ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Yanghee Lee has been the United Nations' special rapporteur on Myanmar for more than three years. She's documented violence that has driven 650,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights and others have called it ethnic cleansing. YANGHEE LEE: Houses are being burned. People are being tied in the houses and set on fire. Children are being thrown into the fire, people being stabbed and thrashed and gang-raped for women. SHAPIRO: Lee detailed all of this over repeated visits to Myanmar in 2017. She was set to visit again next month. The country now says she is no longer welcome. It says her latest report was unfair, biased against Myanmar's Buddhist majority. LEE: I've asked the government, tell me exactly what is unfair and what is biased? And they will say, well, we told you that we don't have Rohingyas. We don't have any more political prisoners. But they're still there. They say that I don't bring out the grievances of the Buddhist community, but I have. SHAPIRO: Do you think the government of Myanmar is trying to hide something from the U.N. by keeping you out of the country? LEE: Well, doesn't it look like that they are doing something very similar, that - Myanmar can't escape criticisms that they're trying to hide something. And I've been the only person from the human rights mechanism that had access this past year, and now they're blocking that. SHAPIRO: So how worried are you about what is happening? LEE: I'm very worried. I'm very worried because consistently I saw that things were backsliding. People are being silenced more. Journalists are being detained or even civilians, people who post blogs. They've been charged with either defamation law or telecommunications or even unlawful associations law. And these are very serious charges. SHAPIRO: So tell me what specifically you were planning to do on this next visit in January. LEE: I planned on looking into economic and social cultural rights like land evictions, labor laws, farmers who had their land evicted, of course the political prisoners situation, freedom of expression. That's what I do. And this is what I had planned to do again. SHAPIRO: By keeping you out of the country, Myanmar is effectively thumbing its nose at the international community and the United Nations. Does the country pay any price for that? Are there any consequences? LEE: I - you know first I would like to emphasise that I sincerely do hope that the Myanmar government revisits their decision because there could be consequences in the long run. SHAPIRO: What do you mean by that? LEE: For instance, if countries or enterprises want to invest or - you know, these variables are going to be factored in. SHAPIRO: I sense that even now, you may be trying to answer questions diplomatically because while you might be documenting abuses by the government of Myanmar, you also may be allowed back into the country with the government's good graces. LEE: Well, I'm not sure, no. But I don't want to stab them again with a lot of criticisms, at least not yet because Myanmar has and the people of Myanmar has fought so hard for a free and democratic Myanmar. And it's really - I'm really saddened that they're taking this route. SHAPIRO: I wonder whether you agree that what we're seeing in Myanmar is ethnic cleansing. LEE: I think it - and I would agree with the high commissioner. It is a textbook case. SHAPIRO: Yanghee Lee is the U.N. special rapporteur on Myanmar speaking with us on Skype from Seoul. Thank you very much. LEE: Thank you very much. https://www.npr.org/2017/12/22/573046396/myanmar-bans-u-n-official-investigating-human-rights-abuses-against-rohingya?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news (c) 2017 NPR

"Chilling and graphic" eyewitness accounts of violence against hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees must be documented so those responsible can be brought to justice, says Bob Rae, Canadian special envoy to Myanmar. Mr. Rae's interim report on the Rohingya crisis calls on Canada to maintain its support for international non-governmental organizations that are making "compelling" legal arguments about the treatment of the Rohingya. Mr. Rae released the report on Thursday, just over a month after his first trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, where he witnessed first-hand the humanitarian crisis that has displaced more than 655,000 Rohingya refugees since August. "Eyewitness accounts that I have heard have been both chilling and graphic. The gathering of evidence about particular events has to be thorough and systematic and relate to specific events, in particular places, at particular times," Mr. Rae wrote. "This work needs to look at events over the last several years, and efforts must be made to link them to those responsible for such violence and abuses of human rights and security." Canada and the United Nations have said "ethnic cleansing" is taking place against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar's remote Rakhine State. Although Mr. Rae's report did not use the term "ethnic cleansing," he described the violence faced by Rohingya refugees. "In addition to accounts of shooting and military violence, I also heard directly from women of sexual violence and abuse at the hands of the Myanmar military, and the death of children and the elderly on the way to the camps," the report read. Mr. Rae said there are well-founded concerns in Rohingya refugee camps about the potential for "catastrophe" due to heavy rain and wind, and the potential for the outbreak of disease. Bangladesh is in one of its cyclone seasons, which run from September through December and March through July. Mr. Rae said the international community, including Canada, must step up to prevent "serious loss of life." The violence in Rakhine began on Aug. 25 after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army base in the state. Myanmar's military responded by killing hundreds of people, triggering an exodus of Rohingya to neighbouring Bangladesh. Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the country's military have come under international pressure to end the violence, but Ms. Suu Kyi does not have any control over the military under the 2008 constitution. Although Mr. Rae was unable to access remote Rakhine during his visit to Myanmar, he had an hour-long meeting with Ms. Suu Kyi's officials in Yangon. He did not meet with any of Myanmar's military officials. He plans to return to Myanmar in January, in hopes of visiting Rakhine, and will issue a final report with recommendations after his return. Canada has pledged more than $37.5-million in humanitarian assistance for Bangladesh and Myanmar this year, contributing to the UN's appeal for $434-million (U.S.) before February. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mr. Rae as special envoy in October. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/accounts-of-violence-against-rohingya-muslims-must-be-documented-bob-rae/article37416820/ (c) 2017 The Globe and Mail

Myanmar has barred an independent U.N. rights investigator and withdrawn any government cooperation for the rest of her tenure, prompting further indictments of the country’s backsliding on human rights. Observers say the move reflects a possible deepening of a bunker mentality as the country is besieged by international criticism over what the U.N. has labeled an ethnic cleansing campaign. Yanghee Lee, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, was due to visit the country in January. She says she learned of the ban after repeated deadlines lapsed regarding her upcoming trip. When she called a government official, she was told there was “some bad news”. “It’s a really troubling development,” Lee tells TIME. “I would be the last to imagine this would happen, especially under the NLD [National League for Democracy] government which operates on a ticket of democracy, human rights, and respect for rule of law. But we’ve seen a real backsliding.” Myanmar told Lee the decision to permanently rescind her access stems from what it called a “biased and unfair” statement she made at the end of her last visit in July. At the time, she accused Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government of behaving like its military predecessors, such as in its persecution of the Muslim Rohingya minority. Lee’s assessments of rampant human rights abuses in Myanmar—especially her condemnations of official attitudes toward the Rohingya—have previously triggered backlash and protests. Buddhist monk and notorious nationalist provocateur Wirathu once called her a “whore”. However, just two weeks ago, Myanmar’s representative to the U.N. reportedly told the Human Rights Council that the country was willing to continue cooperating with the investigator. Officials could not be reached to comment on the change of policy. Lee says increasing resistance has been apparent, with two ministers declining to meet with her on her last visit. She added that de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi appeared to be taking personally critical U.N. reports documenting widespread allegations of military-perpetrated rapes and killing of Rohingya. For human rights observers, Lee’s blacklisting comes as an escalation of Myanmar’s crackdown, but is not necessarily surprising. The government has refused to grant visas to a U.N. fact-finding mission tasked with examining claims of military-led abuses. “What is clear is that [Aung San Suu Kyi] is not prepared to accept international criticism, regardless of evidence presented about the atrocities committed,” says Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. He added that Myanmar is increasingly adopting “a ‘shoot the messenger’ approach to human rights activists, investigative reporters, and UN agencies and NGOs that raise concerns about what the government is doing.” Except on tightly controlled government-led tours, journalists and foreigners have largely been barred from Rakhine State, where a military campaign has prompted more than 650,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Myanmar says it is responding to a Muslim insurgency; the U.N.’s human rights chief says genocide can’t be ruled out. Two Reuters journalists reporting on the crisis were arrested last week and their location remains unknown, leading to fears of enforced disappearances. James Gomez of Amnesty International says the timing of Lee’s blacklisting is “troubling” given Médecins Sans Frontières’s recent estimate of at least 6,700 Rohingya killed in just the first month of recent violence, and the military’s announcement that it discovered a mass grave. Matthew Smith, CEO of watchdog Fortify Rights, says barring Lee shows Myanmar clearly has “a lot to hide”. “Myanmar is in shameful company in isolating itself from the U.N. in this way,” he says. “The government is unquestionably returning itself to pariah status.” http://time.com/5075233/myanmar-bars-special-rapporteur-yanghee-lee/ (c) 2017 Time

What’s the issue? While the war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas rumbles on, the regions of Polissya and Zakarpattya in the country’s west are corroded by systemic state corruption. Resentment toward Kyiv in these peripheral regions is pushing many into the shadow economies and exacerbating state fragility. Why does it matter? Widespread corruption in Ukraine’s western regions demonstrates that state fragility is not limited to areas controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists. This is undermining Kyiv’s capacity to withstand Russian aggression and restore its sovereignty over Donbas, meaning Moscow’s withdrawal from eastern Ukraine will not necessarily lead to national cohesion. What should be done? Kyiv must acknowledge that Moscow, while clearly the aggressor in Donbas, is not the root cause of all the country’s challenges. Ukraine’s leaders need to correct their failing battle against corruption. Kyiv’s international backers, in particular the European Union, must attach stricter conditions to financial assistance. Executive Summary As Kyiv battles Kremlin-backed separatists in its eastern region of Donbas, it is also waging a half-hearted war against corruption whose mismanagement risks further undermining national stability. While several million Donbas residents live under separatist rule, Ukrainians elsewhere are losing faith in the country’s laws and institutions. The result is a dramatic weakening of the state: millions of dollars bypassing the official budget, chronic low-level violence in centres of illegal trade, and swathes of rural territory with no legal workforce or tax base to speak of. Kyiv and its allies need to acknowledge their failures in battling corruption and quickly change course. If not, centrifugal tendencies could potentially spread well beyond Donbas. At every opportunity, Kyiv reminds its constituents and international backers that Kremlin aggression is the single greatest threat to the country’s statehood. They are right: between the invasion of Donbas, the annexation of Crimea, possible infiltration of military and security structures, and insidious information warfare, Moscow has played a lead role in Ukraine’s destabilisation. Securing Ukraine’s future will require the West to take a firm, consistent line on Russia, namely maintaining all sanctions until Moscow withdraws fully from Donbas. Yet as Kyiv and its allies acknowledge these truths, they must also face the profoundly corrosive effects of continuing systemic corruption. These are suggested by the phenomena of organised crime in, and mass migration from the two western Ukrainian regions of north-western Polissya (along the Belarusian and Polish borders) and south-western Zakarpattya, next to Hungary. Outside meddling is present in both regions, but corruption at all levels of government is the decisive factor behind the social problems they face. Just as Kyiv cannot afford to maintain its current stance on Donbas, where it lacks a coherent policy to reintegrate a war-scarred population ruled by Kremlin-backed separatists, it cannot retain its current haphazard approach to vulnerable populations on the far side of the country. The latter, in large numbers, are seeking better livelihoods across borders or retreating into shadow economies. Poorly-conceived attempts to confront these behaviours – such as ill-timed language laws and disingenuous crackdowns on organised crime – may be only fuelling resentment toward Kyiv. Instead, Kyiv must confront their root cause by following through on old promises to hold accountable corrupt officials at all levels. Many residents of these areas live on the state’s margins. In Polissya, tens of thousands work in a multimillion-dollar, illegal amber trade controlled by armed gangs and allegedly sheltered by officials. In Zakarpattya, much of the working-age population relies on labour migration and tax-free remittances that deprive entire communities of their workforce or tax base. Some ingredients of the Donbas conflict – strong regional identities; deep resentment toward an ineffectual, heavily centralised state; corrupt law enforcement and criminal shadow economies – are also present here, and outside actors – including Moscow and Budapest – could use it to stir up separatism. Absent organised irredentism, these regions’ alienation from the state still casts doubt on whether Kyiv is capable of governing its vast, diverse territory in an inclusive manner. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s leaders have reaped colossal profits from politics. It is no surprise, then, that a large part of the population – between one-quarter and half, according to various estimates – operates in the shadow economy: they see leaders prioritising private wealth over public good and follow suit. Kyiv has made large strides since Maidan, with a new anti-corruption bureau, a new police force, and momentum toward regional decentralisation – yet Ukrainians remain largely convinced that their leaders systematically obstruct or derail reforms to protect personal fiefdoms and corporate bottom lines. Ukraine must get serious about fighting corruption, or risk becoming a state that people on the margins choose to abandon. Recommendations To the government in Kyiv: Create a specialised national anti-corruption court with regional representation, in line with the Venice Commission’s October 2017 recommendation. Amend national legislation governing the use of mineral resources to facilitate licencing of small, local mining cooperatives managed at the oblast, district or hromada (community) level. Address language controversies by: (a) Revising ethnic language elements of the September 2017 Law on Education; (b) Developing legislation in partnership with education experts from the Hungarian, Romanian and other minority-language communities to augment Ukrainian-language instruction in minority language schools; (c) Following best practices regarding mother tongue-education for persons belonging to national minorities. To reduce incentives to take bribes and combat personnel shortages, raise salaries of police, doctors, teachers, and other civil servants incrementally through 2020, adjusting target salaries to account for inflation when necessary. Ensure decentralisation reform in Zakarpattya and other minority-majority regions proceeds in consultation with local communities, including but not limited to minority community leaders. To the Rivne, Volyn, and Zhytomyr oblast governments: Oversee transparent, lawful provision of amber mining licenses for community-based cooperatives. To the Zakarpattya oblast government: Approve the Office for Self-government’s plan for redistricting within the framework of decentralisation reform. To the government of Hungary: Denounce calls by Hungarian officials for Zakarpattian autonomy. Refrain from blocking Ukrainian-led initiatives in multilateral bodies, except for cases when these could pose a direct threat to either human rights or the principles of the body in question. Revisit implementation of the 2010 Law on Citizenship for compliance with OSCE best practices, which call on states to ensure that “conferral of citizenship [to ethnic kin in other states] respects the principles of friendly, including good neighbourly, relations and territorial sovereignty”. I.Introduction Crisis Group’s 2014-2016 reporting on Ukraine focused on the security situation in Ukraine’s eastern breakaway territories, and the Kremlin’s crucial role in arming and financing the de facto entities. The December 2016 report Military Deadlock, Political Crisis argued that the main goal of Moscow’s interference in Donbas was to destabilise Ukraine and freeze its path to Eurointegration – and that Kyiv, through stalling on anti-corruption reforms, was only aiding this goal. The second part of this analysis is even truer today: corruption continues to take a corrosive toll on Ukrainian civic life, leading to potential instability even in parts of the country distant from the conflict zone. The present report takes a close-up look at this phenomenon, examining two peripheral regions where the state is particularly fragile, and many disaffected citizens are either resorting to illegal activities or abandoning the country altogether. The Maidan uprising that culminated in the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014 promised to replace his kleptocratic regime with a European-style government based on rule of law. The Kremlin-backed insurgency that subsequently arose in eastern Ukraine lent this promise urgency: Kyiv’s international backers and domestic reformers agreed that deep anti-corruption and good-governance reforms were key to restoring territorial integrity and enticing residents of separatist-held territories back into the fold. In May 2014, President Petro Poroshenko won a convincing electoral victory with a series of interdependent promises: he would end the war and crack down on corruption, as well as sell or create blind trusts for his vast business assets. Yet three years later the war continues to simmer, with over 10,225 dead and no end in sight. Billions of dollars of Western aid have failed to yield clear breakthroughs in fighting corruption. Decentralisation and police reform have yielded modest successes, bringing new, young faces to the law enforcement sector and larger budgets to some poor rural areas. Yet despite these hopeful steps, many Ukrainians believe aid has only strengthened and legitimised high-level corruption, and that the president himself – who continues to control several increasingly profitable businesses – is a main offender. He denies any wrongdoing. If Kyiv and its backers initially saw the post-Maidan fight against corruption as a way to hasten a peaceful resolution to the Donbas war – by convincing would-be separatists to value Ukrainian sovereignty – citizens’ perceptions of continuing large-scale corruption have become a clear impediment to this mission. A member of the nationalist opposition recently argued that public calls from Kyiv and western allies to “save the three million people of Donbas” ring hollow: the real priority should be to “save the over 40 million people” in Kyiv-controlled Ukraine from a future of indignity. Like other government critics, he called for those concerned about the country’s stability to look “not just to the eastern border, but to the western border”, where Ukrainians’ close attention to neighbouring states’ superior living standards is driving anti-government sentiment. To weigh the merit of these critiques, this report examines citizen-state relations in Polissya and Zakarpattya, two western Ukrainian regions that domestic and international observers identify as potential centres of further state erosion. It looks at the survival strategies residents use to work around state dysfunction and poverty. The present study does not argue that state fragility in western Ukraine deserves greater attention than the Donbas war, where soldiers and civilians continue to die each week, and where up to 3.7 million residents live under Moscow-backed de facto regimes that show little respect for basic rights. It does, however, seek to show how crises of governance in areas far from Donbas can shed light on long-term obstacles to the creation of a strong, peaceful and cohesive state. Field research was conducted between January and June 2017 in Kyiv city, Zhytomyr oblast (Olevsk and Korosten cities), Rivne city and oblast (Rokytne and Sarny districts), Zakarpattya oblast (the cities of Uzhhorod, Berehove, Mukachevo, Solotvyno, Tyachiv, Lysychovo and Mezhhirye). These locales were chosen for high rates of poverty and damage to infrastructure, emigration and circular migration and/or proximity to illegal trade centres. Interviewees included local officials, journalists, health and education experts, small proprietors and black marketeers. Follow-up interviews were conducted with Kyiv officials in September-November 2017. II.Polissya Polissya, meaning “woodland”, is a geographical region that stretches from eastern Poland along the Ukraine-Belarus border into western Russia. Ukraine’s portion is home to roughly three million people, largely rural and poor, and lacks the rich soil, minerals or warm-water ports that fuelled development of agriculture, industry and commerce in other regions.The heart of Ukrainian Polissya comprises the northern districts of Volyn, Rivne and Zhytomyr oblasts, all of which rank below national average socio-economic indicators. Within these three oblasts, the districts that comprise Polissya are among the poorest. Monthly salaries rarely exceed $200, compared to the national average of roughly $285. Since Maidan in 2014, this border backwater has come to symbolise post-regime change chaos. News stories, YouTube videos and social media depict a region consumed by a gold-rush mentality, where well-armed miners destroy forests and armed groups compete among themselves for turf, unhindered – and in some cases abetted – by local authorities and police. The illegal amber industry now reportedly employs tens of thousands, some of whom travel to Polissya from other regions, clogging rural roads during the spring and summer amber mining season. Media sensationalise mining districts as “the Amber People’s Republic”, and a Rivne oblast official warned that attempts to curb the trade by force could spark violent resistance. While this is likely an exaggeration, amber mining and trafficking certainly fuel violent crime that the state lacks capacity to counter. Even if local law enforcement were committed to stopping the trade, officials and activists worry any dramatic escalation, such as the forcible dispersion of a mine working at full capacity, would be met with violence. A.The Amber Boom Polissian villagers have long supplemented their incomes through informal work using what the forest provides: selling small batches of lumber, berries and mushrooms, or small amounts of fossilised tree resin – amber – dug up from forest clearings. Ukrainian amber began to attract the interest of organised crime in the 1990s after Poland cracked down on illegal mining in its Polissian regions. Some Polish gangs then migrated east and introduced their Ukrainian neighbours to a more efficient, but environmentally devastating form of extraction. Crews first clear the forest with backhoes and scoop out channels to a water source, such as a river or marsh. Then they dig pits into the sandy soil and use hoses and pumps powered by old car engines to blast water underground and raise amber, which is lighter than sand or rocks, up to the surface. This practice has polluted rivers and streams, while destroying thousands of hectares of pine and birch forest, leaving behind bare, cratered land that looks like a moonscape. Crowds of Ukrainians gather near the village of Olevsk in Polissya to mine for amber. To find this ancient, fossilised resin of pine trees, miners have torn down many hectares of forest and flooded the bare soil using electric water pumps. 23 March 2017. CRISIS GROUP/Oleksandr Nikolaychuk Strong protection rackets reportedly overseen by figures close to Kyivemerged in the 2000s, when increases in the global price of amber stimulated illicit mining. Throughout this period, the state enterprise Burshtyn Ukraini (Ukrainian Amber) was the only legally licensed miner, and saw yields that were merely a fraction of the illicit traders’. Under Presidents Yushchenko and Yanukovych, lawmakers attempted to regulate the trade but were said to have lost their nerve as they came to understand the magnitude and power of the protection rackets. In 2014, with the instability that accompanied Maidan and the start of the Donbas war, amber mining exploded as the economy slid into recession and Ukraine’s currency plummeted in value, driving many citizens to supplement their meagre incomes through the black market. With the new volume of mining came increased chaos. Rival bands vying for turf filled the vacuum left by the consolidated protection racket that disintegrated after Yanukovych fled. Ukraine’s depleted security structures were overwhelmed by the 2014 challenges; unable to stem the 24 to 36 tonnes of illegal amber exported from Ukraine in 2013 for shadow earnings of roughly $1 million, according to news reports. In 2014, Ukraine may have illegally exported as much as 300 tonnes, worth an estimated $300 million to $600 million, based on black market rates of at least $1,000 per kilo. Little attempt is made to hide illegal mining, or the sums of money involved. Polissians describe bumper-to-bumper traffic on rutted roads during the spring and summer, as both impoverished locals and workers from poor neighbouring oblasts flood into mining areas. Economic motivation comes in the form of $300 to $1,000 per shift divided among work gangs of – in their vernacular – five to ten knights per brigade and one leader, who together control access to deposits in particular areas. Traffickers pay not only the brigades but reportedly also local officials for protection, at sums equivalent to 30-50 per cent of their earnings.According to news reports, traders in 2013 bought amber at prices up to $250 per kilo and sold it across the border in Poland for mark-ups as high as 100 per cent. As of September 2017, buyers typically paid $1,600 or more per kilo in Ukraine before selling abroad at more modest mark-ups of as low as ten per cent. Local police are largely ineffectual at countering illegal amber. Observers point to corruption: the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) arrested four high-ranking Rivne oblast police officials in 2016 on accusations of sheltering the trade, and in early 2017 a key officer was rumoured to have struck a deal with “amber mafia” elements. Accounts abound of officers treating amber as an earning opportunity: a Rivne city policeman whose units intercept amber shipments en route to the Polish border said colleagues in the amber belt sometimes call him to say, “So you seized the amber and then what, you just turned it in?!” Lawlessness in amber areas is hardly the fault of the police alone. As the Rivne officer put it: “Do you think [140 police] can take on 100 mines with 1,000 people working at each one?” Ukraine’s ongoing national campaign to rid law enforcement of the corrupt vestiges of its militia forerunner and rebrand it as mindful of Maidan sensibilities may have brought new faces to police forces in several amber districts, yet officers remain outnumbered by armed gangs of miners, and suspicions of collusion persist. B.Kyiv’s Response In July 2015, Poroshenko denounced law enforcement and security service officials in the three amber oblasts for protecting the illegal industry. His ultimatum gave them two weeks to purge their ranks of amber racketeers, using a variation of the Russian word krysha, which means “roof” both literally and in the sense of protection racket. He also called on Ukraine’s parliament – Verkhovna Rada – to draft a bill to formalise and institutionalise a framework for regulating the trade in early 2015. But there was little change in the amber regions for almost a year until March 2016, when Rivne’s governor requested National Guard deployment. Less than two weeks later, a Rada deputy presented a report based on data gleaned from state security services that accused Rivne’s governor of protecting the trade in collaboration with high-ranking oblast police.By the end of April 2016, Rivne’s governor had resigned, though he did not admit guilt or face any legal penalties. And in July 2016, Kyiv sent 300 personnel from various security organisations to conduct a series of raids in northern Rivne. They arrested dozens of alleged mafia operatives, including the first deputy oblast prosecutor, current and former police personnel, SBU officers and other rumoured “representatives of the criminal world”. While national and municipal officials praised the raids as a turning point in the fight against illegal mining, others were more sceptical. A high-ranking interior ministry official said the operation broke the back of the trade, but many locals claim little has changed on the ground. A Sarny village leader said miners simply find new ways to avoid authorities’ attention. Miners themselves claim to have worked profitably both during and after the raids, even if they had to adjust schedules to avoid run-ins with law enforcement. A Rivne journalist who has reported extensively on life in amber mining villages called the arrests “a joke”, claiming new local and Kyiv-based officials continue to operate government-run protection rackets in the vacuum left by their predecessors. Meanwhile, efforts to regulate the trade by 2018 – one of the conditions for Kyiv’s future International Monetary Fund (IMF) funding – have gone awry. A bill that would have facilitated mining licencing for individuals, as well as companies, and mandated creation of communal enterprises overseen by oblasts, failed to pass its second parliamentary reading in February 2017. In theory, the state geological service issues permits to companies based on a rigorous application process that includes an environmental impact assessment; oblast authorities then oversee the distribution of land parcels. In practice, the process is opaque and licenses are widely believed to be given out based on personal relationships. One school of activist thought is that making licencing easier for individuals and small cooperatives would limit potential for large bribes and thus incentives for officials to engage in corrupt practices. Not only did the legalisation effort fail; it was discredited by explosive corruption allegations against a central figure. After the bill sank in the Rada, Boryslav Rozenblat, a national deputy from the president’s party and one of the bill’s co-authors, accused