By Dionne Searcey Falmata, 14, was abducted and raped repeatedly by Boko Haram fighters. Her trauma then continued in a camp for victims of the war. ADAM FERGUSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The camp was supposed to be a refuge. Falmata’s life had been stolen by war ever since the sixth grade, when she was abducted from her home and raped repeatedly by Boko Haram’s fighters for the next three years. She finally escaped last spring, slipping into the bush while her captors slept. Fourteen years old and alone, she made it to a camp for victims of the war, and had just settled in for the night when she heard footsteps outside her tent. A security officer’s voice instructed her to come out. Frightened, she obeyed. He took her to his quarters, she said, and raped her. Hours later, after she had returned to her tent, another officer arrived, she said. He raped her, too. “The same day I was brought there, soldiers started coming to rape me,” Falmata said. “They did it one after another. I’m not even sure those two knew about each other.” Rape has been a defining horror of the war with Boko Haram, which has consumed northeastern Nigeria for eight years and spread beyond its borders. At least 7,000 women and girls have endured Boko Haram’s sexual violence, the United Nations estimates. Militants kidnap and rape young girls, teenagers and women, handing them out as so-called brides who are sometimes passed from fighter to fighter. Interactive Feature | Boko Haram strapped suicide bombs to them. Somehow these teenage girls survived. The New York Times interviewed 18 girls who were captured by militants in Nigeria and sent into crowds to blow themselves up. Here are their stories. But Nigerian security forces have also raped victims of the war, preying on the people they are assigned to protect. Dozens of cases of rape, sexual violence and sexual exploitation were reported in seven camps in Borno State last year alone, carried out by guards, camp officials, security officers and members of civilian vigilante groups, the United Nations says. People lined up for food rations being distributed under military watch in Mainok village in Borno State, Nigeria. Dozens of cases of rape, sexual violence and sexual exploitation carried out by guards, camp officials, security officers and members of civilian vigilante groups were reported in Borno State last year. More than a year ago, the Nigerian government pledged to investigate the allegations of rape in camps for people displaced by the war, saying that “these very distressing reports will not be taken lightly.” But accounts of sexual assaults in the camps are still common, including from young girls who say they were raped by soldiers on many occasions. “The soldiers would come and hold me so tight,” one 13-year-old girl said in an interview. She said she had been raped about 10 times this year at a camp in Maiduguri, the city at the center of the fight against Boko Haram, before running away for her own safety. “They were old enough to be my parents,” she said of the soldiers who raped her. The Nigerian military has cleared parts of the countryside to hunt for Boko Haram’s hide-outs, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians to move into huge settlements throughout northeastern Nigeria. Many other civilians have made it to the camps on their own after fleeing Boko Haram’s deadly assaults. Most of the camps are overflowing, with new arrivals every day. Food and water are often in short supply, residents say, and health workers are battling a cholera outbreak that has killed dozens. At night, the camps are dimly lit. Aid workers come during the day, but typically not after sunset because of wartime curfews. Security forces tightly control who goes in and out of the camps, sometimes coercing women and girls to trade sex for food. Government officials say they need 24-hour security to protect the residents, especially since some of the camps are regular targets of suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram. But in one camp, called Teachers Village, some residents said the security forces had worked out a system to select their victims. Young women were called to cook for them. After the women finished, security officers insisted that they clean up, telling them to go bathe in the officers’ quarters as the men watched. “At first none of us knew they were doing this,” said Hadiza, 18, “but then the stories started to spread around camp that anyone cooking for them would be raped.” “At first none of us knew they were doing this, but then the stories started to spread around camp that anyone cooking for them would be raped,” said Hadiza, 18. After living in the camp for several weeks, Hadiza said, she was picked to cook for the officers. She was terrified. “Definitely my time has come,” she recalled thinking. Later, she was asked to serve water to four security officers in their room as they dined. One by one they left, she said, until only one man remained. He dragged her into a separate room and raped her, she said. Hadiza was injured, she said, but didn’t ask for medical care, fearing that the officers would seek revenge. She said she tried to keep a low profile for a couple of weeks, but officers spotted her and raped her again. She said she had been raped as many as 20 times in the camp. “Once they identified you as a girl they wanted to have sex with, they would hardly leave you alone a single day,” Hadiza said. By spring, word of the rapes at Teachers Village camp had spread so widely across Maiduguri that people began showing up at the gates to look for missing relatives. Distant relatives arrived for Hadiza and took her away. Last year, President Muhammadu Buhari called for an investigation into sexual assaults at the camps after Human Rights Watch detailed the abuse in a report, ordering new measures to protect the vulnerable. Security officers have received more training, and at least 100 female officers have been deployed inside the camps. As a result, the number of complaints of sexual abuse has declined, according to some aid groups and the police. Interactive Feature | Fleeing Boko Haram, Thousands Cling to a Road to Nowhere Times journalists spent weeks documenting the stories of people living along a desert highway in Niger, interviewing more than 100 residents scattered by Boko Haram. The police have arrested several men for sexually abusing and exploiting women and girls, according to the United States Embassy. The arrests, made last December, include two police officers, a prison warden, two civilian militia members, a civil servant and three soldiers. But an Army Special Board of Inquiry said in June that allegations against its soldiers at the camps were unfounded, while Jimoh Moshood, a police spokesman, said the investigations were continuing. “Very little progress has been made by Nigerian authorities to implement President Buhari’s promise of justice for the survivors,” said Mausi Segun, the executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “The delay reinforces displaced people’s sense of helplessness, and likely emboldens more perpetrators to prey on their vulnerability.” In the war with Boko Haram, Nigerian security forces have been accused of many human rights abuses, including killing innocent civilians and detaining children for months to determine their loyalties. At checkpoints to enter Maiduguri, soldiers and militia members have turned away large groups of displaced people fleeing Boko Haram, unless they can pay an “entrance fee,” aid workers say. People escaping with their herds are sometimes charged a fee for each animal. Those who can’t pay the bribes have been sent back into harm’s way. Inside the camps, soldiers and members of civilian vigilante groups have been accused of forcing people to pay for the privilege of setting up tents or leaky shelters made of tarps and grass. Some displaced people told Amnesty International that they had to sell their belongings to survive, and when they ran out of things to sell, they had to have sex with soldiers and civilian militia members to get food. Falmata, the 14-year-old kidnapped by Boko Haram, said her ordeal began when she was in primary school, enjoying her classwork and dancing to local Kanuri music. By KASSIE BRACKEN, VEDA SHASTRI and KAITLYN MULLIN 1:10 Fleeing Boko Haram and Food Shortages Click and drag your mouse to explore. Video Along the Niger-Nigeria border, just like other areas where militants are active, hundreds of thousands of people are facing food scarcity. Militants stormed into her home and took her while she was caring for her sick mother. They forced her to marry a fighter, but that man died in battle a week later, so they gave her to another husband. She tried to resist, so they gave her a third. Barely a teenager by then, she became pregnant, she said, but the baby died days after he was born. One night, Falmata woke up and realized the whole camp was asleep. Now was the time, she thought. She ran until she reached a village, finding an older woman with a lantern who pointed her to a road. Soldiers spotted her and took her to Dalori Camp, a sprawling site outside Maiduguri. She thought she was being delivered to safety — but immediately faced the same kind of sexual abuse she had risked her life to flee. And this time it was being committed by the people who were there to protect her. During her two months at the camp, she said, security officers, not always the same men, came for her repeatedly. Falmata described the men as “soldiers,” but it was unclear if they were members of the military, the police or another security force. She said they carried weapons. “I felt it would continue forever,” she said of the abuse. She knew she had to flee, again, so she asked for a pass to go to the market. She walked out of the camp the same way she had escaped Boko Haram: alone, with no money and no idea where she was going. As a little girl, she remembered, she had visited her grandmother once in Maiduguri, but she had only a vague idea where. Falmata spotted a man she had seen around the camp who spoke her dialect, and begged for help. “Look, I have a problem,” she told him. “These people are going to kill me. They come to me every night.” The two drove around the city for hours, trying to track down Falmata’s grandmother, asking everyone. Eventually, they found her. She had thought Falmata was dead. Falmata now lives with her grandmother, but is too ashamed to tell her what happened. Someday, she hopes to continue her education and become a lawyer. She wants to represent the powerless. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

It was a modest ceremony for such a significant victory: it is not every day that the descendants of enslaved people are given the title to their land. But there was no doubt of its importance at a time when the protection of Brazil’s traditional rural communities is threatened by a conservative government in league with powerful agribusiness interests. This weekend, Simão Jatene, the governor of Pará state, signed a document giving land titles for more than 220,000 hectares of Amazon forest to an isolated community populated by descendants of enslaved people who escaped centuries ago. The 500 inhabitants of Cachoeira Porteira have spent 23 years trying to get legal rights to their territory. “It has a very important meaning for us,” said Valterlane Souza, 34, who was born and raised in the community. “Everyone was too emotional to talk.” “Where there was slavery there was resistance. Some quilombos were formed by those who escaped the slave house and others by those who fought and took the plantation,” he said. Brazil has struggled to come to terms with its brutal legacy of slavery. Some 4.5 million people were forcibly brought here between 1600 and 1850, when Brazil ended the traffic, though domestic slavery was only abolished in 1888. Even today, 76% of the poorest Brazilians are black, compared with 55% of the general population. Under Brazil’s 1988 constitution, quilombola and indigenous people were given rights over their ancestral territories. Leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvaissued a decree regulating the procedures in 2003, but so far just 170 quilombola territories have been given their full land rights, according to Conaq – 62 of those in Pará state. President Michel Temer’s administration is closely allied to powerful agribusiness lobbies and has eroded protection for Amazon forest reserves. Last year, his government suspended new demarcations of quilombo territories pending a supreme court ruling on a legal action that argued that Lula’s original decree was unconstitutional. But in a landmark judgment on 8 February, the supreme court voted to uphold Lula’s decree. “It was a significant victory,” said Rodrigues. But he cautioned that the government body charged with the regulatory process has had its budgets slashed as part of austerity measures and is barely able to operate. Anthropologist Emmanel Farias Júnior participated in a project to map the limits of Cachoeira Porteira’s land and said the community lives in close harmony with the forest, living by harvesting Brazil nuts, subsistence farming and fishing. Five guest houses offer eco-tourism visits. “They have this very strong relationship with the place,” Farias Júnior said. At Saturday’s ceremony, a song written for the occasion was sung and women performed an Afro-Brazilian dance called the Maculelê, spinning fluidly and clashing pieces of wood. “The titling ceremony was wonderful, simple as it was,” said another resident, Claucivaldo Souza, 44. “It was something that many people no longer believed in, but it happened.” Ivanildo de Souza, 46, president of the Cachoeira Porteira association, cried as he described years of struggle to secure the title, during which the community resisted illegal loggers who attempted to buy their way into the area and plans for a hydroelectric dam project and highway were drawn up, then abandoned. He told how two centuries ago escapees from plantations would climb up the treacherous Cachoeira Porteira waterfall – “Waterfall Gate” – beyond which overseers sent to capture them could not pass. De Souza said the community was committed to protecting the forest that sustains them. “This is our objective,” he said. “We want to guarantee the nature. We struggled for this.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/05/descendants-of-slaves-celebrate-brazil-land-rights-victory (c) 2018 The Guardian

By Dionne Searcey Nigerian soldiers in Borno State last year. The army has made progress in the fight against Boko Haram. CreditStefan Heunis/AgenceFrance-Presse — Getty Images February 28,2017 MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — A wheelbarrow saved his life. Sprawled across it, Babagana felt every bump, moaning in pain from four bullet wounds. Covered in his blood, his pregnant wife helped roll him across the Nigerian countryside to a hospital. Somehow, Babagana survived the makeshift ambulance ride. More than 80 men from his village had been shot to death, he said, all of them forced to strip to the waist and lie face down. The gunmen then burned their small farming village before speeding away. The attack fit the pattern of rampages by Boko Haram, the terrorist group that has killed poor people in this region for years. But Babagana and multiple witnesses to the attack in June, as well as another one days before in a neighboring village, say the radicals were not to blame this time. Instead, they say, the massacres were carried out by the Nigerian military. “They told us they were here to help us,” said a resident, Falmata, 20, adding that soldiers in uniform shouted for villagers to point out the Boko Haram members among them. When none were identified, the killings began, she and other witnesses said. In recent months, the Nigerian military has made great headway in its war against Boko Haram, the radical Islamist militants terrorizing northeast Nigeria. But the army’s aggressive sweeps to root out the remaining fighters have taken a toll on more than just Boko Haram. Witnesses are accusing Nigerian soldiers of killing unarmed civilians, as well. Reports of civilian massacres have emerged in recent weeks as residents from areas previously sealed off by Boko Haram start to stream out. “As more combatants from Boko Haram have been hiding within the civilian population, the line between who is civilian and who is not has been blurred,” said Agnes Bjorn, a manager for Plan International, an aid group. “It is, however, the responsibility of the Nigerian Army to protect civilians and clearly distinguish between civilians and combatants. Protecting civilians in war is part of international humanitarian law.” The Nigerian Army has a long record of human rights abuses. In 2013, soldiers burned homes and opened fire in the village of Baga, killing as many as 200 people, survivors said. Civilians have complained for years of arbitrary detentions, torture and killing by soldiers. Worried about such abuses, the American government held up the sale of attack helicopters to the Nigerian military. President Muhammadu Buhari, a former general elected on promises to defeat Boko Haram and stamp out corruption, pledged to clean up the abuses. “We are guided by rules and guided by our transparency of operations,” said Brig. Gen. Rabe Abubakar, the director of defense information for the Nigerian military. He denied that the military was responsible for the massacres, contending that insurgents, “criminal elements” or cult members could be to blame. Many observers give the president credit for pressing the campaign against Boko Haram and taking steps toward professionalizing the military. Soldiers have pushed into forests that have long hidden Boko Haram fighters. New villages have been freed, and major roads have reopened. The army says it has scattered Boko Haram and encouraged many of the nearly two million people in Nigeria who have been uprooted by violence to go back home. “What you find now is a collection of ragtags that are running from pillar to post,” Maj. Gen. Leo Irabor, the commander leading the fight against Boko Haram, said of the militants at a recent news conference. In some areas, soldiers have treated sick residents, helped with food handouts and repaired wells. Here in Borno State, the center of the battle against Boko Haram, one commander even secured a film projector to host a movie night in a displaced persons camp, screening “Tom and Jerry” cartoons and movies in two local languages. But allegations of abuse continue. The military has detained children and infants for weeks at a time after their families have escaped or been freed from Boko Haram territory. Huge detention centers have been set up to hold families until civilians with perceived sympathies for Boko Haram can be weeded out. Last month, the Nigerian military mistakenly bombed a displaced persons camp, killing at least 90 civilians. Humanitarian workers for the United Nations said they had heard repeated complaints from civilians that the military had been evacuating villages and burning them to the ground. On a helicopter flight over the area, the blackened remains of small villages were clear. Inside one enormous camp for displaced persons, on the grounds of an old science-theme high school, several residents said the military ordered them to leave their villages to carry out operations against insurgents. Shortly after they fled, they said, their villages were set ablaze. Salamatu Omaru, an elderly woman living in the camp with her sister, said the military told everyone in her village of Uruga to clear out three weeks ago. A relative sneaked back to check on their homes, she said, only to find them burned. Like most residents with similar complaints, Ms. Omaru was uncertain whether soldiers or insurgents were responsible. But witnesses had few such doubts about the massacres last year in Marte, a dangerous region where military officials say operations against insurgents continue. Residents acknowledge that Boko Haram had recruited fighters from the tiny villages in the area. Militants would also go to a market there to get fuel and meat. Last summer, soldiers killed three Boko Haram members in Marte and captured 11 others, recovering hand grenades and weapons. A few days before the massacres in June, witnesses said, soldiers and local vigilantes surrounded the village of Ngubdori, a small farming community in the area. They rounded up all residents, including those out working in the fields, witnesses said. Men were forced to remove their shirts, perhaps to reveal any weapons they might be hiding. They stood bare-chested before the soldiers, said Mallam, a 25-year-old man who complied. Point out the Boko Haram members among you, soldiers told the residents, witnesses recounted. The villagers argued back, saying that none among them were insurgents. “We told them we’d also been attacked by Boko Haram from time to time,” said Mallam, who, like several other witnesses, asked that his last name not be used to protect him from reprisals by the military. “But we had nowhere to go. Our farms were there, and we hadn’t yet harvested. Our livestock was there.” At one point, two men stepped from inside their homes. The soldiers shot both of them, witnesses said. Seven other men came out of their homes and were shot, too. “We watched so many of them killed like that,” Mallam said. Then the soldiers turned their weapons on the crowd, gunning down 13 more men. The soldiers grabbed a canister of fuel, doused rags and set fire to all the grass huts before leaving. “We separated the corpses from the ones who had not yet died,” said another resident, Zainaba, 42, adding that she lost six relatives that day. “All of our bodies were stained with blood.” About four days later, a missile landed in the nearby village of Alamderi, announcing the arrival of soldiers. “That was our first indication trouble was coming,” Babagana said. He and a community official were just outside the village when they heard the missile, followed by gunshots, he said. The two returned with their hands in the air “to indicate our loyalty,” Babagana said. But when they arrived, the soldiers were already burning homes. Everyone in the village had their hands up. “Drop your hands,” Babagana recalled soldiers saying. “We’re here to fish out your Boko Haram.” The soldiers gathered women and children to one side of the village and told them not to look back. “I’ll show you who’s Boko Haram,” Babagana recalled one soldier saying before he picked men from the crowd and shot them. “I ask you again. ‘Who is Boko Haram?’” The group pleaded with the soldiers, witnesses said. The soldiers made the men lie face down on the ground. They started shooting. One woman, Fanna, said she and the other women secretly turned their heads toward the gunfire. “We wanted to know whose husband was being killed,” she said. Babagana, lying with the men, said he tilted his head to see what was happening. But before he could get a clear picture, he was shot, too. The gunfire stopped, but soldiers noticed his leg twitching. They shot him again, he said. The soldiers drove off in military vehicles, and women rushed to the bullet-riddled bodies of their husbands. Maryam, 20, said she ran crying to her husband, Babagana. Others dug shallow graves. Corpses, many with bullet wounds to the head, were stacked in piles, but Babagana was still breathing. Maryam propped him up against a wall. “I was praying for him,” she said. An hour passed before Babagana opened his eyes. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Villagers from nearby poured into town once the gunfire stopped. Several took turns pushing Babagana for hours until they persuaded a vehicle to take them to a hospital. His medical records confirmed four gunshot wounds. “We were all stained with his blood,” Maryam said. The couple, along with other witnesses interviewed, now live in one of the most squalid camps for displaced people in Maiduguri, the biggest town in the state where Boko Haram is active. General Irabor has promised that anyone harboring or helping Boko Haram would be ensured psychological counseling to help them understand they were “with the wrong people.” But witnesses of the massacres in Marte say they had been victims of Boko Haram, not collaborators. Last week, even the camp where they had taken refuge was set upon by nine suicide bombers from Boko Haram, the most coordinated attack in months. The witnesses stumbled upon the decapitated head of a girl, apparently that of a bomber, shortly before being interviewed for this article. “We wanted to tell our story,” Zainaba said. (c) New York Times 2017

Published by RFI on February 15, 2021. July 1, 1994, marines intervened in Butare, Rwanda. (Jose Nicolas/Hans Lucas/AFP) According to a diplomatic cable, the authorities in Paris helped suspects in the 1994 Rwanda genocide to escape while under French military protection. The revelation has rekindled Kigali's allegations that France secretly supported Hutu forces who orchestrated the massacres. The document, which came to light on Sunday from a lawyer researching France's actions during the genocide, was written by France's envoy to Rwanda which suggested that Paris knew suspects had sought refuge in a "humanitarian safe zone" controlled by French soldiers. The soldiers had arrived in June 1994 as part of the UN-mandated Operation Turquoise to stop the massacres that left at least 800,000 people dead, mainly among the Tutsi ethnic minority. French envoy to Rwanda Yannick Gerard wrote to his superiors to ask what to do with the genocide suspects, in a cable found in the archives of an adviser to President François Mitterrand, the incumbent at the time. "We have no other choice... but to arrest them or place them immediately under house arrest to wait for international judicial authorities to decide their case," Gerard wrote, in excerpts of the cable first published by French investigative website Mediapart on Sunday. 'All indirect channels' The cable was discovered by François Graner, a lawyer who works with the victims' rights group "Survie" and who won a years-long battle in June 2020 to access to Mitterrand's archives. In response, French foreign ministry officials told Gerard: "You can... use all indirect channels, especially your African contacts, without exposing yourself directly, to transmit to these authorities our wish that they leave the Humanitarian Safe Zone." "You will note in particular that the international community, and in particular the United Nations, will determine very soon how to proceed with these so-called authorities," it continued, referring to the former Hutu regime who had sought refuge in southwest Rwanda near the border with what was then Zaire. It is signed by Bernard Emie, a foreign ministry adviser who is now the head of France's DGSE foreign intelligence service. According to Graner, "It's the missing written piece of evidence, an essential piece of the puzzle." Tensions have remained fraught between Rwanda and France, which has always denied claims that it sided with the Hutu regime and failed to stop the surge in anti-Tutsi hatred following the 1994 assassination of then-president Juvenal Habyarimana. But in 2019, President Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of an expert panel of historians and researchers to look into the claims, widely hailed as an effort to confront France's troubled past in Africa. While Rwanda was never a French colony, successive French governments cultivated close ties after the country's independence from Belgium in 1962, including training its top military leaders. © 2021 Copyright RFI - All rights reserved.

Tales of atrocities dominate accounts of Liberia's years of civil war but not a single person has been tried for war crimes in the country's courts. This is despite the estimated 250,000 dead - amounting to around 8% of the population at the time - and survivors willing to testify about the conflicts from 1989 to 1997 and 1999 to 2003. On Tuesday, in an unprecedented move, a war crimes case is due to be heard in the capital, Monrovia. But this will be a Finnish court holding a special session, not part of the Liberian judicial process. Gibril Massaquoi was a resident of Finland when he was arrested in 2020 and is accused of killing civilians, rape and recruiting child soldiers. He denies the charges. The case, while welcomed by campaigners, raises the question of why the Liberian courts have not taken any action. Arthur Bondo is one of those who wants to see people on trial in his country. He was recruited as a child soldier - though not by Mr Massaquoi - in 1990, when he was 15. He has a clear memory of the day when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) rebels came to his father's farm in north-central Bong county. "They shot the pigs we were rearing, ordered us to carry the pigs with them and forced us to join them," he says. "I experienced a lot of bad things." He does not go into any more detail. He is clear however that he wants a war crimes court to be established "to stop impunity". Liberia's Civil War Liberia endured two bouts of brutal fighting in 1989-1997 and 1999-2003 Charles Taylor led an uprising against President Samuel Doe, who himself had taken power in a coup in 1980 Doe was executed in 1990 by a rebel group led by Prince Johnson Some 250,000 people were killed in the fighting overall Thousands more were mutilated and raped Taylor was elected president in 1997 after a peace deal The war was reignited in 1999 when two new rebel groups emerged Taylor stepped down and went into exile ahead of a peace deal in 2003 The 46-year-old bears the physical and emotional scars of the conflict and wants to make sure that others do not have to go through the same thing. He lost an arm during that time and is now head of a disabled persons association in Bong county. "The child soldiers who were used are living in poverty and trauma. If a war crimes court comes to Liberia and people are prosecuted no-one would use child soldiers again." 'Need for closure' His words are echoed by campaigner Adama Dempster from the Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia. He believes that a "war crimes court would give closure to victims from the civil war, and would also give victims an opportunity for legal redress". Victim testimony has become a key part of war crimes trials, and the Finnish court will be sitting in Monrovia to hear those witnesses. Mr Dempster also believes that the lack of a judicial process and a "failure to address past human rights violations during the war [has led] to the undermining of present human rights". It was supposed to be different. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who won the country's first post-conflict presidential election, inaugurated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2006 to, in her words, "help the process of healing". This was a country shattered by war and looking for a way to restore trust among the people. The TRC was not a tribunal but it was established to identify "the root causes of the conflict, and [determine] those who are responsible for committing domestic and international crimes against the Liberian people". Its final report in 2009 recommended, among other things, the prosecution of certain individuals, the establishment of a special court and for certain people to be barred from public office for 30 years, as well as reparations for victims. But the recommendations were immediately mired in political controversy. Among those who were supposed to be barred was Mrs Johnson Sirleaf herself because of a past connection with one-time rebel leader and former President Charles Taylor. She had admitted that she had donated money for a relief operation that ended up in Taylor's hands and had apologised at the commission - but she did not step down. She was not the only one, and some remain in office today. There were others in positions of authority who were identified for prosecution - including two lawmakers who still sit in parliament. "The TRC recommendations had political implications for those in government," Liberian researcher into transitional justice Tennen Dalieh Tehougue says. "A logical reason why they didn't sign off on a war and economic crimes court, or other measures, is that it would have affected them." She also thinks that the TRC was a missed opportunity because "it did not provide a platform for truth telling and remorse from most of the major actors in the war. Most of them justified their actions before the tribunal's hearings." 'Why a war crimes court now?' The current government, under President George Weah, who unsuccessfully ran against Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf in 2005, has given mixed messages on a war crimes court. In 2019, he wrote to parliament to say that it should advise and provide guidance on the legislation needed to implement the TRC's recommendations. But later that year he told journalists that "since we came to power [in 2018], I have not one day called for a war crimes court. Why now? When we have economic issues, we're trying to develop our country, why focus on a war crimes court now?". When contacted by the BBC, Information Minister Ledgerhood Rennie said "any decision of a war crimes court is one that would emanate from the Liberian people through their representatives in the legislature". But there does not seem to have been any progress. Rather than waiting, some activists, including the Switzerland-based group Civitas Maxima that works with Liberians and provides information to the authorities, have tried to find alternative routes to justice in foreign courts, hence the Finnish trial of Mr Massaquoi. In the US, ex-warlord Mohammed "Jungle Jabbah" Jabateh was jailed in 2017 for 30 years convicted of immigration fraud for lying about his past as a leader of a force that carried out multiple murders and acts of cannibalism. Thomas Woewiyu, who had founded the NPFL with Taylor, was also convicted in the US of immigration fraud in 2018, but died before sentencing. Taylor's son, "Chuckie" Taylor, was tried as an American citizen in a US court and sentenced to 97 years in 2009 for torturing and killing people while he was the head of Liberia's anti-terrorist services. Taylor himself is in prison, but he was sentenced in connection with crimes relating to the conflict in neighbouring Sierra Leone. And Alieu Kosiah - a former commander of a rebel group fighting the NPFL - went on trial last year in Switzerland. Mr Massaquoi - who is Sierra Leonean - had given evidence to the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone set up to investigate war crimes committed in that conflict. He was relocated to Finland in 2008 as part of a witness protection programme, which provided immunity for crimes committed in Sierra Leone, but not in Liberia. The two conflicts were intertwined. There are some Liberians for whom the memories of the fighting are too traumatic and they would rather not look back. Godfrey Konnah, now 40, lost his leg after shrapnel from a grenade explosion hit him as he was going out to buy bread in Monrovia. "I don't like to talk about the war, I don't like to think about it," he says. "I have moved on, whether they bring war crimes court or not, I am fine. What God wants to happen would happen." But Mr Dempster, who has campaigned for a court, believes that its establishment would give victims hope that their concerns could be addressed. He adds that the money would come once the political will was there. What Mr Massaquoi's trial might do is reignite the discussions in the country about finally finding justice for the hundreds of thousands of victims. © 2021 BBC

KITSHANGA, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 22 (Reuters) - Dozens of militia fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo have laid down their weapons and surrendered, the first to do so since President Felix Tshisekedi announced martial law to tackle worsening security in two eastern provinces. Congolese Mai-Mai rebels who surrendered their weapons to government officials stand in a formation in Kitchanga, in the Masisi territory of North Kivu province, in the Democratic Republic of Congo June 21, 2021. REUTERS/Djaaffar Al Katanty Around 140 men from various local armed groups sang and clapped as they handed themselves in to authorities during a ceremony in Congo's North Kivu province on Monday. Around 70 weather-beaten weapons, mostly rifles, were also turned in. Congo's mineral-rich east has been convulsed with conflict since the official end to the country's second civil war in 2003. More than 120 armed groups are now fighting for control of the region's land and natural resources. "Being in a rebellion means stealing, harassing the population and destroying the environment of the population," said 28-year-old Jean-Paul Ndagije, who fought with the Nyatura rebel group. "That is why we bush commanders have decided to take our children out of the bush to embrace a better life." Tshisekedi declared a state of siege in early May in response to a two-year surge in violence across the region. But deadly attacks have increased since then, according to data collected by the Kivu Security Tracker, which maps unrest in the region. "We will continue to track down these armed groups wherever they are entrenched," the military governor of North Kivu Constant Ndima told reporters. Some conflict analysts say increasing the army's power is unlikely to address the root causes of the bloodshed, pointing to a long history of problematic behaviour documented among troops. In a blistering report published last week, the United Nations said that sexual violence perpetrated by government troops in Congo's east could amount to war crimes. The report also accused Congolese troops of diverting weapons to armed groups and smuggling cocoa from abandoned farms into neighbouring Uganda. While visiting the region last week, Tshisekedi said that a mafia had developed within the army and police, propped up by a "law of silence". "There is a lot of scheming undermining our security forces," Tshisekedi said. "It developed at the same time as the mafia here, the same mafia in the army, in our institutions." (Reporting by Djaffar Al Katanty; writing by Hereward Holland; editing by Jonathan Oatis) © Copyright 2021 Reuters.

