Riot police arrest a boy during demonstrations against the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on May 5, 2018. Photograph by Celestino Arce / NurPhoto / Getty When my kids were fifteen and twelve, we lived through a period during which the Russian government was threatening to take children away from queer parents, and, specifically, threatening to go after my kids. I sent my son, who is adopted, to boarding school in the United States while the rest of us got ready to emigrate. My biological daughter was less at risk, perhaps even at no risk, and yet the question of whether social services would come knocking sent me into a panic. One day, about a month and a half before we left Moscow, as I was about to go on a short book trip, my daughter asked what would happen if social services came while I was away. “Will you go crazy?” she asked. I reassured her that a small army of lawyers, activists, and embassy officials stood at the ready and would protect her. “I know I’ll survive,” she responded dismissively. “I mean, Will you go crazy? Will you lose your mind?” A twelve-year-old was asking me if I had the mental capacity to survive having my child taken hostage. It was the right question. Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror. Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything. The single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison. But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother, who is forced to listen to her baby cry. Last weekend, independent Russian-language media published hundreds of photographs from protests that preceded Monday’s inauguration of Vladimir Putin, who has claimed the office of President for the fourth time. In many of the pictures, Russian police were detaining children: primarily, preteen boys were having their arms twisted behind their backs by police, being dragged and shoved into paddy wagons. According to OVDInfo, a Web site that has been tracking arrests since anti-Putin protests began, six and a half years ago, a hundred and fifty-eight minors were detained by police during the protests, accounting for just less than ten per cent of the day’s arrests. Ella Paneyakh, a Russian sociologist who studies law-enforcement practices, observed in a Facebook post that the police had clearly been directed to target children. A possible explanation, she suggested, is that social services, which will process the minors, is even less accountable than the regular courts are. While Russian activists have learned to make the work of the courts difficult, filing appeals and regularly going all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, there is no role for defense attorneys and no apparent appeals process in the social-services system. The threat is clear: children who have been detained at protests may be removed from their families. At least one parent has already been charged with negligence as a result of his son’s detention at one of the demonstrations last weekend. Another possible explanation is that Putin and the system he has created have consistently, if not necessarily with conscious intent, restored key mechanisms of Soviet control. The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do. The threat that children might be removed from their families is likely to compel parents to keep their kids at home next time—and to stay home themselves. A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said. The Attorney General did not appear to be unveiling a new policy so much as amplifying a practice that has been adopted by the Trump Administration, which has been separating parents who are in immigration detention from their children. The Times reported in December that the federal government was considering a policy of separating families in order to discourage asylum seekers from entering. By that time, nonprofit groups were already raising the alarm about the practice, which they said had affected a number of families. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the hundreds of families that had been separated when they entered the country with the intention of seeking asylum. The practice, and Sessions’s speech, are explicitly intended as messages to parents who may consider seeking asylum in the United States. The American government has unleashed terror on immigrants, and in doing so has naturally reached for the most effective tools. (c) 2018 The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/taking-children-from-their-parents-is-a-form-of-state-terror

EU/ECHO/Pierre Prakash Although global media outlets like the Economist have made the case that the Rohingya of Burma are the “most persecuted people in the world” for several years at this point, their plight has yet to fully register around the world. Besides the fact that the genocide involves a poverty-stricken and stateless ethnic people with no political voice, the world’s lack of knowledge about the Rohingya also stems from the fact that Myanmar State Councillor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has offered cover for the brutality of her military through her lack of action and her dismissal of the carnage going on under her rule. As Hannah Beech wrote in the New Yorker, “[Suu Kyi] has described the Rohingya insurgents as ‘terrorists’ and dismissed the worldwide condemnation, saying that international outlets have created ‘a huge iceberg of misinformation.’ Her office has accused the Rohingya of setting fire to their own homes in order to provoke an outcry.” This January Bill Richardson, former New Mexico governor and former member of an international panel advising Suu Kyi, described her situation this way: “She seems isolated. She doesn’t travel much into the country. I think she’s developed a classic bubble.” Richardson resigned from the panel in frustration, blaming the Burmese military for most of the killing and destruction and calling the government’s investigation into the Rohingya crisis “a whitewash.” What exactly is being whitewashed? A New York Times article gave graphic details of the kinds of atrocities the Myanmar government is trying to cover up: “Survivors said they saw government soldiers stabbing babies, cutting off boys’ heads, gang-raping girls, shooting 40-millimeter grenades into houses, burning entire families to death, and rounding up dozens of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them.” Human Rights Watch has gathered expensive data that corroborates what the refugees told the New York Times: “The atrocities committed by Burmese security forces, including mass killings, sexual violence, and widespread arson, amount to crimes against humanity. Military and civilian officials have repeatedly denied that security forces committed abuses during the operations, claims which are contradicted by extensive evidence and witness accounts.” In March, the US Holocaust Museum joined several organizations that have taken back humanitarian recognition from Suu Kyi: it revoked its prestigious Elie Wiesel award, stating, “We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population.” At a recent international conference on the Rohingya held in Paris, organized by Dr. Maung Zarni, a Burmese Buddhist activist and organizer with the Free Rohingya Coalition, Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi indicted Suu Kyi specifically in terms of rape: “My sister laureate has dismissed as ‘made-up stories’ credible finding of the Burmese military’s use of systematic and pervasive rape and other acts of sexual violence – such as public stripping of Rohingya women. The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of Burmese military’s systematic sexual violence against literally thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to Cox Bazaar’s [in Bangladesh] camps. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.” Ebadi insisted that Suu Kyi and Burmese military leaders be brought before an international tribunal on charges of genocide. Stripping Suu Kyi of her prizes and accolades is an important step towards exposing the violence going on under her protection, but knowing the history and the causes behind the persecution is essential. The debates over what words to use to describe the carnage in Myanmar are not simply a matter of semantics. Words like “genocide” and “apartheid” trigger specific sanctions within international law and human rights discourse. The issue of whether or not the Rohingya are an actual “ethnic group” is likewise a critical point of debate, with specific rights and remedies hanging in the balance. Roots of an Atrocity Who are the Rohingya and why is Burma so intent on its brutal program of ethnic cleansing? The Rohingya are recognized internationally as an ethnic group, present in their current location from at least the twelfth century. When the modern states were created upon the end of the British empire, the Rohingya were instantly transformed from a distinct people into an ethnic minority within Burma, later to be known as Myanmar. But the Rohingya are Muslim, and the Burmese state sees itself as Buddhist. The ethnic cleansing is meant to force Rohingya into submission or out of the country. There are two main reasons behind the genocide: racism and greed. Militant Buddhist groups such as the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party voice the dominant anti-Rohingya sentiment. One of its leaders, U Shwe Mg asserts: “the so-called Rohingya are just illegal immigrants. We allowed them to settle down here because we are generous people and we thought they would just stay a while. But the Bengali had a lot of children, paid Buddhist women to convert to Islam and marry them, stole our land, squeezed our resources, and now they demand equal rights and citizenship. It can’t be.” This racism has been stirred up by the Burmese military, who have other reasons for expelling the Rohingya.: the land they have lived in for centuries has large natural gas resources. Big multinational corporations acting in collusion with the military are profiting from the killings and displacements. Even some Arab states such as Qatar are complicit in supporting the Burmese regime. According to Shirin Ebadi, these corporations and the military are “knee deep in the blood of the Rohingya people.” The idea that these resources do not belong to the Rohingya, and that they are simply interlopers in Burma, is manifested in laws that perpetually keep them disenfranchised. Last year Myanmar began a citizenship verification program in Rakhine State under which some residents were granted a form of citizenship on condition that they identify as Bengali, rather than Rohingya. This puts the Rohingya in a Catch-22 situation. If they identify as Bengali in order to get this citizenship they are considered as immigrants from Bengal and their form of citizenship made precarious. This is essentially a bribe to self-incriminate. Their taking this bait advances the government’s argument that the Rohingya are not a distinct Burmese ethnic group but rather Bengali “foreigners.” The Rohingya have resisted this form of blackmail and insist on their designation as a Burmese ethnic group. Amnesty International has called the system the Rohingya live under “apartheid”: “This system appears designed to make Rohingyas’ lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible. The security forces’ brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing … is just another manifestation of this appalling attitude.” The deliberate burning of Rohingya villages, often with their inhabitants inside, is done not only to cause death and displacement, but also because according to Burmese law, the state can then claim that land. In December, UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein noted “concordant reports of acts of appalling barbarity committed against the Rohingya, including deliberately burning people to death inside their homes, murders of children and adults; indiscriminate shooting of fleeing civilians; widespread rapes of women and girls, and the burning and destruction of houses, schools, markets and mosques… Can anyone… rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” The only sanctuary that has been offered to the more than one