As the death toll from a four-day assault on Eastern Ghouta rose above 200 last week, the UN Security Council met behind closed doors on Thursday, 8 February to discuss the worsening humanitarian crisis in the country. However, Russia rejected Assistant Secretary-General and UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis Panos Moumtzis’ appeal for a month-long humanitarian ceasefire in Syria as “unrealistic”. The UN has said that since calling for the ceasefire on 6 February, bombings in the country have intensified and the suffering of civilians in Syria has worsened. On Saturday 10 February, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that between 4 - 9 February, Syrian airstrikes, as well as those of its allies, had killed 230 civilians, which, depending on the circumstances, may constitute war crimes. The High Commissioner also called for “urgent international action.” In an official statement released on 12 February, Ali al-Za’tari, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Syria, also described the recent surge in violence as “some of the worst fighting of the entire conflict” and asserted that the “escalation is taking its cruelest toll on civilians… with reports of hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries, massive displacement and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities.” Even though Russia maintains veto power at the Security Council, Sweden has insisted that it must nevertheless try to gain support for a ceasefire. As Sweden has asserted, “when international law, including humanitarian law is violated on a daily basis, it is our duty to act”. Finally, on 14 February, after weeks of appeals from the UN, the Eastern Ghouta region received its first humanitarian aid delivery. However, much more is needed and will be difficult to deliver without a cessation of fighting in the area. In the meantime, the humanitarian situation remains one of the worst the world has seen. (c) 2018 RtoP Weekly

Three months to the day after the arbitrary arrest of two journalists in Phnom Penh, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is publishing a report about the tragic decline in the freedom to inform in Cambodia, where the independent media are now in ruins as a result of constant depredation by Prime Minister Hun Sen's regime. Imprisoned since 14 November on espionage charges, former Radio Free Asia reporters Oun Chhin and Yeang Sothearin are above all the collateral victims of the offensive that Hun Sen has waged against the independent media for the past six months in order to pave the way for general elections in July. The aim of the report published today is to detail this tragic reversal for the media in Cambodia. It is based on research carried out by Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, during a visit to Cambodia in October 2017 (see attached versions in English, Khmer and French). Cambodia Daily, the country’s oldest English-language newspaper, suddenly learned on 4 August thatthe tax department was demanding 6.3 million US dollars (5.3 million euros) in supposed back taxes. If the newspaper couldn’t pay, it would just have to “pack up and go,” Hun Sen said. No audit had been carried out and no document was produced to support the government’s claim. In the absence of any possibility of appeal, Cambodia Daily published its last issue on 4 September. Harassing independent media The Cambodian authorities brazenly tried to play innocent by repeatedly insisting that Cambodia Daily’s closure was the result of nothing more than a tax problem. However, it emerged a few daysago that they told Internet service providers on 28 September to block access to Cambodia Daily’s still functioning website and to its Facebook and Twitter pages although they are based outside the country. This clearly shows, if any proof were needed, that Hun Sen’s government persecutes independent media. A total of 32 radio stations, including Radio Free Asia’s Phnom Penh bureau, were shut down at the end of August. Their common feature was a lack of subservience towards the government. The closures have been accompanied by persecution of journalists. In fact, anything goes in order intimidate the media. This is why RSF has joined other international and Cambodian NGOs in issuing a statement (see attached) demanding the immediate release of Oun Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, who are facing up to 15 years in prison. Mass media control The war against independent media has left the field free for media outlets that take their orders from the ruling party. This is clear from the Cambodian Media Ownership Monitor (MOM) carried out jointly by RSF and the Cambodian Centre for Independent Media (CCIM), an updated version of which is published today. It shows that media ownership is largely concentrated in the hands of a small number of leading businessmen linked to the ruling party. This is particularly so with the broadcast media. The four main TV channels, which have 80% of Cambodia’s viewers, are all run by government members or associates. An independent regulator should be in charge of issuing licences to broadcast media and press cards to journalists but the information ministry is responsible for these functions in Cambodia, executing them in a completely opaque manner. New information vehicles When the traditional media are so closely controlled, the only hope lies with the Internet and citizen-journalists. Internet and social media use is exploding within Cambodia’s young and connected population. In 2017, 40% of Cambodians got their news primarily from Facebook. However, Facebook included Cambodia in the six countries where it began trialling a new set-up in October in which the independent news content is hived off to a secondary location called the Explore feed. The effect has been drastic. In a matter of days, the Phnom Penh Post’s Khmer-language Facebook page lost 45% of its readers and traffic fell 35%. Meanwhile, a survey showed that the prime minister’s Facebook page received 58 million clicks in 2017, putting him third in the click ranking of the world’s politicians, just behind Donald Trump and India’s Narendra Modi. But many are sceptical, to the point that a former opposition leader recently filed a legal suit against Facebook in a US federal court in San Francisco, demanding that it hand over any information indicating that Hun Sen bought millions of “likes” from foreign “click farms” in order to boost the appearance of invincibility ahead of July’s parliamentary elections. Pursuing the fight There can be no democracy without independent media but media independence is in greater danger now in Cambodia than at any other time in its recent history, which still bears the deep scars of the Khmer Rouge era. The fight for the freedom to inform in Cambodia must therefore be pursued at all costs. Ranked 132nd out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index, Cambodia is likely to fall in the 2018 index. https://rsf.org/en/news/rsf-publishes-report-media-freedom-under-attack-cambodia (c) 2018 Reporters without Borders

Sultangazi is an inner-city district of Istanbul located on the European side of the Bosphorus, home to more than a half-million Turkish citizens and 50,000 Syrians. What’s happening there reflects nationwide patterns of refugee integration and assimilation – but also growing impatience among the native population. The district is a microcosm of Turkish society in terms of faith, ethnicity and political persuasion. Pious Sunni conservatives live next door to left-leaning Alevis; Turkish ultra-nationalists rub shoulders with Kurdish movement sympathisers. There are no formal records of religious affiliation, but locals estimate that 30-40 per cent of Sultangazi’s residents are Alevi and the rest Sunni. Alevis, Turkey’s second-largest faith community, profess a variant of Shia Islam (as do the Alawites of Syria, from whom the Alevis are distinct in historical evolution, culture and religious practice). Around half the population are Kurds – of whom slightly over half are social conservatives who vote for the Sunni Islamist formation ruling Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The rest largely support the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). The Syrians who have settled in Sultangazi are mostly Sunni Arabs from rural areas around Aleppo. In addition to the 40,000 who are registered refugees, an estimated 10,000 Syrians are unregistered. There are also approximately 8,000 migrants of other nationalities, mainly Afghans, Pakistanis and Azerbaijanis. Crisis Group’s Turkey Project Director Nigar Goksel talks about identity politics and growing frictions in the job market between Syrian refugees and host communities in the refugee-dense neighbourhoods of Turkey’s major western cities. CRISISGROUP In conversations with Crisis Group, residents referred to their quarter as “a district of victimhood” because it brings together so many different people – citizens and non-citizens – who have had to leave their hometowns behind for political or economic reasons. There has been a particularly large influx of Syrians over the past two years, as the Assad regime recaptured parts of northern Syria that had been held by rebels, and as more Syrians moved from border provinces to western cities in search of job opportunities. Sultangazi today ranks among the top five of Istanbul’s 39 districts in the number of Syrians hosted; they now comprise over 8 per cent of its total population. Many Syrians received a warm welcome in Turkey. But, as their numbers grow in districts such as Sultangazi, some fear that the new arrivals will redraw the demographic map to the detriment of long-time residents. Secularists and leftists, in particular, see the Syrians as pawns in a move by the AK Party government to dilute the concentration – and perhaps, down the road, the electoral strength – of minority constituencies. Such perceptions deepen existing social and political divides (covered in a November 2016 Crisis Group report). The Syrians’ socio-economic impact is also becoming increasingly manifest. Public services such as health and education, already strained by the district’s rapid expansion, have been further overstretched by the refugee influx. Locals complain about long lines at hospitals, crowded classrooms, skyrocketing rents, packed busses and piled-up trash. The sense that the Syrian influx has worsened the quality of life is sowing resentment among hosts, irrespective of political affiliation. Compassion and solidarity are curdling into hostility. As underlined by Crisis Group’s 29 January report, Turkey’s Syrian Refugees: Defusing Metropolitan Tensions, the risk of violent clashes between hosts and refugees is higher in places where the stress on public services overlaps with labour market competition and identity-related demographic concerns. Sultangazi is such a place. The Gazi Hot Spot The tract of land now known as Sultangazi has witnessed waves of migration, starting in the mid-1970s when people came from across Anatolia. In the 1990s, a