Jovana Gec, December 13, 2024 Protestor holding a sign signifying government responsibility for the 15 victims of the Novi Sad roof collapse, December 13, 2024. Photo courtesy of AP. BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Residents throughout Serbia stopped in silence for 15 minutes on Friday as part of persistent anti-government protests following the collapse last month of a concrete canopy in the country’s north that killed 15 people. Traffic blockades have taken place each Friday since Nov. 1 at 11:52 a.m. , the exact time when the canopy at the railway station building in Novi Sad crashed down on people who were sitting or strolling below on a sunny day. Initially, 14 people were killed and three were injured, but one more person later died while hospitalized . The two injured remain hospitalized weeks later. The station building was renovated twice in recent years. Many in Serbia believe rampant corruption led to sloppy work on the building reconstruction, which was part of a wider railroad project with Chinese state companies. The collapse also has become a flashpoint for broader dissatisfaction with the growingly autocratic rule of populist President Aleksandar Vučić , reflecting public demands for democratic changes. Thousands of people, led by university students, on Wednesday evening held a noisy rally outside the state RTS television building over the station’s pro-government editorial policies. RTS has broadcast Vučić's accusations that students were paid from the West and elsewhere to hold protests to overthrow his government. Friday’s traffic blockades took place at dozens of locations throughout the country. Some participants held up their hands in red-painted rubber gloves, a symbol of the protests telling the authorities they have “blood on their hands.” Serbian media reported that a car rammed through protesters at a blockade spot in Novi Sad. A similar incident was reported a week ago when four musicians were injured while participating in a silent traffic blockade in central Belgrade. Street protests in recent weeks also occasionally turned violent when pro-government thugs showed up to disrupt opposition-led gatherings and student demonstrations. Classes at more than 50 university faculties and a number of secondary schools throughout Serbia have been suspended for days. Serbia’s farmers also on Friday blocked a road in central Serbia with their tractors, holding a banner featuring a bloody hand. An actors’ guild announced daily protests outside theaters. Vučić's government has sought to cushion mounting dissatisfaction by publishing around 130 documents related to the railway station building renovation, which has been one of the protest demands. Prosecutors have arrested 13 people, but a government minister has been released. This has fueled skepticism over the proceedings as the governing populists hold firm control over both police and the judiciary. Vučić has imposed a tight grip over all state institutions and mainstream media since coming to power more than a decade ago and despite pledging to lead Serbia into the European Union. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press.

Yuliia Dysa, December 11, 2024 Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Russia's President Vladimir Putin arrive for a press conference following their meeting in Moscow, Russia July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina/File Photo Dec 11 (Reuters) - Ukraine blasted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for undermining Western unity by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, criticism that Budapest said showed Kyiv was not interested in a "Christmas ceasefire" in the war. Orban, who has had closer ties with Putin than any other European leader during Russia's 33-month-old war in Ukraine, said they spoke for an hour and that he believed the fighting was now in its "most dangerous weeks" to date. With Donald Trump set to return to the White House next month vowing to rapidly end the fighting, the war is at an uncertain juncture, making Kyiv even more sensitive to moves it sees as reducing Putin's pariah status in the West. "No one should boost (their) personal image at the expense of unity," Zelenskiy wrote on X after the Orban-Putin call, appearing to mock the Hungarian's self-styled attempts to launch a peace mission to end the war. "We all hope that Orban at least won't call Assad in Moscow to listen to his hour-long lectures as well," Zelenskiy said, referring to Russia's decision to grant overthrown Syrian President Bashar al-Assad political asylum . Responding in kind with a statement on X, Orban hit back, saying that Budapest had "proposed a Christmas ceasefire and a large-scale prisoner exchange. It's sad that President Zelenskiy clearly rejected and ruled this out today." The Hungarian leader did not spell out exactly when or how he had proposed such a truce, or whether