Justice Symposium & ICTY Movie Screening WARM FESTIVAL 2017 The Post-Conflict Research Center and WARM Foundation cordially invite you to attend the Justice Symposium, ''Conventional and Unconventional Approaches to Transitional Justice,'' on June 29 at 11 am at Sarajevo’s Kino Meeting Point. The symposium will be followed by the Bosnian premiere of ICTY's latest documentary,''Never justified: ICTY and the Crime of Torture,'' and a special discussion with ICTY Outreach Officer, Petar Finci. The symposium and film screening are presented as part of the 2017 WARM Festival. Complete festival program is available here. (http://warmfoundation.org/warm-festival-2017) Simpozijum i premijera filma MKSJ WARM FESTIVAL 2017 Centar za postkonfliktna istraživanja i WARM Fondacija vas poziva da prisustvujete simpozijumu ''Konvencijalni i nekonvencijalni pristupi tranzicionoj pravdi'', 29. juna od 11 časova u Kinu Meeting Point. Nakon simpozijuma biće upriličena premijera najnovijeg dokumentarnog filma Međunarodnog krivičnog trbunala za bivšu Jugoslaviju (MKSJ) ''Nikad opravdani: MKSJ i zločin mučenja'' i posebna diskusija sa Petrom Fincijem iz Outreach programa MKSJ. Simpozijum i projekcija filma su organizovani u sklopu WARM Festivala 2017. Kompletan program festivala možete pronaći ovdje. The Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) | Centar za postkonfliktna istraživanja (CPI) Dedicated to Restoring a Culture of Peace in the Western Balkans Posvećeni obnovi kulture mira na Zapadnom Balkanu ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 WARM

A leader of Ukrainian Jewry condemned the hosting in Lviv of a festival celebrating a Nazi collaborator on the anniversary of a major pogrom against the city’s Jews.The municipality plans to hold “Shukhevychfest,” an event named after the nationalist collaborator Roman Shukhevych featuring music and theater shows, on June 30th. Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, in a statement called the event “disgraceful.” On June 30, 1941, Ukrainian troops, including militiamen loyal to Shukhevych’s, began a series of pogroms against Jews, which they perpetrated under the auspices of the German army, according to Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder and other scholars. They murdered approximately 6,000 Jews in those pogroms.This June 30 will be the 110th birthday of Shukhevych, a leader of the OUN-B nationalist group and later of the UPA insurgency militia, which collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviet Union before it turned against the Nazis. "Shukhevychfest” is part of a series of gestures honoring nationalists in Ukraine following the 2014 revolution, in which nationalists played a leading role. They brought down the government of former president Viktor Yanukovuch, whose critics said was a corrupt Russian stooge. On June 13, a Kiev administrative court partially upheld a motion by parties opposed to the veneration of Shukhevych in the city and suspended the renaming of a street after Shukhevych. The city council approved the renaming earlier this month. In a related debate, the director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, who recently described Shukhevych as an “eminent personality,” last month defended the displaying in public of the symbol of the Galician SS division. Responsible for countless murders of Jews, Nazi Germany’s most elite unit was comprised of Ukrainian volunteers. Displaying Nazi symbols is illegal in Ukraine but the Galician SS division’s symbol is “in accordance with the current legislation of Ukraine,” Vyatrovich said. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Jerusalem Post

The Trump administration State Department is evidently content to allow recently appointed Charge d’Affaires Steven Koutsis to remain the senior U.S. diplomat in Khartoum, serving as the primary interlocutor on a day-to-day basis with the genocidal National Congress Party regime, which is now celebrating the 28th anniversary of the military coup that brought it to power—as the National Islamic Front, whose ideology the NCP has never abandoned, only trimmed as circumstances warrant. In his brief tenure (he was appointed only last year) Koutsis has been the spokesman for views that are disingenuously framed, typically misleading, and alarmingly tendentious. Most alarming are his comments of June 24, first reported by Agence France-Presse (El Daien, East Darfur | June 24, 2017), but subsequently by many other news organizations. Referring to those expressing grave concern about Khartoum’s increasing repression and continuing violent suppression of political dissent, religious intolerance, its abysmal human rights record, and its continuing deployment of brutal militia forces in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan, Koutsis declared: “None of these other issues were the point of sanctions, and none of these other issues, therefore, should be linked to the lifting of sanctions.” Here Koutsis is so egregiously in error that we must question his basic diplomatic competence in dealing with the Khartoum regime. U.S. economic sanctions imposed by President Clinton in 1997 are explicit about why they were being imposed; in the Preface of his Executive Order, Clinton declared: We must wonder what part of “the prevalence of human rights violations, including slavery and the denial of religious freedom” escaped Koutsis’ understanding. Rather more to the point, we must ask whether it was an unforgiveable ignorance of this language in the 1997 Executive Order—or a cynical belief that no one would call him on the outrageous inaccuracy of his statement. Steven Koutsis, the cynical diplomatic ignoramus representing the Trump administration State Department in Khartoum Does Koutsis think that “human rights violations” in Sudan are a minor issue, merely a tag-on to U.S. concerns about Khartoum’s support for international terrorism, support that has kept the NIF/NCP regime on the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism” for 20 years? Sudan, Syria, and Iran are the only three countries in the world that remain on this list, and for good reason. But that fact in no way diminishes the appalling nature of human rights abuses by the same regime in its treatment of its own people: torture by the security services is commonplace; the denial of press freedoms only grows more rigorous; suppression of demonstrations has taken the form of regime orders to “shoot to kill” demonstrators (September 2013); political power-sharing and democratization has been relentlessly subverted; bombing of civilian and humanitarian targets by the regime’s military aircraft has been a primary tactic in its wars against marginalize populations living in Sudan’s peripheries (see | http://wp.me/p45rOG-Pv ); chemical weapons were used against civilians in Jebel Marraduring the savage military offensive mounted by the regime’s regular and militia forces in 2016 (established conclusively by Amnesty International | September 29, 2016 | https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/09/chemical-weapons-attacks-darfur/ ). Infant dying from chemical weapons attack in Jebel Marra by armed forces of the Khartoum regime (Amnesty International, September 2016) Koutsis would evidently have us believe that none of this matters, or bears on the decision about whether the U.S. should lift sanctions on the regime—sanctions actually strengthened under the Bush administration in 2006 in response to the regime’s continuing genocidal counter-insurgency in Darfur. President (and former self-promoted “Field Marshal”) Omar al-Bashir—installed in office during the 1989 military coup—is the target of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, charging him with multiple counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. The ICC has issued arrest warrant for other members of regime, charging them with crimes against