President Trump sees arms deals as jobs generators for firms like Raytheon, which has made billions in sales to the Saudi coalition. The Obama administration initially backed the Saudis too, but later regretted it as thousands died. A Saudi-led bombing of a funeral hall in Sana, Yemen, in 2016 killed at least 140 people and injured another 500. A bomb shard was linked to the American company Raytheon. Credit...AP Photo/Hani Mohammed Year after year, the bombs fell — on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign. But in June 2017, an influential Republican senator decided to cut them off, by withholding approval for new sales. It was a moment that might have stopped the slaughter. Not under President Trump. With billions at stake, one of the president’s favored aides, the combative trade adviser Peter Navarro, made it his mission to reverse the senator. Mr. Navarro, after consulting with American arms makers, wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials calling for an intervention, possibly by Mr. Trump himself. He titled it “Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.” Within weeks, the Saudis were once again free to buy American weapons. The intervention, which has not been previously reported, underscores a fundamental change in American foreign policy under Mr. Trump that often elevates economic considerations over other ones. Where foreign arms sales in the past were mostly offered and withheld to achieve diplomatic goals, the Trump administration pursues them mainly for the profits they generate and the jobs they create, with little regard for how the weapons are used. President Trump has charged his trade adviser Peter Navarro with growing American manufacturing, particularly in the arms industry.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times Mr. Trump has tapped Mr. Navarro, a California economist best known for polemics against China, to be a conduit between the Oval Office and defense firms. His administration has also rewritten the rules for arms exports, speeding weapon sales to foreign militaries. The State Department, responsible for licensing arms deals, now is charged with more aggressively promoting them. “This White House has been more open to defense industry executives than any other in living memory,” said Loren B. Thompson, a longtime analyst who consults for major arms manufacturers. No foreign entanglement has revealed the trade-offs of this policy more than the war in Yemen. There, Mr. Trump’s embrace of arms sales has helped prolong a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people in the Arab world’s poorest nation, further destabilizing an already volatile region, according to a review of thousands of pages of records and interviews with more than 50 people with knowledge of the policy or who participated in the decision-making. American arms makers who sell to the Saudis say they are accountable to shareholders and are doing nothing wrong. And because weapon sales to foreign militaries must be approved by the State Department, the companies say they don’t make policy, only follow it. “Our economic policy can be summed up in three very beautiful and simple words.” It’s a common refrain. “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” “You’re talking about jobs. What I’m doing here, we’ve created an incredible economy.” But when promises of jobs are tied to the arms trade, where do we draw the line? And what happens when this promise collides with the mistakes of a previous administration? “We found ourselves locked into this terrible situation, unable to wrap it up and handing it off to an administration that was going to handle it even worse than we did.” It’s a scenario that has plunged the U.S. deeper into one of the world’s most catastrophic conflicts. “These were not mistakes. These were deliberate and precise attacks, and everybody in Yemen knows that the bombs causing this suffering are made in the United States.” But as the situation in Yemen worsened, at least one firm, Raytheon Company, did more than wait for decisions by American officials. It went to great lengths to influence them, even after members of Congress tried to upend sales to Saudi Arabia on humanitarian grounds. Raytheon, a major supplier of weapons to the Saudis, including some implicated by human rights groups in the deaths of Yemeni civilians, has long viewed the kingdom as one of its most important foreign customers. After the Yemen war began in 2015 and the Obama administration made a hasty decision to back the Saudis, Raytheon booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales, according to an analysis of available U.S. government records. Intent on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials, who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former colleagues to approve the sales. And though the company was already embedded in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and then defense secretary under Mr. Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer ties. They assiduously courted Mr. Navarro, who intervened with White House officials on Raytheon’s behalf and successfully pressured the State Department, diminished under Mr. Trump, to process the most contentious deals. They also enlisted the help of David J. Urban, a lobbyist whose close ties to Mr. Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go back to the 1980s, when all three men were at West Point. As the nation turned against the war, a range of American officials — Democratic and Republican — tried three times to halt the killing by blocking arms sales to the Saudis. Their efforts were undone by the White House, largely at the urging of Raytheon. Approached a half-dozen times, Raytheon representatives declined to speak with reporters about foreign sales. “We believe further dialogue regarding foreign military sales is best directed to officials in the U.S. government,” Corinne Kovalsky, then a company spokeswoman, said in December. Lawmakers from both parties have condemned the continued arms sales in the Yemen war, expressing both humanitarian and security concerns: Some of the weapons have wound up in the hands of militant Islamic groups in the country. “We don’t know how these weapons are really being used or whether they may be turned against U.S. troops in the future,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, who has publicly criticized the administration’s approach to the conflict. “This war was never authorized by Congress.” Others say the president’s arms sale policies diminish the United States. “People look to us. We’re the only country in the world that is ever capable of using this immense power that we have in a way that’s more than just about our naked self-interest,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who was born in Communist Poland and led the State Department’s human rights bureau under President Barack Obama. “President Trump has proudly said that we should continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia because they pay us a lot of money,” Mr. Malinowski said. “He seems to see foreign policy in the way he viewed the real estate business — every country is like a company and our job is to make money.” The Trump administration has defended arms sales to Saudi Arabia as being vital to job growth and the American economy. “We’ve created an incredible economy,” Mr. Trump told Fox Business in October 2018, after the killing of the journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi sparked calls to stop selling to the Saudis. “I want Boeing and I want Lockheed and I want Raytheon to take those orders and to hire lots of people to make that incredible equipment.” Raytheon hired former U.S. officials to press for approval of arms deals with Saudi Arabia, one of its most important clients. Credit...Pascal Rossignol/Reuters Records show that foreign military sales, facilitated by the U.S. government, rose sharply after Mr. Trump became president. They averaged about $51 billion a year during Mr. Trump’s first three years, compared with $36 billion a year during the final term of Mr. Obama, who also oversaw a big increase. Arms industry groups say defense jobs rose more than 3.5 percent to about 880,000 during Mr. Trump’s first two years, though the numbers, the most recent available, do not specify how many were in manufacturing. The White House referred requests for comment to the National Security Council, where a spokesman said that “Iran and its Houthi proxies” had targeted Saudi Arabia and had endangered Americans. “We remain committed to supporting Saudi Arabia’s right to defend against those threats, while urging that all appropriate measures are taken to prevent civilian casualties,” said the spokesman, John Ullyot. A State Department spokeswoman said that the administration had made clear that “economic security is national security,” and that the administration was “strengthening our advocacy for defense sales that are in our national interest.” She disputed the suggestion that human rights had taken a back seat to other considerations, insisting the new approach “actually increases focus on human rights” through military training and other programs with allies. Anthony Wier, a former State Department official under Mr. Obama, said past administrations of both parties had sought to balance the economic benefits of arms sales with the realities on the ground. “This is an important export industry with a lot of factory jobs, with a lot of states,” Mr. Wier said. “But there’s also a crater in Yemen where a school bus used to sit, and there’s a stack of children dead.” Getting the President’s Ear Mr. Trump won the presidency partly on promises to resuscitate American manufacturing. “We’re going to bring back the jobs that have been stolen from you,” he told a packed arena in Raleigh, N.C., on Nov. 7, 2016, the day before the election. “We’re going to bring back the miners and the factory workers and the steelworkers. We’re going to put them back to work.” But as the initial glow of victory faded, reality set in. Mr. Trump’s aides realized there were not many ways the executive branch, on its own, could affect manufacturing and trade, three former Trump administration officials said. One campaign adviser, Mr. Navarro, thought he had a solution. A Harvard-educated economist, Mr. Navarro had published papers on management strategy and a book of investment advice, “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks.” He had not specialized in the American arms industry. Even so, he made the case to members of Mr. Trump’s transition team, including Stephen K. Bannon, then one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted [extremist nationalist] advisers, that invoking national security and promoting the defense industry were ways to impose tariffs, create manufacturing jobs and shrink the trade deficit. Mr. Bannon embraced the pitch, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations. In December 2016, the president-elect named Mr. Navarro head of the newly created National Trade Council, an ill-defined position that seemed in conflict with other, more established roles in the White House. And though the organization apparently existed only on paper, the title afforded him access to Cabinet-level meetings, where he would forcefully argue his points as the principals looked on. Mr. Trump gave him responsibility for stoking American defense manufacturing by growing foreign arms sales, among other things. Defense companies took notice. After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, representatives of Raytheon and other firms streamed in to see Mr. Navarro, finding him ready to listen. Mr. Navarro’s hard-line stance toward China was well known, and they played it to their advantage, said Mr. Thompson, the analyst and consultant, who soon arranged a lunch meeting between Mr. Navarro and industry leaders, including Thomas A. Kennedy, then Raytheon’s chief executive and now its executive chairman. Mr. Trump in the Oval Office with Mr. Navarro, an economist who previously worked on the 2016 campaign. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times The defense firms presented themselves as the rare high-tech industry that had not recently lost ground to China, Mr. Thompson said. During the first years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, as aides undermined one another and turned over on a regular basis, Mr. Navarro’s claim to an essential mission, and his new ties to arms executives, insulated him from the turbulence, according to the former administration officials. In Mr. Navarro, they said, the companies had an advocate who was not shy about confronting senior leaders over matters he deemed important. And while the officials often bristled at his presumption, and worked to marginalize him, Mr. Navarro nevertheless retained influence with Mr. Kushner and Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump relished having around him an Ivy League economist who agreed with his pronouncements on trade. The president, in turn, listened when Mr. Navarro repeatedly raised arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other countries, sometimes repeating talking points used by Raytheon and other arms makers, the former administration officials said. In an interview, Mr. Navarro said that his focus has been on carrying out Mr. Trump’s economic policies, not on corporate cheerleading. “I don’t advocate for companies,” Mr. Navarro said. “I advocate for the president and for American workers and for our men and women in uniform. That’s it. Period. Full stop.” Mr. Trump’s aggressive arms sale policies were met with alarm by some in the State Department, in part because the administration did not seem concerned with human rights issues, according to several current and former State Department officials, who like others interviewed for this article were not authorized to speak publicly. Though past administrations had sometimes shown a willingness to achieve narrow goals by arming rough regimes, Mr. Trump seemed to view weapon sales as ends in themselves. Worse, they said, were signs of how little the administration grasped the basics of arms deals, which can have profound foreign policy and national security consequences. One episode in spring 2017 underscored those concerns. When Mr. Kushner and others wanted to line up military sales ahead of a visit by Mr. Trump to Saudi Arabia, they convened meetings at the White House but did not invite the State Department — the only agency by law that can authorize foreign deals. Arms sale specialists in the State Department learned about the gathering only after a senior Pentagon official called and urged them to hurry over, current and former officials said. A $5 Billion Turnaround As war broke out five years ago in Yemen, Raytheon was a company on the rebound. Based in Waltham, Mass., it had risen over the years to become the third-largest defense firm in the United States, bolstered by sales of its best-known system, the Patriot missile. But Raytheon had been battered by flagging profits and federal budget cuts, and Mr. Kennedy, the chief executive, was determined to turn things around, starting with international sales. Raytheon earned more of its revenue from sales to foreign governments than Lockheed Martin and other American defense giants, and few foreign customers were more important than Saudi Arabia. Its ties with the Saudis dated to the 1960s, when the company became one of the first American defense firms to build a permanent base in the kingdom. Since then, generations of Raytheon executives had sought to ingratiate the company with the Saudis, hiring members of the royal family as consultants, building schools and investing in projects favored by the royal court. The close relationship was evident two days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when three Saudi college students began their journey out of the country from Raytheon’s private terminal in Tampa, Fla., according to a report by the 9/11 Commission. (None of the men, including one who was a member of the Saudi royal family, was tied to the attacks, though Saudi nationals were among the hijackers.) The longstanding ties helped Mr. Kennedy turn around the company. Since the Yemen war began, Raytheon has booked at least a dozen major sales to the kingdom and its partners worth more than $5 billion, U.S. government records show, helping lift the firm’s fortunes and position it to pursue a merger with another large defense company, United Technologies, that was completed in April. Some of the deals, for defensive items, sailed through the government approval process. But sales of offensive weapons, including more than 120,000 precision bombs and bomb parts that the Saudis were using in Yemen, faced major hurdles. Those deals were among the most lucrative ones, worth more than $3 billion, the government records show. Rescue workers at the funeral hall that was bombed in Sana. Credit...Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Trouble for the company started on Oct. 8, 2016, when Saudi coalition planes repeatedly targeted a funeral hall in Sana, the Yemeni capital, where some 1,500 men, women and children had gathered to mourn the father of a government official. The first bomb shattered the building, killing some instantly and sending others on a scramble to escape the smoldering rubble. A second landed as people poured in to help the survivors. A third fell as the newly injured and dying were clambering amid the splintered wood and broken concrete. “People were on fire, and some people were burned alive,” one survivor, 42-year-old Hassan Jubran, told human rights workers. “There were also many children,” he said. “There were three children whose bodies were completely torn apart and strewn all over the place.” At least 140 people died and another 500 were wounded in the bombing, which the Saudis later said was a mistake. Soon after the attack, human rights workers discovered amid the wreckage a bomb shard bearing the identification number of an American company: Raytheon. It was one of at least 12 attacks on civilians that human rights groups would tie to the company’s ordnance during the first two years of the war. Asked in 2017 whether dead and wounded civilians gave him pause, John D. Harris II, then Raytheon’s vice president of business development, told CNBC that they did not, “because we do the hard work of making sure that the countries that employ our systems have the very best training and the ability to use the system in an appropriate manner.” Finding U.S. Fingerprints in the Bomb Sites of Yemen Based in Sana, researchers at Mwatana for Human Rights are documenting deadly attacks on civilians and tracing weapons back to U.S. defense firms, including Raytheon. Al-Matmah District, Jawf Province DATE Sept. 20, 2016 DEATHS 15 Part of a Raytheon-made GBU-12 bomb that struck a vehicle packed with women and children. After a coalition bomb ripped through a truck carrying 15 women and children outside Sana, a Mwatana researcher discovered a shard with Raytheon’s identification number. The resulting report linked the company to the attack and raised doubts about a Saudi internal investigation that said the strike had targeted Houthi rebel commanders. “We document, and we publish,” said Mwatana's co-founder, Radhya Almutawakel. “This is the work we do.” Remnants of the civilian truck after the airstrike. Mwatana for Human Rights A piece from another Raytheon-made GBU-12 bomb, which killed members of the Al-Juma’i family. Al-Dhihar District, Ibb Province DATE Sept. 24, 2016 DEATHS 6 Mwatana researchers have chronicled hundreds of strikes, gathering stories of victims and survivors. “Her legs were shredded, and her body was burnt,” one witness said of an 11-year-old girl after a strike on an apartment building. “I gathered her in a blanket. Then I went to look for the rest of the family.” A bloodied shirt believed to have belonged to a 3- or 4-year-old child killed in the attack.Mwatana for Human Rights Dar Saad District, Aden Province DATE April 30, 2015 DEATHS 1 Mwatana’s work has helped shape discussions in the United Nations Security Council as well as in Congress, where Ms. Almutawakel testified last year. “Some of these attacks are likely war crimes,” she told the Foreign Affairs Committee at the U.S. House of Representatives. “Many of them used American-made bombs and munitions. Every single one of these attacks destroyed innocent lives.” A shard from a Raytheon-made GBU-12 that killed a woman named Haifa Zawqari and injured others. The strike in Sana unsettled the Obama administration, which had agreed to support the Saudis but was becoming increasingly concerned about the war. “That demanded a response,” said Andrew Miller, a Middle East expert on Mr. Obama’s National Security Council. “By that time it was clear that the war had gone in a direction we had not anticipated.” The residential neighborhood after the strike. Mwatana for Human Rights In December, the administration halted delivery of bomb parts that had been sold but not yet shipped, a decision that angered the Saudis and Raytheon. Mr. Kennedy placed a personal call to Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice. But the administration would not budge. The firm would have to wait until Mr. Obama left office — and then try to forge ties with the Trump administration as quickly as possible. The company’s executives got to work. ‘Raytheon, Congratulations’ Just seven months into the new administration, Mr. Kennedy was standing by Mr. Trump’s side in the White House, watching as the president dashed his signature across a presidential memorandum on trade with China. When he was finished, Mr. Trump held up the pen. “Where’s Raytheon?” he asked. Mr. Kennedy leaned in to accept the gift. Thomas A. Kennedy, center, on a White House visit while he was chief executive of Raytheon. Credit...Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg “Raytheon,” Mr. Trump said, “congratulations.” It was August 2017, and the Trump administration was in the grip of a crisis. Business leaders were abandoning the president over his comments about racial violence in Charlottesville, Va., just when he needed executives to show support for a new crackdown on China. Mr. Kennedy was there to help Mr. Trump, even though his company had virtually no relationship with China. He did not get there by accident. During the early months of the new presidency, Raytheon executives tried to get close to the administration by arranging for Mr. Kennedy to meet with Mr. Trump on a handful of occasions, including during the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia that May, former employees said. Soon after the trip, the Trump administration waved through the delivery of bomb parts to the Saudis that Mr. Obama had delayed. But the company wanted more. So it turned to Mr. Navarro, whose office helped Raytheon orchestrate Mr. Kennedy’s appearance at the August signing ceremony, according to a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement. It was a face-saving moment for the president, and a turning point in the company’s relationship with the White House. In the months that followed, Mr. Navarro pushed hard for Raytheon and its deals with Saudi Arabia. His first order of business was trying to reverse a new obstacle to the company’s deals — a decision in June by Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, to block arm sales from Raytheon and other companies to Persian Gulf nations over a matter unrelated to the Yemen war. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Corker had the authority to place a hold on the deals. The move put Raytheon in a difficult position. The company was already in contract to sell the Saudis and Emiratis more bombs and bomb parts for nearly $2 billion. But unlike the earlier deal that Mr. Obama had halted, these agreements exposed Raytheon to onerous penalties if the company did not deliver. At first, Mr. Navarro directed his attention at Mr. Corker, complaining that the senator was interfering with the president’s agenda, one former White House official said. “It was clear that this for him was priority No. 1,” the official said of overturning the hold. By that winter, Mr. Navarro had shifted his focus to Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose department, Mr. Navarro learned, had still not forwarded to Congress its approval for the Raytheon bomb deals — a crucial step for them to be finalized. To break the logjam, Mr. Navarro sent the memo in January 2018 to top White House officials, urging them to bring Mr. Tillerson in line. Recipients included Mr. Kushner, who, like Mr. Trump, his father-in-law, enjoyed a close relationship with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and would have been sensitive to Saudi complaints about stalled weapon deals. The memo was described by three current and former government officials; one read portions of it to a New York Times reporter. It called for White House officials to “meet with Tillerson and direct him to immediately” send the pending deals to Congress for approval. Then, it continued, the White House should contact Mr. Corker to make sure he cleared the sales right away. “Unless the White House promptly intervenes, one particular company, Raytheon, will begin laying off thousands of workers,” Mr. Navarro wrote, attributing the information to “industry sources.” He added: “POTUS may have to get involved,” a reference to Mr. Trump. Mr. Navarro, in the interview, said he involved himself not because any company’s deals were at stake but because Mr. Tillerson was running a foreign policy that was not in line with Mr. Trump’s. “When the president of the United States found out that his signature arms sales packages weren’t moving, he said, ‘Fix this.’ That’s what I do at the White House,” Mr. Navarro said. “I fix things.” Former Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, center, was accused by Mr. Navarro of working to hold up Saudi weapon sales. Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times Within a week of the memo, Mr. Tillerson met with Mr. Corker. About three weeks later, the senator lifted the prohibition. Mr. Corker declined to comment. Mr. Navarro’s memo landed as Mr. Tillerson’s relationship with the White House was deteriorating, and the delay in moving the Saudi sales deepened the rift at a critical moment, former officials said. Morale within the department was also flagging, and several senior leadership posts remained unfilled. Tina Kaidanow, who oversaw the State Department’s arms sale approval bureau at the time, recalled cautioning Mr. Tillerson in a meeting. “I told him that continuing to hold those sales would almost certainly occasion an unhappy response from a White House focused on increasing arms sales to Saudi Arabia,” Ms. Kaidanow said in an interview. Mr. Trump fired Mr. Tillerson that March. A Third Intervention Fails Raytheon may have had a powerful White House ally who had influence over a Republican senator and an unpopular cabinet member. But the company’s sway did not extend to Democrats on Capitol Hill. Weeks after Mr. Navarro helped end Mr. Corker’s hold, another leading senator blocked the Raytheon deals. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, made the third attempt to stop the arms feeding the Yemen war. By then the fighting had entered its third year. The death toll had soared past 50,000, including 9,000 civilians, raising concerns among Mr. Menendez and other lawmakers that the Saudis were not doing enough to avoid killing noncombatants. Mr. Kennedy of Raytheon visited Mr. Menendez in the Capitol in May 2018, pleading his company’s case in an ornate room usually reserved for welcoming foreign dignitaries. The senator, who as ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee had authority to block the sales, was unswayed. “I told him I don’t have an ideological problem; I have supported other arms sales. But you cannot, as a company, be promoting the arm sales to a country that is using it in violation of international norms,” Mr. Menendez said in an interview. “I understand the motivation for profit, but I don’t understand the motivation for profit in the face of human rights violations and civilian casualties.” At the same time, the company’s Washington office deployed former State Department officials to press their former colleagues in the administration. Among them was Tom Kelly, the erstwhile American ambassador to Djibouti, a small country across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen. It was a strategy common among defense contractors, who routinely bring on former government officials for their expertise and deep connections, said Mandy Smithberger, a defense analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. A loophole does not require them to register as lobbyists. “These people are being hired for who they know,” Ms. Smithberger said, calling the practice “a form of legalized corruption.” Mr. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mr. Navarro continued his push for Raytheon sales. He had already overseen a rewrite of the government’s conventional arms transfer policy — its rules for selling arms to foreign militaries — to make it easier for companies like Raytheon to win government approval. The new rules, which marked the first time “economic security” was listed as a guiding principle, called for the State Department to expand its support of American defense firms abroad while paring back regulations that slowed the transfer process. Mr. Navarro then began holding biweekly progress meetings about pending deals, including Raytheon’s, with officials from the National Security Council and the State Department. During the meetings, he put intense pressure on officials to move the deals forward, according to two people present at some of the gatherings, asking over and over again: “Why aren’t we further along?” Some State Department officials worried that a White House trade adviser with no foreign policy role was expediting arms sales with profound diplomatic consequences, the people present said. Mr. Navarro, in his interview, said the meetings were necessary to “bring to heel a bunch of career bureaucrats” who were not carrying out the president’s wishes. “We dramatically accelerated the pace of approvals on the Hill and at State to the advantage of American workers and the security of our allies and partners,” Mr. Navarro said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a meeting last year with the mass murderer Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Credit...Pool photo by Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds That fall, the C.I.A. implicated Prince Mohammed in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, the American resident and Washington Post contributor, further damaging the kingdom’s standing with Congress. But pressure from Mr. Navarro and industry officials on the State Department kept building until spring last year, when Mr. Pompeo, who had replaced Mr. Tillerson as secretary of state after helming the C.I.A., decided it was time to move the sales through. That April, Mr. Pompeo met with other top administration officials and discussed declaring an emergency to release the arms — something that had occurred only rarely in the past. Soon after, they decided to fast-track the sales by citing the need to counter Iran, which was supporting Yemen’s Houthi rebels, according to a person with knowledge of the meetings. A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment on specific deliberations. Declaring an emergency would bypass Congress and risk alienating allies on Capitol Hill. Mr. Pompeo and the others pursued it anyway. Only a handful of people within the Pentagon and State Department knew of the plan. They did not include anyone in the State Department’s human rights bureau, which had consulted on weapon sales in previous administrations, the person said. Mr. Pompeo took the final step on May 24, 2019, the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, delivering Congress an emergency declaration tailored to free up more than 20 stalled deals, including Raytheon’s bomb sales, by citing Iranian support for the rebels in Yemen. Within weeks, those arms were flowing again. By the end of the year, the civilian death toll in Yemen had topped 12,000. A Trap ‘Like Flypaper’ As Mr. Trump gears up for re-election, the administration has framed arms sales to the Saudis as a win, signaling no regrets. “The relationship has been very good, and they buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” Mr. Trump told reporters before boarding Marine One in October. “It’s millions of jobs.” An attack in Jawf Province this February 2020 killed 32 civilians, mostly women and children. A bomb part tied to Raytheon was found in the rubble. Credit...Mwatana for Human Rights But for those who first pledged American support to the Saudis, the past five years have been replete with second-guessing and misgivings. Officials in the Obama White House, recalling how the Saudis had sought American backing, know it as the “five minutes to midnight” call. It was late March 2015, and the Saudis wanted to know immediately whether the United States would support its imminent invasion of Yemen to suppress the Iranian-aligned rebels who had overthrown the Saudi-friendly government there. The Saudis characterized the military action as necessary to defend their borders from potential Iranian aggression, just as the United States was involved in negotiations with the Iranians over a nuclear deal. “It happened so quickly,” Ben Rhodes, one of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy advisers, said in an interview. “Obama typically had a very rigorous process around certainly the application of U.S. military force, and this felt very different.” With few options, none of them appealing, the advisers recommended a high-risk plan to support a country with billions of dollars in American weapons but little experience in using them. Mr. Obama agreed despite misgivings. Not wanting to get embroiled in another war, he offered primarily defensive support without defining in clear terms what that meant. The arms industry would later seize on the ambiguity to sell the Saudis billions of dollars in both offensive and defensive weapons. On the day of the call, as Mr. Obama’s advisers departed the White House Situation Room, at least a few had a sinking feeling. “We knew we might be getting in a car with a drunk driver,” one adviser would later say. Within hours, their fears became reality. While the Saudi ambassador in Washington was briefing the media, Saudi planes were already over Yemen. In their first bombing run, around 2 a.m., the Saudis hit a residential area and killed 14 children. Through the night, neighbors pulled the dead and the living from the piles of stone that had once been their homes. Three of the children belonged to a man named Yasser Al-Habashi, who did not learn they had died until he awoke from a coma 13 days later. As evidence mounted in the following months that civilian casualties were rising, the Obama White House chose not to aggressively rein in the Saudis. “People make miscalculations all the time,” Steve Pomper, a former senior official on Mr. Obama’s National Security Council, said in an interview. “But it was striking to me as I reflected on my time in the Obama administration that it wasn’t just that we embarked on this escapade — it’s that we didn’t pull ourselves out of it.” Smoke rising from Sana in 2015 after a Saudi-led airstrike killed seven people. Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times In an extraordinary move, 30 former senior Obama officials signed a public statement of regret in November 2018 for what turned out to be, they said, a blank check of support for the Saudi military. Mr. Pomper defended the government officials who oversaw Saudi policy, calling them serious, humane people. “And yet we found ourselves locked into this terrible situation, unable to wrap it up, and handing it off to an administration that was going to handle it even worse than we did. And I wanted to understand why we did that.” The result was a lengthy report published under the auspices of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization devoted to conflict resolution. It said American arms sales acted “like flypaper in trapping the U.S. in Yemen.” The phrase echoed President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the unseen political influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Gerald M. Feierstein, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen under Mr. Obama who now works for the Middle East Institute, a think tank funded in part by the United Arab Emirates, said America should not turn its back on an important strategic ally, despite the civilian casualties. “We should be looking at whether or not we believe that either the Saudis are doing this purposefully or through negligence,” he said in October. He added, “I’m not sure that either side has proved its case.” Mr. Pomper said State Department officials tried to counsel Saudi pilots on ways to minimize civilian casualties, mostly without success. But even that effort ignored the larger issue. “We were in Yemen,” Mr. Pomper said. “We shouldn’t have been there.” This story may be found online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-raytheon-yemen.html?searchResultPosition=1 Michael LaForgia is an investigative reporter who previously worked for The Tampa Bay Times and The Palm Beach Post. While in Florida, he twice won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. @laforgia_ Walt Bogdanich joined The Times in January 2001 as investigative editor for the Business and Finance Desk. Since 2003, he has worked as an investigative reporter. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes. A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why U.S. Arms Take Grim Toll In Yemen War. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company [Genocide Watch comment: Kennedy, Harris, and other Raytheon executives, and Navarro and other US officials could be charged with complicity and aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity. War crimes and crimes against humanity are crimes of universal jurisdiction in most of western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Senegal. The financial assets of these men could be frozen, their visas to such countries revoked and barred, and other international sanctions applied. If they ever set foot in countries with universal jurisdiction, they could be immediately arrested.] Related Stories on Yemen U.S. Cuts Health Care Aid to Yemen Despite Worries About Coronavirus March 27, 2020 Trump Officials Prepare to Bypass Congress to Sell Weapons to Gulf Nations May 23, 2019 The Tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen Oct. 26, 2018 Amal Hussein, 7, starved to death in 2018 in Yemen despite overwhelming bipartisan votes by US Senators and Congressmen to cut off sales of military equipment made in America to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The weapons were used in bombing civilians in Yemen, a war crime and crime against humanity. President Trump vetoed the legislation banning the arms sales and the sales have continued down to the present day. “The Weekly” — Watch how arms sales to Middle Eastern allies that were meant to shore up American jobs are contributing to a humanitarian crisis. The full episode of our TV show is available online to Times subscribers in the U.S. Video ID: 100000007041362 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/the-weekly/saudi-arabia-yemen-raytheon.html

