Gregory Stanton, the chairman of Genocide Watch, sits down with Rudaw in April 2018 to discuss a warning issued by the Washington, D.C.-based organization regarding Kurds in all four parts. WASHINGTON, D.C. — Kurds in the Middle East are in "grave danger" and in the midst of genocide like the Anfal that culminated 30 years ago, according to an international watchdog. "Remembering and commemorating these past genocides is very important to understand the warning signs and to look out for the genocides that are coming. And that is exactly what is coming right now," Gregory Stanton, the founding chairman of the US-based Genocide Watch, said in an interview. April 14 marks the Anfal memorial day in the Kurdistan Region, when people remember 182,000 Kurds who were systematically rounded up and driven to southern Iraq and executed by Saddam Hussein's Baath regime. "In the Anfal, there was the chemical attack on Halabja. Well guess what happened just last week? A huge chemical attack in Syria. As they say in French, 'The more things change, the more things stay the same.' It looks like nobody has learned," said Stanton. The Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention sees Kurds on the brink of "extermination" in the Middle East. "We believe that is the next stage about to happen... It's already happened in small massacres — not small of course by the people who are affected — but massacres of several thousands of people" he said. Split between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, Stanton sees "very, very strong signs of the genocide beginning," pointing to Afrin and Cizre. "It wasn't just forced displacement because it included mass killing.” “Genocide is about power” Stanton says, “what you have are three ancient empires that are continuing to exist and try to re-assert their control ... the Ottoman Empire ... the Persian Empire ... and the Arab Empire. All of them consider the Kurds a dangerous threat to their full control. Imperialism always causes genocide" He expresses particular concern with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's emboldened rhetoric and forecasting of where he will go next, stating “We think the biggest dangers are coming from Turkey… we believe that the aim of the Turkish regime is to push all the way across into northern Iraq and to basically takeover all of those areas where Kurds control the territory," he said. The genocide expert began working on the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale in 1981. "The Turks are very much afraid of these people," he said, referring to Kurdish forces in control of Syria’s northern enclave and Peshmerga in the Kurdistan Region "Because they realize they are such good fighters and they will defend their territory..." he added. However, Stanton considers confederalism, as a better alternative to independence because it is less likely to be viewed as an existential threat. "The best thing right now for people in [Iraqi] Kurdistan and Rojava and other areas is not to declare independence. Instead say, 'We just want to control our own government, we want to control our own affairs.' In other words, autonomy should be the proper objective so you don't directly threaten these empires," he said. Still Western powers can play a role in assisting Kurdish bids for greater autonomy, according to Stanton. "A good example what happens if you do have a power like the United States willing to defend the autonomy of Kurdish people, Kurdistan, I believe, became one of the model areas of the whole Middle East with American protection. I believe we need to do the same thing right now with Rojava, with northern Iraq, in order to tell the Turks we aren't going to put up with this anymore. And we basically have to tell the Russians the same thing," argued Stanton. Genocide Watch issued a warning for Kurds being "at risk for a large-scale genocide" at the hands of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria earlier this month. "Currently the largest threat comes from Turkey," the reported summarized. Directors and advisors of the Washington-based organization include Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, a Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program director at Stockton University; Adama Dieng, a special advisor to the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide; and Samantha Power, a former US Ambassador to the United Nations. View Full Interview HERE (c) 2018 Rudaw http://www.rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/13042018

At first the silence is strange, then unnerving. An African village missing its people. Perhaps 2,000 men, woman and children, vanished. But as we walk down the steep, rutted track that leads off the main road we see why. House after house lies in blackened ruins. Roof beams turned to charcoal. Mud walls collapsed. Doors kicked in. The wide market square is deserted except for Bambu Desiree, his wife and baby son, who sit in a lonely corner next do a wrecked house. They’re the only family left. "When they came, they ran through the village with bows and arrows and machetes," says Bambu. Some set fire to the houses, others looted their contents. "One of our men was cooking, he didn’t get away in time," Bambu tells me. "They chopped him down and he died." Ethnic violence is nothing new in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the killing spree here is on a chilling scale. It is also just one of several bloody conflicts that suggests a nation falling apart. In Ituri Province, in the far north west, most of the atrocities are committed by the Lendu people against the Hemas. "They were our neighbours. They used the same market and prayed at the same church," says Ngaimoko Augustin. He was too old to run when the raiders came. So he hid and watched in horror as the carnage unfolded. "They had no pity for anyone. They went for everyone. Those who were strong got away. But most of those they caught were the women and children who could not run so fast." He says 83 died in his village. No one we talked to could explain why the violence is so extreme and why it has happened so suddenly. President Joseph Kabile, whose term in office officially expired in 2016, has been forced by international pressure to call elections for later this year. Some suspect the chaos might be used as a reason to delay them again. Meanwhile, as the state’s authority recedes, local warlords and foreign interests vie for power and influence. Whoever or whatever is to blame, there is a lot at stake. The green rolling hills of Ituri Province are rich in gold, though little of the wealth seems to find its way into local pockets. "It is a very successful extraction industry. All the money leaves the country straight away," says one official; a joke as sardonic as it is accurate. For now, hopes of peace lie with just 15,000 UN troops, tasked to police a country the size of western Europe on a budget that’s just been cut. We spent time with a small detachment of Bangladeshi soldiers, whose enthusiasm was not matched by their number. They have an area of almost 6,000 square kilometres to patrol. Add in appalling roads rendered even worse by the rainy season - when it can take an hour to travel a few miles - and you realise the difficulties. Yet the DRC government wants even this modest force gone by 2020. And it’s also threatened to boycott Friday’s conference in Geneva, when donors will be asked to stump up $1.7 billion (£1.2 billion) to meet the humanitarian crisis. That’s an ambitious target in a world distracted by crises in Syria and Yemen. But what is happening in the DRC is on just as vast and troubling a scale: 13m People in need of humanitarian help. 8m The number facing severe food insecurity. 4.5m The population forced from their homes. A few thousand find shelter in a densely crowded camp in the town of Bunia. Here, there are many survivors of shocking savagery. Grace is a young girl who saved her baby sister but watched her mother butchered. "They chopped her neck and she fell. She was pregnant. They cut open her belly. First they pulled out the baby and they killed her. I saw four other people die," she says. Her sister Rachel plays in the dirt. There’s a deep scar left by the machete on a head and face. Grace lost her left hand to the same blade. "I can’t say why they did this. They wanted money. We had none," she says. She managed to run. So many others have paid in in blood. © 2018 ITV News

April 4th, 2018 Severe beatings, electric shock treatment and forced starvation continue to be perpetrated against the LGBT+ community in Chechnya, a leading Russian NGO has said. At least 36 people have suffered “abusive treatment” in secret prisons over the past year according to the Russian LGBT Network, an NGO based in St Petersburg, which cited testimonies alleging the abuses were “directed by the highest officials of Chechnya”. “The victims were subjected to tortures, humiliations, and other measures that harm their physical and psychological well-being,” the group said. The claims are contained within a report prepared with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which in April of last year exposed the arrest, torture and murder of members of the Chechen LGBT+ community. The paper wrote that Chechen police had rounded up more than 100 gay men in a “prophylactic sweep”, killed three and subjected many to prison beatings and electro-shock torture. Kheda Saratova, an activist on the humans rights council of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, responded at the time: “I haven’t had a single request on this issue, but if I did, I wouldn’t even consider it.” “In our Chechen society, any person who respects our traditions and culture will hunt down this kind of person without any help from authorities,” she added. President Kadyrov’s press secretary Alvi Karimov also previously denied the existence of homosexuals in Chechnya. “This publication is a complete lie,” he said last year. “It is impossible to detain and oppress those who simply don’t exist in the Republic.” “If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them, because their relatives would send them to a place of no return.” But several testimonies in the updated report describe abuse by Chechen police and military personnel. “They threw me to the floor and beat me,” said a victim known as I.J. “They beat my chest and my face with their feet, and they hit my head against the floor. One of them said: ‘Do not beat him until the shock stage, at that point he will stop feeling pain. We don’t need that.’” Another victim known as E.F. described their car being raided by police who on finding bracelets and a leather bag said to them: “Are you a faggot? If you are, I’ll shoot you right here.” The LGBT Network said that it continues to document reports of detentions in Chechnya with authorities “visiting the houses of some previously detained survivors to learn if they stayed or left the region”. Many have fled the country over the past year to escape persecution according to the NGO. “The Network’s activists evacuated 119 people from the region and accommodated the survivors in shelters located in the central part of Russia,” it said. In an interview with HBO last year, President Ramzan Kadyrov denied any sort of crackdown: “This is gibberish. We don’t have such people. If there are any — take them to Canada. For the sake of Allah. Then, they would be far away from us.” © 2018 | The Independant

