Accusations of abuse and neglect have come to light after a fire at a state-funded youth shelter killed 41 girls. On March 10, a funeral was held for Siona Hernandeza, one of the girls who died in the fire at the Virgen de Asuncion shelter, at her grandmother's home in Guatemala City [Reuters/Saul Martinez] San Jose Pinula/Jutiapa, Guatemala - Sisters Jilma and Grindy Carias, aged 15 and 16, had begged their parents not to send them back to the state-run youth shelter. But they did, and days later, on March 8, the girls were killed in a fire there. Nineteen girls died in the fire at the Virgen de la Asuncion youth shelter that day, and a further 21 later succumbed to their injuries in hospital. Seven survivors were flown to two hospitals in the US, the Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston and Texas. One girl has since died, bringing the death toll to 41. The remaining six are now in a stable condition. The sisters' grandmother, Blanca Lidia Martinez, 64, agreed to be interviewed in lieu of the girls' parents, who were too distressed to speak. Standing on the doorstep of the family home, located in the municipality of Jutiapa, 124km from the capital Guatemala City, Martinez says that the girls' parents sent them to the shelter because they were unable to curb their unruly behaviour. "Sometimes they were rebellious and they didn't listen to their mum. They would come home at midnight or they didn't come home at all," she says. Fifteen members of the Carias family live in a cramped tin-walled shack. They were unable to afford to pay for the girls' funeral, so the Jutiapa municipal authorities stepped in to cover the expense. Before returning to the shelter, the girls "said they'd rather die than go back because they were being mistreated and were not being fed", Martinez says. Their parents decided to send them back after they refused to attend appointments with a counsellor. Martinez says the girls' bodies were so badly burned that their parents only recognised Jilma from a mole she had next to her mouth and identified Grindy by her teeth. Martinez pauses. "This is really hard. We never thought they would return home in a coffin," she says, her voice breaking. For the Carias family and other victims' relatives, the tragedy has been compounded by allegations - previously ignored by the authorities - that staff beat and sexually assaulted girls and boys at the shelter. These allegations came to the fore in the aftermath of the fire and have highlighted the wider issue of the lack of adequate facilities for vulnerable youths in the country. The shelter Virgen de la Asuncion, the institution run by armed security guards where the Carias sisters died, is located in the municipality of San Jose Pinula, 25km southeast of Guatemala City. In 2016, a court ordered that it be closed by the end of that year. But it wasn't. Then the fire happened. After the fire, panic-stricken relatives flocked to the shelter to remove their children from the facility. But around 50 children and adolescents who have no relatives or whose relatives do not want to look after them remain there. Built in 2010, it was meant to house children and teenagers who had previously lived in four separate institutions, separated by age and gender. The shelter was intended to house a maximum of 350 youths, but around 700 girls and boys of different ages - living in separate wings of the building - lived in the overcrowded shelter after the Procuraduria General de la Nacion (Procurator General's Office), the state institution responsible for investigating cases of missing children or child neglect, and which legally represents vulnerable young people in family courts, deemed them wards of the state. "Putting all those kids together was a crass mistake. Each of them had issues that needed specialised treatment. A young offender has completely different needs to that of an LGBT youth or a rebellious teenage girl," says Mireya Saadeh, director of PAMI, a local NGO that works with children who have been subjected to sex trafficking. The girls' backgrounds varied. Some, such as the Carias sisters, had behavioural issues. Others had been rescued from violent homes or from brothels where they were forced to engage in prostitution, while others were orphans or had special needs and were abandoned by families in extreme poverty who could not afford medication and specialised care. Some had run away from home after being bullied at school or threatened by gang members. Fifteen-year-old Yoselin Yamilet Barahona Beltran, the last girl to be identified, was orphaned at the age of one, after her mother was hit by a car and her father didn't acknowledge her. Had she remained unidentified, she would have been buried in a mass grave, her body marked as "XX". "Yami", as her family and friends affectionately called her, was raised by her aunt and uncle, Blanca and Emilio Marroquin, who spent 14 days searching the morgue and hospitals in the hope of finding her. Yoselin wound up in the shelter after she was raped by an unknown attacker and ran away from home, too traumatised to tell her uncle and aunt about her ordeal, say friends and relatives who asked to remain unnamed. Girls such as Yoselin and the Carias sisters lived alongside young offenders - a minority within the shelter - who were sent there by judges because there was no space for them in the juvenile detention centres. "What kind of country only pays attention to children and young people when a tragedy such as this happens or when young people commit a crime? Many people on social media have said that these kids were gang members when there was only a minority of young offenders; most of these kids were victims," says Carolina Escobar Sarti, director of Asociacion La Alianza, a privately run shelter for vulnerable children and teenagers. Guatemala currently has seven state-run youth shelters and two facilities for youth offenders, where overcrowding and inadequate food, which were among the conditions reported at Virgen de la Asuncion, are the norm. After the fire, 130 severely disabled children were moved to the Alida Espana de Arana home for children with disabilities, where 43 of them are housed together in one room. Disability Rights International, a Washington-based advocacy group whose representatives visited the new home, said in a report that these children were at risk of suffering the same abuse they had endured at the previous shelter because the new facility was not prepared to accommodate them. A history of abuse and neglect Since the fire at the Virgen de la Asuncion youth shelter, teenage girls who were sent there have told various Guatemalan media outlets that strangers were brought in at night and allowed to single out the girls they wished to abuse. Children and teenagers, both boys and girls, told the Guatemalan media they were sexually abused and beaten by members of staff. "My daughter was raped in that shelter by an American man ... Children are constantly mistreated there, especially those that are mentally handicapped. Girls are classified according to their physical appearance and the prettiest ones are placed in a special unit where they are abused," the mother of a 17-year-old girl who was sent to the shelter told PlayGround, a Guatemalan news website, on March 8. The girl was removed from the shelter before the fire. In November 2016, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman's Office visited the facility and documented 45 complaints of children's rights violations, including signs of physical abuse and the possible existence of a child sex trafficking network within the shelter, all of which were conveyed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Two teachers were arrested in 2013 and are awaiting trial, accused of sexually abusing children and teenagers in the shelter. One of them is accused of forcing children as young as 12 to strip naked and perform oral sex on him. The same year, a workman hired by staff to carry out maintenance work was given a 15-year prison sentence for raping a mentally disabled 13-year-old girl. When questioned about the progress made by the Attorney General's Office on the investigation into the alleged existence of a child prostitution network operating within the Virgen de la Asuncion shelter, spokesperson Julia Barrera told Al Jazeera on April 14 that prosecutors could not comment on the issue at present and that a full report will be issued once investigators have concluded their work. Investigators have not given an exact date for when the investigation is expected to end. Aldrin Salguero, 15, whose older sister Keila Lopez was among the girls killed in the fire, told Al Jazeera what Lopez had told her about the place: "She said that a guard kicked her in the stomach after he tried to take advantage of her and she resisted and that they were given rotten food that was full of maggots." Lopez had turned 17 five days before the tragedy. The Presidential Secretariat for Social Welfare, the government bureau in charge of running state-funded youth shelters, didn't have an accurate list of the young people housed in the shelter, adding to the chaos in the aftermath of the fire. Lopez's father, Virgilio, a truck driver, was initially informed that his daughter was alive and well and that he could collect her. But when he arrived at the shelter with Keila's aunt, he was told: "No, she's dead, she's at the morgue." Judge Veronica Galicia was so shocked by what she saw when she visited the shelter last June that she ordered it to be closed by December but the order was never obeyed, as she detailed on her Facebook page the day after the fire. Her ruling was published online by Canal Antigua news channel. Two reports by UN rapporteurs on the conditions in the shelter as well as precautionary measures issued by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission also went unheeded, which means Guatemala could be sanctioned by an international tribunal for violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Ramon Cadena, a representative of the International Commission of Jurists in Guatemala, told Al Jazeera. "These kids were being tortured by the guards. These shelters are regarded as places where they should be punished for being rebellious rather than a place where they should receive help," Saadeh says. How the fire happened The fire in which the Carias sisters, Yoselin, Keila and the other girls were killed, broke out a day after 104 teenage girls rioted and escaped from the shelter. Before they were flown to the US, three of the seven survivors said that 47 of those who escaped were caught by armed police and taken back to the shelter at gunpoint, where they were shoved into a classroom with a few foam mattresses. Those who weren't caught remain unaccounted for. The next day, after they were not allowed to leave the classroom to use the toilets, they used the mattresses to build a makeshift shack where they relieved themselves. Then, one of the girls set fire to the mattresses to catch the police agents' attention and to force them to open the door. "We started shouting at the police to open the door because we were getting burnt. They said they didn't care and that if we had managed to escape we could put up with the fire. They told us to 'go to hell'," one of the survivors told Nomada, a digital investigative journalism publication. According to these accounts, the police ignored their screams and pleas to open the door, which remained locked until the fire brigade arrived 25 minutes later and found burned bodies and victims of smoke inhalation as well as the severely burned survivors. Shaken by the survivors' accounts of the abuse and neglect that led to the deaths of 41 teenage girls, Guatemalans took to the streets to demand justice for the victims, and for several days, the national flag flew at half-mast in Guatemala City's main square. On March 13, the director of the Virgen de la Asuncion youth shelter as well as the director and deputy director of the social welfare government bureau, were arrested on homicide and child abuse charges. On April 7, they were granted house arrest on the condition of bail after a preliminary hearing. The day after the three officials were arrested, President Morales appointed a new director and deputy director of the social welfare government bureau. Both have a track record of working with widely recognised child welfare NGOs such as Save the Children and World Vision. To date, however, the Virgen de la Asuncion youth shelter remains without a new director, as no one has accepted the position. The shelter is due to be closed as soon as the remaining 50 children are housed elsewhere. Prosecutors say they will appeal against the judge's house arrest ruling. Child welfare activists and ordinary citizens who have rallied behind the victims' families held a protest in Guatemala City's central square the day after it. During the Easter weekend, many Catholics made traditional sand and colourfully dyed sawdust carpets, known as alfombras, commemorating the tragedy and demanding justice for the victims. "Ni una menos" or "Not one less", an expression commonly used by Latin American women's rights activists, and "41 ninas" (41 girls) were some of the messages stenciled into the alfombras. On March 15, at the University of San Carlos de Guatemala, protesters display a mock coffin covered with skulls and signs which in Spanish read: "State femicide. Justice. It wasn't a fire, it was the state" and "We demand justice" [AP/Luis Soto] Investing in children Child welfare experts insist the institutions in charge of young people who become wards of the state need a drastic overhaul in order to prevent such tragedies from happening again. Some suggest scrapping the Secretariat and replacing it with a Ministry of Family Affairs with a greater budget. Saadeh, however, is not convinced and says the change would be purely cosmetic. "It's not just a question of building these kids a nice new place," she says. "The idea isn't to set up new institutions for nothing to change." Real change, critics say, will begin when the country makes child welfare a top development priority. According to World Bank figures, Guatemala, the fourth most unequal country in Latin America, only invests $0.34 a day in child welfare policies despite the fact that children and teenagers comprise 30 percent of the country's population. "As long as we don't invest resources in what should be most sacred to us - our young people - Guatemala will be condemned to underdevelopment," Saadeh says. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________(c) Al Jazeera News 2017