Félicien Kabuga, 84, had been on the run for 23 years, since he was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on multiple charges of genocide. A Nairobi newspaper in 2002 carried a photograph of the fugitive Felicien Kabuga. Credit...George Mulala/Reuters PARIS — He was behind the radio station whose hate-filled invectives turned Rwandan against Rwandan, neighbor against neighbor, even spouse against spouse. He was the man, it was said, who imported the hundreds of thousands of machetes that allowed countless ordinary people to act upon that hatred in one of the last genocides of the past century. One of the most-wanted fugitives of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Félicien Kabuga, was arrested Saturday morning in a rented home just outside Paris, protected by his children, the French authorities said. The capture of Mr. Kabuga, 84, who was living under a false identity, was the culmination of a decades-long international hunt across many countries on at least two continents. His arrest — considered the most important apprehension by an international tribunal in the past decade — could help bring long-awaited justice for his actions more than a generation after the killing of at least 800,000 and perhaps as many as one million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the small central African nation. His trial could also help unravel some of the enduring mysteries of the killings, particularly how much planning went into the genocide, which also led to a catastrophic war in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and continues to destabilize much of central Africa today. Mr. Kabuga, one of Rwanda’s richest men before the genocide, is accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of being the main financier and logistical backer of the political and militia groups that committed the genocide. He had been on the run for 23 years since he was indicted on multiple charges of genocide. “It is historical on many levels,” Rwandan’s justice minister, Johnston Busingye, said in a phone interview from the country’s capital, Kigali. “You can run, but you cannot hide. It can’t be forever.” A tribunal official said on Saturday that Mr. Kabuga had been tracked down in France after investigators followed communications among members of his family who, the official said, had acted as his support network. It was not known how and when Mr. Kabuga entered France, and how he had managed to evade detection while living in Asnières-sur-Seine, a well-off suburb just northwest of Paris. He was arrested at his home around 7 a.m. after a long investigation by French national police specializing in crimes against humanity, with help from the federal police in Belgium and the Metropolitan Police in London, according to France’s justice ministry. Mr. Kabuga was expected to be handed over to United Nations prosecutors, with his trial expected to take place in the tribunal’s successor court in Arusha, Tanzania. “Kabuga has always been seen by the victims and survivors as one of the leading figures,” Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, said by phone on Saturday from The Hague. “For them, after waiting so many years, his arrest is an important step toward justice.” Mr. Kabuga’s capture could be the most important arrest of a figure wanted by an international tribunal since the 2011 apprehension of Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian military leader who was later convicted of having committed genocide during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s, Mr. Brammertz said. The arrest ended a lengthy and often-frustrating search for Mr. Kabuga by international investigators across multiple countries. Immediately after the genocide Mr. Kabuga fled to Switzerland, where he unsuccessfully applied for asylum, and was then seen in other European countries before settling in Kenya for several years. Mr. Rapp said the fugitive had used assumed names and several different passports. In 2002, the United States government began circulating wanted posters in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, one of his known hide-outs. In an attempt to use its own resources and official connections to catch him, the United States had offered a reward of up to $5 million for his capture. But with his huge bank account and high-level connections, Mr. Kabuga had managed until Saturday to escape an arrest warrant issued by the tribunal in 1997. In the late 1990s, Mr. Kabuga was traced to a house owned by Hosea Kiplagat, a nephew of Kenya’s president at the time, Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, according to a report published in 2001 by the International Crisis Group, a research organization. The study also detailed how investigators for the International Criminal Tribunal uncovered evidence that a Kenyan police officer might have tipped off Mr. Kabuga in 1997 that an arrest was imminent. The Kenyan government at the time disputed the allegations that it had not been diligent in its search for Mr. Kabuga. In 2001, the United Nations court froze bank accounts that Mr. Kabuga held or had access to in Switzerland, France, Belgium and Germany. Believed to have been one the most powerful men in Rwanda before the genocide, Mr. Kabuga, an ethnic Hutu, made his fortune in trade. Through the marriage of a daughter, he was linked to a former president, Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, who was killed after his plane was shot down by a missile over the Rwandan capital in 1994. The Rwandan government has tried thousands of people, and the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has tried close to 80, among them senior government figures. After Mr. Kabuga’s capture, at least six senior figures suspected of participating in or orchestrating the genocide remain on an international most wanted list. Mr. Kabuga was charged with using his fortune to fund and organize the notorious Interahamwe militia, which carried out the brunt of the slaughter, often carried out by hacking people to death. He is accused of issuing them weapons, including several hundred thousand machetes imported from China, which were shipped to his companies, as well as providing them transport in his company’s vehicles. The indictment against him also alleges that his radio station, Radio-Television Mille Collines, incited the killings through broadcasts that directed roaming gangs of killers to roadblocks and sites where Tutsi could be located. “His trial may help us understand to what extent the genocide was planned,’’ said Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian expert on the genocide. “Kabuga is often mentioned as someone who was involved through the funding of the extremist radio station. He’s also mentioned in the context of the purchase of machetes. All of that will need to be proven, but a trial could unearth of a lot of things 26 years after the genocide.’’ [Genocide Watch comment: Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of Genocide Watch, wrote UN Security Council Resolutions 955 and 978, which created the Rwanda Tribunal. He also co-wrote the UN Commission of Inquiry Report that recommended creation of the tribunal. As the US State Department's liaison to the Tribunal, Stanton did the invetigation and wrote the report that resulted in a shake-up at the Tribunal after it got off to a rocky start due to a corrupt UN Registrar and incompetent Deputy Prosecutor. The Rwanda Tribunal went on to convict over sixty leaders of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis. The Tribunal's judges wrote the most important case law on the crime of genocide.] [Stanton commented: "This arrest shows the long-term impact of institutions of justice like the Rwanda Tribunal. Even perpetrators who think they can get away with their crimes can be tracked down and put on trial many years after they have committed their crimes. Justice is sometimes slow, but it is inexorable."] Abdi Latif Dahir contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya. Norimitsu Onishi is a foreign correspondent on the International Desk, covering France out of the Paris bureau. He previously served as bureau chief for The Times in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan, Ivory Coast. A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2020, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: France Arrests Rwandan Millionaire Tied to Genocide. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

THE VIRUS OF HATE AND STEVE BANNON’S DECLARATION OF WAR The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association has echoed the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ warning against ‘the tsunami of hate and xenophobia’ sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. The Warsaw-based organization has published its latest REPORT ‘The Virus of Hate: Brown Book of the Epidemic’. The report documents acts of racism, xenophobia and discrimination which have occurred in the context of the coronavirus in Poland in recent weeks and months. Steve Bannon on Polish TV The authors of the report recorded cases of assaults on members of minorities who are unjustly blamed for spreading the virus, as well as numerous examples of hate speech and conspiracy theories about the pandemic spread by the far right. The descriptions collected on over 30 pages include the following events: - On 1 March, during mass in the St. Michael Archangel church in Wroclaw Fr. Leonard Wilczynski, belonging to the Salesian order, stated in his homily that the COVID-19 pandemic is ‘God’s punishment for living in the sin of homosexuality’. He also added that the Chinese ‘are dirty, eat bats and dead fetuses’. - On 25 March in Sosnowiec three men attacked a female of Chinese descent – a scientific worker of the Silesian University. The victim said: ‘They surrounded me, I was so afraid - even now I am trembling. They kept shouting «virus» and «China»’. She also added: ‘I do not feel safe here as a woman of Chinese descent’. - On 8 April in Szprotawa local media reported that a security guard of the local supermarket refused a Ukrainian man entrance to the store on the grounds of his nationality. One witness to the event reported: ‘When the young man wanted to enter the store, the security guard asked him if he was Polish or Ukrainian. When he replied that he was Ukrainian, he was told that he could not go inside’. The employee’s xenophobic behaviour stemmed from the false belief that all persons of Ukrainian origin in the town were carriers of COVID-19. - On 8 April, Radio Wnet in Warsaw presented its listeners with a special programme introducing a conspiracy theory pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic, advocated by well-known British extremist, David Icke. According to Icke, the responsibility for the pandemic rests with a secret global group, described as a ‘cult’, with which ‘madmen from Silicon Valley’, the World Health Organization, the British heir to the throne Prince Charles, and entrepreneur Bill Gates are connected. - In the second half of April in Poznan, in the middle of the night, unknown perpetrators smashed the windows of a flat occupied by a Filipino man, who has been living in Poland for ten years. A report about it was broadcast on 23 April on the television channel, TVN24, and that night, there was a second attack on the flat, with stones once again being thrown. According to the victim, both attacks were associated with the COVID-19 epidemic and hostility towards people of Asian origin. ‘Some Filipinos experience incidents of people shouting «corona!» after them on the streets. One of the Filipinos was spat in the face and called «Chinese». We are very afraid’ – he said. - On April 25 Grzegorz Braun, a Member of Parliament representing the Confederation party, shared his views on the pandemic in an interview on YouTube: ‘Jew-communists are trying to use the coronavirus to get rid of Trump […]. Bill Gates is heading for a situation in which each person on this globe will need to legitimise his or her existence with a certificate of kosher standard’. On 6 May, during a speech in the Polish Parliament, Braun made threats of death by hanging to the Minister of Health, Lukasz Szumowski, in reaction to sanitary measures introduced in the preceding weeks in connection with COVID-19. On 8 May in Warsaw Braun together with Piotr Rybak (who had been convicted for publicly burning an effigy of a Jew in Wroclaw in 2015) participated in skirmishes with the police during a protest against sanitary restrictions imposed to combat the epidemic. - On 9th May, TVP Info, a Polish state-run television channel, broadcast a thirty-minute conversation with Steve Bannon, an idol of the international alt-right movement and former advisor to Donald Trump. Bannon presented an ideological conspiracy theory on the COVID-19 pandemic, using military rhetoric. He stated: ‘This is really a serious matter, and I think that every leader in every country in the world should listen when the commander in chief of the US Armed Forces [the President] says that we have been attacked just like at Pearl Harbour and this time the Chinese are responsible. […] The real dark days are ahead, […] now they are turning to a kinetic type of war. […] This was like an order of assassination. The death of each person, each nurse, each doctor can be blamed on the Chinese Communist Party’. He also added a confrontation with China was inevitable and said: ‘This is our goal, our destiny’. According to the research carried out in