Newly arrived Rohingya wait for their turn to collect building material for their shelters distributed by aid agencies in Kutupalong refugee camp, Bangladesh. From Sept. 13, 2017. The Conservative opposition is calling on the government to use all political and diplomatic measures to hold those, including Myanmar’s government, responsible for the genocide of Rohingya people. Conservative MP David Sweet issued a statement Thursday in response to Bob Rae’s final report on the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Rae earlier this year as special envoy to the region. “Although the ongoing mistreatment of the Rohingya dates back decades, Mr. Rae’s work confirms that the Myanmar authorities are escalating the violence, something that’s been confirmed by the independent NGOs,” said Sweet in the statement. “It is time to finally take action. We call on the government to use all political and diplomatic tools available to them. The Liberals should make full use of the legislative powers we’ve given them to hold all those responsible, including within Myanmar’s civilian government, for the unacceptable persecution and genocide of the Rohingya people,” said Sweet. Rae said in his report that the lesson of history is that “genocide is not an event like a bolt of lighting, it is a process, one that starts with hate speech and the politics of exclusion, then moves to legal discrimination, then the policies of removal and then finally to a sustained drive to physical extermination.” The government and others often refer to the crisis as ethnic cleansing, because calling it a genocide would carry an international legal obligation to intervene, potentially with force. In Rae’s report released April 3, he said no Myanmar politician, including the country’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi, is above a potential investigation by the International Criminal Court of possible war crimes. Rae also suggested Canada consider granting refugee and resettlement status to Rohingya muslims. According to the United Nations, around 700,000 Rohingyas have fled to safety in Bangladesh. The report does not, however, address how to deal with Aung San Suu Kyi who is a Nobel Prize winner and an honorary Canadian citizen. Suu Kyi has faced a lot of criticism for not speaking out against the ethnic cleansing being committed against the Rohingyas. At a news conference the day he released his report, Rae said he wishes she would act. “Whoever is found responsible, whether in the civilian government or the military government, for what has happened should be held responsible. I don’t exclude anybody from that,” Rae said. Sweet reiterated much of what Rae reported – that the crisis is severe, Rohingyas are being tortured and forced from their homes. He criticized the report, though, for having lots of “lofty language” but little on steps of action to pressure theBurmese Military and government to end their actions against the Rohingya. “We clearly have seen and heard of the tragic suffering and injustice that the Rohingya people have endured for too long,” said Sweet. (c) 2018 iPolitics

Iran has transformed its embassy in Yemen into a military base, the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Thursday. Iran is being accused of training newly recruited Shiite fighters, known as Houthis, in their embassy in Yemen. Hani Mohammed / AP The ministry condemned the move saying that Iran’s interference had become the main source of instability in the Arab world’s poorest nation. “Iran has made its embassy into a military facility and training grounds for the rebel militias. Iranian military consultants hold meetings in the building with rebel groups,” said a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. According to local media reports, the embassy is being used as a weapons cache and meeting grounds for Iranian military training consultants. The internationally-recognised government of Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, supported by the Arab Coalition, issued a statement reminding Iran of Yemen's demand that Tehran end its diplomatic presence in the country. The United States condemned an attack by Houthi militias targeting an airport in the southwestern city of Abha on Wednesday. "The Houthis’ continued attacks on Saudi population centres calls into question their commitment to helping shape a peaceful, prosperous, and secure future for Yemen,” said Heather Nauert, the US Department of State Spokesperson. The missiles were fired just hours after President Donald Trump suggested the US would strike Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, whose forces are backed by Russia and Iran, over a suspected chemical weapons attack. Saudi forces were able to intercept the two drones launched by the Houthis. The rebels said the attack was directed at the Saudi defence ministry. The Department of State said the Houthi attacks on Saudi population centres were “fuelled by the Iranian regime’s dangerous proliferation of weapons and destabilising activities in the region.” “It’s hard to see the timing of the latest Houthi strike on Saudi Arabia as purely coincidental,” said Hani Sabra, founder of Advisory, a New York-based consultancy. The attack is probably an Iranian message to embarrass Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is wrapping up a foreign tour to world capitals and has repeatedly accused Iran of seeking to destabilise the kingdom, he said. (c) 2018 The National

Al Mukalla: Yemeni government troops continued to advance in the northern province of Saada, Al Houthis’ main bastion, as Yemen’s president discussed with the UN envoy ways of reviving of peace talks. Hadi told the UN envoy that his government is still keen on ending the war through talks, blaming Al Houthis for failing previous rounds peace talks and initiatives. Yemen’s Defence Ministry has said government troops, backed by the Saudi-led coalition airpower and military logistics, pushed into new areas in the district of Ketaf, northwest of Saada, killing at least 20 rebels and capturing several hills in the offensive that began on Saturday. Brigadier Diab Al Kebli, the commander of Brigade 143, said government forces laid siege to pockets of Iran-backed Al Houthi militants at Ketaf district’s centre from three directions, adding that his forces liberated Al Frae and Saker hills and captured five Al Houthis during the fierce fighting. Fighter jets from the Saudi-led coalition destroyed Al Houthi military reinforcement before reaching Ketaf battlefield, the Defence Ministry said in a statement on its official news site. Inspired by Al Houthis’ crumbling defences on main battlefields, government forces stepped up offensives in Saada, Hajja, Hodeida, Serwah, and Taiz. On Wednesday, Yemen’s army announced ousting Al Houthis from the Red Sea port city of Medi in the northern province of Hajja after months of fierce fighting. The victory in Medi comes as the Saudi-led coalition seeks to tighten the screws on arms supplies to Al Houthis, smuggled into the country through the Hodeida port by Iran, and reestablish maritime security in the internationally-travelled Red Sea. Yemeni government forces have recaptured vast swathes of the country’s coastline on the Red Sea and the strategic Bab Al Mandab since early last year and are now battling Al Houthis almost 80 km south of the city of Hodeida, the last major port city under their control. Meanwhile, in the southern province of Lahj, security authorities detained two Al Qaida operatives after a raid against their hideout in the province. One of the detainees fought along Al Qaida in Afghanistan. Dozens of Al Qaida and Daesh militants have been killed or detained since early 2016 when UAE-backed Yemeni security and military forces booted the militants from their strongholds in Lahj. In the Saudi capital, Yemen’s president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi met for the second time with the new UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths who is seeking to push for peace talks between different factions in Yemen. The state-run Saba news agency reported that Hadi told the UN envoy that his government had positively dealt with previous proposals and offered concessions during peace talks in Geneva and Kuwait. Griffiths has returned to the Saudi capital after meeting leaders of Southern Transitional Council and Ahmad Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of ousted president. (c) 2018 Gulf News

An air raid struck the set of a rebel TV series in Yemen on Thursday, killing at least two people, a security source and a rights activist said. A man is seen at the site of an air strike that destroyed the Community College in Saada, Yemen on Thursday. The strike on Marawiaa district in the western province of Hodeida came as a cast and crew were filming a Ramadan series for Houthi rebel-run Al-Masirah television, they said. The set was on a farm that had belonged to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a one-time rebel ally who was gunned down by the Houthis in December after their partnership collapsed. Multiple military vehicles, including two tanks, were on the property at the time of the attack, the sources told AFP. A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Houthis, seen by Riyadh as Iranian proxies, since 2015. The security source said Thursday's attack was one of a string of strikes in Hodeida province, which he attributed to Saudi-led forces. "We take this report seriously, it will be investigated," a coalition spokesman told AFP, saying it would be "inappropriate to comment further" while the probe is ongoing. The coalition had previously targeted Saleh's residence in Sanaa when the strongman was alive and allied with the Houthis. A Yemeni photographer at the site of Thursday's raids said the victims were the series' set designer and finance director. The Yemen war has created what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis. It has killed nearly 10,000 people since 2015, when the coalition joined the government's fight against the Houthis. While all sides in the war stand accused of failing to protect civilians, the Saudi-led coalition has drawn particularly harsh condemnation from international rights groups over civilian deaths. It was added to a UN blacklist last year for the killing and maiming of children. The Houthis have in recent months intensified missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, declaring this week that 2018 would be the "year of ballistics". (c) 2018 Gulf Times