million Rohingya refugees has been from one of the poorest nations in the world, Bangladesh, whose resources are now stretched to the limit. Fifty-eight percent of those refugees are children, many of them orphans who witnessed the execution of their parents and other family members. These children continue the generations-old history of being stateless. They are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. To give a sense of the immensity of this human-made horror, Shirin Ebadi asserted that refugee camps in Syria and Palestine are like “five-star hotels” compared to the refugee sites in Bangladesh. The present conditions are bad enough, with the monsoon season is fast approaching, disease, hunger, and death will rise exponentially very soon. A Just Return The Rohingya in exile are arguing for their human right to return, but most importantly in safety and with rights. On June 6, the United Nations announced that a Memorandum of Understanding had been signed between the Government of Myanmar, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). It says the MOU is the first step needed to create conditions “conducive to voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable refugee returns from Bangladesh, and their reintegration in the country.” While this seems an encouraging advance, it is crucial to note that the very people it is meant to help, the Rohingya, were given no voice in the matter. That is a disturbing sign. The process that led to this MOU has not been transparent, and the key idea of “citizenship” is left wide open to interpretation. The only satisfactory kind of citizenship for the Rohingya would need to full and unconditional enfranchisement. Otherwise all the talk about “reintegration in the country” would rightfully be looked upon with suspicion. And even if legally granted full citizenship, it would be naïve to think the Myanmar government would not continue to find ways to continue its repression. The international human rights NGO, Refugees International, reacted to the MOU thus: “UNHCR’s engagement in the process is welcome and its inclusion in a framework for returns will be an important step toward ensuring that any improvement of conditions in Myanmar can be independently verified. However, RI urges that the text of the MOU be made public and warns that conditions for Rohingya in Myanmar remain appalling.” It added that “continued impunity, restricted access to aid, and denial of basic human rights in Myanmar’s Rakhine State make repatriation a distant reality at this time.” But international law is mostly a matter of self-interest and the exercise of power to secure those interests. Today those interests are aimed toward acquiring those natural gas resources — hence the need to think broadly and imaginatively about how to act alongside international protections, which are slow to be activated. The role of civil society is therefore critical. In the Paris conference, Mireille Fanon-Mendès France, a prominent human rights activist and daughter of Franz Fanon, noted the similarity between the case of the Rohingya and that of the Palestinians, and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement there, which stems from Palestinian civil society. The likeness is striking. Foreign Policy agrees: “Both groups became disenfranchised in the aftermath of colonial rule and imperial collapse, and both the Myanmar and Israeli governments have attempted to relocate them from their territory, portraying them as foreigners with no claim to the land. In both Israel and Myanmar, there have been attempts to rewrite the history of the two persecuted groups, claiming that neither constitute a ‘real’ ethnic group and are thus interlopers and invaders.” International solidarity groups have formed in many countries such as Japan, Turkey, the US, India, and Ireland that support and offer refuge to the Rohingya. Calls for boycotts and sanctions have been issued. At this point Bangladesh is bearing the weight of the world’s responsibility — this cannot continue to be the case. Hannah Arendt wrote that human rights cannot depend on nation-states or international bodies for their viability. She said the only guarantor of human rights is the human community. On August 25, the Free Rohingya Coalition will hold a global day of awareness, and ask that world governments and civil society help end the suffering and death of the most vulnerable and persecuted people in the world. (c) 2018 JACOBIN https://mail.google.com/_/scs/mail-static/_/js/k=gmail.main.en.etqpWYX_4_c.O/m=pds,pdl,pdit,m_i,pdt,t,it/am=Xv8jgB1A3j4AAQFAO8YihyBCmoEw838EtTQAbzdGMvv__wIQGAB0APgG_Jv7AJ0DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALSjwCw/rt=h/d=1/rs=AHGWq9CBNpr-7nXPBkxPqgFp3dUYcwzSQw

The Burmese/Myanmar government has garnered intense international scrutiny with their handling of the Rohingya people. The conflict, which has been going on for decades and has begotten militant and civilian casualties on both sides, is nothing new. However, after some specific attacks on police checkpoints, the Burmese government decided to accelerate their offensives which escalated into what the UN would later call “textbook ethnic cleansing.” After that specific conflict began, many were not aware that the government has actually been mired in conflict with ethnic minorities all across the outer states since the close of WWII. The state-sponsored media attempted to push stories of the Rohingya militant group attacks as if they were isolated, extremist incidents; this is in direct conflict with the on-the-ground reporting from multiple aid organizations, fact-finding missions and the UN. Still, their media campaign made it seem as if these conflicts and military campaigns were new and justified, when in fact the violence against civilian ethnic minorities tends to shift from one minority to another across the country, regardless of their origins or religion. This photo of a Kachin refugee eating rice from a bowl is from 2012. These conflicts are older than his grandparents in what has become the longest civil war in modern history. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu) Now the violence has begun to boil back over in the northern Kachin State, on the border of China and just north of Shan State. As seen in the image above, Kachin State lies a far reach away from Rakhine State in the Southwest, where the Rohingya were pushed out of. The vast majority of the Kachin are Christian, some estimates going all the way up to 95% of their total population. The Burmese military has a long history with its brutal campaigns against civilians — rape is a commonly used weapon of war, killing children under the age of 5, and destroying entire civilian villages are just a few documented examples of the Burma Army’s methods of waging war. They have consistently bought children to use as child soldiers in their fight against these fringe-state minorities. Now they have shifted their gaze once again to the Kachin. The Kachin’s primary fighting force is called the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). Though they used to hold an uncertain cease-fire like the Karen do now, there has been fighting on and off since 2011, with some bouts ending up in thousands of Kachin refugees fleeing their homes. According to the United Nations, 4,000 Kachin have been forced to run with their loved ones into the jungle away from their homes, all in the month of April of this year. Not only are these situations dangerous due to the obvious violence, but a staggering number of people wind up dead or seriously injured simply due to the harsh realities of being a refugee in the jungle — often times these people are running with whatever they had on their person at the time. This can mean no access to clean water or even the most basic of medical treatments for a very long time, all while trying to take care of children or elderly family members. Something as simple as a cut or diarrhea are common killers for those on the run. The numbers of refugees often fluctuate, especially at the beginning of a renewed conflict like this. Almost 700,000 Rohingya were driven from their homes in Rakhine State to the neighboring refugee camps in Bangladesh, but those numbers were difficult to track at first. The Kachin conflict is no different in that regard, though these conflicts are nothing new and one can reference back to older ones to get an idea as to what they might look like now. In 2013, there were a reported 100,000 Kachin refugees who had lost 364 villages due to the violence. As the situation develops, SOFREP will stay apprised with our on-the-ground sources. And though the fighting may increase in Kachin State, it does not negate or change the situation with the Rohingya. This video, captured by the aid organization the Free Burma Rangers, was taken in 2016 during another conflict between the Kachin and the Burma Army. The Burma Army was criticized then for using air assets on military and civilian targets alike: (c) 2018 SOFREP News https://sofrep.com/104378/burma-myanmar-violence-from-the-rohingya-to-the-kachin/

The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative honors the esteemed lawyer for his personal sacrifice fighting injustice and advocating for the Rohingya people in Myanmar YEREVAN, ARMENIA – The third annual $1.1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity was awarded today to Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung, a lawyer and activist recognized for his dedication to fighting for equality, education and human rights for the Rohingya people in Myanmar, in the face of persecution, harassment and oppression. Kyaw Hla Aung was presented the 2018 Aurora Prize, granted by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors, at a ceremony in Armenia. Kyaw Hla Aung was selected as the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate among 750 nominations submitted from 115 countries. Vartan Gregorian, Co-Founder of the Aurora Prize and Member of the Selection Committee, commended Mr. Aung, stating: “As we remember the horrors and violence experienced by Armenians – especially women and children – on the deportation route during the Genocide, it is with a great sense of responsibility that we stand ready to support Kyaw Hla Aung’s advocacy work that will hopefully lead one day to the enactment of national and international policies to protect and defend the vulnerable. Kyaw Hla Aung is doing tremendous work, at great risk to himself, and exemplifies the far-reaching impact one person can have to galvanize a movement, and to help individuals transform their lives.” As the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate, Kyaw Hla Aung will receive a $100,000 grant and the opportunity to continue the cycle of giving by donating the accompanying $1,000,000 award to organizations of his choice. He will donate the award to three international organizations that provide medical aid and assistance to refugees in Myanmar: Médecins Sans Frontières (London) Malaysian Medical Relief - MERCY Malaysia (Malaysia) International Catholic Migration Commission – ICMC (Switzerland, USA) Kyaw Hla Aung has been working tirelessly for decades, using his legal expertise to appeal for basic human rights for the stateless Rohingya people. His commitment to fight for justice for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees in Myanmar persecuted by the government, and for the children who no longer have access to education, remains stronger than ever. He sacrificed a total of 12 years in prison as a result of his mission, at huge personal cost to his own family. On being named the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate, Kyaw Hla Aung said: “There are severe restrictions on my people. They have lost their courage and faith in themselves, have become illiterate, and, as a result, are penniless. It has been heartbreaking to see my community suffer from such discrimination. The support of the Aurora Prize serves as important recognition for all of the Muslim victims of human rights violations, as the plight of the Rohingya people continues to become more visible to the international public.” “Kyaw Hla Aung’s work personifies the spirit of the Aurora Prize. He demonstrates the exceptional impact an individual can have in fighting injustice that often seems unbeatable, and inspires us to consider how a brave step forward to support the world’s most vulnerable people can create impact beyond measure,” said Mary Robinson, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member and Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Leading international humanitarian figures and Aurora Prize Selection Committee members, including Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi; former president of Ireland Mary Robinson; former foreign minister of Australia and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group Gareth Evans; former president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo; Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, Lord Ara Darzi; former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power; and co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières and former French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, were in Armenia to celebrate the 2018 Aurora Prize Laureate. Kyaw Hla Aung was congratulated by Dr. Tom Catena, who was awarded the 2017 Aurora Prize for his exceptional commitment to providing urgent medical care to the 750,000 people in the war-torn Nuba Mountains of Sudan. He said: “The Aurora Prize has created a true light for our people in Nuba, and has helped rebuild the resilience of our community, ultimately to keep people alive. I am proud to share the Aurora Prize mantle with such a selfless humanitarian as Kyaw Hla Aung. I congratulate him on receiving this award and applaud his incredibly selfless efforts fighting for such a noble cause.” Guests of the Aurora Prize Ceremony also honored the contributions of the other two 2018 Aurora Prize Humanitarians: Dr. Sunitha Krishnan, women’s rights advocate and Co-Founder of Prajwala, India, and Father Tomás González Castillo, Founder of La 72, a center that supports Central American migrants in Mexico. The Aurora Prize Co-Founders, Vartan Gregorian, Noubar Afeyan and Ruben Vardanyan, and the organization’s esteemed Selection Committee members join in congratulating the exceptional efforts of Kyaw Hla Aung, and the 2018 Aurora Humanitarians. As modern-day saviors who are putting their own lives at risk to save others, they serve to inspire the global community to step up embrace a commitment to our shared humanity. About the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative Founded on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors, the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative seeks to empower modern-day saviors to offer life and hope to those in urgent need of basic humanitarian aid anywhere in the world and thus continue the cycle of giving internationally. The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative is Gratitude in Action. It is an eight-year commitment (2015 to 2023, in remembrance of the eight years of the Armenian Genocide that took place from 1915 to1923) to support people and promote global projects that tackle the needs of the most helpless and destitute and do so at great risk. This is achieved through the Initiative’s various programs: The Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, the Aurora Dialogues, the Aurora Humanitarian Index, the Gratitude Projects and the 100 LIVES Initiative. The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative is the vision of philanthropists Vartan Gregorian, Noubar Afeyan and Ruben Vardanyan who have been joined by more than two hundred new supporters and partners. The Initiative welcomes all who embrace a commitment to our shared humanity. The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative is represented by three organizations – Aurora Humanitarian Initiative Foundation, Inc. (New York, USA), the 100 Lives Foundation (Geneva, Switzerland) and the IDeA Foundation (Yerevan, Armenia). About the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity The Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity is a global humanitarian award established to recognize modern day heroes and the exceptional impact their actions have made on preserving human life and advancing humanitarian causes in the face of adversity. On behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviors, an Aurora Prize Laureate is being honored each year between 2015 and 2023 (in remembrance of the eight years of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1923) with a US$100,000 grant as well as the unique opportunity to continue the cycle of giving by nominating organizations that inspired their work for a US$1,000,000 award. The Aurora Prize Selection Committee includes Nobel Laureates Oscar Arias, Shirin Ebadi and Leymah Gbowee; former president of Ireland Mary Robinson; human rights activist Hina Jilani; former foreign minister of Australia and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group Gareth Evans; former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo; Médecins Sans Frontières co-founder and former foreign minister of France Bernard Kouchner; Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London Professor the Lord Ara Darzi; former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power; President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York Vartan Gregorian; and Academy Award-winning actor and humanitarian George Clooney. Further information is available at www.auroraprize.com. (c) 2018 Hetq online http://hetq.am/eng/news/89973/$11-million-aurora-prize-for-awakening-humanity-awarded-to-rohingya-human-rights-defender-kyaw-hla-aung.html

Iraqi Archbishop Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil (REUTERS) Seven months after Vice President Pence vowed to stop funding “ineffective” United Nations-led recovery efforts in northern Iraq and provide U.S. support directly to persecuted Christians and other minorities who suffered ISIS-directed genocide, and are now struggling to reclaim their homes, much of the promised additional U.S. support has not appeared. Although the beneficiaries have not yet been named, some of the most direly afflicted Christian groups, embedded in the region for nearly two millenia, say they have already been told by USAID that projects they submitted for financing have been vetoed, without explanation. Many of the Christian churches in the Nineveh Plain in Northern Iraq were defaced or completely decimated by ISIS. (Courtesy Knights of Colombus) The rejected proposals were aimed at providing jobs and economic security, and also the means of cultural survival, for the ancient communities, whose numbers are eroding as the lack of assistance forces them to leave Iraq in order to survive. Meantime, private-sector donations that the Christian organizations had previously relied on have apparently dried up, as donors assumed U.S. assistance would be quickly forthcoming. As Archbishop Bashar Warda, head of the Chaldean Catholic Church in the northerly, Kurdish area of Erbil, told Fox News: “We are left with still many thousands of families to care for and services to provide, and not a penny with which to do it. In this sense, we are worse off now than we were two years ago.” “The only support for these displaced people comes from the church, and now it seems everyone is turning away from us.” Christianity is edging closer to extinction in Iraq, where many ancient documents and artifacts have been destroyed or defaced. (The Associated Press) Archbishop Warda’s church relief organization has often been the sole pillar of support for some 60,000 brutalized Christians—in a region that once held upwards of one million—who fled waves of murder, rape, displacement and plunder inflicted by ISIS, and the ensuing war to dislodge the Islamic extremists. His new cries of dismay are a pointed reminder that political promises, even those of a vice president, are subsequently filtered through stodgy and often recalcitrant layers of bureaucracy. These have the final say, despite assurances in January from the White House and USAID, two months after Pence’s initial avowal, that assistance would speedily be focused on Iraq’s battered and deprived minorities, including through newly reprogrammed and highly supervised efforts by the U.N. The continued reliance on the U.N., which already contradicted Pence’s initial promise, was seen months ago by U.S. officials as a necessary compromise: U.N. organizations, already on the ground in Iraq, were still believed to be the fastest and most efficient way to deliver aid to the minorities that had been, as one USAID official delicately put it, “overlooked” previously, mostly by the U.N. itself. In fact, numerous exposes have documented U.N. neglect was far more widespread than accidental, ostensibly the outcome of high-minded aid policies that claimed to be uninfluenced by religious status or minority identity—exactly the characteristics, in other words, of those most savagely repressed by ISIS. Due in part to extensive U.N. collaboration with Iraqi government officials and other majority-Muslim interest groups, U.N. reconstruction efforts almost entirely favored a majority of returning Muslims who had fled the same conflicts, and Christian properties were often handed over to their majority neighbors. Christians fear their future in Iraq as funding dries up and promises fall short (Fox News/Hollie McKay) One of the rejected proposals from Archbishop Warda’s Catholic University of Erbil, jointly submitted with an organization of Iraq’s equally persecuted non-Christian Yazidi minority, specifically called for the creation of “a property rights program to protect minority…property rights against illegal seizures in the post-ISIS period.” All that was supposed to change in the renegotiated deal with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which has been the lead actor on most of the international reconstruction work. About $75 million in U.S.-provided “stabilization” funding was to be refocused on areas that were ancient homelands for hundreds of thousands of Christians, as well as the Yazidis, who were equally hated by ISIS. Most of that money was still focused on infrastructure projects that would benefit persecuted minorities and their Muslim neighbors equally, as their battered communities are rebuilt. But more communities in previously Christian areas were targeted. Additional monitors and auditors were added to the plans ensure that the stronger focus on those persecuted would remain in place. Under the deal, another $75 million was allocated as follow-up spending, to be released once UNDP’s initial efforts were deemed to be on target. The reformed U.N. efforts are underway—but so is the evaluation. “We are still assessing,” a senior USAID official told Fox News. “We want to make sure the efforts are ongoing. We are getting them [UNDP] to take a look at every single activity. There will be a decision in the next month or so.” A church hall in the Christian village of Barzani, outside of Mosul, used by ISIS as target practice (FOX News/Hollie McKay) That may be no time at all in Washington, but can easily be a lifetime in the poverty-stricken and ravaged Iraqi territories. An even bigger cause of concern among the beleaguered minorities is some $35 million in fresh funds that bypasses the U.N., through an allegedly innovative USAID mechanism known as the Broad Agency Announcement, or BAA. The blandly named initiative is intended to give the victims more input in a speeded-up relief effort—and, the victims of genocide thought, more direct influence on how the resulting money was awarded. Five months after USAID officials announced the BAA’s use in northern Iraq, the outcome of the much-advertised innovation is still grinding along in the bowels of USAID bureaucracy—except for those proposals that already have been summarily rejected. Specific financial awards under the BAA will likely be formalized “in the next couple of months,” according to a senior USAID official—who added: “We are very eager to get this done.” Maybe. To call the BAA a simple and decisive tool for cutting through and red tape would be very misleading. Nor is it quite a novelty. According to officials in non-government humanitarian officials consulted by Fox News, the BAA, a consultative mechanism that indeed bypasses normal USAID procurement bureaucracy, has been in use at the agency for at least five years, and is now being used with increasing frequency. Christian leader Father Afram looks out at his once vibrant Christian town of Bahzani, Iraq outside of Mosul. (Hollie McKay) Its virtues include the fact that it invites organizations of all kinds to present their best proposals for solving specific problems without a lengthy preliminary assessment by USAID, which can adopt the proposals a la carte if they seem promising. In the case of northern Iraq, this was done at a special “co-creation” meeting held in March in Baghdad, to which Christian and minority groups, including Archbishop Warda’s relief organization, was invited. So were, among others, the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), the U.S. government-funded United States Institute for Peace, and Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the globe-spanning Catholic relief organization. Two staffers from Pence’s staff also attended the session. Under BAA rules, USAID can “encourage” organizations to form coalitions—which by their nature are likely to favor bigger international organizations, with substantial resources to cover elaborate U.S. funding requirements for extensive accounting and oversight. The drawbacks of the BAA include the fact USAID can adopt its favorite proposals without giving any money or a contract to the organization that came up with the well-received notion. “You literally are giving away your best ideas,” one U.S. development expert who is familiar with the BAA process told Fox News. “To make matters worse, they don’t give a debrief to tell you what went wrong. You can’t improve an idea for the future.” “I have heard nightmare stories where they have had workshops, and USAID has taken ideas and given them to another implementer,” the expert said. Bill O’Keefe, CRS vice president for government outreach and advocacy, told Fox News his organization’s proposals had been “green-lighted” for further consideration in the BAA, and called the process “really competitive” “It’s not surprising that many groups are not getting funded,” he said. “It happens to us all the time.” With total annual revenues last year of nearly $1 billion, however, CRS can clearly roll with many punches. As Archbishop Warda’s church discovered, along with offering no reasons for a veto, the BAA methodology does not include nor grounds for appeal. Moreover, even top officials at USAID are not necessarily privy to how BAA proposals are finally analyzed and judged. Those decisions are made at the level of USAID missions abroad—in this case, Fox News was told by a source briefed on some of the details, a five person group in Baghdad selected by the USAID head of mission. Long terrorized by ISIS fanatics, their injustices ignored by local governments and ignored for years by ostensibly neutral, U.N.-managed relief efforts, it is perhaps unsurprising that those championing Iraq’s barely-surviving minorities could see something sinister in the dashing of their hopes for U.S. support. As Archbishop Warda told Fox News, “It is very clear to us that many people within the [U.S.] government are opposed to this.” That accusation drew a stiff rejoinder from the White House, where an official told Fox News “we believe the administration is making a difference in aiding and resettling victims of religious persecution in Iraq. Tens of millions of dollars have been directed at the crisis, including 150 specific projects in the Ninewa Plain [a Christian heartland] identified by the U.S. and our partners, including faith-based NGOs.” “We hope that the initiatives will be judged by results and positive impact on these vulnerable populations—not by what organizations are awarded the money.” In context, however, the millions of dollars and multiple projects mentioned by the official were the money committed so far under the reformed UNDP initiative—which is still being evaluated. As for UNDP, a spokesperson told Fox News “new projects are being added to the pipeline every week” in minorities communities—as of late May, 415 in all, with half completed, “covering areas like health, water, electricity, housing and education.” “In some minority areas,” the spokesperson added, “priorities have involved discussion with religious leaders and UNDP works closely with them to ensure these are met. The spokesperson reeled off a list of 10 towns in areas that have significant Christian populations where projects were “prioritized by community leaders”— not necessary religious leaders - as well as “increased activities” in historically-Yazidi areas. A source deeply familiar with conditions in the minority communities, however, told Fox News the quality and outcome of the projects, completed or not, varies at best. Moreover, the source alleged, “the work is all being done by Kurdish or Arab Muslim contractors for USAID/UNDP. Christians are not involved in either the work, or the planning of the work orders. The quality of the work is poor since those doing the work have no interest in the communities themselves.” In one center specifically cited by the UNDP spokesperson for its restoration work, Batnaya — formerly an overwhelmingly Christian enclave north of the re-conquered ISIS stronghold in Mosul — a local source related that a small group of Christians starting to return to the town were forced to flee again by hostile Iraqi government forces and local militias. According to that source, the Christians now believe Batnaya is being repaired so it can be inhabited by Muslims from Mosul who are still homeless. According to Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the conservative Hudson Institute, the murkiness of the USAID process and the frustration felt by Iraqi Christians and minorities point to the need for an inter-agency “genocide aid coordinator” to handle the issue more decisively, something she has long advocated. Such a coordinator “could have taken into account all the complexities, gathered pertinent information, kept principals apprised and parried the obstacles to keep the reform policy on track.” Without one, Shea fears, “there simply is no hope.” Or at least, not much. Christian concerns, as well as those of other persecuted minorities, will get a wider audience at a June 14 hearing of a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ). Smith is the author and longtime supporter of a bill that would specifically support the transfer of U.S. government funds to faith-based and other groups doing humanitarian relief and reconstruction work in both Iraq and Syria. The bill has passed the House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but has never reached the Senate floor. “Generally speaking, the presumption has been that if an indigenous entity wanted to use USAID money directly, it was not able to do the work and requisite accounting and reporting to our standards,” Smith told Fox News. It’s an attitude that he think’s Pence’s initial promise was intended to change. “But the policy is seen [by bureaucrats] as being political. Which means they are more or less ignoring the policy.” Concurs Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee: “If the United States does not step up to help these Christians then who will?” Both USAID and administration officials have told Archbishop Warda’s clients, in effect, to try again next time. Said a White House official: “The Administration has not defined or declared an end to assisting victims of persecution in Iraq.” The U.S. government, however, may have more time available that the victims. Historically speaking, notes Philip Jenkins, a world-renowned authority on the early history of Christianity who teaches at Baylor University, the collapse of Christianity in Iraq and even more so in neighboring Syria is “a catastrophe” that mirrors the earlier disappearance of far-flung Jewish populations from the region. Jenkins passed on a grim Jewish observation about the fate of the two religions in the region: “after Saturday comes Sunday.” Meaning: after the disappearance of far-flung Jewish communities across the Middle East, the Christian minorities will be next. The question may be whether the U.S. wants to continue to attempt a rebuttal. (c) 2018 Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/05/months-after-pence-promise-iraqi-christians-say-are-worse-off.html

Read the 90-page English-language report HERE. (c) 2018 Maka Angola https://www.makaangola.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/EXTRAJUDICIAL-KILLINGS-IN-ANGOLA-2016-17.pdf

Fragmentation of territories, widespread destruction, and new legislation governing property rights will all complicate Syrian refugees’ ability to reclaim the lives they left behind. 5/28/2018 - A Syrian child sits in front of a mural covered in bullet holes on the wall of a former school in the rebel-held region of Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, on January 5, 2016. (Getty Images) Syria’s 18 million people make up less than one percent of the world’s population, but a whopping one-third of all refugees are Syrian. Since 2011, more than 5.5 million people have fled the country and 6.1 million have been internally displaced. Syria’s neighbors have borne the brunt of the crisis: there are 3.3 million registered refugees in Turkey, one million in Lebanon, and 650,000 in Jordan. Another half million Syrian refugees now reside in Europe. (Canada and the United States have taken in approximately 50,000 and 18,000, respectively.) These refugee flows have destabilized other countries in the region, reshaped global asylum and migration policies, and fueled a populist backlash in the West that has undermined liberal democracy. And so it may be no surprise that most international discussions about the future of Syrian refugee populations settle on a simple solution: sending them back to Syria once the conflict is over. The various peace negotiations under way—such as the Geneva process, sponsored by the UN, and the Astana talks, co-sponsored by Iran, Russia, and Turkey—take for granted that refugees will willingly return home once a political settlement is in place. But these plans have ignored a crucial piece of the equation: what the refugees themselves want. My colleagues and I at the Carnegie Middle East Center sought to fill this gap by interviewing refugees in Jordan and Lebanon about what it would take for them to go home. These conversations made clear just how difficult mass voluntary return would be. What refugees want Although experiences of discrimination in their current countries of residence have led many refugees to romanticize pre-conflict Syria, those whom we interviewed overwhelmingly cited safety and security as a chief condition for return. But most do not believe that these security conditions will be met any time soon without some form of political change. The majority of refugees oppose the regime, and for them, safety and security can only be guaranteed if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad goes. This is especially true for women, who fear for the safety of their children and families if they return. But the departure of Assad is not all that refugees want; many believe that safety and security also means demilitarization, which would involve the disbanding of all militias and armed factions and putting an end to arbitrary arrests and checkpoints. For most refugees, local actors bring only chaos and instability. Their hopes for ending the conflict lie mainly with external actors. Even pro-regime refugees (who qualified for refugee status because they were fleeing conflict-heavy areas) have doubts about whether their homeland will be safe enough to return. Although some believe that there is hope for political stability if the Syrian army regains control over enough territory, most feel that no solution in sight. Another key obstacle to refugee return is Syria’s mandatory military conscription for men between the ages of 18 and 42, a policy that also spurred the departure of many of our young focus group participants. Sectarian grievances compound this fear. Given that the Alawites dominate Syria’s ruling political class, some Sunni youth believe that they will be sent to the frontlines to die, while Alawite conscripts will receive safer deployments. Recent laws have further complicated this issue. In 2017, the government imposed an $8,000 fine on men who fail to register for military service within three months of turning 18. Because this law also applies to those who fled before it was ratified, male refugees of conscription age who want to come back to Syria must pay the fine. Those who subsequently fail to join the military will be imprisoned for a year and penalized $200 for every year after the starting date of conscription, and the government can seize the conscript’s assets until these payments are complete. Given the destitution of most refugees, such fines would cripple a family’s finances. Justice also ranked high among the refugees’ condition for return. Many feared that without the proper legal framework to hold individuals responsible for crimes committed during the conflict, lawlessness and vigilante style justice will prevail. But our focus group disagreed over how this should be accomplished. Pro-regime refugees rejected the notion of a presidential pardon for those who evaded conscription or participated in anti-regime activities because they believe that individuals who opposed the regime are traitors and should not be forgiven. Most anti-regime refugees, on the other hand, opposed the idea of a blanket impunity for all crimes committed during the conflict because they are adamant that those who committed grave crimes should be held accountable. Surprisingly, economic opportunity was less of a concern for most refugees than political stability. When asked if they would return to Syria under favorable political conditions, even if they lacked economic opportunities or housing, most refugees stated that they would. But they also specified that they wanted to return to their cities of origin. Only a minority of the focus group suggested that they would be willing to settle in any region of Syria if that were the only option. Facts on the ground In practice, however, going back home will be challenging for even the most committed refugees. Fragmentation of territories, widespread destruction, and new legislation governing property rights will all complicate refugees’ ability to reclaim the lives they left behind. Mass displacement has produced large-scale secondhand occupation of housing, and many poorly equipped camps have been erected on land still legally owned by civilians. These settlements will generate property rights issues for refugees seeking to recover their assets. The Assad regime has only made matters worse. A number of studies indicate that the regime has used land registries to identify areas allied with the opposition and target them with military campaigns in the hope that this would turn civilian populations against the opposition. Credible reports in 2016 also claimed that the regime deliberately destroyed land registries in order to dispossess those who fled and forge new ownership records for pro-regime citizens. In Homs, a recent urban renewal law (no. 10), took this approach to a new level by creating administrative units charged with reconstructing parts of the city and requiring all Syrians who own property in those areas to file a claim within one month. Those who fail to do so risk having their assets seized by the government, but for many refugees, returning to Syria could be a suicide mission. This legislation is designed to reward regime loyalists, who will be tasked with the redevelopment of Syria, and to dispossess opponents, including the millions of refugees who either cannot return or who fled without property deeds. In the long run, such policies could make exile permanent for many refugees. Vetting procedures, such as those outlined by the governor of Homs, Talal Barazi, also ensure that going back to Syria will be difficult. To recover their homes, returning refugees must submit a legal document that certifies their place of origin and property ownership and they must undergo a security check by local police to ensure that they have no pending security or felony charges. New regulations also mandate that refugees must reclaim their property within a period of 30 days. This is an issue for men who avoided conscription and risk being arrested. Furthermore, in 2004, around 40 percent of property in Syria was informal, meaning that owners either did not have the right permits or built on publicly owned land. Half of our focus group participants fled Syria without proof of ownership. And because most refugees have limited access to information about new laws (especially those that relate to housing, land, and property rights), the process of reclaiming their assets would rely largely on informal networks and word of mouth. The road ahead For many refugees, the traumatic experiences of departure, compounded by the survival of the regime that forced them to flee, complicate the prospect of returning to Syria. Many remain wary about the unpredictable security situation. Although the intensity of the conflict may subside in the near future as the Assad regime consolidates more territory, the country will likely remain fragmented into different zones of influence for some time. Meanwhile, urban planning laws, reconstruction plans, forced conscription, and vetting procedures have become instruments in the hands of a regime bent on rewarding its loyalists and using the question of refugee return—a high priority for both its neighbors and Europe—as leverage to amplify its territorial gains and to initiate the process of reintegration into the international community. No political settlement to the Syrian civil war will be sustainable unless it accounts for the needs and circumstances of refugees. The international community should insist on a refugee-centered negotiating framework that upholds the right to voluntary return. This means engaging with the key demands of refugees for political stability and justice, as well as pressuring the regime to roll back laws that dispossess refugees or hinder return. For example, international funding for stabilization and reconstruction at the local level could be directly linked to the maintenance of refugee rights. Addressing the Syrian refugee crisis requires acknowledging its political roots and including the voice of refugees in the peace process. If this does not occur, Syria will continue to be an epicenter of instability and human misery. And millions of Syrians around the world will remain refugees. (c) 2018 Foreign Affairs https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2018-05-28/what-will-it-take-syrian-refugees-return-home

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb lost its Kabylia stronghold through its multiple mistakes. On May 23, Algeria’s Defense Ministry announced it had captured 22 jihadists in less than two months. This followed the killing by the security forces of dozens of members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) since the beginning of 2018. Among the fatalities was Adel Seghiri, known as Abu Ruaha al-Qasantini, a senior Algerian operative responsible for the group’s propaganda. In AQIM’s historical stronghold of Kabylia, east of Algiers, the security forces also killed another important member, Bekkai Boualem, known as Khaled al-Mig, the organization’s head of external relations. In contrast, Heddad Fodhil, known as Abou Dedjana, who headed a local AQIM brigade, surrendered to the authorities. AQIM has lost the areas it once controlled in Kabylia, the Berber heartland. This fact can be explained by the group’s extreme methods, its organizational woes, and repression by the state alongside its conciliatory policies toward repentant jihadists. AQIM has also lost key leaders and assets, and is finding it difficult to recruit militants as its ideology no longer seems to appeal to locals. Unable to pass on its dreams of an Algerian caliphate to a new generation of Algerians, the group has moved its operations toward the eastern part of the country, near the border with Tunisia. AQIM’s networks are likely to persist as the group has shown an ability to survive and conduct low-intensity attacks in Algeria. However, it remains a nuisance for the state, not an existential threat. Even if AQIM is less extreme than one of its predecessors, the Armed Islamic Group, which fought in Algeria’s civil war, it managed to alienate the local population because of its harsh methods. When jihadi groups appeared in Kabylia during the 1990s, the population remained passive, even if it opposed their ideology. Because Berbers have always had a conflictual relationship with the central authorities in Algeria, which failed to address their resentments, a modus vivendi was established between the inhabitants of Kabylia and AQIM. This allowed the jihadi organization to strengthen its presence in the Berber hinterland. However, this cohabitation would fall apart when AQIM started intimidating the local population to extract money and abducted or killed wealthy entrepreneurs in the region. Since 2005, AQIM is believed to have kidnapped more than 80 individuals. The constant insecurity hindered development and investment in Kabylia, aggravating an already unfavorable economic situation in the Berber provinces. In 2014, for example, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Tizi Ouzou Province reported that there were more than 71 cases of companies that had left Kabylia due to the absence of security. As a result, relations between locals and AQIM changed as the popular mood turned decisively against the group. Another factor that contributed to AQIM’s reversals was its organizational woes. AQIM’s national emir in Algeria, Abdel Malek Droudkel, known as Abu Mus‘ab Abdelwadud, has been leading the group since 2004. In practice, however, Droudkel offers only guidance as AQIM’s multiple brigades remain autonomous when conducting their operations. Because of this separation, AQIM’s brigades often failed to communicate with one another or even provide their men with a minimal amount of material, weakening the group. Such an organizational structure hindered Droudkel’s leadership, negatively affecting AQIM as a whole. A final reason for AQIM’s loss of its Berber stronghold was the tough, persistent counterterrorism measures adopted by the Algerian state. The kidnapping in September 2014 of French national Hervé Gourdel by Jund al-Khilafa fi Ard al-Jaza’ir, an AQIM splinter group that had defected to the Islamic State, was a tipping point. Gourdel’s killing a few days later led to a relentless manhunt and increased counterterrorism operations in the most remote redoubts of the Kabylia mountains. Between 2013 and 2018, such operations led to the killing of some 600 jihadists. The security forces, with the help of the Algerian intelligence services, also dismantled AQIM’s logistical networks. However, the state did not solely resort to violence. It also adopted conciliatory measures, particularly the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation in 2005, which pushed hundreds of jihadists to surrender, sometimes in groups, sometimes with their families. For all these reasons, AQIM has been unable to conduct any major attack in Algeria since the attack on a military convoy in ‘Ain Defla in 2015. Yet the group’s relocation east, to provinces such as Khenchla, Tebessa, Jijel, and Skikda, closer to the Tunisian border, had a limited impact, because the Algerian security forces and their Tunisian counterparts reinforced border security and collaborated on counterterrorism. They mounted several successful operations, with the latest one, in February 2018, leading to the killing of eight AQIM leaders in Khenchla. AQIM had hoped its move would allow it to unite its battalions and revive the dying Ukba bin Nafe‘ Brigade, an AQIM affiliate active in Tunisia, but this failed. Given its limited manpower and organizational shortcomings today, AQIM’s prospects in Algeria seem limited. None of the organization’s goals in the country have been achieved. The government in Algiers continues to function, and those whom AQIM had described as tawaghit, or the impious, are still running the state. The prospect of establishing an Islamic state in Algeria now seems absurd. While AQIM’s end in Algeria may not be near, it also may not be so farfetched an idea either, as things stand. This is hardly unimportant, given the fundamental threat that the jihadists posed to the Algerian state not so very long ago. (c) 2018 Carnegie Middle East Center http://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/76459?lang=en&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTjJZME5HTTVNR1ptTW1NeCIsInQiOiIrWlh3alJqTWFZTmN1YVlrVWwwdllFRVAzMTZkREhLd2ZiaVJHVklQSUhuczZPVjBaeFFibzFGUGdPXC83aHVqbkZpNHlhTW1RVWVHRUVQMW9zU1ZqU2NpV216VVBSRkJiNkdpTjdVXC9qamZ1OGJUaUsyQ1ZhSklxQzdmYVIrR1dxIn0%3D

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 7 June 2018 The Free Rohingya Coalition is gravely concerned about the non-inclusive, non transparent nature of UN agencies signing a repatriation deal with Myanmar The coalition demands protection of Rohingya people in both return and in rebuilding communities, as well as restoration of full-citizenship and recognition of group identity in Myanmar. FRANKFURT, Germany: We, the Free Rohingya Coalition, welcome the involvement of the two UN agencies, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in supporting the creation of “conditions conducive to voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable refugee returns from Bangladesh, and their reintegration in the country.” However, we are gravely concerned about several major aspects of the 6 June MOU. Firstly, we are concerned about the lack of transparency regarding the details of the MOU, and the draft text has not been made available to the public or the media for scrutiny, beyond the reported twin-emphasis placed by UN on the respect for Rohingya group ‘identity’ and the need for “safety”. Secondly, there has been no Rohingya representation in the negotiations relating to this MOU, nor any mention of Rohingya representation in any future negotiations. This goes against the principals of inclusivity and participation that govern UN and development institutions. For an agreement that will profoundly impact the lives of 1 million Rohingyas – who have been deported and displaced into the neighbouring Bangladesh in periodic waves of exodus since the early 1990’s, the lack of transparency and Rohingya representation is both unacceptable and deeply concerning. Thirdly, the UN references to “pathways to citizenship” and the UN’s acknowledgement that citizenship is “the government’s prerogative” troubles us deeply. This is an approach that has categorically failed since Rohingya repatriations from Bangladesh of the 1990s. What the Rohingyas need is not a gradual process towards a possible citizenship, at the mercy of Myanmar authorities, but the immediate restoration of our full and equal citizenship rights. Rohingya also require recognition of our ethnic group identity and the right to self-identify, which Rohingyas as a group fully and officially enjoyed previously in post-independence Myanmar. Official Myanmar documents – easily accessible- unequivocally support Rohingyas’ claims that we enjoyed full and equal citizenship rights, and our group identity was recognized as a native, ethnic minority of the Union of Burma. Fourthly, we are also deeply concerned about UN agencies speculating about the ‘safety of Rohingya people.’ UNHCR, UNDP and other UN agencies have not been able to establish safe conditions for Rohingya since previous repatriations. In fact the situation has deteriorated under the watch of the UN in Myanmar. Troublingly, UN leadership in Myanmar has a poor track record on the ground with respect to Rohingyas’ need for international protection, defence of its group identity, and the need to frontload human rights over UN’s amicable relations with Myanmar leaders who stand credibly accused of crimes against humanity and even genocide. Whilst unfettered access for these UN agencies is necessary, they are no substitute for institutions that can provide international protection for Rohingya and other communities of Rakhine State. In light of the fact that “the four pillars of Myanmar” as a nation – that is the military, the NLD and political parties, the Buddhist Order and the predominantly Buddhist public – have rejected Rohingyas as an integral community of multi-ethnic Myanmar, it is vital that UNHCR and UNDP are clear, transparent and inclusive in establishing exactly what constitutes ‘safe conditions’ for return. This includes establishing what is needed to integrate our systematically persecuted people into a society that has rallied behind Myanmar military’s mass killings and mass deportation of 700,000 Rohingyas in the past months, and how Rohingya will be protected in future from – not by – the Myanmar security forces. Accountability for the well-documented atrocities committed by Myanmar military will help to end blanket impunity. Equally important, Rohingyas need international protection by state and regional actors, as well as the UN Peacekeepers in both the repatriation process and the rebuilding our bulldozed homes in North Rakhine State of Western Myanmar. We need a protected return to our protected homeland inside Myanmar. Contact: Ro Nay San Lwin, Coordinator for Media Relations, Free Rohingya Coalition Tel: +49 176 62139138; email : info@freerohingyacoalition.org (c) 2018 Free Rohingya Coalition https://freerohingyacoalition.org/en/?p=753

“The Venerable W” profiles Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist nationalist in Myanmar. More and more nations have lately embraced the ideology of “nationalism,” often a code word for ethnic, religious, and racial prejudice and oppression. The recent history of the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar, where a nationalist movement demonizing Muslims verges on genocide, presents a case study of that process. That history is illustrated in two documentaries presented by the Belmont World Film “Justice for All” series (June 11-25). Ashin Wirathu, the title subject of “The Venerable W,” a documentary by Barbet Schroeder (“Reversal of Fortune,” “Amnesia”), comes across at first like a serene Buddhist monk, his voice calm and comforting, his expression benign and wise. He seems to embody Buddhist beliefs in peace, love, and the kinship of all living beings. He talks about a sermon he often delivers about the African catfish. They breed fast, he says, they are violent, they eat their own species, and destroy the environment. “Muslims are like that species,” he says. As in “General Idi Amin Dada,” his 1974 documentary about the psychopathically murderous Ugandan dictator, Schroeder allows his subject to express himself unguardedly and reveal his true nature to the camera. As he is described on the cover of the June 2013 issue of Time, Wirathu is “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Through his sermons and his social media resources, Wirathu has stirred up the majority Buddhist population’s fear and hatred of the tiny Muslim Rohingya minority. He promulgates lies about their citizenship (even though they have lived in the country for generations), about their increasing population (“they breed like rabbits,” he says), their economic power, their threat to Myanmar women, their link to terrorism, and their parasitic consumption of national resources. He spreads fake news stories about crimes committed by Muslims, which have inspired real-life rioting and attacks in which hundreds of Muslims have been killed and thousands of homes have been destroyed. These attacks sparked an abortive Rohingya insurgency that gave the military-dominated government the excuse to unleash a full-scale ethnic cleansing campaign. That has resulted in widescale destruction of property, and uncounted killings, rapes, and other atrocities. More than half a million refugees have fled to impoverished neighboring Bangladesh, and the Myanmar government has relocated 140,000 others to overcrowded, disease-ridden camps. “The Venerable W” screens with Jeanne Hallacy’s more hopeful short documentary, “Sittwe,” which focuses on young Muslim and Buddhist teenagers who have been estranged by the ongoing ethnic and religious turmoil. A Muslim girl who lived through some of violence and is now in a detention center misses the days when she and her Buddhist friends could get together. A Buddhist boy expresses similar sentiments, but he still parrots one of the lies spread by Wirathu — that during the anti-Muslim riots the Rohingya burned down their own homes so they could get foreign human rights organizations to build them new ones. “Children have to know who the enemy is and where the danger is,” says Wirathu in “The Venerable W.” “That is why I teach mostly children.” For their sake, and the sake of the future, let’s hope they don’t listen. “The Venerable W” screens on June 11 at 7:30 p.m., followed by “Sittwe,” at the Studio Cinema in Belmont. The evening also includes a discussion moderated by Yee Htun of Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic. Go to www.belmontworldfilm.org. (c) 2018 Boston Globe http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2018/06/07/what-happens-when-nationalism-goes-awry/h3YzNnaAi2x38jBHXCbbYL/story.html

On 7th June, 2018 the Burmese Government and United Nations agencies signed a Memorandum of Understanding regarding the voluntary repatriation of 700,000 Rohingya refugees who were displaced following a military offensive against the civilian population last summer. While on its face this agreement could be is a positive step, the Burma Human Rights Network urges further scrutiny and vigilance about this agreement and its implementation over the coming years. It should be noted that Burma and the UN previously coordinated on repatriation efforts of the Rohingya following mass exoduses from military crackdowns in 1978 and 1991-92. Witnesses to these repatriations still speak of gross human rights abuses that have continued and worsened over the years. Precedents have been set to question Burma’s seriousness regarding the repatriation of the Rohingya and the UN’s ability to oversee such events on Burma’s terms. Previous attempts at repatriation have not included any mechanism for accountability and have almost certainly emboldened the Burmese Government and Military to repeat their offenses time and time again. Any plan moving forward now must contain such mechanisms in order to be successful, and to ensure the military does not consider itself to be acting with impunity. The details of memorandum itself are unknown and current information comes from a vague statement by the Office of the State Counsellor. The specifics of the plan have not been released to the public. However, there is no indication that the existing discriminative laws and regulation would be abolished. Under such discriminatory laws and regulations the repatriation is a trap rather than a solution. The Office said there would be coordination regarding the safety and dignity of returnees, but fails to explain how they will achieve this with the same security forces who had driven these refugees from the country in the first place. “While coordination with UN agencies in resettlement is a positive step, but many concerns remain that need to be addressed. Based on past experiences, lack of accountability encouraged the perpetrators to commit crimes again, whereas the population who experienced the atrocities need concrete assurance of safety, which is not the case here," said BHRN Executive Director Kyaw Win. He also said, "The victims of such a genocidal campaign without proper mechanisms to assure their safety to return is not only irresponsible but would be unethical of the international community to support as well.” Any plan involving the resettlement of the Rohingya must first include and take steps for these 120,000 who’ve been trapped in open air prisons for the past 6 years if Burma wants their intentions to be taken seriously. BHRN calls on the international community including UN to seek justice on behalf of Rohingya minorities and insist on accountability for the crimes the Burmese military have committed with the complicity of the Burmese government. Finally, BHRN also calls on the UN and its relevant agencies to have a plan of consequences for the Burmese Government if they fail their obligations to this memorandum or if any other human rights violations continue. Background on the Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) is based in London, operates across Burma/Myanmar and works for human rights, minority rights and religious freedom in Burma. BHRN has played a crucial role in advocating for human rights and religious freedom with politicians and world leaders. Media Enquiries Please contact: Kyaw Win Executive Director of the Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN) E: kyawwin78@gmail.com T: +44 (0) 740 345 2378 (c) 2018 Burma Human Rights Network

