Genocide Watch staff have published the tenth Timestream in a series of critical genocides in the world. This Timestream covers the violence committed by Boko Haram through July 2020. Since 2009, Boko Haram has waged a violent insurgency against the Nigerian government. In that time, the Islamist group has killed 27,000 people, making them the deadliest terrorist organization in the world. The violence currently shows no signs of slowing. Boko Haram's genocidal ideology is now spreading across West Africa. See the full Timestream here and view our other Timestreams here.

By Timothy Snyder The New York Times Magazine Outside the Capitol, the crowd cheered as rioters stampeded into the building, 2:10 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version. Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible. People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view. In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. They had different reasons for doing so. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences. Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy. The split between these two groups, the gamers and the breakers, became sharply visible on Dec. 30, when Senator Josh Hawley announced that he would support Trump’s challenge by questioning the validity of the electoral votes on Jan. 6. Ted Cruz then promised his own support, joined by about 10 other senators. More than a hundred Republican representatives took the same position. For many, this seemed like nothing more than a show: challenges to states’ electoral votes would force delays and floor votes but would not affect the outcome. Pro-Trump extremists tried to scale the walls of the Capitol building in Washington to bypass barriers and get inside, 2:09 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. Making his fictions the basis of congressional action gave them flesh. Now Trump could demand that senators and congressmen bow to his will. He could place personal responsibility upon Mike Pence, in charge of the formal proceedings, to pervert them. And on Jan. 6, he directed his followers to exert pressure on these elected representatives, which they proceeded to do: storming the Capitol building, searching for people to punish, ransacking the place. Of course this did make a kind of sense: If the election really had been stolen, as senators and congressmen were themselves suggesting, then how could Congress be allowed to move forward? For some Republicans, the invasion of the Capitol must have been a shock, or even a lesson. For the breakers, however, it may have been a taste of the future. Afterward, eight senators and more than 100 representatives voted for the lie that had forced them to flee their chambers. Rioters threatened and chased Officer Eugene Goodman inside the Capitol, 2:13 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true. Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth. These last four years, scholars have discussed the legitimacy and value of invoking fascism in reference to Trumpian propaganda. One comfortable position has been to label any such effort as a direct comparison and then to treat such comparisons as taboo. More productively, the philosopher Jason Stanley has treated fascism as a phenomenon, as a series of patterns that can be observed not only in interwar Europe but beyond it. My own view is that greater knowledge of the past, fascist or otherwise, allows us to notice and conceptualize elements of the present that we might otherwise disregard and to think more broadly about future possibilities. It was clear to me in October that Trump’s behavior presaged a coup, and I said so in print; this is not because the present repeats the past, but because the past enlightens the present. An angry mob confronted the police as it tried to gain entry into the Capitol, 2 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter. Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. A bust of George Washington had a Trump hat placed on it, as intruders charged through the building, 2:34 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.” One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship. In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” The force of a big lie resides in its demand that many other things must be believed or disbelieved. To make sense of a world in which the 2020 presidential election was stolen requires distrust not only of reporters and of experts but also of local, state and federal government institutions, from poll workers to elected officials, Homeland Security and all the way to the Supreme Court. It brings with it, of necessity, a conspiracy theory: Imagine all the people who must have been in on such a plot and all the people who would have had to work on the cover-up. Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president. On the surface, a conspiracy theory makes its victim look strong: It sees Trump as resisting the Democrats, the Republicans, the Deep State, the pedophiles, the Satanists. More profoundly, however, it inverts the position of the strong and the weak. Trump’s focus on alleged “irregularities” and “contested states” comes down to cities where Black people live and vote. At bottom, the fantasy of fraud is that of a crime committed by Black people against white people. It’s not just that electoral fraud by African-Americans against Donald Trump never happened. It is that it is the very opposite of what happened, in 2020 and in every American election. As always, Black people waited longer than others to vote and were more likely to have their votes challenged. They were more likely to be suffering or dying from Covid-19, and less likely to be able to take time away from work. The historical protection of their right to vote has been removed by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, and states have rushed to pass measures of a kind that historically reduce voting by the poor and communities of color. The claim that Trump was denied a win by fraud is a big lie not just because it mauls logic, misdescribes the present and demands belief in a conspiracy. It is a big lie, fundamentally, because it reverses the moral field of American politics and the basic structure of American history. When Senator Ted Cruz announced his intention to challenge the Electoral College vote, he invoked the Compromise of 1877, which resolved the presidential election of 1876. Commentators pointed out that this was no relevant precedent, since back then there really were serious voter irregularities and there really was a stalemate in Congress. For African-Americans, however, the seemingly gratuitous reference led somewhere else. The Compromise of 1877 — in which Rutherford B. Hayes would have the presidency, provided that he withdrew federal power from the South — was the very arrangement whereby African-Americans were driven from voting booths for the better part of a century. It was effectively the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of segregation, legal discrimination and Jim Crow. It is the original sin of American history in the post-slavery era, our closest brush with fascism so far. If the reference seemed distant when Ted Cruz and 10 senatorial colleagues released their statement on Jan. 2, it was brought very close four days later, when Confederate flags were paraded through the Capitol. Some things have changed since 1877, of course. Back then, it was the Republicans, or many of them, who supported racial equality; it was the Democrats, the party of the South, who wanted apartheid. It was the Democrats, back then, who called African-Americans’ votes fraudulent, and the Republicans who wanted them counted. This is now reversed. In the past half century, since the Civil Rights Act, Republicans have become a predominantly white party interested — as Trump openly declared — in keeping the number of voters, and particularly the number of Black voters, as low as possible. Yet the common thread remains. Watching white supremacists among the people storming the Capitol, it was easy to yield to the feeling that something pure had been violated. It might be better to see the episode as part of a long American argument about who deserves representation. The Democrats, today, have become a coalition, one that does better than Republicans with female and nonwhite voters and collects votes from both labor unions and the college-educated. Yet