April 21, 2018 (KHARTOUM) - Over fifty human rights defenders form Sudan, United Kingdom and the United States have called on the African Union and United Nations to put the needed pressure on Khartoum government to end arbitrary detention and improve the deteriorating human rights and humanitarian situation in Sudan. In a letter addressed to the UN Secretary-General, African Union Commission, and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the signatories said the release of 50 political detainees on 10 April 2018 does not address the human rights crisis in the country, pointing that hundreds of detainees particularly from Darfur region are still jailed under harsh conditions. "We wish to express our deep concern about the frequent arbitrary arrest and detention of individuals for political reasons in Sudan as well as the selective and discriminatory treatment of political detainees, particularly those coming from the conflict-affected areas," reads the letter. "We are also deeply concerned about the extremely harsh conditions in Sudanese prisons, especially in detention facilities run by the security forces, where detainees are often subject to physical and mental torture and inhumane and degrading treatment, as well as being deprived of adequate food, medicines and other daily necessities," it further added. The letter pointed to over 160 rebel fighters arrested after a coordinated attack in North and East Darfur states in May 2017, 61 local leaders from the Maaliya tribe imprisoned since nine months ago. The Janjaweed leader, Musa Hilal and about 300 of his supporters arrested in mid-November 2017 and hundreds of IDPs and political activists from the IDP communities. The human rights and advocacy activists called to press the Sudanese government to "guarantee the safety, physical integrity and well-being of all persons" and "put an immediate end to the use of torture". They additionally called to try without delay the detainees and allow their lawyers to challenges the legality of their arrests and conditions of detention. Furthermore, they urged the need for a comprehensive reform to the security apparatus pointing that the government "should amend or repeal measures that allow security officials carte blanche to commit human rights violations" and to end the immunity provided to the army and security members if they committed human rights crimes and violations. Click here to read the full text of the letter (c) 2018 Sudan Tribune http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article65241

CANBERRA, Apr 25 2018 (IPS) - The lead-up to the Australia-ASEAN Summit in Sydney on 16-18 March 2018 was characterised by widespread and well-publicised protests in Sydney against human rights abuses occurring in several ASEAN member countries – namely Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. These protests dominated pre-summit media coverage and likely surprised some ASEAN leaders who might not have expected such a public outcry. In some instances, the protests were accompanied by quite negative commentary in Australian media. As Myanmar’s State Counsellor and de facto head of government, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi attended the Australia-ASEAN summit for Myanmar. This was her first official visit to Australia, although she had visited in late 2013 when she was a mere member of parliament, before her National League for Democracy (NLD) won a resounding victory in the November 2015 general elections. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was accorded the courtesy of a full state visit to Canberra. Yet throughout her visit, she faced constant criticism from the Australian public over her government’s handling of its Muslim minority group, the Rohingya. Australians are naturally dismayed by the disastrous humanitarian circumstances confronting the Rohingya, large numbers of whom had fled to Bangladesh after heavy-handed military operations against them by the Myanmar Army in August and September 2017. Both Australian government and non-government responses have led to additional humanitarian assistance flows from Australia to help relief efforts. So far, this assistance is mainly going to Rohingya who have fled to Bangladesh. This does not really get to the heart of the problem, which is ultimately for Myanmar to resolve. The Rohingya question was reportedly raised in confidential sessions of the Australia-ASEAN Summit but was not mentioned in any official media coverage. In fact, Myanmar’s policy on the Rohingya remains in stalemate. One important challenge for Suu Kyi is to demonstrate how her government would implement the policies she announced in her 19 September 2017 speech to the Myanmar nation. The world has yet to hear how her policies of inclusion and realising the peace dividend for all Myanmar’s people might be achieved in Rakhine State as a credible part of a compact involving the Rohingya. Even if tangible and satisfactory outcomes will take time to achieve, Suu Kyi needs to articulate how any truly relevant action plan might be seriously pursued. The people of Myanmar and international donors alike are keen to know that a way forward is worth pursuing. Any internal solution of the Rohingya issue in Myanmar will eventually need to address the vexed question of citizenship for the Rohingya. However, this seems to be more than Myanmar’s Buddhists can tolerate at the moment, obsessed as they are with any perceived threats to national sovereignty. Even Aung San Suu Kyi may not have sufficient authority on her own to forge a new national consensus in Myanmar that means treating Rohingya more fairly, and she is still apparently reluctant to entrust finding a way forward to the United Nations. But it is meaningless to hold her alone morally responsible or to single her out for not doing more when the Rohingya problem has been mismanaged by all concerned for so long. Whatever transpires, Myanmar will probably not be able to fashion a solution to its Rohingya problem without additional direct international assistance, but any Myanmar government response to the Rohingya problem will be constrained by growing public hostility in the country towards the Muslim population. There has been some press reporting that the Myanmar Government had decided to allow the United Nations access to the areas where the Rohingya were forced to leave, but UN access to Rakhine State is not confirmed. A UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission has been waiting for permission to enter Myanmar since late 2017 in order to investigate allegations of human rights abuses against the Rohingya. The issue of whether or not Australia should provide direct assistance to Myanmar will now need delicate consideration, free from any additional constraints from ASEAN. This is especially the case since achieving an ‘ASEAN consensus’ may not be feasible. Australia has a strategic interest in having the Rohingya problem resolved on an enduring basis, but Australia does not necessarily have the clout to do this on its own. It would require working more intensively to persuade all stakeholders to take the Annan Commission recommendations seriously, to establish a better and more transparent regional basis for cross-border migrant workers, and to ensure that those whose claims to refugee status can be verified are granted protection in countries like Australia, where Rohingya have proved to be excellent citizens. Trevor Wilson is a retired Australian diplomat who served as Australian Ambassador to Myanmar from 2000-03, and has been Visiting Fellow at The Australian National University since 2003. (c) 2018 Inter Press Service http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/04/myanmar-unlikely-resolve-rohingya-problem-without-international-help/

Bazaar in Erbil, 2010. Credit: Martijn Munneke The Kurdistan Region of Iraq defies easy categorisation and demonstrates various paradoxes. Since 2005, it has been officially recognised as an autonomous region in the Iraqi constitution; but in the aftermath of the 2017 referendum on independence, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) lost much of its autonomy, and furthermore its territory. KRG officials have pursued neoliberal policies of privatisation seeking to attract foreign investment; but the regional economy remains almost completely cash-based and largely isolated from globalised and digitalised financial flows. Finally, in the run-up to the referendum, there was much talk of defending Kurdish freedom with one’s own blood; but when the Iraqi army, backed by Shi’ite militias, marched on the disputed territories in Kirkuk, Ninewa, and Sinjar regions, Kurdish military forces, or Peshmerga, withdrew virtually without a fight. To the extent one can talk of the KRG as constituting a ‘state’ (or a ‘quasi-state,’ as it has also been called), it is indeed a paradoxical one. It is a ‘strong state’ in that it has a strong repressive and redistributive apparatus, and until recently had vast financial means at its disposal; but it is a ‘weak state’ in that it knows little institutionalisation, let alone international recognition. The region employs no military service or standing army: the Peshmerga forces are professional (and semi-private) militias mostly consisting of older men. Nor can one easily speak of a Kurdish ‘society’ as distinct both from the state and from the ruling parties. A solid majority of the work force is employed by the KRG, and hence directly dependent on those in power. They are no ‘bourgeoisie’ in the classical sense, however, since they have no clear role in any productive process and are entirely dependent on the ruling elites. Most civil society organisations are created, and dominated, by the political parties, rather than reflecting grassroots or bottom-up self-organisation. Local youth have grown up in a consumerist environment, in which employment and income were seen as entitlements. Even long-standing ideals of masculinity and femininity, like that of the heroic Peshmerga defending Kurdish freedom with his life, are starting to lose their appeal. Thus, it is as problematic to speak of a ‘society’ in Iraqi Kurdistan as it is to talk of a ‘state.’ Hence, the term ‘state-society relations’ may not the best analytical tool for understanding local dynamics, since few if any of the Kurdish parties appear to accept the legitimacy of the distinction or separation between the two. This unwillingness reflects one of the enduring features of the Kurdish political landscape: the Leninist desire for the party apparatus to pervade and dominate both the state apparatus and societal organisations. Next to this Leninist vanguardism, another enduring feature of the region is the Stalinist personality cult around the political leaders. Instead of distinguishing between social institutions presumed to be legitimate and relations of patronage assumed to be informal and unstable, one may instead focus on tactics or technologies of government, and on questions of self-legitimation rather than legitimacy. A primary governmental tactic, obviously, is patronage, which is pervasive and by now solidly entrenched in the region. Patronage involves the creation of dependency; hence, until recently, relatively few open protests could be seen against the KRG’s corruption, the failure to pay salaries and other forms of mismanagement. Most protests, in fact, were located in Sulaimaniyah area, where there is no clear one-party rule: not only is the KDP traditionally weaker here, but the PUK has also been weakened by the breaking away of Goran and by infighting among its different factions. A second governmental tactic is surveillance and repression. The elites of both governing parties have extensive security apparatuses at their disposal, which sometimes amount to virtual private militias, and which harshly attempt to suppress all actual or potential opposition. A third tactic is the control of information. Official TV channels broadcast a steady and uninterrupted flow of propaganda, for example, consistently repeating the narrative that the fiasco of the 2017 referendum was due to ‘treason’ rather than to the errors of the Kurdish leadership. The oppositional press risks heavy fines, or in a number of cases the intimidation, maltreatment or even assassination of opposition journalists. This is not to say, of course, that these tactics are always successful. At the time of writing, open protests against the KRG appear to be on the rise in the entire region. In March of 2018, there were open demonstrations against the KRG’s inability to pay salaries even in KDP heartlands, where until recently protests were almost unheard of. Most of these demonstrations were violently repressed; but it is doubtful how long those in power can maintain using the stick of their security forces to govern, now that they have largely lost the carrot of salary payments. (c) 2018 Middle East Centre Blog http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/04/20/state-society-relations-in-the-kurdistan-region-of-iraq-a-mythical-abstraction/

Famous Burmese dissident Dr. Maung Zarni speaks to Anadolu Agency on heartrending plight of Rohingya Muslims and what can be done to resolve it. Famous Burmese dissident Dr. Maung Zarni speaks to Anadolu Agency on heartrending plight of Rohingya Muslims and what can be done to resolve it, in Istanbul, Turkey on April 24, 2018. ( Selin Çalık Muhasiloviç - Anadolu Agency ) ISTANBUL In a rare exclusive interview, Myanmarese scholar and democracy advocate Dr. Maung Zarni spoke to Anadolu Agency on the ongoing humanitarian crisis involving Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence and persecution in the Rakhine state and Turkey’s important role specifically to help them return to the ‘Protected Homeland’. - ‘The Rohingya are misframed as a proxy for terrorists’ You are a Buddhist academic but you support the Rohingya Muslims. How did the genocide take place? Why do you oppose the genocide as a Buddhist? Well, I am not supporting Rohingya Muslims because they are Muslims. I am supporting that they are fellow humans from my country and they are oppressed not because they take up arms, not because they are trying to gain independence or separate from Burma, but because they are Rohingya and they are misframed as a threat to national security. As you know, they are misframed as a proxy for the terrorists in the Middle East. They are also seen and misperceived basically as local proxies for Bangladesh, if Bangladesh were ever to decide to take the Rohingya region. So, essentially the Rohingya are innocent and they have a small number of radical or young angry Rohingya who want to fight back because they do not have any option because they have lost everything. But, that does not justify what the Burmese military has been doing, which is essentially “genocide”. If I do not speak out and oppose, I would be less than a human being, because this kind of genocide can destroy our community and poses a threat to the territorial integrity of Burma. In the case of the Rohingya, we have been engaged in different ways of killings since 1978 when the Burmese military decided that this community must not be allowed to exist as Rohingya or their numbers must be reduced by terrorizing them so that they would run away to Bangladesh or other places. So, on the religious or philosophical ground, the killings must not be condoned, especially given that I know that the Burmese military destroys their livelihood, food systems, and restrict their access to farms where they can raise or harvest food crops like rice. If I do not speak out, then it is my responsibility, then I am complicit. In this kind of situation when you keep your mouth shut, you know that a large number of human beings are being slaughtered; then I am complicit. Similar to the situation in the Nazi Germany, when some decent and good Germans kept their mouth shut as they were afraid for their lives. But, there were also a very small number of Germans who said Nazism was bad for everybody, including the Germans. So, they opposed when a lot of people were executed by the SS, or the Hitler regime. In my case, I have been declared the top enemy of the state and a national threat. But, if you do not want your children to be raped and killed, you should not want any other people’s families to be hurt either. The Rohingya are not small in number. We are talking about 800.000 Rohingya who have run away from their lands. They are someone else’s wife, husband, brother, teacher... They are human beings like us. I personally know some of the people that rewrote the citizenship law against the Rohingya in 1982. I also know the top leader of the military that organized the genocide. As a researcher, I know. So, on these grounds, I have no choice but to oppose these inhumane acts. That’s why I am the first Buddhist who publicly says this is wrong. I named these acts as crimes as early as 2013 when everybody basically ridiculed me, saying that I was exaggerating because they did not see the large numbers of people being killed. The government has often restricted access to the northern Rakhine State for journalists and aid workers. What kind of restrictions have you experienced as an academic and activist? What kind of price have you paid? Has this price been worth paying? Firstly, let me tell you that I have been active for 30 years in different campaigns or movements to try to stop the military government in Burma and to introduce the principles of human rights, women’s rights, environmental protection etc. Rohingya is the latest issue that I want to do something about, to end the genocide. In the last 30 years, I haven’t suffered in the form of imprisonment, torture, or restrictions as I come from a privileged, urban, and educated family. But I do get some “treats” from time to time. When I was living in Brunei and teaching there, the Burmese Embassy tried to have me fired from the Brunei University because the Brunei government wanted to do business with the Burmese government. Brunei is a Muslim country but they are more interested in making money with the Buddhist government. So, unfortunately I resigned from my position under pressure because I had written a number of articles in support of the Rohingya Muslims. - ‘Kofi Annan Commission is a failure’ In September 2016, an advisory commission headed by Kofi Annan was established to sustain the peace and stop the massacre of the Rohingya Muslims. Do you think that this commission has been successful in its efforts? The Kofi Annan Commission is a huge international shield to protect the Burmese government because Kofi Annan is seen as a credible individual. I have never held Kofi Annan in any high regard particularly because Kofi Annan was the man on whose watch two genocides took place. The first genocide was that of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, who were slaughtered in 1995 when Kofi Annan was the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in New York. The second one was Rwanda. 