As a responsible Government, you don’t just go around hollering ‘genocide.’ You say that acts of genocide may have occurred and they need to be investigated. David Rawson, United States Ambassador to Rwanda 1994 The Rohingya in Myanmar have by all accounts – save for those of the Myanmar government and military – been on the receiving end since at least 2012 of consistent, widespread, presumably organized, and arguably sanctioned acts of violence amounting to crimes against humanity. Take your pick of alleged crimes: persecution, rape, murder, forcible transfer, deportation, extermination, arbitrary detention and imprisonment, and arguably, apartheid. The full treatment. Ethnic cleansing with tinges of genocidal acts seems to be the obvious goal, or more ominously put, the desired solution: to expel and, if necessary, eradicate the Rohingya Muslims from the Rakhine state of Myanmar. Meanwhile, the international community and those most expected to speak loudly and repeatedly contently wait, naively or apathetically, for the criminal acts against the Rohingya to dissipate, for their plight to be resolved. Wishful thinking based in part on willful blindness. Current events show that the Myanmar government and military not only lack the political and moral will to act responsibly, but that they are also comfortable with accepting the commission of purported “acts of genocide” against the Rohingya. Appallingly, the storm of intolerance and indifference that has already stripped the Rohingya of their human dignity, the enjoyment of their inalienable rights, their property, their places of worship, their freedom, and, in far too unacceptable numbers, their lives, is brewing and picking up steam. Time is against the Rohingya. Time to face the ugly and inconvenient facts. Before I discuss the ongoing events, a few words about the Rohingya in Myanmar. Northern Rakhine state (the name commonly given to the townships of Maungdaw and Buthidaung) is located in the west of Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. It is populated mainly by the Rohingya, but also by other ethnic minorities such as the Rakhine Buddhist. The Rohingya have faced decades of repression and discrimination. The Myanmar government does not recognize them as one of the ethnic groups of the country. Instead, the Rohingya are regarded as mere refugees from Bangladesh. The 1982 Citizenship Law effectively denies the Rohingya the possibility of acquiring Myanmar nationality. Being stateless, they lack legal protection by the government, which results in severe restrictions on their movement, impacting their ability to access healthcare, education, and livelihood opportunities. In 2012, religious and ethnic tensions between the Rohingya Muslims and the Rakhine Buddhists escalated into widespread rioting. Since then, ongoing conflicts have forced the Rohingya to flee, though they are often rejected (equally unwanted) by neighboring Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The situation in northern Rakhine state has deteriorated significantly since 9 October 2016 when unknown assailants attacked three police outposts in northern Rakhine state, killing nine Border Guard police officers and seizing weapons and ammunition. The authorities responded by initiating a major security operation, conducting sweeps of the area to find the perpetrators. The United Nations (“UN”) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that since early November 2016 almost 27,000 people have fled across the border from northern Rakhine state into Bangladesh. Government officials in Myanmar have repeatedly denied reports of human rights violations by security forces. Conversely, journalists and NGOs describe the actions of the state forces in the region as ethnic cleansing and genocide, and have reported murders, mass rape and beatings, burning villages, and other human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity. Shockingly, our Buddhist brothers and sisters in Burma have lost the virtue of Buddhism. Most recently, a video surfaced showing officers beating members of the Muslim Rohingya during a security operation. This appears to have gotten the attention of the international community. The selfie-style video showed the brutality of officers kicking and beating civilians and the impunity they feel. And as the saying goes, the evidence never lies. Finally, the government had to confront what it has known and neglected, if not outright encouraged. The government’s past failures to acknowledge, condemn, and act against this cycle of violence has nurtured a culture of impunity. In the recent Interim Report of the Investigation Commission on Maungtaw, the Investigation Commission established by the government to investigate the attacks on 9 October 2016 dismissed the allegations of genocide: “[T]he increasing population of Mawlawi, mosques and religious edifices are proof that there were no cases of genocide and religious persecution in the region.” Characterizing crimes as genocide is often over the top, hyperbolic. Whenever there are large-scale atrocities, the knee-jerk reaction is to claim that genocide is occurring. And then there is the reverse action by some governments: best not to come out and claim that genocide is occurring – even when rather obvious – for fear that action (boots on the ground) may need to be taken to halt it. We saw this in the case of Rwanda. Better to punt and claim that only “acts of genocide” are taking place, a policy articulated by the Bill Clinton administration. Message to those who were perishing or about to: help will be on its way if the situation intensifies to genocide. Comforting. Years later Clinton would get teary-eyed as he admitted his failure to act in the face of overwhelming evidence of what was happening in Rwanda. What are acts of genocide? It is like saying that a woman is a little pregnant. It may make for clever diplomatic speak, but it is just a vacuous phrase. Look beyond the phrase. Where a group (Rohingya Muslims) is being targeted as such, and the intent – as deduced from the actions taken – is at a minimum to maim, permanently expel from Myanmar, and kill them, because of who they are as members of that group (Rohingya Muslims), are there not sufficient hallmarks of genocide (or at the very least traces of extermination) present to merit immediate condemnation and action at the national and international level? The Lady speaketh not What of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi? Silence. Aung San Suu Kyi Should not the residents of Myanmar, the Rohingya, and the international community, expect more than her purposeful silence, her occasional drab demur, or her belated request for an international commission? As the de factohead of state,15 and having promoted herself as the doyenne of human rights activists in Myanmar, one would think that she would be front and center in condemning these cruel, inhumane, and, yes, genocidal acts. Is Aung San Suu Kyi’s position so tenuous that she would suffer politically were she to speak out against this systematic violence against the Rohingya? Is she afraid of any backlash from the military, the police, and those who support, incite, and carry out the physical acts of violence? Is she just being pragmatic – as any politician of her position should be? Aung San Suu Kyi’s deafening silence and lame rationalizations give aid and comfort to the perpetrators. Some argue that she needs a bit more time and space. Take, for instance, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s most recent statement. Selected to the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, he made the following remarks: “I think there are tensions, there has been fighting, but I wouldn’t put it the way some have done…. [The international community should give Aung San Suu Kyi’s government] a bit of time, space and patience.” Tensions? Is Annan serious? How much more time and how much more space does Aung San Suu Kyi need? If she can use the bully pulpit to garner votes for her party to win the elections, she can certainly use the bully pulpit to condemn these ongoing acts of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Rohingya. But is it really a matter of having more time and space, or is it about clinging to and coveting more power? Aung San Suu Kyi may wish to recall and reflect upon her own thoughts on power and the fear of losing it – which seems to be the case with The Lady. It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Copyright 2017 Michael Karnavas

