A woman sobs after she lost two little sons amid the hubbub of Rohingyas gathering to collect relief at Balukhali in Photo: Star file photos/Anisur Rahmn As more than 30 makeshift rafts carrying over 1,000 Rohingyas arrived in Bangladesh in the past 10 days, the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, says it is concerned at the growing number of people resorting to desperate means to flee Myanmar. Unable to pay to cross the Naaf River that forms the border, the Rohingyas were building rafts from whatever materials they could find, such as bamboo poles and jerrycans tied together with rope and covered with plastic sheets, UNHCR spokesperson William Spindler told a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on Friday. "More than two hundred Rohingyas are known to have drowned in shipwrecks and boat incidents since the start of the crisis on 25 August," Spindler said, adding: "Recent arrivals told us they had been waiting for more than a month in desperate conditions on Myanmar's shores. Food and water are said to be running low." An estimated 620,000 Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh since 25 August. Spindler said that, despite efforts to provide more aid and services, overcrowding and difficult living conditions in the camps and makeshift sites increased health, sanitation and fire risks, as well as violence and trafficking. "There is an urgent need for additional land and more space for shelters and infrastructure to provide life-saving services and aid including water points, latrines, bathing areas, distribution points, child safe and friendly spaces, safe spaces for women and girls, community centres, etcetera," he added. So far, UNHCR has delivered hundreds of thousands of aid items including tents, plastic sheeting, blankets, sleeping mats, mosquito nets, kitchen sets, buckets and jerrycans. Talking to UNHCR in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, some 70 families who arrived this week said they fled extortion and harassment in Buthidaung, in Myanmar's Rakhine state. One man said uniformed men threatened to seize their belongings. "My uncle and my grandfather rejected their orders to share their belongings, so they were detained," he said. "My family and I fled, so we did not end up in jail." They walked through a hilly area to reach Dong Khali Chor island from where they could sail to Bangladesh. During the journey, they were stopped at a military checkpoint. "They took everything. We left with nothing but the clothes on our backs," the man added. "We decided to leave at night because the tide was high, so we could reach Bangladesh faster and avoid the sun in the day time," said Sidiq, 37, who arrived with his wife and five children aged one to 12. The raft carried 34 people, more than half of them children. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Rohingya Crisis

ROHINGYA Muslims in Myanmar are facing “destruction” and the actions of the country’s military look “like ethnic cleansing”, the Prime Minister Theresa May has said this week. Mrs May said that the UK would work through the UN to “stop this appalling and inhuman destruction of the Rohingya people”, and that the Burmese military “must take full responsibility” for the crisis. The UN has already described the situation in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State as textbook ethnic cleansing. A Sky News investigation this week took the first independent footage of the treatment being meted out to Rohingya Muslims in Rakine, including images of emaciated adults and children who have been forced onto a beach by the military and left to die. The Burmese military have denied all accusations of violence, releasing details of their own internal investigation into the situation in Rakhine State. In a post published on Facebook this week. They denied killing Rohingya people, raping women, or burning their villages, and instead blamed any violence on “terrorists” within the Rohingya community. It did announce the removal of the army chief in charge of the region, although no reasons for his transfer were given. Amnesty International said that Myanmar’s “crimes against humanity” must be punished. “The Myanmar military has made clear it has no intention of ensuring accountability; it’s now up to the international community to step up to ensure these appalling abuses do not go unpunished,” Amnesty International’s regional director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Dr James Gomez, said. Since August, more than 600,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh, where they are living in makeshift camps. More have been forced from their homes but are trapped in Myanmar. The mounting evidence of the crimes against the Rohingya has led to a backlash against Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s defacto leader. Once beloved by the West, she has now been stripped of many of the accolades once awarded to her, and there are further calls for her to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize that she won in 1991. The Irish singer and musician Sir Bob Geldof has handed back his honour of the Freedom of the city of Dublin in protest at his fellow recipient, saying that he did not want to be on the same roll as someone who was a “handmaiden to genocide”. The city of Oxford has already removed the similar honour it awarded to Ms Suu Kyi. She was a former undergraduate in the city. The Association of South East Asian Nations, which includes Myanmar, met this week and issued a statement that failed to mention the Rohingya crisis. Ms Suu Kyi attended the summit in Manila. The United States Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was due to hold talks on Wednesday with Ms Suu Kyi and the head of Myanmar’s military, to try to stem the crisis. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Church Times

When it comes to describing the acts of cruelty perpetrated by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya people, words fail. Indeed, by using rape of women and girls as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign, Myanmar has shown the world that there is nothing its army will not do in order to rid the country of Rohingya. A report from Human Rights Watch documents the extensive use of sexual violence by Myanmar’s military against women and girls, as well as other acts of violence, cruelty, and humiliation — are these accounts not enough to unite the whole world against the Myanmar regime’s current ways? The bare facts are so horrific they need no sensationalising — many women said their spouses, parents, and young children were murdered right in front of them. Many of the rape victims who fled to Bangladesh did so with swollen and torn genitals, all the while being deprived of food, shelter, or — it goes without saying — medical attention. Any country that chooses to look away when it comes to these atrocities forfeits its right to claim any moral ground in any matter. It is about time these actions of Myanmar were recognised as the crimes against humanity that they are, because to sit by and do nothing but exchange words will not make Myanmar change its ways. It is certainly not enough to merely make statements requesting Myanmar to stop using excessive force — it is blatantly clear that Myanmar has no intention to stop its operations. We do not need another eyewash from the international community, we need stern action. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Dhaka Tribune

Men work by hand to build new two-chamber latrines in Zone CC of Kutupalong Extension Site in Bangladesh. Photo by: Kelli Rogers / Devex COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — Overused toilets line the steep embankments of Kutupalong refugee camp. Sagging bamboo and tarpaulin emergency latrines balance precariously near steep drop-offs; others sit dangerously near water sources. Some have been damaged, their skinny skeletons exposing the concrete rings of a pit partially buried and unsealed, while others are already taped off completely due to waste overflow. The shallow pit latrines many refugees are using can fill up in as little as one week, several Rohingya who built their shelters in the sprawling, scorching maze of the world’s largest refugee camp told Devex. After that, the toilets stand unused — until perhaps another group arrives to build several new latrines, according to a refugee named Kamal, who has lived in Kutupalong for 12 years and who led Devex to a particularly problematic area of overflowing latrines in an area of the camp known as Lambbasia. Throughout Cox’s Bazar — a seaside district once known more as a Bangladeshi vacation destination than as the home of the world’s most persecuted minority — the scale of the water, hygiene, and sanitation challenges is massive and growing. It balloons along with the population of Rohingya who have fled across the border from a violent Myanmar military clearance operation since August. That figure has already surpassed 600,000, on top of the more than 200,000 Rohingya refugees already living in Bangladesh. Every day, men, women, and children continue to arrive, tired, malnourished, and devastated. They need safe drinking water and sanitary toilets, but neither of these basic services are guaranteed for a gap of nearly 600,000, according to the latest WASH sector situation report on Cox’s Bazar. The overall target for the WASH sector now stands at more than 1 million people. More than 26,000 temporary emergency latrines have been built so far — but “there are concerns regarding the quality, durability and the geographic distribution of the infrastructure,” according to the report. During a large-scale refugee crisis, an initial overuse of a limited number of latrines can be expected in the emergency response phase. But in this case, concerns can be traced to the fact that some groups have relied on a limited number of local contractors without providing sufficient technical oversight, several actors on the ground told Devex. In a push to meet the needs of a suddenly overwhelming number of refugees, other groups parachuted in, built shoddy standalone latrines in areas with relative “easy” access — structures that served as a very physical example of their presence and funds — and then left. “For any kind of emergency, there will be so many nontraditional actors, private foundations, private donors — those who are providing their assistance by emotion, not by logic,” said Abu Naim Shafiullah Talukder, WASH program manager and sector coordinator at Action Contre la Faim, or Action Against Hunger. “For example, if there is a private bank coming here to install 100 tube wells … they will build and they will leave. That’s a common phenomenon. In our scenario, this is happening.” Prior to the influx of refugees that began in late August, there were five organizations working on WASH in the camps. Previously in Kutupalong makeshift camp and Balukhali makeshift camp — which have now merged to become one mega camp — Action Contre la Faim and International Organization for Migration split the WASH services in order to ensure the maintenance of all the points, according to Hildegarde Thyberghien, deputy country director for ACF, which leads WASH cluster coordination. Water and sanitation groups are currently working to decommission or reassign for maintenance full or overflowing toilets. Photo by: Kelli Rogers / Devex Now, there are 44 WASH actors, a jump in numbers that makes coordination as big of a challenge as providing sustainable potable water and sanitation options for 1 million people. The intentions of nontraditional donors or groups that haven’t exercised strong construction oversight may have been to help, but latrines uphill from water points in particular put the Rohingya population in danger of serious waterborne illness — particularly cholera. Contaminated water also causes many in the camps to suffer from chronic diarrhea and skin diseases, which was apparent to Devex when speaking with refugees in line at a clinic in Kutupalong. Many guardians pointed to the scabs and irritation on children’s bodies and arms. Meanwhile, broken or overflowing latrines — as many as 36 percent of constructed latrines were about to get full, according to a Nov. 5 WASH sector report — take up valuable space that could potentially be used for other services. Many organizations have continued to dig shallow tube wells, which are cheaper and quicker to construct at less than 300 feet, but these will likely need to be converted into deep tube wells in order to provide safer drinking water. Very few groups have been chlorinating the wells after construction to protect against fecal contamination — a practice that should be standard, according to ACF’s Thyberghien. Among aid groups active on the ground now, BRAC’s name has come up as one of the guilty parties of too-quick construction, having already built more than 11,000 latrines. But BRAC, an international development organization based in Bangladesh, “maintained the sphere standard guidelines strictly,” according to Iffat Nawaz, the head of BRAC’s communications team on the ground, referencing appropriate and adequate toilet facility guidelines. “A number of latrines that were installed by actors who may have left the ground after the early onset have become unusable, and have been mis-accounted to BRAC,” Nawaz said. Nawaz credits the “high volume of humanitarian actors on the ground as well as poor coordination in the early stages of the onset” for the fact that many latrines and wells were installed between BRAC’s established tube well points, leading to eventual contamination problems in BRAC’s own water points. BRAC employed a team of auditors, who visited each of the organization’s WASH facilities and conducted thorough inspections to ensure the latrines and tube wells were safe for usage and ensured closing of any possible facility that could pose health threats for the community, she added. This fact-finding mission is ongoing through the cluster — with reports coming almost every week on the state of facilities throughout the sprawling Kutupalong extension site, as well as farther south in Leda and Nayapara makeshift camps. Still, the result on the ground is a large number of latrines and wells that were built without properly surveying the area, which then received little to no maintenance following their construction — an issue that poses ongoing health problems and adds to service gaps now. “If we install a hand pump, it requires daily maintenance,” ACF’s Talukder said. “If we install a latrine, it requires daily maintenance. A door can be broken, a roof can be broken. The holding tanks can be filled up in 7-20 days based on volume. If there is no regular maintenance, it’s going to overflow.” Ideally, WASH committees should be appointed by zone to maintain the wells and latrines installed there, while also involving the local community using the services daily to help keep them clean and functioning. This coordination is already underway, according to Nawaz. And although it is the WASH sector coordinator’s job to establish guidelines, it is not within their purview to tell other groups what to do. This can lead to the frustration of witnessing groups installing latrines or wells and bailing on upkeep, but being able to do little about it: They “can’t instruct, as the cluster lead. Theoretically they have no authority, no controlling mechanism. They are a support role,” Talukder said. As for taking shortcuts on construction by employing unreliable contractors without providing sufficient technical oversight, for example, Talukder believes that NGOs, at the least, end up answering to these practices eventually. “If we look at all the NGOs, how they get funds from all the big donors — USAID, SIDA, ECHO, EU … they are doing their own monitoring visits,” he said. “They are roaming around to see the technical aspects. So the NGOs need to present what they did with the money. The donors can see [the quality].” Now, as the sector sheds its emergency phase surge programming and moves into efforts to improve services, many latrines will be decommissioned or reassigned to groups currently active on the ground for maintenance, and there will be a focus on constructing block latrines with permanent bases. Already, BRAC has broken ground on new, double chamber latrines that allow one chamber to fill and be desludged, or cleaned, while waste is directed to the other. Several Rohingya refugees in the surrounding area will be tasked with keeping the latrines clean on a daily basis, and a BRAC team will circle back to remove waste from chambers when it’s time. BRAC teams are already desludging 50 to 60 latrines a day, Nawaz said. Aside from too few access points to some of the farthest refugee settlement zones — where the task of maintenance will be monumental until more access roads are built — the current unavailability for fecal sludge management options tops the list of challenges for WASH actors on the ground to address overflowing latrines. Sector partners are now in talks with the Bangladesh government to identify a solid waste management system and a space for the construction of a large-scale fecal sludge treatment center. There is also a sector-wide call for the construction of deep tube wells, rather than shallow ones. In the meantime, women including 25-year-old Umma Kulsum walk 15 minutes two or three times a day to fetch water to drink, to cook with, and to use to bathe their children. The path is steep and the water, she said, is making them all sick. Her children have been suffering from diarrhea for days. Several groups have come to measure a clearing near the well. Nothing has come of it yet, but “I hope they’re measuring to build a shower,” she said. Right now, she and several other women take turns holding tarps around each other, then wash with the same water that makes them sick to drink. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Devex