large number of Kurds arrived after being forcibly displaced from villages in the south east at the peak of the army’s fighting with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Since 2004 or so, the district has also attracted refugees and migrant workers from countries to Turkey’s east. With plenty of affordable housing and low-skilled job opportunities in textile workshops, Sultangazi has continued to boom, absorbing around 100,000 Turkish citizens in the past decade. On aggregate, voting patterns in the quarter reflect strong support for the AK Party government, albeit with staunch opposition in certain neighbourhoods. In the November 2015 general elections, the AK Party received 163,000 votes (60.6 per cent), while the main centre-left, secular opposition force, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), garnered 60,000 and the left-leaning, pro-Kurdish HDP got 40,000. Over 60 per cent of voters said “yes” to the April 2017 plebiscite asking citizens to approve measures that greatly strengthened the powers of the president. The Istanbul average “yes” vote was 48.6 per cent. Despite this higher overall support, some neighbourhoods firmly rejected the referendum (see map below for a detailed breakdown). One of them was Gazi, where a majority of residents are left-wing Alevis, either Kurdish or Turkish in ethnicity. A full 78.9 per cent of its voters said “no” to the stronger presidency. Similarly, the AK Party won only 19 per cent of the neighbourhood’s vote in the November 2015 parliamentary elections, while the CHP received 54 per cent and the HDP 23.8 per cent. Gazi is legendary in Turkey for antipathy to the state. Left-wing and/or Alevi youth there clashed frequently with the nationalist police in the 1990s. On 12 March 1995, the unrest culminated in what is commonly referred to as “the Gazi incidents”. Unknown gunmen in a stolen taxi riddled five teahouses with bullets, killing one person and wounding numerous others. Residents saw the police response as markedly slow; riots broke out and spread to other neighbourhoods, continuing for about a week. The police reaction to the rioters was swift and harsh, with officers shooting into crowds, killing fifteen people. Many believe the incident was instigated by the “deep state” – ultra-nationalists and their allies in the security forces – to discourage the growth of Alevi and Kurdish dissent in big cities. Anger spiralled into confrontations with police again during the Gezi Park protests in May-June 2013. Some 2-3,000 neighbourhood residents took to the streets for around one week in anti-government protests. Tensions also rose in Gazi on the night of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt, when pro-AK Party crowds reportedly marched into the neighbourhood chanting “Allahu Ekber” (God is great). Pro-government demonstrators had been summoned into the streets across Istanbul by state-employed imams using the loudspeakers of mosques. Rumours spread that the demonstrators were planning to attack Alevis, and residents gathered in front of the local cemevi (Alevi house of worship). Police dispersed the pro-AK Party crowd before it reached the area. Many leftists took this series of events as validation of their view that, under AK Party rule, the invocation of Sunni Muslim solidarity is “party politics”, geared toward mobilising the right-wing, conservative-leaning majority of the electorate. They point to statements they perceive as sectarian by AK Party leaders to back up this interpretation. Blame Game Across the Sultangazi district, representatives of the Alevi community and the Kurdish movement view the Syrian refugees’ presence largely through the prism of their own accumulated grievances against the state. The risk of violent attacks on refugees may increase amid the building anger among Kurdish movement sympathisers at the crackdown on the HDP underway since early 2016. Thousands of the HDP’s members and nine of its 53 MPs – including party co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş – were arrested and remain in prison. Another 30 MPs were detained and/or arrested and released since November. “We have no rights. There is police impunity for any action against the Kurdish youth here”, a Kurdish movement figure in Sultangazi told Crisis Group. “This is all building up a frustration [that] can be channelled against the Syrians, many of whom announce Erdoğan as their saviour”. Alevis also feel worn down by longstanding state discrimination. “We still do not have equal citizenship”, said one representative. “We have so many complaints about our situation that it is hard for us to talk about Syrians …. In a place like the Gazi neighbourhood that locals say is over 50 per cent Alevi, there is a threat perception from the past anyway, and now they think Syrians will be settled here to reduce the Alevis to a minority”. The government and its supporters accuse Alevi organisations of being sectarian when they reach out to the minority of Syrian refugees who are Kurds or Alawites. A Kurdish movement representative claimed that the authorities warned Syrian Kurds not to establish relations with Kurdish organisations in Turkey: “Syrian Kurds who came to Sultangazi were told they would be provided all health and education services if they abide by this rule. So, out of fear of being sent back to Syria by Turkish authorities, they have stayed low-profile about their Kurdish identity”. Kurdish and Alevi oppositionists insist they are not concerned solely with their co-ethnics and/or co-religionists. One Alevi representative said: “At first, we tried to provide support to all the Syrians who came here, regardless of sect or ethnicity. However, when the numbers soared, and since we get no resources from the state, we had to cut down. Since we observed the Syrian Alawites were not so comfortable going to the centres of the Sunni Muslim charities, we concentrated our efforts on them”. People at the Gazi cemevi told Crisis Group they held the potential to help break down sectarian stereotypes, but they lacked the resources: “We provided Turkish language courses for Syrian children and women, and 30 per cent of those who attended were Sunni. It overcame prejudice, but then we didn’t have enough funds to continue”. Another employee of a mainstream NGO who has been working with Syrians for a few years said that, just as the authorities try to impose an artificial homogeneity of identity and thought on Turkish citizens, they want Syrians to be homogeneous, too. “The government thinks that Syrians in Turkey who have any thoughts beyond support for the Free Syrian Army [a Sunni rebel group fighting alongside the Turkish military in northern Syria] should be invisible”, the NGO worker said. Widening Local Divides The Syrian refugee crisis has thus widened the gap between the government’s backers and its critics. The authorities, along with Sunni Muslim charities, blame the negative attitude of hardline Alevi and Kurdish organisations. A local state official who also works for a large Islamist charity, suggested: “Considering they [the Kurds] have also experienced displacement, one would expect them to be more compassionate. However, perhaps because they see the refugees’ presence as being against their interests, I observe that the Kurds speak out less compassionately about the refugees”. Meanwhile, Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin in Sultangazi told Crisis Group they find it unjust that public institutions employ translators for Arabic-speaking Syrians. “There are signs in both Turkish and Arabic in rooms in some hospitals, whereas the Kurdish language has never been tolerated, let alone catered to in such a way”. They point out that many Syrian Kurdish refugees are not fluent in Arabic; hence, translation of signs into Kurdish would merely be an extension of the refugee integration policy. The authorities are trying as well to accommodate Syrian parents’ desire for Arabic language courses in schools, even as the Kurds’ decades-old demands for Kurdish-language education remain unaddressed. Liberal intellectuals privately advocate reforms that would enable service provision in languages other than Turkish in places where demand exists. But open discussion of such options cannot occur at the peak of Turkish nationalist fervour in the country today. Divergent Perceptions Distrust runs deep between the authorities and their adversaries, leading to competing narratives of violent incidents involving refugees. One such incident took place in the İsmetpaşa neighbourhood of Sultangazi on 15 May 2017. A young Kurdish man was killed in a fight with an Afghan, supposedly over who could sit where in a park. Local authorities told Crisis Group that sinister outside agitators, probably members of the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), were planning to use this incident as an opportunity to organise an anti-government protest at the scene of the murder, by claiming the state does not protect its Kurdish citizens. The authorities say they reached out to residents to dissuade them from joining, and that police evacuated 500-600 Afghans and Pakistanis to protect them from reprisal. Reflecting a common view among authorities, a deputy mayor in Sultangazi said the far-left elements living in Sultangazi systematically try to sabotage the state’s effectiveness and to rally opposition: “It is no coincidence that there were protests every day in the Gazi neighbourhood before the coup attempt, and then it stopped suddenly afterward. There was an effort to mobilise people for further destabilisation”. Kurdish/Alevi community representatives, on the other hand, claim the authorities systematically try to provoke Kurdish opposition, in order to create excuses for crackdowns. A local HDP representative said: “This is part of the systematic effort to stir up unrest. Police bully our young men daily. The swarms of Turkish flags in our streets and the playing of janissary [Ottoman soldier] anthems are all meant to provoke our youth. There is police impunity. A young boy was killed by police the other day; they said he disobeyed a stop warning. Who knows? It can’t be proven one way or another”. They also argue that the government is trying to create circumstances that will lead ordinary residents who support opposition parties to move out of Sultangazi, which is becoming lucrative real estate, thanks to its increasingly central location as mega-projects like the planned third bridge over the Bosphorus proceed. Coming to Terms with Pluralism At present, the Syrian refugee presence is exacerbating social problems in Turkey and driving a wedge deeper and deeper between the state and the political opposition. But the Syrian influx also has the potential to trigger constructive debates about how to address the demands of the country’s diverse communities, be they tied together by mother tongue, ethnicity or sect. As long as certain groups feel marginalised by the ruling party, they will be embittered by the integration of Syrians, and social cohesion will be harder to come by. As such, what works in one setting may well backfire in another. In the conservative border province of Şanlıurfa, for example, no one objects to appeals for unity with Syrian refugees on religious grounds. But districts with heterogeneous demographics, such as Sultangazi, need to be approached with more sensitivity to the perception that the government is promoting Sunni solidarity at the expense of minorities. Government efforts to meet the needs of host communities and Syrians will be more effective and better perceived if the state also reaches out to constituencies who sympathise with opposition parties. Inviting the representatives of NGOs and political parties that are not aligned with the government to refugee-related coordination meetings at the district level in itself would send a message of inclusivity. It would also serve to generate creative ideas about how to bridge divides in localities that are politically divided. Opposition parties also have a role to play: they need to be careful not to spread misinformation or exploit the growing angst about Syrians among their constituents. Instead, they should work constructively to bridge the divide. Local actors of all political persuasions need to open channels of dialogue, share information and pool capacities to address local grievances and stop trouble before it starts. https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/western-europemediterranean/turkey/integrating-syrian-refugees-istanbuls-district-victimhood?utm_source=Sign+Up+to+Crisis+Group%27s+Email+Updates&utm_campaign=56d7c6e5bc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dab8c11ea-56d7c6e5bc-359909997 (c) 2018 International Crisis Group

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Ugandan authorities to investigate newspaper reporter Charles Etukuri’s abduction in order to identify those responsible and find Etukuri as quickly as possible. He was kidnapped on 13 February, five days after writing an article implicating Uganda’s counter-intelligence agency in the death of a visiting Finnish businessman. An investigative reporter for New Vision, a pro-government daily owned by the Vision Group, Etukuri was abducted outside Vision Group headquarters in Kampala by five unidentified armed men, according to several Ugandan media outlets. His abduction came five days after he reported in a story published in the newspaper that Tuomas Teräsvuori, a Finnish businessmen who sold security systems, had been arrested by members of Uganda’s Internal Security Organization (ISO) on 5 February, the day before he was found dead in a Kampala hotel. “We are extremely concerned about the fate of Charles Etukuri,” RSF said. “Journalists must be free to do investigative reporting without fear of being targeted. We urge the authorities to launch a full investigation at once in order to shed all possible light on this matter, to find Etukuri and to punish those responsible.” According to local newspaper reports, five armed men in military uniforms waited outside Vision Group headquarters and, when Etukuri came out, they forced to get into their vehicle and drove away. Describing Etukuri in an interview as their best crime reporter, Vision Group editor-in-chief Barbara Kaija said she suspected that his abductors were members of the security services and that his abduction was linked to his recent reporting. The national police have said they know nothing about his abduction or arrest. Uganda is ranked 112th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index. https://rsf.org/en/news/uganda-reporter-abducted-broad-daylight-kampala (c) 2018 Reporters Without Borders

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is relieved to learn that Eskinder Nega and Woubshet Taye, two Ethiopian journalists who had spent seven years in prison, were freed yesterday as part of the planned release of around 750 political prisoners that the prime minister promised on 3 January Convicted in 2012 on charges of support for terrorism and acts of terrorism, Eskinder and Woubshet were sentenced to 18 and 14 years in prison respectively. Shortly before their arrests, both had written articles criticizing the 2009 terrorism law and the ruling party’s methods. “We are deeply relieved and delighted to learn that Eskinder Nega and Woubshet Taye have been freed but their release must not eclipse their seven years of arbitrary detention and the relentless way the authorities have used the 2009 terrorism law to censor the media,” RSF said. “Rather than an isolated gesture, this measure needs to be part of a radical change in the government’s position towards the press.” A week before his release, Eskinder was told that, in order to be freed, he would have to sign a statement falsely acknowledging his support for the “terrorist” group Ginbot 7. He refused to sign. Ethiopia is ranked 150th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index https://rsf.org/en/news/two-ethiopian-journalists-freed-after-seven-years-prison (c) 2018 Reporters Without Borders

Last week, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed a controversial law criminalizing statements that attribute responsibility for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities to “the Polish nation.” In a televised speech, Duda said that the law protects Poland’s interests, dignity, and the historical truth, “so that we are not slandered.” The move sparked an outcry in Western countries. Human Rights Watch warned that it would have “a chilling effect on free expression.” Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, said that the Polish government should not attempt to “rewrite history.” And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the law “baseless.” “I strongly oppose it,” he said. “One cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied.” The law is just the latest part of a broader effort at historical revisionism. Last year, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (known as PiS) took over a World War II museum in Gdansk in an effort to restructure the exhibitions to emphasize Polish suffering and heroism. The museum’s director was fired, its advisory board was reshuffled to include right-wing pro-PiS historians, and an exhibit on contemporary conflicts across the world was replaced with a patriotic animation on Poland’s struggle from the beginning of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union. PiS also began talk of requesting new reparations from Germany and started removing the “monuments of gratitude” to the Red Army erected by the Soviet Union after World War II. Nor is Poland the only post-communist country that has tried to reframe the history of its role in World War II and defend the part it played in the Holocaust. Hungary, Ukraine, and the Baltic states have all made similar moves. Critics of such policies say they falsify history; their defenders argue that they represent a normal and necessary part of state building or even valiant attempts to preserve historical truth. In reality, these developments have little to do with historical accuracy or state building. The recent rise in efforts to reshape historical memory has been driven by three linked factors: the decreasing influence of EU institutions, the growth of right-wing parties, and rising tensions with Russia. AFTER COMMUNISM During the 1990s, while the international community was preoccupied with the political and economic reforms ushered in by the collapse of communism, eastern European states were engaged in another important but largely overlooked process: reconstructing and redefining their national histories, in particular grappling with World War II and the Holocaust. Central to that effort was establishing a sense of national victimhood. In 1992, Lithuania established a Museum of Genocide Victims that commemorated the crimes of the Soviet occupation but originally ignored the Holocaust. In 1998, Poland created the Institute of National Remembrance, which researches and prosecutes Nazi and Soviet crimes against the Polish nation. In 2002, Hungary turned the former headquarters of the Nazi, and later communist, police into the House of Terror, a museum dedicated to Nazi and Soviet crimes. These institutions not only commemorated the past and educated the public but also served political ends. At home, national victimhood was a powerful tool to mobilize political support and legitimate those who played on the theme. Abroad, governments used the focus on past suffering to apply pressure in negotiations with the EU and NATO. Yet initially, official efforts to exploit history had to co-exist with conditions imposed by the EU, which required at least rhetorical grappling with the legacies of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and World War II. In the 1990s, the European Parliament adopted numerous resolutions commemorating the Holocaust and calling on national governments to restore stolen Jewish property and combat anti-Semitism. Although they were non-binding, the resolutions signaled what western European states expected of future members. Governments in eastern Europe responded. They created Holocaust commissions and included chapters on the Holocaust in textbooks, devoting almost as much space to the subject as western books did. Some, such as the Baltics, paid only the required lip service to past atrocities. Others were more serious about confronting past darkness. Poland, for example, passed legislation in 1997 to restore communal Jewish property confiscated by the Nazi and Communist authorities to its prewar owners and in 2003 created a Center for Holocaust Research within the prestigious Polish Academy of Sciences. When, during the 2001 election, responsibility for the 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which a group of ethnic Poles murdered several hundred of their Jewish neighbors, became a key issue, Poland’s left-wing President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized for the pogrom. It seemed possible that nationalism could coexist with pluralistic discourse about the past. Yet even these initial, tentative attempts to deal with the Holocaust proved contentious. A poll in 2001 showed that 48 percent of Poles disapproved of Kwasniewski’s apology. When, in 1995,Lithuanian President Algirdas Brazauskas asked forgiveness for Lithuanians who had murdered Jews, he was met by demands from some in the Lithuanian intelligentsia that Jews also apologize for the way they treated Lithuanians during the Soviet occupation. FROM ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO RESISTANCE In recent years, the narratives of Holocaust commemoration and eastern European victimhood have increasingly clashed. With the memory of national suffering successfully institutionalized, nationalist elites have moved to marginalize the inconvenient past. Poland is ahead of the curve, in part thanks to the ascendance of the right-wing populist PiS. The party has repeatedly tried to frame pluralistic discourse about the past as an attack on Polish honor. Polish Jews are asked to prove their loyaltyto Poland by defending the new