Tan Hecheng might seem an unlikely person to expose one of the most shocking crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. A congenial sixty-seven-year-old who spent most of his life in southern Hunan province away from the seats of power, Tan is no dissident. In fact, he has spent his career working for official state media and trying to believe in Communism. But in a meticulously detailed five-hundred-page book released in English this week, he lays out in devastating detail one of the darkest, and least known, episodes in Communist Chinese history: the mass murder of nine thousand Chinese citizens by explicit order of regional Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Tan’s subject is specific to one county, but documents suggest that similar such massacres in the countryside were widespread, leading to as many as 1.5 million deaths. In fact, it was the government itself that introduced Tan to these crimes. In 1986 while covering factory life for state media in Hunan province, a reform-minded magazine gave him an unusual assignment: to go to Dao County in a rural part of the province to write about a government investigation of killings that had taken place there during the Cultural Revolution. It was a time of reform and growing openness in China, and as an official journalist he was given full access to its tens of thousands of pages of documents. The idea was that Tan would write a positive piece about the Party’s efforts to deal with the past and punish the perpetrators But by the end of 1986 the political climate in China had shifted, and Tan’s article was never published. Still, Tan couldn’t let go of the explosive information he had found about the mass killings, and twenty-five years later he published his findings in Hong Kong. Now his book is coming out in English as The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution. Our conversation took place this fall, when I traveled with Tan to Dao County, where the massacres he writes about took place. Ian Johnson: Let’s start with some specifics about the book. Why were you allowed to do your investigation in the 1980s? Tan Hecheng: This was a time when [the reformist Communist Party leader] Hu Yaobang was in charge. He sent 1,300 officials to Dao County to investigate what had happened in the Cultural Revolution. I was working for Kaituo, which back then was the most courageous magazine in China. So I got to write it and in a big way do the interviews. But then things didn’t go as planned. When the first round of interviews was over, the political atmosphere was already turning. Forces in the Party opposed what was called “bourgeois liberalization.” So my article couldn’t be published. And the more time went on, the more impossible it became. It got tighter and tighter. But why didn’t you give it up? That’s simple. To speak frankly, in the past I didn’t really understand the Communist Party and its peasant revolution. It was like a blockage in my thinking. But suddenly in a short period of time my thinking became clear. What triggered this understanding? I’d kept asking one question: Had any one of the 9,000 people killed in the region been planning a counterrevolutionary event or said something unlawful? In the end the answer was: No. Not one? Not one. There wasn’t one who was counter-revolutionary in thoughts or deeds. Not one said anything against the revolution. They found a lot of cases of “counterrevolutionaries” and they killed them all, but they were all fake. When I understood this, I was heartbroken. I began to realize that the Party had a history of violence. Already in 1928 it organized violent peasant revolts that killed masses of people. And land reform [shortly after the Party took power in 1949] was incredibly violent. It was one mass killing after another. All of a sudden it became clear. There was no justification for what happened. It was just terror. So I felt that situation really needed me. I had to write it. All those people [survivors, family members, and reform-minded government officials] who gave me information, I had pledged to them that I wasn’t taking this for personal gain, but for our children and grandchildren’s descendants—so that a massacre wouldn’t happen again. In your book, you describe how the killings radiated out of the cities and towns into the countryside. You described it as a “pestilence.” I mean it spread at foot speed. It spread like an old-fashioned plague, with carriers bringing it from one place to the next. At that time, transportation, information wasn’t developed. The massacre’s spread relied on individuals walking and delivering the message. When someone arrived with the orders, the killing started. The killers were all young. You wrote that most were in their twenties. Were they brainwashed by the Maoist propaganda? Yes. The young people kept talking about exploitation by the landlord class. But for all this talk, all the exploitation was by the same four landlords: Huang Shiren, Zhou Bapi, Liu Wencai, Nan Batian. [Four landlords whose alleged crimes were constantly repeated by Communist Party propaganda across the nation in movies, posters, and textbooks.] And it turned out that their crimes were all fake. But this is all they knew and they thought that anyone who owned any land in China was a horrible landlord who deserved to die. In fact, the people who owned land were mostly just the country’s middle class. Especially in Hunan, big landlords were very rare. But they were all classified as landlords. They were declared to be subhuman, and when the orders came down, people found it easy to kill them. They had been conditioned to think of them as not human. But this is all half a century ago. Things have changed. No. It is rooted in this soil. Around the time of the [1989] Tiananmen Square massacre I raved about this at a meeting and put it like this: I said that according to my research the Communists were triumphant not because the Nationalists [their opponents in the civil war] were backward; it was because the Communists were even more backward. Their brutality and backwardness allowed them to succeed. The Nationalists still had a few enlightened ideas so they lost. What about today? Can these ideas be published today? It’s even stricter than before. In the past you could play an edge ball [a term from ping pong referring to hitting a ball right on the edge of the table—a risky strategy but one that allows a talented player to score points]. Now they don’t let you play that. Now they’ve drawn the demarcation line even tighter. Why? Some leaders aren’t very educated. They have just a middle school level. And then you add in the autocratic system that China has and you have policies that are moving against rather than toward greater openness. What’s the reaction of local leaders in Dao County? Their greatest desire is to avoid trouble. The county is not run by the same people as before. Several decades have passed. The people who wielded power then are now in their 80s. The new people in power don’t want trouble or unrest. Even in the 2000s it was risky to go there to do research because those in power were the children. But even they have retired. When I traveled with you to Dao County you were quite cautious to avoid attracting attention. Why were we so prudent? It’s because of higher-ups—of the new emperor [Xi Jinping]. His ways of doing things isn’t the same. Hu [Jintao, the party secretary from 2002 to 2012] is gone, so is Jiang [Zemin, party secretary from 1989 to 2002]. Hu and Jiang were more flexible. Xi is hard. The lower-downs don’t dare do otherwise, so they are hard too. Do you think that people are still traumatized by memories of the killings? Most people who witnessed it have died off, but the scar hasn’t healed. Because those who were killed and who suffered were the weakest members of society, the most marginal. They couldn’t get justice. But some killers were brought to trial and compensation was paid. According to the commission, 15,050 people were directly implicated in the killings, including one half of the Party’s cadres and members in the county. But only fifty-four people were sentenced for their crimes and another 948 Party members were disciplined. In addition, families only received 150 yuan for each person killed. This was equivalent to about 5,000 or 6,000 yuan [about $1,000] in today’s currency. Couldn’t they fight or protest? You can only have a conflict if the two sides have equal power. If one side is overwhelmingly more powerful, then there is no conflict. These poor farmers are so pitiable. If you give