A small stream flowing into the Dudan cave in Turkey. It was here that the Armenian residents of a local village are said to have been thrown, after being led there by Ottoman gendarmes and local Kurdish paramilitary personnel. Credit: Bryan Denton for The New York Times For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be found. Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. “Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in the denialist wall.” The story begins in 1915 in an office in the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia, the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey. Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide. And then, just like that, most of the original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper. Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey’s ossified policy of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist. But Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey. “My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said. He broadened his point to argue that much of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront. “The past is not the past in the Middle East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.” Eric D. Weitz, a history professor at the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr. Akcam “the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.” “He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,” Professor Weitz added. Exactly where the telegram was all these years, and how Mr. Akcam found it, is a story in itself. With Turkish nationalists about to seize the country in 1922, the Armenian leadership in Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of court records to England for safekeeping. The records were kept there by a bishop, then taken to France and, later, to Jerusalem. They have remained there since the 1930s, part of a huge archive that has mostly been inaccessible to scholars, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Mr. Akcam said he had tried for years to gain access to the archive, with no luck. Instead, he found a photographic record of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk, now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide. While researching the genocide in Cairo in the 1940s, the monk, Krikor Guerguerian, met a former Ottoman judge who had presided over the postwar trials. The judge told him that many of the boxes of case files had wound up in Jerusalem, so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took pictures of everything. The telegram was written under Ottoman letterhead and coded in Arabic lettering; four-digit numbers denoted words. When Mr. Akcam compared it with the known Ottoman Interior Ministry codes from the time, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he found a match, raising the likelihood that many other telegrams used in the postwar trials could one day be verified in the same way. For historians, the court cases were one piece of a mountain of evidence that emerged over the years — including reports in several languages from diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed the events as they happened — that established the historical fact of the killings and qualified them as a genocide. Turkey has long resisted the word genocide, saying that the suffering of the Armenians had occurred during the chaos of a world war in which Turkish Muslims faced hardship, too. Turkey also claimed that the Armenians were traitors, and had been planning to join with Russia, then an enemy of the Ottoman Empire. That position is deeply entwined in Turkish culture — it is standard in school curriculums — and polling has shown that a majority of Turks share the government’s position. “My approach is that as much proof as you put in front of denialists, denialists will remain denialists,” said Bedross Der Matossian, a historian at the University of Nebraska and the author of “Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.” The genocide is commemorated each year on April 24, the day in 1915 that a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were rounded up and deported. It was the start of the enormous killing operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary executions and rapes. Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide and faced a storm of criticism from within Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany and Greece, have recognized the genocide, each time provoking diplomatic showdowns with Turkey. The United States has not referred to the episode as genocide, out of concerns for alienating Turkey, a NATO ally and a partner in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. Barack Obama used the term when he was a candidate for president, but he refrained from doing so while in office. This year, dozens of congressional leaders have signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide. But that is unlikely, especially after Mr. Trump recently congratulated Mr. Erdogan for winning expanded powers in a referendum that critics say was marred by fraud. Mr. Shakir, the Ottoman official who wrote the incriminating telegram discovered by Mr. Akcam, had fled the country by the time the military tribunal convicted him and sentenced him to death in absentia. A few years later, he was gunned down in the streets of Berlin by two Armenian assassins described in an article by The New York Times as “slim, undersized, swarthy men lurking in a doorway.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

Transcript In this episode of the LRB podcast, Adam Shatz talks to Joshua Landis about Syria. Joshua Landis is the Director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and his blog, Syria Comment, has long been an indispensable guide to a country that has never been easy to see, both because of the nature of the Assad regime and because of the fog of war since the uprising began there in 2011. Adam Shatz: Joshua, thank you for talking to us. Joshua Landis: It's a real pleasure and it's an honour to be on your podcast. AS: Josh, before the Sarin attack in Idlib Province, it seemed as if Trump would deliver on his promise to partner with the Russians and work with Assad, as a bulwark against the Islamic State. Whatever you think of that position, it promised to break with precedent. But then Assad carried out this gruesome attack, and Trump responded, not just with an air-strike but with a variety of statements to the effect that he’d changed his very changeable mind on the conflict. What’s your reading of Trump’s volte-face? JL: Well, I think that the way I understand Trump’s volte-face is that he’s really reverting to the Obama doctrine, which is to maintain a red line on the use of chemical weapons, which he has done. I think that this use of chemical weapons was a test. Sarin had not been used since 2013, when Obama threatened to use force but ultimately made a deal with the Russians to get rid of Syria’s chemical weapons, over 100 tonnes of which were put onto American ships and incinerated in 2013. And that held good – it was a success, to the extent that not having chemical weapons used was good for everybody in Syria; of course, it did nothing for solving the civil war, for which he was bitterly criticised. But President Obama [sic] has upheld that, and he has really moved towards an Obama position on abjuring the human rights violations of the Assad regime while not really taking action to put somebody else in power, or to destroy the regime, or to kill Assad. We have to wait and see. His security advisers have said that Assad can’t be involved in the future of Syria, which is the Obama stand. They have abjured his human rights violations, but they have said – as McMaster, the national security adviser, said the other week – Assad has to go, but America’s not going to make him go. So that’s really the Obama doctrine. AS: That is a pretty extraordinary shift, though, when you consider that Trump had said explicitly that he was abandoning Obama’s position on the Syrian war. JL: It absolutely is, and he had marked off a rather clear policy during the campaign, in which he argued the reverse of Obama and Clinton – and I particular, of course, he was targeting Clinton and her regime change policy in Libya, which he said was a disaster, and had spread chaos and extremist groups from one end of Libya to the other. And then he extended that criticism, and he laid into President Bush and the Republican Party for getting us into stupid wars – he said that regime change in Iraq was also a crazy idea that had spread chaos, terrorism and al-Qaida in Iraq. AS: Although he had initially been a supporter of the Iraq war, which he of course denied. JL: Well, his one statement supporting the Iraq war was when he was cornered on a talk show about sex, and he was asked, Don’t you support the invasion of Iraq? And he said, Well, I guess so. You know, it was very lukewarm – he clearly didn’t want to discuss it. And then later on, he came out against it. So ... he’s vacillated. But you’re right – he didn’t take a clear stand in the very beginning of the Iraq war, and he wants to be where the people are, I think, and he was following whatever he thought would be popular at the time. The point is that he drew, during the campaign, this broad criticism of regime change and US involvement in the Middle East, and he ... said ... in fact, he implied that human rights had not been advanced by following the game plan of regime change, attacking dictators and getting rid of these evil dictators, soi-disant, and that this had in fact created much more suffering in the world; and that what you needed, he suggested, was a page out of the Putin playbook, which is strongmen in the Middle East, to do what we had done under presidents like Reagan, where we had supported dictators in Latin America and the Middle East in order to bring stability and to fight the Soviet Union. And so he said stability, dictators, which suggested that Assad would be that dictator in Syria, and he had embraced Sisi in Washington only a few days before the sarin attack, and said what an extraordinary job he was doing. AS: And of course Sisi is very much allied with Assad. JL: Yes, Sisi has supported Assad, because he does not want more dictators overturned, because it’ll undermine his own presidency. But now he’s had to walk away – President Trump has had to walk away from that tough, very simple view of the Middle East, because it put human rights really in the back seat. Then the sarin gas use forced him to calibrate that message, and his administration came forward and said, you know, we can’t reject human rights; we’ve got to uphold both stability and human rights – which puts us back to where we began with the Obama doctrine, of how do you, you know, walk this delicate line? AS: And I imagine, Josh, that the fact that Trump has expressed horror over the sight of these massacred children, and yet at the same time is unwilling to allow other children even to enter the United States from Syria, and that, moreover, he’s not really willing to take on other grotesque violations of human rights inside Syria – I imagine that that package, as it were, is a bitter pill to swallow for people close to the opposition in Syria, who might say, ‘How can you express such selective horror?’ I mean, dying in a barrel bomb attack is not much better than being murdered with sarin gas. JL: Absolutely. This raises all the hypocrisies of the West, where they’re willing to intervene to stop an international norm like sarin, but they’re not willing to intervene to stop the killing in the civil war. And it underlines, also, other hypocrisies, which is that the United States had bombed al-Qaida in exactly the same province, Idlib Province, only a week before the use of sarin gas, had hit a mosque by accident, and killed sixty people – roughly the same number of people killed by sarin. It underlines all the delicate issues of who’s right, who’s wrong, what role should America play. AS: I’m curious, how are the other parties – the various parties to the Syrian conflict: the state, the rebels, the states that are supporting the different factions in the Syrian conflict – how are they interpreting Trump’s reversion to the Obama doctrine of conflict management, of expressions of selective horror over human rights abuses without actually doing anything to bring the conflict to an end? JL: Well, you know, most opposition members are trying to spin Trump as someone who’s going to intervene, who’s not Obama, and is going to bring some measure of justice to Syria. I don’t know whether they really believe it, or whether they’re just putting this message out in order to try to build some momentum and some pressure on the people around Trump to actually take that next move to do something about Assad, and to begin to rearm the Syrian opposition. AS: So in that regard, Josh, they’re not very different from others who have expressed such pipe dreams – I’m thinking of liberal hawks like Anne-Marie Slaughter, who praised Trump for carrying out the air strike. JL: Right. You know, everybody is hopeful that Trump is going to do what they want him to do, and we’ve seen that as a powerful ... that’s been a powerful element to his getting elected. So, I think many people in his administration are using the airwaves to try to lay out these possibilities, and to keep people hoping that he’s going to fulfil their ambitions in Syria. My suspicion is that they’re going to be sorely disappointed. AS: Josh, for a number of years we’ve heard occasional rumours that Russia, or Iran, was less committed to Assad as a figure than to the preservation of their interests inside Syria, whatever those happen to be, and that if those interests were protected, they might be willing to relinquish their support for him and to pave the way for a transition to another government. But that’s not how it seems to have worked out. The impression one gets is that they’ve really dug in their heels about Assad staying in power. Why is it that Assad, as a figure, is so important to them? JL: It’s because it’s very difficult to replace the Assad family and to keep the regime integral, and to preserve its strength and the legitimacy that remains to it. And this is the problem that we’ve seen many times before: you get rid of Qaddafi, you get rid of Saddam Hussein, and the entire structure of these regimes falls away, precisely because these dictators have built the regimes in this fashion, so that they are coup-proofed – because Syria was a land of great instability, from 1949, just a few years after independence, when there were three coups, and then there were a series of coups, and