it’s not quite right to contrast this coalition with a monolithic Republican Party. Right now, the Republican Party is a coalition of two types of people: those who would game the system (most of the politicians, some of the voters) and those who dream of breaking it (a few of the politicians, many of the voters). In January 2021, this was visible as the difference between those Republicans who defended the present system on the grounds that it favored them and those who tried to upend it. In the four decades since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have overcome the tension between the gamers and the breakers by governing in opposition to government, or by calling elections a revolution (the Tea Party), or by claiming to oppose elites. The breakers, in this arrangement, provide cover for the gamers, putting forth an ideology that distracts from the basic reality that government under Republicans is not made smaller but simply diverted to serve a handful of interests. At first, Trump seemed like a threat to this balance. His lack of experience in politics and his open racism made him a very uncomfortable figure for the party; his habit of continually telling lies was initially found by prominent Republicans to be uncouth. Yet after he won the presidency, his particular skills as a breaker seemed to create a tremendous opportunity for the gamers. Led by the gamer in chief, McConnell, they secured hundreds of federal judges and tax cuts for the rich. Trump was unlike other breakers in that he seemed to have no ideology. His objection to institutions was that they might constrain him personally. He intended to break the system to serve himself — and this is partly why he has failed. Trump is a charismatic politician and inspires devotion not only among voters but among a surprising number of lawmakers, but he has no vision that is greater than himself or what his admirers project upon him. In this respect his pre-fascism fell short of fascism: His vision never went further than a mirror. He arrived at a truly big lie not from any view of the world but from the reality that he might lose something. Yet Trump never prepared a decisive blow. He lacked the support of the military, some of whose leaders he had alienated. (No true fascist would have made the mistake he did there, which was to openly love foreign dictators; supporters convinced that the enemy was at home might not mind, but those sworn to protect from enemies abroad did.) Trump’s secret police force, the men carrying out snatch operations in Portland, was violent but also small and ludicrous. Social media proved to be a blunt weapon: Trump could announce his intentions on Twitter, and white supremacists could plan their invasion of the Capitol on Facebook or Gab. But the president, for all his lawsuits and entreaties and threats to public officials, could not engineer a situation that ended with the right people doing the wrong thing. Trump could make some voters believe that he had won the 2020 election, but he was unable to bring institutions along with his big lie. And he could bring his supporters to Washington and send them on a rampage in the Capitol, but none appeared to have any very clear idea of how this was to work or what their presence would accomplish. It is hard to think of a comparable insurrectionary moment, when a building of great significance was seized, that involved so much milling around. A woman who had been pepper-sprayed leaned on the eastern door to the Capitol’s rotunda, 3:47 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times The lie outlasts the liar. The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now? And to whose benefit? On Jan. 7, Trump called for a peaceful transition of power, implicitly conceding that his putsch had failed. Even then, though, he repeated and even amplified his electoral fiction: It was now a sacred cause for which people had sacrificed. Trump’s imagined stab in the back will live on chiefly thanks to its endorsement by members of Congress. In November and December 2020, Republicans repeated it, giving it a life it would not otherwise have had. In retrospect, it now seems as though the last shaky compromise between the gamers and the breakers was the idea that Trump should have every chance to prove that wrong had been done to him. That position implicitly endorsed the big lie for Trump supporters who were inclined to believe it. It failed to restrain Trump, whose big lie only grew bigger. The breakers and the gamers then saw a different world ahead, where the big lie was either a treasure to be had or a danger to be avoided. The breakers had no choice but to rush to be first to claim to believe in it. Because the breakers Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must compete to claim the brimstone and bile, the gamers were forced to reveal their own hand, and the division within the Republican coalition became visible on Jan. 6. The invasion of the Capitol only reinforced this division. To be sure, a few senators withdrew their objections, but Cruz and Hawley moved forward anyway, along with six other senators. More than 100 representatives doubled down on the big lie. Some, like Matt Gaetz, even added their own flourishes, such as the claim that the mob was led not by Trump’s supporters but by his opponents. Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie. He is the leader of the breakers, at least in the minds of his supporters. By now, the gamers do not want Trump around. Discredited in his last weeks, he is useless; shorn of the obligations of the presidency, he will become embarrassing again, much as he was in 2015. Unable to provide cover for their gamesmanship, he will be irrelevant to their daily purposes. But the breakers have an even stronger reason to see Trump disappear: It is impossible to inherit from someone who is still around. Seizing Trump’s big lie might appear to be a gesture of support. In fact it expresses a wish for his political death. Transforming the myth from one about Trump to one about the nation will be easier when he is out of the way. As Cruz and Hawley may learn, to tell the big lie is to be owned by it. Just because you have sold your soul does not mean that you have driven a hard bargain. Hawley shies from no level of hypocrisy; the son of a banker, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, he denounces elites. Insofar as Cruz was thought to have a principle, it was that of states’ rights, which Trump’s calls to action brazenly violated. A joint statement Cruz issued about the senators’ challenge to the vote nicely captured the post-truth aspect of the whole: It never alleged that there was fraud, only that there were allegations of fraud. Allegations of allegations, allegations all the way down. A mixture of tear gas discharged by police and fire-extinguisher residue discharged by pro-Trump extremists hung in the air of the Rotunda as the crowd milled about, 2:38 p.m.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times The big lie requires commitment. When Republican gamers do not exhibit enough of that, Republican breakers call them “RINOs”: Republicans in name only. This term once suggested a lack of ideological commitment. It now means an unwillingness to throw away an election. The gamers, in response, close ranks around the Constitution and speak of principles and traditions. The breakers must all know (with the possible exception of the Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville) that they are participating in a sham, but they will have an audience of tens of millions who do not. If Trump remains present in American political life, he will surely repeat his big lie incessantly. Hawley and Cruz and the other breakers share responsibility for where this leads. Cruz and Hawley seem to be running for president. Yet what does it mean to be a candidate for office and denounce voting? If you claim that the other side has cheated, and your supporters believe you, they will expect you to cheat yourself. By defending Trump’s big lie on Jan. 6, they set a precedent: A Republican presidential candidate who loses an election should be appointed anyway by Congress. Republicans in the future, at least breaker candidates for president, will presumably have a Plan A, to win and win, and a Plan B, to lose and win. No fraud is necessary; only allegations that there are allegations of fraud. Truth is to be replaced by spectacle, facts by faith. Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished. Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia. Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination. When that violence comes, the breakers will have to react. If they embrace it, they become the fascist faction. The Republican Party will be divided, at least for a time. One can of course imagine a dismal reunification: A breaker candidate loses a narrow presidential election in November 2024 and cries fraud, the Republicans win both houses of Congress and rioters in the street, educated by four years of the big lie, demand what they see as justice. Would the gamers stand on principle if those were the circumstances of Jan. 6, 2025? To be sure, this moment is also a chance. It is possible that a divided Republican Party might better serve American democracy; that the gamers, separated from the breakers, might start to think of policy as a way to win elections. It is very likely that the Biden-Harris administration will have an easier first few months than expected; perhaps obstructionism will give way, at least among a few Republicans and for a short time, to a moment of self-questioning. Politicians who want Trumpism to end have a simple way forward: Tell the truth about the election. America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good. The racism structured into every aspect of the coup attempt is a call to heed our own history. Serious attention to the past helps us to see risks but also suggests future possibility. We cannot be a democratic republic if we tell lies about race, big or small. Democracy is not about minimizing the vote nor ignoring it, neither a matter of gaming nor of breaking a system, but of accepting the equality of others, heeding their voices and counting their votes. Timothy Snyder is the Levin professor of history at Yale University and the author of histories of political atrocity including “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth,” as well as the book “On Tyranny,” on America’s turn toward authoritarianism. His most recent book is “Our Malady,” a memoir of his own near-fatal illness reflecting on the relationship between health and freedom. Ashley Gilbertson is an Australian photojournalist with the VII Photo Agency living in New York. Gilbertson has covered migration and conflict internationally for over 20 years. Copyright 2021 The New York Times Company Lire en français

This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson Boris Cheshirkov – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at today's press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is calling for an end to the unrelenting violence in Africa’s Sahel which has now displaced more than two million people within the borders of their countries for the first time ever. The Sahel – which includes Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Niger — is home to some of the world’s least developed countries, and the communities hosting the displaced have reached a breaking point. Needs are surging across a region where multiple crises converge including armed conflict, extreme poverty, food insecurity, climatic changes, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The extreme vulnerability of the Sahel has been laid bare by the impact of forced displacement, caused by widespread and gruesome violence perpetrated by armed insurgent groups and criminal gangs. The humanitarian response is dangerously overstretched, and UNHCR is urging the international community to redouble its support for the region. States must act now to help Sahel countries address the root causes of this forced displacement, to boost strategic and sustainable development, and to strengthen institutions such as schools and hospitals, many of which have shut due to ongoing violence. The situation has worsened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Internal displacement in the region has quadrupled in just two years, as there were 490,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) at the beginning of 2019. More than half of the IDPs in the region are Burkinabé. The Sahel also hosts over 850,000 refugees, mainly from Mali. Already this year, violence in Niger and Burkina Faso has forced more than 21,000 people to flee their homes and seek refuge within their own countries. In Burkina Faso, since 31 December, a series of armed attacks on the town of Koumbri and nearby villages in the North of the country have displaced more than 11,000 people. Most are women and children who fled at night after attackers began shooting at their homes. They have reached safety and are now staying within local communities in Ouahigouya and Barga, some 35 kilometres away. Despite the generosity of their hosts, many of the IDPs lack basic shelter and are sleeping under open skies. They are in urgent need of adequate shelter, water, and essential relief, as well as access to health and proper sanitation to prevent the spread of COVID-19. UNHCR is erecting 108 sturdy shelters in Ouahigouya and our teams have distributed mats and blankets, hygiene materials, and other essential aid. Local authorities are accelerating efforts to register the new arrivals and relocate them to another site. Across the region, UNHCR and its partners are working to provide critical assistance to hundreds of thousands of displaced people and their hosts, such as shelter, aid items, and cash. Our teams are also working to prevent and respond to instances of sexual violence, which have become widespread. We are rehabilitating schools and classrooms and supporting distance learning opportunities. © The UN Refugee Agency 2021

The "Stolen Election": Trump's Big Lie By Gregory Stanton Founding President Genocide Watch Genocide Watch was founded in 1999 to predict and prevent genocide. We use a model of how genocide develops to warn about processes that make genocide possible. The Ten Stages (or Processes) of Genocide include: · Classification: "us" versus "them," exclusion from citizenship · Symbolization: IDs, naming, color, language, yellow stars · Discrimination: exclusion from voting, jobs, civil rights · Dehumanization: calling people criminals, terrorists, vermin, cockroaches · Organization: hate groups, armed militias, mobs · Polarization: hate radio and TV, social media hate campaigns · Preparation: planning, violent attacks, coups d'état · Persecution: ghettos, starvation, untreated epidemics, trial massacres, terrorism · Extermination: mass murders, genocide · Denial: Big Lies denying or justifying crimes The processes are not linear. They often occur simultaneously. Together they lead to genocide. Donald Trump has promoted all of these processes, but another American genocide has not begun. Restraints in the American Constitution have checked the process at Polarization, Preparation, and Persecution. Classification: Under Stephen Miller's racist policies, ICE holds asylum seekers in detention camps and separates children from their parents. Ten million immigrants in the US are denied citizenship. Symbolization: Without documents, these ten million long-term residents cannot register to vote. Discrimination: One in six Black American men cannot vote. Native Americans are on reservations. Visitors from many Muslim countries are barred from the US. Dehumanization: Trump calls immigrants at the southern border "murderers", "rapists", "illegal aliens." [What planet did they come from?] Trump labels his opponents "Antifa", "communists,""far-letists." Organization: The Proud Boys and white supremacists parade openly, brandishing automatic weapons. Polarization: FOX news, right-wing radio, and over 130 members of Congress and the Senate amplify Trump's Big Lie that he won the election and that his followers should "Stop the Steal." He denounces reports of his election defeat as "Fake News." Preparation: White supremacists post hate speech on Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Signal, and Telegram. They planned the takeover of the US Capitol. They are planning more violence for Biden's inauguration. Persecution: Black and Native Americans are dying from Covid-19 at a mortality rate per capita over twice as high as for whites. White police shoot Black people with police union-backed impunity. Extermination: The mob that took over the Capitol was led by terrorists, intent on murdering the Speaker of the House and the Vice President. They