April 2020 by the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, as many as 45 percent of Poles believe in conspiracy theories alleging that ‘some foreign forces or countries intentionally spread the coronavirus’ and only 42 percent recognize its natural origin confirmed by scientific knowledge. Rafal Pankowski, a co-author of the report of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association and a sociology professor at the Collegium Civitas university, commented: - ‘The global pandemic is also a global crisis of social trust and values amid confusion and anxiety. It is fertile ground for the dangerous growth of xenophobia and conspiracy theories. For the first time in Polish history we are dealing with such a wave of hatred against people of Asian origin, but the antisemitic stereotypes are also present, together with hostility and contempt for various other groups - for example Roma, Africans, Ukrainians, Americans, Russians, as well as Muslims, refugees, LGBT people, environmentalists, vegans, and others’. - ‘Unfortunately, the media are also involved in promoting conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, often inviting people with extreme views as experts. These «experts» are also gaining popularity on the web, where antisemitic and xenophobic content is distributed on a massive scale. Companies such as YouTube and Facebook, contrary to their formal announcements, often tolerate such content on their platforms’ - said Dr. Anna Tatar, co-author of the ‘Brown Book’. - ‘Examples of hatred are unfortunately coming from the top. In a pandemic, conspiracy theories promoted by public figures: celebrities, artists, politicians, journalists and clergy are particularly alarming’ - adds Jacek Dziegielewski, also a co-author of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association report. The ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association is an independent organization established in Warsaw in 1996. It has campaigned against racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, both in Poland and internationally. Among others, it is a member of the International Network against Cyber Hate (INACH), which brings together organizations from twenty countries fighting hatred and discrimination on the Internet. Together with partners from Estonia, Slovakia, Romania and Spain, it conducts research on hate speech as part of the Opcode: Open Code for Hate-Free Communication project. ‘The Virus of Hate: Brown Book of the Epidemic’ (full report in PDF) Additional information: www.nigdywiecej.org www.facebook.com/Respect.Diversity www.twitter.com/StowNIGDYWIECEJ

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's public use of the insult "the leftovers of the sword" in referring to survivors of the massacres of Christians in his country is alarming on many levels. The phrase not only insults the victims and the survivors of the massacres but also endangers the safety of Turkey's dwindling Christian community, who are often exposed to pressures that include physical attacks. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) "Leftover of the sword" (kılıç artığı in Turkish) is a commonly used insult in Turkey that often refers to the survivors of the Christian massacres that mainly targeted Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and its successor, Turkey. The use of "leftovers of the sword," therefore, does not represent a denial of massacres or genocides. On the contrary, it declares the pride of the perpetrators. It means: "Yes, we slaughtered Christians and other non-Muslims because they deserved it!" During a coronavirus briefing on May 4, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used a most derogatory phrase "the leftovers of the sword". "We do not allow terrorist leftovers of the sword in our country," he said, "to attempt to carry out [terrorist] activities. Their number has decreased a lot but they still exist." "Leftover of the sword" (kılıç artığı in Turkish) is a commonly used insult in Turkey that often refers to the survivors of the Christian massacres that mainly targeted Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and its successor, Turkey. As the head of state, Erdoğan using the phrase publicly is alarming on many levels. The phrase not only insults the victims and the survivors of the massacres but also endangers the safety of Turkey's dwindling Christian community, who are often exposed to pressures that include physical attacks. In protest, Garo Paylan, an Armenian MP in Turkey's parliament, wrote on Facebook: "In his hateful speech last night, Erdoğan once again used the phrase 'leftover of the sword.' "'Leftover of the sword' was invented to refer to orphans like my grandmother who survived the [1915] Armenian genocide. Every time we hear that phrase, it makes our wounds bleed." Other Armenian activists and writers on social media also criticized Erdoğan. Journalist Aline Ozinian wrote: "For those who don't know 'terrorist leftover of the sword' means Armenian 'terrorists' who survived the genocide and could not be butchered via the sword. What does 'terrorist' mean? Well, it changes daily: It could be a journalist, a civil society representative, a writer, a doctor or a mother of a beautiful child." "They do not want those who held the swords," she continued, "but the grandchildren of the survivors of a people and culture that were slaughtered by the sword to be ashamed." The columnist Ohannes Kılıçdağı wrote: "Think about a country that actively uses a phrase like 'leftover of the sword' in the political culture and language. It is used by the highest authorities. But the same authorities of the same country claim that 'there is no massacre in our history'. If there is not, then where does this phrase come from? Who does it refer to?" The crimes that Turkey attempts to hide by blaming the victims are actually well-documented historical facts. In 2019, for instance, historians Professor Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi published a book, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, describing "the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities." According to their research: "Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent". During the genocide, the perpetrators' annihilationist policies included "premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad." Like the Christians, the Alevi community too is targeted in Turkey for being "leftovers of the sword". Erdoğan's ally, Devlet Bahçeli, the head of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), for instance, called the journalist Abdülkadir Selvi "a leftover of the sword" in 2017 to refer to his alleged Alevi roots. Pro-government journalist Ahmet Taşgetiren then described the phrase as follows: "You wipe out an entity (a society, a religious community, an army) that you view as 'the enemy'. What is left is a group of people who have survived the swords and surrendered to you. Those are the leftovers of the sword." Selvi then tried to explain why he is not a "leftover of the sword': "I would like to remind Bahçeli: My grandfather, Osman, was a son of the homeland that ran from one frontline to the other and was taken prisoner in the Ottoman-Russian war. I'm a grandchild of Oghuz Turks; my ancestors, Hasan and Hüseyin, became martyrs in Yemen. This honor is enough for me." Selvi's explanation once again demonstrates that having Christian, Alevi or any other non-Muslim roots is seen as an insult or a disgraceful offense by many in Turkey. Instead of explaining why calling someone "a leftover of the sword" is unacceptable, Selvi tried to prove his "purebred" Turkish origins and Sunni Muslim faith. "Today, less than half a percent of Turkey's population is Christian -- the result of a history throughout which Turks persecuted the region's indigenous Christians," wrote historian Dr. Vasileios Meichanetsidis. "Many Turks still proudly endorse this history, with no attempt to face it honestly, or secure respect for the victims. In fact, they falsely label the victims as perpetrators, praise the criminals and insult the memory of the victims and their descendants." The use of "leftovers of the sword," therefore, does not represent a denial of massacres or genocides. On the contrary, it declares the pride of the perpetrators. It means: "Yes, we slaughtered Christians and other non-Muslims because they deserved it!" Uzay Bulut, a Turkish journalist, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. Copyright 2020 The Gatestone Institute

Genocide Watch has published its first Timestream presentation, a new educational tool created by Ntrepid LLC. Timestreams on other genocides will follow. The Rohingya Timestream covers the history of the genocide and forced displacement of the Rohingya in Myanmar. It explores key events leading up to the Gambia's case against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice. View the Timestream presentation here . .

NIGERIA (BP) -- Militant Fulani herdsmen killed at least 25 Christians in several attacks in Nigeria's Middle Belt in April as the local government did little to intervene, Morning Star News reported. The unfettered attacks could lead to a regional civil war in Nigeria's Middle Belt, religious liberty advocate International Christian Concern said Tuesday (May 5). "A full-blown civil war between the Fulani people and the rest of the indigenous people around them could very well happen," said Nathan Johnson, International Christian Concern's regional manager for Africa. "The Nigerian government has turned a blind eye daily to these attacks. At some point it's got to give, and the government, if they don't step in and start protecting the civilians, the civilians will start protecting themselves." In the latest reported attacks, militant Fulani herdsmen killed 13 Christians and kidnapped 13 others in five villages in Kaduna state April 23-25, Morning Star reported Monday. More than 1,000 villagers were displaced in the attacks. The dead reportedly include Baptists, Catholics as well as members of the Evangelical Church Winning All, the United Church of Christ in Nations and Assemblies of God churches. Others fled for their lives as militants stole livestock and large quantities of food. In other villages in Kaduna, militant herdsmen killed five Christians at an April 12th wedding, kidnapping the bridal couple and some church members. Militant herdsmen also killed seven other Christians in three attacks spanning through April 21. In Kaduna state, Nigeria, militant herdsmen killed five Christians at an April 12th wedding and kidnapped the bridal couple, shown here, and some church members. Morning Star News photo On April 26 in Plateau state, militant herdsmen pulled a Christian couple from a motorcycle and attacked them with machetes, sticks and short swords, leaving the husband with severe head wounds. The couple are members of the Christ in Nations congregation in Rachos village, Morning Star reported. Peter Aboki, president of the Gbagyi Development Union in Kaduna State, told Morning Star the government has not defended Christians against the attacks. Herdsmen occupy the villages, preventing Christians from returning. "We want the government to do something urgently, because Christians are being killed or abducted almost on a daily basis," Morning Star quoted Aboki. "Those areas are becoming a no-go area as a result of the deadly activities of herdsmen, and we want the government to do everything possible to stop this frequent loss of lives and destruction of property." Such attacks would be more rampant in the scenario of a civil war, Johnson told Baptist Press. "Two civilian populations going after each other in full-blown warfare, where they stop and kill, and have genocidal tendencies toward each other, because these attacks continue to happen year after year," Johnson said. "Thousands of people are killed and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are displaced." He describes 2018 as the most violent year suffered by Christians in the Middle Belt with about 2,000 killed by militants, not including attacks by Boko Haram terrorists in northeast Nigeria. "2019, it did die down a little bit, but it's unclear as to why," Johnson said. "It doesn't seem to have been government action." He added that some Fulani herdsmen are peaceful. "Not all Fulani herders are involved in these kind of attacks," Johnson said. "Trying to identify an entire ethnic group as terrorists or attackers is dangerous and could lead to even worse problems. Despite this, there are definitely groups of militants who hide among the Fulani people or use that identity as a way to attack others." Yusuf Pam sustained cuts from a machete attack by Muslim Fulani herdsmen April 26 in Plateau state, Nigeria. Morning Star News photo Many displaced Christians are subsistence farmers who need their land for the most basic of needs, including food and clothing, International Christian Concern said in an April 30 press release. "Despite this mass migration and devastation, the Nigerian government continues to turn a blind eye to the violence and hurt. They have yet to offer any solution to ending the chaos, any support to displaced families and any protection for communities that have been attacked numerous times but are unwilling to leave," the release said. "The Nigerian government's negligence cannot continue without communities taking safety into their own hands. If that happens, it could mean civil war in the largest country in Africa." Christian persecution watchdog Open Doors ranked Nigeria 12th in its 2019 AND 2020 World Watch Lists of the 50 countries where it is most dangerous to live as a Christian. According to Open Doors, of 4,136 Christians killed worldwide in 2018, Nigeria accounted for 3,731. In 2019, 2,983 Christians were killed worldwide; Nigeria accounted for 1,350. Christians are 51.3 percent of Nigeria's population, while Muslims living primarily in the north and middle belt account for 45 percent. Diana Chandler is Baptist Press' general assignment writer/editor. BP reports on missions, ministry and witness advanced through the Cooperative Program and on news related to Southern Baptists' Copyright 2020 Baptist Press