800.000 people were slaughtered and Kofi Annan concealed the telegram that had come from the head of the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda to his office in New York. Additionally, Kofi Annan did nothing in South Sudan when the South Sudanese were being killed by the regime. Nonetheless, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the UN. His commission had two other foreign members; the former Dutch ambassador and the former Lebanese minister of culture. On this issue, their mandate was not to document the human rights abuses or decide whether a genocide is being committed in Burma. Their mandate was to look at the situation from our conflict-mediation perspective. His commission’s framework is fundamentally flawed because the nature of the Rohingya persecution is not a conflict; it is a genocide. Genocides are not conflicts. Genocide is essentially the destruction of an ethnic or religious or racial group of people by the political state that is controlled by the majority ethnic or religious group. In our case, the Buddhist majority that controls the arm forces and the Rakhine state wanted to get rid of all the Rohingya or a large number of Rohingya who happen to be Muslims from their own homeland. In ignoring the international criminal nature of the Burmese state and its policies and then taking a “conflict resolution” or “conflict management” approach, the Kofi Annan commission is deeply flawed conceptually. But even with that conceptual flaw, I would say that maybe some of the recommendations are worthy, like granting the Rohingya citizenships. The Kofi Annan Commission was never ever accepted by the Burmese military anyway. We have a situation in Burma, where the government is kind of hybrid; there is the military and the Aung San Suu Kyi government. They jointly run the country depending on the issues. On the Rohingya issue, the military never accepted Kofi Annan’s involvement, because he was widely seen within the military leadership as someone connected with the responsibility to promote an intervention, although our responsibility to protect has never been mentioned and used by the UN to stop the mass atrocities. So, his commission had absolutely no chance of succeeding from day one. The military attempted to derail his commission within the parliament by introducing a motion that would oppose Kofi Annan’s involvement. The military worked with the Rakhine nationalists to stage protests whenever Kofi Annan and his commission came to the Rakhine state. The military also encouraged the Rakhine people not to collaborate with Kofi Annan. So, this commission is a complete failure. - ‘Serious leadership from a powerful state like Turkey is needed’ According to a Turkish government statement, President Erdogan was the first to manage to get permission for humanitarian aid to enter Myanmar. The Burmese government had, at the peak of the violence, blocked all UN aid for the Rohingya. How does Turkey support the oppressed Rohingya? On the issue of Rohingya, Turkey has been extremely good. Turkey apparently highly prioritized the oppression of the Rohingya people. Turkey’s first lady (Emine Erdogan) visited Rohingya and Cox’s Bazaar and met with the Rohingya. Turkey has provided humanitarian aid by the help of TIKA, AFAD and other NGO’s of Turkey. I think the support that the Turkish leadership has shown towards Rohingya Muslims seems to be genuine and that is very commendable from a human rights perspective. I think there are two things Turkey can do: one is to increase the level of humanitarian assistance to Rohingya very significantly. There are about one million Rohingya in Bangladesh alone, 200,000 Rohingyas are in the IDP (internally displaced person) camps. The other is that Turkey can mobilize the political opinions among the governments within Muslim blocs, the 57-country OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), and Western blocs such as Canada, France, Germany and others with the purpose of holding high-level international conferences to discuss the future of the Rohingya people and what they need to rebuild their communities. They were expelled from the region where they were born and raised in. There is a 100-km stretch of land where the Rohingya people used to live. They were driven out violently, a massive number of the Rohingya were slaughtered and women raped. We are looking at the killing fields of the northern Arakan, a stretch of a hundred kilometers. Turkey and other governments around the world should mount a serious opposition against the Burmese government’s plan to turn the killing fields of northern Arakan to economic zones. Turkey’s leadership and role would be the most important contribution; Turkey can do more than feed the Rohingya and give them medicine. In reality, no one can keep feeding one million people forever. What the Rohingya need is essentially their homeland, where they can grow their own rice or they can set up little shops. Their area is also not landlocked. They can do cross-border trade. So, what is needed is serious leadership from a powerful state like Turkey. Western governments are not showing any commitment to address the issue. They keep framing this as a conflict but there is actually a genocide being committed by a state against a people who just want to simply live in peace in that country. That’s why Turkey needs to step in more to stop the hegemony of the Western governments on the Rohingya issue. (C) 2018 Anadolu Agency https://aa.com.tr/en/analysis-news/interview-committed-int-l-leadership-needed-for-rohingya-issue-/1126519

The plight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people is said to be the world's fastest growing refugee crisis. Risking death by sea or on foot, nearly 700,000 have fled the destruction of their homes and persecution in the northern Rakhine province of Myanmar (Burma) for neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017. The United Nations described the military offensive in Rakhine, which provoked the exodus, as a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing". Myanmar's military says it is fighting Rohingya militants and denies targeting civilians. Who are the Rohingya? The Rohingya, who numbered around one million in Myanmar at the start of 2017, are one of the many ethnic minorities in the country. Rohingya Muslims represent the largest percentage of Muslims in Myanmar, with the majority living in Rakhine state. They have their own language and culture and say they are descendants of Arab traders and other groups who have been in the region for generations. But the government of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, denies the Rohingya citizenship and even excluded them from the 2014 census, refusing to recognise them as a people. It sees them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Since the 1970s, Rohingya have migrated across the region in significant numbers. Estimates of their numbers are often much higher than official figures. In the last few years, before the latest crisis, thousands of Rohingya were making perilous journeys out of Myanmar to escape communal violence or alleged abuses by the security forces. Why are they fleeing? The latest exodus began on 25 August 2017 after Rohingya Arsa militants launched deadly attacks on more than 30 police posts. Rohingyas arriving in an area known as Cox's Bazaar - a district in Bangladesh - say they fled after troops, backed by local Buddhist mobs, responded by burning their villages and attacking and killing civilians. At least 6,700 Rohingya, including at least 730 children under the age of five, were killed in the month after the violence broke out, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Amnesty International says the Myanmar military also raped and abused Rohingya women and girls. The government, which puts the number of dead at 400, claims that "clearance operations" against the militants ended on 5 September, but BBC correspondents have seen evidence that they continued after that date. At least 288 villages were partially or totally destroyed by fire in northern Rakhine state after August 2017, according to analysis of satellite imagery by Human Rights Watch. The imagery shows many areas where Rohingya villages were reduced to smouldering rubble, while nearby ethnic Rakhine villages were left intact. Extent of destruction Human Rights Watch say most damage occurred in Maungdaw Township, between 25 August and 25 September 2017 - with many villages destroyed after 5 September, when Myanmar's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, said security force operations had ended. The UN says the Rohingya's situation is the "world's fastest growing refugee crisis". Before August, there were already around 307,500 Rohingya refugees living in camps, makeshift settlements and with host communities, according to the UNHCR. A further 687,000 are estimated to have arrived since August 2017. Most Rohingya refugees reaching Bangladesh - men, women and children with barely any belongings - have sought shelter in these areas, setting up camp wherever possible in the difficult terrain and with little access to aid, safe drinking water, food, shelter or healthcare. The largest refugee camp is Kutupalong but limited space means spontaneous settlements have sprung up in the surrounding countryside and nearby Balukhali as refugees keep arriving. While numbers in the Kutupalong refugee camp have reduced from a high of 22,241 to 13,900, the number living in makeshift or spontaneous settlements outside the camp has climbed from 99,495 to more than 604,000. Most other refugee sites have also continued to expanded - as of mid-April 2018, there were 781,000 refugees living in nine camps and settlements. There are also around 117, 000 people staying outside the camps in host communities. What is being done by the international community? The need for aid is overwhelming. With the monsoon season approaching, work has begun to re-locate some refugees from the camps most at risk of flooding or landslides and in other sites, work has been taking place to improve drainage channels and strengthen shelters. About 70% of the one million refugees are now receiving food aid, according to the Inter Sector Coordination Group report from mid-April 2018. Almost 100,000 people have been treated for malnutrition Large-scale vaccination programmes have been launched to try to minimise the risk of disease. By mid-January 2018, 315,000 children under 15 years of age had received a five-in-one vaccination, including cover for diptheria, tetanus and whooping cough. 47,639 temporary emergency latrines have been built Bangladesh military There has been widespread condemnation of the Myanmar government's actions but talk of sanctions has been more muted: The UN Security Council appealed to Myanmar to stop the violence but no sanctions have been imposed The UN's human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein has said an act of genocide against Rohingya Muslims by state forces in Myanmar cannot be ruled out The US urged Myanmar's troops to "respect the rule of law, stop the violence and end the displacement of civilians from all communities" China says the international community "should support the efforts of Myanmar in safeguarding the stability of its national development" Bangladesh plans to build more shelters in the Cox's Bazaar area but also wants to limit their travel to allocated areas Myanmar urged displaced people to find refuge in temporary camps set up in Rakhine state. In November Bangladesh signed a deal with Myanmar to return hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees, but few details have been released The UK has pledged £59m in aid to support those fleeing to Bangladesh. UK Prime Minister Theresa May also said the military action in Rakhine had to stop. The UK has suspended training courses for the Myanmar military. Copyright © 2018 BBC