LA GRULLA, Tex. — Manuel Torresmutt, a Border Patrol agent, pulls his white and green Chevy Tahoe to the side of a deserted gravel road, framed on one side by railroad tracks and on the other by thick green brush. The South Texas sun streams brightly as Mr. Torresmutt, a stocky, 24-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol, steps from his truck to meet with his three-man team. A radio dispatcher says “four bodies” have been spotted on the “Mike” side, referring to the code name for the bank of the Rio Grande in Mexico. A few minutes later, Mr. Torresmutt and other members of the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector Horse Unit are on their way, rocks and dust flying as their mustangs rush into the bush in search of those crossing the border illegally. President Trump has promised to build a wall to stop the flow of illegal immigrants in areas like this, but the geography — like shallow riverbanks and craggy trails that are impassable for vehicles — makes that nearly impossible and staggeringly expensive. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States has spent over $100 billion on various border security technology, including ground sensors, video cameras, walls, layers of fencing and infrared cameras. But in the thicket along the river where smugglers can easily hide, the horse patrol unit plays an essential role in efforts to detect illegal activity. Just over two years ago, asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Central America swarmed the Rio Grande Valley, and many of them eagerly surrendered to Border Patrol agents. But in the past few months, the number of immigrants caught illegally crossing here has plummeted to about 100 people a day from over 600. John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, has said the drop stems from aggressive enforcement, but migrant experts say improving conditions in the countries that people have been fleeing have also contributed to the decline. Border Patrol agents comb the area in trucks and on bicycles on main roads. Helicopters and blimps, known as aerostats, provide aerial surveillance, while boats keep watch over the waterways. The horse patrol unit works close to the Rio Grande, where agents say a border crosser can slip through wooded areas and in a few minutes be in town or spirited away in a vehicle. While the flow of migrants has slowed, drug smuggling remains constant. The signs are everywhere: Dozens of footprints, abandoned life jackets, swimming trunks and food wrappers appear along the riverbank. The Border Patrol unit here has almost 40 horses, obtained from a wild mustang program run by the federal Bureau of Land Management. The agency catches horses and turns them over for basic training to inmates at the Kansas City Correctional Facility. Horses have been used for border security since the inception of the Border Patrol in 1924. The horse patrol unit here was established in 2011, after the local chief of the Border Patrol realized that the animals were well suited for hard-to-patrol areas. Their keen sight and hearing are also useful, said Jeff Wiggins, an agent who oversees the training of horses. A little over an hour after riding off into the bush, Mr. Torresmutt and another agent, David Garcia, return to the staging area. Two other agents, Garrett Gremes and Kelby Forbes, are chasing a man who has made it past both the horse patrol and agents in vehicles. As evening sets in and mosquitoes buzz, radio chatter signals that agents and local law enforcement officers have spotted drugs dumped on the Mexican side of the border. While Mr. Torresmutt and his unit decide their next move, radio dispatchers report that agents have made dozens of roadside apprehensions. A short time later, a dispatcher alerts the unit to a group of people who are crossing the river in a small raft. That information is being relayed from radar aboard an aerostat flying in the area. Within an hour, an alert is sent to Mr. Forbes’s cellphone from a remotely operated camera system, known as Operation Drawbridge. The agent clicks on a link and is instantly given the coordinates to the areas where a camera has spotted the group. Operation Drawbridge, which is run by the Texas Department of Public Safety, is a network of thousands of hidden wildlife cameras equipped with motion detection and lowlight capabilities. State monitors receive an alert each time a camera detects activity and provide agents in the field with round-the-clock images of possible illegal crossings. Mr. Torresmutt gathers his unit to devise a strategy to catch the crossers. He and Mr. Forbes will approach from the east, while two other agents will come from the north. “We good?” Mr. Torresmutt asks. Everyone nods in agreement. The agents gallop toward the river. It is nearly midnight when a Border Patrol van pulls up. Three men are in the back. They were captured by Mr. Torresmutt and the horseback unit while trying to elude agents by running back into the river. The men had been turned over to another agent driving the van. All are wet and covered in mud. One says he is a Mexican citizen. The two others say they are from Guatemala and have been traveling for over a month. The agents don’t believe them. The three men have cellphones and seemed to be communicating with people on the Mexican side of the river. The agents suspect they are drug runners or scouts for the cartels. “How much did you pay to get here?” Roderick Kise, a public relations officer for United States Customs and Border Protection, asks the men in Spanish. The three men shake their heads in unison, indicating that they had not paid anyone. “Por favor!” Mr. Kise says in disbelief. He asks again whom they paid for passage. The three men stand firm. “Por favor!” Mr. Kise says again, raising his voice. “You cannot cross from Mexico without one of the cartels. Nothing is free, especially over on that side.” Mr. Torresmutt and the horseback unit arrive just as the interview of the captured men is wrapping up. Both the agents and the horses are covered in sweat. Mr. Forbes’s horse stepped on a rattlesnake during the chase, he says. The three apprehended men are part of a larger group, the agents say. Several members of the group fled back into the river after spotting the horse patrol. Agents did not pursue them into the river, but stayed and signaled to possible smugglers on the Mexican side to come and get the men. At least one man managed to evade capture, according to the agents. He most likely made it into town and disappeared. Finding him is a task for the next shift. Mr. Torresmutt and the team load the horses back into a trailer. After 10 hours, their shift is over. They will head back to the stables, where the horses will be rubbed down and watered. The agents will file their paperwork and then head home. “Tomorrow we’re back at it,” Mr. Torresmutt said. ©, 2017, The New York Times

The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with its Montana co-counsel, filed suit in federal court today against the founder of a major neo-Nazi website who orchestrated a harassment campaign that has relentlessly terrorized a Jewish woman and her family with anti-Semitic threats and messages. The lawsuit describes how Andrew Anglin used his web forum, the Daily Stormer – the leading extremist website in the country – to publish 30 articles urging his followers to launch a “troll storm” against Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana. Gersh, her husband and 12-year-old son have received more than 700 harassing messages since December. The intimidation began after Anglin accused Gersh of attempting to extort money from the mother of Richard Spencer. The younger Spencer heads the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist organization. Anglin and Spencer are both prominent leaders of the “alt-right” movement that rallied white nationalists behind President Donald Trump’s campaign. “Andrew Anglin knew he had an online army primed to attack with the click of a mouse,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen. “We intend to hold him accountable for the suffering he has caused Ms. Gersh and to send a strong message to those who use their online platforms as weapons of intimidation.” The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, Missoula Division, seeks compensatory and punitive damages. It accuses Anglin of invading Gersh’s privacy and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. It also outlines how his campaign violated the Montana Anti-Intimidation Act. “There’s no place in Montana for the hate Andrew Anglin unleashed from the darkest corners of the internet,” said co-counsel John Morrison, a partner with Morrison, Sherwood, Wilson, & Deola. “The attack on Tanya Gersh was an attack on all of us.” Anglin, whose website attracts hundreds of thousands of readers each month, is a key figure in the alt-right movement, which was energized by Trump’s campaign. The day after the election, he wrote, “Our Glorious Leader has ascended to God Emperor. Make no mistake about it: we did this. If it were not for us, it wouldn’t have been possible.” Anglin also encouraged his followers after the election to harass Muslims and “any foreigners you see.” He wrote, “We want these people to feel unwanted. We want them to feel that everything around them is against them. And we want them to be afraid.” Within the first 10 days after the election, the SPLC documented nearly 900 bias-related incidents across the country, many of them done in Trump’s name. The Daily Stormer, which has established 31 physical chapters in the United States and more in Canada, has been designated a hate group by the SPLC. It takes its name from the Nazi propaganda sheet known as Der Stürmer. Some of its readers do more than issue threats. Dylann Roof, who massacred nine African Americans in Charleston in 2015, posted on the site. Thomas Mair, the neo-Nazi assassin who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament, was a regular reader. And just last month, another Daily Stormer reader, James Jackson, was charged with murder and terrorism after carrying out a plan to go to New York City to kill a black man at random. The lawsuit is similar to litigation the SPLC has used to win crushing court judgments against 10 major white supremacist organizations and 50 individuals who led them or participated in violent acts. The legal strategy, however, has been adapted for the digital age. Gersh was targeted after she agreed to help Sherry Spencer sell a commercial building she owned in Whitefish, where both women live. There were rumors that the building would be a target for protests around the time that a video of Richard Spencer’s speech to a white nationalist conference in Washington, D.C., went viral. In the video, taken days after the 2016 election, he declares, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” as white nationalists respond with Nazi salutes. Gersh agreed to help sell the building after Sherry Spencer reached out to her. Anglin launched the troll storm after Spencer changed her mind and published an article attacking Gersh. “Tell them you are sickened by their Jew agenda,” Anglin wrote under the headline “Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion – TAKE ACTION!” The post included Gersh’s contact information. It also included photographs of Gersh, her husband and son. One was altered to include a yellow Star of David with the label “Jude” – an allusion to the emblem the Nazi regime required Jews to wear during World War II. Anglin launched his campaign of harassment and intimidation with these words: “Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO – it’s that time, fam.” The article prompted hundreds of threatening telephone calls, voicemails, texts, emails, social media messages, letters and postcards. Among them: Thanks for demonstrating why your race needs to be collectively ovened. You have no idea what you are doing, six million are only the beginning. We are going to keep track of you for the rest of your life. You will be driven to the brink of suicide & We will be there to take pleasure in your pain & eventual end. One message included an image of Gersh being sprayed with a green gas, along with the words: Hickory dickory dock, the kike ran up the clock. The clock struck three and the Internet Nazis trolls gassed the rest of them. An email to her husband read: Put your uppity slut wife Tanya back in her cage, you rat-faced kike. … Day of the rope soon for your entire family. Gersh’s son received a tweet with the image of an open oven and the message: psst kid, theres a free Xbox One inside this oven. Anglin referred to him as a “creepy little faggot.” There were also phone calls that consisted only of the sound of gunshots. The campaign escalated to the point that Anglin planned an armed march in Whitefish that he threatened would end at Gersh’s home. He promoted the march, which never materialized, with an image that superimposed Gersh, her son and two other Jewish residents on a picture of the front gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The threats have taken an emotional and physical toll on Gersh. She experiences panic attacks and fears answering the phone. She often goes to bed in tears and wakes up crying. She has trouble leaving her home and feels anxiety in crowds. She has gained weight, has lost hair and is in physical pain. She has been prescribed medication and has sought other treatment, including trauma therapy. “This attack has been one long nightmare that has changed me forever in so many ways,” Gersh said. “No one should endure what I’ve experienced. And with the love and support of my family and others, we will take a stand against hate.” __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Southern Poverty Law Center

War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week. The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online. The files establish that some of the first demands for justice came from countries that had been invaded, such as Poland and China, rather than Britain, the US and Russia, which eventually coordinated the post-war Nuremberg trials. The archive, along with the UNWCC, was closed in the late 1940s as West Germany was transformed into a pivotal ally at the start of the cold war and use of the records was effectively suppressed. Around the same time, many convicted Nazis were granted early release after the anti-communist US senator Joseph McCarthy lobbied to end war crimes trials. Access to the vast quantity of evidence and indictments is timed to coincide with the publication on Tuesday of Human Rights After Hitler: The Lost History of Prosecuting Axis War Crimes by Dan Plesch, a researcher who has been working on the documents for a decade. The documents record the gathering of evidence shortly after the UN was founded in January 1942. They demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnian conflict. The Polish government in exile, the files also record, supplied extraordinarily detailed descriptions to the UNWCC of concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed. The accounts had been smuggled out of occupied eastern Europe. A charge sheet from April 1944 mention victims being forced to strip off clothing and how “the terracotta floors in the chambers … became very slippery when wet”.The village where dozens of young girls have been raped is still waiting for justice The Wiener Library was founded in Amsterdam in 1934 by Dr Alfred Wiener to monitor Nazi antisemitism. He shipped his collection to London on the eve of the second world war, then worked with the British government to inform officials about Hitler’s regime and provide evidence for the Nuremberg trials. Now based in Bloomsbury, central London, the library supports study of the Holocaust and genocide. It also works with the International Tracing Service to provide free help to those searching for relatives who vanished into the concentration camps. “The UN War Crimes Commission catalogue, which can be searched online, will be available through our website this week,” the library’s archivist, Howard Falksohn, said. “People will then be able to come in and look through the archive itself. “We anticipate a lot of interest. Some of the PDF files [on to which the 900GB UN archive has been copied] each contain more than 2,000 pages. This is the first time they will be available to anyone in the UK. It may well be that people will be able to rewrite crucial chapters of history using the new evidence.” Plesch, who is the director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at Soas in the University of London, had to get special permission to read the documents, which were closely guarded by the UN in New York. Only researchers who received authority from their government and consent from the UN secretary general were allowed to read them, and they were not allowed to take notes or copies. Plesch helped persuade diplomats, including the then US ambassador at the UN, Samantha Power, to release the secret material. “This is a huge resource for combating Holocaust denial,” Plesch said. “The German national authorities were never given access to the archive by the allies after the war. All of this has never seen the light of day.” Some of the earliest files of evidence were collected to indict Adolf Hitler directly for his role in the coordinating and controlling massacres carried out by Nazi units in Czechoslovakia. Much of the evidence was collected by the Czech government in exile. There are more than 300 pages detailing his orders and responsibilities. The Nazi leader was eventually indicted in secret by a meeting of the UNWCC in late 1944 as Luftwaffe bombs fell on London. One affidavit in the files is from a British soldier, Harry Ogden, who was captured at Narvik in Norway in 1940, escaped from a prisoner of war camp to join Polish partisans and was re-imprisoned in another POW camp alongside Auschwitz. By the late 1940s, the US and British governments were winding down prosecutions of Nazis. President Harry Truman made anti-communism, rather than holding Nazis to account, a priority, Plesch says. “Even action against the perpetrators of the massacre of British RAF officers attempting to escape from prison camp Stalag Luft III, a flight made iconic by films such as The Great Escape, was curtailed.” ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Guardian

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says America will not ignore reports that authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are persecuting suspected gay men. “We continue to be disturbed by reports of kidnapping, torture and murder of people in Chechnya based on their sexual orientation and those persecuted by association,” she said in a statement Monday. “If true, this violation of human rights cannot be ignored – Chechen authorities must immediately investigate these allegations, hold everyone involved accountable, and take steps to prevent future abuses.” Haley said the U.S. is spearheading efforts at the U.N. to address human rights abuses like those allegedly occurring in Chechnya. “We are against all forms of discrimination, including against people based on sexual orientation,” she continued. “When left unchecked, discrimination and human rights abuses can lead to destabilization and conflict. “Tomorrow, the United States will lead the first-ever meeting on human rights in international conflicts in the U.N. Security Council to underscore our commitment to addressing human rights abuses wherever they threaten international peace and security.” According to reports this month, police in Chechnya have detained more than 100 people suspected of being gay. Russian activists claim the victims are being held at a detention center near the Chechen town of Argun. Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim region governed by Ramzan Kadyrov, who is reportedly close with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kadyrov’s government denied the alleged persecution, claiming Chechnya does not have an LGBT population. “You can’t detain and repress people who simply don’t exist in the republic,” spokesman Alvi Karimov said last week. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Hill

Two dispatches over this past weekend offer powerful insight into the the final form of the Darfur genocide—recognized as such since 2004 by dozens of political officials and bodies (including the U.S. Congress and the EU Parliament), human rights groups, a wide range of genocide and human rights scholars, and such commemorative bodies as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Vad Yashem in Israel (for an extensive but still partial list of those declaring Darfur to be the site of genocide, see | http://wp.me/p45rOG-22A/). Darfur in 2005: a searing, iconic photograph taken by Brian Steidle, a military observer with the feeble African Union Mission in Darfur, the predecessor to UNAMID The annihilating character of attacks on non-Arab/African civilians and villages in Darfur; the systematic denial of humanitarian aid to these ethnic populations; and the pointed pronouncements of various officials and proxies of the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime—all made “genocide” the inevitable characterization. Only political diffidence or disingenuousness kept the characterization from being universally accepted. The outlines of the genocidal ambition were articulated with remarkable clarity in a memorandum originating from the headquarters of notorious Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal in Misteriya, North Darfur at the height of the violence. Julie Flint and Alex de Waal were among those who reported on this extraordinary memorandum: The ultimate objective in Darfur is spelled out in an August 2004 directive from [Janjaweed paramount leader Musa] Hilal’s headquarters: “change the demography” of Darfur and “empty it of African tribes.” Confirming the control of [Khartoum’s] Military Intelligence over the Darfur file, the directive is addressed to no fewer than three intelligence services—the Intelligence and Security Department, Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret “Constructive Security,” or Amn al Ijabi. (Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, Zed Books, 2005) (all emphases in quoted passages in bold have been added—ER) The notorious Musa Hilal, whose spirit lives on in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) described so comprehensively by Human Rights Watch Lest we think Musa Hilal as only a “man of letters,” we should recall that he was identified by numerous eyewitnesses as having presided at the February 2004 slaughter at Tawila, North Darfur. More than 100 people were killed, 350 girls and women were abducted, and more than 100 women were raped. A number of the women and girls were raped in front of their fathers, who were then killed (see | http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article11358/). This was Musa Hilal’s idea of “demographic change.” And this was only one of many atrocities that he either directed or orchestrated. In September 2015 Human Rights Watch provided the world a clear, authoritative, and deeply researched report on the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), by then the dominant militia force in Darfur, called by some the “new Janjaweed” (“Men With No Mercy: Rapid Support Forces Attacks Against Civilians in Darfur, Sudan” | September 9, 2015 | https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/09/09/men-no-mercy/rapid-support-forces-attacks-against-civilians-darfur-sudan/). This report is more important than ever as we survey the “militia state” that Darfur has become; and the report provides compelling evidence that Musa Hilal’s ambitions continue to animate the violence orchestrated by the Khartoum regime against non-Arab/African tribal populations. The voice of particular significance in this report is that of Vice President of the regime, Hassabo Mohammed Abdel Rahman: Ahmed, a 35-year-old officer in the Border Guards [another of Khartoum’s powerful militia proxies in Darfur], spent two weeks at a military base in Guba in December 2014 before being sent to fight rebels around Fanga. Two senior RSF officials, the commanding officer, Alnour Guba, and Col. Badre ab-Creash were present on the Guba base. Ahmed said that a few days prior to leaving for East Jebel Marra, Sudanese Vice President Hassabo Mohammed Abdel Rahman directly addressed several hundred army and RSF soldiers: “Hassabo told us to clear the area east of Jebel Marra. To kill any male. He said we want to clear the area of insects. … He said East Jebel Marra is the kingdom of the rebels. We don’t want anyone there to be alive.” Ahmed said he was then given direct orders from Colonel Badre, who explained that they were going to attack the area of Fanga and the orders were to kill all the rebels and all of the civilians because they were supporting the rebels. Badre told the officers that if they found any women they were allowed to do anything they want to them, which Mohamed interpreted to mean rape. “Hassabo told us to clear the area east of Jebel Marra. To kill any male. He said we want to clear the area of insects. … He said East Jebel Marra is the kingdom of the rebels. We don’t want anyone there to be alive.” Vice President of the Khartoum regime Hassabo likened the rebels, and their civilian “supporters—overwhelmingly from Darfur’s non-Arab/African ethnic groups—to “insects.” The echoes of Rwanda have not registered in meaningful fashion with those seeking rapprochement with the National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime, despite its long history of genocidal counter-insurgencies animated by the views Hassabo gives voice to. I am astonished that these words by Khartoum’s Vice President have not registered in a consequential way with those formulating various policies of accommodation with the regime, particularly since they define so precisely the nature of the violence that accelerated from 2012 through the militarily successful campaign against the Jebel Marra massif in Central Darfur in 2016 | see these short monographs: “‘Changing the Demography’: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015″ | December 1, 2015 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4 “Continuing Mass Rape of Girls in Darfur: The most heinous crime generates no international outrage” | January 2016 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1QG [Arabic translation of this report | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Rr ] The Jebel Marra campaign, which included the use of chemical weapons against clearly civilian populations in the region, denied rebels forces in Darfur their last significant military redoubt. The genocidal counter-insurgency has—after fourteen years of unspeakable violence, destruction, and deprivation—has succeeded. The use of chemical weapons against children seems to matter in Syria—not in Darfur, despite overwhelming evidence of such use assembled by Amnesty International (“Scorched Earth, Poisoned Air: Sudanese Government Forces Ravage Jebel Marra, Darfur,” September 2016 | http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/scorched-earth-poisoned-air-sudanese-government-forces-ravage-jebel-marra-darfur In the wake of such victory, Khartoum is eager to begin dismantling the camps for displaced persons that have done so much to define destruction and suffering during the Darfur genocide. UN figures suggest that approximately 3 million people remain displaced from their homes, some 300,000 as refugees in eastern Chad (see | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/03/19/internally-displaced-persons-in-darfur-the-invisible-catastrophe/). They are overwhelmingly people from the non-Arab/African tribal populations of Darfur. Extant mortality data and reports, while limited in many ways by Khartoum, when aggregated strongly suggest that well over 500,000 people have been killed directly or indirectly by the violence Khartoum has so effectively orchestrated (see | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/01/05/quantifying-genocide-darfur-mortality-update-august-6-2010/). Since the world seems not to care about the number of violent deaths in Darfur, desperate Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad have attempted to keep at least some records of the human destruction Many tens of thousands of girls and women have been raped as sexual violence continues to be deployed as a brutal weapon of war (see | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/03/07/continuing-mass-rape-of-girls-in-darfur-the-most-heinous-crime-generates-no-international-outrage-january-2016//). Non-Arab/African girls and women of marriageable age have been, overwhelmingly, the targets of a brutal deployment of rape as a weapon of war in Darfur. Many of the girls raped and gang-raped are under the age of ten, often in front of their families. Deprivation is unspeakable in many locations; indeed, the best estimate is that 30 percentof the population in Darfur that remains inaccessible to humanitarian relief operations because of Khartoum’s obstructionist policies. This represents a population of almost 1 million people, as the UN has recently estimated that Darfur’s population in need is 3.3 million people (UN OCHA, Sudan Bulletin 6 | February 2017 | http://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-humanitarian-bulletin-issue-6-13-26-february-2017-enar/). Some of the Darfuris who fled their homes in 2014 as the Rapid Support Forces swept through their villages. Violence from 2014 through 2016 was as intense as that of the early years of the genocide (2003 – 2005), making nonsense of claims by UNAMID heads Gambari and Adada about reductions in violence. These are some of the 3.3 million people that OCHA estimated in February 2017 were in need of humanitarian assistance. I offer in a recent analysis representative examples of camps and locations that remain inaccessible despite the claim by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Powerthat there has been a “sea change” of improvement in humanitarian access in Sudan. This is a preposterous falsehood, and yet it stands uncorrected by any U.S. government official—past or present. It is a particularly outrageous falsehood, given the fact that in addition to obstructing humanitarian relief in Darfur, Khartoum continues to impose a total humanitarian blockade on the large and highly distressed populations in rebel-controlled areas of South Kordofan and Blue Nile. By crediting Khartoum with a “sea change” of improved humanitarian access, Power’s statement perversely works to diminish incentives for the regime actually to make such improvements. Former Obama administration Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power; she claimed that there has been a “sea change” of improvement in humanitarian access in Sudan. There has been no public correction of her egregious falsehood by any official of either the Obama administration or the Trump administration. In short, her statement stands as the most prominent U.S. government assessment of this critical issue, affecting literally millions of human beings in Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile. All this makes clear that, given the terms set by President Obama for a permanent lifting of U.S. sanctions on Khartoum—which include prominently an improvement in humanitarian access—the regime is failing badly (see my recent assessment of Khartoum’s failure to adhere to the terms stipulated | http://wp.me/p45rOG-22o/). The badly malnourished child in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan has seen nothing of the “sea change” in humanitarian access