After the arrests of three reporters in the past three days amid a crackdown on the opposition, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) relays the fears of Cambodia’s journalists and urges the government to stop harassing them and to guarantee their right to report the news. Len Leng, a former reporter for the now closed Cambodia Dailynewspaper, was arrested yesterday outside the supreme court building in Phnom Penh and, although the hearing being held inside was supposed to be open to the public, she was taken into custody on the grounds that she did not have a press pass. Leng’s suddent arrest was attributable to the fact that the pro-government supreme court had just banned the Cambodia National Rescue Party, the only opposition party represented in parliament, thereby turning Cambodia into a de facto one-party state just months ahead of elections due to be held next July. The authorities are clearly bent on silencing all dissent. After the arrests of two former Radio Free Asia (RFA) journalists, Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, in Phnom Penh on 14 November, interior ministry spokesman Kieu Sopheak accused them of trying to improvise a studio in order to send news to RFA’s Washington headquarters. “The court is checking to find the crime,” the spokesman added, referring to the Phnom Penh municipal court’s uncertainty as to what they would be charged with. The two journalists, who deny the allegations, are due to appear in court today. “These latest cases clearly show that the law and the judicial system are being used to suppress any independent reporting and, above all, to intimidate the entire press,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk. “We relay and share the deep concern of many journalists on the ground after these arbitrary arrests. International organizations need to understand the gravity of what is happening in Phnom Penh. The denial of media freedom means the end of a 25-year democratic transition after the trauma of the Khmer Rouge genocide.” In September, the Cambodian authorities ordered the closure of all local radio stations that carried RFA’s programming, resulting in theclosure of this US-funded broadcaster’s Phnom Penh bureau and the loss of 50 jobs. In Washington, RFA spokesman Rohit Mahajan voiced dismay at the“harassment of former RFA journalists.” He said: “The concern is that actions like these only reinforce the misuse of power by [Prime Minister] Hun Sen and the ruling CPP to intimidate independent voices and free press.” Leng is not the first former Cambodia Daily reporter to be harassed. Two others, Aun Pheap and Zsombor Peter, were recently accused of inciting crime by covering the campaign for municipal elections held in June. Created in 1993, the same year as Cambodia’s first free elections, theCambodia Daily was forced to close on 4 September by a sudden tax department demand for payment of 6.3 million dollars in alleged back taxes. Ranked 132nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s2017 World Press Freedom Index, Cambodia is liable to fall in next year’s index. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Reporters Without Borders

Ask most people what they know about Cameroon, and the best informed may mention the national soccer team. Otherwise, the small central African country rarely makes the headlines. Yet, it deserves the international community’s attention right now, before a trickle of refugees becomes a flood; and before the dozens of peaceful protesters shot dead by security services become hundreds or thousands. Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur should have taught us that if the world looks the other way, rather than applying diplomatic pressure on autocratic leaders, we pay a high price for peacekeeping operations and reconstruction, once the killing ends. Purely on economic grounds, prompt action makes sense. Morally, preventing ethnic cleansing and massive human rights abuses with early diplomatic intervention is also clearly the right thing to do. In Cameroon, the grievances of the English-speaking minority, long side lined by the French-speaking majority, have boiled over. After decades of discrimination, Anglophones are calling for a fair share of economic and political power. However, the Francophone government of President Paul Biya, Cameroon’s ruler since 1982, has responded with disproportionate ferocity. Shooting church-goers as they emerge from mass, and firing at unarmed civilians from helicopters, is a sure way of inciting further unrest. What began as a peaceful strike by lawyers and teachers for better working conditions soon became a grassroots campaign for a federal, less centralized government, giving English-speakers equal rights. But the protesters have become polarized by President Biya’s heavy-handed response. People who would have settled for a more devolved form of power are now demanding secession and the formation of an independent country called Ambazonia. Twenty thousand Anglophones have fled to neighboring Nigeria in fear of what is to come. The deaths of several gendarmes, in addition to explosions on November 12, are signs that Anglophone grievance may become increasingly violent. The United Nations Human Rights Commission does not have a good track record on standing up against the corrupt ruling elite of developing nations. However, even they have been moved to call on the Cameroon government to ensure the equal treatment of the English-speaking minority, guaranteeing its rights of expression and assembly. The Commission urged officials to carry out an impartial investigation of “the excessive use of force by Cameroon police officers,” resulting in deaths and injuries during protests at the beginning of October. Anglophone frustration exploded a year ago when lawyers protested that new laws were not translated from French into English; courts in Anglophone areas were forced to conduct their business in French; and they had Francophone judges who could not or would not speak English foisted upon them. The lawyers were soon joined by teachers and others from civil society. There was anger that Francophone teachers with little or no English skills were teaching Anglophone children in French. Once a week, schools and shops close down now, creating so-called Ghost Towns. There are suggestions that some Anglophone citizens feel intimidated into cooperating with the Ghost Town protests by the more militant Anglophone activists who are pushing for separation. Representing the more moderate Anglophone voices are the Roman Catholic bishops of Bamenda, and the moderators of Presbyterian and Baptist churches. They are calling on the government to engage in genuine dialog and to investigate attacks on civilians. The bishops warn that a volatile situation may deteriorate further. Observers believe the churches are well-placed to host any dialog which would need to include grassroots representatives if it is to be perceived as legitimate. However, until there is a unified and coherent Anglophone position, it is feared President Biya will divide and rule. The government has disrupted civil society by suspending the internet in the Anglophone areas intermittently, and enforcing a curfew regularly. Moreover, the Francophone authorities designate activists as terrorists, akin to the Islamist Boko Haram jihadists present in west and central Africa. President Biya, said to be in denial about Anglophone grievances, ordered the arrest of journalists and opposition figures, and the reported torture of dozens of activists. According to the International Crisis Group, 40 people were killed, hundreds imprisoned, and many more are missing or unaccounted for . Despite all this, the international community is reluctant to criticise Biya’s government because Cameroon’s armed forces are fighting the West’s war against militant Islamism. Its soldiers are engaged in a battle against Boko Haram in the Far North region of the country, where 2,000 Cameroon civilians and soldiers have been killed. The country also hosts 348,000 refugees fleeing sectarian conflict in the neighboring Central African Republic. The United Kingdom has colonial ties with the Anglophone region, and left behind its legal and education system, as well as “Anglo-Saxon values,” according to local people. However, when pressed in Parliament, British ministers blandly encourage dialog. They urge all sides to be peaceful, as if there is an equivalence between the unarmed civilians being shot from helicopters, and the security services doing the killing. It is not too late to apply diplomatic pressure on President Biya’s government, but it requires the international community to think one or two steps ahead, learning the lessons of past atrocities. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Huffington Post

The Zimbabwe Defense Forces have taken control of the country. What exactly happened? The crisis burst into the open on 6 November when President Mugabe fired Vice President EmmersonMnangagwa and expelled him from the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Mnangagwa has been aligned with the military and Zimbabwe’s National Liberation War Veterans Association, and had been in a fierce struggle for power in the race to succeed the country’s 93-year-old leader. His principal opponent was Grace Mugabe, the president’s wife, who heads a rival faction of ZANUP-PF veterans known as the G40, leads the women’s wing and is popular among young party activists. The army then unambiguously stepped in. A statement on 13 November by the commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, General Constantino Chiwenga, called for an end to the unfolding purge of party elements that took part in Zimbabwe’s fifteen-year war of liberation from white rule, and warned that the army would intervene against any threat to the integrity of the revolution that led to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Almost 24 hours later, the party’s spokesperson, Ambassador SK Moyo, accused Chiwenga of treasonous utterances and overstepping his mandate. Then, in the early November, troops took control of the government’s media headquarters and other important buildings. The military urged the sixteen million Zimbabweans to “limit unnecessary movement” and have called for calm among key components of the state, the judiciary, parliamentarians, the security sector, churches, youth formations, traditional leaders and other political actors. Military vehicles were parked on the streets, but on the morning of 15 November this did not discourage Zimbabweans from going about their lives almost as normal. Incidents of violence appear to have been minimal, with few reports of gunfire and some of beatings. There is no evidence of overt division within the security sector. An effective news blackout from the state media has however made people reliant on international and social media, and speculation is rife. A great variety of sentiments are being expressed, from relief and excitement that Mugabe's long reign may be finally over, to a profound nervousness that what follows could be even worse. Does the military action spell the end of Robert Mugabe’s 37 years in power? Mugabe appears to have lost power, but not his position as president, at least in the first two days after the military move. At 01:26 in the early hours of Wednesday 15 November, an army spokesman delivered a written statement on national television and radio claiming the military had taken action, “targeting criminals around [President Mugabe] who are committing crimes and are causing social and economic suffering in the country to bring them to justice”. The statement said the president and his family were safe and that “as soon as we have accomplished our mission, we expect the country to return to normalcy”. South African President Jacob Zuma confirmed Mugabe is “confined to his home”, as is apparently his wife, Grace. But Mugabe’s personal position remains unclear on many fronts. Does the military’s action constitute a coup d’état? This is a very peculiar kind of coup. Effectively there has been a military takeover, but the army has not declared martial law, the suspension of the constitution, or the deposition of the country’s head of state. The military and those such as War Veterans who supported a robust pushback following Vice President Mnangagwa’s dismissal have been at pains to argue that they are not pushing for a coup. Outside powers are also at pains not to use the word “coup” in relation to current events. Yet General Chiwenga’s statement on 13 November had the hallmarks of threatening to seize power. He said that unless Mugabe took appropriate steps there would be a military intervention, albeit to address an apparent security threat perceived in both the ruling party and the country at large. The situation, he argued, warranted action and was in line with the military’s previous interventions in internal ZANU-PF disputes, enacted to ensure the ruling party and its revolutionary objectives were not hijacked. It would appear that Mugabe was either unable or refused to take the steps being demanded, setting in motion Chiwenga’s promised action. The military’s televised broadcast maintained that “we wish to make it abundantly clear that this is not a military takeover of government. What the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) is doing is to pacify a degenerating political, social and economic situation in our country which if not addressed may result in violent conflict”. The statement urged important arms of government and social constituencies to remain focused and calm. There may well be sympathy for the military’s intervention from several domestic and regional quarters, but it sets dangerous anti-democratic precedent with major