Several Western countries have announced sanctions against officials in China over rights abuses against the mostly Muslim Uighur minority group. China has detained Uighurs at camps in the north-west region of Xinjiang and faces accusations of torture, forced labour and sexual abuse. The sanctions were announced as part of a coordinated effort by the European Union, UK, Canada and the US. China responded with its own sanctions against European officials. The Chinese government has denied the allegations of abuse, claiming the camps in Xinjiang are "re-education" facilities being used to combat terrorism. But UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the abuse of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang was "one of the worst human rights crises of our time" and the international community "cannot simply look the other way". He said the treatment of Uighurs amounted to "appalling violations of the most basic human rights". The EU has not imposed new sanctions on China over human rights abuses since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, when troops in Beijing opened fire on pro-democracy protesters. What do we know about the sanctions? The sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, target senior officials in Xinjiang who have been accused of responsibility for abuses against Uighurs. Human rights groups say China has detained more than a million Uighurs and people from other Muslim minority groups at camps in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has been accused of carrying out forced sterilisations on Uighur women and separating children from their families. BBC investigations have contained first-hand testimony of forced labour and systematic rape, sexual abuse and torture of detainees. Those hit with sanctions include Chen Mingguo, the director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, who the EU said was responsible for "serious human rights violations"; senior Chinese officials Wang Mingshan and Wang Junzheng; and the former deputy party secretary in Xinjiang, Zhu Hailun. One entity, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau, was also sanctioned. Xinjiang's top official, Chen Quanguo, was not on the list. China on Monday said the sanctions were "based on nothing but lies and disinformation". It said it would sanction 10 people and four entities in the EU "that severely harm China's sovereignty and interests and maliciously spread lies and disinformation" in response. German politician Reinhard Butikofer, who chairs the European Parliament's delegation to China, was among the most high profile officials on China's list. Adrian Zenz, a leading expert on China's policies in Xinjiang, and Swedish scholar Bjorn Jerden were also targeted. Under the sanctions, the European officials are barred from entering China or doing business with it. The sanctions mark a rare escalation of diplomatic tensions between the EU and China, which are major trading partners. © BBC News

President Paul Kagame – long feted by leaders in the west – is accused of serial human rights abuses in expansive new book Published by The Guardian on March 19, 2021. Paul Kagame (AFP) A devastating new book will accuse Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame – long feted by his prominent international supporters as the model of visionary new African leadership – of being a serial human rights abuser, including for his role in a sustained campaign of assassinating his rivals in exile. Written by Michela Wrong, the author who covered the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when more than 800,000 people – largely ethnic Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus – were killed by Hutu militias over 100 days, Do Not Disturb represents one of the most far-reaching historical revisions of Kagame and his regime. Meticulously researched, with substantial new material and interviews, Wrong is careful to set competing claims next to each other where there are unresolved questions, including the suspicions – thus far uncorroborated – of Rwandan involvement in the 2001 assassination of Congolese president Laurent Kabila. While Kagame has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, not least over the high-profile murder of his former intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya in South Africa in 2014 by Rwandan agents, Do Not Disturb alleges Kagame’s involvement in multiple rights abuses from his earliest days in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Beginning with his role as a dour rebel intelligence officer behind the grisly executions of suspected infiltrators, Do Not Disturb chronicles Kagame’s rise as well as his part in the overthrow of two Congolese presidents and the looting of that country’s mineral resources, relying on numerous interviews with former members of his inner circle. With Rwanda heavily reliant on international aid for almost two-thirds of its budget, Wrong’s examination of Kagame and Rwanda’s role in destabilising its neighbours in the Great Lakes raises embarrassing questions for his prominent supporters – who have included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Clare Short – and for international aid donors including the UK accused of long turning a blind eye. The book is being published just months before the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting is due to be held in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, this summer, an event that will once again put Kagame at the centre of an international stage. Far from the charismatic, driven and progressive leader he is perceived as by his international supporters, Kagame emerges from Wrong’s account as a murderously authoritarian figure; a cold, petty and vindictive individual. She compares him to Stalin’s notorious secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, always able “to find the crime to fit the man”. In an interview with the Guardian, Wrong described how her view of Kagame had changed radically over the years since she first encountered his RPF forces as a young reporter covering the genocide, when – like so many others – she embraced the RPF’s narrative. Wrong has already been accused on social media of becoming a “genocide denier”, the standard accusation levelled at critics of Kagame. She has no doubt that genocide occurred, only that it hid a far more complex picture, including the subsequent murders of Hutus by Tutsi forces after the RPF took power. “Going from village to village with the French troops you were confronted by mass graves where people had been hurriedly buried, seeing women scrubbing the floors of the church naves trying to get the blood stains out. “Then you’d meet members of the RPF who were reserved and disciplined and spoke excellent English, who didn’t seem to speak in forked tongues like the departing government of Juvénal Habyarimana [the Hutu president who was killed when his plane was shot down, sparking the genocide]. “I was completely won over by them and completely willing to accept that their takeover was a very good thing because it spelled the end of the horror. That’s how I viewed the RPF for many years and that’s how the world saw it.” Wrong talks of an encounter with a French diplomat who described the later pursuit and murder of Hutus fleeing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by RPF’s forces and remembers thinking: “This is nonsense! It was so at odds with what I believed the RPF stood for. Now I look back, that was a briefing we should have paid more attention to.” At the centre of Wrong’s revisiting is her detailed depiction of the circumstances of the gruesome strangling of Patrick Karegeya in a South African hotel room in 2014. Kagame’s charming if deeply implicated former intelligence chief was murdered in Johannesburg by, she says, Rwandan agents after he, having fallen out of favour, had fled Rwanda, setting up an opposition organisation in exile. A “do not disturb” sign was hung outside the room by his killer as they left. It was a murder that Kagame’s ministers publicly celebrated. Defence minister James Kabarebe told journalists at the time: “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink for them.” Kagame denied involvement. “Rwanda did not kill this person – and it’s a big ‘no’,” he answered when asked by a western reporter. Yet he could not resist: “But I add that, I actually wish Rwanda did it. I really wish it.” Kagame’s message to Rwanda’s domestic audience was different. He delivered it at a prayer breakfast in Kigali: “Whoever betrays the country will pay the price, I assure you,” he told a small crowd of dignitaries. “Any person still alive who may be plotting against Rwanda, whoever they are, will pay the price,” Kagame said. “Whoever it is, it is a matter of time.” Wrong claims it has not been an isolated incident, with opposition figures and critics – including in the UK – receiving warnings that their lives