The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder by Jess Melvin Routledge, 319 pp., $140.00 The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66 by Geoffrey B. Robinson Princeton University Press, 429 pp., $35.00 Bettmann/Getty Images Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and Indonesian president Sukarno aboard a cruise on the Nile River, Cairo, July 1965 On a baking hot afternoon in 2010, Jess Melvin, a young scholar from Australia, walked out of a government archive in Banda Aceh carrying a cardboard box. It was brimming with three thousand photocopied documents from the Indonesian army, and Melvin could barely believe her luck. These documents prove what has always been officially denied: the Indonesian army deliberately planned the 1965–1966 massacre in which up to a million suspected Communists died, one of the worst but least-known mass killings of the twentieth century. Melvin’s astonishing discovery forms the core of her groundbreaking book The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. She chronicles what happened after October 1, 1965, when six high-ranking army generals were yanked from their homes in the early hours of the morning and murdered by left-leaning junior officers who called themselves the 30 September Movement. They claimed they were forestalling a coup by a CIA-backed group of anti-Communist generals. Within hours, the junior officers were outmaneuvered by Major General Suharto, who staged a counter-coup and blamed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) for the murders. By the end of the day, Suharto sent out orders to “completely annihilate” the 30 September Movement “down to the roots,” according to an army document Melvin discovered. Melvin’s book will forever alter the telling of what happened next. Suharto, relying on an army command structure outside the control of the revolutionary leader and president-for-life Sukarno, issued orders to carry out mass killings. The documents Melvin uses to explain how the army planned and organized the killings shatter the official narrative that has prevailed for more than fifty years and continues to be taught to Indonesian schoolchildren today. This narrative holds that God-fearing, anti-Communist Indonesians, provoked for years by the PKI and outraged by the 30 September Movement’s treacherous murder of the generals, rose up in a frenzy to annihilate the PKI across the archipelago of 17,000 islands. According to the official 1966 Fact Finding Commission, the army could not contain the violence of the masses. Indonesia’s official history describes civilians seeking revenge, and there is no mention of the military’s participation in the killings. In fact, as Melvin’s book and other new scholarship show, Suharto instituted martial law, leaving the flamboyant leftist-turned-autocrat Sukarno stuck in the presidential palace as his supposedly unrivaled power dwindled away. Melvin offers a fascinating day-by-day chronicle, based on the archival army documents and the 1965 annual report of the army commander in the northern province of Aceh, unearthed in a Dutch library. The documents reveal the army’s plan to pin the murder of the generals on the PKI and then wipe it out. The army took control of all newspapers and radio, and propaganda—including the fake and endlessly repeated story of how Communist women danced around the kidnapped generals as they castrated them and gouged out their eyes—played a huge part in whipping up support within Muslim militias, mostly organized by the army, for rounding up, detaining, and then killing suspected Communists. The army’s own chronology, which Melvin annotates, shows how the provincial military commander would go to a town, denounce the PKI, organize a public demonstration, oversee the creation of militias and death squads, and then oversee the killings. They usually started with public executions of well-known PKI members and then escalated into mass roundups. According to Melvin, “The pogroms and public killings broke down normal social bonds and established violence as the manner in which the military’s campaign was to be pursued.” In addition to proving the army’s involvement, the documents show that the tactics and scale of the killings evolved both for the army and for local civilians, who were often coerced into killing by the logic of “you are with us or against us.” Over the following weeks and months, annihilating the 30 September Movement morphed into annihilating the PKI. Melvin writes that it remains unclear if the army intended killings on such a vast scale. At some point, either because the army was unable to feed all the detainees or because the pogrom took on a life of its own, the army decided to kill them. While Melvin’s cache of military records focuses on Aceh and the nearby provinces on the northern island of Sumatra, the documents prove conclusively that the Indonesian army expected a showdown with the Communists and devised a plan to exterminate them. Fortuitously, Melvin’s book appears at the same time as Geoffrey B. Robinson’s The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66. Robinson, a veteran historian of Indonesia who teaches at UCLA, describes the broader cold war background to the massacre and digs into the available sources to prove that the US and British governments secretly backed the anti-Communist faction of the Indonesian army. The goal of the US and UK covert strategy, Robinson shows, was to provoke the PKI into action so that the army had a pretext to crush it. An illuminating third perspective on this cold war epic comes from a Chinese scholar, Taomo Zhou, who adds missing information on the involvement of China in the showdown between the left and right in Indonesia. Zhou’s research started at Cornell University and is based on Chinese Foreign Ministry documents that were declassified in 2008, then reclassified in the summer of 2013. In an article in The China Quarterly, part of her forthcoming book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War, 1945–1967,1 Zhou, now teaching at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, documents that Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders knew that the youthful and charismatic head of the PKI, D.N. Aidit, had developed plans to prevent an anti-Communist army takeover (relying on a handful of left-leaning officers), but the Chinese were not the architects of those plans. For the first time, reading Melvin, Robinson, and Zhou together, the puzzle pieces of who was really behind the 30 September Movement and why its failure led to the murderous extermination of the left nearly fall into place. “Nearly” must be stressed since critical clues are still missing: most importantly from Indonesia, but also from the still-classified records of the CIA and the Defense Department in the US and of Britain’s MI6, and, crucially, from other documents from Chinese sources. But by early 1965, these studies reveal, both the army and the leaders of the PKI yearned to seize power, using President Sukarno as cover in their bid to destroy each other. They also add to our understanding of how Indonesia, by 1965, was in the path of a cold war collision, with the US and Britain on one side and China on the other. Sukarno, who claimed to be the voice of his people and to reconcile Islam, nationalism, and socialism, marched ever leftward, decrying the “imperialist and neo-colonialist West” while embracing the PKI and the Chinese Communists. By this time, the PKI was the third-largest Communist Party in the world, after China’s and the Soviet Union’s, claiming 3.5 million members and some 20 million sympathizers, mostly peasants and workers. Robinson captures the high stakes: by 1965 the Vietnam War was raging; after the Sino-Soviet split China was determined to recast itself as the leader of revolution in Asia, and ensuring that Sukarno and the PKI looked to China for support and inspiration mattered to Mao. With China encouraging him, Sukarno had already launched the “Crush Malaysia” campaign, calling for an armed confrontation with the neocolonialists for creating Malaysia, which he called a puppet state meant to encircle Indonesia. Alarmed, President Johnson’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy approved more intensive covert programs. The extent of the programs remains unknown, but Robinson has pieced together the documents that have been declassified, which describe support for the Indonesian army and Muslim groups, and psychological operations designed to provoke the PKI into doing something—ideally attempting a coup—that would provide a pretext for the army to smash it and seize power.2 The British created a division for covert political warfare against Indonesia in Singapore. By mid-August, Bundy called for a meeting “to alert the President to the seriousness of the situation in which the Communists may take over Indonesia,” a development that Undersecretary of State George Ball said “would be the biggest thing since the fall of China.” Meanwhile, China also was determined to win in Indonesia. Zhou describes how Mao thought that backing the PKI was essential to show the rest of Southeast Asia that China, not the Soviet Union, led the revolutionary movement. Aidit ingratiated himself with China. He soon became Mao’s—and China’s—man in Jakarta, as well as a forceful figure in Sukarno’s inner circle and in his cabinet. Mao and Zhou Enlai dangled promises of huge shipments of small arms and even nuclear technology. They supported Aidit’s plan, for which he also got Sukarno’s support, to create a Fifth Force and arm workers and farmers for the Crush Malaysia campaign. By the summer of 1965, Aidit, who was confident one minute and anxious the next that the right-wing generals were about to launch a coup, had created a clandestine group that became the 30 September Movement, without the knowledge of the PKI politburo or the party’s millions of followers. The historian John Roosa, a professor at the University of British Columbia, was the first to delve into Aidit’s role in the poorly organized movement, which relied on a group of “revolutionary” officers without a clear plan.3 Zhou is the first scholar to find a document proving that Aidit described the movement to Mao. On August 5, Aidit was in Beijing when Sukarno collapsed from an unknown illness, and he decided to rush back to a tense Jakarta. Mao met with Aidit before he left, and asked what he would do if Sukarno died or the army moved to take over. Aidit laid out his plan for a preemptive strike. He told Mao, according to minutes of the meeting, that he planned to establish a military committee to confuse his enemies and to ensure that “military commanders who are sympathetic to the right wing will not oppose us immediately.” He then added, “After it has been established, we need to arm the workers and peasants in a timely fashion.”4 Zhou writes that the minutes do not include Mao’s exact reply, but that he told Aidit to be ready for both negotiations and armed struggle. It seems clear from Roosa’s and Zhou’s research that while Aidit was emboldened by Mao’s support and expected many guns to follow, China never sent any. Zhou, whose study is designed to add to the global history of the cold war, said in a telephone interview that opening up more of the historical record is unlikely in Xi Jinping’s China, where the 30 September Movement remains a taboo subject. As a result, Zhou said, she can only write about it in English.5 By August 