the same offer was made to Putin over the phone. There was no mention of a ceasefire in the Kremlin's readout of the call. Ukrainian presidential adviser Dmytro Lytvyn said there had been no advance warning or communication from Hungary, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, before Orban calling Putin. "We need just peace, not PR," he said in a written statement adding that Hungary did not discuss any ceasefire with Ukraine. Orban himself has repeatedly made calls for a ceasefire. Kyiv officials have consistently said that would play into Russia's hands, as it could freeze the current front lines with Russia holding nearly 20% of Ukrainian territory. Kyiv has insisted that it also needs security guarantees, namely membership in the NATO military alliance that would prevent Russia using a ceasefire to prepare for another invasion. Moscow sees Ukraine joining NATO as unacceptable. The Kremlin said Putin told Orban during their phone call that Ukraine's stance excluded the possibility of a peaceful settlement to the war. Putin has said Ukraine must not join NATO and that Russia should be left in full control of four Ukrainian regions his troops partially control currently for a peace deal to be done. Orban is not the first leader to be criticised by Kyiv for calling Russia's leader. Zelenskiy criticised German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for speaking to Putin in November, saying their conversation had opened a Pandora's box that undermined efforts to end the war and would only lead to more similar calls. "There can be no discussions about the war, that Russia wages against Ukraine, without Ukraine," Zelenskiy said on Wednesday. © 2024 Reuters.

he fight. The Gold Rush at the Heart of the Sudanese Civil War The New York Times Dec. 11, 2024 By  Declan Walsh Reporting from Juba, South Sudan; Port Sudan, Sudan; Cairo; and Adré, Chad.   Gold mining in Darfur, Sudan. citation: Tohami, Abu, Smart Artisanal Gold Mining from a Sudanese Perspective, Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research, 2018 The luxury jet touched down in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, on a mission to collect hundreds of pounds of illicit gold. On board was a representative of a ruthless paramilitary group accused of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s sprawling civil war, the flight manifest showed. The gold itself had been smuggled from Darfur, a region of famine and fear in Sudan that is largely under his group’s brutal control. Porters grunted as they heaved cases filled with gold, about $25 million worth, onto the plane, said three people involved with or briefed on the deal. Airport officials discreetly maintained a perimeter around the jet, which stood out in the main airport of one of the world’s poorest countries. After 90 minutes, the jet took off again, landing before dawn on March 6 at a private airport in the United Arab Emirates, flight data showed. Its gleaming cargo soon vanished into the global gold market. As Sudan burns and its people starve, a gold rush is underway. War has shattered Sudan’s economy, collapsed its health system and turned much of the once-proud capital into  piles of rubble . Fighting has also set off one of the world’s worst famines in decades, with 26 million people facing acute hunger or starvation. But the gold trade is humming. The production and trade of gold, which lies in rich deposits across the vast nation, has actually surpassed prewar levels — and that’s just the official figure in a country rife with smuggling. Indeed, billions of dollars in gold are flowing out of Sudan in virtually every direction, helping to turn the Sahel region of Africa into one of the world’s largest gold producers at a time when prices are hitting record highs. But instead of using the windfall to help the legions of hungry and homeless people, Sudan’s warring sides are wielding the gold to bankroll their fight, deploying what U.N. experts call “ starvation tactics ” against tens of millions of people. Advertisement Gold helps pay for the drones, guns and missiles that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and forced 11 million from their homes. It is the prize for rampaging fighters and mercenaries who have robbed so many banks and homes that the capital now resembles a giant crime scene, with fighters gleefully vaunting piles of stolen jewelry and gold bars on social media.   The Sudanese people once hoped that gold would lift up their country. Instead, it is turning out to be their downfall. It even helps explain why the war started — and why it is so hard to stop. “Gold is destroying Sudan,” said Suliman Baldo, a Sudanese expert on the nation’s resources, “and it’s destroying the Sudanese.” The civil war pits the nation’s military and what remains of the government against their former ally, a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces. Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan at the headquarters of Sudan’s military in June 2019.Credit ...Declan Walsh/The New York Times The group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, is a camel trader turned warlord whose forces grew especially powerful after they seized one of Sudan’s most lucrative gold mines in 2017. “It’s nothing, just an area in Darfur that belongs to us,” he told The New York Times in a 2019 interview, trying to downplay its significance. The mine became the cornerstone of a billion-dollar empire that transformed his armed group, the R.S.F., into a formidable force. General Hamdan later sold the mine to the government for $200 million, helping him buy even more weapons and political influence. But that wealth and ambition  led to a standoff  with the Sudanese military,  paving the way for the civil war  that has all but destroyed the country. The fight for gold only intensified when the war broke out in 2023. In one of his opening salvos, General Hamdan seized back the mine he had sold to the government. Weeks later, his fighters marched on the national gold refinery in the capital as well, making away with $150 million in gold bars, the government says.   Gold drives the war for Sudan’s military, too. It has bombed R.S.F. mines, while ramping up gold production in areas still under government control, often by inviting foreign powers to do the mining. Sudanese officials have been negotiating gun and gold deals with Russia and are seeking to woo Chinese mining executives. They even share a gold mine with Gulf leaders accused of arming their enemies. The war’s foreign sponsors play both sides as well. President Vladimir V. Putin has long heralded Russian gold mining in Sudan, and his country’s Wagner Group  worked with the military and its rivals  even before they went to war. See more on:  Wagner Group Now that  Wagner’s boss is dead , killed in a plane crash  after his brief mutiny  against Russia’s military leaders, the Kremlin has  taken over the group’s business  and appears to be pursuing gold on either side of the front line, partnering with the R.S.F. in the west and the nation’s army in the east. The United Arab Emirates is also lighting both ends of the fuse. On the battlefield, it backs the R.S.F., sending it powerful drones and missiles in a  covert operation under the guise  of a humanitarian mission. Yet when it comes to gold, the Emiratis are also helping to fund the opposing side. An Emirati company, linked by officials to the royal family, owns the largest industrial mine in Sudan. It sits in government-controlled territory and delivers a chunk of money to the army’s cash-strapped war machine — yet another example of the dizzying array of alliances and counter-alliances fueling the war.   An official Emirati photograph shows aid arriving for Sudanese refugees. American officials say the Emirates also supplied arms to the R.S.F. through the same airport.Credit ...Emirates News Agency Motorbikes, trucks and planes spirit gold out of the nation at every turn, shuttling it across the porous borders with Sudan’s seven neighboring countries. Ultimately, nearly all of it ends up in the United Arab Emirates, the prime destination for smuggled gold from Sudan,  the State Department  says. Along the way, a motley chain of profiteers take their cut — criminals, warlords, spymasters, generals and corrupt officials, the cogs of an expanding war economy that provides a powerful financial incentive for the conflict to grind on, experts say. Some now liken Sudan’s gold to so-called blood diamonds and other conflict minerals. “To end the war, follow the money,” said Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese tycoon whose foundation promotes good governance. “Gold feeds the supply of weapons, and we need to pressure the individuals behind it. At the end of the day, they are merchants of death.” An Empire of Gold In the Spain-sized region of Darfur, where a genocide spurred global outrage two decades ago, the horrors have returned. R.S.F. fighters have waged a campaign of  ethnic cleansing   [Genocide Watch comment: “Ethnic cleansing” is a euphemism invented by Milosevic to cover up GENOCIDE] against civilians and carried out  a punishing siege  on an ancient city. In the turmoil,  the world’s first famine  in four years started in a  camp of 450,000 terrified civilians. “I shouted and screamed,” said Zuhal al-Zein Hussain, a woman from Darfur who recounted being gang-raped by R.S.F. fighters last year. “But it was useless.”   Zuhal al-Zein Hussain at a refugee camp in Chad in July.Credit ...