Image: Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers building the infrastructure to host the 2022 tournament has come under the spotlight. Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images Fifa will have to consider the future of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar if its record on the treatment of migrant workers does not improve within 12 months, according to the Harvard professor who has authored an independent report commissioned by world football’s governing body into its human rights responsibilities. Fifa has come under fire over its failure to consider human rights issues in host countries including Brazil, Russia and Qatar and its reluctance to exert its influence to improve the situation. In particular, the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar building the infrastructure to host the 2022 tournament has come under the spotlight following a series of investigations by NGOs and the Guardian. Professor John Ruggie’s report makes 25 explicit recommendations, praising Fifa for making a start in addressing the situation by commissioning the report – but he said it must match its words with action. “The foundational shift for Fifa now is to go beyond putting words on paper and adding new administrative functions,” he concludes. “What is required is a cultural shift that must affect everything Fifa does and how it does it.” Ruggie said that among the immediate priorities must be addressing human rights risks in tournaments that have already been scheduled and following through on promises to include such criteria in the bidding requirements for the 2026 World Cup. The report read: “Fifa should include human rights within its criteria for evaluating bids to host tournaments and should make them a substantive factor in host selection.” Another of the recommendations states: “Fifa should set explicit human rights requirements of Local Organising Committees in bidding documents for tournaments and provide guidance on them.” On Qatar, Ruggie noted that the International Labour Organisation had recently given Qatar 12 months to end migrant worker exploitation or face a formal inquiry by the United Nations. This month an Amnesty report claimed that despite repeated promises of action by the Qatari administration, it found ongoing abuse of migrant workers on a World Cup stadium project and a related development. A labourer pictured in March in accommodation built to house 70,000 workers, some of whom work on World Cup projects. Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images This week the Guardian revealed that two major British firms had been accused of mistreating migrant workers on construction projects not directly related to the World Cup but part of the huge building boom that has characterised the tiny Gulf state’s attempt to vault on to the world stage. “Fifa can’t impose human rights on countries but in return for hosting a tournament there are certain human rights to which you should have to adhere,” Ruggie told the Guardian. “If you can’t, you have to make tough decisions. That may include having to terminate an existing relationship.” Asked specifically about Qatar, he said: “The ILO has recently put out an assessment in which they put off a decision for a year. They didn’t want to shut the door. The next ILO report will be absolutely critical. If it says six to seven years later that no progress has been made then that’s pretty clear.” He added: “I think the ILO was being quite strategic in what they did. My sense is that the Supreme Committee will do everything humanly possible to meet the tests. If it doesn’t, Fifa has a tough decision.” The Supreme Committee, responsible for the World Cup, has introduced minimum standards for its contractors and there has been some progress more widely on living standards for some workers. However, human rights groups claim too little progress has been made on sweeping away the kafala system that bonds labourers to their employer and has been likened to modern slavery. Ruggie also said there were major human rights issues facing the Russia 2018 World Cup. “There is stuff happening in Russia that hasn’t been much written about in terms of forcible removal of people, migrant labour issues, like there was in Sochi [before the 2014 Winter Olympics],” he said. “That should be all part of the conversation.” This stadium in Sochi is due to host matches at the 2018 World Cup. The author of the Fifa-commissioned report, Professor John Ruggie, said there were major human rights issues facing the tournament in Russia. Photograph: TASS/Barcroft Media He raised an alarm about the Under-20 women’s World Cup, which will take place in Papua New Guinea in November and December. “I was shocked by how little interest that had generated within Fifa when we know that multinational organisations will not allow women to go on the streets in broad daylight.” The report adds: “Papua New Guinea is known as one of the world’s worst places for sexual violence against women – and police are often among the perpetrators. This is precisely the kind of case that requires heightened human rights due diligence as part of the bid evaluation process.” With the decision already taken, the report calls on Fifa to prove that adequate security arrangements are being made to address the risks. The report said that it was not enough for Fifa to claim it had limited influence, calling on it to work to maximise its leverage on human rights issues. Ruggie said: “Its leverage concerns the activities involved in hosting and staging a tournaments. It requires the LOCs to get declarations from governments. They all have human rights implications.” Ruggie, a respected expert in the field, who was responsible for drawing up the UN guiding principles on business and human rights during 14 years in senior roles at the organisation, said that Fifa’s human rights responsibilities went beyond those issues related to tournaments. Among others, he mentioned the risks to workers’ rights in Fifa’s own supply chain, alleged trafficking of young players and “endemic” discrimination against women in world football. He also called for Fifa to invest more resource in tackling the issue. “The HQ of Fifa is a surprisingly small entity. The new president has to pump more money into Fifa staff in Zurich, if only to get more eyes and hands monitoring information with regard to their supply chain and so on and so forth. At present, they lack the capacity to do what is required. You can’t just hire a human rights manager and think you’re done.” Fifa recently advertised for a new human rights manager and its head of sustainability, Federico Addiechi, insisted it was now taking the subject seriously. “As the governing body of the most popular sport in the world, we have a responsibility in regard to human rights and in terms of how we go about developing the game of football and organising our competitions,” he said. “Beyond that, Fifa is committed to using its leverage to ensure respect for human rights.” Ruggie added: “Fifa is not solely responsible for solving these problems where the actions of others are the primary cause. But it must use its influence to address these human rights risks as determinedly as it does to pursue its commercial interests.” The new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, said Fifa was “fully committed to respecting human rights” and said the new report would guide the way forward. “This is an ongoing process and of course challenges remain but Fifa is committed to playing its part in ensuring respect for human rights and to being a leader among international sports organisations in this important area,” he said. Ruggie’s report was welcomed by Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation and a trenchant critic of the lack of progress by Qatar on the migrant workers issue. “This report makes clear that Fifa must act decisively. Equally Qatar, which fails massively to meet the standards set out in the report, must ahead of the UN human rights and business forum which it is hosting next week, make a real commitment to comprehensive reform,” she said. “The system of modern slavery for migrant workers, the absolute denial of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, the poverty wages and the deep discrimination encountered by those who are delivering the huge 2022 infrastructure programme is completely out of step with the requirements that Professor Ruggie has highlighted,” added Burrow. “This report represents a major challenge for Fifa and it also gives an opportunity for Qatar to comprehensively reform its medieval labour laws and thus retain the hosting rights to the 2022 World Cup,” she said. Amnesty International UK called on Infantino to take immediate steps to improve conditions for migrant workers in Qatar. “Only concerted Fifa action to prevent abuses on World Cup sites will save the soul of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar,” it said. Balfour Beatty and Interserve accused of migrant worker labour abuses in Qatar © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

(Brussels) – Efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to bring to justice those responsible for Kenya’s deadly 2007-2008 election violence have been marred by what the court previously suggested was systematic interference with witnesses, Human Rights Watch said today. On April 5, 2016, ICC judges vacated crimes against humanity charges against Deputy President William Ruto and a former broadcaster, Joshua arap Sang, ending the last ICC prosecution directly related to the violence. The two judges who formed the majority of the three-judge panel agreed that the prosecution had failed to show sufficient evidence to require the defendants to mount a case. But one judge would have acquitted the defendants, while the other would have declared a mistrial because of the “serious tainting of the trial process by way of witness interference and political intimidation of witnesses.” Given witness interference, however, they both agreed to vacate the charges to leave open the possibility that the ICC prosecutor could bring charges again. The dissenting judge would have allowed the case to continue. The decision may be subject to appeal. “Sadly, this case will be remembered for an apparent campaign to corrupt witnesses,” saidElizabeth Evenson, senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. “Many Kenyans had supported justice for crimes committed during the post-election violence, but those hopes are likely to disintegrate now given the lack of action in Kenya and the seeming obstruction of the process in The Hague.” A previous ICC ruling had suggested that there had been systematic efforts to corrupt witnesses, including through bribery. According to the ICC prosecution, at least 16 of its original 42 witnesses withdrew, most citing threats, intimidation, or fear of reprisals. ICC judges charged Ruto and Sang with crimes against humanity in 2012. Ethnic-based killings and reprisals that often appeared to be meticulously organized, as well as police use of excessive force against protesters, killed at least 1,100 people during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election violence, injured thousands more, and forced as many as 650,000 people from their homes. Officials say there were at least 900 cases of sexual violence, but that is most likely an underestimate. Charges in a parallel ICC case against President Uhuru Kenyatta were officially withdrawn in 2015, and cases against three other Kenyans also failed to go to trial before the ICC. An ICC pretrial chamber issued arrest warrants for three people – Walter Barasa, Paul Gicheru, and Philip Kipkoech Bett – on charges of witness tampering in the Ruto and Sang case. The first warrant, against Barasa, was issued in August 2013. An ICC statement described the case as stemming from an alleged “criminal scheme devised by a circle of officials within the Kenyan administration.” Kenyan authorities have not surrendered the three men to the ICC. A legal challenge to Barasa’s surrender is before the Kenyan Court of Appeals. The trial chamber had admitted into evidence the out-of-court statements of four witnesses who recanted on the stand, after determining that the witnesses had been subjected to interference, as well as the statements of a fifth witness who disappeared. But the appeals chamber ruled that use of the evidence in the case was incompatible with fair trial rights. A man claimed by Ruto’s defense as a witness was apparently murdered in late December 2014 or early January 2015. Kenyan authorities have not made any results of investigations into his death public. “People who stepped forward to testify in this case put themselves at risk, while bribery and threats interfered with the search for the truth,” Evenson said. “Barasa, Bett, and Gicheru should be surrendered to the ICC but the allegations against them may only be the tip of the iceberg.” The Kenyatta administration has pursued an intense campaign to undermine the ICC, lobbying the African Union and other regional groups, the United Nations Security Council, and the ICC Assembly of States Parties. Kenya’s leaders failed to prevent and even encouraged hostility toward human rights activists pushing for justice for the post-election violence. The government, for example, did not address hate messages circulated online against activists, even though the identities of some of those behind the blogs were known to authorities. ICC judges are still to decide whether Kenya breached its obligations as an ICC member country by withholding Kenyatta’s financial and other records in the case against him. Even with the closure of this case, pending any appeal, the ICC’s jurisdiction regarding the post-election violence will remain in place. The absence of convictions before the ICC continues a cycle of impunity in Kenya. Those responsible for political violence in Kenya in 1992 and 1997 escaped justice, and Kenyan authorities broke their promises to hold to account in national trials those responsible for the 2007-2008 post-election violence. Kenyan security forces continue to be implicated in extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances, and arbitrary detention. Impunity remains a significant risk factor for future election-related violence, Human Rights Watch said. The next national elections are expected in 2017. “The Kenyan government set out to undermine the ICC while it turned its back on its responsibilities to provide justice and to stop threats against witnesses and human rights defenders,” Evenson said. “While Ruto and his supporters may celebrate the ICC decision, the victims who have already suffered so much may well now end up without justice or the help they need.” A total of 954 victims were registered to participate in the ICC case against Ruto and Sang, while 839 victims participated in the ICC case against Kenyatta. Hundreds of women and girls who were raped during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election violence struggle with devastating physical and psychological health conditions, poverty, and social exclusion. Children born of rape also face special challenges including stigmatization and verbal and physical abuse. In March 2015, President Kenyatta announced a fund of 10 billion Kenyan shillings (US$9.8 million) to provide “restorative justice” for victims, but a year later, no money has been released from the fund. While this fund should not be used in place of criminal accountability, the initiative could be a crucial opportunity for victims of the post-election violence, including rape and sexual violence victims, many of whom still have urgent medical needs. The government should follow through with the promise of reparations, provide services, and fully acknowledge victims of sexual violence and ensure that they are consulted in the design of the reparations process. The process should be in line with international good standards and practice, Human Rights Watch said. The ICC should continue to draw lessons from its work in Kenya. The court appears to have been unprepared to deal adequately with witness protection needs arising out of the Kenya situation. The ICC registry is restructuring witness protection mechanisms. And the ICC prosecution reported that the challenges it encountered in its Kenya investigations have prompted strategy changes. “The ICC was set up to try just these kinds of cases, but it faces many of the same obstacles national investigations confront in cracking entrenched impunity, especially when politically powerful people are involved,” Evenson said. “Stronger investigations, stepped-up witness protection programs, and more consistent international support are the key to doing better for other victims.” © 2016 Human Rights Watch

Image: Missile test, retrieved from Bloomberg article. A top Treasury Department official argued against imposing new legislative sanctions on Iran after its ballistic missile tests last month, even as he said the Islamic Republic would remain blocked from the U.S. financial system. “New mandatory non-nuclear sanctions legislation would needlessly risk undermining our unity with international partners,” Adam Szubin, Treasury’s acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said at a conference Wednesday in Washington. “It is important to make sure our sanctions tools remain effective and are not overused.” Republicans in Congress are still simmering over the nuclear accord with Iran that was completed last July and have criticized President Barack Obama for failing to punish the country for repeatedly defying a United Nations ballistic missile test ban. Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mark Kirk of Illinois have introduced legislation to bar Iran from access to the U.S. financial system, including offshore U.S. dollar-clearing houses. The U.S. already has the ability to impose new sanctions on individuals and entities for ballistic missile violations, Szubin said, citing restrictions placed on 11 people after the nuclear accord was reached last year. Iran has denied the missile tests are violations, in part because the accord with the U.S. and five other world powers guarantees that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapons capability. Elusive Benefits While U.S. critics of the nuclear agreement said it would provide Iran with a windfall, the country’s leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have complained that the benefits of sanctions relief remain elusive. European banks have been reluctant to establish lines of credit or finance investment in Iran due to concerns about the lack of transparency in the Iranian financial system and a fear of renewed U.S. sanctions. Szubin said Treasury had seen “indications that some non-U.S. banks lack an understanding about the scope of U.S. sanctions with regard to Iranian funds that were formerly restrained.” As part of the accord reached last year, Iran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in return for removal of nuclear-related sanctions, including unblocking access to as much as $100 billion in assets frozen in international banks outside Iran. “We are in no way blocking Iran’s access to these funds,” Szubin said at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies conference. “We are not encouraging banks or other partners to do so.” However, the U.S. won’t provide Iran access to the U.S. financial system, Szubin said, and there will be no restoration of the “U-turn’’ authorization, ­where transactions priced in U.S. dollars are cleared through a U.S. financial institution even though the money doesn’t stay in the U.S. bank. Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew have previously denied published reports that the administration would give businesses wanting to operate in Iran such access to U.S. dollars. In a news conference April 1, Obama said Iran, while keeping to the letter of the nuclear deal, was violating its “spirit” through its recent missile launches and other actions. Iran must send “signals to the world community and businesses that it is not going to be engaging in a range of provocative actions that might scare business off,” Obama said. ©2016 Bloomberg L.P.

For the full voice podcast please visit the Federalist Society. After much prodding from human rights advocates and congressional committees, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the Obama administration considers ISIS guilty of “genocide.” Why did it take them so long? The Obama administration may believe the rationale that Christian purges are mitigated by the ISIS offer of historic jizya (dhimmi tax) compliance from religious objectors. But field reports reveal that, under ISIS, the jizya option has been categorically rejected. What does the genocide designation do for targeted religious groups? Does it matter that particular religious groups are described by this designation? Should we now expect a very different policy in the Middle East? Featuring: Prof. Julian Ku, Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law, Faculty Director of International Programs and Hofstra Research Fellow, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University Nina Shea, Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, President, Genocide Watch Moderator: Prof. Jeremy Rabkin, Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law

The Yida refugee camp, near the northernmost point in Unity State (South Sudan), has for over four years been the home of tens of thousands of people from South Kordofan—overwhelmingly from the Nuba tribes that make up the Nuba people. The camp has been controversial for various reasons, and against the wishes of many humanitarians, the UN High Commission for Refugees has decided to compel the movement of people from Yida camp to other locations. Radio Dabanga reported yesterday: The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in South Sudan has started the registration procedures for the moving of refugees who have fled from South Kordofan’s Nuba Mountains. The 70,000 Sudanese have been residing in Yida camp, just over the border, since 2011. The UNHCR plans to move a large part of the refugee population to a camp in Pamir, 10 kilometres from the border between Sudan and South Sudan. The registration process began on the first of February and will last until June, when the agency plans to close Yida. (April 8, 2016 [Yida refugee camp], Radio Dabanga) The implications of this move—which is quite against the will of the camp residents—are extraordinary. I have received notes from the field, originating with a humanitarian worker intimately familiar with the prevailing circumstances in Yida, as well as its history. My source emphasizes that UNHCR is “failing to fulfill its primary purpose ‘to safeguard the rights and well being of refugees’ in South Sudan.” Primary evidence is conspicuous: Though UNHCR and the Government of South Sudan have made assurances that no one will be forced to leave, they have stated that all services currently being provided in Yida refugee camp—including nutrition and water—will end as of 30 June 2016. Denying food and water to refugees that the UNHCR has long made clear it wishes to re-locate is tantamount to forced relocation. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous in the extreme. The Nuba people in Yida can hardly be expected to return to South Kordofan and the Nuba Mountains—not at a time when the Khartoum regime is expanding its massive, multi-pronged military offensive through much of the region. Khartoum has made its contempt for these people fully clear with its deliberate bombing of the camp (and other refugee camps in the Mabaan area of Upper Nile, South Sudan)—this in November 2011. One bomb, which failed to detonate, landed on the very edge of a rudimentary school in Yida camp. What justification does UNHCR give for compelling the movement of refugees? One is that Yida is too close to the Sudan/South Sudan border. But one of the alternative camps—Ajuong Thok—is only a little more than a mile further from the border: insignificant if the issue is protection of refugees from assaults by Khartoum’s forces. Moreover, both Ajuong Thok and Pamir (another new camp location) are actually closer to armed groups—not only those of the Khartoum’s Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), but to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/In Opposition (SPLA/IO). In December 2013, as violence exploded throughout South Sudan, insecurity and violence near Ajuong Thok increased. UNHCR would also have us believe that “the layout of Yida is not in compliance with health and access standards of UNCHR.” But as my humanitarian source on the ground reports: Due to thousands of refugees arriving in Yida in 2011, a spontaneous settlement emerged of people seeking shelter. It is true that the site was not pre-planned, but refusal by UNHCR to recognize Yida as a refugee camp and make appropriate preparations resulted in a critical opportunity being missed to resolve this problem in the early stages. However, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been able to provide assistance throughout the camp and refugees have been able to access necessary services without difficulty. My source also reports that UNHCR has objected to continuing the Yida camp because it lacks educational facilities and programs, something of great value to the people of the Nuba Mountains. But here again, UNHCR itself is responsible: UNHCR did not allow education to be provided in Yida and has withheld formal learning opportunities for youth in the camp for four years now. Furthermore, UNHCR has used education as bait to manipulate refugees into relocating to other refugee camps, creating protection concerns as unaccompanied minors have been forced to leave their families to attend school. Nor is moving to Ajuong Thok an adequate alternative for educational purposes: While Ajuong Thok does offer educational programs, there are not enough classrooms or teachers for the current number of school-aged youth residing in the camp. Many people in Ajuong Thok complain about the educational facilities and programs, stating the classrooms are so full that students are not able to see the teacher, impacting their ability to learn the material being presented. Further, the already full classrooms in Ajuong Thok do not take into account the thousands more youth that would need to be enrolled in the schools once Yida closes. UNHCR also claims that Yida residents have “limited agricultural opportunities for the refugees, making them entirely dependent on foreign aid”: The claim that refugees in Yida are not able to farm is also inaccurate, as the host community has given plots of land to refugees for agricultural activities. Land has also been allocated in Ajuong Thok for refugees to use for planting and harvesting. However, due to insecurity issued and tensions between the host and refugee communities, the refugee population in Ajuong Thok does not feel safe utilizing the land. Even if refugees are compelled to move from Yida to new camps, there is inadequate capacity. UNHCR and GOSS have stated that individuals residing in Yida camp who are willing to relocate will be transferred to Ajuong Thok and Pamir refugee camps. Ajuong Thok was initially designed to host a population of 20,000 and was recently expanded to hold a total of 40,000 people. However, the current population of Ajuong Thok has already reached 33,469, meaning the site only has the capacity to accommodate an additional 6,500 individuals. Once Ajuong Thok reaches capacity, the remaining people will be transferred to Pamir refugee camp. According to UNHCR, Pamir will have the capacity to accommodate 20,000 people by June 30, though the camp has not yet been completed. If the entire population of Yida (70,000 people) agreed to relocate to Ajuong Thok and Pamir camps prior to June 30, as requested by UNHCR and GOSS, the proposed sites would not be able to fully support and accommodate all of the individuals being transferred, as the two camps will only have the capacity to hold a total of 26,500 people collectively, leaving 43,500 people without a place to access essential services. Further, Pamir camp has not yet been completed. While UNHCR has indicated that three of four boreholes have been drilled and 14 kilometers of road has been completed within the camp, the health and educational facilities are currently in the initial stages of construction. To move a large population of more than 70,000 people without adequate services, including safe water, health facilities, and schools, would only create a humanitarian emergency among the refugee population and the host community. Finally, the refugee population of Yida has serious concerns about security: Despite the reality that Ajuong Thok and Pamir will likely not have the capacity to host the entire population of Yida by June 30, there are also many security concerns with relocating refugees to those locations. In Ajuong Thok, numerous cases of gender-based violence have been reported when women go to gather firewood. In addition, tensions between the host and refugee communities are very high, and refugees in Ajuong Thok do not feel they can move freely outside of the camp. Further, the refugees strongly believe Ajuong Thok and Pamir camps are [highly] insecure due to their close proximity to Liri, a nearby location to the north of both sites with a presence of SAF forces and nomadic Arab tribes believed to be hired by the Government of Sudan to attack people from the Nuba Mountains. Pamir is also located near a river that has traditionally been used by Falata herders, along with other nomadic tribes, during the dry season. The Falata have a history of violence, allegedly clashing with both the host community and government forces in the area recently. Additionally, Pamir is closer to locations of both the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the SPLA-IO, which creates a potential for insecurity should fighting resume between the two forces. Not only are there various armed groups located close to the proposed relocation sites, the road that leads to Pamir refugee camp branches off and heads straight to Sudan, giving direct access to SAF forces and nomadic Arab groups, both of which are the very groups the refugees fled from [because of] targeted killings of the Nuba people. Already, Sudanese Arabs have been seen traveling along this road coming from Sudan. Because of these security concerns, refugees in Yida have clearly stated that they do not feel safe relocating to Ajuong Thok or Pamir, and would rather return to their homeland of the Nuba Mountains. Unconfirmed reports indicate some people have already left to go back to the Nuba Mountains, choosing to return to the war zone they fled rather than move to the insecurity they perceive in Ajuong Thok and Pamir. Given the extraordinary efforts by UNHCR to respond to the refugee crisis generate by those fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq, Sudanese refugees seem to be the beneficiaries of only mediocre efforts, and indeed actual malfeasance. Misrepresentation of the situation in Yida has been ongoing for over four years; for UNHCR to act on these misrepresentations is a betrayal of the High Commission’s primary mandate. And Eastern Chad— Notably, the situation in eastern Chad—where some 350,000* Sudanese refugees from Darfur continue to live in wretched circumstances, some for thirteen years—also disgraces not only UNHCR, but the UN’s World Food Program and the UN generally. These people have essentially been abandoned, face growing hostility from the Déby regime in N’Djamena and declining food deliveries. Last August WFP announced that it had no budget in 2016 for the Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad. UNHCR shared in the announcement and has not updated its “2015 UNHCR country operations profile – Chad,” which indicates almost 380,000 Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad. We are over three months into 2016. More recently, WFP has tried to offer a somewhat more accurate view of the crisis, but it is far from encouraging. A suspicious “re-calculation” of the number of refugees (from all countries) is used to justify a further cut (of 29 percent) in food rations—rations that interviewees make clear in the WFP dispatch are grossly inadequate: FARCHANA – It has been more than 11 years since Hawaya Yaya Ismail arrived with her husband and two young daughters at the Farchana refugee camp in eastern Chad… The rations she receives are not enough, says Hawaya. “This food will only last 5 or 6 days, not a full month,” she states as she removes dust from the grains of sorghum. She must set aside one-third of the grain to serve as payment to another refugee, the price of using his mill to grind her sorghum grain into flour. Funding shortfalls forced WFP in 2013 to begin reducing the level of food assistance distributed in the refugee camps scattered along Chad’s border with Sudan. Currently, each refugee receives only about 39 percent of the generally recommended minimum daily intake of 2,100 calories. (January 6, 2016) And various reports from the border region between Chad and Darfur indicate that many in and near camps are not even receiving this amount of food—39 percent of the minimum daily recommended calorie intake. This ensures widespread stunting among refugee children, especially those who have grown up on such meager rations. This is unconscionable. And the question becomes inevitable: why are African refugees of less concern than the well-publicized refugees from Arab countries? Ultimately, we are asking about the politics of the UN and the African Union. Answers are not flattering. ******* [* This figure represents an estimate based on recent reports of returning refugees as well as UNHCR’s figure for 2015: almost 380,000. It is unclear why refugees are returning to Darfur, given the extreme levels of insecurity that continue to prevail; it may be a desperate effort to secure agricultural land despite the extremely great risks. © 2016 · Eric Reeves

Despite a growing repudiation of the death penalty by governments around the world, at least 1,634 people were executed last year, the highest total in a quarter-century, Amnesty International said Wednesday in its annual report on capital punishment. The deaths represent more than a 50 percent increase over the 1,061 recorded in 2014 by Amnesty, a London-based rights group that has made abolition of the death penalty one of its signature causes. The group said almost 90 percent of the 2015 executions were carried out in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which have repeatedly ignored pleas by rights groups to abandon capital punishment. In Iran and Saudi Arabia, many of the executions were for nonlethal crimes. Amnesty said drug-trafficking offenses were the main reason for executions in Iran. The group said other reasons cited by countries that practice capital punishment included adultery, blasphemy, corruption, kidnapping and “questioning the leader’s policies.” As it had done in previous years, Amnesty did not count executions in China, which the group said resorted to the death penalty more than any other country. The true extent of capital punishment there is unclear because the data is considered a state secret, but the report said executions were believed to be in the thousands. “The rise in executions last year is profoundly disturbing,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty’s secretary general. “Not for the last 25 years have so many people been put to death by states around the world.” At least six countries that had not put anyone to death in 2014 did so last year, including Chad, where executions resumed for the first time in more than a decade. The increase in executions came amid some trends in the opposite direction. Fiji, Madagascar, Republic of Congo and Suriname outlawed the death penalty. Mongolia passed a new criminal code that will abolish the death penalty this year. For the first time, a majority of the world’s countries — 102 of 195 — have abolished what Mr. Shetty called “this most horrendous of punishments.” In the United States, the only country in the Americas to execute people for the seventh consecutive year, 28 people were put to death, the lowest total since 1991, and the number of death sentences, 52, was the lowest since 1977. The Amnesty report followed news last week from another British rights group, Reprieve, that more than 80 people had been beheaded this year in Saudi Arabia, putting the kingdom on course to decapitate twice as many condemned prisoners as it did last year. ______________ A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2016, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Executions Worldwide Reach a 25-Year High. © 2016 The New York Times Company

BRUSSELS — Yves Goldstein makes no excuses for Belgium’s failure to find Salah Abdeslam and the other Islamic State recruits who attacked Paris and then bombed Brussels Airport and a subway station. The problem is not Islam, he insists, but the negligence of government officials like himself in allowing self-contained ethnic ghettos to grow unchallenged, breeding anger, crime and radicalism among youth — a soup of grievances that suits Islamist recruiters. “Our cities are facing a huge problem, maybe the largest since World War II,” Mr. Goldstein said. “How is it that people who were born here in Brussels, in Paris, can call heroes the people who commit violence and terror? That is the real question we’re facing.” Friends who teach the equivalent of high school seniors in the predominantly Muslim districts of Molenbeek and Schaerbeek told him that “90 percent of their students, 17, 18 years old, called them heroes,” he said. Mr. Goldstein, 38, grew up in Schaerbeek, the child of Jewish refugees from Nazism. Now a councilman from Schaerbeek, he is also chief of staff for the minister-president of the Brussels Capital Region. Schaerbeek is almost as infamous these days as Molenbeek, two districts where Mr. Abdeslam and his group of Islamic State adherents had the space and time to live, hide and manufacture their weapons. Adjacent to Molenbeek, Schaerbeek is richer, tidier and more mixed. Jacques Brel lived here for a time, so did René Magritte. It has a young, affluent section, which some compare to Notting Hill in London, and a large Turkish population. The townhouse where preparations were made for the Paris attacks and where Mr. Abdeslam sought refuge for weeks is in the Turkish area, which is more well-to-do, and a better place to hide. Belgium Releases Video of Terror Suspect The Federal Police released additional footage on Thursday of the man believed to be the third attacker at Brussels Airport, often referred to as the man in the hat. By FEDPOL BELGIUM, VIA YOUTUBE on Publish DateApril 7, 2016. Photo by Olivier Hoslet/European Pressphoto Agency. Brussels itself is about 25 percent Muslim — 70 percent are of Moroccan heritage and 20 percent Turkish, and the ethnic groups tend to stick to themselves, making them difficult for outsiders, like the police, to penetrate. Belgium’s integration has been somewhere between the French model, which put new immigrants in suburban ghettos, and the British and American one, which created communities like Chinatown or Little Italy, Mr. Goldstein said. “In Brussels, everyone lives in the city, and we chose a model of diversity through mixing of populations in the same neighborhoods.” But “we failed,” he said. “We failed in Molenbeek” and Schaerbeek, too, to ensure the mixing of populations. “We have neighborhoods where people only see the same people, go to school with the same people,” he said. “What connection do they have with the whole society, what connection do they have with real diversity? It’s the establishment of the ghetto,” he said, “and it’s the thing in our urban development that we have to tackle.” Jews have left Schaerbeek, and the last two synagogues are being sold. Instead, there is a kind of suffocating, insular, ethnic uniformity. “These young people will never go to museums until 18 or 20 — they never saw Chagall, they never saw Dalí, they never saw Warhol, they don’t know what it is to dream,” Mr. Goldstein said. Of course there is poverty and unemployment, he said. “But we don’t give these young people the keys to think differently, to think outside the little box, the little neighborhood where they live — this ideological box, this closed-eyes box.” As for the terrorists, “religion for them is a pretext,” he said. “They believe in nothing. But Islam is the way they find to express, to crystallize their radicalization.” Young people whose parents or grandparents were immigrants face serious questions of identity, Mr. Goldstein acknowledged, speaking during and after a conference here of the German Marshall Fund. “But identity is a two-sided relation” — between young Muslims and ourselves. “We have to fight racism and discrimination with the same force” as radicalization, he said, because “our society gives to these young people a bad idea of who and what they are.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Some half a million people have been killed in Syria’s civil war. An additional five million have fled, emptying the country. CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes. He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war. In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison. Upstairs, in a room secured by a metal door, detailed maps of Syrian villages cover the walls, and the roles of various suspects in the Syrian government are listed on a whiteboard. Witness statements and translated documents fill dozens of binders, which are locked in a fireproof safe at night. Engels, who is forty-one, bald and athletic, with a precise, discreet manner, oversees the operation; analysts and translators report directly to him. The commission’s work recently culminated in a four-hundred-page legal brief that links the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coördinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported the successes of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. The brief narrates daily events in Syria through the eyes of Assad and his associates and their victims, and offers a record of state-sponsored torture that is almost unimaginable in its scope and its cruelty. Such acts had been reported by survivors in Syria before, but they had never been traced back to signed orders. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone before serving for six years as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, told me that the CIJA’s documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.” The case is the first international war-crimes investigation completed by an independent agency like the CIJA, funded by governments but without a court mandate. The organization’s founder, Bill Wiley, a Canadian war-crimes investigator who has worked on several high-profile international tribunals, had grown frustrated with the geopolitical red tape that often shapes the pursuit of justice. Because the process of collecting evidence and organizing it into cases is purely operational, he reasoned that it could be done before the political will exists to prosecute the case. Only the U.N. Security Council can refer the crisis in Syria to the International Criminal Court; in May, 2014, Russia and China blocked a draft resolution that would have granted the court jurisdiction over war crimes committed by all sides of the conflict. Nevertheless, Wiley told me, the commission has also identified a number of “quite serious perpetrators, drawn from the security-intelligence services,” who have entered Europe. “The CIJA is very much committed to assisting domestic authorities with prosecutions.” Counting Syria’s dead has become nearly impossible—the U.N. stopped trying more than two years ago—but groups monitoring the conflict have estimated the number to be almost half a million, with the pace of killing accelerating each year. The war has emptied out the country, with some five million Syrians escaping to neighboring countries and to Europe, straining the capacities of even those countries which are willing to provide asylum and humanitarian aid. The chaos has also played a fundamental role in the rise of ISIS, the bloodiest of the jihadi groups that have used Syria as a staging ground to expand the reach of terrorism. Last fall, Wiley invited me to examine the commission’s case at its headquarters, on the condition that I not reveal the office’s location, the governments assisting with document extraction, or, with few exceptions, the names of his staff. THE INSURRECTION In December, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old fruit seller in rural Tunisia, fed up with a life of harassment and extortion by venal government officials, doused himself in paint thinner, struck a match, and unwittingly ignited the Arab Spring. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in the Middle East and in North Africa, sharing his rage and despair, rose up against an assortment of autocrats and kings. They demanded democratic reforms, economic opportunities, and an end to corruption. In late January, 2011, Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal, “What you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease.” Syria remained stable, a fact that Assad attributed to his attention to the “beliefs of the people.” He added, “This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.” In fact, Assad’s confidence was likely rooted in the proficiency of Syria’s security-intelligence apparatus, which had kept his family in power since 1971. Other autocrats in the region placed similar trust in their own security forces. Then Egypt’s dictatorship collapsed, and the U.N. Security Council voted to refer the situation in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi had ruled for forty-two years, to the International Criminal Court. In March, NATO forces launched a bombing campaign in Libya. In Syria, people began calling for concessions by the government—timidly, at first. The country had spent forty-eight years under martial law, and the notion of public demonstration was unfamiliar. The protests were met with tear gas and bullets, but were soon attracting tens of thousands of people. On March 30, 2011, Assad addressed the nation from the rotunda of the Syrian parliament building. He had just sacked his cabinet, and many people expected him to announce liberalizing reforms. Instead, he declared his intention to suppress dissent in the brutal tradition of his father, Hafez al-Assad. “Syria is facing a great conspiracy, whose tentacles extend” to foreign powers that were plotting to destroy the country, he said. “There is no conspiracy theory,” he added. “There is a conspiracy.” He closed with an ominous directive: “Burying sedition is a national, moral, and religious duty, and all those who can contribute to burying it and do not are part of it.” He emphasized, “There is no compromise or middle way in this.” Two days later, protests across the country grew larger. Assad had already formed a secret security committee, called the Central Crisis Management Cell, to coördinate a crackdown. Its chairman was Mohammad Said Bekheitan, the highest-ranking official in the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the other members—who were all Assad-dynasty confidants—were routinely shuffled among the top positions in the military, the ministries, and the security-intelligence apparatus. Every night, the Crisis Cell met in a drab office on the first floor of the Baath Party Regional Command, in central Damascus, and discussed strategies for crushing dissent. This required detailed information about each protest, so the cell requested reports from security committees and intelligence agents in the most rebellious provinces. The group decided to hire someone to process all the paperwork. One of the applicants was Abdelmajid Barakat, a twenty-four-year-old with slicked-back hair. Barakat, who had recently finished a master’s degree in international relations, was working for the education ministry. At his interview, in April, a high-level official named Salaheddine al-Naimi examined his résumé and asked whether he could use a computer. Next, Naimi asked how he would resolve the developing crisis. Barakat replied that, in order to avoid an armed response, the government should make some concessions and enact moderate reforms. Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends were involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest, he had joined one of Syria’s first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in the regime’s haste to make the Crisis Cell more efficient, it was employing a member of the opposition to process confidential security memos from all over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages arrived at Barakat’s desk, cataloguing the minutiae of perceived threats to Assad’s rule—graffiti, Facebook posts, protests—and, eventually, actual threats, like the existence of armed groups. Barakat read everything and drafted summaries, which Naimi delivered to the members of the Crisis Cell to guide each meeting. Barakat was never allowed into the meeting room, but he saw the members walk in, and Naimi kept detailed minutes on Baath Party letterhead. Occasional guests of the group included high-ranking Baathist officials, Syria’s Vice-President, and Assad’s younger brother, Maher, a short-tempered military commander, whom the European Union identified in a sanctions list as the “principal overseer of violence against demonstrators.” At the end of each meeting, the Crisis Cell agreed on a plan for every security issue. Then Bekheitan, the chairman, signed the minutes, and a courier delivered them to Assad at the Presidential palace. Barakat learned that Assad reviewed the proposals, signed them, and returned them to the Crisis Cell for implementation. Sometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new ones. He also issued decrees without consulting the Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made without Assad’s approval. Shortly after Barakat began working for the Crisis Cell, he started leaking documents. Though the regime publicly claimed that it was allowing peaceful demonstrations, security memos showed that intelligence agents were targeting protesters and media activists, and shooting at them indiscriminately. Barakat photographed the memos in the bathroom, and sent the pictures to contacts in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded them to Arabic news organizations. His plan was to steal as much information as possible and then leave the country. But each leak heightened suspicion within the office, increasing the chances that, sooner or later, the regime would discover that he was the mole. THE INVESTIGATORS One day in October, 2011, while Bill Wiley was visiting a Libyan exile in Niger, he received a phone call from a friend, relaying a request from the British government: as the crisis in Syria spiralled into civil war, it was looking for someone to train activists to document human-rights violations. Wiley told the caller that plenty of groups were already cataloguing the abuses. But he had a counter-proposal: he could train Syrians to collect the type of evidence that would better serve a prosecution, tracing criminal culpability up as high as it went. It was a novel approach—instead of raising awareness of crimes, he intended to pin them on state actors, whether or not the international community sanctioned the investigation. The British government approved of the idea. Wiley’s career had intersected with a resurgence of the field of international criminal law; since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, there had been no major international investigations until the atrocities in the Balkans, in the nineteen-nineties, led to the Yugoslavia tribunal. Wiley, who had completed a Ph.D. in international criminal law at York University while serving in the Canadian Army—he wrote his dissertation on war crimes and the evolution of international humanitarian law—became an analyst at the tribunal. In 2002, he travelled to Kigali to investigate war crimes in Rwanda, and the following year he moved to the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he was the first investigator retained by the International Criminal Court. Wiley, who considers himself “a field guy, not an office guy,” is tall, with reddish-blond hair, and handles the considerable stress of his profession with Cuban cigarillos, gallows humor, and exercise. (At the age of fifty-two, he bench-presses more than three hundred and fifty pounds.) While working for the I.C.C., he came to believe that the international court system was often afflicted by upper-management “incompetence.” Since its launch, in 2002, the I.C.C. has opened nine investigations, spent more than a billion dollars, and secured convictions against three men: two warlords and a former politician, all from Congo. After two years, Wiley became disillusioned, and he applied to become a human-rights monitor for the United Nations, in Iraq. On October 19, 2005, Wiley sat in a hangar at a military base in Amman, Jordan, awaiting transport to Baghdad. A television showed Saddam Hussein in a heated exchange with a judge, insisting