Ambassador Power spoke of. Dr. Tom Catena, the only surgeon working in the Nuba Mountains, has written to me repeatedly to insist that “not a grain of sorghum, not a bit of medicine” has reached the people he serves from his hospital near Kauda. What does Darfur look like in the wake of this ghastly “success”? The character of Khartoum’s success in Darfur is revealed in two dispatches from Radio Dabanga this past weekend (see below) and a recent report from the Enough Project (“Border Control from Hell: How the EU’s migration partnership legitimizes Sudan’s militia state” | April 2017 | http://www.enoughproject.org/files/BorderControl_April2017_Enough_Finals.pdf/). What they have in common is the characterization of the region as a “militia state,” one in which security has essentially been turned over to the militia forces that have fought for Khartoum and which will sustain themselves primarily by continuing predations on civilians and permanent, violently ensured expropriation of farmlands and pasturage. This Human Rights Watch report is our definitive account of the savage predations of the Rapid Support Forces through September 2015; see also my monograph on the RSF and other militia forces in Darfur: “Changing the Demography”: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015″ | December 1, 2015 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4 Hamid Nur, a man known to me as someone of extraordinary knowledge, integrity, and humanity, is reported by Radio Dabanga to have offered the following assessment: Sudan’s western region is politically, militarily, and economically dominated by militias, says the head of the Darfur Civil Society Platform. The Darfur displaced and refugees have no way to return to their [homes and farms] as the places are occupied by militiamen and their families. In an interview with Radio Dabanga, Hamid Ali Nur, head of the Darfur Civil Society Platform, called the repeated statements by the Sudanese government and the recent report by the US military attaché about the improved security situation in Darfur inaccurate and incorrect. According to the civil society leader, the Khartoum government has, to a large extent, succeeded in changing the Darfur population itself. “Militiamen and their families have occupied the villages and farms left by fleeing Darfuris during all these years.” The civil society activist said that the government’s options given to the Darfur displaced, either to return to their villages of origin, or integrate them into the local communities by re-structuring the camps, are fake. “As the displaced are not able to return, Khartoum’s policy is aimed at permanently displacing them from their homes, lands, and heritage.” The new U.S. military attaché in Khartoum, John Bung, has negligible knowledge of or experience in Darfur, and yet— According to SUNA, the Military Attaché John Bung said he witnessed great developments in North Darfur, and lauded the coordination between the state and federal security bodies to maintain the security situation in the region. (Radio Dabanga, April 10, 2017 | El Fasher/Tullus) Of course Military Attaché Bung saw only what Khartoum permitted him to see, and would have been quite unprepared for the manipulations of appearances at which Military Intelligence and the National Intelligences and Security Services (NISS) have become so expert in Darfur. And while there is good reason to be deeply skeptical of the accuracy of the SUNA account—“the news agency” is little more than an extension of the regime’s elaborate propaganda apparatus—the views attributed to Bung comport all too well with U.S. Sudan policy under the Obama administration and so far under the Trump administration. The angry response of Darfuris to the reported characterization by Bung was made most bluntly and directly by camp officials and displaced persons (Radio Dabanga, “‘Militiamen living in our villages, using our lands’: Darfuri displaced” | April 17, 2017 | BELEIL / ZALINGEI The continued announcements of the Sudanese government and the recent declaration of the US military attaché in Khartoum about the improved security situation in the region are “false propaganda,” according to the displaced people in Darfur. “These statements about security in Darfur have no basis in reality,” Hussein Abu Sharati, the spokesman for the Darfur Displaced and Refugees Association, commented to Radio Dabanga. “In terms of security and stability, the situation in Darfur is now more serious than three years ago. As the region is currently under the control of those who fought alongside government forces against the people, and chased them from their villages. The government rewarded them by letting them occupy our lands.” Abu Sharati explained that the displaced and refugees do not refuse to return voluntarily. “On the contrary, they are longing to return to their places of origin. It is imperative however, to achieve a comprehensive peace, to restore security, disarm the militias, expel the militiamen and their families from the occupied lands, and bring those who have committed crimes against civilians in Darfur to justice. “Otherwise, we have nothing to do with any re-planning of camps, nor with the so-called voluntary return as it is promoted by the government,” he added. **************** According to El Shafee Abdallah, Coordinator of the Central Darfur camps and one of the members of the Darfur Camps Coordination Committee, the government’s announcement of security in Darfur and the possibility for the displaced people in the camps to return to their villages is “baseless propaganda.” “The lands and villages of the displaced people are currently occupied by militiamen, from the region or neighbouring countries, who are allied with the government,” he said. “They daily prevent the displaced from leaving the camps to collect firewood and straw, let alone to return to their villages.” He explained that “The government aims to keep the displaced people where they are, after a so-called re-planning of the camps. “If the camp areas are annexed to the towns and the displaced registered as town residents, they will deprived from the possibility to reclaim their land. Thus the way to legalising the new settlers’ ownership of our lands will be paved.” “That is why the displaced people will never accept the re-planning of the camps and their integration into the towns,” he said. The inaccurate and distorting characterization offered by Military Attaché Bung will undoubtedly inform and guide U.S. participation in the June 2017 UN Security Council debate on re-authorizing the absurdly expensive and disastrously under-performing UN/African Union “hybrid” peacekeeping force in Darfur (UNAMID). There will be unctuous words about the importance of “protecting innocent civilians in Darfur,” but in the end the U.S. will vote to reduce, and thus weaken, UNAMID. The vote will be justified as the only way in which to avoid a Russian or Chinese veto of UNAMID reauthorization, which is vehemently opposed by Khartoum (the regime is continually demanding of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations an “exit strategy” for UNAMID and will insist that there be at the very least significant cuts to the force, an insistence that will be supported by Russia and/or China). As the debate about the need to reauthorize UNAMID nears, we would do well to recall the various accounts of “improved security” in Darfur and the “success of UNAMID” that preceded Military Attaché Bung’s assessments—it is have an ominous history. In 2008 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon first appointed as Joint Special Representative to UNAMID the bombastic and incompetent Rodolphe Adada of Congo. Although achieving virtually nothing in strengthening UNAMID as a force on the ground, or improving security, Adada did set the tone for UNAMID’s claims about its achievements, declaring at the end of his brief tenure: “I have achieved results in Darfur. [ ] There is no more fighting proper on the ground.’ ‘Right now there is no high-intensity conflict in Darfur. Call it what you will but this is what is happening in Darfur—a lot of banditry, carjacking, attacks on houses.” Not to be outdone, UNAMID head Ibrahim Gambari, on the occasion of the end of his tenure in 2011, declared: “I am gratified to note that barely 31 months on, all the set goals and objectives have largely been met. The Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD) was signed in July 2011.” (UN Forum | Sept 15, 2012) “…all the set goals and objectives have largely been met.” What utterly despicable mendacity. Violence against IDP camps continues, and indeed has become more frequent and more destructive—increasing the need for humanitarian assistance that Khartoum continues to block to much of Darfur. Assistance to displaced Darfuris is often woefully inadequate, and some locations have not seen humanitarian relief in years because of Khartoum’s actions. Violence had already begun to escalate in Darfur as Gambari made his exit. And as was clear from the beginning of the completely corrupt “Doha process,” and is now acknowledged by all international actors of consequence—including the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for the Sudans—the Doha Document for Peace in Darfur (DDPD) was a diplomatic dead letter from the very beginning of negotiations through finalization in July 2011. There was no support or even meaningful participation in fashioning the “Document” by Darfuri civil society—those with the largest stake in the character and integrity of any peace agreement. Nor did any of the major rebel groups sign on. The DDPD did nothing to improve security, and indeed violence accelerated dramatically within a year of the signing by a factitious rebel “coalition” and the regime in Doha, an event that gave the cynical and expedient Qataris an opportunity to showcase their diplomatic “achievement.” In the wake of the “Doha Document for Peace in Darfur”: a victim of the ghastly “Nertiti Massacre,” perpetrated by regular Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) troops on unarmed Darfuri civilians in Nertiti, Central Darfur (January 1, 2017—see http://wp.me/s45rOG-7710) Lies from the Obama administration—past…but still consequential The record of disingenuous, duplicitous, false, and cynical characterizations of Darfur, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile—as well as in speaking about the nature of the barbarous Khartoum regime—is long and all too telling. It is a record that does far too much to explain the success of the Darfur genocide as well as the collapse of Western civil society activism that coincided with the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009. Obama had campaigned on Darfur as an issue, declaring it to be a “stain on our souls” and that as president he would not turn his eyes from such human slaughter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEd583-fA8M/). Candidate Obama campaigned on the issue of Darfur, calling it a “stain on our souls,” and promising that he would not avert his eyes from human slaughter. Those words, however, were betrayed almost immediately with the appointment of campaign supporter Air Force Major-General Scott Gration (ret.) to be Special Envoy for Sudan. Gration knew nothing of Sudan, had no diplomatic experience, was irrationally stubborn, did not speak Arabic, and was really aiming for the ambassadorship to Kenya (with which he was rewarded shortly after his immensely destructive two-year tenure). It was Gration who infamously announced his strategy for dealing with a serially genocidal regime: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration, who was appointed in March. “Kids, countries—they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.” (Washington Post, September 20, 2009 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/28/AR2009092802336.html/) The unfathomably incompetent and deeply destructive first special envoy of the Obama administration, Scott Gration; his appointment made clear Obama was more interested in repaying election debts than in providing real diplomatic assistance in ending the Darfur genocide (Gration would, incomprehensibly and unintelligibly, refer to continuing ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur as “remnants of genocide.” His “diplomacy” never achieved greater sophistication or insight into Sudan’s realities. Thus in summer 2009, Gration had repeatedly told Darfuris that peace would be achieved “by the end of the year” (2009). His foolish optimism proved a cruel hoax. But it had deadly implications, as it led Gration to an unreasonable view of the possibility of returns by displaced persons. A highly alarmed humanitarian working group in Darfur (“Inter-Agency Management Group,” IAMG) prepared damning field notes that were reported by the Washington Post in August 2009: “Given the message sent by Scott Gration to the Humanitarian Community and the beneficiaries, i.e., peace will prevail in Darfur by the end of the year, and returns have to happen, the IAMG felt it has to take a common position.” “The Special Envoy emphasized his desire to see IDPs returning to their home as early as possible. Beyond the fact that this is linked to a success of the political process, the IAMG, whilst recognizing the possibility of returns as an ultimate goal and supporting it, want to emphasize that specific impediments need to be addressed before it is made possible. In addition, it is important to keep in mind that a large part of the IDPs might opt for staying in their new settlements over a return to their place of origin. [ ] The incapacitation of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and [the] UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in South Darfur is utterly limiting the capacity to deal with population movements and potential returns. Gration conspicuously failed to understand that this “incapacitation” was deliberately engineered by Khartoum. Just as consequentially, Gration—even while pushing for early returns—failed to understand the obstacles to returns and the lack of capacity to ensure that any such returns would indeed be voluntary and secure—problems that persist eight years later. A Second U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan Things did not improve with the appoint of Princeton Lyman as successor to Gration. During the first month of renewed genocidal assault by Khartoum in South Kordofan (June 2011), targeting the African Nuba people of this soon-to-be southernmost state of Sudan (after Southern secession), Lyman gave a series of news interviews in which he deliberately refused to accept authoritative accounts of ethnic slaughter in Kadugli (capital of South Kordofan), including clear evidence of the digging of mass graves—confirmed by both the Satellite Sentinel Project and a UN human rights team, based in Kadugli, which issued an extraordinarily damning report on Khartoum’s actions during June 2011 (see “Mass Graves Identified in Kadugli, South Kordofan: The End of Agnosticism,” Dissent Magazine, July 14, 2011 | https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/mass-graves-identified-in-kadugli-south-kordofan-the-end-of-agnosticism/). In interviews with both the Washington Post and PBS NewsHour, Lyman prevaricated in conspicuous fashion and events soon revealed just how serious that prevarication was. See | “U.S., UN Refuse to Speak Honestly About Compelling Evidence of Genocide in South