may be in danger, raising a question over why the UK is so supportive of a regime that Scotland Yard has had to provide protection against. But even long before Karegeya’s murder, Wrong admits she was harbouring doubts about Kagame. It was the assassination in Kenya of Seth Sendashonga, a Hutu former interior minister in the government of national unity in Rwanda who had fallen out with the regime in Kigali, that was the first crack in her perception. She recalls it as the day “when with a near-audible mental ping, I realised I no longer believed most of the key ‘truths’ upon which [Kagame’s RPF] built its account.” “That was 1998. Early on. There were two attempts on his life and that made it impossible to pretend it was just random crime. “It’s not what I expected the RPF to be doing. I remember the behind the scenes RPF counter-narrative to journalists and diplomats with friends in the movement was: ‘No! You have to understand, he’d gone abroad and he was mustering these former genocidaires. They were going to attack Rwanda. He’d gone over to the dark side.’” But as Wrong points out, many, such as Karegeya and Gen Kayumba Nyamwasa, the exiled former Rwandan chief of staff (who also survived an attempt on his life in South Africa), were far from former genocidaires camped out in the forests of the neighbouring DRC, but among those once in Kagame’s most trusted inner circle. “The people that Kagame really fears, the people he is reaching out across the globe to silence, intimidate, harass and kill are more often than not members of his own Tutsi elite.” After four years researching and writing Do Not Disturb, what shocks Wrong is how, in the light of the public outcry over the attempted and successful assassinations carried out abroad by Russia and Saudi Arabia, criticism of Kagame has been at best tepid. “It feels like it has been consequence-free. There’s been a very tactful diplomatic cover-up by Rwanda’s allies abroad. “At the most there have been a very few court cases, with Patrick Karegeya’s inquest being the most prominent, with testimony showing the South Africans wanted to bury the story completely because it was the Rwandan government behind it. “There have been massive consequences for the Russian targeting of [Sergei] Skripal and [Alexander] Litvenenko abroad yet Rwanda is just given a little scolding. There’s a double standard because Rwanda is seen as the good guys. Our friends. And they’re people we give an awful lot of aid to.” All of which raises the question: why? Wrong sees a mixture of vanity and lazy thinking, compounded by the west’s post-colonial habit of seeking to anoint favoured African leaders. “It’s an old story. We always pick sides. Leaders are embraced and a blind eye turned to the atrocities. There’s a temptation to personalise and simplify, to choose good guys and bad guys. “The other argument of Rwanda’s international supporters is that it’s a stabilising force, but the destabilising force in the Great Lakes for decades has been Rwanda, including the systematic pillaging of Congo’s minerals.” Wrong is highly critical of the role played by the aid and development sector, including that of the UK. “There’s a development paradigm playing out in Rwanda which goes quite deep and it’s sinister. It’s this idea that the west can deliver development irrespective of what the local government is like and that you can strip the politics out of the development agenda by focusing on education, health, mosquito nets, vaccination rates. “But the local politics are the only thing that matters. There’s something profoundly uncomfortable about insisting that a government which has a deteriorating human rights record and has committed egregious war crimes is a worthy recipient of aid because it performs well on aid metrics yet is busy killing journalists and rounding up and disappearing critics.” © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

An Opportunity to Reverse Trends, Ensure Accountability Published by HRW on March 18, 2021. Tanzania's President John Magufuli leaves after inspecting a guard of honour during his official visit to Nairobi, Kenya October 31, 2016. (2016 Reuters) Tanzania’s President John Pombe Magufuli, whose death was confirmed on March 17, 2021, leaves a legacy of repression and serious human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. His death provides an opportunity for the new leadership in Tanzania to take concrete steps to reverse the country’s downward human rights trajectory and ensure accountability for past abuses. “Over the past six years, President Magufuli oversaw abusive laws and policies that seriously undermined human rights in Tanzania,” said Otsieno Namwaya, East Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The new government now has a chance for a fresh start by ending problematic past practices.” President Magufuli was last seen in public on February 27, and the media reported that he was seriously ill due to Covid-19-related complications that could have aggravated an existing heart condition. However, government officials insisted that he was well and threatened to arrest journalists who published news of his health. In March, police in Iringa and Dar es Salaam arrested at least four people for “distributing fabricated information” about the president’s health. On March 17, Vice President Samia Suluhu Hassan said in a public address that Magufuli had died of a heart attack at a hospital in Dar es Salaam. The vice president is expected to assume leadership as president until 2025, when Magufuli’s term was to end. Magufuli was first elected president of Tanzania in 2015. In October 2020, he won a second term in presidential elections marred by serious human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and detention of scores of opposition party leaders and supporters. In the weeks ahead of the elections, the authorities suspended television and radio stations, censored mobile phone communication, arrested activists and journalists, and blocked social media. On the eve of elections, police fired live ammunition into crowds on the semi-autonomous island archipelago of Zanzibar, killing at least three people. The authorities continued to threaten and pursue opposition leaders and supporters even after Magufuli was declared the winner of the October vote. Since Magufuli first took office, the authorities have increasingly cracked down on the media and civil society groups by passing and enforcing restrictive laws and threatening to withdraw the registration of organizations critical of the government. The government also placed restrictions on the political opposition and gave the registrar of political parties wide discretionary powers, including to withdraw registration from parties. In 2017, Magufuli banned pregnant girls and teenage mothers from attending school and prohibited family planning. This was followed by crackdowns on individuals and organizations seen as critical of these policies. The authorities censored and suspended newspapers and radio stations for publishing or airing material critical of Magufuli’s presidency. The government also arbitrarily arrested – and in some cases brought harassing prosecutions against – journalists, activists, and opposition politicians perceived to be government critics. Magufuli declared Tanzania free of Covid-19 in June 2020, after which the authorities imposed new restrictions on media outlets because of their reporting on Covid-19. They fined and suspended licenses of media companies and summoned media professionals over coverage of the pandemic. “With Magufuli’s passing, the urgent need for justice for his many victims of abuse is clearer than ever,” Namwaya said. “The new leadership should not commit another injustice against Tanzanians by allowing these abuses to go unpunished.” © 2021 Human Rights Watch