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism. “History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes “I Was Hitler’s Pilot,” “I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur,” “I Was Hitler’s Doctor,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Hitler Was My Friend,” “He Was My Chief,” and “Hitler Is No Fool.” Books have been written about Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design (“Hitler at Home”). Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to “Mein Kampf.”) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler’s negative mystique. Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind. Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it. The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler’s extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar. Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an “opportunist entirely without principle.” German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject. In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany had followed a “special path” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a “cumulative radicalization” of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a “weak dictator,” ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester’s 1968 book, “The Arms of Krupp,” ends with a lurid image of “the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.” The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror. Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book “The Peculiarities of German History,” questioned the “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans. Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between “strong” and “weak” images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of “working towards the Führer”: when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler’s leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them. People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke. Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them. From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.” The claims of “Mein Kampf” notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.” The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler’s soldier years in the 2010 book “Hitler’s First War,” has now written “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it “provided a raison d’être for his existence.” As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be. The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had “broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a ‘just peace.’ ” The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric. The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.” Having noticed Hitler’s gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers’ Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.” Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view. To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.” The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.” Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title. On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does. What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple,” he wrote. The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric. Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away. The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs. The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter. As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified. The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand. America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism. American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards. When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.” These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—the British production “Hitler in Color.” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control. The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting. (c) 2018 The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler

The Myanmar state can and must be held accountable for the genocide being perpetrated against the Rohingya, a point lost in largely illusory efforts to pursue international criminal trials of individuals. Open Global Rights April 24, 2019 Also available in: Français | Rohingya Photo: Tansim News Agency/Seyyed Mahmoud Hosseini The plight of the Rohingya of Myanmar is an existential question. Indeed, they are enduring an on-going genocide. After decades of persecution and a deliberate campaign of terror, violence, killings and rape waged against them, today perhaps only 15% of the original population of Rohingya remain in Rakhine State. Some 750,000 have fled the country since August 2017, most to squalid conditions in Bangladesh. A third of those remaining in Myanmar (some 140,000 human beings) are confined to concentration camps while the fate of many others is precarious at best. All credible and independent sources who have investigated the situation have concluded there exists ample evidence for the charge of genocide, including a UN fact-finding commission, UN rapporteurs, and many NGOs. Such a charge inevitably demands individual criminal accountability, and indeed several reports have named the military commanders that ought to be brought to justice along with complicit civilian leaders. Yet, the demand for international criminal trials far in the future is obscuring and detracting attention from other actions demanded of UN Member States in the face of a credible charge of genocide. “Accountability” mustn’t be limited to trials of individuals. The Myanmar state itself can and must be held to account. To focus only on individual criminal accountability misunderstands the basic nature of genocide. The Genocide Convention is above all a matter of state obligations, where breaches engage state responsibility. This is distinct from individual responsibility (which entails punishment of culpable, individual human beings). It is crucial to realise that the state is a uniquely powerful actor. Under international law, it is endowed with sovereign powers of policy- and law-making. Genocide is, by its character, not just a composite of disparate individual acts—although individuals can commit certain genocidal acts. The point is that some acts cannot be committed by individuals. For example, no individual confers or withdraws citizenship—which is a prerogative of the state alone. The continued denial of citizenship to the Rohingya, alongside the blatant discrimination and violence they suffer, is clearly evidence of the systematic persecution that sustains the charge of genocide, and it shows the state’s intent. Further, the Tatmadaw are the Armed Forces of the Union of Myanmar, possessing specific state authority and equipped with enormous public means. The Tatmadaw is not a gang, nor a militia. They are not distinct from the state, but are the effective instrument of control (the monopoly of lawful force) by and within the state. Thus, coordinated actions, by command, are the responsibility of the state and not just of the Generals named in various investigations. To be precise, in August 2017 the mass rapes across hundreds of villages and different districts, occurring at the exact same time, were not just the sum of individual sexual assaults by disparate, coincidental decisions of individual soldiers. Those thousands of acts were and remain under license of the Myanmar state—which grants both authority and impunity—and the aim of those rapes (simultaneously, brutally, also to forcibly impregnate) is intended by the state to destroy the Rohingya as a group, at least in part. That is the very definition of genocide. The Myanmar state has commissioned these acts—which would not otherwise be possible in scale—and which continue today. A number of states have already expressed the view that genocide has occurred. There are now 150 States Parties to the Genocide Convention—three-quarters of the world, including Burma/Myanmar. Article IX of the Genocide Convention prescribes the recourse in obligatory language: in case of a dispute the matter “shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice” [ICJ]. It would be reasonable and desirable for several states—a broadly representative group—to act together to bring a case against Myanmar at the ICJ. Cases under the Genocide Convention have been brought to the ICJ and the obligation to prevent genocide has been adjudicated. An action before the ICJ would be hugely impactful both politically and legally. Politically, it would constitute an immediate forum for open and comprehensive consideration of the ongoing genocide. Initiation of the action would alone generate reputational risk, thereby causing concern for foreign investors and affect ‘business as usual’ given the prospect of a binding judgment and orders including potentially huge reparations. Prosecutions of some ‘bad apples’ can be easily ignored by investors, but laws and practices of the state possibly judged unlawful (and ordered remedied) have far-reaching consequences. Not surprisingly, therefore, ICJ judgments are generally respected. The benefits of such an action would be immediate, notably the possibility to seek from the Court Provisional Measures. Myanmar would be obligated to respond, with its failure to respond constituting a further breach with further consequences. A case would also serve to expose before the world Myanmar’s formal position, to be scrutinized according to law. In terms of reparations, the Rohingya have rights to return home, to restitution of their property and to compensation for other injuries. These can follow an ICJ action. They do not follow from prosecutions of individuals (at the ICC or elsewhere) which, at best—many years hence, if ever—might result in the incarceration of some individuals, long out of power. Judging from recent, disappointing ICC decisions, even this thin possibility holds a fair chance of failing. In sum, the ICJ is an immediately available, easily accessible, highly appropriate and powerful recourse. We need to stop prevaricating, stop ignoring the overwhelming facts, and simply apply the existing law. This is not only an existential matter for the Rohingya—which should be reason enough to act. It is also, perhaps, an existential matter for the international rule of law and for the core value of universal human rights. We cannot be unsure about this or hesitate to act in the face of this genocide. https://www.openglobalrights.org/genocide-is-an-act-of-state-and-demands-a-response-by-other-states/?lang=English