Former army chief Paul Malong’s new group is just the latest in a proliferation of opposition factions When the third round of talks* aimed at revitalising the chances of peace in South Sudan gets underway in Addis Ababa on 26 April, the country’s influential former military chief wants to be at the table. Paul Malong’s announcement on Tuesday, 10 April, that he was launching a new opposition party added an extra element of uncertainty into the mix ahead of potentially pivotal talks aimed at restoring a permanent ceasefire and reviving a collapsed 2015 peace agreement. More than four million people, one third of the population, have fled their homes since South Sudan’s brutal war began in December 2013, creating the largest refugee crisis in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and parts of the country have plunged towards famine. Accused of human rights atrocities against civilians, Malong was sanctioned last year by the United States for obstructing peace talks, international peacekeeping efforts, and humanitarian missions. Malong’s group, the South Sudan-United Front, is one of as many as 14 opposition groups seeking to join the discussions in the Ethiopian capital on 26 April, many of which already see the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) process as discredited. Announcing the formation of his new group from exile in Kenya, Malong said he wanted to “arrest the carnage” of South Sudan’s ongoing war, stating that President Salva Kiir “has concentrated all his efforts, with the help of a small clique around him, to quite literally loot the coffers of our great nation to total bankruptcy.” After fighting erupted in her village in Upper Nile last year, Rose, 26, has fled to Aburoc, in the northeast of the country. Malong’s new grouping is being portrayed both as a political party and as a form of rebellion, but experts say any large-scale military ambitions he may harbour are likely in their infancy. “Malong has yet to show the capability to launch a potent rebellion,” explained Alan Boswell, conflict analyst and Sudan expert for Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based group focusing on armed violence. “The declaration of his rebel movement is a political move, not a military one. He is seeking to legitimise and protect his interests during the political process in Addis Ababa.” South Sudan’s war began after Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his former deputy Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer, of attempting a coup. Fighting has since killed more than 50,000 people, with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the SPLA-in-Opposition (SPLA-IO) the main parties to the conflict. A peace agreement was signed in August 2015, during Malong’s time as army chief, but the war has since splintered into myriad inter- and intra-communal conflicts, incorporating previously localised disputes over land, resources, and power. Observers say the dynamics change almost daily. Peace talks have continuously failed and the security situation is unpredictable at best in many parts of the country. The nation is largely divided along ethnic lines – especially since the creation of new states, now a total of 32 – and traditional front lines are changing into widespread guerrilla warfare, with numerous militias also involved in the fighting. Destruction is evident in Malakal, once South Sudan's second city but now largely deserted. More than 24,000 people now live in a UN protected camp on the outskirts of the town. What next? The IGAD-led peace process has proven difficult to resurrect. Opposition groups say IGAD partner states Uganda and Kenya (accused by the UN of fuelling the conflict by supplying weapons) are on Kiir’s side. Some are arguing for the African Union and the UN to take over. While some observers still back the IGAD process and think it’s important to give it the best chance possible, others see it is an outside intervention that has already failed and blame it for helping to further fragment the conflict. The mandate for Kiir’s transitional government is due to run out in July and a government spokesman warned on Friday, 6 April, that any foot-dragging during negotiations by the opposition could lead to fresh elections. The UN has warned that any attempt to hold elections before the country is in a more stable environment only risks deepening and extending the conflict. With time running out, achieving some progress in the next round of talks is paramount. But the omens for steps towards peace aren’t looking great. “It’s the national dialogue that will move this country forward,” First Vice President Taban Deng Gai said last month during a speech in Yambio. “It needs to happen in South Sudan; it can’t happen in Addis.” As the picture is muddied ahead of the peace talks in Addis Ababa, here’s a quick look at Malong’s new group and some of the other main protagonists: The South Sudan-United Front The jury may still be out on whether Malong’s primary intentions are political or military, but his new SS-UF group could become a major factor on the front line as the former army chief likely still enjoys considerable support in his hometown of Aweil and the surrounding Bhar-el-Ghazal region. The main opposition group, the SPLA-IO, is already actively encouraging Malong’s military ambitions. “His movement is a big threat to the government, because he will fight in areas that we have never reached, like the Bhar-el-Ghazal region,” SPLA-IO spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said, adding, “Malong will expose a lot in the peace negotiations, making it difficult for the government to handle the pressure.” Malong has announced his intention to join the talks in Addis Ababa, but it’s not yet clear if he will be permitted to participate in the negotiations. “Malong is a hardline defector from within Kiir’s Dinka power base,” explained Boswell. “The main threat he poses is from within Kiir’s coalition rather than from outside. If Malong is invited to join the peace process, then the government will protest and could use it as a pretext to roadblock the process.” Serving as governor of Northern Bhar-el-Ghazal between 2008 and 2014, Malong was made chief of the army in January 2014. In May 2017, he was sacked and placed under house arrest in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, until he fled while supposedly seeking medical treatment. He now lives exiled in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) South Sudan’s government-controlled army was founded in 1983 by ‘father of the nation’ John Garang. A collection of smaller militias such as the Mathiang Anyoor, which Malong was accused of controlling and which are accused of human rights atrocities, normally support the government. Sudan People’s Liberation Army-in-Opposition (SPLA-IO) Loyal to Machar, the SPLA-IO is the SPLA’s main opponent. It usually has the support of some smaller youth militias such as the White Army in Northern Jonglei. Government accusations that Machar and the SPLA-IO were planning a coup resulted in the start of the civil war on 15 December 2013. After new fighting erupted in the capital Juba in July 2016 and Machar fled the country, Taban Deng Gai was instated as the new first vice president. Some members of the SPLA-IO were loyal to Taban Deng and now still support Kiir’s government. This nominally opposition faction loyal to Taban Deng remains a separate entity from both the SPLA and the SPLA-IO in most parts of the country, but is pro-government. Most of the opposition forces across the country are an array of local, non-Dinka ethnic groups. The Shilluk Agwelek militia The Agwelek forces have fought both alongside the SPLA and the SPLA-IO (those loyal to Machar). Primarily focused on defending Shilluk land in South Sudan’s Upper Nile, the group is predominantly loyal to Johnson Olony, believed to side with the opposition. National Salvation Front (NAS) Most of the NAS rebels are from the country’s Equatoria region and were previously with the opposition loyal to Machar but later joined Thomas Cirillo Swaka, Kiir’s former deputy head of logistics who resigned in February 2017 and accused the president of turning South Sudan into a “tribal army”. Murle and Bul Nuer Communities These ethnic groups are currently pro-government. Other groups: Western Equatoria has several armed groups, some of which recently signed amnesty agreements with the government, such as the South Sudan People’s Patriotic Front and the South Sudan National Liberation Movement (SSNLM). Many of the child soldiers released in Yambio in February were previously captured by the SSNLM. Groups like the Gelweng (armed cattle keepers from Lakes State), the Mathiang Anyoor, and the White Army rely on local community structures. It is estimated that South Sudan has at least 40 different armed groups. New ones continue to emerge, particularly due to the conflict spreading to the Equatoria and Northern Upper Nile regions. * UPDATE - Peace monitors announced on the 18th April that the third round of talks had been suspended until further notice. (c) 2018 IRIN http://www.irinnews.org/analysis/2018/04/12/who-s-who-south-sudan-s-splintering-civil-war