Amy Booth in Buenos Aires Thu 18 Mar 2021 05.00 EDT Wichí indigenous women and their children walk along a road in Salta province, Argentina. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images The attacks are common in northern Argentina against women and children – including one victim who was just four years old Ana* was on her way home from school with her young cousin when it happened. “She managed to run away, but I didn’t,” she said, her voice trembling. “They put me in a car. They were white men. And they raped me.” Ana’s ordeal wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a horrific pattern of brutal sexual violence inflicted on indigenous children and women in northern Argentina by non-indigenous men, often in groups. Campaigners describe it as a racist practice dating back to the conquest of the Americas. Now, they are demanding it be made a specific hate crime, doubly aggravated on the grounds of race and gender. “Ever since the conquest, we women have been the first victims,” said Octorina Zamora, a Wichí campaigner for the rights of indigenous women. The attacks, predominantly in the northern Argentinian provinces Salta and Chaco, are sometimes called “chineo”, although some activists say the term is racist because it stems from “china” (Chinese) – a slang term for indigenous women. Argentina: human rights outrage at province's 'abusive' quarantine Read more Alina*, a Wichí woman from a remote region in northern Salta, has encountered at least four cases – including one victim who was just four years old. “Sometimes because of the fear, sometimes because the person who did it threatens them, they won’t say [what happened],” she said. “But we’re mothers. We speak to them, and then they tell us.” It is impossible to tell how common such attacks are as many victims don’t speak out because of trauma, shame and fear of reprisals. But sexual abuse is a major issue in the region. A 2016 Unicef report found that the proportion of babies born to teenage mothers was substantially higher than the national average in northern provinces, reaching over 20% in some places. Indigenous people make up roughly 2.4% of Argentina’s population, and face entrenched problems with discrimination, neglect, hunger and desperate poverty. Alina’s community is a cluster of small houses made of clay, metal sheeting and tarpaulins. Many women speak no Spanish and have no means of transport to the nearest town. Attackers are usually in a position of economic power over the victims and their families, sometimes offering them food or money after the attack. “To report someone who has money – you can’t do that,” Alina said. Zamora said that women’s organizations and state institutions that are supposed to help victims lack an understanding of indigenous realities. “They just tell us to call 911, like in the city, but we don’t even have phone lines,” she said. Zamora stressed that sexual abuse also occurs within the community. She believes that awareness of the issue is starting to grow. In 2015, a 12-year-old Wichí girl with learning difficulties was raped by a group of non-indigenous men and the case made headlines when it emerged that she was pregnant. In a landmark February 2019 ruling, six men were sentenced to 17 years in prison for the attack. Activists from the Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir (Indigenous Women for Living Well) movement launched #BastadeChineo (#NoMoreChineo), a campaign to end the practice in 2019. The women compiled the stories of Ana and other survivors anonymously, in the hope that raising awareness of their experiences would prompt the authorities to take action. “It’s the story of indigenous girls in the north and how this patriarchal, racist, machista, colonial system keeps colonizing, keeps exterminating, keeps violating the indigenous world,” said Juana Antieco, a Mapuche-Tehuelche activist with the group. “Because unfortunately, the conquest isn’t over.” Campaigners are asking Argentina’s government to incorporate the rape of indigenous children and women by non-indigenous men into the penal code as an aggravated hate crime. Modifying the penal code to secure harsher sentences for this kind of crime would require a bill to pass through congress. Gustavo Farquharson, provincial delegate for Salta for the state anti-discrimination agency, Inadi, said similar modifications have been made in the past to recognize femicide, but the process is slow. And for indigenous communities, the need for action is urgent. “Many women and girls live in constant danger of being abused and murdered,” Farquharson said. Zamora believes more resources and support are needed to educate and train indigenous women about their rights, so they can advocate for themselves. “Rape breaks a woman spiritually,” she said. “It’s very hard to recover from that. Or you don’t recover at all.” Link to Original Article Here The Guardian © 2021

40 ans après la guerre civile qui a divisé le Tchad, le clivage entre musulmans et chrétiens est toujours présent. Pour panser ces plaies, la jeune génération essaie de changer les mentalités. Publié par Deutsche Welle le 14 janvier 2021. Scène de rue non loin de la la grande mosquée de N'Djamena. (Getty Images/AFP/P. Desmazes) Le soleil est au zénith dans le jardin de Koundoul, une ville située à près de 25 kilomètres de N'Djamena. Un temps idéal pour un groupe de 50 jeunes venus se détendre. Parmi eux, Jonas, un jeune chrétien habillé dans une tenue traditionnelle. Pour lui, ce moment d'échange permet d'oublier les tensions sociales en cours dans la capitale. ‘’Nous sommes ici pour un brassage entre jeunes. L’objectif de cette rencontre c’est de profiter de l’occasion pour discuter de la question du vivre ensemble entre chrétiens et musulmans. Parce que jusque- là, il y a des chrétiens et musulmans qui ne s’entendent pas au Tchad. C’est pourquoi, on s’est dit pourquoi ne pas initier et multiplier de telles rencontres pour cultiver le vivre-ensemble entre jeunes ? Nous voulons un Tchad dans lequel règne la paix et la tolérance. Et cela ne peut être possible que par le dialogue.’’ Mariam Zenaba, assise à côté de Jonas, en est à sa quatrième participation. Ce qui plait à la jeune femme musulmane de 27 ans, ce sont les débats qui animent ces rencontres. ‘’Nous avons appris beaucoup de choses ce soir, notamment…le vivre-ensemble, la tolérance, l’amour du prochain etc… C’est un moment très instructif. Je pense que 40 ans après, les erreurs de nos aînés doivent êtres classées dans les oubliettes. Nous devons nous accepter malgré nos différences religieuses. Je suis musulmane, mais j’ai plein d’amies chrétiennes. Il faut que ces idées rétrogrades s’arrêtent, nous avons actuellement besoin de la paix pour le développement de notre pays.’’ La paix, une obsession pour ces jeunes Des jeunes qui n'ont pas connu la guerre civile qu'a traversé le Tchad en 1979 causant la mort de près de 5 000 personnes. Mais 40 ans après, ils ressentent encore le clivage entre chrétiens et musulmans. Pour Fortunat Allatara, membre de la plate-forme religieuse interconfessionnelle du Tchad, la jeune génération doit multiplier ce genre de rencontres. ‘’Ces jeunes on a eu à travailler avec eux sur plusieurs domaines et je crois que ce sont des initiatives vraiment à encourager. Le vivre-ensemble et la cohabitation pacifique sont essentiels pour promouvoir la paix. Par exemple aujourd’hui, nous arrivons à rassembler les étudiants de l’université Roi Fayçal (arabe) et ceux des universités francophones. Chose qui ne se faisait pas avant. Les jeunes des universités francophones ont peur par exemple de franchir les portes de l’université Roi Fayçal par ce qu’ils pensent que c’est un lieu qui est réservé uniquement aux musulmans et aux arabophones. Mais, avec les activités qu’on a réalisées, on a pu briser cette barrière qui, en réalité est un préjugé." Du côté des responsables religieux, seule cette nouvelle génération pourra faire oublier les rancœurs du passé. ‘’Ces jeunes chrétiens, musulmans tchadiens qui veulent s’engager à écrire une page nouvelle de l’histoire de notre pays, nous devrions être plus attentifs, les encourager à ne pas commettre les erreurs que nous avons commises hier en nous regardant comme des ennemis. Alors que nous sommes appelés à former une seule et même nation et à transformer cette terre en un pays de paix, de bonheur comme nous l’a écrit notre grand écrivain Joseph Brahim Seid (écrivain tchadien)‘’, explique Monseigneur Edmond Djitangar, Archevêque Métropolitain de N’Djamena. Un avis que partage, Cheik Abdouldaim Abdallah, Vice-président du Conseil supérieur des affaires islamiques du Tchad. ‘’La cohabitation pacifique entre musulmans et chrétiens demeure un sujet de préoccupation jusque-là. Sans cohabitation pacifique entre les enfants d’un pays, il n’ y a pas la paix. Nous en tant que musulmans, l’islam nous recommande de cohabiter avec les autres.’’ Pour encourager le vivre ensemble, une journée de Paix est célébrée depuis 2001 au Tchad, le 28 novembre, date de la proclamation de la République. Tout un symbole pour panser des plaies de la société tchadienne. © 2021 Deutsche Welle

