mob protest in Yangon, the country’s biggest city. The police, she said, detained several young women and crammed them into an interrogation center cell so small they barely had room to sit on the floor. For a whole day, there was no food. Ms. May Thaw Zin said she resorted to drinking from the toilet. The interrogations were just her and a clutch of men. They rubbed against her and kicked her breasts and face with their boots, she said. On the fourth day, after men shoved the barrel of a pistol against the black hood over her head, she was released. The bruises remain. Since she returned home, some family members have refused to have anything to do with her because she was caught protesting, Ms. May Thaw Zin said. Even if they hate the coup, even if they know their futures have been blunted, the instincts of survival have kicked in. “They are afraid,” she said, but “I can’t accept that my country will go back to the old dark age.” Riot police prepared to remove protesters who attempted to block a motorcade of security forces in February.Credit...The New York Times Hannah Beech has been the Southeast Asia bureau chief since 2017, based in Bangkok. Before joining The Times, she reported for Time magazine for 20 years from bases in Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok and Hong Kong. @hkbeech A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Junta Restores Reign of Terror For Myanmar. Copyright 2021 The New York Times Company

Ahead of key Uttar Pradesh elections, state police accused of being ‘mercenaries’ of hardline Hindu nationalist government By Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman Fatima Begum’s son, Altaf, was said to have hanged himself in prison, but his family tell a different story. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman/The Guardian According to police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, it was suicide. The young Muslim man they had brought into their custody had, out of despair, killed himself in the police station toilets. But, as photos of the scene emerged, so too did suspicions. The 22-year-old man, Altaf, was 165cm (5ft 5in) tall and weighed 60kg (9.5 stone), but the toilet tap he had supposedly hanged himself from was just 76cm off the ground and made of flimsy plastic. And why, as the police later claimed in court, was the CCTV in the police station mysteriously not working that day? Family and friends tell a very different story: that Altaf, a Muslim man living in the town of Kasganj, was in love with and planned to marry a Hindu girl. That powerful local Hindu vigilante groups opposed to interfaith unions found out and reported him to the police. And that on 9 November 2021, Altaf was arrested and tortured to death in police custody and his family pressured to keep quiet. “The police murdered my son and then gave me money to say he was depressed and took his own life,” says Altaf’s father, Chand Miya, an illiterate mason who has taken the case to the state high court. “But I will not stay quiet, I want justice.” Last Friday, the courts ordered Altaf’s body to be exhumed and a new postmortem examination to be carried out. Altaf was not the first to die in such circumstances in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which is holding a high-stakes election this month . In six cases examined by the Guardian of deaths in custody and police shootings of suspects, allegedly in self defence, from 2018 onwards, those accused of carrying out and covering up killings are the same: the Uttar Pradesh police, under the rule of the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government. Polls this month will decide if Yogi Adityanath, who has pursued a fiercely Hindu nationalist agenda, will remain Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister. Photograph: Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty The victims of these alleged unlawful killings were all from the communities that Adityanath’s government, with its sectarian Hindu nationalist agenda , is accused of routinely targeting and oppressing: Muslims, who make up 20% of the state’s population and who have been subjected to increased lynchings, hate speech and prejudicial legislation , and Dalits, who are at the bottom of India’s oppressive Hindu caste system and were previously referred to as “untouchables”. The elections will decide whether to return Adityanath’s state government to power for another five years. It is being seen as a referendum on Hindu nationalist politics – the push for India to become a Hindu, rather than secular, nation – on both a state and national level, and is happening against a backdrop of rising religious intolerance and anti-Muslim hate speech in India. Not one officer who fatally shot someone in Uttar Pradesh in the past five years faced disciplinary action. Not long after he took office in 2017, Adityanath, a hardline Hindu monk, made it clear that his agenda would be twofold: a fierce promotion of Hindu nationalism and a tough crackdown on crime. “ Agar aparadh karenge, toh thok diye jayenge [If anyone commits a crime, he will be knocked down],” he said in June 2017. From that point on, lawyers, activists and ex-police officers allege that “ thok denge ” – slang for “shoot them” – became unofficial policy in Uttar Pradesh. Police allegedly began carrying out “instant justice”, maiming or executing those they deemed to be criminals, and were professionally rewarded for doing so. Lawyers and families of victims