humanity; and many more arrest warrants will be issued when the regime eventually falls. ICC-Indicted génocidaire Omar al-Bashir Again, then, what are we to make of Koutsis’ viciously inaccurate claim that all this is beside the point? “None of these other issues were the point of sanctions, and none of these other issues, therefore, should be linked to the lifting of sanctions.” If nothing else, this pernicious falsehood provides context for other of Koutsis’ remarks this year, remarks that create a deeply distorted and highly tendentious picture of present conditions in Sudan—and Darfur in particular. One of the key “tracks” stipulated in the gravely misguided decision by President Obama to lift sanctions provisionally (January 13, 2017) was an improvement in humanitarian access. The Khartoum regime has for almost three decades used the denial of humanitarian access as a central weapon of war in its counter-insurgency campaigns: in the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan in the 1990s and through the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005; in Darfur from the beginning of major fighting in 2003; and again in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan and Blue Nile State beginning in summer 2011. This has been extraordinarily well documented, by journalists, humanitarian workers, and human rights organizations. So when former Obama administration UN ambassador Samantha Power declared in her last UN press conference (January 13, 2017) that there had been “sea change” of improvement in humanitarian access in Sudan, she was promulgating a deeply destructive falsehood, one admitted to be such by State Department officials. Yet no clarification or correction came—even from Power’s friends in the administration, including National Security Advisor Susan Rice and US Agency for International Development Administrator Gayle Smith, who said nothing—and this perverse characterization stands as the last word prior to Koutsis’ recent remarks on the issue: “I can say without much hesitation that, with the few exceptions, the advances on the five tracks have been positive,” US charge d’affaires in Khartoum, Steven Koutsis, said. “The few exceptions being… the implementation of humanitarian access is uneven… and that we want to see that the government begins to act more on moving towards a more permanent agreement with the opposition” on ending hostilities. “The implementation of humanitarian access is uneven”? What a preposterous understatement: rebel-controlled areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile remain under a humanitarian embargo imposed by the regime, which has resolutely refused to negotiate humanitarian access in good faith. In February 2012 an African Union, UN, and Arab League proposal for such access (known as the “Tripartite Proposal”) was accepted by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-North) in South Kordofan and Blue Nile—but was rejected by Khartoum. Over more than five years, in countless negotiating session, the regime has found ways to accept and then renege, to add condition after condition, to do everything possible to make an agreement on humanitarian access impossible. A child slowly starving to death in the Nuba Mountains (2012); we have no idea what the malnutrition and mortality rates in the Nuba are because Khartoum refuses to allow even humanitarian assessment. But reports from sources on the ground and hit-and-run humanitarian assessments in violation of Khartoum’s embargo suggest that malnutrition is extremely severe and and a great many have died—from aerial bombardment (typically targeting agricultural production) and malnutrition and related disease. Yet when Koutsis weighed in on this issue in a piece written for Sudan Tribune (March 3, 2017), he essentially blamed the SPLM-North leadership, pointing to their reservation about a questionable U.S. proposal made in November 2016—but referring to none of the antecedent history of bad faith by the regime that led to the SPLM-North reservation. This extremely attenuated version of the history of this critical issue is all too typical of what we have seen of Koutsis, who has also not done nearly enough to highlight the overwhelming urgency of the humanitarian situation in Darfur, where access continues to be denied by the regime to many hundreds of thousands of civilians (almost 1 million people according to one highly-informed humanitarian source). [See also: http://sudanreeves.org/2017/04/04/famine-in-south-sudan-should-not-obscure-urgent-food-crisis-in-sudan/] Humanitarian access is “uneven”? This is simply disgraceful dishonesty given the number of people denied any humanitarian relief by the regime Koutsis seems so eager to give a passing grade: “I can say without much hesitation that, with the few exceptions, the advances on the five tracks have been positive,” US charge d’affaires in Khartoum, Steven Koutsis, said. (AFP, June 24, 2017) Koutsis simply refuses to acknowledge the extent of desperate humanitarian need in Sudan, and this now includes a raging cholera epidemic, affecting nearly all of Sudan, and that has now reached Darfur just as the rainy season begins in earnest. Humanitarian access could not be more urgently required and the distortions by former UN ambassador Samantha Power and now Steven Koutsis are terrible betrayals of people in critical need. Koutsis seems already to be looking past the decision on whether to lift U.S. economic sanctions permanently, going so far as to declare last August (2016): The acting U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Khartoum Steven Koutsis has expressed his country’s keenness to provide technical and logistical support for Sudan to face challenges of climate change. (Sudan Tribune | August 22, 2016 | KHARTOUM) But about the chemical weapons assault by Khartoum against the civilians of Jebel Marra—also in 2016—Koutsis said not a word, a silence in which he was joined by the rest of the world, including those who profess themselves outraged by the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry, who called chemical weapons use in Syria a “moral obscenity,” but was completely silent about what Amnesty International had conclusively demonstrated about Khartoum’s use of the same sort of weapons in Jebel Marra. Climate change is a real, present, and massive danger to the world; but chemical weapons use in Darfur is not for that reason less a matter of the gravest concern, a concern that U.S. Charge d’Affaires Steven Koutsis evidently does not share. Nor does he share the concern articulated so comprehensively in two recent reports on Khartoum’s success in turning Darfur into a “militia state”: Border Control from Hell: How the EU’s migration partnership legitimizes Sudan’s “militia state” The Enough Project | April 5, 2017 [by Suliman Baldo] | http://www.enoughproject.org/files/BorderControl_April2017_Enough_Finals.pdf “Remote-control breakdown: Sudanese paramilitary forces and pro-government militias,” Small Arms Survey (Geneva), No. 27, April 2017 | http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/fileadmin/docs/issue-briefs/HSBA-IB-27-Sudanese-paramilitary-forces.pdf Human Rights Watch reported in detail (September 2015) on what remains Khartoum’s dominant militia force in Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Not to highlight the central role of Khartoum-backed militias in Darfur—to say only that “we want to see that the government begins to act more on moving towards a more permanent agreement with the opposition” on ending hostilities—is to reveal either ignorance or indifference to the most consequential nature of present violence and insecurity in Darfur. Koutsis declares, “Yes, I can say with absolute certainty that Darfur today is more peaceful than it was a year ago.” But his “certainty” is only superficially informed—like his knowledge of the contents of the 1997 Executive