Accounts of atrocities keep coming in as the wounded flee to the regional capital, Mekelle, where Tigrayans say they are being winnowed for their leaders’ rebellion. Declan Walsh / The New York Times The calm is deceptive. A stubbled crater attests to a recent artillery barrage, but with its bustling streets and shops, the highland Ethiopian city of Mekelle has an air of relative peace. Then the stories start spilling out. Of the hospital that begins its days with an influx of bodies bearing gunshot or knife wounds — people killed, relatives and Red Cross workers say, for breaching the nightly curfew. Of the young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles. Of a nightlong battle between government forces and local militia fighters in a nearby town and its aftermath, when soldiers returning to collect their dead stormed into nearby homes, firing indiscriminately. “I’m lucky to be alive,” said Alefesha Hadusha, her head swaddled in bandages, as she gave a whispered account in a hospital ward. Her parents and two brothers were killed instantly in the attack, she said. An X-ray by her bed showed the bullet lodged in her head. When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, began a sweeping military operation in the restive region of Tigray on Nov. 4, he cast his goal in narrow terms: to capture the leadership of the region’s ruling party. The party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, had brazenly defied his authority for months, and then attacked a federal military base. But four months on, the operation has degenerated into a bitter civil conflict marked by accounts of egregious rights violations — massacres, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and fears that starvation is being used a war tactic — that have set off alarm across the world. In Mekelle, the region’s biggest city, many Tigrayans say they feel that they, not their leaders, are the true targets of Mr. Abiy’s military campaign. Hospitals are filled with casualties from the fighting that rages in the countryside, many of them terrified civilians arriving with grievous wounds. Schools house some of the 71,000 people who fled to the city, often bringing accounts of horrific abuses at the hands of pro-government forces. A palpable current of fear and resentment courses through the streets, where hostilities between residents and patrolling government soldiers often erupt into violence. “We don’t say that everything was perfect under the T.P.L.F.,” said Assimee Misgina, a philosophy lecturer at Mekelle University, referring to the Liberation Front. “But this is a war against the people of Tigray. Basically, we are under an existential threat.” Mr. Abiy, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, denies responsibility for any atrocities, and United Nations officials say that all sides including the T.P.L.F. may have committed war crimes. But the majority of serious accusations have been aimed at government troops and their allies — the ethnic Amhara militias that moved into the western part of Tigray, and soldiers from Eritrea, Ethiopia’s northern neighbor and onetime enemy. Mr. Abiy’s spokeswoman and the head of an Ethiopian government task force dealing with the crisis in Tigray did not respond to a list of questions or repeated requests for comment for this article. In Mekelle, captured by government troops on Nov. 28, residents have learned to toe the government line, even if the nearest battleground is 60 miles away. Restaurants and bars no longer play certain songs in the local Tigrinya language, fearing retribution. A TV station that once broadcast local news now offers the government perspective. The interim president of Tigray, Mulu Nega, holds court in a luxury hotel where federal soldiers stand guard by the entrance. The internet has been shut down since November. In late February, when the authorities permitted a rare visit to Mekelle by international reporters, Tigrayans flocked to the hotels where journalists were staying, desperate for news of the outside world — and to tell their own stories. In the lobby of the Northern Star hotel, Berhane Takelle, the manager of a garment factory, produced a video that showed the remains of his business in Adwa, 100 miles to the north — charred machinery, a destroyed roof and garments strewn across an empty factory floor. It was all that remained, he said, following a series of violent raids by plundering Eritrean soldiers. “They took everything,” Mr. Berhane said, shaking his head. At the city’s main hospital, the Ayder Referral hospital, officials said they received the bodies of 250 men, ages 20 to 35, between Nov. 28, when Ethiopian soldiers seized Mekelle, and March 9. Four-fifths of the bodies had gunshot wounds, and the remainder had been injured with knives, said a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. Most of the attacks appeared to have been carried out by government soldiers, he added. One morning, three young men gathered in the morgue to identify the body of Getachew Tewolde, 26, the friend whom soldiers beat to death with beer bottles. The soldiers who killed Mr. Getachew had a day earlier accused him of supporting the opposition. “They said he belonged to the junta,” said Kidanu Gidey, using a euphemism for the T.P.L.F. But Mr. Getachew was a laborer, not a political leader, his friends said. Even more harrowing accounts came from outside the city. The attack in which Ms. Hadusha’s family was killed took place near the town of Abiy Addi, in central Tigray, on Feb. 10. One 26-year-old man, Berhe, offered a similar account of that day, saying that his brother and seven other men were picked up and taken to a military camp and executed. He asked to use only his first name, fearing reprisals. A surgeon who treated the wounded showed a photo of a young man with cratered eyes — shot through the temple at close range, apparently in an attempted execution, the surgeon said. An aid worker with an international group working in that area, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid compromising the work, confirmed that attacks on civilians had taken place near Abiy Addi on that date. The violence, the aid worker said, was typical of a conflict where the worst atrocities often occur in the aftermath of battle. Last month Amnesty International accused Eritrean soldiers of massacring hundreds of civilians in Axum, in northern Tigray, in late November, hours after Tigrayan militants attacked an Eritrean military post in the town. In western Tigray, American officials found evidence of ethnic cleansing led by ethnic Amhara officials and militia fighters, according to an internal United States government report obtained by The New York Times. A spokesman for the Ahmara regional government told Bloomberg this week that it was pressing to officially incorporate western Tigray into Amhara. In late February, Prime Minister Abiy said that he took the “safety, security and well-being of all Ethiopian citizens very seriously” and that he was ready to cooperate with any joint investigation of abuses with “relevant human rights bodies.” On Wednesday, the opening of an investigation was approved by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights In testimony to Congress last week, the United States secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, called the situation in Tigray unacceptable and reiterated calls for Eritrean troops to withdraw immediately. “They need to come out,” Mr. Blinken said. Mr. Mulu, the interim leader of Tigray, cuts a lonely figure in Mekelle. An ethnic Tigrayan installed by Mr. Abiy nine days into the war, he lives and works from a suite at the Axum Hotel where he is trying to trying to restart Tigray’s war-battered bureaucracy. Unlike Mr. Abiy, Mr. Mulu does not deny the Eritrean presence in Tigray. And in an interview he said he had initiated his own investigation into reported atrocities. “It’s not acceptable that people should die like this,” he said. “But we need evidence. We have requested our security forces to investigate it.” Tigray’s health services, once among the best in Ethiopia, have been ravaged. On Monday, Doctors Without Borders said that dozens of clinics across the region had been destroyed and plundered by soldiers, often deliberately. Berhanu Mekonnen, head of the Ethiopian Red Cross in Tigray, said in an interview that Eritrean soldiers had killed seven of his workers including a driver who was dragged from his ambulance and shot. The Red Cross’s fleet of 254 ambulances in Tigray has been reduced to 30, Mr. Berhanu added. Most were seized by soldiers or destroyed in fighting. Those still in use are often hidden behind churches or dense vegetation to prevent Eritrean soldiers stealing them, he said. The battle is also one of narratives. The government frequently accuses critics and foreign news outlets of falling for T.P.L.F. propaganda, a charge made by supporters of Mr. Abiy who recently demonstrated in New York outside the offices of The Times. In Washington a day earlier, a senior diplomat at the Ethiopian Embassy quit his job over the reports of atrocities in Tigray, accusing Mr. Abiy of leading Ethiopia “down a dark path toward destruction and disintegration.” Inside Tigray, soldiers detained Ethiopian translators and reporters working for four international outlets, including The Times, last month. The men were released without charge days later, but by then most foreign reporters had been forced to leave Tigray. In such a fraught environment, even massacres are contested. Mr. Abiy’s officials frequently cite a massacre in Mai Kadra, a town in western Tigray, on Nov. 9, as an example of T.P.L.F. war crimes. Witnesses cited in an Amnesty International report blamed the deaths on Tigrayan fighters. But at a camp in Mekelle, eight residents of Mai Kadra said the killings had in fact been carried out by the Fano, an ethnic Amhara militia group with a reputation for brutality, and insisted that the majority of victims were Tigrayans. Solomon Haileselassie, 28, said he watched the slaughter from his hiding place in a garbage dump. “I saw them cut off people’s legs and arms with axes,” he said. Fisseha Tekle, Amnesty International’s Horn of Africa researcher, said the group had received credible new evidence of Tigrayan deaths, but stood by the finding that the majority of victims were Amharas. Restricted access and the “high politicization of violence” make it hard to establish the truth about much of anything in Tigray, Mr. Fisseha added. © Declan Walsh for the New York Times