that he was still the President of Iraq. It was the former dictator’s first day on trial. “I paid no attention to it whatsoever,” Wiley recalled. The multinational coalition had established a special tribunal, staffed by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, to hold legal proceedings in accordance with international standards. But the Iraqi government replaced judges who seemed sympathetic to the defense, and, days after Saddam’s lawyers appeared in news broadcasts, two of them were assassinated. Chris Engels and Bill Wiley inside the evidence room of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN TAUB In early 2006, the coalition hired Wiley to advise Saddam’s lawyers, whose principal argument was that the court itself was illegal. They regularly boycotted proceedings, leaving Iraq and watching the hearings on television. To Wiley, the trial was “not about Saddam, per se,” but “about sending a signal to a conflict-affected society that, from here on out, this nation will be governed on the basis of the rule of law.” He urged the lawyers to come back to Baghdad and defend their client. Eventually, Saddam’s defense team returned to court, but shortly before the hearings concluded a third lawyer was kidnapped; his bullet-riddled corpse was found the next day. The remaining members of the team blamed the Iraqi government and did not show up for the closing arguments. Wiley drafted Saddam’s defense, and a court-appointed Iraqi lawyer read it out in court. Saddam protested, declaring, “A Canadian wrote this closing argument. I know he’s a spy.” It was clear that the court would convict Saddam, but Wiley argued that his life should be spared. Instead, seven weeks later, at a military base called Camp Justice, Saddam was hanged while Shiite guards taunted him. His body was delivered to the Prime Minister’s residence for display at a party. Wiley stayed in Baghdad for another two years, filing defense motions for former members of Saddam’s regime. An American justice official told me that Wiley’s efforts to bring due process to the tribunal were “practically heroic.” When Wiley left Iraq, in 2008, he launched a private consultancy, called Tsamota, which assists Western governments and U.N. agencies in preventing war crimes in troubled countries by training police, as well as members of the military, security, and intelligence services, to act in accordance with international law. In November, 2011, Wiley travelled to Istanbul with two Tsamota colleagues to train Syrians to collect evidence that would be useful in war-crimes prosecutions. A security consultant whom he knew had selected some young Syrian activists and lawyers, who were invited to recruit trusted friends. Wiley was impressed by their bravery, but he thought that their methods were ineffective. “Their tendency, in those days, was to run around with cameras, video cameras, smartphones, and photograph regime attacks in urban areas, and then put this stuff on YouTube,” he told me. “One of the first things we did was explain to them that, as criminal evidence, it’s basically useless” without corroboration. “You’re running tremendous risks—and, indeed, a lot of young people were getting killed and wounded generating video or visual images—really to no end.” Filming an air strike on a hospital, for example, offers no evidence that the attack was planned by the kinds of high-level officials who draw the interest of the international justice system. “One needs to establish their individual criminal culpability,” Wiley said. Thousands of Syrian government troops had defected by then, joining ragtag brigades of local farmers, students, and hairdressers. Some fighters made their own explosives and launched grenades from giant slingshots. The Syrian Army bombarded what little territory these rebels controlled. Several of the activists attending the training session in Istanbul lived in besieged areas; Wiley and his colleagues taught them to photograph and measure artillery craters, assess angles of impact, collect shell fragments, identify the types of weapon used, and calculate launching points. But, he said, “the big thing we wanted them to focus on was documentation generated by the regime,” which he called “the king or queen of evidence in international criminal proceedings.” After the first few training sessions, Wiley invited Stephen Rapp, at that time the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, to speak to the Syrians, who now numbered in the dozens. The two men had met a decade earlier, while working for the Rwanda tribunal. Over drinks in Istanbul, Wiley and Rapp discussed the prospect of creating a hub to house captured documents that could one day be used in trials. The United Nations had set up a commission of inquiry to investigate human-rights abuses in Syria, but its mandate didn’t extend to prosecutions, and, rather than dealing with documents, the U.N. relied mostly on witness interviews conducted in refugee camps and by Skype. “Almost all the evidence that they’re collecting won’t be available for prosecution,” Rapp told me, because the U.N. promised witnesses indefinite confidentiality, and trials are public. When the activists and the lawyers—now investigators—returned to Syria, Wiley drafted a plan to create the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, and drew up a budget. Although Britain continued its support, finding other donors proved challenging. Western governments allot hundreds of millions of dollars to human-rights projects each year, but Wiley told me that their typical response to his requests for funding was “What you’re proposing to do is something that governments do, or the United Nations does, and the International Criminal Court does.” Eventually, with Rapp’s backing, the CIJA secured three million euros from the European Union. After that, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Canada also pledged consistent funding. CAPTURING THE DOCUMENTS The war was going poorly for Assad. In 2012, the number of high-level defections from the military and from civilian ministries rose dramatically. The defectors joined the Free Syrian Army, a loose organization of rebel groups. They hoped to transform Syria into a democracy, but jihadis started appearing on the battlefields, too. Generally, they proved to be more capable in combat than the Free Syrian Army. Various insurgents captured key crossing points into Turkey, and pushed government troops out of much of northern Syria, including parts of Idlib and Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. By that February, the head of the Central Crisis Management Cell had questioned Barakat about the leaks. Another employee of the Crisis Cell told Barakat that his secretary was spying on him. Barakat decided to escape the country, but not before securing the minutes of the meetings, which were stored in the members’ offices. He also planned to steal correspondence between the Crisis Cell and the Presidential office, the Prime Minister, and the minister of the interior. On a day off, Barakat ransacked the offices, taking as many documents as he could, before driving some two hundred and fifty miles north from Damascus, to the Turkish border. Syrian troops controlled the crossing point. But, with more than a thousand pages taped to his body, Barakat managed to slip through and check into a hotel under a false name before anyone in Damascus realized that he was gone. The next month, once his mother had safely left Syria, Barakat went public. He told Al Jazeera that he wanted the documents to go to the International Criminal Court. Shortly after Barakat fled, the Crisis Cell moved its meetings from the Baath Party Regional Command to the heavily guarded premises of the National Security Bureau. In July, amid rumors of an impending coup, a blast inside the meeting room killed the chairman of the Crisis Cell; the head of the National Security Bureau; the minister of defense; and Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat, who had recently taken over as the deputy minister of defense. (At least two rebel factions claimed credit for the attack, but they offered wildly inconsistent accounts of the logistics behind it.) The next day, a headline in the Times read, “WASHINGTON BEGINS TO PLAN FOR COLLAPSE OF SYRIAN GOVERNMENT.” Then Assad’s Prime Minister defected to the opposition. So did the spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. Even the top general responsible for preventing defections accused the military of “carrying out massacres against our innocent civilian population,” and announced, “I am joining the people’s revolution.” The commission’s Syrian investigators forged alliances with key Free Syrian Army brigades as they gained territory. The rebels initially “had no interest in the documentation,” Wiley said. “They would go in, capture a regime facility. The smartphones would come out. There would be great joy and shouting and firing in the air. They would loot the place, looking for weapons and ammunition, because that’s what they needed. And then they would set the place on fire.” All potential evidence would be destroyed. Wiley says that the commission told the rebels, “Take the documents first, and set them aside until they can be moved out of the country. And make a note—a very simple note—of where the documents were acquired and on what date. Box them up. Seal the boxes to the best of your ability with Saran wrap, or something like that—whatever’s at hand. And then, as those materials move, chart that movement. But don’t tamper with or rifle through the materials,” because in court a defense lawyer could argue that exculpatory evidence had been discarded. Often, Syrian investigators accompanied moderate rebel groups as they attacked security-intelligence buildings, but government forces attempted to destroy any files that they couldn’t bring with them. In the days after a retreat, “there would be relentless shelling” at key sites, the CIJA’s chief investigator, a Syrian, told me. Water pipes would explode, destroying hundreds of thousands of pages before he and his colleagues could enter. Sometimes armed groups would call them to come and collect the files after a firefight ended. “Chain of custody is important, but it’s not a deal breaker,” Wiley said. “It’s not worth getting—Well, people have been killed and wounded moving this stuff.” The first casualty was a courier, shot and wounded in 2012 as he ran toward a smuggling route out of Syria with a suitcase full of documents. Since then, two others have been injured during extractions, and one—the brother of the commission’s deputy chief investigator—was killed in an ambush by Syrian troops. Also in 2012, a courier and his wife came to an unexpected checkpoint outside Aleppo. It was manned by fighters belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadi group that later revealed its affiliation with Al Qaeda. The militants discovered the courier’s documents in the back of his car. They let his wife go, but took him into custody. “They were threatening to put him on trial and execute him as a regime spy,” Wiley told me. “We worked out a deal where he was convicted of something by the Sharia court and the fine was five thousand dollars. So we paid the fine.” Several CIJA investigators have been kidnapped by jihadi groups, but all of them are free today. Radical Islamists pose as great a threat to their work as the regime does. These groups regard Western affiliations, as well as the often unfamiliar concept of international justice, with deep suspicion. And yet, in the pursuit of documents, many investigators made their mission known to rebel commanders with murky connections. “Our people are extremely well trained on what to do if they’re captured,” Wiley told me. “The equipment they have is encrypted and sufficiently sophisticated that anyone going through it would not find any evidence of the work they’re doing.” Only one investigator, a Syrian woman, who was captured more than two years ago, is currently detained by the Syrian regime. Moving documents to the international borders is by far the most dangerous step in the CIJA’s operation. Paper is heavy and incriminating for the carrier; on the other hand, photographs, while more portable, can be difficult to authenticate in court. Bundles of up to fifty pounds typically arrive “in a dizzying array of crappy suitcases” smuggled across borders, Wiley told me, while large loads demand more intricate planning. “Think in terms of a box of paper that sits next to the photocopier,” he explained. “That box has five bricks, each with five hundred pages in it,” weighing a total of about twenty pounds. “And that’s only twenty-five hundred pages. We’ve extracted from Syria approximately six hundred thousand pages”—several tons. “So you need vehicles. Those vehicles need to get through checkpoints. You need to do reconnaissance. You need to know what kind of checkpoints you’re going to run into.” The commission pays rebel groups and couriers for logistical support. “We burn enormous sums of money moving this stuff,” he said. Large extractions often depend on friendly countries to negotiate openings in otherwise sealed borders, so captured documents can remain hidden for months. On one occasion, several thousand pages of evidence were left with an old woman in a remote farmhouse in southern Syria, but the investigator didn’t explain the significance of the files. When winter came, Wiley said, “in fairness, she was cold, so she burned the whole lot of it as fuel.” The commission’s chief investigator told me that in exceptionally hostile areas he and his colleagues hide boxes in caves or bury them in the ground, log the location, and hope to retrieve them months or years from now—whenever the killing stops. Wiley said, “We have enormous quantities of material still in Syria that we’re not moving,” because it’s too dangerous. “Probably up to half a million pages.” As the Syrians collected documents, Wiley hired military and political analysts, investigators, translators, and lawyers in Europe. By 2015, theCIJA’s budget had grown to eight million dollars a year, and its staff to around a hundred and fifty, including employees at the headquarters and at a video-analysis office elsewhere in Europe, in addition to the investigators in the Middle East. The CIJA employs about as many investigators as the International Criminal Court has working on all its cases combined. Many of the documents have come from security-intelligence facilities far from the capital. These pages often refer to decisions made by the Central Crisis Management Cell, but to complete the chain of command the commission needed notes from those meetings. Barakat, who now lives in Istanbul, told me that in 2014 Chris Engels and an analyst visited him to examine his documents from the Crisis Cell. (The CIJA, which doesn’t publicly identify witnesses, refused to acknowledge this.) “They spent three days here, asking me in very great detail about the work I did, details about how the meetings would go,” he said. They also photographed the smuggled papers, and Barakat promised them that he’d supply the originals if the case went to trial. As Barakat and I spoke through a video feed, he lifted up a heap of files, which are usually kept in a secure facility. “These are the meeting minutes for the Central Crisis Management Cell,” he said. He pulled out a page and pointed to the embossed emblem at the top. “As you can see—that little gold hawk? These are the original documents, and they’re signed in green.” The commission began sifting through Barakat’s files, analyzing connections between the Crisis Cell’s decisions and the criminal behavior of security agents in distant provinces. The task of tracking down former regime agents who were willing to explain their roles in the system was simplified by the fact that so many had defected from the government. Analysts for the CIJA found wealthy defectors in the Gulf states, Turkey, and Europe. They also took witness statements in southern Turkey, in a heavily guarded refugee camp called Apaydın, which is wholly populated by former regime officers and their families. (None of them are listed as suspects in the case, which focusses on higher-level officials.) Wiley said of the witnesses, “If I could use a rather cold metaphor—they’re a dime a dozen.” The CIJA preferred to interview victims who remained in Syria and had never spoken to reporters, human-rights groups, or the U.N. commission of inquiry. (A defense lawyer could suggest that, inside crowded refugee camps, testimonies might unfairly converge on a damning narrative.) So the CIJA’s Syrian