Genocide Watch is pleased to welcome Dr. Jennifer Eve Rich as the new Executive Director for Education. Dr. Rich will work with Genocide Watch President, Dr. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, to bring Genocide Watch to teachers and to schools across the country and to organize and host workshops, conferences, and summits related to genocide prevention education. Jennifer Rich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Inclusive Education at Rowan University in New Jersey, where she also serves as the Director of Research and Education for Rowan Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Before her work at Rowan, she spent a decade as a New York City public school teacher. Her teaching experiences at Rowan have focused on social emotional learning, social justice and democratic education, and Holocaust and Genocide education and memory. Her scholarship focuses on best practices in Holocaust and Genocide education, and the memory of the Holocaust and other genocides inculture, education, and by the children and grandchildren of survivors of genocides. She has presented on these topics nationally and internationally. Dr. Rich’s research has been published in Holocaust Studies, and she has forthcoming articles in multiple scholarly journals, including Teacher’s College Record and The Social Studies. She recently had an op-ed published in The Washington Post about gun violence in schools, and will speak at The Atlantic Summit on Education later this spring. Dr. Rich’s current book project, Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Memory, focuses on the ways in which society remembers the Holocaust, and how and in what ways this remembering affects individuals, particularly the descendants of survivors, today. She argues that the transmission of memory shapes the ways in which the second and third generations live and work and, more broadly, the ways in which society remembers and memorializes the Holocaust. Through a series of interviews with the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, she explores topics that include intersecting professional and personal identities, the value of education, and how stories of survival become stories of either empowerment or trauma. She has also watched taped testimony of the survivors these children and grandchildren descend from in order to understand the context of the inherited memories. When considering these stories together, they form a compelling picture of the promises and pitfalls of memory, and point to implications for memory and commemoration in the coming generations. This research has rooted Dr. Rich in teaching complicated histories to students and teachers. In her work with these populations, she has found that they fall back on one standard version of history, and seem unwilling, or unable, to contextualize new information. It has become increasingly obvious to Dr. Rich that helping teachers grapple with their own understanding of history is critical. They, of course, need a stronger sense of multiple perspectives for themselves, but they also need to be able to teach differently in order to break the cycle of reinforcing a single narrative. For more information about Genocide Watch's educational programs, or to partner with us, please send us an email. (c) 2018 Genocide Watch

This past winter here in Vilnius, the charming capital of Lithuania, was much like any other. During long solid weeks of subzero temperatures, as the flow of tourists and roots-seekers slowed to a trickle, I adjusted the route of my daily walk to pass by up to a dozen top tourist sights. Day after day, there was one constant: The most popular, winter-defying “must-visit” for foreigners is “The Museum of Genocide Victims.” Perhaps there is something grotesquely sexy about “genocide.” Maybe the promise of (real) former KGB interrogation rooms and isolation chambers in the basement is less run-of-the-mill and more strikingly authentic than much usual museum fare. Estimates obtained from the museum’s administrators suggest about a million visitors total to date. Called “The Genocide Museum” for short, the city’s premier attraction is housed on the central boulevard in an elegant Russian imperial building completed in 1899 that was formerly used for the courthouse of the empire’s Vilna Province. The museum’s current headquarters are located in an annex dating to 1914-1915, just prior to World War I, which brought that empire tumbling down. Vilna would then change hands (depending how you count) around seven times through to 1920, when it came under the stable rule of the interwar Polish Republic, a rule that lasted until the Hitler-Stalin pact brought on Poland’s dismemberment in September of 1939. Then came little over a month of Soviet rule of the city (Sept.‒Oct. 1939), a little over a half-year of Lithuanian rule (Oct. 1939‒June 1940), a year of Soviet rule (June 1940‒June 1941) three years of Nazi rule (June 1941‒July 1944), 46 or 47 years of Soviet rule, and since 1990 or 1991, depending from when you prefer to reckon, the beginning of close to three decades of modern democratic Lithuanian sovereignty. Somewhere around the halfway mark of this modern period, in 2004, the country, along with a number of neighboring states that had been freed from Soviet yoke and became successful democracies with growing market economies, joined NATO and the European Union, cementing their firm and proud anchorage within the West. This particular building had a starkly macabre function during two of its signal incarnations. It was the German Nazi Gestapo headquarters, with its own interrogation rooms, prison cells, and death chambers. Then for decades, it was a Soviet NKVD/KGB central facility used to coordinate terrorization of the undesired part of the population, particularly dissidents and resistance figures, who were incarcerated, interrogated, and tortured in its cells and shot on its premises during the Stalin years and beyond. It is all the more eerie, painfully so, to have to say that this building now mars the pleasant Vilnius ambiance of the delightful, freewheeling city center in a raw, soul-destroying sort of way. Not because it tells the story of dark and brutal chapters of history. Those stories must be told. They are told in major museums in city centers around the world. Moreover, there is no country on the planet without major blots on its history. It is a sign of maturity when for example the United States has museums dedicated to the national crimes of slavery, horrors against Native Americans, and commemorative sites for many others who were victimized and mistreated. Though far from perfect, these efforts indicate an elementary sense of national honesty, in dealing with the past that is, whether we like or not, very much part of our present. The “reconciliation” part of this effort has a lot to do with tolerance for minorities who may not see the “mainstream” historical narrative or its foundational heroes quite the way the standard schoolbooks like to have it, but who are nevertheless patriots who serve their country just like everyone else. America got some small “echo of a taste” of all that last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. The proximate cause of discontent was the fate of a long-standing statue of Confederate States General Robert E. Lee. So let us try a little “thought experiment”: Imagine not a statue of General Lee in Charlottesville, but an elaborate state-sponsored museum in the nation’s capital, in which the Confederate forces are depicted as pure heroes of independence and freedom, fighting off the central government of tyranny, and African Americans turn up only occasionally as evil collaborators with the Northern tormenters who came to destroy their beloved civilization. An American constitutional scholar might well explain why such a counter-historical museum, founded on intellectually and academically filtered racial hatred, could well be legal on someone’s private property as their own private realm but must not occupy public space. In the hands of specialists, it can all be made to look rather convincing to the proverbial outsider from Mars. In Lithuania, the murder rate of around 96 percent of the Jewish population during the Holocaust was among the highest in Europe, which incidentally makes the bravery of those who did the right thing and rescued someone all the more inspirational. They were regarded as betraying their own nationalist cause. They are the people who should be honored throughout the land starting with a museum in the capital. In today’s incarnation of the Genocide Museum, a stone’s throw from the nation’s parliament, there are no longer individual human victims in the flesh. The victim here, in the 21st century, is the truth. The point of the museum is to persuade all comers that Soviet crimes were the genocide that took place in this part of the world and that those groups to which most of the museum’s space is dedicated to glorifying were indeed humanitarian lovers of truth, justice, and multi-ethnic tolerance. The sad truth is, however, that many of those honored were collaborators who participated in, or abetted, genocide. There lies the heart of the title “Museum of Lies,” which Holocaust survivors here (now mostly gone) would use over these last decades to describe the project. But there is one theme in this museum that is very honest, and necessary, and if it is one day disentangled from the Fake History components—and those components discarded—it would make a truly excellent Museum, namely a cabinet of KGB Crimes and Stalinist Horrors such as one finds in numerous other cities. These exhibits expose Soviet crimes against humanity, particularly in the Stalin period, including mass deportations, imprisonments and harsh punishments, including torture and barbaric murder, of supposed “enemies,” suppression of human freedoms including speech, religion, emigration and political beliefs, and, pervasive from morning to night for all those decades, a cruel forced occupation of one’s country by a larger empire with the resultant loss of freedom, identity and myriad basic human rights. If the ghosts of KGB tormentors still linger in those cellars, they can only be giggling that their own cruelty is presented as part of a twisted tale in which the legitimacy of anything and everything sinks into some murky postmodernist mush under the inane heading of Everything is Equal. The ‘LAF Rebellion’ The first major dynamic historical episode encountered in the Genocide Museum is a series of exhibits lavishly dedicated to the 1941 Lithuanian Activist Front (“LAF”) white-armbanded fascists whose “pre-Nazi invasion central planning” came from Berlin, and included a group of high-level Lithuanian Nazis, adherents of ethnic cleansing (to put it politely) stationed there in the months before the Nazi invasion of the then Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. But as the Soviet occupation collapsed in disarray on the day of the Nazi invasion, and especially the following day, Monday, June 23, 1941, many nationalist young men rapidly joined the “LAF” militias, often by donning a white armband and just “becoming LAFers” or joining related militias and gangs at will. With or without the armband, with or without documentary affiliation to the LAF, they have all come to be known as the “White Armbanders” in the local languages (Lithuanian Baltaraiščiai, Polish Białe opaski, Russian Bielorukavniki, Yiddish Di Váyse Órembendlakh, and so forth). Accompanied by a sham radio-address “declaration of independence” (that included the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler—woe to such “independence”), they took over post offices, police stations, and town halls vacated by the fleeing Soviet forces for several days before turning them over, unctuously and with sumptuous servitude, to the arriving Germans. The museum’s exhibits tell a very different story, which is not rooted in historical fact. A tall tale: that this was all a “rebellion” of the Lithuanian people against Soviet rule. That story is shameless nonsense. While the Soviets were in power, these White Armbander and LAF folks did not fire a single shot at any Soviet official or military installation. When the Soviets were