Washington Post January 8, 2023 By Diane Jeantet and David Biller | AP Protesters, supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, sit in front of police after inside Planalto Palace after storming it, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023. Planalto is the official workplace of the president of Brazil. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres) RIO DE JANEIRO — Supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his election defeat stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and presidential palace Sunday, a week after the inauguration of his leftist rival, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Thousands of demonstrators bypassed security barricades, climbed on roofs, smashed windows and invaded all three buildings, which were believed to be largely vacant on the weekend. Some of the demonstrators called for a military intervention to either restore the far-right Bolsonaro to power or oust Lula from the presidency. Hours went by before control of the buildings on Brasilia’s vast Three Powers Square was reestablished, with hundreds of the participants arrested. In a news conference from Sao Paulo state, Lula accused Bolsonaro of encouraging the uprising by those he termed “fascist fanatics,” and he read a freshly signed decree for the federal government to take control of security in the federal district. “There is no precedent for what they did and these people need to be punished,” Lula said. TV channel Globo News showed protesters wearing the green and yellow colors of the national flag that also have come to symbolize the nation’s conservative movement and were adopted by Bolsonaro’s supporters. The former president has repeatedly sparred with Supreme Court justices, and the room where they convene was trashed by the rioters. They sprayed fire hoses inside the Congress building and ransacked offices at the presidential palace. Windows were broken in all of the buildings. Bolsonaro, who flew to Florida ahead of Lula’s inauguration, repudiated the president’s accusation late Sunday. He wrote on Twitter that peaceful protest is part of democracy but vandalism and invasion of public buildings are “exceptions to the rule.” Police fired tear gas in their efforts to recover the buildings, and were shown on television in the late afternoon marching protesters down a ramp from the presidential palace with their hands secured behind their backs. By early evening, with authorities’ control of the buildings restored, Justice Minister Flavio Dino said in a news conference that roughly 200 people had been arrested and officers were firing more tear gas to drive away lingering protesters. But with the damage already done, many in Brazil were questioning how the police had ignored abundant warnings, were unprepared or were somehow complicit. Lula said at his news conference there was “incompetence or bad faith″ on the part of police, and that they had been likewise complacent when Bolsonaro supporters rioted in the capital weeks ago. He promised those officers would be punished and expelled from the corps. The incident recalled the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Political analysts have warned for months that a similar storming was a possibility in Brazil, given that Bolsonaro has sown doubt about the reliability of the nation's electronic voting system — without any evidence. The results were recognized as legitimate by politicians from across the spectrum, including some Bolsonaro allies, as well as dozens of foreign governments. Unlike the 2021 attack in the U.S., few officials were likely to have been working in the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court on a Sunday. U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters that the riots in Brazil were “outrageous.” His national security adviser Jake Sullivan went a step further on Twitter and said the U.S. “condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brazil.” Biden later tweeted that he looked forward to continuing to work with Lula, calling the riots an “assault on democracy and on the peaceful transfer of power in Brazil.” British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly tweeted: “The violent attempts to undermine democracy in Brazil are unjustifiable. President @LulaOficial and the government of Brazil have the full support of the UK.” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also said on Twitter that he condemned the assault on Brazil’s democratic institutions but he was confident “the will of the Brazilian people and the country’s institutions” would be respected. Earlier videos on social media showed a limited presence of the capital’s military police; one showed officers standing by as people flooded into Congress, with one using his phone to record images. The capital’s security secretariat didn’t respond to a request from The Associated Press for comment about the relative absence of the police. “Brazilian authorities had two years to learn the lessons from the Capitol invasion and to prepare themselves for something similar in Brazil,” said Maurício Santoro, political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “Local security forces in Brasilia failed in a systematic way to prevent and to respond to extremist actions in the city. And the new federal authorities, such as the ministers of justice and of defense, were not able to act in a decisive way.” Federal District Gov. Ibaneis Rocha confirmed on Twitter he had fired the capital city’s head of public security, Anderson Torres. Local media reported that Torres is currently in the U.S. The office of Lula’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to order Torres’ imprisonment. Bolsonaro supporters have been protesting Lula’s electoral win since Oct. 30, blocking roads, setting vehicles on fire and gathering outside military buildings, urging the armed forces to intervene. The head of Brazil’s electoral authority rejected the request from Bolsonaro and his political party to nullify ballots cast on most electronic voting machines. “Two years since Jan. 6, Trump’s legacy continues to poison our hemisphere,” U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, who chairs the Senate’s foreign relations committee, tweeted, adding that he blamed Bolsonaro for inciting the acts. “Protecting democracy & holding malign actors to account is essential.” Copyright 2023 Associated Press

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Seated on a platform outside a regional post office in Sri Lanka’s former war zone, about 150 miles north of the capital, Colombo, a mother whose son has been missing for seven years sobbed as she spoke. “All we are asking for is for them to give us our children back. They took my child,” the aggrieved mother, Sangarappillai Vanalochini, said in an interview widely viewed on television and social media in Sri Lanka this week. For four days, Ms. Vanalochini has refused food and water, joining 13 other people on a hunger strike in the northern town of Vavuniya, only a few miles away from the center of some of the most brutal fighting during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009. She and the others fasting are trying to force the government to investigate what happened to family members who disappeared during the conflict in which Tamil Tiger rebels fought for a separate state for the Tamil minority in the island nation’s north and east. The condition of the hunger strikers grew so grave on Thursday that Sri Lanka’s state defense minister, Ruwan Wijewardene, flew from the capital to meet them. The strikers agreed on Thursday evening to call off their fast after he promised in writing to ensure “a proper response on Feb. 9 through a meeting between the families of the disappeared and a delegation of government ministers and officials at the office of the prime minister,” said Ruki Fernando, an activist who has been in regular contact with the families. If the response is not satisfactory at that meeting, “the families have said they will restart a larger fast unto death,” he said. The state defense minister could not immediately be reached for comment. The government under the former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, defeated the Tamil rebels, ending the civil war in a surge of violence. Amnesty International estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 people are still missing from two communist insurgencies and the long war with the Tamil Tiger rebels. The current president, Maithripala Sirisena, was elected to office in a stunning upset in 2015, to a great extent on the promise of promoting justice and reconciliation, including an investigation into the disappearances during the war. But little progress has been made in the two years since he took office. Human rights groups say that many of the thousands who disappeared were abducted by military units and paramilitary groups, while some who surrendered to government forces at the end of the conflict never came home. Canagasabapathy Viswa-lingam Wigneswaran, the chief minister for the Tamil-majority Northern Province, said in a letter to Mr. Sirisena this week that the Tamil people had placed “tremendous expectations and hope” in Mr. Sirisena in 2015 and helped to elect him to office. “Those hopes seem to be eroding in recent times,” he said in the letter. A Tamil member of Parliament, S. Sivamohan, said that Tamils had grown increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress. He noted that the Sirisena government passed a law to set up a permanent office last August to investigate disappearances. But six months later, the office has yet to be constituted. “All the initiatives of the government remain on paper, there has been nothing evident in practice,” Dr. Sivamohan said. A spokesman for Mr. Sirisena declined to comment. Mr. Fernando, the activist, said that the strikers had expressed deep frustration at the beginning of their fast, and that years of protests, petitions, complaints and testimony had yielded nothing. “If the government is serious about postwar reconciliation, it’s time to move beyond rhetoric,” he said. _______________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times Company