A Syrian child poses atop a stack of neutralized shells at a metal scrapyard on the outskirts of Maaret Misrin town in the northwestern Idlib province, Syria last week. Aaref Watad/AFP via Getty Images On March 15, 2011, protesters inspired by successful "Arab Spring" uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, rallied in Syria to call for an end to their own repressive regime. But unlike the governments that had earlier more or less collapsed in the face of popular uprisings and armed insurrections, Syria's President Bashar Assad was not about to go quietly. Days after the initial protests, Syrian soldiers fired on demonstrators, killing dozens in what would become the opening shots in a seemingly endless civil war that has reverberated far beyond the Middle Eastern country's borders. The conflict has not only pitted Assad against a band of rebels, but drawn the U.S., Iran, Russia and Turkey, among others, into a complex proxy war. Along the way, it has brought out ethnic and sectarian divides, helped foster a revival of the extremist Islamic State militia, displaced millions of people and left hundreds of thousands — mostly civilians — dead. While "much of the hot fighting in Syria has subsided, you still have massive displacement of people," Michele Dunne, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells NPR. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking to journalists recently, said that while Syria "has fallen off the front page," it "remains a living nightmare." "It is impossible to fully fathom the extent of the devastation in Syria, but its people have endured some of the greatest crimes the world has witnessed this century," he said. Ordinary Syrians have borne the brunt. The Damascus government and its allies have hit hospitals and bakeries with airstrikes – measures designed to terrorize the local population, in an apparent attempt to weaken the opposition's grip on the area. The regime has also dropped "barrel bombs" from helicopters directly onto civilian homes. Fared al-Hor, a Syrian journalist living in Idlib, a city held by the rebel opposition, calls it a "scorched earth" strategy by which Assad's forces try to retake an area by forcing everyone to leave – rebels and civilians, alike. "In 2016 my home was destroyed by shelling. [The regime] kept shelling and shelling until everyone left and the area was empty," he tells NPR. "I believe we were hit by more than 400 rockets in a single night." Syrians stand next to a painted mural on the remains of a building depicting Iran as an octopus dropping bombs, in the rebel-held town of Binnish in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib, on March 11. Rami Al Sayed/AFP via Getty Images A web of interests Although narrow in scope, last month's U.S. airstrikes against an obscure militia group in eastern Syria illustrates just a portion of the web of competing interests in the region that have made the civil war so intractable. The U.S. strikes were a response to an earlier rocket attack on an airfield in Erbil, Iraq, that killed a Filipino contractor and wounded six others – including a Louisiana National Guard soldier. That attack was claimed by Awliya al Dam, or Guardian of the Blood Brigades – a Shiite group believed to be based in neighboring Iraq and backed by Tehran. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a statement that the airstrikes destroyed facilities inside Syria "used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups, including Kait'ib Hezbollah and Kait'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada." The Kremlin — a staunch ally of Syria since the early days of the Cold War – called the U.S. attack "outrageous." President Biden, asked by a reporter what message he was trying to send to Iran with the U.S. strikes, said they should be a warning not to support militia groups that threaten U.S. interests or personnel. The choice by the Biden administration to strike at the group in Syria rather than in Iraq — to spare blowback on the U.S.-backed government there — is just the latest example of how outside powers have used Syria as a convenient venue to settle scores. A fighter from Turkish-backed forces of the Free Syrian Army is shown in October 2019 firing a heavy machine gun during military training maneuvers in preparation for an anticipated Turkish incursion targeting Syrian Kurdish fighters, near Azaz, in north Syria. AP The belligerents For the Syrian president, it's been a decade-long fight for survival. The 2011 "Arab Spring" uprising that inspired the rebellion against the Syrian regime had already taken down leaders elsewhere. Many predicted that Assad would be next. Instead, by brutally crushing dissent, he has confounded his critics and clung to power. "Right now, the regime has the upper hand, controlling most of the country," Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy tells NPR. At this point, he says, "Assad thinks he's won. So, to him, there's really no need to negotiate." As peaceful protests became armed insurrection, rebel opposition militias formed under the banner of the "Free Syrian Army." They fought with the stated purpose of ousting the Syrian regime. But the militias were plagued by factional infighting and disputes over a limited supply of weapons provided by Western countries and Gulf states. As the years progressed, these militias increasingly became proxy armies for their international backers, turning away from the fight against Assad to focus on ISIS. As Turkey took greater control of northern Syria and these militias, they turned their focus to fighting Kurdish fighters, whom Turkey considers terrorists. In recent years, Turkey on the opposition side, and Russia on the regime side, have both hired thousands of Syrians as mercenaries to fight in other conflicts in which these countries are invested including Libya and Azerbaijan. Syria is one of Iran's few allies in the region. Their "mutual contempt" for Saddam Hussein's Iraq helped bring them together in the 1980s and their "mutual fear and loathing of the United States and Israel has helped sustain their alliance," Karim Sadjadpour wrote in 2013 for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Iran initially supported the popular uprisings in the Middle East—calling them 'Islamic awakenings' —when it appeared that only Western-allied Arab autocracies in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen were vulnerable to collapse," Sadjadpour, who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote. "In Syria, however, Tehran has offered unwavering support to the embattled al-Assad regime and denounced the Syrian opposition as 'terrorists' supported by a motley alliance of Gulf Arab states, Israel, and the United States." Iran-backed Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been a key player in the fight on the ground among the pro-Assad forces. "Since the beginning of 2013, Hezbollah fighters have operated openly and in significant numbers across the border alongside their Syrian and Iraqi counterparts," according to Marisa Sullivan, writing for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War. "They have enabled the regime to regain control of rebel-held areas in central Syria and have improved the effectiveness of pro-regime forces." "The impact of Hezbollah's involvement in Syria has been felt not just on the battlefield, where the regime now has momentum in many areas, but also in Lebanon where growing sectarian tensions have undermined security and stability," Sullivan writes. From the beginning, Washington's interests have been somewhat varied and seemingly at cross-purposes — at once opposed to Assad and wanting to stabilize the region, but at the same time wanting to annihilate the Islamic State, which was a key force arrayed against the regime. In 2012, reports emerged that Syria was preparing to use chemical weapons against combatants and civilians. Alarmed, then-President Barack Obama and his advisors warned Assad's regime that their use constituted a "red line" for the administration. But the Obama administration quickly backed off the threat. Some reporting has suggested that the administration relented on Syria to keep alive secret talks with Iran to contain its nuclear ambitions. Under Obama, the CIA began funneling