Corten steel monuments with the names and dates of lynching victims are inscribed on them as they hang from the roof structure at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a somber, hilltop pergola of rusted steel overlooking the city that saw the birth of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement, is one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation. When it opens on Thursday, this ambitious project will force America to confront not only its wretched history of lynching and racial terror, but an ongoing legacy of fear and trauma that stretches unbroken from the days of slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. As clearsighted, uncompromising and architecturally effective as any American design since Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the memorial sits in a mostly blighted neighborhood, overlooking the city where Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955. It is symbolically placed on high ground about a mile from the hill that hosts both the state capitol building and an abundance of Confederate statues, including an ornamental column celebrating Alabama’s Civil War dead as “the knightliest of the knightly race.” Even more remarkable, this memorial, comprising more than 800 coffin-shaped boxes of oxidized steel hanging from a square canopy, was built on a budget of only $15 million, in an age when major national memorials tend to cost $100 million and up. The memorial is the project of Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit legal and civil rights group that represents poor defendants, including juvenile offenders and death-row inmates. Stevenson, a 1995 winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, set up the EJI more than two decades ago to focus on death-penalty cases. In recent years, he has expanded its role to include research into the criminal justice system and the history of lynching. In 2015, the group issued a comprehensive report on lynching that added some 700 new cases to the tally of how many African Americans lost their lives to extralegal and mob violence between 1877 and 1950. That work led to Stevenson’s desire to memorialize the victims, and to do it in the American South, where the vast majority of these killings took place — often in public spectacles announced and celebrated by the local media. “The question I used to get,” says Stevenson, “was why don’t you do this in Washington, D.C.? And I just really believe it is important for Americans to make the journey, take the trip, and get proximate to the part of this country where this legacy was most intensely felt.” Designed by Stevenson and his colleagues at EJI in collaboration with the Boston-based MASS Design Group, the memorial doesn’t break new formal ground and is clearly inspired by other monuments. Stevenson is deeply conversant in the recent history of memorial architecture, citing the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington among his inspirations. The design shows signs of all these precedents, from its first impression at a distance, in which it resembles the colonnade of the Lincoln Memorial. Upon closer approach, most of these Corten steel “monuments,” which seem at first to be columns, are revealed as suspended forms. Once inside the memorial, visitors descend through four long corridors, arranged at right angles, and the monuments begin to form what looks like an ominous carillon of silent bells suspended over head. The descent into this space explicitly recalls the experience of Peter Eisenman’s sunken concrete jungle near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, in which the outside world disappears, replaced by a disorienting landscape of unyielding, funereal boxlike forms. Despite these precedents, the memorial reconfigures old elements in a distinctly new way, and avoids both the slick and generic symbolism and the Hollywood bathos of many recent American memorials. Stevenson said he wanted to avoid any sense of false narrative uplift. The memorial had to focus on the impact and legacy of lynching, which often involved amputations, mutilation, torture and castration. “The people who carried out this violence could have just shot people and buried them in the ground, but they didn’t want it to be a secret, they didn’t want it hidden, they didn’t want it obscured by dirt and dust,” he says. “They actually lifted up the bodies because they wanted to terrorize. They wanted the entire community to see it.” And so they photographed the lynchings, made postcards from the images, and distributed flesh torn from the body as souvenirs. The memorial is located a few blocks from the EJI’s small but powerful new museum, which explains lynching as a direct legacy of slavery, a way of enforcing white supremacy and a de facto extension of the slave system after its legal abolition. Exhibits explore a consistent history of violence and control over African Americans: If lynching was a way of sustaining the exploitation of slavery, mass incarceration continues to extend the trauma of lynching with devastating damage to black families and communities. Two key design elements in the memorial focus on this history. While the memorial is national in scope and ambition, itr esolutely focuses on American counties, insisting on local culpability while other memorials speak vaguely of national guilt or crime. Each suspended steel monument represents one of the hundreds of American counties in which lynching took place, and is inscribed with as many of the known names of the victims from that locality. A duplicate steel monument for each county is laid out horizontally, as if in a vast, open-air morgue, outside the memorial structure. Stevenson’s concept for the memorial includes the hope that individual counties will claim these duplicate steel boxes, and display them in some way in public places across the country. Counties that refuse to collect their “monument” will be shamed by the presence of the unclaimed coffin form on the grounds of the national memorial. The memorial also focuses resolutely on the body, which is often hidden or elided in contemporary memorials. The steel monument forms are roughly human-sized, and while their layout looks strictly rectilinear at first, they actually have a slight spiral form in places, which is more organic than geometric. Gritty and realistic sculptures without a trace of idealization — of enslaved Africans, and the women who were at the forefront of the bus boycott — are placed throughout the memorial grounds. And the words of Toni Morrison, from her novel “Beloved,” form the last inscription as visitors leave the hilltop memorial structure: “They do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.” If the focus on counties forces visitors to confront responsibility for racial terrorism in an often painfully local way, the focus on the body brings home the sexualized nature of the spectacle, which was ritualistically sadistic and often justified as punishment for men falsely accused of rape or sexual contact with white women. And it will make tangible for many people an important discourse about the black body — the way in which white supremacy obsesses about and tries to control black bodies — that is common in academic and civil rights circles, but less known among the general public, which encounters it mainly in the persistent denigration of the physical appearance of African American celebrities and political figures, such as Michelle Obama. Soil samples from lynching sites across the country. On some samples the jars are marked with Unknown if the names of the victim were not known. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) So this is also a smarter and more intellectually ambitious memorial than many others, which too often deal in the platitudes of memory and healing. How did it happen? And why did it happen here? Although this is a national memorial in every way that matters, it isn’t technically a “national memorial” administered by the federal government. Stevenson and his team used private funds and worked outside the complex and often faulty process of design and oversight that bedevils many major federal projects. They chose the site, bought the land and selected their collaborators, including the artists Hank Willis Thomas, Dana King and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo. They worked within a civic tradition that helped invent the localized, do-it-yourself ethos of the civil rights movement, in which ordinary people improvised networks and strategies to enact powerful symbolic demonstrations of resistance. Stevenson’s long exposure to the inequities and cruelty of the criminal justice system also has made him quietly and intellectually uncompromising. More than anything else, he decided from the beginning not to let anyone off easy when it came to telling this story. This memorial, which suspends above its visitors an oppressive and heavy weight of history, asks and answers a question that others avoid: Was it as bad as this? It was, and worse.