describe an atmosphere of terror in Uttar Pradesh , where Muslims and lower-caste men are picked up on the streets and killed with alleged impunity by police, either in what are known as “encounter killings”, in which officers fatally shoot their captives and claim it was in self-defence, or in police custody, where they are beaten or tortured to death. The same police accused of the murders are often then responsible for the investigations. Subsequently, police reports are often not lodged, evidence and CCTV footage routinely disappears, charges filed to the courts are watered down to “accidental death” and some cases disappear altogether. “The police are now mercenaries of the Yogi government,” says Rajeev Yadav, an activist running for a seat in the forthcoming election in Azamgarh, which has a large Muslim population and has experienced multiple “encounter killings” by police. I n the past five years, according to the government, there have been more than 8,700 shootings by police in the state, including more than 3,000 incidents when allegedly escaping suspects were shot, often in the knees, and more than 150 deaths. There are rarely any eyewitnesses to these encounters, according to human rights organisations that have examined many of the cases . Not a single officer who fatally shot someone in Uttar Pradesh in the past five years has faced disciplinary action. Two former police officers told the Guardian that in their experience most so-called “encounter killings” were falsified by police. In the case of Kamran, a 40-year-old Muslim water-seller from Azamgarh, police claimed he was apprehended on his way to commit a crime in Lucknow, 200 miles from his home, and then killed after a shootout with an anti-terrorism unit. Nasim Ahmed with a photo of his dead son, Kamran. Police say Kamran died in a shootout, but his family say he was tortured and killed in custody. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman/Guardian But a lawyer, Ashma Izzat, says the evidence, including a leaked police photograph that appears to show him alive and in police custody – a direct contradiction of the police account of events – demonstrated the events in November 2021 were covered up. Kamran’s body was returned to his family with signs of torture. “He had a perforated eye, dark bruising around his neck and body, a broken collar bone and leg, and four of his front teeth knocked out,” said his 87-year-old father, Nasim Ahmed. Police later filed a report that Kamran had been an absconding criminal in multiple cases with a 25,000 rupee (£250) reward on his head. But Kamran made daily visits to the police station to deliver water as part of his job, including on the day he was killed. Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of deaths in police custody in the country. Officially, there have been 23 deaths over the past three years but Mehmood Pracha, one of the few lawyers who has taken cases of custodial killings to India’s highest court, said this was likely to be a “significant undercount”. “The police hide these custody deaths when they can get away with it, and won’t even tell the family,” says Pracha. In several cases, grief-stricken families said they have been pressurised or threatened by police to withdraw charges and stay silent. Faisal Husain, an 18-year-old Muslim vegetable seller from Unnao, was among those allegedly beaten to death in police custody in May 2021. The case is now in the supreme court and the Guardian listened to recordings of threats and offers of money made to Hussain’s sister, Khushnuma Banu, 28, over the phone, to pressure her to withdraw the case. Kamla Devi’s son, Arun Valmiki, died in custody. Police say he died of a heart attack, but have withheld the postmortem report. Photograph: Shaikh Azizur Rahman/Guardian In another two cases of killings in custody examined by the Guardian, the police had not given families details of the postmortem examination, despite them being legally bound to do so. Police claim that Arun Valmiki, a 30-year-old Dalit man from Agra, died of a heart attack in police custody in October 2021, but withheld the postmortem report from his family, who allege he was tortured and electrocuted to death by police. “Police put pressure on me to say that my brother had heart problems but it’s not true – he was strong and healthy,” says his brother Sonu Narwal. Ziauddin, a 38-year-old Muslim businessman, died in police custody in March 2021 after being picked up by police for alleged theft. The police claimed he died from a heart attack during questioning despite him being in robust health. When Ziauddin’s body was returned to his family, it was covered in torture wounds, including cigarette burns, bruises around his neck and across his body, and signs he had been electrocuted, visible in photographs viewed by the Guardian. Despite almost a year of requests, the police continue to withhold the postmortem report from his family and have not submitted the legally mandated “charge sheet” to the courts. The family say they were offered money by the police to withdraw the case. "Police put pressure on me to say that my brother had heart problems but it’s not true – he was strong and healthy" - Sonu Narwal “He was the most kind, honest, gentle man, who had never committed a crime,” said Alauddin, Ziauddin’s father. “I feel so terrible that he was murdered and we will never get justice for him.” The Uttar Pradesh government denied all the allegations. “There are judicial