1965, with Aidit back in Jakarta, the army and the PKI played out the last moves of this grand game of chicken. Over the next two months, tensions escalated, pro- and anti-Communist students clashed, and Sukarno’s self-proclaimed magic of holding the nation together was waning. Rumors flew. One day there were reports of guns from China arriving to arm the Fifth Force. Another day reports circulated that there was proof that the CIA-backed Council of Generals was going to seize power on October 5, Armed Forces Day. As the showdown was brewing, the US incited the right while China encouraged the left. President Suharto with his wife and son at a military shooting range, Indonesia, 1967. Larry Burrows/Life/Getty Images Early in the morning of October 1, Aidit launched the plan he had outlined to Mao, only to watch it fizzle. There were no promised guns from China. PKI cadres did not rise up to support the 30 September Movement. Sukarno failed to support Aidit and the leftist officers. The brash and brutal Suharto moved quickly to declare himself commander of the army, and he ignored Sukarno’s order that afternoon to step down. Aidit fled to Yogyakarta and, during his weeks in hiding, he denied that he was involved in the killing of the generals and instructed party officials to call off any demonstrations and avoid any actions that would provoke an army response. Sukarno would protect the PKI, he told his followers. But Sukarno had no protection to offer; instead the unarmed PKI members and poor farmers and workers who belonged to affiliated organizations were defenseless as the army moved to annihilate them. Hiding in a village on the outskirts of Solo in Central Java, Aidit was tracked down by the army on November 22 and summarily executed. Melvin adds a new understanding of why the army was able to move so quickly on October 1. Under the cover of the Crush Malaysia campaign, it had devised its separate command structure and trained civilian militias, ranging from gangsters to members of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization. When Suharto gave the order, the means to carry it out were already in place. Army commanders quickly met with NU leaders, handing out guns and money.6 In Aceh, Melvin follows what she calls “the coordination tour” of the Aceh army commander Brigadier General Ishak Djuarsa to explain how the civilian population was enlisted in the annihilation campaign. Mass rallies were held to rile up hatred for the PKI. Muslim religious leaders joined in, condemning Communists as atheists, giving religious sanction to the murders. The army issued edicts ordering civilians to crush the PKI. Death squads were formed all over the province, and by the end of October, Djuarsa declared war on the PKI. The militias and death squads collected accused Communists from army-run detention centers, mostly at night, and killed them, throwing the corpses into rivers or shallow mass graves. Robinson argues that what happened in Aceh was not unusual. What makes the massacre in Indonesia remarkable is that the victims were killed for their political and ideological connections, not their ethnicity or religion. There were many willing executioners, especially in the Muslim militias, and Islam was often invoked to justify the violence. Yet in religiously diverse Indonesia, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists also participated in the violence. Without the army, as Melvin and Robinson painstakingly detail, there would have been no mass murder. All of the evidence, Robinson writes, “points to the army as the chief instigator and organizer of the violence.” One notable exception was the targeting of Chinese Indonesians, long stigmatized as clannish, unfairly wealthy, and not quite Indonesian. Hostility toward Chinese in the archipelago had simmered for hundreds of years, but the antipathy took on a political dimension in 1965. As Sukarno and the PKI allied themselves with China, anti-Communists in Indonesia insisted that Chinese Indonesians were disloyal and untrustworthy. Rumors spread that local Chinese were spies or were bankrolling the PKI. When the army went after the PKI, Chinese Indonesians became targets of violence as well, especially in Medan and Aceh. Melvin writes that indiscriminate violence against Aceh’s Chinese community erupted in 1966, and Djuarsa, the commander, issued an order that all “alien” Chinese had to leave by August 17, 1966. China sent ships to Medan to rescue them. Some ten thousand were expelled. By March 1966, the killings slowed or stopped in most places. Suharto forced Sukarno to sign over his presidential powers on March 11, and embarked on his thirty-two years of strongman rule. Communism was outlawed. Every Indonesian had to declare belief in one of the official religions (Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, and Buddhism)7 to inoculate against Marxism. Chinese characters were banned, and Chinese Indonesians were forced to adopt Indonesian names. China and Indonesia severed relations. The US and Britain, watching their covert dreams in action, rushed to help Suharto and the army and celebrated the elimination of the PKI. It was seen as a momentous victory and a turning point in the cold war. As if the massacre was a down payment for aid, money flowed into Indonesia in the form of loans, foreign aid, military funding and equipment, and private investment, especially in oil and mining. Suharto’s New Order, as his rule was called, ushered in a period of high growth rates and harsh repression. Not only were up to one million alleged Communists massacred, another 1.5 million were imprisoned, and their families were shunned and discriminated against for generations. Suharto’s authoritarian control of society rested on the “latent danger of communism,” and an elaborate intelligence apparatus reached down to the village level to quash dissent or signs of leftism. Any talk about the killings became taboo except for the official version: the PKI had to be exterminated, and Indonesians themselves supported and joined in the mass murder. This official version was embraced in high-ranking circles of the US and British governments. Many journalists and scholars accepted it as well. “The US government also went to extraordinary lengths to disguise its own role in the violence,” according to Robinson, including releasing Indonesia—1965: The Coup That Backfired, the CIA’s version of events, which echoed the Indonesian army’s official version. One reason the CIA took the extraordinary step of releasing this report, completed in 1968, was to counter what came to be known as the “Cornell Paper,” a dissenting study by two scholars, Benedict R. Anderson and Ruth T. McVey, who rejected the notion that the PKI was behind the September 30 Movement.8 Instead, they claimed that intra-army conflict was the cause. The Cornell Paper and the CIA’s report—both of which turned out to be wrong—gave rise to years of sharp polemics between pro–and anti–New Order officials and scholars.9 An exchange of letters in these pages from 1978 gives a taste of the bitter debate.10 Francis J. Galbraith, ambassador to Indonesia from 1969 to 1974, lambasted an article by Huang Wen-hsien and David Hinckley, “In Indonesian Prisons,” based on an Amnesty International report that at least 55,000 and perhaps 100,000 political prisoners, rounded up in the annihilation campaign, languished as detainees without trial. Galbraith wrote that the Cornell Paper had been discredited, the role of the PKI had been proven, and that Indonesia was still fighting a Communist insurgency: The Suharto Government has understandably hesitated to turn loose the slightly more than 30,000 Communist cadres still detained (not 100,000 as alleged by Amnesty International) to fuel such an insurgency. Anderson and McVey’s reply appeared a few months later. The CIA’s own study, they pointed out, showed that the PKI never took up arms or had plans to lead an insurgency. They also dismissed Galbraith’s claim that the PKI was to blame, instead asserting that it was the CIA that had the most to gain in stopping Indonesia’s “headlong slide to the left.” Anderson and McVey got a lot wrong in the Cornell Paper, but so did a subgenre of books in both Indonesian and English, including Marshall Green’s memoir of his time as US ambassador from 1965 to 1968, which obscures the role of the US and UK and the organizing of the killings by the Indonesian army. According to Green, “The events of October 1, 1965, came as a complete surprise to us.” As for the killings, he describes them as the inevitable result of neighbor-against-neighbor antipathy with no mention at all of the army. In the last analysis, he writes, The bloodbath visited on Indonesia can be largely attributed to the fact that communism, with its atheism and talk of class warfare, was abhorrent to the way of life of rural Indonesia.11 Since Suharto was toppled in 1998 and Indonesia entered its cacophonous and fragile democratic era, many have challenged the official narrative through personal memoirs, documentaries, and novels.12 Yet these efforts have led to a backlash, with a growing alliance of the right and Islamists attacking any effort to investigate the past as a neo-Communist threat to the nation. These deeply researched and authoritative new books should offer support to those who are searching for the truth. They have, at the very least, revealed the urgent need for a new account of a tragic chapter in Indonesia’s past that continues to haunt the present. To be published by Cornell University Press in 2019. ↩ There was another declassification of US State Department records in 2017, which I wrote about in “Uncovering Indonesia’s Act of Killing,” NYR Daily, October 20, 2017. ↩ John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup D’État in Indonesia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Roosa discovered an analysis of the movement’s failure written by an army participant, Brigadier General M.A. Supardjo, who faulted the leaders for having bravado instead of a plan: “After all, the slogan of the leadership was always: ‘Enough, we just have to begin and everything else will just fall into place.’” ↩ Taomo Zhou, “Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy Towards Indonesia, 1960–1965,” The China Quarterly, Vol. 221 (2015), p. 223. ↩ Robinson writes that while Zhou may be right, it is also possible that Aidit was only talking about how the party would react if Sukarno died. More documents from China are needed to settle this question. ↩ See Greg Fealy and Katharine McGregor, “Nahdlatul Ulama and the Killings of 1965–66: Religion, Politics, and Remembrance,” Indonesia, Vol. 89 (April 2010), p. 44. ↩ Confucianism was added in 2001. ↩ A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia (Modern Indonesia Project, 1971). The authors circulated the original paper among a small number of colleagues in early 1966 and sent it to two top US officials at the State Department. Anderson wrote later that he believed these officials sent the report to Indonesian officials, leading to the banning of both authors. In 1971, Cornell Press decided to publish their tentative study since it had become the subject of such debate. ↩ In 2007 the CIA’s report was republished, with some misleading changes, by Praeger Security International as Sukarno and the Indonesian Coup: The Untold Story by Helen-Louise Hunter. The 2007 book makes no mention that Hunter was the author of the 1968 CIA report. In a telephone interview, Hunter, now retired and living in Maryland, said she regretted that the 2007 volume did not disclose its origins as the CIA report. She also said she believes the CIA did not disclose all its files to her as she compiled her supposedly definitive report ↩ See The New York Review, February 9 and June 1, 1978. ↩ Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation, 1965–1968 (Compass, 1990). ↩ See Ian Buruma, “The Violent Mysteries of Indonesia,” in which he discussed Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, as well as Eka Kurniawan’s novel Beauty Is a Wound, The New York Review, October 22, 2015. (c) 2018 The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/truth-about-indonesia-killing-fields/