an estimated $1 billion worth of arms annually to anti-Assad forces. By 2014, however, Washington's focus was instead on eliminating a resurgent Islamic State, which had joined the fight against Assad but by then was carrying out attacks on the U.S. and other Western nations. Within a year, the U.S. had boots on the ground in Syria. The United Kingdom, France and other countries entered the fray along with the U.S. in a campaign against the ISIS Caliphate in Syria. The extremist group — also known as ISIL, or Daesh — held about a third of Syria at its zenith there, according to the Wilson Center. By the end of 2017, the Caliphate had suffered a devastating reversal, losing all but a fraction of the territory it had acquired. "The U.S. and its international allies were in it to kill ISIS, not to bring down Assad," Byman says. "The U.S. could have intervened more forcefully from the beginning," he adds. "However, the Obama administration was concerned about 'winning' and then owning a shattered country: Iraq 2.0." The Trump administration mostly aimed to reduce U.S. involvement in Syria, not only cutting support for the Kurds, but promising to withdraw U.S. troops — a move that prompted a backtrack amid an outcry from fellow Republicans. Moscow entered the conflict in support of the Syrian regime, using airstrikes to target ISIS and other extremist groups, as well as the Free Syrian Army. Since the 1950s, the Soviet Union and later Russia has been a staunch ally of Syria, supplying its army with the latest "Made in Russia" weapons. By the mid-2000s, the ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had only recently come to power, and Assad — who himself had not long before assumed the leadership mantle from his father, Hafez Assad — were growing stronger. "Putin began to think about developing Russia as a great power again," Richard Reeve, director of the Sustainable Security Programme at the Oxford Research Group, a security think-tank, told the BBC in 2017. In the great power game that continued well after the end of the Cold War, Putin saw the U.S. as a perennial rival. Turkey has been engaged in an ongoing war of its own against an insurgency in the south, where ethnic Kurds — who occupy lands across the region that straddle national borders — are fighting for an independent state. In 2012, Kurds in northern and northeastern Syria seized on the disarray caused by the civil war to unilaterally establish an autonomous region that borders Turkey. In the past, they have benefited from U.S. support in exchange for their fighters being a key element in the fight against ISIS. However, in 2017, the Trump administration, apparently bowing to pressure from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced that it was ending that cooperation. Turkey sees the seeming success of the Syrian Kurds as a threat, fearing that they could lend support to Kurdish insurgents, known as the PKK, in Turkey. Relations between Syria and Turkey are further complicated by a history predating the civil war in which Damascus backed the PKK against Turkey. To neutralize the threat posed by the Kurds, Turkey has backed Islamist extremist groups fighting them, including some formerly affiliated with al-Qaida. "Various opposition factions, some of which enjoy Turkey's support, remain active in north and northeastern Syria," Byman says. "Part of the area is controlled by Kurdish-dominated forces, which work with the United States, fear Turkey, and have an uneasy modus vivendi with the Syrian regime." For the Gulf states, by contrast, "it was mostly about containing Iran, though many resented Assad for other reasons and saw most of the opposition as deserving of support," he says. The war "quickly became a sectarian conflict, and this colored the lens for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states," Byman says, noting that Syria had been a "cable news" war that was watched closely by ordinary citizens throughout the Arab world, who were able to bring pressure on their governments. Syrians wait to leave the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp, which holds relatives of alleged Islamic State group fighters, in the Syrian northeastern al-Hasakeh governorate, in December. Delil Souleiman/AFP via Getty Images Humanitarian crisis After a decade of conflict, Syria remains the world's largest refugee crisis, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. More than half of the country's people are displaced — including 5.5 million refugees living primarily in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, and another 6.7 million internally displaced inside Syria. Two-thirds of those displaced are women and children, the U.N. says. "The situation is beyond horrible," Byman says. In the last few months alone, heavy rain and flooding in Syria's northwest have destroyed tents, disrupted food supplies and left tens of thousands homeless, according to the UNHCR. "Healthcare centers and hospitals, schools, utilities, and water and sanitation systems are damaged or destroyed," World Vision writes in a report. Historic landmarks and once-busy marketplaces have been reduced to rubble. War broke the social and business ties that bound neighbors to their community. "It was a hard ten years," Ahlam Rachid, a 52-year-old aid worker at World Vision in Syria's Idlib province, tells NPR. "We're all tired. People here all say they're tired, but despite this they're living and fighting. Despite all the difficulties here, it's still better than living under regime-controlled areas," she says. The refugee crisis has had a huge impact on Syria's neighbors, where many of the displaced have arrived. But it also goes beyond the region, Dunne, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says. "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the spillover of the Syrian conflict essentially destabilized Europe," she says. "Initially, Syrian refugees went to Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. But, from there, many of them went on to settle in Europe," she says. "The political effects of that were significant. You saw the rise of right-wing governments, Islamophobia, nationalism, and a lot of tensions inside the European Union." What's next? Volunteers clear the Old Market district of debris in Aleppo, Syria, in 2019. Years of fighting have left many sections of Aleppo destroyed. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Today Syria is a devastated country. While the regime may have won back much of the country, it is itself much weakened. Many of those who fought for Assad have become war lords who now control their own fiefdoms, semi-independently of Damascus. After so many years of war and tightening Western sanctions, the economy has collapsed. Syrians in regime-held areas struggle to procure even the basics. There are shortages of fuel and electricity. And even in the capital, Damascus, many spend hours a day waiting in line to buy the basic staple, bread. "The Syrian people are being crushed from both sides; from the Assad regime and by Western sanctions," says Joshua Landis, who heads the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and whose wife is from Syria. Proponents of sanctions say these are a necessary tool to force Assad to the negotiating table and weaken his ally Iran. Landis says they are harming Syria's people while only driving the country into greater reliance on Iran. "These ensconce Iran further into Syria," he says. "It makes Syrians so poor that they become more dependent on the government and its allies." The United Nations continues to push for peace. "The message is clear: There is no military solution for the Syrian crisis," Secretary-General Guterres said in remarks to the press recently. "The only possible solution remains political. This man-made humanitarian nightmare for the long-suffering Syrian people must stop." But for now, the Syrian regime shows no real signs of coming to the table. It continues to keep up the pressure on Turkish-backed opposition groups who control northern parts of the country. These areas are also home to millions of civilians, many of them internally displaced and living in camps. And in Syria's northeast, attacks by ISIS are on the rise again. "As long as the various players can get resources, the fighting will be hard to stop," Byman says. © 2021 npr

Genocide Watch staff have published the sixteenth Timestream in a series of critical genocides in the world. This Timestream covers the persecution and genocide of Yazidis, an indigenous minority group in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, committed by ISIS. In August 2014, ISIS killed roughly 5,000 Yazidis for their religious beliefs. Approximately 500,000 Yazidis became refugees, and thousands of women and children were sold into sexual slavery. Six years later, the survivors are still denied aid and reparations. See the full Timestream here and view our other Timestreams here.