government changes – tremendous instability. Syria was the banana republic of the Middle East for twenty years after its independence. Assad comes along, 1970, and stops that – he stops it by building a regime based around loyalty to him and his family: his brother is the head of the Republican Guard that protects Damascus and the presidency; cousins are very senior in the security structure; and then Alawites, his coreligionists, crowd the top, upper ranks of the security state – that means both the army and the intelligence agencies. And in this way he uses traditional loyalties to cement his permanency. That means, if you take out that person, that family, there’s nothing to hold it together at the core: the various Alawite generals would begin to fight each other for power, as the generals had been doing before Assad consolidated power. There would be no sort of central tent peg around which legitimacy and agreed loyalty was built. And this is what America found in Iraq – it tried to build a regime based not on loyalty to the man or to the single party, the Baath Party, and there was no agreed-upon loyalty factor in Iraq, and it became, by default, sectarianism; and, even deeper than that, there were a lot of different groups within the Shi’ites that fought against each other, and it’s been very difficult. AS: It’s rather striking, Josh, that in Syria a minority sect, the Alawites, rather like the Sunni minority in Iraq, created a state, or dominated a state, based on a superficially universalist ideology – the ideology of pan-Arabism. Syria, of course, was known as the beating heart of pan-Arabism during the Cold War. And I think what you’re suggesting is that in Syria as in Iraq or, for that matter, a country like Yugoslavia, where Yugoslav identity was most passionately embraced by a minority, the Serbs, that this universal ideology essentially became a fig-leaf for what were a network of familial and clan interests. JL: Absolutely. And we see that right across the Middle East, where Arab Nationalism was the presiding ideology, from the successful struggle against colonialism that ends at the end of World War II, when both Britain and France retreat from the Middle East. Now, that’s partly ... not because of the success of Arab nationalism – it’s largely because Europe was in its own civil war, the thirty years’ war between World War I and II, and it weakened itself so severely that it had to withdraw from the Middle East. But Arab Nationalism became the prevailing ideology right up until ... it’s been ... the Iranian Revolution, where Islamism successfully challenged it there, but then continued to build Islamist parties around the Middle East. And today Arab Nationalism is really a very weak reed – you know, Arafat gone in Palestine; Boumédiène; Ben Ali; Saddam Hussein. In many ways, Assad is the last of these. AS: So was Arab Nationalism particularly attractive to minority groups, such as the Alawites or the Sunnis in Iraq, because it was a way for them to transcend their minority status, submerge themselves in something larger, and also, in a sense, conceal themselves within a kind of larger community of interests? JL: Absolutely. It was a way to safety for minorities. They embraced Arab Nationalism more heartily than Sunni Arabs. Now, of course, there was an elite of Sunni Arabs who also embraced it – it was very important that there were these sort of cross-cutting alliances between minorities and a Sunni elite, all of whom saw Arab Nationalism as the way to bind together these very fragmented societies, and to build the foundations for a new state – I mean, people bought nationalism after World War I, it was the growing ideology. But because the nationalist governments turned out to be, in fact, hijacked by minorities ... it’s important to understand that minorities were able to come to power, and to grab authority in the state, in every one of the Levantine countries after World War II, and this is largely because of the colonial occupation. The colonial powers, Britain and France, used minorities to divide and conquer and to keep their power in all these countries, and this meant that minorities were able to grab the state once colonial powers left – this is true for the Maronites of Lebanon, the Catholic Christians of Lebanon; the Alawites of Syria, who are about 12 per cent of the population; the Sunnis of Iraq, 20 per cent of the population; and also the Jews of Palestine, who were a third of the population by the time the British withdrew in 1948 and they got independence. AS: To some extent that was also true of the Kabyles of Algeria, who were, at one and the same time, disproportionately influential and intermittently persecuted and forced to repress their ethnic identity. JL: Well, and it’s true of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan as well, which in some ways was a foreign implant in Jordan – not that foreign, because it’s only from Arabia, the Hejaz, and it has Islamic legitimacy; but in all of them, they’ve been challenged – these minoritarian states. Now, the Jews were able to become a majority – they’re the only minority that were able to become a majority in numerical population, because ... through war, and because two-thirds of the Palestinians either fled or were driven out of Palestine. And, of course, the process is not an easy one – the Palestinians are still trying to get a hunk of the state; but their fortunes seem to diminish with every year. AS: In a sense, you’re almost arguing that what we’re seeing now in Iraq and Syria are latter-day Nakbas? JL: Yes, we are. Because the majority population is trying to get rid of minoritarian rule. And that begins in 1975 in Lebanon, with the Lebanese civil war, which was driven, at the most simplistic level, by the Muslim population, which had grown to be 60–65 per cent – 60 per cent perhaps, 66 per cent – it was a majority of the Lebanese population; and it looked up at the Maronites and Christians that were presiding ... had a lion’s share of power, and said, Why should you rule? One man, one vote. And it used democracy, and the call for democracy, to challenge the supremacy of the Christians. The Christians, of course, were terrified. They thought, If we lose power, we’re going to be driven out, in the same way that Armenians had been driven out of Turkey and so forth. So they clung on to power, they fought bitterly ... AS: Of course, in all the cases that you’re describing – Lebanon, Iraq, and now Syria – not a single one of these conflicts has been a pure internal struggle; in each of these cases the borders of the state have been porous and permeable, and powerful outside actors have profoundly shaped and made more violent the dynamics of the conflict. In Lebanon, for example, the Israel-Palestine conflict exerted a very significant influence, since you had a large Palestinian refugee community and the PLO was based there, etc. And now, with both Iraq and Syria, we see no less intense dynamics of external meddling both by regional powers and by international powers. JL: Absolutely. All these wars turned into regional wars. And not just regional wars, but also ... international powers, because they pulled in the Cold War Russia and America, which were competing. Today, of course, the dynamic is Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Shi’ites versus Sunnis. Those are the fault lines in the Middle East; but Russia, of course, has sided with the Shi’ites, and America has sided with the Sunnis, by and large. And so, those divisions go right up onto an international level – they’re very geostrategic; they’re not just about religion, they’re being driven by geostrategic struggle for balance of power. AS: That actually brings me to another question that I wanted to ask you about Iran’s proxy force in the Syrian conflict – Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia political and military organisation led by its General Secretary, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has played a critical role in protecting the Assad regime, and it’s made two claims about its support – one made early by Nasrallah in the conflict is that Hezbollah is fighting against taqfiris – against extreme jihadists. The other claim is that it is fighting to defend Shia shrines in Syria. Hezbollah hasn’t spoken much about its major reason for entering the conflict, or what some believe to be its major reason – protecting its supply line, so that Iran can continue to provide it with weapons. Josh, can you assess Hezbollah’s relationship to the Assad regime and its long-term project in Syria. I’m also wondering, if Hezbollah is successful in protecting the regime, how might this affect Israeli–Syrian relations, as Hezbollah potentially acquires power inside of Syria – is there a greater chance that Israel might be tempted to get drawn into the war? JL: Yes. We do have to see this as a regional war, which is what you’re outlining. In a sense, there is a super-struggle going on between Saudi Arabia and Iran, between Sunnis and Shi’ites, for authority, influence and dominance in the Middle East. And what we’re seeing happen in the northern Middle East – that’s Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – is that ... Shi’ite minorities in Lebanon – Hezbollah; Syria – the Assad regime, the Alawites; and of course a Shi’ite majority in Iraq – which has been brought to power by the United States and really ... un-clinched this regional war, and allowed for a reshuffling of the balance of power, and allowed for Iran to see a way to dominate the entire northern Arab world. And it has tried to ... it has made sure that Hezbollah has been the paramount power in Lebanon; and despite attempts by Israel in 2006, and others, to destroy Hezbollah, Hezbollah has reigned supreme, keeping Assad in power – that’s the civil war in Syria – and of course consolidating its grip with the Shi’ites in Iraq. This allows for what some people, King Abdullah of Jordan, called the Shi’ite crescent. And that [has] helped Iran to consolidate its power over the north. Of course, Saudi Arabia and Israel see this as a real challenge to their own stability. They fret over this consolidation of Iranian support; they do not want Hezbollah and Iran at their border, along the Golan Heights, and along the Syrian border as well as the Lebanese border. That is a net loss for Israel, and it’s led some of the leaders of Israel to make an argument that ISIS is better than Hezbollah! And that shows you the geostrategic element in this. Saudi Arabia, of course, also has supported the rebels, supported the Sunnis, hoped very much that the Sunnis in Syria would become the paramount power, and overthrow the Assad regime. Turkey jumped in on this; Israel has supported it – and it’s created this rather odd alliance between the Gulf states and Israel and Turkey, against Iran, Iraq, Hezbollah and Russia. So, those are the stakes, and what we’re seeing, in many ways, is the consolidation of this Iranian security arc, stretching from Lebanon to Iran, over the Middle East – and the United States is also very concerned about it, and we hear from Trump people ... AS: Iran, of course, since the early 1980s, with the creation of Hezbollah during the Israeli invasion – Iran has viewed Lebanon as its lung in the Arab Middle East. But just to push tp push a little bit against your remark about the Shia crescent, it’s also true that Hezbollah has been fairly deft in cultivating an alliance inside Lebanon with a substantial share of the Christian population, Christians who are afraid of Sunni jihadists; and although, from one vantage point, Hezbollah has put Lebanon in harm’s way by entering the Syrian conflict on the side of Assad, from another vantage point Hezbollah has protected Lebanon – both its Shia and Christian communities – from the threat of Sunni radicalism. JL: Yes. No, Shi’ites today, by many Christians in Lebanon, as well as in Syria and in Iraq, are seen as protectors – protectors because they’re minorities, and there is this sort of minority closing of ranks against the fear of Islamism and Salafism, that if Salafism becomes the predominant power in the region, the Christians will be driven out. So they see the Assad government and Hezbollah, and Iran ultimately, as protectors of their own status in the Middle East. And that’s what General Aoun, who’s now president of Lebanon, has championed – that outlook on the world. But the Christians are very split in Lebanon; not so much in Syria. AS: Pierre-Jean Luizard, a French specialist on the Middle East, published two years ago a much-discussed book called, in France, a La piege Daech, or ‘The Daesh Trap’ – the trap of the Islamic State. In that book he argued that Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria had been driven into the arms of the Islamic State, not because they share its ideology or its ambitions, but rather because their aspirations had been crushed by authoritarian, intolerant and sometimes murderous forces, often with the assistance of outside actors, including the United States. So, to put it crudely, if you have to choose between living in the Caliphate and having your head drilled by a Shia militia, you’re going to choose the Caliphate. Now that Assad seems to be prevailing, at least for the foreseeable future, and now that parts of the international community are willing to tolerate him remaining in power, if only as a bulwark against the Islamic State, won’t this possibly drive more Sunnis in Iraq and Syria towards the Islamic State? Josh - what kind of future can be imagined for Sunnis who feel besieged in these countries? JL: Well, that brings up a very good question, which is: How do you rebuild the comity, the sort of modus vivendi, between these different groups in society? And that is ... very difficult to do, because we’re seeing the intolerance become a vicious circle, as you say: the more the struggle goes on, the more it becomes violent, the more the two groups learn to distrust each other, and to begin to view each other not as part of the same nation, but as different nations, different peoples. So, when somebody says Assad is killing his own people, in Idlib, to a certain extent Assad no longer sees it that way – he sees those people as aliens who don’t belong to Syria, that they are terrorist crypto-Saudi agents who are being run by America and Turkey, who are trying to destroy the Syrian nation. That’s the way he speaks about it, that’s the way he sees it – and I think he’s convinced a lot of his followers to look at it in the same way. They, of course, see Assad as very much as a fifth column who is an agent of Iran, who is an unbeliever and a majus, as one of the favourite epithets – in