2015 has been a very productive year for Genocide Watch. With the creativity and hard work of our interns during 2015, Genocide Watch has maintained the most actively updated and heavily used websites on genocide on the internet. We testified before Congress on the genocidal massacres of ISIS. We had many meetings at the State Department. We sponsored an Appeal to Congress by Genocide Scholars concerning the ISIS genocide and other crimes. We co-sponsored a conference at George Mason University on Women and Genocide in the 21st Century, focused on Sudan. We keynoted a Los Angeles conference on the genocide in Burma against the Rohingya. We contributed articles to newspapers and appeared on worldwide television, including BBC and CNN. We sponsored a summer film series on Genocide. Our interns built and launched a new website for the Alliance Against Genocide, againstgenocide.org to serve as a communications site for the 50+ member organizations of the Alliance, which continues to grow. One of our interns built a Genocide Watch app for I-phones and Androids, which can be downloaded from our website, www.genocidewatch.net. We continue to use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with the thousands of people who follow our work. Genocide Watch is a non-partisan, non-profit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization that pays no salaries and keeps its overhead very low thanks to its affiliation with the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. Three interns each semester and each summer receive academic credit for their work with Genocide Watch. Our office space and furniture, computers, telephones, and meeting rooms are provided by George Mason University. Genocide Watch pays only for liability insurance as required for affiliates of the university. In return, Genocide Watch provides educational opportunities to its interns, to the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and to the public about how and why genocide develops, including early warning signs of threats of mass killing and reports on current genocidal situations. Our reports are posted on our websites, sent to the member organizations in the Alliance Against Genocide, and sent directly to Congress, the State Department, National Security Council and the President, and to the UN’s Special Advisor to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide. This year, Genocide Watch received two small foundation grants and many smaller donations with which we raised $20,000 for website domain maintenance and other operating expenses. Every penny is spent wisely. Because our budget is small and simple, we only file the short form annual non-profit tax return. In the near future, we plan to develop an online course on Genocide in conjunction with the publisher of our textbook for secondary school students. December 31, 2015 Greg Stanton President, Genocide Watch

Chairman Smith on the hearing: “More than half of the 635,000 refugees entering Europe this year are from ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. They are pushed from the area not only by the violence they experience that is directed specifically at them or violence in which they are caught up. Humanitarian assistance has not kept pace with need. The World Food Programme, which reports only 41% funding for its Syria regional program this year, considers this shortfall the main trigger for flight from the region by those persecuted or displaced. This hearing will focus on the plight of persecuted religious minorities in Syria and Iraq and the failure of the international community to fulfill their pledges of support.” Opening Statements Witnesses Gregory H. Stanton, Ph.D. President Genocide Watch [full text of statement] [truth in testimony form] The Most Reverend Bishop Francis Kalabat Chaldean Eparchy of St. Thomas the Apostle in America [full text of statement] [truth in testimony form] Mr. Mirza Ismail Founder and Chairman Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International [full text of statement] [truth in testimony form] Mr. Carl A. Anderson Supreme Knight Knights of Columbus [full text of statement] [truth in testimony form] Mr. Noah Gottschalk Senior Policy Advisor for Humanitarian Response Oxfam America [full text of statement] [truth in testimony form] ____________________________ Hearing transcript (PDF)

When South African president Jacob Zuma confirmed he was planning to withdraw the country from the international criminal court, he was careful to claim the moral highground. “In the eyes of the African leaders, the ICC is biased,” Zuma said in a speech in Johannesburg on Monday. “Only Africans they are interested in. This is what has made Africa feel we need to relook at our participation. It looks like it is just meant for us.” The announcement comes after a debacle earlier this year when the cracks in South Africa’s relationship with the ICC first became clear. In June, in defiance of an international arrest warrant for alleged crimes in Darfur, Sudanesepresident Omar al-Bashir was allowed to make an abrupt departure from an airstrip outside Pretoria. As an ICC signatory South Africa was obliged to arrest him, but didn’t. James Stewart, the ICC’s deputy prosecutor, said: “In our view, it was very clear thatSouth Africa should have detained Bashir so he could have been brought to trial in The Hague.” At the time South Africa hinted that the court was “no longer useful”, but now it’s gone a step further. The party was eager to reiterate its support for the court’s guiding morals – but only in theory. “The principles that led us to be members [of the ICC] remain valid and relevant … however, the ICC has lost its direction and is no longer pursuing that principle,” said deputy minister Obed Bapela at the weekend. If the ANC really does wish to end impunity for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sees nothing wrong (in principle) with an international court charged with doing so, why is it leaving? Prejudice Zuma’s charge, that the ICC has “unfairly targeted African leaders”, is often made. But a closer look suggests it is without basis. Of the eight cases the ICC has pursued in Africa thus far two have been referred by the United Nations security council – Sudan and Libya – and four have been self-referrals, in which the state involved has requested the assistance of the court – the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, Uganda and Mali. This leaves only two cases, Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire, which the prosecutor initiated independently. That’s not much of a vendetta. Why has the ICC not pursued cases elsewhere? Well, it is currently investigating situations in Afghanistan, Colombia, Georgia, Honduras, Iraq, Palestine and Ukraine. But also up until now most crimes that fall under the court’s jurisdictionhave occurred either in Africa or in countries that have not ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty which established the ICC. It is telling that no one has ever argued that any of the eight cases currently being investigated is not deserving of prosecution. This is the great tragedy of South Africa’s new stance: the victims of real atrocities in Uganda, in the Central African Republic, in Mali and elsewhere are forgotten, brushed aside by rhetoric and political posturing. How the court works South Africa has also not provided any evidence that the structures of the ICC are open to abuse or manipulation. The court is presided over by a diverse panel of international justices appointed by a two-thirds majority of the Assembly of State Parties, of which South Africa is a member. There are three stages to every prosecution: first a pre-trial chamber of three judges evaluates the evidence to determine whether it is sufficient to issue an arrest warrant. This means the prosecutor cannot simply haul any person to trial on a whim or fancy; in the case of Callixte Mbarushimana, for example, the leader of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a pre-trial chamber dismissed the charges and halted proceedings. If sufficient evidence exists, the accused has access all the rights of a fair trial and is able to appeal against the verdict. The statute also provides advanced mechanisms to hold the judges and the prosecutor accountable. In short, this is probably the most sophisticated and fair judicial structure in the world. Tarnish reputation It is true that the ICC has not been as effective as it should be, often hamstrung by the reluctance of many states to cooperate with its investigations and comply with its arrest warrants. But this is not a reason to leave its jurisdiction. In the absence of any compelling evidence to suggest malice on the part of the ICC, and without any reason to believe that it has done more harm than good in the pursuit of human rights, there can no credible argument for South Africa’s withdrawal. The decision does not even make sense in pursuit of South Africa’s national interest. Should the country withdraw, a mass exodus of African states will likely follow and the foundations of the court will crumble. Not only will this set back the pursuit of meaningful international justice by decades, it will seriously tarnish South Africa’s global reputation as a proponent of human rights and a moral authority in the world, significantly reducing its political capital. The country’s prominence in a variety of international institutions relies on this reputation, as does its bid for permanent status at the UN security council. Ultimately, the ANC can whine as much as it likes about the country’s continued commitment to human rights but the world will not care. South Africa will be seen to join the ranks of those states that have forsaken the most vulnerable victims of atrocities for short-term political gain. Copyright: The Guardian 2015

MILAN — “Indifference” is the word engraved on the stark wall at the entrance to Milan’s Holocaust memorial, housed beneath the central railway station from which Jews were deported to Auschwitz and other Nazi camps. The premises vibrate when trains depart overhead, as if mirroring the shudder the place provokes. A survivor of the deportation, Liliana Segre, whose father, Alberto, was killed at Auschwitz, suggested that “indifference” was the most appropriate word to greet visitors to the memorial, which opened in 2013. Nobody had cared when, from 1943 onward, Jews were hauled through the elegant avenues of Milan to the station. They were unloaded from trucks and packed into wooden boxcars made to transport six horses but used for some 80 doomed human beings. So it was perhaps inevitable that when Roberto Jarach, the vice president of the memorial, was asked if he could help with Milan’s refugee crisis, he saw that word flash through his mind. As hundreds of desperate refugees converged daily on Milan’s central station — opened during the rule of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini — the memorial could not show “indifference.” “I immediately came down here to measure the space we have,” Jarach told me. “These people hardly know where they are.” And so, for a few months now, camp beds have been set out every night to the left of the main entrance. In all, about 3,500 people have been sheltered, mainly Eritreans, but also Syrians and Afghans, part of the largest movement of refugees and migrants since the end of World War II. Children are given toys and crayons. Adults get a new pair of shoes: A pile of discarded footwear testifies to their popularity. A jury-rigged pipe provides a shower in the washrooms. When I visited, 38 refugees had spent the previous night at the memorial. They come in the evening from the station, where municipal authorities and an organization called Progetto Arca have set up a processing center. They sleep near the Indifference Wall. They leave the next morning, usually headed north toward Germany. There is no direct analogy between the situation of millions of refugees today and the Jews who were deported from Milan’s Platform 21 (as the memorial is also known). The refugees are fleeing war — not, in general, targeted annihilation. They are victims of weak states, not an all-powerful one. Their plight often reflects the crisis of a religion, Islam — its uneasy adaptation to modernity — not the depredations of a single murderous ideology. Still, there are echoes, not least in that word, indifference. The indifference of Hungary, with its self-appointed little exercise in bigotry: the defense of Europe as Christian Club. The indifference of Britain, where the prime minister speaks of “swarms,” the foreign secretary of “desperate migrants marauding,” and the home secretary of threats “to a cohesive society.” The indifference of a Europe that cannot rouse itself to establish adequate legal routes to refugee status that would stem trafficking that has left about 3,000 people dead this year in the Mediterranean. Then there is the indifference of an America that seems to have forgotten its role as haven for refugees of every stripe. The indifference of a world unready to acknowledge that more than 4 million Syrian refugees absorbed by Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon need a massive program of economic and educational aid over the next decade to confront the crisis. “It’s a trend and not a blip,” David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, told me. If the counter-indifference gesture of Milan’s Holocaust memorial were repeated myriad times across a European Union of more than half a billion people, the impact would be dramatic. One quarter of Lebanon’s population is now composed of Syrian refugees; the numbers reaching the E.U. constitute less than 0.5 percent of its population. Another echo, for Jews, lies in their own situation in Europe a little over a century