Order he wishes to see ended permanently—and ignores countless dispatches from Radio Dabanga and Sudan Tribune that make nonsense of Koutsis’ characterization. The rape of women and girls is relentless [http://wp.me/p45rOG-1QG/]; the violent expropriation of African farmland by Arab militias and armed groups continues apace [http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P /; camps for the displaced face relentless assaults in one form or another, some by way of arson. Khartoum has made no secret of its wish to dismantle the camps [http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Qo/], a task that will be made easier and less visible with the slashing of UNAMID—44 percent of its present (already reduced) military presence, and over 30 percent of its police forces (also already reduced). If the camps are dismantled and emptied, we may expect a collapse of organized humanitarian relief and an orgy of violence as people lose their only security, tenuous though it is. In the face of these realities, it would appear that Koutsis is a man equally capable of both the most culpable ignorance and the most cynical indifference to human suffering in the country where he serves as the United States’ senior diplomat. Moreover, as AFP editorializes in its dispatch, Koutsis’ “assessment of Darfur is expected to guide Washington’s decision on sanctions.” Given Koutsis’ demonstrated ignorance and cynicism, we must fear a terribly unjust reward awaits Khartoum’s génocidaires. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 SUDAN Research, Analysis, and Advocacy

Deputy Prime Minister Bin Chhin looks at portraits of Khmer Rouge victims at an opening ceremony for the Khmer Rouge tribunal’s Legal Documentation Centre in Phnom Penh yesterday. Erin Handley Deputy Prime Minister Bin Chhin yesterday opened up about the hardship he experienced under the Khmer Rouge, telling students at the inauguration of the Legal Documentation Centre (LDC) yesterday that the Cambodian tragedy was “not a lie”. The LDC, in the capital’s Phnom Penh Thmey commune, was officially opened yesterday thanks to almost $2.4 million in Japanese funding. The centre will house the reams of documents produced from the decade-long Khmer Rouge tribunal, which has tried and convicted senior leaders Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, Brother Number Two Nuon Chea and head of state Khieu Samphan. In his first public appearance in his new role at the helm of the government’s task force on the Khmer Rouge trials, a post previously held by Sok An who passed away in March, Chhin added a personal note to the inauguration. “I experienced hardship during the Democratic Kampuchea regime of building canals and dams; I experienced hardship as well as killings,” he said. Chhin, a former editor at a newspaper, said he wrote under the pseudonym “black crow” and managed to hide his real position from the Khmer Rouge by showing them an old student card. He said he was evacuated from Phnom Penh to the East Zone and saw men drop dead from exhaustion. When the communist militia presented him with a letter and asked him to read it, he sensed a trap, and fooled them by pretending to try to read it upside-down. He volunteered when cadre needed fish, he said, despite not knowing how to handle a net. Eight others in his unit who couldn’t fish were detained, bound together at the ankles with wooden shackles, and tortured. “I could hear the screams of the people who were being beaten, so I was lucky that at that time I survived,” he said. After the fall of the regime in 1979, he visited the notorious S-21 prison and found that his father-in-law, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, had been detained there for three months and killed. “This was the reality under the regime – it is not a play or a show or a performance. I am afraid you think it is a show or a lie, but it is true,” he told the students in the audience. “Some inconsiderate people who lived during the regime could say it was an exaggeration. What I say here is not a political message, it is the truth.” Khmer Rouge victim Sou Sotheavy speaks in front of her portrait to the press about her horrific experience as a transgender woman under the regime. (credit: Erin Handley) Chhin’s comments follow last week’s closing statements at the tribunal in Case 002/02 against Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, who repeatedly cited “Vietnamese propaganda” as having distorted Cambodian history – a potential symbolic threat to the ruling party’s claim to legitimacy, which stems from its overthrow of the Khmer Rouge with the help of Vietnam. Chhin said that 3 million people died during the regime, though more conservative estimates put the figure at 1.7 million, and extended his “most profound gratitude” to Prime Minister Hun Sen “for constantly and strenuously supporting the process of the tribunal”. That support has been called into question throughout the court proceedings, however. Hun Sen has threatened civil war would ensue if controversial future cases against Meas Muth, Yim Tith and Ao An went ahead. The fate of those cases currently hangs in the balance, with the co-investigating judges considering a stay on proceedings due to a purported lack of funding. Yesterday’s inauguration of the archives, library and “virtual tribunal” was attended by some of the Khmer Rouge’s most well-known victims, among them Bou Meng, one of only a handful of survivors of S-21, and Sou Sotheavy, a transgender woman who was forced to marry a woman and father a child during the regime. Speaking at the ceremony, former tribunal media officer Dim Sovannarom said the centre would ensure that even when the court was dissolved, “the past remains”. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Phnom Penh Post

A shocking new report by Amnesty International into ongoing human rights violations in Kachin State and northern Shan State in Burma has prompted Burma Campaign UK to raise further questions about the decision of the British government to provide free training to the Burmese Army. The report, “All the civilians suffer”, describes many of the human rights violations as war crimes. The vast majority of them are committed by the Burmese Army. They include 25 instances of the Burmese Army executing civilians, including one case where 18 men were executed and left in a mass grave. Another example cited was the death of an eight or nine-year-old child, killed when the Burmese Army fired mortar bombs at a village. Villagers are used as slave labour to carry equipment for soldiers, and face regular beatings. In one example they had their faces slashed with a shaving blade. The 51 page report, based on 140 interviews, details numerous case studies of how the Burmese Army has been either deliberately targeting civilians, or taken no effort to ensure the safety of civilians in conflict areas, in violation of international law. The cases documented have largely taken place in the past year, three years after the British government first announced it would provide free training to the Burmese Army. Facing criticism for its decision, the British government initially claimed the training related to human rights, but was later forced to admit that only one hour in the sixty hour training course covered human rights, and no reference to human rights violations by the Burmese Army are made in the training. The government now says the training is to ‘professionalise’ the Burmese Army and that no direct combat training is involved. The last thing ethnic civilians need is a more professional Burmese Army attacking their villages. The new evidence of human rights violations by the Burmese Army comes just three months after the United Nations decided to launch an investigation into human rights violations by the Burmese Army in Rakhine State and Kachin and Shan States. The United Nations has already documented