In the absence of hard evidence justifying their detention, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate release of two Reuters news agency journalists who have been held for the past two days in Yangon for allegedly violating Myanmar's Official Secrets Act. After the two journalists, Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, were reported missing on the evening of 12 December, the government said in a statement the next day that they had been arrested for planning “to send important security documents regarding security forces in Rakhine state to foreign agencies abroad." They are facing up to 14 years in prison under the Official Secrets Act. "We call for the immediate release of these two Reuters reporters,"said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk. "The charges announced by the government's spokesman are completely spurious. No detail has been provided about the supposed 'security documents' or the mysterious 'foreign agencies.' These arrests are clearly another attempt by the authorities to intimidate overly curious journalists." In a grotesque piece of staging, a photo accompanying the government's statement showed the two journalists standing handcuffed behind a table covered with documents. Rakhine State has been a focus of international media attention since August because Burmese army operations there have driven more than 620,000 members of Myanmar's Rohingya minority to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh. The army has refused to allow journalists into the troubled region, where its operations may have involved "elements of genocide," the United Nations said on 5 December. The formation of a civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi raised hopes of a significant improvement in respect for media freedom but, in practice, little progress has been seen and Myanmar is still ranked no higher than 131st out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Reporters without Borders

The outbreak of violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority has reportedly killed thousands more people than the government admits. At least 9,000 Rohingya died in Myanmar from Aug. 25 to Sept. 24, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins sans frontieres, said Thursday. That’s 22.5 times the official government estimate of 400 deaths. Most of the deaths in that month-long period ― 6,700 ― were from violence, the group said, citing surveys it conducted with survivors in refugee resettlement camps in Bangladesh. The toll includes at least 730 children younger than 5. Causes include gunfire, arson and beatings. Survivors have told aid workers of seeing dozens of Rohingya villagers beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed, and summarily executed, and said entire villages have been burned to the ground. Hala Sadak, 15, told Human Rights Watch last month that 10 soldiers dragged her from her home and raped her. “They left me where I was … when my brother and sister came to get me, I was lying there on the ground, they thought I was dead.” Almost 650,000 people have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh since the end of August. MSF said its survey shows that the Rohingya people “have been targeted” by “clearance operations” launched by the Myanmar military, police, and local militias. “What we uncovered was staggering, both in terms of the numbers of people who reported a family member died as a result of violence, and the horrific ways in which they said they were killed or severely injured,” Sidney Wong, MSF’s medical director, said in a statement. “The peak in deaths coincides with the launch of the latest ‘clearance operations’ by Myanmar security forces in the last week of August.” Human rights groups and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have called the death and destruction a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Last month, Bangladesh and Myanmar entered discussions about a repatriation deal that would send Rohingyas back to the country’s Rakhine State. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi authorities are moving forward with plans to construct a new refugee camp, possibly anticipating more people fleeing extended conflict in Myanmar. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/rohingya-death-doctors-without-borders_us_5a3253d9e4b01bdd765a24f1 (c) 2017 The Huffington Post

December 13 is the 11th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It’s a good moment to reflect on the protection of persons with disabilities in armed conflict. International humanitarian law and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) have different starting points. Nevertheless, they share significant commonalities in accommodating the specific capacities, experiences and perspectives of persons with disabilities in armed conflict. This cohesion can be seen particularly in the assessment of prohibited inhuman acts as well as in the requirement that positive measures for persons with disabilities be taken to ensure that they are able to effectively access services on an equal basis with others. Positive measures may include the adaptation of infrastructure and information on available vital services relating to water, food, sanitation, shelter, health care and rehabilitation; the provision of support to transport food and non-food relief items; the continued provision of services required by persons with disabilities; or, assistance to victims of the use of certain weapons in armed conflicts. IHL provides additional protection for persons with disabilities in armed conflict. While the CRPD binds only States party to it, IHL imposes obligations on organized non-state armed groups—in addition to State armed forces. IHL may also further prevent or minimize harm to persons with disabilities resulting from specific risks for them in armed conflict, including harm resulting from military operations, or being trapped in areas where hostilities are ongoing. Admittedly, the terminology IHL uses for referring to persons with disabilities in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols (such as ‘infirm’, the ‘wounded and sick’ or ‘disabled’) was a product of the social and historical context of its time, and is certainly outdated in light of contemporary understandings of disability. This, however, does not detract from the fact that—already then—persons with disabilities were recognized as requiring protection under IHL. The relevant rules reflect an acknowledgement of their specific needs and the barriers they may face, as well as the particular risks to which they are exposed in their armed conflict environment. Furthermore, under a contemporary interpretation of IHL, this in no way implies that persons with disabilities are seen as mere objects of pity or passive victims in need of protection rather than agents of their own destiny. Appreciating the complementary and mutually reinforcing nature of IHL and the CRPD may facilitate current efforts aiming to operationalize better inclusion and participation of persons with disabilities in humanitarian activities in armed conflict. The ICRC is committed to this aim in its own humanitarian activities and it stands ready to constructively engage with other stakeholders in this regard. Provided here is a paper setting out more in detail the commonalities between IHL and the CRPD, as well as IHL’s specific contribution to protecting persons with disabilities in armed conflict. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Humanitarian Law and Policy

Fresh details have emerged in a new report pointing to the involvement of France in the planning and execution of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. The report, released early Wednesday by the Government of Rwanda, is the result of an inquiry by Washington, DC, law firm Cunningham Levy Muse LLP, and documents the role and knowledge of French officials in the world's fastest genocide that killed more than a million people in a space of a hundred days. French officials facilitated the flow of weapons into Rwanda in the build-up to the Genocide, despite knowing about violent attacks against the minority Tutsi group in the country, the new report says. Despite this knowledge of recurring massacres of the Tutsi during the early 1990s, French officials allowed génocidaires (perpetrators of the Genocide) to meet within the French Embassy in Kigali and begin to form the interim government that presided over Rwanda during the Genocide, the report adds. It further says that private communications between French officials reveal that Opération Turquoise, a French military mission deployed in Rwanda at the height of the Genocide and presented as a humanitarian mission "had the military objective of propping up the interim government responsible for the Genocide, and preventing its removal by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, who eventuality halted the atrocities in July 1994". The report also cites French officials' continued efforts to protect Genocide perpetrators from justice. "French officials provided safe harbour to suspected génocidaires and obstructed attempts to bring them to justice at various points during the 23 years since the Genocide," it says. It also says that "French authorities have refused to declassify and release documents that are vital to a full understanding of the activity of French officials at the time of the Genocide, and to allowing the public to finally learn the truth". France has failed either to extradite or to prosecute the majority of the dozens of Genocide suspects residing within the country, it adds. The new inquiry further questions a 1998 French Parliamentary Commission's investigation into the role of French officials in the Genocide in Rwanda, saying the probe was "neither transparent nor complete". The Muse Report was based solely on information available in the public record and concludes that there is evidence to substantiate allegations of foreign involvement in the Genocide, including that of French officials, adding that French actors continue to undermine accountability with regard to the Genocide. "The report, which has been shared with the Government of France, is part of wider efforts by Rwanda, announced in November 2016, to thoroughly investigate the responsibility of French officials in respect of the Genocide," according to a statement released by the Government. Reacting to the latest report, Foreign affairs minister Louise Mushikiwabo, said Rwanda agrees with the findings of the report, which she describes as "a damning summary of conduct by French officials in Rwanda during the 1990s and thereafter". We agree with the report recommendation that a full investigation into the role of French officials in the Genocide is warranted, she said in the statement. "Historical clarity is crucial and concerns us all. The Government of Rwanda commissioned the Muse Report to inform our ongoing investigation into the role of French officials before, during, and after the Genocide," Mushikiwabo said. She added: "We have transmitted the Muse Report to the Government of France, which has responsibilities to face. This is also an opportunity for French authorities to collaborate better with Rwanda in the pursuit of truth, justice and accountability regarding the Genocide against the Tutsi." France and Rwanda have had uneasy relations since the RPF stopped the Genocide and defeated the genocidal regime in July 1994, with France reluctant to accept its responsibility in the killings, while many Genocide fugitives continue to freely live in France, with several others being released by French courts without trial. The closest that France came to acknowledging its role in the slaughter was in February 2010 when then president Nicolas Sarkozy admitted during a visit to Rwanda that his country had committed "grave errors of judgment" in the days leading up to and during the Genocide. A previous investigation by the Government of Rwanda also linked dozens of French political and military leaders to the Genocide. Cunningham Levy Muse, the authors of the new report, describe themselves as "a premier global law and strategic advisory firm whose clients include multinational Fortune 500 companies and prominent individuals". With broad experience in advanced technology and complex civil and criminal litigation matters, the lawyers of Cunningham Levy Muse boast a multi-decade track record of successful resolutions to challenging national and international issues, the American firm says. http://allafrica.com/stories/201712140099.html (c) 2017 The New Times

The belongings of Genocide victims inside Ntarama Genocide Memorial in Bugesera. The building was a Catholic church during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. / File Countries should respect their international obligation on genocide. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (also known as the Genocide Convention) defines genocide as any of the acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. It states that to deter people from committing crimes of genocide, those responsible for such crimes need to be brought to justice and to fight impunity and establish a credible expectation that the perpetrators of genocide and related crimes will be held accountable to effectively contribute to a culture of prevention. This Convention gives countries that are signatory to it the obligation to bring to justice those responsible for those offences making up the crime of genocide. Some countries are commendable for having respected this international obligation by trying or extraditing to Rwanda perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi; namely, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Canada, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The same goes for countries that extradited to Rwanda 19 Genocide perpetrators who had found refuge on their territory including the USA, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the ICTR. However, there are other countries that have reneged on this international obligation and have instead granted a safe haven to perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi, which explains the fact that there are still over 835 Genocide fugitives who are at large in various countries across the globe. As we mark the 69th anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, countries should wake up and ensure that they respect their international obligation and bring to book perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi who enjoy impunity on their territories. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New Times

The two NGOs that are receiving the French Republic's Human Rights Prize in the "Freedom of Information, Press Freedom and Journalism" category today – Pakistan's Freedom Network and Russia's Initiative Centre for the Caucasus – are both closely linked to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). France's National Consultative Commission for Human Rights (CNCDH) awards the prizes, which are being presented today by Christine Lazerges, the commission's president, and justice minister Nicole Belloubet. Freedom Network, RSF's partner organization in Pakistan, plays a key role in that country in defending the freedom to inform and promoting ethical and independent journalism. It monitors press freedom violations, works to strengthen the safety of media and journalists, and lobbies the government for better media laws. Its executive director, Iqbal Khattak, is RSF's representative in Pakistan. It was awarded the prize for a project promoting respect for religious minorities and non-believers within the Pakistani media. The Initiative Centre for the Caucasus is a Russian NGO that publishes Dosh, a magazine that is one of the few independent media outlets covering political and social developments in Chechnya and nearby regions. RSF works closely with the centre and awarded its Press Freedom Prize to Dosh in 2009. Amid the fear and arbitrary rule that characterize Chechnya today, one can only admire its reporters and its editors, Abdulkhazhi Duduyev and Israpil Shavkhalov. As well as publishing Dosh, the centre has opened a press and resources centre for civil society in Grozny, launched a women's magazine, run a legal centre and organized seminars on a range of sensitive issues including independent reporting for young journalism students. "We are pleased to see two of our partner organizations receiving this prestigious award for their activities in defence of human rights," RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. "As well as constituting an important recognition of their enormous efforts and commitment in the field, this prize is a powerful message from the French Republic to all those who fight to defend the freedom to inform at a time when authoritarian centres of power are trying to increase their influence and impose their antagonistic alternative model." _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________' (c) 2017 Reports without Borders

