Ethiopia's military is planning to enter the Tigray regional capital of Mekelle and "eliminate" rebellious forces, a top military official said late on Friday amid diplomatic efforts to end conflict in the country's north. The Horn of Africa country has been gripped by war for more than a year, with the federal military and its allies battling forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that controls Tigray. This week two top U.S. diplomats flew into Addis Ababa to push for a ceasefire, trying to build on tentative signs of a thaw in relations between warring parties, including the release of political prisoners. In an interview with state-affiliated media outlet Fana broadcast late on Friday, Ethiopian Defence Forces (EDF) deputy army chief General Abebaw Tadesse said the country would not be at peace until the TPLF was eliminated. "Tigray is part of Ethiopia and no force will stop us from entering. We will enter and we will eliminate the enemy. There shouldn't be any confusion about this," he said. "The people of Ethiopia shouldn't think that it is over, it is not over. The main thing here is we have stopped because we have to prepare ourselves. This enemy is still there, and it has to be absolutely eliminated. We will not negotiate with them." The TPLF's spokesperson, Getachew Reda, could not be reached for a comment on the military official's remarks. In a tweet on Thursday, when part of Abebaw's interview was aired on Fana, Getachew said:"We are not losing sleep over Abebaw’s plan!" Ethiopian government spokesperson Legesse Tulu and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Abebaw's remarks. Separately, air force chief commander Yilma Merdasa denied targeting civilians in the conflict, saying his forces have the technology to avoid doing so. "The claims by TPLF that our air force is targeting civilians is a lie," he said on Ethiopian Broadcast Corporation television. TPLF spokesperson Getachew could not be reached to comment on this. U.S. President Joe Biden, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres and the U.N. human rights office (OHCHR) have raised concerns about air strikes. The TPLF says Abiy wants to end the country's ethnically-based federal government system while Abiy says the TPLF is hungry to seize the national power it once held. For months there has been an uneasy stalemate between the two sides, punctuated by sporadic fighting. TPLF forces control most of Tigray but are surrounded by hostile forces from neighbouring regions of Afar and Amhara which are allied with the federal military. The conflict, which broke out in November 2020, has displaced millions and triggered widespread hunger. In recent months there have been multiple diplomatic and political efforts to end it, including pressure from the United States. Reporting by Nairobi newsroom Writing by James Macharia Chege and Elias Biryabarema Editing by Ros Russell and Frances Kerry © 2022 Reuters.

Surge in Threats, Rape, Assault, Wrongful Detention January 26, 2022 (New York) – Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Afghans and people who do not conform to rigid gender norms in Afghanistan have faced an increasingly desperate situation and grave threats to their safety and lives under the Taliban, Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International said in a report released today. The 43-page report, “‘Even If You Go to the Skies, We’ll Find You’: LGBT People in Afghanistan After the Taliban Takeover,” is based on 60 interviews with LGBT Afghans. Many reported that Taliban members attacked or threatened them because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Others reported abuse from family members, neighbors, and romantic partners who now support the Taliban or believed they had to act against LGBT people close to them to ensure their own safety. Some fled their homes from attacks by Taliban members or supporters pursuing them. Others watched lives they had carefully built over the years disappear overnight and found themselves at risk of being targeted at any time because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. “We spoke with LGBT Afghans who have survived gang rape, mob attacks, or have been hunted by their own family members who joined the Taliban, and they have no hope that state institutions will protect them,” said J. Lester Feder, senior fellow for emergency research at OutRight Action International. “For those LGBT people who want to flee the country, there are few good options; most of Afghanistan's neighbors also criminalize same-sex relations. It is difficult to overstate how devastating – and terrifying – the return of Taliban rule has been for LGBT Afghans.” Most interviewees were in Afghanistan, while others had fled to nearby countries. In addition to worrying about these countries’ laws against same-sex relations, interviewees outside Afghanistan lacked proper immigration status, so were at risk of being summarily deported. Afghanistan was a dangerous place for LGBT people well before the Taliban retook full control of the country on August 15, 2021. In 2018, the government of then-President Ashraf Ghani passed a law that explicitly criminalized same-sex sexual relations, and the previous penal code included vague language widely interpreted as making same-sex relations a criminal offense. LGBT people interviewed had experienced many abuses because of their sexual orientation or gender identity prior to the Taliban’s return to power, including sexual violence, child and forced marriage, physical violence from their families and others, expulsion from schools, blackmail, and being outed. Many were forced to conceal key aspects of their identity from society and from family, friends, and colleagues. However, when the Taliban, who had been in power from 1996 to late 2001, regained control of the country, the situation dramatically worsened. The Taliban reaffirmed the previous government’s criminalization of same-sex relations, and some of its leaders vowed to take a hard line against the rights of LGBT people. A Taliban spokesperson told Reuters in October, “LGBT... That's against our Sharia [Islamic] law.” A Taliban judge told the German tabloid Bild shortly before the fall of Kabul, “For homosexuals, there can only be two punishments: either stoning, or he must stand behind a wall that will fall down on him.” A manual issued by the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue in 2020 states that religious leaders shall prohibit same-sex relations and that “strong allegations” of homosexuality shall be referred to the ministry’s district manager for adjudication and punishment. Despite making repeated pledges to respect human rights, the Taliban have engaged in widespread rights abuses since retaking control of the country, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media, and land grabbing. In this context, marked by systematic abuse of power combined with virulent anti-LGBT sentiment, Taliban officials and their supporters have carried out acts of violence against LGBT people with impunity. A gay man said that Taliban members detained him at a checkpoint, beat him, and gang-raped him, telling him, “From now on anytime we want to be able to find you, we will. And we will do whatever we want with you.” A lesbian said that after the Taliban takeover, her male relatives joined the Taliban and threatened to kill her because of her sexual orientation. Most people interviewed believed their only path to safety was asylum in a country with greater protections for LGBT people, but very few LGBT Afghans escaping Afghanistan are known to have reached a safe country. Only the United Kingdom has publicly announced that it has resettled a small number of LGBT Afghans. Organizations assisting LGBT Afghans say that hundreds of people have contacted them, seeking international protection and resettlement. “The Taliban have explicitly pledged not to respect LGBT Afghans rights,” said Heather Barr, associate women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s critically important for concerned governments to urgently put pressure on the Taliban to respect the rights of LGBT people, ensure that assistance they provide Afghanistan reaches LGBT people, and recognize that LGBT Afghans seeking asylum face a special risk of persecution in Afghanistan and neighboring countries.” Selected Cases All names are pseudonyms, for their protection Ramiz S. A few weeks after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Ramiz S. headed to his former office to collect his paycheck. Ramiz, 20, had stayed away from his office because he worked in a profession that the Taliban had targeted for retribution. But he needed the cash. He had to pass through checkpoints and at one, an armed man shouted, “You are an izak,” a derogatory term for gay people. One man hit Ramiz in the throat, punched him in the stomach, and kicked him in the back. They loaded him into a car and took him to another location where four men whipped and then gang raped him over eight hours. When they released him, the men said they would come for him again. “From now on anytime we want to be able to find you, we will. And we will do whatever we want with you,” Ramiz recalled the men telling him. Shortly afterward, Ramiz received word that two men came to his office and demanded his records, including his address and his family’s address in his home province. Ramiz went into hiding, but Taliban members repeatedly visited his parents’ house demanding to know where he was. At one point they occupied his family’s home for three days, interrogating family members and beating his siblings. Ramiz rarely left his hiding places, but when he risked a trip to the doctor, a Taliban member whom he believed knew about the attack spotted him and beat him. Hamid N. About two weeks after the Taliban captured Kabul, Hamid N.’s boyfriend’s parents came knocking on Hamid’s door. The two men had met at university and been a couple for about a year, though his boyfriend’s parents just thought the young men were friends. They said their son had been missing for two or three days. But Hamid hadn’t heard from him either. The next day the family found their son’s body. The parents returned to Hamid’s house, saying they had heard rumors that Hamid was gay, and feared their son might have