Turkish soldiers on tank in in the border town of Akcakale in Sanliurfa province, Turkey, Oct. 11, 2019. Photo by REUTERS/Murad Sezer. Turkey’s transfer of Syrian families to Tell Abyad from Afrin has reignited worries of demographic engineering in northern Syria. Turkey has transferred hundreds of people to the northeastern Syrian town of Tell Abyad from the Turkish-controlled Operation Euphrates Shield region, stunning many families displaced from the town that have been hoping to return to their villages in the area, which fell under Turkish control during a military operation in November 2019. A new round of population transfers is reportedly underway. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan makes no secret of his intention to uproot Kurdish self-rule in northern Syria and change the demographic character of the region, often reiterating Ankara’s plan to move up to two million refugees to a safe zone that is planned to be set up in the Operation Peace Spring region in the northeast. Addressing the UN General Assembly last year, Erdogan said Turkey initially planned to transfer up to one million refugees to the area by constructing 140 villages and 10 towns in the region. The second phase of the plan involves extending the resettlements to the town of Deir ez-Zor, which lies on the critical M-4 highway linking the country’s east and west. Turkey’s cross-border operations in Syria remain in full swing despite the novel coronavirus outbreak that sent the world into turmoil. Population transfers to the east of the Euphrates River from the western side are increasing along with the Turkish military activities. On April 20, a convoy of 151 vehicles, including 14 buses, departed from Jarablus, arrived in Turkey via the Karkamis crossing and then crossed into Tell Abyad from the Turkish town of Akcakale. Videos of the convoy were leaked over social media, forcing the governor’s office in Turkey’s southern border province of Urfa to respond. A written statement on April 21 inexplicably claimed that the convoy was carrying families displaced from Tell Abyad under the Kurdish administration. Turkish media reports hailed the news, saying downtrodden families who had escaped the Kurdish rule in Tell Abyad and settled in Afrin were now returning to their homes. Some people who had escaped Tell Abyad during the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces offensive against the Islamic State in 2015 did take refuge in Turkey. Yet, there is no evidence showing Afrin was hosting displaced people from Tell Abyad. Most of the families resettled in Afrin were Syrians who escaped the battles in other parts of the war-torn country and took refuge in the Operation Euphrates Shield area. Another lingering question about the move is why the convoy crossed into Turkey from the Karkamis crossing instead of Oncupinar, only eight kilometers (five miles) from Afrin. Four parliamentary questionnaires submitted by Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party on the transfers also remain unanswered. According to local Syrian Kurdish and Arab sources contacted by Al-Monitor, the convoy carried the families of Syrian fighters who fought alongside the Turkish army during Operation Euphrates Shield. It was one of demands of the fighters who staged two separate protests against Turkey on March 17 and April 7 in Tell Abyad over their overdue salaries. Thus, Turkey’s move might be a response to fighters’ demands to reunite with their families west of the Euphrates. Hamdan al Abd, an ethnic Arab and the former co-chair of Tell Abyad’s now defunct Kurdish-led local council, also thinks the people transferred to the region are mainly families of Syrian opposition fighters that fought under the banner of the Syrian National Army. “The demographic characteristic of Tell Abyad is systematically being changed through population transfers from eastern Ghouta, Homs, Idlib, Daraa, Deir ez-Zor and the countryside of Damascus,” Abd told Al-Monitor. “The arrivals are resettled in Tell Abyad city, eastern Tell Abyad, Ain al-Arus, Ali Bayli, Hamam al-Turkman, Suluk, Khurmaza, Khirbet al-Ruz, Havice and Sherian.” Local Kurdish sources deem the attempts a demographic intervention against the Kurds. Yet, according to Abd, the moves do not just target the Kurdish population and the Arab population suffers as well. “Armed groups and the Turkish forces are displacing people everywhere regardless of their ethnic or religious identities. Their houses are being taken over by their men. People are getting arrested, stripped of their rights for allegedly cooperating with the self-administration or with the Kurds,” he said. Armed clashes between Turkish-backed groups in Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain are another source of concern for the locals, Abd said. The clashes are reportedly caused by disputes over the sharing of money and property that the opposition fighters deem the spoils of war. “It's tragic for the locals. [The fighters] are racketeering, looting private property. They steal agricultural products, furniture, water pumps and other technical wares. They loot the granaries and sell the grain to Turkey. Bakers are having trouble finding flour. They seize generators,” he said. “Even doctors can’t go to their clinics out of fear of being kidnapped or extorted.” According to Abd, some 140,000 people left Tell Abyad and surrounding villages for refugee camps near Raqqa, Ain Issa and Kobani, and the displacements are ongoing. Apparently, Russia, which conducts joint patrols in the region under a deal between the two countries to end Operation Peace Spring, is not willing to interfere. “We asked Russia to provide safe passage for people who seek to return to their homes, but we couldn't receive an assurance or an answer,” he said. “For example, houses in the village of Ser Kerek on the M-4 highway were bulldozed. We sent a protest note to Russia about this but couldn't receive any answer. We also sent a list of the people whose houses were demolished.” Ras al-Ain has suffered similar atrocities, Abd added. An April 25 joint statement by dozens of Arab tribes echoes this outcry. Drawing attention to the Syrian opposition fighters’ crimes in the region, the statement accuses fighters of kidnapping people for ransom and disrupting education and health care services. It also accuses Turkey of demographic engineering in the region. Tell Abyad became a hot spot for Erdogan after the Kurdish-led SDF liberated the town from IS in 2015. “Whose land is it? 95% of the people in that town are Arabs and Turkmens, with 5% Kurds. … This is now posing a threat to Turkey, thus Turkey will take necessary measures,” Erdogan raged, accusing the Kurdish groups of ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Turkmens in the region. Yet not just Kurds, but also Arabs dispute Erdogan’s figures. According to Abd, 20-22% of Tell Abyad’s population is Kurdish, 5% is Turkmen and some 2% is Armenian, with the rest being Arabs. Kurdish sources, in turn, say some 30-40% of the population is Kurdish. Erdogan’s accusations of ethnic cleansing also seem questionable. Most of the displaced people who left their homes during the fight against IS returned to the region by 2015, except for those who are wary of returning because of their former links with IS. Similarly, Ras al-Ain had been almost equally Kurdish and Arab, with the Arabs living mainly in the west and the Kurds in the east. The region hosted a Chechen population that had been exiled from Caucasia during the 19th century. It is far from the first time Kurds have faced demographic engineering attempts. Following the Syrian independence in 1945, northern Syria saw many attempts to set up an Arab corridor against the Kurdish population. In 1969, the Syrian government expropriated more than one million hectares of territory owned by Kurds under what it called “land reform.” Another Arabization attempt was a plan to set up an Arab corridor 280 kilometers (174 miles) long and 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide stretching from Ras al-Ain to the Iraqi border to swallow more than 330 Kurdish villages in the region. Following the construction of the Tabqa Dam, 56 villages were set up in the area, 41 of them on this corridor and 15 in the Raqqa countryside. Some 4,000 Arab families whose lands had been submerged by the dam were settled into these villages, each of which consisted of some 150 to 200 houses. An additional 7,000 Arab families from Aleppo, Manbic and al-Bab who lost their homes to various irrigation projects were also settled in another mainly Kurdish town of Jazeera. They received a wide range of government support from housing to weapons. It seems that history is repeating itself. Copyright 2020 AL Monitor

Allow Public Debate on Security, Covid-19 Responses (Nairobi) – Somali authorities have been stepping up their intimidation of journalists as the country faces a growing number of Covid-19 cases. Since mid-April 2020 alone, authorities arbitrarily detained three journalists, accused two of various crimes, and prohibited a local radio station from broadcasting in a local dialect. As of April 30, Somalia had 601 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 28 deaths reported. The country is also scheduled to hold general elections in late 2020 or early 2021, possibly the country’s first open election in 50 years. Somali authorities should use World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2020, to commit to ending arbitrary arrests and harassment of journalists. “Somali authorities should stop jailing and harassing journalists at the very time when getting the news is crucial,” said Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “An independent media protected from abuse is key to ensuring that Somalis have information to make informed decisions during the pandemic.” On April 20, in the town of Baidoa, the authorities detained a Voice of America (VOA) reporter, Mukhtar Mohamed Atosh, and held him for two nights before releasing him on April 22. A court document stated that he was under investigation on charges of “publication of false, exaggerated news” and “giving false alarm to the authorities.” Mukhtar told Human Rights Watch that the regional police questioned him about an April 19 VOA news story in which he reported on the alleged rape of three women on the road between Mogadishu and Baidoa and the death of one from her injuries. On April 14, the police summoned Abdiaziz Ahmed Gurbiye, the chief editor and deputy director of the private Goobjoog Media Group, to the Hodan police station in Mogadishu, where there was a warrant for his arrest. This followed two posts on his Facebook pages criticizing the Somali government’s response to the Covid-19 crisis. One post alleged that President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (“Farmajo”) had taken one of the few ventilators recently donated to a hospital in Mogadishu. On April 15, prosecutors before the Benadir regional court said that they were investigating Abdiaziz on charges of “offending the prestige and honor of the head of state” and “publication of false news,” among other provisions. Conviction on these charges can be punished with up to three years in prison. The judge ordered Abdiaziz transferred to Mogadishu Central Prison pending investigation. On April 18, he was released on bail. On April 2, Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) posted on its Twitter account that it was investigating Harun Maruf of VOA, a prominent, veteran United States-based journalist and co-author on a book on Al-Shabab, as having “links that are a threat to national security” and accused him of engaging in actions “outside of the media code of conduct.” On April 23, the agency announced on Twitter that it had completed the investigation and was handing over the file to the country’s attorney general. According to Somali journalist organizations, the authorities arrested journalist Mohamed Abidwahab Nur (known as Abuja) on March 7 and held him incommunicado. On April 22, after the journalist organizations protested his detention, the Ministry of Information announced that he was being detained by security agencies and under investigation for Al-Shabab membership and murder. Human Rights Watch wrote to Federal Attorney General Suleiman Mohamed Mohamud on April 28 asking for details of the status of the investigations into Abdiaziz, Harun, and