systems in place and no extrajudicial killings have taken place. This narrative is totally false and we deny such baseless accusations,” it said in a statement. A police ‘flag march’, or show of strength, in Noida, a town in Uttar Pradesh near Delhi, last month ahead of the forthcoming state election. Photograph: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times/Getty Prashant Kumar, the additional director general of police in Uttar Pradesh, said the Uttar Pradesh police strictly follow all procedures and guidelines laid out by the courts and the National Human Rights Commission . Kumar described a “zero-tolerance” approach to custodial killings in which guilty officers are always suspended and jailed. However, in several of the custodial death cases examined by the Guardian, junior officers were suspended but none were in prison. No senior officer or government official under the Adityanath government has faced disciplinary action for either “encounter killings” on the street or deaths in police custody. Kumar said there was no religious or caste bias in the police force, and no culture of silencing victims. “How can we distinguish between our own citizens? It is not possible and it is wrong,” he said. “No government can ask us to do anything which is wrong or illegal.” © The Guardian 2022

By Grace Condon Mexico’s defense secretary deployed the national guard to reinforce a security operation to curb violence in Tijuana. Photograph: Jorge Dueñes/Reuters In 1969 US President Nixon declared an American “War on Drugs.” Since then, the US has spent over one trillion dollars on this “war.” In 2006 , Mexico joined the “war” to take political control away from drug cartels. Through its Mérida Initiative the US appropriated $1.4 billion from 2008 to 2010 to Mexico for military and law enforcement training and equipment. The “War on Drugs” has failed. The cartels have taken over whole Mexican states and have corrupted many others. Mexico has recorded more than 300,000 homicides since 2006. Mexico has one of the world’s highest rates of femicide and attacks on journalists.  In the US, the “War on Drugs” has resulted in mass incarceration of drug offenders, especially black men. Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has actively undermined democratic institutions. He verbally attacks critics of his administration, including journalists , feminists , and human rights defenders. Impunity and corruption pervade all levels of government and law enforcement. Over 98% of crimes in the country go unsolved. Human rights violations seldom result in arrests. Many crimes go unreported.    Since the rise of drug cartels in the 1970s, it is estimated that between 40% and 65% of all homicides in Mexico are related to organized crime. Violence caused by turf wars between cartels has displaced tens of thousands of people. Cartels regularly engage in extortion, kidnapping, rape, torture, murder, and massacres of civilians . Migrants from Central America are particularly vulnerable to cartel violence. Corruption and collusion with cartels among law enforcement personnel has ensured that those involved in organized crime are treated with impunity.     In 2021 Mexico had at least 1,004 cases of femicide – the murder of a woman because of her gender. Femicide is inherently genocidal because it constitutes the intentional destruction of part of a national group. Femicides are not isolated incidents but rather the product of a “macho” society that has normalized violence against women. A femicide unit formed in Mexico City in 2020 has reopened hundreds of cases. The number of disappeared and missing people in Mexico since 1990 has reached 100,000, 25% of whom are women and girls.   Indigenous peoples in Mexico continue to face discrimination, violence, dispossession of land, and lack of access to housing and healthcare, which has left their communities especially vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic . An estimated 70% of Indigenous people in Mexico are living in poverty . 70% of human trafficking victims are Indigenous women . The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) was organized in Chiapas in 1994 to support Indigenous empowerment.     Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to practice journalism. At least 15 journalists have already been murdered in 2022. Since Obrador became president, attacks on journalists have increased by 85% . In 2021, there were 664 documented attacks, with government officials directly linked to 274 incidents and organized crime linked to 42. Obrador verbally attacks journalists during his morning briefings.     The domination by drug cartels in many states, the prevalence of violence against women and femicide, the routine impunity that follows human rights abuses, the systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples, and official attacks on journalists are evidence of Stage 3: Discrimination, Stage 4: Dehumanization, Stage 5: Organization, Stage 6: Polarization , and Stage 8: Persecution .    Genocide Watch Recommends:  The Organization of American States should establish an OAS Criminal Court and international police force with the authority to arrest and try international criminals and corrupt officials and police. The Mexican government should establish femicide units in each state police force. Mexico should establish women’s shelters where women can escape from domestic violence.  Mexico should establish safe corridors for Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States.   Mexico should devote resources to help Indigenous people gain access to housing and healthcare. © Genocide Watch 2022