implications for Zimbabwe and beyond. How much longer can this overt military intervention avoid being labelled a coup d’état? While the army’s intentions may be couched in constitutional language, the democratic credentials of those pursuing this course of action are also in doubt. Just as importantly, will the military, in conjunction with ZANU-PF and the government, be able to cobble together a plausible veneer of legality around this intervention? Will the opposition and civil society take a clear stance on this? Will President Mugabe, whose controversial election in 2013 was widely accepted, be willing and able to put his imprimatur on any new suggested plan of action? What has been the regional reaction? The African Union (AU) and Southern African Development Community (SADC) rightly condemn unconstitutional takeovers of power as a red line not to be crossed. At the time of going to press, neither the AU nor SADC have expressly condemned the Zimbabwe military’s intervention or described it as a coup. There have been growing frustrations with how Mugabe has been mishandling internal factional dynamics, the economy and the unresolved issues of his own succession, exacerbated by the destabilising antics of the first lady. The SADC chairman, Jacob Zuma, despatched two special envoys to Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, his defence minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, and the new and little experienced state security minister, Advocate Bongani Bongo. From there, the envoys are expected to travel to Angola to brief President João Lourenço who is chairperson of SADC’s Organ for Politics, Defence and Security. Zuma confirmed he had been in touch with Mugabe and with the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, which are well-regarded in the region. Zuma called for “calm and restraint” and for the ZDF “to ensure peace and stability are not undermined”. He made no mention of a coup d’état. Speaking on Tuesday, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) Secretary General Gwede Mantashe made it clear that the ANC doesn’t want to get involved in the rift. “ZANU-PF must deal with the issue because Zimbabwe is not our colony. It’s not our province, it’s our neighbour. If things go wrong there, of course, we’ll be concerned because it’ll impact on us, but we have no authority over them, that’s the point we’re making”. Where are Zimbabwe’s domestic politics heading? What kind of transitional government might be possible? When Mugabe fired Vice President Mnangagwa on 6 November, it was thought that Grace Mugabe had prevailed in the eventual struggle to succeed her husband. But the army’s reaction appears to have ended the chances of her taking over. The army has now detained senior members of Grace Mugabe’s G40 faction of party veterans, including Party Commissar Saviour Kasukuwere, Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo, and Patrick Zhuwao, Mugabe’s nephew and minister of public services, labour and social welfare. Some social media is reporting Higher Education Minister Jonathan Moyo has also been arrested; others claim he also sought refuge with Mugabe. Others reportedly taken in include the ZANU-PF youth league chairperson, Kudzai Chipanga; images of his beaten visage have been circulating on social media. Unconfirmed reports claim the commissioner of police, Augustine Chihuri has also been detained. It remains to be seen who else constitutes the alleged “criminals and counter-revolutionaries” referred to by the military and whether they will now be subjected to due process, criminal investigation and prosecution. 36 hours after the announcement on state media, there had still been no public statement from the government or from any key political players. A statement from opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who is on his way back to Harare this evening, is keenly awaited. The most likely person to benefit from recent events is Mnangagwa. Some ZANU-PF party structures have already reversed their former support for Mnangagwa’s expulsion. He was in the past held out by many as the best hope within ZANU-PF for piloting a pragmatic economic recovery predicated on re-engagement with international creditors and a package of reform that would instil a measure of much needed confidence. He now has a chance to show that he can deliver on this promise. If Mugabe steps down from office, Mnangagwa could be sworn in as interim leader. Tsvangirai has not indicated what line he will take, but he has made political deals before. It may be we are in for a staggered transitional process that features a staged public show of Mugabe "overseeing" the process, which would allow the new powers in the land to introduce credibly some kind of interim government. Some wish to bring forward parliamentary elections currently scheduled for mid-2018, but with guarantees that the political space will be opened up. Others are pushing for a longer transition, even up to two to three years, in the hope that this period can be used to level the political playing field and to build some foundation for economic recovery. But even if Mnangagwa wins formal control of ZANU-PF at the scheduled ZANU-PF Extraordinary Congress in December, it is unclear whether he can cobble together a transitional unity government that can turn around the moribund economy and end the political crisis. Mnangagwa may explore options for an executive that incorporates opposition elements and those more recently estranged from ZANU-PF, such as Joice Mujuru. This would probably mean postponing the 2018 elections, which many believe would in any case be unable to provide a legitimising platform for reform and recovery in the current political context. Such a proposition would require broad based buy-in, not only from opposition elements, but civil society more broadly. Their endorsement and participation in charting a new national vision is essential, if this interregnum is to generate a credible set of options designed to enhance and rebuild Zimbabwe’s democratic credibility. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

On December 16, 2016, Tanya Gersh answered her phone and heard gunshots. Startled, she hung up. Gersh, a real-estate agent who lives in Whitefish, Montana, assumed it was a prank call. But the phone rang again. More gunshots. Again, she hung up. Another call. This time, she heard a man’s voice: “This is how we can keep the Holocaust alive,” he said. “We can bury you without touching you.” When Gersh put down the phone, her hands were shaking. She was one of only about 100 Jews in Whitefish and the surrounding Flathead Valley, and she knew there were white nationalists and “sovereign citizens” in the area. But Gersh had lived in Whitefish for more than 20 years, since just after college, and had always considered the scenic ski town an idyllic place. She didn’t even have a key to her house—she’d never felt the need to lock her door. Now that sense of security was about to be shattered. The calls marked the start of a months-long campaign of harassment orchestrated by Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer. He claimed that Gersh was trying to “extort” a property sale from Sherry Spencer, whose son, Richard Spencer, was another prominent white nationalist and the face of the so-called alt-right movement. The Spencers had long-standing ties to Whitefish, and Richard had been based there for years. But he gained international notoriety just after the 2016 election for giving a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he declared “Hail Trump!,” prompting Nazi salutes from his audience. In response, some Whitefish residents considered protesting in front of a commercial building Sherry owned in town. According to Gersh, Sherry sought her advice, and Gersh suggested that she sell the property, make a donation to charity, and denounce her son’s white-nationalist views. But Sherry claimed that Gersh had issued “terrible threats,” and she wrote a post on Medium on December 15 accusing her of an attempted shakedown. (Sherry Spencer did not respond to a request for comment.) At the time, Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin barely knew each other. Spencer, who fancies himself white nationalism’s leading intellectual, cloaks his racism in highbrow arguments. Anglin prefers the gutter, reveling in the vile language common on the worst internet message boards. But Spencer and Anglin had appeared together on a podcast the day before Sherry’s Medium post was published and expressed their mutual admiration. Anglin declared it a “historic” occasion, a step toward greater unity on the extreme right. Tanya Gersh was the target of a months-long campaign of harassment instigated by Andrew Anglin on The Daily Stormer. (Dan Chung / Southern Poverty Law Center) It was in this spirit that Anglin “doxed” Gersh and her husband, Judah, as well as other Jews in Whitefish, by publishing their contact information and other personal details on his website. He plastered their photographs with yellow stars emblazoned with jude and posted a picture of the Gershes’ 12-year-old son superimposed on the gates at Auschwitz. He commanded his readers—his “Stormer Troll Army”—to “hit ’em up.” “All of you deserve a bullet through your skull,” one Stormer said in an email. “Put your uppity slut wife Tanya back in her cage, you rat-faced kike,” another wrote to Judah. “You fucking wicked kike whore,” Andrew Auernheimer, The Daily Stormer’s webmaster, said in a voicemail for Gersh. “This is Trump’s America now.” Over the next week, the Stormers besieged Whitefish businesses, human-rights groups, city-council members—anyone potentially connected to the targets. A single harasser called Judah’s office more than 500 times in three days, according to the Whitefish police. Gersh came home one night to find her husband sitting at home in the dark, suitcases on the floor, wondering whether they should flee. “I have never been so scared in my entire life,” she later told me. That Anglin, a 33-year-old college dropout, could unleash such mayhem—Whitefish’s police chief, Bill Dial, likened it to “domestic terrorism”—was a sign of just how emboldened the alt-right had become. Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection. But where Rockwell and Pierce relied on pamphlets, the radio, newsletters, and in-person organizing to advance their aims, Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented. He also arrived at a more fortuitous moment. Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society. They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been. Anglin is the alt-right’s most accomplished propagandist, and his writing taps into some of the same anxieties and resentments that helped carry Trump to the presidency—chiefly a perceived loss of status among white men. Six days into his Whitefish campaign, Anglin announced phase two: an armed protest. “Montana has extremely liberal open carry laws,” he wrote on The Daily Stormer. “My lawyer is telling me we can easily march through the center of the town carrying high-powered rifles.” He scheduled the event for January 16, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and predicted that about 200 people would show up for a “James Earl Ray Day Extravaganza” in honor of King’s assassin. He promised to bus skinheads in from the Bay Area. As national news outlets picked up the story, frightened Whitefish residents gathered for a community meeting, where Dial, the police chief, saw a 90-year-old Jewish couple trembling with fear. Some people had alarm systems installed. A rabbi had paranoid visions of skinheads in the woods with night-vision goggles and scoped weapons. The police increased patrols. Montana’s governor, Steve Bullock, swooped into town, as did representatives of the Anti-Defamation League. The president of the World Jewish Congress demanded that authorities halt the march, calling it a “dangerous and life-threatening rally that puts all of America at risk.” Anglin stoked the hysteria by claiming that European nationalists, along with a Hamas representative and a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, were coming too. “Nothing can stop us,” he declared. In the end, no one showed up—no European nationalists, no Hamas representatives, no armed skinheads. There was no “March on Whitefish.” Instead Anglin slunk away, having panicked a small town for a month. The Whitefish attack cemented his reputation as the trollmaster of the alt-right. But it left some wondering about the movement’s commitment to its cause. Was this all just a sick joke? Over the coming months, however, Anglin continued to build his audience and urge his followers to take their hate offline, into the real world. In August, when white nationalists actually did stage a major rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, many of his readers were there, chanting slogans he had coined. The alt-right, it became clear, was coming off the message boards and into the streets. By then, I’d spent months reporting on Anglin, trying to understand who he was and how he’d built such a following, as well as how serious a threat he and the rest of the alt-right actually posed. Anglin’s path to white nationalism was disturbing, and more circuitous than I could have imagined. But it fit a pattern that scholars have identified, in that he seems to have been driven, at least initially, more by a desire for status and belonging than by deeply held beliefs. Anglin wanted to be somebody, and the internet gave him a way. Columbus, ohio, is a funky, still kind-of gritty city, and I went there in January looking for clues to Anglin’s past. On a rainy Saturday, about 45 protesters, some with black masks covering their faces, gathered outside a drab two-story building in Worthington, a suburb of Columbus, where Anglin’s father, Greg, runs a Christian counseling service. Anglin has long kept his own location secret. For years he floated around Europe, and one family member told me that around 2015 he was holed up in Russia, his last known foreign address. Another source showed me Facebook messages from Anglin’s childhood best friend that indicated Anglin was still living there last year. But he maintained a footprint in Columbus through his father, who has said he was “not really involved with Andy’s site.” In fact, Greg was involved. He’d registered The Daily Stormer’s trade name and filed paperwork for his son’s limited-liability corporation, Moonbase Holdings—a likely reference to a conspiracy theory that Hitler survived World War II by escaping to a secret lunar base. In January, antifascist activists protested outside the office of Anglin’s father, in Worthington, Ohio. No payment processor would touch The Daily Stormer, but Anglin had little trouble raising money. Since 2014, he has taken in about $250,000 worth of bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, from unknown sources, according to John Bambenek, a cybersecurity expert who has been tracking neo-Nazis’ bitcoin wallets. Anglin urged his readers to send checks as well. Those donations went to Greg’s office, which was why the protesters had gathered outside, many of them from the Columbus chapter of Anti-Racist Action, a national antifascist network. Anglin had first come to my attention in the summer of 2015, after he endorsed Trump on The Daily Stormer. When I interviewed him over email for HuffPostlast year, he lied to me repeatedly—about his site’s traffic numbers, his financing, his location. Before that article came out, he falsely accused me on The Daily Stormer of fabricating information from the FBI regarding his whereabouts. More than once, I offered to walk him through my reporting, but he refused to hear me out. He also refused numerous requests to talk to me for this article. Since our last exchange, I’d watched him tirelessly spew hatred while boasting that “only bullets” could stop him. But he never came out from behind his keyboard. And although he showed no scruples about smearing others and flagging them for harassment, he became wildly defensive when anyone dared examine his life. The Daily Stormer had become arguably the leading hate site on the internet, far surpassing Stormfront, whose message boards had brought white nationalism into the digital age back in the 1990s. Anglin was a punchy, prolific writer who used snark and hyperbole to draw in Millennial readers. “Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism” was how he described his approach. Irony gave him cover to claim that he was just kidding around. He cited Infowars, Vice, and BuzzFeed as inspiration, but the closest analogue in terms of format and tone, he said, was Gawker. Like the now-shuttered gossip site, The Daily Stormer aggregated the news with attitude. Unlike Gawker, Anglin doctored everything to reflect his racist worldview. Anglin wrote about his longing for a race war and urged his readers to prepare for combat against nebulous forces unleashed by Jews, blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, women, liberals, journalists—anyone who might impede the alt-right’s assault on the nation. Like many young men on the extreme right, Anglin hadn’t just given up on the idea of the United States as a liberal democracy. He wanted to burn it to the ground. “There is rapidly approaching a time when in every White Western city, corpses will be stacked in the streets as high as men can stack them,” he wrote. “And you are either going to be stacking or getting stacked.” Anglin’s influence extended offline with Daily Stormer “book clubs,” which he created to engage his followers in “real world actions.” The clubs were small chapters of readers who gathered in cities in the U.S., Canada, and other countries. A Columbus group met at a gun range. Other clubs had been kicked out of bars after openly expressing anti-Semitic views or flaunting Nazi paraphernalia. Anglin pressed his readers to study martial arts, learn to use firearms, and engage in “simulated warfare” through paramilitary training with pellet guns. Among the protesters in the rain outside Greg’s office, I met Anglin’s preschool teacher, Gail Burkholder, who described being shocked when she’d learned that her former student had grown up to be a notorious white nationalist. “Why would I think one of my students would become a Nazi who wants to kill me?” said Burkholder, who is Jewish. She’d spotted Anglin’s name in the news after Dylann Roof murdered nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof reportedly left comments on The Daily Stormer, and he has become a hero to Anglin’s readers, who honor him with “bowl cut” memes. Roof wasn’t the only killer who read The Daily Stormer. In 2016, Thomas Mair shot and stabbed a British member of Parliament. This year, James Harris Jackson was charged with killing a black man with a sword in New York City and cited The Daily Stormer as an ideological influence. Devon Arthurs, an 18-year-old former neo-Nazi who converted to Islam, shot and killed two of his three roommates in Tampa, who were still neo-Nazis. Police arrested the surviving roommate for hoarding explosive materials. Until the Roof massacre, Burkholder hadn’t thought about the “adorable,” “happy-go-lucky” boy in her class who loved dinosaurs. Anglin was a normal kid back then, whose only remarkable quality was his extraordinarily nasal voice—it was so bad that Burkholder thought he might have a sinus problem, and raised the issue with his mother, Katie, at a parent–teacher conference. But that was nearly 30 years ago. Everyone who’d known Anglin when he was young seemed to wonder the same thing: What had happened to turn him into a neo-Nazi? Luke O'Brien on the alt-right By all outward appearances, Andrew Anglin had an ordinary, comfortable childhood, at least until adolescence. He grew up in a big house in Worthington Hills, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where he collected X-Men comics, played computer games, ate burgers at the original Wendy’s restaurant, and got into music with his best friend, West Emerson. And he loved to read. One book that left a deep impression on him was Weasel, which tells the story of a boy in frontier Ohio seeking revenge against a psychopath who, having run out of American Indians to murder, takes to slaughtering white homesteaders. When Anglin entered the Linworth Alternative Program, Columbus’s “hippie” high school, as a freshman in 1999, other students found him a quiet, insecure kid who craved attention and wanted to fit in. A declared atheist, he styled his reddish hair in dreadlocks and favored jeans with 50-inch leg openings. He often wore a hoodie with a large fuck racism patch on the back. In high school, Anglin was a vegan and took progressive stances on various issues. This photo has been posted on alt-right sites by people questioning his sincerity. Anglin was one of only two vegans at Linworth, and before long he began dating the other, a brunette named Alison in the class ahead of him, whom he wooed by baking vegan cookies. She was a popular girl who introduced him to a diverse and edgy clique of kids. To them, Anglin seemed sweet and funny, if a little too eager to latch on to causes. Alison was deeply into animal rights. Suddenly, he was too. He also got deeply into drugs, according to half a dozen people who knew him at the time. He did LSD at school or while wandering through the scenic Highbanks Metro Park, north of the city. He took ketamine, ate psychedelic mushrooms, and snorted cocaine on weekends. He chugged Robitussin, and “robo tripped” so much that he damaged his stomach and would vomit into trash cans at school. This photo appeared in Anglin’s high-school yearbook and shows him with his then-girlfriend. At home, Anglin spent hours in his parents’ basement downloading music and visiting early Flash-animation sites. According to Cameron Loomis, a former friend, Anglin’s favorite online destination was Rotten.com, which collected images of mangled corpses, deformities, and sexual perversions. Anglin set up his own website, for a fake record label called “Andy Sucks! Records” that he used to dupe bands into sending him demo tapes. Here, his leftist leanings were on full display: He wrote posts encouraging people to send the Westboro Baptist Church death threats from untraceable accounts, and he mocked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations. He wasn’t so different, back then, from the antifascist activists who would one day protest outside his dad’s office. But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth. Visitors to his house saw holes in his bedroom walls, and they knew that when he was upset, he would smash his head into things. Several recall an episode at a party: Anglin burst out crying after Alison drunkenly kissed someone else, then ran outside and bashed his head on the sidewalk over and over. He harmed himself in other ways, too. He tried to tattoo the name of his favorite band, Modest Mouse, on his upper arm but gave up after two and a half letters, leaving him with moi etched on his skin. He stretched his earlobes by jamming thick marker caps into piercing holes until they dripped blood. He claimed to feel no pain and used lighters to melt the flesh on the inside of his forearms. He provoked people into assaulting him but never fought back, instead laughing as the blows fell. Two kids beat him into a gutter once. Anglin just lay there until they stopped, out of pity and confusion. Former friends recall that Anglin’s parents seemed blind to their son’s alarming behavior. And while he could be tender toward his younger siblings, Chelsey and Mitch, and loyal to his friends, he also had a sadistic side. Alison (who asked that her last name be withheld from this article) told me that during Anglin’s sophomore year, she called him, distraught: She said she’d passed out at a party and been raped by a friend’s older brother. She needed compassion and support, but Anglin just laughed and broke up with her. “You’re a slut,” she remembers him saying. Several girls Anglin had gotten to know at another high school began calling her house at all hours of the night, according to Alison and other sources. “You deserved it,” they’d say. “You slut.” Alison says the abuse went on for weeks, as Anglin showed friends a video he’d made of them having sex. After the breakup, Dan Newman, another friend at the time, remembers Anglin once bashing his head into the walls of his bedroom in such a frenzy that his mother had to call the police. Several classmates told me that Anglin didn’t date again in high school and sometimes tried to kiss other boys, including one black student he especially liked. Whether this behavior was authentic experimentation or just for shock value, it’s notable in light of the extreme homophobia Anglin has since expressed on The Daily Stormer and elsewhere. He has advocated, for instance, throwing gays off buildings, isis-style. By Anglin’s junior year, Greg and Katie’s marriage had come undone. People who knew Katie back then described her to me as a browbeaten woman who lived in fear of her husband. A person who was close to one of Greg’s former clients, along with two Columbus pastors familiar with Greg’s work as a counselor, told me that Greg got involved emotionally, and sometimes sexually, with his female clients. Court documents related to his divorce support this claim: A former client is identified as his girlfriend. Greg would later make her a partner in his counseling practice. (Neither of Anglin’s parents responded to requests for comment.) Shortly after the divorce proceedings began, Anglin found a new emotional outlet: listening to a right-wing radio host who claimed that 9/11 was an inside job. This was Alex Jones, who would go on to become America’s premier conspiracy theorist. For Anglin, he was an entry point into the “internet truth movement,” an online realm filled with all manner of paranoid delusions. Soon Anglin was pulling classmates aside to warn them about lizard people. After graduation, few of his friends saw or spoke to him again. To spend any significant amount of time in truther forums is to feel the traps being set, the hooks sinking in. What if?, the mind wonders. For those short on critical-thinking skills, the forums can be infectious and addictive. Here, one might conclude, are fellow detectives working to excavate realities hidden from the “normie” mainstream—that jet contrails contain chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government, for example, or that the moon landing was faked. Anglin threw himself into this world after high school as he drove around the country, listening to truthers and living out of his Honda Civic. In 2004, he spent a night in jail in Santa Barbara, California, after being arrested for drunk driving. When he returned to Columbus after months on the road, he enrolled at Ohio State University to study English, but dropped out after one semester. In early 2006, he was arrested near campus for two minor drug offenses. (He pleaded guilty to one charge; the other was dismissed.) Anglin was by then spending a lot of time on 4chan, a website that lets users post images and comments anonymously, and that has drawn droves of socially isolated young people thumbing their noses at political correctness. The channers started memes and organized pranks that would later evolve into troll campaigns such as Gamergate, which targeted women in the gaming community with death threats and other abuse. On one board in particular, users vied to see who could make the most-racist comments, ostensibly as a joke. Over time, the humor receded and the racism stuck. “4chan was more influential on me than anything,” Anglin told me over email last year before he cut off communication. In November 2006, Anglin launched his own conspiracy-theory website, virtually all traces of which were removed from the internet during the time I was reporting this story. He called the site Outlaw Journalism, a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, whom he idolized, though Anglin’s writing more closely resembled the rantings of Alex Jones—outrageous posts laced with misogyny and anti-immigrant sentiment. “Welcome to the future,” he wrote. “We’re living in a science fiction nightmare.” In March 2007, Anglin published his first post about Donald Trump, highlighting a video clip from a 2000 roast of Rudy Giuliani. In the video, the then-mayor is dressed in drag and sprays perfume on his fake breasts. Trump shoves his face into Giuliani’s chest. Anglin labeled them both “fags” and wrote that Giuliani must be having a “twisted homosexual transvestite affair with Donald Trump.” Elsewhere on his site, Anglin wrote about blood rituals and underground tunnels used by pedophiles and fetus-eaters. He wrote that the government was a “scientific dictatorship” trying to implant microchips in citizens’ brains to create a “worldwide slave grid.” This delusional thinking eventually overwhelmed Anglin. “I just about lost my fucking mind on that conspiracy shit,” he admitted on a podcast years later. He withdrew to a relative’s farm, most likely his maternal grandmother’s 84-acre property south of Columbus, which had woods, a stream, and fields. “I had some issues, and moved to the country,” he wrote on Outlaw Journalism in May 2007, noting that his thoughts were “about 200 percent clearer.” He took in the stars at night and enjoyed the “ecstatic luxury of taking a long walk on non-paved surfaces.” But he couldn’t stay away from the truthers. He created the Outlaw Forum, a 4chan-esque board where people could burble about conspiracies. Before long, they began harassing other truthers with whom Anglin clashed. It was his first cybermob. The internet truthers had embraced a new medium, but their mode of thinking was hardly novel. In his famous 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the conspiratorial fantasies of Barry Goldwater supporters in terms that sound strikingly contemporary: “The modern right … feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” A similar anxiety about displacement runs through the internet truth movement, which helps explain why it has been a key gateway for the alt-right. Obsessed with systems of control, many truthers end up harping on Jewish influence in society. Some deny that the Holocaust occurred, contending that it was an elaborate ruse designed to let Jews play victims at the expense of everyone else. The Holohoax, as it is known, gives its adherents an excuse to blame everything they hate on a cabal of Jews: Feminism. Immigration. Globalization. Liberalism. Egalitarianism. The media. Science. Facts. Video-game addiction. Romantic failure. The NBA being 74.4 percent black. According to the Holohoax, it’s all a plot to undermine traditional white patriarchy so Jews can maintain a parasitic dominion over the Earth. Anglin didn’t buy into the Holohoax right away, but a nascent anti-Semitism infused his early writing. He riffed about the “Zionist Occupied Government” and urged readers to contact the German Embassy to protest the conviction of an infamous Holocaust denier for breaking a law against inciting hatred. As Anglin’s prospects narrowed, his worldview got even bleaker. In February 2008, he was arrested for driving while impaired and spent 10 days in jail, according to court records. The following January, he reported working 50 hours a week in a warehouse and still being unable to afford his own place. That June, he published what would be his last post on Outlaw Journalism for years. It was a warning about the banking system, one-world government, organ harvesting, and plant–animal gene-splicing. “Glowing green monkeys are able to have baby glowing green monkeys,” he wrote. “The only logical path for humanity to take is to utterly abandon [civilization] and return to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle,” he concluded. He wanted to fish and hunt and grow his own food, to live in a hut, to spend time “having fun, telling stories, making music, creating art, dancing, making love to the wife, joking with the old folks and generally living it up.” So he got on a plane and flew toward the jungles of Southeast Asia. It was there, after a darker plunge into delusion, that he would take his final step into neo-Nazism. The rain poured off the thatched roof of Anglin’s bamboo hut. Outside, tropical ferns shook with water. He’d arrived in the jungle, but it had been a winding journey. After leaving Columbus, he’d meandered through Asia until he reached the Philippines. He’d been reading Joseph Campbell, the writer famous for his work on mythology, and thinking about how to forge his own heroic narrative. Anglin wanted a tribe—a real one. And he’d been looking. He hiked into the mountains with boys who carried drinking water in plastic Monsanto fertilizer jugs and went to Manila to find squatter villages where people “drink from sewers.” He explored the island of Mindanao on a moped and posed for selfies wearing a wry expression, a Marlboro hanging from his lips or tucked behind his ear. In one video he made, he stood shirtless on a beach describing the horrors of deforestation. Anglin established a home base at the Sampaguita Tourist Inn, a $10-a-night hotel in Davao City, where he lived for months at a time off money his father sent. He liked to sit in the lobby with his laptop, drinking Nescafé and planning his next move. At the time, Davao was ruled with an iron fist by its authoritarian mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, now the president of the Philippines. (Anglin shook Duterte’s hand once and has made praise of the violence-prone politician a staple of Daily Stormer coverage.) It was the third-biggest city in the country but hardly a mecca for 20-something Americans. That’s why, in 2009, Anglin came to the attention of Edward, a 33-year-old New Yorker and the only other young American in the hotel. Edward, who asked that his last name be withheld, spent months at a time in the Philippines over the course of several years. He and Anglin became friends and went out to eat together almost every day. Edward thought Anglin was fun and intelligent, with excellent taste in music. Edward had once run a small music-distribution business, but Anglin still introduced him to new bands, such as the Felice Brothers. Yet there was something off about Anglin, who said he wasn’t going back to the United States. “He was running away, clearly,” Edward told me. But from what? Edward recalls Anglin claiming that he’d been trafficking cocaine back home. “I honestly thought that’s why he’d left America,” he said. Edward told me that Anglin acted like he was smarter than everyone else, and in a country where young white men are “treated in a godly way,” Anglin’s ego only grew. He had a complex about being short—he claims to be 5 foot 7, but several people I talked with put his height closer to 5 foot 4. In Davao, however, Anglin hit on every pretty young Filipina he saw and had success with many of them, sometimes taking advantage of their hope that an American husband could be an exit from poverty. Most of these girls were 18 or 19 years old, but Edward says some were younger. He remembers Anglin once picking up a 14-year-old in a bar and bringing her back to the Sampaguita to spend the night. Yet Anglin was troubled by the ways Western society seemed to have degraded Filipino culture—he despised Christian missionaries and was appalled to see Filipinos listening to Lady Gaga instead of traditional music. “You see the way white people—and it is white people—went around the whole world … and fucked everybody,” he said in a podcast he recorded at the time. “I think the white race should be bred out.” He voiced similar sentiments in other podcasts. Then, on one of his forays from Davao, Anglin found his tribe. In 2011, he spent several weeks in a small village in southern Mindanao among the T’boli people, who live around mountain lakes covered in lotus blossoms. The T’boli are known for their traditional music, dance, beadwork, and weaving. “Their life was all so beautiful and amazing,” Anglin said on one of his podcasts. Here was his return to nature. Anglin reported being about a day’s journey from electricity. Everything in the forest had spiritual significance for the T’boli. Each time Anglin crossed a stream, for example, he rubbed a wet stone across his face, hands, and feet to ask for guidance from the water spirit, which always knew the path through the forest. “I love these people,” Anglin said after a trial run in the jungle. Anglin emerged with a plan: He would return to the jungle, build his own hut, and exist “completely outside of the system.” He would live with the T’boli at first, but he hoped to push even deeper into the mountains in search of Muslim tribes and “people that are still fighting with spears, killing miners and loggers.” He would also, counterintuitively, launch a website called Reality Situation to chronicle his new off-the-grid life. He put his belongings up for sale to raise cash for a horse, chickens, and ducks. There was a messianic zeal to his plan. “I’m going to do it,” he told another truther. “I’m going to live without money. And I’m going to set up a community that does the same. And I’m going to video tape it.” Anglin launched Reality Situation in January 2012, before heading back into the jungle. He was reading about UFOs and downloading paranormal podcasts. He was still obsessed with brain-chipping and TV mind control, fake moon landings and satanic sex rituals. His vision of a rainforest utopia was no less unhinged. “Colonel Kurtz meets Travis Bickle” is how Edward described his friend’s mind-set around this time. “He was going to go back to the jungle to be the white savior and teach everybody how to grow crops properly.” And according to Edward, Anglin had another motivation: “He was going out there to marry two 16-year-old Muslim girls. He’d already met them and was buying them livestock for the dowry.” For the next six months, Anglin all but disappeared from the internet. In May 2012, he put up a lone post on Reality Situation in which he said he was planting trees, developing sustainable farming, and educating children about the dangers of Christianity and capitalism. Then he vanished again. What happened to him in the jungle is a mystery. He later said he’d drunk too much of a “strong coconut wine” and “began to feel deeply depressed and alone.” His fanciful notion of “picking fruit and hunting wild boar” and being treated like a hero was, he realized, a “romantic fantasy.” Again, he blamed others for his failure. This time it was the Filipinos’ fault. “Their minds were as primitive as their mode of living,” Anglin wrote, declaring that only among the “European race” would he feel at home. “It is only they who share my blood, and can understand my soul.” Edward saw him one last time, back in Davao. Anglin seemed transformed. He’d shaved his head and was dressed in a street-tough style, with a white tank top and baggy jeans. He was angry, especially about the subject of race-mixing. He also had a gun. Anglin told Edward that the tribe had rejected him. “They’re a bunch of idiots,” Anglin said. “Monkeys.” He shut down Reality Situation, left the Philippines, and, after a stint in China, returned to Ohio. In December 2012, he launched a new site called Total Fascism, an earnest precursor to The Daily Stormer. “From the flaming wreckage of the alleged Truth Movement,” Anglin wrote, “a group of people has begun to emerge … We have found the truth. We have found the light. We have found Adolf Hitler.” Anglin sequestered himself on the family farm again. Now he advocated “brutal extremism.” He wrote that he was not calling for violence “at this time” but added: “If I thought violence could work to free us of the yolk [sic] of the Jew, I would absolutely and unequivocally endorse it.” He developed an almost religious infatuation with Vladimir Putin, or “Czar Putin I, defender of human civilization,” as Anglin called him. For Anglin, Putin was a great white savior, a “being of immense power.” This fixation on strength is common among members of the alt-right, but Anglin took his devotion to power to a wild extreme. “He thinks in terms of a fascist Disney film,” a prominent white nationalist who has collaborated with Anglin told me, adding that Anglin believed that if he tried hard enough, disciples would flock to his cultish vision and help him summon another Hitler into existence. “He imagines he has some magical power.” Over his heart, he’d tattooed the spidery black sun of the Sonnenrad, an occult symbol in a mystical strain of neo-Nazism whose followers embrace such notions as Hitler being an avatar of Vishnu. In March 2013, Anglin, or perhaps his father, used Greg’s email address to register the domain name for The Daily Stormer. Then Anglin left the country again. First he went to Greece, where he stayed in a hostel in Athens for three months. He found work giving tours of the Parthenon and other sites and attended meetings of Golden Dawn, Greece’s ultranationalist far-right political party. On July 4, 2013, The Daily Stormer launched in beta mode, replacing Total Fascism. Anglin named his new site after Der Stürmer, a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi-era weekly that Hitler had read devoutly. (As Anglin would later write, the official policy of his site was: “Jews should be exterminated.”) The Daily Stormer was unlike anything else in white nationalism: The design was clean, the posts were infused with Anglin’s wry humor. It was Nazi Gawker, and it caught on. Another widely circulated photograph of Anglin appears to show him at a gathering of Golden Dawn, an extremist group in Greece. Anglin’s editorial approach, which he has explained in various podcasts, borrowed from both Mein Kampf and Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. From Hitler, Anglin learned to dumb down his argument: Good guys versus bad guys. A few themes repeated over and over. From Alinsky, he learned counterculture tactics: Attack people instead of institutions. Isolate targets. Make threats. One Alinsky rule in particular stuck with Anglin: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Ridicule was hard to counter. So Anglin mocked. He made people laugh. “The whole point is to make something outrageous,” he said on the site. “It’s about creating a giant spectacle, a media spectacle that desensitizes people to these ideas.” He considered jokes about Josef Mengele training dogs to rape Jewish women “comedy gold.” In 2014, Anglin was living in Europe when he found a partner in Andrew Auernheimer, a.k.a. “weev,” a neo-Nazi hacker and troll. Auernheimer grew up in the Ozarks and went to federal prison in 2013 on identity-theft and hacking charges. After his conviction was vacated on appeal a year later, he moved abroad. He now lives in Transnistria, a small, Russia-backed breakaway region on Moldova’s eastern border. Auernheimer ran the tech side of The Daily Stormer, and also contributed his considerable gifts for subversion by making printers on U.S. college campuses pump out swastika-bedecked flyers for the site. “I don’t know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for him,” Anglin said in an interview with another white nationalist last year. “He’s the one basically holding the whole thing together.” Anglin, meanwhile, gained infamy for his troll attacks. In 2015, he tormented the University of Missouri during student protests against racist incidents on campus. He used Twitter hashtags to seed fake news into the conversation, falsely reporting that members of the KKK had arrived to burn crosses on campus and were working with university police. He claimed that Klansmen had gunned down protesters and posted a random photo of a black man in a hospital bed. As his rumors spread, the campus freaked out. But Anglin wasn’t content to troll alone. He wrote instructions for his followers on how to register anonymous email accounts, set up virtual private networks, mask their IP addresses, and forge Twitter and text-message conversations. He created images and slogans for them to use. Anglin warned his Stormers not to threaten targets with violence, a disclaimer meant to shield him from law enforcement. Still, Anglin’s mob was a terror. He sicced his trolls on American University’s first black female student-body president. He had them go after Erin Schrode, a Jewish woman running for Congress in California, as well as Jonah Goldberg and David French, writers for National Review. As I reported this story, Anglin sent his trolls after me, too, and my interactions with them confirmed my suspicions that they were, by and large, lost boys who felt rejected by society and, thanks to the internet, could lash out in new and destructive ways. When I tried to draw them out about their lives, some admitted that they struggled with women. One told me that he struggled with his own homosexuality. Most imagined they were rising up against an unchecked political correctness that maligned white males. The more the liberal establishment chose to revile them, the more they embraced their role as villains. In recent years, psychologists have found a powerful connection between trolling and what’s known as the “dark tetrad” of personality traits: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. The first two traits are significant predictors of trolling behavior, and all four traits correlate with enjoyment of trolling. Research published in June by Natalie Sest and Evita March, two Australian scholars, shows that trolls tend to be high in cognitive empathy, meaning they can understand emotional suffering in others, but low in affective empathy, meaning they don’t care about the pain they cause. They are, in short, skilled and ruthless manipulators. In the summer of 2015, another great white savior—himself a troll—appeared to Anglin, this time gliding down a golden escalator in Manhattan in front of a crowd of paid extras. A few days after Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy—launching into an attack on Mexican “rapists”—Anglin endorsed him as “the one man who actually represents our interests.” Anglin immediately put all his resources toward willing a Trump presidency into reality. He churned out cheerleader posts and deployed his trolls on behalf of Trump, directing several of his nastiest attacks at Jewish journalists who were critical of the candidate or his associates. Anglin hadn’t been to the polls in years, but he wasn’t going to miss a chance to vote for Trump. His absentee ballot arrived in Ohio from Krasnodar, a city in southwest Russia near the Black Sea, according to Franklin County records. That the Russian government wouldn’t know about an American inside its borders publishing a major neo-Nazi website seems improbable. Anglin worshipped Putin, and seemed like exactly the type of online agitator Russia might use to sow chaos during the U.S. election. In March, Auernheimer told Daily Stormer commenters that he was setting up the site’s forum on “a much beefier server in the Russian Federation.” Anglin would later swear on his site—“under penalty of perjury”—that he’d never taken money or direction from the Russian government. But whether Anglin knew it or not, his site appears to have gotten a boost from someone in Russia. A collective of data scientists called Susan Bourbaki Anthony conducted an analysis of The Daily Stormer’s reach on Twitter from February 2 to March 2, 2017, and found that Anglin’s content was being spread by a mysterious network of accounts. This network, which is still active, has amplified divisiveness in American political discourse on Twitter since at least early in the year. It includes bots and “sock puppets” (accounts operated by actual people under false identities), and essentially shuts down each night from 5 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on the East Coast—midnight to 6:30 a.m. local time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The election helped elevate The Daily Stormer from one of several influential white-nationalist sites to a key platform of the alt-right, though the site wasn’t nearly as popular as Anglin wanted people to think. He and Auernheimer often bragged that it got millions of unique visitors a month, but comScore put the site’s monthly visitors closer to 70,000. Still, Anglin knew how to make noise—and by any metric, the post-Trump trend line for his site pointed up. In May 2016, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer had asked then-candidate Trump about the death threats and harassment Anglin’s army had leveled against the journalist Julia Ioffe after she wrote a profile of Melania Trump for GQ magazine. (Ioffe now works at The Atlantic.) “I don’t have a message to the fans,” Trump said. The fans. His people. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” Anglin told a reporter when asked about Trump’s refusal to condemn white nationalists. Iwent back to columbus in mid-February. I’d learned that Anglin might be in town for a legal hearing—for some reason, he’d filed a motion to expunge his 2006 misdemeanor drug conviction—and I intended to approach him at the courthouse. The day I arrived, the city’s weekly paper, Columbus Alive, published a long feature about Anglin. The next evening, Anglin walked into a supermarket where a protester who’d been quoted in the story worked. She later told me that despite the bitter cold, he wore only a white T‑shirt and black track pants. Holding a can of Monster Ultra Blue, an energy drink, he approached her and looked her in the eye. “How’s it going?” he said, before strolling off into the night. I was staying near the old Exile bar, once the premier leather joint in Columbus and an early moneymaker for the Anglin family. The Exile was one of two gay bars that had been owned by Anglin’s uncle Todd until he died of aids, after which Greg took over. The bars continued to stage foam parties and fetish nights while Greg, according to two sources, performed gay conversion therapy at his counseling practice. Greg had amassed a sizable, if shabby, real-estate portfolio in town, and I visited several of his properties, trying, unsuccessfully, to locate his neo-Nazi son. I thought Anglin might be crashing with his childhood best friend, West Emerson, whose Facebook page included a “favorite” Hitler quote and alt-right references. Emerson was prone to bragging about his friendship with Anglin. He told more than one of my sources that he and Anglin communicated every day. In messages he sent to one source, he claimed to be talking with Anglin “now as we speak.” But when I reached out to Emerson, he refused to talk with me. (Emerson told The Atlantic that he did not share Anglin’s views, hadn’t seen him in 15 years, and didn’t even know his phone number.) A week after the Columbus Alive story was published, Anglin doxed the reporters. He published their contact information and put up photos of their homes and cars, their spouses and children, including a six-month-old infant. “Take action,” he told his trolls, who harassed the targets with calls, emails, and offensive mail. The reporters didn’t feel safe in their homes. Police had to increase patrols in their neighborhoods. One evening, I drove to what I thought might be Anglin’s mother’s house. It was dusk, and the only light on was in the living room. From a distance, I thought I saw a thin woman standing by a window, but by the time I parked my car, the light had gone off. I rang the doorbell, then knocked and waited a few minutes. There was no answer. I quickly scratched out a note—“I need somebody who loves Andy to speak on his behalf”—and stuck it in the door. A few days later, I left Katie a voicemail at work. She never responded. I’d been at the right house. Anglin later posted a photo of my note and accused me of engaging in a “vicious scorched-earth campaign” to threaten his family and friends. He labeled me a terrorist and said I was trying to silence him. Angry Stormers called and emailed me. One tried to feed me false information about Anglin’s whereabouts. I received half a dozen spoof emails trying to infect my computer with a virus. But Anglin himself remained elusive. His hearing was scheduled for 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. But the night before, a waterline burst and damaged five floors of the courthouse, including the one where his hearing was to take place. All proceedings on those floors were postponed. I went to the courthouse at nine the next morning anyway, hoping that Anglin might still show up. It took me some time to talk my way up to the right floor and find a clerk. She told me that Anglin and his lawyer had come in early and had his record expunged. I had just missed him. In april, tanya gersh and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Anglin in federal court for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and violation of a Montana anti-intimidation statute. He’d have to answer for what the lawsuit called a “campaign of terror” that had given Gersh panic attacks and landed her in trauma therapy. That she had to file a civil suit instead of pressing criminal charges was telling. There was little the authorities could do about the hate speech The Daily Stormer published, which is protected under the First Amendment—and Anglin knew it. He often mentions Brandenburg v. Ohio, a Supreme Court case that addressed a fiery oration by Clarence Brandenburg, a Klansman, in 1964 on a farm outside Cincinnati. Brandenburg preached violently about Jews and blacks and suggested that if the government continued to suppress white people, “revengeance” might be taken. The Court ruled that his ravings were protected because they were too abstract to incite “imminent lawless action” and did not meet the previously established “clear and present danger” standard. This “Brandenburg test” defines how far hatemongers can go, and Anglin has been careful to keep his violent language vague. He is, for example, within his rights to publish that “Moslems should be exterminated.” He is not, however, allowed to threaten a specific Muslim with extermination. Where he has potentially crossed a legal line is with the trolling he orchestrates. Cyberstalking—defined as using the internet in a way that “causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person”—is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. (Many states also criminalize cyberstalking.) But this activity is difficult to prosecute when trolls know how to conceal their identity. A lone troll might leave his victim only one voicemail telling her to burn in an oven, which would fail to meet the criteria for cyberstalking. When hundreds of trolls do the same, though, the effect can be terrifying. “It’s like a bee swarm,” says Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Law and a leading expert on cyberharassment. “You have a thousand bee stings. Each sting is painful. But it’s perceived as one awful, throbbing, giant mass.” Even if Anglin doesn’t participate in the harassment directly, however, he arguably solicits cyberstalking and aids and abets it, according to Citron. These are crimes in their own right—just not ones that law enforcement is prepared to take on. Few local police departments have the means to go after trolls, and Citron says that federal investigators who are swamped with child-pornography, fraud, and terrorism cases tend not to make cyberstalking investigations a priority. And so Gersh had to go after Anglin in court. A week after she filed her suit, Auernheimer set up a crowdfunding campaign on WeSearchr, a platform run by Chuck Johnson, a far-right troll and propagandist who has claimed that he has ties to the Trump administration. Within a month, Stormers had raised more than $150,000 for Anglin’s legal defense. Anglin then hired Marc Randazza, a First Amendment lawyer who has represented Mike Cernovich, another far-right propagandist. The lawsuit is scheduled to enter the pretrial stage in December. It marks the first time a notorious internet troll has been sued for instigating a campaign of harassment and intimidation. It could force the courts to decide whether calling for a troll attack—Anglin’s admonition to “hit ’em up”—is protected speech. The risk, however, is that if Anglin prevails in court, sadistic trolls will be free to tear across the internet with even greater abandon. For his part, Randazza argues that restricting Anglin’s trolling would set a dangerous precedent. Anglin “has every right to ask people to share their views, no matter how abhorrent those views are,” Randazza told me. “This is the shitty price we have to pay for freedom.” The alt-right leaders came to Charlottesville from far and wide this August for the largest gathering of white nationalists in more than a decade. Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, Matthew Heimbach, Eli Mosley, even David Duke, the old Klansman who has taken up the new label in an effort to get hip to Millennial racism. All of them except Anglin. “We are angry,” Anglin had written a few days before the rally. “There is a craving to return to an age of violence. We want a war.” Many of his underlings made the trip. Ready for street combat, some brought homemade shields painted with skulls. But Anglin was never one to put his body on the line. By all reports, he had stayed in the U.S. after his court date in Columbus and gone even deeper underground over the spring and summer. The SPLC hired process servers to notify Anglin of the Gersh lawsuit, but they couldn’t find him anywhere—despite repeatedly visiting seven different addresses. At one apartment in Columbus, Anglin’s younger brother, Mitch, opened the door but refused to help, saying he “can’t do that” to his brother. At another address, the process servers got the impression that Anglin had barricaded himself inside. Randazza mocked the SPLC’s inability to find his client. (Anglin would soon be fending off two more federal lawsuits: one filed by Dean Obeidallah, a Muslim American comedian and radio host who alleged that Anglin had libeled him, and another brought by Charlottesville residents against the alt-right leaders responsible for the deadly rally.) Anglin told CNN that he’d moved to Lagos, Nigeria, and when the network ran his lie the Stormers had a long, hard laugh. One tried to fool me into thinking that Anglin was in the Czech Republic. But I’d gotten a credible tip that he was holed up somewhere in the Midwest. The Stormers had a private chat server through a company called Discord, and I used an alias to listen in as they talked amongst themselves about genocide, often in graphic terms. “All I want is to see [Jews] screaming in a pit of suffering on the soil of my homeland before I die,” Auernheimer wrote. “I don’t want wealth. I don’t want power. I just want their daughters tortured to death in front of them and to laugh and spit in their faces while they scream.” “This was our Beer Hall Putsch,” Anglin wrote of the Charlottesville rally in August, though he himself did not attend. (Samuel Corum / Anadolu / Getty) In July, Auernheimer posted a new rule in the Discord forum: “Do not talk to police … If we find out you have talked to the police for any reason you will be banned.” It appeared that law-enforcement officials might have finally taken an interest in Anglin’s operation. Perhaps in response, Anglin grew even more maniacal. He went on a popular alt-right podcast and rambled to the baffled hosts about the “electric universe” and “deconstructing reality” and assured them that “as soon as we finally do exterminate these Jews, we’re going to be fighting aliens.” On his site, he pushed a “White Sharia” meme and published posts encouraging men to beat and rape women, take away their voting rights, and treat them like property. Women were “lower than dogs,” he wrote. “They are all vicious, amoral, mindless whores who do not deserve respect or admiration of any sort.” The meme distressed and confused many of his readers, especially the few women who frequented the site. Other Stormers couldn’t understand why Anglin wanted to promote a concept associated with Islam. But Anglin was relentless, and after dozens of posts, his meme caught on. “White Sharia” was one of the phrases members of the alt-right shouted in Charlottesville in August. It was what James Alex Fields Jr. chanted before he drove his car into the crowd of antiracist protesters and was charged with the murder of Heather Heyer. Anglin was triumphant—here was his vision for the Whitefish march, come to fruition. He’d done as much as anyone to promote the rally, turning his site into a key organizing hub. “The Alt-Right has risen. There is no going back from this,” he wrote. “This was our Beer Hall Putsch.” And when Trump again refused to denounce the white nationalists, Anglin exulted. “No condemnation at all,” he wrote. “Really, really good. God bless him.” The day after the rally, Anglin wrote a post saying that Heyer was an “overweight slob” and claiming that “most people are glad she is dead.” Within a day it racked up more Facebook shares than any previous Daily Stormer post. On the private chat server, Auernheimer hatched a plan to send Nazis to Heyer’s funeral. But for all the talk on the alt-right about expanding the Overton Window, Anglin had failed to see that the more savage his words grew, the smaller, ultimately, his sphere of influence became. The Daily Stormer was dropped by GoDaddy, its domain registrar; then by Zoho and SendGrid, which provided email services; and by Cloudflare, which protected against cyberattacks. The site went dark. Other alt-right sites were also shut down. Discord shut down the server where Anglin and his associates conspired, along with chat rooms for other racist groups. Richard Spencer had warned about “The Great Shuttening,” and now here it was. Anglin and Auernheimer scrambled to get The Daily Stormer back online. They were rejected by half a dozen other domain registrars. Even Rozcom, the Russian national registrar, denied them. As of press time, they had managed to get a version of the site up, hosted in the Philippines and rebranded as “America’s largest pro-Duterte news site.” But Anglin had lost many readers, and his comments section—which provided the real energy for the community he’d built—had been decimated. His panic was almost palpable as he tried to walk back the fearsome reputation he’d cultivated. “I am not actually a ‘Neo‑Nazi White Supremacist,’ nor do I know what that is,” he wrote in mid-September. He claimed that his violent rhetoric was never sincere but simply a way to mock those who slap a Nazi label on anyone who “stands up for white people’s rights” or “refuses to believe the stupid lies about Hitler” or rejects the “alleged Holocaust” narrative. Anglin now shared what he said had been his true editorial approach all along: “Ironic Nazism disguised as real Nazism disguised as ironic Nazism.” Five days later, he posted about “the world being ruled either by reptiles from another dimension or some other type of reptilian or insectoid race of aliens.” Where the irony started and stopped was hard to know. I emailed Anglin one more time asking for an interview. He didn’t answer. The next day, he wrote a post calling for the mass execution of journalists. “I want to see pieces of journalist brains splattered across walls,” he wrote. At times while tracking Anglin, I couldn’t help but feel that he was a method actor so committed and demented, on such a long and heavy trip, that he’d permanently lost himself in his role. I thought of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Like so many emotionally damaged young men, Anglin had chosen to be someone, or something, bigger than himself on the internet, something ferocious to cover up the frailty he couldn’t abide in himself. Fantasy overtook reality, and now he couldn’t escape. Who was he if not the king of the Nazi trolls? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Atlantic

Temporary shelters at Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp near Cox's Bazar yesterday. Photo: Reuters Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday in parliament said Bangladesh is faced with an unprecedented crisis over providing humanitarian assistance to the Rohingya refugees and sending them back home. “The Rohingya crisis has taken a serious turn due to the recent military operation and violence in Rakhine State of Myanmar. The present situation is very much worse compared to anytime in the past,” she further said while responding to a question from treasury bench lawmaker Abdul Matin. The prime minister, however, said she firmly believes that despite all odds, there would be a peaceful solution to the crisis with the assistance of international community. Her comments came as more than 600,000 Rohingyas have crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh since late August, driven out by a brutal military crackdown described by a top UN official as a textbook case of "ethnic cleansing". Hasina said more than 10 lakh of the Myanmarese nationals are now staying in Bangladesh; they include the four lakh who had entered the country earlier in various phases. “And still Rohingyas are entering Bangladesh every day,” she told parliament with Speaker Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury in the chair. She added, "The world community stands by Bangladesh for the generosity that we have shown to the displaced people." The PM mentioned that Bangladesh has been making vigorous diplomatic efforts to have a special session of the UNHCR on Rohingya crisis and repatriate the refugees. Dhaka is also maintaining bilateral communications with Naypyidaw, she said, adding, “Today's problem has its root in Myanmar and Myanmar has to find a solution.” Hasina said the entire global community has expressed solidarity with Bangladesh for the first time on any issue, which never happened before. Referring to lingering of the Rohingya crisis for decades, the premier said it all began in 1978 when Ziaur Rahman came to power unconstitutionally. NO PROVOCATION Hasina said a vested quarter has been trying to engage the Rohingyas in acts of violence. Issuing a note of warning against the instigators, she said, “Anybody who provokes Rohingyas into getting involved in acts of violence must face the music. And there is no doubt about this.” Reiterating her government's firm stance against militancy, she said Dhaka would not allow anybody to use this land to operate terrorist activities in any neighbouring country. “I want to say one thing: we believe in peace; we want to maintain good relations with our neighbours; we'll in no way allow anyone to use the land of Bangladesh to carry out any sort of terrorist or provocative activities in any other country. We won't tolerate this,” she said, answering to a question from Nazibul Bashar Maizvandary. In a supplementary question, Cox's Bazar lawmaker Abdur Rahman Bodi said 15,000 people from five unions in his constituency have been suffering as their resources were affected because of the arrivals of Rohingyas. In response, the PM said, “If we can provide food and other assistance to 10 lakh Rohingyas, we can feed 15,000 locals as well.” Responding to a query from Fazilatun Nesa Bappy, she said UN Secretary-General António Guterres talked to her on October 21 over the phone regarding the Rohingya issue. Fatema, a Rohingya woman, and her two children sit inside a mosquito net in Palong Khali refugee camp. Photo: Reuters “At that time I sought his cooperation in implementing my five-point proposal for a permanent solution to the Rohingya crisis. I firmly told him that Myanmar has to take steps to ensure return of their forcibly displaced nationals soon with safety and dignity,” she said. Referring to BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia's recent visit to Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar, the premier raised a question about the motive behind her trip. “Many are curious exactly why she went there,” she said. “The way she went there, gorgeously attired and with a huge motorcade, it can be asked whether she went there to attend a wedding ceremony or stage a showdown.” Pointing to Khaleda's allegation that the government failed to address the Rohingya crisis, the PM lambasted the BNP chief. “We are not bothered about the words of those who patronise the war criminals and kill people by hurling bombs in the name of movement,” Hasina also said. Referring to the Rohingya influx in 1991, she said she visited Cox's Bazar that time before Khaleda Zia, who was then prime minister. In reply to another query, Hasina said Bangladesh has been recognised worldwide as a successful country in terms of peace and socio-economic development, especially because of her government's responsible foreign policy and diplomatic efforts in the last eight years. She mentioned that so far 5,27,597 Rohingyas have been registered and given ID cards. ___________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Daily Star

The Khmer Rouge tribunal’s pre-trial chamber will in December consider an appeal challenging its decision to dismiss Case 004/01 against former district leader Im Chaem. The hearing on December 11-12 comes after the international co-prosecutor objected to the tribunal’s proposed closure of the case against Ms Chaem, who was a high-ranking Khmer Rouge member with allegedly close ties to Pol Pot. The court will hear arguments from civil party lawyers, the national co-prosecutor, the international co-prosecutor, and national and international defence co-lawyers before it decides whether to dismiss the case or send it to trial. “The charged person, if present, shall be given the opportunity to make a personal statement at the end of the hearing,” the court said. The decision on the appeal is expected within six months of the hearing, at the latest, it added. The Khmer Rouge tribunal in February dismissed Case 004/01 against Ms Chaem on the grounds that she was not a “senior leader” within the regime. The Law on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia states that the purpose of the tribunal is to “bring to trial senior leaders of Democratic Kampuchea and those who were most responsible for the crimes and serious violations of Cambodian penal law, international humanitarian law and custom, and international conventions recognised by Cambodia, that were committed during the period from 17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979”. Khieu Samphan was tried because he was a top Khmer Rouge leader. According to local media, the government has been vehemently opposed to Cases 003 and 004, which includes Ms Chaem’s case, saying they could cause a civil war. Prime Minister Hun Sen has long said the tribunal should go no further than Case 002, a statement echoed by the court’s national investigating judge You Bunleng, who reportedly refused to sign off on Cases 003 and 004. Experts and observers have since questioned if the cases could be susceptible to government pressure. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia and himself a survivor of the regime, said the chamber needs to hear the arguments of the parties in the appeal relating to Case 004/01. The tribunal must respect its own internal rules, be guided by the evidence, and implement the law accordingly, he said. “Sometimes the result may not be what we wanted or may be difficult for many survivors to live with, but we need to accept the decision made by the judges,” he said. “A good judge makes good decision. A bad judge makes sloppy decision.” The genocide from 1975 to 1979 led to the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population, or between one and three million people. From 1976 to 1979, Ms Chaem was said to be responsible for setting up security offices in two sectors, including the largest one in Democratic Kampuchea, the Phnom Trayoung security office. While in charge, she allegedly contributed to the arbitrary arrest, detention and execution of thousands of individuals. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Khmer Times

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Myanmar today to urge the government there to stop the persecution of a Muslim minority called the Rohingya. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled Myanmar since August. They now live in squalid conditions across the border in Bangladesh. The U.N. has called the crisis a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. Rex Tillerson did not go that far. He said what happened, quote, "has a number of characteristics of crimes against humanity," and he called for an independent investigation. To talk about this more, we're going to Maung Zarni. He is a fellow with the Cambodian Documentation Center, specializing in genocide in Buddhist countries. Welcome to the show. MAUNG ZARNI: Thank you. MCEVERS: Can you just take us back a little bit and help us understand why the Rohingya are persecuted in Myanmar? ZARNI: Well, for two reasons. They are Muslims. And the other reason is because they are Muslim with their own claim on this strategic piece of borderland next to Bangladesh, the Burmese army starting in the 1960s perceive them as a threat to national security. MCEVERS: Burma of course being the former name of Myanmar. Much of the violence in Myanmar against the Rohingya people has been carried out by the military. Human rights groups have documented mass rape. They say thousands of people have been killed. How does the military in Myanmar justify this violence to the people of the country? ZARNI: Simply put, the military in Burma today uses what the Nazis used in the 1930s - that they have misframed the Rohingyas the way the Nazis blamed the Jewish people for everything that was wrong with the society, all the frustration and anger. So I think the military has cleverly diverted public frustration towards the Rohingya, who are completely unarmed and helpless. And they've been sitting ducks for the last 40 years. MCEVERS: And human rights groups have said that Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar, is part of the problem here. This is a woman who of course won the Nobel Peace Prize. She's considered a champion of human rights. Yet she will not say that what's happening to the Rohingya is ethnic cleansing. Why? Why is she not getting more involved in their case? ZARNI: Well, you know, I've known her personally, and I've supported her for the first 15 years of my activism. And simply put, she is anti-Muslim races. She is Islamophobe. I mean, she is a big part of the problem. MCEVERS: U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with her today. We know that. I mean, is she part of the solution, or is it going to have to be someone else who could turn the tide here and change what's happening to these people? ZARNI: Well, there is no someone else inside the country. Even Buddhist monks justify openly to the military, to the public that killing the nonbelievers, non-Buddhists, the Rohingyas does not amount to bad karma. It is not a crime. And the public is fully behind the army and Aung San Suu Kyi because they believe that those two entities are defending the nation. MCEVERS: If she's not the person to solve this, what will solve this problem? ZARNI: Well, the solution lies outside. And there has to be an international coalition outside the Security Council that is prepared to make a concerted effort to bear serious pressure on both Aung San Suu Kyi and the military. MCEVERS: Do you think Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's visit will provide that outside pressure that you think is needed for things to change? ZARNI: You know, yes or no. Yes, it would put the Burmese military on notice, but no because they have not put their foot down saying that this is international crime and you stop this immediately, or there will be consequences. So that message is not being delivered by Tillerson. MCEVERS: Maung Zarni specializes in genocide in Buddhist countries. He joined us from the U.K. on Skype. Thank you so much. ZARNI: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF GRIMES SONG, "GENESIS") __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 NPR

As it has tragically in the past, Kalma camp for internally displaced persons (near Nyala, South Darfur) may soon be the site of brutal violence against unarmed civilians. A dispatch today from Sudan Tribune (see below) makes clear that Kalma is in the cross-hairs of the Khartoum regime. Under cover of the now forcible disarmament campaign Khartoum has launched, it appears increasingly likely that the IDP camps will be assaulted, even as there is no evidence of any significant presence of weapons. I recur to this subject (see my October 23, 2017 analysis) because it threatens to expand vastly the level of human destruction in Darfur. Indeed, it may well mark the beginning of a second phase to the Darfur genocide. I have recently re-posted my analysis of human mortality in Darfur over the past 14 years, in which I conclude—based on an aggregation of all extant data and relevant methodological reasoning—that roughly 600,000 people have died, directly and indirectly from violence in the Darfur genocide (see | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1S4/). If camps are in the process of being violently dismantled—and Kalma provides strong evidence that this may be the case—this total may double in the coming years. Humanitarian organizations will find it impossible to continue their work without the concentration of people provided by the more than 100 camps and gathering sites for displaced persons in Darfur (see UN map of these widely scattered camps and sites at | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/03/19/map-of-idp-sites-in-darfur/). People will be displaced into areas that are hopelessly insecure; most have lost their farms and lands to Arab militia forces, recruited or countenanced by the Khartoum regime; food and water will simply be unavailable to people already badly weakened by so many years of camp life, with its grossly inadequate humanitarian provisions. For with respect to the camps, it is clear that Khartoum’s “disarmament” campaign has as its goal intimidation and displacement: forcing people to leave the camps in fear and then ruthlessly dismantling the camps when they are largely empty. The disarmament campaign is being led by Second Vice President of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime, Hassabo Abdelrahman—a man whose brutality, savagery, and indifference to the fate of those in the camps is all too well documented. Vice President Hassabo has served as the regime’s primary engineer of ongoing mass destruction of non-Arab/African lives and livelihoods over the past several years. In 2015 Human Rights Watch published a report about the Rapid Support Forces, the militia that Hassabo directs in most key strategic respects. The report at one point cites the statement of a defecting militia member (“Ahmed”) about Hassabo’s comments prior to the 2014 – 2105 dry season offensive in the East Jebel Marra area (primarily North Darfur): Ahmed said that a few days prior to leaving for East Jebel Marra, Sudanese Vice President Hassabo Mohammed Abdel Rahman directly addressed several hundred army and RSF soldiers: “Hassabo told us to clear the area east of Jebel Marra. To kill any male. He said we want to clear the area of insects… He said East Jebel Marra is the kingdom of the rebels. We don’t want anyone there to be alive.” “‘Men With No Mercy’: Rapid Support Forces Attacks against Civilians in Darfur, Sudan” (Human Rights Watch, September 9, 2015) The conduct of Khartoum’s counter-insurgency that dry/fighting season, as well as the following two, matched precisely the ambitions that Hassabo lays out in these extraordinary exhortations. For a detailed, data-rich analysis of what the campaign in East Jebel Marra looked like, see my monograph: “‘Changing the Demography’: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015″ | December 1, 2015 | (http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4. (Based on a data spreadsheet with 502 data entries, giving dates, locations, sources, brief characterizations of the violence, injuries/ casualties/ victims, often with names/damages and losses, as well as relevant observations.) About the camps, Hassabo has long made his views perfectly clear: two years ago, it was again Sudan Tribune that reported on the terrifying prospect of the camps being dismantled at Hassabo’s urging: In a speech delivered before the representatives of former rebel groups and IDPs in El-Fasher, North Darfur on Monday, [Second Vice-President Hassabo Mohamed Abdelrahman] said Darfur has “completely recovered from the war and is now looking forward to achieve a full peace, stability and development.” “IDP camps represent a significant and unfortunate loss of dignity and rights of citizens in their country” he said and called on the displaced “to choose within no more than a month between resettlement or return to their original areas.” He further reiterated his government’s commitment to take all the measures and do the needful to achieve this goal, stressing that “the year 2016 will see the end of displacement in Darfur.” Abdel Rahman told the meeting that he has just ended a visit to Karnoi and Tina areas in North Darfur, adding the two areas which were affected by the conflict have totally recovered. He said his visit with a big delegation to the two areas “is a message sceptics in the fact that security and stability are back in Darfur”… (Sudan Tribune, December 28, 2015 | El Fasher, North Darfur) The mendacity in characterizing conditions in Darfur—and the prospects for 2016 (the year of the savage Jebel Marra assault, which included the use of chemical weapons)—is outrageous, which is to say perfectly in character. What is true, however, is that Hassabo and the regime are indeed prepared to “take all the measures and do the needful to achieve this goal,” i.e., empty the camps of their residents. Those “measures” now include forcible disarmament, with Kalma camp as the first target. And now that U.S. economic sanctions have been lifted, with so little in return—certainly with respect to humanitarian access, one of the key conditions in deciding to lift sanctions—Khartoum is emboldened to pursue its objectives in whatever way it wishes. Having deployed very large numbers of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia to Darfur, Khartoum has its weapon of choice for whatever brutality it chooses to pursue in the camps. Indeed, the distinguished human rights advocate Suliman Baldo has very recently reported the possibility that the U.S. actually approves of Khartoum’s “disarmament” plan: The government of Sudan scored a major political and diplomatic success with the lifting of U.S. trade and financial sanctions that had been imposed on account of Sudan harboring international terrorist groups in the 1990s and perpetuating atrocity crimes against its own citizens in conflict areas. On the heels of this diplomatic success, the weapons collection campaign appears to be meant to present the regime of President Omar al-Bashir to the international community as a guarantor of domestic and regional stability. The effort appears to have worked, with the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Khartoum reportedly welcoming the disarmament campaign after a briefing by the official overseeing its implementation, Vice President [Hassabo] Abdelrahman. The welcome would appear premature because of the selective and heavy-handed approach the campaign has adopted from the beginning that risks backfiring. (“Ominous Threats Descending On Darfur,” Suliman Baldo, The Enough Project | November 9, 2017 | https://enoughproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/OminousThreatsDarfur_Nov2017_Enough1.pdf https://enoughproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Ominous-Threats-Descending-On-Darfur_Nov-2017_AR.pdf Notably, there has been no public comment from the Trump administration about the issue Baldo raises, and this despite the fact that a very senior State Department official,Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan, will soon be traveling to Khartoum to meet with leaders of the regime. But we should demand an answer: Did the senior U.S. diplomat in Khartoum, Charge d’Affaires Steven Koutsis, indeed “welcome” the plan for disarmament as presented by genocidal Vice President Hassabo? It would not be the first time Koutsis has been guilty of gross errors in judgment or fact (see | “U.S. Charge d’Affaires in Khartoum Steven Koutsis: Dishonest, Tendentious, Misleading,” Sudan Tribune | June 28, 2017 | http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article62859/). What Should Be Done? It should go without question that the suggestion of the camp leader cited in the Sudan Tribune dispatch (again, see below) should be followed: allow the UN/African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to conduct searches of the camps. Twice before Khartoum has engaged in bloody assaults on unarmed civilians in Kalma camp, which is the focus of today’s Sudan Tribune dispatch: • “Now Sudan Is Attacking Refugee Camps,” The Wall Street Journal, 6 September 2008, by Mia Farrow and Eric Reeves | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122065894281205691.html?mod=googlenews_wsj • “Yet Again, Kalma camp (South Darfur) for displaced persons is the scene of deadly violence by Khartoum’s security forces” | September 22, 2017 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-26t It will be an unforgiveable outrage if Hassabo’s plans for Kalma camp are carried out: The residents of South Darfur largest camp for displaced people have rejected a forcible arms collection campaign the authorities plan to carry out in Kalma during the upcoming days and called to leave the operation for the hybrid peacekeeping mission (UNAMID). The IDPs are reacting to a meeting held at the Sudanese presidency to discuss ways to conduct the campaign in the IDPs camps in Darfur including Vice President Hasabo Abdel Rahman, South Darfur Governor Adam al-Faki and UNAMID head Jeremiah Mamabolo. Mamabolo, like his incompetent African Union predecessors in the role of leading UNAMID, has proved an abject failure; and the Mission itself is in the process of being gutted following the UN Security Council decision in June 2017 to cut dramatically both the troop presence of the Mission (by 44 percent) and police presence (by 30 percent). The latter reduction drastically reduces the ability of UNAMID to serve in the role of collecting any weapons that may exist in the camps. In the wake of an extraordinarily brazen and terrifying show of strength in Kalma camp by Khartoum’s military and security forces on November 1, 2017, Mamabolo fecklessly suggested: “UNAMID peacekeepers on the ground during the incident reported that more than 100 government military vehicles, including trucks with mounted weapons and armoured personnel carriers, briefly entered parts of the camp,” said UNAMID Joint Special Representative, Jeremiah Mamabolo in a press release on Saturday. [Radio Dabanga—a far more reliable source than UNAMID, reported “at least 200 vehicles, including armoured cars and rocket launchers”—ER]. “While UNAMID acknowledges the significance of the ongoing arms collection exercise, it regrets the entry by the Government forces to Kalma IDP camp was not coordinated with the mission to avoid any potential tension and violence,” he added. UNAMID called on the Sudanese government and the IDPs to work with the Mission “in a collaborative way in order to advance the weapons collection campaign.” (Sudan Tribune, November 4, 2017) But Khartoum has never listened to the leaders of UNAMID, or the UN for that matter: the regime stands in egregious violation of countless UN Security resolutions concerned Darfur—going back to July 2004—and has never been punished or sanctioned for any of these violations. Unsurprisingly, several senior regime officials have been indicted by the International Criminal Court—President al-Bashir on multiple counts of genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. And yet some thirty countries—even those that are signatories to the Rome Treaty that is the statutory basis for the ICC—have welcomed al-Bashir since the ICC issued its arrest warrants. It is not difficult to understand why Khartoum feels so free to ensure that its military, militia, and security forces enjoy total impunity in Darfur. The continuing epidemic of rape of non-Arab/African girls and women is symptomatic of a larger climate of impunity, something Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations have been stressing for years: “Entrenching Impunity: Government Responsibility for International Crimes in Darfur,” Human Rights Watch | December 2, 2005 | https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/darfur1205webwcover.pdf See also | “Darfur and the Consequences of Impunity for Sudan,” Dissent Magazine, September 9, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-Gb The task of preventing the second, possibly more destructive phase of the Darfur genocide falls clearly on the Western democracies. Along with the UN, the African Unioncontinues to accommodate the Khartoum regime, as does the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Conference—and even Israel is making quiet overtures to Khartoum. China and Russia continue to play the role of spoilers at the UN Security Council, making the mandate of the Council—maintaining international peace and security—little more than a cruel joke. But those Western democracies—including those instrumental in establishing the ICC—are nowhere to be found in addressing the threats to millions of Darfuris. Canada has said nothing, (nor has Japan or India or the countries of Latin America); and the countries of the European Union seem more interested in rapprochement with this savage regime, this in the interest of securing its help in stanching the flow of African migration to the European continent. And the U.S. long ago gave up serious concern for Darfur. Like the EU countries, the U.S. during the Obama administration pretended as though the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD; July 2011) was a credible basis for peace in the region. It was never anything of the sort, enjoying no support from Darfuri civil society or any of the consequential rebel groups. Even now the DDPD—a completely dead letter diplomatically—is occasionally invoked because there is simply nothing else to point to. The Obama administration tipped its hand all too fully when a senior administration official declared in November 2011 that Darfur was being “de-coupled” from the major issue of bilateral interest to Washington and Khartoum: Khartoum’s listing by the State Department as one of only three regimes considered a “state sponsor of terrorism” (which Khartoum desperately wishes to end) and Washington’s desire to enlist Khartoum as a partner in gathering counter-terrorism intelligence (the primary purpose of the massive new U.S. embassy in Khartoum, which was only recently allowed by Khartoum to become fully operational). It has become exceedingly unlikely that any of the Western democracies or international actors of consequence will truly care about what Khartoum does in Darfur, and this has brought us to the present moment: violent “disarmament” of the camps for displaced is about to begin, and there will be nothing done to stop the process, however fitfully it may proceed. This made indeed be the beginning of the most destructive phase of the Darfur genocide. ***************************** Kalma IDPs call to task UNAMID with weapons search operation | Sudan Tribune | November 14, 2017 (NYALA) | http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article64004 The residents of South Darfur largest camp for displaced people have rejected a forcible arms collection campaign the authorities plan to carry out in Kalma during the upcoming days and called to leave the operation for the hybrid peacekeeping mission (UNAMID). The IDPs are reacting to a meeting held at the Sudanese presidency to discuss ways to conduct the campaign in the IDPs camps in Darfur including Vice President Hasabo Abdel Rahman, South Darfur Governor Adam al-Faki and UNAMID head Jeremiah Mamabolo. The IDPs spokesperson Hussein Abu Sharati said the camps are free of weapons and saying that the weapons search operation the authorities plan to carry out aims to dismantle the camp. “Talk of weapons in Kalma is just an open pretext for the South Darfur government to dismantle the camp after failing to persuade the displaced to return to their villages under the name of voluntary repatriation programme,” he told Sudan Tribune. Abu Sharati added that the voluntary return the government wants to implement is fraught with great dangers for the lives of civilians, stressing that “many of their areas are still under the control of others who refuse to leave.” The IDPs spokesperson is alluding to the nomads who settled in the fertile areas abandoned by the IDPs who fled attacks by the government militias during the years of the counterinsurgency campaign. The Sudanese army and government militia have launched the forcible weapons collection campaign which is the second phase a large scale operation aiming to restore peace and to end tribal violence in the region. The South Darfur government said they would inspect Kalma camp located outside Nyala pointing to the presence of arms inside the camp which is accused of harbouring some activists loyal to the armed groups. Abu Sharati He called on the UNAMID forces” as a neutral body,” to take over the weapons search operation in the camp, pointing out that “Kalma is safe and there has been no security breach, as it is the case from time to time in (the state capital), Nyala” which is at 17 km from the camp. He further disclosed that the UNAMID mission held several meetings with the IDPs to discuss the decision of the South Darfur government to inspect the camp, adding the camp leaders rejected the intervention of the government forces in Kalma. He emphasized that conduct of the arms search by the state government may endanger the lives of displaced persons, calling on the international community and human rights organizations to stand with the displaced to protect them. UNAMID called on the Sudanese government and the IDPs to work with the Mission “in a collaborative way in order to advance the weapons collection campaign.” The call came after a show of force by the Sudanese government forces which surround some parts of the camp before to withdraw on 2 November. The camp residents protested in the past several times against the presence of the government forces. In August 2008, the police killed over 40 IDPs who objected a weapons search operation in the camp. Recently, the government forces killed three civilians during a protest against a visit of the Sudanese president to the area last September. [Emphases added–ER] _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 SUDAN Research, Analysis, and Advocacy