been killed because of their relationship. “It was a warning for me, too,” Hamid said, describing urgent steps he took to flee the country. Brushna Y. Brushna Y. was living with her uncle’s family in a small village. In July, about six weeks before the fall of Kabul, her cousin discovered Brushna with her female partner and reported them to Brushna’s uncle. Her uncle wanted to kill her, Brushna said, to “get rid of this shame” from the family. Brushna managed to escape and returned to her parents’ house in the city. Her uncle and male cousins demanded that she be killed. Her parents refused and engaged her to a man who didn’t know she was a lesbian. But her uncle and cousins weren’t satisfied. “Why did you engage this daughter of yours? She needs to be killed,” she overheard one of her relatives say. As long as the previous government was in power, she wasn’t too worried. “At that time there was no Taliban – there were police,” Brushna said. “No one could kill me easily.” But when the government fell in August, her uncle and male cousins joined the Taliban. Now, they insisted, they had the power to kill Brushna if her father would not take action. “If you're not going to do this, we will do it,” she recalled a relative saying. “We have the authority.” Her parents arranged for a speedy wedding, beating Brushna when she tried to refuse to go through with it. Then her parents paid her husband to take her to a nearby country, telling him he’d have more luck finding work there. But one of her cousins got word to her husband that she is a lesbian. Now, Brushna said, her husband beats her nearly every day and will not allow her to leave the house. “I'm afraid he will kill me, or my uncle's son will kill me,” Brushna said in a brief phone call while her husband was out of the house, the only time she was able to make calls. Farid Q. Farid Q., in his early 20s, said that he had confessed to a neighbor in August that he had a crush on him. The neighbor hadn’t rejected the overture, so Farid was hopeful they might strike up a relationship. “After the Taliban took over, I was texting him and I saw that he had [pictures of] Taliban members as his display picture,” Farid said. “I texted and asked him, ‘Why did you join the Taliban? They are not good people.’ He said, ‘Are you a good person? You are gay.’ Then he started threatening me. …He said, ‘Even if you go to the skies, we’ll find you. We will arrest you – because I shared all of your info with Taliban groups.’” Farid said the man and other Taliban members came to look for him at his home several times a day for a week, but family members hid him until he was able to flee. Riza When Taliban forces took their city in August, Aimal W. and Aryan D. took shelter with two other trans women in an abandoned hostel. The neighbors would often insult them. Their friend Riza was the most masculine of the group, so she would go out to buy food for the others. "Every moment we receive threats and calls,” Aimal said. “Even children on the street say, ‘You're still here? Why hasn't the Taliban taken you yet?’” Six weeks under Taliban rule, the neighbors decided to take matters into their own hands. One morning in October, someone started pounding on Riza’s door at about 6 a.m. When she opened it, a group of more than 20 neighbors pounced on her, Aryan and Aimal said, beating her viciously and tearing off her clothes. Aryan tried to intervene, approaching one woman in the mob to ask, “Why are you doing this?” “You're making our community filthy,” the woman replied. “We are going to call the [Taliban] police and they're going to clean you from this place.” Riza’s friends fled, leaving behind all their belongings. Aimal saw a police car drive up as she ran away and saw men tying Riza up with a rope. Aimal later sneaked back to the neighborhood to see if she could find out what happened to Riza. A friendly shopkeeper told her he’d last seen Riza being loaded naked into the police car. More than 10 days passed before Aryan or Aimal heard from Riza again. Riza found Aryan by chance, after her captors had dumped her on the street in men’s clothes and without a cell phone. Aryan saw that Riza’s body was covered with purple and green bruises, and it looked like Riza’s nose had been broken. Her head was patchily shaved and covered in cuts. Taliban members had also shaved her eyebrows. “You will be a sign to the public and to your trans community,” Riza recalled her captors saying. “It is a lesson, and you should stop dancing and sex work.” Riza told Aryan she’d been held naked at the police station and beaten every day. Aryan said Riza recalled a Taliban commander telling her that if he ever saw her in the city again, he would kill her. “You should leave the capital and go back to your family,” he allegedly said. Aryan bought Riza a meal and a bus ticket home, though her family had disowned her and she had nowhere to stay there. She has not heard from Riza since. © Human Rights Watch 2022

By: Danielle Paquette (The Washington Post) DAKAR, Senegal — Mali. Chad. Guinea. Sudan. Even before Burkina Faso’s army declared Monday that it had toppled a democratically elected president, military officers across the region had grabbed power four times in the past 18 months — the highest number of coups in four decades. In West Africa — from Guinea’s seaside capital, Conakry, to the eastern edge of Burkina Faso — terrain governed by soldiers now stretches nearly 1,300 miles long. That creates a potential “coup bloc,” as one analyst described it. Alliances with Western powers, particularly France, and neighboring leaders are rapidly unraveling. New partners, namely Russia, are stepping in to fill the void. And the international community is panicking over how this shift could hind the fight against one of the world’s fastest-growing Islamist insurgencies.
“ Coup leaders tend to stick together — especially in the face of sanctions from their traditional allies,” said Aanu Adeoye, a Russia-Africa researcher at the Chatham House think tank in London. “If they don’t get help from the French, for example, there is a group of Russian mercenaries waiting.”
In Burkina Faso, where the latest coup d’etat began early Sunday and climaxed less than 36 hours later with a state television announcement, fighters linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have transformed the nation of 21 million over the past seven years. What was once a calm farming state known for a prestigious African film festival is now routinely battered by extremists who have killed thousands of people and displaced millions as they seek to expand their influence.
Military leaders said they overthrew President Roch Marc Kaboré to “get back on the right track,” Capt. Sidsoré Kader Ouedraogo said Monday on national television, “and to gather all forces to fight for our territorial interest, our recovery and our sovereignty.” West African militaries have reported that they lack the funding and weapons to tackle the growing threat on their own. Since 2013, when al-Qaeda militants tried to seize the capital of neighboring Mali, France has acted as the biggest foreign partner against the scourge, deploying roughly 5,000 troops to the region. But after military leaders took control of Mali in August 2020 — and sacked the acting president again in May 2021 — French President Emmanuel Macron announced a drawdown in West Africa that is expected to reduce its troop strength by approximately half. Then news broke late last year that Mali was cutting deals with Russian security firms — a development that the nation’s leaders have denied — and Macron asserted that French soldiers would not fight alongside Russian mercenaries. According to the United Nations, the mercenaries have a track record of extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual assault. Germany and Sweden, which supply peacekeeping and counterterrorism reinforcements in the region, have issued similar ultimatums. The deployment of Russian mercenaries to Mali “can only further deteriorate the security situation in West Africa,” France and 14 other Western powers said in a December joint statement. But in West Africa, Western powers are losing popular support. French forces have also faced accusations of hurting civilians — such as when a U.N. probe found that an airstrike in central Mali killed 19 bystanders. Protests across Mali and Burkina Faso feature signs that say: “France, get out!” In the Malian capital, Bamako, demonstrators have turned out by the thousands this month to support the military. Some waved posters that read: “I love Russia.” “People look at the things going wrong and they blame the government for it, or they blame France for it,” said Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim, a West Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group in Niger. Military juntas, meanwhile, seek legitimacy, he added, “so they are quite tempted by these populist ideas” — new partnerships — “so they can garner more support.” However, army rule has not translated to less death in Mali. In the year before the junta rose to power, researchers counted 1,815 conflict-related fatalities in the nation. That figure did not fall in 2020 (2,854) or 2021 (1,915), according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
One report found that security forces killed more West Africans in 2020 than extremist groups. The coup in Burkina Faso, meanwhile, has made it harder for regional leaders to punish military uprisings, said Mathias Hounkpe, program director for the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in Bamako.
“If you are alone, you can be singled out,” Hounkpe said. “But now you have Guinea and are adding Burkina Faso.” When Mali postponed democracy-restoring elections to 2026 and the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, moved to seal borders and halt trade with the nation this month, Guinea’s junta refused to go along, tossing Bamako an essential lifeline.
“ ECOWAS’s reactions are going to be challenged increasingly by countries that feel addressing security issues is more important than restoring constitutional order,” said Ousmane Diallo, a West African researcher at Amnesty International in Dakar, Senegal. As he watched the military’s announcement Monday, Burkinabe choreographer Salia Sanou said he didn’t feel safer.