Mohamed Abuja but did not receive a response. On April 24, the police briefly held Farhan Mohamed Hussein, a reporter with Radio Kulmiye, while covering a sudden outbreak of protests against the police, after the police fatally shot two people during a coronavirus curfew. They detained Farhan shortly after he arrived at the scene of the shootings, and took him to the Bondhere district police station, where he was forced to delete his photos and audio, and then released him. On April 20, in the coastal town of Barawe, District Commissioner Omar Sheikh Abdi ordered a private community radio station, Radio Barawe, to stop broadcasting programs in Barwani, the local dialect. The order followed an April 17 broadcast on Universal TV network of a program featuring Radio Barawe. The station director said that the district commissioner arrived at the station at 8:30 p.m. with armed guards and ordered him to stop the broadcast. After significant public outcry and a statement from the region’s governor, the station was able to resume its Barwani programing late on April 21. Somalia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, as they face threats and attacks from government officials, private individuals, and the Islamist armed group Al-Shabab. Impunity for killings of journalists remains the norm. Journalists seeking to report on security issues and human rights abuses have regularly faced harassment and intimidation and many have been compelled to resort to self-censorship. These problems have increased during previous pre-election periods. Amnesty International has reported that Somalia’s current government regularly threatens, harasses, and interferes with the social media accounts of journalists who post critical comments. The country’s outdated penal code, which came into force in 1964, includes a number of vague and overly broad crimes, including criminal defamation; offending the honor and prestige of the head of state; insulting a public officer or institution; and contempt against the nation, state, or flag, that contravene regional and international human rights standards. The authorities have used these vague criminal laws on a number of occasions to silence critical reporting and commentary, Human Rights Watch said. The police detained another popular Goobjoog journalist, Ali Adan Mumin, for three days in May 2019 and accused him of insulting public officials in Facebook posts criticizing the country’s intelligence agency. He has since fled the country, fearing for his security. A Human Rights Watch report in March 2020 on the human rights dimensions of the Covid-19 response and government obligations noted that governments have an obligation to protect the right to freedom of expression, including the right to seek, receive, and impart information of all kinds. Any restrictions on this right must be lawful, proportionate, and necessary to achieve legitimate objectives. Access to timely and accurate information and open public debate are crucial for addressing the public health crisis. The Somali government should ensure that the public is kept informed and that people are allowed to express their views, including to criticize the government’s response to Covid-19, Human Rights Watch said. “The free flow of information is especially important in addressing and curbing the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bader said. “The government should be encouraging coverage of the pandemic and taking to heart people’s concerns and fears, rather than trying to stop the flow of information.” Source: Human Rights Watch

At least three boats carrying Rohingya refugees have been adrift for more than two months. As of this week, rights groups that had been tracking the boats lost sight of them. The belongings of Rohingya refugees lying on the shore last month as their boat remained anchored nearby in Teknaf, Bangladesh.Credit...Suzauddin Rubel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images BANGKOK — Somewhere in turquoise waters, perhaps where the Bay of Bengal meets the Andaman Sea, wooden boats filled with Rohingya refugees are listing, adrift now for more than 10 weeks. They were prevented from docking in Malaysia, their preferred destination, and Bangladesh, their port of origin. As of this week, rights groups that had been trying to track the boats by satellite lost sight of them. Each boat — there were at least three — carried hundreds of Rohingya Muslims desperate for sanctuary and at the mercy of human traffickers. “I feel like crying, realizing the situation of my brothers and sisters who are still floating in the deep sea,” said Mohammad Yusuf, a chief imam in one of the refugee camps in Bangladesh, where about one million Rohingya have taken refuge after fleeing waves of persecution and violence in neighboring Myanmar. The boats had been caught in what the United Nations has called a dangerous “game of human Ping-Pong.” The Bangladeshi government balked at accepting them, arguing that it has already taken in many Rohingya and borne a far greater share of the burden in the refugee crisis than any other nation. But with Malaysia refusing to allow the boats to dock amid a national coronavirus lockdown, and a xenophobic mood sweeping the region, the boats had nowhere else to go. “Bangladesh has shouldered very heavy responsibilities for the Rohingya refugees and must not be left alone to deal with these challenges,” said Steven Corliss, the United Nations refugee agency’s representative in Bangladesh. “But turning desperate people away cannot be the answer.” The deadly results of such a rejection became clear on April 15 when another Rohingya boat that had been prevented from docking in Malaysia was rescued by the Bangladeshi Coast Guard. Nearly 400 malnourished and dehydrated figures, many of them children, emerged from the hold, where they had been kept by human traffickers. The United Nations refugee agency, which assessed the refugees’ condition, did not quantify how many Rohingya perished on the journey, saying simply that “many died and were tossed overboard.” A significant number had suffered physical abuse at the hands of the traffickers, the agency said. Rohingya refugees gather after being rescued last month in Teknaf near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.Credit...Suzauddin Rubel/Associated Press The Rohingya who survived that journey are now in quarantine for the coronavirus at a temporary camp in Bangladesh. The human traffickers who smuggle the Rohingya from internment camps in Myanmar, or refugee camps in Bangladesh, prey on some of the most vulnerable people on earth. Mostly stateless and traumatized by decades of persecution by the Myanmar military, many Rohingya are desperate to get to Malaysia, where they can find work as undocumented laborers. About 100,000 are registered with the United Nations refugee agency, and many more live in the margins of society with no paperwork at all. A trade in Rohingya women and girls supplies wives to the Rohingya men, ensuring that an already disenfranchised community continues to suffer in another country. Hundreds of Rohingya have died trying to get to Malaysia. Some were thrown overboard from overloaded boats when the journeys lengthened because countries refused them safe harbor. Others were buried in mass graves in the jungle when their families could not afford trafficking fees that suddenly increased during the trip, a common tactic by human smugglers to squeeze more money out of the trade. Mr. Yusuf, the imam in the Bangladeshi refugee camp, said that he and other clerics have advised families against the perilous sea expeditions. But the sense of hopelessness in the camps, where hundreds of thousands of people are chronically underemployed, has propelled the Rohingya to put their lives in the hands of smugglers. “Punishment should be given to human traffickers, not these innocent Rohingya,” Mr. Yusuf said. Conditions on the boats have been likened to those of modern day slave ships, with Rohingya women and children packed together so tightly in the darkened hold that they can barely stretch out. When coast guards and navies in Thailand and Malaysia have intercepted the boats, they have sometimes thrown packets of instant noodles and cases of drinking water aboard the vessels. But in refusing to give them shelter, the Southeast Asian authorities condemn many Rohingya to death, rights groups say. A wooden boat carrying Rohingya migrants being detained in Malaysian territorial waters off the island of Langkawi last month.Credit...Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency In interviews, survivors said they got used to the daily rhythm of bodies being tossed overboard. In 2015, the police in Malaysia uncovered nearly 140 graves and cages made of branches at jungle camps for trafficked Rohingya and Bangladeshis who were trying to make their way from Thailand to Malaysia. By The New York Times Authorities in both countries have been accused of complicity in the trade and of impeding efforts to eradicate it. While Thailand eventually convicted nine officials of participating in human trafficking schemes, no Malaysians have been held accountable. The persecution of the Rohingya intensified in 2017 when the Buddhist-majority military in Myanmar unleashed what United Nations officials have described as a campaign with genocidal intent. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya poured across Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh, bringing with them stories of executions and mass rape. Many Rohingya now live in refugee camps spread across denuded hills once thick with bamboo and fruit orchards in eastern Bangladesh. Conditions that were crowded and hot even before the coronavirus epidemic are now even more dire, according to humanitarian organizations. No Rohingya have been confirmed to have contracted the virus in the camps, although testing is limited. Worried about the spread of the virus among the refugees, the Bangladeshi government has banned most aid workers. With certain social distancing rules in effect, some Rohingya have lost the few low-paying jobs they had. Now that roughly 80 percent of aid workers have been barred from the camps, important medical campaigns, like measles vaccines, have been halted. Latrines are flooding while there is not enough water for showers, residents said. A mobile internet ban instituted by the Bangladeshi government has made conditions worse. Despite the dangers of the journey, some camp residents said, the perilous passage to Southeast Asia might still be worth it. One refugee who fled to Bangladesh in 2017 said if he could afford it, he would send his sons to Malaysia. Another cursed the money he had lost from a failed trip in an earlier sailing season. “People are always looking for a safe and better life,” said Sirajul Mustafa, who lives in the Kutupalong camp, the world’s single largest refugee settlement. “Brokers keep luring them. They are taking risks without knowing the consequences.” From his bamboo shack in Kutupalong, Mohammed Noor summed up the Rohingya condition. “No big hope before,” he said, “but now zero hope.” Hannah Beech has been the Southeast Asia bureau chief since 2017, based in Bangkok. Before joining The Times, she reported for Time magazine for 20 years from bases in Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok and Hong Kong. @hkbeech A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2020, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Hope Fades For Hundreds Of Rohingya Stuck at Sea. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company