powerful officials involved in the trade of working behind the scenes to undermine reform. Then the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) accused him and his co-authors of accepting bribes to revise the draft; they also accused Rozenblat individually of improperly influencing officials to approve mining licenses on behalf of an offshore company. While he insists the charges are fabricated, he has been stripped of parliamentary immunity and may face up to twelve years in prison. While some anti-mining activists welcome these actions as a sign that authorities are getting serious about cracking down on the amber mafia, others remain unconvinced. A deputy from the presidential bloc argued that the charges continued a post-Maidan trend of catching relatively small fish while freeing bigger ones. A prominent activist asserted that NABU was simply pretending to fulfil its mandate while serving Kyiv’s goal of discrediting any attempt to regulate the trade, highlighting the cynicism many citizens feel toward state anti-corruption initiatives. Since the February failure of Rozenblat’s proposal, no bill on regulation has been active in the Rada. Officials have instead opted for a controversial process of issuing licenses for private companies to mine large tracts of land in the absence of national legislation regulating and opening the industry to independent miners. Defenders of this process characterise it as a stopgap measure to achieve benefits of the failed legislation – job creation, environmental accountability, reduced child labour and tax revenues – while Kyiv comes up with something better. Opponents argue it is aimed at benefitting politically connected investors while freezing villagers out. As of late 2017, merely four private entities had been licensed, and reports concerning their ownership suggest sceptics’ concerns may be warranted. There are strong, competing views as to who is ultimately to blame for, and to benefit from, the stalled legislative efforts and ad hoc interim measures. The bottom line, as several officials point out, is that a government widely perceived to be looting the state cannot credibly tell citizens to stop doing the same. C.Local Impact The environmental consequences of amber mining are catastrophic and well known: miners have felled large tracts of forest, pumped water out of wetlands, and washed away fertile top soil. The barren spaces left behind are bereft of traditional forest products, such as berries, and vulnerable to flooding. As of early 2017, the total area of devastated land is estimated to range anywhere from 2,600 hectares to more than 10,000. Moreover, corruption allegations have marred a February 2017 plan to recover 6,000 hectares of destroyed forest. The trade has also greatly reduced the appeal of formal work in Polissya. While villagers generally play only supporting roles – as knights or brigade leaders – profits from the rise in amber prices have indeed trickled down. At the start of the amber boom in 2013, knights made about $12 (100 hryvnia) a day – three to four times normal daily earnings in these districts. In 2016 and 2017, someone in the same position could expect to earn about $20-$40 a day, while average monthly salaries in Polissya rarely clear $200. The former forest in Ukraine’s region of Polissya now known as the Korabel (“Ship”) tract for amber mining was cut down and devastated by thousands of people digging for the valuable fossilised pine resin. Shebedykha, Ukraine. June 2016. CRISIS GROUP/Oleksandr Nikolaychuk Local economic benefits have been mixed. One anti-mining activist argued that amber money only has a superficial effect on villagers’ living standards: “People are buying iPhones and using them to light the way to their outhouses”. Anecdotal evidence suggests the new income has in fact been a boon for previously impoverished families, allowing them to afford essential goods. But the under-the-table nature of these earnings still limits the trade’s long-term positive impact on communities. Villages flush with new amber money have next to no tax base. Rivne oblast generated a mere $8.5 million in tax revenue for the state budget in 2016, most of it thanks to industry located outside of the amber belt.An official responsible for oblast-level decentralisation in Rivne pointed out that the dearth of taxes is a crucial obstacle to these reforms, which envision municipalities using locally generated taxes to pay for their own infrastructure needs. This is particularly unfortunate given that decentralisation was conceived, at least in part, to revitalise depressed rural areas like Polissya. The trade has also had dire effects on education. So many children skip class to help families extract amber that a Rivne school deputy head said secondary classes are often half-empty during fall and spring; mining only stops when the ground freezes in winter. The head teacher said many students see little need for a university education, since they already make more money than teachers. Potential security concerns are also worrying. According to locals, a majority of families in amber-mining areas keep firearms, most of which are unregistered. Officials say the number of firearms in Ukraine as a whole, and Polissya in particular, has increased in recent years, facilitated by smuggling that has taken off since the start of Kyiv’s operations against Russian-led forces in Donbas.Sources also say grenades are readily available in mining areas, where they cost between $50 and $150. Crime – especially of the violent kind – has increased in amber areas much more rapidly than in the country as a whole in recent years. While the total number of crimes committed in Ukraine rose about 6.5 per cent from 2013 to 2016, crime in Rivne’s Rokytne district jumped by 40 per cent in 2015 alone. To cite the most extreme examples in amber areas over the past two years, violent crime has tripled in Rokytne, while rising just 18 per cent nationwide. In neighbouring Volodymyr, crime has increased 22 per cent, while violent crime has more than quadrupled. Local leaders say most violence is linked to turf wars and financial disputes. Even without police corruption, any further increases could stretch local law enforcement’s limited capacity to the breaking point. D.Outlook While the amber trade currently shows few signs of sparking large-scale violence, Kyiv is not considering any viable long-term solutions to the structural problems it represents – namely a widespread loss of faith in the rule of law. An anti-mining activist in Olevsk, who was an active supporter of the Maidan revolt, compared the situation in his region to 1990s Donbas, when coal and steel barons presided over a subculture largely divorced from the laws of the land, laying the groundwork for some locals eventually to decide that they should split from Kyiv. Other liberal, Maidan-supporting Polissians find themselves, in spite of their core beliefs, looking enviously across the border at autocratic Belarus, where strict laws on soil usage and draconian enforcement have helped preserve the forests. Kremlin-affiliated media have devoted substantial space to the state’s supposed collapse in Polissya, relying primarily on concerned, pro-Maidan locals to make their case. Kyiv can work toward restoring citizens’ belief in the rule of law by following through on long-pledged reforms. It needs to build on modest successes in police reform as well as carry out pledges to raise salaries for police and prosecutors – a move experts agree will not automatically lead to more effective law enforcement, but will reduce incentives to take bribes from organised crime. Criminal justice reform is also key: as long as Polissian miners believe prosecutors are sheltering organised crime, they will see little reason to obey the law themselves. Finally, Kyiv should create its promised Anti-Corruption Court, without which NABU’s investigations of high-level corruption in the amber trade may have little consequence. Kyiv, crucially, also should take steps to convince Polissians that the state can in fact be trusted to provide public services – and that taxation is key to this function. One step could be to pass legislation that would facilitate licencing of local cooperatives – including for amber extraction and processing. These enterprises could be managed on the oblast level, as suggested by the Rozenblat draft, or at the level of sub-oblast municipalities, which may now levy and collect their own taxes under decentralisation reform. Of course, such an arrangement would need to be handled carefully, so as not to merely reinforce local entrenched interests. When Polissians see their tax money going to tangible improvements in local infrastructure, they may stop thinking of the state as something to be looted before it has a chance to steal from them. III.Zakarpattya Zakarpattya – known to the West as Transcarpathia – is one of Ukraine’s most diverse oblasts. Located in the far south west, it shares a border with four European Union (EU) countries. The region is also poor relative to the rest of Ukraine, largely rural, and most of the population lives in villages surrounded by mountains and dense forests. Many of its 1.2 million inhabitants understand at least three languages and have lived and worked in the EU. Ukrainian nationalists, as well as external actors, regularly warn of – or incite – separatist tendencies among the oblast’s two major ethnic minorities: Hungarians and Rusyns. Both communities were key constituencies behind a failed 1991 bid for autonomy, whose stubborn legacy earns frequent, if misplaced, comparisons to Crimea. Yet the most immediate problem facing Zakarpattya is not active separatism, but something more banal. Its culturally agile population, fed up with corruption and the anaemic local economy, might simply drop out of civic life – either by retreating into a state of permanent circular migration, or by leveraging family ties in EU neighbours to emigrate altogether. A.Separatism in Zakarpattya: A Phantom Threat? History shows that separatism in Zakarpattya is more bark than bite. When Ukraine voted to leave the Soviet Union in 1991, the local governments of two territorial entities – Crimea and Zakarpattya – held parallel referendums on self-rule. Nearly 80 per cent of Zakarpattians voted for autonomy within Ukraine. Yet unlike Crimea, Zakarpattya never went ahead with self-government, and only marginal local politicians continue to call for the referendum’s implementation. Many Zakarpattians insist oblast residents are too pragmatic and concerned with household economics to bother with separatism or even federalism. While reassuring, this also holds the key to a more real threat Kyiv faces in Zakarpattya and other western peripheries whose populations have extensive cross-border ties in the EU: the same pragmatism that militates against active separatism is also eroding citizens’ respect for – and perhaps loyalty to – a state that refuses, in their eyes, to give its constituents a chance to achieve dignified living standards. Where Zakarpattya is concerned, Kyiv’s separatism fears revolve around the oblast’s roughly 150,000 ethnic Hungarians. Zakarpattian Hungarians were a major driver of the 1991 referendum, for which Budapest actively lobbied. In 2010, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán introduced a law guaranteeing Hungarian passports to anyone who could pass a language test and offer proof of ancestors “deprived of Hungarian citizenship” during 20th century territory shuffles. Kyiv at the time paid little attention, but Ukrainian nationalists – both officials and activists – have grown increasingly nervous about cross-border interference since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Many point to the increase in Ukrainians obtaining Hungarian passports: according to statistics cited in a March 2017 news report, there are now over 118,000 Hungarian citizens in the oblast, and other sources put the number at over 200,000. Critics also call attention to inflammatory statements by both Orban and members of the far-right opposition party Jobbik, calling for autonomy for Hungarians in neighbouring states. In the most extreme analysis, Orbán’s ostensible Russian President Vladimir Putin alliance is seen as evidence of shared tactics of hybrid warfare, and that Budapest is grooming its Hungarian minority for a Crimea-style annexation of Zakarpattya. In practical terms, Hungary’s EU membership would preclude any such ambitions, yet political forces in Ukraine regularly take the bait. Nationalist activists from the right-wing Svoboda party and Azov civil corps have now held several torch-lit marches protesting the use of the Hungarian language and other markers of Hungarian ethnic identity in the quiet Zakarpattian town of Berehove. Officials in Kyiv – including the president – have also called for banning dual citizenship to stem the tide of Hungarian “passportification”, drawing ire from the oblast’s vocally anti-separatist governor. Separatism fears have already had a palpable impact on governance in Zakarpattya. Decentralisation reform, in which sub-oblast municipalities form new units called hromadas that levy their own taxes and manage their own budgets, has offered a lifeline to some poorer Ukrainian villages since the process began in 2015, increasing the funds at their disposal by orders of magnitude. Yet in Zakarpattya, the process has ground to a halt. Some barriers are technical: many small municipalities need to amalgamate with neighbouring ones to form electoral units with a viable tax base, a difficult task in an oblast where many poorer villages are surrounded by mountain and forestland. Yet the key obstacles may be political: authorities are loath to allow hromadas to form in majority-minority areas, lest this encourage ethnic divisions, and their concerns have only grown amid recent tensions between Kyiv and Budapest. This impasse comes at considerable cost to ordinary Zakarpattians, who are hungry for more control over how they are governed. The clearest example of Kyiv’s misbegotten response to concerns about cross-border influence is the September 2017 education reform package, which included a law that requires minority-language schools to begin transitioning grades 5-12 to Ukrainian-only curricula starting in 2018, and grades 1-4 starting in 2020. This has presented moral and logistical dilemmas to Zakarpattya’s over 100 minority-language schools, which include over 50 Hungarian ones. The initiative is tied to Kyiv’s ongoing Ukrainianisation campaign. Motivated largely by Putin’s claim that Russia annexed Crimea to protect Russian-speakers, Kyiv has sought over the past three years to ensure predominance of the Ukrainian language in public life. While Ukrainianisation focuses largely on reducing the prevalence of Russian, supporters of education reform present it in part as a way to counter so-called Magyarisation of primary and secondary education in Zakarpattya. The law’s passage drew a swift, angry response from neighbours; Hungary led the charge. In October, Budapest initiated an EU-member review of Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement, fully in force since 1 September 2017. Budapest also promised to block Kyiv-led initiatives in multilateral organisations, including the UN and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Foreign ministers of Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania – there are over 90 Romanian-language schools in Zakarpattya, Chernivtsi, and Odesa oblasts – also asked Kyiv to reconsider.Moscow’s response was slow and subdued; some Kyiv-based experts speculate it was sparing itself the effort as Ukraine’s western neighbours were making enough noise on their own. Political observers see the row as proof of Kyiv’s proclivity to further divide Ukraine through heavy-handed measures to strengthen national cohesion, as well as neighbours’ eagerness to take advantage of its weakness. The new education law has some valid goals in terms of better integrating residents of the country’s south-western oblasts into civic life. Zakarpattian schoolchildren, along with their heavily Romanian-speaking neighbours in Chernivtsi, consistently have the country’s highest failure rate on university entrance exams, which revolve around Ukrainian-language proficiency. In both 2016 and 2017, roughly 27 per cent of college-bound Zakarpattians failed the state exam; some estimate that this included over half of Hungarian-language high schoolers. Ukraine’s Education Minister Liliya Hrynevych lobbied for the bill partially because low Ukrainian fluency limits minority students’ prospects at home. In late 2016, she said reform is aimed at “integrating these children and giving them a chance to continue their education in Ukraine, not Hungary or Romania”. However, even harsh critics of Budapest in Zakarpattya oppose the new law, which contradicts international best practices on minority language education. The OSCE high commissioner on national minorities recommends minority children be given the opportunity to develop literacy in their native language, and states that this goal is best met when countries guarantee access to primary school curricula taught mostly in that language – a guideline that the law violates by calling for grades 1-4 to transition to Ukrainian only. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, while characterising state language knowledge as an essential pillar of national cohesion, stated that it “deplores the fact there was no real consultation with leaders of minority communities in Ukraine” when preparing the law. Zakarpattya Governor Hennadiy Moskal, known for his vocal distaste for any discussion of regional separatism or autonomy, denounced the law as showing zero appreciation for conditions in multi-ethnic regions. He said Zakarpattya’s minorities are “law-abiding citizens of Ukraine, striving to master the state language”. A Kyiv senior statesman, after voicing concerns that Budapest has designs on the oblast, called the law an “idiotic” move tailor-made to alienate Zakarpattians. Berehove’s town head condemned discussions of autonomy in Budapest and called for improved Ukrainian-language instruction in Hungarian schools – while stressing the right of Hungarians to study in their native language: “We would like to be considered full-fledged members of society, having lived for centuries at the foot of the Carpathians”, he wrote, adding: “It’s not our fault that the border changed several times in a single decade”. There is still time to defuse tension the law has provoked. In response to the uproar following its passage, Kyiv submitted it to the Venice Commission, which partially endorsed “the strong domestic and international criticism [of] provisions reducing the scope of minority language education” – while noting that these provisions were vague enough to offer “space for an interpretation and application which are more in line with the protection of national minorities”. Ukraine has promised to consult with minority community leaders regarding the legislation’s most controversial components. These are positive signs, but a longer-term solution to challenges of minority integration will require Kyiv to address deeper structural problems. B.Economics, Not Nationalism, Drive Cross-border Ties Lost in conversations about language proficiency and the threat of separatism is the deeply pragmatic nature of many Zakarpattians’ ties to Hungary and other neighbouring states: residents opt for dual citizenship and Hungarian-language education not out of allegiance to Budapest, but to ease the process of labour migration. Officials and private citizens have made a strong case for the practical nature of dual citizenship. The oblast head for decentralisation reform called it “awful”, but dismissed as absurd the notion it reflects residents’ loyalty to other states. Staff at an Uzhhorod visa agency asserted there is “absolutely no ideology” behind the choice to get legal documentation for Hungary or any neighbouring state, saying the decision is based on poor living standards, rising utilities prices and frustration with Kyiv. Pensioners crossing the nearby Romanian border echoed this sentiment, saying they had obtained EU residency to access better medical care and because post-Maidan leaders had “looted the country”. Zakarpattya has traditionally had one of the highest rates of labour migration in Ukraine, and it shapes nearly every aspect of oblast life. Work opportunities are scarce, and much of the economy revolves around cross-border smuggling rings allegedly controlled by a political dynasty from the city of Mukachevo, the Balogas – who spend just enough of their vast wealth on infrastructure to retain local backing. Remittances are the core source of income for many rural households, but do not produce tax revenue because they are neither passed through formal channels, nor reinvested in domestic business development. This dynamic has made Zakarpattya a place of dramatic contrasts, where Western living standards often exist in the home, but nowhere else. Many villages consist of half-destroyed roads lined with grand multi-story houses: a constant reminder to working-age Zakarpattians of the greater earning potential just across the border. Weak identification with the Ukrainian ethnos does not completely explain high out-migration: heartland oblasts, including largely Ukrainian ones like Vinnytsia, also have rural working-age populations abroad in large numbers.What distinguishes Zakarpattya and neighbouring Chernivtsi, bordering Romania, from these heartland regions is the fact that residents leverage ethnic ties with neighbouring states to ease the process: Hungary is often not Zakarpattians’ final destination; instead, many labourers use it as a springboard to other EU states with stronger economies. A man from the majority-Hungarian border district of Berehove quoted in an October 2016 report spoke of using his Hungarian documents to find work in Spain, where he earned enough money to pay for a life-saving operation for his mother. An ethnic Ukrainian pensioner working at an Uzhhorod market, desperate for a Hungarian passport, said her daughter obtained citizenship after picking up the language from childhood friends. Unable to use her economics degree at home, she looked for work in Hungary before moving to Prague, where she finally found decent wages at a clock factory. Dual citizenship is pragmatic. Language issues must also be viewed in the context of migration. One in five oblast schoolchildren has one or more parents working abroad, a factor that a January 2017 study linked to an average loss of up to eight points on state Ukrainian language tests, suggesting poor Ukrainian knowledge correlates to parental transience. Moreover, many neglect Ukrainian precisely because they plan to study abroad to increase future earning potential. An expert on education among ethnic Hungarians in the oblast noted that demand for slots in Hungarian-language schools has increased in recent years, saying this was likely because parents want to give their children a chance to obtain Hungarian citizenship, and the educational and earning opportunities that go along with it. As in other parts of the country, mass migration means shortages of qualified experts in critical fields – particularly teachers and doctors. A medical resident at Uzhhorod National University, who planned to move to Slovakia, said half of his graduating class left for the EU before even starting their residencies. The head of a highly-regarded family clinic in Uzhhorod reported that 30 per cent of his residents had dropped out in 2016 to practice in EU countries: “They are never coming back”, he said. “We’re training doctors for Hungary and Germany”. Zakarpattya’s shortage of expert professionals has an ethnic dynamic absent from other oblasts – again, due less to national allegiance than the fact that specialists who speak a minority language have an easier time finding work abroad. Teachers at Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian-language schools leave to fill vacancies in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania left by teachers who are themselves working even further west. In first stop Hungary, teachers already make up to six times more than their Zakarpattian monthly income of $150-$230; this only increases going west. Within the past year, hospitals in the majority-Hungarian district of Berehove have had to bring in staff from neighbouring areas to work night shifts because so many staff have left the country. Despite a 20-30 per cent salary hike at the start of 2017, a new Ukrainian doctor can still only expect to make roughly 2,500 hryvnia (about $90) a month, compared to the $900 they can make next door in the EU. In a hopeful step, the Rada passed a medical reform package in late 2017 that is due to raise the average doctor’s salary to $720 by 2020 – a plan that is naturally contingent on the state not losing critical amounts of money to corruption. Many ordinary Zakarpattians are deeply alienated from Kyiv, but this alienation should not be conflated with irredentism. Some describe the oblast as its own “separate republic”, referring to other provinces as simply “Ukraine”. Many express contempt for Kyiv officials whose professionalism falls far short of the EU standards with which they are familiar. Others remark that given higher living standards in neighbouring states, life would be simpler had Zakarpattya joined one of them at the end of the Second World War. Yet these casual references to Zakarpattian exceptionalism are best seen as a regional variation of an all-too-Ukrainian theme – anger at economic malaise and poor governance. Remarks by a hotel owner in Mezhhirye present an unusually hyperbolic example of this: “I’m basically against dividing Ukraine”, he said. Yet he predicted that Kyiv, Moscow, and Budapest would soon do just that, with Hungary taking Zakarpattya. Explaining his far-fetched prediction, he appealed not to widespread ethnic nationalism or historic cross-border ties, but to the everyday complaint that Kyiv lacks the will to fight corruption and put its constituents first. IV.Conclusion Ukraine has made significant strides since Maidan, in spite of enormous external challenges from Kremlin-backed insurgents in the east and inconsistent support from a troubled Euroatlantic world. Yet this is far from the whole story. Conditions in its western regions show that the state remains fragile, even beyond those parts of the country where Moscow is actively undermining sovereignty. In the years since Maidan, the Poroshenko government has not shown itself capable of admitting to – let alone addressing – the root cause of this fragility: leaders prioritising private wealth over public good. Instead, it attacks symptoms: mass participation in shadow economies or weak identification with markers of Ukrainian ethnic identity, such as language. Authoritarian neighbours are eager to provoke and capitalise on these missteps, as illustrated by the row with Budapest and Kremlin-affiliated outlets’ gloating coverage of the amber fiasco. But their predatory behaviour should not distract from Kyiv’s responsibility to correct its own mistakes. Kyiv’s leadership cannot afford to deny its core weaknesses any longer. Ukraine needs the buy-in of all its citizens if it is to survive as a state. Three years ago, President Poroshenko promised to end the war in Donbas and confront corruption. Fulfilling the first promise would be hard enough on its own, as it requires major concessions from an intractable neighbouring great power and a watertight strategy to reintegrate a traumatised population growing used to living under separatist rule. Yet Kyiv cannot treat these challenges as an excuse to neglect inclusive governance or stop fighting corruption. If it does, the people of Donbas will not be the only ones Kyiv will have to struggle to win back. https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/ukraine-will-centre-hold-1 (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

In August 2017, Crisis Group sounded the alarmabout the risk of an insurrection in Cameroon’s Anglophone region unless a genuine dialogue, complete with strong measures to defuse tensions, was initiated. The crisis, which has been brewing for the past year, regrettably escalated in November when armed attacks were launched against defence forces. Since then, at least sixteen soldiers and police officers have been killed and some twenty injured during thirteen attacks led by separatists. This is four times the number of military victims killed by Boko Haram in the Far North during the same period. After the defence and security forces suppressed the protests staged from 22 September to 1 October 2017, the separatist faction has taken a harder line and attracted more support. The Manyu division in the Southwest is currently the hotbed of the insurrection, because of its proximity to Nigeria’s Cross River state, home to some of the officials of the “Federal Republic of Ambazonia” (the name given by secessionists to their self-proclaimed state). Most of these attacks have been of low intensity, though some appear to have been more violent. The communications minister reported that 200 assailants participated in the attack on the Mamfe gendarmerie on 8 December, although this number seems to be an exaggeration. The Anglophone movement is by no means represented simply by its secessionist faction. However, at the heart of the secessionist movement, those calling for armed struggle seem to prevail. Official Cameroonian media and diplomatic sources contacted by Crisis Group have provided information about fighters being recruited and training camps operating in border areas. Those taking up the armed struggle can be divided into two categories. The first consists of around a dozen violent splinter groups or self-defence groups, each with an average of between ten and 30 members, for example the Tigers, Vipers and Ambaland forces. Some of them have carried out arson attacks on markets, shops and schools. The second category is comprised of three rebel militias, numbering more than a hundred fighters in total: the Ambazonia Defence Forces (ADF), led by Ayaba Cho Lucas and Benedict Nwana Kuah, the Southern Cameroons Defence Forces (SOCADEF), commanded by Ebenezer Derek Mbongo Akwanga, and the homonymous group called Southern Cameroons Defence Forces (SCDF), under the leadership of Nso Foncha Nkem. Seven home-made bombs have exploded since the outbreak of the crisis in the Anglophone regions, without claiming any victims; another device was defused in Douala. There are indications that these may have only been tests to give a show of force to the Cameroonian authorities, also in the Francophone region, should the unrest continue to grow. Ambazonia’s “interim government” has so far rejected theoption of an insurrection. But those behind the armed struggle have increased the number of their attacks with the intention of pushing the Cameroonian state into declaring war and thus forcing the hand of the “interim government” with a fait accompli. Under pressure, Ambazonia’s president, Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, is wavering between armed struggle and a strategy of civil disobedience and diplomatic initiatives. His supporters may oblige him to change his mind in 2018 and shift from self-defence to actual insurrection. The violence since October has created a troubling humanitarian situation. Thousands of people have fled to neighbouring Nigeria, and tens of thousands to other, less-exposed departments or Francophone regions. The situation facing these displaced populations has been exacerbated by a heavy-handed statement made in the beginning of December by the prefect of Manyu, who issued an order to residents of around fifteen villages to leave their homes, at very short notice and with the threat that otherwise they would be considered by the military as being complicit with “terrorists”. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded 7,204 Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria. The Cross River state authorities refer to the presence in their territory of 28,000 Cameroonian refugees, most of whom are not receiving any support. A Military Response that Risks Antagonising the Population Faced with a separatist faction lurching toward armed struggle, Cameroon’s president has declared war on secessionists and called them terrorists. International arrest warrants have been issued against the secessionist leaders, yet another wave of military reinforcements has been deployed in the Southwest, and a de facto state of emergency has been imposed in the Manyu division. These steps have unfortunately been accompanied by a refusal to engage in any meaningful dialogue with the militant Anglophone federalists, who have never advocated violence and some of whose members were imprisoned in January 2017 for political reasons. A year ago, the Cameroonian government held the view that the Anglophone problem did not exist. Ten months ago, radicals within government believed that the crisis would be solved by arresting the federalist movement’s leaders. Instead it has worsened. Today this same radical wing is betting on war, despite the cost in terms of human lives – some sixty civilians, sixteen members of the army and police officers, as well as an indeterminate number of secessionist fighters have already been killed. This bet could prove counterproductive, because the military response will only feed the cycle of violence, make the population more receptive to separatist ideas, and strengthen the position of supporters of the armed struggle at the core of the secessionist movement. Reports were made, including by traditional chiefs, of abuses and serious human rights violations committed by soldiers in the Manyu division. President Biya will find it hard to stabilise the Anglophone regions through a military response alone, and only at the cost of hard-fought and expensive counter-insurgency war. However, the escalation in the separatist violence is playing into the hands of powerful members of government and military elite, who have been waiting precisely for this to happen to reduce the Anglophone crisis to a simple question of insurrection and therefore justify a purely military response. This radical element within government is convinced that it will be able to swiftly suppress the uprising before the next elections. But it’s a hazardous calculation. Putting down even a small-scale insurrection is difficult when it is supported by a section of the population. 2018: A Year Rife with Danger The insurrection has only really so far been notable in Manyu division. But if it spreads to other divisions in the Southwest, or even to the Northwest, where separatist feelings are running high, it could spiral out of control. To raise an army, violent separatists simply need more resources. A section of the radicalised population supports them, and manpower is available in Cameroon and from the refugees. This would have repercussions in Nigeria where local backing for Anglophone militants undoubtedly exists. Southeast Nigeria has long been a centre of various irredentist or secessionist disputes, and has several ethnic and political affinities with Cameroon’s Southwest region. If the uprising gains momentum, there is a real danger of the Francophone regions being affected, especially since many of the separatists threaten to expand violence around the whole country. Such a scenario would cause deep and long-lasting destabilisation in Cameroon, and the party in power would certainly pay the price in the elections scheduled for autumn 2018. The financial and humanitarian cost would be immense. Cameroon’s finance minister has already announced that the predicted 6-per-cent growth in the country’s GDP has ended up dwindling to 3.7 per cent. Although the Anglophone crisis may not have been the sole cause of the economy’s weaker-than-expected performance, it has certainly played its part. Unless a political dialogue begins soon, Cameroon could find itself in 2018 – an electoral year – facing an increasingly delicate economic and security situation. The gradual formation of an armed insurrection does require military reaction, but it must be proportional and respect human rights. The political solution must remain the top priority. This approach must include a discussion on federalism and decentralisation led by Cameroon’s president himself. The traditional end-of-year speech gives the Cameroonian president an ideal opportunity to send out a message of calm, take measures to ease tensions and announce the start of a dialogue. International partners still have the chance to give their backing to such an initiative to prevent Cameroon becoming trapped in a long fratricidal conflict. To date they have been content to do the bare minimum, wrongly believing that the crisis poses no direct threat to their economic, political and security interests, whereas destabilisation in Cameroon would necessarily have sub-regional consequences both in Central Africa and in Nigeria, and is also likely to weaken the fight against Boko Haram. The stakes are high: a destabilised Cameroon would be damaging for everyone. All parties must focus on finding a political solution to the crisis, as well as offer mediation. For the UN and the African Union, now is the time to restore the reputation of their early-warning system and to prevent this crisis from evolving into an insurrection and becoming a dangerous conflagration. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon/cameroons-anglophone-crisis-dialogue-remains-only-viable-solution?utm_source=Sign+Up+to+Crisis+Group%27s+Email+Updates&utm_campaign=a4b18bff38-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_12_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1dab8c11ea-a4b18bff38-359909997 (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

Sujatha Gidla, far left, with her family, Andhra Pradesh, India, 1966. Her mother, Manjula, is at right. Many Indian houses still have a simple pit toilet, which consists of a large hole in the floor. The feces are collected at night by “manual scavengers,” who, Sujatha Gidla writes in Ants Among Elephants, “carry away human shit” and whose “tools are nothing but a small broom and a tin plate.” Most are women. In the past, they would “fill their palm-leaf baskets with excrement and carry it off on their heads five, six miles to some place on the outskirts of town where they’re allowed to dispose of it.” In many places today, baskets have been replaced with buckets and carts, but the disease-ridden job of cleaning toilets, septic tanks, gutters, and sewers still falls on Dalits, formerly “untouchable” Hindus.1 One out of six Indians is a Dalit, but for years I neither witnessed nor imagined the life of one, although almost every week small columns in the newspapers reported the murder, rape, and torture of them. If any of the students at my schools were Dalits, I did not know—such obliviousness about a hierarchy that benefited me was part of my upper-caste privilege. I did hear much whispered malevolence among relatives against the “Scheduled Castes” (the official name of Dalits) and the affirmative action program designed to bring them equal citizenship. It was only at my provincial university, in a left-wing student group, that I first came into regular contact with Dalits; and it was while reading Ralph Ellison in my late teens that I began to reflect on the historical injustices and social and psychological pathologies that had conspired to make tens of millions of people invisible. India, the world’s largest democracy, also happens to be the world’s most hierarchical society; its most powerful and wealthy citizens, who are overwhelmingly upper-caste, are very far from checking their privilege or understanding the cruel disadvantages of birth among the low castes. Dalits remain largely invisible in popular cinema, sitcoms, television commercials, and soap operas. No major museums commemorate their long suffering. Unlike racism in the United States, which provokes general condemnation, there are no social taboos—as distinct from legal provisions—against hatred or loathing of low-caste Hindus. Many Dalits are still treated as “untouchables,” despite the equal rights granted to them by India’s democratic constitution. This constitution was drafted in the late 1940s with the help of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit leader, whose reputation as a bold and iconoclastic thinker has been eclipsed by the cults of his upper-caste rivals Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. The founding principles of India’s democracy that Ambedkar helped enshrine are even more far-reaching than America’s in their guarantee of equal rights and absolute prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. But high-minded legislation in India is rarely accompanied by a necessary change in hearts and minds. The institution of caste, the social group to which Indians belong by birth, remains the most formidable obstacle to an egalitarian ethos. In the hierarchical order, a Brahmin ranked highest due to his “pure” occupations of priest and scholar, and the Dalit was degraded to the lowest rung because of his proximity to human excreta and other polluting bodily substances. Ambedkar, for instance, belonged to a subcaste whose members were forced to walk with brooms tied to their waists, sweeping away their evidently contaminating footprints. Among many activists he was deeply frustrated by how Dalits, denied access to education and property, had been “completely disabled,” as he wrote in Annihilation of Caste (1936): They could not bear arms, and without arms they could not rebel. They were all ploughmen—or rather, condemned to be ploughmen—and they never were allowed to convert their ploughshares into swords. They had no bayonets, and therefore everyone who chose, could and did sit upon them. On account of the Caste System, they could receive no education. They could not think out or know the way to their salvation. They were condemned to be lowly; and not knowing the way of escape, and not having the means of escape, they became reconciled to eternal servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate.2 This terrible destiny has been justified over time by all kinds of religious and philosophical rationalizations. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi claims that manual scavengers realized ages ago that it is their “duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods” and “that this job of cleaning up should continue as an internal spiritual activity for centuries.” Such opinions are encouraged by the fact that the values, beliefs, prejudices, phobias, and taboos of the caste system were deeply internalized by its victims, including Indian Christians and Muslims, whose ancestors tried to escape the stigma of untouchability by renouncing Hinduism: the family of Sujatha Gidla converted to Christianity. This implicit surrender to the hierarchical norms of deference and obligation has long prevented solidarity among the oppressed castes, forestalling any concerted challenge from below to the entire iniquitous system. Indeed, India’s multilayered social order seems more fiendishly organized than the simple hierarchy that placed whites over blacks in the United States. The advent of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of white supremacism has refocused attention on how the degradation of African-Americans in the nineteenth century served to affirm the rights and dignity of poor white men. “White men,” the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis wrote, “have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.” But in the Hindu caste system defined by “graded inequality,” as Ambedkar brilliantly defined it, “there is no such class as a completely unprivileged class except the one which is at the base of the social pyramid”; “every class is interested in maintaining the system” and indeed does so by dominating or degrading the one just below it. The Marathi poet Govindaraj put it more bluntly: Hindu society consists of men “who bow their heads to the kicks from above and who simultaneously give a kick below, never thinking to resist the one or refrain from the other.” Govindaraj offered this generalization in the late nineteenth century; it remains largely valid in the twenty-first. In rural areas, which many upper-caste Hindus have migrated from, members of India’s formerly subordinate middle castes, for instance, are often responsible for some of the worst atrocities against Dalits today. It is also true that a growing number of people at the very bottom of the hierarchy are vigorously resisting the kicks from above. Political parties and social movements organized around Dalit identity have emerged in recent decades.3 Such is the electoral potency of this Dalit political awakening that India’s present Hindu nationalist regime, though dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has had to position itself as the benefactor of Dalits. The liberalization of the Indian economy since 1991 has helped some Dalit entrepreneurs, provoking ambitious claims by some commentators that global capitalism is finally bringing about a long-delayed emancipation from the inequities of caste.4 The range and intricacy of Dalit experience can be grasped by English-language readers through the works of scholars and critics such as Anand Teltumbde, Gopal Guru, and D.R. Nagaraj.5 Daya Pawar’s pioneering Dalit autobiography, Baluta, which describes caste violence in Mumbai in the 1940s and 1950s, appeared in a fine English translation in 2015. Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan and Vasant Moon’s Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography are eye-opening memoirs of impoverished Dalit childhoods in the mid-twentieth century, while Ajay Navaria’s stories in Unclaimed Terrain turn an ironic gaze on the recent emergence of a Dalit middle class through affirmative action and economic liberalization. Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants, which records the life of a Dalit family in the central Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and spans nearly a century, significantly enriches the new Dalit literature in English. Gidla grew up in India and now works as a conductor on the New York City subway. She knew firsthand the poverty and discrimination that several generations of her family had suffered. Defiant in the face of endless cruelty and misery, and tender with its victims, she seems determined to render the truth of a historical experience in all its dimensions, complexity, and nuance. The result is a book that combines many different genres—memoir, history, ethnography, and literature—and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations. Gidla is fully aware of the sanction the caste system receives in Hindu scripture. She seems more interested, however, in how the twin shocks of colonialism and capitalism in nineteenth-century India turned the caste system into a more exploitative force. A brisk account of her ancestors describes how they worshipped their own tribal goddesses and had little to do with society outside the forest where they lived. When the British cleared the forests for teak plantations, my great-grandparents’ clan was driven out onto the plains, where the civilized people, the settled ones, the ones who owned land and knew how to cultivate it—in a word, the Hindus—lived. The little clan, wandering outside the forest, found a great lake and settled around it. There was no sign of human life for miles and miles. They took up farming. The land around the lake was fertile and gave them more than they needed. They called their new settlement Sankarapadu, after one of their gods. But soon the civilized people took notice of them. They were discovered by an agent of the local zamindar—the great landlord appointed by the British to collect revenue in that area—who saw the rice growing in their fields and levied taxes, keeping the bulk of what he extracted for himself. But that was not enough for this agent. He and his family and his caste people moved nearby and set about stealing the land by force and by cunning. They loaned the clansmen trivial sums at usurious rates to buy small necessities such as salt, seeds, or new clothes for a wedding. Unable to pay off these debts, the villagers gave up their land acre by acre. My ancestors, who had cleared and settled the area, were reduced to working on their old fields as laborers. In a few simply phrased sentences, a great movement of Indian and world history is compressed: the corralling of peoples in subsistence economies into the world made by feudalists, colonialists, capitalists, and other “civilized” peoples. Gidla is acutely aware of how modern much of what we call tradition is. Take her account of the “vettisystem” in central India, in which “every untouchable family in every village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk” to the local landlord. The system had its origins, she writes, in “British demands to maximize revenues” and land reforms that created a class of oppressive landlords while turning low-caste peasants and artisans into slave labor. “Although based on traditional caste hierarchies,” Gidla writes, “the vetti system was not a traditional system. However antiquated it appeared, it was unknown before the end of the nineteenth century. Like chattel slavery in the Americas, it was a modern product of the capitalist world market.” But Gidla’s characters are not two-dimensional victims, poor and weak, waiting to be liberated from their primitive existence by some modern ideology or institution such as secular democracy, Hindu nationalism, or global capitalism. Rather, she commemorates their ingenuity and creativity, their repertoire of cultures and memories. A tireless interviewer, she displays an ethnographic fidelity to the stories, images, gods, taboos, and fears of her community—her account of its tradition of pig-hunting and wedding feasts is particularly vivid. And the emotional current is always strong. People fall in love, and are cruelly thwarted, by both fate and man-made prohibitions. The book’s most memorable character is the author’s mother, Manjula. This gifted woman’s struggles with entrenched caste prejudice and misogyny form the emotional core of the narrative. But the largest place in it is reserved for Gidla’s maternal uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, a famous poet and revolutionary who in the 1970s organized a guerrilla group that aimed “to liberate the countryside village by village, driving off the landlords and gathering forces to ultimately encircle the cities and capture state power.” This was a doomed project, given the superior military strength of the Indian state. But it would be too easy to judge its advocates as deluded losers who failed to grasp the emancipatory potential of liberal democracy and free markets. Many Dalits were not enraptured by freedom from British rule or what they saw as the substitution of a white ruling class by high-born Hindus. In the midst of India’s independence day festivities in August 1947, a “boy Satyam had never before seen” asks him: “Do you think this independence is for people like you and me?” Nehru, India’s first prime minister, soon clarified this issue by unleashing his British-trained military on rebellious landless peasants in Satyam’s region. Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos A member of the Ramnami sect of untouchables whose tattoos represent a protest against the caste system, Chhattisgarh, India, 2005 While revealing Nehru, a hero to middle-class and upper-caste Indians, as another tormentor of Indian’s most wretched, Gidla’s book also clarifies why Dalits were not much attracted by the upper-caste paternalism of Gandhi, who narrowed the manifold cruelties of India’s social system to the issue of manual scavenging, claiming that the institution of caste needed to be reformed rather than abolished. Gidla may disconcert more of her readers when she writes that “everything exciting and progressive” in the 1950s and 1960s was “associated with communism.” But this is true not only for India or Dalits, but also for many other postcolonial peoples in Asia and Africa. Much seemingly disparate activity—writing plays and novels, making films, reciting poetry, organizing reading clubs, libraries, labor, and protest movements—was indissolubly linked to the promise of a more extensive liberation than the first generation of anticolonial leaders had achieved. It is arguable that the delegitimation since 1989 of Communist ideals of justice and dignity and social-democratic notions of collective welfare created a great vacuum—one that various ethnic and racial fundamentalisms eagerly fill today. Gidla’s account of Satyam’s life as a radical valuably illuminates the moral energy and purpose the pursuit of these ideals brought (and continue to bring) to the lives of the oppressed, long after the revolutions made in their name in Russia and China mutated into tyrannies. It is also true that communism appeared irresistible to Satyam and fellow Dalits because no other ideology on offer—whether liberalism, nationalism, or Gandhism—could match its combined promise of intellectual growth, political fraternity, and redemptive action. Saytam, Gidla writes, “was amazed by this way of thinking—that one can look at society, the people in it, the things they do, in the same manner as a natural process that can be studied in a science lab” and how “the struggle between classes in society is reflected in something called ideology—in ideas and culture. Under the right conditions, the spread of certain ideas could in turn spur social change.” Social change was what India needed above all, with or without communism. For as Ambedkar warned in 1951 in resigning from Nehru’s cabinet, “to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.” Gidla expands these insights into a devastating critique of not only India’s iconic leaders but also its Communist bosses, who were mostly Brahmin men parasitic on the Soviet Union and China for ideological guidance. “When Stalin was alive,” she writes caustically, “everyone took his sayings as verses from the Vedas.” These camp followers neglected the central problem of caste and gender discrimination, assuming that it would disappear with the reordering of socioeconomic structures. Such mechanical application of Marxist dogma to uniquely Indian situations explains the historic failure of the mainstream left in India to build support among the country’s numerous trampled-upon peoples. Many disenchanted Dalits chose to organize themselves into guerrilla groups rather than be represented by upper-caste Communists-by-rote in local and national legislatures. Political activism for them became a way of life and a source of meaning; and this in itself represented a triumph over adversity and misfortune. Gidla writes on the occasion of her grandmother’s death: Who could have imagined that the body of this diminutive black-skinned untouchable woman, a gleaner of fields, a singer of songs of toil, a pounder of rice, a Bible woman, the widow of a railway coolie, the mother of a plantation slave, a woman who’d never spent a single moment of her life on herself, would be carried to her grave in a procession of hundreds of men and women carrying red flags and singing “The Internationale”? In the life of the fugitive activist, the personal was always and inescapably political. Here is Manjula leaving her home to enter a dubiously arranged marriage: The moment Manjula stepped out of the house, Satyam broke down, fell to his knees, and wept. No one could console him. They all thought that he wept because he couldn’t attend his sister’s wedding. But it wasn’t that. He was thinking of their common struggles, growing up motherless and abandoned by their father, their efforts to get educated, the shameful way in which her match had been arranged. What was to become of Satyam-Carey-Manjula? At such moments, Gidla’s book achieves the emotional power of V.S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which describes the solitary struggles of a descendant of indentured laborers. The contrast between the two books is instructive. Mr. Biswas, modeled on Naipaul’s father, is an educated Brahmin in a small colony, dreaming of individual redemption through writing and affiliation with the imperial metropolis—an ambition that his son eventually realizes. For a Dalit woman in India who confronts centuries of structural and legitimated injustice, salvation lies in a broader social and political revolution at home. The signs lately are both promising and discouraging. The first generation of Dalit political parties has been undermined by their own self-serving leaders, who sought in politics easy access to wealth and power. Everyday violence against Dalits has spiked in recent years, largely as a result of their greater political assertiveness. Dalits face discrimination in employment and housing even in the urban and globalized sectors of the economy; they are still exposed in rural areas to murder, rape, and torture; recourse to the police can invite more violence.6 Last year in the state of Gujarat, a mob of cow vigilantes—one of the many unleashed by Modi’s regime—assaulted several Dalits whose traditional occupation is to retrieve and skin dead cattle. The Dalits were tied to the rear of a car and dragged to a police station where they were beaten again; their persecutors also felt emboldened enough to post a video of the flogging on social media. Today, however, a major agitation in Gujarat is being led by those same Dalit victims of mob violence. They have renounced their occupation in an attempt to undermine the very basis of a society in which degrading work is reserved for low-castes. Their protests have been strong enough to help force the state’s chief minister out of office and provoke Modi into publicly admonishing his cow vigilantes: “If you feel like attacking someone, attack me, not my Dalit brothers.” Certainly Ambedkar would have approved of a movement that aims at a profound transformation of Indian society instead of expanding the palace built on a dung heap. As he put it, the struggle of the Dalits is “not for wealth or for power.” Rather, “it is a battle for freedom…for the reclamation of the human personality”—an arduous, never-ending battle in which Gidla’s book represents an all too rare victory. 1 Nearly a million Dalits still work in this dangerous and debasing profession, though manual scavenging, as it is called in India, was banned in 2013. A new documentary titled Kakkoos, directed by Divya Bharathi, gives a searing account of their working conditions. ↩ 2 Ambedkar’s major work is available in a new edition, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy: Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (Verso, 2016). ↩ 3 For a broad account of these developments, see Christophe Jaffrelot, Religion, Caste and Politics in India (London: Hurst, 2011). ↩ 4 See, for instance, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, “Capitalism’s Assault on the Indian Caste System: How Economic Liberalization Spawned Low-Caste Dalit Millionaires,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 776, July 21, 2015. ↩ 5 There are some stimulating essays on contemporary Dalit writing in Namit Arora, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities (Gurgaon, India: Three Essays Collective, 2017). ↩ 6 For a probing account of one such atrocity and how it was reported in the upper-caste-dominated media, see Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008). ↩ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/dalits-gods-oppressed-children/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Dalits%20lies%20Mark%20Dion&utm_content=NYR%20Dalits%20lies%20Mark%20Dion+CID_3a1213936428a227155ae95b261104c3&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Gods%20Oppressed%20Children (c) 2017 New York Review of Books

Within a 100-day span in the spring and summer of 1994 the Rwandan genocide claimed the lives of an estimated 500,000-1,000,000 Tutsis and their sympathisers. A generation has since past yet Rwandans, old and young alike, are continuing to experience post-genocide trauma. Why is this the case and what can be done to counter this enduring trauma? As with any society that has suffered horrible atrocities, post-genocide Rwanda has had to cope with an enduring trauma. This phenomenon has been observed not only among those that lived through the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but also among a second generation of Rwandans who continue to suffer from the societal trauma caused by this tragedy. This observation brings us to undoubtedly confirm that trauma, if not healed, can become a transgenerational phenomenon. Trans-generational trauma: an existing reality in Rwanda The transmission of trauma from one generation to another and its related consequences are gradually gauging the interest of peacebuilding organizations in Rwanda, key among them Community-Based Sociotherapy (CBS) which is currently working on this particular issue. CBS has explored the intergenerational legacies of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, investigating specifically how the genocide, its aftermath and related events are transmitted within families to future generations. In its recent research project, entitled “Intergenerational Legacies of the Genocide in Rwanda and Community Based Sociotherapy: Identifying and Addressing Pathways of Transmission,” it was revealed that the legacies of the 1994 genocide and its aftermath have been transmitted to the second generation within families through direct and indirect pathways, which are interrelated and interact in multiple ways. The direct pathways of inter-generational transmission concern the ways in which the genocide and related events are reflected upon, reconstructed and explicitly communicated - or not - to the second generation. The indirect pathways of inter-generational transmission are the ways in which the genocide affects the second generation’s socio-cultural environment and, in turn, the child. One of the research project's key findings, as pointed out by CBS, is that the legacy of the genocide, including its transmission of trauma and violence across generations, is a risk factor for sustainable peace and development. It is understandably true that those who were alive when the genocide happened have been suffering from traumatic experiences and troubling memories. For members of the second generation, i.e. those who were not yet born when the genocide happened and are direct descendants of those who witnessed the genocide, though they did not directly experience the physical and psychological pain of the genocide, they have been raised in a traumatised society and, in one way or another, have been affected by the multiple consequences of the tragedy. Living in a post-genocide context, all Rwandans have suffered from leftover trauma: no one can claim to be immune from the society’s ‘generalised’ suffering. The fact that even those who were born after the genocide can acquire the trauma from parents, relatives and neighbours, has put trauma-healing efforts on the list of priorities for ensuring sustainable peace and development in Rwanda. In order to respond to this issue and break the cycle of trauma and violence, a consortium on the issue was recently formed, which is composed of the following organizations: Community Based Sociotherapy Rwanda (CBS), Prison Fellowship Rwanda (PFR), Anglican Church in Rwanda/Byumba Diocese (EAR-D/B) and Duhumurizanye Iwacu Rwanda (DIR). Supported by Palladium Rwanda, the consortium is undertaking a pilot project called Umusingi w’Amahoro Arambye (‘The Foundation for Sustainable Peace’ in the Kinyarwanda language). The project aims at facilitating evidence-based grassroots advocacy and strengthening citizen’s participation in order to contribute to the recognition and prevention of inter-generational transmission of trauma and violence at the family and community levels. The project is being coordinated by Community Based Sociotherapy Rwanda and implemented by Prison Fellowship Rwanda and the Anglican Church, Byumba Diocese, in close cooperation with the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC). Towards creating a conducive environment for effectively coping with trans-generational trauma in Rwanda To effectively address this inter-generational trauma and contribute to ensuring sustainable peace and reconciliation, it is of utmost importance that the issues that mark the lives of Rwandans at a grassroots level are known to policymakers and the voices of the community members are heard. In addition, practices at the community level that aim at reconciliation and development could be even more effective when they are informed about trauma. CBS explains that a trauma-informed approach: (1) is aware of the impact of trauma on individuals and communities and understands potential pathways to recovery; (2) recognises the signs and symptoms of trauma; (3) responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies and practices; and (4) seeks to actively resist the re-traumatisation and transmission of trauma. A trauma-informed approach complies with some key principles, such as creating safety, trust and mutual support, rather than a prescribed set of practices or procedures. To be able to contribute to this, the Umusingi w’Amahoro arambye project has proposed a ‘4A’s strategy’: awareness, advocacy, acknowledgement and action. Through the project, the consortium intends to: increase awareness on the necessity of investing in responding to the problem of inter-generational transmission of trauma; develop and implement appropriate mechanisms for grassroots advocacy; identify and acknowledge issues related to trans-generational trauma; and, take actions to inspire policy and practices with the aim of ensuring that the healing and reconciliation processes in Rwanda are sustainable. Launched on Thursday 28 September 2017, at Marasa Umubano Hotel, the project is expected to start a policy dialogue between national and local government representatives and local civil society, leading to the integration of efforts to counter inter-generational trauma in national policies and practices on national unity and reconciliation, mental health, youth and socio-economic issues. To effectively break through the cycle of intergenerational transmission of trauma and violence, there is a pressing need to promote initiatives like the Umusingi w’Amahoro Arambye project and expand them throughout the country. Such initiatives should create a conducive environment and provide opportunities for generations to freely talk with one another, for elders and adults to frankly share the truth about the past, and for young people to openly ask questions about the history of their country and guarantee the rights of imagining and creating the future they want. https://www.peaceinsight.org/blog/2017/12/coping-trans-generational-trauma-key-feature-peace-building-work-rwanda/ (c) 2017 Peace Insight

When ISIS arose in 2014, the jihadist force swept across northern Iraq and carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign of Christian villages as part of a broader genocidal plan to wipe out all religious and ethnic minorities. Approximately 100,000 displaced Christians found refuge in the Kurdish-controlled population centre of Erbil, said Philipp Ozores, international secretary general of Aid to the Church in Need. ACN, a papal humanitarian agency, closely monitors the situation on the ground, including the number of Christians who are still classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Iraq. After years of fighting, Iraqi, Kurdish and international forces have finally defeated ISIS in Iraq, driving them off the Nineveh Plain, the traditional homeland of ethnic Assyrians and other ancient Christian communities in the north. This Christmas season, tens of thousands of displaced Christians are returning to their recently liberated villages for the first time in more than three years. "The situation is hopeful in spite of tensions, which are still there in the region currently between the Kurdish Regional Government and the Iraqi central government," said the leader of Aid to the Church in Need, which serves persecuted and vulnerable Christians around the globe. The nongovernmental organization (NGO) has a permanent presence in Iraq. "In spite of this tension, Christians are now already returning from Erbil, the regional capital Kurdistan, where they have been living since ISIS expelled them," Ozores said in a telephone interview from ACN's Montreal offices. Ewelina Ochab, a legal researcher and genocide expert, is cautiously optimistic this Christmas season. "I do believe that many Christians will celebrate Christmas in the Nineveh Plain with more and more hope for the future," said Ochab, author of the 2016 book Never Again: Legal Responses to a Broken Promise in the Middle East. Ochab has been to Iraq to collect evidence of genocide and interview survivors. For example, she met with displaced Christians in Erbil. She also visited a number of liberated towns and villages that had previously been under ISIS occupation, including Quaragosh, Karamless and Bartallah. "There is definitely more hope than last year this time," she said. Home for Christmas According to International Christian Response (ICR), Assyrians and other Christians have been returning to their villages since before the Kurds held a referendum on independence in September. "Regional politics have weighed heavily against Christians, and other minority populations," said an official with International Christian Response (IRC) who is on the ground in Iraq. For reasons of personal security, the ICR official cannot be named. "Most of the 18,500 refugees ICR deals with directly were helped back to their hometowns in or around Mosul," said Karen Ellis, who is also with ICR, serving as the organization's ambassador. ICR is a humanitarian organization that provides spiritual and material support to Christians in places where traditional missionaries cannot go. According to Ellis, "ICR helped significant numbers of Christian families when they first fled the Nineveh Plain," providing life-saving assistance to IDPs living in harsh outdoor mountain camps. More recently, clashes between the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga on the Nineveh Plain disrupted the organization's plan to distribute aid to the returning Christians. Many of the IDPs reportedly had to flee again to Kurdistan when the fighting broke out. "When Christians went back to the Christian villages after the [Kurdish independence] referendum, we promised to help them resettle in Nineveh Plain," Ellis said. "Over the next two weeks, ICR will distribute food to as many of these areas as possible." According to Ozores, approximately 29,000 Christians have already returned to their villages in northern Iraq. "So this is great news," he said, adding that 70,000 Christians IDPs remain at Erbil for now. Displaced Christians are also currently living in other northern population centres, such as Dohuk. "The level of destruction is very varied in the villages on the Nineveh Plain," Ozores said of what ACN found during inspections of liberated Christian areas. "We could see that almost 30,000 houses have been damaged in one or another way." The inspections revealed that 8,200 Christian homes had sustained only light damage. "So it means that these houses can be made livable again for a relatively low amount of funding," said Ozores, who visited the Nineveh Plain earlier this year. And he hopes that all 100,000 Christian IDPs will eventually return to their homes. Did ISIS booby trap Christian homes before they withdrew from the region? "I only heard of booby traps in very few villages," Ozores answered. For example, he did not see any in Khatarah when he visited the Christian town. However, some of the homes had been destroyed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and ISIS explosives. However, it was a different story in the abandoned Assyrian city of Batnaya in northern Iraq. "I could see the booby traps myself," Ozores recalled. "The bigger problem was the mining of the fields around the villages in some areas, especially in the north between the battle lines of the Peshmerga Kurdish Army and the ISIS [fighters]," he said. The mines prevent returning farmers from working in their fields. Fortunately, Ozores said, "there are now international teams clearing the fields of mines." A safe Christmas? Will Christians be safe in Iraq this Christmas? "I don't think safety now is the biggest issue for them," Ozores said of the victims of ethnic cleansing. "They have been living in a state of extreme crisis in the last three years." In some villages, there are hard feelings between Christians and Muslims. "In one or two smaller villages," Ozores said, "there are some tensions, which is unsurprising after what has happened in the last years." According to Ozores, ISIS is "not in the picture" anymore in the villages on the Nineveh Plain. "No one is afraid of ISIS anymore." However, the ACN secretary general acknowledged that "the Christians will also be taking some kind of security measures" to protect churches and worshippers at Christmas services. "This Christmas won't be different from all other Christmas years," said Monica Ratra of the Canadian branch of Open Doors, an NGO that serves persecuted Christians around the world. "There always exists the risk of terror attacks, especially in Baghdad. But that could also happen on any other time of the year." "Christians most definitely do not feel safe; there is too much uncertainty," the unnamed ICR official in Iraq asserts. "Right now the region is quiet, men have returned as well as some families, but those who have returned are very uncertain." In the northern city of Mosul, the situation "is not really safe," the ICR official contends. "Sunni Arabs have switched to civilian clothes to infiltrate places without being detected, and there is much mistrust from the Shia Iraqi army toward the Sunni." Ochab agrees that "safety continues to be an issue" in northern Iraq. "The region is still fragile and there is still no sustainable solution to address the security needs," she said. "Over the last months and post-referendum, yet another issue came to light: the conflict between the Iraq and Kurdistan over the disputed territories [including the Nineveh Plain]," Ochab explained. "The conflict was exacerbated by the recent referendum that supported the independence of the KRG. "The conflict escalated to the point that a few weeks ago, Christians had to flee from Teleskof out of fear of being injured or worse," Ochab said of clashes between Iraqi and Kurdish forces. "A number of civilians got injured. This is unacceptable. The people in Nineveh Plain have suffered enough." Will this be a joyous or uncertain Christmas for Iraqi Christians? "There is more hope for Christians in Iraq now than ever before in the last three years," Ochab answered. However, she added that post-war reconstruction and security issues must be addressed. Moreover, Ochab stated that "interfaith dialogue and community reconciliation is not being discussed yet, but is a crucial step to ensure that Iraqi Christians feel like a part of the Iraqi community." In addition, the genocide researcher said that "legal steps are yet to be taken, both to ensure that the Daesh fighters are brought to justice, but also to ensure that the rights of Iraqi Christians -- a minority group -- are adequately protected under the law and fully enforced." Reconstruction and the future Ozores said that it has been heartening to see the international Catholic community "rallying around the cause of the plight of the Christians in the Middle East." And he said that the suffering of Iraqi Christians has "woken up many Christians around the world." However, International Christian Response offers a more sobering view of the situation in Iraq. According to ICR's Karen Ellis, many of the Christians feel forsaken by the international community. "They feel the abandonment most tangibly in terms of financial support, but the need is so much greater than food and Christmas celebration ... they need desperately to rebuild. People are persevering, but they can only hold on for so long," Ellis said of Iraq's long-suffering Christian communities. "While there may be spiritual growth in the region in spite of the hardship, we must pray that there will be relief from unrest in the region, as well as true justice and mercy." Although there is no census data for Iraq, it is estimated that there were approximately 1.5 million Christians in Iraq before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the country unleashed many waves of anti-Christian violence. As bad as the situation was after the ouster of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the plight of Christians worsened greatly with the rise of ISIS in 2014. According to ACN's Ozores, there are only between 200,000 and 400,000 Christians left in Iraq. "Definitely, there is a very significant reduction" from 2003, he said. Do Christians have a future in Iraq? Or will this be one of the last Christmases they celebrate in the Muslim-majority country? "Christians will definitely have a future in Iraq," Ozores replied without hesitation. "The most critical point has passed. And we have a much reduced but significant base of Christians there. "These people want to stay, and they have shown determination. And they will receive a means to do so," continued the ACN boss, noting that the needs of the Christian population are being met in the short run. "And then from there, no one can tell what will happen in five or 10 years." Ozores pointed out that many Iraqi Christians are professionals "who are important for the Iraqi economy." "No one knows at this point if the majority of Christians will stay in the region. It is difficult to say and hope is still infused with uncertainty," the ICR official of Iraq's ancient Christian population said. "The reconstruction of the many parts of the Nineveh Plains is ongoing," Ochab said. "For example, in Quaragosh, one of the biggest Christian towns in the Nineveh Plain, over 1,000 houses have been refurbished and released to their rightful owners. Another 600 are being refurbished at the moment. "The reconstruction is generously funded by organizations like Aid to the Church in Need or the Knights of Columbus." According to Monica Ratra, Christians still have a future in Iraq. She stated that the Open Doors organization is also supporting Iraq's remaining Christians. For example, the NGO is doing its part by restoring houses in the Nineveh Plain and through "income generating projects, micro loans etc." Joy and uncertainty Will this be a joyous or uncertain Christmas for Iraqi Christians? "For those who returned back home, it is indeed a joyous Christmas," the Open Doors Canada spokesperson said. "On the other hand, it is a time of uncertainly for Christians, too, especially those in the Nineveh Plain, as so much needs to be done," Ratra said. "Schools are slowly starting with students coming back. As more teachers return, classes can begin full swing. Other businesses are slowly becoming operational. Life is just starting afresh. "There are varying levels of trauma, discouragement and hope among every population during the holidays," the ICR official in Iraq said. "It will definitely be both," Ozores said of Christians' mixed emotions this Christmas. "Uncertain, because the future is not 100 per cent sure for the whole area," he said of the tension between the Kurdish Regional Government and the Iraqi central government. "On the other hand, it's a big moment of joy, because after three years, surviving in camps, and with brutal terrorists hiding in their homes, now they are able to return again. They are already seeing aid coming in," he said. "Uncertainty, of course, is still there. We should not be naive; they are not. But they are very hopeful." http://www.aina.org/news/20171221181202.htm (c) 2017 Assyrian International News Agency

Myanmar must ensure that journalists can operate freely and safely, UN human rights specialists* have urged, after two Reuters journalists were detained in what has been described as a widening crackdown in the country. “We urge the authorities to take steps to reverse their acts of repression and ensure that media can operate freely in Myanmar,” the experts said. “We are especially concerned that the arrests signal a desire to limit access to information about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Rakhine State.” The Special Rapporteurs called for the immediate release of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were arrested in Yangon on 12 December while working on stories about the military’s role in the widespread assault on the Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine State. The United Nations and Reuters have both rejected reports published in domestic media suggesting that the journalists had given information to the UN. The Special Rapporteurs said: “We note that the UN has denied any suggestion that the Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo work for the UN, or have contacted them regarding the situation in Rakhine State. We urge the authorities to free them immediately and drop all allegations against them.” The call comes after the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, confirmed she had been denied access to the country for a planned visit in January, and all cooperation had been withdrawn for the duration of her tenure. The journalists have been charged under the 1923 Official Secrets Act, and face prison terms of up to 14 years if convicted. According to the authorities, the journalists illegally acquired information with the intention of sharing it with foreign media. “The use of the Official Secrets Act to criminalize journalism in this way puts Myanmar on a dangerous path towards closing the space for media independence and freedom of expression,” the experts said. “Journalism is not a crime. These detentions are another way for the Government to censor information about the military’s role in Rakhine State and the humanitarian catastrophe taking place.” The Special Rapporteurs are in contact with the authorities of Myanmar concerning the situation. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22561&LangID=E (c) 2017 United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner

For six hours Bodru Duza hid in an upstairs room, listening to the screams of people being slaughtered outside his Myanmar home. The 52-year-old man braced for the soldiers to find and kill him, like all the others. What had started out as a quiet Sunday in northwestern Myanmar had spiraled into an incomprehensible hell -- one of the bloodiest massacres reported in the Southeast Asian nation since government forces launched a vicious campaign to drive out the country's Rohingya Muslim minority in late August. When Duza finally dared to emerge from his hiding place, his wife, daughter, and five young sons were nowhere to be seen. "Oh Allah!" he thought. "What have they done to us? What have they done to my family?" Editor's note: The Associated Press reported this story with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The Rohingya Muslims have long been persecuted and denied basic rights in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, but the latest round of violence was in retaliation for a wave of 30 attacks by Rohingya insurgents in August on security posts. At least 14 people were killed. The assaults triggered an army counter-offensive that has left hundreds of villages burned and driven 650,000 refugees into Bangladesh. The aid group Doctors Without Borders estimates 6,700 Rohingya civilians were killed in the first monthof reprisals alone, and human rights groups have documented three large-scale massacres. At least 82 Rohingya are believed to have been murdered in the village of Maung Nu on Aug. 27. The Associated Press has reconstructed the massacre, as told by 37 survivors now scattered across refugee camps in Bangladesh. Their testimony, combined with exclusive video footage from the massacre site obtained by AP, strengthens a growing body of evidence indicating that Myanmar armed forces have systematically killed civilians. Myanmar's military did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story, and did not reply to an AP request for a visit. The army has insisted in the past that not a single innocent was slain. A few hours after midnight on Aug. 25, gunfire woke the residents of Maung Nu. Rohingya militants had launched a surprise assault on a security post in a village less than one mile to the north. According to the government, two officers and at least six assailants died. Fearing reprisals, hundreds of residents walked to the homes of friends and relatives in Maung Nu. But on Aug. 27, bursts of gunfire echoed across Maung Nu again. This time only the army was shooting. Hordes of people were already seeking the closest refuge, the vast hillside compound of Duza and his brother, Zahid Hossain. At 11 a.m., dozens of soldiers poured into the compound, setting set off a panic. A few men in Duza's house locked the main wooden doors and climbed the stairs to a balcony, where most of the males already had gathered. Before joining them, Duza pulled his wife aside. "Please take care of our daughter and our sons," he said. Outside, one soldier called on everyone to come out. When nobody did, several bursts of gunfire rang out. Seconds later, soldiers broke down the doors and dragged shrieking mothers and children outside. The troops ordered them onto their knees, ripped off their headscarves and tore at their clothes. They snatched cell phones, gold earrings, necklaces and wads of cash. About 20 or 25 of the women -- mostly attractive and young -- were taken away. They were never seen again. Upstairs, soldiers bound the men's hands behind their backs and ordered them to lie face down in the dirt courtyard. Most were blindfolded with masking tape or veils taken from the women. A handful who tried to resist were thrown off the balcony head-first. Duza's brother, Hossain, begged for the violence to stop. "Why are you doing this?" he cried. "Why are you tying us up?" There was no answer. Around noon, a senior officer told a commander on his phone that they had rounded up 87 men. "What should we do with them?" The call ended. The officer barked an order. "Let us begin." Duza watched through a slit in a closed window as a soldier plunged a long knife into his brother's neck. When two of Hossain's sons tried to run, soldiers opened fire. Duza stepped back in shock. He scrambled upstairs and crawled into the only place he could think of: a foot-high space under a large wooden container normally used to store rice. In this Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017, photo, Bodru Duza, 52, demonstrates how he hid in his house when members of Myanmar's military forces accused of massacring civilians in his village Maung Nu, in Myanmar's Rakhine State, during and interview with The Associated Press in his tent in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Outside, several soldiers hammered four-inch nails into the temples of three men on the ground with the butts of their rifles. Others were decapitated. As the afternoon wore on, the carnage became methodical. Men and teenage boys were taken away in small groups and killed by firing squads. In some cases, a soldier blew a whistle beforehand, signaling for them to begin. When the guns finally fell silent, Duza crept slowly downstairs, and slipped away. For the next two weeks, he traveled to Bangladesh. His family, he thought, was surely dead. There is no way to independently confirm the death toll in Maung Nu. But one handwritten tally seen by The AP details the names, ages and professions of 82 people, whose family members say were killed. The youngest is seven years old; the oldest, 95. According to Mohamed Arof, the Maung Nu village administrator, at least 200 more remain missing and are feared dead. "You have to understand ... they hate us," Arof said. "This didn't only happen in our village, it happened everywhere." In the end, Duza was one of the luckiest survivors. After weeks on his own, he found a newly-arrived refugee with a Myanmar phone and asked to use it. He dialed his wife's number. A young girl answered. It was his 14-year-old daughter, Taslima. As tears welled in his eyes, Duza asked about the rest of his family. "Are they with you? Are they alive?" "Yes papa! Yes!" Taslima replied. "We're here! Everybody is fine." Weeks later, in a refugee camp, Duza would break down as he hugged his wife and squeezed the children he never thought he'd see again. "It felt like living in another world," Duza said. "It felt like a new life." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rohingya-myanmar-troops-alleged-massacre-executions-villagers-maung-nu/ (c) 2017 CBS News

Imagine a place where over half the population is under 18, and most of the adult population are women, many of whom have been raped at gunpoint. A place where everyone shares the recent trauma of fleeing their home with only the clothes on their back, witnessing family members being tortured, burned and killed. Welcome to Kutupalong, Bangladesh. Kutupalong, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, is home to over a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, over 600,000 of whom arrived in the last four months. In early December, I spent three days in Kutupalong. I had been invited by one of the founders of the To: platform, with whom I had recently visited the Nakivale refugee camp in Uganda, searching for new ways of addressing the challenge of the global refugee crisis. We were in Bangladesh with others from the Love Army, and my job was to listen to Rohingya refugees. Here are some of their stories. Ten-year-old Said arrived two or three days before we met. He couldn’t remember exactly when, or how long the journey took. All he knows is he and his siblings fled after watching Burmese soldiers kill their parents, scared that the soldiers would find and kill them too. Such horror stories are the norm in Kutupalong. Hadara, like many Rohingya refugees, doesn’t know the fate of a loved one. After seeing soldiers kill her husband in August, Hadara fled her home near Buthidaung in the Rakhine state of Myanmar with her five children. Their seven-day journey involved trekking through forests at night she said because “if the soldiers or the extremist Buddhists saw us, they would kill us. We were hiding, running to protect our lives.” Only four of her children made it to Kutupalong, Hadara lost her 10-year-old daughter along the way, “She might be dead. I don’t know. Everyone was running to protect their life. I couldn’t find her. I have no news if she is alive or not.” Two months ago, shooting erupted in Khadija’s village, and the family fled when her cousin was killed, as “soldiers were shooting people, capturing women and cutting their eyes out” before burning down their homes. Khadija became separated from her husband as soldiers shot at them from helicopters, but “we continued to walk without looking back.” She doesn’t know if he is dead or alive. Khadija was not the only refugee who reported women being blinded by the military. Mahboba, 24, told us that soldiers captured his wife as they fled and “cut her eyes with a knife.” When Roshida’s village was raided two months ago, “the military killed everyone and burned down the houses.” She said soldiers killed her brother-in-law and captured her sister: “They shot her in the eyes. She fled with her eyes shot out.” I learned that the soldiers had a system. Before villages were burned to the ground, almost everyone spoke of helicopters hovering overhead with soldiers shooting “from the skies.” Jamilah, 23, told me that when the helicopters landed in her village, soldiers “took the women from their houses and raped them before forcing people inside at gunpoint and burning the houses down with people inside.” Jamilah estimated the population of her village to have been “250 families” and that some 200 women and girls were raped, including her sister. When they fled, they “hid in the mountain during the day, and walked at night” while being hunted by soldiers. The men, it seems were targeted for death, the women for torture. Another member of the Love Army spoke to a woman who had been raped by ten soldiers, her husband was forced to watch at gunpoint. The soldiers then doused him and their two children in gasoline, marched him and the children into their home at gunpoint and burned it down in front of her. Her husband and children remained inside. Pregnant women were less likely to be tortured, but for them the days-long treks without food were especially perilous. Thirty-four-year-old Ramsha invited me into her tent, where she lit a small fire for warmth. The tent was uncomfortably hot on the humid 85-degree day, but Ramsha shivered with a high fever, her right hand resting on her infant son, who lay on the ground next to her. She made the 15-day trek with her husband and nine children, while she was late in her third trimester. They had occasionally paused at villages along the way so Ramsha might rest, but every village they stopped at was attacked and burned down by soldiers. Ramsha nonetheless felt fortunate; she had her children and her husband, and she had not been assaulted. While Kutupalong is overcrowded, disease is spreading, and sanitation is a challenge. But at least the traumatized refugees can sleep without the sound of gunfire or the smell of homes burning. But their lives have been disrupted beyond recognition, thrown into an unimaginable uncertainty. In Myanmar, Hadara’s husband owned rice paddies, but in Kutupalong “our life depends on donations.” So do many others. A vast number of Bangladeshis, and some Rohingya, have set up small shops in Kutupalong, selling food and other necessities. Because refugees are not allowed to leave, shops can charge extortionate prices. Consequently, drug gangs and pimps allegedly operate in the camp, exploiting refugees’ need for income. How extensive is criminal activity in Kutupalong? I asked a group of Bangladeshi soldiers on police duty who denied that crime exists in the area. But we had already observed some soldiers on duty beat refugees with sticks at a food distribution center, so I was already rather skeptical of the military. My translator stuck to the official line when I mentioned later that it was inconceivable that there wasn’t any crime given the size of the population. Aid workers were more forthcoming. One told us of reports that children had been abducted and sold to outsiders, and a health worker told us that female refugees had been raped in the camp by “local men, Bangladeshi men.” When I mentioned this to Rohingya women, asking if it was true, they refused to answer. Add criminal activity and refugee abuse to the already mind-boggling challenges faced by those tasked with managing camp infrastructure and the needs of a rapidly growing and deeply traumatized population, and it would seem that the Kutupalong crisis has only just begun. Imran, one of my translators, had been a 21-year-old tech entrepreneur in Myanmar, until his father was killed, forcing Imran to flee to Bangladesh with his mother. “We had a good life,” he told me, “but our luck is dead.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/inside-the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp-rohingya-women-cant-escape-trauma_us_5a3bd541e4b025f99e15474f (c) The Huffington Post

The Burmese government plans to permanently bar entry to Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Burma. With this decision, Burma joins a handful of pariah governments – notably Eritrea, Syria, Burundi, and North Korea – that have outright refused to engage with UN experts assigned to their countries. This refusal to cooperate is just Burma’s latest move in its efforts to conceal the military’s crimes against humanity, including killings, rape, and mass arson, against the ethnic Rohingya population in Rakhine State, which have forced over 645,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh since late August. It echoes the government’s refusal to grant access to the UN Fact-Finding Mission, established in March to investigate allegations of rights abuses in Rakhine State and elsewhere in the country. The decision was reportedly a response to the special rapporteur’s July 2017 end of mission statement, in which she highlighted ongoing abuses against Rohingya and noted she was “disappointed to see the tactics applied by the previous Government still being used” by the new administration. In lieu of allowing independent investigators access to northern Rakhine State, the government has carried out domestic investigations that lack any credibility, the latest of which found that security forces had committed no abuses and caused “no deaths of innocent people.” As Yanghee Lee stated yesterday, the decision to bar her “can only be viewed as a strong indication that there must be something terribly awful happening in Rakhine.” Lee has conducted six visits to Burma since being appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2014, yet she has recently faced growing hostility from the government and increasing restrictions on access to conflict areas and victims of abuses. Both the State Counsellor’s Office, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and the lower house of parliament denounced her July report, claiming it contained factual errors and unverified allegations. In early December, Burma promised cooperation with UN experts at both a Human Rights Council special session and UN Security Council briefing. “We always choose the path of engagement and cooperation,” Burma’s permanent representative in New York asserted. The claim, then feeble, now appears patently false. https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/21/burma-bars-un-rights-expert (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch