Villagers fleeing fighting between the Tatmadaw and Kachin Independence Army arrive in Namti town, Kachin State, in April. / Kachin Baptist Convention During a recent trip to the United States, an American told me how she used to have a good relationship with her Burmese neighbors, who had lived in New York for a long time. However, the family stopped talking to her after she tried to raise the Rohingya issue with them, she said. This was a story of a divided neighborhood overseas. But, there are many more such divided neighborhoods in Myanmar. The international community has been well informed about the human rights abuses committed by the Myanmar Army against the Rohingya in the state of Rakhine. There is much sympathy for the the Rohingya, which fled en masse to Bangladesh after the Myanmar Army launched a massive military sweep in the west of the state last year. The international community is considering how it can help the Rohingya regain their human dignity as equals based on human rights. It cannot accept how the Tatmadaw has treated them, burned their houses, tortured, arrested and put many of them in prison. All human beings should be treated equally – that is the view of the international community. During my one-week visit, I gave some public talks about the decline of press freedom in Myanmar. I met US State Department officials and some members of Congress to brief them about how press freedoms in the country have been curtailed. U.S. government officials and members of Congress are generally well informed about the political situation in Myanmar, and were happy to listen to our stories about how press freedom is increasingly being restricted. They even asked what they could do to help boost media freedoms in the country. They said the U.S. government was not happy to see the political situation in Myanmar deteriorating and expressed a desire to see it move forward under the government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who gained international recognition and a Nobel Peace prize for her long pro-democracy struggle. But people asked me most about the Rohingya. I was surprised to meet one member of Congress who just seemed to want us to listen to him talk about the Rohingya, instead of listening to our accounts of the state of press freedom. He seemed to think that if the Myanmar government gave full citizenship to the Rohingya, then all their problems would be solved. I told him about a case I came across at a refugee camp in Myae Pone Township in Rakhine State. There were some Rohingya there who had been granted full citizenship cards, but they still could not leave the camp. It did not matter what cards they possessed. The more important thing, I told him, was that they had the freedom to travel and work. We spent about 40 minutes talking about the Rohingya, and did not get the chance to bring up the issue of media rights with him. There are ongoing investigations by different U.S. government departments about rights abuses committed by the Myanmar Army against the Rohingya. Washington has vowed to target certain Army and government officials with sanctions, based on the recommendations of the different government departments. The Rohingya crisis is one of the biggest international issues today. Yet, there are other issues in Myanmar, especially in Kachin State, where fighting has been raging for almost two months. There are 150,000 Kachin IDPs who have had to flee their homes due to the fighting and amid widespread reports of human rights abuses by the Myanmar Army. The Myanmar Army’s actions against the ethnic Kachin are not much different to what it has done to the Rohingya. But most normal civilians from the international community know very little about the six-decade long civil war between the Myanmar Army and the ethnic rebel groups in the country. The ethnic groups have suffered many different types of abuses at the hands of the Myanmar Army, and they want the international community to know their situation is not dissimilar to that of the Rohingya. It is time is to bring the two issues together. Both the Rohingya and the ethnic groups have been targets of human rights abuses. But while the international community talks about one, it seems to ignore the other. (c) 2018 The Irrawaddy https://www.irrawaddy.com/opinion/rohingya-crisis-just-tip-dark-iceberg.html

5/22/2018 - A Hull man who befriended and helped vulnerable families in rural Kenya to gain access to their children has been convicted of 9 child abuse offences. The National Crime Agency began investigating Keith Morris, a 72-year-old locksmith, in February 2017 after another British national staying in Kenya reported his inappropriate behaviour with children. Enquiries by the NCA and Kenyan National Police identified that in the many years Morris had been visiting a rural village in Kilifi County, Kenya, he frequently took local children away for trips, where he would buy them gifts and stay with them in hotel rooms. It was on these trips taken between January 2016 and February 2017 when Morris would conduct his abuse. One of his young victims gave evidence via video link during the trial at Leeds Crown Court and described how Morris, known to her as ‘Mozzy’, had done “bad things” to her when they were staying at a hotel. He then told her she would be in trouble if she told anyone about it. Morris had been visiting the village for a number of years with his family and had supported locals by providing household goods and clothing, as well as paying for medical treatment and education. After he was arrested by NCA officers and released on bail in February 2017, Morris transferred money to associates in Kenya in exchange for helping him to prove his innocence. In addition, officers conducting a further search of his home in August 2017 seized a Dictaphone containing audio recordings of phone conversations made after his arrest. In these recordings, he asks his victims to sign retraction statements stating the sexual abuse had not occurred. As a result, Morris was also charged with and convicted of two counts of intending to pervert the course of justice. He is due to be sentenced at Leeds Crown Court on 17 July 2018. Graham Ellis, NCA operations manager, said: “Keith Morris spent many years integrating himself into the local community in Kenya, making him a trusted figure to people that lived there. He then abused this trust in the worst possible way. “Not only did he sexually abuse and rape vulnerable children but he attempted to manipulate and bribe them into helping him prove his innocence. “Thankfully, those attempts failed and due to his victims’ courage Morris now faces significant jail time for his horrific crimes. “Travelling sex offenders like Morris think that by conducting their abuse in a remote part of the world, they won’t get caught. However borders are not a barrier and the NCA works closely with international partners to ensure Britons committing offences abroad are prosecuted in the UK. “I would like to take this opportunity to encourage anyone who may have information on Morris’s offending to contact the NCA on 01925 663355. Alternatively, you can email op.shoran@nca.x.gsi.gov.uk.”

