From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire—Columbus, Rhodes, Cook—have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues—and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere—has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed? In the course of her long career, the historian Lyndall Ryan has thought about little else. In the late nineties and early aughts, Ryan found herself on the front lines of what came to be known, in Australia, as the History Wars: skirmishes fought with words, source by disputed source, often in the national media. At stake was whether the evidence existed to prove—as Ryan and others had argued, and conservative historians and politicians refused to accept—that Indigenous Australians had been massacred in enormous numbers during colonization, from late in the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Even among those who grudgingly accepted that there had been widespread killings, there were still bitter, and, in some cases, ongoing, fights over the exact number of Indigenous people killed, the strength of their resistance to British settlement, and the reliability of oral versus written history. A truce has never been reached in what the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright calls Australia’s entrenched “storytelling war.” (In October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the core recommendations of the government-appointed Referendum Council, which, after six months of deliberative dialogue across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, had called for establishing an Indigenous voice to Parliament, and a process of “truth-telling about our history.”) In 2005, in the midst of the public disputes over Australia’s history, Ryan came across the work of the French sociologist Jacques Sémelin. After the Srebrenica massacre, in 1995, there was renewed interest from European scholars in understanding massacre as a phenomenon. Sémelin defined a massacre as the indiscriminate killing of innocent, unarmed people over a limited period of time, and he characterized massacres as being carefully planned—i.e., not done in the heat of the moment or the fog of war—and deliberately shrouded in secrecy by the systematic disposal of bodies and the intimidation of witnesses. Sémelin’s typology prompted Ryan to reconsider her own earlier scholarship on the Tasmanian War, which was waged between British colonists and Aboriginal people early in the nineteenth century. This time, Ryan concluded that there were not four massacres of Indigenous people but, in fact, more than forty. “Most historians of my generation were brought up with the idea that Aboriginal people were killed in ones or twos, similar to how settlers were killed when there’d been a dispute over stock, or women,” Ryan told me recently, at an art gallery in Sydney’s vibrant neighborhood of Kings Cross, where she was about to give a talk. Ryan, who is seventy-four, has short-cropped white hair and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that belies a very quick mind. She realized, once she’d started researching massacres, how many of her peers were still deeply in denial about the past. “People would say to me, ‘We will never know how many massacres there were, or how many Aboriginal people were killed, so what’s the point in trying to find out?’ But they would never say that about World War One or Two.” Ryan is based at the Centre for the History of Violence at Newcastle University, up the coast from Sydney. A few years ago, she applied for a research grant to embark on a hugely ambitious undertaking: to map the site of every Australian colonial frontier massacre on an interactive Web site. Ryan defines a massacre, in this context, as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people. Since Aboriginal communities tended to live together in camps of about twenty people, losing six or more people in one killing—a “fractal” massacre—usually led to the whole community collapsing. Four years of painstaking research later, with the grant depleted, Ryan’s map is nowhere near finished. So far, it includes more than a hundred and seventy massacres of Indigenous people in eastern Australia, as well as six recorded massacres of settlers, from the period of 1788 to 1872. She estimates that there were more than five hundred massacres of Indigenous people over all, and that massacres of settlers numbered fewer than ten. (Ryan has not yet researched any massacres of Torres Strait Islander people, who are culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal groups but share their history of colonization.) In July, Ryan and her tiny team decided it was time to release the partially completed map online. Since its launch, the site has had more than sixty thousand visitors. Contrary to Ryan’s fears, it was widely and mostly respectfully covered in the Australian media, and, at least for now, there has been no public response from conservative figures. At the gallery in Kings Cross, the lights were turned off, and a map appeared, projected onto a large screen, showing Australia’s unmistakable outline—the continent declared by the British on their arrival to be terra nullius, land considered to belong to nobody, and thus ripe for the taking. Spread across the eastern states were dozens of yellow dots, often clustered together. Each one represented the site of a massacre of Aboriginal people. The map’s data management still needs improvement—a consequence, in part, of limited funding, and also of Ryan’s admitted mistake in thinking she should do all the research first, before getting input from the project’s digital cartographer, Mark Brown, and digital-humanities specialist, Bill Pascoe. Even so, its power is undeniable. Ryan clicked on the yellow dot representing one of five massacres in the region of Jack Smith Lake, in eastern Victoria. On a fresh page, an aerial snapshot from ArcGIS, the geographic-information system, showed a slice of green and brown farmland and bush bordering a long, thin line of sand beside the ocean. A small square section was shaded yellow, delineating a five-kilometre radius around the site of the killings. The exact coördinates of the massacres are not identified, Ryan explained. “For many Aboriginal communities, the preference is not to pinpoint the actual site, out of respect for what is considered a taboo site of trauma. But also because sites tend to be desecrated if identified very specifically.” Some sites are on private land, or mining properties; others are at the bottom of reservoirs, because so many of the massacres happened at campsites close to creeks. On the left of the screen was a graph, cataloguing the details of this series of massacres carried out in 1843. Aboriginal Language Group: Brataualang. Aboriginal people killed: sixty (at each of the five sites). Colonists killed: zero. Weapons used: Double-barrelled Purdey. Attacker details: twenty horsemen, known as the “Highland Brigade,” organized by Angus McMillan. In a box titled “Narrative,” these fragments form a horrific tale. McMillan, a local settler, and his group of armed horsemen, all Scots, had, for years, been attacking Aboriginal camps with impunity. In this instance, they attacked five campsites over five days. At one camp, people jumped into the waterhole but were shot as soon as they resurfaced to breathe. One of the survivors, a young boy who’d been shot in the eye, was captured by the Brigade and forced to lead them to other camps. “Human bones have been found at each of these sites on several occasions,” the text notes. “The rampage would fit the criteria of ‘genocidal massacre.’ ” Bruised by the History Wars, Ryan set herself strict criteria for including a massacre on the map. A key signals the strength of the evidence: three stars means that there is high-quality evidence drawn from disparate sources, while one or two stars indicates that there are only one or two reliable sources, respectively, with more corroboration welcome. Most of the evidence used for the map, she told the gathering, is from contemporaneous “white people’s sources”—newspaper articles, official reports—rather than Indigenous sources, such as oral histories or social memory. (Some Aboriginal testimony is captured in those white textual sources, in the rare cases where survivors gave statements to officials or to missionaries. But Aboriginal people were for a long time prohibited from being called as witnesses in legal proceedings.) Many existing place names around the country are themselves a form of damning evidence, as the historian Ian Clark has noted in his own pioneering work on frontier massacres: Murderers Flat, Massacre Inlet, Murdering Gully, Haunted Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully. Earlier this year, Ryan presented a draft version of the map at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, in Canberra. The feedback was largely positive, though she was advised to use a different color for the dots than red, which is considered sacred for many communities and shouldn’t be associated only with death. As Ryan moves on to more recent massacres, she will increasingly draw on Aboriginal sources. She hopes the map will eventually be expanded to include massacres that aren’t represented in written evidence but have been known about and passed down through memory and story by descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Since the map was released, she’s heard from more than five hundred people, black and white, many from rural areas, many with details of massacres not on the map. Pascoe told me that viewers, on first seeing the map, are sometimes so overwhelmed they have to look away, but to him this is the point of mappingthis kind of trauma. “People whose ancestors were involved already know what happened. But it becomes personal for everyone, because you can see what happened in a place near you, or where you grew up.” Ryan’s decision to focus, for now, on archival research rather than community consultations was driven by funding and time constraints, but she also believes that white Australians who are skeptical about widespread frontier massacres need to be confronted with the gruesome truths recorded by their own ancestors—the magistrates and crown-lands commissioners, the settlers who wrote about killing sprees in their journals or correspondence. In the History Wars, she noted, the denialists figured out ways of discounting all evidence of massacre, no matter its provenance. “They’d say things like, well, you can’t trust evidence from a convict, they’re born liars. Same with the Native Police. Women don’t tell the truth. Soldiers who weren’t officers clearly didn’t know what was going on.” This sort of thinking would leave only sources from the two categories of whites with the most to gain from covering up massacres: the officers who gave the orders, and the male settlers who often carried them out. Ryan is also working with historians in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to consider massacres from a comparative perspective. The same men who were brutalized by mass warfare in Europe—during the Napoleonic wars, for example—became the brutal colonizers of the new world. (Angus McMillan fled Scotland during the Highland Clearances, when Highlander tenants were forcibly removed from their land.) In the eighteen-twenties, massacres in Tasmania and Victoria were usually carried out at dawn, to give the perpetrators—who used unreliable weapons, such as muskets, which often misfired—the advantage of surprise. When more sophisticated weapons, like the repeating rifles which were first manufactured around the time of the American Civil War, spread across the globe, the nature of frontier violence changed. By the eighteen-seventies, massacres were more often done in broad daylight. The awful intimacy of the violence is another shared feature of massacre, as is the divide-and-conquer strategy of recruiting Indigenous people into Native Police forces commanded by white officers and compelled to carry out killings. While people milled around after Ryan’s talk, I spoke to Aleshia Lonsdale, a young Wiradjuri artist from the country town of Mudgee, who was showing work in the gallery. Lonsdale, who has curly red hair and a gap-toothed smile, had created an assemblage of stone tools tightly bound in cling wrap. She told me about visiting her local museum, where stone tools were massed together, and feeling as if she were in a morgue. “There was nothing saying where the tools had come from, only who had donated them to the collection—you know, ‘a stone tool donated by Mrs. Brown,’ ” she said. Mudgee is now a