A boat carrying suspected ethnic Rohingya migrants is seen detained in Malaysian territorial waters, in Langkawi, Malaysia on April 5, 2020. File Photo: Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency/Handout via Reuters Pushing hundreds of starving and persecuted Rohingya refugees back out to the sea in the full knowledge that they have no safe place of refuge elsewhere are fundamental violations of their human rights, said Free Rohingya Coalition, a global network of Rohingya survivors and activists, today. It said it is deeply troubled by the news reports that a number of Asian countries, specifically Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh, are pushing starving Rohingya refugees on boats back out to dangerous waters after refusing disembarkation on their shores. According to foreign ministry sources, two boats with some 500 Rohingya refugees are still in the Myanmar sea of the Bay of Bengal after earlier being refused by the Malaysia and Thailand navies. "These inhumane acts put the lives of those on the boats at immediate risk as they do not have adequate supplies of drinking water, food or fuel. States are obliged to provide those on board the ships with a place of safety and access to humanitarian support as victims of state persecution and genocide, and as potential victims of trafficking," said Nay San Lwin, co-founder of Free Rohingya Coalition in a statement today. These latest developments have occurred just weeks ahead of Myanmar's first reporting deadline to the International Court of Justice, which has ordered provisional measures to protect the half-million Rohingyas who remain on Myanmar soil and to prevent genocidal acts against them, including the incitement of genocidal violence. Khin Maung, the Free Rohingya Coalition's coordinator in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh and founder of the Rohingya Youth Association said, "We Rohingyas have been fleeing death and destruction at the hands of Myanmar government and local communities in our birthplace of Western Myanmar since long before I was born in the 1990s. "Our people have resorted to paying brokers to take us somewhere safer, risking death or starvation at sea." He also said they are in Bangladesh or going to Malaysia because they think these are places of milk and honey. "We take these high-risk journeys because we are desperate to escape subhuman conditions, and because in Rakhine we can no longer live with the constant threat of another wave of genocidal slaughter or being killed in the fierce fighting between Myanmar troops and the Rakhine rebels." Nay San Lwin said instead of showing governmental resolve or a collective sense of urgency or state responsibility to end the root cause of genocide and war in Rakhine, ASEAN and South Asian governments have issued empty declarations laced with euphemistic spin such as "irregular maritime movements" and "voluntary, sustainable, and dignified return". "There is absolutely nothing dignified about hundreds of Rohingyas being pushed back out to sea where they are adrift, desperate for drinking water and starving for weeks. In fact, it is inhumane." Alongside these push-backs, which have already caused the deaths of dozens onboard, Rohingya refugees have been subjected to an onslaught of racist attacks on social media, believed to be coming from Malaysian citizens of various religious and racial backgrounds, he said. The volume and targeted nature of these attacks strongly suggest that this is a coordinated nationalist campaign, he added. The Free Rohingya Coalition says the nations in the region have a responsibility to prevent hate speech and prosecute their nationals who incite racism. "This is particularly important in a situation where the victims of such attacks are a group that are already the victims of persecution and genocide in the neighbouring ASEAN state of Myanmar." Copyright 2020 The Daily Star Read More 32 Rohingyas die on drifting boat, 382 rescued while going to Malaysia illegally: coast guard HRW urges Bangladesh to take in Rohingyas stranded in the Bay

Desecrated Yezidi graves in Afrin, Syria cemetery. credit: Edzina Foundation ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkish-backed armed groups continue to desecrate property belonging to the Yezidi minority in Afrin, northern Syria. Cemeteries, religious shrines and Yezidi cemeteries in Afrin have been destroyed, stolen and looted by armed groups, according to local activists. The Ezdina Foundation, which monitors abuses in Afrin in general and against Yezidis in particular, documented the latest information and footage of the damaged shrines and cemeteries. “We are documenting these oppressions and show them to the international community so they can help the Yezidi minority in northern Syria,” said Ali Isso, head of the foundation, to Rudaw TV on Monday. Shrines looted and vandalized by armed groups include the shrine of Sheikh Junaid in the village of Faqira, the shrine of an ordinary king in the village of Qibar, the shrine of Sheikh Hussein in the village of Qibar, the shrine of Gilkhan and the shrine of Sheikh Rikab in the village of Shadiri. Yezidi graves in the village of Qibar have also been destroyed. Villagers tried to repair the shrines, but the damage is still visible. “Their aim is to destroy and loot all signs or symbols that represent the history and identity of the Yezidis,”Isso added. According to information obtained by Rudaw from Yezidi organizations and activists, out of a total of 35,000 Yezidis, only about 3,000 Yezidis remain in the Afrin region. Six Yezidi women and girls in Afrin have been kidnapped by armed groups in the past six months. “Nergis was shot ten times and died. Arin Hassan, another Yezidi girl, was kidnapped 60 days ago… nothing is known about her,” Isso told Rudaw. “Gulle Hassan was released two weeks ago after 40 days in prison. She was tortured a lot and her body turned black with bruises,” he added. “They imagine that after next five years they can own the land. That’s why they want to remove the Identity of the Yezidi minority. They don’t want any signs of Yezidis and Kurds. They want to impose Ottoman, Turkish and Arabic signs on Afrin land.” Ali added. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has warned of ethnic cleansing against Yezidis in the area, saying locals face "systematic violations" in at least ten villages in northern Syria. Yezidi human rights organizations have condemned violations against Afrin's minorities for over a year. Reporting by Hussein Omar Translation by Sarkawt Mohammed Copyright 2020 RUDAW

Years of strife left a generation traumatized. India’s clampdown disrupted daily life. Now the battle against the coronavirus has further isolated and scarred a people with little access to help. [Genocide Watch comment: INTENTIONALLY CAUSING SERIOUS BODILY OR MENTAL HARM TO A GROUP IS AN ACT OF GENOCIDE. Genocide Convention Article II (b).] Sara Begum, center, at her home next to her husband and daughter in Kashmir, last month. Photographs by Atul Loke PAHOO, Kashmir — Sara Begum’s suffering began on Aug. 3, when masked policemen barged into her home, badly roughed up her son and whisked him away. Ms. Begum’s son, Fayaz Ahmad Mir, 28, was one of thousands of civilians arrested or detained by order of the Indian government after it moved forcefully to cement its control over Kashmir, a largely Muslim region of about eight million people claimed by both India and Pakistan. The clampdown has disrupted daily life, with many people feeling besieged and afraid to leave their homes. Since her son was arrested, Ms. Begum has become gaunt and unsteady, but she and her family say her worst afflictions have been mental and emotional. She now takes sertraline and lithium, both antidepressants. She tried twice to commit suicide, once by consuming rat poison and again by jumping into a river. “When I close my eyes,” Ms. Begum said, “I see my son shouting, ‘Mother, I want to see you.’” Eight months after India revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and brought the region fully under its authority, doctors here say a state of hopelessness has morphed into a severe psychological crisis. Mental health workers say Kashmir is witnessing an alarming increase in instances of depression, anxiety and psychotic events. Hard data is difficult to come by, but local medical professionals say they are seeing a rise in suicides and an increase in already disturbingly high rates of domestic abuse. A nationwide lockdown that India imposed across the country in recent weeks to fight the coronavirus has worsened the problem, the medical professionals say. Police officers block roads with coils of glistening concertina wire. Any residents who step out of their homes, especially in Kashmir’s towns and cities, risk getting beaten up. A roadblock in Srinagar last month. Doctors and researchers say the Kashmir Valley, tucked into the Himalayas, has few resources to cope. This area has been mired in conflict for decades, with its majority-Muslim population agitating for independence or at least more autonomy from India, which is majority Hindu and controls most of Kashmir. Pakistan controls a smaller slice. Even before the events of recent months, decades of violence between Indian security forces and Kashmiri militants had taken a physical and mental toll on the region and its people. Nearly 1.8 million Kashmiris, or nearly half of all adults, have some form of mental disorder, Doctors Without Borders estimated after surveying 5,600 households in 2015. Nine of 10 have experienced conflict-related traumas. The figures are much higher than in India, according to other surveys. A leading psychiatrist said he was overwhelmed. Dr. Majid Shafi, a government psychiatrist, said that last year he saw a hundred patients a week. Now he sees more than 500. Overall, Kashmir has fewer than 60 psychiatrists. A long line snakes out of Dr. Shafi’s office — teenagers traumatized by violence; mothers too worried about their incarcerated children to sleep; businesspeople owing a mountain of debt that is climbing higher and higher under a lockdown that has shuttered nearly everything. Patients waiting to see Majid Shafi, a psychiatrist, in Kashmir last month. “This is just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Shafi, the single government psychiatrist for around a million people in the district of Pulwama. “The crisis is growing.” Every season of turmoil in Kashmir brings a new kind of pain. One season is marked by the corpses of teenage boys felled by Indian forces. Another brings an epidemic of dead eyes, as Kashmiris refer to protesters left blind after being struck in the eyes by pellets fired by police officers. This past year will be remembered for the crackdown. In August, the Indian government suddenly stripped away statehood from Jammu and Kashmir, which had been India’s one Muslim-majority state. Security forces flooded the area, cut off roads, shut down landlines, cellphone lines and the internet, and arrested thousands of Kashmiris, from students to top elected officials. Some have been released, but many remain in jail. Though some phone and internet service have been restored, they remain nothing close to pre-crackdown levels. Many Kashmiris, who used social media to socialize because it was dangerous to hang out in the streets, now feel completely isolated. Children have remained out of school for months. Because of the military crackdown and then the coronavirus lockdown, students have been in school only a few weeks. Ms. Begum’s family said her son, a farmer, participated in protests against the Indian government a few years ago, as did thousands of other Kashmiris. They believe this is why he was arrested in the roundups in August. Ms. Begum, who is in her 60s, raised Mr. Mir during the heyday of the insurgency, shielding him from the wrath of security forces and militants alike. He is being held in a jail hundreds of miles away on vague charges of being a “threat to peace,” family members said. They don’t have money to visit. When the cellphone network was switched back on in October, the authorities promised a video call. That has not yet happened. Ms. Begum, increasingly demoralized, said her son had been “stolen” from her. Ms. Begum says she sees her son in dreams, his face covered in bandages, his hands shaking in fear. He begs for water, but she feels chained, unable to move. According to India’s home ministry, Mr. Mir was among more than 7,000 people arrested in August. Of those, more than 450 are still in jail, including Mr. Mir. Many, including three former chief ministers, were detained under India’s Public Safety Act, a law that allows the authorities to jail suspects without charge for up to two years. People who were recently released spoke of the humiliation and fear they experienced behind bars. Bilal Sultan, a politician, was placed with hardened criminals, he said. He slipped into depression. In February, he said, he was set free because his doctors were afraid he might kill himself. Mr. Sultan takes sleeping pills and complains of a recurring dream in which he is traveling to a tourist resort before soldiers stop him and shoot him between the eyes. “I was a very strong man,” Mr. Sultan, 55, said recently at his house in Srinagar. “Now I fear my own children.” Kashmir’s new generation, long accustomed to violence and bloodshed, may be the hardest hit. Nida Rehman, who tried to spread mental health awareness to help others, was diagnosed with depression. Before the August clampdown, Nida Rehman, 28, wanted to lift the spirits of others by setting up a nonprofit organization to raise awareness for mental health issues. But she says she has failed to learn the lessons she gave to others. In pictures, she looks happy. But the trauma has withered her. She has lost weight, her cheeks sunken, her eyes ringed by dark circles. Last year, Ms. Rehman visited a psychiatrist, who diagnosed acute depression. She doesn’t sleep for days. She found some relief by spending hours with a caged parrot, Noor, that her family kept. “I felt I was living in a cage, like Noor,” Ms. Rehman said. “That happy world slipped out of my hands.” After her relatives found her talking to the parrot, they grew worried and embarrassed, persuading her to release it. One evening, in October, Ms. Rehman set Noor free. It didn’t help. Ms. Rehman is now taking regular doses of antidepressants. So is Ms. Begum, the mother of the imprisoned Mr. Mir. As days get longer and weather begins to warm, she finds herself staring at a tractor parked outside her house. Mr. Mir bought it on a loan. The bank is now threatening to seize the family’s home. Ms. Begum’s hands tremble and her lips quiver as she speaks. The desperation has incapacitated her. She can’t even cook, she said. “I may never see my son again,” she said. “I feel I will die before he comes back home.” The Dal Lake in Srinagar, normally full of tourists, without customers last month. Iqbal Kirmani contributed reporting. Copyright 2020 The New York Times Company