Kordofan” | July 17, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-BU “Yet More Compelling Evidence of Atrocity Crimes in South Kordofan” | August 26, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-Fr “Obama’s Second ‘Rwanda Moment'” | June 13, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-BE “International Crimes and Threats to Peace in Sudan are Mounting Rapidly” | June 28, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-BL “Abyei and South Kordofan/Nuba Mountains: Under Siege, Deeply at Risk,” | July 1, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-BN Former special envoy for the Sudans Princeton Lyman was consistently guilty of egregious misrepresentation and outright mendacity. Lyman’s mandate was clearly to ensure that U.S. relations with Khartoum would improve, no matter how egregious the atrocity crimes committed by the regime—all this in service of advancing the agenda or the U.S. intelligence community in securing from this regime counter-terrorism intelligence (see | “What Really Animates the Obama Administration’s Sudan Policy?” October 10, 2011 | http://wp.me/p45rOG-GT/). Only this priority could account for the decision of November 2011, announced by a “senior State Department official” (the only identification offered in an official State Department transcript), that the Obama administration was “de-coupling” Darfur—site of what the President had repeatedly called “genocide”—from the major bilateral issue between Washington and Khartoum: a lifting of U.S. economic sanctions in return for the NIF/NCP regime’s better cooperation in providing counter-terrorism intelligence. And indeed the deal was consummated with President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order on January 13, 2017 (his last week in office) that lifted economic sanctions, subject to a review that seems at this point to be nothing more than a pro forma exercise (again, see my first in a series of “Report Cards” on Khartoum’s adherence to the major terms stipulated for a permanent lifting of sanctions | http://wp.me/p45rOG-22o/). In December 2011 Princeton Lyman offered the most deeply consequential, most cynical, and most mendacious explanation of the Obama administration views of the Khartoum regime: “We [the Obama administration] do not want to see the ouster of the [Khartoum] regime, nor regime change. We want to see the regime carrying out reform via constitutional democratic measures.” (Interview with Asharq al-Awsat, December 3, 2011 | http://english.aawsat.com/2011/12/article55244147/asharq-al-awsat-talks-to-us-special-envoy-to-sudan-princeton-lyman ) Lyman knew perfectly well as he uttered these words that it was an utterly preposterous notion to think that the Khartoum regime—which has steadily become more repressive in the years intervening between the present and this December 2011 interview—could preside over “reform via constitutional democratic measures.” No one could honestly believe the regime was capable of such reform, and the preposterousness of the assertion by Lyman serves as a standard by which to measure all subsequent cynicism, disingenuousness, and outright mendacity by Obama administration officials. Other “Contributions” to U.S. Sudan and Darfur policies The Obama administration received unexpected help from a deeply distorting New York Times dispatch of early 2012, which on the basis of a visit to a Darfuri “Potemkin Village,” proclaimed in a prominent photograph, “…peace has settled on the region [Darfur]” (New York Times | dateline: Nyuru, West Darfur, February 26, 2012). On another front, Obama administration senior advisor on Darfur, Dane Smith, helped pave the way for the current “militia state” in Darfur by normalizing conditions in spectacularly disingenuous fashion: [Dane Smith said] the U.S. government has told the [rebel] alliance—which was organized around the principle of forcing Mr. Bashir out—that they should “engage” the government in negotiations based on the Doha peace agreement signed in July last year by the government. Though one [completely unrepresentative—ER] rebel group has signed the agreement, none of the allied rebel groups has. The U.S. government’s fear is that an armed rebellion by the alliance would “polarize the Arabs [who dominate the Sudanese government] against everyone else, so they can say, ‘Arabs are under attack. Islam is under attack,'” [Smith] said. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 13, 2012) It is almost impossible to imagine a political assessment that looks more tendentiously ignorant in retrospect. In deeply impressive ways, Sudanese—Arab and non-Arab alike—have, throughout Sudan, organized politically with precisely the goal of regime change. This is not a rebel demand; it is a demand of the overwhelming majority of Sudanese. Moreover, the notion that Darfuri rebels would create the impression that “Islam is under attack” ignores the most conspicuous fact about Darfur: everyone, Arab and non-Arab, is Muslim. Dane Smith’s fantasy about the consequences of a push for regime change was dangerous, deeply ignorant, and could have been meant only to serve Lyman’s preposterous notion of the regime “reforming” itself. Dane Smith was not done, however: he went on to reveal views of the camps for displaced persons that are again sheer fantasy—fantasy that plays directly into the hands of the Khartoum regime’s ambition to dismantle the camps: One of the big changes in Darfur since then, Mr. Smith said, was that in 2003 just 18 percent of Darfur was considered urban settlements, but today it is 50 percent urban. That is largely thanks to nearly a decade of about 2 million people living in Darfur in “internally displaced persons” camps, as they’re known. Though the United Nations believes as security improves in Darfur some of the camp residents will try to move back home, Mr. Smith said: “Nevertheless, these places aren’t just going to empty out.” Dane Smith, the Obama administration’s “senior adviser on Darfur (2012)—the embodiment of diplomatic disingenuousness and foolishness The notion that IDP camps should be considered “urban” is so perverse that there are scarcely words to render its absurdity. Where to begin in parsing this jumble of ignorance, stupidity, and callousness? There has been no improvement in security for the camps; on the contrary, attacks on the camps are more frequent, more violent, and more deadly than ever. While some of the large camps around the major cities of Darfur—Nyala, El Fasher, and El Geneina—have, with continuous expansion, become in effect ghastly “suburbs,” there are no “city services,” there is no effort to incorporate the camps in ways that would make them truly part of these cities, with education, transportation, medical services, and water supplies comparable to those outside the camps. Darfuris displaced in 2015; they saw little benefit to the “urbanization” of which Dane Smith spoke so fatuously Again the view of El Shafee Abdallah, Coordinator of the Central Darfur camps and one of the members of the Darfur Camps Coordination Committee, According to the government’s announcement of security in Darfur and the possibility for the displaced people in the camps to return to their villages is “baseless propaganda. “The lands and villages of the displaced people are currently occupied by militiamen, from the region or neighbouring countries, who are allied with the government,” he said. “They daily prevent the displaced from leaving the camps to collect firewood and straw, let alone to return to their villages.” He explained that “The government aims to keep the displaced people where they are, after a so-called re-planning of the camps. “If the camp areas are annexed to the towns and the displaced registered as town residents, they will deprived from the possibility to reclaim their land. Thus the way to legalising the new settlers’ ownership of our lands will be paved.” “That is why the displaced people will never accept the re-planning of the camps and their integration into the towns,” he said. Smith’s suggestion that there are “about 2 million people” living in IDP camps was dismayingly inaccurate in its understating of the IDP population at the time, and is equally at odds with the current total suggested by UN figures (if we include those displaced in last year’s Jebel Marra offensive). The real figure is approximately 2.7 million, with another 300,000 Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad—3 million human beings altogether (see for an important recent dispatch on Darfuri refugees, see | Chad refugees in Darfur reject voluntary return | April 9, 2017 | UM SHALAYA). Internally displaced Darfuris refuse to return to their lands and homes because insecurity is simply too great; the same is true for Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad, who have suffered terrible cutbacks in humanitarian assistance. Again and again, Darfuris make the same demands as conditions for returning: Abu Sharati explained that the displaced and refugees do not refuse to return voluntarily. “On the contrary, they are longing to return to their places of origin. It is imperative however, to achieve a comprehensive peace, to restore security, disarm the militias, expel the militiamen and their families from the occupied lands, and bring those who have committed crimes against civilians in Darfur to justice. “Otherwise, we have nothing to do with any re-planning of camps, nor with the so-called voluntary return as it is promoted by the government,” he added. Finally, what to make of Dane Smith’s claim that “these places [the IDP camps] aren’t just going to empty out”? While Khartoum may wish to keep some IDPs where they are presently, many camps are already slated for closing or dismantling. Clearly Smith did not understand the determination of Khartoum to dismantle the camps—or that there would be organized efforts to do precisely this: “empty out the camps.” A discussion of the history of this determination by Khartoum to close/dismantle the camps appears below as Appendix A (below and at http://wp.me/p45rOG-22F). Give this history of mendacity, misrepresentation, expediency, and callousness in addressing human suffering and destruction in Darfur—labeled as “genocide” by Obama himself, by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, by Senior Africa Advisor Gayle Smith of the NSC, by Vice President Joe Biden—it is perhaps not surprising that Ambassador Power offered her claim of a “sea change” of improvement in humanitarian access in Sudan (Power also described Darfur as the site of genocide). Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (Clinton administration) and former National Security Advisor (Obama administration). She once cared enough about Darfur, when it was a cause célèbre, to argue for non-consensual deployment of a civilian protection force; that was then… The European contribution to the completion of the Darfur genocide The effects of European efforts to stem African migration to the European continent by enlisting the support of the Khartoum regime is a subject I have addressed frequently since the release a year ago of a remarkable piece of investigative journalism (Der Spiegel, May 13, 2016 | “Questionable Deal: EU to Work with [Sudan’s] Despot to Keep Refugees Out” | http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/eu-to-work-with-despot-in-sudan-to-keep-refugees-out-a-1092328.html/). Very recently, Suliman Baldo of the Enough Project has published the definitive analysis of the effects of European efforts (“Border Control from Hell: How the EU’s migration partnership legitimizes Sudan’s ‘militia state” | April 2017 | http://www.enoughproject.org/files/BorderControl_April2017_Enough_Finals.pdf /). The 27-page report deserves the most careful reading, given the richness of Baldo research and the unrivaled insight he brings to the political and military institutions in Sudan. The basic argument is contained in his Executive Summary: Large-scale migration to Europe has precipitated a paradigm shift in relations between the European Union (EU) and the government of Sudan, and closer ties between both entities. This new partnership has resulted in the EU disbursing millions of euros to the Sudanese government for technical equipment and training efforts geared toward stopping the flow to Europe of migrants from Sudan and those from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa who come through Sudan. The EU’s action plan will involve building the capacities of Sudan’s security and law enforcement agencies, including a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been branded as Sudan’s primary “border force.” The EU will assist the RSF and other relevant agencies with the construction of two camps with detention facilities for migrants. The EU will also equip these Sudanese border forces with cameras, scanners, and electronic servers for registering refugees. There are legitimate concerns with these plans. Much of the EU-funded training and equipment is dual-use. The equipment that enables identification and registration of migrants will also reinforce the surveillance capabilities of a Sudanese government that has violently suppressed Sudanese citizens for the past 28 years. Sudan’s strategy for stopping migrant flows on behalf of Europe involves a ruthless crackdown by the RSF on migrants within Sudan. Dogged by persistent armed uprisings led by opponents protesting chronic inequalities in the distribution of national wealth and political power in its periphery regions, the Sudanese government has always relied on a plethora of militia groups to counter insurgencies. The RSF is one of these militia groups. It evolved from the disparate Janjaweed militias that carried out the genocidal counterinsurgency policy of the Sudanese regime in Darfur that began in 2003. However, in its functions and evolution, the RSF differs significantly from other militia groups employed by the government. The RSF first evolved from a strike force deployed against insurgents in Darfur into a national counterinsurgency force under the operational command of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) that was tasked with fighting the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-North (SPLM/A-N) in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Then, in September 2013, the RSF was deployed against peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the Sudanese government’s removal of subsidies on basic commodities. More than 170 people were killed in September 2013,3 in incidents that unmasked the Sudanese regime’s dependence on the militia to quell political dissent and marked a new evolution in the role of the RSF. Starting in 2015 and 2016, and convinced of the RSF’s effectiveness as a counterinsurgency force, the regime designated the RSF as Sudan’s primary force tasked with patrolling Sudanese borders to interdict migrants’ movement. The Sudanese government made this designation within the framework of its partnership with the EU for the control of migration. As such, the RSF is positioned to receive EU funds for reducing the flows of migrants from Sudan to Europe. The Sudanese government enacted a law in January 2017 that integrated the RSF into the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF, national army). The 2017 law (conflictingly) made the RSF autonomous, integrated into the army, and under the command of President Omar al-Bashir… The EU and the EU member states that are most