tourist town, but the massacres and forced removals that occurred there almost destroyed the Aboriginal community. “It’s not just something in the history book, or dots on a map, it still impacts on people today,” she said. “Even in terms of Aboriginal identity, and people not knowing who they are or where they’re from—sometimes that can stem back to the massacres.” I asked her what she thought of Ryan’s approach. “When I first heard about the map, I went online and had a look,” she said. “I told people in my community about it. Some were taken aback. They wanted to know why their massacre wasn’t on there. So, for me, it was helpful to hear from Lyndall today. Because there are a lot of massacre places that the community knows about that wouldn’t fit those criteria.” Lonsdale paused to greet a well-wisher. “Where some of the massacres happened, in my own country, there’s still a bad feeling,” she said to me. “There’s certain roads people won’t drive along. It’s not just felt by Aboriginal people but by non-Aboriginal people as well. We need a place to go, to mourn or say sorry, but Aboriginal people need to determine what form that recognition takes.” Recently, the Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson, who lives in Brisbane, débuted a different kind of massacres map. Watson, who is fifty-eight, is a descendant of the Waanyi people, of northwest Queensland; her great-great-grandmother Rosie hid under a windbreak to survive a massacre carried out by the Native Police at Lawn Hill. Watson has been researching and making art about the massacres for decades. Earlier this year, her multimedia, research-based art work “the names of places” was shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra. Superimposed on the shaky, ever-moving boundaries of a map of Australia is a scrolling, alphabetized list of hundreds of massacre sites and images of other work by Watson on the same theme—such as “pale slaughter,” which lists weapons used (bayonets, revolvers), and “the names of men,” which lists perpetrators. Next to this video, Watson set up a touch-screen map that people could use to bring up historical documents associated with different massacres. The map is now online for anybody to explore, and visitors can share information—including “hearsay”—about massacres in their own communities. In many Indigenous communities, art works have long had dual functions as historical sources, as repositories of cultural or spiritual knowledge, and as maps of territory. There is an established tradition of mapping massacre sites through art, as in the acclaimed paintings by the Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and Rusty Peters, among others. Watson wanted viewers of her video to be aware that any map is a slippery, contested artifact, and also to have a bodily response to the work. She told me the story of one of her relatives, who, after viewing the video, turned to her in anguish, saying, “Wherewasn’t there a massacre?” Jonathan Richards, a historian based at the University of Queensland and an expert on the history of the Native Police, worked on both Watson’s and Ryan’s maps. The biggest technical challenge, he told me, was matching historical data with actual G.P.S. coördinates. “I am conscious of the fact that we might identify a massacre site that nowadays is somebody’s home or backyard, and they have no connection with the violence,” he said. “So a little caution was crucial.” The online version of Watson’s map is somewhat unwieldy—again a function of limited funding, and of the enormous amount of time that both the historical and technical work of mapping requires. (She, too, has a very small team.) But, taken together, the two maps allow for “a welling up of this aspect of our shared history,” as Watson put it when I spoke with her over the phone. If the funding allows, she hopes to hire a historian to travel with “the names of places” video as it tours around Australia, and meet with communities at each location to gather massacre stories. Richards told me that his research has permanently changed the way he sees the landscape. “In fact, the drive from Brisbane to Cairns these days is really, for me, just a linked pathway of brutal massacre sites.” There are about twenty, mostly very small, physical memorials to Aboriginal massacre sites across Australia, according to Genevieve Grieves, an Indigenous artist who is writing a Ph.D. on the memorialization of frontier violence. The majority, Grieves says, are community-created and landscape-based: a sculpture trail or a plaque on a single boulder, for instance. Watson and Ryan hope that their maps might act as digital memorials, which can circulate fluidly and are not as vulnerable to desecration. For, while the statues of white men have been targeted lately, the few public memorials commemorating Aboriginal history have been vandalized repeatedly for years. In Perth, there is a bronze statue of the Noongar resistance fighter Yagan, whose head was sent to England after he was killed by white settlers, in 1833. In 1997, his head was repatriated to Australia; soon after, a vandal used an angle grinder to behead the statue. It was repaired, but later beheaded again. (The 1997 beheading inspired Archie Weller to write a short story, later turned into a film, “Confessions of a Headhunter,” in which two Noongar men travel across the country, taking off the heads of every bronze colonial statue they find, and finally melting them down to create a sculpture of an Aboriginal mother and her children looking out to sea at Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed.) One of the memorials often held up as exemplary is the Myall Creek Massacre and Memorial Site, at the top of a bluff in northern New South Wales. It was established, in 2000, after years of advocacy work by Sue Blacklock, a descendant of one of the survivors, in collaboration with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the local community. In 1838, on the farmland visible below the hill, thirty Wirrayaraay people were massacred, and their bodies burned, in what Ryan calls an “opportunity massacre.” It’s an extremely unusual case: afterward, some of the white perpetrators were arrested and tried in court, and seven of them were hanged. As the site’s heritage listing notes, it was “the first and last attempt by the colonial administration to use the law to control frontier conflict.” This memorial, too, has been subject to vandalism: in 2005, the words “murder” and “women and children” were hammered out of the metal plaques. Each June, a ceremony is held at the site, bringing together the descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Watson attended this year. When she told me about the experience, her voice broke with emotion. She filmed the descendants’ interactions, and Greg Hooper, her technical collaborator and sound designer, put a contact microphone (similar to a stethoscope) “against one of the ancient trees that had stood witness to the events in the valley below, and captured a sound like gurgling water deep within it.” School children stood at each of the plaques on the path up the hill, reading aloud. The descendant of a perpetrator got up with his grandson to speak, saying how sorry he was for what had happened. “It was like watching history slowly unravelling,” Watson said. “We all take a thread and pull it, and, as it tightens, we start to see what is there.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres (c) 2017 The New Yorker

What made you take up the role of an activist on the Rohingya issue? Personally, there are layers of connections with this issue. First, I have been a human rights and political activist for the last 29 years. I can't call myself a human rights defender and turn my back on my own country's genocide, like most human rights defenders in Myanmar are doing today. Second, and on a more personal level, my own late great uncle was the deputy commander-in-charge of Arakan in the late 1950s when Rohingyas were considered both an ethnic group of the Union of Burma and full citizens. Since my own relative was directly involved in this issue at a time when the army treated them well, I felt that I needed to get involved when the army is treating them so brutally. The third reason is that I am a Buddhist. And I cannot keep quiet when I see genocide, the most anti-Buddha Dharma, being committed by the military, aided and abetted by the Buddhist society at large, including monks. Every time Suu Kyi denies and dismisses genocide allegations she too is guilty. For denial is part of genocide. You said genocide has been going on for a long time. How then did it manage to evade international attention? The problem is not that the UN-clustered world of governments and human rights organisations had not known this. They have known this for a long, long time. But they did not take the persecution of Rohingyas seriously enough to see the genocidal nature of the persecution, much less take any effective policy measures to end it. Bangladeshi governments since the 1970s have known what has been happening because refugees were flowing into Bangladesh by the hundreds of thousands. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has been aware of this issue since 1978 because it was brought in to help with the first refugee crisis in mid-1978. So if UNHCR knew, it means the UN knew. Countries like the US and UK and key UN agencies have known this for the last 39 years. In 1978, the late US Senator Ted Kennedy, John F Kennedy's younger brother, came to Bangladesh and the US Congress donated about USD 150,000 to manage the refugee crisis. Dawn, Bangkok Post and Far Eastern Economic Review based in Hong Kong all knew about this. Back in 1978 news headlines were something like “Burmese Muslims, machine-gunned down by the Burmese government troops” or “Burma's brand of apartheid”. Around two weeks ago, Amnesty International published a report saying dehumanising “apartheid” is ongoing in Myanmar. Well, the word “apartheid” was used as early as July 1978 in a magazine article in the Far Eastern Economic Review. “Burma's brand of apartheid” was the title! It seems the world's oldest human rights watchdog was asleep throughout these decades. For Amnesty International to characterise a full, institutionalised genocide in slow motion as “apartheid” is utterly unconscionable. It is just infinitely pathetic! The UN has passed resolution every year for the last 25 years with the exception of last year. We have had at least six special rapporteurs since 1993 investigating inter alia the persecution of Rohingyas. UNHCR has a huge operation in Myanmar. To my deep dismay, it has even issued orders to its staff in Myanmar telling them not to say the word “Rohingya” in any writing but to call them “Muslims from Rakhine” in clear violation of the group's fundamental right to self-identify. The UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar and World Food Programme were concealing information about the genocide! So the world did not just “discover” this, it's a lie. Those in international politics and the humanitarian world are not even lifting a finger because helping the Rohingyas is not profitable. Ending genocide is not profitable. Working with the killers is profitable. Because the killers have monopoly over natural gas, strategic coastlines, deep sea ports, visas, etc. So it's not the lack of knowledge. It's self-interest and the pretence of not knowing that are in play. Dr. Maung Zarni with his late great uncle Zeya Kyaw Htin Major Ant Kywe in November 2005. The UN has not gone so far as calling it genocide. Your comments? Legal scholars, genocide scholars and even practitioners of international law from Yale Law School and Queen Mary U Law, from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Permanent People's Tribunal on Myanmar, have all called it genocide. Because there is no political will to use force to end the genocide, the UN, US and UK play what Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein called “language games”. But some of us including renowned genocide scholars such as Greg Stanton and Daniel Fierstein refuse to use the word “ethnic cleansing”: it is a euphemism that was originally released into mass media by Milosevic, the Serbian genocidal leader. We now have a new doctrine called “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, post-Rwanda and Srebrenica. And if a UN member state fails to protect people, not just citizens, who live within its territory, the neighbours and the entire UN system have a responsibility to go in and protect that community and to punish the perpetrating regime such as Myanmar. And that principle can be invoked if four crimes take place; one of them is ethnic cleansing which has no legal basis in international law. My Rwandan friends are outraged that UN is letting another genocide unfold. So yes, the UN should call it genocide. But even if it is not prepared to call it genocide, ethnic cleansing is enough of an inhuman deed for the international community to intervene. NATO bombed Milosevic's palace, and the genocidal bully was forced to accept a deal to stop the genocide. How would you assess Bangladesh's role in this crisis? I want to separate Bangladesh's role in two different ways. There is palpable and genuine compassion and outrage among the Bangladeshi people regarding the genocide next door. This is such a positive and welcome shift in public opinion. Previously, Rohingyas were seen as potential criminals, or exploitable cheap labourers. The Bangladeshi government does not feel that resolving the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar is its main concern; its main concern is to make sure that the Rohingyas return to their country. Bangladesh is a very populous country. So understandably, Dhaka places its primary emphasis on repatriating the Rohingyas, who belong in Myanmar. But there is a major problem with that. The Rohingyas did not come here voluntarily nor were they merely displaced across the border. They came as survivors of Myanmar's genocide. These attacks need to be stopped and their safety in Myanmar established with armed UN protection. The solution lies in ending the genocide in Myanmar. Repatriation is just a temporary relief. Sending the Rohingyas back while what I call “slow-burning genocide” is ongoing will not work and has not worked in 39 years. Dhaka needs to come to terms with the fact that the fate and wellbeing of the Rohingyas have become interlinked with its national interests and stability—they are not two separate issues. Bangladesh has played an exemplary humane role in the world's opinion. This newfound prestige and moral influence should be fully capitalised on, not simply to repatriate the survivors, but also to end the genocide. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Daily Star

Order of Saint Andrew the apostle, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in America (05.12.2017) – http://bit.ly/2it8MpP – “Violence arising from religious intolerance is a huge global problem,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross pointed out at the opening session of the three-day International Conference on Religious Freedom in the nation’s capital Monday night. “The truth is that freedom of thought and belief are the underpinning of the most innovative and vibrant economies in human history – the United States among them,” Ross said. “That is at least partially why it is troubling to see a resurgence in the persecution of Christians in recent years.” Ross spoke at the 3rd Archon International Conference on Religious Freedom. Sponsored by the Order of Saint Andrew the Apostle, Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the conference is a direct response to Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew who expressed their “shared profound concern for the situation of Christians in the Middle East and for their right to remain full citizens of their homelands.” Prior to his opening remarks at the Metropolitan Club, a press conference was held that featured several participants including His Eminence Archbishop Angaelos, Papal Legate for the United Kingdom for the Coptic Orthodox Church, who stressed that the problem of the persecution of Christians is greater than many of us realize. “It is time for us to stand and work together,” the archbishop, who was born in Egypt, emphasized. “It is an epidemic spreading through the world and it affects everyone. The brunt of this persecution falls on Christians.” Also at the press conference was Archbishop Dionysius John Kawak, Archbishop and Patriarchal Vicar, Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of the Eastern United States, who stressed the importance to find a solution, noting that 50 percent of the Syrian Christians have left that country. “Our goal as Middle East Christians is to teach everyone to accept one another,” he said, emphasizing the need to stop the war, adding that we must “collaborate to help those that need the most help.” Also at the press conference was Johny (cq) Messo, president of the World Council of Arameans (Syriacs), who said this conference “gives us the opportunity to speak for people who have no voice,” adding that “if you look at Syria and Iraq today we have to hope the situation can be stabilized since very few Christians are left. It is very important to act now – not tomorrow.” Also participating at the press conference was Elizabeth Prodromou, Tufts University Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy visiting professor of conflict resolution, saying what happens in the Middle East is important because all people have the right to be free, stressing that Christians are being targeted. Speaking about the conference, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of America remarked, ”This conference provides the context for intensifying our prayers to God for the safety and well being of all Christians confronted by forces of hatred, religious intolerance and wild fanaticism.” “Christianity is being wiped out from the very lands in which it was born 2,000 years ago,” said Dr. Anthony Limberakis, National Commander for the Order of St. Andrew. “By hosting the Third International Conference on Religious Freedom, the Order of St. Andrew aims to shed light on this crisis confronting Christians in the Middle East.” The conference continues Tuesday with a breakfast meeting featuring Hank Hanegraaff, Christian Research Institute president, as speaker, followed by sessions on the “History of the Christian Church” focusing on the disappearance of Christians from Christianity’s birthplace and a luncheon address by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. An afternoon session will focus on “Persecution of Christians and Possible Solutions” followed by an evening session featuring Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice. On Wednesday the schedule will include speakers Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., Jay Alan Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the European Centre for Law and Justice, a session on “Freedoms of Religion and the Press” and on “Sacred Sites and Property Rights.” Open Doors USA, the California-based non-profit that has tracked Christian persecution for the past 25 years, points out that millions of Christians face interrogation, arrest, torture, and/or death because of their religious convictions and cultural or ethnic identification. The U.S. State Department reports that Christians face persecution in more than 60 countries with Pew Research noting that between 2007 and 2014, Christians have been targeted for harassment in more countries than any other religious group. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 HRWF

Syrians who fled the city of Homs five years ago are slowly returning to rebuild their homes and lives. Much of Syria’s third largest city has been destroyed, but Maha says she is just “so happy” to be back. With her husband and her sister, she recently returned to live in their apartment again. After the government regained control of the city in March, Maha and her family were among the first to return to their neighbourhood to see what was left standing. Their home “was 70 per cent damaged, but not as bad as many of the other buildings”, Maha says. Most of the damage was caused by a gas barrel that exploded during heavy fighting close to their home during the early stages of a civil war that has been raging since 2011. As they fled, Maha was shot in her leg by a sniper and her family carried her to the hospital that was nearest. “Many surgeries followed,” she recalls. “My bone was totally fractured and they needed to insert metal to fix… Only after two years has the bone started growing together again. The doctors had to implant bone from my hips.” The iron pins are clearly visible when she walks, wearing a skirt. Antoon Mansoor, 77, says it was a miracle that he and his wife Basima Abo Jamd, 63, weren’t injured when their house was destroyed by a mortar shell five years ago. “I was standing right here,” he recalls, pointing at the spot where he stood when the explosive struck. “There was shrapnel flying all around, but I wasn’t hit.” The couple fled to the countryside, outside of Homs, where they – without sufficient income – struggled to find accommodation to rent. They finally decided to call on their priest for help, at St George’s Church, across the street from their destroyed home. “People of this age feel most comfortable at their own place,” the priest says. “First I was afraid we couldn’t [fix] their house. It was so damaged. But when I talked with Open Doors [an international charity], they agreed to help. I am so happy that we could finish the house before the winter comes. This house has been family property for over a hundred years.” Five years after they were forced to leave everything behind, Antoon and Basimo are back in their home. The doors and windows are new and there is a smell of fresh paint in the rooms. “I didn’t expect that we would be able to come back here. But two weeks ago we could, after about five years of being away. I am so happy!” Basimo says. Antoon adds: “You know, I was depressed when I lived in the rented house far away from this place. Now I feel much better, much stronger. I can breathe again, I am happy.” What future? After six years of war an estimated 6.3 million people are internally displaced across Syria, while a further 5 million are refugees in neighbouring countries. Syria produced the most asylum-seekers in 2016, ahead of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a report on broader migration trends from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. According to a June report by three Christians charities, for many of Syria and Iraq’s Christians the emergence of IS in 2014 was only the “tipping point” for their displacement. As a result, the report concluded that for them to return home it would require more than just safety from IS, the army or other militant groups. The charities say an “accountability mechanism” is needed to deal with years of religious and ethnic persecution and discrimination. One of the charities, Open Doors, has launched a petition, titled One Million Voices, calling on the UN Secretary General to ensure that as people start to return to their countries and homes, the rights of Christians and other minorities in the Middle East will be protected. In August, World Watch Monitor reported the differences in outlooks between the Syrian and Iraqi Christians forced to flee their homes in recent years. According to human rights lawyer Ewelina Ochab, many Iraqi Christians feel they have no future in the region anymore, while Syrian Christians believe they still have a future at home under President Bashar Al-Assad. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 HRWF

What exactly happened and what led up to this sudden twist in Yemen's devastating war? On 4 December, Huthi fighters killed Yemen’s former president and their erstwhile ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh. His violent death and the military defeat of his loyalists in Sanaa were the culmination of months of growing tensions between Saleh’s General People’s Congress party (GPC) and the Huthis. Before coming to blows, the Huthi-Saleh alliance had fought the Saudi-led coalition, which is backing the internationally recognised government of Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, to a stalemate. After nearly three years of war, including a punishing air campaign and a policy of economic strangulation, they still controlled the north, where the majority of Yemen’s population lives. It came at a high human cost: Yemen is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world with seven million on the brink of famine, over three million internally displaced and an expected one million cases of cholera by the end of the year. The Huthis and Saleh had a history of distrust and violence, fighting six rounds of conflict between 2004 and 2009. As partners against the Saudi-led coalition, they fought over positions in the government, accused each other of corruption and engaged in an off-and-on again war of words in the media. Overtime, the Huthis consolidated control over the military-security apparatus, but the exact balance of power in the tribes and loyalties within some military units were unclear. By August 2017, when Saleh staged a rally in Sanaa to celebrate the GPC’s 35th anniversary, the Huthis suspected he was planning to turn against them with the help of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To his followers’ disappointment, Saleh failed to act, but four months later he did, a decision that would cost him his life and confirm the Huthis’ military superiority. The trigger for the violence was a 29 November clash between Saleh fighters and Huthi loyalists over control of the Saleh Mosque, a major landmark in the capital that was built and opened by Saleh a decade ago. Local mediation failed to cool tensions and on 2 December, Saleh lit a match by calling his followers to take up arms against the Huthis. He also announced his willingness to “turn a new page” with the Saudi-led coalition, a statement that confirmed his treachery to the Huthis and played poorly with some of his base, who oppose the Huthis but Saudi military actions in Yemen even more. For a brief moment, it looked like Saleh could win. The GPC and Saudi-led coalition media outlets reported victories in Sanaa, saying that Saleh’s Republican Guard forces had taken over the airport, strategic military bases and government buildings. But their euphoria was short-lived. On 3 December, the Huthis responded militarily and by 4 December a short, bloody battle on the streets of the capital had turned the tables on Saleh’s forces. Critically, the tribes around Sanaa failed to come to Saleh’s defense. Most remained neutral, allowing Huthi reinforcements to enter the city. While Saleh and his party enjoyed a great deal of popular support and sympathy, this did not translate into a hard-power advantage. What has been local players’ reaction to his death? The most common reaction is shock. Saleh has been part of Yemen’s ruling structure since he became president in 1978. He was known as a wily political survivor, hated by some and loved by others. Many had been calling on him to leave political life since the political uprising against him in 2011, but his violent death and the lack of any clear leadership for his party will likely complicate the conflict. For the GPC, Saleh’s death and his forces’ military defeat in Sanaa are devastating political and military blows. Saleh’s son and former Republican Guard Commander Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh is in exile. His nephew and former Special Forces Commander Tareq Saleh was also killed in Sanaa. The party had already suffered a series of defections in the popular uprising against his rule in 2011, and it is very possible that it will fragment even further. During the current war, some prominent members supported the Hadi government, although most stayed with Saleh. With Saleh gone, some may join Hadi’s side, while many in Sanaa will support the Huthis, mainly from a mix of fear, lack of better options and common hostility to the Saudi air campaign. For the Huthis, his death is viewed as a victory. Many in the group had long wanted revenge for the death of their leader, Hussein Badr al-Deen al-Huthi, at the hands of President Saleh’s forces in 2004. Equally important, they see it as a justified response to Saleh’s about-face against them. Does this alter Yemen’s local balance of power? For the moment, the Huthis are the winners and it is possible that they will continue to consolidate military and political control of the north. They have defeated their only real competitor on the ground and in doing so have intimidated those who may want to oppose them in the future. But there also are important risks for them. Killing Saleh, his family members and high-ranking party members, plus continued Huthi raids on homes and detention of GPC officials suspected of taking up arms against them, is feeding future cycles of revenge. The Huthis are aware of the political risks of alienating the GPC even further and are publicly making a distinction between Saleh supporters who took up arms against them and the rest of the party, whom they say they will not hold responsible for recent events and still consider brothers. But statements cannot undo actions. The majority of the GPC is afraid and deeply resentful, creating a situation in which the Huthis may increasingly have to rely on force and intimidation to maintain control. There is a chance that the military balance in the north could still shift – albeit a small one. Some are pinning their hopes on Saleh’s son Ahmed who vowed revenge for this father’s death. The UAE kept him under “soft” house arrest in Abu Dhabi during the war to have him available as back-up, a kind of wild card, for a moment like this. While he is influential within the old Republican Guard, the most recent events demonstrated these forces’ weakness and disarray. Opposing the Huthis militarily would require some reconstitution of these troops, support from the tribes around Sanaa and cooperation between Ahmed Ali and his bitter enemy, Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, the vice president under Hadi, who commands forces in Marib. Thus far, and despite media bluster from Hadi calling for troops to march on Sanaa or for Yemenis to rise up against the Huthis, there is little indication that troops are prepared for such action. Instead, the coalition has intensified its air campaign in Sanaa, something that will not dislodge the Huthis and works to their advantage by increasing anti-Saudi sentiment. How does the splintering of the Huthi-Saleh alliance affect the regional actors engaged in the war and the prospects for peace? It is difficult to see how this result plays to the advantage of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their policy of trying to split the Huthi-Saleh alliance has backfired dramatically, resulting in a Huthi military victory. As Crisis Group warned in a September 2017 briefing, the result of a clash between the two sides would be unlikely to redound in Saudi’s favor. More likely, it would produce a Huthi win or a protracted fight in the north. If Saudi Arabia wanted to support a negotiated end to the war, the prospects for doing so now have become bleaker. The Huthis have said they are ready to talk, but their substantive demands will no doubt be even more out of line with what Saudi Arabia and their Yemeni allies are willing to accept. It is difficult to see Saudi Arabia encouraging compromise and negotiation at this stage now that the Huthis are clearly in charge. Saudi Arabia and the UAE may try to find a silver lining in recent events. From their perspective, without the cover of Saleh’s GPC and the veneer of nationalism that came with it, the Huthis will be exposed as the narrow, sectarian Iranian project that the coalition and their Yemeni allies accuse them of being. To some extent, they are right that the GPC provided important political cover and the appearance of political inclusion. But the narrowing of political support for the Huthis will not necessarily trigger the popular uprising that the coalition hopes to incite. In fact, absent a clear military advantage for the anti-Huthi side or an end to the war and a return to politics, populations in the north are now far less likely to oppose the Huthis, lest they face the same fate as Saleh. Over time, opposition to the Huthis may well rise, especially if they fail to govern adequately, but this does not guarantee revolt. Also, the split with Saleh’s GPC does not erase widespread and deep popular resentment toward the Hadi government and the coalition for a brutal air campaign and economic blockade that are killing the country. As long as these policies continue, the Huthis will have the opportunity to stand behind the banner of nationalism and defending Yemen. Iran once again stands to gain. While the Huthi-Saleh fighting was an internal power struggle not of Iran’s making, Tehran will benefit if the Huthis succeed in consolidating their control of the north, including the capital. Politically isolated, the Huthis are allies but not puppets of Iran. There is increasing evidence of Iranian military support to the Huthis, including for their missile program. The 4 November rocket attack on Riyadh’s international airport shows the significance of this capability. The Huthis have threatened the UAE as well, claiming to have launched missiles in its direction. Iran’s relatively low-cost investment is paying off in spades, bogging Saudi Arabia down in a war that is unwinnable, costly and damaging to its reputation. What can be done to advance the cause of peace in Yemen now? At the moment, the prospects for peace are slim to none. That said, the need for a political solution is ever more urgent. Yemen is already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but following the 4 November missile strike on Riyadh, the situation deteriorated dramatically as the Saudi-led coalition shut off all access points to Huthi-controlled areas. Then, just as they started easing up on the blockade, fighting broke out in Sanaa between Saleh and the Huthis, and this once again curbed even humanitarian flights into the country. Regardless of the course of the war, all ports of entry should be fully opened to humanitarian and commercial goods, including Hodeida port and Sanaa airport, which has been closed to commercial fights since August 2016. Saudi Arabia already had signalled that doing so will require additional security checks, but will be even more insistent now to address the coalition’s concerns about weapons shipments to the Huthis. At the political level, recent developments should confirm that the current military approach toward the Huthis is failing and that new thinking is needed. Attempting to shift the military dynamics against them would require significant ground troops and cohesiveness on the anti-Huthi side that has been absent thus far. Most importantly, if attempted, it would come at an extraordinary human cost. Yemen’s war is going from bad to worse. Instead of watching the next chapter unfold, the UN Security Council should pass a resolution calling on all sides to agree to a ceasefire and political negotiations. This will require compromises from all sides. While this may be unappealing to the coalition and the anti-Huthi bloc, a return to politics, not a continuation of the war, is arguably the best way to counter-balance the Huthis. It is certainly the only way to avoid famine, the spread of cholera and further economic devastation – and the long-term instability that these will cause. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

In September 2015, the UN General Assembly established December 9 as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime. December 9 was an obvious choice, since, in 1948 of the same day, the UN General Assembly adopted the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). This Convention was the first document that dared to define genocide for the first time, imposing an obligation on states to prevent and punish genocidal crimes. The Convention followed the mass atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis before and during World War II. At the time of drafting the Convention, the drafters were hopeful that the world would never again witness such atrocities as committed by the Nazi regime. While, arguably, there has been no such great loss of human lives as during WWII, genocidal incidents have and still take place. After WWII, we have witnessed examples of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and now in Syria and Iraq, to name only a few. The genocide in Cambodia was the first genocide since the introduction of the Genocide Convention. From 1975 to 1979, between 1.7 and 2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. In 1994, in Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsis, an African ethnic group, were killed. Thousands of people were injured. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were subjected to systematic rape. In 1995, in Bosnia, approximately 100,000 people were killed. In 2003, over 300,000 people were killed and over three million people were displaced in Darfur. Despite the numerous incidents of genocide since the Convention was adopted, nothing or not enough has been done to address the inadequacies of the Convention and their domestic implementations. As a result, we now witness yet more and more incidents of genocide, as perpetrated by state or non-state actors. Genocide By State Actors Over the recent months, more evidence has come to light to suggest that the Rohingya Muslims are subjected to genocide by the Burmese government. Rohingyas are the people indigenous to the Western Rakhine State of Burma. They are predominately Muslims. Despite their indigenous status, the Burmese government refuses to recognise their identity as Rohingyas, labelling them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The effect on their rights within Burma has been profound. Their situation deteriorated rapidly after the events on October 9, 2016, when nine Burmese police officers were killed by an armed militia. It is a given that any armed insurgency or terror activities must be adequately addressed by the state to ensure the safety of its people. However, the response to the killings of the Burmese police officers was reportedly violent, leading to widespread and systematic indiscriminate attacks against Rohingya Muslim civilians. The events of October 2016 decisively placed Burma onto the United Nations' radar. The atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslims resulted in them being forcibly displaced and fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh, by the tens of thousands. However, the crimes are being strongly denied by the Burmese government and the steps taken by the international community continue to be slow and insignificant. And while civil societies continue to express their disapproval of the lack of decisive action, it has to be emphasised that this is nothing unusual. This is nothing unusual in relation to the crimes committed by governments as per diplomatic considerations. Surprisingly, even if the genocidal atrocities are committed by non-state actors (like Daesh), there has been no speedier response. Genocide By Non-State Actors Since 2014, Daesh has been committing crimes of genocide. Its victims are Christians, Yazidis, and members of other religious minorities in Syria, Iraq, and beyond. The exact numbers of the individuals killed by Daesh are difficult to ascertain, especially in Syria with the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Mass graves continue to be discovered in Northern Iraq. However, this uncertainty about the exact number of fatalities should not take the focus away from the atrocities committed by Daesh. The overriding objective is that the murder, mass killings, torture, ill-treatment, rape, sexual abuse, sexual slavery, and many more crimes are committed by Daesh against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities with the specific intent to destroy the groups in the region in whole or in part. It took the cooperation of over 70 states to ensure military victories against Daesh. Currently, over 90% of formerly Daesh-occupied territories have now been recovered. The progress in Syria is much slower. The humanitarian assistance is ongoing. First steps have been taken to ensure justice for the victims, although the process will be long. Nonetheless, the lack of quick and decisive steps has marked the region and the survivors for decades to come. Changes Needed The recent cases of the mass atrocities committed against religious minorities in Syria and Iraq and against Rohingya Muslims, perpetrated by non-state actors and state actors respectively, show that the international community continues to fail in its primary obligation - to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide. As the Convention approaches 70 years next year, it is crucial to scrutinize whether the Convention is fit for its purpose – to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. Was it meant to be a powerless document merely defining genocide? Or maybe the aspirations to prevent and punish were once real but dissolved when faced with the empirical reality. Even if the document was meant to be just a symbolic document, the recent mass atrocities amounting to genocide suggest that the international community should consider whether the current approach is adequate or whether new mechanisms are needed to make the promise of ‘never again’ mean something. (c) 2017 Forbes

From New York to Cape Town to Sydney, the bronze body doubles of the white men of empire—Columbus, Rhodes, Cook—have lately been pelted with feces, sprayed with graffiti, had their hands painted red. Some have been toppled. The fate of these statues—and those representing white men of a different era, in Charlottesville and elsewhere—has ignited debate about the political act of publicly memorializing historical figures responsible for atrocities. But when the statues come down, how might the atrocities themselves be publicly commemorated, rather than repressed? In the course of her long career, the historian Lyndall Ryan has thought about little else. In the late nineties and early aughts, Ryan found herself on the front lines of what came to be known, in Australia, as the History Wars: skirmishes fought with words, source by disputed source, often in the national media. At stake was whether the evidence existed to prove—as Ryan and others had argued, and conservative historians and politicians refused to accept—that Indigenous Australians had been massacred in enormous numbers during colonization, from late in the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Even among those who grudgingly accepted that there had been widespread killings, there were still bitter, and, in some cases, ongoing, fights over the exact number of Indigenous people killed, the strength of their resistance to British settlement, and the reliability of oral versus written history. A truce has never been reached in what the Indigenous writer Alexis Wright calls Australia’s entrenched “storytelling war.” (In October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull rejected the core recommendations of the government-appointed Referendum Council, which, after six months of deliberative dialogue across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, had called for establishing an Indigenous voice to Parliament, and a process of “truth-telling about our history.”) In 2005, in the midst of the public disputes over Australia’s history, Ryan came across the work of the French sociologist Jacques Sémelin. After the Srebrenica massacre, in 1995, there was renewed interest from European scholars in understanding massacre as a phenomenon. Sémelin defined a massacre as the indiscriminate killing of innocent, unarmed people over a limited period of time, and he characterized massacres as being carefully planned—i.e., not done in the heat of the moment or the fog of war—and deliberately shrouded in secrecy by the systematic disposal of bodies and the intimidation of witnesses. Sémelin’s typology prompted Ryan to reconsider her own earlier scholarship on the Tasmanian War, which was waged between British colonists and Aboriginal people early in the nineteenth century. This time, Ryan concluded that there were not four massacres of Indigenous people but, in fact, more than forty. “Most historians of my generation were brought up with the idea that Aboriginal people were killed in ones or twos, similar to how settlers were killed when there’d been a dispute over stock, or women,” Ryan told me recently, at an art gallery in Sydney’s vibrant neighborhood of Kings Cross, where she was about to give a talk. Ryan, who is seventy-four, has short-cropped white hair and a slow, deliberate way of speaking that belies a very quick mind. She realized, once she’d started researching massacres, how many of her peers were still deeply in denial about the past. “People would say to me, ‘We will never know how many massacres there were, or how many Aboriginal people were killed, so what’s the point in trying to find out?’ But they would never say that about World War One or Two. ”Ryan is based at the Centre for the History of Violence at Newcastle University, up the coast from Sydney. A few years ago, she applied for a research grant to embark on a hugely ambitious undertaking: to map the site of every Australian colonial frontier massacre on an interactive Web site. Ryan defines a massacre, in this context, as the indiscriminate killing of six or more undefended people. Since Aboriginal communities tended to live together in camps of about twenty people, losing six or more people in one killing—a “fractal” massacre—usually led to the whole community collapsing. Four years of painstaking research later, with the grant depleted, Ryan’s map is nowhere near finished. So far, it includes more than a hundred and seventy massacres of Indigenous people in eastern Australia, as well as six recorded massacres of settlers, from the period of 1788 to 1872. She estimates that there were more than five hundred massacres of Indigenous people over all, and that massacres of settlers numbered fewer than ten. (Ryan has not yet researched any massacres of Torres Strait Islander people, who are culturally distinct from mainland Aboriginal groups but share their history of colonization.) In July, Ryan and her tiny team decided it was time to release the partially completed map online. Since its launch, the site has had more than sixty thousand visitors. Contrary to Ryan’s fears, it was widely and mostly respectfully covered in the Australian media, and, at least for now, there has been no public response from conservative figures. At the gallery in Kings Cross, the lights were turned off, and a map appeared, projected onto a large screen, showing Australia’s unmistakable outline—the continent declared by the British on their arrival to be terra nullius, land considered to belong to nobody, and thus ripe for the taking. Spread across the eastern states were dozens of yellow dots, often clustered together. Each one represented the site of a massacre of Aboriginal people. The map’s data management still needs improvement—a consequence, in part, of limited funding, and also of Ryan’s admitted mistake in thinking she should do all the research first, before getting input from the project’s digital cartographer, Mark Brown, and digital-humanities specialist, Bill Pascoe. Even so, its power is undeniable. Ryan clicked on the yellow dot representing one of five massacres in the region of Jack Smith Lake, in eastern Victoria. On a fresh page, an aerial snapshot from ArcGIS, the geographic-information system, showed a slice of green and brown farmland and bush bordering a long, thin line of sand beside the ocean. A small square section was shaded yellow, delineating a five-kilometre radius around the site of the killings. The exact coördinates of the massacres are not identified, Ryan explained. “For many Aboriginal communities, the preference is not to pinpoint the actual site, out of respect for what is considered a taboo site of trauma. But also because sites tend to be desecrated if identified very specifically.” Some sites are on private land, or mining properties; others are at the bottom of reservoirs, because so many of the massacres happened at campsites close to creeks. On the left of the screen was a graph, cataloguing the details of this series of massacres carried out in 1843. Aboriginal Language Group: Brataualang. Aboriginal people killed: sixty (at each of the five sites). Colonists killed: zero. Weapons used: Double-barrelled Purdey. Attacker details: twenty horsemen, known as the “Highland Brigade,” organized by Angus McMillan. In a box titled “Narrative,” these fragments form a horrific tale. McMillan, a local settler, and his group of armed horsemen, all Scots, had, for years, been attacking Aboriginal camps with impunity. In this instance, they attacked five campsites over five days. At one camp, people jumped into the waterhole but were shot as soon as they resurfaced to breathe. One of the survivors, a young boy who’d been shot in the eye, was captured by the Brigade and forced to lead them to other camps. “Human bones have been found at each of these sites on several occasions,” the text notes. “The rampage would fit the criteria of ‘genocidal massacre.’ ” Bruised by the History Wars, Ryan set herself strict criteria for including a massacre on the map. A key signals the strength of the evidence: three stars means that there is high-quality evidence drawn from disparate sources, while one or two stars indicates that there are only one or two reliable sources, respectively, with more corroboration welcome. Most of the evidence used for the map, she told the gathering, is from contemporaneous “white people’s sources”—newspaper articles, official reports—rather than Indigenous sources, such as oral histories or social memory. (Some Aboriginal testimony is captured in those white textual sources, in the rare cases where survivors gave statements to officials or to missionaries. But Aboriginal people were for a long time prohibited from being called as witnesses in legal proceedings.) Many existing place names around the country are themselves a form of damning evidence, as the historian Ian Clark has noted in his own pioneering work on frontier massacres: Murderers Flat, Massacre Inlet, Murdering Gully, Haunted Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully. The yellow dots on Lyndall Ryan’s map show where Indigenous people were massacred. The blue dots stand for colonists who were massacred. Map by Lyndall Ryan, Jennifer Debenham, Mark Brown & William Pascoe. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia 1788 – 1872, v1.2 Newcastle: University of Newcastle, 2017. This project has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC).Earlier this year, Ryan presented a draft version of the map at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, in Canberra. The feedback was largely positive, though she was advised to use a different color for the dots than red, which is considered sacred for many communities and shouldn’t be associated only with death. As Ryan moves on to more recent massacres, she will increasingly draw on Aboriginal sources. She hopes the map will eventually be expanded to include massacres that aren’t represented in written evidence but have been known about and passed down through memory and story by descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Since the map was released, she’s heard from more than five hundred people, black and white, many from rural areas, many with details of massacres not on the map. Pascoe told me that viewers, on first seeing the map, are sometimes so overwhelmed they have to look away, but to him this is the point of mapping this kind of trauma. “People whose ancestors were involved already know what happened. But it becomes personal for everyone, because you can see what happened in a place near you, or where you grew up.” Ryan’s decision to focus, for now, on archival research rather than community consultations was driven by funding and time constraints, but she also believes that white Australians who are skeptical about widespread frontier massacres need to be confronted with the gruesome truths recorded by their own ancestors—the magistrates and crown-lands commissioners, the settlers who wrote about killing sprees in their journals or correspondence. In the History Wars, she noted, the denialists figured out ways of discounting all evidence of massacre, no matter its provenance. “They’d say things like, well, you can’t trust evidence from a convict, they’re born liars. Same with the Native Police. Women don’t tell the truth. Soldiers who weren’t officers clearly didn’t know what was going on.” This sort of thinking would leave only sources from the two categories of whites with the most to gain from covering up massacres: the officers who gave the orders, and the male settlers who often carried them out. Ryan is also working with historians in South Africa, Canada, and the United States to consider massacres from a comparative perspective. The same men who were brutalized by mass warfare in Europe—during the Napoleonic wars, for example—became the brutal colonizers of the new world. (Angus McMillan fled Scotland during the Highland Clearances, when Highlander tenants were forcibly removed from their land.) In the eighteen-twenties, massacres in Tasmania and Victoria were usually carried out at dawn, to give the perpetrators—who used unreliable weapons, such as muskets, which often misfired—the advantage of surprise. When more sophisticated weapons, like the repeating rifles which were first manufactured around the time of the American Civil War, spread across the globe, the nature of frontier violence changed. By the eighteen-seventies, massacres were more often done in broad daylight. The awful intimacy of the violence is another shared feature of massacre, as is the divide-and-conquer strategy of recruiting Indigenous people into Native Police forces commanded by white officers and compelled to carry out killings. While people milled around after Ryan’s talk, I spoke to Aleshia Lonsdale, a young Wiradjuri artist from the country town of Mudgee, who was showing work in the gallery. Lonsdale, who has curly red hair and a gap-toothed smile, had created an assemblage of stone tools tightly bound in cling wrap. She told me about visiting her local museum, where stone tools were massed together, and feeling as if she were in a morgue. “There was nothing saying where the tools had come from, only who had donated them to the collection—you know, ‘a stone tool donated by Mrs. Brown,’ ” she said. Mudgee is now a tourist town, but the massacres and forced removals that occurred there almost destroyed the Aboriginal community. “It’s not just something in the history book, or dots on a map, it still impacts on people today,” she said. “Even in terms of Aboriginal identity, and people not knowing who they are or where they’re from—sometimes that can stem back to the massacres.” I asked her what she thought of Ryan’s approach. “When I first heard about the map, I went online and had a look,” she said. “I told people in my community about it. Some were taken aback. They wanted to know why their massacre wasn’t on there. So, for me, it was helpful to hear from Lyndall today. Because there are a lot of massacre places that the community knows about that wouldn’t fit those criteria.” Lonsdale paused to greet a well-wisher. “Where some of the massacres happened, in my own country, there’s still a bad feeling,” she said to me. “There’s certain roads people won’t drive along. It’s not just felt by Aboriginal people but by non-Aboriginal people as well. We need a place to go, to mourn or say sorry, but Aboriginal people need to determine what form that recognition takes. ”Recently, the Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson, who lives in Brisbane, débuted a different kind of massacres map. Watson, who is fifty-eight, is a descendant of the Waanyi people, of northwest Queensland; her great-great-grandmother Rosie hid under a windbreak to survive a massacre carried out by the Native Police at Lawn Hill. Watson has been researching and making art about the massacres for decades. Earlier this year, her multimedia, research-based art work “the names of places” was shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra. Superimposed on the shaky, ever-moving boundaries of a map of Australia is a scrolling, alphabetized list of hundreds of massacre sites and images of other work by Watson on the same theme—such as “pale slaughter,” which lists weapons used (bayonets, revolvers), and “the names of men,” which lists perpetrators. Next to this video, Watson set up a touch-screen map that people could use to bring up historical documents associated with different massacres. The map is now online for anybody to explore, and visitors can share information—including “hearsay”—about massacres in their own communities. In many Indigenous communities, art works have long had dual functions as historical sources, as repositories of cultural or spiritual knowledge, and as maps of territory. There is an established tradition of mapping massacre sites through art, as in the acclaimed paintings by the Aboriginal artists Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, and Rusty Peters, among others. Watson wanted viewers of her video to be aware that any map is a slippery, contested artifact, and also to have a bodily response to the work. She told me the story of one of her relatives, who, after viewing the video, turned to her in anguish, saying, “Where wasn’t there a massacre?” Jonathan Richards, a historian based at the University of Queensland and an expert on the history of the Native Police, worked on both Watson’s and Ryan’s maps. The biggest technical challenge, he told me, was matching historical data with actual G.P.S. coördinates. “I am conscious of the fact that we might identify a massacre site that nowadays is somebody’s home or backyard, and they have no connection with the violence,” he said. “So a little caution was crucial.” The online version of Watson’s map is somewhat unwieldy—again a function of limited funding, and of the enormous amount of time that both the historical and technical work of mapping requires. (She, too, has a very small team.) But, taken together, the two maps allow for “a welling up of this aspect of our shared history,” as Watson put it when I spoke with her over the phone. If the funding allows, she hopes to hire a historian to travel with “the names of places” video as it tours around Australia, and meet with communities at each location to gather massacre stories. Richards told me that his research has permanently changed the way he sees the landscape. “In fact, the drive from Brisbane to Cairns these days is really, for me, just a linked pathway of brutal massacre sites. ”There are about twenty, mostly very small, physical memorials to Aboriginal massacre sites across Australia, according to Genevieve Grieves, an Indigenous artist who is writing a Ph.D. on the memorialization of frontier violence. The majority, Grieves says, are community-created and landscape-based: a sculpture trail or a plaque on a single boulder, for instance. Watson and Ryan hope that their maps might act as digital memorials, which can circulate fluidly and are not as vulnerable to desecration. For, while the statues of white men have been targeted lately, the few public memorials commemorating Aboriginal history have been vandalized repeatedly for years. In Perth, there is a bronze statue of the Noongar resistance fighter Yagan, whose head was sent to England after he was killed by white settlers, in 1833. In 1997, his head was repatriated to Australia; soon after, a vandal used an angle grinder to behead the statue. It was repaired, but later beheaded again. (The 1997 beheading inspired Archie Weller to write a short story, later turned into a film, “Confessions of a Headhunter,” in which two Noongar men travel across the country, taking off the heads of every bronze colonial statue they find, and finally melting them down to create a sculpture of an Aboriginal mother and her children looking out to sea at Botany Bay, where Captain Cook landed.) One of the memorials often held up as exemplary is the Myall Creek Massacre and Memorial Site, at the top of a bluff in northern New South Wales. It was established, in 2000, after years of advocacy work by Sue Blacklock, a descendant of one of the survivors, in collaboration with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the local community. In 1838, on the farmland visible below the hill, thirty Wirrayaraay people were massacred, and their bodies burned, in what Ryan calls an “opportunity massacre.” It’s an extremely unusual case: afterward, some of the white perpetrators were arrested and tried in court, and seven of them were hanged. As the site’s heritage listing notes, it was “the first and last attempt by the colonial administration to use the law to control frontier conflict.” This memorial, too, has been subject to vandalism: in 2005, the words “murder” and “women and children” were hammered out of the metal plaques. Each June, a ceremony is held at the site, bringing together the descendants of victims, survivors, and perpetrators. Watson attended this year. When she told me about the experience, her voice broke with emotion. She filmed the descendants’ interactions, and Greg Hooper, her technical collaborator and sound designer, put a contact microphone (similar to a stethoscope) “against one of the ancient trees that had stood witness to the events in the valley below, and captured a sound like gurgling water deep within it.” School children stood at each of the plaques on the path up the hill, reading aloud. The descendant of a perpetrator got up with his grandson to speak, saying how sorry he was for what had happened. “It was like watching history slowly unravelling,” Watson said. “We all take a thread and pull it, and, as it tightens, we start to see what is there.”Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the novel “Blood Kin” and the short-story collection “Only the Animals.”Read more »More:AustraliaIndigenousAboriginalMassacreGet a recap of the week in culture every weekend, in your in-box. Sign up for our Culture Review newsletter.Most Popular1.Fiction“Cat Person”By Kristen Roupenian2.Page-TurnerA New History of the Second World WarBy Joshua Rothman3.A Reporter at LargeThe Dark Bounty of Texas OilBy Lawrence Wright4.A Reporter at LargeThe Takedown of TupacBy Connie Bruck5.Letter from FranceThe Killer-Nanny Novel That Conquered FranceBy Lauren Collinsour thirty most popular https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/mapping-massacres (c) The New Yorker

Myanmar’s security forces may be guilty of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority and more of them are fleeing despite a deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh to send them home, the top U.N. human rights official said on Tuesday. Rohingya refugees continue their way after crossing from Myanmar into Palang Khali, near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. REUTERS/Hannah McKay The United Nations defines genocide as acts meant to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. Such a designation is rare under international law, but has been used in contexts including Bosnia, Sudan and an Islamic State campaign against the Yazidi communities in Iraq and Syria. Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, was addressing a special session of the Human Rights Council which later adopted a resolution condemning “the very likely commission of crimes against humanity” by security forces and others against Rohingya. Myanmar’s ambassador Htin Lynn said his government “dissociated” itself from the text and denounced what he called “politicisation and partiality”. Zeid, who has described the campaign in the past as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing”, said that none of the 626,000 Rohingya who have fled violence to Bangladesh since August should be repatriated to Myanmar unless there was robust monitoring on the ground. He described reports of “acts of appalling barbarity committed against the Rohingya, including deliberately burning people to death inside their homes, murders of children and adults; indiscriminate shooting of fleeing civilians; widespread rapes of women and girls, and the burning and destruction of houses, schools, markets and mosques”. “Can anyone - can anyone - rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” he told the 47-member state forum. Shahriar Alam, Bangladesh’s junior foreign affairs minister, told the session in Geneva that his country was hosting nearly one million “Myanmar nationals” following executions and rapes. These crimes had been “perpetrated by Myanmar security forces and extremist Buddhist vigilantes”, Alam said, calling for an end to what he called “xenophobic rhetoric..including from higher echelons of the government and the military”. Mainly Buddhist Myanmar denies the Muslim Rohingya are its citizens and considers them foreigners. China’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Wednesday told a regular news briefing that the resolution would not resolve or alleviate the situation. “It could further complicate the issue and have a negative impact on Myanmar and Bangladesh implementing the repatriation agreement,” he said. China has supported Myanmar in the face of international criticism and has taken an increasingly active role in the issue, with foreign minister Wang Yi recently proposing a three step resolution during a visit to Myanmar. But Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director at Amnesty International, said in a statement that by voting against the resolution China has proved itself “woefully out of step” with world opinion and is serving to “preserve impunity for horrific crimes”. Marzuki Darusman, head of an independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said by video from Malaysia that his team has interviewed Rohingya refugees, including children in the Bangladeshi port city of Cox’s Bazar, who recounted “acts of extreme brutality” and “displayed signs of severe trauma”. Myanmar has not granted the investigators access to Rakhine, the northern state from which the Rohingya have fled, Darusman said. “We maintain hope that it will be granted early in 2018.” Pramila Patten, special envoy of the U.N. Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict, who interviewed survivors in Bangladesh in November, said she had heard accounts of “rape, gang rape by multiple soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery in military captivity”. Myanmar denies committing atrocities against the Rohingya. Its envoy Htin said: “People will say what they wanted to believe and sometimes they will say what they were told to say.” ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Reuters

Nothing in this extraordinarily revealing article that is truly new. Having worked on dozens of asylum cases in Europe in recent years, I’ve seen the increasing determination to rid the continent of African immigrants, even if they are asylum seekers who have been imprisoned and/or tortured. Cases such as the one reported here in Belgium are signs of just how despicably the countries of Europe are accommodating a genocidal regime that is destroying the Sudanese economy for self-enrichment and in the process putting the lives, health, and livelihoods of millions of ordinary Sudanese at risk. This belies every claim Europeans make to a commitment to human rights. The grim history of deportation in Europe in the 20th century should have made impossible such deportations as reported here. Belgium teamed up with Sudan on deportations. Then, allegedly, there was torture. The Washington Post | Michael Birnbaum, January 4, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/belgium-teamed-up-with-sudan-on-deportations-then-allegedly-there-was-torture/2018/01/04/7675bb18-effd-11e7-95e3-eff284e71c8d_story.html?utm_term=.eef4f2e16161 BRUSSELS — In an era of closing borders, European leaders are increasingly willing to go to extreme lengths to deport people. But a Belgian effort to partner with the Sudanese government has backfired after two men alleged they were tortured after being sent home, and the top Belgian migration official involved is now facing pressure to resign. The Sudanese citizens’ expulsions highlight new measures that might once have been seen as politically toxic. The men were repatriated after being identified by a delegation of Sudanese officials who had been invited to Belgium to screen migrants accused of being in the country illegally and to authorize the deportation of people from Sudan. Migrant advocates condemned the collaboration with Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, has been accused of war crimes and genocide. Now the allegations of torture are roiling Belgium’s complicated ruling coalition. Some politicians have suggested that the migration secretary, Theo Francken, the leader who invited the Sudanese officials to Belgium, should consider stepping down over his handling of the matter. Belgian Minister of Migration (and deportations) Theo Francken “In the past, we have seen ministers . . . resign if they seem to have lied, even if that is not the case,” said Wouter Beke, the leader of the Christian Democratic and Flemish party, which is a member of the ruling coalition, in an interview with Belgian radio. “It’s a question of personal ethics,” he said. Francken has said he has no plans to resign after appearing to mislead Parliament by telling lawmakers, incorrectly, after the allegations emerged that no further deportations were planned. He said he has not received any direct information about deportees being tortured, but “if it turns out that they have indeed been tortured, that’s a big problem.” He has called for a commission to investigate the allegations. The Belgian effort follows a deal Italy struck this summer with Libya to halt migrant traffic. Rights groups warn the agreement increases risks of slavery and abuse in Libya. And in 2016, E.U. leaders promised aid and concessions to Turkey to stop the migrant flow to Greece. The accusations of torture emerged late last month, when Belgium’s Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper published interviews with two of the expelled Sudanese men who said they had been beaten after returning to Sudan. “They picked me up immediately after landing in Sudan, interrogated me for hours and struck my feet with sticks. They only released me two days later,” said one of the men according to the Belgian news account, which used a pseudonym for the man because he feared for his security. “I was so scared that I lay in bed at home for three days.” Another man said he was picked up by police and beaten for three hours during an interrogation, in which the officials accused him of being a political enemy. Through an intermediary, both men declined a request for an interview, saying their communications were being monitored by the Sudanese government and that Sudanese security officials told them after the initial article was published not to speak to journalists. The collaboration with the Sudanese officials brought representatives of that government, which has been cited for human rights abuses, into the nation that hosts the capital of the European Union, Brussels. Although Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel later said the Belgian and Sudanese governments did not sign an agreement formally outlining the terms of the partnership, the Sudanese officials were granted access to detention facilities holding migrants who had been arrested for being in Belgium without the proper documents. Then they were offered the chance to question the detainees. Belgian leaders have said that although representatives of the Belgian government were present, an Arabic translator was not always present so Belgian officials could not always understand what was being said. Lawyers for some of the migrants said the Sudanese officials threatened the detainees they talked to, warning that if they applied for asylum in Belgium, they would be targeted for abuse in Sudan if they returned home. That alleged threat could have served to discourage asylum requests, since half of Sudanese asylum seekers are rejected in Belgium. The Sudanese Embassy in Belgium did not respond to a request for comment. “This whole story was bound to end in disaster,” said Koert Debeuf, the director of the European branch of the Tahrir Center for Middle East Policy, who stayed in touch with some of Sudanese men after they were deported and helped publicize the allegations of abuse. “These Sudanese guys are frightened to death.” Rights groups have condemned the collaboration. “They did a lot of harm to these people for nothing. The disproportion between the goal they have and the harm they have created is enormous,” said Alexis Deswaef, the head of the Belgian League of Human Rights who filed a suit to halt the deportations. The Belgian government won the case on appeal, after a judge ruled that the group had no standing to sue. But Michel, the prime minister, has so far stood behind the actions of his migration secretary. “The government has been implementing a firm and humane migration policy,” he wrote in a post on Facebook this week. “Belgium makes it a point of honor to respect European and international obligations.” http://sudanreeves.org/2018/01/05/when-it-comes-to-sudan-europe-is-proving-as-xenophobic-as-trumps-america/ (c) 2017 SUDAN Research, Analysis, and Advocacy

Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh in September. CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times Myanmar came under renewed international pressure on Tuesday for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims as United Nations officials said it should be investigated for crimes against humanity and possibly genocide by security forces. The country’s security forces “deliberately and massively targeted civilians” in operations that drove more than 626,000 Rohingya, half the population of Rakhine State, into neighboring Bangladesh, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, told a special session of the Human Rights Council that convened in Geneva on Tuesday. “Can anyone, can anyone, rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” Mr. al-Hussein, said, detailing “acts of appalling barbarity” committed by the security forces since August after decades of systematic discrimination and persecution. The human rights chief had previously described Myanmar military operations in Rakhine as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. His reference to genocide elevates the charge to the gravest of crimes against humanity: acts aimed at destroying in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The Rohingya are still fleeing across the border and human rights violations in the area are still occurring, Mr. al-Hussein said. The scale and gravity of the atrocities being reported warrant investigation by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he said The Myanmar authorities have made few concessions to international criticism of their military actions against the Rohingya, which appear to be broadly popular with the country’s majority-Buddhist population. On a recent visit to Myanmar, Pope Francis did not publicly use the word “Rohingya” — and drew criticism for that decision. He later said using the term “would have been a door slammed in the face.” The security forces’ campaign is already the subject of a fact-finding mission by the United Nations Human Rights Council, with a report expected in March. Mr. al-Hussein sought on Tuesday to ratchet up the pressure by urging the United Nations General Assembly to set up a separate body to investigate the individual criminal responsibility of the authorities involved in the operations in Myanmar. The fact-finding team has thus far been refused access to Myanmar, but the team’s chairman, Marzuki Darusman, said it had still been able to collect significant information from refugees and had heard many allegations of “extreme severity,” including genocide. “We have not come to any conclusion on these issues but we are taking such allegations very seriously and are examining them in depth,” he told the council in a recorded video message. Additional investigations by Pramila Patten, the United Nations special representative dealing with sexual violence in conflict, are focusing on reports of widespread sexual assaults by the Myanmar military. Ms. Patten told the human rights panel Tuesday that she had heard “the most heartbreaking and horrific accounts of sexual atrocities reportedly committed in cold blood out of a lethal hatred of these people solely on the basis of their ethnicity and religion.” The testimony was collected from Rohingya women who had escaped to Bangladesh. Refugees described to her, she said, how women and girls had died while being raped by gangs of men, or raped and then left to die as their houses were burned down. The killing of babies, the next generation of Rohingya, was a recurrent feature in the women’s testimony, she said. Diplomats and human rights groups said the council’s special session, convened with unusually wide backing from council members and cross-regional support, underscored Myanmar’s international isolation on the issue and the pressure on its rulers to alleviate the crisis. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the army commander, told officers graduating from the Defense Services Academy this past weekend that troops had “strictly followed orders and acted in accordance with the rules of engagement during the recent Rakhine crisis.” Htin Lynn, Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, responding at the forum on Tuesday to the grim recital of atrocities, said: “People will say what they want to believe. And sometimes they will say what they were told to say.” Mr. Lynn said Myanmar was ready to work with the United Nations on improving the situation in Rakhine. He said the country was working with Bangladesh to begin repatriation of Rohingya refugees beginning in two months. United Nations agencies, however, insist that the conditions for voluntary and safe repatriation of refugees do not yet exist. Aid agencies, with the exception of the International Red Cross and the World Food Program, are still barred from working in Rakhine. That has prevented a comprehensive assessment of the destruction after military operations that burned hundreds of villages, or of the assistance refugees would need if they returned. No repatriation should occur without sustained international monitoring of the conditions, Mr. al-Hussein told the council. “The world cannot countenance a hasty window-dressing of these shocking atrocities,” he said, “bundling people back to conditions of severe discrimination and latent violence.” _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

The Human Rights Council this afternoon concluded its special session on the human rights situation of the minority Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. In a resolution, the Council condemned the alleged systematic and gross violations of human rights and abuses committed against persons belonging to the Rohingya Muslim community and other minorities in Myanmar, and requested the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to track progress concerning the human rights situation of Rohingya people, and to provide oral updates to the Council as well as a comprehensive written report. In the resolution on the human rights situation of the minority Rohingya Muslim community and other minorities in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, adopted by a vote of 33 in favour, three against and nine abstentions, the Council strongly condemned the alleged systematic and gross violations of human rights and abuses committed in Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine state, notably against persons belonging to the Rohingya Muslim community and other minorities, including women and children. It condemned the attacks against Myanmar police and military posts carried out on 25 August 2017 and all acts of violence against the security forces, and stressed that the challenges facing Rakhine state and other areas in Myanmar could be resolved only through peaceful means. The Council expressed grave concern at consistent allegations of widespread sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, and called for those allegations to be investigated, for those found responsible to be held to account, and for access by victims of human rights violations, including victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence, killings and other attacks, to long-term health services and psychosocial support to be ensured. The Council requested the High Commissioner for Human Rights to track progress concerning the human rights situation of Rohingya people, and to provide oral updates, followed by an interactive dialogue, at the thirty-eighth, forty-first and forty-fourth sessions of the Human Rights Council, with a view to reaching a comprehensive solution of the crisis within three years through the full implementation of the present resolution and Council resolution 34/22. The Council also requested the High Commissioner to prepare a comprehensive written report on the situation, including on the level of cooperation and access given to the Fact-Finding Mission and other United Nations human rights mechanisms, the implementation of the present resolution, the findings and recommendations of the United Nations system on the situation of human rights of Rohingya people in Rakhine state and recommendations on a future course of action, to present the report to the Human Rights Council at its fortieth session, and to submit the report to the General Assembly for its consideration. The opening meeting of the special session heard keynote statements by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; Catalina Aguilar Devandas, Chairperson of the Coordinating Committee of the Special Procedures, who also spoke on behalf of Yanghee Lee, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar; Marzuki Darusman, Chair of the Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, in a video statement; and Pramila Patten, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict; as well as statements by Myanmar and Bangladesh as the concerned countries. A summary of their statements and the debate can be found here and here. This was the Human Rights Council’s twenty-seventh special session. Documentation relating to the special session is available on the Human Rights Council webpage. The thirty-seventh regular session of the Human Rights Council will take place from 26 February to 23 March 2018. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Council

From China to Cuba, international religious freedom (IRF) violations have remained a pressing concern throughout 2017. Here are the five most important IRF stories of this year. 1. A Three-Year Trend Reversed: Rising Religious Freedom Restrictions. In April, the Pew Research Center published its annual reportdocumenting an increase in religious restrictions for the first time in three years. The number of countries maintaining “high” or “very high” government restrictions moved from 24 to 25 percent, while the number of countries with “high” or “very high” social hostilities rose from 23 to 27 percent. This translates into 79 percent of the world’s population now living in contexts where they face marginalization, discrimination or persecution for their most closely held religious beliefs. This includes Russia, where in the past twelve months a new law has resulted in the prosecution of 180 individuals from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Muslims, Jews, Protestants and Buddhists. This reversed and rising tide stems from the ongoing crisis engulfing Syria and Iraq, unrestricted authoritarian governments, and transnational activities often linked to terrorism. 2. Nomination of Governor Sam Brownback as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. On July 26, Governor Sam Brownback was nominated to serve as the next Ambassador following in the footsteps of Ambassador David Saperstein who was well regarded for his robust engagement. Governor Brownback’s nomination was generally well received though ultimately the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved his nomination on a straight partisan vote of 11-10. Today marks day 132 since Governor Brownback’s nomination. While there is ongoing effort to see a Senate vote prior to Christmas, the window is quickly closing. 3. Unprecedented Shift to Assist Genocide Survivors in Iraq. In March 2016, Secretary Kerry determined that Christians, Yezidis and other religious minorities in Iraq had suffered genocide at the hands of the Islamic State. This was only the second time the U.S. declared an active situation as genocide. Following several important legislative attempts, on October 25, Vice President Pence announced that the White House will redirect additional money to USAID with a mandate to ensure that the religious minority communities most impacted receive an opportunity to qualify for these grants. While full implementation is still ongoing, this marks both a significant policy shift as well as an unprecedented humanitarian approach within the U.S. that has the potential to significantly help communities that have been pushed to the edge of extinction. 4. Rohingya Muslims: Horrific and Rapid Displacement. Rohingya Muslims have lived in Myanmar for generations but are regarded by many in the country as foreigners. In the fall, this long simmering conflict erupted into a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign. In the past 16 weeks, 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled as refugees to Bangladesh to escape rape, scorched earth leveling and mass killing where according to the Washington Post, “blood flowed in the streets.” 5. Relaunch of the IRF Scorecard and a Comprehensive Analysis of Congressional Engagement. In February, 21CWI relaunched the IRF Congressional Scorecard (https://irfscorecard.org/) grading all 100 Senators based on a rubric of fourteen legislative items and all 435 Representatives on twenty-five legislative items. Widely downloaded, inside Washington D.C. the IRF Scorecard has already become the source used by policy makers and professionals to understand and track the depth and breadth of international religious freedom issues pending on Capitol Hill. To be published annually, the IRF Scorecard is quietly becoming the go-to tool used by insiders. Elijah Brown Executive Vice President Take Action: 1. Contact your senators and urge them to vote for Governor Brownback as the next Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. 2. Calendar mid-February for the publication of the next IRF Scorecard and visit www.IRFscorecard.org today to see the latest insights. A Personal Note This will be the last A!ert I write in this role. On January 1, 2018, I will transition to the Baptist World Alliance as its ninth General Secretary. These past three years of working and serving alongside many of you have been an incredible privilege. I am especially grateful to 21CWI President Randel Everett and the entire staff who have given tirelessly and wholeheartedly to the mission of international religious freedom. On January 1, Sharon Payt will join the Wilberforce team as Executive Director. She has an extensive background in championing international religious freedom globally and is an amazing leader who will continue to partner with you in empowering a global movement to advance religious freedom as a universal right. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Wilberforce Initiative