human rights violations against the Rohingya ethnic group which could amount to crimes against humanity. These include soldiers arbitrarily executing civilians, stamping on a baby as it was born, the mass use of rape, and slitting the throat of a baby as it cried out to be fed while Burmese Army soldiers gang-raped its mother. The British government is spending £305,499 a year training the Burmese Army. No specific goals exist for what the training is supposed to achieve, and no evaluation of the spending has been carried out. No questions are asked about the past records of the soldiers Britain trains, and no follow up done to see if soldiers trained by Britain were involved in recent military offensives against the Shan, Kachin, Rohingya and other ethnic groups. If the original false claims by the British government that the training was about human rights were genuine, then training the Burmese Army has been a spectacular failure. Human rights violations by the Burmese Army have increased significantly in the past year. Perhaps because they are reluctant to admit they made a mistake, the British government are doggedly sticking to the training programme. Worse, other European countries are joining them, with Germany and Austria also recently offering to train the Burmese Army. It is possible that the real reason for the training is commercial. On his now regular trips to Europe, the head of the Burmese Army, Min Aung Hlaing, has been given factory tours of arms manufacturers and military suppliers, and presented with gifts and lavish dinners. Although there is officially an arms embargo in place, some European companies are already supplying the Burmese military with equipment. The decision to train and trade with the Burmese military is a spectacular failure of morality, but also much more than that. It sends a signal to Min Aung Hlaing and his military that they can continue to act with impunity. No matter what they do, no matter how horrific the human rights violations they commit, instead of facing consequences, they are embraced even more warmly. With the things Min Aung Hlaing has been responsible for, he should be a pariah, not a dinner guest. Perhaps when the UN Fact Finding Mission issues its report next March, the British government and others will be shamed into action. Ending the free training programmes should be just one small part of a wide range of measures that pressure the military to end its violations of international law. In the meantime, it seems that British taxpayers’ money will keep being spent on training war criminals. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 HuffPost | HPMG News

Farc rebels in Colombia have handed over all of their personal weapons, completing the transfer of arms a day ahead of a revised schedule, United Nations monitors in Colombia say. A total of 7,132 weapons have been registered and boxed away, the UN says. The monitors said they had also found and emptied 77 out of the Farc's 900 arms caches hidden around the countryside. The arms handover is a key condition in last year's peace agreement. The deal seeks to end more than five decades of conflict and negotiations between Colombia's largest left-wing rebel group and the government. But US monitors have warned that the task of locating and emptying the Farc's remaining caches could take many months because of the difficulty in reaching them. Some of them are reachable only by river or foot through dense jungle and mountain terrain. Many are booby-trapped and need to be painstakingly dismantled. Many Colombians are concerned that if there is any delay, these weapons could fall into the hand of criminals, paramilitaries or the ELN, Colombia's second-largest left-wing rebel group. All these groups are seeking to occupy territory relinquished by the Farc under the peace deal and take over their drug-trafficking activities. In the meantime, President Juan Manuel Santos, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts in securing the peace deal with the Farc, is expected to attend a symbolic ceremony on Tuesday in the town of Mesetas, south of Bogota, to mark the end of the disarmament process. Mesetas was once a Farc stronghold during the 52-year conflict with the state in which 260,000 people lost their lives. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 BBC News

Bosnian women from the "Srebrenica Mothers Association" arrive at the Court of Justice, for the verdict in a higher appeal against the Dutch State, in The Hague, on June 27, 2017. AFP/Getty Images A court has ruled that the Dutch government is partially liable for the deaths of around 300 Muslim men killed in the Srebrenica massacre. The Hague court of appeal’s findings largely upheld a civil court judgement from 2014, which found the state was liable for the murder of Bosniak Muslims who were turned to Bosnian Serb troops by Dutch UN peacekeepers. Presiding judge Gepke Dulek-Schermers said that Dutch soldiers “knew or should have known that the men were not only being screened…but were in real danger of being subjected to torture or execution”. Dutch soldiers of a Dutchbat convoy chatting with Bosnian fighters in Vares, Bosnia, on 1 March 1994 (AFP/Getty Images) "By having the men leave the compound unreservedly, they were deprived of a chance of survival," he added. In a departure from an earlier ruling, the court said the Netherlands should pay only 30 per cent of damages to victims’ families, after estimating odds of 70 per cent that the victims would have been dragged from the base and killed regardless of what action Dutch soldiers took. The amount of damages will be determined in a separate hearing unless the victims and the state can reach a settlement. The court rejected a claim from the relatives of other Srebrenica victims, who argued that Dutch government should also be held responsible for the protection of thousands more Muslims who had gathered outside the military base. Judges have acquitted Netherlands of responsibility for more than 7,000 other victims killed in the Srebrenica area. "This is a great injustice," said Munira Subasic of the Mothers of Srebrenica group. "The Dutch state should take its responsibility for our victims because they could have kept them all safe on the Dutchbat (Dutch battalions') compound." Their lawyer, Marco Gerritsen, called the court's assessment of the men's chances of survival “very arbitrary” and said he was looking at the possibility of appealing to the Dutch Supreme Court. The case is the first time a country has been held liable for the actions of peacekeeping forces operating under a UN mandate. The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after acknowledging its failure to protect refugees, although the Netherlands maintains that the Bosnian Serbs, not Dutch troops, bear responsibility for the killings. Around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in a genocidal campaign by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1995 massacre – the worst mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, had been formally designated a “safe area” by the UN Security Council two years before, sparking condemnation of its strategy. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia concluded that the killings at Srebrenica, compounded by the mass expulsion of Bosniak civilians, amounted to genocide and pinned principal responsibility on senior officers in the Bosnian Serb army. The UN and its Western supporters have accepted a portion of responsibility for failing to protect men, women and children uprooted from their homes in the Bosnian War. Srebrenica was targeted by Bosnian Serb forces as part of efforts to annex the territory and expel Bosniak civilians, who were subjected to a siege and food embargoes ahead of the massacre. Thousands march to remember Srebrenica victims A military advance on the town started in July 1995, seeing Bosnian Serb forces burning Bosniak homes as they advanced, sending thousands of civilians fleeing Srebrenica for the nearby village of Potočari, where around 200 Dutch peacekeepers were stationed. Some of the Dutch surrendered, while others withdrew and are not known to have fired on the advancing Bosnian Serb forces headed by Ratko Mladić, who told journalists the time had come to “take revenge on the Muslims”. On the night of 11 July, more than 10,000 Bosniak men set off from Srebrenica through dense forest in an attempt to reach safety, but were found the following morning by Bosnian Serb officers who made false promises of security to encourage the men to surrender. Thousands surrendered or were captured, while others were forced out of Potočari by a campaign of murder and rape as women and children were transported back to Bosniak territory on buses. Men and boys were taken to holding sites and executed en masse over several days, with estimates of the final death toll ranging between 7,000 and more than 8,000. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves, which were later bulldozed and scattered among other burial sites in an attempt to hide evidence of the atrocity. A UN criminal tribunal indicted more than 20 people for their involvement, including Bosnian Serb commanders, while Mladić was caught in 2011 and is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Independent

On 22 June 2017 fifteen-year old Hafiz Junaid was stabbed to death on a Mathura-bound train from New Delhi. He was traveling home for Eid with his brothers and two friends. A dispute over seats resulted in a group of men repeatedly assaulting and stabbing Junaid and his companions. The assailants flung their bodies onto the Asoti railway platform. A crowd gathered. At some point an ambulance was called and two bodies were taken away. Junaid is dead. His companions are in critical condition. While one person has been arrested the police investigations are running into a wall of social opacity since they have been unable to find a single eye-witness to the incident. Of the 200 hundred strong crowd that assembled on Asoti railway platform on Thursday evening, the police cannot find one person who can say what they saw. The police cannot find a witness because something very peculiar seems to have happened to those present at Junaid’s death. A reportby Kaunain Sherrif M in the Indian Express provides specific details. When asked if he had seen anything that evening, Ram Sharan a corn-vendor whose daily shift coincides with the killing, Sharan said he was not present at the time of the incident. Two staffers who were sent to investigate by the station master were unavailable for comment. Neither the station-master, the post-master or the railway guards saw the event they were present at. In this startling piece the journalist reports how the public lynching of a Muslim child becomes a social non-event in contemporary India. He shows the reconfiguring, and splitting, of a social field of vision. He reports all the ways in which people – Hindus- did not see the body of a dead – Muslim – child that lay in front of them. The Hindus on the Asoti railway platform managed to collectively not see a 15 year old Muslim boy being stabbed to death. Then they collectively, and without prior agreement, continued to not see what they had seen after the event. This is the uniquely terrifying aspect of this incident on which this report reflects: the totalising force of an unspoken, but collectively binding, agreement between Hindus to not see the dead body of a Muslim child. Hindus on this railway platform in a small station in north India instantly produced a stranger sociality, a common social bond between people who do not otherwise know each other. By mutual recognition between strangers, Hindus at this platform agreed to abide by a code of silence by which the death of a Muslim child can not be seen by 200 people in full public view on a railway platform in today’s India. If this has happened we are far beyond the Gujarat pogroms, perhaps because the logics unleashed at that time have reached their final denouement. In 2002 we saw the clasped hands of a Muslim man pleading for his life from armed Hindu mobs. In 2017 there is nothing to see and no one to see it. One way to read this public blindness is as the breakdown of a social contract in purely descriptive terms- that of recognizing the body before you as being one to whom fundamental social obligations (such as the protection undertaken by adults towards children) are owed as a result of membership within the social body. The Hindus on this railway platform did not believe that any fundamental obligations, indeed even the most basic as an acknowledgment of his (dead)existence, were owed to Junaid. I stress this one social relation -that between adults and children -because its public disregard usually occurs in those situations (such as warfare, pogroms, genocides, lynchings) when social bonds have come asunder. When some adults refuse to see some dead bodies as dead children (the Holocaust, slavery) it means that the persons these children would have grown up to be are not deemed worthy of living on into membership in the socio-political order. The affective alienation by which a gathered crowd of Hindus can lynch, break, stab, tear into pieces a Muslim boy, and then not see what is left, is because these Hindus do not think Muslims belong in the social body. Yet this analysis goes only so far because something much more terrifying seems to have occurred: not the breakdown of a social contract but the production of a new contract in today’s India, one from which all Muslims, even children, are now affectively felt to be outside. In this case it is not simply that those present did not intervene to save Junaid and his friends from harm. This is common in India. Most people do not stop to intervene or help in a violent situation because they are scared. We should cease lamenting the indifference of “the Indian public” and ask instead what forms of obligation to strangers can exist in a society as radically unequal as ours. In this case then it is not that those present were indifferent to the public lynching of a 15 year old Muslim boy. They were not indifferent at all. Rather they made a collective agentive decision to abide by a common sense to not see the public savaging of a Muslim boy. The blind wall behind which Junaid’s body lies reflects a positive action on the part of the Hindus present to collectively agree to refuse him the most basic recognitions humanity (that is the force by which humans recognize each other as sharing a common being and bond) demands. What are the social logics revealed on Asoti platform? What is the nature of these principles of willed unseeing to which the ordinary Hindus on Asoti platform seem to hold? Anthropologists identify a fundamental organizational logic of human society, that of mutual exchange. Humans living in society, i.e. in a social order, i.e. in a rule-governed order, enter into relations of exchange with other humans also living in society. Thus persons are those with whom one trades, barters, goes to war, enters into ties of mutual obligation and marries. Sometimes under extreme social torsion the principle of inter-social and inter-subjective mutuality breaks apart and certain groups are ejected out of the socio-political order. The force of the social as mutual exchange is withdrawn and they become humans with whom one does not marry, trade, go to war (since even warfare assumes negotiations) or exchange food, even what they eat ejected from the category of the edible. One does not respect their dead, revere their gods, nor recognize their marriages. In such circumstances these persons occupy a frightening new location in the social order. Towards such persons (prisoners captured in warfare, slaves, pacified populations) the forms of mutual exchange that