them 300 yuan [about $50], or 500 kuai, or find them a temporary job somewhere, then they won’t speak up. Poverty chills ambitions. The current leadership seems trying to move back to the 1950s, when officials were thought to be clean and the Party had broad support. Exactly. They think that that era was good. But that era led to the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t a good time. It was just because Mao had not laid bare his plans. I don’t mean the Cultural Revolution will repeat itself exactly. The methods won’t be the same but all socialist systems end up like that. It’s like inheriting a wife from your dead brother, or a father passing on knowledge to his son. The leaders just appoint their successors. It’s just a small circle. The soil—it’s so deep. That makes change hard. Look at it like this: the Qing [dynasty from 1644 to 1911] deteriorated into a complete mess [in the mid-nineteenth century] but still muddled through for fifty years. Now, look at the assets the current government has in its hands. You want to change it? It’s laughable. The very last chapter of your book is a single, very striking line. You write, “The Buddha said: Lay down your butcher’s knife and become a buddha”—fangxia tudao; lidi chengfo. This is a well-known expression about repenting one’s sins. Why did you use it here? I had three intentions. One is as the Buddha says, that people should put down their killing swords. Only then can they be absolved of their sins. The others is that I wish the Communist Party would really put down its killing sword—to reform. And the third, well it’s not about the knife in your hand. It’s the knife in your heart. Wang Yangming [the neo-Confucian philosopher who lived from 1472 to 1529] said it is easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains but hard to defeat the bandits of the heart. This applies to the entire population. It’s not aimed at the Communist Party but all of us: we have to lay down the knives in our hearts. Only then can we move toward a democratic path. So in the future if we have troubles, we won’t have to solve it through massacres and murders or clashing of fists, or whoever is stronger wins. Why hasn’t the Party put down its sword? It can’t. The benefits enjoyed by this privileged class are too great. If you put down your butcher’s knife you have to lay down your privileges. Because this whole state power is based on power coming from the barrel of a gun. Right now the Communist Party can’t really cheat anyone anymore because they are [ideologically] bankrupt. In the past they relied on deception and violence. Right now it’s entirely on violence. Think of all the arrests and detentions. This is the only way it rules. Lay down your knife and repent! http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/01/13/china-hidden-massacres-tan-hecheng/ (c) 2017 The New York Review of Books

Myanmar Tatmadaw, the creation of Fascist Japan, rediscovers its roots. I watched this last night. ​ The methods used by Japanese Imperial Army in 1937-1938 are strikingly similar to Myanmar Tatmadaw's "clearance operations" in Rohingya region today: separating men from the rest, tying men by strings, subjecting women and girls to systematic acts of sexual violence, splitting vaginas with bayonets or knives, stabbing anyone at will, burning down anything in sight, looting, robbing, summary executions, sadistic killings and tortures, burning alive, etc. The pretty Chinese girls and women were separated from the rest for rape and gang rape. In the first month of Japan's occupation of this old capital - Nanking - 20,000 females were raped; over 250,000 were slaughtered. My late relatives were decorated Burmese soldiers in the Japanese-founded Burma Independence Army, which later revolted and fought against their Masters. They would be turning in their graves if they knew the Myanmar troops are behaving like a Fascist occupying military force - against virtually un-armed, peaceful, terrified and most vulnerable community of Rohingyas on whom the overwhelming majority of Burmese public spit on. In the Tokyo Tribunal, 25 top Japanese leaders were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Post-WWII nationalists treat these mass murderers as "heroes" and bow to them at Yasakuni shrine in the middle of Tokyo. ​When I was living briefly in Tokyo - for half a year - in 1988, ​I was taken there for a visit by my late close Japanese friend. He was a young POW in Burma. I had no clue where I was or what a respectful visit to Yasakuni signifies then. Japan has never come to terms with its deeply murderous past. I doubt Myanmar will ever either. Both places like civilisational conscience, integrity or higher principles to which a society holds itself.​ The official and popular historical narrative about the rise of militarism in Japan is rooted in 'self-defence' vis-a-vis Western imperialism. ​ A British academic friend of mine who lives in Kyushu and I visit Hiroshima, the city and the Peace Museum a year ago. No doubt, dropping of the atomic bomb at the city centre on this industrial city with military encampments is a world class criminal act Harry Truman committed. But the way Hiroshima Peace Museum exhibited the victims of the atomic bombing shows lack of remorse and Japan's racism towards Koreans and Chinese. Of the thousands of Hiroshima victims, a significant percentage were Chinese and Korean slave labourers. They barely got any mention in Japan's narrative of victimhood. As the result, Japan at the height of its economic power failed to influence the world morally or intellectually. Looks like China, Japan's victim, doesn't have inclination or potential to provide the world moral or intellectual leadership either.​ Having suffered major oppression and colonialism ​at the hands of Japan and European powers, one would expect or hope that China would be a more compassionate, ethical power house today. Alas, China shows no signs of compassion, conscience or humanity in its pursuit of commercial and strategic interests around the world. We are all impoverished when leading nations lack what it take to be civilisational leaders.​

VOA quoted Yanghee Lee as saying she had received “no cooperation from both the Union and Kachin State government—I was not allowed to visit the places which I applied to visit.” “That really harms my rights and duties,” she reportedly went on to say. “My responsibility is to look for injustices and human rights violations, [the government] did not allow me to visit the places where human rights violations are taking place.” Read the full article: http://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/un-rapporteur-blocked-on-kachin-state-visit.html ====================== Fighting Continues With No Sign of Letup in Kachin and Shan States January 11, 2017 Tsa Doi La ====================== Kachin IDPs Fled To Chinese Side of the Border January 12, 2017 KLN =========================== Bangladesh PM asks Myanmar to take back Rohingya refugees By AFP PUBLISHED: 18:24, 11 January 2017 | UPDATED: 18:24, 11 January 2017 =================== Dhaka's been begging genocidal neighbour to "take back" #Rohingya for 38 yrs.

Iraqi Christian shows statue decapitated by IS in Mar Addai Church, Karemlash, northern Iraq © ACN Extremists driven out of Iraq's the Nineveh Plains "riddled the region with land mines" and "put bombs in children's toys" according to a senior Catholic cleric. Father Luis Montes, Latin Episcopal Vicar for Kurdistan, told Aid to the Church in Need: "Approximately 60 percent of the homes on the Nineveh Plains were burned down. The terrorists not only seized all of their belongings. They riddled the region with land mines." He said that members of Daesh (ISIS) had also "put bombs in with children's toys" that would have exploded when people returned to their homes. Father Montes added: "It is true that some people were able to return to their houses. However, they were only able to determine that they still exist. Because it is impossible to live there." He said: "The mines first need to be cleared out of the entire region. Only then can the villages be restored, and [then] from the ground up. Everything still needs to be done, the people have nothing left. Despite everything, Iraqis have lost neither their smiles nor their hope." ACN's project partner, Fr Montes added: "When we received the news that Daesh was retreating, a spontaneous celebration broke out in the refugee camps. "The people went out into the streets to dance and sing, as though they did not have any other problems in their lives." He added: "They have not lost the hope of being able to return to their homes." Despite the challenges, Fr Montes said the Iraqi Christians lived "not only in peace, but also with joy. "To talk about forgiveness with them is easy because they forgive without bearing a grudge. They are what gives us strength." He thanked ACN's benefactors for their generosity, adding that the refugees "know that Christians from other countries have kept them alive. They always pray for their benefactors." The priest asked for continued support this winter, stating that the pressing need for refugees in Erbil is for "blankets and more blankets" as the average temperature is -3°C. The charity continues to respond to urgent requests for aid from the Church in Iraq. Neville Kyrke-Smith, Aid to the Church in Need (UK) National Director, said: "The continued compassion of ACN benefactors is ensuring that these displaced suffering Christians can remain in Erbil until it is safe for them to return to practice their Catholic faith in their own villages and towns in the Nineveh Plains." He added: "This month, the charity has approved a further urgent aid payment of more than £400,000 at this deeply difficult time to help thousands of displaced Christians and refugees in the Archdiocese of Erbil to ensure the Christian presence in northern Iraq." Read more about Aid to the Church in Need here: http://www.acnuk.org Source: ACN

Whatever happened in the past, religious-based violence is real in modern India, and Muslims are frequent targets. It is thus disingenuous to single out Indian Muslim rulers for condemnation without owning up to the modern valences of that focus. Prince Aurangzeb facing a maddened elephant named Sudhakar, 1633. Note: This article was first published on January 9, 2016. The idea that medieval Muslim rulers wreaked havoc on Indian culture and society – deliberately and due to religious bigotry – is a ubiquitous notion in 21st century India. Few people seem to realise that the historical basis for such claims is shaky to non-existent. Fewer openly recognise the threat that such a misreading of the past poses for modern India. Aurangzeb, the sixth Mughal Emperor (r. 1658-1707), is perhaps the most despised of India’s medieval Muslim rulers. People cite various alleged “facts” about Aurangzeb’s reign to support their contemporary condemnation, few of which are true. For instance, contrary to widespread belief, Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of Hindu temples. He did not perpetrate anything approximating a genocide of Hindus. He did not instigate a large-scale conversion program that offered millions of Hindu the choice of Islam or the sword. In short, Aurangzeb was not the Hindu-hating, Islamist tyrant that many today imagine him to have been. And yet the myth of malevolent Aurangzeb is seemingly irresistible and has captured politicians, everyday people, and even scholars in its net. The damage that this idea has done is significant. It is time to break this mythologized caricature of the past wide open and lay bare the modern biases, politics, and interests that have fuelled such a misguided interpretation of India’s Islamic history. A recent article on this website cites a series of inflammatory claims about Indo-Muslim kings destroying premodern India’s Hindu culture and population. The article admits that “these figures are drawn from the air” and historians give them no credence. After acknowledging that the relevant “facts” are false, however, the article nonetheless posits that precolonial India was populated by “religious chauvinists,” like Aurangzeb, who perpetrated religiously-motivated violence and thus instigated “historical injustices” to which Hindus can rightly object today. This illogical leap from a confessed lack of reliable information to maligning specific rulers is the antithesis of proper history, which is based on facts and analysis rather than unfounded assumptions about the endemic, unchanging nature of a society. A core aspect of the historian’s craft is precisely that we cannot assume things about the past. Historians aim to recover the past and to understand historical figures and events on their own terms, as products of their time and place. That does not mean that historians sanitise prior events. Rather we refrain from judging the past by the standards of the present, at least long enough to allow ourselves to glimpse the logic and dynamics of a historical period that may be radically different from our own. Going back more than a millennium earlier, Hindu rulers were the first to come up with the idea of sacking one another’s temples, before Muslims even entered the Indian subcontinent. But one hears little about these “historical wrongs” In the case of Indian Muslim history, a core notion that is hard for modern people to wrap our heads around is as follows: It was not all about religion. Aurangzeb, for instance, acted in ways that are rarely adequately explained by religious bigotry. For example, he ordered the destruction of select Hindu temples (perhaps a few dozen, at most, over his 49-year reign) but not because he despised Hindus. Rather, Aurangzeb generally ordered temples demolished in the aftermath of political rebellions or to forestall future uprisings. Highlighting this causality does not serve to vindicate Aurangzeb or justify his actions but rather to explain why he targeted select temples while leaving most untouched. Moreover, Aurangzeb also issued numerous orders protecting Hindu temples and communities from harassment, and he incorporated more Hindus into his imperial administration than any Mughal ruler before him by a fair margin. These actions collectively make sense if we understand Aurangzeb’s actions within the context of state interests, rather than by ascribing suspiciously modern-sounding religious biases to him. Regardless of the historical motivations for events such as premodern temple destructions, a certain percentage of modern Indians nonetheless feel wronged by their Islamic past. What is problematic, they ask, about recognising historical injustices enacted by Muslim figures? In this regard, the contemporaneity of debates over Indian history is crucial to understanding why the Indo-Islamic past is singled out. For many people, condemnations of Aurangzeb and other medieval Indian rulers stem not from a serious assessment of the past but rather from anxieties over India’s present and future, especially vis-à-vis its Muslim minority population. After all, one might ask: If we are recognising injustices in Indian history, why are we not also talking about Hindu rulers? When judged according to modern standards, medieval rulers the world over measure up poorly, and Hindu kings are no exception. Medieval Hindu political leaders destroyed mosques periodically, for instance, including in Aurangzeb’s India. Going back more than a millennium earlier, Hindu rulers were the first to come up with the idea of sacking one another’s temples, before Muslims even entered the Indian subcontinent. But one hears little about these “historical wrongs” for one reason: They were perpetrated by Hindus rather than Muslims. Religious bigotry may not have been an overarching problem in India’s medieval past, but it is a crucial dynamic in India’s present. Religious-based violence is real in modern India, and Muslims are frequent targets. Non-lethal forms of discrimination and harassment are common. Fear is part of everyday life for many Indian Muslims. Thus, when scholars compare medieval Islamic rulers like Aurangzeb to South Africa’s twentieth-century apartheid leaders, for example, they not only display a surprising lack of commitment to the historical method but also provide fodder for modern communal fires. It is high time we discarded the pernicious myth of India’s medieval Muslim villains. This poisonous notion imperils the tolerant foundations of modern India by erroneously positing religious-based conflict and Islamic extremism as constant features of life on the subcontinent. Moreover, it is simply bad history. India has a complicated and messy past, and we do it and ourselves no justice by flattening its nuances to reflect the religious tensions of the present. Audrey Truschke is a historian at Rutgers University-Newark. Her first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court was published by Columbia University Press and Penguin India in 2016. Her second book, Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, will published in February 2017 by Penguin India.