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Yet in a corner of Darfur largely untouched by the war, the R.S.F. has also been quietly building a vast, secretive gold mining operation. The enterprise, worth hundreds of millions a year, expanded with the help of Russia’s Wagner mercenaries and has become the financial fuel of a military campaign notorious for atrocities. In the savanna around Songo, a mining town hacked out of a  nature reserve , tens of thousands of miners labor in sandy pits in a region rich with gold, uranium and possibly diamonds. The mines provide rare, though often dangerous, jobs at a time of near total economic breakdown. But a fortune is being made by the R.S.F., whose fighters control every aspect of the gold trade.   Map locates the Kush gold mine in Sudan as well as the Songo gold mines in the Darfur region, Port Sudan and the capital, Khartoum. The map also shows Wau in South Sudan and its capital, Juba. An inset shows the area within the African continent and the Sahel. The mines are the latest offshoot of a vast family business that began well before the war. When General Hamdan seized a major gold mine in Darfur in 2017 — effectively becoming Sudan’s biggest gold trader overnight — he channeled the profits into a network of  as many as 50  companies that paid for weapons, influence and fighters, the U.N. says. His paramilitary force ballooned in size, and General Hamdan grew so wealthy from gold and supplying mercenaries for the war in Yemen that he  publicly offered $1 billion  in 2019 to stabilize Sudan’s tottering economy. One company anchors his empire of guns and gold. It’s called Al Junaid, and the United States  sanctioned it last year , saying that gold had become “a vital source of revenue” for General Hamdan and his fighters. As violence has engulfed Sudan, Al Junaid has focused on hundreds of square miles around Songo, where the R.S.F. has long worked closely with Wagner. Production across the region has been brisk, according to witnesses, satellite images and documents obtained by The Times. A confidential report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in November found that $860 million worth of gold had been extracted from paramilitary-controlled mines in Darfur this year alone. Satellite images analyzed by The Times show ongoing activity at a major Al Junaid gold plant 35 miles south of Songo. Recently built houses beside the plant indicate a growing work force.Credit ...Maxar Technologies The fighters don’t do the digging themselves. At about 13 sites across the region, small-scale miners work for a pittance. The R.S.F. controls everything at the barrel of a gun. Sudanese journalists with Ayin Media, an investigative website, visited the area this year and recounted R.S.F. fighters patrolling an Al Junaid gold plant, with Russian employees stationed behind high walls. Sudan’s mines have been a big lure for Wagner, as The Times  reported two years ago . New documents obtained by The Times since then further detail Wagner’s partnership with the R.S.F., including a plan to prospect for diamonds near Songo. In one letter from 2021, a manager for Al Junaid invoked the name of the R.S.F. leader, General Hamdan, and extolled “the great work between us and the Russian company,” a common shorthand for Wagner in Sudan. The alliance is about weapons as well as money. U.N. investigators have documented missile shipments from Wagner to the R.S.F. Songo is now so important to General Hamdan that the mines are a military target. The Sudanese air force  bombed the area  last year and again  in January , killing civilians, according to news reports. A video taken after one strike shows people scrambling for safety as a fire blazes nearby.   The R.S.F. has a ready market for its gold in the Emirates, where 2,500 tons of undeclared gold from Africa, worth a staggering $115 billion, were smuggled between 2012 and 2022, according to a  recent study by Swiss Aid , a development group. The challenge is getting it there. Before the war, General Hamdan could fly his gold directly to the Emirates. But Sudan’s main airport has been destroyed in the war, its tarmac riddled with holes, and the other way out, through Port Sudan, is in army hands. So the R.S.F. has had to find new routes through neighboring countries — as it did with the smuggling job earlier this year, when porters heaved cases filled with illicit gold across the airport tarmac. A Luxury Jet, Loaded with Gold The plane that landed in South Sudan on March 5 to pick up that gold was not the usual bush hopper used by many smugglers in Africa. It was a Bombardier Global Express, a long-range business jet of a kind favored by corporate executives, and it was  registered in the United States .   Its crew had a troubled history. Juba International Airport, in the capital of South Sudan, where an American-registered private jet landed in early March, on a mission to collect smuggled gold.Credit ...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Seven months earlier, the pilot in command of the plane and the flight attendant had been arrested in Zambia soon after landing in another private jet. Zambian investigators who raided that plane confiscated five guns, $5.7 million in cash and 602 bars of fake gold, indicating a  likely gold scam , they said. The flight to pick up the R.S.F.’s gold, by contrast, went off smoothly, possibly because the deal involved a web of powerful officials from multiple countries who helped ease the way, according to flight documents and three people who were involved with or briefed on the deal. After leaving Abu Dhabi, the Bombardier jet — with the same pilot and flight attendant — stopped off briefly in Uganda before landing in South Sudan. Though the plane  had room for 15 passengers  as well, only two were listed on a manifest obtained by The Times. One of them was a relative of General Hamdan who has acted on behalf on R.S.F. interests before, said several officials and experts familiar with the paramilitary group’s business networks. The other passenger on the manifest was a senior intelligence officer for Uganda, a country widely seen as a major hub for smuggled African gold. In 2022, the Treasury Department  sanctioned  a large gold refinery right next to Uganda’s main airport that, it said, was handling hundreds of millions of dollars in conflict gold every year. “It’s the epicenter of gold laundering in Africa,” J.R. Mailey, an expert on corruption at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, said of Uganda.   At the African Gold Refinery in Entebbe, Uganda, in 2018. The Treasury Department placed sanctions on the refinery and its owner, a Belgian businessman named Alain Goetz, in 2022.Credit ...Baz Ratner/Reuters Reached by phone, the senior Ugandan official confirmed that his passport details listed on the manifest were accurate, though he denied being on the plane or transporting any gold from Sudan. But the three people involved with or briefed on the deal said he was seen standing outside the Bombardier jet as porters loaded it with cases of gold weighing as much as 1,200 pounds in all. Other regional officials appeared to take part in the deal, too. The gold had come in from Darfur through the city of Wau in South Sudan, two of the people briefed on the transfer said. From there, it was transported to Juba aboard a commercial airliner operated by South Sudanese intelligence, they said. South Sudan is a particularly opaque corner of the international gold trade. Senior figures in the country’s elite control a gold industry that  produces up to 40 tons a year, diplomats say . Yet, officially, they export next to nothing. Only a single kilo of gold left the country through official export channels this year, said James Yousif Kundu, a director general for the nation’s mining ministry. “The rest may be smuggled,” he said. On March 6, the Bombardier jet landed back in Abu Dhabi, just before 3 a.m., at the Al Bateen Executive Airport used by business and government jets, flight data shows. (Fly Alliance Aviation, the Florida-based company that operates the Bombardier jet and advertises it on its website, declined to answer questions about the flight, including who had chartered it and why.)   The luxury jet used by the smugglers in March is advertised on the website of Fly Alliance, a Florida-based company.   The Emirates is a major hub for the R.S.F., which uses front companies controlled by General Hamdan and his relatives to sell gold and buy weapons, officials say. Since the war started, the United States has imposed sanctions on 11  R.S.F. companies , mostly in the Emirates, and often for their links to the gold trade. On the sidelines of American-sponsored peace efforts in August, which failed to stop the war, General Hamdan’s younger brother, Algoney Hamdan, told The Times that he had lived in the Emirates for the past decade. But he insisted that the R.S.F. was no longer in the gold business. “Since the war, there haven’t been any more exports,” he said. Less than two months later, the United States  imposed sanctions on him , calling him the “procurement director” for the paramilitary group, responsible for obtaining weapons “to facilitate attacks and other atrocities against their own citizens.”   Sudanese troops standing guard in the basement of a building used as an arms depot by the R.S.F. in Omdurman, in the western part of the capital, in April. The Government’s Gold Hundreds of miles from the R.S.F.’s gritty, but lucrative, gold pits in Darfur sits a modern, industrial gold mine that helps the military keep fighting as well. It’s called the Kush mine, with giant excavators and expensive machinery that churns out gold and generates precious income for Sudan’s wartime government. The trick is, Sudan’s leaders haven’t always known who owns it. They thought the mine — out in the desert, 220 miles from the capital — was controlled by Boris Ivanov, a Russian mining executive with ties to the Kremlin who flourished in the upheaval of post-Soviet Russia. But when they looked more closely in 2021, Sudanese government officials discovered that the mine had actually passed into