By Grace Condon The Morning Star flag, a banned symbol of the independence movement in the Indonesian province of West Papua. Photo: AFP/Andrew Gal In 1963, Indonesia invaded West Papua, the western half of the island of New Guinea. Both countries were once colonized by the Netherlands. The United States brokered a deal with the Dutch and the UN to hand over West Papua to Indonesia. This deal was made due to Cold War politics and absent consultation with West Papuans. In 1969, Indonesia and the UN oversaw the rigged Act of Free Choice “referendum” in which 1000 selected “representatives” voted to formalize Indonesian rule. The “representatives” were threatened with death if they opposed annexation by Indonesia. West Papuans call the “referendum” the “Act of No Choice.” West Papua is rich in natural resources. It is home to one of the biggest gold and copper mines in the world. The Grasberg mine, partly owned by American mining company Freeport McMoRan , has caused grave environmental damage. Indonesian security forces respond with violence to any opposition to the mine’s operation and other “economic development” projects. Due to migration from Java and other parts of Indonesia, 50% of the West Papuan population is now non-Indigenous. Non-Papuans dominate the local economy and politics. Indonesia expropriates and exploits West Papuan land. Mining, deforestation, and internal colonization have led to West Papuans losing their land, traditional livelihoods, and autonomy. There is strong support for the Free Papua Movement (OPM). However, support for West Papuan independence is criminalized under Indonesian law. The Indonesian government has designated the OPM and other separatists as “terrorists,” and has increased its military presence in West Papua. Since 1969, the Indonesian military has committed genocide against West Papuans. It is estimated that the military has killed up to 500,000 West Papuans since their war for independence began. The Indonesian army commits systematic atrocities against West Papuans that amount to genocide. They include massacres, torture, sexual assault, and detention of political prisoners. In April 2021, the West Papua Liberation Army killed an Indonesian general. Between April and November 2021, Indonesian forces carried out systematic extrajudicial killings and torture. It forcibly displaced at least 5,000 West Papuans . The UN has reported that since 2018 the number of internally displaced Papuans has grown to 60,000 to 100,000 people . The Indonesian government severely restricts journalists’ and human rights workers’ access to West Papua. In 2020, Indonesia passed a law to restrict internet services and to authorize arrests of journalists for publishing “prohibited content.” Indonesia controls the narrative of conflict in West Papua. It portrays separatists as criminal terrorists to justify its military’s genocidal campaign. The UN has reported that Indonesian authorities obstruct the delivery of humanitarian aid to displaced Papuans. Indonesia’s abuse of human rights and its use of dehumanizing racist hate speech against West Papuans represent Stage 3: Discrimination , and Stage 4: Dehumanization . The Indonesian Army’s massacres, torture, sexual assault, forced displacement, and obstruction of humanitarian aid amounts to Stage 9: Extermination . Indonesia’s denial of access to West Papua to journalists and human rights groups constitutes Stage 10: Denial . Genocide Watch Recommends: · A UN Human Rights Council Independent Investigative Team should be allowed access to West Papua to investigate genocidal massacres, extrajudicial killings, torture, and other human rights abuses. · The investigation should include the complicity of foreign corporations in these abuses. · Indonesia should repeal its laws that authorize internet blackouts and that ban “prohibited content.” · Indonesia should allow unrestricted access for journalists, human rights, and humanitarian aid workers. · Indonesia should pass and enforce laws placing environmental restrictions on resource extraction. · Indonesia should pass protection of property laws to prevent further dispossession of West Papuan land. © Genocide Watch 2022

By Grace Condon Myanmar’s military seized control of the country’s infrastructure in early February 2021, suspending most television broadcasts and canceling flights. Credit: The New York Times Myanmar (formerly Burma) has persecuted the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities since Burma gained independence from Britain in 1948. Burma stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in 1982. Myanmar law recognizes 135 ethnic groups , many of which are socially, politically, and economically marginalized. The Rohingya are not on the list of ethnic groups considered citizens of Myanmar. Myanmar falsely classifies the Rohingya as illegal "Bengali" immigrants. Minority groups have fought the Tatmadaw for decades to gain more autonomy, political representation, or independence. The Myanmar Army (the Tatmadaw) has committed grave crimes against humanity against these groups. In 2012, 2016, and 2017, the Myanmar army launched genocidal military operations against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, forcing almost one million Rohingya to flee their homes and seek refuge in