The Syrian government, under dictator Bashar al-Assad, is waging a brutal war against its own citizens. 5/7/2018 - Innocent civilians were rounded up, put onto trains, and deported to a network of 25 concentration camps where they suffered torture, medical experimentation, starvation, disease, and death. Those who didn’t perish in the concentration camps were sent on a death march, a forced march during which the prisoners were left to die along the way from hunger, thirst, disease, abuse, or outright murder. An estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children perished. This was a systematic slaughter aimed at eliminating a minority religious group that the majority had labeled ‘vermin. ’This was not the Holocaust. This was the genocide of the Armenians, 1915-1923, what Winston Churchill described as an "administrative holocaust," and he noted, "This crime was planned and executed for political reasons … for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race." Who speaks today of the Armenians? Adolf Hitler used the catastrophe to justify the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews, saying in 1939, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" When we don’t know or don’t remember, we are prone to repeat the same cycles of violence, destruction, and displacement. Today there is a link between two atrocities that happened in the very same place yet are separated across a century of time. Deir-zor. Aleppo. Tall Abyad. Ras al-Ayn. Shaddadi. Kessab. These cities were once part of the Ottoman Empire, and in these cities a little more than a century ago, on April 24, 1915, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. After that, ordinary Armenians were rounded up and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water, forced to walk naked in the blazing sun, shot if they stopped to rest. At the same time, Ottoman rulers organized killing squads to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.” They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them, and burned them alive. Bones litter the countryside yet today. Armenian children were stolen and given to Turkish families. Women were raped, marked with tattoos showing "ownership," and forced into Turkish harems and households. Local Turks seized Armenians’ homes and property. By the time the genocide ended, there were only about 200,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire – some of them saved by Turkish "upstanders." A century later These cities of Armenian tragedy are located in today’s country of Syria. And today there is war, devastation, hunger, torture, displacement, forced disappearance, and death – in these very same places once again. The Syrian government, under dictator Bashar al-Assad, is waging a brutal war against its own citizens. By the numbers: 500,000 people killed by poison gas, barrel bombs, starvation, disease, and torture; 6.6 million displaced within their own country; and 5 million refugees who have fled from Syria. Assad’s war is a politicide, an effort to eliminate people who began protesting against their dictator in March 2011. What connects these two tragedies, besides the terrible coincidence of brutalities in the same places? The underlying cause of the violence: climate disruptions. Drought and genocide Droughts and floods devastate agriculture, and when people’s bellies are empty, they do what’s necessary to survive. They can easily be motivated to blame others for their despair and to take out their anger and frustration against a scapegoat, typically a religious or ethnic minority group. That was the tragedy of the Armenian genocide. In 1873-75 the Ottoman Empire was stricken with record droughts. Edgar Whitaker, British editor of an Istanbul newspaper, wrote, “A struggle against death from starvation has been going on [in the Ottoman Empire] for the last twenty months, and the whole population has been decimated, enfeebled by disease, and so scattered and dispersed, that the whole of its social system had been utterly disorganized. ”The climate events combined with regional political and economic vulnerability to turn drought into catastrophe. In a war with Russia a few years later, the Ottoman Empire lost a great deal of its European territory. Turkish citizens from those regions came streaming back into the Empire needing food, housing, and work, but they came back to a country devastated by drought. This crisis magnified already-existing ethnic and religious divisions: Muslim against Christian; Turk against Assyrian, Armenian, and Greek. For the next several years, the drought conditions intensified, worsening in 1879-1881 when there were urban bread riots. The “Armenian Question” depicted the Armenians as Christian infidels allied to the enemy Russia and responsible for the collapsing Ottoman Muslim economy and political empire. It was a small step to go from scapegoating the Armenians to exterminating them. A hundred years later, Syria’s tragedy also started with a drought. From 2006-2011 up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago. In 2009, the UN reported that more than 800,000 Syrians had lost their entire livelihood because of the droughts. By 2011, about 1 million Syrians were food-insecure and as many as 3 million, about 14 percent of the entire population, were driven into extreme poverty. Rural families fled to the cities. Crop failures in the farming villages around Aleppo alone led 200,000 rural villagers to leave. Syrian cities were already struggling to cope with Iraqi refugees from the U.S. invasion in 2003, and this current crisis added insurmountable burdens. Hunger and desperation, water shortages and crop failures, continued population growth and massive internal displacement all resulted in Syria’s originally peaceful opposition movement. The contestation with the Assad government quickly devolved into one of the worst crises on the planet. A path to peace? In the short term, the thousands of starving and ill Syrians, both inside of Syria and in refugee camps in neighboring countries, must have access to food, water, medical treatment, and shelter. In the long term, any peace will be unsustainable unless the fundamental needs of food and water can be assured. During the Armenian genocide, Syria was a refuge for families who survived the forced marches and mass violence in the desert. Today, Armenia has welcomed more than 30,000 Armenian refugees from Syria. (c) 2018 MinnPost https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2018/05/genocide-over-and-over-again-armenians-syrians

'BlacKkKlansman,' in competition for Cannes’ Palme d’Or, is the true-life tale of an African-American detective who in 1979 infiltrated a Colorado Springs, Colorado, cell of the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke John David Washington and Adam Driver in BlacKkKlansmanFocus Features Spike Lee is holding court on the sunbaked rooftop terrace of the Cannes Film Festival hub, the Palais des Festivals, doing his best Peter O’Toole impression. A passionate cinephile, Lee likes to punctuate his points with movie references or classic stand-up lines or sports metaphors. When it’s suggested to him that his furious statement on race in Donald Trump’s America, “BlacKkKlansman,” has rocked Cannes like nothing else at this year’s festival, he smiles. “Did you ever see one of the greatest films that was ever made? David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’” says Lee before raising his voice to a sonorous battle cry. “Taaaaaake nooooo prisoners!” BlacKkKlansman Trailer #1 (2018) | Movieclips Trailers For even a filmmaker who has seldom pulled punches when it comes to straight taking — what he would call “da truth, Ruth” — “BlacKkKlansman” is a haymaker. The film, which is in competition for Cannes’ Palme d’Or, is the true-life tale of an African-American police detective Ron Stallworth (played in the film by John David Washington, son of Denzel), who in 1979 infiltrated a Colorado Springs, Colorado, cell of the Ku Klux Klan. Introduced to the project by producer Jordan Peele (“Get Out”), Lee made what he knew would be a commentary on race in America. Then, during a summer weekend in Martha’s Vineyard, he saw his film run directly up to present day. On the TV was news of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent in clashes with counter-protesters. Anti-racism activist Heather Heyer was run over and killed. Former KKK leader David Duke, who’s played by Topher Grace in “BlacKkKlansman,” was part of the rally. After