undergird full membership in the social order are no longer operative. Instead another principle of social differentiation and interaction takes over- that of the hunter and the hunted. Social forms descend into bloody spirals of violence as former exchange partners withdraw social relations of mutuality and obligation. There is no more talking (the exchange of words), no more selling (the exchange of goods) and no more love (the exchange of kinship). Such a notion may seem archaic, out of the pages of a yellowed structuralist text which once excelled in tracing the social logic of hunting and warfare in “non-state” (acephalic) societies. But we can discern the operations of this logic in modern polities. The hunting of black bodies that accompanied the conquest of Africa, the genocides that accompanied the founding of modern America and Australia. And a brief look at the bloody political history of the twentieth century shows us what happens when a hyper-nationalist militarized majority (as Pritam Singh points out below the anti-Sikh pogroms, Nazi Germany, Kosovo) begins hunting minorities. We saw the intimations of this logic – this experiment with open violence as a means of terrorizing Indian Muslims and Hindus into expelling Muslims from the national socio-political body in the Gujarat pogroms in 2002. At that time what struck and horrified a watching Indian public in this hyper-mediatized pogrom was the intimate and perverse nature of the violence directed at Muslim bodies. The rioting Hindus in Gujarat did not simply kill Muslims: they dismembered them with swords and knives. Pregnant women were ripped open, unborn fetuses thrown on fires. Mass rape accompanied by mutilation. The organic desecration of Muslim places of worship. North India is today Gujarat, except now the ruling dispensation does not need to incur the expense of a full blown pogrom since its organizing logics are abroad in the social body. Its operations can be discerned in the myriad ways in which vigilante Hindu meṅ are spreading across towns and villages in north India hunting Muslims for sport. To return, we can and should locate this blindness of ordinary Hindus in the historical narrative we now know of the ascendancy of the Hindu Right as a social and political force in modern India. Yet the historical arc is what social scientists would call a necessary but insufficient explanation. Necessary because it is from out of this that what is coming will come. But it cannot explain the form it is taking- the peculiar horrifying quality by which non-pathological sane people cannot see the dead body of a child. Something more fundamental seems to have broken in today’s India. As we have come to expect with the Narendra Modi regime and the national blindness it is imposing on the country, the central government has also refused to see Junaid’s body. The eyes of the state which see almost everything else did not see Junaid’s body as it lay on the platform and once it had been removed. The statements by functionaries of the state on what they did not see are instructive. Om Prakash, the Station Manager, managed to not see what was by his own admission a “huge crowd” gathered 200 ms away from his office. The two guards he sent to investigate this crowd which he himself could not see also did not see anything since by the time they had arrived 200 people had vanished. Bhagwat Dayal, the Post-Master, managed to be in two places at once and at none of them did he see anything: from his office he asked a railway officer to call an ambulance, while at the same time he was at home “relaxing”. And indeed the CCTV camera – that technology of unmediated sight normalized in public consciousness by the security state through the long decade of the 2000s- has by dint of being damaged no vision to offer. A field of invisibility in which it is impossible for Junaid’s body to be present is thus constructed through public agreement between the ordinary Hindus on this railway station and a state apparatus that has earned the necrotic distinction of blinding 1200 people in Kashmir within the past year. The ordinary Hindus at this station eschewed the use of their own eyes and turned them towards the purposes of the blind state. From a purely social scientific viewpoint if we do not today as a society attend to the symptoms that reveal the ascendance of a logic of war against our own people incarnated within the social body, we are heading to mass slaughter. The public messaging by the current regime, and the silence of ordinary Hindus, has been well diagnosed by journalists. The BJP regime currently holding state power in the Sovereign Socialist Republic of India has declared through acquiescence, commission and omission that it is open hunting season on Muslims and Dalits. Two conclusions follow: 1) We are in a radical breakdown of the rule of law in BJP ruled India and in these regions mob rule now obtains. We are in the terror days of state supported goondaraj. From which flows the second conclusion: 2) On the 22nd of June 2017, the Republic effectively ended. India is no longer a secular constitutional republic but on the precipice of being transformed into a majoritarian state ruled by an ethnic and religious majority. The hunting of Muslims and Dalits in today’s India should concern every right thinking Indian because it demonstrates a prowling consuming violence aided and abetted by the Narendra Modi regime leaking through the social body. As all our public institutions erode under increasing assault, as the space of public discourse and exchange is vitiated through threat, coercion and open violence, we are teetering on the edge of becoming a country in which children are not safe on the trains. A country in which people run scared of what their neighbours think they are eating, and armed thugs patrol small town streets hunting young lovers. 15 year old Junaid’s body, the broken body of a young Muslim boy that ordinary Hindus chose to un-see, shows India the shape of things to come. We are 1.3 billion people spread over one of the largest contiguous landmasses in the world. Imagine the scale of social violence, what it will consume, what will be left, what can escape, once it begins. We should prepare for the future being put in place for us. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Kafila

Kino Meeting Point Hamdije Kreševljakovića 13 - Sarajevo Welcome Desk & Accreditations, Film Screenings, Conferences, Press Events, Festival Café Wednesday 28th June / 18:00 Welcome Desk & Accreditations Wednesday 28th June / 19:00 'Never Ending Stories' Exhibition Opening An exhibition of drawings by Pierre Courtin Meeting Point Wednesday 28th June / 20:00 WARM FESTIVAL OPENING EVENT 'Legion of Brothers' A film by Greg Barker (2017) Thursday 29th June / 11:00 Justice Symposium 'Conventional and Unconventional Approaches to Transitional Justice' (PCRC) Moderated by Velma Šarić (Post-Conflict Research Center - PCRC), with Tanya Domi (Columbia University in the city of New York), Denis Džidić (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network - BIRN), Samantha Šoletić Owens (Art Works Project Chicago), Myles Wallingford (Post-Conflict Research Center - PCRC) Thursday 29th June / 12:30 'Never justified: ICTY and the crime of Torture' (ICTY Outreach documentary) A film by Petar Finci Discussion with Petar Finci (Senior Information Assistant and Documentary Maker, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia - ICTY) Thursday 29th June / 15:00 'Boko Haram: The Origins of Evil' A film by Xavier Muntz (2016) Thursday 29th June / 17:00 'Islam, It’s Also Our History!' Exhibition Presentation Discussion with Eli Barnavi and Isabelle Benoit (Tempora) Thursday 29th June / 19:00 'Islam, It’s Also Our History!' Exhibition Event Bosniac Institute Opening by Elie Barnavi (Tempora), Olaf-Gamal Deussen (EU Delegation B&H), Amina Rizvanbegović-Džuvić (Bosniak Institute) and Rémy Ourdan (WARM) Partners: Tempora, Museum of Europe, Caen-Normandy Memorial, WARM Foundation Thursday 29th June / 21:00 'Clash' A film by Mohammed Diab (2016) Friday 30th June / 09:00 'Why Remember? Memory and Forgetting in Times of War and Its Aftermath' A conference organized by Paul Lowe Friday 30th June / 10:00 'WARM Center Workshop' A conference moderated by Stéphane Grimaldi (Caen Memorial) with Benoît Remiche, Isabelle Benoit and Eli Barnavi (Tempora), Adnan Pavlovic and Velma Saric (WARM), WARM Members, Sarajevo partners & guests Partners: Caen-Normandy Memorial, Tempora Friday 30th June / 12:30 'Depth Two' A film by Ognjen Glavonić (2016) Friday 30th June / 15:00 - 'Sanctuary/Sustenance: The Story of Many Journeys' A multimedia projection of photography, film, music, and words directed by Maren Wickwire, with Lynsey Addario, Marcus Bleasdale, Paula Bronstein, Helene Caux, Jean Chung, Ron Haviv, David Hogsholt, Giulio di Sturco, and James Whitlow Delano. Discussion with Maren Wickwire followed by - Films by contemporary artists about conflicts, aftermath and human toll. A selection of videos by Odile Burluraux (Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris) Friday 30th June / 17:00 'Philippines War on Drugs: The Nightshift' Conference Moderated by Maral Deghati, with Eloisa Lopez, Raffy Lerma and Ezra Acayan Friday 30th June / 18:00 'Philippines War on Drugs: The Nightshift' Exhibition Event Photographs & Video by Ezra Acayan, Alyx Arumpac, Dante Diosina, Kimberly Dela Cruz, Vincent Go, Eloisa Lopez, Carlo Gabuco, Bro Jun Santiago, Basilio Sepe, Jes Aznar, Raffy Lerma, Jay Ganzon, Linus Escandor Curated by Damir Sagolj Academy of Fine Arts Friday 30th June / 19:00 'Drawing the war' Exhibition Event An exhibition of drawings by Mevludin Ekmečić Duplex 100m2 Friday 30th June / 21:00 'Syria's Disappeared: The Case Against Assad' A film by Sara Afshar (2017) Discussion with Roy Gutman (journalist) and Roula Nasrallah (WARM Syrian War Archive) Saturday 1st July / 11:00 'The Siege' A film by Remy Ourdan, directed by Remy Ourdan and Patrick Chauvel (2016) Discussion with Remy Ourdan ('The Siege' director), Elma Hasimbegovic (Historical Museum), Suada Kapic (FAMA Collection), Muharem Osmanagic (Flash), Adnan Pavlovic ('The Siege' Pro.ba co-producer) Saturday 1st July / 15:00 'The Battle of Mosul' Exhibition Event A photo exhibition by Laurent Van der Stockt Location: Historical Museum + Visit of 'The Siege of Sarajevo' exhibition of Historical Museum Saturday 1st July / 17:00 'Transitions' A photo exhibition by Midhat Poturovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Juan Arredondo (Columbia), Martin Lukongo (Democratic Republic of Congo), Sophia Nahli Allison (United States) Curated by the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) & ART WORKS Project Chicago Opening with Ron Haviv, Tanya Domi, Velma Šarić and Midhat Poturović Location: Skenderija Bridge Saturday 1st July / 21:00 WARM FESTIVAL CLOSING EVENT "Wrong Elements" A film by Jonathan Littell (2017) Saturday 1st July / 23:00 WARM Festival Closing Party EXHIBITIONS 'Philippines War on Drugs: The Nightshift' A photographic & multimedia group exhibition showcasing the work and lives of local journalists from the Philippines and their dedicated coverage of the ongoing armed conflict against drugs. Photographs & Video by Ezra Acayan, Alyx Arumpac, Dante Diosina, Kimberly Dela Cruz, Vincent Go, Eloisa Lopez, Carlo Gabuco, Bro Jun Santiago, Basilio Sepe, Jes Aznar, Raffy Lerma, Jay Ganzon, Linus Escandor Curated by Damir Sagolj Location: Academy of Fine Arts A WARM production project Partner: Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents 'The Battle of Mosul' A photography exhibition by Laurent Van der Stockt Location: Historical Museum Partner: Visa pour l'Image Perpignan Generous Support by Central Dupon Images 'Transitions' A photo exhibition by Midhat Poturovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Juan Arredondo (Columbia), Martin Lukongo (Democratic Republic of Congo), Sophia Nahli Allison (United States) Curated by the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC) & ART WORKS Project Chicago Location: Skenderija Bridge Partners: Post-Conflict Research Center (Bosnia and Herzegovina) - Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (Colombia) - Yole!Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) - Art Works Projects (United States) Generous Support by the MacArthur Foundation 'Drawing the War' An exhibition of drawings by Mevludin Ekmečić Curated by Claudia Zini Location: Duplex 100m2 Partners: Duplex 100m2 - Bosniac Institute 'Never Ending Stories' An exhibition of drawings by Pierre Courtin Location: Kino Meeting Point Partner: Duplex 100m2 Generous Support by Institut Français CONFERENCE 'Why Remember? Memory and Forgetting in Times of War and Its Aftermath' - Friday 30th June / 09:00 Opening Remarks by Dr Stephenie Young, Dr Paul Lowe, and Rémy Ourdan Meeting Point - Friday 30th June / 14.00-15.00 Simon Norfolk (Photographer) Hotel Europe - Saturday 1st July / 14.15-15.15 Vladimir Miladinović (Artist) Hotel Europe - Sunday 2nd July 11.00-12.00 Ron Haviv and Lauren Walsh Hotel Europe Generous Support by Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Salem State University & London College of Communication, University of Arts London ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 WARM

WHEN war broke out in Syria in 2011, some of the wealthier families from the country’s Christian Armenian minority decamped to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, where they rented luxury flats on the city’s Northern Avenue. It felt, some would later say, as though they were on holiday. The government allotted them space in a local school, where Syrian teachers who had fled as refugees continued to instruct their children using the Syrian curriculum. It took some time for it to dawn on them that they might never go home. Syria’s six-year-old civil war has forced more than 5m of its citizens to seek refuge outside their country. In 2015-16 hundreds of thousands trekked through the Balkans, seeking safety in Europe. But hardly any of Syria’s Armenian minority took this route. Instead, many went to Armenia. With its own population shrunken by emigration (falling from 3.6m in 1991 to 3m today), Armenia was happy to welcome as many Syrian Armenians—most of them educated, middle class and entrepreneurial—as would come. Before the war some 90,000 ethnic Armenians lived in Syria, two-thirds of them in Aleppo. Many were descended from ancestors who had fled their homeland in 1915, escaping systematic Ottoman massacres and ethnic cleansing. For most of them, the civil war has put an end to a century-long story. Hrair Aguilan, a 61-year-old businessman, invested his life savings in a furniture factory in Aleppo just before the war, only to see it destroyed. Now he is in Yerevan to stay. “It lasted a hundred years. It is finished,” says Mr Aguilan. “There is no future for Christians in the Middle East.” No more than 30,000 Syrian Armenians are believed to remain in Syria. Many dispersed to Lebanon, Canada, Turkey, the Persian Gulf states and elsewhere. The rest, up to 30,000, went to what they regard as the motherland. (Some have since moved on to other countries.) The wealthy, who found it easy to move, came first. Others tried to wait out the war in Syria, fleeing only once their means were exhausted. They arrived in Armenia with nothing. Vartan Oskanian, a former foreign minister of Armenia who was born in Aleppo, says many of the refugees have started small businesses. In Syria, members of the Armenian minority tended to be skilled professionals or artisans; they were known as jewellers, doctors, engineers and industrialists. Native Armenians are delighted by the restaurants opened by the newcomers, who have brought their much spicier cuisine to a country where