Michelle Nichols / Reuters NEW YORK (Reuters) - United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has agreed to an Ethiopian request for a joint investigation in the country’s northern Tigray region, where Bachelet says possible war crimes may have been committed. Fighting between government troops and the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has killed thousands of people and forced hundreds of thousands from their homes in the mountainous region of about 5 million. The United Nations has raised concerns about atrocities being committed in Tigray, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described acts carried out in the region as ethnic cleansing. Ethiopia has rejected Blinken’s allegation. Bachelet “responded positively” to a request from the state-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for joint investigations in Tigray, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Jonathan Fowler said on Wednesday. “The U.N. Human Rights Office and the EHRC are now developing an investigation plan, which includes resources needed and practical modalities, in order to launch the missions as soon as possible,” Fowler said. Ethiopia’s foreign ministry said on Saturday it was ready to work with international human rights experts to conduct investigations on allegations of abuses. Amnesty International last month accused Eritrean forces of killing hundreds of civilians over 24 hours in Axum city last year. Eritrea denied that, but the EHRC also described such killings in a rare acknowledgment from the Ethiopian side that Eritrean troops have participated in the conflict. The United Nations and the United States have demanded that Eritrean troops leave Tigray. Both the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments have denied Eritrean troops are in Tigray, despite dozens of eyewitness accounts and admissions that Eritreans are there from Tigray’s federally-appointed regional administration. © Michelle Nichols for Reuters

Adam Easton / BBC News, Warsaw Thirteen-year-old Pola is one of an estimated 50,000 children in Poland being raised by same-sex couples. Like most of those children, Pola is growing up with her biological mother, Anna Adamowicz, together with her wife, Agnieszka. Pola was born during Anna's previous relationship with a man and her father continues to play an active role in her upbringing. Together for more than a decade, Anna and Agnieszka married in Copenhagen three years ago, but their marriage is not legally recognised in Poland, whose constitution stipulates that marriage is a union of a man and a woman. Move to bar all LGBT+ adoptions Now the rules for LGBT+ Poles in this Catholic country are tightening further. They are already barred from adopting children as couples, but some local authorities look favourably on applicants adopting as single parents. Poland's justice ministry has proposed that a legal loophole should be closed to prevent LGBT+ people from adopting children completely. The government appears to have public opinion on its side. According to a 2019 CBOS opinion poll, 66% of respondents said same sex couples should not have the right to marry, 67% said they should not be open about their way of life in public and 84% said they should not be able to adopt children. No civil unions are legally recognised in Poland, and many couples experience difficulties gaining access to visit their partners in hospital should they fall ill. Anna, an activist dealing with family issues for Grupa Stonewall in Poznan, says she cannot even collect registered mail on behalf of Agnieszka at the post office. She complains of feeling like a second-class citizen and that after after six years of being an activist their rights are no better, and perhaps worse. With the arrival of coronavirus, she worries what will happen to her daughter. "I thought, with Covid, it is possible that both Pola's father and I will die and then my wife would be unable to adopt Pola and take care of her, despite the fact she has been involved in her life for almost 11 years. She would not be able to stay with the person who helped raise her." Anna has told Pola's form teacher about what she calls her "patchwork family" but her daughter has only confided in those classmates she trusts. Pola initially attended school religion classes, which in practice are Catholic catechism lessons, but she quit after the teacher told the pupils that Jesus cried when children were born using IVF treatment. Warnings of a 'rainbow plague' Some Church leaders have been vociferous in their condemnation of "LGBT ideology". The Archbishop of Krakow Marek Jedraszewski has condemned it as a rainbow plague, worse than Bolshevism. Last summer he warned that "attempts are being made to take away our Poland and for over 1,050 years, our Christian land". And the nationalist-conservative government echoes such sentiments. "We will not allow the legalisation of homosexual relationships and their adoption of children in our country. We protect Polish identity and culture from LGBT+ ideology, which is alien to us," deputy justice minister Marcin Romanowski told government-friendly Nasz Dziennik newspaper on Tuesday. It all adds up to a hostile atmosphere in a country where about 100 municipalities covering one third of Poland have adopted resolutions declaring themselves "LGBT ideology-free". In 2017, Anna and her family attended a picnic for LGBT+ families in the Polish seaside town of Sopot when they were confronted by a pro-life group with banners reading "Ban paedophiles" and "You will never be a real family". The group then turned on their loudspeakers and played an anti-LGBT+ song over and over for three hours. "We tried to talk to them saying there are children here, they are scared, they are crying. We asked the police to help us but they didn't react," Anna said. Anna said she and Agnieszka would calmly hold hands in the street, but they have felt less safe since last summer's presidential election campaign that saw almost daily attacks on LGBT+ rights on Polish public television. During a stump speech, the incumbent Andrzej Duda, who went on to be re-elected, also compared LGBT+"ideology" with communism. "People are trying to convince us that they are people and this is just an ideology," he said. 'In Berlin no-one will punch us' Anna complains of a concerted campaign that makes her feel unsafe. "My grandmother watches public television and she is told that we are discriminating against Catholics. We feel dehumanised. It's only a short distance from this to saying that we are not people." She and her family are seriously considering moving to Berlin, a two and a half hour drive away from their Poznan home, so her daughter can feel more secure. "My daughter always says she feels at home in Berlin because of the diversity, she feels accepted there. We feel the same. No-one will come and punch us because we are holding hands or kissing. We feel included," she said. According to pollster CBOS, Poles were slowly becoming more open towards LGBT+ people, but that trend stopped in 2019. Anna believes things will change in Poland but not for some time: "I'm very optimistic about young people in Poland. They do really care and they are open and they really want to change something." © Adam Easton for BBC News, Warsaw, 2021