fleeing for their lives from the Nazi invasion, the local militants fired at their backs and took over some freshly-vacated installations. (To be clear, the KGB and its affiliated organs did brutally murder many political prisoners and others in their last hours on the soil of the lands they had occupied in 1939 or 1940 all along the front of the arriving Nazi invasion forces.) Put simply, you cannot “rebel” against an authority that has collapsed because of someone else’s attack, the less so when the folks you are “rebelling” against are already fleeing. Nor do you have much moral authority when your main “activity” during those days was butchering your Jewish neighbors. In other words, there was no rebellion. And, it goes without saying that the Soviet army was fleeing Hitler’s invasion, Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in human history. As surely as water is wet, the Soviet Army was not fleeing the local Lithuanian White Armbander Jew-killers. For that is, alas, what the White Armbander “Lithuanian nationalists” were doing in the final week of June 1941. They initiated the first phase of the Lithuanian Holocaust, murdering Jewish civilians, particularly younger women and older rabbis, often in macabre city-center shows of “victory,” such as the teenage Jewish girl cut in half in the center of Šiauliai (in Yiddish: Shavl), or Rabbi Zalmen Osovsky’s head put in a shop window in Kaunas (Kóvne). The late Professor Dov Levin, historian of the Lithuanian Holocaust, documented 40 locations in Lithuania where the actual murdering began before the arrival of German forces. If we add violence causing serious injury, plunder of property, humiliation, degradation and dehumanizing treatment, it is hundreds of places, not 40. And if we add the places where many of the same murderers continued on under German administration, the kill rate grows exponentially. But this is not about numbers, though the numbers of Jews killed by the LAF-affiliated White Armbanders is in the thousands, with the biggest single concentration in Kaunas itself. Kaunas was the interwar de facto Lithuanian capital and center of the “rebellion.” (Vilna, prewar Wilno, in Yiddish forever Vílne, was still a largely Polish city at the time, and there were vastly fewer instances of pre-German lethal violence in the city and its area, that Stalin had “given” to Lithuania in October 1939 when it became Vilnius.) But what does the Genocide Museum’s exhibit tell us about these LAFers’ deeds? Not a word about their rampage of murder that unleashed phase one of the Holocaust in the country. Instead, the story told is illustrated by this key panel: This text (which like all, appears bilingually in Lithuanian and English) has caused such anguish to local Holocaust survivors and their families over the years that many found it too painful, or too enraging—or both—to even set foot in the place. Survivors are unanimously quick to point out, incidentally, that in addition to “occupying the just-vacated post offices and police stations,” murdering and humiliating Jewish neighbors, the LAF actually did “something else too.” On the roads crisscrossing the country, outside hundreds of towns, they created a ring of armed militants who prevented the flight of Jewish people who were attempting to flee eastward to Russia (the only hope for survival for a Jew in this part of the world—there were no American or British forces around). Fleeing Jews were sent back into the Nazi choke-hold until the Germans could arrive to “organize it all properly” (which took the form of organized mass shootings at around 230 major mass grave sites that dot the country today). Holocaust memoirs contain hundreds of eyewitness statements about the white-armbanders and their cohorts preventing Jews from escaping even when all their property was left behind for the taking. These then are the LAF white armbanders celebrated in this museum as “heroic rebels.” Needless to say, it is nowhere mentioned that the LAF masterminds in Berlin in the preceding months had published leaflets and entire works calling for the removal of Jewish citizens from Lithuania. These were no street thugs. They were educated people who knew their history. One infamous leaflet declares the charters of toleration issued by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Witold (Vytautas) in the 14th century to be “completely and finally revoked.” That Lithuanian leader’s charters of tolerance were a highpoint of European civilization in the middle ages, and he became known as “The Cyrus of Lithuania” to many generations of Litvaks, or Lithuanian Jews. I am proud in my home to follow a tradition of hundreds of years of Jews here of having a portrait of Witold near my front door. Before going any further, however, let us be very clear that the launch of the 1941 genocidal phase of the Holocaust by the White Armbanders, and by their fellow “partisans” in Latvia, Estonia, and western Ukraine, among other places, does not mean that any of these nations are “bad.” The guilty alone are responsible, and their supporters and enablers. All these nations had, as noted, inspirational rescuers who risked everything to save a neighbor in danger (the “Righteous Among the Nations”). All these nations have their storied poets, statesmen, military heroes, scientific geniuses, architects, artists, and much more. So why would anyone in the 21st century, much less anyone fortunate enough to be in the NATO and European Union area, choose to falsify the history of these first days of the Holocaust in order to turn Holocaust-initiating thugs into “national heroes” to be featured in museums as “rebels,” “partisans,” and “freedom fighters”? That question requires serious study, a task that has been shirked by many historians in these recent days of “The New Cold War.” But just scratch a historian, diplomat, or political PR person involved with such things in this part of the world and you’ll get an answer, one that is probably part of the answer. Ultranationalist elements, consumed with (understandable) resentment against the many crimes of the Russian and Soviet empires over the centuries, will go to any length to make heroes out of all anti-Soviet and anti-Russian manifestations in history, including Hitlerism and—to hell with the “detail” of the extermination of a national minority. The problem here is that virtually all of the many thousands of actual East European Holocaust murderers were “anti-Soviet.” If that makes them heroes, ipso facto, heaven help European civilization. During the genocidal phase of the Holocaust, from June 22, 1941 onward, the Soviets were of course in the Alliance with Great Britain and the United States, where they remained until war’s end. But there are also many subtly local aspects in play. For example, many ultranationalist historians in all three Baltic states are “ashamed” that their people barely fired a shot against the “peaceful” Soviet annexation of their countries in 1940, and a “revolt” in 1941 seems like a darned good idea for stitching up a patriotic narrative of “resistance.” Again, these nations all have grand patriotic histories, which in the Baltics includes the magnificent rise to independence of democratic states in 1918, and then again in 1991. ‘Double Genocide’ and ‘Holocaust Envy’ The post-Soviet East European nationalist decision to glorify Hitler collaborators is situated very near the conceptual core of the current set of Holocaust issues in Europe and beyond. The far-right jewel in the crown is the Genocide Museum in Vilnius. The other regional museums infected with the same virus are more in the dressed-up-for-export mode of “Double Genocide,” the theory that Nazi and Soviet crimes are in principle equal and that that equality must guide the study and application of European History. That theory has come to be, in effect, the 21st century respectable-in-high-society successor to the previous century’s classic Holocaust Denial. It came to its fullest expression in the 2008 Prague Declaration.(Disclosure: I was privileged, in 2012, to co-author, with Danny-Ben Moshe, the European parliamentary rejoinder known as the Seventy Years Declaration, signed by 70 European parliamentarians, including eight particularly courageous ones from Lithuania, all incidentally Social Democrats.) Unlike Vilnius’s Genocide Museum where Soviet crimes are presented in fact as The Genocide, the others follow the model of “equality” of the Prague Declaration, that insists on “equality” as the absolute principle of European history and the point of departure for all else. For example, the House of Terror Museum in Budapest, founded in 2002, features on its outside roof-corner display both the arrow cross (the local fascist wartime symbol) and the Soviet star side by side in an exposition of equality, echoed by two huge panels with the same symbols in the welcoming hallway (in case someone missed the message outside). The Museum of Occupationsin Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, founded in 2003, welcomes visitors with an elaborate piece of Double Genocide modern art, with the Soviet star and the swastika atop equal commanding pillars. Much older than both is Riga’s Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, founded in 1993, where recent revisions have taken harsh Western criticism into account, though the system of “red” (Soviet) and “brown” (Nazi) panels gives the immediate impression that the Soviet issue is the main one, as it is in space dedicated. But to be fair, this is called a museum of the Occupation, not of Genocide. The most recent addition to Eastern Europe’s macabre litany of “anti-Holocaust museums” (in the sense of negating the Holocaust’s place in history and consciousness) is the Lonsky Street Prison National Memorial Museum, founded in 2009 in Lviv (former Lvov, Lemberg, Yiddish Lémberik), which has prominently featured a photoshopped photograph of a woman looking for her murdered Ukrainian relatives in 1941 with the piles of Jewish corpses in the image covered over by circles indicating numbers of Ukrainian victims far and wide. That brings us back to the mother of East European genocide museums, the Museum of Genocide Victims right here in Vilnius. While its main message is much more extreme than its sister museums in Eastern Europe, there have for many years been hints of the compulsion for comparison that “must” lead to some sort of equality. The ascendant phenomenon called Holocaust Envy comes to the fore at the Genocide Museum in a large bilingual chart on the main floor, toward the rear of the corridor near the restrooms, in other words away from the actual major exhibit rooms. “For the foreign Jews,” as a former museum employee once quipped to me. For many years, until 2011, this was the only “oblique” and nameless reference to the Holocaust in the entire “Museum of Genocide Victims.” A