Bangladesh. During the Rohingya genocide in 2017, the Tatmadaw attacked and burned hundreds of Rohingya villages, and murdered at least ten thousand Rohingya men, women, and children. The Tatmadaw also opened fire on fleeing Rohingya and placed landmines near border crossings, where nearly one million forcibly displaced Rohingya were fleeing to Bangladesh. Evidence released in August 2022 revealed how the Tatmadaw planned its genocidal attacks against the Rohingya. The military intentionally destroyed a substantial part of the Rohingya religious and ethnic group, committing genocide as defined by the Genocide Convention. In 2019, The Gambia charged Myanmar with violating the Genocide Convention in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In 2020, the ICJ issued a provisional order for Myanmar to protect the Rohingya from genocide. In July 2022, the ICJ rejected Myanmar’s objections and will continue to try the case against Myanmar. The United States formally recognized Myanmar's genocide against the Rohingya in March 2022 . Nearly one million Rohingya refugees now reside in vast camps near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Refugees in the camps face harsh conditions. They are not permitted to seek asylum in Bangladesh. Bangladesh authorities have intensified restrictions on Rohingya refugees’ livelihoods, movement, and education. The UN and national governments have failed to provide adequate humanitarian aid for the Rohingya living in the camps. Bangladesh authorities have relocated 19,000 Rohingya to Bhasan Char island, despite its isolation and vulnerability to cyclone flooding. Many of these refugees received little information prior to relocation, and some felt coerced to move. The Bangladeshi authorities have also pressured Rohingya to return to Myanmar. Over 135,000 Rohingya are detained arbitrarily and indefinitely in displaced persons camps in Myanmar. The estimated 600,000 other Rohingya still in Myanmar are subject to persecution and are deprived of adequate food, education, health care, livelihoods, and freedom of movement. If Rohingya refugees are forced to return to Myanmar, they will be subjected to more persecution. Almost none have chosen to return. In February 2021 , the Tatmadaw overthrew the government and detained Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s democratically elected leader, and other officials. The Tatmadaw junta also declared a one-year state of emergency, which it has since extended by six months. The Tatmadaw claims, without evidence, that widespread fraud tampered with the results of the November 2020 elections. Commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, a key perpetrator of the Rohingya genocide, is now in power. Suu Kyi and other detained officials are being tried on trumped-up charges for alleged crimes, and the courts have already convicted Suu Kyi. In 2022, the military carried out politically motivated executions of four pro-democracy activists in Myanmar’s first use of the death penalty in decades. In response to the 2021 coup, peaceful pro-democracy protestors took to the streets. The military responded with violence and has killed at least 2,300 people and arrested over 15,000 since the coup . The military shot live ammunition at protestors. The army has laid landmines on a massive scale, including in and around places of worship and schools . The military has systematically committed rape and other forms of sexual violence, as well as violence against children. Former members of the ousted NLD party established the National Unity Government (NUG) in opposition to the military junta. The NUG has formed an armed division , the People’s Defence Force (PDF), which has clashed with the military across the country. PDF members have allied with ethnic armies that have fought the military for decades. The February 2021 coup intensified ethnic conflicts in Myanmar. Myanmar is financially supported by its gas exports, which were enabled by American and European corporations. Myanmar has received weapons and military training from China, Israel, the US, and Canada. China vetoes any action against the junta in the UN. Due to Myanmar’s marginalization of ethnic minorities and denial of Rohingya citizenship, and the military’s ongoing genocidal campaign against the Rohingya and targeting of pro-democracy activists, Myanmar is at Stage 3: Discrimination, Stage 8: Persecution, and Stage 9: Extermination. Genocide Watch recommends that: ASEAN should scrap its failed 5-Point Consensus and should stop legitimizing the Tatmadaw’s rule by allowing the junta to attend ASEAN meetings. ASEAN should recognize the NUG instead. Bangladesh should allow the Rohingya living in camps near Cox’s Bazar access to education and freedom of movement. Bangladesh authorities must stop pressuring Rohingya to return to Myanmar. The United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Bangladesh, and other nations should join The Gambia’s case against Myanmar in the ICJ. Donor nations should devote more resources to helping Rohingya refugees. Sanctions against Tatmadaw generals and military corporations should be vigorously enforced. Democratic nations should support the NUG's People's Defence Force in its struggle against the Tatmadaw junta. The Tatmadaw must release Aung San Suu Kyi and other detained officials, end Myanmar's state of emergency, and return power to the democratically elected government, which should recognize the Rohingyas' citizenship.