investigators interviewed roughly two hundred and fifty victims across several provinces, to secure “pattern evidence” showing that crimes had been perpetrated in a systematic manner, in accordance with evidence in the documents. The goal was to draw strong links, through regime documents and testimony by witnesses and victims, between Syrian government policies and their effects on individuals. THE ACTIVIST One afternoon this winter, in a hotel room near Amsterdam, I met a gaunt thirty-eight-year-old Syrian activist named Mazen al-Hamada. The story of Hamada, who is not a CIJA witness—those people’s identities will remain secret unless they are called to testify—offers an opportunity to trace the specific effects of the Syrian regime’s policies on the citizens that it was trying desperately to subdue. Hamada was born in 1977, the youngest of seventeen children in an educated, middle-class family in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor. His siblings grew up to be pharmacists, teachers, and lawyers, and he became a field specialist at Schlumberger, the international oil-services company, which operated in the rich oil fields around Deir Ezzor. Members of Hamada’s family were outspoken critics of the government, and even before the revolution they were routinely followed and periodically arrested. They were especially outraged by the government’s failure to do anything about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. “It was all organized to benefit the élites,” Hamada told me. In 2011, the head of the National Security Bureau wrote a secret memo to the chairman of the Crisis Cell, attributing the scarcity of patriotism in Deir Ezzor to “the corrupt judicial system, long delays in adjudicating lawsuits, nepotism, and the resort to bribery to restore rights.” The security-intelligence agencies in the district were competent, and loyal to Assad. Beginning with the earliest hints of unrest, in February, 2011, the head of Deir Ezzor’s military-intelligence branch, Brigadier General Jameh Jameh, sent instructions to all of his subordinates to “prepare cameras . . . in order to film the participants and instigators so they can be identified and held accountable in the future.” (CIJA investigators later retrieved this order, among many others related to the crackdown, from the military-intelligence headquarters in Deir Ezzor, after it was abandoned.) Deir Ezzor’s security agents carried out even the most trivial orders from their superiors. On February 4th, the head of the National Security Bureau, in Damascus, signed a directive “to investigate, search for, and arrest” whoever had written “Down with Bashar” on a ten-inch water pipe along a remote stretch of highway near Deir Ezzor. The head of political security for the province spent a month investigating the incident, then replied, “We did not have any information about the perpetrators.” On March 18th, there was a soccer match in Deir Ezzor between the home team, Al Foutoua, and Tishreen, from Latakia, the team Assad favored. Hamada lived next to the stadium, and could hear the noise from the spectators. “People in the crowd started chanting for reforms, against the regime,” he recalled. Assad’s team won. The crowd was upset, but Hamada just laughed. He figured that the match was fixed. “As soon as the referee blew the whistle to stop the game, everybody came out to the streets,” he said. It was the first substantial protest in Deir Ezzor. All soccer matches were cancelled for the rest of the season. Through most of March, security-intelligence officials in Deir Ezzor described the unrest in straightforward terms. In a cable to his subordinates throughout the province, Brigadier General Jameh explained that the protests in Syria were influenced by “some Arab countries witnessing youth revolutions calling for change, democracy, freedoms, and reforms aimed at creating job opportunities for young men, improving living standards, and fighting corruption.” But by the end of the month the provincial security chiefs had adopted the language of conspiracy which emanated from Damascus. Hours after Assad gave his televised speech at the parliament building, on March 30th, the members of the Deir Ezzor security committee agreed to consider it “a reference and a pillar in our work,” and most of the group’s future discussions were infused with anxiety over treachery, sedition, foreign infiltration, and “the Zionist American project.” Hamada and his friends were excited by the prospect of revolution, and every Wednesday they began meeting inside the neighborhood mosque, the Othman bin Affan, to organize protests that would take place after Friday prayers. “It was a logistical issue,” he told me. “Everyone went to the mosque on a Friday, everyone came out.” He laughed, and added, “If we could have come out of churches, we would have come out of churches!” According to captured minutes from the Deir Ezzor security committee, its members decided to infiltrate the mosques with Baath Party loyalists, “an average of two hundred comrades per mosque, to deal with any case that incites sedition.” The committee divided each group into three teams: one inside the mosque, one doing “reconnaissance” just outside, and the third on standby. But the plan backfired: the following week, the governor of Deir Ezzor informed the committee that “most of the men who were arrested by the security apparatus were Baathist comrades” who had abandoned the Party to join the protesters. Hamada often videotaped protests as well as the security response. The regime had cut off the Internet in his neighborhood, so he uploaded the videos to YouTube at a relative’s workplace. Some of them ended up in Arabic news broadcasts. To counter such activities, the governor told the security committee, “We should nominate Internet experts among our comrades to deal with hostile Web sites spitting out their venom in the country, such as Facebook.” Even as the committee discussed the importance of showing restraint, the violence escalated. Jameh said that protesters were courting “bloodshed, in preparation for summoning a foreign military intervention,” an outcome that he said he desperately wanted to avoid. Early the next morning, he sent a one-sentence cable to all military-intelligence sections in the province: “You are requested to instruct your agents to strictly refrain from opening fire indiscriminately and killing people.” In May, security in the province rapidly deteriorated. Men armed with bats, pistols, and incendiary bombs burned two police stations, four police cars, and six police motorcycles. Intelligence agents learned that someone had tried to recruit volunteers to detonate a car bomb outside Jameh’s house. The head of the Deir Ezzor political-security branch warned, “There may be a wave of assassinations.” Hamada, who was briefly detained twice, continued to organize protests, but he started spending nights in safe houses with other activists. One of his brothers had been arrested and hadn’t been released. In a meeting with the security committee, Jameh warned that the detentions could be “a double-edged sword,” increasing the number of angry people demanding their family members’ release. In late May, Jameh sent several cables expressing his outrage that interrogators were giving detainees electric shocks, putting out cigarettes on their flesh, beating them “on all parts of the body, in a disgusting manner,” and sodomizing them by forcing them to sit on soda bottles. He said that his jail would “refuse to take custody” of torture victims “unless there is a written report about the detainee’s health condition . . . that includes the names of those responsible for beating him.” Jameh’s scruples apparently waned in the summer of 2011. Evidence obtained by the CIJA shows that detainees at his military-intelligence branch were beaten with fists, cables, and sticks until they were unconscious, their bones were broken, and their teeth fell out; stuffed into car tires and beaten until their feet bled; given electric shocks after having water poured on them; abused until they urinated blood; and beaten to death. Jameh personally participated in many of the interrogations. THE ORDERS On the evening of August 5, 2011, the Central Crisis Management Cell held its usual meeting at the Baath Party Regional Command. In five months of revolution, the protests had spread to several more provinces, which members of the committee attributed to “the laxness in handling the crisis,” according to documents captured by the CIJA. They blamed “weak coördination and coöperation among security bodies.” That evening, they devised a plan to target specific categories of people. First, all security branches were to launch daily raids against protest organizers and “those who tarnish the image of Syria in foreign media.” Next, “once each sector has been cleansed of wanted people,” security agents would coördinate with Baathist loyalists, neighborhood militias, and community leaders to insure that opposition activists could not return to those areas. Third, they would “establish a joint investigation committee at the province level,” made up of representatives from all of the security branches, which would interrogate detainees. The results “shall be sent to all security branches, so that they can be used in the identification of new targets that need to be prosecuted.” This policy became the linchpin of the CIJA’s case against officials in the Syrian regime. Between Barakat’s documents from Damascus and the commission’s own six hundred thousand pages, retrieved from all over the country, analysts in Europe were able to trace the dissemination of these orders down multiple parallel chains of command from the Crisis Cell. Hisham Ikhtyar, the head of the National Security Bureau, sent the instructions to regional secretaries of the Baath Party, who chaired each province’s security committee, with additional orders to “implement what is requested of you, so as to speed up putting an end to the crisis.” The heads of the four security-intelligence agencies—military intelligence, Air Force intelligence, political security, and the general-intelligence directorate—sent the instructions to the provincial and regional branch heads, who passed them on to local security agents. Members of the Crisis Cell travelled to problematic provinces to oversee the formation of joint investigation committees. For the CIJA, identifying suspects was easy, Wiley said, because “their names are all over those documents.” “If those are orders that are sent down, but no one acts on them, then it doesn’t really tell us much,” Chris Engels told me. “So it was equally important for us to see reports coming back up the chain of command,” confirming that those categories of people had been targeted for detention and interrogation, and that the leadership in Damascus remained informed of the abuses in detention facilities. “A consistent failure to control one’s subordinates who are behaving in a criminal manner will be prosecuted,” Wiley said. “The law of command and superior responsibility is extremely well evolved.” The Crisis Cell even demanded lists of all arrestees. Some members of the provincial security committees took preëmptive steps to satisfy their superiors. A copy of the Crisis Cell’s instructions was found in Raqqa with a handwritten note: “We did that a long time ago.” Under international law, governments are obligated to investigate reports of human-rights abuses. In September, the public attorney in Deir Ezzor sent three faxes—later retrieved by the CIJA’s investigators—to the governor, the Syrian minister of justice, and the head of the province’s joint investigation committee, urging them to stop violating Syrian law. In one, he wrote, “Parents and relatives of the arrested persons are asking daily about the fates of sons, fathers, and brothers. You ought to listen to what they have to say. The hospital refrigerator is full of unidentified corpses that have disintegrated, since they have been there for a long period of time.” DETENTION Mazen al-Hamada’s name soon appeared on an arrest list in Deir Ezzor. Two of his brothers were also wanted, as was one of his brothers-in-law. One day in March, 2012, a doctor asked Hamada if he would smuggle baby formula to a woman in Darayya, a rebellious suburb of Damascus. He and his nephews gathered fifty-five packages of formula, hid them under their clothes, and travelled to meet her at a café. As soon as Hamada handed over the bags, security agents handcuffed him and his nephews, pulled their shirts over their heads, and shoved them into an S.U.V. “I had no idea where we were going,” Hamada said. “The whole way, they were telling us, ‘We’re going to execute you.’ ” After they were stripped to their underwear, beaten, and thrown in a holding cell, about twelve feet square, with some forty other detainees, they learned that they were in the Air Force-intelligence branch at al-Mezzeh Military Airport, one of the most notorious detention facilities in the country. Two weeks later, the prisoners were put in a small hangar, a little more than forty feet long and twenty feet wide. A hundred and seventy people were packed inside, their arms wrapped around their legs, chins on their knees. “You’re rotting,” Hamada told me. “There’s no air, there’s no sunlight. Your nails are really long, because you can’t cut them. So when you scratch yourself you tear your skin off.” The prisoners weren’t able to wash themselves or to change their underwear. The sores of scabies and other skin ailments covered their bodies. Throughout the country, detainees routinely drank water out of toilets and died from starvation, suffocation, and disease. “People went crazy,” Hamada said. “People would lose their memories, people would lose their minds.” Eventually, he was transferred to a solitary-confinement cell, which he shared with ten people. One day, Hamada was blindfolded and dragged to another room for questioning. The lead interrogator, whom Hamada knew as Suhail, began by establishing Hamada’s identity. (Some people were detained and tortured by accident; their names were similar to those on wanted lists.) When Suhail asked for information about other opposition activists he had met in Damascus, Hamada hesitated. The torture began. “At the beginning, they were using cigarettes,” he said. “They would stub them out on my legs.” He rolled up his jeans to the knee and showed me four round scars on his left leg, five on his right. There were burns on his thighs, too. They also poured water on him, and shocked him with wires and prods. To end the abuse, Hamada gave up the names of friends who had already been killed in Deir Ezzor. The names were only the beginning. “How many people from the Syrian Arab Army did you murder?” Suhail asked. Hamada had already confessed to organizing protests, uploading videos, and speaking to the foreign press. “The challenge here is: how do you make up a story that you killed these people?” he said. His hands were cuffed to a pipe near the ceiling. “My feet were sixteen inches above the ground, so all of the weight was on my wrists,” he said. “I felt like the handcuffs were sawing my hands off. I stayed for more than half an hour, and then started screaming. Because I kept screaming, they shoved a military boot in my mouth and said, ‘Bite on this so you don’t scream.’ ” This method of torture was used in most Syrian security-intelligence detention facilities, with creative variations. Many detainees had their wrists bound behind their backs before being strung up by them; some were left hanging for days, others until they stopped breathing. Suhail’s assistants told Hamada that if he admitted to carrying weapons he would be released. He didn’t confess, so they cracked four of his ribs. At that point, he agreed that he had been armed with a hunting rifle, and they let him down. But, to better suit terrorism charges, Suhail wanted the confession to include a Kalashnikov. Hamada refused, so, he said, “they stripped me out of my underwear and brought a plumbing clamp,” of the kind typically used to moderate pressure in hoses. “They put it on my penis, and started tightening it.” Hamada recalled Suhail asking, “Are you going to admit it, or shall I cut it off?” Hamada agreed that he had carried a Kalashnikov, so Suhail released the clamp and asked how many clips of ammunition Hamada had carried. “How many clips do you want me to have?” Hamada asked. Suhail reminded him that he had to confess on his own, so Hamada said, “I had five bullets.” That wasn’t good enough, Suhail told him: “I need two magazines.” The torture escalated until Hamada confessed to everything they asked. In hundreds of witness interviews, the CIJA found consistent patterns in interrogation practices across all branches of the security agencies. People were detained following the Crisis Cell’s policy. Besides identifying “new targets,” the results of these interrogations were shared among the agencies. Detainees were routinely kept in inhumane conditions for months or years without entering the judicial system. Coerced confessions served no apparent intelligence-gathering purposes, but they did lend a legalistic veneer to the detention process. After confessing to violent crimes, anti-government activists could face serious charges, and, if convicted, be kept in detention for years. The confessions also perpetuated the illusion of a vast conspiracy against Syria, as detainees admitted to engaging in sedition or treason. The brutality took a toll on many interrogators, too. In at least one case, an interrogator begged a detainee to admit to a crime so that he could stop hurting him. “They were very much of the opinion that they had to produce results,” Chris Engels told me. “The ramifications of not doing their job well were real, and there’s evidence of what happened to people who did not.” The final line of the Crisis Cell’s targeting policy ordered the heads of security branches to “periodically supply the National Security Bureau with the names of security agents who are irresolute or unenthusiastic.” Some of them ended up in Hamada’s cell. Several months after first being tortured, Hamada stood in line with his nephew Fahad to ink their fingerprints onto their reports. Hamada assumed that his included his confession; he didn’t know, because reading the report was not an option. A seventeen-year-old boy stood in line behind Hamada and Fahad. When the guards learned that he was from Darayya, the suburb of Damascus, they knocked him to the ground. One fetched a welding torch and burned the boy “from here to here,” Hamada said, tracing a finger along his jawline. “And then he turned him around and he burned his neck and his entire back. . . . His face—I mean, it was fire. It was melting.” Recalling the event, Hamada’s eyes grew damp and red. His voice faltered, and he sobbed desperately. For two days, he and other prisoners in the hangar tried to soothe the boy’s injuries as he was dying. When the guards came to retrieve the corpse, Hamada yelled at them. In response, they hung him by his wrists for several hours. He told me, “You want them to kill you anyway, so you can be done with this. You’re sick of the torture. You’re sick of the sleeping, and waking up, and living every single day.” HOSPITAL 601 In early 2013, after nearly a year of detention, Hamada lay on the floor of the hangar. He had been interrogated and tortured seven or eight times. An infection in his eye was dripping pus. The skin on his legs was gangrenous. Prisoners were supposed to stand when a guard entered the cell, but on this day Hamada didn’t. “I’m urinating blood,” he said. The next day, the head of interrogation came to the cell and informed Hamada that he was being sent to Hospital 601, a military hospital that sits at the base of Mt. Mezzeh; the Presidential palace is perched at the top. The head of interrogation also told Hamada to forget his own name: “Your name is 1858.” Hamada had heard of Hospital 601. Several other detainees had been sent there, and the few who had returned, Hamada said, had cautioned, “This is not a hospital—this is a slaughterhouse.” Despite Hamada’s condition, guards hit him during the drive to the hospital. One used a green pipe; in Arabic, al-akhdar refers to a green object, so security agents all over Syria taunted detainees by calling this weapon Lakhdar Brahimi, who was then the U.N. special envoy for Syria. In the hospital corridor, male and female nurses started hitting Hamada with their shoes and calling him a terrorist. When he got to the ward, he was tied to a bed with two other prisoners. A nurse asked him about his symptoms, then beat him with a stick. A U.N. report from later that year notes, “Some medical professionals have been co-opted into the maltreatment” of detainees at Hospital 601. Hamada was in disbelief as much as he was in pain. That night, Hamada woke up needing to use the bathroom. A guard hit him all the way to the toilets, but he went in alone. When he opened the first stall, he saw a pile of corpses, battered and blue. He found two more in the second stall, emaciated and missing their eyes. There was another body by the sink. Hamada came out in panic, but the guard sent him back in and told him, “Pee on top of the bodies.” He couldn’t. He started to feel that he was losing his grip on reality. According to the U.N. inquiry, dead detainees were “kept in the toilets” at multiple security branches in Damascus. Later that night, two drunk soldiers walked into the ward. One of them bellowed, “Who wants medicine?” Several detainees lifted their hands. The doctors hadn’t given Hamada any drugs—only a mostly empty bag of intravenous fluid—but one of his bedmates, who had been in the ward for several days, warned him not to volunteer. The soldier selected an eager prisoner. With the inmate kneeling at his feet, head facing the floor, the soldier grabbed a sharp weapon and started hacking at the base of his skull, severing the spinal cord from the head. Then he ordered another patient to drag the body to the bathroom. The U.N. report says of Hospital 601, “Many patients have been tortured to death in this facility.” The soldier called himself Azrael, after the archangel of death; other survivors recall him murdering patients in similarly horrifying ways. “When I saw this, I swear—that’s when I thought this was my fate,” Hamada told me. “I would die here.” On the second day, he begged a doctor to send him back to the Air Force-intelligence branch. The doctor noted that Hamada was still sick. “No, no, no, I am totally cured,” he said. On the fifth day, he was escorted out of Hospital 601 by the same guards who had deposited him there. “You animal, you son of a bitch,” they said. “You still didn’t die.” They hit him all the way back to the branch, then strung him up by his wrists for four hours. In June, 2013, Hamada’s case was referred to the judiciary. He was transferred to Adra Prison, in Damascus, where he filed an application for proof of the charges against him. (Syrian prisons are nominally subject to judicial oversight; the security agencies are not.) The written reply said that he had been arrested “for the crime of terrorism and has been deprived of his liberty since June 5, 2013”—the same date that the charges were filed. Officially, his fifteen months in the Air Force-intelligence branch at al-Mezzeh Military Airport didn’t exist. In the early hours of August 21st, the Syrian government launched rockets carrying sarin gas into densely populated neighborhoods in Damascus, killing more than fourteen hundred people. In response, President Obama, who had earlier committed to a “red line” should Assad use chemical weapons, announced, “I have decided the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.” He said he would wait for congressional approval, but, he continued, “what message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death, in plain sight, and pay no price?” Shortly after the chemical attack, Hamada and many other prisoners were transported to al-Mezzeh, without explanation. Agents moved the detainees to a large, empty hangar on the base. At least one of the sarin-gas rockets is believed to have been launched from the base at al-Mezzeh—it was a logical target for an American strike. Inside the hangar, guards jeered at the detainees. They said that when the Americans bombed Syria all of them would be killed. In early September, the United States backed away from the prospect of a military campaign, and Hamada was returned to the terrorism court in Damascus, where his case was finally heard. The judge noted that he had confessed to attacking checkpoints and killing soldiers. Hamada rolled up his pants and showed the judge the cigarette burns. He held up his wrists, revealing deep purple scars. He showed the black-and-blue welts on his torso. It was a familiar scene inside the courtroom. To each charge, the judge said, “Not guilty.” Before Hamada was freed, he was interrogated by agents from the political-security department. They asked him about protests he had attended two years earlier. He immediately confessed: “I said, ‘Yes, I was at protests. I called the President an asshole!’ ” He added, “I had been through hell already. If it’s this, I’ll admit to everything.” When the agents brought Hamada back to the courtroom, the judge recognized him and immediately dismissed his case. Hamada returned to Deir Ezzor, which he described as “a ghost city.” Two years of intense combat and air strikes had destroyed many of the buildings. The minaret of the Othman mosque had been shelled. His two nephews were still detained in the Air Force-intelligence branch in Damascus. Other family members had disappeared in security facilities. During Hamada’s detention, the revolution had become a sectarian war. Jabhat al-Nusra had established itself as a powerful force, eclipsed in brutality only byISIS. Moderate rebel groups still existed but were often led by corrupt warlords, and lost fighters to more competent jihadi factions. Many of the revolutionaries who once fought for freedom had been radicalized or killed. Pro-Assad militias arrived in Syria from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iran. ISIS had a significant presence in Deir Ezzor. Hamada said, “They were killing all of the media activists and the democratic activists, and every time they did it in a different Hollywood way.” He fled to Turkey, boarded a smuggler’s raft to Greece, and travelled more than seventeen hundred miles to the Netherlands, where his sister had moved before the war. He recalled the migration with a shrug, in a single sentence, as if it were nothing. Hamada’s account of atrocities at Hospital 601 was later corroborated by approximately fifty-five thousand photographs, smuggled out of Syria by a military-police officer known by the name Caesar, an alias. Before the war, Caesar and his colleagues had documented crime scenes and traffic accidents involving military personnel in Damascus. He uploaded pictures to government computers, then printed them and stapled them to official death reports. Beginning in 2011, however, the bodies were those of detainees, collected each day from security branches and delivered to military hospitals. At Hospital 601, Caesar’s team photographed bodies in the morgue and in a garage bay. Each corpse that was photographed had a unique number, usually four digits—like Hamada’s 1858—scrawled on paper, tape, the chest, or the forehead with a thick marker. Another number signified the intelligence branch in which the patient had been killed. There were about eleven thousand bodies. Caesar’s team sometimes catalogued more than fifty corpses a day—emaciated, mutilated, cut, burned, shot, beaten, strangled, broken, melted. According to a U.N. report, after Caesar’s team had finished their documentation a doctor at the hospital usually wrote “heart attack” on the death certificate. Then the bodies were loaded onto trucks and hauled away. In rare cases, family members have been able to retrieve a body, but the report noted that in each known instance it “bore marks of extensive torture.” The report continued, “Some bodies were returned from hospital morgues to their family only after the family agreed to sign a statement confirming that the deceased had been killed by ‘terrorists.’ ” Caesar fled Syria in August, 2013, with flash drives hidden in his socks. The photographs remained a secret until after he had spoken to a team of international prosecutors and forensic experts, the following January. Without a key connecting detainee names to the corpse numbers, identifying the dead is difficult. Many of the faces were thoroughly destroyed, or the eyes were gouged out. Syrian activists close to Caesar published several thousand pictures online, allowing family members to search for missing loved ones. The photographs also circulated in refugee camps. Some families discovered that they had been paying bribes to insure decent treatment for relatives who had been killed long before. So far, about seven hundred and thirty victims have been identified. Hamada recognized several of his cellmates in the files. ENDGAME Between Caesar’s photographs and the CIJA’s case, Stephen Rapp told me, “when the day of justice arrives, we’ll have much better evidence than we’ve had anywhere since Nuremberg.” Wiley and Engels believe that, should the case go to court, the CIJA has sufficient evidence to convict Assad and his associates on several charges of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and other inhumane acts. Last year, when Assad was asked about the Caesar photographs during an interview with Foreign Affairs, he said, “Who said this is done by the government, not by the rebels? Who said this is a Syrian victim, not someone else?” In 2011, the U.N. commission of inquiry alleged that a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb had been tortured to death in detention. In response, a Syrian investigation concluded that, shortly after the boy died, a “forensic photographer” took “six colored photos” of the corpse. “We attributed the number twenty-three to it.” The Syrians determined that the pictures showed “no beating marks, no traces of torture,” and that the boy had been killed by gunfire, “most probably by his fellow-terrorists.” The investigation also found that a doctor who had reported that the boy’s penis had been cut off “had misjudged the situation in an earlier examination.” Caesar’s collection contains six images of Hamza al-Khateeb’s body. His eyes are swollen shut, and his head is a deep purple, from being beaten. His penis is missing. In every picture, there is a bloodstained note card bearing the number twenty-three. In a formal response to a U.N. inquiry, Syria’s permanent mission to the U.N. wrote a letter citing Syria’s constitution and domestic laws as evidence that allegations of arbitrary detention and torture are “no longer plausible.” The letter continued, “We have no detainees unlawfully arrested with regards to peaceful demonstrations. If your question concerns individuals who have used weapons or terrorist acts against the state, it is an entirely different matter.” A few months later, Assad told Barbara Walters that Syria’s participation in the United Nations was “a game we play. It doesn’t mean you believe in it.” This week, a new round of negotiations between the Syrian government and the opposition is set to begin in Geneva, where U.N. officials will shuttle between delegations that still refuse to meet in person. In advance of the negotiations, Barakat, the former mole in Damascus, told me that the opposition delegation asked him for copies of the documents he stole from Assad’s government; the delegation failed, however, to arrange a pickup. In the past few months, as the Syrian Army has regained territory it had lost to rebel forces, it has come to seem increasingly unlikely that Assad will step down. His foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, recently announced, “We will not talk with anyone who wants to discuss the Presidency.” Wiley and the CIJAstaff avoid comment on regime change. He told me, “We don’t get too caught up in the policy agony” of the efforts to end the Syrian war. “We’re simply confident—and I don’t think it’s hubris—that our work will see the light of day, in court, in relatively short order.” In the Netherlands, Hamada attends physical-therapy sessions to rehabilitate his scarred limbs. He studies Dutch and organizes anti-Assad protests in public squares, though attendance is sparse. He wonders about his nephews, his brother, his brother-in-law, and many missing friends. “Where are they?” he cried. “Are they alive? Are they dead?” His sister in Syria asks the military police for death certificates, to no avail. Every day is “misery,” Hamada said. “It’s misery. It’s misery. It’s death. It’s a life of death.” ♦ Reporting for this piece was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Copyright 2016 The New Yorker

This photo released on Monday March 28, 2016, by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows some damage at the ancient ruins of Palmyra, central Syria. A Syrian antiquities official says demining experts have so far removed 150 bombs planted by the Islamic State group inside the archaeological site in the historic town of Palmyra. Syrian troops captured the town from IS fighters on Sunday after three weeks of intense fighting.(SANA via AP) (Associated Press) Russian combat engineers arrived Thursday in Syria on a mission to clear mines in the ancient town of Palmyra, the military said. The Defense Ministry said the sapper units were airlifted to Syria with an array of equipment, including state-of-the art robotic devices, to defuse mines at the 2,000-year-old archaeological site. Russian television stations showed Il-76 transport planes carrying the engineers landing before dawn at the Russian air base in Syria. Sunday's recapture of Palmyra by Syrian troops under the cover of Russian airstrikes was an important victory over Islamic State extremists who operated a 10-month reign of terror there. Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi of the military's General Staff said that Russian military advisers had helped plan and direct the Syrian army's operation to recapture Palmyra. He said Russian warplanes had conducted about 500 sorties from March 7 to March 27, striking 2,000 targets around Palmyra, including artillery positions and fortifications. The Russian jets also hit IS militants as they tried to flee toward the group's strongholds of Raqqa and Deir el-Zour, he added. Russian television stations showed reports about Alexander Prokhorenko, a Russian military officer who helped direct Russian airstrikes around Palmyra. He died when he was surrounded by IS militants and drew fire on himself. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a partial drawdown of Russian warplanes from Syria earlier this month, but he has vowed to continue fighting the IS and the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front. A Russian- and U.S.-brokered cease-fire in Syria that began on Feb. 27 has largely held, but Islamic State militants and the Nusra Front have been excluded from it. Rudskoi emphasized that the Russian jets used precision weapons to avoid any damage to Palmyra's archaeological treasures. During the fighting around Palmyra, the Russian military tested its latest helicopter gunship, the Mi-28, for the first time in combat. The helicopters have recently joined the Russian forces in Syria. Rudskoi said the seizure of Palmyra has a major strategic importance due to its location at the junction of major highways. "The restoration of the Syrian army's control over Palmyra will make it significantly more difficult for the bandit groups to regroup and move their resources between Syria's northern and southern regions, and it will also significantly weaken their capability around Damascus and Aleppo," he said. "The loss of control over the areas rich in natural resources will also affect the terrorists' economic and financial potential and reduce their ability to buy weapons, ammunition and materials and pay the militants." Rudskoi said Russian sapper teams will now have to search more than 180 hectares (445 acres) of both historic and residential areas in Palmyra for mines. He added the job is even more difficult because, along with standard military mines, the area is littered with a large number of booby traps and other self-made explosive devices. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Thursday urged other nations to join the effort of clearing Palmyra from mines. Copyright © 2016 ABC News Internet Ventures

Professor Alex Hinton is giving a talk on 'What is Genocide?' to Genocide Education National Teacher of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, on March 18, 2016. (Photo DC-Cam) Professor Alexander Hinton spoke with VOA Khmer’s Sayana Ser about his dramatic courtroom confrontation with “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea. PHNOM PENH—[Editor’s Note: Professor Alexander Hinton is the author of “Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide,” a book published in 2005 on the Khmer Rouge period. In March, he gave evidence at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, in Phnom Penh. The American author and academic took the stand for more than three full court days, giving evidence in case 002/02, which is hearing evidence on genocide charges against top regime leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. He spoke with VOA Khmer’s Sayana Ser about his dramatic courtroom confrontation with “Brother Number Two” Nuon Chea, and why—unlike other Western witnesses to the court—he chose to take a traditional Buddhist oath in front of the Lokta Dambang Dek, or lord of the iron staff, Neak Ta at the court. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.] What were you thinking on your first day giving evidence at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal? It was a very intense three and a half days of giving testimony. When I first arrived, there was a degree of uncertainty because I was uncertain how the process would go, what I would be asked. But I was very excited as well to contribute to what’s an important process in general and in Cambodia in particular. I know at times the court has come under criticism, but I believe that what the court is doing is extremely important. What moments stood out for you during those days at the court? When I gave my testimony, I wanted, of course, to provide expert testimony about whatever questions the prosecution, civil parties and the defense had, and I was hoping along the way that I will be able to tell the story of the village and the region where I did my fieldwork from 1994 to 1995. That’s the village called Banyan village that’s located near Wat Phnom Pros Phnom Srey in Kampong Siem district in Kampong Cham. I lived there for a year from 1994 to 1995. And the book that I eventually wrote, and the research I did, was to try and understand the lived experience of living through the Khmer Rouge regime. In this area, life was pretty good until 1977 when Southwest [Zone] cadres came in and at that point, as in many part of Cambodia, killings began to dramatically escalate, conditions became much more difficult. So, I hoped, even if I responded to the questions, that I would be able to also provide the sense of the lives and suffering of the people from that region during the testimony. In terms of specific moments for me that was important. Maybe my most disappointed moment was at the very beginning when I wanted to engage in an in-depth discussion of genocide, the meaning of the term, which often is misunderstood. I very much wanted to talk about this in court. But the court has a certain definition that it uses—the U.N. Genocide Convention—and the defense intervened and said I should restrict my comments. So at the very beginning I was a little frustrated that I was unable to have this discussion, but on the other hand, over the course of three and a half days of intense testimony, I was able, in bits and pieces, to discuss the meaning of genocide and how the genocide perpetrated in Cambodia not only fits the four protective groups in the U.N. Genocide Convention—racial, ethnic, national, religious groups—but potentially can apply to broader grouping such as, for example, ethnic Chinese, who came under assault, possibly class-based attacks, maybe the killing of people in the Eastern Zone. So, as proceedings unfolded, I was able to discuss this. I think one moment that was stood out in the end was when Mr. Nuon Chea, one of the accused, the second in command of the Khmer Rouge, the Democratic Kampuchea regime, after Pol Pot, came to the courtroom to speak. I was glad, his voice has been missing. I strongly believe that the defense should have a clear voice, they should voice their arguments—be heard. He has been silent. He’s chosen not to speak for quite sometime. And so he came up to the courtroom and I was delighted. So that was one of the moments I very much appreciated. Nuon Chea reacted strongly to evidence you gave about the use of the word Yuon. What are your thoughts about what happened? I’m unable to know his heart, only he knows his own heart. I can only hear his words. So that’s the basis upon which I have to make a surmise. He did not apologize. And he offered an explanation as, of course he should do. He should present a defense and it should be heard. The larger context of his coming to speak was a discussion that I’ve been having with the defense teams, who had questioned whether the use of the term Yuon in the context of Khmer Rouge speeches was in fact incitement to hate. I have presented based on my fieldwork and the lived experience of the people in Kampong Siem district, as well as my knowledge of Cambodia, having come here many times over the years and the research I’ve done. I made a strong case that while the word Yuon can be used sometimes in a way that doesn’t connote incitement and hate, very often it can be mobilized and used in any ideological discourses, used by politicians to promote a message of hate. This message, in the context of Democratic Kampuchea was extreme. It’s everywhere in Communist Party of Kampuchea broadcasts, from the radio to party publications, and it seems clear cut that this was an incitement to genocide. I made that point and I understand that for the defense, this was something they felt they needed to respond to. Effectively, what happened is Nuon Chea came up. He was in a wheelchair. And he came and he spoke—loudly. He said he’d been told by Pol Pot to use the word [Yuon], but he suggested that it didn’t connote hatred. So, I respected what he said, but I disagree. I was given an opportunity to respond to that and one other question, and I said that what is very important is that we think critically and have a dialogue about to use of terms like this in society. I think the discussion that we had is hopefully one that can be opened up more broadly in Cambodia, and more generally, about what it means to use a word, stereotyping, feelings of anger, and sometimes even hate that are associated with this term. So I was pleased that even if he didn’t agree with me he had raised the issue. But it seems quite clear—as I said in the end as I finished speaking to him—that the use of the word Yuon in the context of Democratic Kampuchea was clearly incitement to genocide against ethnic Vietnamese. Do you think Nuon Chea’s defense team, led by Victor Koppe, was fair when questioning you, in comparison to Khieu Samphan's defense team? The defense teams are in a difficult position. There is a mountain of evidence against their clients. They express the view that they don’t feel that their voice is always heard sufficiently. So, I understand that as a defense lawyer, you need to do the best you can to defend the rights of the accused. Some lawyers take up a strategy of disruption. [The late French lawyer] Jacques Vergès, who was initially representing Khieu Samphan, was one of the pioneers in this way. They would seek to disrupt and question the legitimacy of the entire proceedings. This is a common tactic. This is sort of a legal strategy of disruption. Others stick very much to the rule, to the law, and contest a case that way. So the two defense teams have somewhat different strategies. I think that Mr. Koppe’s strategy is more disruptive. I think that he tries to maybe shake up the person giving testimony if the testimony is incriminating. And I think the testimony I gave about the destruction of the Chams and ethnic Vietnamese in Region 41 of the Central Zone was incriminating. So, even though he tried to attack my arguments in different ways, that’s exactly what he should have tried to do. I’ll leave it to other to judge if sometimes he was a bit too personal, but again I respect what he’s trying to do and defend his client. And I think he should fulfill his duty to the best of his ability. The defense team for Khieu Samphan as well. They’ve got to work hard. Even though I was confident about all of my arguments and I think they were born out through the process, and it’s quite clear that, for example, the use of the word Yuon incites hate and that genocide was committed against the Chams. Again, their voice needs to be heard, the rights of their client defended. And they should do this to the best of their ability. You mentioned Grandma Yuth, or Yeay Yuth, a lot in your testimony. What does she have to do with this genocide case? During this time, an extermination center was created at Wat Phnom Pros Phnom Srey, which was a famous pagoda in Kampong Cham province and they turned it into a security center where well over 10,000, probably over 12,000, people were executed. So many people were dying here. There were also other killing areas—one by Tuol Veng, for example. But in 1977, after Kuy Thuon and his associates had been purged and were being purged, the destruction arrived in Kampong Siem. The local cadres, who were thought to be associated with Kuy Thuon and his network, were replaced by the cadres from the Southwest. Grandma Yuth, as many people told me, arrived from the Southwest. She became the head of the district. There is another woman, Rorm, who is the head Krala sub-district commune. And I heard many story about them. One story was that grandmother Yuth had been so fierce that she had even agreed [to], or was thought to have killed her husband to show that she had renounced everything for the party. I should note that the two of them were linked to different cadres from the Southwest, but in particular, [Case 003 suspect] Ta An was also there. He had taken over and he was her superior. But under Grandma Yuth, a great deal of devastation took place including a number of killings, not just ethnic Chams who perished in large numbers in Kampong Siem district, but also “new people,” students, intellectuals, people from the cities who were thought to have capitalistic or privatist tendencies, counter-revolutionary tendencies. At this time, initially, the Khmer Rouge had thought that perhaps people could sharpen their consciousness, to use their phrase, and purify themselves from what they called “impure elements.” But in late 1976 and especially in 1977, these people began to be more and more suspect, and in Kampong Cham we saw the consequence, which was mass execution. Grandma Yuth, I mentioned her many time because she figured in the experience of the people in the area—her and other cadres, such as Rorm, were known as fierce. And they were feared. I can’t tell you exactly what took place in Grandma Yuth's office. But I can tell you that for the people living in the area, Rorm and Grandma Yuth were terrifying figures. But you know they also symbolize what was the terrifying time in their life when their fear greatly escalated, life became much harder, people lost loved ones, and massive numbers of people were killed that as a broader process in Cambodia of genocide. During your testimony you mentioned the Khmer Rouge-era novel Dam Pheng. Can you explain why? There’s a story about Dam Pheng that appeared in the Khmer Rouge magazine revolutionary youth. There is a version that appeared in 1973, but the story is thought to have served as inspiration, for example, of different performances that took place during the Democratic Kampuchea regime. People have spoken about their memories of witnessing this. I believe Youk Chhang, the head the Documentation Center of Cambodia, is on record as having spoken about this as well. It’s a legendary story of Khmer youth who came from a poor family in the countryside, went to Phnom Penh to study and eventually he became beholden to the Khmer Rouge message. Their message of class oppression, at the time war was going on next door in Vietnam that also had reverberations in Cambodia. So, the story of Dam Pheng tells about how he began to take up the revolutionary cause to fight against U.S. imperialism, against class oppression. And in this story, he epitomizes the qualities of the ideal revolutionary who has a pure conscientiousness, who constantly fights without hesitation. The story ends—I can’t remember the year, I believe it’s in the late 1960s—and Dam Pheng is arrested, he’s tortured, but throughout the process, he doesn’t succumb. He doesn’t reveal his associates, and then, in the end, after being tortured, he writes a poem in blood on his cell before he dies. As I said before, this was, apparently, a widely known story and one that was used to help propagate the Khmer Rouge ideological message, but I have spoken to someone who says that Dam Pheng was a real person. The story itself, I believe, was mentioned during the Duch trial [Case 001] and is thought to have been a somewhat legendary character and perhaps, it’s thought, Noun Chea or Pol Pot may have actually written this story that appeared in that magazine. We don’t know. Perhaps Noun Chea will one day provide clarification. I had hoped that he might do so, but we don’t know. But Dam Pheng is a figure that symbolizes much and teaches us much about the mindset of Khmer Rouge. What does Duch a.k.a. Kang Kek Iew, who was convicted in the court’s first case, have to do with case 002? Duch gave a great deal of evidence that was incriminating toward the case of Noun Chea because he places Noun Chea directly in control of S-21 after Son Sen went to fight the Vietnamese in mid-to-late 1977. Duch’s previous testimony about this has been attacked by the defense lawyers—and again, they’re doing their job, that’s what they should try to do—but if it stands up as most likely it will, it’s very bad for the case of the Noun Chea defense because it directly links him to a process of violence and killing and torture, crimes against humanity and even war crimes that were taking place at S-21. So Duch is very much a person who I would imagine might come and testify again and offer very incriminating evidence against Noun Chea, someone with whom he interacted a number of times during DK [Democratic Kampuchea]. Why did you take a Buddhist oath at the court? As an anthropologist and as someone who is a visitor in Cambodia, I wanted to honor and respect the traditions of Cambodia and in the Cambodian part of this court, people pay the respects and swear the oath before the Lokta Dambang Dek Neak Ta, and I thought it’s important to respect the traditions that exist in this country. In fact, I think it might be a good thing if everybody had to swear an oath before the Neak Ta. It is a very strong oath. Maybe people are afraid to swear an oath before the Neak Ta, but I was pleased to be able to do so and I thought of the Neak Ta as I testified and I did my best to uphold the oath I made to him, as well as the oath I made in court. Do you think U.N. war crimes trials in the future should have civil parties, like the Khmer Rouge Tribunal? This court is very distinctive in having civil parties represented, having a voice to the people brought in. There’s been in the Duch trial, and even going back to the time before the cases began and pre-trial hearings, there was some discussion about what it means for victims to have a voice and to express that voice in court. Whether, for example, a civil party should be able to stand up and actually ask questions to the accused, or to make pleas on their own behalf. Because it’s extremely complicated and there are a large number of civil parties, a system emerged where civil parties have lawyers and then their co-lead lawyers. I understand that, on the one hand, in order for the trail to run efficiently, it needs to be structured like this. But, on the other hand, there’s also a problem, because the voice of the victims is pushed back to an extent. When I was in the court room, I glanced over at the civil parties, they were backed by the AV booth, sitting in the room, but they said nothing. I should note that civil parties do speak at the court. It’s important to recognize and be aware of. They are allowed to tell their stories. Not everyone gets to speak, but some people do speak. But if you compare this trial to, for example, the international criminal tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Despite the shortcomings, this court has made an effort and made progress in helping to give a voice to people. But I think as well, it’s important in retrospect to look back and think how we might strengthen the voice of victims even more. Do you think the foreign lawyers at the court are sensitive to the local culture of the victims? I don’t think it’s possible to generalize. I would hope that all lawyers would respect the traditions of Cambodia, respect Cambodian customs. In Cambodia, though, especially if you don’t speak the language, it becomes more difficult. You don’t really understand what’s taking place around you. Perhaps at all courts that are international hybrid mixed tribunals, there should be, for example, cultural sensitivity training that takes place. I think this might be a good thing for everyone. Maybe this is a lesson from the court that in future courts maybe something like this can be done. Having said that, I have spoken to many international personnel at the tribunal who are very culturally sensitive and want to act in accordance with local understanding, local beliefs. There are others who maybe do so to a lesser extent. For those, I hope they will struggle and work to improve their performance, but at no place is it possible to have things perfect in this manner, but maybe there’s a lesson to be learnt. © Copyright 2016VOA News and Information Websites

With the aid of Turkish officials, Islamic State fighters' have been able to travel through Turkey to reach Syria (Photo: Video screenshot) While Turkey has arrested ISIS fighters planning an attack on Jewish children, new documents reveal the extensive collaboration between Turkey and ISIS. A hot warning received by intelligence officials revealed that the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is planning an “imminent attack” on Jewish children in Turkey. Officials believe the most likely target is in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, where a Jewish school is attached to a synagogue and community center. The information was obtained after Turkey arrested six ISIS operatives in the southern city of Gaziantep last week. "This is a more than credible threat. This is an active plot," a Turkey source said. Less than 10 days ago, a suicide bomber stalked Israeli tourists in Istanbul before blowing himself up near them, killing five people (four of them Israelis) and wounding many more. "The so-called Islamic State is believed to be behind both sets of attacks and the organization continues in determined efforts to perpetrate further attacks in Turkey and elsewhere," reported Sky News, quoting from an intelligence report seen by the news outlet. In addition to the six arrested, another three ISIS operatives were arrested last week. Turkey, it seems is scrambling to protect itself from attacks the terror group has threatened to execute all across Europe. After the Brussels attacks, Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan shocked the world by saying that Turkey had captured one of the perpetrators of the massacre last June and send him back to his country. Erdogan specifically said that Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the suicide bombers in the Brussels airport, was detained in Turkey and sent back to Belgium with a warning (that was ignored) that he was a militant. Yet, new documents obtained by Kurdish YPG fighters (People’s Protection Units) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who are fighting together, refute the claim made by Erdogan that Turkey is preventing ISIS and Al-Nusra (Al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria) from travelling through Turkey to reach Syria. The documents seized from Islamic State headquarters in seven locations, including Kobane, show that ISIS fighters from all over the world – and particularly from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, and Tajikistan -- were given passage through Turkey to Syria. The Firat News Agency (ANF), a Kurdish outlet whose websites have been repeatedly blocked in Turkey by Turkish courts, reports that the hundreds of documents show that since 2013, ISIS fighters have used the Istanbul and Adana airports and have received permits from the Turkish government to reside in Turkey until they cross over to Syria. The documents also include bus tickets, electronic Turkish visas, residency permits, and documents with stamps from Turkish immigration officials. Chillingly, the documents show that chemical and explosive materials was transferred from Turkey to Syria. One such document was signed by the manager of Istanbul’s Police Foreigners’ Department Erkan Aydoga. Manuals in Turkish as to how to use these materials were also given to the jihadis. A sample of the documents can be viewed here. Turkey, as has been previously reported, is playing a dangerous and duplicitous game with the West. As Clarion Project has wrote, Turkey’s arms transfers to al-Qaeda-linked Islamist jihadis in Syria have been long-documented, yet largely ignored by the Western media. A major raid by the U.S. on an Islamic State safe house in Syria in the summer of 2015 gleaned large amounts of intelligence undeniably linking Turkey to the Islamic State. Similarly, the fact the Turkey has been the top financial sponsor of Hamas since 2012, with Erdogan arranging for the transfer of $250-300 million to this U.S.-designated terrorist group annually, is another oft-ignored inconvenience. Similarly, the West has brilliantly avoided confronting Turkey on its abysmal human rights record. Using air-tight documentation, Nafeez Ahmed, editor of InsurgeIntelligence, writes about the many reasons the West has chosen to look the other way while Turkey facilitates oil sales for the Islamic State, which guarantees its strength and viability. “There are many explanations,” writes Ahmed, “but one perhaps stands out: the West’s abject dependence on terror-toting Muslim regimes, largely to maintain access to Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asian oil and gas resources.” Since 2013, the Turkish government has been building a $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland, taking Turkey's "outreach" in America out of the realm of the subtle. This week in America, U.S. President Barack Obama will join Erdogan at the opening of the mosque, the largest in the U.S. Copyright © 2016 Clarion Project, Inc. All rights reserved.

A forensic expert examines the skull of an unknown person killed by suspected members of an armed rebel group and buried in a mass grave in Mutakura, north of Burundi's capital Bujumbura, February 29, 2016. Three bodies were recovered from the grave, which was suspected to hold the remains of up to 30 bodies, police said.REUTERS/Evrard Ngendakumana A genocide is under preparation in Burundi and the United Nations (UN) may be too late to prevent it, the founder of Genocide Watch has warned. The bloody crisis that has killed up to 900 people pits supporters of President Pierre Nkurunziza against those who say that his re-election in July 2015 for a third term violated the constitution of a nation still reeling from a civil war that occurred between 1993 and 2005, leaving 300,000 people dead. After a failed coup, the government intensified its crackdown and most of those arrested or disappeared today are young men and women accused of participating in or supporting opposition groups. Fears UN 'will be too late' For Gregory Stanton, research professor in genocide studies and prevention at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University, Virginia, US, however, the political conflict may be more far-reaching than the UN might want to admit. "I believe strongly that a genocide is well under way in Burundi. We are at the preparation stage, no question about it – it is being planned," Stanton said during the International Conference on Burundi, which aimed at raising awareness of crimes that are being committed in the small African nation on daily basis. Stanton, who wrote Eight Stages of Genocide: How Governments Can Tell When Genocide Is Coming and What They Can Do To Stop It when he served as Foreign Service Officer in the State Department before becoming the Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court, claimed the world body was not ready to prevent violence from spiralling out of control. According to Stanton, for a declaration of genocide to be made, lawyers need to be convinced that the needed requirements for a definition of genocide have been met – including enough proof of intent. "Lawyers tend to be very conservative about using this term, and those within the State Department and the UN will be very reluctant to apply the term 'genocide'. In the case of Burundi, the lawyers are going to be too late again, they won't be willing to use the so-called G-word (genocide) again until it's too late, until it's already under way. I am sorry to say that – I don't think they have learned very much from Rwanda ('s genocide in 1994)." President of Genocide Watch, Professor Gregory Stanton, speaks during the International Conference on Burundi in Manchester on 25 March 2016.Elsa Buchanan for IBTimes UK Intent to commit genocide – 'in part' Citing the need to prove that there is intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, to evidence intent of genocide, Stanton alleged it the case could be currently made for Burundi, despite many claiming the violence is not entirely conflict based, but socio-politically motivated. After explaining that divisions between Hutus, Tutsis – and Twas – in Burundi had somewhat lessened after the end of the civil war in 2005, Stanton said that the nation's population has remained 'bipolar' and a pattern of denial of violences and genocides has prevented these divisions to be broken. Additionally, Stanton said recently discovered mass graves in the capital Bujumbura were "clear proof that killing of a group is under way". "If you have proof of intent of genocide, you just have to prove that there is intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part. It doesn't have to be the whole group – for instance, it was definitely a genocide in 1972, when the intellectual class among the Hutu Burundian population was killed. Even though it was not killing every Hutu, it was certainly a genocide because they were trying to kill all the intelligencia in the Hutu community – which equates to a planned genocide in part," he explained. "The same goes for what going on right now. The UN itself has said, and this was back in January when they verified that 439 people had been killed just in the past several months – that people are selectively killed, and those killing are essentially trying to destroy the leadership of the other group, most of these people being Tutsi in this case. Then you may have evidence that there is a plan, a policy." UN and African Union should intervene fast In Stanton's view, the African Union (AU) and the UN could, if they acted immediately, find ways to prevent a genocide. The UN Security Council should take up the issue – again – and specifically authorize the AU to take action. Under Chapter 8 of the UN charter, the AU does not have to wait for the UN for such authorization – the bloc can legally take action before the UN even authorizes it. "The Union is then supposed to submit their action for review by the Security Council, but that's after the fact – and that's exactly what we need here," Stanton said. "I'm not necessarily in favour of using force but the international community should not be afraid of doing so. It would be good to send in at least police to oversee what is happening in Burundi right now. Not as an invasion force at all, but a force that would cooperate with the Burundi government to do that. If the Burundian government resists, that's why a Chapter 7 resolution from the UN Security Council would be available." While Stanton said the Burundian government could be led to cooperating through "enough diplomatic and economic pressure", he outlined justice as a real solution to Burundi's crisis. "Burundi has had a history in which justice has been denied, in which a pattern of impunity has developed – in the last 50 years no one has been punished for the crimes against humanity and the genocides that have been committed on a very regular basis in Burundi. In fact, in peace agreements, amnesties are declared. Justice is not the opposite of reconciliation, justice is part of reconciliation: they must go together, and that is what is needed in Burundi, we have to have both – enough of the kind of impunity that amnesties encourage." Throughout his legal career, Stanton has covered a number of conflicts. Previously involved in the UN-Cambodian government negotiations that brought about the creation of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Stanton drafted the UN Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also helped set out the UN Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped end the Mozambique civil war. An estimated 240,000 Burundians have fled their nation which was plunged into chaos in April when its President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would run for a third termMarco Longari/AFP/Getty Images © Copyright 2016 IBTimes Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.