lengthy analysis of this chart could be penned, a chart that contained the only mention of what happened to the Jews of Lithuania between the museum’s founding in 1992 and late 2011. For here a few salient points may suffice. First the use of the word “losses” to cover the Jewish victims of the campaign of genocide to murder every Jew in the country as well as an array of other categories of state crimes: “arrested, interrogated, imprisoned,” “deported,” “prisoners who died,” “died in deportation,” “partisans and their supporters killed,” for the Soviet side of the ledger; and then for the Nazi side: “imprisoned and deported to concentration camps,” “killed” and “deported to Germany for forced labor”. The penultimate category, “killed” has the addition in parenthesis: “including about 200,000 Jews,” which is not only “lost in the list” but comports exactly with what the eye first saw above, “Arrested, interrogated, imprisoned” with, lo and behold, also 200,000. This is all related to the inflation of the word genocide by the ultranationalist camp, which was boldly exposed by the late, lamented Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis. Such equivalencies are no quirks of some statistical modelling. They are part of two interrelated, and weird, phenomena that represent different stages of the Holocaust revisionism tendencies of Eastern Europe. First is in fact Double Genocide, the notion that the starting point for the subject is the universal acceptance of the Nazi and Soviet regimes’ brutality being “the same.” Second is a deeper feeling, just under the surface, that in some profound sense the Holocaust must be regarded as the lesser of the two phenomena. Since 1997, the Genocide Museum has been under the auspices of a state-financed institute with close ties to the highest echelons of power, called the “Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania” or, for short, “the Genocide Center.” For years its website carried a page on the “two genocides” that included this gem of Holocaust Envy: “One may cut off all four of a person’s limbs and he or she will still be alive, but it is enough to cut off the one and only head to send him or her to another dimension. The Jewish example clearly indicates that this is also true about genocide. Although an impressive percentage of the Jews were killed by the Nazis, their ethnic group survived, established its own extremely national state and continuously grew stronger.” For many years, one of its “chief specialists” was also a leader of the neo-Nazis in Lithuania. Recently, a bold Californian-born Lithuanian scholar who settled in his ancestral homeland years ago, Prof. Andrius Kulikauskas, has boldly taken on its leadership, which frequently defends the ethnic cleansing policies of various purported national heroes. Analogous points have been scored in visiting exhibitions. For some years it was this comparison in an exhibit on the Ukrainian famine, or Holodomor, which for years was the only word starting with h-o-l-o in a museum of genocide in Eastern Europe. The museum told its visitors that “When the Holodomor eyewitnesses, even those who survived the Nazi death camps, were asked what was more frightful—the famine or the war, they unanimously answered: [a number of quotes follow, including, under the image of an elderly woman, her quote]: In Auschwitz, “we were given some spinach and a little bread. War is terrible, but famine is even worse.” No mention of the fate suffered by the statistically overwhelming victims of Auschwitz or who they might have been. Such is the face of our new century’s Holocaust Denial: Talking the Holocaust out of history without denying a single death, or for that matter, fact, through rhetorical analogies and false comparisons. The ‘Forest Brothers’ A vast portion of the “Museum of Genocide Victims” is dedicated to “The Partisan War Between 1944 and 1953.” Popularly known as the “Forest Brothers,” these were the resistance fighters from the time of the defeat of Hitler’s forces in 1944 until around 1953, who opposed Soviet rule and carried out armed attacks. Not all of these fighters were recycled murderers of 1941 but a disputed number were. Most painfully, a number of their leaders are now extolled as national heroes for resisting the postwar Soviets, as if their involvement in the Holocaust is a minor, disregardable detail of history that must not spoil the heroic resistance party. The fearless Lithuanian ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas has published exposés using solid sources concerning the Holocaust participation of a number of the “heroes” extolled in the museum as martyrs for justice, freedom and democracy. Asking why his state’s authorities glorify murderers, Balčiūnas went on to publish a series of articles on individual heroes extolled in the Museum of Genocide Victims who were actually collaborators with the perpetrators of the genocide that actually occurred in the country. Among those that have appeared in English translation are his pieces on Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas, Juozas Barzda, Konstantinas Liuberskis–Žvainys, Vincas Kaulinis-Miškinis, Juozas Krikštaponis (Krištaponis), Jonas Noreika, Adolfas Ramanauskas Vanagas, Juozas Šibaila, Sergijus Staniškis Litas, and Jonas Žemaitis. One of the most notorious, an actual participant in the Holocaust, Jonas Noreika, has a stone block outside the building, on Vilnius’s main boulevard, dedicated to his memory. Instead of the medal he deserves, Evaldas Balčiūnas was hit with police visits to his place of work, summonses, and a series of nuisance court cases that finally, after a dozen 280-mile round trips from home, came to a not guilty verdict in July 2016. But the message was clear: The country is a democracy for 99 percent of topics but not for far-right choices on historical narratives related to the Holocaust, which are enforced by the power of the state. In 2011, the late Joe Melamed, longtime head of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, was visited by Interpol in his Tel Aviv office because some of the same names appeared in his 1999 book Crime and Punishment; the harassment of Melamed made it to the British Parliament. After questioning the postwar bonafides of one of these “heroes” a best-selling Lithuanian author known (and widely criticized) for her lurid sensationalism, Ruta Vanagaite, in late 2017 had her books banned by her own publisher, in an episode that reached the New Yorker. There is little doubt that the real reason for the ban was a 2016 book she coauthored with famed Nazi hunter Dr. Efraim Zuroff that revealed the extent of Holocaust participation by local forces. Until 2015, the museum’s large halls dedicated to glorification of the “Forest Brothers” also contained three blatantly anti-Semitic caricatures that appear in a section on the Brothers’ underground artwork and literature. One features a jeep driven by Lenin, Stalin, and “Yankelke the Jew,” a second shows a coarse caricature of a Jew behind Stalin blowing economic bubbles (along with a soap dish adorned by a Star of David should someone miss the point). The third depicts an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew serving as a Soviet torturer of Lithuanian patriots. These images all date from after the Holocaust (at right). In 2015, after numerous complaints, these three images disappeared from the exhibit on the Forest Brothers’ underground art. In reply to our question for this article on whether the removal was permanent, museum director Eugenijus Peikštenis said (in a written reply): “Exposition of the museum is constantly updated—one exhibit is replaced by another.” The best known free-thinking, critical book here on the Forest Brothers, one that is a great credit to Lithuania, Memorial Book for the Victims of Partisan Terror, edited by Povilas Masilionis, appeared in 2011. It comprises his introduction in three languages (Lithuanian, English, Russian) followed by a list of some 25,000 names of people, nearly all civilians, murdered by the Forest Brothers, who were notorious for killing fellow Lithuanian citizens they considered “collaborators” with the Soviets, including those who led or worked on collective farms and other Soviet enterprises (as if people had a choice about where to work under the autocratic and dictatorial Soviet rule). Masilionis concludes his forward to the book, aptly named “Victims of the Unbrotherly ‘Forest Brothers’ ” with the plea: “Books of memory should be published in every city and every region. Even a national Memory institution could be established to defend the rights of relatives of terror victims and to defend the memory of murdered unarmed civilians.” Before that, in 2009, Lithuauanian historian, Mindaugas Pocius published his academic monograph, The Far Side of the Moon, which reported “only” some 9,000 innocent civilians murdered by the Brothers (including 300 children). He too became a victim of nuisance prosecution, intended to defame and to deter others more than to find guilt with someone exercising their European Union right of freedom of expression. Last year, the mayor of Vilnius fired Dr. Darius Udrys, the American-born head of the capital’s “Go Vilnius” development agency, after he dared ask on his own Facebook page whether Lithuanians who worked for Soviet collective farms in the 1950s actually deserved to be summarily executed. The ultranationalist-controlled academic establishment at major universities plays its part too in stifling free debate, especially since a 2010 “Double Genocide” lawmade it a crime to disagree with the state model, one punishable by up to two years in prison. (Disclosure: That was the year I was myself discontinued as professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University after 11 blissful, incident-free years; I was told it was because I had published “false articles in three radical left-wing newspapers,” a reference to two 2009 articles in London’s Jewish Chronicle and Dublin’s Irish Times and the final straw, a 2010 piece in the Guardian.) Vilnius has a tiny, separate Holocaust museum, out of sight on a hill up a driveway, whose longtime fearless director, Rachel Kostanian, now retired, was repeatedly harassed for her determination to just tell the truth. On more than one occasion, the late Sir Martin Gilbert would truly play the part of the white knight who would step in to save her job. The saga became the source for much dark humor on all sides of the debate. Nobody has gone to prison, but freethinking, talented Lithuanian young historians continue to flee the country for studies abroad before even thinking about staying to face ruined careers. Thankfully, the Lithuanian people have vastly more common sense than the far-right elite that has usurped control of the country’s official historical narrative. In 2015, there was a proposal