By Grace Condon A photo posted on social media shows people making their way towards Aychi cemetery in Saqqez [Photo by UGC/AFP] Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranians have lived under a repressive regime run by misogynistic Islamists. Minority religious groups are persecuted. Women and LGBTQIA+ people have almost no civil rights. Iran exports genocidal terrorism against Israel and Jews, Syrian Sunnis and Kurds, Americans, and Christians. Iran is supplying lethal drones to Russia in support of Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine. Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons and missiles which it could use to carry out its genocidal intention to destroy Israel. Shia Islam is the dominant faith in Iran. The regime subjects religious minorities including Baha’is, Sunni Muslims, Mandeans, Yaresanis (Kaka'i), Christians, Gonabadi Dervishes, and Jews to discrimination and persecution . People who do not practice Shia Islam are subjected to arbitrary detention, torture, or execution. Baha’is are Iran’s most significant non-Muslim religious minority. In 2022, the Iranian regime intensified its persecution of Baha’is, who are arrested for practicing their faith. Their homes are demolished or confiscated. Iran’s current president, Ebrahim Raisi , ordered the 1988 extrajudicial murders of thousands of political prisoners. Many human rights organizations have called for him to face charges of crimes against humanity. Following her September 2022 detention for "wearing her headscarf improperly " Mahsa Amini was murdered in police custody by the “Morality Police.” Protests against the regime have since erupted throughout Iran. Iran's Revolutionary Guard responded with lethal repression and it has executed over 94 people since January 2023. Ethnic minorities, including Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen, and Baluchs, comprise more than half of Iran’s population. The Iranian regime forbids Azeris, Baluchs, Kurds , and Arabs from receiving education and government services in their own languages. Official media and textbooks present racist histories of minorities . Iranian government officials employ hate speech against LGBTQIA+ people. Iran's laws encourage state and societal violence against them. The Iranian regime subjects LGBTQIA+ people , including youth, to flogging, imprisonment, and execution. LGBTQIA+ people are forced to undergo conversion therapy , which the UN has stated amounts to torture . They are ordered to undergo abusive sex reassignment surgery . In September 2022, Iran’s so-called Morality Police arrested and killed Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, for "improperly wearing her hijab." Since Amini’s death, protests against the government have erupted throughout Iran, especially in Kurdish areas. The Iranian regime has responded with deadly violence. Since the protests began, more than 22,000 people have been arrested for vague violations of “national security laws.” At least 530 people, including children, have been killed in the government's crackdown on protests. The Iranian regime has imposed severe internet restrictions to block news of the protests. Security forces have fired live ammunition at unarmed peaceful protestors and bystanders. A wave of poisonings of hundreds of schoolgirls has reignited protests regarding the oppression of women and girls. Due to Iranian incitements to genocide against Israel, its nuclear weapons program, its violations of human rights, including torture, arbitrary detention, and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, women, girls, and protestors, Genocide Watch considers Iran to be at Stage 3: Discrimination, Stage 4: Dehumanization, Stage 5: Organization, Stage 8: Persecution, and Stage 9: Extermination. Genocide Watch recommends: · President Ebrahim Raisi should be tried for ordering the 1988 murders of thousands of political prisoners. · Iran should cooperate with the UN fact-finding mission investigating Iran's brutal response to protests. · The UN Human Rights Council should authorize an independent fact-finding mission to investigate violations of human rights against religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, women, and girls. · The US, Canada, and the EU should continue to enforce sanctions against the Iranian government and military in response to the regime’s widespread human rights violations and its nuclear program. · Iran’s Morality Police should be disbanded, and their officers must be held accountable for their crimes.