Holocaust law against foreign criticism. PiS’ position is consistent with public opinion.In a 2015 opinion poll, just 23 percent of respondents agreed that Poles’ crimes against Jews were “still valid and needed to be disclosed and publicized.” Twice as many said that although the crimes should be remembered, they revealed nothing about the broader attitudes of Poles toward Jews during World War II. Even modern Polish music draws on the idea of the country’s martyrdom. Rappers such as Tadek and punk rockers such as Kukizspread the nationalist message. Yet Poland is anything but unique. In Hungary—another state led by a right-wing populist party—a Holocaust monument erected in 2014 presents the state as an innocent victim of German aggression despite the country’s wartime alliance with Germany and the active participation of Hungarian collaborators in the Holocaust. Last year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbandescribed Admiral Horthy, who governed Hungary from 1920 to 1944 and took the country into its alliance with Germany, as an “exceptional statesman.” The story is similar in the Baltic states. In 2010, Lithuania amended its criminal code to punish with up to two years in prison those who “deny or grossly underestimate” the genocides committed by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union against Lithuanians. A recent book that exposed Lithuanians’ collaboration in the Holocaust caused a public backlash against its author, the journalist Ruta Vanagaite. Earlier this month, Latvia bestowed financial benefits on all World War II veterans, including SS volunteers. In 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament passed two laws reframing the country’s World War II experience. The first criminalized denying the legitimacy of “the struggle for the independence of Ukraine in the 20th century” and glorified violent groups such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with the Nazis and killed large numbers of Jewish and Polish civilians in the name of Ukrainian statehood during World War II. The second made it a crime to reject the “criminal character of the Communist totalitarian regime of 1917-1991 in Ukraine.” THE POLITICS OF HISTORY A major factor behind the growing resistance to inconvenient history is the diminishing leverage of the EU and the weakened appeal of western European norms. By now, most eastern European countries have either joined the EU or, like Ukraine, have effectively given up on the idea. EU membership has freed right-wing governments in countries such as Hungary and Poland from the need to follow liberal norms not only of political freedom and the rule of law but also when it comes to memory and presentation of the Holocaust. Germany’s central role in EU institutions also offers an irresistible opportunity for states such as Poland to highlight their suffering during World War II, a goal that conflicts with the prominence of the Holocaust in EU narratives of European history. Moreover, ascendant right-wing populist parties across Europe mean that the union no longer speaks with one voice. Sanctioning a member state is now more difficult. Right-wing populist politicians, traditionally Euroskeptics, are now even more willing to invite international disapproval and gain domestic popularity by stoking nationalism and whitewashing the past. Their ideology necessitates real or perceived threats from powerful “others” to flourish. Narratives of historical martyrdom satisfy these needs, and the international opprobrium they provoke reinforces the claim that the nation is under attack from nefarious outsiders, especially from powerful Jews. Equally important, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 exacerbated perceptions of national vulnerability in eastern Europe. The more acute the Russian threat, real or perceived, the more post-communist states double down on past victimhood and seek to restrict the conflicting Holocaust narrative. Although the Russian threat is most salient in Ukraine and the Baltic states, it also motivates other post-communist countries with memories of Russian aggression, including Poland. In states that experience direct threats from Russia and are ruled by right-wing populist parties, the trend toward policing history and silencing inconvenient facts about their roles in World War II is likely to continue. That will heighten tensions with the United States and Israel, divide allies even within eastern Europe, and stifle open debate. Ironically, it is Putin’s autocracy that might benefit the most from these developments. But there is still hope. Dark pasts have been treated differently in countries where the left remains strong and where the Russian threat is less acute. Left-wing parties are ideologically less prone to appeals to nationalism and the right-wing narrative of victimhood is less convincing without an external threat. In Slovakia, prosecutors have asked the Supreme Court to ban the far-right People’s Party, which idolizes the World War II collaborationist leader Jozef Tiso. In 2016, Slovakia’s president and prime minister opened the Sered Holocaust Museum, which documents Slovak collaboration with the Nazis and the fate of the country’s Jews. Romania, one of the newest EU members and a German ally during the war, offers an even more positive example. The country has outlawed Holocaust denial, acknowledged its role in the Holocaust, and pays pensions to survivors of World War II–era anti-Jewish persecution. Although the past cannot be changed, some states have proved willing to learn from it. (c) 2018 | Foreign Affairs

In preparing the report, Reuters journalist Simon D. Lewis contacted me to comment on legal issues. Over several exchanges of emails and three lengthy telephone conversations, the primary discussion revolved around one central question: whether the recruitment of civilians to assist parts of the operation could be used to demonstrate intent. The extent of our discussions was reduced to a soundbite in print. Though it captures the essence of my assessment based on the factual predicate presented to me, the quote attributed to me warrants further elaboration considering that I invoked the crime of genocide as a possibility. I was quoted as having said that there was evidence to show that the military organized Buddhist civilians (I hesitate to single out the Rakhine Buddhists, since Buddhist civilians from elsewhere may also be involved) to commit violence against the Rohingya it “would be the closest thing to a smoking gun in establishing not just intent, but even genocidal intent, since the attacks seem designed to destroy the Rohingya or at least a significant part of them.” The special report makes a case against the military, showing that it is organizing Buddhist civilians to commit crimes that are arguably crimes against humanity, and may even be encouraging, if not inciting them, into a genocidal mindset. By this I mean the military is priming them into a state of mind to kill and commit other violent acts against the Rohingya because of who they are, and possibly, with the specific intent to permanently destroy, to extinguish, the Rohingya or at least a substantial segment of them – and not to just drive them out of Myanmar. In previous posts on Myanmar, I had noted that genocide against the Rohingya was looming on the horizon (see here and here), drawing some parallels with what had occurred in Rwanda and how the US under the Clinton administration avoided using the term “genocide”, opting instead to claim that “acts of genocide” were occurring, so as not to be drawn into the events. I noted then, and my position remains unchanged, that what we have been seeing against the Rohingya are classic crimes against humanity, though the circumstances on the ground seem to be dangerously inching towards a genocide. From what is being reported, it appears that the military’s intent (and I think you can include the civilian government here as well – given its inactions and failure to speak out) is to ethnically cleanse the area – to drive the Rohingya out of Myanmar. This intent may not, however, necessarily be the intent shared by the Buddhist civilians, who have turned into physical perpetrators. Their intent, which, as I have noted, is being or has been shaped by the military (and perhaps others, such as hardline monks and nationalist groups), may have evolved or is evolving into genocidal intent. And if this is so, a colorable argument can be made that the military could be held responsible for direct and public incitement to commit genocide or complicity in genocide under Article 3(c) or (e), respectively, of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Though the evidence remains inconclusive, it does appear that the military is encouraging and/or facilitating Buddhist civilians to assist them in their attacks against unarmed and unthreatening Rohingya civilians. As for determining what sort of intent to ascribe to those committing the crimes (which is not just limited to the physical perpetrators), unless there is some sort of documented or recorded remarks spelling out the intent of those who conceptualized and/or are orchestrating the crimes, it is the evidence surrounding the events (circumstantial evidence) and the acts of those involved in committing the crimes that are most revealing. Suffice it to say using civilians as proxies is a clear indicator of the military’s intentions that it wishes for these crimes to materialize. In determining whether crimes were committed with specific genocidal intent in the absence of direct evidence, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Jelisić identified certain indicators such as “the general context, the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against the same group, the scale of atrocities committed, the systematic targeting of victims on account of their membership of a particular group, or the repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts.”1 While not an exhaustive list of indicators, it discerningly serves as a point of departure in examining the events in Rakhine State in general. So, if there is evidence that the military is inciting, arming, instructing, coordinating civilians, and giving them the green light to commit crimes such as purging villages of the Rohingya (attacking them, killing them, burning down their homes, and driving them away) – and in so doing, shielding perpetrators from scrutiny and punishment by also providing them with instructions and assistance on concealing their criminal activity – its intent to commit or facilitate the commission of these crimes becomes rather obvious. Simply put, if there is evidence of instructions and/or assistance from the military to the Buddhist civilians carrying out these crimes, this would be the closest thing to a smoking gun in establishing the military’s intent. Factoring in the Jelisić indicators – the general context, the perpetration of crimes against the Rohingya, the scale of crimes committed, the systematic targeting of victims based on their membership in the group (Rohingya Muslims), the repetition of the crimes – the evidence could point to specific genocidal intent. What of the mass graves uncovered? Can any conclusions be drawn, other than that the killings are, at the very least, punishable as murders in the ordinary courts of Myanmar? If the ten Rohingya victims found in this mass grave were killed after being taken into custody by security forces, would there be implication in terms of international crimes? Could the summary execution of ten unarmed civilians detained by the military potentially be a crime against humanity? An isolated killing of ten civilians and their subsequent burial in a mass grave – in the abstract and assuming that no other crimes are being committed on a widespread or systematic scale – as repugnant as it may be, would not amount to a crime against humanity. That said, a reality check is in order. The making of a mass grave requires labor-intensive efforts that are hard to conceal – especially if, as in this instance, the military is ever-present and responsible for monitoring and securing the area. The execution and mass burial could be the work of a few civilians who have joined the fray of persecuting, attacking, and killing the Rohingya, civilians working as proxies for the military, some rogue soldiers, or the military itself. Going out on a limb, I suspect that were more mass graves to be found, (a very likely scenario), a pattern of widespread or systematic killings will invariably emerge. While it may be hard to determine who directed the killings and mass burial in this instance, consideration must be given to a fact that is beyond dispute and beyond change: the military is firmly in control of the area where the killings and burial have occurred. As such, the military bears the brunt of responsibility. We now know that the military has owned up to the killings, though only to the extent of admitting that the killers were soldiers and acted on their own – not under orders. Under command responsibility, failure to prevent and/or punish the commission of crimes – if there is effective command and control over the physical perpetrators – is punishable. If the military is behind these executions – either directly or indirectly through civilians – then the question is whether the military commanders/units/soldiers in situ acted on their own or were carrying out orders from above – and if so, how high up the chain of command? Just as direct orders are not necessarily needed to affix responsibility, the same applies if superiors act with willful blindness; a high probability in this instance, considering the events in and around the area where the ten civilians who were in military custody were executed and then buried in a mass grave. Whether the facts and circumstances concerning this execution establish a crime against humanity remains an open question in my mind, since I do not know all of the facts. That said, when considering what is in the Reuters special report, and knowing what we know about the massive exodus of the Rohingya, it is hard to fathom how this execution of ten unarmed civilians in military custody is some isolated incident. If it could be shown that it was part of a widespread or systematic campaign targeting the Rohingya population, then a case of crimes against humanity can be made against the military commanders responsible for these executions – linkage provided. My natural inclination as a defense lawyer is to want more information before reaching any tentative conclusions based merely on prima facie evidence – the sort of evidence required for charging/indicting a person for crimes, as opposed to the more exacting evidence required to meet the standard of proof for conviction. However, if the military was indeed behind the executions and mass burial (as opposed to some rogue soldiers), it is highly improbable that anything reliable will be forthcoming from the military investigation (pointing to itself and up the chain of command). Expect opacity, obduracy, and obfuscation. But when you factor in that villages are wholesale being burned to the ground and Rohingya civilians are indiscriminately being attacked (killed, raped, persecuted, etc.) under the watchful gaze of the military, this indicates a purposeful effort, a coordinated plan, a decisive drive to eliminate the Rohingya from Myanmar. Difficult to draw any alternative plausible explanations. To argue that what is happening to the Rohingya is the handy-work of independent-minded disaffected and misguided soldiers gone rogue, is to ignore the strategic planning, tactical support, and physical and human resources needed to carry out the ongoing campaign of clearing villages through persecutory and deadly means. It is not without reason based on credible evidence that the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein described the military offensive in Rakhine State as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” or in legal parlance, the crime against humanity of forcible transfer (along with other associated crimes). Where to go from here? As it stands, there is no international(ized) criminal tribunal or court that is able and willing to exercise jurisdiction over these crimes in Myanmar – even if these executions (as well as some of other crimes being reported) are crimes against humanity. Presumably the physical perpetrators and (shadowy) co-perpetrators could be charged in a domestic court in Myanmar. Realistically, however, if we can draw any conclusions from the Myanmar military’s behavior and the callous indifference of the de facto head of the civilian government, Aung San Suu Kyi, it is safe to conclude that about all we can expect is a charade: high-level whitewashing through low-level scapegoating (see Former US Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson’s remarks during a CNN interview following his resignation from an advisory board on the Rohingya crisis). With the military being the last to have detained the ten Rohingya civilians executed, the mass grave cover-up, and the ensuing attempts to conceal these events by arresting the two journalist who were responsible for uncovering the cover-up – there is strong circumstantial evidence of linkage between these crimes and the military, which may serve as further indicia of linkage between the military and other similar or associated crimes committed against the Rohingya. But even if soldiers have admitted to having committed the executions, going beyond them will not be so easy, especially without some physical (documentary) proof. For command responsibility to come into play in moving up the accountability pyramid, evidence will be needed to establish a superior-subordinate relationship, awareness of a crime that is about to be committed or having been committed, and a failure to prevent or punish – assuming the superior has effective command and control over the perpetrators and has the capacity to act. Most, if not all of this can be established through circumstantial evidence, but to make a convincing iron-clad case, the evidence must be of such quality that however sliced and diced, no other plausible alternative inferences could be drawn. This story is far from over. Detaining the messengers – the two Reuters journalists arrested and bogusly charged by the Myanmar military for exposing the executions and cover-up – is unlikely to pay any long-term dividends. Though I would also not count on the United Nations Security Council (which is finally being urged to take notice and action) to do much, if anything, in bringing to justice those who committed these crimes and all the other crimes that have lead nearly a million Rohingya to flee from Myanmar. http://michaelgkarnavas.net/blog/2018/02/14/myanmar-inferred-intent/ (c) 2018 Michael Karnavas

Every spring, buses covered in portraits of Joseph Stalin appear on the streets of Russian cities. His face replaces ads for cell phones, soft drinks, laundry detergent, and cat food. With each passing year, the dictator gets more handsome and more glamorous; a portrait of him in his gorgeous white generalissimo’s jacket has become especially popular. He casts his stern gaze on the citizens, as if to say, “Remember me? I’m here, I didn’t go anywhere—and don’t you forget it!” The ads aim to remind the country of the dictator’s role in the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. For those who would rehabilitate Stalin, that victory is their final argument, their last chance to drag the tyrant out of oblivion and put him back on his pedestal. They use it to make excuses for the dictator, to wash his hands of the blood he shed, and to recast him as the savior of the motherland during the hardship of the war years. The victory, in this version of history, legitimizes and justifies the entire repressive Soviet regime. In the eyes of the Stalinists, admiration for the tyrant ought to be public and compulsory. That’s why they’ve chosen such an assertive way to inject the dictator into public space. Many want to go even further. There’s talk of erecting monuments to Stalin. There are annual calls to restore the city of Volgograd’s Soviet-era name: Stalingrad. Newly published histories in Moscow’s bookstores perpetuate the mythologized image of Stalin as a strict but fair ruler. Their titles—The Other Stalin, Stalin the Great, Stalin: Father of a Nation—say it all. There is even a new popular literature attempting to justify the actions of Viktor Abakumov, Lavrenty Beria, and other odious leaders of Stalin’s secret police. The monsters of Stalin’s era are coming back from the dead. And some of Russia’s leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, are exploiting the ideology of Stalin’s era to serve their own ends. SHADOWS OF THE PAST At first glance, the resurgence of admiration for Stalin seems surprising. The leader of one of the twentieth century’s bloodiest regimes, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of between ten million and 12 million people in peacetime. At least five million of these died of starvation and disease in 1932–33, during a famine caused by the mass collectivization of agriculture. (Because the records are so scanty, accurate numbers are hard to determine. Some historians put the famine’s death toll even higher.) The most intense period of deliberate killing, although it saw fewer overall deaths, came during the Great Terror, which took place in 1937–38. At Stalin’s direction, the Soviet secret police, known as the NKVD, killed hundreds of thousands of former kulaks (well-off peasants who had been stripped of their property during collectivization) and other “anti-Soviet elements,” along with members of ethnic minorities, especially Germans and Poles, who might be tempted to betray the Soviet Union. All told, nearly 700,000 people were shot in a roughly 15-month period that began in the summer of 1937. Many others were sent to the gulag, the vast system of labor camps spanning the Soviet Union that held over 1.5 million people by the start of World War II. Despite this bloody history, Russian authorities today avoid giving official assessments of either the Soviet past in general or individual Communist leaders in particular. That was not always the case. In 1987, during the period of liberalization known as glasnost, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in which he said that Stalin had committed “enormous and unforgivable” crimes. Today, such a clear statement would be unthinkable. In 2000, during his first inauguration as president, Putin set the new official tone, declaring that “there have been both tragic and brilliant pages in our history.” Since then, the Kremlin has maintained this official line. On the one hand, in 2015, the government announced a new policy called the Program for Commemorating the Victims of Political Repression. Last October, as part of that policy, Moscow saw the opening of the Wall of Grief, a memorial to the victims of Soviet totalitarianism. This marked an important watershed: official government acknowledgment of the scale and gravity of the mass repressions. But many human rights advocates have expressed skepticism of the Russian government’s ability to properly acknowledge the past. They point to the growing human rights violations in Russia and the fact that the archives containing the records of the security services’ crimes remain closed. Official public memory also has a darker side. Authorities still refrain from officially describing Stalin’s deeds as crimes. They carefully refer to them as “mistakes,” justifying them by pointing to the difficulties of the pre-war period and the need to prepare the country for war, as well as through misleading comparisons. At a press conference in 2013, a British correspondent asked Putin how he felt about Stalin. Putin shot back: “Was Cromwell any better?” Contradictory views of Stalin are not limited to politicians. A popular high school textbook, The History of Russia, 1917–2009, claims that “as a statesman, Stalin was a great hero, but in terms of human rights, he was an evil murderer.” More and more often, Stalin is referred to as “a great statesman” who undertook a controversial but nonetheless effective push to strengthen the country. It’s as though Russians have two national histories. HISTORY NOT ON TRIAL The resurgence in public appreciation for the Soviet regime became possible in large part because Russia has never put its communist past on trial. Stalin flagrantly violated the constitution his own government had ratified in 1936. Despite constitutional guarantees including freedom of speech, the press, religion, and assembly, he created extrajudicial organs that issued death sentences in the absence of the accused and personally signing off on execution lists. More than six decades since Stalin’s death, there has been no official reckoning with this lawlessness. In 1991, President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree terminating the activities of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU then challenged the decree in the Constitutional Court. Memorial, the civil rights group for which I work, prepared an expert analysis for the court in support of Yeltsin’s decree that included many archival documents testifying to the multitude of crimes perpetrated by the party’s leaders, from Vladimir Lenin to Gorbachev—but most of all by Stalin. The report marshaled vast quantities of evidence to prove that the party was a special instrument of the state that crudely violated constitutional norms, supplanting the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The court ruled in Yeltsin’s favor, authorizing his closure of the CPSU. “For a long period of time,” the decision declared, “this country was ruled by a regime with limitless power founded in violence, controlled by a small group of Communist functionaries, united in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, led by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.” But the court had not set out to determine whether the CPSU had broken any laws and so gave no assessment of the crimes committed by the party or its leaders. It even declined to rule on the constitutionality of the CPSU before Yeltsin’s ban. Thus, the opportunity for a reckoning with the crimes of the Soviet regime was lost. Today in Russia, it is impossible to take former Soviet security functionaries to court because their crimes were committed so long ago and the current government has failed to extend the relevant statutes of limitations. The Russian government even attempts to interfere in court proceedings in other former Soviet republics. In the 1990s and early years of this century, Estonia and Latvia conducted investigations and trials of former associates of Stalin’s security forces, charging them with genocide and war crimes. In 2004, Latvian authorities convicted Vassili Kononov, a Red Army soldier, of war crimes for his participation in 1944 in the murders of nine unarmed people, including a pregnant woman, in Mazie Bati, a village in modern-day Latvia. In 2008, Estonia put Arnold Meri, a former Communist functionary, on trial for his role in the mass deportations of Estonians in 1949. (Meri died before the trial concluded.) In both cases, the Kremlin launched loud propaganda campaigns in protest. OFFICIAL MEMORY There’s no doubt that Stalin was a criminal, whether or not the Kremlin deems him one. Still, official acknowledgment of the criminality of both Stalin himself and the system he led is important, as it would help prevent the state from reverting to the policies that made Stalin’s regime possible. In modern Russia, with its deep-rooted tradition of authoritarianism, the danger of returning to bad habits is real. In that light, the new popular Russian ideology is worrying. It consists of a paternalistic conception of government paired with the glorification of the past, including the entire Soviet period. The ideology’s basic principles are simple: the government is always right, and if in the past its policies created any victims, even a great many of them, they were necessary to continue down the special path chosen by the country. To ensure popular acceptance of these ideas, the state increasingly intervenes in the teaching of history. For the government, history is not a subject to be treated objectively; instead, it is an instrument to advance the ideology of the state. The official “historical and cultural standards” that guide public school curricula mention the “mistakes,” not the crimes, committed by the Soviet regime. Textbooks dryly present the facts about the Great Terror without properly assessing them. They either list the total number of people arrested and executed or just claim that Stalin had decided to carry out a “general cleansing” of Soviet society as part of a necessary purge of a potential “fifth column.” These accounts aim to rationalize events rather than present a clear picture of what happened and what it meant. These history texts form part of an official Russian state program of “patriotic education.” This endeavor not only runs counter to the principles of a free and democratic society but also contradicts the Russian constitution. That document, adopted in 1993, states that “no ideology may be established as the official state ideology or made compulsory in any way.” In theory, educational historical texts should aim to develop independent thinking, which can form the basis of civic consciousness. But in practice, the desire to promote patriotism prevents an honest analysis of history and takes textbooks out of the realm of scholarship. The result is biased writing that twists the facts to support ideologically determined conclusions. At the personal level, many people still remember relatives and loved ones who died in the purges. They are not afraid to discuss the past, but their memories are often framed by an acceptance of the official line about the necessity of Stalin’s deeds. “That’s just the way things were back then,” Russians often remark. Rather than blame the government, most see the Great Terror as something akin to a natural disaster. Very few Russians privately acknowledge—and fewer still are brave enough to publicly declare—that the mass Soviet political repression of 1937–38 was a crime, planned and perpetrated by Stalin and his government against the Soviet people. There is no place in the Kremlin’s fine-tuned propaganda for an honest public discussion of Soviet-era political repression, resettlement, famine, and mass murder. Instead, the prohibition against remembering past horrors goes hand in hand with patriotic fervor for the modern state. Putin’s government has enacted laws that limit the freedom to speak, rally, or demonstrate and has restricted the activities of nongovernmental civic groups. All of this is justified as necessary to prevent “foreign intervention” in Russian affairs. Kremlin propaganda and pro-Kremlin historians insist that Western media and institutions use the “intentional negativization” of Soviet history as a weapon against Russia. THE HISTORY OF EXPANSIONISM Russia’s modern resurrection of old ideologies reaches back further even than the Soviet era. A new dogma deems the Soviet government the inheritor of the Russian empire, and modern Russia, in turn, the rightful heir to the Soviet Union. According to this view, Russia has inherited both the empire’s old enemies and the confrontational thinking that went with them. Russia’s foreign policy reveals its leaders’ archaic ideas. An old conception of “geopolitical principles” has become their go-to rationalization for the country’s actions. In particular, the Kremlin uses the 1945 victory over Hitler’s Germany as an instrument for rehabilitating the Soviet regime. The victory has taken on a universal significance. Modern Russian propagandists acknowledge that leading Western countries also fought Hitler’s Germany but claim that they did so in their own interests. Only the Soviet people fought for the interests of all humanity, the propagandists contend. To them, this demonstrates the messianic essence of the Russian people and that the Russian victory was the single most important event of the twentieth century. Stalin’s great achievement, they say, was that he returned the country to the Russian geopolitical doctrine. The irony is that the Soviets would have rejected this interpretation. The third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published by the state during the government of Leonid Brezhnev, defines “geopolitics” as a “bourgeois, reactionary conception” based on the idea of a state as a geographic and biological organism seeking to expand and noted that geopolitics “became the official doctrine of fascism.” But today, Russian politicians and political scientists unashamedly defend the expansionist policies of the Soviet Union with reference to geopolitics. This allows them to present the forced sovietization of neighboring countries—and even the mass repression that followed—in a positive light. STUCK IN THE PAST In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the communist government in 1991, it seemed that history would be laid bare. Declassified archival documents demonstrated that the country had been run by a group of criminals led by Stalin and that the mass murders they perpetrated were crimes against humanity. Unfortunately, the new Russian government, busy with more immediate problems, never got around to passing a legal verdict on the Soviet past and calling its crimes by their names. And paradoxically, the very freedom of the 1990s allowed previously hidden Stalinist voices to make themselves heard. Two and half decades later, the Russian public has been left disillusioned by lackluster economic reforms, widespread official corruption, and politicians who have turned their backs on the people. They dream of a strong leader capable of installing a just order. The renewed sympathy toward the Stalinist past is based on idealized conceptions of the orderliness, peace, and justice of the decade after 1945. The desire to turn back the clock also flows from the legacy of Soviet education, which taught the masses that the Soviet people were superior to the citizens of capitalist countries. Every Russian above a certain age knows the slogans from their childhood: “Our system is the best and the fairest. We are going down the most correct path, leading the way for the rest of humanity.” The Soviet Union that propagated those mantras collapsed into a cloud of dust. But a slave mentality remains deeply ingrained in Russian minds, along with a latent monarchism and paternalism. The general mood is summed up in a formulation long accepted in conservative circles: “We don’t need a government that serves us; we need a government that’s like a father, even if that father is strict.” Back in Brezhnev’s time, these attitudes were common among the masses, but the political elite prevented the return of a dictator in Stalin’s mold, afraid to see the reemergence of Stalin’s style of governance. Today, however, the Kremlin has instilled the cult of strong government in the public consciousness, proclaiming in its propaganda the exceptional nature of the Russian people and their history and the special value of unifying all Russian-speaking people, no matter where they live. All of this serves to justify Russia’s expansionism abroad and repression at home. As long as Russia refuses to officially acknowledge the darkness in its past, it will be haunted by ideas that should have died long ago. © 2018 | Foreign Affairs

“We are now in a race against time as a major new emergency looms,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told the Security Council via videolink from Geneva, Switzerland. He said that the Kutupalong area in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar is now the largest refugee settlement in the world, and with the monsoon season to start in March, 107,000 refugees are estimated to be living in areas prone to flooding or landslides. “The [Bangladeshi] Government is steering a massive emergency preparedness effort, but international support must be stepped up to avert a catastrophe,” he said, stressing that “as we have repeatedly said, resolving this crisis means finding solutions inside Myanmar.” He said that conditions are not yet conducive to the voluntary repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. The refugee crisis erupted in late August when Myanmar armed forces launched a security operation in the north of Rakhine State, driving thousands of children, women and men to flee over the border to Bangladesh in search of safety. “The causes of their flight have not been addressed, and we have yet to see substantive progress on addressing the exclusion and denial of rights that has deepened over the last decades, rooted in their lack of citizenship,” Mr. Grandi said. “It is time to bring an end to this repeated, devastating cycle of violence, displacement and statelessness to invest in tangible, substantial measures that will start to overcome the profound exclusion that the Rohingya community have endured for far too long,” he added. Also addressing the Council was UN Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs Miroslav Jenca, who said that while there has been certain progress on the three priorities laid out by the Secretary-General, not all have been implemented thus far. Turning first to the need to end violence and improve the security situation, he said that although large-scale acts of violence have subsided, concerns about threats and intimidation against the remaining Rohingya population from Bamar and Rakhine communities, as well as from militia and security forces in Rakhine state, persist. Second, the UN does not have sufficient access to make a meaningful assessment of the humanitarian or human rights situation in Rakhine. As for the third point, which is voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable return of refugees and internally displaced people to their places of origin or choice, Mr. Jenca said the Government has taken some high-level steps to advance this process, including the convening of an Advisory Board, whose recommendations include the inclusion of the UN at an early stage, soonest full humanitarian access, wider media access, and the formation of an independent fact-finding commission. Mr. Jenca called on the authorities in Myanmar to release the arrested two Reuters journalists and respect the right to freedom of expression and information. Reuters has now published the story these journalists were working on, a deeply disturbing account of the execution of 10 Rohingya men in Inn Din village (Maungdaw) in northern Rakhine state,he said, while the Associated Press (AP) has also published a report of five mass graves in Gudar Pyin village (Buthidaung). “These and other shocking reports of grave abuses demand our attention and action, for the sake of lasting peace and justice,” he said. https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/02/1002612 (c) 2018 UN News Centre

For four straight days last month, Rahim Muddinn watched, amazed, as Myanmar’s state-run newspapers published special supplements showing Rohingya Muslims accused of being terrorists — nearly 250 photos each day. For the 41-year-old Rohingya man, it was a surreal moment. He was born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city and far from the western state of Rakhine, where bloody military operations that followed Rohingya militant attacks in August have driven nearly 700,000 Rohingya into refugee camps in Bangladesh. “When we first saw those pictures, we started laughing. We wondered: When will it be our turn to have our pictures in the paper?” Muddinn, a teacher, said in an interview in his Yangon home. The pictures are the latest in a series of chilling realizations for the Rohingya minority here. Though Yangon’s tree-lined boulevards and weathered colonial architecture seem a world away from the rice paddies and isolated villages of Rakhine — let alone the tarp-walled huts of the teeming refugee camps — the government is increasingly linking Rohingya across the country with what it calls a terrorist threat, Muddinn and others say. Rohingya in Yangon describe a sense of rising persecution and hatred, of vanishing freedoms and opportunities, of Buddhist neighbors and friends su ddenly more willing to publicly express sympathies with the military’s destruction of Rohingya villages in Rakhine. “One day it really could be my picture in the paper,” said Muddinn. Like most of the other Rohingya who spoke with The Associated Press, he used his Rohingya name because of safety worries. “I do have anxiety. The government can detain anyone it says is a supporter of terrorism or anyone viewed as a threat to the state.” Though Rohingya have always been persecuted in the country, it got much worse after 2012, when violence in Rakhine killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people, most of them Rohingya, from their homes to camps. Violence flared again in 2016 and, most dramatically, following the August attacks, when refugees report widespread killing and rape by Myanmar forces. The AP last month confirmed, through extensive interviews with survivors and time-stamped video, a massacre and at least five mass graves, all previously unreported, in the Rakhine village of Gu Dar Pyin. Many Rohingya have been in Myanmar for generations, but, increasingly, the government and media have played up their claim that they’re not citizens but “illegal Bengali interlopers” who entered Myanmar from Bangladesh with the help of corrupt immigration officers. There are non-Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and they often report rising discrimination, especially those in Rakhine. But generally their situation is less precarious than the Rohingya. Myanmar’s government denies discriminating against Rohingya and other Muslims. “It’s totally not true that Muslims in the cities like Yangon have no freedom of movement or lack the same rights as other populations,” said Aung San Win, director general of Myanmar’s Ministry of Religion. “Everyone is granted rights to freedom by the constitution, including Muslims. There is no discrimination in the country.” In Yangon, however, hate speech against Rohingya has risen, and Buddhists who were once friends and colleagues now shun Muddinn’s family. Muddinn believes the government is now trying to portray all Rohingya as terrorists. When he hears a motorcycle rev its engines near his home after midnight, he wonders if a policeman is coming to detain him. His wife, Amina, hasn’t left their home by herself since 2012 because of shame and fear after a Buddhist spit on her. Why did it happen? Because she was wearing a burqa. Not far away, Kyaw Min, a well-known Rohingya activist and president of the Democracy and Human Rights Party, brandishes the newspaper photos of alleged terrorists. The government, he said in his party headquarters, is trying to make it so that nearly every Rohingya family in Rakhine state will be associated with an accused terrorist if the refugees in Bangladesh ever return to Myanmar. Safety is a worry even in Yangon. He said he no longer leaves his home at night or travels alone around the city. Some party members have been attacked, and he has suffered intense abuse on social media, with people calling him “rubbish” and an “interloper from Bangladesh.” Early last year, a gunman killed Ko Ni, a prominent member of Myanmar’s Muslim minority and a legal adviser for the ruling National League for Democracy party. He was shot in the head at the Yangon airport. Ko Ni, who wasn’t Rohingya, had criticized the NLD in 2015 for not putting up Muslim candidates in the general election. Since August, abuse has intensified, and Rohingya leaders risk their safety if they speak out publicly. “We feel this everywhere,” said Kyaw Min, who spent years in prison on what he calls politically motivated charges. Though most Rohingya worry less about their political future and more about putting food on their plates, the sense of discrimination and persecution is a heavy burden. All of them, says Kyaw Min, “will have some sort of scar in their hearts.” “The word ‘Rohingya’ is a dangerous thing to be called in this country,” said Ajas, 26, a college student in Yangon, who, like some other Rohingya, uses only a single name. “The government has brainwashed the whole country into thinking that we are illegal immigrants.” Few local NGOs or Buddhist activists will stand up for the Rohingya, but Ajas said he and others are trying to talk with liberal Buddhists and other “moderate minds.” Still, he is the only Rohingya in his class and sometimes has problems with Buddhists when he describes himself as Rohingya. “They don’t accept that word because they say there is no such thing as that concept in this country.” Like many Rohingya in Yangon, Mohammad Warris, another college student, usually keeps his national ID card in a safe at home. The cards, which are used to apply for school, to set up bank accounts and to get passports, are irreplaceable without a huge bribe, he said, because Myanmar has long tried to take them from Rohingya as a way to more easily strip them of citizenship. “If I didn’t have this, I wouldn’t be able to survive. I could be caught by the police and jailed as a ‘Bengali terrorist,’” Warris, 24, said. “They are hated by the mass of Burmese because they simply exist,” a 20-year-old student at the University of Yangon says of the Rohingya during an interview in an empty classroom, ceiling fans whirring overhead. Though the student, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety worries, is a rare example of a Buddhist at the school willing to regularly defend the Rohingya, he won’t do it on the streets. “It’s too precarious,” he said. “If I say ‘genocide’ in public, the government would put me in jail for years.” Buddhists at the university have accused the student, whose parents are Buddhists from Rakhine, of having Rohingya blood and of taking money from foreign governments and NGOs. A nationalist friend told him he had informed on him to police for insulting Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi and said he would be sued. “He said, ‘You’re destroying your own country by sympathizing with terrorists.’” He still speaks up in class to defend the Rohingya, but he doesn’t describe himself as an activist anymore and has focused lately on his studies. “I can do better work (for the Rohingya) as a researcher than if I was in jail.” One day last year, Muddinn sat with some friends sipping tea at a cafe in his neighborhood when the Buddhist driver of a bicycle rickshaw smashed purposely into the side of a car driven by a Muslim man. It was not the first time the neighbors had seen this Buddhist slam into Muslim cars. The Buddhist got off his bicycle, screaming insults at the Muslim and trying to punch him. “I was really furious,” Muddinn said. But he did nothing, even though he describes himself as short-tempered. “Even if we’re the victims,” he said, “the police will see us as the perpetrators because we’re Muslim.” “I feel trapped,” Muddinn said. “There is no guarantee for our future. I want to stay in this country forever, but now my faith is shaken and I wonder if I will have to move away.” http://time.com/5154730/myanmar-muslims-violence-rohingya/ (c) 2018 Time

The United Nations Security Council should refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court to investigate genocide and other atrocity crimes against Rohingya Muslims, Fortify Rights said today. The Security Council will convene today, February 13 at the U.N. Headquarters in New York City for a briefing on the situation of the Rohingya. “It’s not too late for the Security Council to respond with action,” said Matthew Smith, CEO of Fortify Rights. “The civilian and military leadership in Myanmar are ensuring complete impunity for ongoing, heinous crimes, and that’s precisely why international action is warranted and overdue.” In response to violent assaults on security forces by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army in October 2016 and again in August 2017, the Myanmar Army led a brutal attack on the Rohingya civilian population, forcing more than 775,000 refugees to flee to Bangladesh and causing a humanitarian situation that U.N. Secretary General Gustavo Guterres described as “catastrophic.” In a report published in November 2017, Fortify Rights and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documented Myanmar Army-led massacres, mass gang-rapes, and arson attacks against Rohingya since October 2016. Based primarily on hundreds of testimonies from eyewitnesses and survivors collected during a yearlong investigation since October 2016, the report found “mounting evidence” of genocide. On November 24, 2017, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence Pramila Patten said the Myanmar Army’s widespread use of sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls was “a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group,” adding that she, too, documented the basis for characterizing the crimes as genocide. In a statement during a Special Session of the Human Rights Council on December 5, 2017, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein referred to the crime of genocide with regard to the attack on Rohingya, saying, “[C]an anyone rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” In a BBC film that aired later that month, High Commissioner Zeid said that members of the military as well as the civilian government in the country may be liable for genocide. More recently, at a press conference on February 1, U.N. Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee said the situation of Rohingya in Myanmar “bears the hallmarks of genocide.” In 2015, a legal analysis prepared for Fortify Rights by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School found “strong evidence” that the government of Myanmar was responsible for genocide against Rohingya Muslims. “Understanding the crime of genocide is not the exclusive domain of international courts,” said Matthew Smith. “If we can ever hope to prevent genocide, we have to be able to diagnose it when we see it. Enough is enough. It’s time to stop tip-toeing around terminology and move towards holding perpetrators accountable.” The governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar have recently made preparations to repatriate Rohingya refugees back to northern Rakhine State, Myanmar. The governments did not consult Rohingya or the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees about the plan. The repatriation was scheduled to begin January 23, but has been delayed. Donor governments and humanitarian agencies should not support the repatriation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar under the current conditions, Fortify Rights said. Donor governments and the U.N. should instead ensure that any repatriation in the future is voluntary, safe, and dignified in accordance with international standards. Rohingya families continue to arrive in Bangladesh, fleeing persecution and ongoing human rights violations in Myanmar. The Myanmar authorities also continue to confine more than 120,000 Rohingya to dozens of internment camps in eight townships of Rakhine State—mostly survivors of violent attacks in 2012—while denying all Rohingya in Rakhine State equal access to citizenship, marriage, education, and employment and systematically restricting their freedom of movement. The authorities also continue to deny the existence of Rohingya. Since August 2017, the Government of Myanmar has denied lifesaving humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Rohingya in need, particularly in the three townships of northern Rakhine State—Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung townships—creating conditions of life designed to be destructive, Fortify Rights said. The U.N. Security Council met in September and again in December 2017 to discuss the Rohingya crisis, failing each time to issue action-oriented resolutions. In addition to a referral to the International Criminal Court, the Security Council should also implement a global arms embargo on Myanmar and targeted sanctions against those responsible for mass atrocity crimes, Fortify Rights said. http://www.fortifyrights.org/publication-20180213.html (c) 2018 Fortify Rights International

Visiting European parliamentary delegation yesterday put the emphasis on giving back the Rohingyas their basic rights, citizenship and opportunity to return safely to Myanmar from Bangladesh. Delegation leader and chair of the delegation for relations with the countries of South Asia (DSAS) Jean Lambert said Rohingyas certainly need to have the right to live with their basic rights and right to citizenship. She made the remarks while speaking to the media at the UNHCR-run relief distribution centre at Rohingya camp in Ukhia. Lambert said the European Parliament expects safe and dignified return of Rohingyas to their homes in Myanmar. She highly appreciated the Bangladesh government and its people for showing such generosity, saying such efforts deserve high appreciation. State Minister for Foreign Affairs M Shahriar Alam said the repatriation is getting delayed because it is a complex issue. He said the government is moving ahead with repatriation process focusing on safe homes and safe environment for Rohingyas so they will not need to come back after repatriation. Four teams of Members of European Parliament (MEPs) comprising 11 MEPs arrived in Bangladesh on Saturday and Sunday. The EU teams visited different parts of Kutupalang camp and observed relief operations by international partners including UNHCR and IOM. They also observed health services operations in the Rohingya camp. The UNHCR officials also held discussions with the visiting delegation members. The delegation members also spoke with Rohingyas who shared their tales of sufferings. The delegation members are expected to visit Myanmar on Thursday. Members of the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights (DROI) are Pier Antonio Panzeri (Chair), Joachim Zeller, Soraya Post and Barbara Lochbiler. Urmas Paet will represent the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET). Marc Tarabella is representing the Delegation for relations with the countries of Southeast Asia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (DASE). The members of the delegation for Relations with the countries of South Asia (DSAS) are Jean Lambert (Chair), James Nicholson, Richard Corbet, Wajid Khan and Sajjad Karim. In October last year, the Council of the EU in its conclusions said it may consider additional measures if the situation does not improve. However, it is yet to know what the conclusions will contain -- whether it will be arms embargo or targeted sanctions on the Myanmar government and its army. On January 16, Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a document on “Physical Arrangement” which will facilitate the return of Rohingyas to their homeland from Bangladesh. The “Physical Arrangement” stipulates that the repatriation will be completed preferably within two years from the start of repatriation. http://www.thedailystar.net/city/give-back-rohingyas-rights-1533844 (c) 2018 The Daily Star