the war videos and opposition languages, majus, meaning ‘magi’, are somebody from the east, a pre-Islamic Persian, Zoroastrian. And so, both sides have come to demonise the other, so they no longer see each other as being fellow countrymen. How do you, then, repair those divides? We are facing the same problem in Iraq – how do we bring Kurds, Sunnis and Shi’ites together, to form a common Iraqi nationalism, with power-sharing? Is that a reasonable objective, or are we banging our head against a wall? People disagree on that. AS: Also Josh, who’s going to do it? I mean, ultimately the solution has to come from inside these countries – it can’t be imposed; and the idea that ‘we’ can do it sounds like another imperial folly. JL: Well, you’re absolutely right. And, you know, I’ve been making an argument what I call the great sorting-out for a number of years now, and comparing what’s going on in the eleven states to what went on in central Europe during the interwar years and [World War II]. In some ways, this comparison is too grim, and perhaps cynical, about nation-building in the Middle East. But I think ... it provides an important corrective to a US policy which has believed that it can preserve the borders of all of these states and create a power-sharing arrangement that will bring happiness, and will ultimately bind together these different peoples in an organic community – except they won’t be different peoples; they’ll be the same people, who just have little, teeny differences. And that’s really a central argument for all the policymakers about how to proceed in the Middle East. AS: Is this federalism or neo-Ottomanism you’re talking about? JL: Well, the trouble is that what we saw with the great sorting-out in Europe is that all these new states that were created out of multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires after World War I – the class of 1919, as I call them – that includes over nine nation-states in central Europe that were created whole-cloth or reconstituted in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where different peoples were asked to form an organic community and become a nation. These multi-ethnic empires that were destroyed in World War I, the empire-destroying war – Russian Empire, German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for our purposes, the Ottoman Empire – were turned into nation-states; and they failed spectacularly. And it’s led to the process of this great sorting-out, where Poland, for example, was 64 per cent Poles before World War II; by the end of World War II, by 1950, it was 100 per cent Polish. That meant the destruction of 3 million Jews, the ethnic cleansing of 5 million Germans, mostly at the end of the war, and Ruthenians – that’s Ukrainians and Lithuanians – were also driven out. In Czechoslovakia we see the same thing, where the Sudeten German, 3 million, were destroyed, as well as all the Jews; and then the Czechs and Slovaks, two of the most ... seemingly liberal peoples, could not live together, and chose their Velvet Revolution. AS: I take your point, and clearly Europe to did see, as you call it, a great ‘sorting-out’, but of course that term as you’re using it describes a set of different processes – or, I should say, historical events and catastrophes – ranging from the Final Solution, the extermination of European jewry to the ethnic cleansing that took place at the very end of and in the aftermath of the Second World War. But what all these events share is that they’re are not a sorting-out of primordial identities so much as they are political events, driven by war, state interests, racial ideology, etc. And so to bring the conversation back to the Middle East, I think there is, unfortunately, a danger in the West’s conversation about sectarian warfare, to treat these identities as if they were primordial and as if this conflict that we’ve been seeing in Iraq and Syria is somehow natural, this sorting-out is a natural process, when in fact Syrian and Iraqi Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians lived together for centuries with only episodes of internecine conflict. What we’re seeing now is actually quite exceptional. JL: You’re absolutely right, Adam. This should not be mistaken for primordialism. These identities, religious identities, had been accommodated in the Ottoman Empire, as they had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where you see cities like Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, have very distinct quarters for Armenians, Shi’ites, Sunnis, Jewish Quarter, Catholic, Orthodox – all these different quarters, where people lived cheek by jowl. Now, that didn’t necessarily mean that they saw each other as equals, but they had much more in common than separated them. There might be walls between these different sections of town, but the Ottoman Empire was able to contain the centrifugal forces of these many different groups, and keep them. And that was the power of the Ottomans – that’s why the Ottoman Empire lasted for 500 years; it’s one of the central arguments that every historian makes, is that the Ottoman Empire was more successful than Spain, than much of medieval Europe, because it accommodated these different identities and peoples in a happy empire – and Jews fled Spain, where they were evicted, and came to Istanbul, where they were protected. And so it’s nationalism – it’s a very modern ... notions of community and difference that turn these identities into something completely different. They’re radically changed, and, unfortunately, these religious differences, which had sat more lightly on people, get turned into very important differences, and that’s why we’re seeing Shi’ite and Sunni, all of a sudden, recognising who they are – people who didn’t even know the difference, really, are now ... they’ve become profoundly important, in the same way that Czechs and Slovaks, or so forth ... in a way, religion has become the new ethnicity in the Middle East; and that’s a great danger, because it does rip people apart, and it leads to things like the Armenians being ... the holocaust of the Armenians, with the rise of Turkish nationalism; the driving out of Palestinians, with the rise of Jewish nationalism. Nationalism is a very brutal force, and ... I guess the point of my argument is that we shouldn’t look at nationalism as something that’s not important, that doesn’t reorganise people – because Americans think that they can shape the national identities of the peoples of the Middle East much too easily, where it’s much more difficult to get an Arab–Israeli peace, or to get Sunnis and Shi’ites to sit down together in Iraq, after something like, you know, retaking Mosul. We shouldn’t underplay the difficulties, because we will make mistakes that lead to further violence. AS: Do you think that the United States, with its planned overthrow of the Saddam regime bears at least some of the responsibility for this outcome? JL: I do – I think that kicking over the anthill in Iraq led to a much more violent sorting-out, if you will, of this problem than had Iraqis been left to deal with it on their own. Now, of course, probably Kurds and Shi’ites will beg to differ with me, because, by and large, the many Kurds and Shi’ites in Iraq are happy that Saddam Hussein was destroyed, and that his Baath Party and so forth ... because they were being brutally dealt with by Saddam Hussein’s regime. And yet, because we used force, we misunderstood the nature of Iraqi society – we thought we could build this power-sharing, new Iraqi nation that would become democratic, that people would embrace us. We got that completely wrong. And what we did is we tripped this sectarian and ethnic war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and then led to the ... spread of al-Qaida throughout much of Iraq, and now ISIS. It’s been a very violent process. We don’t know – ultimately this is counter-factual history, and it’s hard to assess how things are going to end up. I’ve had many neoconservatives argue to me, rather convincingly, that ... they use the pressure cooker metaphor, and they say, Better to take the top off and kill the dictator today, before the pressure builds up even more tomorrow. There’ll be a civil war, but civil wars are inevitable; and it’ll be a smaller civil war if we ... kill the dictator today than if we let it sit there for another decade. I’m not convinced by that argument – I don’t think that we know that much, and I don’t think it’s true. The only way to counter that argument is to use the Soviet Union as a model – to say, If you don’t kick it over, and you don’t invade it, it’s possible that the elites at some point will realise the system is so corrupt and dysfunctional that they will change their attitudes. You’ll have a meltdown, you’ll have some violence, you’ll have a lot of poverty – but it won’t be as bad as the transformation of the Soviet Union was from a communist country to a sort of statist crony capitalism, as it is today. But that evolution, no matter how painful it was, was nothing like had America invaded and tried to build a democratic country using military force. AS: During the Afghanistan war, a new term emerged, and that was Af-Pak, as if Afghanistan and Pakistan were a single territorial unit. Do you think it’s fair to say that there’s now something called ‘Iraq-Syria’? JL: I do. I do, because it’s gotten sucked into this regional war, it’s become very sectarianised, the conflict. And what we saw were the emergence of an ISIS state, a Sunni, very sectarian state that emerged from the outskirts of Baghdad, stretching already all the way to the outskirts of Aleppo, and including, really, all that tribal, Arab tribal desert civilisation that is stuck between those two capitals, and bound them together into one state. That Sunni Arab state that emerged there, and endured for a few years, before America decided to destroy it, was an expression of an emerging national identity. I think, if the United States had not intervened, and that state had been allowed to survive there, it might have found legs – it might have developed institutions, and evolved over the years into something much more acceptable; but we don’t know. The United States has decided that international borders are important, and that it’s going to preserve them, and it’s going to crush that Sunni sectarian state that was [born in?] there. And so, in that sense, I think that these two countries, Iraq and Syria, have in a sense become joined at the hip; in the effort to destroy ISIS ... as much as ISIS emerged, in between them, now in the effort to destroy it, we’re getting Iranian influence embedded both in Baghdad and Damascus. A sectarianisation of those two states has become deeper, and the populations have been divided along those sectarian lines. And that brings those two states together – what happens on one side of that border immediately flows over to the other side of that border. AS: Josh, you’ve talked about the relationship between Sunnis and Shia in both Iraq and Syria. Both those countries also have substantial Kurdish populations. Can you talk a bit about the dynamics of the Kurdish question in Iraq and Syria , particularly in relation to Turkey’s ambitions? JL: Well, the single people who have benefited from the collapse of the Iraqi and Syrian state are the Kurds. As we recall, after World War I, the Kurd did not get a state – and they’ve always complained that they’re one of the biggest ethnic groups, or should-be nations, that did not get a state, and now they are getting states. A state has emerged – a de facto state – in northern Iraq, and that began with the no-fly zone that the United States imposed in 1990, during the first Gulf War, and it has evolved since. And today the Kurds are virtually independent in northern Iraq. The schools teach in Kurdish; most Kurds below the age of thirty do not know Arabic, or know it at a very elementary level, because the second language is English, taught in Kurdistan and northern Iraq. In Syria, the Kurds are 10 per cent of the population, rather than 20 per cent as they are in Iraq. But they dominate – they ... are a compact minority, and they are the majority in parts of northern Syrian, north-eastern Syria; and they have taken those regions, they have built their own army, they have a political leadership. And this, of course, has infuriated Turkey, because the political leadership in Syria hived off from the PKK, or the Turkish Workers’ Party, that Turkey sees as a tremendous danger to national sovereignty inside Turkey – because perhaps 20 million Turks are Kurdish. They live largely in the eastern part of Turkey. Turks are worried that if the Kurds gain independence in Turkey, they’ll lose the entire eastern part of their country; and so they want to crush this emerging Kurdish state in the north of Iraq; a state and a population with which the United States has formed a deep alliance is now arming and training in order to destroy ISIS territory in Syria. AS: And that group, the PYD, is the Syrian branch of the PKK, which not only Turkey but also the United States regards as a terrorist organisation. Just to add to the complexity. JL: Indeed. And in fact the United States has tried to split the difference, and say that the PYD is not the PKK – it has not designated it as a terrorist organisation, even though it designates the PKK as a terrorist organisation. So the United States has finessed that problem – Turkey is not convinced at all that the United States is doing something ... Turkey is convinced that, by arming the PYD, this is going to come back and haunt Turkey, because those arms, that professional army, is going to seep across the border, is going to be used to help the PKK in Turkey launch a war – a war which is already going on at a low level, but could become much more violent in the future. So Turkey is furious, and America needs to do this – because President Trump and President Obama promised the American public that it would destroy ISIS. AS: And the PYD are the best fighters, the most reliable fighters against ISIS. Now, adding to the ambiguities of the relationship between Turkey and its Kurdish population is the fact that the PKK and its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, who’s in jail, have, at least in public, shifted their demands from national independence in territories where Kurds are the majority in Turkey, to a call for equality and cultural or national recognition inside Turkey as citizens. In other words, the claim of Turkish Kurds is that they’re not looking to break away from Turkey and set up their own republic; they want equality and language rights inside Turkey. Now, if I’m correct, my