A Yemeni stands in front of a graffiti protesting US military operations in war-affected Yemen, in Sana'a, Yemen. According to reports, US Special Forces troops allegedly disembarked from US helicopters in the Yemeni town of Yakla and attacked several houses belonging to members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, killing three high-ranking Al-Qaeda members and nine civilians, six women and three children. One American serviceman has been killed and three injured in the attack. At least 20 people including the bride were killed when an air strike by the Saudi-led coalition hit a wedding party in northern Yemen, health officials have said. The dead were mostly women and children gathered in a tent set up for the wedding in the Bani Qayis district, according to Khaled al-Nadhri, the leading health official in the north-western Hajjah province. Hospital chief Mohammed al-Sawmali said the groom and 45 other wounded people were brought to the local al-Jomhouri hospital. Thirty of those injured were reported to be children, with some in critical condition having suffered severed limbs and shrapnel wounds. Footage that emerged from the scene of the airstrike showed scattered body parts and a young boy in a green shirt hugging a man’s lifeless body, screaming and crying. Health ministry spokesman Abdel-Hakim al-Kahlan said ambulances were initially unable to reach the site of the bombing for fear of subsequent airstrikes as the jets continued to fly overhead after the initial strike on Sunday. “We take this report very seriously and it will be fully investigated as all reports of this nature are,” a spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said. Al-Masirah, the TV station of the armed Houthi movement which controls the area and much of northern Yemen, claimed on its Twitter account that 33 people had been killed and 55 wounded. More than 10,000 civilians have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in three years of war in Yemen. The civil war broke out after the government of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi was pushed out of the capital, Sana’a, by the Houthis in March 2015. It led to a military intervention by the Saudis and others. Some 22 milllion people, or 80 per cent of the population, are in need of humanitarian aid, the UN has said. UN officials have accused the Saudi Arabia-led coalition of war crimes and of being responsible for most of the killings. Air strikes have hit weddings, busy markets, hospitals, and schools. For its part, the coalition has blamed Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and said they have used civilians as human shields. Earlier this month the UK approved a £170m aid package for several million Yemenis at risk of starvation. In November last year Theresa May’s government was criticised for allowing arms deals with Saudi Arabia worth billions of pounds. (c) 2018 The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/yemen-airstrike-wedding-party-killed-injured-bani-qayis-saudi-coalition-latest-updates-a8317826.html

Britain and the EU are under fire for engaging with a nation with one of the world’s worst human rights records – all in the name of stemming migration Relatives shout outside Kober prison after the release of opposition activists who had been arrested following peaceful protests against government austerity measures. Photograph: Ebrahim Hamid/AFP/Getty Images When Amjed Farid was transferred to a small cell in Kober prison on 5 April, he had a sense of deja vu. “I suddenly realised it was the same one I’d been in five years before,” he says. “It brought back some unpleasant memories. I spent a month in solitary, and had hoped I’d never have to see the place again.” Farid was one of hundreds imprisoned in Sudan in January following peaceful protests against government austerity measures. While some were released after a few weeks, dozens were detained for nearly three months without charge, including British citizen Sidqi Kaballo. Many were kept in a bitterly cold security centre in Khartoum notorious for interrogations and torture, dubbed “the Hotel” by officials. “We’re going in circles,” says Farid, 36, who co-founded two of the main activist groups, Sudan Change Now and Girifna. “In fact, we’re going backwards. The regime knows the international community will turn a blind eye to these violations because they now rely on its valuable services in the region, such as tackling migration. It has complete impunity.” Politicians, activists, diplomats and NGOs have all voiced concerns about moves by both the UK and EU to normalise relations with Sudan in order to stem migration flows. Sudan is a key transit country for African migrants, and in 2016 was the fifth biggest source of refugees globally. “A young and diverse civil society in Sudan is raising its voice for change and defining the country’s future, but the UK and EU are instead focusing on engaging with a government committed to oppressing it,” says Lord Alton, secretary of the all-party parliamentary group for Sudan and South Sudan. In February 2017, the group released a report questioning the approach of Westminster and Brussels. The shift in policy from stick to carrot is designed to tackle the “root causes” of migration through a relationship of mutual trust, according to the foreign office and EU. But critics fear the main motivation is to stop refugees reaching Europe, and such engagement emboldens the Sudanese government, which has one of the worst human rights records in the world. Activists and journalists are routinely harassed, and newspapers shut down. Its president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged genocide in Darfur. “History teaches us that doing deals with the devil always unravel,” says Mukesh Kapila, former UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. “We’ve seen this again and again. We need to engage with civil society, not get into bed with al-Bashir.” The Strategic Dialogue, launched by the UK in 2016, comprises ongoing bilateral talks on issues such as migration, trade, counter-terrorism, the peace process and human rights. The EU’s Khartoum Process – in which the UK has a leading role – began in November 2014 and focuses on “improving human rights” and tackling the “root causes of instability, irregular migration and forced displacement” from the Horn of Africa. The EU has so far given €183m (£160m) to Sudan through partner organisations. An EU spokesperson said: “Engagement does not mean that we agree on everything. Having a dialogue provides us with an avenue where we can voice our concerns. Respect for human rights and the establishment of sustainable peace have been and remain our priorities.” In May 2016, Der Spiegel and German TV station ARD obtained classified documents revealing the EU’s main migration policy in Sudan was border protection, including providing training and surveillance equipment. While the EU stresses that no money, support or equipment has gone to Sudanese officials, and all projects are “closely scrutinised”, concerns remain about lack of transparency and oversight. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), known for their brutality, have already claimed credit for policing Sudan’s borders on the EU’s behalf. Few have faith that the Sudanese government has any intention of defeating trafficking rings due to its well documented complicity in such operations. “The security apparatus is directly benefiting from the EU’s migration fund,” says Ahmed Hussain Adam, a prominent lawyer and negotiator in Darfur peace talks. “This is no secret in Sudan. The EU’s collaboration is based on al-Bashir’s good faith and lacks scrutiny of the regime’s track records.” Activists point out that human rights have deteriorated since the process started, including two waves of mass arrests, and the detention and torture of British journalist Phil Cox in December 2016. Government militia groups reportedly killed at least 23 Darfuri civilians in March, while hundreds of political prisoners, including visually impaired clergyman Sheikh Matar Younis Ali Hussein, remain in prison. Without tackling the key drivers of migration, such as conflict, rights workers say, people will continue to flee. “People are leaving because of Sudan’s abusive and genocidal models of governance,” says Maddy Crowther, co-executive director of Waging Peace. “You cannot rely on building walls to discourage them.” The foreign office highlights the UK’s legacy of aid and human rights work in Sudan, which included £60m of development funds in 2017-18. An FCO spokesperson said: “Human rights are a key priority in the UK’s engagement with Sudan. The Strategic Dialogue has proved to be an effective means of discussing our concerns with senior members of the government.” Abdelbagi Jibril, executive director of the Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre, believes “intelligent yet aggressive” engagement could be effective, but warns the UK and EU to be on their guard. “The Sudanese regime are masters of deception. Negotiators must remain vigilant and place a very high bar on their demands.” (c) 2018 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/apr/24/uk-blind-spot-sudan-human-rights-abuses