engaged with Sudan in the actual programmatic partnership on migration flows should scrutinize the record and conduct of the RSF as the partnership unfolds. By “building the capacity” of Sudan’s newly minted border force with funding and training, the EU would not only be strengthening the hand of the RSF but also could find itself underwriting a complex system of a “militia state” that Sudan has evolved into since the current regime came to power in 1989. In so doing, the EU contradicts and undermines the overriding objectives of its own founding treaty. EU members cannot advance peace, security, and human rights and they cannot stem irregular migration from Sudan and the Horn of Africa by directly funding a government that deploys a militia group that stokes violent conflict, commits atrocities, and creates massive displacement of populations within Sudan. The remainder of this paper synthesizes public information about the RSF’s activities and argues how EU support for this group could ultimately worsen irregular migration to Europe, escalate violent conflict within Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and embolden a regime and militia force that acts with impunity and now faces even fewer checks on its criminal behavior. This paper aims to highlight the latest developments from Sudan and examine the record of earlier engagements of the RSF, lest one or all of Sudan’s EU partners claim, at a later date, that they were unaware of the perverse incentives at play. Baldo’s conclusion is a powerful distillation of the survivalist strategy that has kept the NIF/NCP regime in power for 28 years: Sudan’s official militia policy has displaced millions of Sudanese people and deliberately destroyed the livelihoods of large numbers of communities in Darfur, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan states. The Sudanese regime’s harsh crackdowns on political dissent and its abuses of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of its citizens to free expression, association and assembly have harmed thousands more throughout the country. An elaborate system of patronage to buy and preserve the loyalty of militias that are integrated in the government’s security strategies has led to the emergence of a multifaceted criminal economy in conflict areas, as exemplified in the Darfur region, where this criminal economy is most developed. This criminal economy is based on predation, looting, and a wide range of organized economic crimes including bank robberies, the looting of salaries for government workers, and the extortion of cash from businesses and ordinary people. The criminal activities of the militias in Darfur have extended to neighboring CAR, Chad, and Libya. Gold deposits discovered in the Jebel Amir area in 2012, are contributing to the financing of militia group sin the region, as reported by the United Nations. Fighting among competing militias for the control of this resource has been a leading driver of violence in the region in recent years. By extending material and technical support to Sudan in order to enhance its migration management capacity, and given that Sudan had designated one of Darfur’s most abusive militias to patrol its borders with Libya and Egypt, the EU risks not only supporting the RSF but also underwriting an elaborate web of economic interests in Sudan’s militia state. APPENDIX A: Has the Dismantling of Darfur’s IDP Camps Begun? As far back as the summer of 2004 plans were being considered, and mendacious public announcements by senior NIF/NCP officials spoke of returns as in full swing—a crude effort at making something so by declaring it so. Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, then Minister of the Interior and the regime’s special representative on Darfur, announced on Sudanese government-controlled radio on July 9, 2004 “that 86 percent of the Internally Displaced Persons had already returned to their villages” (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, July 12, 2004). Hussein further declared that “it was ‘most important’ to get people to return to their villages. Each state—the Darfur region has three—had its own plan of return.” At the time camps for displaced persons in Darfur held more than 1 million people—leaving aside the large number of refugees (today this a population of approximately 300,000 according to the UN High Commission for Refugees). Presently, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has frequently been either unreliable or badly out of date with its figures for internally displaced persons (IDPs), provides data indicating that the number if IDPs in all setting is approximately 2.7 million (see | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/03/19/internally-displaced-persons-in-darfur-the-invisible-catastrophe/). Here it seems appropriate to recall that Hussein, the man speaking so callously of Darfuri IDPs, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for massive crimes against humanity in Darfur. But there have been many such statements subsequently; indeed, sixteen months ago Vice-President Hassabo Mohamed Abdelrahman was reported by Sudan Tribune as making clear the regime’s view of the IDP camps: In a speech delivered before the representatives of former rebel groups and IDPs in El-Fasher, North Darfur on Monday, [Second Vice-President Hasabo Mohamed Abdelrahman] said Darfur has “completely recovered from the war and is now looking forward to achieve a full peace, stability and development.” “IDP camps represent a significant and unfortunate loss of dignity and rights of citizens in their country” he said and called on the displaced “to choose within no more than a month between resettlement or return to their original areas.” He further reiterated his government’s commitment to take all the measures and do the needful to achieve this goal, stressing that “the year 2016 will see the end of displacement in Darfur.” Abdel Rahman told the meeting that he has just ended a visit to Karnoi and Tina areas in North Darfur, adding the two areas which were affected by the conflict have totally recovered. He said his visit with a big delegation to the two areas “is a message sceptics in the fact that security and stability are back in Darfur”… (Sudan Tribune, December 28, 2015 | El Fasher, North Darfur) Hassabo’s statement came a matter of days before Khartoum would launch the massive military offensive against the Jebel Marra massif in the center of Darfur. As many as 200,000 people were newly displaced in that campaign, perhaps more—humanitarian access has not been sufficient to allow for a full census. The claim by Hassabo that “security and stability are back in Darfur”—on the very eve of the Jebel Marra offensive, during which chemical weapons were used against civilians—is mendacity entirely in character for the regime. In February 2017 Radio Dabanga reported on an explicit threat of camp dismantling: 14,000 displaced given days to vacate South Darfur camp | February 17, 2017 | KALMA CAMP The Commissioner of Nyala locality in South Darfur has given the 14,000 residents of Centre 4 of Otash camp near the state capital less than a week to vacate it before it is dismantled. The spokesman for the Association of Displaced Persons and Refugees, Hussein Abusharati, told Radio Dabanga that a Land Cruiser mounted with a Dushka machine gun drove into the camp on Thursday afternoon. “It moved through the camp using a loudspeaker, calling on the displaced to evacuate the camp by February 22, without specifying an alternative place for the displaced to live. The association denounced the Commissioner’s decision and held Government responsible for the implementation of the decision. It renewed its refusal to dismantle the camp, and conditioned the return of displaced persons to their home by provision of security and stability in their villages. Abusharati warned of “dire consequences should the decision be implemented by force.” He called on state government “to cancel the decision so as to preserve the lives and property of the displaced.” He urged the residents of Centre 4 to approach UNAMID should the commissioner order the camp to be forcibly evacuated. He called on UNAMID, the international community, and human rights organisations to protect the displaced of camp Otash “so that there will not be a repeat of the massacre that occurred at Kalma camp in 2008.” Abusharati was referring to an infamous incident in August 2008 when police attempted to enter Kalma campo by force, leaving 32 displaced people dead (see | “Now Sudan Is Attacking Refugee Camps,” The Wall Street Journal, 6 September 2008 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122065894281205691.html?mod=googlenews_wsj/). There has been no follow-up report from Radio Dabanga on the fate of Otash camp center 4; nor has there been a response from the feckless UNAMID or, more consequentially, the Western actors of consequence so eager to accelerate the process of rapprochement with Khartoum. Silence on the part of the Trump administration is particularly significant, given the terms laid down for a lifting of sanctions on Khartoum when the Obama administration perversely decided on this action in its last week in office. “Humanitarian access” was to have been the key terms of any assessment of Khartoum’s behavior, both in the six months prior to the decision and the six months following. What is all too clear is that if the IDP camps are emptied and dismantled, “humanitarian access” in any meaningful sense will have been almost entirely eroded. The concentrations of large populations in these camps are all that make the distribution of food and medicine possible, as well as the provision of clean water, shelter, and a modicum of security. If people are forced from the camps with no place to go, they will either perish or be forced to seek refuge in other camps—camps that may themselves be in the dismantling cross-hairs. Khartoum is of course aware of this, but relentlessly seeks to end the rationale for an international humanitarian presence in Darfur—and emptying the camps is the most efficient way of doing so. Camp emptying and dismantling will also give Khartoum an argument for the withdrawal of the impotent but (for Khartoum) noisome presence of the UN/African Union “Hybrid” Mission for Darfur (UNAMID). Khartoum will be pushing hard for a large if not complete withdrawal of UNAMID from Darfur when the Mission comes up for UN Security Council reauthorization in two months. The force has already been cut severely from its originally mandated size, but because it has proved so ineffective while being terribly costly, there is diminishing support for a continuation of UNAMID. There seems to be almost no enthusiasm for the kind of meaningful civilian protection argued for in compelling terms recently by Jonathan Loeb, primary researcher and author for the last three significant human rights reports on Darfur (see “Time to Get Serious about Civilian Protection for Darfur” | NEW YORK, December 20, 2016 (IPS)/). If the dismantling and emptying of camps has not yet officially begun, the increasingly strident rhetoric and increasingly insistent threats of action make clear that it is only a matter of time before Khartoum does act. A further cutting of UNAMID may well be the catalyst for that action, with a cascade of knock-on effects that portend disaster on an inconceivably large scale. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 SUDAN Research, Analysis, and Advocacy

The Allied Powers were aware of the scale of the Jewish Holocaust two-and-a-half years earlier than is generally assumed, and had even prepared war crimes indictments against Adolf Hitler and his top Nazi commanders. Newly accessed material from the United Nations – not seen for around 70 years – shows that as early as December 1942, the US, UK and Soviet governments were aware that at least two million Jews had been murdered and a further five million were at risk of being killed, and were preparing charges. Despite this, the Allied Powers did very little to try and rescue or provide sanctuary to those in mortal danger. Indeed, in March 1943, Viscount Cranborne, a minister in the war cabinet of Winston Churchill, said the Jews should not be considered a special case and that the British Empire was already too full of refugees to offer a safe haven to any more. Several countries indicted Hitler and other senior Nazi leaders for war crimes (UNWCC) “The major powers commented [on the mass murder of Jews] two-and-a-half years before it is generally assumed,” Dan Plesch, author of the newly published Human Rights After Hitler, told The Independent. “It was assumed they learned this when they discovered the concentration camps, but they made this public comment in December 1942.” Mr Plesch, a professor at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London, said the major powers began drawing up war crimes charges based on witness testimony smuggled from the camps and from the resistance movements in various countries occupied by the Nazis. Among his discoveries were documents indicting Hitler for war crimes dating from 1944. In late December 1942, after the US, UK and others issued a public declaration about the Jewish slaughter, UK Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the British parliament: “The German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule extends, the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people.” Mr Plesch said that despite the collection of evidence and the prosecution of hundreds of Nazis – a judicial process that has been overshadowed by the trial of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg – the Allied Powers did little to try and help those in peril. He said efforts by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s envoy to the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), Herbert Pell, were pushed back by anti-semites in the US State Department. Mr Pell would later claim that individuals within the State Department were concerned that America’s economic relationship with Germany after the war would be damaged if such prosecutions went ahead. After Mr Pell went public with the scandal, the State Department agreed to the prosecution of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, something that gathered pace after the highly publicised liberation of the concentration camps in the summer of 1945. “Among the reason given by the US and British policy makers for curtailing prosecutions of Nazis was the understanding that at least some of them would be needed to rebuild Germany and confront Communism, which at the time was seen as a greater danger,” writes Mr Plesch. Mr Plesch said the archive on which he based his research was closed to researchers for 70 years. Those wishing to read the UNWCC archive required the permission not only of the person’s own national government, but the UN Secretary General. Even then, researchers were for several years not permitted to make notes. Former American ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers took the action that made the archive available. Mr Plesch said the new material provided a further “cartload of nails to hammer into the coffins” of Holocaust denial – not that further evidence was required. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance memorial in Israel, says on its website that “information regarding mass murders of Jews began to reach the free world soon after these actions began in the Soviet Union in late June 1941, and the volume of such reports increased with time”. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook (c) 2017 The Independent