sense is that the Erdoğan government simply doesn’t take them at their word, and finds it more convenient to make war with the Kurds than to reach an accommodation with them. JL: Yes. I mean, part of this is political calculation, in order to consolidate his own power and to fan the flames of nationalism, which redound to his favour. But part of it, I think, is the anxiety of the slippery slope – the belief that most Kurds, in their hearts, want independence. That’s what the idea is, that if you start giving them language rights, their own schools, and federalism, that it will only end with independence. And that’s the fear. There is some basis for that fear – I mean, one has to only travel in northern Iraq to see how, you know ... the Kurds are bringing up for a vote independence, imminently; so this is what the anxiety is, is that if you give them an inch, they’re going to take a mile. AS: One of the more surprising developments in the last six months in Syria, Josh, has been the shift in Turkey’s position. Turkey had always been the most enthusiastic backer, aside from the Gulf states – perhaps even more than the Gulf states – of the rebel groups, and arguably the most lax in permitting jihadists of various stripes to gain the upper hand in the rebellion. Now under pressure from attacks by Isis inside Turkey, the Erdoğan has shifted, at least tactically, towards an alliance with Russia, which is Assad’s main backer. How do you understand this shift in position? JL: Well, the shift is because Turkey couldn’t beat Russia. Turkey shot down a Russian airplane, 2015, that briefly traversed its territory. Russia is backing Assad, Turkey was backing the Syrian opposition and the rebels. The two came into conflict because of this, and Turkey could not prevail. Russia began to rebuild Assad’s state, and was pushing the rebels back into Turkey – Turkey tried to call Russia’s bluff, take down this airplane. It looked to Nato to back it up, and to the United States. The United States was unwilling to back up ... Turkey. And that’s when I think Turkey realised, this is a losing ... we’re not going to win this – we’ve got to about-face; and when Trump, in his election campaign, said, We don’t want to fight Russia, we’re going to support the dictators of the Middle East, and ... it became very obvious that if Turkey didn’t ... make a rapprochement with Russia, that it was going to be the odd man out. And so it made that about-face. Now, it’s also important that Russia is a much bigger trading partner with Turkey than the United States – there’s $30 billion worth of trade; Russia had begun to cut off that trade and put sanctions on Turkey. So Turkish businessmen were screaming bloody murder. AS: Essentially, we’ve reached the phase in the conflict where it has been grinding along for so long, and so futilely, that outside backers which once professed grand principles are casting them aside, and digging in their heels around their core economic assets. JL: Absolutely. And, you know, also the rebels played their part in this – the Syrian rebels – because they remained very divided, they became increasingly dominated by extremist groups like al-Qaida and Ahrar al-Sham, and Turkey found it very difficult – just the way the United States had before it – found it difficult to justify giving more arms to what became increasingly radical groups, like ISIS – and ISIS began to attack everyone, blowing up bombs in Turkey. So this became untenable – Turks revolted against it, they did not want their government to send more arms into Turkey [sic] that they feared would come back and blow up Turks. So, all those factors militated towards this about-face by Erdoğan. And he’s made this about-face, but at the same time he’s clearly challenging Russia in Syria – he’s continuing to send arms to the opposition groups to support them, and we’ve seen [these] recent offensives, in Idlib, pushing down towards Hama, which are very much backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, that continue to want more leverage against Assad – and the way they get that is by building up the rebels. So they haven’t given up the game – they are going along with Russia, but they’re pursuing their own independent policies at the same time. AS: Now Josh, you know, we haven’t spoken much about the Syrian people, except to say that, increasingly, Syrians see many of their co-nationals as no longer belonging to the same community, because the cleavages along sectarian lines have become so bitter and so lethal. And so, in a sense, one great question is: Who are the Syrian people? What will their future be? Will their future even be inside Syria? About five million Syrians have left the country, many of them are attempting to settle in Western countries that have closed their doors to them, including, of course, the United States. The question is, and perhaps it is un-answerable – because there are no polls – but I felt that I should ask you: What is your sense of how Syrians view the future, the possible future of their country? What kind of solution in Syria, what kind of settlement, could attract the support of a majority of Syrians, and allow them eventually to rebuild this brutalised country, this utterly shattered country, which was once one of the more welcoming countries in the Middle East? JL: Boy ... that’s the million-dollar question. It’s very hard to see through this ... to see into the future. You know, on the one hand, one can look at this as a major tectonic shift in identity and power in the northern Middle East, on a par to what happened in the twelfth century, when Shi’ite lords dominated much of northern Syria, and were a powerful element supported by Persia. The Mamluks, and then, following them, the Ottomans, changed that: they pushed out the Shi’ites, marginalised them – they became very impotent; and the Arab world became a Sunni world, led by the Ottoman Empire. Today, you could see something like the twelfth century coming back, with Shi’ites predominating in the north. Now, a lot of Sunnis argue, you know: Assad is a flash-in-the-pan, Shi’ite power in Syria, it’s not going to last but a moment, because there aren’t very many Shi’ites – there are only 12 per cent Alawites, Shi’ites are about ... Twelver Shi’ites are about 1 per cent; Druze, 3 per cent; Christians are 3 per cent – this is tiddly-winks: not more than 20 per cent of Syrians are minorities, religious minorities. But, you know, political power can be very enduring, if Iran, Hezbollah, Iraq all secure their alliance; and that means that Sunnis in Syria could live under this kind of a regime – a regime that’s backed by Iran – for a long time. If that happens, identities are likely to shift once again, to be plastic, and to be reworked. I don’t know how that happens, but that’s a possibility; or the ... counter-argument, that the Assad regime’s going to explode, this insurgency’s not going to go away, it’s going to continue, the Sunni Arabs will prevail ... I’m worried that, if Saudi Arabia, Turkey ... AS: But, one wonders, for the sake of what? Because I wouldn’t say that the great slogan of the rebellion today is the establishment of a democratic society based on the rule of law. JL: No, it isn’t. And what I worry about is, if the United States tries to build a Sunni enclave in eastern Syria, which is one of the proposals – in fact, about six different think tanks in Washington have proposed this at various levels: some kind of an autonomous region in the Euphrates Valley, the region that’s going to be taken away from ISIS, which constitutes about 35 per cent of Syrian land – there are many people in Washington who want a sort of US mandate over this, where Sunni Arabs will be built up as an autonomous force. Which Arabs, which tribal groups, which rebel groups would lead that, we don’t know. But that’s the argument. Now, I don’t think the United States will do it, because I don’t think anybody in this administration has the patience or the desire to really nation-build in eastern Syria. But that could be ... AS: This sounds to me like an echo of Leslie Gelb’s plan for a ‘three-state solution’ in Iraq. JL: Well, it is – and it’s a continuation of the notion that America was helping the rebels to defeat Assad, and no longer is it ... we’re not going to drive Assad out of the four cities, but we will set up this quasi-independent part of Syria as a ... safe zone with its own leaders. So it’s really just a downsizing of the initial Obama plan, which was to bring about Sunni ascendancy in Syria through supporting the rebels. Now it’s supporting them only in this ex-ISIS territory. But whether that comes to pass or not, the point that I think ... the thing that frightens me, because of my seeing this as a great sorting-out, is that, if Saudi Arabia, and the US and others, continue to fund rebellion by the Sunni populations of Iraq and Syria, they’re likely to get crushed, with the present disposition of power in the Middle East ... that it could lead to ethnic cleansing. And we’ve seen an element of ethnic cleansing already against the Sunnis – I mean, most of the 5 million Syrians that have fled Syria are Sunnis, from rebel areas that have been badly bombed. That’s true in Iraq, with the crushing of cities like Ramadi, where 80 per cent of the housing stock was destroyed – a Sunni city; Tikrit; and now Mosul, a much bigger city, which is being very badly destroyed. Many of the people, Sunnis, of that area, complicit with ISIS at some level, are never going to feel safe going back to their houses – they’re going to become refugees. And the fear is, the longer this war goes on, one of two things can happen: either Sunnis get increasingly driven out of their country, or they win, and revenge is taken against the others. And I don’t see how the Sunnis can win any time soon. Now ... of course, I can’t see what’s going to happen in the more distant future. But today, they’re so badly fragmented – the Sunni world is beleaguered, Turkey is inward-looking, Saudi Arabia is completely ensconced in its war in Yemen, and ... the lower oil prices, driven by fracking and so forth, have weakened Saudi Arabia tremendously. Israel is very insular, and I don’t think wants to get sucked into the Syrian civil war. So it’s hard to see where assistance to a Sunni rebel world that has been badly bruised and fragmented is going to come from, and how it can turn around its fortunes. And, in that sense, I think ... the faster the international community, and Syrians and Iraqis, find some kind of an accommodation that bring stability, the more people’s lives will be preserved, the less ethnic cleansing will go on. And, ultimately, it’s an unhappy solution for many, but I think it’ll be less violent, because, if you look at the balance of power, it’s very clearly in favour of the pro-Iranian forces in this region today. AS: Josh, thanks so much for talking to us. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 LRB Limited

MOSCOW — Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday declared Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination that rejects violence, an extremist organization, banning the group from operating on Russian territory and putting its more than 170,000 Russian worshipers in the same category as Islamic State militants. The ruling, which confirmed an order last month by the Justice Ministry that the denomination be “liquidated” — essentially eliminated or disbanded — had been widely expected. Russian courts rarely challenge government decisions, no matter what the evidence. Viktor Zhenkov, a lawyer for the denomination, said Jehovah’s Witnesses would appeal the ruling. He said it had focused on the activities of the organization’s so-called administrative center, a complex of offices outside St. Petersburg, but also branded all of its nearly 400 regional branches as extremist. “We consider this decision an act of political repression that is impermissible in contemporary Russia,” Mr. Zhenkov said in a telephone interview. “We will, of course, appeal.” An initial appeal will be made to the Supreme Court’s appellate division, Mr. Zhenkov said, and if that fails, Jehovah’s Witnesses will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France. Hard-line followers of Russia’s dominant faith, the Orthodox Church, have lobbied for years to have Jehovah’s Witnesses outlawed or at least curbed as a heretical sect, but the main impetus for the current campaign to crush a Christian group active in Russia for more than a century seems to have come from the country’s increasingly assertive security apparatus. Founded in the United States in the 19th century, Jehovah’s Witnesses has its worldwide headquarters in the United States and, along with all foreign-led groups outside the control of the state, is viewed with deep suspicion by Russia’s post-Soviet version of the KGB: the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B. Summing up the Justice Ministry’s case against the denomination, the ministry’s representative, Svetlana Borisova, told the Supreme Court on Thursday that Jehovah’s Witnesses had shown “signs of extremist activity that represent a threat to the rights of citizens, social order and the security of society.” During six days of hearings over two weeks, lawyers and witnesses for the religious group repeatedly dismissed the extremist allegation as absurd, arguing that reading the Bible and promoting its nonviolent message could in no way be construed as extremist. Human Rights Watch, in a statement issued in Moscow, condemned the court ruling as “a serious breach of Russia’s obligations to respect and protect religious freedom.” Rachel Denber, the human rights group’s deputy director for Europe and Central Asia, said the decision delivered “a terrible blow to freedom of religion and association in Russia.” Jehovah’s Witnesses shuns political activity and has no record of even peaceful — never mind violent — hostility to the Russian authorities. But it has faced growing hostility from the state since President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began his third term in 2012 and put the Orthodox Church at the center of his push to assert Russia as a great military and moral power. The denomination suffered relentless persecution by the KGB during the Soviet era, and after more than a decade of relative peace following the collapse of Communism in 1991, it again became a target for official harassment under a 2002 anti-extremism law. That law makes it illegal for any group, other than the Orthodox Church and other traditional religious institutions, to proclaim itself as offering a true path to religious or political salvation. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