it, President Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence. For Lee, it was a “defining moment” for Trump and the United States. (In a press conference in Cannes on Tuesday, he blasted the president in a passionate, expletive-filled monologue.) Lee decided to end “BlacKkKlansman” with footage from Charlottesville (he sought and received permission from Heyer’s mother) and of Trump’s speech. The film concludes with the image of an upside-down black-and-white American flag. “Those terrorist groups wrote themselves into the film,” Lee said in an interview. “The real-life David Duke wrote himself into the film. The president of the United States wrote himself into the film. They gave us an ending we’re not good enough to write.” Focus Features will release the film in August on the anniversary of Charlottesville. “Take the past and make it present was the real approach Spike and I wanted to take with it,” says co-writer Kevin Willmott. “And unfortunately, the events of today just presented themselves. They’ve taken the past and brought it back to the present.” Many in the cast were surprised by the film’s unscripted conclusion. Asked when he found out, Washington replies: “Uh, when I saw it. And it messed me up. I was emotional. I was fighting (tears) back.” Washington has known Lee since his father, one of Lee’s favorite leading men, made “Malcolm X” with him and the younger Washington had a small role. But as to the first time they met, Lee lights up and mimics cradling a baby. “BlacKkKlansman” is a breakthrough for the 33-year-old Washington, a former professional football player. The cast is filled with what Lee calls “new blood” — actors he hasn’t worked with before. Among them is Adam Driver, who plays Stallworth’s Jewish partner. Driver calls Lee’s revision “a testament to his movies’ unpredictability.” “And it’s like how he directs on set — following your impulses. He’s worked with most of the same crew members since ’Do the Right Thing,’” Driver said. “That’s what I like about his movies. They’re filled with an energy that you never know what’s going to happen.” “BlacKkKlansman” is also, in part, about the influence movies can have. It begins with the flying Confederate flag of “Gone With the Wind” and shows the Klan members enthralled by D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.” But it also captures characters lovingly discussing “Shaft” and “Superfly.” “Here’s the first time I really realized what a movie can do. I went to see a Bruce Lee film on 42nd Street, and when people came out of there, people were doing flying kicks all over the sidewalk,” says Lee with a karate chop of his own.” And it clicked for me: That is a power.” (c) 2018 The Associated Press https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/a-jew-and-an-african-american-infiltrate-the-kkk-spike-lee-at-cannes-1.6096680

A Pomo man paddles a canoe on Clear Lake, 1924. By Edward S. Curtis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons California’s history is marked by horrific and systemic violence against Native Americans. On this edition of Your Call, we’ll speak with Bay Area Native Corrina Gould and historian Benjamin Madley about the genocide of California Indians and how the state should acknowledge it. In his book American Genocide, Madley details the murders and institutionalized killings of Native communities in California in the latter half of the 19th century. Vigilantes, military members, and others drove the Native population in California down from around 150,000 to about 30,000 between 1846 and 1870. How should California recognize the war of extermination waged against its Native communities? Guests: Benjamin Madley, historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism, and author of American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 Corrina Gould, co-founder of Indian People Organizing for Change and the Sogorea Te Land Trust To listen, click HERE (c) 2018 KALW http://kalw.org/post/how-should-california-reconcile-its-genocidal-past#stream/0

The Archives of Morocco in Rabat. (COURTESY) (JNS) The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., signed a cooperation agreement with the Archives of Morocco in Rabat to share materials on the Jews of North Africa during the World War II held by each institution. The agreement will expand the museum's archival holdings on this understudied aspect of history and enable scholars from North Africa, Europe and around the globe to conduct research both in Morocco and at the museum. The agreement follows a meeting in Morocco in October 2017 between Prince Moulay Rachid and a museum delegation that included director Sara J. Bloomfield. Participants discussed the importance of Holocaust education as a way to memorialize the victims and help educate people about the dangers of extremism and hatred. "The signing of this agreement with Morocco is an important step in the Holocaust museum's work in collecting archival documentation from North African countries and making them available for research," said Tad Stahnke, the museum's director of international outreach. "The museum signed an archival sharing agreement with the Moroccan National Library in 2008, and Morocco remains the only Arab nation with which we have an archival agreement." In addition to Stahnke, those who spoke at the signing event included Jamaa Baida, director of the Archives of Morocco; Stephanie Miley, charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Morocco; the Hon. André Azoulay, senior adviser to King Mohammed VI of Morocco; and David Toledano, head of the Jewish community in Rabat. (c) 2018 Jewish Journal http://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jjps-morocco-0523-20180516-story.html

Israeli Arabs wave Palestinian flags during a rally to mark the Nakba (Day of catastrophe), when Palestinians lost their homes and land, in the northern Israeli town of Megiddo, April 24, 2007. Israel celebrates their 59th Independence Day on Tuesday. 5/14/2018 - Violence is intensifying in Gaza as the United States opens its new embassy in Jerusalem, a convergence of current politics and long-simmering tensions in the region. Israeli forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens and wounding hundreds more, Palestinian officials said. May 14 marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding; May 15 is a day Palestinians know as their nakba, or “catastrophe,” the traumatic expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 by Israelis. This event both defined their future of statelessness and occupation, and now forms the basis for their distinct national identity. Many of the chief consequences of the nakba, including the displacement of most Palestinians from their ancestral lands and ongoing statelessness, remain unresolved to this day. This helps explain the enduring violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which flared up most recently on the border with Gaza. Beginning on March 30, a series of Friday protests billed the “Great March of Return” have seen thousands of mainly unarmed young men confront Israeli forces and border guards. They are blocking these men from the nearby villages, located in what is now Israel, from which many of their families were displaced in the 1940s. At least 37 protesters have died, and over 4,000 injured, in the unrest. These demonstrations, which will culminate on the 15th, combined with the opening of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, may well become yet another historic flashpoint. And even if the worst does not come to pass this time, sooner or later, it will. Until we come to grips with the political and cultural legacy of the nakba, calm, stability, and normality will elude Israel and the rest of the Middle East. To understand the nakba is to first confront its sheer scale and totality. Before the nakba, there was a large, deeply rooted, and essentially ancient Arab society in most of what, within a few months, became the Jewish state of Israel. In effect, one day it was there, as it had been for living memory, and the next day it was gone. An entire society, with the exception of relatively small groups in a few places, simply vanished. After World War I, the League of Nations broke the Ottoman Empire up into territories assigned to different colonial powers. The lands that today constitute Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were placed under British rule, but with two explicit and incompatible purposes: Britain was already committed to supporting the recently established Zionist movement that sought to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The mandate reaffirmed that goal, but did not define what a “national home,” such as a Jewish state, meant in practice. Yet the terms of the Covenant of the League of Nations held that the purpose of mandates was to secure the “well-being and development” of the people living in those territories. The problem was that just under 90 percent of the population of Palestine in 1922, when the British mandate was formally initiated, were Arab Muslims and Christians, with Jews, in many cases recent arrivals, constituting 11 percent. In other words, the project of providing “tutelage” to the people of the territory and preparing them for independence was at stark odds with the project of transforming Palestine into a “national home for the Jewish people,” however that was defined. In both Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Palestine mandate, the overwhelming Palestinian majority was simply referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” with “civil and religious rights,” but not political ones. This meant the British colonial overlords were almost always at odds with both the local Arab population, and also frequently with Jewish leaders. But by the time the British Mandate began to fall apart after World War II, the population of the territory had been transformed: 68 percent were Arabs and 32 percent were Jews (about two-thirds of whom were born abroad). The fledgling United Nations proposed to partition the territory between Arabs and Jews, but even in the proposed Jewish state, gerrymandered to include the maximum number of Jews, there was a virtual Arab plurality. Even after decades of immigration, it still wasn't possible to carve out a significant portion of Palestine with a solid Jewish majority. The Arabs, and especially Palestinians, angrily rejected partition on the grounds that the overwhelming majority of the people of the country did not wish to see their land divided and more than half of it given to the sovereignty of the Jewish minority who, at the time, made up one-third of the population. Many others were expected to arrive at some future date, all against the wishes of the large majority. Violence between the two communities, and between both and the British authorities, grew common throughout the 1930s and ’40s, including a fully fledged Arab revolt from 1936 to 1939. But as it became clear that Britain was simply going to leave Palestine in 1948, both sides began jockeying for position. Communal violence broke out into open warfare in the fall of 1947. This set the stage for the nakba. Fighting intensified in January 1948, and the Palestinian exodus began. Up to 100,000 Palestinians, mainly from the upper and middle classes, fled the cities and towns which were the epicenter of the fighting. Until then, expulsions were rare. But in April 1948, the Jewish forces launched a more concerted campaign of massacre and forced displacement, including the notorious Deir Yassin massacre of about 100 Palestinians on April 9. This spread panic among Palestinians, encouraging them to flee. When terror didn’t do the trick, Palestinians were forced out by Jewish militias. Early April saw the launch of the “Plan Dalet” military campaign, which sought, in part, the ethnic cleansing of most or all of the Arab inhabitants from areas claimed for a Jewish state. As the British withdrew from Palestine in early May 1948, Israel declared its establishment, and the war intensified with the intervention of several Arab armies. The process of Palestinian displacement also intensified. Yitzhak Rabin, then a young Jewish commander, would later write in his memoir of how he was ordered by David Ben-Gurion—literally with the wave of a hand—to “drive out” the 50,000 civilians in the towns of Lydda and Ramla on June 10 and 11. When the dust settled, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs, perhaps 700,000 to 800,000 people, had either fled or been expelled. The Palestinians who remained in what was now a Jewish state made up around 18 percent of the population of Israel, and for the next 20 years lived under martial law. The society the Palestinians had composed over the centuries was, for the most part, now gone. Towns and villages were renamed or bulldozed. Property was expropriated en masse through various legal mechanisms. And, most importantly, whether Palestinians fled or were expelled, virtually none were allowed to return. Most Palestinians who left their homes in 1947 and 1948 believed they would one day come back when the fighting stopped, no matter what the outcome. This was a complete delusion. They were gone, and the new Israeli state regarded their absence as the godsend that allowed a Jewish-majority country to suddenly emerge. This, in brief, is the Palestinian nakba, the collapse and disappearance of an entire society that was politically, militarily, and culturally unprepared for the collision with Zionism, colonialism, and war. But the nakba defined, and continues to define, Palestinian national identity. At the time of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism was running strong. The Muslims and Christians in the territories that were about to become Mandatory Palestine overwhelmingly identified as Arabs, but not yet as an ethno-national Palestinian community. They had warmly welcomed the creation of the first, short-lived, pan-Arab state in 1920, before it was crushed by the French. At that time, many if not most Palestinians saw themselves as Arabs and essentially “southern Syrians.” But once that early Arab state ended, they were, in effect, on their own. They had little choice but to begin defining themselves chiefly as Palestinians. While Palestinians do have cultural features that distinguish them from other Arabs, it is their history and, above all, the nakba and its never-ending aftermath, that firmly separates them from all other Arabs. All Palestinians, including those left behind in Israel, shared this experience. And given that most Palestinians today are either exiles, refugees, or living under Israeli occupation—or, at best, live as second-class citizens of Israel itself—their collective social, political, and historical identity centers almost entirely around the shattering experience of the nakba. No other group of Arabs endured this. Historians can and do debate who is at fault for this debacle. But it’s irrefutable that Palestinians didn’t merely lose their putative state and political power. At an individual and familial level, they lost their homes and property, in almost all cases for good. Collectively, they lost their society, and were condemned to live as exiles or stateless subjects under the rule of a foreign military. They had a society, and then they didn’t. The rupture of the nakba cannot be mended. The state of Israel is a reality that will not disappear. Most Palestinians fetishize the right of return, and from a moral and legal perspective, their case is irrefutable. But politically, there is no chance of any such return, except in tiny, symbolic numbers. After decades of fruitless struggle and brutality on all sides, Palestinians have somewhat bitterly come to accept that the nakba cannot be reversed or even really redressed. They accepted that a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state based in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 living alongside the Jewish state, was the only available outcome. But even that has proven unattainable. The trauma of the nakba cannot be addressed until the rest of the world, and particularly Israel, recognizes its validity and importance. The event does not compare to the Holocaust—very little else does. But Jews and Palestinians are two peoples both marked by definitive historical traumas that define their worldviews. The difference is that the Jewish and Israeli narratives continue to an epiphany of redemption in the founding and flourishing of the state of Israel, while for Palestinians, permanently dispossessed and living in exile or under occupation, the trauma is enduring and still unfolding. This is especially true in Gaza, which has become a wretched open-air prison for almost 2 million densely packed residents. The humanitarian crisis and pervasive despair there are so dire that even Israeli security officials regard Gaza as a ticking bomb of human misery. If it does not explode on May 15, it will soon. Hence the nakba is not so much a historical memory for most Palestinians, as a daily, lived experience. Recognizing that and acting on it will be indispensable for understanding the Palestinian perspective, at long last ending the conflict and the nakba, and allowing Jews and Arabs, and the whole world, to finally move on. (c) 2018 The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/the-meaning-of-nakba-israel-palestine-1948-gaza/560294/

Romani civilians in Asperg, Germany are rounded up for deportation by German authorities on 22 May 1940. (German Federal Archives) WASHINGTON, DC, May 14, 2018 – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum expresses deep concern regarding recent manifestations of intolerance and antisemitism in Ukraine including violence directed against the Romani communities in Kyiv and L’viv. On April 21 members of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian organization C14 in the Holosiyiv District of Kyiv forced 15 families to flee the area and burned down their dwellings. On May 9, approximately 30 masked men burned down the Rudne settlement in the L’viv district. The Roma were targeted by the Nazis during World War II and at least 200,000 were killed by the Germans and their collaborators. There has also been an alarming rise in antisemitic activity including the desecration of Jewish memorial sites, torchlight marches and antisemitic speeches organized by neo-Nazi groups in L’viv and Odessa glorifying Nazi collaborators who participated in the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews. While acknowledging the hate crime investigation of the April 21 attack on the Romani community that has been opened by the Kyiv municipal police and the recent statement by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko strongly condemning “any manifestations of intolerance and antisemitism” and promising immediate reaction by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, it is clear that more needs to be done to combat antisemitic and anti-Roma prejudice and to stop the various efforts to distort the nation’s Holocaust history by glorifying Nazi collaborators and white-washing historical truth. This will require greater consistency of government action. The Memorandum of Cooperation signed on March 18 between the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Education and Science, Kyiv Municipality, and the National Historical and Memorial Reserve Babyn Yar is a positive step promising to advance the project to create the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a museum and educational center, at one of the most horrendous mass murder sites of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, the continuing effort led by the leadership of the government’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory to praise certain leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and cleanse their murderous records raises doubts regarding the government’s intentions. The Museum urges the Ukrainian government to consistently combat new manifestations of intolerance – including antisemitism and anti-Romani sentiment – and to honestly confront the country’s past, including the participation of some Ukrainians in the murder of Jews and Roma during the World War II. Ensuring consistency in the government’s approach and the commitment of national resources to initiatives to memorialize and educate about the tragedy of Babyn Yar and the Holocaust in Ukraine will be positive steps in this process. (c) 2018 YubaNet

One shudders at the thought of museums one day conjuring up excuses for more recent presidents who likewise turned a blind eye to genocide or other atrocities around the world. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT. (photo credit: REUTERS) A new exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum blames the Roosevelt administration’s failure to aid European Jewry on public opinion, Herbert Hoover, and a couple of bad guys in the State Department – but never on President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most Americans recall FDR as a strong, decisive leader, but in this exhibit, he has been transformed into the Incredible Disappearing President. The exhibit begins by describing how some American Jews responded to the rise of Nazism by boycotting German goods and opposing US participation in the Berlin Olympic Games. There is no mention of Roosevelt’s opposition to the boycott, his support for taking part in the games, or his insistence on friendly diplomatic and economic relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The exhibit defends FDR’s refusal, from 1933 to 1938, to publicly criticize Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. A text panel claims that “the accepted rules of international diplomacy obliged them to respect Germany’s right to govern its own citizens and not intervene on behalf of those being targeted.” Obliged to respect Hitler’s brutality? Presidents Van Buren, Buchanan, and Grant protested the mistreatment of Jews in Syria, Switzerland and Romania, respectively. Theodore Roosevelt protested the persecution of Jews in Romania. The US government, under President William Taft, canceled a Russo-American treaty to protest Russia’s oppression of Jews. Woodrow Wilson inserted clauses protecting minorities in the Paris Peace Conference agreements. There was ample precedent for Franklin D. Roosevelt to speak out; he chose not to. The exhibit overflows with material concerning antisemitism, nativism and isolationism in America in the 1930s. The argument is that FDR could do little or nothing to aid the refugees in the face of such strong public sentiment. Yet Roosevelt was not afraid to take on controversial issues that were important to him, even if they lacked wide public backing, such as his scheme to pack the Supreme Court. He also carefully monitored public opinion and worked to reshape it on issues he cared about. In any event, the president could have aided the Jews without provoking a public controversy, by quietly allowing the existing German quota to be filled. However, FDR permitted that quota to be fully utilized in only one of his 12 years in office, and in most of those years, it was less than 25% filled. More than 190,000 quota places from Germany and Axis-occupied countries were left unused from 1933 to 1945. The exhibit does not mention that clergy (rabbis), professors and students could have been admitted without regard to number. Nor is there any mention of the proposals for admitting refugees temporarily to US territories such as Alaska or the Virgin Islands. Acknowledging these options would have conflicted with the exhibits’ theme of a weak, hapless Roosevelt who had no choice but to follow public opinion – an FDR who was a prisoner of the immigration policies carried out by the Hoover administration. The exhibit simply ignores the many extra requirements and burdens which the Roosevelt administration imposed upon visa applicants. As the exhibit moves into the 1940s, it makes new excuses for FDR’s indifference. “With America at war, Jews seeking to emigrate had almost no chance to escape,” a panel declares. Nonsense. Hitler’s Europe was not hermetically sealed during the war. More than 26,000 European Jews reached Palestine during 1941-1944. Some 27,000 Jewish refugees escaped to Switzerland and were granted haven during the war years (and tens of thousands more reached the Swiss border but were turned back). More than 7,000 Danish Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to safety in Sweden in 1943. Thousands more fled to Spain and Italy. One of the most egregious flaws in the exhibit concerns a proposal, in 1944, by a small government agency called the War Refugee Board. It tried to convince the president to grant temporary haven to hundreds of thousands of refugees for the duration of the war. An April 1944 Gallup poll – commissioned by the White House itself, to test the waters – found 70% of the public in favor. KEEP IN mind that polls are a central part of the exhibit. They demonstrate the extent of the antisemitism and anti-immigration sentiment that the exhibit says tied FDR’s hands. Scattered through the exhibit, there are nine large, lit boxes, each featuring a poll question; the viewer turns the box around to see the results. They all show strong opposition to immigration. Yet the aforementioned April 1944 poll showing a very different result is not shown. Acknowledging the wartime shift of public opinion would upset the exhibits’ major theme. Mention of the widespread public support for temporary havens would reflect poorly on President Roosevelt, who granted haven to just 982 refugees in 1944. Viewers would realize that the president’s hands were not completely tied, after all. And so the US Holocaust Museum simply pretends there was no change. Here’s what chief curator Daniel Greene said, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, about public attitudes toward admitting refugees from 1933 to 1945: “Public opinion doesn’t move.” But the fact is that by the spring of 1944 – once the tide of the war had turned, and once Americans learned more about the mass killings – it did move. Greene told The Washington Post he “hopes visitors will emerge with an understanding that even the US president faces constraints.” Visitors who are familiar with the events in question, however, are more likely to emerge disappointed that the US Holocaust Museum has distorted the historical record in order to make excuses for inexcusable policy decisions. One shudders at the thought of museums one day conjuring up excuses for more recent presidents who likewise turned a blind eye to genocide or other atrocities around the world. (c) Jerusalem Post https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Holocaust-museums-exhibit-makes-excuses-for-ignoring-genocide-556229

May 15, 2018—GAZA CITY — Gaza residents buried their dead Tuesday as the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces at the Gaza boundary fence climbed to at least 60 after several succumbed to injuries overnight, according to local health officials. Monday’s demonstrations, which coincided with the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, were marked by a level of bloodshed not seen in Gaza since a 2014 war with Israel. Israel’s use of live ammunition has drawn widespread condemnation, notably from Turkey, which expelled the Israeli ambassador Tuesday after recalling its envoys to Israel and the United States. Gunfire rang out over Gaza City on Tuesday as rounds were fired during funeral processions. Further protests were planned as residents attended funerals and prepared to mark the anniversary of Israel’s founding, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe.” More than two-thirds of Gaza’s population is descended from refugees who were displaced at the time of Israel’s creation 70 years ago. However, crowds at the border were thin after the organizing committee for the demonstrations called for a day of mourning to bury the dead. Demonstrators were asked to go home early as the death toll climbed. Monday’s killings more than doubled the number of Palestinians slain in Gaza during six weeks of demonstrations, dubbed the “March of Return.” More than 2,700 people were injured, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said, about half of them from live ammunition. At least six of the dead were under age 18, the ministry said, including a girl whose family said she was 14. The Health Ministry also reported that a baby died after inhaling tear gas at the main protest area in Gaza. An unidentified doctor told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the baby, Layla Ghaben, had a preexisting medical condition and that he did not believe her death was caused by tear gas. One more person was killed in demonstrations on Tuesday, the Health Ministry said. Speculation was rife that crowds were thinner because Egypt had pressured Hamas to order people home. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was summoned to Cairo on a last- minute trip Sunday night, and senior leaders were noticeably absent from Monday’s demonstrations. Egypt controls Gaza’s southern border, which opens only sporadically, while Israel has blockaded its boundary with the territory for the past 10 years. Ahmed Yousef, a former senior adviser to Haniyeh, said it was likely that Egypt warned Hamas to prevent an escalation. He said Hamas may have secured some short-term concessions from Egypt in return, such as a sustained opening of the Rafah crossing point with Egypt, which has been open in recent days. “This is the minimum they can ask,” Yousef said of Hamas. Israeli officials, however, justified the military’s tactics as necessary to stop the Palestinians from breaking through the border into Israel, which blockaded Gaza after Hamas took control of the enclave in 2007. Rupert Colville, spokesman for the Office of the U.N . High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday that while Israel has a right to defend itself, lethal force should be a last resort and was not justified against people who were just approaching the fence. He condemned Monday’s “appalling deadly violence.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned a continuing “massacre” of the Palestinian people. South Africa joined Turkey in announcing it was recalling its ambassador from Israel. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim called on Muslim countries to review their ties with Israel in the wake of the violence. Netanyahu later attacked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Twitter, saying that he “is one of the great supporters of Hamas, and there is no doubt that he understands terror and the massacres well, and I suggest that he not preach morality to us.” Israeli newspapers on Tuesday contrasted the upbeat inauguration ceremony for the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem with pictures of the violence on the border but characterized the Israeli reponse to the demonstrations in terms of self-defense. “Every country must protect its borders,” Netanyahu wrote in a tweet. “Hamas is a terrorist organization that states its intention to destroy Israel and it sends thousands of people to breach the border fence to realize this goal. We will continue to act firmly to protect our sovereignty and our citizens.” He was backed by the Trump administration, which blamed Hamas for the loss of life. Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security adviser and a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies, said people around the world condemning the violence need to understand that the Gaza demonstrations are not like protests in Europe. “They do not take into consideration that this is a cover for a terrorist organization that is attempting to stop Israel from building a system that would stop their underground terror tunnels,” he said. Asked if Israel could use less lethal methods to contain the protesters, most of whom were unarmed, Amidror said that such a question was a good example of those who “can sit in an air-conditioned office, drinking coffee and give advice to the Israeli army that is facing off against many thousands of Palestinians.” Tens of thousands of Palestinians had gathered on the edges of the enclave from midmorning Monday. Many came to demonstrate peacefully, but some protesters appeared to be more aggressive than in previous weeks. Israeli snipers opened fire, ostensibly to prevent any breach of the border fence, and protesters began to fall. No Israeli soldiers were injured. In Gaza, Hamas backed the demonstrations, called to protest the loss of Palestinian homes and villages when Israel was formed in 1948. Commenting in the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonoth, however, journalist Ben-Dror Yemini said the situation was “self-inflicted” and called on Palestinians to get over the events of 70 years ago. “There was a Nakba. The Arabs of Palestine underwent expulsion. Tens of millions of people throughout the entire world, including Jews, underwent similar expulsion. But only the Palestinians adopted an ethos of rejectionism, victimhood, suffering and death,” he wrote. “They aren’t looking to improve things for themselves.” © 2018 | The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/toll-for-gaza-protests-rises-to-59-as-baby-dies-from-tear-gas-with-more-protests-expected/2018/05/15/ee4156f8-57c6-11e8-9889-07bcc1327f4b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0b1171f31304