ago. They were often marginalized. As Rabbi Julia Neuberger pointed out in a recent sermon at the West London Synagogue, around 150,000 Jews, often fleeing pogroms, arrived in Britain between 1881 and 1914. An anti-immigrant group called the British Brothers’ League declared then that Britain could not become “the dumping ground for the scum of Europe.” Sound familiar? Yesterday’s “scum” often proves to be the invigorating lifeblood of renewal. Churchill opposed the Aliens’ Act of 1905, designed to control Jewish immigration, on the grounds that “free entry and asylum” were practices from which Britain “has so greatly gained.” Europe is awash in small-mindedness, prejudice and amnesia. On Syria, the United States is not far behind. Jarach, whose Jewish family arrived in Milan in the late 19th century, is assisted by Adhil Rabhi, a Moroccan immigrant. They showed me around the memorial, explained how each boxcar was filled with Jews and then shunted to an elevator that took them up to the platform. Nobody saw the Jews. Nobody wanted to see them. Indifference kills. As Syria demonstrates. Copyright: New York Times 2015

Image: Jean-Pierre Bemba is alleged to have corruptly influenced testimony of witnesses in war crimes trial over alleged atrocities committed by his MLC militia. Photograph: Peter de Jong/EPA Copyright: The Guardian PARIS — A former Congolese vice president, Jean-Pierre Bemba, and four of his associates went on trial Tuesday at theInternational Criminal Court on charges that they tampered with witnesses, gave them money and urged them to testify in Mr. Bemba’s favor at his war crimes trial. Mr. Bemba, a wealthy and once-powerful man in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is still in jail in The Hague, awaiting a verdict in his trial for grave crimes attributed to his militia in the neighboring Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003. During that trial, the prosecution told the court on Tuesday, Mr. Bemba and his associates “corruptly influenced the testimony of numerous defense witnesses” to provide or withhold information. Prosecutors said they had intercepts of telephone calls and emails, as well as witness accounts to support their case. The other defendants are Mr. Bemba’s lead lawyer, Aimé Kilolo; his case manager, Jean-Jacques Mangenda; and two associates, Narcisse Arido and Fidèle Babala, who is a member of the Congolese Parliament. All five pleaded not guilty. Other cases at the court have faced questions of tampering. Last year, prosecutors had to withdraw their case against Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, citing extensive intimidation and bribery of witnesses, while in the continuing trial of Kenya’s vice president, William Ruto, some fearful prosecution witnesses have similarly withdrawn or changed their accounts. Copyright: New York Times 2015

Advocates for the Yazidi people of northern Iraq, who have been targeted by Islamic State because they are not Muslims, urged the International Criminal Court on Thursday to investigate their persecution as a potential case of genocide. In a meeting with ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, two Yazidi groups submitted a report detailing atrocities they allege IS fighters in northern Iraq have perpetrated since August 2014. They include the summary executions of more than 700 Yazidi men, the killing of the sick and elderly, the rape and enslavement of thousands of women and the abduction of their children, who are forced to convert to Islam and fight for IS. More than 400,000 Yazidi have fled Iraq’s Sinjar and Nineveh Plains districts, at times with the help of U.S. and Iraqi strikes against IS forces. They are now living in camps in areas controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq. Islamic State has openly said it wants to eliminate the Yazidi religion, which it regards as heathen. Yazidi believe in one god and their theology mostly derives from ancient Iranian religious traditions, rather than canonical Jewish, Christian, or Islamic texts. A spokeswoman for Bensouda confirmed she has received the report but could not comment further. The court’s previous prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who helped put together the Yazidi submission, told Reuters in an interview this month he believed the treatment of the Yazidi was a clear case of genocide. Bensouda has previously acknowledged that Islamic State fighters appeared to be committing grave crimes in Iraq and Syria. She has called on the international community to act as she has no jurisdiction because Iraq and Syria are not ICC members. The report submitted by the Free Yezidi Foundation and Yazda, with the support of the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq, argues the court has jurisdiction over some 5,000-7,500 foreign fighters within IS who come from ICC member states, including around 2,000 from France, Britain, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. The ICC was set up in 2002 to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity when member states are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. Bensouda said in April the court could in theory exercise “personal jurisdiction” over individuals from member states who have joined IS. The Yazidi groups said Thursday they had evidence that foreigners played an important role within IS. “They are a significant portion of Islamic State,” Murad Ismael of Yazda told Reuters in The Hague. “They are responsible for running the media, they are responsible for the funding, they are responsible for the training, and more importantly, foreign members that we were able to identify were responsible for the sex trade in Yezidi women and girls, some as young as six years old.” The groups want Bensouda to review publicly available evidence and legal arguments to see whether her office has jurisdiction and can open a formal investigation. The U.N. Security Council could also refer the case to the ICC regardless off whether a state is a member of the court, as it did over genocide allegations in the Darfur region of Sudan. (Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Jon Boyle) Copyright: Reuters 2015

In Central African Republic, the conflict between armed groups is now compounded by a conflict between armed communities. The roadmap to end the crisis including elections late 2015 presents only a short-term answer and risks exacerbating existing tensions. The transitional authorities and their international partners must address crucial issues by implementing a comprehensive disarmament policy and reaffirming that Muslims belong within the nation. Executive Summary Crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) is longterm and characterised by sporadic surges of violence against a backdrop of state disintegration, a survival economy and deep inter-ethnic cleavages. Armed groups (including the anti-balaka and the ex-Seleka) are fragmenting and becoming increasingly criminalised; intercommunal tensions have hampered efforts to promote CAR’s national unity and mend its social fabric. Unfortunately, the roadmap to end the crisis, which includes elections before the end of 2015, presents a short-term answer. To avoid pursuing a strategy that would merely postpone addressing critical challenges until after the polls, CAR’s transitional authorities and international partners should address them now by implementing a comprehensive disarmament policy, and reaffirming that Muslims belong withinthe nation. If this does not happen, the elections risk becoming a zero-sum game. By virtue of its geography and history, CAR is located at the crossroads between two regions and two peoples: in the north, the Sahel with its pastoralist communities and majority Muslim merchants, and in the south, Central Africa with its communities of the savanna, initially animist but now predominantly Christian. The Seleka power grab in March 2013 marked a fundamental reversal of CAR’s traditional political landscape. For the first time since independence, a force stemming from the Muslim population of the north and east of the country held the reins of power. The ensuing clashes between Seleka and anti-balaka forces generated strong intercommunal tensions that were exacerbated by the instrumentalisation of religion, societal fractures and collective fears, reviving traumatic memories of the pre-colonial slave trade era. These tensions, which culminated in the killing and displacement of Muslims from the west, are still very high in the centre of the country, the front line between armed groups. The conflict between anti-balaka and ex-Seleka is thus now compounded by a conflict between armed communities. In areas with frequent intercommunal clashes, the link between armed groups and communities is strong: ex-Seleka combatants are seen as the protectors of Muslims and anti-balaka fighters as the defenders of Christian communities. By contrast, communities in other parts of the country are keeping their distance from armed groups. The current approach to disarmament, which was formalised by the agreement signed at the Bangui Forum last May, underestimates both the extent to which the conflict is now communal, and the criminalisation and fragmentation of armed groups. In western CAR, following the withdrawal of ex-Seleka fighters and the flight of the region’s Muslim communities, the militarily and politically unorganised local armed groups known as the anti-balaka, have begun preying on local communities. The Seleka coalition in turn has splintered into several movements over leadership rivalries, financial squabbles and disagreements about strategies to adopt toward the transitional authorities and international forces. The fragmentation and criminalisation of CAR’s armed groups makes negotiations much more difficult. In this context, the rushed organisation of elections risks exacerbating existing intercommunal tensions, undoing the country’s indispensable reconstruction efforts and postponing indefinitely the resolution of crucial issues like the disarmament of militias and communities. The outstanding issues to be addressed by CAR’s transitional authorities and international partners require replacing the current disarmament program with a comprehensive policy that engages not only militiamen but also communities, and which includes real opportunities and effective sanctions. This means maintaining a capacity to restrain armed groups – in other words re-evaluating the planned withdrawal schedule of the French Sangaris forces and reducing armed groups’ financing abilities – among other measures. This would lessen the appeal of the militia economy for CAR’s youth. It is also imperative to avoid the electoral process adding fuel to the fire. To do so, the transitional authorities should reaffirm Muslims’ equal rights, register them to vote, demonstrate the government’s concern for populations in the northeast, and diversify recruitment in the public service. The country’s international partners and transitional authorities focus too much attention on the electoral process in isolation from other issues: they should prioritise these other issues in their conflict resolution strategy, as elections alone will change very little in a country which today has ceased to function as a state. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2015 International Crisis Group

New Haven — BEFORE he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, “You must die so that we can live.” As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us. Today we think of the Nazi Final Solution as some dark apex of high technology. It was in fact the killing of human beings at close range during a war for resources. The war that brought Jews under German control was fought because Hitler believed that Germany needed more land and food to survive and maintain its standard of living — and that Jews, and their ideas, posed a threat to his violent expansionist program. The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living. Image: In Bangladesh, millions of people have been displaced by floods and the rising sea level. Credit Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR, for The New York Times The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land. The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war. “It is always the Jew,” argued Hitler, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.” As exotic as it sounds, the concept of Lebensraum is less distant from our own ways of thinking than we believe. Germany was blockaded during World War I, dependent on imports of agricultural commodities and faced real uncertainties about its food supply. Hitler transformed these fears into a vision of absolute conquest for total security. Lebensraum linked a war of extermination to the improvement of lifestyle. The chief Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, could therefore define the purpose of a war of extermination as “a big breakfast, a big lunch and a big dinner.” He conflated lifestyle with life. To expand Germany’s Lebensraum, Hitler aimed to seize Ukraine from the Soviet Union, starve 30 million Eastern Europeans and transfer the food to Germany. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the campaign had two major aims: the control of fertile Ukrainian soil and the destruction of Jews living there. It was this invasion that placed defenseless Jewish children at the mercy of the murderous Einsatzgruppen. Climate change threatens to provoke a new ecological panic. So far, poor people in Africa and the Middle East have borne the brunt of the suffering. The mass murder of at least 500,000 Rwandans in 1994 followed a decline in agricultural production for several years before. Hutus killed Tutsis not only out of ethnic hatred, but to take their land, as many genocidaires later admitted. In Sudan, drought drove Arabs into the lands of African pastoralists in 2003. The Sudanese government sided with the Arabs and pursued a policy of eliminating the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur peoples in Darfur and surrounding regions. Climate change has also brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics. China today, like Germany before the war, is an industrial power incapable of feeding its population from its own territory, and is thus dependent on unpredictable international markets. This could make China’s population susceptible to a revival of ideas like Lebensraum. The Chinese government must balance a not-so-distant history of starving its own population with today’s promise of ever-increasing prosperity — all while confronting increasingly unfavorable environmental conditions. The danger is not that the Chinese might actually starve to death in the near future, any more than Germans would have during the 1930s. The risk is that a developed country able to project military power could, like Hitler’s Germany, fall into ecological panic, and take drastic steps to protect its existing standard of living. How might such a scenario unfold? China is already leasing a tenth of Ukraine’s arable soil, and buying up food whenever global supplies tighten. During the drought of 2010, Chinese panic buying helped bring bread riots and revolution to the Middle East. The Chinese leadership already regards Africa as a long-term source of food. Although many Africans themselves still go hungry, their continent holds about half of the world’s untilled arable land. Like China, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea are interested in Sudan’s fertile regions — and they have been joined by Japan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in efforts to buy or lease land throughout Africa. Nations in need of land would likely begin with tactfully negotiated leases or purchases; but under conditions of stress or acute need, such agrarian export zones could become fortified colonies, requiring or attracting violence. Hitler spread ecological panic by claiming that only land would bring Germany security and by denying the science that promised alternatives to war. By polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the United States has done more than any other nation to bring about the next ecological panic, yet it is the only country where climate science is still resisted by certain political and business elites. These deniers tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science — an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s. The full consequences of climate change may reach America only decades after warming wreaks havoc in other regions. And by then it will be too late for climate science and energy technology to make any difference. Indeed, by the time the door is open to the demagogy of ecological panic in the United States, Americans will have spent years spreading climate disaster around the world. THE European Union, by contrast, takes global warming very seriously, but its existence is under threat. As Africa and the Middle East continue to warm and wars rage, economic migrants and war refugees are making perilous journeys to flee to Europe. In response, European populists have called for the strict enforcement of national borders and the end of the union. Many of these populist parties are supported by Russia, which is openly pursuing a divide-and-conquer policy with the aim of bringing about European disintegration. Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine has already shattered the peaceful order that Europeans had come to take for granted. The Kremlin, which is economically dependent on the export of hydrocarbons to Europe, is now seeking to make gas deals with individual European states one by one in order to weaken European unity and expand its own influence. Meanwhile, President Vladimir V. Putin waxes nostalgic for the 1930s, while Russian nationalists blame gays, cosmopolitans and Jews for antiwar sentiment. None of this bodes well for Europe’s future — or Russia’s. When mass killing is on the way, it won’t announce itself in the language we are familiar with. The Nazi scenario of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal elements have already begun to assemble. It is not difficult to imagine ethnic mass murder in Africa, which has already happened; or the triumph of a violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East; or a Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves removing the people already living there; or a growing global ecological panic if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart. Today we confront the same crucial choice between science and ideology that Germans once faced. Will we accept empirical evidence and support new energy technologies, or allow a wave of ecological panic to spread across the world? Denying science imperils the future by summoning the ghosts of the past. Copyright: New York Times, 2015

Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool. QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted. He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion. “I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity. The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets. The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them. A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden. A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous. “Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame associated with rape. “He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship. “He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ” said the teenager, who escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for nearly nine months. Calculated Conquest The Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern Iraq. Its valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority who represent less than 1.5 percent of Iraq’s estimated population of 34 million. The offensive on the mountain came just two months after the fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it appeared that the subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt to extend the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters. Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different. Survivors say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they had armpit hair, they were directed to join their older brothers and fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with automatic fire. The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks. “The offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert on the Yazidi minority. He was in Sinjar when the onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists. Fifteen-year-old F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic State fighters encircled them. “Right away, the fighters separated the men from the women,” she said. She, her mother and sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my mom. The young, unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.” The buses were white, with a painted stripe next to the word “Hajj,” suggesting that the Islamic State had commandeered Iraqi government buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. So many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F’s bus that they were forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said. Once the bus headed out, they noticed that the windows were blocked with curtains, an accouterment that appeared to have been added because the fighters planned to transport large numbers of women who were not covered in burqas or head scarves. F’s account, including the physical description of the bus, the placement of the curtains and the manner in which the women were transported, is echoed by a dozen other female victims interviewed for this article. They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart. F says she was driven to the Iraqi city of Mosul some six hours away, where they herded them into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. Other groups of women and girls were taken to a palace from the Saddam Hussein era, the Badoosh prison compound and the Directory of Youth building in Mosul, recent escapees said. And in addition to Mosul, women were herded into elementary schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of Tal Afar, Solah, Ba’aj and Sinjar City. They would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet of buses again before being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex. “It was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider Domle, a Yazidi community activist who maintains a detailed database of the victims. “I spoke by telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory of Youth in Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had mattresses, plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.” Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex trade. In each location, survivors say Islamic State fighters first conducted a census of their female captives. Inside the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were over 1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out and leaning against the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by several other women held in the same location. They each described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was married, and if she had children. For two months, F was held inside the Galaxy hall. Then one day, they came and began removing young women. Those who refused were dragged out by their hair, she said. In the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time. “They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State leader explained it meant slave. “He told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray — “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit.” The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers. Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as fellow “People of the Book.” In Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on Mount Sinjar and among the farthest away from escape, residents decided to stay, believing they would be treated as the Christians of Mosul had months earlier. On Aug. 15, 2014, the Islamic State ordered the residents to report to a school in the center of town. When she got there, 40-year-old Aishan Ali Saleh found a community elder negotiating with the Islamic State, asking if they could be allowed to hand over their money and gold in return for safe passage. The fighters initially agreed and laid out a blanket, where Ms. Saleh placed her heart-shaped pendant and her gold rings, while the men left crumpled bills. Instead of letting them go, the fighters began shoving the men outside, bound for death. Sometime later, a fleet of cars arrived and the women, girls and children were driven away. The Market Months later, the Islamic State made clear in their online magazine that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls had been extensively preplanned. “Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq. The article made clear that for the Yazidis, there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the Jews and Christians.” “After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided” as spoils, the article said. In much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, to justify their human trafficking, experts say. Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery. Many argue that slavery figures in Islamic scripture in much the same way that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection of the period in antiquity in which the religion was born. “In the milieu in which the Quran arose, there was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular religious institution. It was just how people did things.” Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes detailed rules for the treatment of slaves. “There is a great deal of scripture that sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel, the author of a research paper published by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did.” The youngest, prettiest women and girls were bought in the first weeks after their capture. Others — especially older, married women — described how they were transported from location to location, spending months in the equivalent of human holding pens, until a prospective buyer bid on them. Their captors appeared to have a system in place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers. Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank, unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic, “Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on. Buildings where the women were collected and held sometimes included a viewing room. “When they put us in the building, they said we had arrived at the ‘Sabaya Market,’” said one 19-year-old victim, whose first initial is I. “I understood we were now in a slave market.” She estimated there were at least 500 other unmarried women and girls in the multistory building, with the youngest among them being 11. When the buyers arrived, the girls were taken one by one into a separate room. “The emirs sat against the wall and called us by name. We had to sit in a chair facing them. You had to look at them, and before you went in, they took away our scarves and anything we could have used to cover ourselves,” she said. “When it was my turn, they made me stand four times. They made me turn around.” The captives were also forced to answer intimate questions, including reporting the exact date of their last menstrual cycle. They realized that the fighters were trying to determine whether they were pregnant, in keeping with a Shariah rule stating that a man cannot have intercourse with his slave if she is pregnant. Property of ISIS The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape. The Islamic State’s leadership has repeatedly sought to justify the practice to its internal audience. After the initial article in Dabiq in October, the issue came up in the publication again this year, in an editorial in May that expressed the writer’s hurt and dismay at the fact that some of the group’s own sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery. “What really alarmed me was that some of the Islamic State’s supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the Khilafah had committed a mistake or evil,” the author wrote. “I write this while the letters drip of pride,’’ he said. “We have indeed raided and captured the kafirahwomen and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” Kafirah refers to infidels. In a pamphlet published online in December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and disposed of just like any other property after his death. Recent escapees describe an intricate bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward for doing so. Though rare, this has created one avenue of escape for victims. A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month, identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore setting her free. Labeled a “Certificate of Emancipation,” the document was signed by the judge of the western province of the Islamic State. The Yazidi woman presented it at security checkpoints as she left Syria to return to Iraq, where she rejoined her family in July. The Islamic State recently made it clear that sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible, according to a new 34-page manual issued this summer by the terror group’s Research and Fatwa Department. Just about the only prohibition is having sex with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as well as those who were past menopause. Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December. One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding. “He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said. Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child. “I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’ ’’ “And having sex with her pleases God,” he said. Copyright: New York Times 2015

This month, the International Criminal Court will present its budget request for next year to the court’s 123 members, including Canada. The ICC is the only permanent global court with a mandate to prosecute the world’s worst abuses, whether in Darfur, Libya or Congo. But budget negotiations have become increasingly fraught. Just as its workload began to increase (to eight countries from five between 2010 and 2013), some ICC members, with France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain in the lead, began to insist the court undertake reforms and cap its budget. They cited the global economic crisis and budget crunches at home. The pressure to limit growth has eased in some corners but not in Canada, which has become the leading advocate for holding down ICC budget increases. In the past couple of years, Canada has not stood in the way of increases in the ICC’s budget agreed to by all other member countries, but it has made clear it intends to apply a non-growth stand to all international organizations, including the ICC. That will have disastrous effects if Canada wins the day on the ICC. Zero growth for the ICC is simply not tenable, even in times of austerity. The 13-year-old court is just hitting its stride, completing first trials, grappling with complex and important situations, and facing demands for justice in more places. It is at pains to keep up. Consider Ivory Coast. A new Human Rights Watch report on the ICC’s work in the West African country paints a picture of a court struggling to make sure the justice it delivers actually counts. The ICC prosecutor opened investigations in 2011 into horrific abuses during the country’s 2010-2011 post-election crisis. Attacks both by forces allied with former president Laurent Gbagbo and by those with current President Alassane Ouattara killed at least 3,000 civilians. But the prosecution focused initial investigations on crimes by pro-Gbagbo forces. It has signalled it will continue its investigations into all sides this year but, until now, the only cases opened, including the one against Mr. Gbagbo, relate to one side of the conflict. The result is polarized opinion about the court and a lack of access to justice before the ICC for victims of pro-Ouattara forces. Resulting perceptions of bias in the ICC’s work in Ivory Coast have damaged its legitimacy in that country. And even the court’s outreach around these existing cases was too narrowly focused to engage more Ivory Coast citizens in the ICC’s work. Lessons from the court’s work in Ivory Coast likely apply, to varying degrees, across all countries where the ICC has investigations. The problems cannot be explained by a lack of resources alone, but they are a factor. The ICC lacked the money to put a full-time staff member in Ivory Coast to provide information to the public and journalists. Making do with missions conducted from the court’s headquarters in The Hague contributed to the narrow reach of these efforts. And while a budget crunch cannot explain away the prosecution’s initial decision to focus on only one side, it has been a factor in allowing the situation to persist; the ICC prosecution has cited its need to focus on other investigations – and a lack of resources to be everywhere at once – to explain the prolonged delay in getting to other cases in Ivory Coast. Even if court officials could have made different decisions in Ivory Coast, to apply the lessons from its work there across the countries where the ICC is working – and where it may work in future – it will likely need more resources. While Canada may have allowed some budget increases to go through, its insistence on zero growth, like the insistence of other ICC member countries before it, risks distorting budget discussions. It moves these discussions toward an arbitrary bottom line, rather than where they need to be: firmly focused on whether the ICC has what it needs to make a difference where it matters, for victims and for communities that have borne the brunt of mass atrocity. Member countries do need to scrutinize the court’s requests for resources and demand accountability for its use of funds. But as human-rights crises continue to pile up, the ICC’s mandate to hold abusers to account is too big to let the court fail, and yet the Canadian position risks leaving the court too small to succeed. ________________________ Elizabeth Evenson is a senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. ________________________ © Copyright 2015 The Globe and Mail Inc. All Rights Reserved.