Annual Commemorative Statement Fails to Properly Characterize Armenian Genocide. WASHINGTON, DC – Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Executive Director Aram Hamparian issued this response to President Donald Trump’s failure to lead an honest American remembrance of the Armenian Genocide in his commemorative statement issued earlier today. President Trump’s ‘Turkey First’ approach tightens Erdogan’s grip over U.S. policy on the genocide of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christians. In his annual April 24th statement, the President once again enforced Ankara’s gag-rule against honest American condemnation and commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. In outsourcing U.S. leadership on genocide prevention to Erdogan – who openly undermines U.S. interests, attacks U.S. allies, threatens U.S. troops, imprisons American clergy, and even orders the beating of American citizens – President Trump is emboldening a foreign dictator who revels in the public spectacle of having bullied successive American presidents into silence on Turkey’s still unpunished murder of millions Christians. Sadly, by caving in to Turkish pressure, President Trump is isolating America, which today stands alone as Ankara’s last genocide-denial lifeline. Forty-eight of our U.S. states have recognized the Armenian Genocide, as have a dozen of our NATO allies – including France and Germany, the European Union, and, of course, Pope Francis. We will press ahead with our work to end U.S. complicity in Ankara’s obstruction of justice, in order to put in place a U.S. policy that actively pressures Ankara to abandon its denials, reckon with its responsibilities, and engage directly with Armenian stakeholders toward a truthful, just, and comprehensive international resolution of this crime against humanity. The President’s full statement is provided below. Background: Last week, one hundred and two U.S. Representatives – including the Chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees – called on President Donald Trump to reject Turkey’s gag-rule by honestly and accurately commemorating the Armenian Genocide this April 24th. The letter to President Trump, led by Congressional Armenian Caucus Co-Chairs Frank Pallone (D-NJ), David Trott (R-MI), Jackie Speier (D-CA) and David Valadao (R-CA) as well as Vice-Chairs Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) explained that: “The Armenian Genocide continues to stand as an important reminder that crimes against humanity must not go without recognition and condemnation. Through recognition of the Armenian Genocide we pay tribute to the perseverance and determination of those who survived, as well as to the Americans of Armenian descent who continue to strengthen our country to this day. […] By commemorating the Armenian Genocide, we renew our commitment to prevent future atrocities.” They closed by asking that the President: “appropriately mark April 24th as a day of American remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.” A copy of the letter is available here. The U.S. first recognized the Armenian Genocide in 1951 through a filing which was included in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Report titled: “Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The specific reference to the Armenian Genocide appears on page 25 of the ICJ Report: “The Genocide Convention resulted from the inhuman and barbarous practices which prevailed in certain countries prior to and during World War II, when entire religious, racial and national minority groups were threatened with and subjected to deliberate extermination. The practice of genocide has occurred throughout human history. The Roman persecution of the Christians, the Turkish massacres of Armenians, the extermination of millions of Jews and Poles by the Nazis are outstanding examples of the crime of genocide.” President Ronald Reagan reaffirmed the Armenian Genocide in 1981. The U.S. House of Representatives adopted legislation on the Armenian Genocide in 1975, 1984 and 1996. Forty eight U.S. states have recognized the Armenian Genocide through resolution or proclamation. ##### Statement by the President on Armenian Remembrance Day 2018 Issued on: April 24, 2018 Today we commemorate the Meds Yeghern, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century, when one and a half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. We recall the horrific events of 1915 and grieve for the lives lost and the many who suffered. We also take this moment to recognize the courage of those individuals who sought to end the violence, and those who contributed to aiding survivors and rebuilding communities, including the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, who sought to end the violence and later raised funds through the Near East Relief to help the Armenian people. We note with deep respect the resilience of the Armenian people, so many of whom built new lives in the United States and have made countless contributions to our country. As we honor the memory of those who suffered, we also reflect on our commitment to ensure that such atrocities are not repeated. We underscore the importance of acknowledging and reckoning with painful elements of the past as a necessary step towards creating a more tolerant future. On this solemn day, we stand with the Armenian people throughout the world in honoring the memory of those lost and commit to work together to build a better future. (C) 2018 Armenian National Committee of America https://anca.org/press-release/president-trump-tightens-turkeys-grip-over-u-s-policy-on-armenian-genocide/

Undocumented immigrants arrested last year by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. The European Union has made the country a nerve center for an effort to counter human smuggling, but many migration advocates say the moral cost is high. Credit Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters ABU JAMAL, Sudan — At Sudan’s eastern border, Lt. Samih Omar led two patrol cars slowly over the rutted desert, past a cow’s carcass, before halting on the unmarked 2,000-mile route that thousands of East Africans follow each year in trying to reach the Mediterranean, and then onward to Europe. His patrols along this border with Eritrea are helping Sudan crack down on one of the busiest passages on the European migration trail. Yet Lieutenant Omar is no simple border agent. He works for Sudan’s feared secret police, whose leaders are accused of war crimes — and, more recently, whose officers have been accused of torturing migrants. Indirectly, he is also working for the interests of the European Union. “Sometimes,” Lieutenant Omar said, “I feel this is Europe’s southern border.” Three years ago, when a historic tide of migrants poured into Europe, many leaders there reacted with open arms and high-minded idealism. But with the migration crisis having fueled angry populism and political upheaval across the Continent, the European Union is quietly getting its hands dirty, stanching the human flow, in part, by outsourcing border management to countries with dubious human rights records. In practical terms, the approach is working: The number of migrants arriving in Europe has more than halved since 2016. But many migration advocates say the moral cost is high. To shut off the sea route to Greece, the European Union is paying billions of euros to a Turkish government that is dismantling its democracy. In Libya, Italy is accused of bribing some of the same militiamen who have long profited from the European smuggling trade — many of whom are also accused of war crimes. In Sudan, crossed by migrants trying to reach Libya, the relationship is more opaque but rooted in mutual need: The Europeans want closed borders and the Sudanese want to end years of isolation from the West. Europe continues to enforce an arms embargo against Sudan, and many Sudanese leaders are international pariahs, accused of committing war crimes during a civil war in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. Mohamed Atta Abbas al-Moula, center left, Sudan’s security chief, in Khartoum last year. The Sudanese officers who patrol the borders have been accused of torturing migrants. Credit Ashraf Shazly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images But the relationship is unmistakably