“It’s a terrible feeling of starting over again,” he said. Sanou runs a dance studio in the capital, Ouagadougou, that caters to children uprooted by violence. They had to cancel practice this week. “The coup,” he said, “is not a solution to the deep evil that the country is enduring.” © The Washington Post 2022

Five men were sentenced to 30 years each in prison in a ruling hailed as vindication for survivors who have spent years fighting for justice By Sandra Cuffe Five former paramilitary patrolmen have been sentenced to jail for the rape of Maya Achi women during Guatemala’s civil war. Photograph: Johan Ordóñez/AFP/Getty Images Indigenous women raped by paramilitaries during Guatemala’s brutal civil war have triumphed in court, when their aggressors were sentenced to 30 years each in prison. In a verdict hailed as a vindication for survivors who have spent years fighting for justice, a tribunal convicted five former paramilitary patrolmen of crimes against humanity for the rape of five Maya Achi women in the early 1980s. “We are very happy, very satisfied with the outcome,” said Brisna Caxaj, a sociologist and gender programme coordinator for Impunity Watch Guatemala, who accompanied the women during the trial. “The tribunal recognised the use of sexual violence during the armed conflict because it was systematic, and it also established how the army used the [paramilitaries] to commit those crimes,” Caxaj told the Guardian. The verdict is also slightly bittersweet. A group of 36 Maya Achi survivors initiated the legal proceedings that eventually led to Monday’s verdict, but three of the women died in the intervening period, including one just last week. Pedrina López, one of the five women whose cases were directly included in the trial, was only 12 years old when she was raped in Rabinal, 80km north of Guatemala City. She testified during the trial and took the stand again Monday morning to call for justice. “What happened never leaves us,” López told the courtroom on Monday morning prior to the verdict. “My body has been left with everything that happened.” López also called for paramilitaries to return the remains of her parents, who were taken away and forcibly disappeared. Other Maya Achi survivors of sexual violence witnessed massacres of relatives, including children. Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war left an estimated 200,000 people dead and 45,000 people disappeared. Many of the worst atrocities occurred in the early 1980s. The 36-year armed conflict was between leftist guerrilla groups and the military, but the military’s counterinsurgency campaign, which included paramilitaries, was also deployed against indigenous civilians. Maya Achi women await the verdict of a court on the case of five paramilitaries accused of sexually assaulting 36 indigenous women during Guatemala’s civil war. Photograph: Esteban Biba/EPA More than 80% of victims of atrocities were indigenous Maya civilians, according to a United Nations-backed truth commission, which also documented more than 600 massacres carried out by the military and paramilitaries. State actors committed acts of genocide in some regions of the country, including the Achi region, the truth commission concluded. A domestic court concurred in 2018, and high-ranking former military officials are facing trial for genocide. “Sexual violence was part of the war,” the three-judge tribunal affirmed in its verdict on Monday, noting sexual violence was generalised and systemic against Achi women, who were also subjected to domestic slavery. Nearly six years ago, two former military officers were convicted of crimes against humanity for the systemic rape and enslavement of 11 Maya Q’eqchi’ women in the 1980s in eastern Guatemala. That landmark case helped Achi survivors advance their own. In 2019, however, a judge originally on the Achi women’s case acquitted three paramilitary patrolmen and provisionally acquitted another three, releasing them all from custody. The men are also indigenous and some are from the same villages as the female survivors. The army recruited, often forcibly, local men into paramilitary “civil defence patrols” during the civil war. “The women were challenged by relatives of the accused, and they faced taunts and insults when the men got out,” said Lucia Xiloj, one of three indigenous female lawyers who represents the Achi women joint plaintiffs. “They have faced so many difficulties,” she told the Guardian, noting the women faced stigma in court as well as back home. The conviction is a victory for the women, and their communities will see they were heard and believed, said Xiloj. “The tribunal highlighted in its arguments the importance of the testimonies of the women,” she said. “It vindicates all those years of struggle during their search for justice.” © 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

Genocide Watch is issuing a Genocide Warning for Belarus. The country has experienced widespread political repression since 1994 under the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator. Lukashenko claims to have won reelection for a sixth time in 2020 with 80% of the vote, but the European Union declared the election to be neither free nor fair. During election season, internet access was restricted, especially during protests, rallies, and election day. Millions of Belarussians took to the streets to protest the results, leading to brutal crackdowns. Over ten thousand peaceful protesters were arrested and tortured. The Lukashenko government attempts to silence any expression of dissent through arrest, imprisonment, exile, censorship, torture, and threats of murder. Lukashenko’s main political rival, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was forced to flee from Belarus under government pressure after the 2020 presidential election. Since the election, the government has imprisoned over 600 political prisoners at home and detained journalists, activists, and other outspoken critics. Government air traffic controllers forcibly diverted a Ryanair flight to Minsk to arrest blogger Roman Protasevich, who is openly critical of Lukashenko. Belarussian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya also sought asylum in Poland for fear of detention and punishment from the government. Tsimanouskaya refused orders to return to Belarus from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics after accusing her coaches of negligence, prompting Belarussian officials and media to label her as a traitor. Concern for politically active exiles increased after Belarussian activist Vitaly Shishov was found dead in Kyiv, Ukraine, in August 2021. Ukrainian officials found him hanged in a park near his home, but they believe that his death was murder masked as suicide. Shishov was the director of the Belarusian House in Ukraine, an organization that helped Belarussian citizens escape repression and censorship after the anti-election protests. His death has been blamed on the Belarussian KGB. In mid-2021, 4,000 refugees and asylum seekers were trapped on the Belarus-Poland border for months. They suffered from beatings, hunger, thirst, torture, sickness, injuries, and hypothermia. Belarussian border officials prevented migrants from re-entering Belarus. The Polish border patrol pushed back asylum seekers. Border guards on both sides prevented humanitarian aid from reaching migrant camps. The European Union received criticism for not sending aid, especially after the death of a one-year-old Syrian boy at the border. At least 13 people died at the Belarus-Poland border. In addition, the build-up of Russian forces at the Belarus-Ukraine border in January 2022 is an ominous prelude to what will likely be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Genocide Watch considers Belarus to be at Stage 6: Polarization and Stage 8: Persecution. Genocide Watch recommends: The US and EU should demand the release of all imprisoned Belorussian politicians, journalists, activists, and protesters. The US and EU should demand President Lukashenko’s resignation, followed by free and fair democratic elections. International and national courts should prosecute Belarussian officials who have abused political protesters and asylum seekers who were trapped at the Polish-Belarussian border. Surrounding countries like Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, and Latvia should assist refugees and asylum seekers and receive financial support from the EU and the US to do so. Download alert.

Ghazi al-Qadasi closes his apparel store early these days to rush home as residents of the Yemeni capital brace for further air strikes by a Saudi-led coalition after at least 20 people were killed in a bombing two days ago. FILE PHOTO: A building with shattered windows is reflected on fragments of window glass broken by a Saudi-led air strike on a nearby military site in Sanaa, Yemen January 19, 2022. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah “There have been three days of very strong strikes,” said Qadasi, whose store is in Sanaa’s Hael district, which lies 1 km (0.62 mile) from a military area that had been struck. “Clients are scared and we have started closing our stores early to go make sure our children are inside the house.” Sanaa, held by Iran-aligned Houthi forces since 2014, had since 2020 enjoyed relative calm as fighting flared elsewhere in Yemen. But in September the coalition resumed attacks on military sites belonging to the Houthis, which had ramped up cross-border missile and drone launches on Saudi cities and on Monday struck the United Arab Emirates. Ahmed al-Hashedi and his family live in a building near a military academy on the road leading to Sanaa airport. A dawn air strike on Wednesday shattered the windows and left gaping holes in the walls. “They (coalition) have ruined our lives. There is nothing left. Where shall we go, the street?” Hashedi, 48, said. The United Nations has urged de-escalation in the nearly seven-year-old conflict in which more than 100,000 people have been killed and 4 million displaced in a war marked by coalition air strikes as well as Houthi shelling and missiles. The coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 after the Houthis ousted the Saudi-backed government from Sanaa. The Houthis say they are fighting foreign aggression. As violence escalates, the International Rescue Committee called in a statement on Thursday for the reinstatement of a war crimes investigations body which was shut down last October. It cited data from the Yemen Data Project showing that in the two months after the panel was closed, coalition bombing rates had increased by 43%. In Sanaa’s Hael district, government employee Saleem Rajeh said he worries about leaving his family to go to work, while silverware store owner Ibrahim Alwan feels trapped. “You think about leaving but where do you go? You can’t make a living in the countryside,” Alwan said. “So do you stay here and wait for the air strikes or do you leave? We are in an unenviable position.” Reporting by Yemen team; writing by Ghaida Ghantous; editing by Mark Heinrich © 2022 Reuters.