El presidente boliviano, Evo Morales durante una conferencia de prensa en la sede de las Naciones Unidas (ONU); Nueva York, 08 de enero de 2014. REUTERS / Eric Thayer Bolivia’s restrictions on the work of nongovernmental organizations violate human rights defenders’ right to freedom of association, Human Rights Watch said today. On August 5, 2015, Human Rights Watch submitted an amicus brief to the Bolivian Constitutional Court, in a case brought by the Bolivian Ombudsman challenging the constitutionality of a 2013 law and presidential decree that grant the government broad powers to dissolve nongovernmental organizations. “The way Bolivia’s law and decree on nongovernmental groups is written invites arbitrary, politically motivated decisions that undermine their right to freedom of association,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Bolivia should immediately repeal these restrictions to ensure that human rights defenders can do their job freely, which is critical in any democratic society.” Under the decree, any government office may ask the Autonomy Ministry, which is charged with strengthening autonomous local governments and indigenous communities in the country, to revoke an organization’s permit to operate if the group carries out activities different from those listed in its bylaws or if the organization’s representative is criminally sanctioned for activities that “undermine security or public order.” The Plurinational Assembly, the national legislature, may also request revocation of permit in cases of “necessity or public interest.” The Ombudsman’s submission specifically challenged the constitutionality of a provision in the Law of Legal Entities that provides that nongovernmental organizations and foundations must specify in their bylaws “their contribution to economic and social development,” and another in the presidential decree that provides that organizations can be dissolved if they “fail to comply with [official] policies and rules.” The challenged provisions contravene Bolivia’s obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights, ratified by Bolivia in 1979, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by Bolivia in 1982, Human Rights Watch said. Both treaties impose the obligation to respect the right to freedom of association and to ensure the free and full exercise of that right for everyone, without discrimination. The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights has noted that in the case of human rights defenders, the right of freedom of association is a “fundamental tool that makes it possible to fully carry out the[ir] work.” The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has repeatedly noted that “[s]tates have the duty to provide the necessary means for human rights defenders to conduct their activities freely...[and] to refrain from placing restrictions that would hinder the performance of their work.” In 2013, the UN Human Rights Committee, the body that oversees Bolivia’s compliance with the ICCPR, stated that Bolivia “should also amend its legislation on the legal status of NGOs in such a way as to eliminate the requirements that place excessive restrictions on their ability to operate freely, independently and effectively.” The United Nations special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association has noted that associations “should be free to determine their statutes” and has stressed that any restrictions on the right to association should respect the principles of “pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness.” _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Human Rights Watch

Image: A wounded man after an explosion in Suruc, Turkey, on Monday. Credit Reuters ISTANBUL — A suicide bombing hit a cultural center in a Turkish town near the Syrian border on Monday, killing at least 30 and wounding more than 100 in an attack that Turkey’s prime minister suggested had been plotted by the Islamic State. The assault, in the town of Suruc, was the deadliest in Turkey in more than two years. If the Islamic State is confirmed to be behind the assault, it would be the organization’s first mass killing of civilians in Turkey and the worst spillover in deadly violence from Syria’s civil war. It was carried out two weeks after Turkey intensified efforts to combat Islamic extremists by arresting hundreds across the country in a series of raids. On Saturday, Turkish security forces arrested nearly 500 people trying to cross from Turkey into northern Syria, where the Islamic State has firmly entrenched itself. When Turkish authorities blocked access to several Islamic news websites last week, Islamic State sympathizers in Turkey threatened to carry out an unspecified retaliation. “For the first time, the war along Turkey’s borders moved within Turkey on Monday,” said Verda Ozer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research group, who was recently in Suruc. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, speaking about the Suruc bombing at a news conference in Ankara, the capital, said preliminary findings pointed to “a suicide attack carried out by Daesh,” the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. He said, however, that “we are not at a point to make a final judgment.” Turkish officials universally condemned the assault as an act of terrorism and some suggested it was retaliation for the government’s crackdown. The Interior Ministry said the assault was a “terrorist attack targeting our country’s unity.” The explosion was the deadliest attack inside Turkey since car bombings in May 2013 left dozens dead in the town of Reyhanli, right by the Syrian border. Turkish officials blamed supporters of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, for that assault. Relations between Turkey and Syria, which share a border of more than 500 miles, have steadily worsened during the Syrian civil war, now more than four years old. Turkey houses one of the largest populations of Syrian refugees. An official at the mayor’s office in Suruc said that the explosion on Monday hit the Amara Cultural Center during a gathering of a youth group of Turks and Kurds meeting to discuss entering Kobani, the town across the border in Syria that has been ravaged by fighting and is in urgent need of rebuilding. Amateur video footage published by the Dogan News Agency shows a youth group chanting slogans and carrying a banner in the garden of the culture center before an explosion ripped through the crowd. Witnesses said that two men had been seen carrying bags into the garden of the cultural center before blowing themselves up. “Bodies and body parts were scattered all over the place,” said Mustafa Ebdi, a Kurdish activist based in Suruc who arrived at the scene shortly after the blast. “Passers-by rushed to evacuate the wounded from the scene and then rushed them to the hospital.” Television footage showed dozens of people lying on the grass as plumes of smoke rose up from the ground. Ambulances and private cars arrived to pick up the wounded. Suruc is about eight miles from the Syrian town of Kobani, which Kurdish fighters have defended from repeated attacks by the Islamic State as a military coalition led by the United States has carried out airstrikes. The Islamic State suffered a blow when it lost control of Kobani in January. Another explosion was reported in Kobani on Monday, but the cause was not immediately clear. Karam Shoumali reported from Istanbul, and Ceylan Yeginsu from Mugla, Turkey. Maher Samaan contributed reporting from Beirut. Copyright 2015 New York Times