For all of Patrick Stein’s life, Southwest Kansas — “God’s country,” he called it — had looked basically the same. Golden fields, white grain elevators, blue sky. But lately it was starting to look different. “Here come a couple of fucking raghead bitches,” Stein announced as he spotted a group of dark-skinned women in long, colorful robes and gauzy scarves walking up the avenue named for the great frontiersman Buffalo Jones. His buddy Dan Day, with whom he had attended a Garden City gun show that day — February 27, 2016 — slowed his truck. Stein, who was sitting in the passenger seat, poked his head out the window, and by the time he spat those last two words — raghead bitches — he was close enough that the women, startled, lifted their eyes toward the vehicle. Men like Stein and Day — with drink-ruddy faces and ISIS HUNTING PERMIT bumper stickers — are a common feature of the landscape in Southwest Kansas, although Garden City has perhaps fewer than its neighbors Dodge City, the infamous gun-slinging town, and Liberal, which isn’t. As locals like to point out, there’s something a little different about “Garden,” which despite feeling like the middle of nowhere is populated by people from seemingly everywhere. The seat of rural Finney County, Garden City is situated in almost the exact center of the country, with attractions like the World’s Largest Hand-Dug Swimming Pool (built 1922) and the World’s Largest Hairball (discovered in the belly of a cow circa 1993). It has been a modest but consistent boomtown, host to a rotating crop of industries — sugar beets, cattle, wind turbines — that require a lot of land and a lot of people to work it. As a result, the area has always attracted immigrants, from the Mexicans who laid the tracks of the Santa Fe railroad in the early-20th century to the Japanese who arrived after the Second World War. And while there was some initial trepidation on the part of the locals, they usually found, in working side by side with the newcomers, that they shared those values considered to be midwestern: belief in God, family, and hard work. “All equal, regardless of wealth, color, or creed,” one resident boasted to Truman Capote when he visited the area in the 1960s to report In Cold Blood. “Everything the way it ought to be in a Democracy, that’s us.” This egalitarian spirit prevailed through the 1980s, when big meatpacking companies relocated to the area, bringing with them a wave of workers from Vietnam and Cambodia. Members of the police department underwent cultural-awareness training, learning to do things like take their shoes off when entering Asian households. When the International Rescue Committee opened an office in Garden City in 2014, headed by a no-nonsense former refugee named Amy Longa, and resettled over 200 transplants from war-torn countries like Somalia into jobs at the meatpacking plants, the police reached out to the elder males in the groups, to earn their trust. “To make sure that everybody is part of a community,” as Chief Michael Utz put it. Garden City became what NPR called “an unlikely progressive town.” Newspaper headlines regularly referred to it as an exemplar of “America’s future,” and although the area had long suffered its share of “brain drain,” its reputation drew a new class of educated millennials. Like John Birky, a young physician, and his wife, Lisa, Kansas natives who had spent time in Africa and moved back specifically to work with the refugees; and Benjamin Anderson, the 30-something CEO of a nearby hospital, who sold incoming interns on “the idea of America as a mission field” and espoused a philosophy of “unconditional radical love.” Thanks in part to their efforts, moonfaced med students could be found slurping pho in the area’s Vietnamese restaurants and trying on guntiino at one of two stores selling African goods. Main Street, which had languished after the arrival of chains like Buffalo Wild Wings, was showing new signs of life, and the Chamber of Commerce had come up with a logo that reflected the town’s multiculturalism: THE WORLD GROWS HERE, accompanied by a picture of a yucca plant with leaves the colors of the rainbow. But not everyone was willing to accept this vision of America’s future. Most famously: Donald Trump, then running for the Republican nomination for president, who had made it clear that he saw immigrants, particularly Muslims, as the enemy. As Stein and Day rolled through town, a speech Trump had given a few days earlier — praising the (apocryphal) methods of a U.S. general in dispensing with Muslim opponents in the Philippine-American War — was still playing on conservative radio. “He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” he’d told the crowd. “And he had his men load their rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: ‘You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.’ ” Looking out the window, Stein caught the eye of one of the Somali women. On the seat next to him was a pistol and next to that an automatic rifle with ten rounds of ammunition. If he wanted to, he could splatter her and her friend’s brains all over the sidewalk right then and there. Raghead bitch. The moment passed. The woman averted her eyes. Stein relaxed his grip on his gun. There was no upside in acting impulsively, he reminded himself. Whatever they decided to do had to be carefully planned. And when the world saw it, they would be hailed as heroes. A few blocks away, Ifrah Ahmed was sitting cross-legged on a cushion in her apartment, packing a hookah pipe with sweet strawberry tobacco. Ifrah wasn’t supposed to smoke hookah, because she was a woman, but as Ifrah — and Beyoncé, of whom she was a fan — liked to say, she was an “independent woman.” She had been so ever since the day her mother told her, at age 14, that she was engaged to be married. You’re going to be happy, her mother said, as Ifrah cried her eyes out. That’s what you are born for. Everybody does it. Not Ifrah, who later that night stole her mom’s keys and sneaked out of the house in Nairobi, where they’d lived since the Somalian government had collapsed in 1991. She spent the night in a mosque near the bus station and, through the charity of the imam and his congregation, bought a bus ticket to Uganda, where she bribed her way across the border, ending up in Nakivale, considered to be one of the nicer refugee camps in the world. “Everybody is just humble and kind and nice,” she recalled. “You don’t eat, you eat with the neighbors. The neighbors don’t eat, they eat with you.” Ifrah’s people skills and proficiency with languages — in addition to Somali, she speaks Swahili, English, and some Arabic — made her useful to the camp’s administrators, and she was working as a translator for the U.N. when she got a call, at age 21, informing her she could come to America — specifically, Kansas City — as a refugee. From there, she made her way to Garden City, where her cousin worked for Tyson Foods. Ifrah got a job there, too, as a quality-control inspector. But it wasn’t long before her supervisors recognized in her the same traits the U.N. had, and soon she was being called off the production line to help them communicate with their African workers. Their conversations were often about injuries. Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, physically and, perhaps, mentally. Tyson slaughtered thousands of cows every day. Some of the refugees had been through unspeakable horrors, and being around all that blood couldn’t be the healthiest thing. Then again, what else could they do, far away from home, unable to speak the language? Ifrah’s shift at the plant was 3 to 11 p.m., but this part of the job — the helping — was more of a lifestyle. Ifrah had been elected a community leader by a council of elders, and this meant someone was always knocking on her door, needing something. Women whose genital mutilation left them with horrible recurring urinary-tract infections wanted her to help communicate their symptoms to doctors. Mothers asked her to talk to their children’s teachers. People needed rides to Western Union, to send money to relatives, or the African Shop, one of the hubs of the community, to watch Law & Order: SVU and eat sambosas with ranch dressing, a local delicacy that Somalis had taken to. Unlike many of her neighbors, who were skittish about strangers, Ifrah didn’t limit her own relationships to other Africans. At her cozy apartment, adorned with inspirational sayings like DREAM and JOURNEY, she hosted friends of all kinds — Dominican, Burmese, white Kansans — making them tea and inviting them to sing on the karaoke machine. When a transgender Turkish-Iraqi with a long glossy wig under her hairnet appeared on the floor at Tyson, some of her co-workers tittered and stared, but Ifrah thought she was beautiful. “We are not God,” she admonished them. “We are not here to judge.” A few of the older Somalis disapproved of these friendships and that Ifrah was still, at the ancient age of 28, unmarried. “Don’t lose your roots,” they warned. “You cannot lose your roots!” she responded. She would know. She still heard regularly from her mother, who had recently called from Nairobi to complain about Ifrah smoking hookah — she’d heard about it from Ifrah’s neighbors. Garden City was a small town, but she liked it. It was peaceful, and friendly. But in the lead-up to the presidential election, the atmosphere started to feel a little different, the way it had right before Ifrah saw her first tornado darken the sky. Down at the African Shop, detectives Benson and Stabler solved crimes on mute while people fretted over the things Donald Trump was saying about Muslims. Ifrah didn’t want to think the people she’d lived among believed him. At the same time, she’d noticed a shift in the way she was treated. Like the suspicious employee who’d followed her through Target, where she’d long been a regular. And Mimi, the trans woman, and her cousin Ghasak, who liked to go to the club and dance on the weekends, said one night the DJ had trained his spotlight on them and said he hoped Trump would “make America great again.” They’d laughed about it, but Ifrah was worried. Many of her supervisors supported him. Even this veterinarian she worked with — a nice vet, who’d been to Africa — had gone to one of his rallies and taken a picture with the guy. “He doesn’t really mean all immigrants,” he’d said as he inspected a cow. “He just means illegal immigrants.” “Just because they are illegal doesn’t mean they are going to harm you,” said Ifrah, thinking of a friend from Mexico. “They’re here because they want a better life for their kids.” The vet shrugged. “He just talks,” he said. “It’s not like he’s gonna do it.” Then he patted the cow on the hindquarters and sent it out to meet its fate. As far as Patrick Stein was concerned, Donald Trump was “the Man.” Stein had grown up in Wright, Kansas, a tiny town outside Dodge City (“Maybe 450 to 500 people, if you count cats and dogs”) where “everybody knew everybody” and “you could always count on your neighbor.” His parents ran a farm and expected their six children to help out with the chores while they worked day jobs. In between, there was church, lots of it, including a Catholic Mass every morning before school. Stein was an altar boy. “It was a pain in my ass,” he said in his flat drawl. “But it was all right. You get good morals and good values.” One could argue that when it came to Patrick, these didn’t stick. He was bright and charming: a good-looking kid, with sandy hair, a snub nose, and roguish blue eyes. But the slow country life didn’t suit him. He had a taste for action — fast cars, loud music, big guns. Marriage and two sons failed to settle him down, and in 1998, Stein allegedly forced his way into the home of a drug dealer who’d sold him some bum crystal meth and threatened “a bloodbath” if he didn’t get his money back. He left with the dealer’s mother’s gun as collateral, and when she called the police and told them it was missing, Stein was arrested. For a long while, the cops had taken it easy on him, “on account of everyone knowing each other,” he says. But it wasn’t clear he’d be able to avoid jail much longer: “Between the cops and a vindictive female, I couldn’t sneeze in the wrong direction.” It was time to, as they say, get out of Dodge. He went to Nebraska, where he “ran a ranch,” then moved to Colorado Springs before ending up working construction in Arizona. That’s where he was when his mother called early on September 11, 2001, and told him to turn on the television. “That was my game-changer,” he said. “That’s what started me paying attention to the political world, our so-called representatives, and educating myself on the individuals that threw themselves into the planes, what the ideology is.” When the U.S. invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, Stein was happy for the chance at retribution. “I knew we were going in to kick some ass and not take names neither,” he said. He might have gone and kicked some himself had his family not, around that time, summoned him back home to Kansas. His sons were getting older, and they needed their father around. Stein didn’t care for his ex-wife — “If she was standing on a ledge or something, I might push her off” — but he acknowledged his masculine responsibility. “Better get my ass back to Kansas,” he said. The family farm was as money-losing as ever, but Stein soon came up with an idea that he thought could reap a major windfall. President Bush had just signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, and investors were scrambling to invest in renewable fuels. Stein had done some research online, and it turned out that on the farm, they had everything they needed to produce them. “The conversion process is actually quite simple,” he told his father and brother. “If we grew our own soybeans and processed them into biodiesel, it wouldn’t cost us a dime.” They formed a company, Torsten Energy — the name was a reference to their family’s Nordic roots — and by 2008, had raised a substantial amount from local investors, according to Stein, who claims he was on the verge of making a deal that would take him the rest of the way toward his vision: four $40 million plants silhouetted against the Kansas sky, monuments to his ingenuity. “I felt like I finally made it,” he said. “We were going to be riding on cloud nine, peaches and cream.” Then, one morning in 2008, Stein turned on the TV. “And it was another day like 9/11,” he said. “There’s Bernanke and Bush and everyone saying the markets are crashing, the world is coming to an end, there was no more money coming, nobody was doing nothing in terms of new projects. I knew at that point we were done.” After the company collapsed, his father may have found solace in going to church, but Stein felt only the accusing eyes of the neighbors whose money they’d lost. “To have to see those people on a daily basis, those people who’d invested a good chunk of their lives  …” he said. “It sucked.” The next few years, he was in and out of rehab, struggling with alcohol and amphetamine addiction, after which he repaired to his trailer on his parents’ property to nurse his rage. “How many other companies across the country went bankrupt, they didn’t get a bailout?” he seethed. “Why should the banks?” When they were setting up the company, Stein had made a few trips to the nation’s capital to meet with elected representatives, and the dismissive way they treated him still stung. “I really saw how disgustingly corrupt, how wasteful, our system is,” he said. “If you got money, if you know people, you get everything you want done. It’s a disgrace, if you ask me. It is everything our Founding Fathers feared. It literally makes me sick. And it’s ‘We the People’ who are responsible. Our system relies on the people to keep the government in check. But most people don’t pay any attention.” Now Stein was paying attention. Back in his trailer, he developed a new addiction: content produced by right-wing media outlets, whose outrage matched his own. Stein was a fan of Fox News, and when this corporate entity failed to provide the high of extreme indignation, there were news sites like Breitbart, Infowars, and Reddit, plus Veterans Today, JewsNews, et. al, which Stein, whose mind was already addled by the information he’d mainlined elsewhere, took to be purveyors of the “real” truth. Among the things he came to believe: that the U.N. had built secret tunnels underneath all of the country’s Walmarts that linked to underground military bases. That there were Chinese troops lined up at the Mexican border readying to launch a communist invasion. That Cuba was going to invade Florida. “Been telling people for years it was all a hoax,” he wrote above a headline he posted on Facebook: “Sandy Hook Redux: Obama Officials Confirm That It Was A Drill and No Children Died.” The nucleus of Stein’s rage was, of course, Barack Obama. “We are literally being run by a terrorist organization at the highest level, being the Oval Office,” Stein told people in the militia he joined during the president’s second term. “He is their leader. Their organization is called the Muslim Brotherhood, and of course it filters down through every other department and branch of the federal government.” The Southwest Kansas Three Percent was a part of the Three Percenter movement, founded after Obama’s election by Chris Hill, a Georgia-based former Marine who goes by the name General Bloodagent. The group is named for what he claims is the actual percentage of Colonists said to have taken up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War (this figure is disputed by historians). Of its members’ many and varied fears, in early 2016, it was “radical Islam,” as Donald Trump was calling it, that perhaps loomed the largest. Down in Georgia, Hill’s Three Percenters had led an armed protest of a planned mosque, and a Kansas branch threatened to do the same thing when the Islamic Society of Wichita invited the sheikh Monzer Taleb to speak. They hadn’t had to — the event was canceled after then–U. S. representative Mike Pompeo warned the Society’s leaders that if they went ahead with the event, “they will be responsible for the damage.” Still, many of the militia’s members didn’t feel like their government was doing enough to protect them from the rising tide of fundamentalism. “Hell, it’s even getting down into the local governments now,” Stein pointed out. “It’s at the point where it’s got to be stopped or there is going to be no stopping it.” When Stein talked like this, some people in the group looked at his wild eyes and thought he was crazy, maybe even dangerous. Others thought he sounded right on the money. Among them was Dan Day, whom Stein had met during a field exercise in Cimarron, Kansas. Day, a former probation officer with a goatee and glasses, lived in Garden City, which had been fairly overtaken by Somali refugees, who Donald Trump had warned might be terrorists in disguise. There were whole apartment complexes full of them, Stein said Day told him. Supposedly, the Somalis worked at the beef-packing plants, but Day thought they might be in cahoots with the Mexican drug cartels, which had been known to route product through the city. He’d watched them coming and going late at night, carrying duffel bags, which he suspected were filled with money that the Somalis — who seemed to use Western Union a lot — were funneling to ISIS. Not too long ago, he said, someone had found an ISIS recruitment flier at the Finney County Public Library. “I was blown away to find out that ISIS is recruiting in the public library,” said Stein. He and Day exchanged information and agreed to stay in touch to keep on top of this problem. “If we don’t do it, who’s gonna do it?” asked Day. They agreed to meet in Garden City the weekend of the gun show for a “surveillance mission.” After that, Stein told Day he had some other friends he wanted to introduce him to. “It’s such a relief to find like-minded souls,” he said. Stein’s friends lived about an hour outside of Garden City, in Liberal, where, the story goes, the town’s original homesteader, Seymour Rogers, had allowed thirsty travelers to dip into his well free of charge. “And they’d say, ‘Well, that’s mighty liberal of you,’ ” said Earl Watt, publisher of the Liberal Leader & Timesnewspaper, who notes that, despite the moniker, “we probably haven’t voted for a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson.” The band struck up the national anthem, and Watt stood up. We were in the high-school gym, where his daughter was playing in a basketball game. Although the school is “majority minority,” as Watt puts it, the team is called the Redskins, which reflects the town’s complicated relationship with its diversity, one that partly stems from economics. Unlike Garden City, Liberal is “a boom-bust town.” Industries come there for a short time, then move on, leaving residents bubbling with resentment, like the oil wells the companies had capped and left in the fields. “It’s been hard on the community,” said Watt. The town is divided, literally, between the longtime, mostly white residents who participate in events like Pancake Day, and the immigrants who are there to work whatever’s working, which at the moment is beef. “There is zero assimilation,” admitted Watt. “It’s a real dang problem.” What they need, he said, is “some kind of program, so that when people come in — I don’t care where they’re from or how they got here or whatever — but we need to let them know, ‘Hey, you’re welcome. We love you. We want you to be an active part of the community. Stay. Let’s be neighbors.’ ” It’s surprising to hear this from Watt, who has written editorials in support of Building a Wall. “But I’m also behind adding 10,000 more agents down there to get them through,” he said. “They’re human beings looking for a better life. Who isn’t?” Not everyone in Liberal feels this way, of course. “They’re taking our jobs,” Curtis Allen complained to his neighbors. Pale, with dark eyes, a sullen mustache, and close-cropped hair, Allen, a native of Wichita, had washed up in Liberal a few years after being convicted on a domestic-assault charge. He told people he was a veteran of the war in Iraq, which was true, his brother later said, noting that he hadn’t been quite the same since returning home: He had anger issues and, sometimes, trouble processing his thoughts. He lived in a trailer packed with survival gear on the far side of town, where he liked to drink beer and skin animals, and he had some paranoid ideas about the government, although he lived mainly off disability checks, which he supplemented with work installing security systems. This was how he met Gavin Wright. Wright, a single father with bushy gray hair and lonely eyes, was also relatively new to the area, having moved there from Manhattan, Kansas, after the death of his father, to help his brother set up the new branch of their family business, G&G, which sold modular homes. “He was an awfully sweet man,” said Tammy, the pretty blonde bartender at the VFW. “The other one I wasn’t so sure about.” She meant Allen, with whom Wright hit it off: He ended up hiring Allen as a salesman at G&G, and together they joined a militia, the Kansas Security Force 3%, which is how they’d become acquainted with Patrick Stein, who was also a member. Militia etiquette has it that you aren’t really supposed to be in more than one, but Stein was, after all, a man of action. Stein knew that Allen would be particularly incensed by Day’s news about ISIS fliers in the library. Allen hated Muslim refugees, or “cockroaches,” as Stein called them. It was all over his Facebook. “If anyone hears they are bringing these refugees into our state we have to spread the word imeadiatly [sic]!” Allen had written. “This just might get you killed, or worse your kids!!” “They bring these fuckers in by the goddamn planeload,” Stein told him on a call that included Wright, Day, and other interested members of the KSF that June. “I mean, there’s gotta be a fucking line somewhere. And when that line is crossed, there’s gotta be action taken. I mean, am I wrong?” “Not in my eyes,” said Wright. “Say there was an ISIS attack in Garden City,” Day said. “Someone went into Walmart and mowed down 100 people. What would we do?” “In my mind, I’m ready to just start fucking taking them out,” Stein said. “Kick in doors. Start cleaning this fucking state up.” “I mean, we gotta have a plan,” said Day. “You know?” They agreed to form a splinter group to deal with the problem, for which they communicated through an encrypted app, on a channel Stein named “Crusaders.” The group they formed wasn’t a secret, at least not at first. “They’d be all, ‘You gotta join our group, you have to know what’s going on with your government,’ ” said Tammy, rolling her good eye. Their meetings took place at the town library, or the Branding Iron, the bar inside the Liberal Inn and Suites, where Allen was friendly with the waitress, a bouncy, busty blonde named Cora. “He was fun,” she said. “A little racist, I’m sure. But at the time, I put it down to him being an asshole. I mean, he was a friend, but he was kind of an asshole, you know what I mean? I set him up with a Spanish woman and he had a great time, you know what I mean?” Over the spring and summer of 2016, the fun-loving asshole she knew started to change. At the time, Cora attributed it to the sudden appearance of Donnette, Allen’s ex-wife — or maybe girlfriend, it wasn’t clear — who’d arrived in town out of nowhere. She was the jealous type, and eventually Curtis told Cora they couldn’t be friends anymore. She still saw him around occasionally. “It was so strange,” she told me. “He went from like a clean-shaven, good-looking guy to unshaven, kind of twitchy-looking.” In hindsight, it makes sense. Allen was spending the bulk of his time at the G&G offices, where the group had started holding its meetings. “ ’Cause we couldn’t talk like this at the fucking restaurants,” he’d pointed out. Meaning they couldn’t say things like “Make sure if you start using your bow on them cockroaches, make sure you dip them in pig’s blood before you shoot them,” which was a suggestion Stein had made when discussing their Plan in public. It’s not clear how the idea for the Plan progressed from something that was reactive to, as Allen put it, “preemptive.” But later, Stein would say the idea to move things forward had originated with Day. “I can’t let what could happen a year from now, or six months ago, dictate what we fucking do now,” Day said, in August. “I mean, you just can’t.” They were at G&G, listening to AC/DC, which they’d taken to playing to cover the sound of their discussions. “I think it needs to be something big,” Wright said. “Something that’s going to accomplish something,” Stein affirmed. “We need to come up with a manifesto,” said Day. “To trigger the other like-minded people across the nation to fucking stand up and start doing the same thing we’re doing,” added Allen. “Against the U. N.?” asked Stein. “Muslims,” Allen said definitively. “Cockroaches. But we have to do it in a way to where they don’t play it off, like some fucking redneck with a fucking goddamn hundred pounds of fertilizer just, you know, hates his wife or something.” They discussed targets. Sitting at the computer, Allen pulled up Google Earth to note where “cockroaches” were. “Do you know how to drop pins?” Stein asked. “I mean, I’m just figuring it out,” Allen said. “It’s harder than shit.” Day, who had been quiet, spoke up. “I was thinking,” he said. “The Somali mall. That’s where we start this. No cameras back there. You can drive right up the back.” The Somali Mall, in Garden City, isn’t actually a mall. It’s a store selling African imports and a popular Somali hangout, though its location on a back road makes it harder to see and for some people maybe a little bit scary. “The first time I went there, to be downright honest, my fear was some guy might come out with a machine gun and say ‘Allahu akbar!’ and shoot me,” said John Birky, the doctor. He laughed, embarrassed, because, of course, he went in and it was just a handful of Somalis drinking tea. “For my people, it’s the solution to everything,” said Ifrah, who took me to the store one day for a cup made by an older, gold-toothed woman, who filled it with carefully foamed milk and an unconscionable amount of sugar. “Lots of sugar,” said Ifrah, who loves the stuff; I have seen her put maple syrup on scrambled eggs. It’s a real problem in that community, according to Birky. “I tell them all the time, ‘That stuff will kill you.’ ” The crusaders never actually set foot inside the mall. They ended up deciding on a new target: an apartment building on Mary Street, near where Stein and Day had seen the Somali women the day of their drive-by. As it turned out, Wright was loosely related to the owner of the building, but never liked him, and they discussed killing him and maybe raping his daughter to send a message before someone remembered they’d heard the building contained a mosque. This would make it the ideal target, in that it would “make an impact,” as Allen put it, in terms of casualties. “We can find the prayer times online,” he said. Hopefully, they said, it would be the first of many similar “projects.” “If you’re a Muslim, I’m going to enjoy shooting you in the head,” said Stein. “When we go on operations, there’s no leaving anyone behind, even if it’s a 1-year-old. I’m serious. I guarantee, if I go on a mission, those little fuckers are going bye-bye.” The group took this in. “I think I would just sit there and toss a cell phone in there with a wire coming off the ringer,” said Wright. But how would they get ahold of explosives? Allen, who had watched a few YouTube videos on the subject, suggested they get a chemistry set. “Like a kid’s?” said Stein. “No, man,” said Allen. Day interjected. He had some cousins, drug traffickers, who knew some “bad motherfuckers,” he said. They’d have access to real weapons. Money was a problem — none of them had any, but perhaps they could trade something. As for a date, September 11 would be ideal, Stein said, but at this point it was only a week away. Plus they didn’t want to give ammunition to the Hillary supporters. It was decided they’d wait until the day after the election. Stein agreed to liaise with the Bad Motherfuckers. In the meantime, they’d try making their own explosives. Day was tasked with acquiring a mortar and pestle, Stein a rock tumbler for crushing cans into aluminum powder. Allen said he’d get to work on the manifesto. “I can get the beer bottles,” Wright belched. “Probably tonight, after I’m done with this.” On October 11, 2016, Gavin Wright was in his office when his work was interrupted by the sound of a woman shrieking. Donnette. She’d stormed into the office and was screaming at Allen — maybe accusing him of sleeping around? Wright wasn’t sure. Embarrassed, he ducked into the bathroom and was getting up the nerve to come out and tell them to take it somewhere else when it got quiet. They were gone. When Allen returned a few hours later, he didn’t seem to want to talk about whatever had happened, so they went over some numbers instead. Donnette, on the other hand, did want to talk. Back at their trailer, she called the Liberal Police Department and told them Allen had beaten her. He was dangerous, she said. He had guns. Lots of them. He was part of a militia, and he and a group of his friends were plotting an attack against Muslims. Donnette said a lot of other crazy things, like that she’d been brought to Earth by aliens. But the dispatcher was sufficiently disturbed to send a car out to the trailer, and when Donnette opened the door to the room where Curtis kept his guns, the cops saw that maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all. Inside was close to a metric ton of ammunition. The officer eyed a belt of bullets, like the kind worn by Rambo. That’s for his machine gun, Donnette boasted. In addition to the small armory, the cops also found Allen’s half-written manifesto. “America, I want to share some information with you,” it began. “Over the last few years the mainstream media and government has been telling you veterans, Christians, and assorted groups are domestic terrorists. I am basically all the above and I am a threat to no person.” Apparently, the police didn’t agree. That afternoon, they pulled Allen and Wright over as they left G&G and arrested Allen for domestic assault and felony gun possession. They let Wright go, but after one of the cops mentioned that Allen had explosives, Wright was shaken. “I’m just cutting ties for now,” Wright told Dan Day later. “I don’t want to even be in the group, ’cuz I don’t know what’s going to happen.” “It’s always a woman,” Day responded. “I know, man,” Wright said. “I know.” Stein was disappointed at Wright’s defection. Now they were two men down. Still, he felt the show had to go on. The following day, he met with Day’s cousin’s contact. As it turned out, the Bad Motherfucker was pretty cool. A like-minded individual. And when he opened his truck, Stein saw he hadn’t been bluffing about what he could get his hands on. Sure, the BMF said, as Stein regarded the gleaming line of weapons, he could try a few. Stein fired rounds from a few automatic weapons into the blue Kansas sky. “It’s going to be a bloody, nasty, Tory-fucking battle, brother,” he said when he was done. The BMF nodded. “I’m not scared,” he said. “When it’s my turn to bow my knee, I’ll do it proudly before my God.” “You and me both, brother.” Stein had told the BMF about their group and what they were trying to accomplish — “We are on a tight budget and limited experience, but tons and tons of heart and drive,” he’d said — and perhaps because he was down for the cause the BMF had offered them a pretty sweet deal. He’d make the explosives if Stein delivered six 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate to him — fertilizer that was easy enough to come by when your family owned a farm. They agreed to meet early the next morning, at the McDonald’s in Dodge City. Afterward, walking out into the bright morning air, Stein felt a sense of accomplishment, like once again, he was on the verge of making it. “When we are done, people from miles and miles away will take note at the beautiful job we did,” he’d told the BMF. “Hell, if things go like we want them to, it will inspire others in a huge way.” Dodge City looked the same as it always had. Same blue sky, same golden fields, same fast-food restaurants where he’d written bad checks back in his wayward youth. Then suddenly, everything was upside down. Stein was facedown on the ground, and the person strapping handcuffs on him wasn’t anyone he knew. It was the Feds. Inside the mosque at the Garden Spot Apartments on Mary Street. Photo: Benjamin Rasmussen Ifrah was on the floor at Tyson when she got the news that someone had been planning to bomb the apartment complex on Mary Street. The perpetrators had been arrested, and Chief Utz was convening a meeting of elders and community leaders to explain what had happened. She washed her hands and drove over to the apartments, whose residents were panicking. Some were having what seemed like post-traumatic flashbacks. “I was hoping when I get to United States I would not seen a gunshot, I will not hear an explosion, or suicide bomber, or car explosion,” said Ahmed Ali, who left Somalia after his father was shot and left in a Dumpster by members of the jihadi group Al-Shabaab. “And all of a sudden those guys were preparing a bomb?” The next morning, the chief’s deputies played basketball with the kids while the two agents from the FBI walked them through what had happened: They’d been investigating the men for ten months, they said. They were bad people. Still, the crisis had been averted. It was over. They were safe. As Ifrah translated, she saw people beginning to calm down. That night, a group from the local Presbyterian church organized a vigil in which is parishioners spent the night holding hands around the apartment complex, as a gesture of protection. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/a-militias-plot-to-bomb-somali-refugees-in-garden-city-ks.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s1 (c) 2017 New York Magazine

Thousands of new Rohingya refugee arrivals cross the border near Anzuman Para village, Palong Khali, Bangladesh. Credit: UNHCR/Roger Arnold Almost 70 years since the Genocide Convention was adopted, the international community still faces a continued and growing risk of genocide. On the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide, the UN launched an appeal for member states to ratify the 1948 convention by the end of 2018. “Genocide does not happen by accident; it is deliberate, with warning signs and precursors,” said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “Often it is the culmination of years of exclusion, denial of human rights and other wrongs. Since genocide can take place in times of war and in times of peace, we must be ever-vigilant,” he continued. The Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng echoed similar sentiments, stating: “It is our inaction, our ineffectiveness in addressing the warning signs, that allows it to become a reality. A reality where people are dehumanized and persecuted for who they are, or who they represent. A reality of great suffering, cruelty, and of inhumane acts that have at the basis unacceptable motivations.” The Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” This includes not only killing members of the group, but also causing serious bodily or mental harm and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Despite the comprehensive definition of genocide in the Convention, genocide has recurred multiple times, Guterres said. “We are still reacting rather than preventing, and acting only when it is often too late. We must do more to respond early and keep violence from escalating,” he said. One such case may be Myanmar. After a year of investigation, the organization Fortify Rights and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said that there is “mounting” evidence that points to a genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar with Burmese Army soldiers, police, and civilians as the major perpetrators. “The Rohingya have suffered attacks and systematic violations for decades, and the international community must not fail them now when their very existence in Myanmar is threatened,” said Cameron Hudson from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Without urgent action, there’s a high risk of more mass atrocities,” he continued. More than half of Myanmar’s one million Rohingya have fled the country since violence reignited in August. “They tried to kill us all,” 25-year-old Mohammed Rafiq from Maungdaw Township told researchers when recalling how soldiers gathered villagers and opened fire on them on 30 August. It has been the largest and fastest flow of destitute people across a border since the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said. “There was nothing left. People were shot in the chest, stomach, legs, face, head, everywhere.” Eyewitness testimony revealed that Rohingya civilians were burned alive, women and girls raped, and men and boys arrested en masse. “These crimes thrive on impunity and inaction…condemnations aren’t enough,” said Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights Matthew Smith. On the other side of the border, refugees find themselves living in overcrowded camps with limited access to food, water, and shelter. They are in need of treatment for not only their physical injuries, but also the mental and emotional scars from their traumatic experiences. IOM spoke to some of the survivor who made the treacherous journey by boat to Bangladesh including 8-year-old Arafat. His entire family including his parents, two brothers, and a sister drowned when the fishing boat carrying them capsized in stormy weather. “Where will I go now,” he cried, transfixed with shock. The government’s strict restrictions on Rohingya’s daily lives also point to signs of genocide. In 2013, authorities placed a two-child limit on Rohingya couples in two predominantly Muslim townships in Rakhine State. Others have come forward to claim that the crisis in Myanmar may constitute genocide such as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein and the British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. “Considering Rohingyas’ self-identify as a distinct ethnic group with their own language and culture – and [that they] are also deemed by the perpetrators themselves as belonging to a different ethnic, national, racial or religious group – given all of this, can anyone rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” al-Hussein asked. Though the UN Human Rights Council recently condemned the systematic and gross violations of human rights in Myanmar, the Security Council has failed to act on the crisis. As the UN appeals for the remaining 45 member states to ratify the Genocide Convention, what about nations like Myanmar who are already party to the document? The Convention requires all states to take action to prevent and punish genocide. Not only Myanmar, but the entire international community has failed to protect Rohingya civilians from mass atrocities. “The world has reacted with horror to the images of their flight, and the stories of murder, rape and arson brought from their still smoldering villages in North Rakhine State. But this horror will have to be matched by action on the part of the international community, if we are to avert a humanitarian disaster on both sides of the border,” said IOM’s Director-General William Lacy Swing. Perhaps the international community may need to consider additional mechanisms to address and prevent genocide, making sure ‘never again’ really means never again. To date, a total of 149 member states have ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 IPS news

What’s the issue? Ten months after the Sahel’s five countries set up the G5 Sahel joint force (FC-G5S) as a means of settling the armed conflicts within the region, multiple questions have been raised and the force is struggling to find its place in the region. Why does it matter? This force’s success or failure will depend on whether it can position itself in the crowded field of armed forces already in the Sahel and gain people’s trust in the region. What should be done? The G5 Sahel joint force must also have political support, coordinate its work with other regional and international actors and forces, and receive tangible financial support from its donors. Executive Summary Ten months after its launch, the G5 Sahel joint force (FC-G5S), a joint project undertaken by the five countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad), is slowly taking shape. This force is now backed by two UN Security Council resolutions and has its own headquarters; it also carried out its first mission in the border zone of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso in early November. The force represents an important step toward addressing the worrying instability that affects Mali and the Sahel in general, but it remains a work in progress. This raises numerous unanswered questions about its funding, operational capacity, the political cooperation between its five members, and its place in the Sahel – a region crowded by sometimes-competing military and diplomatic initiatives. The backers of the FC-G5S – due to meet on 13 December at the Paris conference aimed at fine-tuning its operationalisation – must grasp the fact that the construction of this force, and more generally the resolution of crises in the Sahel, is not exclusively a matter of weapons and money. As part of a larger organisation known as the G5, set up in 2014, the FC-G5S is still mainly an experimental force. Its creation is part of a growing appetite both within and outside the continent for this new generation of military response in a global context that is increasingly sceptical of both the effectiveness of the UN peacekeeping doctrine and its suitability to asymmetrical conflicts and terrorism. Although not completely pulling out of the Sahel, France and other European countries with a presence in this region are attempting to reduce the number of their troops on the ground and to bring down the expense of their overseas operations by delegating them partially to their African partners and replacing them with the use of drones. The Sahel is politically and economically strategic, especially for France and Germany, both of which view the region as posing a potential threat to their own security and as a source of migration and terrorism. As for the African states themselves, they have lost trust in the ability of their own regional and continental organisations to guarantee their security. Instead they are choosing to try out these new collective defence mechanisms, known by specialists as ad hoc forces. The FC-G5S was created shortly after another ad hoc force, the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), was launched by four countries (Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad). The MNJTF has been fighting against the Boko Haram’s uprising in the Lake Chad basin since 2012. Compared to this analogous force, the G5’s equivalent has various weaknesses: the respective armies lack capability and its members are much poorer. Whereas the MNJTF can mobilise with discreet support from Western powers against a single enemy, the G5 acts in a region containing more than twenty active armed groups, making it difficult to focus on a common target. This new force will increasingly need to carve out a place for itself in a region where the UN’s Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and France’s Operation Barkhane already have forces in operation, and in the same theatre as a deployment of U.S. troops, whose exact number remains a mystery. The success or failure of the new force will largely depend on how it positions itself in this crowded security field, and on its coordination with the armies already in place since 2013. France’s Operation Barkhane will almost certainly guide the development of the FC-G5S, but it is much less obvious how the force will collaborate with MINUSMA (35 per cent of the troops for this UN mission are provided by the members of the G5 states). Any logistical support that MINUSMA might provide could not be regional, for example, because its stabilisation mandate only covers Mali. Its success will also be contingent on its backers’ ability to make it fit into the wider picture with a set of political objectives. In areas where the G5 has operations and comes to secure peace, spaces for negotiation must swiftly be found while channels of communication with certain leaders of jihadist groups from the Sahel should also be maintained or reactivated. The FC-G5S will achieve its objective by isolating jihadist groups from local communities and from other armed groups which currently give them support. To be effective, the FC-G5S will need the trust and support from local populations, whose rights must be scrupulously respected; its mistakes and abuses will be sure to drive people in this region toward giving their allegiance to jihadist groups, which are skilled at offering protection and promises of revenge. In this sense, the MNJTF provides an example of what not to do: anger or fear incited by acts of brutality committed by its armed forces, particularly by Nigerian troops, caused many people to join the ranks of Boko Haram. The G5 and its armed force must also earn the trust of Algeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). For the time being, these two regional powers prefer the Nouakchott process that groups together eleven West African countries, from the Lake Chad basin and Maghreb, hence it is deemed more inclusive. In their eyes, this process is also more legitimate, having been initiated by the African Union (AU). Unless a better understanding is reached with these two partners, the search for greater regional cohesion will paradoxically lead to new rifts between neighbours. Similarly, given the slow and difficult process of setting up this initiative, and all the effort required, it is important not to forget the peace process already underway and floundering in the north of Mali, and that it is currently the only political solution to a crisis which is more political and social than military. In short, the FC-G5S must not simply become a façade that conceals a lack of political vision. Recommendations Ensure scrupulous respect for the rights of people living in zones of FC-G5S’s operations, otherwise a section of these populations, in search of protection, will side with the jihadist groups active in the Sahel. Military personnel, police forces and the judiciaries of the G5 countries must therefore be made aware of fundamental human rights; legal recourses must be made available to families of those killed or arrested in connection to the G5 force’s operations; compliance must be ensured with the human rights and international humanitarian law reference framework established by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; those found guilty of human rights violations must be severely punished. The FC-G5S must be part of a project that is not simply repressive but instead seeks political solutions to crises affecting the Sahel.Its operations must go hand in hand with local-level negotiations designed to tackle the causes of conflicts and to encourage certain leaders of jihadist groups from the Sahel region to engage in dialogue. Diplomatic initiatives must be taken in parallel with the use of force by the G5 countries and by France, the group’s main backer. The prime objective of this approach would be to relieve any reservations that Algeria and ECOWAS may have about the creation of the FC-G5S, in order to create a regional unity that spreads beyond the G5 Sahel’s borders, while also ensuring that these two regional powers will work alongside the G5, and not against it. Bilateral military cooperation from the U.S. must be arranged for improved coordination with the other forces deployed in the Sahel. If the U.S. wishes to fight against jihadist groups, it should strive for its bilateral cooperation not to duplicate but complement the contributions made by France, the European Union (EU), and the UN to the FC-G5S. The FC-G5S must be given significant financial backing. It would be better for the donors to provide immediate and tangible funds rather than simply make pledges. They must show themselves to be sufficiently generous by providing more than the amount initially requested, and to guarantee long-term funding to the force Brussels/Dakar, 12 December 2017 I.What Is the G5? Launched in February 2017, the G5 Sahel joint force (FC-G5S) forms part of the regional G5 Sahel organisation. The idea for this new regional body – comprising Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad – was conceived in February 2014. Designed to respond to the security and development challenges facing the Sahel region, it has been supported by France, the most military active European country in this part of the world. Paris has refused to take ownership of this initiative, however, and has gone to some lengths to attribute its existence primarily to the presidents of its five member states. It is hard to give a definitive answer to the paternity question, but ever since the G5 was set up, Paris has clearly been busy making diplomatic efforts in support of the group, and certain regional actors rightly or wrongly perceive that France is behind the initiative. The G5 is a very fluid and constantly changing organisation. At the time of its creation in 2014, the G5 described itself as a multidimensional grouping with a strong development component. This aspect has gradually slipped into the background as the G5’s initiators have turned their attention to the area of most interest to the international community: security. The priority has therefore shifted toward the construction of a joint armed force, a task that has proved very difficult, especially in terms of its financing. During the G5 summit held in July 2017, France, Germany and the European Union (EU) added a new element to the group called Alliance for the Sahel, which is still a work in progress. Tasked with coordinating the initiatives and mobilising donors, this alliance was created without the G5 officially abandoning its own development objectives. This raises two questions: one concerns the ability of the Alliance and the G5 to work in conjunction with each other, given that the G5’s permanent secretariat is “an institutional framework to coordinate and follow up regional cooperation for development”; the other issue relates to the G5’s prospects as an organisation. And over time, the G5 is increasingly being reduced to its military component. Even though the G5 and FC-G5S acronyms are not interchangeable and describe two distinct structures, they are still frequently confused. Many writers refer to the G5 as an armed force, something it is not but what it could become in the future. The FC-G5S separates the Sahel into three sectors: an eastern sector for Niger and Chad, with two battalions; a central sector covering Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, in which three battalions have been deployed; and a western sector corresponding to Mauritania and Mali, where two battalions will be operating. The battalions will each consist of 650 men. The different zones are equipped with their own tactical command post (PC tactique), while a general command post (PC opératif) has been set up in Mali. The force is led by a commander appointed by the president chairing the G5. Selected from among the G5 member countries’ five heads of state, this position has a one-year duration. The joint force’s initial mandate includes fighting terrorism, organised crime and human trafficking; restoring state authority; helping displaced persons to return home; contributing to humanitarian operations; and helping to implement development projects. Officially it has a peace-enforcement mandate rather than a peacekeeping one. In fact, the work of the FC-G5S is rather a counter-insurgency operation than a classic peace-enforcement mission. Its rules of engagement fall within the realm of warfare. The FC-G5S is another example of recent attempts made by African countries to take on responsibility for their own security, which have had varying degrees of success. The trend began with the tentative steps taken in 1978 by an African detachment of troops in Shaba (former Zaire), followed by the first peacekeeping force sent by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU, precursor of the AU) into Chad in 1981.Subsequently, from the 1980s until the 2000s, initiatives have mostly formed part of peacekeeping missions, enlisting intervention forces rather than fighting forces. Some major Western actors have been eager to progressively wit draw from the region, due to a combination of their own domestic political and budgetary pressures. This is compounded by new security challenges facing the African continent, such as terrorism and the growing networks of international criminal groups, as well as the declining effectiveness of the UN peacekeeping concept. The situation that has lasted for around a decade has accelerated the pace at which, and significantly changed how, countries in Africa are taking control over their own security. The G5 is part of a current shift toward the creation of ad hoc forces that go beyond peacekeeping and have a mandate for direct military intervention. The implementation of this new type of force now lies at the heart of the strategy adopted by the AU, whose Peace and Security Council created the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in 2007. The G5 is keen to address the failures of regional and international military cooperation initiatives that have followed the establishment and expansion of armed groups in Mali and then in the Sahel. These militias spilled out from the Algerian civil war waged in the 1990s, with small groups of uncompromising combatants settling in the Malian desert. More recently, fighters have been spawned by localised conflicts such as intercommunity disputes in central Mali and regional unrest of the kind generated by the chaos in Libya. Despite various efforts, the countries in the Sahel-Saharan region have never achieved a joint security apparatus capable of putting a stop to the activities of these groups. The Algerian-led Joint Military Staff Committee of the Sahel Region (CEMOC) has never properly taken off. Lacking resources and without enough mutual understanding among its members, ECOWAS has been unable to deploy troops to the Sahel as part of its own regional security initiative known as the Standby Force. Ill-adapted to asymmetrical warfare, the MINUSMA has also failed to stabilise the country at the centre of Sahel’s crises. Armed groups have not only taken advantage of this ineffectiveness and divisions between countries in the region, but they have also shown an organisational ability superior to the states under attack. Spurred on by a common cause, they are often better than the nation states at making things mesh at a local, regional and international level. The Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), created in March 2017, is the most recent example of this state of affairs. This alliance operating under the international banner of al-Qaeda consists of two groups, Ansar Eddine and the Macina Liberation Front, which have a strong presence in northern and central Mali, along with al-Mourabitoun, an organisation active throughout the wider border region of the Maghreb. These groups have also made the most of Sahel’s vast desert landscape by adapting their strategy to the French and international military intervention of 2013. The French operation, carried out within the framework of Operation Serval, chased out armed groups from towns which they had briefly controlled. This also had the effect, as part of a discreet political strategy, of encouraging al-Qaeda supporters, particularly those involved in Ansar Eddine and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), to join the Algeria-brokered peace talks or retract their support for these terrorist groups. But these groups have then used one of the most classic stratagems in warfare: they dispersed and started attacking rural targets that had been abandoned by states and rendered vulnerable by local tensions, particularly in the case of border areas. Without joint security initiatives, these areas located largely beyond the reaches of the states are perfectly suited for government adversaries to regroup and move around freely.The G5 countries want to remedy this lack of regional cooperation and surveillance of these abandoned locales. France and Germany are also concerned by threats to their domestic security and perceive the Sahel as a potential base for those launching attacks on their countries, even though this region has not been the origin of any such attacks in Europe. Both of these countries, as well as various members of the EU, are keen to stem the flow of migrants from this area and envisage the FC-G5S as a more global strategy to bring migration under control. From this perspective, the initiative appears logical and sensible.The group’s operational phase began with the inauguration of its general headquarters in Sévaré in Mali and its first mission (named Hawbi) to the border area of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger in early November. Yet the details remain vague for how this extremely complex new security apparatus will work in practice; it is more experimental than effective, and raise many unanswered questions. It will take time to build. And even the partial replacement of the French troops – as awaited by a France that is tired and short of solutions – is set to be a lengthy process. It must also succeed where similar initiatives have failed, and create something that few regional groupings have achieved: a common defence.II.Operational Capabilities and Limited FundingThe G5 was set up soon after the regional Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) was established and began operations to tackle the Boko Haram uprising in the Lake Chad basin. This is often cited as an example to be followed given its relative success at containing the expansion of Boko Haram. The G5 will have many difficulties emulating the MNJTF, for at least three reasons.Firstly, the armies’ capabilities are not comparable. The MNJTF has benefited with everything from the Nigerian army’s manpower and weapons, Chad’s veteran soldiers, and the long experience of one of Cameroon’s army units that enjoys unconventional funding, the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR). Conversely, three of the G5’s armies (from Burkina, Niger and Mali) have more weaknesses than strengths.Burkina Faso’s army and intelligence services are immersed in a restructuring process after President Compaoré’s downfall in October 2014. Niger’s army must operate with a budget that has a chronic deficit, at a time of tense relations with the political establishment, and the obligation to have a permanent presence along three borders (with Mali, Libya and Nigeria). And although the Malian army exists on paper, its operational capability is feeble. Its reorganisation process is progressing very slowly, and it largely remains the same disorganised armed force as it was before Captain Sanogo’s coup d’état in March 2012. As before, some of its members sell their equipment to the highest bidder and commit abuses against the civilian population.Although not as weak as its neighbours in the central Sahel region, the armies of Mauritania and Chad are far from being beacons of hope. Despite boasting a good reputation for its intelligence services and rapid intervention units, Mauritania has not participated in any major combat situations for the past four years. Chad’s soldiers also may not be quite as sharp as they were in 2013, fatigued by multiple deployments and financially weak after the fall in oil prices. Despite having superior capabilities than the G5’s other members, both of these armed forces are distanced from the current flashpoints in the central sector, around the Liptako-Gourma region near the borders of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. This creates a paradox where the cornerstones of the G5, its weakest links, must initially be the ones that take on most of the work. Secondly, the G5 lacks a donor from among its members able to disburse an important sum of its own money, as happened in the case of Nigeria and the MNJTF. Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad rank in the last five places of the UN Development Programme (UNDP)’s human development index (HDI). Mauritania and Mali are not much higher. The G5 therefore faces a similar paradox to AMISOM: its member countries must take responsibility for their own security while still relying on foreign financing backing. For the time being, the force’s initial budget is set at €423 million for its first twelve months of operations. This amount is broken down as follows: 230 million for investments, 110 million to cover initial operations, and 83 million to pay the troops. Even if the budget is severely cut, as a number of sources have indicated will be the case, it is still far from being exercised. The EU has donated €50 million, not including France’s 8 million, and the G5’s member countries have contributed 10 million each, while Saudi Arabia has pledged to donate €84.8 million. The focus on the force’s budget has ended up as a distraction from another issue: its future funding and durability. The refusal of the Americans and British to fund the force through a regular and enduring UN mechanism places the G5 in a permanently precarious financial situation. As noted by a diplomat recently, “if the funding is raised by a donor conference, there will be funds for a year or two, not much longer”. The poor countries of the G5 must maintain over a long period of time costly equipment (sophisticated vehicles, latest-generation weapons, high-performing intelligence structures, seasoned troops) normally reserved for the world’s most well-endowed armies. Funding the G5 also raises the question of its member countries’ ability to absorb significantly large sums of money for them, without suffering the consequences. The G5’s initial budget, if it remains at €423 million for the first year, corresponds to about one year of the total budget of all the armies put together. No mention is made of how this inflow of money will fuel the corruption that has undermined the G5 member countries in the past, heightened tensions both internally and between the countries in the region, and increased manipulations among the political elites wanting to help themselves to some of this windfall of cash. Some of the G5 countries’ armies are already struggling to cope with the plethora of training courses offered to them since the war started with Mali. Officers and non-commissioned officers from the member countries are spending longer in training or preparatory missions than in doing their actual jobs. Thirdly, the MNJTF is fighting against a single common enemy, Boko Haram, isolated in a relatively confined area in the Lake Chad basin. The G5 countries will be facing a different reality. Their troops will be fighting in a far wider area containing a proliferation of armed groups that are intertwined and often split up into different factions, making it hazardous even just pinpointing the actual target: “Right now, we don’t really know who we’re going to be fighting against”, admitted a high-ranking member of Burkina Faso’s army last October. The shifting meaning of the word “terrorist”, referred to in Resolution 2359 of the UN Security Council, makes it a notoriously difficult term to define. The comings and goings of some combatants between different groups blurs the picture and may lead to the G5 forces attacking armed groups that do not even appear on any list of terrorist movements. On 7 November, after the G5’s first operation, some members of the Coordination of Azawad Movements (known by its French acronym, CMA), a signatory of the 2015 Bamako Convention, were arrested before being released four days later following an angry response from the CMA. In addition, in the same way the MNJTF is supported by units of armed civilians, the G5 increasingly uses militia or proxies to fight those it has designated as the enemy. It is uncertain whether all of the member countries consider these militias as their allies. By the same token, national interests will continue to prevail over the common interest. Chad in particular will certainly refrain from taking part fully unless its president considers that the country’s vital interests are under threat. And Mauritania, geographically the most westward country in the G5 grouping, is currently a long way from the armed attacks to the east; this makes it highly improbable that it will immediately enter the fight against groups posing no direct or immediate danger to it. Political leadership is also missing in the G5, since none of the member countries predominate over the others to agree on the way ahead. For the moment at least, the five members of the G5 do not share the same views on which direction the group should take going forward. The fight against transnational criminal groups, included in Resolution 2359, is also a hard-to-reach goal. It is likely to be held back by conflicts of interest arising from collusion between segments of the member states and traffickers. This can include the direct involvement of certain influential national leaders in lucrative trafficking, or more distant relations based on political patronage or the practical reality of obtaining and exchanging information. More broadly, the G5 states will have to fight against a trafficking that forms the backbone of the economy in certain disadvantaged regions within their territory, for which they have few alternative or attractive proposals. To break these illicit channels, especially those of migrants, without providing compensation, is to take the risk of turning a large segment of the local population against the state. And the G5 needs the support of its own populations to succeed. This local support will be crucial for the future of the G5 and is already a concern for many diplomats in the region. It will mean not only considering the economic interests of local populations, but also respecting their rights. The challenge, in fact, is to avoid pushing more people into the arms of armed groups through frequent misconduct and abuse against civilians during counter-insurgency operations or while attempting to curb illicit trade. This risk is even greater as armed groups are now anchored among populations that often perceive them as protectors, and are sometimes open to their messages of struggle against what are deemed occupying forces. In this regard, the MNJTF is a bad example to follow, since the action of its armies, especially that of Nigeria, has incited thousands of men and women to join the ranks of Boko Haram, seeking revenge or protection against the abuses they suffered. Another lesson to retain is that of the Malian army’s brutal action in the centre of the country, an important factor in the deterioration of the situation. Indeed, many problems in this region arose because what were essentially police tasks were undertaken by the army, particularly those concerning cattle theft, an inexhaustible source of local conflicts. The G5 forces must be made up of as many police forces as possible, with the investigative capacities and tact that the military does not possess. Although the enemy is difficult to define, it must not be the population of the countries concerned, even if they hold sympathies for certain armed groups. It is also essential that the FC-G5S act in accordance with the points mentioned in UN Resolution 2391 regarding its obligations under international law and human rights. The force will have a strong interest in working within the human rights and international humanitarian law framework as defined by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. III.A Security Bottleneck and Political Vacuum A further aspect of the situation in the Sahel sets apart the MNJTF from the G5. The MNJTF has settled in an area where it is the main force operating on the ground. This has greatly facilitated its mission. In contrast, the FC-G5S operates in a region where the military forces of France, the UN and the U.S. are already present. Moreover, the G5 must undertake its mission while avoiding being at odds with a growing number of regional and continental initiatives. Without a greater cohesion between the different forces on the ground, deploying the FC-G5S could aggravate what increasingly resembles a security and institutional bottleneck. The FC-G5S will first have to find the best possible way to collaborate with MINUSMA. With nearly 35 per cent of MINUSMA contingents coming from G5 member states, there is a need for discussion between the UN and these countries regarding their respective roles. It is evident that the G5 members will be unable to provide contingents comprised of thousands of men to both forces for very long. They lack the means to do so. The question of collaboration between the two structures is also far from settled. France is of the opinion that tasks could be divided up between the FC-G5S and MINUSMA as follows: the former would provide security and border control while the latter would oversee the hinterland. For their part, some G5 members, such as Burkina Faso and Chad, have a different view of the situation. They would prefer to see some of their MINUSMA troops return home to provide security within the framework of the FC-G5S or at the national level. This last option remains very hypothetical for the time being and raises some serious issues. Bringing home current MINUSMA troops would mean that these countries would no longer receive automatic financial contributions from the U N. This could lead to cash flow problems for their respective Ministries of Defence. Such a situation could strongly demotivate unstable armies, which have often used UN missions as safety valves. G5 countries face a dilemma: maintain their troops in MINUSMA and hold on to the associated benefits while lacking troops to secure their own territories, or repatriate these forces, at the risk of losing a source of income and of creating tensions within their militaries. The possibility of MINUSMA providing logistical support for the FC-G5S is also a matter of debate. Diplomats first point out that aid for water, food, fuel and medical services could only be provided within Mali, given that MINUSMA’s stabilisation mandate does not apply beyond Malian borders. On this point, an arrangement could in theory be made with the U.S., which is planning to provide logistical support for some member countries of the FC-G5S as part of its bilateral collaboration. But even if this arrangement is agreed upon, the logistical support provided by MINUSMA will likely encounter funding issues, since the U.S. strongly opposes any increase in MINUSMA’s budget and all recourse to mandatory contributions. The question that could be asked is whether MINUSMA has the capacity to support another force besides itself. The G5 countries will also have to consider their membership and obligations to other organisations. Niger and Chad have two irons in the fire: the FC-G5S and the MNJTF, which is currently facing a resurgence of Boko Haram attacks. The complaints coming from Chad, which considers that too much is being asked of it, must be taken very seriously, and not merely seen as a clever ploy to raise the stakes and sell its commitment at a higher price. This country already supplies 1,390 men to MINUSMA and about 2,000 men to the MNJTF. If they are badly handled, the issues generated by these multiple commitments may eventually weaken, or even shatter, the FC-G5S or MNJTF. The G5 will also have to deal with two major players in the Sahel-Saharan region: ECOWAS and Algeria. ECOWAS is unhappy that it was not involved in crucial choices concerning its own turf, and that three of its members created the G5, an organisation seen as competing and non-inclusive. ECOWAS unofficially supports another structure, the Nouakchott process, which it considers to be more inclusive, effective and sustainable than the G5. The Nouakchott process brings together West African and Maghreb countries and, as a result, would appear to be better suited to manage conflicts such as the one in Mali, whose causes and repercussions extend far beyond the borders of West Africa. As a major regional player, Algeria goes even further by making its support for the G5 conditional on its integration into the Nouakchott process, which it considers more legitimate, since it was initiated by the African Union. As usual, the country is observing this initiative supported by France with considerable concern. Finally, Algeria is worried about the impact, whether positive or negative, of G5 activities on the implementation of the 2015 Bamako Agreement. An adverse situation could be created if, while seeking stronger regional cooperation, the G5’s arrival on a very crowded scene were to trigger new divisions among the region’s countries. There is a real risk of this occurring. An ECOWAS member country recently objected to the G5’s request to loan equipment belonging to the Standby Force of the West African regional organisation. As the MNJTF did by erasing some of the animosity between Nigeria and Cameroon, the G5 will have to overcome past disputes between its members, but also between these members and their neighbours. The security effort will not suffice unless it is also supported by constant and patient diplomatic work, aimed at defusing the points of contention between the region’s countries and easing frustrations. Above all, the construction of the G5 and its armed forces cannot overshadow the need to pursue attempts to settle the Sahel crises by political means. There is a danger today of choosing the security-based solution and giving up on the difficult search for non-warlike solutions to problems that are eminently political and social. As the G5 and its force prepare to receive millions of investment dollars, they should not forget that a peace process has been launched in Mali, and that it is stagnating. This process does not cover other areas of conflict where the FC-G5S is supposed to intervene. In central Mali as in northern Burkina Faso, local conflicts are the breeding ground for terrorist groups. The FC-G5S needs to fit into a larger framework with policy objectives. If it manages to pacify the areas where it operates, local spaces of negotiation must be created to deal with the causes of conflicts between communities. Jihadist groups thrive on these local conflicts, and they must therefore be a priority. Attempts should be made to re-engage with some local leaders of jihadist groups from the Sahel region, with a view to reopening negotiations. The success of the FC-G5S is connected to this political agenda and to the need to isolate jihadist groups from local communities and other armed groups. IV.Conclusion Attempting to respond to the deficit in regional military cooperation, the FC-G5S is also a default response to a situation characterised by a lack of political and diplomatic solutions to the current crises in the Sahel. This initiative, which is an important component of the Sahel conflict resolution strategy, can only succeed if it adapts to the region’s security landscape by coordinating with the forces involved at the strategic and diplomatic level, respecting the populations whose support is essential, and benefiting from solid financial support. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

Overview Food security remains a major challenge due to the shortage of farmland caused by the military frontlines, and the terraced agriculture is now showing signs of soil deficiency and stunted crop growth. [All bold orange highlighting has been added—ER] A significant number of farms (21) and pastoral land were reported destroyed by fire along frontlines in South Kordofan. Houses were also destroyed as a collateral damage. This also has a major impact on communities’ hope for peaceful coexistence. New details from Kaw and Warni suggest the shrinking population faces a dire humanitarian situation. Few have planted and mostly live on wild roots. Schools have reopened in South Kordofan, not in Blue Nile, but lack of school fees, school material and teachers’ incentives remain a major obstacle for a quality education. Food Security and Agriculture South Kordofan Food security improved in the Central Region (CR) and in the Western Jebels (WJ) in the last month as the harvest of near farms (jibraka) finished in most counties. While the 2017/2018 harvest has improved compared to the past years, it remains short of the ten-year average. Moreover, as agriculture land along frontlines remain inaccessible to the population, the overall potential output for the region has significantly reduced since pre-conflict levels. According to FSMU, rainfall measured by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), was consistently below average throughout October. Nonetheless relative to last year’s poor harvest, farmers anticipate a fair harvest that will likely improve food security in 2018.[1] In addition to less than ideal climatic conditions, the rocky soil of the mountains is showing signs of depletion and stunting yields from the major cereal crops. As the population is already producing less than needed to sustain itself, it is unlikely that a rest season will be possible to help improve conditions. 
Per FSMU, most markets in the CR functioned well. The number of cereals traders doubled from last month as the jibraka sorghum harvest hit the market.[2] CU monitors reported that new crops like chickpeas, sesame, dry okra and small quantity of sorghum were available in markets and often exchanged with other household needs (salt, soap, sugar and other). Sesame and okra from the far farms in WJ have also been harvested. Vegetables (tomatoes, refresh okra, eggplant and cucumber) were also largely available. Access to cross-line markets also improved as roads are more accessible with the beginning of the dry season and looting and ambushes against traders have reduced in the CR. However, prices of both crops and livestock remained high in some counties, especially in Heiban and Umdorein. In the WJ, crops prices remained high as the harvest predictions are not as positive as in other areas. According to CU monitors, basic commodities remained expensive and poorly available in the local markets. Poor rainfall, especially in August, affected crops development. Lagawa county, which used to be a surplus area, is especially affected by poor rains, as well as parts of Dilling county. Crops like lubia (beans), okra, maize and pumpkin have generally failed as result of lack of rain. Moreover birds and weeds, such as the locally named bouda, that lives under the sorghum and causes it to dry up prematurely, affecting the plant’s development. According to FSMU, even if rainfall was below average also throughout October, those who planted generally predicted a more bountiful harvest than last November’s.[3] However, even with some relative improvement, local monitors continue to expect a significant hunger gap next year in the WJ. In the whole region, the harvest of far farm is expected to start next month and to last until late January 2018, with the exception of Thobo (Buram) where it is expected to last until late February. However, some communities have started harvesting ahead of time as wildfire has already destroyed 21 farms (9 in CR and 12 in WJ) in the reporting period. According to local monitors, fire mostly occurred close to the frontlines and was man made. The burning of pastoral land will also impact on livestock survival hence ultimately affecting livelihood for communities living on both sides of the frontline. Information from the isolated regions of Kaw-Nyaro (estimated 25,000 people) and Rashaad-Alabassya (estimated 25,000 people) remains largely unavailable. As already reported, according to qualitative interviews with resident in Kaw-Nyaro, the small agriculture which is possible due to security reasons does not provide enough food for the population. People live on wild fruits, and severe food insecurity has already forced a significant number of population to leave. There were reports of hunger related deaths and malnutrition is reportedly endemic. Blue Nile Conflict and flooding in Blue Nile continue to affect food security. Internal conflict since May has significantly affected people’s ability to plant and overall access to near and far farms, though it remains unclear how much agriculture was lost due to the limited access to the areas in the past months. According to FSMU, most households did not plant crops this growing season. Restricted cultivation and below average rainfall hindered crop development, so a poor far farm harvest is predicted offering little respite from the lean season.[4] In addition, severe flooding since August has damaged planted fields in Yabus and Chali, further reducing the prospect of the 2017/2018 harvest. By September 2017, all crops (sorghum, cassava and sweet potatoes) along the Yabus rivers were destroyed. Better access during the month of October allowed CU monitors to reach Wadaka, an area significantly affected by the internal conflict. There the population is mostly locally displaced, and severe levels of food insecurity were observed. The lack of food in the area in the past months has forced the population to survive on roots and to move in search of food. 200 individuals have reportedly left to the Maban refugee camp in Doro between 23 – 25 October 2017 due to hunger. Food and NFIs assistance to these communities is urgently needed in order to prevent hunger and further displacements. All markets were partially functioning in October in Blue Nile but availability of food was very low due to insecurity and inaccessibility of the roads. Markets with access to Ethiopia were better supplied and new products such as sesame, groundnuts, okra, and beans (Lobia) were seen. While prices have generally decreased throughout the region since last month, they remain at untenable levels for the population.[5] Wadaka payam has especially suffered and witnessed a high increase of the commodities price, due to the isolation during the conflict until September. According to FMSU market monitoring, in Wadaka the average price for sorghum was declining but was still three times higher than in Yabus.[6] CU monitors confirmed that a malwa (3Kg) of sorghum was sold at 500 South Sudanese Pounds (SSP) in Wadaka in October (almost 3 USD), while it was 1,250 in September, 300 SSP in Chali (2.5 USD), and 30 Birr in Yabus and Moguf (a little over 1 USD). Without access to more cash to encourage trade within the region it is unlikely external food will enter local markets in sufficient quantities. The poor prospect of the harvest and threat posed by the possible resumption of the conflict are exacerbating an already poor food security situation in the area. According to FSMU July reports, 39% of the population was severely food insecure and 11% at the highest level of food insecurity (6 out of 6 on the Household Hunger Scale). Those percentages are expected to rise and for a larger part of the population in the coming months. [This is extremely ominous—ER] Health and Nutrition South Kordofan No update reported on major disease outbreak from the Secretariat of Health but cases of malaria continue to affect adults and children, consistent with seasonal norms. Similar to September, CU Monitors reported that local clinics were overwhelmed by cases of malaria in all the accessible locations and drugs were largely depleted. The CU wishes to raise attention to the overall weakness of the health system in the area, beyond the supply of drugs. Access to trained medical staff is highly limited for most of the population and more medical capacity is sorely needed to address the needs of nearly a million people in the areas. Immediate and chronic malnutrition remains a major challenge in South Kordofan remains a serious problem. As previously reported, global malnutrition and severe malnutrition based on height for weight were 23.9% and 8.4% in the Central Region and slightly worse in the Western Jebels at 29.2% and 9.3% respectively.[7] Blue Nile While the overall access to health care remains extremely limited in Blue Nile, the provision of health services has slightly improved in Yabus area in the last month thanks to better security and accessibility of roads. The Koma Ganza areas on the southern bank of Yabus river however remained inaccessible due to the high level of the waters, and threats of insecurity continue to limit provision of services in Wadaka and Chali payams. Moreover, due to flooding, the population’s access to the better equipped clinics and the hospital in the Maban refugee camps remains largely inhibited. Reports of Acute Watery Diarrhoea just north of the SPLA-N and Government of Sudan frontline increase concerns of the illness spreading into the region. This is an immediate concern as access to health care in Blue Nile is highly limited and few clinics have the needed drugs to deal with such an outbreak. [This disease is almost certainly cholera, which first broke in Sudan in Blue Nile in August 2016—ER] Animal Health South Kordofan No new report from the Secretariat of Animal Health on major disease outbreak this month. Last month’s livestock disease outbreak reported in Tutubo village in Umdorein County, that killed more than 600 heads of the animal, appears to have been contained and no further death of animals was reported. In the WJ, hooves infection among goats was reported, as well an ‘undiagnosed disease among cows that causes high fever, bending while walking and white rush on the skin’. Supplies of veterinary vaccines, drugs and personnel is desperately needed in these areas, also to avoid the spread of diseases in Sudan and neighbouring countries. Blue Nile Information on this sector is scarce, despite its great cultural and economic importance for the communities. Recent reports from local monitors indicate that a large number of livestock was lost between June and October due to the lack of any veterinary assistance.Locally reported, unverified statistics suggest that losses amounted to the 15% of animals in Wadaka, 10% in Yabus and 5% in Chali Alfil. The most common diseases reported are diarrhea, skin diseases, swelling feet, nose and eye bleeding, cough, and tsetse fly. Water South Kordofan As the dry season has just begun, water was still largely available in the area for both human and animal consumption. Even if water in streams has started to dry up, it was still available in the shallow hand dug wells. Despite the availability of water, the overall access to clean water remains a significant issue. In WJ drinking water for both animals and human was especially scarce, as most of the bore holes are broken and lacking of spare parts. Water-borne illness still threatens a community without sufficient access to healthcare. More boreholes or treated water distribution centers are badly needed. Blue Nile Similar to SK, availability of water has improved in the last month, especially in the usual dry areas of Wadaka, though overall access to clean water remains poor. As reported, heavy rains started in August and that continued until the end of the month causing severe flooding that led to further displacement in the Yabus area and loss of crops. With thousands displaced and no access for goods and humanitarian relief, people have suffered from contaminated water, lack of shelter from rains, and an increased risk of illness. Education South Kordofan All schools have reopened after the break. However the Secretariat of Education has set school fees of 2500 SSP per child per year. This amount is unattainable for most of the families and has forced many children stay at home or look after the animals instead. Education remains the top priority for the region, and a significant reason for families and unaccompanied children to displace out of the area or children to join military forces. Quality education however is severely affected by the lack of school material. Teacher training opportunities are rare and generally under-resourced, meaning the months away from classes could not be used to build capacity in most of the region. Investment in education is badly needed. There are approximately 255,000 school age children in the region and very little access to trained teachers or well-equipped schools.[8] Blue Nile Education in the areas is severely compromised due to insecurity, lack of resources and the endurance of the humanitarian crisis. The school year has not started at the scheduled beginning of October 2017 due to the conflict. Overall, the 37 bush primary schools in the area lack of education material and qualified teachers. Education opportunities for the children in the area are desperately needed, more so in the current situation where the conflict has the potential to affect boys of potential military stature. Protection and security situation update South Kordofan The security situation in the state has been relatively stable on the ground throughout this reporting period, However, a series of isolated incidents, especially across the frontlines, have caused fear among the population and undermined daily activities, as well as damaging relations between cross-line communities. Cross-line activities remain flash points for violence, dedicated effort is needed to bring communities together. The list of incidents occurred in October is below: – 10 October, long-range missile fired from Dilling into Hejerat village (Sillara payam), no casualties. – 13 October, wildfires, allegedly set in Dalami county by Government forces or affiliated militias, destroyed partially 9 farms, 4 granaries in Tunguli, 13 houses in Sabat and 8 houses in Umheitan payams. As reported, the bushfire is not only destroying crops but pasture for the livestock. – 17 October, allegedly SAF soldiers from Dilling town set fire on 12 farms in Nitil village South- East of Sillara Payam (names of farms owners were reported). – 22 October, fire was set by allegedly Government troops from Dilling towards Deleba village of Kabella payam in Habila county, that burnt an estimated 5km square of grazing land and forest of gum Arabic and one plot of crops. The fire also burned down a house with all HH properties as well as 2 farms. 
8 Based on an approximately 27% of population, ages 6 to 17. • – 22 October, 2 motorbikes were taken from cross-line traders at Warl stream and goods were looted, implying a loss of around 100,000 SDG. That is a major setback for trading options in the area. Note, the SKBN CU is reporting according the accounts received. No comprehensive verification of perpetrators or damages has been possible Blue Nile The internal SPLA-N conflict in Blue Nile ceased in October and relatively free movement of civilians and goods was observed within the area, also thanks to the accessibility of the roads at the end of the rainy season. However tension remains high as the two SPLA-N factions maintain different camps and have shown no sign of reconciliation. Urgent neutral efforts are needed to bring an end to this conflict and to allow for the safe access of humanitarian assistance to all areas and for the reconciliation of the communities. The conflict has already left a long-term effect in the area, as it has undermined planting. That will result in even more severe food insecurity in the coming months. The risk of the resumption of insecurity poses also uncertainty on the civilians while it affects long-term planning for humanitarian partners. Given the fragility of the situation, a resumption of conflict will have a devastating effect on the communities and will cause massive displacement to the refugee camps if not dealt with urgency. Notes: 1 FSMU ‘October 2017 growing season prospects brief’ available at https://fsmu.org/files/documents/2017/11/22/Growing_season_prospects_brief_October_2017.pdf 2 FMSU ‘October 2017 market monitoring brief’, available at https://fsmu.org/files/documents/2017/11/22/Market_monitoring_brief_October_2017.pdf 3 FSMU ‘October 2017 growing season prospects brief’ available at https://fsmu.org/files/documents/2017/11/22/Growing_season_prospects_brief_October_2017.pdf 4 Ibid . 5 SKBN CU September 2017 field monitoring activities 6 FMSU ‘October 2017 market monitoring brief’, available at https://fsmu.org/files/documents/2017/11/22/Market_monitoring_brief_October_2017.pdf 7 SKBN CU SMART Survey Report ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (C) 2017 V

This combo photo comprises of portraits of some of the Rohingya Muslim women taken during an interview with The Associated Press in November 2017 in Kutupalong and Gundum refugee camp in Bangladesh. (AP Photo) Related Articles PoliticsRepatriating Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar means sending them to death Asia PacificRohingya refugee exodus continues despite repatriation deal Asia PacificRights group urges 'strong resolution' for Myanmar at UN session over Rohingya Asia PacificMyanmar imposes 'apartheid' on Rohingya Muslims, Amnesty says WorldMyanmar's abuses of Rohingya may amount to genocide, UN says The soldiers arrived, as they often did, long after sunset. It was June, and the newlyweds were asleep in their home, surrounded by the fields of wheat they farmed in western Myanmar. Without warning, seven soldiers burst into the house and charged into their bedroom. The woman, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, F, knew enough to be terrified. She knew the military had been attacking Rohingya villages, as part of what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing in the mostly Buddhist nation. She heard just days before that soldiers had killed her parents, and that her brother was missing. This time, F says, the soldiers had come for her. The men bound her husband with rope. They ripped the scarf from her head and tied it around his mouth. They yanked off her jewelry and tore off her clothes. They threw her to the floor. And then the first soldier began to rape her. She struggled against him, but four men held her down and beat her with sticks. She stared in panic at her husband, who stared back helplessly. He finally wriggled the gag out of his mouth and screamed. And then she watched as a soldier fired a bullet into the chest of the man she had married only one month before. Another soldier slit his throat. Her mind grew fuzzy. When the soldiers were finished, they dragged her naked body outside and set her bamboo house ablaze. It would be two months before she realized her misery was far from over: She was pregnant. ___ The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar's security forces has been sweeping and methodical, the Associated Press found in interviews with 29 women and girls who fled to neighboring Bangladesh. These sexual assault survivors from several refugee camps were interviewed separately and extensively. They ranged in age from 13 to 35, came from a wide swath of villages in Myanmar's Rakhine state and described assaults between October 2016 and mid-September. Foreign journalists are banned from the Rohingya region of Rakhine, making it nearly impossible to independently verify each woman's report. Yet there was a sickening sameness to their stories, with distinct patterns in their accounts, their assailants' uniforms and the details of the rapes themselves. The testimonies bolster the U.N.'s contention that Myanmar's armed forces are systematically employing rape as a "calculated tool of terror" aimed at exterminating the Rohingya people. The Myanmar armed forces did not respond to multiple requests from the AP for comment, but an internal military investigation last month concluded that none of the assaults ever took place. And when journalists asked about rape allegations during a government-organized trip to Rakhine in September, Rakhine's minister for border affairs, Phone Tint, replied: "These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances — do you think they are that attractive to be raped?" Doctors and aid workers, however, say that they are stunned at the sheer volume of rapes, and suspect only a fraction of women have come forward. Medecins Sans Frontieres doctors have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, a third of them under 18. The youngest was 9. ___ The U.N. has called the Rohingya the most persecuted minority on earth, with Myanmar denying them citizenship and basic rights. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees now live in sweltering tents in Bangladesh, where the stifling air smells of excrement from a lack of latrines and of smoke from wood fires to cook what little food there is. The women and girls in this story gave the AP their names but agreed to be publicly identified only by their first initial, citing fears they or their families would be killed by Myanmar's military. Each described attacks that involved groups of men from Myanmar's security forces, often coupled with other forms of extreme violence. Every woman except one said the assailants wore military-style uniforms, generally dark green or camouflage. The lone woman who described her attackers as wearing plain clothes said her neighbors recognized them from the local military outpost. Many women said the uniforms bore various patches featuring stars or, in a couple cases, arrows. Such patches represent the different units of Myanmar's army. The most common attack described went much like F's. In several other cases, women said, security forces surrounded a village, separated men from women, then took the women to a second location to gang rape them. The women spoke of seeing their children slaughtered in front of them, their husbands beaten and shot. They spoke of burying their loved ones in the darkness and leaving the bodies of their babies behind. They spoke of the searing pain of rapes that felt as if they would never end, and of days-long journeys on foot to Bangladesh while still bleeding and hobbled. They spoke and they spoke, the words erupting from many of them in frantic, tortured bursts. N, who says she survived a rape but lost her husband, her country and her peace, speaks because there is little else she can do — and because she hopes that somebody will listen. "I have nothing left," she says. "All I have left are my words." _____ Two months after the men came quietly in the night for F, they came boldly in the daytime for K. It was late August, she says, just days after Rohingya insurgents had attacked several Myanmar police posts in northern Rakhine. Security forces responded with swift ferocity that human rights groups say left hundreds dead and scores of Rohingya villages burned to the ground. Inside their house, K and her family were settling down to breakfast. They had only just swallowed their first mouthfuls of rice when the screams of other villagers rang out: The military was coming. Her husband and three oldest children bolted out the door, fleeing for the nearby hills. But K was nearly 9 months pregnant, with swollen feet and two terrified toddlers whose tiny legs could never outpace the soldiers' strides. She had no place to hide, no time to think. The door banged open. And the men charged in. There were four of them, she thinks, maybe five, all in camouflage uniforms. Her young son and daughter began to wail and then, mercifully, scampered out the front door. There was no mercy for her. The men grabbed her and threw her on the bed. They yanked off her earrings, nose ring and necklace. They found the money she had hidden in her blouse from the recent sale of her family's cow. They ripped off her clothes, and tied down her hands and legs with rope. When she resisted, they choked her. And then, she says, they began to rape her. She was too terrified to move. One man held a knife to her eyeball, one more a gun to her chest. Another forced himself inside her. When the first man finished, they switched places and the torture began again. And when the second man finished, a third man raped her. In the midst of her agony, she thought of nothing but the baby inside her womb, just weeks away from emerging into a world that would not want him, because he was a Rohingya. She began to bleed. She blacked out. As she awoke, her great aunt was there, tearfully untying her. The elder woman bathed her, clothed her and gave her a hot compress for her aching thighs. When K's husband returned home, he was furious: not just at the men who had raped her, but at her. Why, he demanded, had she not run away? She was pregnant and in no condition to run, she shot back. Still, he blamed her for the assault and threatened to abandon her, because, he told her, a "non-Muslim" had raped her. Fearful the men would return, she and her family fled to her father's house in the hills above the village. When they saw soldiers setting fire to the houses below, they knew they had to leave for Bangladesh. K was too crippled by pain to walk. Her husband and brother placed her inside a sling they fashioned out of a blanket and a stick, and carried her for days. Inside her cocoon, she wept for the baby she feared was dead. _____ A few days after the men burst into K's house, 10 soldiers arrived at R's. She was just 13 years old, but R had already learned to fear the military men. Her parents had warned her to steer clear of them, yet it was her father who first fell prey to their wrath. One day last year, R says, soldiers stabbed him in the head with a knife, killing him. Yet R's family had nowhere else to go. And so they stayed in the village. R busied herself by learning Arabic, doting on her chicken and its hatchlings and caring for her two younger brothers. And then one day in late August, R says, the soldiers barged into her house. They snatched up her little brothers, tied them to a tree outside and began to beat them. R tried to run out the front door, but the men caught her. Her body is barely pubescent, her limbs still gangly like a child's. But her youth could not protect her. R fought back against the men, but they dragged her out of the house. The skin tore away from her knees as her legs scraped along the ground. The men tethered her arms to two trees. They ripped off her earrings and bracelets, stripped off her clothes. R screamed at them to stop. They spit at her. And then the first man began to rape her. She froze. She was a virgin. The pain was excruciating. The attack lasted for hours. She remembers all ten men forcing themselves on her before she passed out. One of her older brothers later found her on the ground, bleeding. R's two little brothers were missing, but their mother had no time to search for them. She knew she had to get her daughter over the border and to a doctor quickly to get medicine in time to prevent a pregnancy. R was barely conscious. So her two older brothers carried her across the hills and fields toward Bangladesh. R's mother hurried alongside them, terrified for her daughter, terrified that time was running out. ___ That R's family sought treatment for her at all is an anomaly. Despite still suffering pain, bleeding and infections months after the attacks, only a handful of the women interviewed by the AP had seen a doctor. The others had no idea free services were available, or were too ashamed to tell a doctor they were raped. In a health center overflowing with women and wailing babies, Dr. Misbah Uddin Ahmed, a government health officer, sits at his desk looking weary. He pulls out a stack of patient histories for those treated at his clinics and begins to flick through them, reading the case summaries out loud: Sept. 5, a patient 7 months pregnant says three soldiers burst into her home 11 days ago and raped her. Also Sept. 5, a patient says she was asleep at home when the military broke in 20 days ago and three soldiers raped her. Sept. 10, a patient says the military came to her house one month ago and beat her husband before two soldiers raped her. Ahmed says the women who manage to overcome their fear and make it to his clinics are usually the ones in the deepest trouble. So many others, he adds, are suffering in silence. Though the scale of these attacks is new, the use of sexual violence by Myanmar's security forces is not. Before she became Myanmar's civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi herself condemned the military's abuses. "Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country," she said in a 2011 videotaped statement to the Nobel Women's Initiative. And yet Suu Kyi's government has not only failed to condemn the recent accounts of rape, it has dismissed the accounts as lies. In Dec. 2016, the government issued a press release disputing Rohingya women's reports of sexual assaults, accompanied by an image that said "Fake Rape." Ahmed seems bewildered that anyone would ever doubt these women. Look at what I have just shown you, he says, gesturing toward his stack of files chronicling one atrocity after another. Gynecologist Arjina Akhter has witnessed the results of those atrocities. Since August, so many women began showing up at her two clinics, she stopped asking them to fill out patient history forms so she could treat them faster. Among other women, she estimates between 20 to 30 rape survivors visited her clinics in September and October. She ticks off the injuries: Two women with lacerations to their cervixes they said were caused by guns shoved inside their bodies. One woman with horrific tearing she said was caused by a nail driven into her vagina. Several women with severe vaginal bleeding. More recently, she says, women who were raped months ago have been coming to her in a panic, asking for abortions. She has to explain to them that they are too far along, but reassures them that officials will take the babies if they cannot care for them. Still, for some Rohingya women, giving up the babies they never asked for was not an option. Which is how it was for F. ___ More than three months had passed since the men burst into F's home, and her despair had only deepened. Neighbors had taken her in and cared for her. But her house was gone, her husband was dead. And the timing of the attack left little doubt that the baby growing inside her belonged to one of the men who had caused all her grief. She could only pray that things would not get worse. And then, one night in mid-September, they did. F was asleep along with the neighbors — a couple and their 5-year-old son — when the men broke down the door, jolting everyone awake. There were five of them this time, she remembers. They quickly grabbed the boy and slashed his throat, and killed the man. Then they turned to the man's wife, and to F. And her nightmare began again. They stripped off the women's clothes. Two of the men noticed the swell of F's stomach and grabbed it, squeezing hard. They threw the women to the floor. F's friend fought back, and the men beat her with their guns so viciously the skin on her thighs began to peel away. But the fight had gone out of F. She felt her body go soft, felt the blood run between her legs as the first man forced himself on her, and then the second. Next to her, three men were savaging her friend. When it was finally over and the men had gone, the two women lay immobile on the floor. They lay there for days, so crippled by pain and catatonic from the trauma that they could not even lift themselves to use the toilet. F could smell the blood around them. As the house baked under the punishing sun, the stench from the decaying bodies of her friend's husband and son finally overwhelmed her. She would not die here. And neither would her baby. She reached out for her friend's hand and clasped it. Then F hauled herself to her feet, pulling her friend up with her. Hand in hand, the women stumbled to the next village. They spent five days recovering there and then, alongside a group of other villagers, began the 10-day journey to Bangladesh. The monsoon season had begun, but there was nowhere to shelter. So F kept walking through the downpours. She was starving, and her battered body ached with each step. Generous strangers offered her sips of their water, and one man gave her a few sweet rolls. One day, she came across a 9-year-old boy lying along the side of a road, wounded and alone. He had lost his parents, he told her, and the soldiers had tortured him. She took him with her. Together, the two made it to the shores of the Naf River and boarded a boat to Bangladesh. Which is where they live now, in a tiny bamboo shelter between two filthy latrines. And it is here that F prays her baby will be a boy — because this world is no place for a girl. ___ For now, the women are left to wonder how long they will live in the bleak limbo of Bangladesh, and if they will ever return to their homeland. R, the teen, is not pregnant. Her mother sold all her jewelry and got her to the hospital in time. But R can't stop thinking about her little brothers, and her sleep is plagued by nightmares. Since the rape, she has struggled to eat, and her once-curvy frame has shrunk. Before the rape, she says softly, she was pretty. K, who feared the baby inside her had died, gave birth to a boy on the floor of her tent in a dizzying rush of relief. She had kept her son alive through it all. But her trauma persists. The thrum of a helicopter hovering over the camp sends her into a panic and she recites the Muslim prayer for the moments before death. She is convinced the aircraft is Myanmar's military, coming to kill them all. When told she is strong, she looks up with tears in her eyes. "How can you say that?" she asks. "My husband says he is ashamed of me. How am I strong?" F, whose body is starting to ache under the strain of her pregnancy, finds her mind often drifts toward how she will care for the child in the future. She believes God has kept them both alive for a reason. Her parents, her brother, her husband are gone now. This baby will be the only family she has left. For her, the most haunting reminder of the agony she endured also, somehow, represents her last chance at happiness. "Everybody has died," she says. "I don't have anyone to care for me. If I give this baby away, what will I have left? There will be nothing to live for." _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Asia Pacific

The soldiers arrived, as they often did, long after sunset. It was June, and the newlyweds were asleep in their home, surrounded by the fields of wheat they farmed in western Myanmar. Without warning, seven soldiers burst into the house and charged into their bedroom. The woman, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, F, knew enough to be terrified. She knew the military had been attacking Rohingya villages, as part of what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing in the mostly Buddhist nation. She heard just days before that soldiers had killed her parents, and that her brother was missing. This time, F says, the soldiers had come for her. The men bound her husband with rope. They ripped the scarf from her head and tied it around his mouth. They yanked off her jewelry and tore off her clothes. They threw her to the floor. And then the first soldier began to rape her. Opinion: The tragedy of the Rohingya is our collective failure She struggled against him, but four men held her down and beat her with sticks. She stared in panic at her husband, who stared back helplessly. He finally wriggled the gag out of his mouth and screamed. And then she watched as a soldier fired a bullet into the chest of the man she had married only one month before. Another soldier slit his throat. Her mind grew fuzzy. When the soldiers were finished, they dragged her naked body outside and set her bamboo house ablaze. It would be two months before she realized her misery was far from over: She was pregnant. ——— The rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar's security forces has been sweeping and methodical, the Associated Press found in interviews with 29 women and girls who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. These sexual assault survivors from several refugee camps were interviewed separately and extensively. They ranged in age from 13 to 35, came from a wide swath of villages in Myanmar's Rakhine state and described assaults between October 2016 and mid-September. Foreign journalists are banned from the Rohingya region of Rakhine, making it nearly impossible to independently verify each woman's report. Yet there was a sickening sameness to their stories, with distinct patterns in their accounts, their assailants' uniforms and the details of the rapes themselves. The testimonies bolster the U.N.'s contention that Myanmar's armed forces are systematically employing rape as a "calculated tool of terror" aimed at exterminating the Rohingya people. The Myanmar armed forces did not respond to multiple requests from the AP for comment, but an internal military investigation last month concluded that none of the assaults ever took place. And when journalists asked about rape allegations during a government-organized trip to Rakhine in September, Rakhine's minister for border affairs, Phone Tint, replied: "These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances — do you think they are that attractive to be raped?" Doctors and aid workers, however, say that they are stunned at the sheer volume of rapes, and suspect only a fraction of women have come forward. Medecins Sans Frontieres doctors have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, a third of them under 18. The youngest was 9. ———————————— The Associated Press reported this story with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. ———————————— The U.N. has called the Rohingya the most persecuted minority on earth, with Myanmar denying them citizenship and basic rights. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees now live in sweltering tents in Bangladesh, where the stifling air smells of excrement from a lack of latrines and of smoke from wood fires to cook what little food there is. The women and girls in this story gave the AP their names but agreed to be publicly identified only by their first initial, citing fears they or their families would be killed by Myanmar's military. Each described attacks that involved groups of men from Myanmar's security forces, often coupled with other forms of extreme violence. Every woman except one said the assailants wore military-style uniforms, generally dark green or camouflage. The lone woman who described her attackers as wearing plain clothes said her neighbours recognized them from the local military outpost. Many women said the uniforms bore various patches featuring stars or, in a couple cases, arrows. Such patches represent the different units of Myanmar's army. The most common attack described went much like F's. In several other cases, women said, security forces surrounded a village, separated men from women, then took the women to a second location to gang rape them. The women spoke of seeing their children slaughtered in front of them, their husbands beaten and shot. They spoke of burying their loved ones in the darkness and leaving the bodies of their babies behind. They spoke of the searing pain of rapes that felt as if they would never end, and of days-long journeys on foot to Bangladesh while still bleeding and hobbled. They spoke and they spoke, the words erupting from many of them in frantic, tortured bursts. N, who says she survived a rape but lost her husband, her country and her peace, speaks because there is little else she can do — and because she hopes that somebody will listen. "I have nothing left," she says. "All I have left are my words." ————— Two months after the men came quietly in the night for F, they came boldly in the daytime for K. It was late August, she says, just days after Rohingya insurgents had attacked several Myanmar police posts in northern Rakhine. Security forces responded with swift ferocity that human rights groups say left hundreds dead and scores of Rohingya villages burned to the ground. Inside their house, K and her family were settling down to breakfast. They had only just swallowed their first mouthfuls of rice when the screams of other villagers rang out: The military was coming. Her husband and three oldest children bolted out the door, fleeing for the nearby hills. But K was nearly 9 months pregnant, with swollen feet and two terrified toddlers whose tiny legs could never outpace the soldiers' strides. She had no place to hide, no time to think. The door banged open. And the men charged in. There were four of them, she thinks, maybe five, all in camouflage uniforms. Her young son and daughter began to wail and then, mercifully, scampered out the front door. There was no mercy for her. The men grabbed her and threw her on the bed. They yanked off her earrings, nose ring and necklace. They found the money she had hidden in her blouse from the recent sale of her family's cow. They ripped off her clothes, and tied down her hands and legs with rope. When she resisted, they choked her. And then, she says, they began to rape her. She was too terrified to move. One man held a knife to her eyeball, one more a gun to her chest. Another forced himself inside her. When the first man finished, they switched places and the torture began again. And when the second man finished, a third man raped her. In the midst of her agony, she thought of nothing but the baby inside her womb, just weeks away from emerging into a world that would not want him, because he was a Rohingya. She began to bleed. She blacked out. As she awoke, her great aunt was there, tearfully untying her. The elder woman bathed her, clothed her and gave her a hot compress for her aching thighs. When K's husband returned home, he was furious: not just at the men who had raped her, but at her. Why, he demanded, had she not run away? She was pregnant and in no condition to run, she shot back. Still, he blamed her for the assault and threatened to abandon her, because, he told her, a "non-Muslim" had raped her. Fearful the men would return, she and her family fled to her father's house in the hills above the village. When they saw soldiers setting fire to the houses below, they knew they had to leave for Bangladesh. K was too crippled by pain to walk. Her husband and brother placed her inside a sling they fashioned out of a blanket and a stick, and carried her for days. Inside her cocoon, she wept for the baby she feared was dead. ————— A few days after the men burst into K's house, 10 soldiers arrived at R's. She was just 13 years old, but R had already learned to fear the military men. Her parents had warned her to steer clear of them, yet it was her father who first fell prey to their wrath. One day last year, R says, soldiers stabbed him in the head with a knife, killing him. Yet R's family had nowhere else to go. And so they stayed in the village. R busied herself by learning Arabic, doting on her chicken and its hatchlings and caring for her two younger brothers. And then one day in late August, R says, the soldiers barged into her house. They snatched up her little brothers, tied them to a tree outside and began to beat them. R tried to run out the front door, but the men caught her. Her body is barely pubescent, her limbs still gangly like a child's. But her youth could not protect her. R fought back against the men, but they dragged her out of the house. The skin tore away from her knees as her legs scraped along the ground. The men tethered her arms to two trees. They ripped off her earrings and bracelets, stripped off her clothes. R screamed at them to stop. They spit at her. And then the first man began to rape her. She froze. She was a virgin. The pain was excruciating. The attack lasted for hours. She remembers all ten men forcing themselves on her before she passed out. One of her older brothers later found her on the ground, bleeding. R's two little brothers were missing, but their mother had no time to search for them. She knew she had to get her daughter over the border and to a doctor quickly to get medicine in time to prevent a pregnancy. R was barely conscious. So her two older brothers carried her across the hills and fields toward Bangladesh. R's mother hurried alongside them, terrified for her daughter, terrified that time was running out. ——— That R's family sought treatment for her at all is an anomaly. Despite still suffering pain, bleeding and infections months after the attacks, only a handful of the women interviewed by the AP had seen a doctor. The others had no idea free services were available, or were too ashamed to tell a doctor they were raped. In a health centre overflowing with women and wailing babies, Dr. Misbah Uddin Ahmed, a government health officer, sits at his desk looking weary. He pulls out a stack of patient histories for those treated at his clinics and begins to flick through them, reading the case summaries out loud: Sept. 5, a patient 7 months pregnant says three soldiers burst into her home 11 days ago and raped her. Also Sept. 5, a patient says she was asleep at home when the military broke in 20 days ago and three soldiers raped her. Sept. 10, a patient says the military came to her house one month ago and beat her husband before two soldiers raped her. Ahmed says the women who manage to overcome their fear and make it to his clinics are usually the ones in the deepest trouble. So many others, he adds, are suffering in silence. Though the scale of these attacks is new, the use of sexual violence by Myanmar's security forces is not. Before she became Myanmar's civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi herself condemned the military's abuses. "Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country," she said in a 2011 videotaped statement to the Nobel Women's Initiative. And yet Suu Kyi's government has not only failed to condemn the recent accounts of rape, it has dismissed the accounts as lies. In Dec. 2016, the government issued a press release disputing Rohingya women's reports of sexual assaults, accompanied by an image that said "Fake Rape." Ahmed seems bewildered that anyone would ever doubt these women. Look at what I have just shown you, he says, gesturing toward his stack of files chronicling one atrocity after another. Gynecologist Arjina Akhter has witnessed the results of those atrocities. Since August, so many women began showing up at her two clinics, she stopped asking them to fill out patient history forms so she could treat them faster. Among other women, she estimates between 20 to 30 rape survivors visited her clinics in September and October. She ticks off the injuries: Two women with lacerations to their cervixes they said were caused by guns shoved inside their bodies. One woman with horrific tearing she said was caused by a nail driven into her vagina. Several women with severe vaginal bleeding. More recently, she says, women who were raped months ago have been coming to her in a panic, asking for abortions. She has to explain to them that they are too far along, but reassures them that officials will take the babies if they cannot care for them. Still, for some Rohingya women, giving up the babies they never asked for was not an option. Which is how it was for F. ——— More than three months had passed since the men burst into F's home, and her despair had only deepened. Neighbours had taken her in and cared for her. But her house was gone, her husband was dead. And the timing of the attack left little doubt that the baby growing inside her belonged to one of the men who had caused all her grief. She could only pray that things would not get worse. And then, one night in mid-September, they did. F was asleep along with the neighbours — a couple and their 5-year-old son — when the men broke down the door, jolting everyone awake. There were five of them this time, she remembers. They quickly grabbed the boy and slashed his throat, and killed the man. Then they turned to the man's wife, and to F. And her nightmare began again. They stripped off the women's clothes. Two of the men noticed the swell of F's stomach and grabbed it, squeezing hard. They threw the women to the floor. F's friend fought back, and the men beat her with their guns so viciously the skin on her thighs began to peel away. But the fight had gone out of F. She felt her body go soft, felt the blood run between her legs as the first man forced himself on her, and then the second. Next to her, three men were savaging her friend. When it was finally over and the men had gone, the two women lay immobile on the floor. They lay there for days, so crippled by pain and catatonic from the trauma that they could not even lift themselves to use the toilet. F could smell the blood around them. As the house baked under the punishing sun, the stench from the decaying bodies of her friend's husband and son finally overwhelmed her. She would not die here. And neither would her baby. She reached out for her friend's hand and clasped it. Then F hauled herself to her feet, pulling her friend up with her. Hand in hand, the women stumbled to the next village. They spent five days recovering there and then, alongside a group of other villagers, began the 10-day journey to Bangladesh. The monsoon season had begun, but there was nowhere to shelter. So F kept walking through the downpours. She was starving, and her battered body ached with each step. Generous strangers offered her sips of their water, and one man gave her a few sweet rolls. One day, she came across a 9-year-old boy lying along the side of a road, wounded and alone. He had lost his parents, he told her, and the soldiers had tortured him. She took him with her. Together, the two made it to the shores of the Naf River and boarded a boat to Bangladesh. Which is where they live now, in a tiny bamboo shelter between two filthy latrines. And it is here that F prays her baby will be a boy — because this world is no place for a girl. ——— For now, the women are left to wonder how long they will live in the bleak limbo of Bangladesh, and if they will ever return to their homeland. R, the teen, is not pregnant. Her mother sold all her jewelry and got her to the hospital in time. But R can't stop thinking about her little brothers, and her sleep is plagued by nightmares. Since the rape, she has struggled to eat, and her once-curvy frame has shrunk. Before the rape, she says softly, she was pretty. K, who feared the baby inside her had died, gave birth to a boy on the floor of her tent in a dizzying rush of relief. She had kept her son alive through it all. But her trauma persists. The thrum of a helicopter hovering over the camp sends her into a panic and she recites the Muslim prayer for the moments before death. She is convinced the aircraft is Myanmar's military, coming to kill them all. When told she is strong, she looks up with tears in her eyes. "How can you say that?" she asks. "My husband says he is ashamed of me. How am I strong?" F, whose body is starting to ache under the strain of her pregnancy, finds her mind often drifts toward how she will care for the child in the future. She believes God has kept them both alive for a reason. Her parents, her brother, her husband are gone now. This baby will be the only family she has left. For her, the most haunting reminder of the agony she endured also, somehow, represents her last chance at happiness. "Everybody has died," she says. "I don't have anyone to care for me. If I give this baby away, what will I have left? There will be nothing to live for." ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Globe and Mail