deepening. A recent dialogue, named the Khartoum Process (in honor of Sudan’s capital) has become a platform for at least 20 international migration conferences between European Union officials and their counterparts from several African countries, including Sudan. The European Union has also agreed that Khartoum will act as a nerve center for countersmuggling collaboration. While no European money has been given directly to any Sudanese government body, the bloc has funneled 106 million euros — or about $131 million — into the country through independent charities and aid agencies, mainly for food, health and sanitation programs for migrants, and for training programs for local officials. “While we engage on some areas for the sake of the Sudanese people, we still have a sanction regime in place,” said Catherine Ray, a spokeswoman for the European Union, referring to an embargo on arms and related material. “We are not encouraging Sudan to curb migration, but to manage migration in a safe and dignified way,” Ms. Ray added. Ahmed Salim, the director of one of the nongovernmental groups that receives European funding, said the bloc was motivated by both self-interest and a desire to improve the situation in Sudan. “They don’t want migrants to cross the Mediterranean to Europe,” said Mr. Salim, who heads the European and African Center for Research, Training and Development. But, he said, the money his organization receives means better services for asylum seekers in Sudan. “You have to admit that the European countries want to do something to protect migrants here,” he said. Critics argue the evolving relationship means that European leaders are implicitly reliant on — and complicit in the reputational rehabilitation of — a Sudanese security apparatus whose leaders have been accused by the United Nations of committing war crimes in Darfur. Gen. Awad Elneil Dhia, head of Sudan’s immigration police, says the country is an effective partner for Europe. Credit Patrick Kingsley/The New York Times “There is no direct money exchanging hands,” said Suliman Baldo, the author of a research paper about Europe’s migration partnership with Sudan. “But the E.U. basically legitimizes an abusive force.” On the border near Abu Jamal, Lieutenant Omar and several members of his patrol are from the wing of the Sudanese security forces headed by Salah Abdallah Gosh, one of several Sudanese officials accused of orchestrating attacks on civilians in Darfur. Elsewhere, the border is protected by the Rapid Support Forces, a division of the Sudanese military that was formed from the janjaweed militias who led attacks on civilians in the Darfur conflict. The focus of the group, known as R.S.F., is not counter-smuggling — but roughly a quarter of the people-smugglers caught in January and February this year on the Eritrean border were apprehended by the R.S.F., Lieutenant Omar said. European officials have direct contact only with the Sudanese immigration police, and not with the R.S.F., or the security forces that Lieutenant Omar works for, known as N.I.S.S. But their operations are not that far removed. The planned countertrafficking coordination center in Khartoum — staffed jointly by police officers from Sudan and several European countries, including Britain, France and Italy — will partly rely on information sourced by N.I.S.S., according to the head of the immigration police department, Gen. Awad Elneil Dhia. The regular police also get occasional support from the R.S.F. on countertrafficking operations in border areas, General Dhia said. “They have their presence there and they can help,” General Dhia said. “The police is not everywhere, and we cannot cover everywhere.” Yet the Sudanese police are operating in one unexpected place: Europe. In a bid to deter future migrants, at least three European countries — Belgium, France and Italy — have allowed in Sudanese police officers to hasten the deportation of Sudanese asylum seekers, General Dhia said. Nominally, their official role is simply to identify their citizens. But the officers have been allowed to interrogate some deportation candidates without being monitored by European officials with the language skills to understand what was being said. Sudan’s border with Eritrea is one of the busiest passages on the European migration trail. Credit Patrick Kingsley/The New York Times More than 50 Sudanese seeking asylum in Europe have been deported in the past 18 months from Belgium, France and Italy; The New York Times interviewed seven of them on a recent visit to Sudan. Four said they had been tortured on their return to Sudan — allegations denied by General Dhia. One man was a Darfuri political dissident deported in late 2017 from France to Khartoum, where he said he was detained on arrival by N.I.S.S. agents. Over the next 10 days, he said he was given electric shocks, punched and beaten with metal pipes. At one point the dissident, who asked that his name be withheld for his safety, lost consciousness and had to be taken to the hospital. He was later released on a form of parole. The dissident said that, before his deportation from France, Sudanese police officers had threatened him as French officers stood nearby. “I said to the French police: ‘They are going to kill us,’” he said. “But they didn’t understand.” European officials argue that establishing Khartoum as a base for collaboration on fighting human smuggling can only improve the Sudanese security forces. The Regional Operational Center in Khartoum, set to open this year, will enable delegates from several European and African countries to share intelligence and coordinate operations against smugglers across North Africa. But potential pitfalls are evident from past collaborations. In 2016, the British and Italian police, crediting a joint operation with their Sudanese counterparts, announced the arrest of “one of the world’s most wanted people smugglers.” They said he was an Eritrean called Medhanie Yehdego Mered, who had been captured in Sudan and extradited to Italy. The case is now privately acknowledged by Western diplomats to have been one of mistaken identity. The prisoner turned out to be Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, an Eritrean refugee with the same first name as the actual smuggler. Mr. Mered remains at large. Even General Dhia now admits that Sudan extradited the wrong man — albeit one who, he says, admitted while in Sudanese custody to involvement in smuggling. “There were two people, actually — two people with the same name,” General Dhia said. Mr. Berhe nevertheless remains on trial in Italy, accused of being Mr. Mered — and of being a smuggler. Beyond that, the Sudanese security services have long been accused of profiting from the smuggling trade. Following European pressure, the Sudanese Parliament adopted a raft of anti-smuggling legislation in 2014, and the rules have since led to the prosecution of some officials over alleged involvement in the smuggling business. But according to four smugglers whom I interviewed clandestinely during my trip to Sudan, the security services remain closely involved in the trade, with both N.I.S.S and R.S.F. officials receiving part of the smuggling profits on most trips to southern Libya. The head of the R.S.F., Brig. Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, has claimed in the past that his forces play a major role in impeding the route to Libya. But each smuggler — interviewed separately — said that the R.S.F. was often the main organizer of the trips, often supplying camouflaged vehicles to ferry migrants through the desert. After being handed over to Libyan militias in Kufra and Sabha, in southern Libya, many migrants are then systematically tortured and held for ransom — money that is later shared with the R.S.F., each smuggler said. Rights activists have previously accused Sudanese officials of complicity in trafficking. In a 2014 report, Human Rights Watch said that senior Sudanese police officials had colluded in the smuggling of Eritreans. A British journalist captured by the R.S.F. in Darfur in 2016 said that he had been told by his captors that they were involved in smuggling people to Libya. “I asked specifically about how it works,” said the journalist, Phil Cox, a freelance filmmaker for Channel 4. “And they said we make sure the routes are open, and we talk with whoever’s commanding the next area.” General Dhia said that the problem did not extend beyond a few bad apples. Sudan, he said, remains an effective partner for Europe in the battle against irregular migration. “We are not,” he said, “very far from your standards.” Zeinab Mohammed Salih contributed reporting from Khartoum. (c) 2018 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/world/africa/migration-european-union-sudan.html