Early counts show Muqtada al-Sadr has become the unexpected frontrunner. The cleric led the insurgency against US troops after 2003 and later became a strong critic of corruption in Iraq's political system. Supporters hold a banner with the picture of Muqtada al-Sadr in a spontaneous rally after preliminary results were announced Iraq's electoral commission released the initial results of the parliamentary elections in the early hours of Monday. With 95 percent of the votes from 10 of Iraq's 18 provinces tallied — more than half of the total votes — the firebrand nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was leading, in what would be an unexpected political comeback. If results hold, they would spell bad news for the country's current leader, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who had been seen as the narrow frontrunner prior to the vote. Read more: Iraq election: Unlikely candidate emerges as face of the youth Initial results Muqtada al-Sadr's Sairun list leads in four provinces, including the capital, Baghdad. Shiite militia leader Hadi al-Amiri's bloc, which is backed by Iran, is currently in second place. PM al-Abadi's Victory Alliance has so far only won in one province and sits in third place. A splintered Shiite majority looks likely and would mean that no single electoral alliance will secure enough seats to govern alone. The record-low turnout — 44.52 percent — has been attributed to problems with the country's new electronic voting system and voter disenchantment. The number of voters was significantly lower than in previous elections. The tallied votes included full returns from only 10 of the country's 19 provinces. The situation may still change due to the country's complex electoral arithmetic. Complete results may not be released for another few days. Potential problems in Kirkuk: Tensions erupted in the ethnically diverse province of Kirkuk on Saturday night after preliminary results showed that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) was making significant gains. Security forces were called on to take control of the situation and maintain "neutrality" in the electoral process. The Arab and Turkmen political parties in Kirkuk have given an independent commission in charge of the election 24 hours to start a manual recount, local politician Ershad Salihi, the head of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, said. Al-Sadr's supporters jubilant: After the announcement that Muqtada al-Sadr's movement Marching Towards Reform was leading the polls in Baghdad, supporters took to the streets in the capital to celebrate a win. Supporters, mostly young people, waved flags, held pictures of the nationalist cleric, and set off fireworks. Al-Sadr campaigned on an anti-corruption platform and formed an unlikely alliance with communists and other independent secular supporters. Trouble for the United States? Muqtada al-Sadr has a colorful history with Washington. A militia under his control waged a brutal and costly insurgency against coalition troops after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The US labeled him a "terrorist" and issued an arrest warrant for the cleric, who then fled to Iran to enroll in religious studies. But when US troops were withdrawn in 2012, al-Sadr came back to Iraq and instructed his army to lay down their arms. The cleric withdrew from politics, later re-emerging as a fierce critic of Prime Minister al-Abadi in 2016. (c) Deutsche Welle

Washington D.C., May 10, 2018—Five years ago today, one of the most celebrated human rights trials in Latin America came to a stunning conclusion when Guatemalan dictator, retired Army general, and self-proclaimed “president” Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by a panel of three Guatemalan judges. To commemorate that milestone in Guatemalan history, the National Security Archive is posting the groundbreaking ruling that was issued on May 10, 2013, by the court that found Ríos Montt guilty. The Archive is also making a collection of 15 declassified documents available that chronicle Washington’s unabashed support for the dictator at the height of his powers, and the US Embassy’s determination to ignore the violence unleashed by his Army against civilians. The verdict was unprecedented in Guatemala and around the world; never before had a former head of state been convicted by his own country’s justice system for the crime of genocide. Ríos Montt, 86 years old at the time of the 2013 trial, was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Many of the hundreds of spectators present in the courtroom stood and clapped, wept, and cheered as the verdict was read. But the court’s decision was felt most powerfully by survivors of the Guatemalan Army’s scorched earth campaigns, which in the early 1980s sought to destroy them, their villages, and their culture in the Maya Ixil region of the country’s northwest. Ninety-seven men and women testified before the tribunal in the course of the almost two-month proceeding. They described repeated military sweeps through the Ixil communities that left a trail of death and mayhem in their wake. According to the testimonies, the soldiers massacred entire communities, raped and tortured their victims, looted and destroyed homes, hunted down fleeing refugees with helicopters, and occupied and destroyed sacred Mayan sites. Those captured were corralled into militarized camps where they were forced to stay, sometimes for years. The witnesses’ searing words are preserved in the genocide tribunal’s ruling, a 718-page document that not only pronounces the sentence on Ríos Montt (see page 682 and ff.), but summarizes the statements of all 97 survivors, reports from dozens of expert witnesses, Guatemala military and other government documents, results from exhumations, truth commission reports, and human rights publications. This is the story of just one of the 97 survivors of Ríos Montt’s Army attacks on the Ixil region of El Quiché in 1982. She was among a group of courageous women who appeared before the genocide tribunal to describe not only the destruction of their families, their homes, their livelihoods, but their sexual assault by soldiers. See the court’s ruling, pp. 516-17. 69. The witness ANA PACHECO RAMÍREZ declared that: In the year 1982 she lived in the Juil settlement, Chajul. In that settlement, she lived with her husband on land owned by her parents-in-law. One night at 8 o’ clock the soldiers came to take her husband away. At nine they returned and took her to a field that was about a mile from the house. The soldiers raped her after they brought her to the field. They shamed her, they left her practically naked and it was other people who gave her some clothes to wear. Her husband was Ignacio Pacheco. They had children. One child was 30 days old. After [the rape] she decided to go back to her house but everything had been burned. Her child died in the fire when they burned her house because he was just a baby. She wept to see everything burned. She says her testimony comes from the grief caused by that time. What she seeks is justice. To be giving her declaration 30 years later is sad, her husband never appeared again. She says that she has experienced great sorrow and suffered enough. Her declaration is granted evidentiary value for the following reasons: a). She recounts how the soldiers arrived and took her husband away. b). She describes how the soldiers raped her. c). She explains that her baby, just thirty days old, was burned to death. d). The sorrow can still be observed in the face of the victim, remembering what happened. In light of the 2013 ruling and the extraordinary personal stories of suffering and survival recounted by Ixil witnesses during the trial, it is disturbing to recall that at the time of the Ríos Montt regime (March 23, 1982 – August 8, 1983), the United States refused to acknowledge the role of the Guatemalan Army in the widespread killing of civilians. Instead, the administration – and President Reagan himself – championed the Guatemalan leader and sought to lift the sanctions imposed by Congress barring US military assistance to Guatemala because of the atrocities committed by the Army. * * * At the time of the 1982 coup that brought Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt to power, the Reagan administration was fighting a covert war against the Nicaraguan Sandinista regime and in need of allies in Central America who would support the anti-Sandinista contras. The overthrow of the reviled President Romeo Lucas García provided a welcome opening for Washington to reestablish ties with Guatemala and bolster US strategic goals in the region. Reagan officials were eager to embrace the country’s new leader; as a memo to President Reagan from his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said before Reagan and Ríos met for the first time, “The coup which brought Ríos Montt to power on March 23 presents us with an opportunity to break the long freeze in our relations with Guatemala and to help prevent an extremist takeover.” (Document 11) Breaking the freeze proved to be more difficult than expected. Although U.S. officials repeatedly asserted to the press, in congressional hearings, and in their own secret internal communications that Ríos Montt had made tremendous strides in “human rights reforms,” international human rights groups were just as insistent about the Guatemalan military’s role in repeated brutal massacres in the country’s rural and predominantly Mayan regions. Despite the public outcry, US diplomatic, military and intelligence officers in Guatemala and Washington perceived Ríos Montt and reported on his government in ways that served US interests. The declassified documents from 1982 described Ríos Montt as a leader who brought the Army under control, quelled the growing insurgent threat, and curbed human rights violations. If Lucas García was routinely characterized by US officials as a butcher, Ríos Montt was a democratic reformist, using legal tactics to fight a brutal insurgency.