tried to enable a coup d'état to keep Trump in power. Denial: Trump's Big Lie is that he won the 2020 election "by a landslide," but it was a "Stolen Election." His followers believe "the steal" justifies their invasion of the Capitol to prevent certification of the election. The parallels are ominous. The Nazis claimed that Jews "stabbed Germany in the back" and made Germany lose World War I. Victory for Germany was "stolen." The Nazis used this Big Lie to rise to power. Nazis failed to win an outright majority in the elections of 1932, but as leader of the largest party, Hitler became Chancellor. On February 27, 1933, Nazis burned the Reichstag (German parliament.) Hitler dissolved parliament and declared emergency powers. · The Nazis re-classified Jews, stripping them of German citizenship. · The Nazis required Jews to carry IDs marked "Jude" and made them wear symbolic yellow stars. · The Nazis discriminated against Jews, excluding them from government and academic jobs. · They dehumanized Jews as "vermin," and as vampires who drank the blood of Christian children. · The Nazi Party seized power and the SS was organized to kill Jews. · Nazi radio and newspapers spewed polarizing hate propaganda. Opponents were the "lying press." · On Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) November 9-10, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers and mobs burned 1000 synagogues, looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, and sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. · Nazi leaders planned "The Final Solution" and tested methods of extermination. · The Nazis forced Jews into ghettos where they starved and perished. Nazi slaves built the death camps. · Nazi troops invaded Eastern Europe, where Einsatzgruppen and Police Units murdered 1.3 million Jews. During the Holocaust the Nazis transported and murdered over six million Jews, Roma, LGBT, and disabled people, and other minorities. · The Nazis denied their crimes from start to finish. Holocaust deniers still deny the Nazi crimes. Holocaust denial is still dominant among neo-Nazis in Europe and America, in Iran, and in much of the Middle East. Some of the rioters who seized the Capitol on January 6 wore 6MNE T-shirts.("Six Million is Not Enough.") Another wore a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt. Many believe the QAnon neo-Nazi cult's conspiracy theory that Jewish, Democrat, and Hollywood pedophiles kidnap children to drink their blood. QAnon revived the Nazi Jewish conspiracy myth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Blood Libel that claimed Jews kidnap and murder Christian children, and then mix their blood in matzos at Passover. There are now even QAnon cultists in Congress. The parallels to Nazism should make your blood run cold. Trump has promoted policies that are chillingly similar to Nazi policies. He is supported by neo-Nazis and Congressmen and Senators too cowardly to oppose him. Trump himself suffers from the same Narcissistic Personality Disorder that deranged Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and other tyrants. He is most at home with murderous dictators like Kim Jong-un, Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdoğan, and Mohammed bin Salman. Like all narcissists, Trump can never admit he is wrong or that he has lost. Trump's worst fear is that he will be branded a "Loser." That is why Trump's Big Lie that he did not lose the 2020 election is vital to his narcissistic self-image. He is trying to inflict that Big Lie on America. Make no mistake about it. The January 6th invasion of the Capitol was the prelude to a Trump attempted coup d'état. By a 232 to197 vote to impeach supported by only ten Republican Congresspersons, Trump was stopped. For now. Take Trump's intended insurrection seriously. It can happen here. Dr. Gregory Stanton is the Founding President of Genocide Watch. He was Research Professor in Genocide Studies at George Mason University, and the James Farmer Professor of Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington. He was President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Photo credit: Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Salvadoran Archbishop José Escobar Alas of San Salvador is pictured in Washington April 13, 2018. (CNS/Tyler Orsburn) SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR — The head of the Archdiocese of San Salvador refused to allow a judge access to church records on one of the largest modern-day massacres in Latin America, saying in a Jan. 17 news conference that he's simply protecting victims. San Salvador Archbishop José Escobar Alas was heavily criticized for his decision to block access to documents the archdiocese has on the 1981 massacre of El Mozote, where 800 to 1,200 Salvadoran civilians, including many children, were slaughtered by government forces. "We can't just open the doors to anyone who wants to inspect, to take whatever information they want," the archbishop said. But the "anyone" who wants to see the church documents is a judge armed with a warrant. In a long explanation to a journalist's question asking about why he was denying access, the archbishop said he was following a different court order to protect victims. Tutela Legal, the human rights office that houses the archives under the auspices of the Archdiocese of San Salvador, has gathered evidence of human rights violations extending back to the time of El Salvador's conflict starting in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, when St. Oscar Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador, the office was a place where the poor and disenfranchised could have their stories of disappeared or murdered loved ones documented. The hope was to house the information in the archive to locate the person, dead or alive, or at least document the abuses that led to his or her killing and eventually have the perpetrators face justice. In 2013, Archbishop Escobar abruptly closed the office, causing international outcry from the human rights community. Its contents include information on still-unresolved and unadjudicated cases, including the El Mozote massacre. Though the Tutela Legal office later reopened, it lost the luster it had once had as a defender of human rights under St. Romero and his successor, Archbishop Arturo Rivera Damas. Escobar's refusal was seen as yet another blow to those trying to find justice for the victims of the massacre. El Salvador's army, too, has blocked the same judge from accessing its records. Though Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who commands the armed forces, had promised he would do everything possible to open up the documentation the army has related to the massacre, he later said the judge had no jurisdiction over the armed forces and did nothing to make sure the warrant was honored. In December 1981, during a period of two days, soldiers rounded up the villagers of El Mozote, raped girls and women and later murdered all but one villager, Rufina Amaya, who survived by hiding. She was represented by the archdiocese's Tutela Legal office, and her account is part of the archive. Escobar, in presenting various reasons why he would not allow the church's archives to be viewed, said a separate court had ordered that names be held in confidence until the case is adjudicated. He said in the past, various entities — including a past president — have sought to take away documents in the archives, and the archdiocese has a right to protect them. "No one can violate the archives in that manner, kidnap them," he said, adding that there were victims on both sides. "This information cannot fall into the hands of their enemies," he said. David Morales, a lawyer with the human rights group Cristosal, who has prosecuted the El Mozote case, said the archbishop's statements were "lamentable" and based on "disinformation." He said the archbishop needs to reread the order he thinks prevents him from cooperating, because it says he is obligated to collaborate with judicial authorities in any investigation involving human rights violations. He also said lawyers want access to simply inspect or view historical material describing the life of the communities collected after the massacre, not individual accounts. "It's information that would help victims," Morales said. The order from the judge that the archbishop objects to is one that is backed by those representing the victims, he said. Otherwise, the archbishop will be placing himself in a "position that affects the judicial process, and that would end up favoring the perpetrators." The archbishop also is facing controversy over his view of the peace accords that ended the war in El Salvador in 1992, seeming to also echo Bukele, who called them a "farce." Both men said the accords had done little to bring peace to El Salvador, which still faces high homicides rate and random violence from gangs. But the Catholic Church, including Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez, played a significant role in championing the agreements. On Jan. 16, their accords' 29th anniversary, the cardinal, along with Salvadoran Bishop Oswaldo Escobar of Chalatenango, three Jesuits priests, and other Christian faith leaders signed a statement supporting the accords after they were criticized by Bukele. Copyright © 2021 The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company