to rename a high school in the town Obeliai (known in Yiddish as Abel), in northeastern Lithuania, in honor of a Forest Brother leader whose memoir had recently been published. The school’s leaders did something very intelligent and quite simple. They organized a poll, by secret ballot. A majority of the town opposed the proposal. But the clique of ultra-nationalists controlling “state history” keeps going further in the other direction. Another alleged Holocaust collaborator who became a postwar Forest Brother leader, Jonas Žemaitis, was incredibly proclaimed to be the de-facto “fourth president of Lithuania” by the nation’s parliament in 2009. And, in December of 2017, the parliament declared 2018 to be the year honoring yet another alleged Nazi collaborator, Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas). Whenever a Holocaust-tainted militant is chosen for honors, it is a de-facto message of adulation for fascism and not-so-latent glee at the greater ethnic purity rendered by the Holocaust and its related events. Believe it or not, the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry (which squanders vast sums on history and Holocaust manipulation) had arranged to pay for a monument to Ramanauskas in the Connecticut town of New Britain (where Ramanauskas happened to be born, before his parents returned to Lithuania). The mayor’s office was rapidly persuaded. And why not—no mention was made of his Holocaust-era activity, only his postwar anti-Soviet activity. Here in Lithuania, the “American monument for Ramanauskas” was flaunted for months in the media in the triumphalist spirit of demonstrating how America now accepts the East European nationalist narrative of Holocaust history. Moreover, there is no (known) evidence Ramanauskas personally killed anyone during the Holocaust, though he boasted in his memoirs of leading one of those (Hitlerist, LAF-affiliated) groups of “partisans” in the first days of the Holocaust. Is that the kind of symbol of heroism the free world wants to bequeath to future generations? When our Vilnius-based web journal Defending History posted an appeal to the New Britain mayor in January 2018, after writing to her office, there was no immediate response. A lively internal debate then ensued within the New Britain city council. Several weeks ago, that debate ran into the single determined force of elected city alderman Aram Ayalon, a professor in the education department of Central Connecticut State University. He rapidly launched a petition and alerted local media. The New Britain Progressive published a report on 2 April. Last Friday, April 6, Justin Dorsey of the mayor’s office circulated an email confirming that “There will be no monument recognizing this individual.” The Progressive carried the news of the cancellation. This, while the walls of (and around) the Genocide Museum in Vilnius continued to be plastered up with posters celebrating the “2018 Year of Ramanauskas.” Now 2018 is a very special year for Lithuania. It is the 100th anniversary of the rise of the modern democratic state in 1918, special too for its remaining Jewish people, because that state was founded on the principle of cultural autonomy for minorities. It included even a Jewish Affairs ministry led by the famed Dr. Max Soloveitchik in its early years. Ramanauskas’s link to those events? He was born in 1918 (as were so many others). After deliberation with numerous colleagues in different fields here, our small dissident band at Defending History countered by naming as person of the year for 2018 Malvina Šokelytė Valeikienė, who was decorated by the Republic of Lithuania for her bravery in Lithuania’s 1918 war of independence, and then went on during the Holocaust a generation later to save a Jewish neighbor. The point we were making by doing this was honoring a true Lithuanian hero in honor of the country’s 100th anniversary celebration, and, of course, making a wider point: Lithuania, like all the countries of Eastern Europe, has many centuries of genuine heroes in whom all humanity can rightly take pride. Addition of a Holocaust Cubicle in the Basement Following a number of Holocaust-related scandals, not least the attempts by Lithuanian prosecutors to target Holocaust survivors for investigation of their activities in the Jewish partisans, which I reported on for Tablet back in 2010, the Genocide Museum announced with considerable PR gusto that one of the former prison cells in the basement would be turned into a Holocaust exhibit. It was opened with fanfare in 2011, in the atmosphere of a “major concession to the Jews.” Yes, you heard that right, the “concession” was that the Holocaust would finally merit one cubicle in the basement of the city’s Genocide Museum. Although a map of the basement still lists the same 18 exhibits as before, including cell no. 3 (= item no. 5 on the list, “marks on the wall made during the Nazi occupation”), it suddenly came to house a contemporary museum-tech exhibit on the Holocaust. There is an emblem of the yellow Star of David outside the door and when you look inside the new room, there is a huge Star of David on the far wall near the radiator. The problem with this one room addition is that it tells a very distorted story of the Lithuanian Holocaust. Worst of all, the perpetrators who unleashed the killing through much of the country before the Germans even arrived, the LAF and their associated killer groups, is obfuscated yet again. The Nazi puppet prime minister of the summer of 1941, Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) whose remains were repetriated in 2012 from another Connecticut town, Putnam, for reburial with full honors in Lithuania, is presented as obliquely “anti-Nazi” when in fact he personally signed Lithuanian versions of the Nazi orders for Jews from his own city, Kaunas, to be sent to a murder camp, the Seventh Fort, and another for all the remaining Jews to be locked up in a ghetto within one month. In other words, the added “Holocaust Room” repeats the same Fake History as in the main grand exhibit halls upstairs: covering up the murders by the LAF, and of the Provisional Government which followed it, at the start of the Lithuanian Holocaust, and sanitizing the perpetrators as some kind of freedom fighters. Much of the Holocaust room is dedicated to the Vilna Ghetto, where it is infinitely easier to downplay local collaboration and consider it all a German deed alone, with a few odd tantalizing references to the Jewish police and Judenrat as the supposed co-authors of the Holocaust in Vilna. While far from noble in many cases, there is no moral comparison of the tragic compulsion of Jewish police and Judenrats intermingled with false hopes of saving some, vs. the massive voluntary participation in the gleeful genocide of neighbors by those in positions of power. To cite the one and omit the other amounts to Fake History par excellence. But there is one major redeeming feature of the Holocaust cell in the basement: There is honor for those who did the right thing and saved a neighbor from the barbaric hands of the Nazis, and their LAF and other local collaborators and partners. They are the true Lithuanian heroes of WWII. They deserve an entire museum in their honor. In addition, there have been some other welcome modifications since 2011. Some Holocaust videos have been added to the repertoire on the monitors, and the outside plaque now duly notes that the building once housed the Gestapo. Chicanery, Context, Caveats The nonsense of Fake History museums rises to the level of dangerous chicanery only when it is all done so well that is can fool even journalists from famous Western publications. In recent years, naive souls writing for the New York Times (in 2015)and the San Francisco Examiner (2016) were successfully bamboozled, and the front desk where you pay to buy your ticket has stickers flaunting the approval of those publications for the farce of historical denialism inside. By contrast, a well-seasoned author from the London Guardian, writing back in 2008, immediately saw that something was wrong, and another, in 2010, analyzed the Double Genocide industry. The New York Times’s seasoned, Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Rod Nordland recently did some measure of penance for his publication by writing an extended, fair article after a chance visit brought him to this shocking museum, and to some other shocks of contemporary Vilnius. These include church steps made of readable Jewish gravestones that the church has refused to remove for years, and plans to house a new national conference center in the heart of the old Vilna Jewish cemetery (reported by Tablet in 2017). Today’s Putinist Russia does indeed pose a very real and serious threat to the small, freedom-loving nations on its periphery, most dangerously the three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were forcibly made into Soviet republics for all those decades, not left as Warsaw Pact “allied states” like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. The Western alliance, NATO, the European Union and Western civilization more generally need to stand up for these democracies against Putin’s (and future Russian) mischief, and make clear that the protections of NATO are real and permanent. But that loyalty must not include adopting a pro-fascist revision of history that turns Holocaust perpetrators into heroes simply because they were “against the Soviets.” Just about all East European Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators were “against the Soviets.” Adulation of Hitler’s accomplices is at odds with core Western values as is the legal crackdown, of all things, on dissident opinions about history. It is shameful that in 2017, to counter Putin’s disgraceful “Zapad 17” military exercises right near the borders of his small, free neighbor countries, NATO produced a film lionizing the Forest Brothers without so much as a hint of a second opinion that these were largely veterans of Hitlerist fascism and mostly murderers of civilians and believers in an ethnically pure state. In recent years, American embassies in this part of the world, particularly here in Vilnius, have misguidedly participated in events to deceive foreign (particularly Jewish) groups while participating themselves in the defamation of any who challenge Baltic history revisionism as “Putinist agents.” The noticeable shift in State Department policy can be traced to 2009-10. True friends of the Baltic states should be pointing out that such museums do grave damage to the country’s reputation and that those citizens who stand up with a contrary opinion should not be the victims of state-financed campaigns of defamation or prosecutorial investigations carried out to harass dissenters and deter free thought. The USSR, during the time of the Lithuanian Holocaust (1941-1944), in alliance with Great Britain and the United States, was the only force seriously fighting the Nazis and was largely responsible for there being any survivors and progeny alive today. History is history. Still, there is a very big caveat to all this. People reading such articles might think that Lithuania is an anti-Semitic country or a country with a majority of fascism-lovers who delight in the Holocaust having taken place. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have lived for almost 19 years here in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, where I have always felt welcome, well-treated, and blessed to have a wide and diverse circle of friends from an array of backgrounds. Here’s that extra bit of proof: I am treated very well by the fine staff whenever I enter this museum that makes my local Jewish friends sick. When I bump into its director at a weekly antiquarian flea market that we both frequent, we exchange warm handshakes and pleasantries. This is not personal. As in other parts of Eastern Europe, a small group of powerful elites, who have been able to enmesh Holocaust history into current geopolitical security, are the ones doing the damage to history, and to the freedom of their own citizens and the reputations of their own countries. History will show that the folks they are prosecuting under a series of laws are the real patriots. While there certainly is an anti-Semitic component in elite ultranationalist circles in this part of the world, it is neither pervasive nor necessarily dominant. There is moreover a special kind of East European anti-Semitism that is focused on an alleged Jewish Communist past, that despises today’s tiny remnant Jewish communities who have a different narrative of history (think Charlottesville), but that has generally very positive approaches to modern Western Jews and Israelis. There is a heavily subsidized effort to enmesh Judaic studies (and particularly its fragile components like Yiddish studies), and even Holocaust Studies per se, within the project to revise the narrative of the Holocaust and WWII. Future of the Museum If any one feature of this museum is just “too much,” it is its name. This past September, an announcement was made that national powers had decided to change the name to: “Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights.” Last month, the nation’s parliament took steps to enact the name change. As of now, the bill is one ballot short of adoption. But in a macabre sort of way the new name is worse. The inflation of the concept “genocide” to cover Soviet crimes in Lithuania (and to obfuscate the Holocaust) is lost. But what is gained? The misnaming, potentially in the museum’s very title, of the murderous unleashing of the Lithuanian Holocaust by the LAF Hitlerist fascists as a freedom fight! Is that what is supposed to count as an improvement? And so, without the name change, and even more so with the proposed name change, the shameful core of this museum is its permanent exhibit’s glorification, via fake history, of actual Holocaust killers who unleashed its first phase here in June 1941, turning them into would-be rebels and freedom fighters. That falsification needs to disappear before the next million visitors are misled. This is all a grave injustice to the delightful, hard-working, tolerant, and economically long-suffering citizens of the country, who all deserve better. Until that most foul of untruths about the Holocaust is done away with, this will remain the most dishonest and pernicious museum in the lands of NATO and the European Union. © 2018 | The Tablet

VISEGRAD, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- About a 5-minute drive from the center of this town in Bosnia and Herzegovina's northeast is the hotel Vilina Vlas, with a dark past from the Bosnian War (1992-1995) that the Serb-led Republika Srpska is trying to scrub from history. Surrounded by forest and hills, roughly 200 Bosniak women were imprisoned in Vilina Vlas by Serbian forces during the war, where they were repeatedly sexually assaulted and then murdered. Among Bosniaks, the hotel is known as a "rape camp." However, after the war ended, the building went back to being a hotel as the town came under the control of the Serb-led autonomous government of Republika Srpska. When visiting the hotel in mid-March this year, the outside of the hotel had been repainted, but otherwise the building was unchanged. According to an NGO, not even the frames of the beds where the rapes took place have been replaced. Visegrad itself is famous for the UNESCO World Heritage Site Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge, built when the town was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Many tourists now visit Visegrad to see it. The majority of the license plates of the cars parked in the Vilina Vlas lot bore numbers from the neighboring countries of Serbia and Montenegro. The hotel was 80 percent booked, and around 30 elderly visitors were enjoying the hotel pool filled with water from a nearby hot spring. Because of Visegrad's location by the Serbian border, it was the center of thorough "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbian army from the very start of the conflict. It is estimated that roughly 3,000 Bosniaks were killed there. Before the war, the town's population was over 60 percent Bosniak. Now, Bosniaks account for less than 10 percent of the population, and Serbians nearly 90 percent. Even though the war crimes committed at Vilina Vlas were recognized by a U.N. specialist committee, because the Serbian residents strongly reject the claim, a "memory" of Visegrad during the war completely different from the international community's has taken root throughout the town. "I have never heard of war crimes happening in Vilina Vlas," said 79-year-old Rajka Jovanovic. "I think this town had no problems during the war." Nanad Simic, a 35-year-old river sightseeing boat guide, insisted, "That hotel was used as hospital. I heard many Serbs soldiers who were wounded in the war were taken there and got treatment," and dismissed the U.N. report as "false information." Taking a ride on Simic's sightseeing boat, I wondered if the smiling tourists from Western Europe had any idea of what had happened here during the Bosnian War as they took commemorative photos. Simic expounded on the beauty of the famous bridge, not once mentioning anything of the conflict. When I requested comment from the Visegrad town government about war crimes, I did not receive a response. Meanwhile, Bosniak Amela Mectuseyac, 45, who was raped here by Serbian soldiers, has a different view of her home town. "When someone says Visegrad, I can only think of what happened during the '90s. What my life was like before that time, I just forgot," she said. Amela is still troubled by the difference in the "recollection" of what happened during the war between her and the Serbs. What should have been joyful recollections of her childhood home have been stolen by the violence of the war. "Whatever happened before, I just don't remember -- I don't recall anymore," lamented Amela. "Many beautiful things happened up until 1992, but when I think about Visegrad, I only think about 1992 and after." © 2018 | The Mainichi

(CNN) Seven members of Myanmar's military have been sentenced to 10-year prison terms with hard labor for killing 10 Rohingya men last year, the state-run newspaper Global Light of Myanmar reported on Wednesday. Detained Myanmar journalist Wa Lone, center, gives a thumbs up to reporters as he is escorted by police to a court for his ongoing trial in Yangon on April 11, 2018. The sentences follow an internal investigation carried out by the country's military, or Tatmadaw, which centered on Inn Din, a village in western Rakhine State, where the bodies of the 10 men were found buried in a mass grave in September 2017. In a separate development, two Reuters journalists detained while investigating the killings in Inn Din had bail applications denied Wednesday when a court in Yangon rejected a request to have a case against them dismissed. \ The journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, face a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison under the country's Official Secrets Act. A detailed report on a mass grave published in February by Reuters with the two journalists' bylines was the first time soldiers and paramilitary police have been implicated in violence against the Rohingya by testimony from security personnel themselves, Reuters said. The report quoted a retired Myanmar Army soldier who claimed he helped dig a mass grave for 10 Rohingya Muslims who were killed by Buddhist villagers and soldiers in Inn Dinn. In a statement, Reuters President and Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said his organization was "deeply disappointed with the court's decision." "Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were reporting on issues in Myanmar in an independent and impartial way. They have not violated any laws in the course of their newsgathering and were simply doing their jobs. We will continue to do all we can to secure their release," Adler said. The ruling was made on Wa Lone's birthday. Family and friends of the journalists gathered outside the courthouse for the ruling with a birthday cake. Pan Ei Mon, Wa Lone's wife, insisted her husband was innocent and tearfully begged authorities to release the reporters when speaking to media outside the court. Myanmar's military has vehemently denied any wrongdoing against civilians in the Rakhine State, claiming it has been conducting a battle against terrorists that attacked border outposts on August 25. All of the men involved in the killings in Inn Din were dismissed from the military and sentenced to 10 years hard labor for the killings, according to the Tatmadaw True News Information Team, which is quoted in the Global Light Of Myanmar. The report said four officers and three men of other ranks "were involved in killing 10 terrorists." Police officers and civilians also found guilty of taking part in the killings have yet to be sentenced, the report said, without giving further details. More than 670,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh since August 2017, bringing with them stories of murder, rape and destruction at the hands of the country's military. The UN and US has said the violence amounts to ethnic cleansing and the UN Special Envoy for human rights in Myanmar said it potentially bears the "hallmarks of genocide." On Monday, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said the court was seeking a ruling on whether the court has jurisdiction over the "alleged deportation of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh." Bangladesh is a member of the court, which is intended as the world's "court of last resort." Myanmar is not. (c) 2018 CNN