Claiming that Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen to turn a blind eye to the genocide taking place in her country to retain her political power, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Iran's Shirin Ebadi today said that their fellow laureate has sold her soul to the devil. The laureate came up with this remark at a programme titled 'Combating Violence Against Women and Advancing Women's Rights' arranged by Naripokkho and Nobel Women's Initiatives in the city where she and another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Northern Ireland's Mairead Maguire talked to female reporters of the country. "When Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, Mairead and I staged several campaigns in order to secure her release, we even staged demonstration outside the Myanmar Embassy in Washingtong," she said adding, "However, unfortunately, when she was released from the house arrest she sold her soul to the devil." Shirin said she, as a Muslim laureate, has written several open letters to Suu Kyi saying that her silence is shameful. "I urged her to take a stance breaking her silence, but Suu Kyi didn't reply to any of them." Suu Kyi appears to have forgotten how she suffered when she was under house arrest. Now the Rohingya Muslims are suffering at least ten times more than any of her sufferings but she wants to hold on her political power, she added. Urging for a peaceful solution,Mairead Maguire said dialogue and diplomacy are very important to solve the Rohingya crisis and the role played by Bangladesh is a model for the world. She and the two other laureates will hopefully further detect the genocide of Rohingya people to the ICC and encourage the other countries to support Bangladesh for their inspirational works in the crisis, added the laureate. She said it is also important to focus on the need of having dialogue and listening to each other to bring peace, while everybody, including the governments, has a role to play here. Claiming that they have the evidence that the Rohingya issue is genocide, Mairead said their next course of programme is to identify interested states through the UN who can take the Myanmar government to the ICC. "We want to find states that have passion for human rights and justice," she added. However, the three Nobel laureates -- Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, Shirin Ebadi of Iran and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland -- came to Bangladesh on a week-long visit to see the Rohingya situation on the ground. The Nobel Women's Initiative in collaboration with its partner in Bangladesh, Naripokkho, led the delegation to Bangladesh to better understand the situation of the Rohingya refugees and the two laureates except Tawakkol Karman joined the programme to share their experiences with some of the female journalists of the country. http://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/suu-kyi-sold-her-soul-devil-nobel-laureate-shirin-ebadi-1541992 (c) 2018 The Daily Star

By Denis Dumo April 25, 2018-JUBA (Reuters) - South Sudan President Salva Kiir has rejected opposition calls for him to resign as part of efforts to end a civil war, accusing anti-government groups of making “unreasonable demands” in peace talks. Despite several agreements and ceasefires, fighting has rumbled on in South Sudan with barely any break since it first erupted in 2013, just two years after independence, killing tens of thousands. In talks in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa led by East African bloc IGAD, 10 opposition groups last month demanded Kiir step aside. They also want a transitional parliament dissolved and replaced by a new one formed with less than 200 members. “The people who are fighting with us have unreasonable conditions to make peace,” Kiir said during a ceremony for his deceased army chief, General James Ajongo Mawut late on Tuesday. “They think that I am the obstacle to peace and if I am removed after signing the Agreement then there will be no problem,” he added. “They want me to sign the agreement and then step down immediately. Just imagine, what is my incentive in bringing peace if it is peace that I will bring and then I step aside? Nobody can do it. Bashir (Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir) didn’t do it when we are fighting with them.” The government and rebel groups signed the latest ceasefire in December in Addis Ababa, aiming to revive a pact reached in 2015. But the truce was violated within hours. Another series of talks that were scheduled for this week were postponed, and are now expected to take place in early May. Civil war first erupted when troops loyal to Kiir clashed with forces loyal to Riek Machar, then the vice president. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and much of the nation has faced dire food shortages. IGAD said last month Machar should be released from house arrest in South Africa as soon as possible, on condition that he renounces violence. The fighting has slashed oil production and driven about a third of the population of 12 million from their homes. The U.N. refugee agency estimates 3.1 million will be refugees in neighboring countries by the end of this year. Kiir also dismissed calls to dissolve the parliament. “If we were to sign an agreement, the agreement has to be endorsed by the parliament so that it is passed into law. If the parliament is dissolved then what do we do with the agreement?” he said. “We will not work for such thing.” © 2018 | Reuters

Paul Rusesabagina went from the world’s most famous Rwandan to a prisoner of his political nemesis, President Paul Kagame, whose government accuses the coolheaded hotelier of murder, arson and terrorism. By Abdi Latif Dahir, Declan Walsh, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Ruth Maclean Published by The New York Times on September 18, 2020. Updated on September 20, 2020. Police escorting Mr. Rusesabagina into a van after his pre-trial court appearance. [Cyril Ndegeya for The New York Times] KIGALI, Rwanda — As the manager of a five-star hotel where 1,268 people sheltered from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina was known for his cool head — a quality that kept the killers at bay, helped ensure that all his guests survived, and led to an Oscar-nominated movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” that brought his story to a global audience. Now Mr. Rusesabagina is back in Rwanda, but this time under arrest, in a spartan cell in Kigali’s central police station, where he sleeps in a simple bed draped in a mosquito net. He still cuts the figure of an unruffled hotelier — pressed blazer, white shirt, polished loafers — even as he wrestled with how to explain the latest twists of a life story that threatens to outdo even its Hollywood version. Not long ago Mr. Rusesabagina, 66, was the toast of America, feted by Oprah Winfrey, awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and earning large fees for his speeches around the world — a human rights icon who warned about the horrors of genocide and offered a living example of standing up to it. Now he finds himself in a country he vowed never to return to, at the mercy of a president who pursued him for 13 years, and preparing to stand trial for murder, arson and terrorism. “How I got here — now that is a surprise,” he said with a wry smile, in a jailhouse interview this past week, with two Rwandan government officials in the room. “I was actually not coming here.” The tale of how a Hollywood hero went from celebrity human rights ambassador to prisoner speaks to the predicament of Rwanda, the small African country where as many as one million people died in 1994 in a grotesque massacre that became the shame of a world that did not intervene to stop it. A quarter century on, the genocide still casts a long shadow inside Rwanda, where the truth about how it unfolded is bitterly contested. In the aftermath, Rwanda was stabilized under the firm hand of Paul Kagame, a rebel leader turned president who became the darling of guilt-ridden Western countries. Mr. Kagame won powerful allies, like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Donors lavished aid on his government, which cut poverty, grew the economy and promoted women leaders. Now, Rwanda is also known as an authoritarian state where Mr. Kagame exerts total control, his troops are accused of plunder and massacres in neighboring Congo, and political rivals are imprisoned, subjected to sham trials or die in mysterious circumstances at home and abroad. Foremost among those critics is Mr. Rusesabagina, who leveraged his celebrity as the world’s most famous Rwandan to launch scathing attacks on Mr. Kagame, gradually transforming from activist to opponent to, as the government now alleges, a supporter of armed struggle. Mr. Rusesabagina was a leader of a coalition of opposition groups, all in exile, that includes an armed wing. In an address to those groups in 2018, recorded in a video now widely circulated by