View the program at: https://psu.zoom.us/rec/share/KsU-bcVbwFplF1I-XrQQgdHHmo3XLxNrNGS21NNBvd-Pthzdao09_5Ziq_oXfUSq.9_Ey6ICAEvOJeS4h?startTime=1611237696000

Defeated measure aimed to give high court more power to protect minorities such as China’s Uighurs The government has narrowly defeated a move requiring the government to reconsider any trade deal with a country found by the high court to be committing genocide. The measure, backed by religious groups and a powerful cross-party alliance of MPs, was defeated by 319 to 308. The move giving the domestic courts a new role in determining genocide had been heavily endorsed by the Lords, and now peers will be asked by campaigners to reinsert the measure in a revised form back into the trade bill so forcing MPs to consider the proposal again. A US state department’s declaration that the treatment of the Uighur Muslims represents genocide and crimes against humanity, issued on Tuesday in the midst of the Commons debate, may embolden peers. The outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called for all appropriate multilateral and relevant judicial bodies to join the US in seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the atrocities. “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uighurs by the Chinese party-state,” Pompeo said in a statement. Greg Hands, the trade minister, opposed the amendment as a fundamental denial of parliamentary supremacy. He said he was open to holding further discussions with his rebel MPs, but offered no specific concession. A second measure, also endorsed by the Lords, requiring ministers to make a formal assessment of a country’s human rights record before striking a trade deal was heavily defeated by 364 to 267. The genocide amendment was devised by the independent peer Lord Alton as an attempt to break the current impasse whereby the international courts often cannot make rulings on genocide since nation states such as China do not recognise the relevant courts, or veto any reference to such issues. Alton had proposed the UK high court be able to make a preliminary determination that the government would then have to consider. The measure is primarily directed at protecting the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, but a similar reference to the high court could be sought by any group claiming they are victims of genocide such as the Rohingya Muslims. The amendment had the backing of the Conservative Muslim Forum, the British Board of Jewish Deputies, the International Bar Association and a large array of Christian groups. Hands told MPs: “To accept this specific amendment would allow the high court to frustrate, even revoke trade agreements entered into by the government and approved after parliamentary scrutiny. This is a completely unprecedented and unacceptable erosion of the royal prerogative and not something the government could support.” He added the government had no plan to sign a free trade deal with China. In his only hint at a concession, he said the government was committed to make sure the expertise in the Commons on human rights is used and to explore how this could happen. He was backed by the former attorney general Sir Jeremy Wright who said it was not clear who the respondent would be in the event of a genocide case being brought in the high court. But he added the government did need to give MPs a greater say over future trade deals. Nus Ghani, a leading member of the inter-parliamentary alliance on China, said: “When the British Board of Deputies of Jewish colleagues state they are reminded of the Holocaust when they consider the state of the Uighur people it cannot get any worse than that.” Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said the “vote was not about whether the courts or parliament decide on genocide. It’s already the courts who decide. The question is whose courts. The international courts are blocked, so this a way for the British people to take back control of our laws and our conscience.” Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the defence select committee, said: “The UK was suffering from an absence of clarity about what we believe in,” adding China was on a geopolitical collision course with the west. “The world watched and hesitated when genocide took place in Rwanda and indeed in Syria. Let’s not hesitate again.” Responding to the defeat Alton, the co-sponsor of the amendment in the Lords, said: “The fight does not end here. We will continue to do all we can to ensure that Uighurs and other victims of alleged genocide have a route to justice through UK courts.” He said the revised amendment would seek to “meet the perfectly reasonable argument that, once the court has reached a determination of genocide, parliament should then be able to vote on the revocation of a trade deal with the country concerned”.Helena Kennedy, the Labour peer and human rights lawyer, said: “I know that colleagues across all parties will not accept the loopholes in our existing systems which allow perpetrators of genocide to escape with impunity. The work to bring an improved amendment to the House of Lords begins immediately.” © The Guardian.

The number of people killed in clashes between different ethnic groups in Sudan's West Darfur state has risen to 83, a medical body has said. The fighting in the state capital, El Geneina, began on Saturday after a row in which a man was stabbed to death. A state-wide curfew has been imposed and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has sent a delegation to investigate. A conflict in Darfur that began in 2003 forced millions to flee and, despite a peace process, tensions remain. Saturday's violence comes less than three weeks after peacekeepers from the United Nations and African Union handed over security to the Khartoum authorities after 13 years there, reports the BBC's Youssef Taha. Similar clashes in El Geneina last year, which saw Arab pastoralists fight with non-Arab groups, caused hundreds of casualties. The most recent fighting was centred around a camp for people who had been displaced by the Darfur conflict. A deadly row between two men escalated into a fight involving armed militias, the AFP news agency reports. The Central Committee of Sudan Doctors said the death toll had risen from 48 to 83, and the number of wounded from around 100 to 160. Members of the armed forces were among the victims, it said. Casualties were likely to rise further as fighting was continuing, the medical body added. The government said on Sunday that troop reinforcements would be sent to the area The announcement was made after army chief Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan met top security officials to discuss the violence. A peace deal involving most, but not all, groups in Darfur was signed last year. The Darfur conflict began under the presidency of Omar al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019 and is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and genocide in the region. Justice for the people of Darfur was a key rallying cry for civilian groups who backed the ouster of the president after nearly three decades in power. The Sudanese Professionals' Association, which was at the forefront of the anti-Bashir movement, called for the current transitional government to deal with the "unruly armed groups which have been freely moving and terrorising civilians since the collapse of the former regime", Sudan's news agency reports. © 2021 BBC.