As a New York Jew, the Holocaust was introduced into my life at quite an early stage. Although a full conceptual understanding would take years to develop, the concept of “70 years ago, Germany killed a bunch of Jews – just because they were Jews” was a staple in both my early religious and secular educations. Growing up, this collective suffering served as a source of solidarity and unity in a reform Jewish community in which other political and social views – along with level of practice – were severely deviated. As I progressed academically and personally, my understanding of the Holocaust deepened. Hitler didn’t just kill the Jews because they were Jews. He killed the Jews because he could cite them as the harbingers of German failure – largely due to the fact that we were already otherized. In both secular and religious academia, the Holocaust is portrayed as a largely Jewish genocide. Other communities, such as Soviet prisoners of war, ethnic Poles, Serbians, the disabled, and Romani people, are mentioned as secondary victims. For the most part, this is exactly how the Holocaust should be taught – as a Jewish genocide in which others were also targeted. The issue, however, is the historical omission of a specific community; gay men. Homosexuals were not the direct focus of the Holocaust, but they were exterminated at rates higher that most, and treated worse than nearly every community. Alongside with the Jews, Hitler and the Nazis saw “the Weimar Republic’s toleration of homosexuals as a sign of Germany’s decadence.” In their posing as messengers of Christian morality, the Nazis intended to stamp out the “vice” of homosexuality. According to the Nazis, male homosexuals were weak, effeminate and could therefore not represent their pure German state. Male homosexuals also posed a specific risk, as they could not increase the German birthrate. The Nazis believed that inferior races produced more children than “Aryans,” meaning that any community that failed to increase the German birthrate posed a racial danger. The Nazis therefore saw male homosexuals as immoral, weak, and as reproductive failures. To the Nazis, male homosexuals were the physical embodiment and cause of German degeneration. They believed male homosexuals to be a unique threat to Germany –and they persecuted them as such. In the Nazi male-dominant society, “the presence of lesbians was not feared,” as Ted Phillips, director of exhibitions at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it, adding “the sex of women was not important, except for being a mother and a wife.” Between 1933 and 1945, nearly 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, while 50,000 of these men were officially sentenced. Nearly 15,000 of these men were sent to concentration camps. A study by leading scholar Rüdiger Lautmann asserts that the death rate of homosexuals may have been as high as 60% — one and a half times higher than that of political prisoners (41%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (35%). As the United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes has stated, male homosexuals “were subjected to the harshest conditions and treated as the lowest of the low in the camp hierarchy.” Male homosexuals were constantly beaten, had their testicles boiled off by water, sodomized by broken broomsticks, and were often utilized by the S.S. as target practice; with these soldiers aiming their shots at the pink triangles gay men were forced to wear. The Nazis also repeatedly utilized gay men for cruel human experimentation. Although gay men were “the lowest of the low” in the concentration camp hierarchy, this community is often omitted from all Holocaust literature and education. This modern exclusion is the natural evolution of historical revision across Europe. Although Jews and other groups were given reparations and state pensions, gay men were excluded. In fact, gay men in Germany remained criminals, as the 1935 Nazi-legal change was on the books until 1969. Homosexual holocaust survivors were often re-imprisoned for these “repeat offenses,” even being kept on lists of “sex offenders.” Following the fall of the Nazi government, countless homosexuals were forced to serve further imprisonment, regardless of their time in concentration camps. Due to global homophobia, the Nazis anti-gay policies were largely ignored by the allied powers, Holocaust historians, and educators up until the 1980s. The allied powers – the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – all had anti-gay, anti-sodomy laws on the books for years following the end of World War II. They therefore saw nothing wrong with Germany retaining such laws following the fall of the Nazi regime. Since homosexuality was criminalized after the war throughout much of the world, very few gay victims came forward to tell their stories. It wasn’t until 2002 that the German government officially apologized to the gay community. The persecution of gays in the Holocaust is still not considered a genocide by the U.N., as its definition is limited to national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. As Slate puts it, “gay victims of the camps have long been neglected.” History courses, taught both in my secular schools and in my religious school, failed to mention the persecution of male homosexuals. As a gay Jewish man, I quite literally would have been at the bottom of the Nazi totem pole. The Holocaust was a Jewish-focused program of genocide, but others were victimized as well. Ignoring male homosexuals – “the lowest of the low” – is dangerous and allows for future persecution. Concentration camp-style prisons for gay men have recently emerged in the Russian region of Chechnya. These camps are the most recent in a wave of anti-gay violence from Muslim nations across the region. The press secretary for Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, asserted that the report is a lie, claiming that are in no gays in Chechnya – and that if there were, they would be dealt with by their families. “If there were such people in Chechnya, law-enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning,” he said. A gay Holocaust took place in the 1930s and 1940s. It is repeating in Chechnya as we speak. The post-Holocaust denial of homosexuality’s legitimacy and morality has allowed for a world in which countless states, including U.S. allies, have no issue detaining and murdering gays. The Trump administration’s decision to remove LGBT people from the 2020 census allows for the existence of such a world. By denying our domestic existence, the Trump administration gives the world a green light to both demonize and persecute us without fear. As of writing, the Trump administration and Secretary of State Tillerson has yet to condemn the existence of these concentration camps created exclusively for gay men. If that sentence doesn’t frighten you, it should. The Trump administration clearly has not learned from our nation’s post-WWII mistakes. In a week where Trump has attacked Syria because of the suffering of “beautiful babies,” his administration’s silence towards an orchestrated program of genocide against innocent gay men is deafening. Gay men, just like after the Holocaust, are once again being omitted from the global consciousness. We were not considered legitimate victims of the Holocaust until the 1980s. The stories of gay men are still not included in the average Holocaust history class. When we fail to recognize the horrors of the past, we are bound to repeat them. Chechnya’s concentration camps – the first in Europe since World War II — are a prime example. Gay men are literally being rounded up and sent to concentration camps; all while the western world, as lead by the Trump administration, continues to ignores our existence and turn a blind eye to our current suffering. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Huffington Post

The twin bomb blasts that tore through two Christian churches in Egypt on Palm Sunday marked the latest episode in the Islamic State militant group’s (ISIS) violent campaign against the country’s Coptic minority. The attacks on a church in the Nile Delta town of Tanta and a cathedral in Egypt’s second city of Alexandria came as churches were packed with worshippers marking the beginning of the Easter week. In Tanta at least 27 people were killed and 78 injured as the first bomb exploded inside St George's Church. Hours later a second bomber detonated an explosive device as he rushed towards St Mark's Cathedral in Alexandria, killing at least 17 and wounding 48. At least 44 died in the two separate bombings, the worst attack on Egypt’s Copts in decades. In the aftermath of the explosions, ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate—known as Sinai Province—claimed responsibility for the attacks, naming the bombers via its Amaq news agency. Read more: Pope Francis will go ahead with Egypt visit despite deadly ISIS bombings In the wake of the attacks, many in Egypt’s Coptic community have remained defiant,saying they will not flee their communities. Marcos, an Egyptian monk from the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem, who declined to provide his last name for security reasons, told Newsweek on April 10 that Coptic Christians have always stayed in the country despite attacks. “No matter what happened in Egypt, we never left our land, we never left our home,” he said. “We were sure then that we will stay, and we are sure now that we will stay. Nothing will force us to leave.” Forensics personnel inspect the site of an explosion that took place at a Coptic church on Sunday in Tanta, Egypt, April 9, 2017. ISIS' Sinai Province has taken responsibility for the attackMOHAMED ABD EL GHANY/REUTERS The origins of ISIS in Egypt The forerunner to the Islamic State’s Sinai Province was Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (ABM), which first emerged in 2011 when it claimed responsibility for a cross border attack launched from the Sinai on Israel. According to the U.S.’ counter terrorism guide, a government directory of listed terror groups, ABM’s primary goal was the “destruction of Israel, the establishment of an Islamic Emirate and the implementation of Sharia in the Sinai Peninsula.” Jack Kennedy, a senior analyst at IHS Markit, tells Newsweek ABM grew out of militant Bedouin tribes operating in the Sinai, monopolizing smuggling networks, most likely over the Egyptian frontier into Gaza. “It’s very likely that most of the founding members of the group, as a cohesive Salafi jihadist group, met and were radicalized in Egypt’s prisons before January 2011,” he says. In Egyptian army soldier looks on from his postion at a checkpoint in Al Arish city, the troubled northern part of the Sinai peninsula, July 8, 2015. The area has been plagued by ISIS violence as the group seeks to create a separatist emirate in the peninsulaSTRINGER/REUTERS Pledging allegiance to ISIS By 2013, when Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi was ousted as leader, the group had already pivoted away from attacks on Israel to targeting the Egyptian security forces. The shift resulted in a spike in Egyptian troop casualties. In November 2014, ABM pledged allegiance to the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and became known as Sinai Province. The government of Egyptian President and former General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has imposed a widespread media blackout on the Islamist insurgency. However, Sinai Province made headlines internationally following the downing of Metrojet Flight 9268in October 2015. The crash resulted in the deaths of 224 mostly Russian tourists. The remains of a Russian airliner which crashed is seen in central Sinai near El Arish city, north Egypt, October 31, 2015. The Airbus A321, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia under the brand name Metrojet, carrying 224 passengers crashed into a mountainous area of Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Saturday shortly after losing radar contact near cruising altitude, killing all aboard. The ISIS branch Sinai Province claimed responsibility for the attackSTRINGER/REUTERS Sinai Province claimed responsibility for the blast through its leader, Abu Osama al-Masri, according to contemporary media reports. Sinai Province was also able to use an extensive ISIS propaganda network to spread its message when a picture of the bomb appeared in the jihadis’ propaganda magazine Dabiq. Targeting Christians and stoking sectarian tension In recent months Sinai Province has stoked sectarian tensions by increasingly targeting civilians and religious minorities. In December, the group bombed a chapel attached to Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral, the seat of Egypt’s Christian Coptic minority, killing 28 people. According to Reuters since January 200 families from the Coptic minority have fled their homes in the Sinai. The exodus followed a series of brutal attacks when a list of Christians in the peninsula and an incitement to kill them was circulated by ISIS. Copts comprise about 10 percent of Egypt's 90 million people, making them the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. “Focusing on targeting Christians is most likely a strategic decision on behalf of their leadership to create the situation of real sectarian conflict in Egypt,” Kennedy explains. “With the deployment of military forces to supplement the police and the re-imposition of a state of emergency, the idea would be to provoke sustained protest from Christians.” Sinai Province has not only looked to divide between Egypt’s majority Muslim and Christian communities. On March 29 the group decapitated two elderly men accused of practicing witchcraft and apostasy, posting a video of the execution on social media. The language used in the video indicates the two men were most likely executed for their adherence to Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Newsweek

Children’s rights advocate Cindy Blackstock is among the six people selected to represent the movement. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press) Canada’s Indigenous-rights movement has been named a recipient of a prestigious award from Amnesty International, drawing attention to persistent inequality in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Amnesty International describes the Ambassador of Conscience Award as its highest honour, given annually to those who show courage in standing up to injustice. In announcing the award, Amnesty underlined the fact that although they live in a prosperous country, Canada’s Indigenous peoples are “consistently among the most marginalized members of society.” Children’s rights advocate Cindy Blackstock, Truth and Reconciliation Commission chair and Senator Murray Sinclair, relatives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and leaders of Idle No More are among the six people selected to represent the movement. Ms. Blackstock was the driving force behind a 2016 Human Rights Tribunal victory that concluded the Canadian government was discriminating against Indigenous children on reserves because it failed to provide the same level of social services available to those living in the rest of Canada. She said this award serves as a reminder of the chronic injustices facing Indigenous children. “You see First Nations children getting less for education, less health services, one in six First Nations don’t have clean drinking water for children to drink, all of these things are symptomatic of the federal government simply making a decision to allow these inequalities to continue. In effect, they’re sending a message to First Nations children that they’re not worth the money,” she said. “The government has not formally acknowledged that they are using racial discrimination as fiscal policy across every public service that First Nations children receive. Nor have they developed a clear plan with First Nations that has definable targets on how to eradicate it. Instead, the government’s approach has been to address the inequality for children one teaspoon at a time and then ask for recognition that this is a good first step,” she said. The award also recognizes Melissa Mollen Dupuis and Widia Larivière, co-founders of the Idle No More movement in Quebec, and Delilah Saunders and Melanie Morrison, who both lost a female relative to homicide. Amnesty described Idle No More as a grassroots protest that helped “shine a light on Indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggle to be able to make their own decisions about their lands, resources and environment.” The 2017 award is shared with musician Alicia Keys, who is being recognized for her philanthropic efforts on HIV and AIDS in India and Africa and the global refugee crisis. Previous winners of the award include former South African president Nelson Mandela, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and girls’ education campaigner Malala Yousafzai. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Globe and Mail

The Balukali refugee camp, located about an hour's drive south of the seaside tourist city of Cox's Bazar, is one of many informal camps in southern Bangladesh. An estimated 2,000 Rohingya families who fled neighboring Myanmar live in Balukali. Michael Sullivan for NPR With her 8-year-old son's head resting in her lap, Zubaida was sitting at home with some other women from her village in western Myanmar's Rakhine state when the military came — and the gunfire started. "All the men from the village started running away, and my son ran with them," Zubaida, 25, says. He didn't get far: Myanmar soldiers shot him dead — in the back. That evening, the soldiers came back. "They didn't say anything," she says. "They just came with their guns into my house." They raped her for almost an hour that time, Zubaida says. Two days later, the military returned and rounded up all the villagers. She says they separated the men from the women, beat the men and raped the women. "Some tried to resist and got stabbed," she says. "That's why the rest of the women didn't hesitate, they didn't want to die." Zubaida was one of those picked. Her distraught father pleaded with the soldiers: "Why are you doing this?" "We are not doing as much to you as we have been ordered to do in Oula Para," they replied, referring to a nearby village. Both Zubaida's village, Naiyongsong, and Oula Para are in far west Rakhine near the border with Bangladesh. The villagers in this story have chosen to use pseudonyms to protect family members in Myanmar from possible retribution. The latest crackdown Zubaida and her neighbors are Rohingya — a group the U.N. has described as one of the world's most persecuted people. The Muslim minority Rohingya have lived in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for centuries. Even so, Myanmar's government doesn't consider the Rohingya to be citizens; it says they are immigrants from Bangladesh who are living in Myanmar illegally. About 1 million Rohingya live in Rakhine state, and they are almost entirely disenfranchised and need permission, for instance, to travel outside their own villages or to marry. Many are restricted to living in internment camps, segregated from the local Buddhist population. An armed Myanmar border guard patrols the fence along the river dividing Myanmar and Bangladesh in Myanmar's Rakhine state, on Oct. 15, 2016. The government says Rohingya militants carried out border raids that month that killed nearly a dozen policemen. Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images In October, a new Rohingya militant group attacked several border guard posts and killed nearly a dozen policemen. The militants led another series of attacks in November that left a Myanmar army officer dead. The attacks shocked and infuriated Myanmar's military. And its response has been a brutal form of collective punishment that has not spared villagers, who are accused of aiding and abetting the militants. What followed, witnesses and survivors say, was a campaign of murder, rape and arson. In the past six months, more than 70,000 Rohingya fled in terror across the border into neighboring Bangladesh — a Muslim-majority nation that has provided those who fled with refuge, but not acceptance. This isn't the first time the Rohingya have made that journey. In the late 1970s and early '90s, hundreds of thousands fled violence in Myanmar. By some estimates, there are more than 500,000 Rohingya now living in Bangladesh — and more in Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. In Bangladesh, about 35,000 Rohingya live officially in two camps run by the government in tandem with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Hundreds of thousands more live, unofficially, in squatter camps like Balukali, where Zubaida lives now. Home to some 17,000 people, Balukali is bleak. Small huts have been scraped out of the hillsides, with blue plastic sheeting for walls and roofs, held together by thin strips of bamboo. The homes sit amid pools of fetid water in a hilly area with little shade and lots of sand. Zubaida's tiny hut is barely big enough to stand in. At midday, it is stiflingly hot. Small huts have been scraped out of the hillsides of the Balukali camp. Homes have blue plastic sheeting for walls, and roofs that are held together by thin strips of bamboo. Michael Sullivan for NPR She recalls how the soldiers burned down a number of houses, as well as the mosque next to her house. After she was raped the second time, Zubaida says, she fled with her then-5-year-old daughter, her parents and a couple of siblings, furtively making their way through the jungle until they reached what they thought was a place of safety near the river. They were wrong. The military came there, too. "The last rape took place in a school," Zubaida says. "The women were separated after the men were taken away," and then it all began again. Zubaida, 25, is one of thousands of Rohingya to flee their homes during the latest crackdown on the Muslim minority group by the Myanmar Army. Michael Sullivan for NPR She and her family finally made it across the river about a week after starting their journey. Six years earlier, Zubaida's husband, Mohammad, fled Myanmar by boat for Malaysia. The idea was to earn enough money to bring his family, too. Many others do the same, paying traffickers to make the often harrowing boat journey south to Thailand or Malaysia. But Mohammad's boat broke down and now he is at a U.N. facility in Indonesia waiting to be processed to a third country. We reached him by phone at that facility in Medan, Indonesia. He was feeling guilty and powerless. "I keep thinking if I had brought my wife and my son, I would not have lost my son and my wife would not have been raped," Mohammad says. Now he is stuck in Indonesia, and Zubaida is stuck in Bangladesh. It's not likely they'll be reunited anytime soon. Rape as a tool of war NPR could not independently verify Zubaida's story, as the Myanmar government has restricted access to northern Rakhine state. But we talked to a dozen other women from other villages whose stories were depressingly similar, as have the U.N., Human Rights Watch and others. These stories suggest the Myanmar military was following a familiar playbook when it launched its "counterinsurgency" operation in October. "This is not something that has happened by rogue soldiers ... a crime that was committed spontaneously," says Matthew Smith, CEO of the advocacy group Fortify Rights, which focuses on Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia. "It's very clear to us at this point that state security forces set out to systematically rape Rohingya women and girls," he says. Rape as a tool of war is not new: The Myanmar military has used it as a tactic against ethnic women, in particular, in other parts of the country for many years. But what is different about the past six months, he says, is the scale of rape that took place within a relatively short period of time. "There has been widespread and systematic rape in other ethnic states," says Smith. "But there was an outburst of it, and particularly in November, that was unusual even by the Myanmar military's brutal standards." The Myanmar military continues to deny the systematic attacks against the Rohingya — despite the testimony of dozens of witnesses, satellite photos showing hundreds of homes burned to the ground and disturbing videos uploaded to YouTube that show the military rounding up and beating Rohingya men. The Myanmar government did not respond to NPR's requests for comment on these stories. The silence of Aung San Suu Kyi As for Myanmar's de facto leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has seemed oddly indifferent in her rare public comments on the violence against the Rohingya. In a recent interview with Singapore's Channel News Asia, Suu Kyi told her interviewer: "I'm not saying there's no difficulties. But it helps if people recognize the difficulties and focus on resolving instead of exaggerating them so that everything seems worse than it really is." And last week, she denied that the military's action against the Rohingya amounted to ethnic cleansing. "I don't think there is ethnic cleansing going on. I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening," Suu Kyi told the BBC. "It is not just a matter of ethnic cleansing as you put it — it is a matter of people on different sides of the divide, and this divide we are trying to close up." Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (shown here in December 2016) faces international pressure to address the Rohingya crisis. Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images If this sounds odd coming from a Nobel laureate and onetime human rights champion, it shouldn't. The general's daughter has described herself as a politician long before she was a human rights champion. And in overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar, speaking out for the rights of a much-maligned Muslim minority doesn't win votes. But there's another explanation, too: Suu Kyi has no control over the military. The country's Constitution cements the military's role and power indefinitely. Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights accepts this, but what he doesn't accept is what Suu Kyi could have done but hasn't. "We've seen terrible language coming out of state-run media referring to Rohingya as 'thorns that need to be removed' and referring to Rohingya as 'human fleas,' " says Smith. "This is a shameful discourse that she has failed to change." Last month, the U.N.'s Human Rights Council said it would send a team to Myanmar to investigate the allegations of atrocities. Myanmar's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, U Htin Lynn, called the resolution "not acceptable." That response and Suu Kyi's recent denials don't surprise Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. "She's claiming that there is no ethnic cleansing in this area," says Robertson. "Our response to her would be that if there wasn't such a big problem then why not allow the U.N. Human Rights Council fact-finding mission into those areas, provide them with unfettered access." Robertson says it's time to stop talking. "It's time to get the investigators in there and actually do a professional independent investigation and get to the bottom of what happened," he says. There's no indication Myanmar's government will allow the fact-finding team into Rakhine state. In the meantime, Myanmar has set up its own commission of inquiry, which is led by Vice President Myint Swe — a former army general. With additional reporting by Bangladeshi journalist Muktadir Rashid. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 npr

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Thursday to end its 13-year-long peacekeeping mission in Haiti, and replace its blue-helmeted soldiers with police officers. The mission, often a source of embarrassment to the world body, landed in Haiti in 2004, after a rebellion led to the removal of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It became arguably best known for introducing a deadly cholera strain to the country — and then refusing for years to take responsibility for it. The cholera outbreak, which began in 2010, has killed at least 9,500 people so far and infected hundreds of thousands of Haitians. The United Nations apologized last year and proposed to compensate affected Haitians, but has yet to raise money for the effort. Of the $400 million that the United Nations says it needs, it has received $2.66 million, from only six countries — Britain, Chile, France, India, Liechtenstein and South Korea, according to data posted on its website. The mission has also recently been troubled by allegations of sexual abuse. A sex ring, operated by Sri Lankan soldiers who were posted there from 2004 to 2007, exploited at least nine children, according to an internal United Nations report, The Associated Press reported this week. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, referred to the sexual abuse allegations in her brief remarks in the council chambers on Thursday. “The United States has made it clear to the U.N. and all troop-contributing countries that these abuses must stop,” she said. She did not address the cholera outbreak, nor how the United Nations can compensate survivors. The Haiti drawdown, which was recommended by the secretary general, António Guterres, comes amid pressure by President Trump’s administration to review each of the organization’s 16 peacekeeping missions. The United States is the United Nations’ largest financial contributor; it funds about 28 percent of the world body’s $7.87 billion budget, and Trump administration officials have said they want to bring that down to a maximum of 25 percent. The American contribution amounts to less than 0.1 percent of the federal budget. Missions in Ivory Coast and Liberia, which have shrunk significantly in recent years, are already scheduled to close gradually. The mission in Darfur is set to end as well. The mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo was the subject of intense negotiations recently, with the Security Council ultimately agreeing to pare it back by about 500 soldiers to a little over 16,000 troops. Ms. Haley had sought deeper cuts. In Haiti, the roughly 2,300 soldiers are scheduled to leave gradually by October. Seven United Nations police units will remain for an initial period of six months to train Haitian police officers. The decision to close the Haiti mission represented a rare moment of unity on the Security Council, with the world powers agreeing that the country had reached a new level of stability. Ms. Haley called the drawdown “a success story.” ©, 2017, The New York Times