the government, Mr. Rusesabagina says that politics has failed in Rwanda. “The time for us has come to use any means possible to bring about change,” he said. “It is time to attempt our last resort.” From prison, he said his group’s role was not fighting, but “diplomacy” to represent the millions of Rwandan refugees and exiles. “We are not a terrorist organization,” he said. Experts say his situation is emblematic of Rwanda under Mr. Kagame: As the ruling party totally dominates the political space, some exiled opponents have turned to more extreme measures. “Coming on the heels of something as horrific as 1994, foreigners often want to paint the situation in black and white, good and bad, with heroes and demons,” said Anna Cave, a former National Security Council director for African Affairs under President Barack Obama. “But it’s more nuanced today. There are a lot of shades of gray.” For weeks, the mystery has been how Mr. Rusesabagina, a Belgian citizen and American permanent resident, was lured to Rwanda from his home in Texas. In an interview, Rwanda’s spy chief gleefully described how Mr. Rusesabagina had fallen for an elaborate ruse, involving a private jet from Dubai, that he called “flawless.” Human Rights Watch called it illegal, a “forced disappearance.” Mr. Rusesabagina, speaking in jail, said he believed he had been flying to Burundi. His family insists that he cannot speak freely. “With guns around him, he’s saying that in the belly of the beast,” said his son, Trésor Rusesabagina, 28, speaking from the United States. “And the beast can bite at any time.” A Five-Star Sanctuary The Hotel des Mille Collines, in the heart of Kigali, has been overtaken by newer, fancier hotels. But in 1994, it was a five-star sanctuary in a land of bloodshed. As Hutu militiamen rampaged through the streets in a convulsive slaughter, Mr. Rusesabagina, a Hutu, employed his wiles and the resources of his Belgian-owned hotel — beer, cash, and charm — to fend off the killers. He bribed army generals with dollars and cigars. He battled to protect his wife, Tatiana, a Tutsi. Outside the gate, Rwandans were hacked to death, burned alive or shot. Inside, miraculously, all 1,268 hotel residents survived. “An island of fear in a sea of fire,” Mr. Rusesabagina once called it. After the genocide, Mr. Rusesabagina went back to work. But the country was chaotic and tense. Two million Rwandan refugees had poured into neighboring countries. A new, Tutsi-led government, headed by the rebel leader, Mr. Kagame, was in charge. Many Hutus lived under a pall of suspicion that they bore collective responsibility for atrocities carried out by Hutu militiamen. Revenge killings were common. One day in late 1994, a soldier burst into Mr. Rusesabagina’s home and tried to shoot him. He managed to flee, but it “left him anxious,” recalled his son, Roger, 41, speaking from Billerica, Mass. Two years later, Mr. Rusesabagina received warnings that his life was in danger and his passport might be confiscated. The following day, the family bolted for Uganda, and soon after, moved to Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial power. Mr. Rusesabagina applied for political asylum, drove a taxi, and bought a house in the Brussels suburbs. In 1998, his story featured in an acclaimed account of the genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” by the American writer Philip Gourevitch. Otherwise, he wallowed in obscurity. Sometimes, his children recalled, he regaled taxi passengers with his past life in Rwanda. The Kigali Premiere Terry George, the Irish film director, first met Mr. Rusesabagina in Brussels in 2002, a passenger in his Mercedes taxi. A year later they traveled together for a research trip to Rwanda. At Kigali airport, they were greeted by a crowd of cheering genocide survivors, Mr. George recalled, and at the Mille Collines hotel, teary-eyed staff gushed about their former boss. “A hero’s welcome,” Mr. George said. Mr. Rusesabagina’s apprehensions about his safety had vanished, and he bought a plot to build a house. “I thought that things had changed,” he said from his cell this past week. Mr. George’s “Hotel Rwanda,” released in 2004, was lauded by critics and Hollywood royalty. At the Los Angeles premiere, Angelina Jolie, Harrison Ford and Matt Damon posed with Mr. Rusesabagina on the red carpet. Amnesty International promoted the film and it won three Academy Award nominations, including best actor for Don Cheadle, who played Mr. Rusesabagina. “We should be in awe of people like Paul,” Ms. Jolie said. In April 2005, for the Rwandan premiere, Mr. George flew from the United States to Brussels to rendezvous with Mr. Rusesabagina and his wife for the flight to Kigali. But only she was at the gate. Mr. Rusesabagina declined to board at the last minute. “He said he didn’t feel safe,” said Mr. George. “He said he had been warned not to come to Kigali.” In Rwanda, though, Mr. Kagame seemed to appreciate the film. He sat between his wife, Jeannette, and Mr. George for a screening in the InterContinental Hotel ballroom. When the audience cheered during a scene that showed Mr. Kagame’s face, the president chuckled. A year later, in May 2006, Mr. Kagame invited Mr. Cheadle and his family to the presidential palace in Kigali. While the adults shared a traditional drink of fermented milk, their children played together. About the film, Mr. Kagame “only said that he was grateful for the attention it brought to his country,” Mr. Cheadle recalled. But as Mr. Rusesabagina’s profile soared in America, Mr. Kagame’s camp bristled. After President George W. Bush awarded Mr. Rusesabagina the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award, in November 2005, the pro-government New Times published a series of articles attacking the hotelier. “A man who sold the soul of the Rwandan Genocide to amass medals” read one article. Months later, Mr. Kagame delivered his own broadside. Rwanda had no need for “manufactured” heroes “made in Europe or America,” he said. “An Ordinary Man,” Celebrated and Derided After “Hotel Rwanda,” Mr. Rusesabagina sold his taxi, signed up with a speaking agency, and traveled the world warning of genocide. Admiring articles likened him to Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis. He traveled to Africa with a congressional delegation and established a nonprofit, the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, that accrued $241,242 from 2005 to 2007, according to tax filings. In 2006, he stood beside George Clooney and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a rally in Washington to warn of a new genocide in Darfur, in western Sudan. “It is another Rwanda,” Mr. Rusesabagina said. At home, the conflict with Mr. Kagame boiled over. Mr. Rusesabagina published a memoir, “An Ordinary Man,” that contained sharp criticisms of Mr. Kagame’s Rwanda — “A nation governed by and for the benefit of a small group of elite Tutsis,” he wrote. The few Hutus in power were “known locally as Hutus de service, or ‘Hutus for hire.’” In June 2007, Mr. Rusesabagina reported Mr. Kagame to an international tribunal on war crimes in Rwanda, for atrocities he said had been committed by Mr. Kagame’s troops during the genocide. A battle of narratives erupted. Over six months, the New Times published 21 articles with headlines like “Rusesabagina’s Megalomania Has No Limit.” Survivors from the Mille Collines came forward to accuse Mr. Rusesabagina of exaggerating his role, and even profiting from the genocide. A government official published a book that purported to tell Hotel Rwanda’s “real story.” Mr. Rusesabagina had some influential backers. In early 2006 Alison Des Forges, a noted scholar on the genocide, conducted a review of “An Ordinary Man” for his publisher, Penguin. Mr. Rusesabagina’s account was “true to what I have witnessed and experienced in this complicated society,” Ms. Des Forges wrote in a confidential letter seen by The Times. The Rwandan government intensified its campaign. In 2007, at a forum in Chicago, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United States accused Mr. Rusesabagina of financing rebel groups in eastern Congo. In Brussels, Mr. Rusesabagina began to feel unsafe. Intruders broke into his home twice, his children said, rifling drawers and stealing documents. When a car drove him off the road, he took it as an assassination attempt, they said. In 2009, Mr. Rusesabagina and his wife moved to a gated community in San Antonio, Texas, near the home of an ally — Bob Krueger, a former United States Senator and ambassador to Burundi, whom he had befriended. Even then, Mr. Kagame continued to court the stars of “Hotel Rwanda.” In June 2010, he sent his helicopter to bring Mr. Cheadle to northern Rwanda for a gorilla-naming ceremony, part of a lauded conservation effort. At a dinner afterward with the president, Mr. Cheadle recalled, there was no mention of Mr. Rusesabagina. The Long Arm of Kagame The death of Patrick Karegeya, a former Rwandan spy chief and critic of Mr. Kagame found strangled in a South African hotel room on Jan. 1, 2014, signaled yet again how far the president was prepared to go to quash dissent. In at least six countries, Rwandan exiles have been harassed, assaulted or killed, as part of an apparent covert campaign targeting Mr. Kagame’s most nettlesome detractors. Some were accused of having participated in the genocide. Others, like Mr. Karegeya, had been confidantes and even friends of Mr. Kagame. In Belgium, a fugitive politician was found floating in a canal. In Kenya, a former minister was shot dead in his car. In Britain, police warned two dissidents