“Send us as many birth control pills as you can. They (Myanmar troops) are gang-raping our women. They are arresting and killing all our men. There is nothing else you can do. Just pray to Allah and to wish us speedy deaths! This is just simply unbearable,” said a Rohingya woman talking from her mobile phone from Myanmar’s predominantly Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine State bordering Bangladesh.[1] [See Figure below right.] She was talking to her brother, an unregistered refugee living and working in a poor and rough neighborhood called Salayang on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Among the handful of Burmese eager for updates, listening to the phone conversation on speaker phone was U Maung Maung, a respected Muslim leader and activist from Mandalay, also making a living in Malaysia. Maung immediately posted this on his Facebook timeline on November 20, 2016,[2] hoping to alert people to the shocking events unfolding. Western experts on the region note there is an “information blackhole,”[3] owing to the Myanmar government’s lockdown of Northern Rakhine State for its ‘security clearance operations.’ As such, Myanmar authorities have barred access to humanitarian aid groups and local and international media. This latest lockdown was a result of the killing of nine Myanmar police officers which was believed to have been instigated by Rohingya hoping to form a resistance group. However, Maung’s attempt to alert the world via Facebook came to naught. The post was in Burmese language. But more importantly, his alert — like many others conveyed by ‘locals’ — had not been vetted by any Western organizations or international human rights ‘experts,’ who have become the standard bearers of facts or “truth-conveyors” relating to other peoples’ experiences of atrocities. Victims and their accounts need first to be vetted by these mediating agencies — a system understood only too well by the Burmese government with its blanket denials of the allegations coming out of the information black hole it created. Aung San Suu Kyi Government’s Information Committee referred to the atrocities on many occasions, “fake rape”[4] and “exaggerations” or “fabrications.”[5] Following hundreds of similar allegations and coordinated documentation by Rohingya groups of mass killings, mass rape, and destruction of whole villages, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR) sent a team to interview Rohingya refugees who had recently fled to Bangladesh — 70,000[6] of whom had arrived in four months. Based on over 200 interviews, OHCR issued a damning Flash Report (Feb 3) complete with harrowing tales of burning elderly Rohingya men alive and slitting children’s throats.[7] The U.N. estimates that Myanmar may have killed as many as 1,000 Rohingya men in recent violence alone.[8] This information, presented at the 34th session of the Human Rights Council,[9] did not result in the much-hoped-and-lobbied-for U.N. Commission of Inquiry with a view towards the International Criminal Court. The result was a compromise — a ‘Fact Finding Mission’[10] — which both the military[11] and the National League for Democracy (NLD)-led government[12] are determined not to accept or cooperate with. We have previously argued that far from being a new phenomenon, waves of state-directed violence and communal destruction such as these have been occurring since 1978 and are part of a process of ‘slow-burning genocide.’[13] Two other independent studies published a year later reinforce our findings.[14] Over these decades, Rohingya experiences and sufferings have been tossed across multiple discourses that deny the central role of the military such as “communal violence”[15] or since the October 9 raids, “Muslim insurgency” pregnant with potential for escalations involving “international terrorism.”[16] In recent years, these have run concurrently with human rights bodies and organizations framing the situation as “ethnic cleansing”[17] and “crimes against humanity”— U.N. Special Rapporteurs and the OHCHR included. Despite these shifting narratives, the fundamental nature of the problem has remained constant. The military-controlled state has attempted to “cleanse”the nation of the largest Muslim minority in Myanmar, unique with legitimate claims to Northern Rakhine as their ancestral home. Firstly, this has been attempted through legal, bureaucratic, and administrative means — such as removing their rights to citizenship, destroying and revoking documents in Rohingya possession, refusing to register thousands of Rohingya infants, household checks, as well as subjecting them to a web of criss-crossing security grids by which the freedom of movement of the Rohingya population is severely restricted and monitored.[18] Secondly, it has been attempted through denial of their history/identity and propaganda campaigns that serve to de-nationalize them.[19] Where these two attempts have not been achieved, communities have also been subjected to physical destruction through methods such as burning property, evictions, and killings. However, this has not always been the case. In 1961, the Burmese co-author’s late great uncle, Zeya Kyaw Htin Major Ant Kywe, a decorated nationalist solider, was the Deputy Commander of the administrative district of Mayu in 1961, which was effectively established as a homeland for Rohingya in Rakhine State in order to maintain law and order[20] in the region where the central government was confronted with rebellions from two different fronts: Muslim Rohingya separatists and Buddhist Rakhine nationalists clamouring for statehood. On Myanmar’s Independence Day (January 4, 1948), even as the Union Jack was lowered at the colonial Secretariat in Rangoon, the Burma Army was engaged in ferocious battles against armed Rakhine (Buddhist) rebels[21] who wanted to reclaim the sovereignty they had lost to the militarily dominant Burmese Buddhist group in 1784. In the years following Myanmar independence in 1948, the central government, specifically the Ministry of Defense, strategically sought to embrace Rohingyas as a bona fide ethnic minority of the new Union of Burma,[22] with equal and full citizenship rights, along with multiple other minorities with armed revolts against the ethnically Burmese central government. It is essential to see the root of the Rohingya persecution not simply in the sectarian ethnic conflict between the two main co-habitant communities in Rakhine state of Western Burma, namely Rakhine Buddhist majority and Rohingya Muslim minorities, but in the ethnic triangle involving also the majority Burmese in ultimate control of the state (both the military under General Ne Win and the civilian political coalition headed by PM U Nu).[23] Although the Burma Army was fighting battles on two fronts in West Myanmar, it was the Rakhine rebellions that presented a more serious threat to the central government than the simultaneous Muslim/Rohingya armed movements, some of which sought, with no success, to join with the predominantly Muslim nation of Pakistan (East Pakistan). During the Rohingya surrender ceremony of 290 Muslim rebels, held on 4 July 1961 in Northern Rakhine town of Buthidaung, the Commander of the Border Area Administration and Territorial Forces Colonel Saw Myint promised “absolutely no religious or ethnic discrimination” against Rohingyas — vis-à-vis Rakhine Buddhists —and guaranteed “equal protection under Law for all those who abide by the law and live in peace.”[24] Saw Myint’s superior and the second in command, after General Ne Win of the Burma Army Brigadier Aung Gyi, presided over the ceremony and explained the need for Rohingyas as an ethnic minority group to recognize and accept the primacy of political allegiance to the Union of Burma over their kinship, cultural, and religious ties in exchange for the full citizenship rights and ethnic equality which they were offered.[25] In addition, as early as May 1960, the Ministry of Defense agreed to the Rohingyas’ request to carve out the predominantly Rohingya geographic pocket in Northern Rakhine State and establish a new district named after the local river Mayu. The co-founder of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the then-young Lt-Colonel Tin Oo, was tasked with establishing the Mayu District, which was to be administered centrally from the Burmese-controlled Rakhine Military Command.[26] Rohingyas’ request was precipitated by the moves made by Prime Minister U Nu’s re-elected civilian government in order to fulfil its election pledge of granting Rakhine Buddhists a separate statehood, within the Union of Burma.[27] Within eight months of the establishment of the May-U District, General Ne Win and his deputies staged a coup against U Nu’s government on the pretext that Nu’s opportunistic electioneering and weak leadership were emboldening ethnic minorities’ demands for devolution of power away from the Burmese centre. While the coup leaders continued to honour the arrangements with Rohingyas, the policy orientation of the military leadership shifted towards racist, isolationist, xenophobic, and socialistically doctrinaire. The more liberal and less radical military leaders such as the Deputy Commander in Chief of Army Brigadier General Aung Gyi and Colonel Chit Myaing were sacked in 1963 and 1964.[28]The remaining military leaders under Ne Win’s commandership began to marginalize and eventually cleanse the Armed Forces of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu officers unless they agreed to convert to Buddhism. Having remade this once-multiethnic, multi-faith national institution of unrivalled power and control over society, the military leadership turned its sights to society at large.[29] Most important, the army leadership initiated, promoted, and sustained the process of radically reimagining ethnic and political histories, national identity, and the society at large along the army’s new “purist” Buddhist vision.[30] In 1978, Ne Win launched a centrally organized, violent operation against Rohingyas of both Southern and Northern Rakhine, under the pretext of surprise immigration checks. Known as Operation King Dragon, the events of 1978 are carved into the consciousness and the inter-generational memories of Rohingya communities. It was conducted as an interagency campaign of terror involving Immigration, Religious Affairs, Police, Courts, Army, Navy, and police intelligence, as well as local administrations made up of anti-Rohingya Rakhine.[32] Myanmar’s former chief of military intelligence until 2004, Ex-General Khin Nyunt, who was operationally involved on the ground as a young major from Special Operations Bureau, Ministry of Defense, serving as the Commander of Infantry Regiment No. 20 based in Rakhine, wrote that a total of 277,938 fled, between February 12 and June 3, from Western Burma into the neighboring Bangladesh.[33] Shut off from the outside world by an isolationist military regime, the Burmese public — the Burmese co-author included — was misinformed of this operation as an act of national defense, under the slogan “the (Buddhist) race could be swallowed up by other (alien) race”[34] — an understanding that still resounds today. This was the first of the chronic waves of state-sponsored and state-condoned violence against Rohingyas which have resulted each time in hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fleeing “unbearable life on land.” Following Ne Win’s coup in 1962, the nation’s vision fundamentally changed — from one that sought to establish peace through a unified multiethnic nation based on equality, to one which harnessed and mobilized the Buddhist public’s anti-colonial sentiments, and along with this their anti-Indian (subcontinent) and anti-Muslim racisms, which emerged out of the colonial-era political economy in which locals were subordinated to Indians.[31] It was a vision which sought to ‘cleanse’ the nation through systematic attempts to subjugate some ethnic minorities whilst removing others (such as Rohingyas) from the national fold. The now internationally infamous 1982 Citizenship Act was one part of a long process of stripping the Rohingya of their citizenship and the rights of future generations of Rohingya to obtain Myanmar citizenship. It was accompanied by eviction, land confiscation, and disenfranchisement of the Rohingya. Although this controversial law does not mention Rohingyas by name, viewed within the historical context of large scale forced repatriations from Bangladesh, and based on accounts of those involved in drafting the Act, it can be concluded that the primary aim in drafting the Act was to exclude Rohingyas from citizenship.[35] The law — and its application regarding 135 fixed ethnic nationalities excluding Rohingya, on the basis of their absence in the dubious colonial censuses, who in fact existed in Myanmar prior to the first British Annexation of Western Burma in 1826 — has not simply left Rohingya vulnerable to multiple discriminatory policies aimed at non-nationals, it has also fed popular anti-colonial racisms in society that have led to pervasive social ostracism of Rohingya and violence in which Rakhine Buddhists and state security forces have worked hand in glove. Despite annual U.N. human rights monitoring in Myanmar since 1992[36] and the UNHCR having a presence on the ground in northern Rakhine State since the early 1990s, violent persecution of the Rohingya has continued unabated and indeed increased. This persecution was largely perceived as a part of the authoritarian regime’s general pattern of rights violations, for the Myanmar military was notoriously repressive towards ethnically Burmese opposition movement under Aung San Suu Kyi’s leadership across the country, as well as other non-Bama ethnic groups in the country’s North and North East regions. Myanmar’s rights abuses in Rohingya regions of Western Myanmar weren’t seen as something that demanded special attention. Today, while the anti-historical and institutionally amnesiac discourses such as “humanitarian concern,” “communal conflict,” “security and terrorism,” “lack of development,” and “livelihood creation” float through the ether world of foreign embassies, development, and U.N. agencies, the decades of facts relating to the instrumental role of the central Myanmar State in the abuses of Rohingya are buried alongside very real human corpses — again — waiting to be verified and validated by the right kind of foreign experts and the right kind of U.N. process. People and processes that never come. As Rohingyas in Northern Rakhine wait and their diasporic relatives post desperate calls for U.N. peacekeepers and intervention on Facebook, “Never again!”— the foundational myth of the United Nations — must sound bitterly hollow. Fifty-five years ago, the Myanmar Ministry of Defense and its military leaders officially embraced Rohingya as an ethnic minority, granted them equal rights, and full citizenship while enabling them to make contributions to the country’s politics, society, and economy. Today, the military’s radical reversal of Rohingya policy created the space in society where Rohingyas are commonly seen as “leaches,” their identity and history “a hoax,” and their presence a demographic and jihadist threat to the Buddhist nation. Meanwhile, over the same period, under the same national visions, other ethnic communities along the country’s strategic, resource-rich borderlands including Kachins, Shan, Karenni, etc., were offered promises, pledges, and agreements by generations of military and civilian leaders, only to have them reneged when powerful stakeholders changed their strategic calculations. Under the military regime, those that refused to be co-opted into the military’s national vision complete with its Burmese dominance, were and still are subject to persecution, oppression, and war. They are victims of the same ideologies that cleanse the nation of Rohingyas and all those that oppose or live in contradiction to the state’s centralized control and organization of Burma’s ethnic minorities. With NLD elected to government and with Aung San Suu Kyi as de facto leader, one would hope for at least a dilution of the military leadership’s post-1962 purist ideologies, or at best for a radical re-imagination of the Burmese national community incorporating her late father’s (Aung San) vision of post-colonial Burma as a secular, progressive, multi-culturalist, multiethnic nation. Tragically, it is not only the armed forces that have implemented internal cleansing of their institutions. NLD is now also without a single Muslim representative from the population. Every time the government calls rape ‘fake’ on the military’s behalf or refuses to cooperate with U.N. bodies' attempts to unearth and validate atrocities, Aung San’s multiethnic vision of Burma is trampled further into the ground. [1] Amartya Sen, the foremost scholar on famines, explains why Burma’s intentional measures to deny, severely limit, or block Rohingyas’ access to livelihoods, nutritional opportunities, and essential medical services is an act of “institutionalized killing,” a slow genocide, not like Khmer Rouge’s genocide, Rwanda or the Holocaust. Conference on the Plight of the Rohingya, Harvard University, November 4, 2014, accessed April 5, 2017, http://tribunalonmyanmar.org/2014/11/15/the-slow-genocide-of-the-rohingya-by-nobel-laureate-amartya-sen/. [2] Ibid. [3] International State Crime Initiative (ISCI), Queen Mary University of London, “Genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar may be entering a new and deadly phase, October 17, 2016, April 3, 2017, http://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/items/hss/187983.html. [4] Myanmar State Counsellor Information Committee, “Information Committee Refutes Rumours of Rape,” December 26, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.statecounsellor.gov.mm/en/node/551. See also “Aung San Suu Kyi is making war time rape easier to commit,” MSN.com, December 26, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.msn.com/en-sg/news/other/aung-san-suu-kyi-is-making-wartime-rape-easier-to-commit/ar-BBxzZR6. [5] “Aung San Suu Kyi laughs out loud at Rohingya genocide allegations while in Singapore,” The Independent, January 5, 2017, April 3, 2017, http://www.theindependent.sg/aung-san-suu-kyi-laughs-out-loud-at-rohingya-genocide-allegations-while-in-singapore/; and Jonah Fisher, “Myanmar’s Rohingya: Truth, lies and Aung San Suu Kyi,” BBC, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-38756601 Accessed 3 April 2017. [6] “Rohingya flee into Bangladesh as Crisis Deepen,” Getty Images, January 18, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/album/rohingya-flee-into-bangladesh-as-crisis-deepens-around-70000-rohingya-muslims--fVZ0izTy4ESIzTtE_KtsOQ#people-are-seen-in-kutapalong-unregistered-camp-on-january-18-2017-in-picture-id631975540. [7] “Devastating cruelty against Rohingya children, women and men detailed in UN human rights report,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), February 3, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142&L...http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21142&LangID=E#sthash.ktblvICd.dpuf Accessed 3 April 2017. See the full report at http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/MM/FlashReport3Feb2017.pdfAccessed 3 April 2017. [8] “Exclusive: More than 1,000 feared killed in Myanmar army crackdown on Rohingya - U.N. officials,” Reuters, February 8, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-idUSKBN15N1TJ. [9] U.N. OHCR, “Statement by Ms. Yanghee LEE, Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar at the 34th session of the Human Rights Council,” March 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21355&LangID=E#sthash.au9jPlEw.dpuf. [10] “Rohingya issue: UN to send fact-finding mission to Myanmar,” ANI News, March 24, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.aninews.in/newsdetail-MzY/MzA1NzIz/rohingya-issue-un-to-send-fact-finding-mission-to-myanmar.htmlAccessed 3 April 2017. [11] “Myanmar Military Chief Defends Crackdown Against Rohingya in Rakhine State,” Radio Free Asia, March 27, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/myanmar-military-chief-defends-crackdown-against-rohingya-in-rakhine-state-03272017154143.html. [12] “Myanmar rejects UN call for rights probe,” Bangkok Post, March 25, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/1221134/myanmar-rebuffs-un-rights-probe. [13]Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, 3 (2014): 683-754, accessed April 3, 2017, http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/handle/1773.1/1377. (Hereafter “The Slow-Burning Genocide”). [14] See Penny Green, Thomas MacManus & Alicia de la Cour Venning, “Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar,” International State Crime Initiative Report, Queen Mary University of London, 2015, accessed April 3, 2017, http://statecrime.org/state-crime-research/isci-report-countdown-to-annihilation-genocide-in-myanmar/; and “Is Genocide Occuring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State?: A Legal Analysis,” Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, October 2015, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Yale_Persecution_of_the_Rohingya_October_2015.pdf. [15] See, for instance, Jim Della-Giacoma, “A Dangerous Resurgence of Communal Violence in Myanmar,” International Crisis Group, March 28. 2013, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/dangerous-resurgence-communal-violence-myanmar. See also “Why is there communal violence in Myanmar?” BBC, July 3, 2014, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18395788. [16] “Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State,” International Crisis Group Report No. 283/Asia, December 15, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/283-myanmar-new-muslim-insurgency-rakhine-state; Tim Johnston and Anagha Neelakantan, “The World's Newest Muslim Insurgency Is Being Waged in Burma,” TIME, December 13, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://time.com/4601203/burma-myanmar-muslim-insurgency-rohingya/. [17] Human Rights Watch, “Burma: End Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims,” April 22, 2013, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/22/burma-end-ethnic-cleansing-rohingya-muslims. See also Jocelyne Sambira, “Myanmar minorities suffer 'systemic' discrimination, abuse: UN,” United Nations Radio, June 20, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2016/06/myanmar-minorities-suffer-systemic-discrimination-abuse-un/#.WOKL1_nyu5s. [18] See “The Slow-Burning Genocide.” See also Widney Brown, “Where there is police There is persecution, Physicians for Human Rights,” Physicians for Human Rights, October 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/myanmar-rakhine-state.html?referrer=https://uk.search.yahoo.com/. [19] In addition to the state-controlled mass media and official speeches by the generals and ex-generals, Myanmar Military Intelligence Services spread deliberately false historical information through teachers’ refresher courses at the Civil Servant Training School at Hpaung Gyi, which thousands of Burmese state school teachers are required to attend, according to Daw Khin Hla, former Rohingya Middle School Teacher, from Myanmar, who spoke at the conference on Rohingya Persecution, November 4, 2014, accessed April 3, 2017, http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic662843.files/HGEI-Burma_Semin... [20] “Finally, peace has prevailed in Mayu Borderlands District,” Editorial, Special Issue on Mayu, Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 5. (Burmese Language publication). [21] Tape-recorded Interview in Virginia, U.S. (July 1994) with retired Colonel Chit Myaing, former member of General Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council (1962). As the Deputy Commander of the Burma Rifle Brigade 5, Chit Myaing led the government’s military campaign against the armed Rakhine rebellion in January 1948. [22] The full text of the official Burmese language transcript of the speech delivered by Brigadier General Aung Gyi, Vice Chief of Staff (Army), at the Surrender Ceremony of Mujahideen Rohingya troops, Maung Daw Town, Northern Rakhine State, 4 July 1961. See “Special Issue on Mayu”, Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 8-10 & 23-24. (Hereafter Brigadier General Aung Gyi’s speech). [23] For the detailed records of this triangular politics amongst Rakhine-Burmese-Rohingya see the book-length Burmese language publication, Kyaw Win, Mya Han and Thein Hlaing, “Myanmar Naing Ngan Yay” (Burma’s Politics), Volume 3 (years 1958-1962), (Rangoon: Universities Press, 1991), in particular Chapter 12, pp. 167-250. (Hereafter “Burma’s Politics,” 1991). [24] The full text of the official Burmese language transcript of the speech by Colonel Saw Myint, Chief of the Border Areas Administration and Commander of the Territorial Forces, “Special Issue on Mayu,” Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 15. [25] Brigadier General Aung Gyi’s Speech, 1961. [26] Transcript of the Current Affairs magazine discussions with Prime Minister’s Private Secretary-2 U Khin Nyunt, “Special Issue on Mayu,” Current Affairs (or Khit Yay), Ministry of Defense, the Union of Burma, 12, 6 (July 18, 1961): 16-20. [27] “Burma’s Politics” (1991), 230. [28] Interview with retired Colonel Chit Myaing, 1994, op cit. [29] Within Myanmar Armed Forces – and in the society at large – it is widely known that non-Buddhist military officers no longer get promoted beyond the ranks of Major. [30] Wa Lone, “Snr Gen Min Aung Hlaing pledges to help safeguard Buddhism,” Myanmar Times, June 24, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/national-news/21035-snr-gen-min-aung-hlaing-pledges-to-help-safeguard-buddhism.html. [31] Maung Zarni, “Buddhist Nationalism in Burma Institutionalized racism against the Rohingya Muslims led Burma to genocide”, Feature, Tricycle, Spring 2013, https://tricycle.org/magazine/buddhist-nationalism-burma/Accessed 3 April 2017. [32] Personal Testimony delivered by U Ba Sein, a former Rohingya civil servant – now a refugee in London, UK - who lived through this King Dragon Operation in N. Rakhine, Permanent People’s Tribunal on Myanmar, Queen Mary University of London. March 6-7, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Q11ZhC8qI (Ba Sein’s testimony begins at 7:55 minutes). [33] Ex-General Khin Nyunt, Naing Ngan Ei Ah Nauk Hpet Ta Gar Pauk Ka Pya Tha Na (or The Crisis from the Western Gate of Burma), (Rangoon: Pan Myo Ta Yar Press, 2016), particularly Chapter 3, pp. 21-43. [34] Although race/ethnicity and faith are two different “things,” the majority Buddhist Burmese public collapse the two. The Burmese popular saying sums it up: “to be Burmese is to be Buddhist.” [35] The Burmese co-author and a key drafter, the late Rakhine historian Dr Aye Kyaw, were friends and fellow exiles for years in the United States. A few years before the two bouts of violence against Rohingyas in 2012 Aye Kyaw gave a Burmese language interview to the influential Irrawaddy News Group wherein he explained in details the internal discussions among the Drafting Committee members, that focused on the best ways to de-nationalize Rohingya through the citizenship act. Irrawaddy has since removed Aye Kyaw’s Burmese language interview. [36] See the mountains of Human Rights Situation Reports on Myanmar for the last 25 years beginning March 3, 1992, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, accessed April 3, 2017, http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?m=89. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Middle East Institute

A Russian marine major has been killed in combat in Syria, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday, confirming an earlier report that one of Moscow's highest-ranking officers there had lost his life. Major Sergei Bordov was killed during an attack by militants on a garrison, they said, quoting the Russian defense ministry. The reports gave no further details. Earlier on Thursday, Reuters reported Bordov's death, citing a former marine who had served with him and a person close to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Russian forces are backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his war with rebels and militants seeking to oust him. "They were caught in shell fire. Two of our Russian servicemen and two Syrian soldiers died," Vyacheslav Pavlyuchenko, who has served with Bordov, told Reuters. He said the shelling incident occurred on Tuesday and that he did not know the names of the other fallen soldiers. Bordov is one of the highest-ranking Russian officers to be killed in Syria. Pavlyuchenko said Bordov commanded a reconnaissance company two years ago but he did not know the major's current role in the Syria operation. Bordov's body was expected to be delivered to his military unit in the Crimean town of Sebastopol on Friday and his burial should take place in his hometown of Simferopol on Saturday, Pavlyuchenko and the source close to the fleet said. The defense ministry says about 30 Russian servicemen have been killed since the start of the Kremlin's operation there in September 2015. Evidence collected by Reuters points to losses among Russian servicemen and private military contractors in Syria three to four times higher than some official estimates, although the defense ministry has denied understating the death toll. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Reuters

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Jubilee Campaign

(CNN) - They say they ran from murder and persecution. They've ended up in mud huts on the Bay of Bengal. And with the torrential rains of the monsoon season approaching, along with the threat of cyclones and floods, the fate of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees living in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh looks as precarious as their makeshift shelters. "It's becoming a silent crisis which does not have the international attention that it deserves, given the scale of the needs of the people and the uncertain future they are facing," says Ezekiel Simperingham, Asia Pacific Regional Migration Coordinator for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC). New photographs of the refugees show only the fortunate have tarpaulins for a roof, the rest stretch black plastic over bamboo frames. Mats on the hard ground are beds. "We are surviving mostly with some help from relatives. We would like to return, but it is not safe. Some of our neighbors were killed, and we had to flee to save our lives," he says. "Their shelters are not strong enough to withstand these extreme weather patterns," Simperingham says. The UN estimates that 74,000 Rohingyas have crossed the border into Bangladesh since Myanmar began a military crackdown in northern Rakhine State following attacks on border guards on October 9 last year. Many of those fleeing have made allegations of murder and rape by Myanmar's security forces inside Rakhine State. Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's State Counselor and de-facto leader, denied any ethnic cleansing in an interview with the BBC. Myanmar leader denies ethnic cleansing 00:49 | Video source: CNN And while Bangladesh offers refuge, there is little else available for the Rohingya. Aid agencies have been distributing food, tarpaulins and other essentials in the camps, but they are struggling to keep up with the demand. "We barely have enough food to survive," Mohsena, a 22-year-old Rohingya mother living in a makeshift shelter in Bangladesh, said. "If we have a meal once, we don't know when we can have the next one. Feeding my children is my main concern." Mohsena, 22, is seen in front of her shelter with her two children. Dire needs An estimated one million Muslim Rohingyas live in Myanmar's northern Rakhine State, where they are a persecuted, stateless ethnic minority in the Buddhist-majority country, analysts say. Most of the new arrivals to Bangladesh are living in makeshift shelters outside two United Nations-administered refugee camps, along with hundreds of thousands of other Rohingyas who were already there after fleeing previous spates of violence. "We are hearing reports that 180 people are sharing one latrine," says Simperingham. The Rohingyas were in a desperate situation even before the most recent round of violence broke out. The IFRC says 150,000 people in northern Rakhine State were receiving humanitarian support before October 9. The aid group has now launched an urgent appeal for $3.2 million to help meet the needs of 25,000 of the most vulnerable people in the Bangladesh camps over the next nine months. "People don't have enough food, enough water," Mirva Helenius, a photographer for the IFRC, tells CNN. "These people are living without any kind of status, and without any services." Last week, Helenius traveled to refugee camps in and around Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, to take photographs of the living conditions and gather testimonies from some of the families living there. CNN cannot independently verify the stories of those who have arrived in Bangladesh, as access to media in Rakhine State is heavily restricted. People fetching water in the makeshift extension to Kutupalong camp in Ukhiya, Cox's Bazar district, south eastern Bangladesh on 9 April, 2017. 'Now, we have nothing' Mohsena says she fled Myanmar, also known as Burma, three months ago with her 4-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter after her husband was killed. Mohsena's son is disabled, which means she struggles to earn any income. "Because my son can't walk or sit or eat, I have to stay close to him all the time," she says. "I got some money by begging. I don't know how we will survive after that money is gone." There are thousands of families in the camps with stories just like Mohsena's, Helenius says. Rabeya, 25, says she arrived in the Balukhali makeshift camp four months ago, fleeing Myanmar with her husband and children after she was attacked by a group of men. Rabeya, 25, talking with the Bangladesh Red Crescent volunteer trained in psychosocial support in the makeshift Balukhali camp in Ukhiya, Cox's Bazar district, south eastern Bangladesh on 8 April, 2017. "I lost consciousness because of the pain," she says. "My neighbors found me on the ground and dragged me to the jungle. I was bleeding a lot. All my clothes were torn." Rabeya says she later miscarried a baby she was carrying. She also heard that her mother and sister had been killed. "We had a wealthy and happy life there before," she says. "Now, we have nothing. We have to worry about surviving. We don't even have enough money for food." In February, the United Nations released a report that alleged widespread brutal killings and rapes taking place inside Rakhine State, and in March, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva announced that an "urgent" fact-finding mission will be sent to Myanmar to investigate the claims of human rights abuses. Nobel Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi insisted that those who fled Myanmar are "safe" to come back, adding that "we will welcome them back." But in Bangladesh, the future for the Rohingya refugees is still looking increasingly uncertain. "My first priority is the safety of my family," Rabeya says. "If peace returns to our home, if it is safe for us to be there, we want to go back. But if not, how can we survive here?" (C) 2017 CNN

The UN has now documented 40 mass grave sites in Kasai [File: Aaron Ross/Reuters] United Nations investigators have found 17 new mass graves in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in an area that has seen fighting between soldiers and members of a local armed group, according to the UN rights chief. Zeid Raad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, called the DRC's government to launch an investigation, threatening that the International Criminal Court (ICC) would do so if authorities failed to take action. Zeid said in a statement published by his office on Wednesday that he had reports DRC soldiers had dug the graves after clashes with the Kamuina Nsapu militia in the central Kasai region in March. "At least 74 people, including 30 children, were reported to have been killed by soldiers," in the clashes, he said, without giving details on the sources of his information. During a separate incident in the provincial capital of Kananga last month, soldiers were reported to have shot dead at least 40 people and raped women and girls, Zeid said, again without saying who had made the reports. Most of the victims were said to have been killed in their homes as soldiers went door to door looking for militia members, he added. Fifteen of the newly-confirmed sites are in the town of Tshimbulu, and two in Thsienke, a village near Kananga city. The findings mean that the UN has now documented 40 mass grave sites and killings of more than 400 people in Kasai Central and Kasai Oriental provinces since last August. "It is absolutely vital that the government ... takes meaningful steps to ensure that there is [an]... independent investigation," Zeid said. "Should there be no effective national investigation, I will not hesitate to urge ... an investigation by an international mechanism, including the International Criminal Court." Evidence First The government of the DRC said it would investigate the reports once it saw the evidence. Lambert Mende, the government spokesman, said the UN team should pass its evidence to the justice department . "Then we will start investigations," he added. The government has previously denied that soldiers have used disproportionate force against militia members, who are often armed with machetes and home-made rifles, and said that the militia had dug other mass graves. Kasai is the focus of the fight against the Kamuina Nsapu militia since August, when security forces killed its leader. The militia has been fighting largely to avenge his death. The violence has become the most serious threat to President Joseph Kabila, whose decision to stay in power after his mandate ran out in December has stoked lawlessness across the vast central African nation. The government said last week that it had returned the body of the armed group's leader to his village, which had been one of the militia's key demands. However, it was unclear whether this gesture would sooth tensions after such extensive killings. The Kamwina Nsapu have been accused of recruiting child soldiers, and of attacking public authorities, schools and churches. Hundreds of people have been killed and 200,000 displaced, according to the UN. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Al Jazeera Media Network

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Protesters demanding elections and a return to democratic rule jammed the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities on Wednesday. National Guard troops and government-aligned militias beat crowds back with tear gas, rubber bullets and other weapons, and at least three people were killed, according to human rights groups and news reports. President Nicolás Maduro defied international calls, including a plea from the American State Department, to allow peaceful assemblies and ordered his forces into the streets. Some demonstrators, wearing masks to protect themselves from tear gas, fought back with firebombs. Still, despite the deaths in recent protests, now numbering seven, Wednesday’s rallies attracted thousands of people, the latest in a string of demonstrations against the increasingly autocratic rule of Mr. Maduro. Labeled by organizers “the mother of all protests,” it showed that a sustained movement in the streets against Mr. Maduro may now be forming. Opposition leaders called for more rallies on Thursday. Carlos Moreno, 17, was fatally shot by a pro-government gang on Wednesday, according to witnesses and local news reports. He was attacked after hundreds of pro-government gang members arrived and surrounded protesters, throwing tear gas canisters, Arturo Ríos, a witness, said in an interview. Mr. Ríos said the group then began to open fire. “They shot the boy through the head,” Mr. Ríos said. “It’s not fair. He could have been a friend of mine.” Provea, a human rights group, said a second person had been killed and 400 people had been arrested. On Wednesday night, the government said that a sniper had killed a member of the National Guard in an area outside Caracas. The anti-Maduro protests came after an attempt last month by Venezuela’s Supreme Court, controlled by loyalists of the president, to dissolve the opposition-controlled legislature. The move touched off an outcry in the country and was internationally condemned as leaving Venezuela a dictatorship in all but name. While Mr. Maduro ordered the court to reverse much of the ruling, the lawmakers remain essentially powerless. In the weeks since, the president tightened his grip, barring a main opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, from holding political office for 15 years. Mr. Capriles narrowly lost to Mr. Maduro in a presidential election in 2013 and was seen as his main challenger for elections next year. Marching with protesters on Wednesday, Miguel Pizarro, an opposition legislator, outlined their demands in an interview. They included setting election dates, freeing political prisoners and allowing legislators to write laws. “Today, we are beginning a new stage in the democratic struggle to arrive at elections,” he said. “Our first objective is to mobilize, to show that we are the majority.” While past protest movements by the opposition have often sought to topple the leftist government — one in 2002 even briefly deposed Hugo Chávez, the president at the time — the current wave has a more modest goal: a timetable for elections, which the opposition believes it will win. “In the past, the opposition focused on getting rid of Chavismo, which proved unrealistic,” said Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy group. “This time is different.” Pro-government rallies also formed, and in a defiant address on Wednesday, Mr. Maduro said he welcomed elections, vowing that leftists would trounce the opposition. “I want us to prepare ourselves so we have a total electoral victory,” he said. However, he offered no date for a vote. Instead, the government met protesters with tear gas and water cannons. Some demonstrators took refuge in a nearby river. The leftist movement, weakened by a failing economy and food shortages, is almost certain to lose its grip on power in a popular vote, according to polls. The country’s rulers already postponed elections for governors last year. There were also signs that the lower middle class and the poor, who benefited most from Mr. Chávez’s programs and who steered clear of opposition protests in 2002 and 2014, might be willing to join the demand for elections. Demonstrations in recent weeks have erupted in poor districts of Caracas, the capital, which have suffered most from shortages of food and medicine. And there were signs that many from those areas had come to the streets again on Wednesday. “I live in a barrio, and the people there go around begging for food,” said Beatriz Bustamante, a 61-year-old from the Petare neighborhood, a poor district in which opposition support is strong. Ms. Bustamante blamed the government for rising crime, including the death of her only son, who was killed during a robbery. Even some of the loyalists sent out by Mr. Maduro said they doubted him. “I don’t understand what is going on” in this country, said DeManuel Hernández, a 24-year-old militia member. “Some say there’s an economic war, but I’ve also heard that the president doesn’t understand how to control the economy,” he said. Not far from Mr. Hernández, a crowd had gathered in support of Mr. Maduro. But it numbered only in the few thousands, far less than in previous marches or the huge crowds of the opposition, which shut down highways and the city center. Still, many there defended the president. “We came to support Nicolás Maduro and the legacy of Chávez because we can’t lose the great social advances of the revolution,” said Vlacmy Solorzano, 40, a member of a government food distribution group. But even Ms. Solorzano said elections needed to be held soon. “If we don’t win, we have to accept the result,” she said. Correction: April 21, 2017 An article on Thursday about political unrest in Venezuela misstated, in some copies, the total number of people who had died in recent protests against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. It was seven, not eight. ©, 2017, The New York Times

In a bid to show that the Trump administration cares about human rights around the world, its envoy to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, on Tuesday presided over what the administration called the first “thematic debate” on human rights in the Security Council. “In case after case, human rights violations and abuses are not merely the incidental byproduct of conflict,” Ms. Haley said at the session. “They are the trigger for conflict.” She referred to countries that the United States has consistently criticized for their rights abuses, including Cuba, North Korea and Syria. Rights groups reacted with criticism. The Trump administration, they pointed out, has been sued at home for its visa ban targeting some predominantly Muslim countries. The president has praised Egypt’s authoritarian leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the advocates noted. On Monday, President Trump congratulated Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for prevailing in a referendum that strengthened his powers. “Can’t wait for discussion about detention of journalists, writers, & others in Turkey,” David Kaye, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine and a special United Nations envoy on freedom of expression, wrote on Twitter. Continue reading the main story The United Nations already addresses human rights, one of the pillars of the organization’s system. And for at least a decade, the Security Council has received briefings from human rights officials within the United Nations and, occasionally, from outside organizations that work on human rights. Over the last year, those briefings have included the risk of genocide in South Sudan, war crimes in Syria, politically motivated killings in Burundi and the atrocities committed by the Islamic State. In 2013, Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general at the time, put in place a policy that he called Human Rights Up Front, instructing all United Nations officials in the field to report on human rights violations in the countries where they work. And many of the mandates of United Nations peacekeeping missions authorize human rights investigations, as a memo by Ms. Haley’s aides pointed out in proposing the meeting to fellow council members. The Tuesday meeting essentially amounted to the first human rights briefing at the Security Council not tied to a particular conflict. While Ms. Haley cited abuses by North Korea, Syria and Cuba, other countries, likewise, used Tuesday’s session to shame their rivals. Ukraine singled out Russia; Russia in turn complained about a “general hatred of Russia.” China spoke against terrorism. Ms. Haley has called the United States the “moral conscience” of the world and has said she was committed to addressing rights abuses. She has been skeptical of the United Nations Human Rights Council, though, describing many of its constituents as countries with poor human rights records and calling it “so corrupt.” Countries are elected to serve on the Human Rights Council. The United States was elected in October to a three-year term starting this year. Russia lost its bid for a seat. Whether Ms. Haley will recommend that the United States pull out of the Human Rights Council is unclear. Former American diplomats have said the United States has used its membership to push for commissions of inquiry, including on rights abuses in Iran, North Korea and Syria. “If the U.S. administration wants to show it has a genuine commitment to human rights, then it needs to take a serious look at its recent policies,” Sherine Tadros, the head of the New York office for Amnesty International, said in an email. “You can’t have directives coming from Washington that are distinctly anti-human rights and then say you’re championing human rights at the U.N.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times

Policemen stand guard near the body of a man killed during what police said was a drug related vigilante killing in Pasig, Metro Manila, February 2017. REUTERS/Erik De Castro The Philippine police have received cash payments for executing drug suspects, planted evidence at crime scenes and carried out most of the killings they have long blamed on vigilantes, said two senior officers who are critical of President Rodrigo Duterte's "war on drugs." In the most detailed insider accounts yet of the drug war's secret mechanics, the two senior officials challenged the government's explanations of the killings in interviews with Reuters. Almost 9,000 people, many small-time users and dealers, have been killed since Duterte took office on June 30. Police say about a third of the victims were shot by officers in self-defence during legitimate anti-drug operations. Human rights monitors believe many of the remaining two thirds were killed by paid assassins operating with police backing or by police disguised as vigilantes - a charge the police deny. The two senior officers, one a retired police intelligence officer and the other an active-duty commander, claimed the killings are in fact orchestrated by the police, including most of those carried out by vigilantes. They spoke with Reuters on the condition of anonymity. "It is the Philippine National Police doing it," said the retired intelligence officer. "This killing machine must be buried six feet under the ground." He said he was angry about the impact of the killings on police discipline and wanted "to put Duterte on the defensive." Reuters was unable to independently verify if the police are behind vigilante killings. The president's office and the Philippine police did not respond to questions from Reuters. 'ONLY THE POOR ARE DYING' The intelligence officer has authored an unpublished 26-page report on the conduct of the drug war in an effort to organize opposition to Duterte's campaign. The report, titled "The State-Sponsored Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines," provides granular detail on the campaign's alleged methods, masterminds and perpetrators. The document has been shared with leaders of the Catholic Church in the Philippines and with the government-funded Commission on Human Rights. Some of the report's accusations against individuals could not be confirmed by Reuters; the news agency is therefore not publishing the full document. Many of its findings, however, support and expand upon previous investigations of the drug war by Reuters and independent human rights monitors. (To view the cover page of the report, click on the link: tmsnrt.rs/2o8U73N) The report claims that police are paid to kill not just drug suspects, but also - for 10,000 pesos ($200) a head - rapists, pickpockets, swindlers, gang members, alcoholics and other "troublemakers." It also claims that civilian members of the so-called Davao Death Squad, which rights activists allege killed hundreds of people in Duterte's hometown of Davao, were drafted to "augment and assist" the police's current nationwide anti-drug operation. The report doesn't provide documentary evidence for its accusations, which the intelligence officer said were based on accounts from 17 serving or former policemen, including the commander Reuters interviewed. The police commander said he agreed to talk because he was upset that authorities are targeting only petty drug suspects. "Why aren't they killing the suppliers?" he asked. "Only the poor are dying." The second half of the report is largely political in nature, asserting that Duterte has close ties to Communist forces in the Philippines. Many in the military and police are concerned by what they see as Duterte's leftist sympathies. Since taking office, the president has released Communist rebels from prison to restart peace talks. The report also calls the drug war a "social cleansing" campaign similar to that launched in Mao Zedong's China, with Duterte aiming to have drug addicts "physically eliminated." NEW LEADS The Commission on Human Rights has reviewed the report and the accounts could open up new leads in ongoing investigations, said chairman Chito Gascon. Church officials confirmed receiving the report as well. "We should do all we can to follow any lead that could ultimately shed light on these killings with the view to ultimately holding the perpetrators to account," said Gascon. The fresh claims come amid growing criticism of the drug war. In February, the country's influential Catholic Church called it a "reign of terror." The campaign has also sparked street protests and lawsuits. Duterte's police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa, halted police operations for most of February after it emerged that an anti-drug unit had kidnapped and murdered a South Korean businessman last year. The killings continued but at a slower pace. On March 6, Dela Rosa announced that the police were resuming their drug operations. In March, a former policeman, Arturo Lascanas, testified in the Philippine Senate about his role in vigilante-style killings in the southern city of Davao, where Duterte was once mayor. Lascanas was the second Senate witness to link Duterte to the Davao Death Squad. Duterte denies ordering any killings, either as president or mayor. In a subsequent interview, Lascanas told Reuters that for over a decade he was paid for carrying out the liquidation of drug suspects and criminals. In the early 1990s, he said, he was paid 3,000 to 5,000 pesos ($60-$100) for each of the "jobs" he performed. By the early 2000s he was earning tens of thousands of pesos for each operation, he said. Lascanas said he had no documentary proof of the payments. He has since left the country. UNPLUGGING CAMERAS In the past nine months, police acknowledge having shot dead more than 2,600 suspects during their operations. They say such shootings occur after suspects open fire on undercover officers trying to catch them dealing drugs. But these so-called "buy-busts" are actually well-planned executions, said the commander interviewed by Reuters. The commander said targets are chosen from lists of suspects drawn up by police and local officials, who later coordinate to unplug security cameras in the neighborhood where a killing is planned. According to the report, street lamps are also switched off. "There is no such thing as a legitimate buy-bust," the commander said. "The dealers know the cops and won't sell to them." Instead, he said, a team of police operatives will execute the target, who is almost always unarmed, then plant guns and drugs at the crime scene to justify the use of deadly force. "We have to plant evidence for the legality of the operation," the commander said. "We are ordered to do these operations, so we have to protect ourselves." The commander said officers put the gun in the dead suspect's hand and pull the trigger with the victim's finger so forensic testing will show that the suspect fired a gun. Late last year, he said, police crime-scene investigators told their fellow officers to place the guns at a slight distance from the suspects, rather than in their hands, to make things look more realistic. Most drug suspects in his precinct are shot by rookie cops who are either eager for the experience or nominated by their superiors, the commander said. The superiors refer to this as a "baptism by fire." Each member of the team is quickly paid according to two factors, said the commander: his role in the killing and the target's value. CASH REWARDS According to the report, the cash "reward scales" for drug killings range from 20,000 pesos ($400) for a "street level pusher and user," to 50,000 pesos for a member of a neighborhood council, one million pesos for "distributors, retailers and wholesalers," and five million for "drug lords." Police officers kill for money, said the commander, but also out of fear: Even the police are afraid of being included on a "watch list" of drug suspects drawn up by police and local officials. Officials have been killed for not cooperating, he added. He said he was aware of two cases but did not provide details on exactly what happened. Reuters reported last year that the watch lists were effectively hit lists, with many of those named ending up dead. Another Reuters investigation showed that police officers were killing 97 percent of the suspects they confront in violent buy-bust operations, the strongest evidence yet that the police were summarily executing suspects. Officers also cooperate because they know the police force's flawed disciplinary system, which fails to adequately investigate even a fraction of the killings, means there is little chance they will get caught, said the intelligence officer. One sign of the drug war's success, says the government, is that more than a million users and pushers have voluntarily registered with the police, a process known as "surrendering." But the commander said police are given a quota of "surrenderers," and fill it by using city ordinances to arrest men who are drunk or shirtless - a misdemeanor known as "half-naked" - then forcing them to register as drug suspects. Reuters learned of the intelligence officer's 26-page report from him and interviewed two Catholic priests in Manila who said they had encouraged him to compile it. One of the priests said he edited the report; the other said he helped distribute it among a small group of clerics and human rights activists. Both are helping organize opposition to Duterte's drug campaign. The Church's initial reluctance to criticize Duterte's drug war was prompted by a desire to "give him a chance" when he took office, said one of the priests. But the killings, along with the president's overtures to Communists, made many in the Church feel their values were under attack, he said. The intelligence officer said he hoped the report would be used as evidence at the International Criminal Court. In October, the Hague-based tribunal said it could prosecute suspects if the killings were "committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population." (Additional reporting by Neil Jerome Morales in Manila. Edited by Peter Hirschberg and Andrew R.C. Marshall.) (C) 2017 Reuters