Forced to flee by Islamic State (formerly Isis), Joni Shebo Ali Aamer, in Shariya camp, holds a photograph of her ruined home in Sinjar. ‘We have no place to go,’ she says. Photograph: G Ligios By Gisella Ligios The Iraqi government has been accused of making the survivors of the Sinjar massacre fear for their future once more, almost a decade after the murderous Islamic State campaign that forced tens of thousands of people to flee from their homes. In January, the Iraqi council of ministers set a deadline of 30 July to close 23 displacement camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. The camps are home to about 155,000 internally displaced people (IDP), mostly Yazidis, who were slaughtered, kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery in their thousands at the height of the violence in northern Iraq in 2014. The ministry of migration and displacement (MoMD) is offering each family 4m Iraqi dinars (£2,400) towards resettlement costs and is launching a job-creation programme. But the plans have raised concerns among those living in the camps, as well as among the UN refugee agency’s representative in Iraq, Jean-Nicolas Beuze , and rights organisations including Human Rights Watch. The imminent closure “is leading many to feeling under pressure to return home, rather than making a voluntary and informed decision”, Beuze told reporters last week. Baghdad has already closed all the displacement camps inside federal Iraq, with most people returning home or living in informal settlements, but in the autonomous region of Kurdistan the displaced are mostly from Sinjar, a small region that is still largely in ruins. Although the Islamic State (IS) insurgency was quashed in 2017, people told the Guardian that the money on offer was not enough and it was not safe to return home. “If the government takes us out of this place, we have nowhere to go,” said Sare Ravo Murad Peshow, 60, who lives in Shariya camp near the city of Duhok. “I can’t go back to a place where five of my kids were killed.” More than 2,700 Yazidi people are still missing , believed to be dead or still in captivity, according to the International Organization for Migration. About 12,255 people live in Shariya camp, with many regarding it as a sanctuary. “We don’t have a job, a shop or a car. Only God and those who do good deeds help us,” said Peshow, whose son and four grandsons were kidnapped by IS in Sinjar. Only one grandson has returned. She and her husband, like most people here, depend on MoMD food parcels, delivered every two or three months, and help from other residents. Peshow said she had yet to learn if her application for government compensation, which is available to those from Sinjar whose property was damaged by IS, had been approved. Another resident, Tahseen Hussen Osman Rasho, 39, said: “Some people have no land to build on – 4m dinars, that’s not enough to rebuild a single room. “There are no jobs there, no electricity, and when there is, it is little. There’s no drinking water. Without money or social assistance, people can’t raise their family. I won’t take my kids back there.” Rasho, who works as a handyman in Duhok, said his family of six struggled to make ends meet and relied on the government food parcels. He had also yet to hear about his compensation claim. Rasho escaped with his wife, Tawaf Khodeda Osman, and their children a day before IS arrived in Sinjar, after friends in the south called to warn them. He fears that the small mountainous region is still unsafe. It is undoubtably unstable, with various armed groups still active including the Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces and Kurdish PKK-aligned militias. The area is also a key transit route for smuggling guns between Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria. Joni Shebo Ali Aamer, 60, has photographs of her house in a village in Sinjar district. It was blown up by IS. “If the government rebuilt the area and brought electricity and water, we would go back. But everything has been destroyed and we have no place to go,” she said. Pir Dian Jafar, director of Kurdistan’s department of migration, displacement and crisis, said he believed the Iraqi government would miss its 30 July deadline and that each family should receive at least 10m dinars “to fix their house, and to be able to live in it”. “There’s no turnout of the IDPs to register their name for departure,” Jafar said. “We can’t force the closure [of the camps] and tell people to go back to their place.” Ali Abbas, the spokesperson for Iraq’s MoMD, said the government did not want people to become reliant on aid. “The ministry is continuing its work to close the camps before the announced date,” he said, adding that the financial package on offer was intended to “restore small homes and purchase permanent goods.” © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies