A man reacts to teargas fired by police at protesters calling for electoral reform in Harare, Zimbabwe, July 12, 2017. © 2017 Reuters On Tuesday night, unidentified assailants burned down a bar in Harare owned by Elias Mudzuri, the deputy president of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, MDC-T. Mudzuri and several other local activists with whom I spoke believed that supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party were responsible for this attack, as well as the one that destroyed the house of an MDC-T local councilor. ZANU-PF has not only rejected such allegations, but sought to blame the opposition. Last week, after an MDC-T vehicle was torched, Ignatious Chombo, the minister of Home Affairs responsible for the police, dismissed the attack as “an inside job [by the MDC-T] to get attention and a trick by a fracturing party that is facing loss in the next election.” The recent cases of apparent political violence, like those in past years, have one thing in common: no arrests despite the victims’ willingness to file a report with the police. Human Rights Watch research has shown that the police’s failure to make arrests in these cases and the resulting impunity has helped fuel cycles of political violence in the country. Nor does the minister responsible for the police enhance his and the department’s credibility by making partisan statements about criminal acts even before the police have investigated. Instead, Chombo should be directing the police to make impartial and thorough investigations, and arresting those found responsible. He is responsible for ensuring that the police work for all Zimbabweans regardless of their political affiliation. In the current highly polarized environment, one of the biggest challenges Zimbabwe faces ahead of elections next year is to have independent, professional, and non-partisan institutions of justice. Zimbabwe’s neighbors in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) should press the government to provide justice for past abuses, end further violence, and ensure elections are credible, free, and fair. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is alarmed to learn that South Sudan’s government has for the past three days been blocking Internet and mobile phone access to two reputedly reliable news media. Internet and phone users in South Sudan have not able to access the Sudan Tribune and Radio Tamazuj since July 17 because the National Communications Authority, which regulates the media, ordered them blocked. Information minister Michael Makuei Lueth told Reuters that they were being blocked because their reporting was “hostile” towards the government. “This blocking of two major news websites is intolerable and we ask the authorities to restore access at once," said Cléa Kahn-Sriber, the head of RSF's Africa desk. "Access to news and information is a fundamental right guaranteed bu South Sudan's 2011 provisional constitution." The Sudan Tribune, a Paris-based news site, and Radio Tamazuj, an independent news radio station, are respected sources of news about Sudan and South Sudan that circumvent efforts by the governments of both countries to censor the media. According to Radio Tamazuj, the South Sudanese government is using ZTE, a Chinese communications company and Internet service provider, to block access to both its website and its mobile phone service. However, its shortwave broadcasts can still be heard. Adil Faris Mayat, the head of South Sudan’s state-owned national TV broadcaster, has meanwhile been detained for the past ten days without being allowed access to a lawyer. South Sudan has fallen 20 places in RSF’s World Press Freedom Indexsince 2015 and is now ranked 145th out of 180 countries. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________(c) 2017 Reporters Without Boarders

Dear Supporters, Happy International Justice Day! Today marks the 19th anniversary of the 1998 Rome Statute: the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In honor of International Justice Day, we would like to express our unequivocal support to the ICC and call on our supporters to join us in commemorating this important day. Despite our grave concern about the lack of enforcement of accountability for President al-Bashir we firmly believe that ICC has brought hope to millions of those of who have been victims of genocide and mass atrocities, including the people of Darfur. The ICC may be a young institution, but it has proven its necessity in pursuing accountability for those who need it the most. In spite of the many challenges, today ICC has given us a lot to reasons to celebrate. For example, the ICC worked tirelessly to bring those who perpetrated crimes in Uganda, DRC, CAR and Ivory Coast to justice. Additionally, even though president al-Bashir has been defying justice, Bashir and his allies have recognized the fact that accountability is real and that impunity will no longer be an option it is just a matter of time. We, therefore, call on you to join us to speak up and demand that our leaders support justice for genocide victims and accountability for perpetrators has experienced over the last 14 years. The ICC currently has two arrest warrant in place of al-Bashir, yet has not tried him because he has not been brought to The Hague for trial. Today as we take into account the mechanisms of justice and accountability the international community has put in place; a man accused of the world's worst crimes war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide celebrates his impunity. ICC has done an excellent job in investigating the crimes committed in Darfur and had issued five arrest warrants between 2009 and today. However our leaders have failed to enforce the ICC arrest warrant, and Bashir continued pursuing his genocidal policy in Darfur and across Sudan, killing innocent civilians, forcing millions out of their home, raping countless women and throwing innocent students and human rights defenders in prison. It is incredibly outrageous to see that a man responsible for all this free. Let us take this opportunity on this important day to recommit ourselves to fighting for justice by letting our leaders know that impunity for Bashir will never ever be an option We know the facts, and with your support, we can urge our leaders to do what is right by the principles of justice and accountability. We have the power to change the situation and encourage our leaders to work towards building sustainable justice and peace in Darfur and-elsewhere. With your support, we can assure that next year on International Justice Day; we will have more than a cause for celebration. Thank you for your continued support! Sincerely, Niemat Ahmadi President and Founder www.darfurwomenaction.org ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________(c) 2017 Darfur Women Action Group

A Thai court has found dozens of people guilty in the country's biggest ever human trafficking case, which began in 2015 after the discovery of 30 mass graves. The dead bodies are believed to be of Roghingya migrants. The trafficking case involves 103 defendants on various charges, including murder, torture, rape and money laundering. Although the court started issuing rulings on Wednesday, it was not immediately clear when they would be concluded. Thai police officials, bureaucrats and Myanmar nationals are among the defendants. They have all pleaded not guilty. Thai officials initiated the case in 2015 after the discovery of more than 30 bodies at an abandoned human trafficking camp in the southern Songkhla province close to the Thai-Malaysian border. The authorities believe the graves contained bodies of possible Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh. At least two of them were children. Thousands of persecuted Rohingya Muslims, who have been fleeing Myanmar's Rakhine state since 2012, are smuggled into Thailand every year. It was not immediately clear what caused the deaths, although police said they believed the people were Rohingya because human traffickers often put the immigrants in temporary shelters before taking them across the border to Malaysia. Thailand is considered to be one of the worst places when it comes to human trafficking, according to the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which ranks countries by their efforts to deal with human smugglers. Just weeks after the discovery of dead bodies in Thailand, Malaysian authorities unearthed mass graves near the Thai border. A total of 139 graves were found at 28 abandoned squalid detention camps believed to have been used by human traffickers to hold people fleeing Myanmar and Bangladesh. Rohingya plight The mass graves in Thailand and Malaysia highlighted the largely-ignored plight of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh that are regularly exploited by human traffickers. Myanmar's Rohingyas live predominantly in the western state of Rakhine. They are not officially recognized by the government as an ethnic minority group, and for decades the nation's Buddhist majority has been accused of subjecting them to discrimination and violence. Read: Myanmar's Rohingya conflict 'more economic than religious' Viewed by the United Nations and the US as one of the world's most persecuted minorities, thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar and Bangladesh flee their countries every year in a desperate attempt to reach Malaysia and Indonesia. Beyond verdicts Fortify Rights, a Southeast Asia-based human rights organization, believes it is necessary for the Thai government to carefully examine the entire process in order to avoid similar problems and difficulties in the future trafficking cases. Furthermore, it says that judgments alone won't be effective to tackle the issue. "Thailand has a long way to go to ensure the rights of those trafficked and killed by human traffickers," the organization said. "We hope that the events of 2015 will not be repeated, but the risks exist." Vivian Tan of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, in Bangkok told DW that since mid-2015, the UN has not recorded any Rohingyas fleeing the region by boats. However, he noted, some 74,000 Rohingyas have fled the country to Bangladesh by road since then. TRAFFICKED AND ABANDONED - THE ROHINGYA EXODUS Stranded On Sunday, May 10, a group of about 600 people arrived in the Indonesian province of Aceh on four boats. At about the same time more than 1,000 others landed in three boats on the northern Malaysian resort island of Langkawi. At least two of these overcrowded boats were towed by local fishermen to the shores. Those rescued were rounded up by the police. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2017 Deutsche Welle

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s defence services, is currently on a goodwill visit to India at the invitation of navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, visiting places of military interest, meeting with Myanmar military officers enrolled in post-graduate programs at Purnea, and learning about the capacity and hardware used by the Indian Armed Forces at Ahmednagar. The Burmese general would do well to soak in the teachings of Gautam Buddha, Ashoka, Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhiji, who propagated ideals of reconciliation, peace and universal loving kindness, while touring the military facilities and meeting with India’s modern warriors. After all, despite it being home to one of the world’s longest civil wars and political strife, the Burmese general’s society still has the potential for reconciliation and peace among the warring parties. Hlaing knows this in his heart. On June 30 in Yangon, something extraordinary happened that lifted the spirit of Myanmar’s people – the generals, National League for Democracy (NLD) supporters, political exiles, journalists and the multi-ethnic population at large. Mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Aung La Nsang made history by becoming the Myanmar’s first-ever world champion in any sport. Three judges unanimously declared him the winner in the nationally televised match against the defending middleweight champion Vitaly Bigdash from Russia. Following Nsang’s victory at Thuwunna stadium, another extraordinary thing happened. Hlaing issued an official statement of congratulations, saying the ethnic Kachin fighter embodied the indomitable spirit of Myanmar and was the pride of the nation. Nsang was invited to the defence ministry and presented with a cash award as a token of appreciation and recognition by representatives of all three branches of Myanmar’s armed forces. As an ethnic Burmese on the other end of the political spectrum from the Tatmadaw’s leaders, I uncharacteristically welcomed the military’s gesture towards Nsang as symbolically and psychologically significant. I celebrated what I saw as a son of Myanmar making the entire nation proud. A nation that has for so long been fractured along ethnic and religious lines. While the country’s Aung San Suu Kyi-led, military-backed peace process is running aground, and the UN Human Rights Council bangs on the country’s door to allow a fact-finding mission to visit its conflict zones, the emergence of a world champion is an very rare moment of jubilation. But as a son of Myanmar myself, I can’t help but ask a painful question: in our long-running civil wars and waves of racial and religious violence, how many Nsangs have we killed, maimed or otherwise destroyed? Nsang is no ordinary fighter. In earlier wins outside of Myanmar, Nsang wrapped himself in the flag of the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and publicly expressed his desire for peace in his war-torn birthplace, Kachin State. On Saturday, the South China Morning Post quoted the new champion as saying, “I hope to be an inspiration to the people of Myanmar. This is for them…. It feels like I am very blessed and hopefully I can bring blessings to other people as well.” I am inspired by this to suspend the scepticism of my intellect, born out of nearly 30 years of political involvement in Burmese affairs as a grassroots activist, hoping that such a nationwide moment of pride may awaken our own better selves, along with a realisation that we are bound as those who “drink the same water and live on the same land”. This bond may have been damaged by decades of war and political strife, but it certainly is not dead. War, danger and strife Almost 250 years after the founding – on ethnic Mon land, no less – of Myanmar’s former capital of Yangon, whose name means “end of war, danger and strife,” the country’s conflicts have multiplied, expanded and deepened. This is largely thanks to misguided political decisions that, in turn, compound the violence and suffering we have inherited. The result is the ongoing displacement of communities, so much so that Myanmar is now ranked eighth in the world in its outflow of refugees. The number of forced migrants, according to the recently released UN Global Trends report, topped 490,000 at the end of 2016. This increase is mainly due to the large numbers of Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing the western region of Rakhine or Arakan to Bangladesh. Here, a 50-year-old strategy aimed at controlling and managing cross-border migration among Rohingya Muslims of Northern Rakhine, has degenerated into one of widespread concern for sustained atrocities. In the Shan and Kachin highlands, the breakdown of a 17-year ceasefire agreement between the KIO and Myanmar’s former government led by Thein Sein has had a devastating impact on the country’s commercial and political transformation, as well as on the many different ethnic communities that live in the strategic Sino-Burmese borderlands. In society at large, Islamophobia, dating back to the colonial era, and violent anti-Rohingya racism have poisoned the minds of a generally acquiescing and decent public. In addition to this, the military’s arrest of Burmese journalists from the Irrawaddy and the Democratic Voice of Burma, and the NLD government’s dismissal of the outrage over media freedom as “low priority”, marks a re-emergence of hostilities between the country’s ruling institutions and the press – a crucial pillar of civil society. While blame and responsibilities may be apportioned, Myanmar now needs to take a deep, collective breath as a multi-ethnic nation so that we may regain our common moral sense of what is in the nation’s long-term best interests. A cathartic moment While our shared sentiments of jubilation over Nsang’s supreme victory are still fresh, people from Myanmar who care about the well-being and future of our birthplace must honestly and critically reflect on the futility of continuing conflicts over claims and counter-claims of our contributions, histories, territories, revenues, resources and entitlements. Myanmar is blessed with trillions of dollars worth of natural resources, both above and below ground, tapped and untapped. But more importantly, Myanmar’s people are its greatest asset, its most potent creative energy. Our strength in unity as an incredibly diverse ethnic community has been damaged, and even destroyed, with each passing year of unresolved conflict. Having worked intimately and transparently with Burmese military leaders, I know that there are members of the Tatmadaw who are keen to push for a more representative government in Myanmar. Despite differences of opinion on how to go about instituting such a government, we share a common desire for a peaceful, prosperous and democratic Union of Myanmar. A young colonel, who is now a four-star general in the commander-in-chief’s office, asked me ten years ago: “Do you think Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is the only person among us who can bring about democratisation in our country?” He didn’t mean it rhetorically and was keen to know my honest answer. My response then was “no”. And it remains unequivocally so. But neither the military nor NLD leaders can expect to succeed in their one-year-old joint effort at facilitating a democratic transition without the inspired participation of the public. Nor can these powerful military figures and popular political parties accomplish their stated objectives of defending and developing a multi-ethnic Myanmar until and unless there is a fundamental shift in their mindsets. Sometimes a national tragedy or a moment of collective jubilation can serve as a cathartic moment, from which springs a nation’s revival, renewal and reconciliation. Again as a Burmese whose family has over three generations had organic ties with the military, I hope that Nsang’s world championship may turn out to be one such moment for our country. Nurture, rather than destroy Leaders from both the NLD and the military must see in every person who calls Myanmar their birthplace a potential Nsang, an embodiment of pride for our multi-ethnic nation, an asset to our national defence and a building block for our development. Myanmar are blessed with many Nsangs in various fields such as journalism, civil society development, human rights promotion, minority rights protection, as well as in the creative domains of art and literature, science and technology, medicine and engineering, agriculture and forestry, interfaith harmony and peace-building, environmental protection and scholarship. Internationally, many of Myanmar’s distinguished sons and daughters have – as refugees, expatriates, and exiles – worked in “world class” institutions or independently. Myanmar does not need to wait for a new generation of citizens to emerge. The country’s leaders need to realise and appreciate the potentially invaluable contributions that the yet-to-be recognised Nsangs could make towards peace, security, development and harmony. Militaries, political parties, religious organisations and virtually all communities have made mistakes – some grave and consequential. No nation or national institution is complete, finished or beyond redemption. Therefore, it is not too late for the Myanmar community to turn the land we love into one that nurtures rather than destroys future Nsangs, irrespective of differences in migratory histories, faiths or opinions. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all Burmese citizens could be brought together into a national programme in which they were encouraged to share their opinions and expertise, publicly and privately, towards the shared goal of building a true democratic Union of Myanmar? ​As evidenced in Britain’s Brexit and Trump’s America, racism and prejudice divides and weakens nations. Myanmar must overcome the weight of its past, and embrace a reality where every one – soldier and civilian, majority and minority, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim – sees our individual achievements celebrated as those of one nation.​ ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________- (c) 2017 The Wire

When Tomás Ojea Quintana made his last visit to Myanmar as UN human rights envoy in 2014, the head of the UN country mission picked him up at the airport. In the car, Quintana mentioned travelling to Rakhine State, where tensions still simmered after hundreds of people were killed in violence between Buddhists and Muslims two years earlier. To his surprise, UN resident coordinator Renata Lok-Dessallien advised against it. “She suggested to me not to visit Rakhine State, offering no reasons why I shouldn’t go there,” Quintana told IRIN in a recent interview. “And then she tried not to be associated with any human rights approach to the situation.” Lok-Dessallien’s advice at the time sums up a schism that has plagued the UN in Myanmar throughout her tenure, and has contributed to a divided and “glaringly dysfunctional” mission, according to internal UN documents provided to IRIN. While Lok-Dessallien leads the camp that advocates working with the government and focusing on development as a solution to Myanmar’s problems, others argue that the government has done little to address many human rights issues – most significantly those affecting minority ethnic Rohingya Muslims – and they say the UN needs to stand up to the government. The UN recently said that Lok-Dessallien will be rotated out of Myanmar, even though she is only three and a half years into a term that usually runs for five years or more. But the UN denied reports she was being fired due to her performance, announcinginstead the “elevation” of her position to that of an assistant secretary-general. Interviews with former and current UN staff, as well as reviews of two internal documents, indicate that the new UN secretary general Antonio Guterres has decided to change the leadership structure to allow the Myanmar mission to put forward a more united front – a position that would take into account both development and human rights concerns. A spokesperson for the office of resident coordinator Lok-Dessallien said she had “provided full support” to Quintana’s visit and added: “We have prioritised human rights as well as the other pillars of the United Nations, namely peace and security, development and humanitarian assistance.” Former and current UN staff members disputed that, and internal reports documented dissension within the UN mission over its failure to stand up for human rights. “It’s no secret that Renata was prioritising the development side, to the frustration of individuals within agencies whose mandate is humanitarian protection,” said one former UN staffer who requested anonymity. Development vs human rights In recent years, friction and antipathy within the UN team have been something of an open secret in Myanmar. Humanitarians, who see rights abuses at the root of crises that involve displacement, hunger, violence, and statelessness want to raise the alarm, according to several insider sources. They voice resentment about development people who keep quiet for the sake of relationships with the government, which they have to work with to improve people’s lives. Each thinks the other is morally bankrupt, naive, or both. At the heart of much of the infighting has been the plight of the Rohingya in Rakhine, a state on the western border with Bangladesh. They are denied citizenship, live under virtual apartheid, and have been interned in displacement camps in their tens of thousands since 2012. Rohingya accounted for the vast majority of those who were killed or were chased from their homes during violence that year involving majority ethnic Rakhine Buddhists. During the more than three years that Lok-Dessallien has been at the helm of the Myanmar team, she has favoured a passive approach. Others – especially as the situation for the Rohingya drastically worsened – have urged action and accountability. Tensions between UN agencies that focus on development, and those that focus on human rights and humanitarian crises – such as the human rights agency, OHCHR, and the emergency aid coordination body, OCHA – have grown so bitter that the UN mission was condemned to “irrelevance” in a memo sent to Guterres. Under the former secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, these divisions went unresolved, insiders say. Lok-Dessallien, until early this year, had a strong ally in her boss Helen Clark, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme. Senior officials have now opted for a radical restructuring of the Myanmar country team that would remove Lok-Dessallien and replace her with someone with more political clout. Whoever fills the new position of assistant secretary-general will report directly to Guterres. The leaked documents and interviews with current and former UN staffers, describe a country team that became so internally fractured, specifically but not exclusively over the crisis in Rakhine State, that a major shake-up was deemed necessary. ‘Growing irrelevance’ “The United Nations in-country presence in Myanmar continues to be glaringly dysfunctional,” stated an April 2017 memo sent to Guterres. “Strong tensions exist within the UN country team, the humanitarian parts of the UN system find itself having to confront the hostility of the development arm, while the human rights pillar is seen as complicating both. “The impact of this dysfunctionality is a growing irrelevance of the UN in guiding and defining the international community’s efforts to address the challenges confronting Myanmar,” it continued, adding that donors were turning elsewhere. The memo put the dysfunctionality down, in part, to structural problems. The role of resident-coordinator is inherently flawed, it argued: he or she does not report directly to the UN secretary-general’s office but to the UNDP, and is therefore more focused on development than politics. “Unfortunately, the position of coordinator of the UN’s development efforts lacks the mandate, the capacity, the expertise and thus the credibility to be taken seriously as a political player,” it said. Lok-Dessallien’s defenders stress that any resident-coordinator has a complex job, tasked with overseeing the work of numerous agencies, each with different mandates. But she was also widely described as unapologetic in the exclusion of politics from her work. A confidential 2015 report commissioned for OHCHR described a culture of secrecy where agencies refused to share crucial information with each other, let alone make it available to the public. The report accused Myanmar’s UN team of excessive subservience to the government, and recommended the team take a stronger public stance on rights. “Myanmar as a state has plenty of capacity to resolve the situation in Rakhine, but it is not choosing to do so,” said the internal report. “Addressing this problem of political will requires a combination of private and public advocacy.” Human Rights Up Front Within the UN’s recent history lies a cautionary tale about dealing with these kinds of tensions. During the bloody final months of Sri Lanka’s long civil war, as the army closed in on the rebel Tamil Tigers, there were 300,000 civilians trapped between the front lines. Tens of thousands of them were killed. But the UN declined to publish mounting casualty numbers and staff members who brought up threats to civilians were punished. An internal probe commissioned afterwards by Ban, then UN secretary-general, found a “continued reluctance” among UN staff “to stand up for the rights of people they were mandated to assist”. The report for OHCHR on Myanmar drew parallels to Sri Lanka. It noted that the approximately 100,000 Rohingya now living in camps are referred to as internally displaced people, or IDPs. But rather than IDP camps, the squalid clusters of monsoon-battered shelters “would more accurately be described as detention camps or internment camps, because the privations and restrictions of movement imposed on the Rohingya are so extreme.” “The situation bears a striking resemblance to the humanitarian community’s systematic failure in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka, during which hundreds of thousands of Tamils were held against their will in internment camps that were fully paid for and serviced by international humanitarian institutions,” said the report. After the tragedy in Sri Lanka, Ban created an initiative intended to prevent such a situation from arising again, called Human Rights Up Front. The author of that initiative, former UN assistant secretary-general Charles Petrie, who led the Sri Lanka internal probe, told IRIN the way the policy has been implemented in Myanmar has been “very confused” and demonstrates “a poor understanding of what Rights Up Front is all about”. “Right now what you have is one group of human rights [advocates] and humanitarians who believe the UN should play a much more forceful role, and you have the development advocates who consider it a pain,” he said. “In actual fact you need to find something that’s a bit more common ground.” The spokesperson for Lok-Dessallien’s office said the Human Rights Up Front policy has been rolled out across all UN agencies in Myanmar and “its implementation by the resident coordinator and the UN country team has been praised by the UN headquarters in New York.” New strategy Whatever its approach, the UN has little to show for its efforts in Rakhine. In the more than 20 years the organisation has been in the northern part of the state, conditions have never been worse. Thousands of Rohingya have been brought to the brink of starvation. The World Food Programme said this month that it expects about 80,500 children to need treatment for acute malnutrition this year in Rohingya-majority areas where the government and military have blocked access to aid groups. Security forces began carrying out counter-insurgency operations in those areas last October, following deadly attacks on border police posts by a new group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Rights organisations have compiled evidence of military abuses of Rohingya civilians – including mass rapes, killings, and torture – which OHCHR said in a February report were “the very likely commission of crimes against humanity”. The dramatic escalation of violence in Rakhine State likely caught Lok-Dessallien offguard, said Quintana, the former human rights envoy to Myanmar. While she continued to favour a development-led approach, her colleagues at OHCHR were issuing strongly-worded statements and reports critical of the government and the military. “It seems that, in the country, what is required is at least a common strategy,” he said. Recent statements from UN headquarters in New York indicate that change is afoot. In a 5 July speech, Guterres laid out plans for reform of the resident coordinator position throughout the UN. He said the “consultations and analysis” done by his office indicated the role should report directly to the secretary-general and not to UNDP. Myanmar may serve as the test case. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 IRIN

In interview on eve of 75th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv deportations, Serge Klarsfeld says it is ‘historical accuracy’ France’s best-known Nazi hunter, Serge Klarsfeld, accused his country’s government during World War II of “complicity in a crime against humanity and genocide.” Klarsfeld, a Holocaust survivor and historian, who, in 2014, received France’s highest civil honor together with his wife, Beate, made the assertion in an interview with the French news agency Agence-Presse France, published Saturday, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv deportations. On July 16 and 17, 1942, French police officers rounded up more than 13,000 Jews at the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver. The men, women, and children were imprisoned there for days in unsanitary conditions and without sufficient water, leading to dozens of fatalities, including through suicide. Then the Jews were transported, partly on French national railway wagons, to Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe. More than 1,000 people, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, attended the commemoration of the 75th anniversary Sunday near a monument that was erected where the stadium, which was demolished decades ago, used to stand. Earlier, Klarsfeld accompanied Macron to a new memorial space, opened near the main Vel d’Hiv monument for Jewish children who were murdered by the Nazis, with help from French authorities. “It’s not an appeal to sentiment,” Klarsfeld, who is a prominent member of the executive board of the Memorial for the Shoah group in France, told the president, “but to historical accuracy.” Macron told him: “Thank you for the work that you do.” French presidents rarely attend the annual commemoration for the Vel d’Hiv deportations. Earlier this month, the Communist Party of France condemned Netanyahu’s attendance at the Vel d’Hiv commemoration. An Israeli prime minister had not yet attended the annual ceremony, which is an official day of commemoration in France. The ceremony “is about peace, whereas the Israeli prime minister is a man of war,” the party said in a statement. But Klarsfeld defended Netanyahu’s presence there as “totally appropriate.” He disputed that the ceremony was about peace, arguing it was about remembrance. “If there was a State of Israel, a Jewish state, in 1942, Vel d’Hiv would not have happened,” Klarsfeld said. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Times of Isreal

Three years after armed groups in the Central African Republic signed a ceasefire agreement, more than one million people are displaced. “The number of families displaced from their homes has increased to a level we have not witnessed since the peak of the conflict in 2014,” warned Eric Batonon, Country Director for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). More than 100,000 people have fled their homes in the Central African Republic since April, due to renewed fighting in several parts of the country. In total, 534,000 people are now displaced within the country and another 481,000 people are living as refugees in neighbouring countries. Political turmoil and continued conflict have also left half of the population in need of humanitarian assistance. "We thought that the 2014 ceasefire would bring us peace and social cohesion, but now we are seeing the opposite. I left Bambari to find a safer place, after members of the ex-Seleka burnt our house and killed my brother,” said Frank Pabingui, a newly displaced father of two, to NRC staff in Sibut. “We need to wake up to the fact that the Central African Republic is again spiralling into a devastating crisis. Closing our eyes to the current crisis won’t make it disappear, but only allow it to escalate,” said Batonon. Lack of international attention to the crisis has been matched with a similar lack of funding. Halfway into the year, less than 30 percent of the funding required to meet the humanitarian needs in 2017 has been received. “There is an urgent need for more funding to ensure that people receive the most basic life-saving assistance. Most of the newly displaced were forced to flee suddenly, leaving everything behind. They need food, clean drinking water, shelter, sanitation facilities and medical care. If we are not able to step up the support now, the dramatic humanitarian situation may fuel further conflicts,” said Batonon. Three years ago, 23 July 2014, Seleka rebels and the anti-Balaka militia signed a ceasefire agreement, after one and a half year of conflict. The agreement was a first step towards a decrease in hostilities, but many issues remained unsolved and since November last year, the conflict has again escalated and spread to new parts of the country. In June this year, a peace deal was signed by 13 out of 14 armed groups in the country. The day after the peace agreement was signed, dozens of people were killed in new clashes in Bria in the east. “The peace agreement brought hope, but this hope has been shattered by the increase in violence and new displacement during the last weeks”, said Batonon. “All armed parties should stick to the agreement and work towards a lasting peace in the country. The combination of conflict, under-development, lack of public services like schools and health facilities, and high levels of acute malnutrition becomes a toxic cocktail, claiming too many civilian lives,” he added. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Norwegian Refugee Council

When Tomás Ojea Quintana made his last visit to Myanmar as UN human rights envoy in 2014, the head of the UN country mission picked him up at the airport. In the car, Quintana mentioned travelling to Rakhine State, where tensions still simmered after hundreds of people were killed in violence between Buddhists and Muslims two years earlier. To his surprise, UN resident coordinator Renata Lok-Dessallien advised against it. “She suggested to me not to visit Rakhine State, offering no reasons why I shouldn’t go there,” Quintana told IRIN in a recent interview. “And then she tried not to be associated with any human rights approach to the situation.” Lok-Dessallien’s advice at the time sums up a schism that has plagued the UN in Myanmar throughout her tenure, and has contributed to a divided and “glaringly dysfunctional” mission, according to internal UN documents provided to IRIN. While Lok-Dessallien leads the camp that advocates working with the government and focusing on development as a solution to Myanmar’s problems, others argue that the government has done little to address many human rights issues – most significantly those affecting minority ethnic Rohingya Muslims – and they say the UN needs to stand up to the government. The UN recently said that Lok-Dessallien will be rotated out of Myanmar, even though she is only three and a half years into a term that usually runs for five years or more. But the UN denied reports she was being fired due to her performance, announcing instead the “elevation” of her position to that of an assistant secretary-general. Interviews with former and current UN staff, as well as reviews of two internal documents, indicate that the new UN secretary general Antonio Guterres has decided to change the leadership structure to allow the Myanmar mission to put forward a more united front – a position that would take into account both development and human rights concerns. A spokesperson for the office of resident coordinator Lok-Dessallien said she had “provided full support” to Quintana’s visit and added: “We have prioritised human rights as well as the other pillars of the United Nations, namely peace and security, development and humanitarian assistance.” Former and current UN staff members disputed that, and internal reports documented dissension within the UN mission over its failure to stand up for human rights. “It’s no secret that Renata was prioritising the development side, to the frustration of individuals within agencies whose mandate is humanitarian protection,” said one former UN staffer who requested anonymity. Development vs human rights In recent years, friction and antipathy within the UN team have been something of an open secret in Myanmar. Humanitarians, who see rights abuses at the root of crises that involve displacement, hunger, violence, and statelessness want to raise the alarm, according to several insider sources. They voice resentment about development people who keep quiet for the sake of relationships with the government, which they have to work with to improve people’s lives. Each thinks the other is morally bankrupt, naive, or both. At the heart of much of the infighting has been the plight of the Rohingya in Rakhine, a state on the western border with Bangladesh. They are denied citizenship, live under virtual apartheid, and have been interned in displacement camps in their tens of thousands since 2012. Rohingya accounted for the vast majority of those who were killed or were chased from their homes during violence that year involving majority ethnic Rakhine Buddhists. During the more than three years that Lok-Dessallien has been at the helm of the Myanmar team, she has favoured a passive approach. Others – especially as the situation for the Rohingya drastically worsened – have urged action and accountability. Tensions between UN agencies that focus on development, and those that focus on human rights and humanitarian crises – such as the human rights agency, OHCHR, and the emergency aid coordination body, OCHA – have grown so bitter that the UN mission was condemned to “irrelevance” in a memo sent to Guterres. Under the former secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, these divisions went unresolved, insiders say. Lok-Dessallien, until early this year, had a strong ally in her boss Helen Clark, the former head of the United Nations Development Programme. Senior officials have now opted for a radical restructuring of the Myanmar country team that would remove Lok-Dessallien and replace her with someone with more political clout. Whoever fills the new position of assistant secretary-general will report directly to Guterres. The leaked documents and interviews with current and former UN staffers, describe a country team that became so internally fractured, specifically but not exclusively over the crisis in Rakhine State, that a major shake-up was deemed necessary. ‘Growing irrelevance’ “The United Nations in-country presence in Myanmar continues to be glaringly dysfunctional,” stated an April 2017 memo sent to Guterres. “Strong tensions exist within the UN country team, the humanitarian parts of the UN system find itself having to confront the hostility of the development arm, while the human rights pillar is seen as complicating both. “The impact of this dysfunctionality is a growing irrelevance of the UN in guiding and defining the international community’s efforts to address the challenges confronting Myanmar,” it continued, adding that donors were turning elsewhere. The memo put the dysfunctionality down, in part, to structural problems. The role of resident-coordinator is inherently flawed, it argued: he or she does not report directly to the UN secretary-general’s office but to the UNDP, and is therefore more focused on development than politics. “Unfortunately, the position of coordinator of the UN’s development efforts lacks the mandate, the capacity, the expertise and thus the credibility to be taken seriously as a political player,” it said. Lok-Dessallien’s defenders stress that any resident-coordinator has a complex job, tasked with overseeing the work of numerous agencies, each with different mandates. But she was also widely described as unapologetic in the exclusion of politics from her work. A confidential 2015 report commissioned for OHCHR described a culture of secrecy where agencies refused to share crucial information with each other, let alone make it available to the public. The report accused Myanmar’s UN team of excessive subservience to the government, and recommended the team take a stronger public stance on rights. “Myanmar as a state has plenty of capacity to resolve the situation in Rakhine, but it is not choosing to do so,” said the internal report. “Addressing this problem of political will requires a combination of private and public advocacy.” Human Rights Up Front Within the UN’s recent history lies a cautionary tale about dealing with these kinds of tensions. During the bloody final months of Sri Lanka’s long civil war, as the army closed in on the rebel Tamil Tigers, there were 300,000 civilians trapped between the front lines. Tens of thousands of them were killed. But the UN declined to publish mounting casualty numbers and staff members who brought up threats to civilians were punished. An internal probe commissioned afterwards by Ban, then UN secretary-general, found a “continued reluctance” among UN staff “to stand up for the rights of people they were mandated to assist”. The report for OHCHR on Myanmar drew parallels to Sri Lanka. It noted that the approximately 100,000 Rohingya now living in camps are referred to as internally displaced people, or IDPs. But rather than IDP camps, the squalid clusters of monsoon-battered shelters “would more accurately be described as detention camps or internment camps, because the privations and restrictions of movement imposed on the Rohingya are so extreme.” “The situation bears a striking resemblance to the humanitarian community’s systematic failure in the final stages of the war in Sri Lanka, during which hundreds of thousands of Tamils were held against their will in internment camps that were fully paid for and serviced by international humanitarian institutions,” said the report. After the tragedy in Sri Lanka, Ban created an initiative intended to prevent such a situation from arising again, called Human Rights Up Front. The author of that initiative, former UN assistant secretary-general Charles Petrie, who led the Sri Lanka internal probe, told IRIN the way the policy has been implemented in Myanmar has been “very confused” and demonstrates “a poor understanding of what Rights Up Front is all about”. “Right now what you have is one group of human rights [advocates] and humanitarians who believe the UN should play a much more forceful role, and you have the development advocates who consider it a pain,” he said. “In actual fact you need to find something that’s a bit more common ground.” The spokesperson for Lok-Dessallien’s office said the Human Rights Up Front policy has been rolled out across all UN agencies in Myanmar and “its implementation by the resident coordinator and the UN country team has been praised by the UN headquarters in New York.” New strategy Whatever its approach, the UN has little to show for its efforts in Rakhine. In the more than 20 years the organisation has been in the northern part of the state, conditions have never been worse. Thousands of Rohingya have been brought to the brink of starvation. The World Food Programme said this month that it expects about 80,500 children to need treatment for acute malnutrition this year in Rohingya-majority areas where the government and military have blocked access to aid groups. Security forces began carrying out counter-insurgency operations in those areas last October, following deadly attacks on border police posts by a new group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Rights organisations have compiled evidence of military abuses of Rohingya civilians – including mass rapes, killings, and torture – which OHCHR said in a February report were “the very likely commission of crimes against humanity”. The dramatic escalation of violence in Rakhine State likely caught Lok-Dessallien offguard, said Quintana, the former human rights envoy to Myanmar. While she continued to favour a development-led approach, her colleagues at OHCHR were issuing strongly-worded statements and reports critical of the government and the military. “It seems that, in the country, what is required is at least a common strategy,” he said. Recent statements from UN headquarters in New York indicate that change is afoot. In a 5 July speech, Guterres laid out plans for reform of the resident coordinator position throughout the UN. He said the “consultations and analysis” done by his office indicated the role should report directly to the secretary-general and not to UNDP. Myanmar may serve as the test case. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 IRIN

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is downgrading the U.S. campaign against mass atrocities, shuttering the Foggy Bottom office that worked for two decades to hold war criminals accountable, according to several former U.S. officials. Tillerson’s office recently informed Todd Buchwald, the special coordinator of the Office of Global Criminal Justice, that he is being reassigned to a position in the State Department’s office of legal affairs, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the move. Buchwald, a career State Department lawyer, has served in the position since December 2015. The remaining staff in the office, Buchwald was told, may be reassigned to the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the former official told Foreign Policy. The decision to close the office comes at a time when America’s top diplomat has been seeking to reorganize the State Department to concentrate on what he sees as key priorities: pursuing economic opportunities for American businesses and strengthening U.S. military prowess. Those changes are coming at the expense of programs that promote human rights and fight world poverty, which have been targeted for steep budget cuts. “There’s no mistaking it — this move will be a huge loss for accountability,” said Richard Dicker, the director of Human Rights Watch’s international justice program. The war crimes ambassador’s “organizational independence gave the office much more weight,” he added. Buchwald did not respond to a request for comment. A State Department spokesperson did not confirm or deny the office was being shuttered. “The State Department is currently undergoing an employee-led redesign initiative, and there are no predetermined outcomes,” the spokesperson said. “We are not going to get ahead of any outcomes.” One senior State Department official, speaking on background, said it was “pure speculation on someone’s part” that the war crimes office was closing. But the official said there’s a massive drive to reorganize and consolidate the State Department, including folding special envoy offices back into bureaus to streamline the policymaking process and cut out redundancies from the unwieldy bureaucracy. The official also cautioned that policymakers often float the idea of closing certain offices and bureaus “just to see what comes back.” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright established the office in 1997, creating the post of ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues to elevate the importance of confronting mass murder in U.S. foreign policy. The decision was part of a growing movement in the 1990s, fueled in large part by genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, to prosecute individuals responsible for the world’s worst atrocities. Advocates have long believed appointing a prominent, high-level political appointee, preferably with influence in the highest levels of government, was the only way to prod the American foreign-policy bureaucracy into confronting reports of mass atrocities. For two decades, the office has spearheaded cooperation with a range of internationally supported criminal courts from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to Cambodia and the Central African Republic and pushed for greater U.S. support for the International Criminal Court (ICC). “This is a very harsh signal to the rest of the world that the United States is essentially downgrading the importance of accountability for the commission of atrocity crimes,” said David Scheffer, a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, who served as the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. “This sends a strong signal to perpetrators of mass atrocities that the United States is not watching you anymore.” The closure is only the latest, and most serious, setback for the office, which has found sometimes grudging support from Democratic and Republican administrations and survived “even the darkest days of John Bolton’s rule in the international organization department at State,” Dicker said. Even before the Donald Trump administration took power, the future of the war crimes office was in question. The State Department during the Barack Obama administration also considered downgrading the office and folding it into the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Following the August 2015 departure of Stephen Rapp, the last full-fledged ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, the Obama administration never nominated a successor for the top post, leaving his deputy, Jane Stromseth, in charge until December 2015. Buchwald, then a career State Department lawyer, was plucked out of the bureaucracy to head the office. He was given the title of special coordinator and granted temporary ambassadorial ranking, which has since expired. His appointment was never sent to the Senate for confirmation, meaning the office has not had a full-fledged ambassador-at-large for more than two and a half years. Since its first days, the office has sought to elevate the importance of supporting the prosecution of a rogues’ gallery of alleged mass murderers, from Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and to push back on institutional fears within the U.S. government that the pursuit of justice may complicate competing U.S. interests to persuade countries to pursue peace or to aid the United States in the fight against terrorists. For instance, the war crimes office helped run a special rewards fund for information leading to the apprehension of war criminals and was instrumental in pressuring Sudan’s Bashir, the world’s only sitting head of state wanted for genocide by the ICC, to drop plans to attend a convocation of world leaders at the U.N. headquarters in New York. Beth Van Schaack, a former lawyer in the war crimes office who first reported Monday morning on the decision to shutter the office, wrote that “Buchwald has apparently been told that his detail will terminate shortly.” Van Schaack wrote that the move against the war crimes office is part of a broader reorganization of the undersecretariat for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, which oversees a series of bureaus that deal with refugees, migration, human trafficking, and the effort to counter violent extremism. “Having a free-standing office,” headed by a U.S. ambassador, is “so critical for maintaining our bipartisan tradition of leadership on both justice and accountability and to make sure we have a strong voice for these issues in the government,” Stromseth, the former deputy of the war crimes office, told FP. Michael Posner, who served as assistant secretary of state for the human rights bureau during the Obama administration, suggested that shuttering the war crimes office did not foreclose the prospect that another State Department agency might carry the torch. “The key is the appointment of strong people and the provision of adequate resources and political support to enable them to do their jobs effectively,” he said. “Treating human rights and global justice issues as foreign-policy priorities advances U.S. interests and values. They are inseparable.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Foreign Policy

The victims of the Khmer Rouge regime spent more than 30 years hoping, waiting, and praying for their day in court. Survivors from the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge rule from 1975-79 at long last were able to witness their first glimpse of justice in 2010 with the conviction of Kaing Guek Euv aka Duch, the director of the S21 secret prison. Duch, who reported directly to senior leaders of the regime, masterminded the confessions extracted by all manner of torture — electric shock, waterboarding and being covered with angry, poisonous centipedes and scorpions — en route to the prisoners’ inescapable fate of execution. The prison site was preserved by the Heng Samrin government, and opened to the public in 1980 as the Tuol Sleng Genocidal Museum. When the guilty verdict came in the first trial, the cavernous public gallery, packed with Cambodian survivors still grieving over lost relatives, erupted with applause, relief, and a flood of tears. Sovachana Pou, Senior Research Fellow at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace (CICP) blogged at the time, (all sic) “I personally witnessed the hybrid justice proceeding live, with more than 500 people, most of them are victims. It was a moving experience and historic event for all the victims [who had] to wait more than 30 years to finally having some sort of justice.” Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime was ousted by Cambodian dissidents and Vietnamese regular troops in 1979. However, Cold War diplomacy led to the West’s complicity in supporting recognition of the exiled Khmer Rouge’s right to still represent the Cambodian people inside the UN General Assembly. This Machiavellian diplomacy in support of the hated Khmer Rouge blocked UN recognition of the “Killing Fields” nightmare until 1997. Western ambassadors that I met in Bangkok in the 1980s and beyond predicted back then that a Cambodia tribunal would never take place. After surmounting many hurdles, the Cambodian Tribunal, officially the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), finally came into being in 2006, some 30 years after the mass graves were unearthed and evidence was made available from the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The tribunal was based on a partnership between the Cambodia government and the UN. Under the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-79, two million people died as a result of mass executions and draconian policies that led to starvation, disease, and death in labor camps. In its pursuit of justice, the ECCC Tribunal has secured all-important convictions against key leaders Nuon Chea, who ranked number two to supreme leader Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state, judged to be part of the inner circle of Khmer Rouge decision-makers found guilty of crimes against humanity. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014. David Scheffer, the UN secretary general’s special expert on UN assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials, declared after the verdict, “Today, the winds of international justice swept through the fields, forests, and towns of Cambodia where millions perished.” Hearings on a second part of the trial against already convicted leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan on charges of genocide, forced marriages, and sexual violence was recently completed. The prosecution accused the Khmer Rouge regime of a deliberate policy of elimination targeting two ethnic minorities – the ethnic Cham and the Vietnamese. The judges have adjourned to consider their verdict on the genocide charges. The ECCC, now in its final days or months, finds its legacy and achievements hotly disputed between international lawyers, journalists, academics, and human rights organizations. From the very beginning the ECCC’s reputation was challenged by reports of corruption, poor management, and political interference. U.S.-based Human Rights Watch had always opposed the tribunal being held in Cambodia. Their damning report in 2014 alleged that “political interference, and corruption make [the] tribunal a failure.” Many media adopted a similar theme. The New York Times ran with the headline: “11 Years, $300 Million and 3 Convictions. Was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Worth It?” casting doubts over the tribunal’s performance. The ECCC trial prosecutor Nicholas Moumjian wrote a reply to The New York Times outlining a number of achievements that the Times’ piece had scarcely mentioned. TIME Magazine in 2014 went much further with its denunciation of the Asia’s first-ever exercise in international justice as nothing but a “shocking failure.” (It should be noted that the piece was apparently filed out of Hong Kong, not Phnom Penh where the tribunal is based). A common media narrative assumed that any tribunal based on partnership with Cambodia’s defective domestic courts, under the sway of long-serving Prime Minister Hun Sen, was doomed from the outset. U.S. academic and Khmer Rouge specialist Alexander Hinton, whose new book The Trial of the Torturer is based on the Duch trial, observed, “There are valid concerns about politicization, cost, and the slow pace of the trial. But, despite all the difficulties, there have been fair trials leading to two judgements with a third on the way.” The UN entered into the this hybrid tribunal on the understanding that UN assistance from highly experienced tribunal judges and prosecutors could ensure fair trials and international standards of justice, based on adding humanitarian law onto the body of Cambodian law and legal procedures. Former UN legal affairs expert Lars Olsen, who traveled all over Cambodia during his seven year stint at the ECCC, recounted his experience to The Diplomat. “I met so many survivors to which the work of the tribunal mattered a great deal. All these encounters convinced me that the work of the tribunal matters to many survivors, and that the ECCC was their only hope to get some sense of justice.” The political constraints, legal short-comings, and endless controversy are a common thread that runs through all previous tribunals for international justice and accountability. According to Olsen, who was also the tribunal’s legal communications spokesman, “What the harshest critics often tend to forget is that the alternative to the ECCC is not a perfect tribunal, which would serve as a beacon of light in the world of international justice. On the contrary, the alternative would have been nothing at all.” The Tribunal’s public gallery provided 500 seats and such was public interest it was often packed full. Photo by Khmer Rouge Tribunal (ECCC). In Cambodia itself, the trials resonated with the public. As of July 2017, a total of 535,015 people had come to sit in the court room to watch the proceedings. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, watched the daily live television broadcasts. Victims from all provinces have been provided free transport to attend the hearings so that justice could be watched first-hand. The former secretary general of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, called it “astounding,” saying that nothing like this level of public interest had been shown in other genocide trials. The ECCC also established an important new legal precedent, with victims permitted to play an active role in the trial. More than 3,800 civil parties registered in Case 002 against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, making important contributions to the body of evidence and the court proceedings through their group lawyers. This unique role of victims as recognized parties in the Cambodia court, could well be adopted by future tribunals. A group of 10 victims represented by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) praised the court’s conviction of the former Khmer Rouge leaders on August 7, 2014. “We will finally be able to mourn our relatives,” they wrote. “It was important for us to see those who planned and ordered these crimes be held to account.” Those who seek to belittle the credibility of tribunal frequently cite statistics comparing the Cambodian ECCC and its total of five indictments with 61 indictments from the former Yugoslavia and 95 from Rwanda (both cases prosecuted at the International Court Justice in The Hague) as well as 22 indictments from the Sierra Leone Special Court known as the Sierra Leone Tribunal. This fails to take into account the uniquely daunting obstacles that the Cambodian tribunal faced. Hinton pointed out that some of the failings in the quest for justice are rightly blamed on the West. “Not only did the international community fail to seek to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice [from 1979 -1997], but they resupplied and rearmed the Khmer Rouge to fight a proxy war against the new Cambodian government,” Hinton said. The exiled Khmer Rouge-controlled coalition, under the name of Democratic Kampuchea, occupied Cambodia’s seat in the UN General Assembly until 1990. No previous genocide tribunal had been so systematically blocked and delayed by decades. The 30-year delay clearly limited the number of Khmer Rouge leaders who could possibly be put on trial. Pol Pot, his top military commander Ta Mok, Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, and others died before the ECCC ever convened. Now, Cases 003 and 004 are expected to be “shelved” given that funding is fast running out, and the Cambodian co-prosecutor and its legal enforcement arm have reportedly ceased cooperation apparently under pressure from Prime Minister Hun Sen. Youk Chhang, the founder of DC-Cam (Documentation Center of Cambodia, focused on preserving records of the Khmer Rouge era) has accused the trial judges of “tarnishing justice” by terminating the remaining two cases. But he strongly argues that, despite the tribunal’s flaws, there is overall a very positive legacy: “Without the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Cambodia would not be able to record and preserve the history of the Khmer Rouge regime for future generations and establish a critical foundation for the rule of law, which is very vital for national reconciliation in Cambodia.” In 2009 the first history textbook about the Khmer Rouge rule, A History of Democratic Kampuchea, was introduced in Cambodia’s school curriculum Cambodia can take satisfaction in being the first country in Asia to have bravely confronted the horrors of the darkest chapter in their history. The country has thus rendered all the other victims of mass atrocities still denied justice in the region an important service. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ © 2017 The Diplomat

GENOCIDE EDUCATION IN CAMBODIA A determined attempt of the Ministry of Education and the Documentation Center of Cambodia PREFACE TO THE TEACHER GUIDEBOOK Reameaso chased Mekhala among the clouds and threw his diamond axe at her so violently it produced the sound of thunder. Mekhala shielded herself with a magic crystal ball, a gift given to her by her teacher. Instantly, the collision released a flash of bright light—signifying the clash between good and evil. This anecdote is part of the old Cambodian story the Reamker, an epic that traces the struggles between good and evil. One of the worst, extensive cases of Cambodian evil has been the genocide of 1975–79, a tragic part of our history where an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million people died and so many more suffered under the brutal hands of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. But just like in the epic tale of the Reamker where Reameaso’s axe is counteracted by Mekhala’s crystal ball, the time has now come for Cambodia’s good to offset its evil. For the first time in three decades, the veil of silence that has plagued Cambodian schools will finally be lifted, allowing students and teachers to speak about and understand the Cambodian genocide of 1975–79. It is a monumental time in our nation’s history. Our new textbook and genocide curriculum will educate our youth, as well as simultaneously provide a platform for dialogue and discussion in which all Cambodians can take part. By facing this dark chapter in our history, we can begin to recognize the painful struggles of our family members and friends. Our forebears, whose spirits whisper through the rice fields, call upon us to liberate them from injustice and inhumanity. As custodians of this painful legacy, acknowledging the past also helps us acknowledge the present struggles of survivors. These are the men and women, ordinary and uncelebrated, who have tirelessly labored to rebuild society and their homes in the wake of disaster and tragedy. Teachers play an invaluable and essential part as guardians of our history. They are the stewards of the vessel—guiding our students through the stormy waters of our nations’ turbulent past. They steer us all toward our future. Hopefully, this Teacher’s Guidebook will serve as their compasses, pointing them to the beacons of truth, justice and knowledge, so that they can inspire and teach generations about the distressing aftermaths of genocide, and, above all, evil. H.E. Dr. Hang Chuon Naron Minister, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport For more information, please contact: PHENG PONG-RASY Team Leader, Genocide Education in Cambodia DOCUMENTATION CENTER OF CAMBODIA e: truthrasy.p@dccam.org t: +855 12 696 961 w: www.dccam.org ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 DCCAM