THE 2015 election of the National League for Democracy (NLD) was a time of hope and celebration in Burma (Myanmar). High expectation abounded that the age of oppression and fear of government-led persecution would be over. Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi. Pic: AP. But given the dozens of people who have been charged or jailed under the new administration for supposed online defamation of the regime, it appears those expectations may have been misplaced. At least thirty eight people have been charged under the controversial Article 66D of the Telecommunications Law in the 10 months since Aung San Suu Kyi’s election victory. Despite the law coming in to force under the previous military-backed administration, it was only implemented seven times between 2013 and 2015. The drastic increase seen under the NLD administration, whose members include a significant number of former political prisoners, is of particular concern to human rights groups. They see the abuse of the law and the persistent repression of criticism as a sign that conditions for free speech in the democratic nation have continued to deteriorate. “The capacity of people to freely impart and receive information, including through free political discourse, is critical for a functioning democracy,” Daniel Aguirre, a legal adviser with the International Commission of Jurists in Myanmar, told the Myanmar Times. He added that in order to ensure the law serves the interests of the people and does not pose a threat to free speech, Parliament must “abolish or extensively amend its criminal defamation laws”. The law is being used to target a wide-range social commentators from public officials to social media satirists, activists and journalists. Even members of the NLD themselves are not beyond its reaches. One of the more high profile ongoing cases is that of Myo Yan Naung Thein, secretary of the ruling party’s central research committee, who is currently on trial for criminal defamation. Thein is accused of insulting the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. A point, his wife claims “is just criticising, with facts” and should not be seen as a defamation issue but as mere freedom of speech. This is one of the more recent in a long list of convictions. U Maung Maung Tun, a reporter in the state capital, was arrested in December for criticising a state-media reporter. In a letter to the editor in a local journal, Maung Tun took aim at U Zaw Min Aung for lying. Subsequent social media posts reiterated his point declaring, “He lied and lied, who dares lie on the pages of a newspaper?” Another includes Ma Chaw Sandi Htun who was sentenced to six months in prison under Article 66D for posting a satirical photo on Facebook of a military officer wearing women’s clothing. Activist Patrick Kum Jaa Lee also served a six month sentence for sharing a defamatory post about Myanmar’s military chief. Abuse of the law has gone so far as to include a member of the ruling party pressing charges against two villagers for insulting Suu Kyi during a night of drinking. A supporter of Burma’s National League for Democracy party displays her mobile phone with a picture of Suu Kyi as they gather to celebrate unofficial election results outside the NLD headquarters in Yangon. Pic: AP. While the cases vary in their nature, the majority of them involve the use of social media to spread information. Over the last few years, Myanmar has experienced a connectivity revolution. Tens of millions of people now have access to the World Wide Web; a luxury that was previously reserved for a minority. However, the recent influx of arrests on defamation charges highlights how vulnerable people in Myanmar are when communicating and sharing information online. And given the risks involved, the fear of speaking out seems to be spreading. Aguirre says that through his work he has “met with members of civil society reluctant to speak out on legitimate concerns for fear of landing in jail.” The fear is that the current high prosecution rates on defamation charges will stifle blossoming freedom of expression for good. “The penchant to turn to criminal defamation laws to punish free expression, by both by the military government and the current administration, chills the exercise of free expression of opinion and stifles the exchange of information,” Vani Sathisan, an independent legal expert who spent three years working in Myanmar, said. “This right to freedom of expression protects every form of expression, including electronic and internet-based,” she said. Despite a parliamentary commission in November recommending the removal of Article 66D, the law remains and is unlikely to change anytime soon with several public officials speaking out in defence of the clause. The rise in convictions under Article 66D comes at a time when the government is also attempting to curtail the freedom of the press by restricting information coming out of the northern Rakhine state following violent clashes between the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority and police. The government continues to deny any wrongdoing in the region and yet will not allow independent journalists access to the area. “Those who do report on the situation face threats and intimidation” said Laura Haigh, Amnesty International’s Myanmar researcher. With both Article 66D being used to its full force and ongoing infringement on freedom of press, concerns abound that little has changed in Myanmar since the new administration took over. With fresh fears that freedom of expression may once again be under threat in the newly democratised nation, it appears the high aspirations that once existed for the new government to defend civil liberties may not become reality.

We wanted a fairytale, but we're getting a horror story. After 15 years of detention in which she suffered abuse, psychological torture and physical threats, Aung San Suu Kyi was swept to power by popular vote in November 2014 leading a party that excluded Muslim candidates. She faces massive challenges, not just to modernise an economy crippled by decades of corrupt rule but also to build democratic institutions and establish the rule of law. Within a year, her government had embarked on a brutal program of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority in the majority Buddhist country. Here we have a problem of cognitive dissonance. In psychology, it's the state of mental discomfort that arises when we are confronted by new information that conflicts with our existing beliefs, or the discomfort we feel when we act contrary to our values and beliefs. Everyone who subscribed to the Aung San Suu Kyi fairytale and knows anything about the treatment of the Rohingyas in Myanmar is feeling it. The group of world leaders including more than a dozen of her fellow Nobel peace prize winners, who wrote to the UN criticising Ms Suu Kyi's inaction and drawing parallels with Rwanda's 1994 genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, is probably feeling it. But what about Aung San Suu Kyi. Is she feeling it? Myanmar's foreign minister, State Counsellor and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Photo: AP We can only hope so. Human rights groups have documented allegations of mass killings, rapes and the razing of villages by soldiers in Rakhine state; of soldiers firing out of helicopters at citizens on the ground, of babies being thrown in fires. Myanmar's government led by Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly dismissed the allegations as "fabrications". Amnesty International accuses Ms Suu Kyi of failing to "live up to both her political and moral responsibility to try to stop and condemn what is unfolding". The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said in June that crimes against humanity may have been committed. More than 65,000 terrified Rohingyas have fled across the border to Bangladesh. The latest brutal crackdown began in October after a series of attackstargeting police and military near Myanmar's north-west border with Bangladesh. Nine police were killed. An armed group known as Haraka al-Yaqin (Faith Movement), said by the International Crisis Group to be led by a committee of Rohingyas living in Saudi Arabia, is believed responsible. The ICG has warned of a new Muslim insurgencycentred on Rakhine; a UN spokeswoman said failure to address the Rohingya grievances provided a "perfect breeding ground for violent extremists". The UN describes the Rohingya as among the world's most persecuted people. Since Myanmar stripped them of their citizenship rights and rendered them stateless in 1982, they have been subjected to a campaign of "grinding dehumanisation", the UN says. Many hoped that Ms Suu Kyi, herself a renowned human rights campaigner, would stand up against persecution of minorities once she took power as "State Counsellor". But even if she was inclined to intervene, a junta-era constitution gives her almost no control over the military. It stopped her from becoming president. The military retained a quarter of the seats in parliament, and installed a hardline general as vice-president. The constitution says the army chief can take over in a crisis. Any confrontation with the military risks Ms Suu Kyi's already shaky hold on power. Outside pressure is one path forward. Though domestic political considerations make it inadvisable for Ms Suu Kyi to seek it, her actions seem to invite it. In September she asked the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan to head a commission to try to find solutions. After the Malaysian Prime Minister described Myanmar's treatment of Rohingyas as "genocide", Ms Suu Kyi called an unprecedented informal meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers in December. The result was less than decisive, but it was perhaps a start: a Myanmar government press release following the meeting said it was ready to grant humanitarian access and to keep ASEAN members informed of developments in Rakhine state. The Australian government should be adding to the pressure on Myanmar to stop the persecution in Rakhine, to let humanitarian aid in, and to allow independent investigations of the abuse allegations. The UN human rights envoy for Myanmar is on a 12-day investigative visit to the country. That should be a catalyst for concerted, united pressure by Australia and other countries in the region working with the UN to bring an end to the persecution. Copyright © 2017 The Sydney Morning Herald

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE || January 10, 2017 Smith-Eshoo Bill Will Provide Emergency Relief to Christians and Other Religious Minorities Who Survived ISIS Genocide WASHINGTON—Following his December 2016 mission to Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq to meet with Christian survivors of ISIS genocide, Rep. Chris Smith (NJ-04), along with his Democratic colleague Rep. Anna Eshoo (CA-18), today reintroduced their bipartisan legislation to provide emergency relief to survivors of genocide and ensure accountability for perpetrators. The Iraq and Syria Genocide Emergency Relief and Accountability Act (H.R. 390) is an enhanced version of the Smith-Eshoo bill (H.R. 5961) they introduced in 114th Congress. “The reintroduction of this bill is timely because just last month I saw in Iraq the lack of humanitarian aid for Christian genocide survivors. These genocide survivors told me the United States and global community had abandoned them. They are at-risk from freezing winter temperatures and require emergency help,” said Smith. “Tens of thousands of Christian genocide survivors in Iraq and Syria need our help now and it is essential that emergency humanitarian aid for the survivors be provided,” said Rep. Eshoo. “I thank Chairman Smith for his passionate leadership on this issue and I look forward to working with him and all my colleagues in Congress to quickly move this aid package and bring relief to those who continue to suffer.” The Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul, Nicodemus Sharaf, who had to seek refuge in Erbil from ISIS, told Smith, “We are the last people to speak the Aramaic language. Without help, we are finished.” The Chaldean Catholic Archdiocese of Erbil invited Smith to Erbil and has been supporting more than 70,000 Christians who escaped ISIS – almost 1/3 of the 250,000 Christians remaining in Iraq – with food, shelter, and medical care. It also serves Yezidis and Muslims displaced by ISIS. The Archdiocese has had to rely entirely on donations from organizations like the Knights of Columbus and Aid to the Church in Need. “Because the U.S. Government and United Nations have so far failed to support this life-saving work of the Archdiocese of Erbil, these Christian genocide survivors continue to hang on the edge between life and death, ” added Smith. Among its key provisions, H.R. 390 directs the U.S. Administration to: • Support entities that are effectively serving genocide survivors in-country, including faith-based entities; • Support entities that are conducting criminal investigations into perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Iraq and Syria; • Create a “Priority Two” (“P-2”) designation that Christians and other genocide survivors from religious and ethnic minority communities are of “special humanitarian concern to the United States” and therefore able to access an overseas application interview for the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program without needing a referral from the UN; • Vet P-2 refugee applicants like any other Iraqi or Syrian refugee applicant and not admit them to the U.S. unless they have cleared this vetting; • Assess and address the humanitarian vulnerabilities, needs, and triggers that might force survivors to flee their homes; • Identify warning signs of deadly violence and other forms of persecution against genocide survivors from vulnerable religious and ethnic minority communities, or against other members of these communities, in Iraq or Syria; • Identify gaps in U.S. law so that the American justice system can prosecute foreign perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes present in the U.S., as well as any Americans who commit such crimes; • Encourage foreign countries to add identifying information about suspected perpetrators of such crimes to their security databases and security screening. The other original 15 cosponsors are Rep. Mark Meadows (R), Rep. Juan Vargas (D), Rep. Pete Sessions (R), Rep. Dan Lipinski (D), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R), Rep. Louise Slaughter (D), Rep. Trent Franks (R), Rep. Robert Pittenger (R), Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R), Rep. Randy Hultgren (R), Rep. Randy Weber (R), Rep. David Trott (R), Rep. Sean Duffy (R), Rep. Jody Hice (R), and Rep. Barbara Comstock (R). Background The Smith-Eshoo bill is supported by many groups, including the Knights of Columbus, Family Research Council, In Defense of Christians, 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, Commission for International Justice and Accountability, HIAS, Aid the Church in Need USA, Open Doors, A Demand for Action, Yezidi Human Rights Organization International, Religious Freedom Institute, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Syrian Accountability Project, and Civitas Maxima. It is also supported by all the former US Ambassadors-at Large for War Crimes, David Scheffer (1997-2001), Pierre Prosper (2001-2005), Clint Williamson (2006-2009), and Stephen Rapp (2009-2015), as well as the Founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, David Crane; Director of the Center for Religious Freedom Nina Shea; and the author of Defying ISIS, Rev. Johnnie Moore. Since 2013, Rep. Smith has chaired nine congressional hearings on atrocities in Iraq and Syria, including one titled The ISIS Genocide Declaration: What Next? and another titled Atrocities in Iraq and Syria: Relief for Survivors and Accountability for Perpetrators. He authored the bipartisan H. Con. Res 121, which the House passed overwhelmingly and calls for the formation of an ad hoc tribunal for perpetrators of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Syrian conflict. Smith also authored with Eshoo the bipartisan, historic Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act (H.R. 1150), which the President signed into law. Smith and Eshoo also introduced H.R. 5961, the forerunner to H.R. 390. Just before Christmas, Smith traveled to the Erbil area of Kurdistan region of Iraq to meet with Christian genocide survivors and visit a camp for 6,000 displaced Christians, managed and supported by the Archdiocese of Erbil. He also met with Christian leaders, non-governmental organizations, and officials from the U.S., countries like Hungary and Poland that are proactively supporting assistance to Christian genocide survivors, and the United Nations. Christians have lived in Iraq since the 1st century and there were as many as 1.4 million in 2002. Sectarian violence and targeting of Christians reduced their presence to 500,000 by 2013, the year before ISIS started its genocide against them. At the end of 2015, less than 250,000 Christians remained in Iraq. ### The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, is an independent agency of the Federal Government charged with monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Accords and advancing comprehensive security through promotion of human rights, democracy, and economic, environmental and military cooperation in 57 countries. The Commission consists of nine members from the U.S. Senate, nine from the House of Representatives, and one member each from the Departments of State, Defense, and Commerce.

"It's angering that not everybody has signed this treaty to ban landmines. It's disgusting, it really is, because it is fact that (mines) hurt a high percentage of civilians. They're not effective in any other real way. They've enough weapons for war." ANGELINA JOLIE, Director of First They Killed My Father which is a 2017 American biographical historical thriller film and written by herself and Loung Ung, based on Ung's memoir of same name. CANADA PROVIDES SUPPORT TO ANLONG VENG PEACE & HUMAN RIGHTS STUDY TOUR (July, 2017). With generous support from The Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI), and in collaboration with the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism, the Anlong Veng Peace Center, under the Documentation Center of Cambodia, with core support from the United States Agency for International Development, is pleased to announce the establishment of its Anlong Veng Peace & Human Rights Study Tour. The Anlong Veng Peace Tour program is a community reconciliation initiative aimed at bridging the divide and isolation between the former Khmer Rouge in their last stronghold of Anlong Veng and Cambodia’s younger generation. The intent of the program is to provide an educational platform for the study (and mitigation) of human conflict as well as to encourage greater civic engagement. The Anlong Veng Peace Center will host ten tour groups, comprised of 15 students each, for a total of 150 students. Tours will begin in October 2017. In addition to facilitating student tours, the project will collect over 240 stories from local survivors, many of whom are landmine victims, as well as facilitate the rehabilitation of deforested land by the re-planting of trees. Using Documentation Center of Cambodia’s previous work in genocide education as a model, the project will facilitate the historical tours of on a four-day visit to the last Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng for the purpose of participating in daily educational activities that require critical thinking, reflection, and debate, as well as the opportunity to interact, discuss, and ask questions from former Khmer Rouge and victims residing in the area. The program not only offers a critical understanding of Cambodia’s violent history, but it also aims to convey a basic understanding of different theories on conflict resolution and transformation. The tour will meet its objectives through interactive discussions, guided tours of local historical sites, and a curriculum that uses individual stories to convey historical and moral lessons. The tour is rehabilitative to victims and former Khmer Rouge cadres, as well as victims of landmines. The tours provide victims and former cadres an opportunity to reflect on and impart their understanding of their experiences during the Khmer Rouge period and the civil war years (1979-1998) that followed. The tour is based on a curriculum that is thought provoking and personal. Through face-to-face discussions with victims and former Khmer Rouge cadres, the program will challenge participants to contemplate the diversity of human experience (both instances of humanity and inhumanity) during times of conflict and social upheaval. The stories validate the significance of individual human beings, and they help foster the most basic components of conflict transformation and civic skills. Concepts such as the ability to reflect, think objectively, and empathize with others are cornerstones to any peaceful, democratic society. The project will focus on historical empathy as its core objective, and the students who attend the program will be responsible for serving as representatives in their local schools, sharing their learning and insights. The Anlong Veng Peace & Human Rights Study Tour represents the start of the Peace Center’s work towards its mutually reinforcing aims of Peace, Education, and Social Enterprise. Through these core objectives, the Center aims to become a leading institution for the development of sustainable approaches to achieving reconciliation and peace in Cambodia and the region. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 DCCam

For those of us engaged with human rights, as students, activists and lawyers, I want to suggest that at some point in our engagement with rights discourses, we have had to acknowledge that while human rights offer the possibility for emancipation and justice, they can also be used to entrench existing power relations. This duality within human rights stems from the fact that the human rights project is a colonial one, strongly connected to the adoption of the Universal Declaration in 1948, and remains a largely colonized field. Consequently, in order to draw on human rights as a source of emancipation, human rights itself must be emancipated and decolonized. Based on this argument, I want to make two claims: first, within the human rights field, a discursive shift is currently taking place; a shift from what I refer to as, ‘human rights as tactics’, to ‘human rights as sovereignty’ and ‘human rights as disruption’. Human rights as tactics encapsulates the belief that rights are inherent, as well as the idea that rights serve as a preamble to other forms of emancipation and possibility. Rights are therefore tactics that are employed by states, NGOs, vulnerable groups and individuals, as well as the UN to claim certain entitlements and protections on behalf of others or for themselves. Human rights as sovereignty recognizes the existence of entities such as the state, conservative civil society organizations, and businesses, all of which attempt to entrench power through the creation of self-serving narratives embedded in human rights language. Critical scholars such as Perugini and Gordon describe for example how conservative human rights organizations seeking to legitimize Israel’s military warfare, including the killing of Palestinians, and the dispossession of Palestinian land, use international humanitarian and human rights law to justify their actions. Human rights as disruption can be seen as an issue-based approach to rights claims, which are often constructed outside existing legal frameworks in order to agitate for the disruption of power. Social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter in the U.S. offer an example of human rights as disruption, in that this movement employs strategies of disruption that often operate outside the paradigm of human rights law. While these approaches to human rights are not necessarily new, I believe that human rights scholars (i) often focus their attention on human rights as tactics, (ii) understate instances of human rights as sovereignty, and (iii) largely neglect emerging approaches to human rights as disruption. The second claim I would like to offer is that human rights as sovereignty and disruption have their genesis in the global South. Drawing on Comaroff and Comaroff’s argument that the global South is the driving force of theoretical and social trends today, we could argue that human rights as sovereignty and disruption represent an approach to rights discourses that was first developed in the global South and subsequently exported to the North. The North-South binary is inherently problematic, and has been used to depict the ‘South’ as a late arrival to modernity. The Comaroffs, however, assert that it is the South that first feels the effects of world-historical forces and the South that first decodes them theoretically and innovates political responses to them. These ideas then migrate to the global North. What is new here is that, rather than argue that the colonies were the first laboratory of modernity, the Comaroffs contend that the South is anticipating, even driving, the political, economic, and cultural modalities of the future of Europe and America. Socio-economic rights for instance, are primarily being developed in the global South, in countries such as India, South Africa, Colombia and Argentina, and being transported to the North. We therefore need to look towards the global South as the architect of discourses on human rights, particularly socio-economic rights. Acknowledging that the field of human rights is tainted by its colonial origins, it is also important to recognize that human rights claims continue to be an important tactic in the struggle for emancipation. This contradiction or tension within human rights discourses, underlies what I believe to be a discursive shift in the human rights field, that can in some ways be traced back to its colonial roots. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Kayum Ahmed is a Doctoral Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University. Before joining Columbia University as a doctoral fellow in international and comparative education, Kayum served as Chief Executive Officer of the South African Human Rights Commission from 2010 to 2015. Citations Kayum Ahmed, “Decolonizing Human Rights: Sovereignty, Tactics and Disruption” (OxHRH Blog, 09 January 2017) [date of access].

In a meeting of minds, a small town Indiana teacher and a Cambodian scholar documenting the Khmer Rogue atrocities create a workshop for comparative genocide education in Battambang 'The history that precipitated the Holocaust carries lessons for every human being regardless of culture, religion, or circumstance' Kelly Watson from the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights sits in a classroom of Cambodian history teachers she is teaching the Holocaust to in October 2016. (courtesy Ouch Makara/Documentation Center of Cambodia Archives) NOBLESVILLE, Indiana — Neighbor turned against neighbor. Family members disappeared. Faced with ostracism or even death, youth pledged allegiance to a cause they hadn’t necessarily sought — and committed unspeakable crimes against their countrymen. There are still landmines in Cambodia, where an estimated 1.7 million people died between 1975 to 1979 under the extremist Khmer Rouge government. Today, however, many of these landmines are not physical, rather unspoken tragedy that looms from the past into the nation’s future. Some 70% of Cambodians were born after the notorious Killing Fields, but mandatory education about the genocides only began in 2009. And while the Khmer Rouge government ostensibly fell in 1979, in a pragmatic attempt to unify and stabilize a nation reeling from murder and betrayal, Cambodian politicians quickly formed alliances with Khmer Rouge members: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, one of the longest-serving leaders in the world, is himself a former member. Cambodia is now facing a turning point, said Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the world’s largest archive of photography and documents relating to the Khmer Rouge. A talk about Khmer Rouge regime by Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, to the Digital Traveler Group from the Remote Year. (courtesy DC-Cam) “On the one hand, Cambodians run a real risk of losing a firm grip on understanding, memorializing and ultimately accepting a difficult past. On the other hand, a rapidly globalizing Cambodia must take on new challenges of sustainable growth, democratic integrity and human rights,” said Chhang, who was named Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2007. ‘Cambodians run a real risk of losing a firm grip on understanding, memorializing and ultimately accepting a difficult past’ DC-Cam was founded in 1994 through a grant to Yale University from the United States Congress’ Cambodian Genocide Justice Act. Today an NGO, the organization addresses the country’s genocidal past while working to preserve memory and justice. Chhang told The Times of Israel that one way to deepen the understanding of the Cambodian tragedy is through the study of other global genocides. Enter Kelly Watson, an eighth grade English teacher from Noblesville, Indiana, who recently spent a week in Battambang, Cambodia, teaching about the Holocaust. Sound like the wrong cue for this post-genocide Cambodian stage play? That’s because Watson wasn’t exactly typecast. The long windy road to Battambang Meeting with The Times of Israel a day after running a marathon — not her first or last for this year — Watson said she was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The small city near the Ohio border has, among its quaint nicknames, the moniker “The City of Churches.” In a cute coffee shop chosen to show off the historic Noblesville town square, Watson said that in her first gig as an English teacher back in the mid-1990s in Lebanon, Indiana, she wasn’t what one could call an expert in the Holocaust when her