Two mosques have been damaged in two different cities in southeast France as racist graffiti aimed at Muslims was sprayed on walls in a western town. Several Islamophobic attacks have taken place in France recently amid a government crackdown on mosques under a controversial “anti-separatism” law. Two mosques were vandalized early on Tuesday in La Mure and Domene in southeast France, according to local media. When the congregation arrived at the mosque in La Mure, which is run by the Turkish Muslim community, they found that the trash bins in front of the building had been overturned, the mailbox and door handle damaged, and a small Turkish flag pennant was partially burned. Islamophobic graffiti such as "Muslims are harmful" was written on the wall of the mosque as well. Security forces have launched an investigation into the incident. In a separate incident, a person believed to be drunk entered a mosque in Domene on the evening of December 27, damaged the place, and wrote statements on a tablecloth accusing the imam and the community of inciting terrorism. The attacker managed to escape from the mosque. The security forces are investigating whether there is a connection between the two attacks. Meanwhile, racist graffiti targeting Muslims was also written on the walls in the center of Chateau-Gontier town in the Pays de la Loire region. One of them read “Islam out of Europe”. On Twitter, French Interior Minister Gerard Darmanin said that he supports the affected Muslims in La Mure and Chateau-Gontier and that such heinous acts are against the Republic’s values. In a statement, the Coordination Committee of Turkish Muslims in France (CCMTF), said that anti-Muslim, racist, and xenophobic ideas have been on the rise in the country, especially recently, and Muslims have been exposed to direct attacks Pointing out that Muslims have witnessed an escalating hatred towards them with the closure of mosques, attacks on places of worship, and Islamophobic graffiti, the statement called for the condemnation of these attacks and for bringing the perpetrators to justice. With a controversial “anti-separatism” law adopted in August, Paris tightened the controls on Muslim establishments, places of worship, and influential Muslim figures. On Tuesday, regional authorities ordered the closure of a mosque in the north of the country. The mosque in Beauvais, a town of 50,000 people some 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Paris, will remain shut for six months, according to the prefecture of the Oise region where Beauvais is located. It said the sermons there incite hatred and violence. The international community, especially the UN, as well as non-governmental organizations and human rights organizations have criticized the French government for targeting and marginalizing Muslims. As a result of the inspections carried out in 99 mosques this year upon the instructions of the French Interior Ministry, 22 of them were then closed, and legal proceedings were initiated against six of them. (c) 2021 TRTWorld

The Haridwar hate assembly: the answer to divisive politics is not law alone, but also civil society mobilisation The Leaflet By Sukumar Muralidharan January 11, 2022 India and the world have a long way to go in legislating a practical set of principles on hate speech. Standards of civility are meanwhile under challenge as citizens of even the most stable liberal democracies retreat into narrow ghettos of identity, and respect for the dignity of the “other” disappears, writes SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN A three-day festival of hate speech in Haridwar has prompted a phase of extreme investigative diligence by the Uttarakhand police. Few are holding their breath since the transformation of investigation into obfuscation is already apparent. Explicit video recordings of the Haridwar event, rather pretentiously called a Dharm Sansad, began circulating over social media soon after it concluded on December 19. Police in Uttarakhand and elsewhere received complaints demanding action under applicable statutes against the celebration of violence and the calls for the mass killing of people from minority faiths. Yet, beyond the cursory initial move of “first information reports”, there was little further action. In some dismay, legal scholars wrote of an abundance of statutes available to bring the culprits to book. Senior military officers and bureaucrats, including former chiefs of the defence forces, warned that the rhetoric of hate could cause “serious breaches in internal security (and also) tear apart the social fabric of our nation”. And normally quiescent faculty and students from the Indian Institutes of Management and other educational institutions wrote to the Prime Minister, stating what seemed the obvious: “Your silence on the rising intolerance in our country … emboldens the hate-filled voices and threatens the unity and integrity of our country”. Civility and social concord are built up over the years and their observance is a matter of custom, only inviting the force of law when a violent rupture is imminent. Yet, the force of law diminishes when votes could potentially be harvested by promoting embitterment. Power is meant to be exercised under the law, but the process through which power is constituted often takes lawless forms. When the retention of power at all costs becomes a consuming object, agencies of the law could be directed to abet in endemic lawlessness. This distinction between “hate speech” as actual incitement and as part of the background conditions in which the crime of genocide occurs, creates further ambiguities. It gives rise to a possibility, in the judgment of the ICTR, of “hate speech that does not instigate violence”. Again, diligent observance of these distinctions may well ensure that interventions are too late to stop an outbreak of violence. Rhetorical violence as a precursor to the disenfranchisement of those seen to not “belong” within the nation, is a recognised means for extreme populists to fire up core constituencies and attract new adherents. Constitutional democracies could devise remedies to these frailties in practice, but these are in turn to be implemented by an executive agency constituted in electoral competition. This raises the age-old question: who will educate the educators? In general, the limits on speech are observed as part of an unstated code, with legal restraints prior to the speech act normally being frowned on. If violent consequences follow from speech acts, there is a plethora of laws available for enforcing accountability in varying degrees of rigour. Force was employed in blatantly lawless manners to crush dissent in December 2019, as streets in Delhi began to teem with protests against highly questionable amendments in India’s citizenship law. The protests occurred at a particularly delicate juncture, since elections to the Delhi state assembly were approaching. Intent on doing what they do best, campaigners from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) raised the pitch of the rhetoric as the campaign intensified, with explicit exhortations for further violence against the demonstrators. The BJP lost the Delhi election decisively and a visit soon afterwards by U.S. President Donald Trump was no deterrent, as waves of vengeful violence broke out in a working class suburb of the capital city on a scale unseen for three decades. A petition before the Delhi High Court, demanding immediate FIR’s against the politicians for their words of incitement, led to immediate notices to the local police and the abrupt transfer of the judge involved. The matter has since languished with little prospect of being settled, even two years since the events. Exception to free speech All legal systems recognise hate as a necessary exception to free speech, but as with other issues where culture plays a role, no agreed global standard on the matter exists. The US First Amendment introduced constitutional protections for free speech towards the end of the 18th century, but immediately wrote in a series of exemptions for acts of “seditious” and “blasphemous” libel. In the 20th century came the Espionage Act, another powerful impediment to free speech. Established governments have always legislated on speech in ways to sustain themselves. It was only in the 20th century when the news media and creative arts were themselves institutionalised within the fabric of democratic societies, that more expansive interpretations of free speech gained traction. This shift in judicial standards has since been consolidated. In 1952, in a brief retraction the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) upheld in the case of Beauharnais v Illinois, a token penalty against a white supremacist who railed against “mongrelisation” and a determined pushback against the “rapes, robberies, guns, knives and marijuana of the negro”. Subsequent rulings though have tilted towards an absolutist interpretation of the free speech right. In 1969, in a case involving a Ku Klux Klan leader calling for the “return” of the “nigger” to Africa and the Jew to Israel, SCOTUS unanimously held conviction by a lower court unlawful and instituted a two-part test for assessing when an act of speech breached constitutional boundaries: both the intent to incite violence and the connection with any such consequent action had to be established. This was a high bar to clear for any form of prior restraint on speech: a test that came to be known, after the defendant in the case, as the Brandenburg test. In 1977, in what seemed a step too far in free speech licence, a US Court of Appeals held that local government ordinances to stop a neo-Nazi demonstration in the village of Skokie near Chicago, were unconstitutional. It did not seem of any material importance that the town in question had a substantial Jewish population including survivors of Nazi death camps, or that the leader of the Skokie march was credited with the view that “Hitler should have completed the job”. SCOTUS subsequently declined to hear the case, allowing the Appeals Court’s decision to stand. Are these standards acceptable as general principles? Safeguards are essential since prior restraint is a two-edged sword, which could be used to crack down on speech advocating on behalf of the disadvantaged. As Anthony Lewis points out in a “biography” of the First Amendment: freedom of speech as a constitutional guarantee “is meant to assure Americans that they can believe what they will and say what they believe. But repeatedly, in times of fear and stress, men and women have been hunted, humiliated, punished for their words and beliefs”. Yet, giving effect to the Brandenburg standards is a practically fraught process, seemingly requiring an accurate means of judging “intent” and