food (and almost everything else) has long been influenced by the bland flavours of Russia. Almost all of the refugees have ended up in Yerevan, apart from some 30 families from a farming area, who were resettled in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-held territory that is disputed with Azerbaijan. Some young men who had fought in the Syrian army have volunteered to serve on the front lines of that conflict, but many more young Syrian Armenians hold off on asking for Armenian citizenship so that they do not have to do military service. Vasken Yacoubian, who once ran a construction company in Damascus, now heads the Armenian branch of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), a global charity. He says refugees are still arriving from Syria, if no longer in large numbers. A few have even gone back, especially those with property (if only to try to sell it). Some Syrian Armenians argue that they have a duty to return: their diaspora forms an important branch of Armenian civilisation, and must be preserved. Yet Mr Oskanian says those who have returned to Syria see little future for the community there. In Syria, Armenians have staunchly backed the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has protected them from persecution by Muslim extremists. But that government controls only a portion of Syria’s territory, and Mr Assad’s fate in any peace deal is uncertain. Meanwhile officials at Armenia’s Ministry of the Diaspora, which was caught unprepared by the influx of Syrians, are taking no chances. They are making contingency plans in case a new conflict erupts in Lebanon, sending thousands of Lebanese Armenians their way. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Economist

Credit: AP/Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia/HNET SOK HENG Khieu Samphan, the Paris-educated intellectual who served as the Khmer Rouge head of state in the 1970s, sits in court during the war-crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The genocide trial of two senior Khmer Rouge leaders concluded its hearings Friday with an angry scolding by the lawyer for one defendant and a humble bow to the victims by the other. The half-day hearing could be the last in a decade of proceedings against leading figures in the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist movement that killed an estimated 1.7 million people in Cambodia from 1975-79. The defendants were Nuon Chea, 90, the ideologue sometimes known as Brother No. 2 who was second-in-command to the Khmer Rouge's leader, Pol Pot; and Khieu Samphan, 85, the urbane, Paris-educated intellectual who served as the nominal head of state. A verdict is expected to take months. Three lower-ranking cadres still face charges of genocide, but their prosecution faces strong opposition from Prime Minister Hun Sen and doubts about continued funding for a tribunal that has already cost $300 million. The tribunal has secured three convictions since it opened in 2006. It produced life sentences for Kaing Guek Eav, or Duch, the brutal head of an interrogation center, and for the two current defendants, who were found guilty in an earlier trial of crimes against humanity. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were being tried on a different set of charges this time. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan are the last survivors of a tightknit group that tried to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia, killing off its educated people and reorganizing the country into what amounted to a nationwide labor camp. Pol Pot died in 1998, and two of the original defendants in this trial have died since it began. The three lower-ranking cadres are Meas Muth, a former naval commander; Ao An, a former deputy secretary for the Central Zone; and Yim Tith, a former acting secretary of the Northwest Zone. They are accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Citing questions about funding, two investigating judges have said they are prepared to issue a stay of proceedings against the three men, effectively putting an end to the tribunal once the two current cases are completed. The judges said a decision on the disposition of the cases could come as early as Friday. The trial is a combined enterprise of the United Nations and the Cambodian courts. Most of its funding comes from international donor nations whose generosity has been strained as the trial has dragged on and other priorities have taken its place. Hun Sen has repeatedly warned of civil war if the tribunal moves on to more prosecutions. Many analysts say that if these cases are dropped as a result of government pressure, it will cast a shadow over the entire tribunal and throw the integrity of the process into question. In a statement, James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, said the proposal to issue a stay was "a drastic, insufficiently supported and unwarranted option that would profoundly damage the credibility and legacy" of the court. Khieu Samphan was the last person to speak at the proceedings on Friday. As before, he pleaded ignorance about the forced labor and killings that terrorized the country while he was in power. And he repeated his familiar, nuanced mea culpa, saying, "I want to bow to the memory of all the innocent victims, but also to those who perished believing in an ideal of a brighter future and who died during the five-year war, under the American bombardments and the conflict with the Vietnamese invaders." Both he and Nuon Chea have pointed to U.S. B-52 strikes that killed many civilians and energized the communist movement as precursors of the Khmer Rouge. At an earlier court session, a defense lawyer for Khieu Samphan, Anta Guisse, took a more aggressive tone, saying the trial and its international backers, intended from the start to convict and sentence the defendants. "Mr. Khieu Samphan is going to die in jail," she said. "He's going to die in jail, and he knows that. His defense knows that as well. You know it as well. The prosecution as well as the civil parties know it, too. Especially the donors who financed this court know it as well. Mission accomplished." Nuon Chea refused to attend the session Friday, preferring to watch, as he often has, on a closed-circuit monitor in a holding room beneath the trial chamber. Speaking on his behalf, his lawyer, Victor Koppe, called the proceedings "some sort of circus" and said: "Nuon Chea couldn't care less if you convict him again to a life sentence. He really doesn't care because, rightfully so, he doesn't take this institution seriously." The prosecution portrayed Nuon Chea as dedicated and unrepentant. It played clips from interviews he gave to journalist Thet Sambath in which Nuon Chea said he had "no regrets" for the killings. "Believe me, if these traitors were alive, the Khmers as a people would have been finished," Nuon Chea said in the recording. "I dare to suggest our decision was the correct one. If I had shown mercy to these people, the nation would have been lost. But if the individual becomes a problem, then they must be solved." ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

The Khmer Rouge regime - which ruled Cambodia between 1975-1979 - was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century. Up to two million people died as a result of execution, disease, overwork and starvation under the direction of the country’s Marxist leader, Pol Pot. At a UN-backed tribunal last week, a former senior leader of the Khmer Rouge, Khieu Samphan, denied that Pol Pot's regime had engaged in mass murder. Nan Devi lost 38 members of her wider family to the Khmer Rouge. She says Khieu Samphan is a liar and a coward. Picture: Cambodian people leaving the country's capital, Phnom Penh, Credit; Getty Images http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0570qsb _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 BBC News