61 Lawyers Murdered During Duterte Administration Carlos H. Conde | Human Rights Watch Senior Researcher, Asia Division Protesters hold signs during a rally at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, or Monument to the Heroes, in Quezon City, Philippines, August 19, 2020. © 2020 AP Photo/Aaron Favila More lawyers have been killed in the five years since President Rodrigo Duterte took office than under any other government in Philippine history. Data collated by the news website Rappler found that 110 lawyers were killed from 1972 to the present. Sixty-one of those killings have taken place since 2016. Since 2004, charges have been filed in just seven cases in which lawyers were victims, underscoring the lack of accountability for serious crimes in the Philippines. The Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), one of two nongovernmental groups that track killings of lawyers, said more than half were work-related. The National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL), which also monitors attacks, said most of those killed represented either victims of the “war on drugs” or victims of human rights violations. The NUPL said, “almost all perpetrators have never been brought to the bar of justice.” Many of the high-profile attacks involved members of the NUPL, which represents leftist activists as well as victims of human rights violations. In 2018, gunmen shot dead Benjamin Ramos in Negros Occidental, a province in the central Philippines that has seen an uptick of violence directed against plantation labor organizers, peasant groups, and rights defenders. Earlier this month, masked men with a screwdriver stabbed Angelo Karlo Guillen, the NUPL’s secretary-general on Panay Island. Guillen, who was critically injured but survived, had handled several rights-related cases, notably the police killing in December of nine members of an Indigenous peoples’ group. Lawyers in the Philippines have a long history of representing victims of human rights violations, making them targets as well. FLAG was founded in 1974 at the height of the Marcos dictatorship. The majority of cases it handled were political or human rights cases. NUPL was founded in 2007 during rampant rights violations under then-President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; 22 of the 110 lawyers killed in Rappler’s tally were murdered during her presidency, the highest after Duterte. The targeted killing of Filipinos swept up in the brutal “war on drugs” or taking part in human rights activism is bad enough. The killing of those who defend them or seek to provide their families redress adds immeasurably to the horror. The international community led by the United Nations Human Rights Council needs to act more decisively to press the Duterte administration to end the violence. See article here. © 2021 Human Rights Watch

Many Ahmadi Muslims are threatened with deportation from Germany. But other countries have recognized the need for protection of the minority that is often persecuted in Pakistan. Deutsche Welle Sahar Kalsoon hopes that she and her family can continue to live in Germany The Ahmad family lives in uncertainty. They have no German residency permit. The father, a qualified engineer, is not allowed to work in Germany. They live in a refugee shelter but they can expect a deportation order any day. They have recently learned that the next collective deportation to Pakistan will take place on March 17 — and they are afraid they will be on that flight. Back in Pakistan, they say, their lives would be in danger. Second-class citizens in Pakistan The Ahmad family are members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim religious community, a movement that originated in British India in the 19th century. The adherents of the movement referred to as Ahmadis, follow the Islamic scriptures. But they also believe their movement's founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a messiah. Many Muslims, therefore, regard the Ahmadiyya teachings as heresy. The Ahmadis believe their movement's founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (m), was a messiah "The exclusion of Ahmadis is even enshrined in the constitution [of Pakistan]," explained Mohammad Suleman Malik, spokesman for the Ahmadi community in the German states of Thuringia and Saxony. Ahmadis have been forbidden to call themselves Muslims in Pakistan since 1974. They are also not allowed to call their houses of prayer "mosques," and the adhan, or call to prayer, is forbidden. In a country with some of the strictest blasphemy laws in the world, an "As-salaam-alaikum" greeting by Ahmadis could result in the death penalty. As non-Muslims, Ahmadis are second-class citizens. UNHCR and Amnesty see the need for protection Ahmad and his wife Sahar Kalsoom have also experienced severe hostility. Kalsoom says she had to change schools and has been called a "kafir," an infidel. She did not finish her education. When her cousin was murdered, the entire family had to flee their home village of Khureyanwala. After she married Ahmad and the couple had children, they decided to go to Germany to give their daughters a better future. According to Amnesty International, Pakistani authorities have long downplayed violence against Ahmadis, even supporting it in some cases. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says Ahmadis in Pakistan represent a persecuted minority and should be entitled to protection. For this reason, Ahmadis in the UK, the US, and the Netherlands have not been deported for a long time. This is not the case in Germany. Mohammad Suleman Malik says Ahmadis are not safe anywhere in Pakistan Germany: 'Cases are examined individually' Some 535 Ahmadis are currently being threatened with deportation in Germany. A spokesperson for the interior ministry told DW that merely belonging to this religious community is not sanctioned under criminal law in Pakistan. This is why "cases are examined individually on the basis of the individual circumstances." German administrative courts often point to safe places for Ahmadis in Pakistan — for example, to Rabwah, the seat of the largest Ahmadi community in the country Spokesman Malik was skeptical about this. "Ahmadis in Pakistan are not safe anywhere," he said. "Ahmadis are also regularly murdered in Rabwah." For Malik and the Saxony Refugee Council, the deportations, which are now becoming more frequent, are politically motivated. After the pandemic put them on hold temporarily, the council claims that the German government wanted to make their mark with a tough migration policy in this important election year. "I think there is a lack of knowledge or political will. This, unfortunately, comes at the detriment of the persecuted people who live here and are now being deported in droves," Malik said, shaking his head. "It's a matter of life and death for these people," he added. The Ahmad family is not optimistic about their prospects 'Where can we go?' The Ahmad family is not optimistic about their prospects. "Germans live in freedom, they may not understand — but when you come here from Pakistan and leave everything behind, you carry a pain with you," said Sahar Kalsoon, the mother, struggling through tears. "It's not easy to leave a country and leave everything behind. And now that we're here, we're told we can't stay here. But where can we go?" Her husband fears there will be repercussions if they return, as happened to his uncle who returned from the UK in 2005. A rumor circulated in the village that he, an Ahmadi, was a foreign spy. He was lynched by a mob. The family has long since exhausted all legal possibilities. A petition by Malik to the state of Saxony was also rejected. They can only wait for the deportation notice. The walk in the wind is one last moment of normality. This article was translated from German. See article here. © 2021 Deutsche Welle