an ability to foretell when it would result in real violence. One would be an ex-ante test, premised solely upon the evidence of a speech act and the context of its commission. The other would be an ex post test to be applied in case there violence in close temporal proximity to the speech act. In Charlottesville in the U.S. state of Virginia, a conglomerate of forces including fringe and neo-Nazi groups, mobilised for a “Unite the Right Rally” in 2017, to protest the removal from a prominent public space, of a relic from the age of slavery. Explicit slogans celebrating white supremacy were raised, and as counter demonstrators mobilised, a right-wing rallyist ploughed through their ranks in a car, killing one. The car-borne killer was later tried and sentenced on a homicide charge, but were the antecedent conditions that led to the violence preventable? Did free speech as a fetish rather than value, actually contribute to a climate of violence and the needless loss of one life? The philosopher Jeremy Waldron, who often uses that intangible value of human “dignity” to construct his arguments, is in fundamental disagreement with the standards inherent in the Brandenburg and Skokie cases. “The issue”, he says in a recent book, is “the harm done to individuals and groups through the disfiguring of our social environment by visible, public, and semi-permanent announcements to the effect that in the opinion of one group in the community, perhaps the majority, members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship”. Waldron recognises that a hate speech code could conceivably endanger “vigorous dissenters” with punishment. That was not a hazard to be discounted, but to focus on this possibility alone, while ignoring “other ways in which waves of public hysteria (could) threaten freedom” was fairly useless. Majoritarian bullying, for instance, has become a potent threat to free speech in recent times, though it often escapes being called out because it claims a higher moral value. International law against genocide More stringent standards than those applicable in the US have been specified in international instruments such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, called the CoG for short, the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). All legal systems recognise hate as a necessary exception to free speech, but as with other issues where culture plays a role, no agreed global standard on the matter exists. The CoG for instance, makes the “direct and public incitement” to commit genocide, in turn defined with a fair measure of rigour, a punishable crime. CoG was applied in a real-life situation after the horrific mass violence against the Tutsi tribal group by Hutus of Rwanda in 1994, when between 500,000 to 1,000,000 were killed in the space of three months. This was a campaign of violence that was aided by virulent messages of racial hatred broadcast over Radio Rwanda. An International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up to deal with this genocide, came up in 2003 with a formulation of what constituted “direct and public incitement”. The ICTR recognised the role of mass media in “contributing to a hateful campaign against the Tutsis”. “The direct element of incitement should be viewed in the light of its cultural and linguistic content”, the Tribunal ruled: “Indeed, a particular speech may be perceived as ‘direct’ in one country, and not so in another, depending on the audience”. This distinction between “hate speech” as actual incitement and as part of the background conditions in which the crime of genocide occurs, creates further ambiguities. It gives rise to a possibility, in the judgment of the ICTR, of “hate speech that does not instigate violence”. Again, diligent observance of these distinctions may well ensure that interventions are too late to stop an outbreak of violence. Other international instruments, such as the ICCPR, opened for signature in 1964 and ratified by India in 1979, enjoins member states to prohibit by law, “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence”. ICERD, opened for signature in 1967 and ratified by India in 1969, has an article which specifically bans speech advocating discrimination on grounds of identity. The elusive principles “Hate speech” as a term is rarely if ever used in the Indian legal system, though there is a seeming surfeit of laws dealing with like offences. Apart from the general guarantees under fundamental rights, specific protections based on identity are available for indigenous communities and those traditionally disadvantaged under the caste system: Dalits and Adivasis in common terminology. Though all forms of discrimination are prohibited under the fundamental rights, the Constitution adds an additional layer of protection with the formal abolition of untouchability under Article 17. This seeming redundancy is clearly a safeguard against ambiguities in interpretation. A later enactment, the Protection of Civil Rights Act of 1955, provides for sanctions when the dignity of citizens covered by the ban on untouchability is undermined. This does not mean that other citizens do not have civil rights, only that the disabilities inflicted on certain classes of citizens deserve special attention. The passage of the Prevention of Atrocities on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act in later years, created a special category of protection for two traditionally disadvantaged classes of citizens. Protections based on religious identity are absent in the Indian constitutional scheme, since there is an element within it of the French revolutionary idea, the “Jacobin” denial of religion as a political fact. Section 153 of the Indian Penal Code though, does criminalise the “promotion of enmity between different groups” on grounds of identity. Likewise, a more explicit prohibition of insults to religion or religious belief was written in with Section 295A, after the Rangeela Rasool controversy of the 1920s. Yet, these provisions of the statute remain empty without authoritative judicial interpretations. If the touchstones of violence and public disorder were applied, a case that literally called out for prosecution involved Bal Thackeray, leader of the Shiv Sena, after he used the party newspaper Saamna to exhort his cadre into a ten-day long rampage in the city of Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1993. There was little ambiguity here, nor any effort to disavow responsibility as the front page of the newspaper, day after day, carried orders for battle for Shiv Sena cadre. As the violence raged, a group of public-spirited individuals filed a petition before a city court demanding Thackeray’s prosecution for words – printed and spoken — that contributed directly to the violence. Mumbai city police opposed the petition on the grounds that the matter fell within the jurisdiction of the Press Council of India – an unwieldy and inept body crippled at birth, with no more than the power of censuring delinquent behaviour in the press. The petition filed in the public interest was thrown out at that point, but later revived when an official commission of inquiry in 1998, held Thackeray guilty of inciting violence. A symbolic arrest was effected but the case was held void under the statute of limitations. In 2009, Varun Gandhi, a BJP candidate contesting for the Lok Sabha from Pilibhit constituency in the Uttar Pradesh terai, was recorded exhorting the voters of the Hindu faith to vote for him as a matter of religious obligation. Any hand that was raised with intent to harm a Hindu, he warned, would be ruthlessly cut off. In a constituency with a substantial number of voters of other faiths, Gandhi ended his speech with a particularly gross reference to the religious ritual of circumcision. A similar pejorative, not quite as crass, was also hurled at those of the Sikh faith. Gandhi spent 20 days in prison on charges of incitement to violence and other provisions of criminal law. He returned to campaign and won his seat by over 300,000 votes, among the largest victory margins in that electoral round. He was acquitted in subsequent trial proceedings, with one witness after another turning hostile and the prosecution showing a marked disinterest in pursuing a credible strategy. Majoritarian bullying, for instance, has become a potent threat to free speech in recent times, though it often escapes being called out because it claims a higher moral value. Clearly, India and the world have a long way to go in legislating a practical set of principles on hate speech. Standards of civility are meanwhile under challenge as citizens of even the most stable liberal democracies retreat into narrow ghettos of identity, and respect for the dignity of the “other” disappears. Without those vital elements of respect and dignity – inherently matters that cannot be legislated — no legal system, however well drafted, will serve the cause of civic concord. In the acrimony that prevails today, the law of majoritarian force will continue to be deployed in electoral campaigning until civil society can mobilise for a determined pushback against divisive politics. (Sukumar Muralidharan teaches at the Jindal School of Journalism and Communication in the Delhi region. He has been a journalist and journalism instructor for over three decades, working mostly in the print media. He is the author, most recently, of Freedom, Civility, Commerce: Contemporary Media and the Public, published by Three Essays Collective.) © 2022 TheLeaflet https://www.theleaflet.in/the-haridwar-hate-assembly-the-answer-to-divisive-politics-is-not-law-but-civil-society-mobilisation/