department chair handed her a rummage sale copy of Elie Wiesel’s “Night” to teach the class. Holocaust educator Kelly Watson at a downtown Nobleville, Indiana, cafe on November 6, 2016. (Amanda Borschel-Dan/Times of Israel) Watson laughed and said at that point in her life the sum-total of her Holocaust education was a vague memory of watching Meryl Streep’s “Holocaust” mini-series in 1978 and a supposition she’d probably once read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Reading the Wiesel masterpiece memoir set in the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, she quickly understood she just didn’t have the professional background or tools to do the topic justice. But she couldn’t find the appropriate resources in Indiana. The early 1990s, however, was a tipping point for Holocaust awareness in the United States. With “Schindler’s List” and the much publicized opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 1993, the topic was becoming more accessible to a growing audience. And so, although she’d never before left the state of Indiana on her own, Watson applied and was accepted to the Washington, DC, museum’s Belfer National Conference for Educators. That conference led to a subsequent fellowship at USHMM, and eventually Watson became a part of the museum’s Regional Education Corps. Cambodia exhibition reception and program for the May 27, 2015, opening of the two new Cambodia special exhibitions at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Exhibition curator Greg Naranjo speaks to His Excellency Hab Touch and guests about the Museum’s new exhibition. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) In between her day job as an eighth grade English teacher (now at Fishers Junior High) and parenting, Watson began to lecture, among other places, at Indiana’s Bureau of Jewish Education, which today supports the Holocaust Education Center of Indiana. She had become the resource she herself had sought. While acquiring the skills to be an expert Holocaust educator at USHMM, Watson met a number of like-minded teachers who wanted to apply the lessons learned from the genocide against the Jews in other conflict zones. Independently, these friends organized trips to teach in Rwanda and Bosnia, before eventually founding a non-profit in 2011 called the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights. Watson is currently an educational program director for EIHR. The project, she said, teaches the best practices of Holocaust and comparative genocide education to teachers, who bring them into the classroom. Two years ago, with the Rwandan and Bosnian programs ongoing since 2011, EIHR was ready to expand to other conflict zones. Watson chose Cambodia and said she “blindly emailed” DC-Cam’s Youk Chhang, whom she calls “a force.” He immediately responded and the past two years were spent in planning. In October, Watson was the first EIHR emissary to Cambodia, where she presented on the Holocaust to 100 Cambodian history teachers. Searching for Anne Frank of the Killing Fields With enough troubles of their own in their recent past, why should Cambodians want to learn about the Holocaust? “The history that precipitated the Holocaust carries lessons for every human being regardless of culture, religion, or circumstance,” Chhang explained to The Times of Israel. The site of a mass grave in Cambodia (Courtesy: International Association of Genocide Scholars) “Cambodians, even the generations born after the genocide collapsed in 1979, understand the suffering of survivors and the impact of genocide on a people and society,” he said. “No genocide, mass atrocity, or social upheaval can be compared to another, but there are certainly general trends, insights, and lessons that have great value in the classroom. We need to study and teach these lessons not only for our own society but other societies suffering today and in the future.” In 2002, Chhang initiated and edited a translation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” into Khmer. It was distributed to high school students and also broadcasted on local radio stations “to inspire the local population to learn about their own Anne Frank of the Killing Fields at home,” said Chhang. ‘The resilience of the survivors of the Holocaust is a reference for how Cambodians can overcome their past’ “Cambodians studying the Holocaust… can discern lessons that are useful today. The resilience of the survivors of the Holocaust is a reference for how Cambodians can overcome their past,” Chhang said. In 2007, DC-Cam published its high school history text book, which included Cambodia’s own genocidal past. “In 2009, it became compulsory for all high schools across the country – which is over 1,700 high schools,” said Chhang. Despite exposure to “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Cambodians know little about Jews or Judaism, or the Holocaust, said Watson. With Watson’s help and that of teachers like her, Chhang is hoping to change that. He said DC-Cam has a variety of proposed national projects to integrate more Holocaust and other cross-cultural mass atrocity education into Cambodian public schools. “As the principle partner working with the Cambodian Ministry of Education, we intend to incorporate more educational modules addressing the Holocaust as well as other examples of mass atrocity,” said Chhang. Finding patterns amongst the pain The US Holocaust Museum is currently hosting two exhibits through October 2017, which highlight the Khmer Rouge period: “Cambodia 1975-1979” features survivor testimony, photographs and videos, and “I Want Justice!” depicts efforts of post-genocide retribution on perpetrators — from the Nazi Nuremberg trials to today’s prosecution of several key Khmer Rouge members. A plaque at the Cambodian Genocide Museum, October 2016 (Kelly Watson) In late November, a 2014 conviction was upheld of two surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders of crimes against humanity, including extermination, enforced disappearances and political persecution. Currently, they are on trial for, among other crimes, separate allegations of the genocide of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chams. In addition to museums, the comparative study of genocide among scholars is now de rigueur. Across the globe, there are undergraduate and graduate university programs for Genocide Studies, most with a concentration on the Holocaust. The Yale University Genocide Studies Program, however, was founded in 1998 after originally concentrating on Cambodia (the genesis for the NGO DC-Cam). Today, the program covers topics ranging from Ancient Genocides to War Crimes and Truth Commissions. Professor of International and Area Studies Ben Kiernan is the founding director of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. (courtesy) Prof. Ben Kiernan is the founding director of the Yale program. In an email exchange with The Times of Israel, he said teaching about genocides in countries that have experienced them highlights patterns and “offers citizens access to very important data for predicting and hopefully preventing future outbreaks.” Exhaustively collecting information and comparing it with other cases, allows scholars to “explore what similarities exist (for instance in the statements, plans, and activities of the perpetrators), and therefore try to identify in advance what might become the signposts to the next case of genocide, and enable humanity to stop it before it occurs,” said Kiernan. “At the very least, careful comparison of different cases of mass murder often reveals unexpected similarities,” he said. In many instances, what may seem like politically motivated “purges” could in fact be something even more sinister. Taking the case of Cambodia as an example, he stated, “although the mass murder that took place there in 1975-1979 appeared to many observers to be far from an ethnic genocide, but rather a case of political mass murder, in fact the groups that suffered the highest proportions of killings were ethnic groups, namely the Vietnamese, Muslim Cham and ethnic Chinese minorities, even though in absolute numbers the ethnic Khmer majority suffered the most.” Using the ‘other’s genocide as safe space Through learning about the Holocaust and the seven stages of genocide, Watson felt Cambodian history teachers “did see the connections and that’s what I was hoping for.” According to Watson, teaching a comparative study of genocide has other, more immediate and personal implications as well. In looking at their own genocide through the prism of the Holocaust, after decades of suppression of memories, the Cambodian teachers may feel “safer” in addressing them, she said. “You don’t compare genocides in terms of the amount of pain they caused. Every genocide is absolutely unique,” said Watson. It’s not easy to address an issue “when you’re surrounded by it,” she said. In Cambodia, “the war is still very much with them.” Indiana teacher Kelly Watson, program coordinator at Educators Institute for Human Rights, teaches about the Holocaust in Cambodia on October 19, 2016. (courtesy Ouch Makara/Documentation Center of Cambodia Archives) Many teachers in conflict countries are survivors of genocide themselves, if not the children of survivors. It is important, said Watson that they feel part of a community that understands what it means to be facing a classroom filled with children or grandchildren of perpetrators. After this first initial visit by Watson, there are plans for more Educators’ Institute for Human Rights teacher trainings in Cambodia, as well as a swap with teachers in the US. Through the dissemination of their personal experiences, alongside the acquisition of theoretical knowledge of genocide, DC-Cam’s Chhang hopes these teachers can make a positive change in the world. “The circumstances that precipitated the descent into violence and the dehumanization of people bear witness to ways to improve the human condition and make the statement ‘never again’ really matter,” said Chhang. © 2017 THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, All rights reserved.