[1] As the CIA analyzed, “Reporting from [multiple sources] indicates that human rights violations by the Guatemalan Government – widespread and chronic under former President Lucas – have decreased substantially to the point where discriminate violence (that is, targeting guerrillas) has replaced indiscriminate slaughter since Ríos Montt came to power.” (Document 15; emphasis added) The bias in reporting is clearest in US accounts of the massacres. Although evidence of atrocities committed by the Army reached the United States from human rights groups, humanitarian and refugee organizations, the Church, US Congress, foreign and national media, survivors and eyewitness accounts – and was noted in US reports – the US Embassy in Guatemala and officials in Washington were deeply skeptical. In some cases, US Ambassador Frederic Chapin and his political officers, officials of the CIA station in Guatemala and defense attachés posted in country called the alleged massacres inventions of disinformation and guerrilla propaganda. In almost all other cases, with some exceptions, United States officials blamed the guerrilla forces as the perpetrators of the mass killings. This trend in US reporting bias from that period was directly contradicted by the conclusions of the exhaustive study of the Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—CEH), published in February 1999. The CEH found that the Guatemalan State, through operations carried out by the Army and paramilitary forces, was responsible for 93% of the human rights violations registered by CEH investigators; the guerrillas were responsible for 3% of the violations.[2] The CEH concluded that the Armed Forces committed “acts of genocide” in four regions of the country, targeting distinct ethnic groups, between 1980-83; for many of the genocidal acts documented by the commission, the periods of greatest intensity occurred during the Ríos Montt government.[3] An analysis of the sources used by the United States to obtain the majority of its information on the massacres demonstrates that the most common were the Army, the Guatemalan press, Presidential Public Relations Secretary Francisco Bianchi, Sub-secretary Rafael Escobar Arguello, and civilians speaking in the presence of Guatemalan State officials (Document 14). Documents describing massacres were rarely drawn from firsthand accounts by US officers who physically went to the sites and conducted inspections personally.[4] In late August, US Ambassador Frederic Chapin wrote, “The guerrillas have waged a sustained and indiscriminate campaign of terror, arson, intimidation, kidnapping, mayhem, bombing, disinformation and murder.” (Document 10) The State Department accepted the Embassy claims at first. An analysis produced in the same month observed that, “Human rights violations by Guatemalan security forces have decreased substantially over the past four months…During the same period, killings of civilians by the insurgent forces have reached unprecedented levels. The improvement in the human rights situation can be credited to the efforts of President Efraín Ríos Montt…” Although State Department analysts acknowledged that Army gains against insurgents were marred by “widespread allegations of atrocities by the troops…the Embassy does not as yet believe that there is sufficient evidence to link government troops to any of the reported massacres.” (Document 6) By the end of 1982, however, the State Department was beginning to have doubts about the quality of the intelligence information and analysis reaching Washington from Guatemala. On November 23, in a highly unusual critique of its own Embassy, the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs questioned the credibility of US reporting on the human rights crisis in Guatemala. The secret, “eyes only” (highly classified) memorandum was prompted by intelligence obtained from the US Embassy regarding a massacre of civilians and other violations committed in and around Choatalum, Chimaltenango in late 1982. Having sent several cables discounting the veracity of the reports, Embassy officials suddenly reversed themselves after speaking with several eyewitnesses and an unnamed trusted source who confirmed that the Army had been responsible for the violence. The Embassy’s contradictory accounts prompted the Bureau of Human Rights to review “most of the important cable traffic from Guatemala since March 23.” The Bureau’s analysis focused, in particular, on the sources of Embassy reporting and concluded that “Almost all of the Embassy early responses to charges of Army massacres were based primarily on asking the Army whether or not they were true.” Judging from the information reaching Washington, the State Department observed, “Our Embassy does not really know who is responsible for the killings in rural Guatemala.” Despite mounting evidence of the military’s involvement in violence, the memorandum concluded, the Embassy “has not reported in any cable a single instance that it believes was done by the Army.” (Document 12; emphasis in the original) By the end of the Ríos Montt regime, the Embassy was producing more critical assessments of the Army’s role in human rights violations under Ríos Montt’s leadership, in part under pressure from the State Department internally, and in part because of evidence the Embassy obtained of the military’s role in the assassination of a Guatemalan employed by the US Agency for International Development (AID). On August 8, 1983, General Oscar Mejía Víctores took power in a military coup. By that time the CIA was conceding in a wide-ranging assessment of the Ríos Montt regime that “The Army used extreme violence against guerrilla-controlled villages during last year’s counterinsurgency offensive.” (Document 15) * * * Just ten days after Ríos Montt’s conviction for genocide in 2013, the Guatemala Constitutional Court – under tremendous pressure from the country’s political right, retired military officers, and private sector – vacated the ruling for technical (not constitutional) reasons and ordered a new trial. Following repeated delays and appeals filed by Ríos Montt’s lawyers, the case was reopened in 2017. This time the trial would take place behind closed doors and without the presence of the press or public. Ríos Montt was said to be ill, even demented; he was wheeled to the proceedings on a stretcher from his detention under house arrest. On April 1st of this year, Efraín Ríos Montt died at 91 years of age, and the second genocide trial abruptly came to an end. Notes [1] After meeting Ríos Montt at a conference of regional heads of state in Honduras in late 1982, President Ronald Reagan said famously the Guatemalan leader was “totally dedicated to democracy,” calling him “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” See press release of December 4, 1982, preserved by The American Presidency Project. [2] UN Historical Clarification Commission. Memory of Silence. Chapter II, para. 1752-55 [3] In relation to the Ixil region of El Quiché alone, the CEH registered 32 massacres between March 1980 and November 1982, with 96 percent of victims of Maya Ixil origin. (Chapter II, para. 3274) [4] See Document 12, in which a State Department analysis of US reporting on the massacres observed, “We have not done very many such inspections. I was directly asked by [a US government colleague]… exactly how many on-site inspections Embassy Guatemala has carried out. I don’t know the answer, but suspect it might be embarrassing.” To see the Documents, please click HERE. (c) 2018 National Security Archive