The algebra of appeasement: 1938 and today The Jerusalem Post By ELIHU D. RICHTER JANUARY 12, 2022 Afghans carrying packages handed out by a Turkish humanitarian aid group at a distribution center in Kabul last month. President Joe Biden betrayed the Afghans. (photo credit: ALI KHARA/REUTERS) What can we do to stop a slow and steady march toward appeasement with Iran? Throughout my youth, I retained an obsession with the history of World War II and the Holocaust. I always asked myself: “What led to the outbreak of WWII?” Of course, we all know that the story of the British appeasement of Nazi Germany can be seen as the event that precipitated the outbreak of the war. Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany (September 30, 1938) was quickly followed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939), and thereafter the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In the months that followed, my father’s family in eastern Poland were caught up in the sweep of the Nazi advance and were murdered. So, I have a very personal interest, an obsession if you like, with the issue of appeasement. Historians have written a great deal about appeasement. They’re very good at looking at appeasement in hindsight, but when it comes to predicting its consequences when it occurs, their expertise falls short. We propose an algebraic definition of appeasement: A sacrifices B to placate C. In 1939, A was Great Britain, B was Czechoslovakia, and C was Nazi Germany. Neville Chamberlain (left), Hitler 370 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) Today, we can employ the algebraic model of appeasement to examine some of the latest events in our own area. In the last few years, the United States betrayed the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to placate Syria and Turkey. Thereafter, in one of their most recent betrayals, the US placated the Taliban regime as they left Afghanistan and abandoned the Afghan people. In each case, the consequence is a political environment that reflects, and is born of, weakness, vacillation and lack of moral clarity. Now, naturally, what happened in Syria and Afghanistan leads us to wonder what the future holds as relates to Iran, the US and Israel. Fortunately, Israel is a strong and independent country that takes responsibility for its security. Nevertheless, I have a very queasy feeling that America has not ruled out the possibility of sacrificing Israel to placate Iran, as part of a grand new bargain that will overshadow Chamberlain’s actions in Munich. It is true that Israel is trying to be part of the process of negotiation, but it is clearly in the outside looking in, whether we want to admit it or not. Ultimately, how so ever much the US says it’s consulting with Israel on a deal with Iran, Israel is not at the table as the parties negotiate a deal. Historians have pointed out that appeasement is immoral because the entire process excludes from the negotiation the party that is at the greatest risk of suffering the consequences of a negotiated deal. This is the situation that could evolve if there is a new deal, again, between the US, the P5+1 and Iran, while Israel is far from an equal partner. Right now, Iran makes daily threats to destroy Israel, and this has been its message since the mullahs took power in 1979. They have demonstrated a tenacity of purpose, a most remarkable one indeed, due to the intergenerational nature. Recall that the Nazi regime, from the day it came to power to its defeat in 1945, lasted a mere 12 years. The mullahs in Iran have been in power for more than 40 years already, and their message remains continued, and it is intergenerational, exhibiting a remarkable durability and strength. Iran’s statements regarding the annihilation of Israel are in direct violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits one nation from threatening to destroy another. Iran’s export of terror and support of terror groups grows stronger by the year. What I am alarmed by is what seems to be a loss of moral clarity and a failure to recognize these stark facts. It appears the civilized world has adjusted itself to a new norm, which accepts the rhetoric of genocidal threats, allowing the buildup of forces with the capacity to act upon these threats, or for the very least to intimidate, bully and threaten their neighbors, near and far alike. I’m concerned that the policies of US President Joe Biden remind me all too much of Chamberlain’s policies. These are the policies of appeasement, an attempt to strike a so-called “bargain,” in which A sacrifices B to placate C. I recall the film Darkest Hour, which described the days following the events in Dunkirk, when Winston Churchill rejected proposals to strike a deal with the Nazis. The film accurately describes Lord Halifax’s role in attempting to encourage Churchill and Chamberlain to accept such a deal. I ask whether Robert Malley, the US chief negotiator with Iran, is the Lord Halifax of our time? I ask what we in Israel can do to stop what we believe to be a slow and steady march toward appeasement with Iran, in which Israel is put at a greater risk than ever before? We must state the case for appeasement’s fundamental immorality. We are asked to watch from the side as a deal is on the way with a nation whose current president is a known butcher of his own people, having sent thousands to the gallows in the 1980s to firm down the mullahs’ rule. Iran remains still at the highest rate of executions per capita. We must remind ourselves and everyone what the UN Charter is all about: recognizing the respect for the security and sovereignty of all nations. We must demand an end to Iranian indoctrination and incitement, which promotes terror and calls for the destruction of Israel. I recall that back in 2007, some Christian friends of Israel successfully sponsored a congressional resolution H.Con.Res.21, which was passed by the US House of Representatives almost unanimously. This resolution was based upon an earlier version issued by Genocide Watch in 2006, whose president is Prof. Gregory. H. Stanton, a pioneer in genocide prevention. The resolution calls for the “United Nations Security Council to charge Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Charter because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.” To reach the Senate’s floor the resolution required the approval of the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who at that time was Senator Joseph Biden. I accompanied Richard Hellman, an American Christian Zionist, who lobbied for the resolution, to that office. Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers told us they were against the resolution. In short, I was a firsthand witness to appeasement in the making. As we all recall, right after Munich, Chamberlain increased the military budget of weapons to prepare Britain for war. It was Chamberlain after all who declared war on Germany immediately after the invasion of Poland. We’ll never know whether a tough British posture would have prevented the outbreak of WWII, but there is no doubt that appeasement in response to Germany’s threats only invited further threats and aggression. The fundamentally immoral algebra of appeasement has its own dynamics. It happened at Munich; it happened with president Donald Trump and the Kurds, and lately it happened with President Biden’s betrayal of the Afghans. Apologists for appeasing Iran equate Israel’s settlement policies with Iranian terror, aggression, indoctrination, and incitement. This serves as an excuse to disregard Israel’s security in efforts to sign a deal with Iran. The obvious truth must be stated: there can be no moral equivalence here. The disagreement between Israel and the Palestinians reflects a very complicated political conflict. The negotiation process must rely on the first principles of prevention of genocide, genocidal terror, and incitement to both. These first principles include respecting the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the sovereignty of nations, and of course the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, the concern for these principles is pushed aside by the US and the P5+1 negotiators. Chamberlain upon returning from Munich promised “peace with honor.” As we recall, Churchill declared that the agreement would bring neither peace nor honor. We all know how that played out in the end. It is astonishing to realize how far the US has drifted since 2007, when a brave bipartisan message was declared by Congress in its resolution recommending the indictment of the Iranian regime for incitement of genocide, its terrorism, and its human rights violations. The dynamic of appeasement is clear: It is a self-perpetuating cycle that can lead to disaster. The writer is a retired head of the Unit of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Hebrew University School of Public Health. He is the founder of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention. His recent work focuses on the role of indoctrination and incitement. Copyright 2022 The Jerusalem Post

Murder, Torture, Rape: A Landmark Conviction on State Violence in Syria The New York Times January 13, 2022 By Ben Hubbard and Katrin Bennhold A German court found a former Syrian intelligence officer guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison — a first after a decade of war. Anwar Raslan, a former officer at a Damascus detention center, was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison.Credit...Pool photo by Thomas Frey To view video click here. When detainees arrived at the security office in Syria, it “welcomed” them with an hour of whipping or beating, they told a German court. They were held in packed, sweltering cells and fed potatoes that tasted like diesel. They drank from toilets. One recalled passing dead bodies in a hallway. A woman said interrogators inflicted electric shocks on her hands, legs and chest during questioning. In the world’s first trial prosecuting state-sponsored torture in Syria, the German court, in Koblenz, on Thursday convicted the former intelligence official in charge of that security office, the notorious al-Khatib unit in Damascus, of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison. The ruling said the former officer, Anwar Raslan, 58, oversaw the torture of prisoners and the killing of at least 27 people, in addition to sexual abuse and “particularly grave rape” of detainees. Human rights lawyers and Syrian survivors hailed the verdict as a landmark in the international quest to hold accountable those who committed war crimes during nearly 11 years of war in Syria. It also set a precedent reaching far beyond Syria: It was the first to target atrocities by a government that is still in power, said Stefanie Bock, the director of the International Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials at the University of Marburg in Germany. “This was a very important verdict,” Ms. Bock said. “The signal is: There is no safe haven for war criminals. It’s a clear sign that the world will not stand by and do nothing.” But the conviction also highlighted the stark limitations of international efforts to bring war criminals from countries like Syria to justice. Mr. Raslan, who served as a colonel in a Syrian intelligence service, was ultimately just a cog in the extensive machinery of repression in Syria. Many Syrians far more powerful than Mr. Raslan — accused not only of committing more extensive crimes, but of crafting policies that resulted in mass civilian deaths — are still living freely in Syria, including its autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad. Holding pictures of Syrian civil war victims outside the courthouse where Mr. Raslan was on trial on Thursday in Koblenz, Germany.Credit...Bernd Lauter/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “My question is: Is this the type of justice we’re looking for?” said Lina Mouhmade, who testified about being detained in Mr. Raslan’s center in 2012. “Honestly, the justice I am looking for is prosecuting Bashar himself and his collaborators, who are still committing horrifying crimes.” Mr. Raslan left Syria in 2012, in the war’s second year, and joined the political opposition, which helped him secure a visa to Germany in 2014. The war continued to rage for several more years, with Syrian forces using poison gas, imposing starvation sieges on rebellious communities and reducing residential neighborhoods to rubble through bombing campaigns. Both the rebels who tried and failed to oust Mr. al-Assad, and jihadists from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State who took advantage of the conflict’s chaos, also committed war crimes. But only a few perpetrators on all sides have been prosecuted. One reason, experts say, is that unlike leading Nazis after World War II or Rwandan officials who were convicted of the atrocities they committed, the Syrian government, whose military and security services are responsible for the bulk of the violence in the country, remains in power, preventing the apprehension of its leaders and officers. Mr. al-Assad and his senior advisers and military commanders rarely travel abroad. When they do, they go only to countries they can count on not to arrest them, like Russia, a staunch supporter of Mr. al-Assad. Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not a party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court. As a result, victims of the Syrian government and human rights lawyers have focused their efforts in countries that accept “universal jurisdiction,” a principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecution do not apply. Setting up pictures of victims of the Syrian war during a protest outside the trial. Credit...Thomas Lohnes/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Owing partly to its own Nazi-era history, Germany has become a go-to venue for such prosecutions. It has also become home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to prosecute Syrian officials. Most of the Syrian refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016 fled Mr. al-Assad’s forces. But some, like Mr. Raslan, had served in the president’s military and security services. German prosecutors built their case against Mr. Raslan with the help of scores of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They also drew on a separate investigation that has been collecting evidence for over a decade to illuminate the Syrian state's inner workings and command structure. The concept of universal jurisdiction goes back to the Nuremberg trials, organized by the Allies after World War II to prosecute surviving members of the Nazi regime. Israel used it in the 1961 trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by members of the Islamic State. When it comes to Syria, Thursday’s verdict is only one small puzzle piece in the hope for justice, Ms. Bock said. “In time, there needs to be a truth commission and alternative mechanisms to deal with all the injustices,” she said. “You need to think very long term.” The defendant in the courtroom before the announcement of the verdict.Credit...Pool photo by Thomas Frey The Nuremberg trials went after the leading surviving members of the Nazi regime, but also after a range of individuals who played important roles in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which represented victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial. “That’s what made it possible to get a picture of the whole apparatus that led to the Holocaust,” Mr. Kaleck said. Mr. Raslan’s trial, he added, “is a first step in trying to get a picture of the crimes committed by al-Assad’s regime.” Other prosecutions are already being prepared. A Syrian doctor accused of torturing detainees in a secret military prison and killing at least one of them will soon stand trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the cases have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers. But lower-level prosecutions could facilitate future prosecutions of more senior officials by introducing documents, witness statements and knowledge about the Syrian state’s operations into the court record, Mr. Kaleck said. “If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get al-Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. The verdict stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself. Many rejoiced at knowing that a man who had overseen interrogations at a security office in Damascus was in the dock himself. “This guy who once considered himself the tyrant, the powerful head of the station, I see him standing in court, weak and humiliated,” said Mahran Aoiun, who was detained twice in the early years of the war. “And the people he tortured are stronger.” Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them but are still free. “It is the beginning of a path,” said Wassim Mukdad, who was jailed four times early in the uprising and said he was interrogated by Mr. Raslan himself. “It will be a long one toward justice.” Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Katrin Bennhold from Berlin. Reporting was contributed by Christopher F. Schuetze in Berlin and Hwaida Saad in Beirut. Ben Hubbard is the Beirut bureau chief. He has spent more than a dozen years in the Arab world, including Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen. He is the author of “MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman.” @NYTBen Katrin Bennhold is the Berlin bureau chief. A former Nieman fellow at Harvard University, she previously reported from London and Paris, covering a range of topics from the rise of populism to gender. @kbennhold • Facebook A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 14, 2022, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Landmark Conviction on Syrian War Crimes. Copyright 2022 The New York Times Company

Ethnic Uyghur women take part in a protest against China, in front of the Caglayan Courthouse in Istanbul, Turkey, January 4, 2022. REUTERS/Dilara Senkaya Nineteen people from China's Uyghur Muslim ethnic group filed a criminal complaint with a Turkish prosecutor on Tuesday against Chinese officials, accusing them of committing genocide, torture, rape and crimes against humanity. Lawyer Gulden Sonmez said it was necessary because international bodies had not acted against Chinese authorities, who have been accused of facilitating forced labour by detaining around a million Uyghurs and other primarily Muslim minorities in camps since 2016. China initially denied the camps existed, but has since said they are vocational centres and are designed to combat extremism. It denies all accusations of abuse. About 50,000 Uyghurs - with whom Turks share ethnic, religious and linguistic connections - are believed to reside in Turkey, the largest Uyghur diaspora outside Central Asia. The complaint was filed with the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office. China's embassy in Turkey and the prosecutor's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. "The international criminal court should have already started this trial, but China is a member of the (United Nations) Security Council and it does not seem possible within this dynamic," Sonmez said outside the city's main courthouse. Surrounding the lawyer were more than 50 people holding photos of missing family members and signs calling for the prosecution of Chinese officials. Some waved the blue-and-white flags of the independence movement of East Turkestan, a group Beijing says threatens the stability of its far western region of Xinjiang. Ethnic Uyghur women take part in a protest against China, in front of the Caglayan Courthouse, in Istanbul, Turkey, January 4, 2022. REUTERS/Dilara Senkaya An ethnic Uyghur man takes part in a protest against China, in front of the Caglayan Courthouse, in Istanbul, Turkey, January 4, 2022. REUTERS/Dilara Senkaya Ethnic Uyghur men take part in a protest against China, in front of the Caglayan Courthouse, in Istanbul, Turkey, January 4, 2022. REUTERS/Dilara Senkaya The complaint relates to 116 people who the complainants say are still detained in China and was filed against 112 people, including members of the Chinese Communist Party, directors and officers at labour camps. "Turkish legislation recognises universal jurisdiction. Torture, genocide, rape (and) crimes against humanity can be prosecuted in Turkish courts and criminals can be tried," Sonmez said. 'RESCUE MY SISTER' Medine Nazimi, one of those who filed the criminal complaint, said her sister had been taken away in 2017 and she had not been heard from since. "My sister and I are Turkish citizens so I want my government to rescue my sister," Nazimi said. Some of the Uyghurs living in Turkey have criticised Ankara's approach to China after the two nations agreed an extradition treaty. Turkey's foreign minister said in March the deal was similar to those Ankara has with other states and denied it would lead to Uyghurs being sent back to China. Some Turkish opposition leaders have accused the government of overlooking Uyghur rights in favour of other interests with China, which the government denies. President Tayyip Erdogan told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in July that it was important to Turkey that Uyghur Muslims lived in peace as "equal citizens of China", but said Turkey respected China's national sovereignty. U.N. experts and rights groups estimate more than a million people, mainly from the Uyghur and other Muslim minorities, have been detained in recent years in camps in Xinjiang. Writing by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Alex Richardson © Reuters 2022

Forty years after the heinous state-sponsored crimes were committed, Maya Achi women get their day in court. By Jo-Marie Burt and Paulo Estrada The Maya Achí women survivors, Guatemala City. (Verdad y Justicia en Guatemala / JMR) In 2019, a judge decided not to believe 36 Maya Achi women who accused six men of acts of sexual violence that took place between 1981 and 1985, the height of Guatemala’s bloody 1960-1996 internal armed conflict. The judge dismissed the charges and the men walked free. The accused—all former members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), paramilitaries created by the Guatemalan army—likely did not imagine that the women survivors would successfully recuse that judge. Nor could they have known that another former PAC member, the brother of one of the six, would soon be deported to Guatemala from the United States to face his own criminal proceedings. After a series of hearings in 2021, a new judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez, ruled that there was sufficient evidence to send that man and three of those freed in 2019 to trial. He later added a fifth man who had previously been a fugitive. The incredible tenacity of the Maya Achi women survivors, who began seeking justice more than a decade ago, and the steadfast support of their legal representatives—Indigenous women lawyers Gloria Reyes, Lucía Xiloj, and Haydeé Valey—made it possible for their case to be heard in court today. The presiding judge is Yassmín Barrios, known internationally for her fierce independence and her role in previous high-profile cases, including the 2013 genocide trial against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and the 2016 Sepur Zarco trial, the first to address wartime sexual violence committed by the Guatemalan army. Now, the Maya Achi sexual violence case is a striking reminder that while the old guard military and their oligarchic allies might be trying to block the sun with one finger—to use a well-known Latin American saying—the light still finds a way to shine through. A Long Search for Justice The Rabinal Legal Clinic (ABJP) began to collect testimonies from surviving victims of army massacres in the village of Chichupac and surrounding communities in the early 2000s. Given the difficulties of pursing prosecutions in Guatemala, in 2007 ABJP lawyers filed a complaint on behalf of the victims before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “Clear patterns began to emerge,” recalls lawyer Haydeé Valey, who has been accompanying women survivors since 2011. “The women were detained during market days, when they went to sell their surplus crops and livestock. The PACs accused them of being guerrillas. They were then detained and taken to the Rabinal military detachment, where they were interrogated about weapons, about their husbands, about guerrilla activity, and then they were gang raped.” Sometimes women were raped in their homes amid military operations carried out by soldiers and the PACs. “They would go to the women’s homes and ask for their husbands,” says Valey. “They would rape women and girls, with no regard for their age.” The military also pursued and attempted to capture the surviving victims who fled to the mountains. “Several women were captured, raped, and then taken to the military detachment,” she says, where they were raped again and again. The ABJP lawyers uncovered another disturbing pattern. Many families who had taken refuge in the mountains, where they endured harsh living conditions and ongoing repression, decided to avail themselves of the 1982 amnesty for “political and common crimes” decreed by military dictator Ríos Montt. However, once in government custody in the military detachment, the women were separated from their families and sexually assaulted. As in the Sepur Zarco case, the Maya Achi women were also subjected to a system of forced labor. According to Valey, “after the massacres, when the infamous model villages were set up, the women were forced to prepare food for the PACs and the soldiers.” The Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) documented that domestic slavery was part of the counterinsurgency strategy applied by the army in conjunction with the PAC. Along with collecting testimonies, the ABJP also provided psychosocial support for the survivors and their families, with the aim of empowering the women. Eventually, the women survivors brought a complaint to the public prosecutor's office in Rabinal. But they met resistance. “The assistant prosecutors who received the first complaints questioned the credibility of the survivors, asking why they only dared to talk about what had happened after so much time had elapsed,” Lucía Xiloj, a Mayan K'iche' lawyer and representative of the Maya Achi women survivors, tells us. “They even told them that these cases should not be investigated.” Xiloj and her colleagues requested that the case be transferred to the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office, which is headquartered in Guatemala City. Difficulties Advancing the Case In 2016, the plaintiffs successfully petitioned the pretrial judge to hear the women’s testimonies and admit them into evidence. This was traumatizing for the survivors, Xiloj notes, because not all judges are trained to work with victims of these crimes. “The judges would leave the women locked in a room for two or three hours before taking their statements. They felt anxious about being in the capital city, far from their communities,” Xiloj explains. “The judges also didn't display much patience with them when they were giving their statements.” The legal representatives of the Maya Achi women, left to right: Gloria Reyes Xitumul, Haydeé Valey, and Lucía Xiloj. (Verdad y Justicia en Guatemala) But the 36 Mayan Achi women’s efforts were not in vain. In April and May 2018, seven men were captured and charged for mass sexual violence: Damian Cuxum Alvarado, Bernardo Ruiz Aquino, Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino, Pedro Sánchez Cortez, Simeón Enríquez Gómez, Felix Tum Ramírez, and Juan Cecilio Guzmán Torres. Guzmán Torres died in custody in August 2018; three men wanted in the case remained at large. After the arrests, the women complainants began to receive threats from relatives of the ex-paramilitaries. “The sons of the men who were arrested told me that they were going to grab me when I was walking and that they would put me in a sack and get rid of me,” said Paulina López, who, according to the public prosecutor’s accusation was raped at the age of 12 by the brothers Bernardo and Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino. López is one of the petitioners who brought the Chichupac case to the IACHR and, eventually, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In a 2016 judgment, the Court found the state of Guatemala responsible for at least 183 cases of forced disappearance and at least 361 cases of forced displacement as a result of military operations carried out in conjunction with the PAC. The Court ordered Guatemala to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible, and to guarantee the physical integrity of the complainants, to whom it granted precautionary measures. Challenging Judicial Corruption The case was first assigned to pretrial judge Claudette Domínguez, who presides over High Risk Court A. Human rights groups have criticized Judge Domínguez for several rulings that they claim evidence her ties to and sympathy for the military, including her 2016 decision to exclude more than 80 percent of the victims in the mass forced disappearance case known as CREOMPAZ, which has remained in legal limbo ever since. A little over a year after the initial arrests in the Achi women’s case, Domínguez ruled on June 21, 2019 that there was insufficient evidence for a trial. She ordered the definitive dismissal of charges for three defendants and the provisional dismissal of charges for three others. Within days, all six were released. Her decision did not take into account the testimonies of the women survivors, who fully identified the accused. The women survivors and their lawyers filed a recusal motion against Domínguez. They argued that the judge had failed to fully consider all the evidence and had demonstrated a discriminatory attitude toward the Indigenous complainants when she asked them if the Attorney General’s Office was paying them to testify. The High Risk Appellate Court found Judge Domínguez had acted with discrimination and bias and removed her from the case. The case was transferred to High Risk Court B, led by Miguel Ángel Gálvez. This made a huge difference. “Judge Dominguez used to address us and the victims in a very rude manner,” says lawyer Lucía Xiloj. “On the other hand, Judge Gálvez is very cordial with all the parties to the proceedings.” She notes that unlike Domínguez, who rarely if ever referred to international standards, Gálvez regularly cites and applies international standards, including international humanitarian and human rights law, the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court, and jurisprudence of other international tribunals such as those of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, especially regarding the evaluation of the testimonies of victims of sexual violence. This is crucial, says Xiloj; sexual violence crimes are known as “crimes of solitude,” since there are rarely other witnesses to corroborate the victims' testimonies. After a series of hearings in 2021, Judge Gálvez determined that three of the men who were freed in 2019, Damian Cuxum Alvarado, Bernardo Ruiz Aquino, and Benvenuto Ruiz Aquino, alongside Francisco Cuxum Alvarado, who was deported from the United States, and Gabriel Cuxum Alvarado, who was captured in May 2021 after being a fugitive since 2018, should face trial for their alleged role in sexual violence against 36 Maya Achi women. That trial is now underway in High Risk Court A, over which Judge Yassmín Barrios presiding. A Ground-breaking Opportunity for Gender Justice The trial began on January 5, 2022, after a brief hiccup during the first scheduled hearing on January 4, when the lawyer for three of the defendants was a no-show. Judge Barrios, who has ample experience with defense efforts to delay and obstruct human rights trials like this one, ordered the lawyer, Julio César Colindres Monterroso, to appear the next day. Colindres appeared in court the following day. He claimed that his absence was due to health concerns and requested a one-week delay in the proceedings. Judge Barrios rejected the request, saying that she would not abide any efforts to derail these proceedings. The trial began. Government prosecutor Paula Herrarte presented the accusation against the five defendants, each of whom declared their innocence. In subsequent hearings over the next few days, expert witnesses discussed the context in which the women survivors were systematically sexually assaulted and the lasting impacts on them, their families, and their community; the nature of racial bias and discrimination against the Indigenous population in Guatemala and how state violence was racially motivated; and the nature and purpose of the PAC and their relationship with the Guatemalan army. During the second week of the trial, the court is expected to hear the testimonies of the Maya Achi women survivors. Meanwhile, Xiloj, Reyes, and Valey have petitioned the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court to nullify the ruling dismissing the charges against the other three ex-PAC members who walked free in 2019, Pedro Sánchez Cortez, Simeon Enríquez Gomez, and Felix Tum Ramírez. In the meantime, the Maya Achi women survivors will face at least some of their perpetrators in a court of law and seek justice for the grave harm done to them. It’s a reckoning that has been 40 years coming. Copyright NACLA 2019