they faced an “imminent threat” from Rwanda’s government. In South Africa, a former army chief was shot in the stomach but survived. Western officials often looked the other way. “They are immensely special because of what happened in the past,” Andrew Mitchell, a former British development minister, said in 2015. “It engenders cutting them more slack.” Inside Rwanda, critics were also vanishing or dying mysteriously. In 2014 Kizito Mihigo, a popular gospel singer, was accused of treason over a song that drew attention to the death of all Rwandans, including moderate Hutus, since 1994 — challenging an official narrative of a “Tutsi genocide.” In February Mr. Mihigo, 38, was found dead in police custody. Mr. Kagame’s reputation was further tarnished by a 2010 report from the United Nations human rights body that accused Rwandan soldiers and allied militias of widespread rape, killings of tens of thousands of civilians, and recruitment of child soldiers in eastern Congo. A second United Nations report in 2012 made similar charges and earned Mr. Kagame an unusually public rebuke from President Obama. In 2010, a Rwandan prosecutor repeated the claim that Mr. Rusesabagina had wired funds to Congo-based rebels. The F.B.I. and Belgian authorities questioned him but took no action, his family said. In the United States, Mr. Cheadle met Mr. Kagame at a dinner party hosted by a mutual acquaintance. The friend, whom Mr. Cheadle declined to identify, later pitched the actor on a second Hotel Rwanda film, this time casting Mr. Rusesabagina in an unfavorable light. Mr. Cheadle was incredulous. “I said, ‘You want me to play the same character in a movie I was nominated for an Oscar for, to say that movie was horseshit, and now I’m doing the real movie? I’m probably not going to do that.’” In January 2018, months after Mr. Kagame had been re-elected with 99 percent of the vote, Mr. Rusesabagina tried to enlist a second American president to his cause. “I request your support in liberating Rwandan people,” he wrote President Trump. Since 1994, he said, “nothing has changed” in Rwanda. Bringing Change “By Any Means Possible” In June and July 2018, gunmen carried out a spate of attacks on remote villages in the Nyungwe forest, inside Rwanda’s southern border with Burundi. The deadliest hit Nyabimata, a hamlet of steep slopes and banana trees, on the night of June 19. Three people were killed, including Fidel Munyaneza, a primary schoolteacher. His wife, Josephine, said he had been shot in the back. The Rwandan authorities blamed the attack on the National Liberation Forces — the armed wing of a Rwandan opposition coalition that, at the time, was led by Paul Rusesabagina. Months later, Mr. Rusesabaginadelivered the video address that spoke of change “by any means possible,” which Rwanda’s government calls proof of his guilt. From jail, he said he did not remember making such a video. A Mysterious Flight to Kigali When he boarded a flight from Chicago to Dubai on Aug. 26, Mr. Rusesabagina provided his family with scant details. “Meetings,” he said. The pandemic had separated him from his wife, stranded in Brussels since February. He hadn’t been able to visit a newborn grandchild near Boston. But this trip was apparently worth it. Mr. Rusesabagina spent just six hours in Dubai. At the city’s second, smaller airport he boarded a private jet that he believed was headed to Bujumbura, Burundi. In fact, the plane was operated by GainJet, a Greece-based charter company frequently used by Mr. Kagame. It landed just before dawn on Aug. 28 in Kigali, where Mr. Rusesabagina was promptly arrested. “He delivered himself here,” said Rwanda’s spy chief, Brig. Gen. Joseph Nzabamwita, with a smile. “Quite a wonderful operation.” If that operation was straight out of the Kagame playbook — dissidents say a private jet flew another opposition leader from the Comoro Islands to Rwanda last year — the nature of the bait used to entrap Rwanda’s latest victim was unclear. Mr. Rusesabagina said he had been invited to Burundi by a pastor, Constantin Niyomwungere, who invited him to speak at his churches. The pastor could not be reached for comment. Rwandan officials say Mr. Rusesabagina’s true purpose was to coordinate with armed groups based in Burundi and Congo. Mr. Rusesabagina seemed determined in the jailhouse interview to maintain his customary unruffled demeanor. But he could be evasive and contradictory. He spent the first three days of captivity at an unknown location, blindfolded and bound, where he was interrogated “not much,” he said. Human Rights Watch says his arrest violates international law, even if he was duped into voluntarily boarding the flight from Dubai. General Nzabamwita dismissed any suggestion of illegality because, he said, the United States and Belgium had been cooperating with his investigation all along. In fact, he added, the head of Belgian intelligence and the C.I.A. station chief in Kigali had personally congratulated him on the arrest. “They were only surprised how we could conduct such an operation, and very successfully,” he said. American and Belgian officials denied the general’s assertion. In an email, a spokesman for Belgium’s SGRS intelligence service said its head, Claude Van de Voorde, had “NEVER congratulated the Rwandan authorities” on the arrest. Embracing — and Fearing — the Truth In “Hotel Rwanda” Mr. Rusesabagina is depicted as a wheeler-dealer who used cigars and flattery to talk his way out of the deadliest trouble. Now, confined to a jail cell five miles away, those are not options. Supporters, both in Hollywood and the Rwandan opposition, argue that he cannot receive a fair trial. “They will do everything to keep him in jail,” said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former prime minister of Rwanda and political ally of Mr. Rusesabagina. Mr. Rusesabagina, for his part, insisted that his group was “not a terrorist organization,” even if its components include an armed group. Its objective, he said, was to highlight the plight of “millions” of Rwandan refugees and exiles, like him, who remain trapped outside the country, more than a quarter century after the genocide. “We wanted to wake up the international community, foreign countries and Rwanda itself,” he said. “To remind them that we also exist.” Abdi Latif Dahir reported from Kigali and Nairobi, Declan Walsh from Cairo, Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels and Athens, and Ruth Maclean from Dakar, Senegal. Julian Barnes contributed reporting from Washington. The article was written by Mr. Walsh. © 2020 The New York Times Company.

Deng Machol, July 1, 2022 FILE - South Sudan's president Salva Kiir, left, and vice-president Riek Machar, right, shake hands after meetings to discuss outstanding issues to the peace deal on Oct. 20, 2019. Machar is urging regional mediators in March 2022 to intervene to protect the country's fragile peace deal, warning of a return to war amid alleged attacks by government troops on his forces.(AP Photo/Sam Mednick, File) JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — The head of the United Nations mission in South Sudan urged the East African country’s transitional government Thursday to set a date for elections as time passes. Nicholas Haysom told journalists in the capital, Juba that with barely eight months remaining in the transitional period agreed by political parties, “I am urging south Sudanese leaders to do everything necessary to move the country out of transition and conduct free, fair, creditable and peaceful elections.” A 2018 peace deal that binds President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar in a unity government encourages authorities to hold elections before February 2023. The international community has long hoped a vote would usher in a democratically elected government in the world’s youngest country. A timetable for the polls must be availed in advance for the international community to support the process well, Haysom said, adding that without a date “nobody will really commit to supporting the elections and the South Sudanese will not get into the frame of mind which is necessary” for elections. The government has yet to reconstitute an electoral commission and implement key judicial reforms — and Kiir and Machar are known to have different opinions on the matter. Kiir, South Sudan’s president since independence from Sudan in 2011, says general elections will take place as planned in 2023 despite delays in implementing the roadmap. Machar insists elections cannot be free and fair unless key provisions in the 2018 deal are fully implemented. Another opposition figure, Lam Akol, has voiced skepticism about the chances of a fair vote in a country plagued by sporadic violence. But Haysom said Thursday that elections can still happen if authorities create the right circumstances. “It’s not only technical arrangements and logistical planning that’s necessary for elections to take place. What is also required is a free and open political environment,” he said. There were high hopes for peace and stability once South Sudan gained its long-fought independence from Sudan. But it slid into ethnic violence in December 2013 when forces loyal to Kiir, a Dinka, started battling those loyal to Machar, a Nuer. Numerous attempts at a durable peace failed. The civil war killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced millions. Intense international pressure followed the 2018 deal, and in February 2020 a coalition government led by Kiir, with Machar as his deputy, was formed. All contents © copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.