Baseless Public Health Claims Smokescreen for Persecuting Minority (New York) – Sri Lanka’s requirement to cremate anyone who dies from Covid-19 goes against public health guidance and discriminates against the Muslim community, Human Rights Watch said today. The government’s spurious argument that burial in accordance with Islamic tradition poses a public health risk stigmatizes, oppresses, and causes immense distress to a vulnerable minority. The Sri Lankan government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has claimed that burying people who died of Covid-19 complications may “contaminate ground water.” It has not changed the policy, first codified in a March 31, 2020 regulation, despite World Health Organization guidelines that burial is safe, and growing opposition from United Nations experts, medical professionals in Sri Lanka, and religious leaders of all major faiths in the country. Among those cremated against the wishes of their family have been a 20-day-old infant and a woman whom the authorities later acknowledged did not have Covid-19. “For families already grieving the loss of a loved one, the Rajapaksa government’s forced disposal of remains in a manner contrary to their beliefs is an outrageous and offensive assault on religious rights and basic dignity,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “This policy only serves to cultivate intolerance and social division.” In recent weeks the policy has sparked protests around the country. Authorities removed strips of white cloth that activists tied to the fence of the Borella crematorium in Colombo to protest the forced cremation of the baby. Several Muslim families have decided to leave the body of their loved ones who died of Covid-19 complications in hospital mortuaries rather than to permit cremation. Others say they have been coerced into allowing the cremation, or that it occurred without their knowledge. “My friends and family asked the authorities how they can go ahead with the cremation when neither of the parents had signed any document giving consent,” Mohamed Fahim, the father of the baby, named Shaykh, told reporters. “It is as if they rushed to cremate our baby. When we asked questions, they didn’t have any proper answer.” Sri Lankan civil society groups, in a joint statement after the ban was introduced, warned that there were already “outpourings of vitriol, and hate speech against Muslims” and that it was “important to ensure that decisions regarding matters of public health do not result in the persecution or marginalization of the Muslim population.” The government has done little to combat incitement against Muslims, such as false rumors that the community deliberately spread the coronavirus, which are often shared by government supporters and in pro-government media. A Muslim social media user, Ramzy Razeek, was arrested and detained for five months after opposing the burial ban and calling for religious tolerance on Facebook. Opposition to the policy has grown in recent weeks. The Sri Lanka Medical Association on January 1, 2021, said that the novel coronavirus cannot be transmitted by dead bodies. The College of Community Physicians of Sri Lanka said on December 31 that there is “no solid evidence” supporting the regulation. Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist religious leaders wrote in a joint letter on December 26 that religious rights are protected by the Sri Lankan constitution. A Health Ministry expert panel recommended on December 29 that disposal of bodies could include burial as well as cremation. In April, four United Nations special rapporteurs wrote to the government stating that the regulation violated the right to freedom of religion, and that the government should combat attempts to instigate religious hatred and violence. In November the Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the policy as a violation of religious rights guaranteed by international law. Several fundamental rights petitions were filed against the regulation at the Supreme Court, which dismissed the cases on December 1 without explanation. The court’s independence has been undermined by parliament’s adoption, in October, of the 20th amendment to the constitution, which gives the president control over Supreme Court appointments. President Rajapaksa, whose 2019 election campaign courted Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist majority, said in a November 2020 speech that there are “legitimate fears that the Sinhala race, our religion, national resources and the heritage would be threatened with destruction in the face of various local and foreign forces and ideologies that support separatism, extremism and terrorism.” In December, Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives wrote on Twitter that President Rajapaksa had asked the Maldives to allow Sri Lankan Muslims to be buried in the Maldives, a majority Muslim country. Ahmed Shaheed, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, said that the proposal “could end up enabling the further marginalization of Muslim communities in Sri Lanka.” “We want to be buried on our own soil,” said Ali Zahir Moulana, a Sri Lankan Muslim and former member of parliament. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government has adopted various policies and practices that have a discriminatory impact on Sri Lanka’s Muslim and Tamil minorities in particular. During Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war which ended in 2009, Rajapaksa, as defense secretary during the government of his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, was implicated in war crimes and human rights abuses against Tamil civilians. After becoming president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa renounced Sri Lanka’s earlier commitments to justice and accountability made to the UN Human Rights Council. Michele Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has warned that “continuing impunity risks fuelling communal or inter-ethnic violence, and instability.” The UN Human Rights Council, at its session beginning in February, will consider a resolution to uphold international law in Sri Lanka and to seek to protect vulnerable minorities from further abuses. “Denying Sri Lankan Muslims the right to bury their dead is causing intense distress, stoking communal hatred, and is without any scientific basis,” Ganguly said. “Foreign governments need to recognize Sri Lanka’s dangerous downturn and act before the situation deteriorates further.” © Human Rights Watch 2021

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - More than half a million people have fled their homes due to an Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique, and the violence and humanitarian crisis will worsen without international help, United Nations officials said on Wednesday. “If nothing is done soon, we won’t have only 535,000 displaced people. We won’t have only 2,000 people killed by the conflict, but tens of thousands,” said Valentin Tapsoba, regional director for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). The displaced people were in a dire situation, with overcrowding, malnutrition and a lack of essentials including food and water, the officials said in an online news briefing. Insurgents staged their first attack in Cabo Delgado province - where oil giants such as Total are involved in big gas projects - in 2017 and pledged allegiance to Islamic State two years later. The conflict has escalated since, with attacks growing in scale and frequency and the militants regularly taking and holding entire towns. The insecurity has left aid agencies unable to visit a huge swathe of the coastal province, while the number of people forced to flee their homes has swelled from 18,000 at the start of 2020 to over half a million by the end, Lola Castro, World Food Programme (WFP) regional director said. Some households in the provincial capital Pemba are hosting several other families. One had opened its home to 66 other people who all slept in one room and shared one latrine, Tapsoba said. “The situation in Cabo Delgado is appalling,” he said. South Africa has offered to help Mozambique resolve its northern conflict, as the main player in the Southern African Development Community, a regional trade bloc, but Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told a virtual Chatham House event that the government had yet to take up the offer. “We have made every effort to reach out to the government of Mozambique and to sit with them to define a support agenda,” she said. “Our inability ... to arrive at an agreement as to what ... support we might provide remains a very worrying puzzle to us,” she said. There was no immediate reply from Mozambique’s government to a request for comment. Reporting by Emma Rumney; Editing by William Maclean © Reuters 2021

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Some 10 million children in war-ravaged Afghanistan are at risk of not having enough food to eat in 2021, a humanitarian organization said Tuesday and called for $1.3 billion in new funds for aid. Just over 18 million Afghans, including 9.7 million children, are badly in need of lifesaving support, including food, Save the Children said in a statement. The group called for $1.3 billion in donations to pay for assistance in 2021. Chris Nyamandi, the organization’s Afghanistan country director, said Afghans are suffering under a combination of violent conflict, poverty and the virus pandemic. “It’s a desperately bad situation that needs urgent attention from the international community,” he said. The latest round of peace talks between the Taliban and Afghan government negotiators that began earlier this month in Qatar has been slow to produce results as concerns grow over a recent spike in violence across Afghanistan. The pandemic has also had a disastrous impact on millions of Afghan families. In 2020, the World Bank estimated that the pandemic had hugely disrupted imports, including vital household items, which in turn led to rapid inflation. The added health and economic strains of the pandemic have deepened the humanitarian impact across the country. Many Afghans also blame runaway government corruption and lawlessness for the country’s poor economy. The U.N. and its humanitarian partners will seek $1.3 billion in aid for 16 million Afghans in need this year, U.N. secretary-general spokesman Stephane Dujarric, said this month. That’s up from an estimated 2.3 million people last year who needed life-saving assistance. “It’s a huge increase in people who need aid,” he said. Nyamandi said that with no immediate end in sight to the decades-long conflict, millions of people will continue to suffer. “It’s especially hard on children, many of whom have known nothing but violence,” he said. According to the U.N., nearly 6,000 people — a third of them children — were killed or wounded in fighting in Afghanistan between January and September last year, Nyamandi said. The violence continues to force hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes every year and limit people’s access to resources including hospitals and clinics. In a Save the Children report in December, the group said more than 300,000 Afghan children faced freezing winter conditions that could lead to illness and death without proper winter clothing and heating. The organization provided winter kits to more than 100,000 families in 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. The kits included fuel and a heater, blankets and winter clothes, including coats, socks, shoes and hats. Nyamandi said the plight of the Afghan people is threatened by inadequate humanitarian funding pledged by wealthy nations at a conference in Geneva in November. “Aid to Afghanistan has dropped alarmingly at a time when humanitarian need is rising. We’re now in the unsustainable position where aid falls far short of what’s needed to meet the needs of the people” he said. The London-based Save the Children report cites 10-year-old Brishna from eastern Nangarhar province as saying her family was forced to leave their home and move to another district because of the fighting. “Life is difficult,” she said. “My father, who is responsible for bringing us food, is sick.” Brishna said she and her brother collect garbage for cooking fires and it has been a long time since they had proper food and clothes. “My siblings and I always wish to have three meals in a day with some fruits, and a better life. But sometimes, we sleep with empty stomachs. During the winter we don’t have blankets and heating stuff to warm our house,” she said. © The Associated Press 2021

In the most comprehensive kleptocracy policy study yet published, Nate Sibley and Ben Judah examine the pervasive threat to democracy, prosperity, and security posed by globalized corruption and offer 70 recommendations for US policymakers. “The danger of countries that have fallen to authoritarian kleptocrats is real, and the danger extends beyond the country’s borders. Indeed, most of the threats our rule-of-law world faces emerge from countries operating without rule of law that are sinks of corruption, autocracy, and lawlessness.” – Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Preface Kleptocracy, or “rule by thieves,” has for too long been disregarded from mainstream foreign policy discussions. It is often overlooked as a peripheral economic development issue: A problem for tax justice advocates and foreign aid workers. Yet it has been shaping international politics and the global security environment for decades. The Biden-Harris administration will have an unprecedented opportunity—and a unique responsibility—to confront this pervasive threat with decisive action. This chance comes not come a moment too soon. Since the end of the Cold War, corruption has metastasized beyond national borders into a problem of almost unimaginable scale. The United Nations has estimated that $1 trillion are paid in bribes and a further $2.3 trillion otherwise stolen annually. Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based think tank, cites corruption as a key factor in $8.7 trillion that vanished from official records of trade between 135 developing countries and 36 advanced economies from 2008-2017. Kleptocracy is a blight on international development, governance, and democracy, vastly worsening conditions for populations worldwide. The International Monetary Fund has calculated that global tax revenues would increase by more than $1 trillion annually if all countries collected taxes as efficiently as those with the least corrupt governments, providing nearly twice the revenue needed to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. These figures show that corruption is now a key feature of financial globalization. Yet they are so vast as to run the risk of obscuring the human reality of life and death in societies where the state has been robbed of its capacity to provide security and other basic needs. The true cost of kleptocracy cannot be counted in dollars but in billions of lives that have been ruined or lost through famine, violence, abuse, and despair. It has been estimated that 3.6 million people a year die from corruption induced causes, concentrated in the world’s most vulnerable economies and poorest populations. The time for action is now. Beyond strictly humanitarian concerns, it is no coincidence that the world’s most corrupt leaders also continually undermine global security. Authoritarianism and corruption have melded into a single pervasive threat. Ruling elites in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and other authoritarian regimes are the most prolific abusers of the global financial system, fusing opportunities for illicit self-enrichment with malign geopolitical ambitions. Their corrupt officials are routinely implicated in bribery, sanctions evasion, IP and technology theft, financing of terrorism, and other criminal activities. These are the foreign policy tools that inevitably emerge from domestic political systems shaped by, and sustained through, an endemic kleptocracy. Corruption is used in all such regimes simultaneously as a tool of repression, to entrench and expand the regime, and to project power beyond national borders. Therefore, as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and General David Petraeus observed in 2019, “the fight against corruption is more than a legal and moral issue; it has become a strategic one — and a battleground in a great power competition… Complacency about graft and kleptocracy beyond US borders risks complicity in it — with grave consequences both for the nation’s reputation abroad and Americans’ well-being at home. In fact, “following the money” from overseas corruption cases has often led American experts uncomfortably close to home. All too often, it is unwitting or unscrupulous Western professional services providers who launder, conceal, and claim lucrative commissions from funds derived from transnational crime and corruption. This is not a case of “bad apples” but a structural problem. The kleptocracy that afflicts developing countries and powers authoritarian regimes is not only facilitated but incentivized by offshore tax havens and poorly-regulated major financial centers, some of the most significant of which are located within the United States itself. In this way, the proceeds of kleptocracy find their way into democratic societies as well, with an increasingly corrosive effect on their own political, legal, and financial institutions. President-elect Biden will assume office amid a sea change in attitudes towards corruption. Despite the secrecy surrounding the murky world of transnational kleptocracy, there is now growing public awareness of how it works in practice. In 2016, the Panama Papers – a leak of 11.5 million documents from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca – offered an unprecedented glimpse into the methods used by political elites to move unexplained wealth worldwide. Thanks to a new collaborative model of investigative journalism, similar leaks are emerging with astonishing frequency, notably the Paradise Papers in 2017 and the Luanda Leaks in early 2020. Most recently, the FinCEN Files highlighted the problematic relationship between financial institutions responsible for reporting suspicious financial activity and the under-resourced government agency tasked with analyzing the data. The harmful effects of transnational corruption have also been illustrated by a string of high-profile criminal cases in recent years. These include Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, the prosecutions of various high-level Venezuelan officials, and ongoing inquiries into alleged money laundering by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Most obviously, the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election had the effect of opening many Americans’ eyes to financial entanglements between their own political elites and those of some of the most corrupt countries on Earth. This changing perception of transnational corruption reflects the acute strategic challenge facing the next administration. Kleptocracy continues to devastate the developing world while fueling almost every major threat to global security, poisoning international markets, and undermining democracy. This problem is far more serious and pervasive than the caricatures of Cold War despots hoarding gold bullion, or even Russian “oligarchs” enjoying the high life in London, would tend to suggest. Ultimately, countering global kleptocracy is not a matter of targeting isolated instances of corruption around the world, but winning a competition to shape the global economy in the 21st century. Tackling global corruption is not a distraction from dealing with China, Russia, and other strategic competitors, but central to it. Every so often, a major threat or crisis compels the US government to examine systemic vulnerabilities in its own financial system. In the last decades of the 20th century, the War on Drugs resulted in new legal authorities and unprecedented resources for law enforcement to target the financial proceeds of crime. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, likewise resulted in sweeping new powers with which US intelligence and law enforcement agencies could pursue the funders of terrorism through an increasingly sophisticated global financial system. We face no less a challenge now, in the shape of an adversarial China intent on reshaping the global order to its own ends, a hostile Russia bent on sowing discord within its perceived enemies’ ranks, and the broader upheavals of ongoing geopolitical realignment. Kleptocracy has fueled these developments, yet efforts to upgrade America’s financial defenses and tools of economic statecraft have only just begun. The United States’ approach to transnational corruption and other forms of illicit finance has not always fallen behind the curve. In 1977, America became the first country to ban its own companies from bribing foreign officials through the landmark Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In 1986, it became the first country to criminalize money laundering at the federal level. In 2010, it launched a dedicated interagency Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. And in 2016, it became the first country to introduce sanctions targeting human rights abuses and corruption in the form of the Global Magnitsky Act. Working multilaterally, the US played a leading role in launching the Financial Action Task Force (1989), as well as shaping the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (1997), the UN Convention Against Corruption (2003), and other important international agreements. President George W. Bush introduced a National Strategy to Internationalize Efforts Against Kleptocracy as early as 2006, while President Barack Obama launched a US Global Anticorruption Agenda in 2014. These and many other examples show that, more than any other country, the United States can innovate, adapt, and lead the rest of the world in beating back kleptocracy if it so chooses. Indeed, America has a unique capacity and special responsibility to take on kleptocracy and other forms of illicit finance. This is because the United States alone bears the “exorbitant privilege” of economic hegemony while overseeing the global reserve currency. This gives the US government tremendous political leverage worldwide and means that even seemingly minor regulatory measures enacted in Washington, DC can send shockwaves through the entire global financial system. The Biden-Harris administration should use this power to trigger another transformational moment in America’s decades-long struggle against corruption. Encouragingly, the President-elect has in fact already committed to doing so. In a March 2020 Foreign Affairs article, he outlined plans for a multilateral Summit for Democracy that would put countering global kleptocracy at the heart of US foreign policy: “...the United States will prioritize results by galvanizing significant new country commitments in three areas: fighting corruption, defending against authoritarianism, and advancing human rights in their own nations and abroad. As a summit commitment of the United States, I will issue a presidential policy directive that establishes combating corruption as a core national security interest and democratic responsibility, and I will lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies.” President-elect Biden has also committed to addressing domestic vulnerabilities to malign foreign influence: “I will propose a law to strengthen prohibitions on foreign nationals or governments trying to influence US federal, state, or local elections and direct a new independent agency—the Commission on Federal Ethics—to ensure vigorous and unified enforcement of this and other anticorruption laws. The lack of transparency in our campaign finance system, combined with extensive foreign money laundering, creates a significant vulnerability. We need to close the loopholes that corrupt our democracy.” Strange as this central focus on corruption may sound to the US foreign policy establishment, it is by now hardly a radical agenda – or even a partisan one. Many people will remember the 116th Congress as one of the most divided in living memory, but advancing an unprecedented raft of anti-kleptocracy legislation was one of the few areas in which lawmakers from both sides of the aisle felt strongly enough to put aside their differences. It was a process in which the US Helsinki Commission, with its decades-long mission to fostering bipartisan cooperation on human rights, security, and economic issues, played a leading role. This momentum culminated in the passage of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act), which mandates the most significant upgrades to America’s financial defenses in nearly two decades. President-elect Biden’s commitment, combined with ongoing congressional efforts, reflects a key area of bipartisan understanding in which it should be possible to expedite domestic reforms that end America’s current status as a magnet for dirty money. The Biden administration can then take this agenda overseas by making countering kleptocracy a central pillar of US foreign policy and of the planned Summit for Democracy. Among democratic partners, the United States needs a clear diplomatic agenda, regrouping allies in the G7, OECD, and NATO to pass their own bold reforms against illicit finance. This can only be achieved by working closely with like-minded partners such as the European Union, the Five Eyes countries, and strategic allies such as Japan and India. Renewed American influence and leadership can then be leveraged through other multilateral organizations and institutions such as the G-20, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Financial Action Task Force to pressure corrupt regimes. Taking on kleptocracy also offers a way for the United States to distinguish itself from strategic rivals, especially the Chinese Communist Party and its disingenuous anti-corruption campaign. At some point in 2021, the United Nations General Assembly will hold a once-in-a-generation Special Session on corruption that could set the international agenda for decades to come. As China and Russia’s leaders work to seize key anti-corruption institutions and build a new global consensus that shields them from accountability, a US platform that consists of past victories, a decent enforcement record, and delayed reforms will not be good enough. A bold international agenda against corruption, by contrast, will represent a renewed statement of values and the message that the “swing states” of the international order need to hear. This paper provides a policy blueprint for achieving what the US now urgently needs: A comprehensive strategy for confronting authoritarian corruption and countering global kleptocracy. The first section sets out the domestic reforms needed to defend America’s financial system. The second section outlines measures to target corruption overseas, while the third proposes initiatives to renew US global leadership against kleptocracy. In the final section, we set out a sequential checklist containing 70 policy recommendations for both the Executive Branch and Congress. These proposals will enable the United States to assert new global standards and lead initiatives that can unite democratic allies in a common cause, bring billions of people closer to the promise of democracy, and gradually transform the global economy into a hostile environment for authoritarian kleptocrats who seek to abuse it. It is a task on which America’s own democracy, security, and prosperity ultimately depend. We are grateful for the support of the Smith Richardson Foundation in compiling this paper; and to the many leading experts who imparted their time and insights during our research, including many former and serving US officials. Any errors are, of course, our own. We do not endorse any specific legislation but have cited relevant bills for ease of reference and to illustrate the growing momentum behind US anti-kleptocracy efforts. We hope the following report will help in its own small way. Access the full article here. Hudson Institute © 2021