the hands of mysterious new investors from the United Arab Emirates, the country backing their enemy today. Officials from the Sudanese government, which had a minority stake in the mine, said that no one bothered to tell them of their surprising new partnership. So they sent a delegation, led by Sudan’s finance minister, to Abu Dhabi to sort it out. Kush was the jewel of Sudan’s gold boom, the largest industrial gold mine in the country. It also had geopolitical significance, as a focal point of Sudan’s strengthening ties with Russa. Mr. Putin  singled out  the “flagship” project at the first Russia-Africa summit in 2019, and he named the Russian company  under U.S. sanctions  at the center of the effort. Mr. Ivanov, the managing director of that company, also spoke at the summit,  at a session  titled “Using Minerals in Africa for the Benefit of Its Peoples.”   A photograph released by Russian state media shows President Vladimir V. Putin meeting with Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, on the sidelines of the 2019 Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi, Russia.Credit ...Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik Mr. Ivanov’s success in mining was a classic story of post-Soviet Russia. He began his career as a diplomat — posted in the 1980s to the Soviet embassy in Washington, where his portfolio included arms control — and ended up in the oil, gas and mining business. (Two former colleagues said he boasted that he was also working under cover for the K.G.B. during his time in Washington. A person briefed on Western intelligence confirmed that, but a spokesman for Mr. Ivanov denied the assertion, saying Mr. Ivanov never had any ties to Russian intelligence). By 2015, when the Kush mine began producing gold, Russia and Sudan were both facing international sanctions — Russia for its intervention in Ukraine, and Sudan for the genocide in Darfur — and their joint gold mining  only expanded from there . Mr. Ivanov seemed to prosper as well. Property records show that he and his wife, Natasha, bought two condominiums in Manhattan, next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in the early 2010s. Later, they bought a pair of adjoining beachfront homes in Juno Beach, Florida, which they are seeking to demolish to  construct a single 15,000-foot mansion  instead. But when the Sudanese officials traveled to Abu Dhabi in 2021, they learned that Mr. Ivanov wasn’t the only one they were in business with.   The mine in Sudan now belonged to Emiral Resources, a new company founded by Mr. Ivanov. And behind that company was a much bigger player — Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati National security adviser and brother to the country’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, according to three people familiar with the talks.   In an email, an Emiral spokesman confirmed that the company was owned by “a leading Abu Dhabi investment group,” but declined to provide names. The takeover was a sign of the Emiratis’ billion-dollar push into African mining. Seeking to diversify the nation’s oil-dependent economy, Sheikh Tahnoon’s companies are racing to acquire mines and the raw minerals needed for electric cars and the transition to green energy. That means the Emiratis are effectively hedging their bets in Sudan’s war. In the past 18 months, they have smuggled vast amounts of  weapons to the R.S.F. , often  under the guise of the Red Crescent , a potential war crime. But the Emirati-owned Kush mine in government-controlled territory likely generates tens of millions of dollars for the Sudanese authorities, who, in turn, use the money to buy Iranian drones, Chinese planes and other weapons. In other words, the Emirates is arming one side in the war, while funding the other. The Biden administration raised its concerns directly to Sheikh Mohammed and Sheikh Tahnoon when they  visited the White House  in September, three senior U.S. officials said. Yet President Biden has been careful not to publicly criticize a wealthy Gulf nation that is an ally on Iran and Israel — infuriating many Sudanese.   President Biden welcoming the leader of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, to the White House in September.Credit ...Tom Brenner for The New York Times A degree of mystery still surrounds the role of Mr. Ivanov, however. Records at Sudan’s mining ministry list him as part owner of the Kush mine, a senior Sudanese official said. But Emiral contested that, saying Mr. Ivanov left the business last year and that “Emiral is an Emirati company.” Mr. Ivanov remains in the public eye. With his wife and daughter, he attended  a gala dinner in Manhattan  in October for the Princess Grace Foundation. Boris Ivanov and his daughter Katie Ivanov attend the Princess Grace Awards at The Pierre Hotel in New York in October 2024.Credit ...Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images Prince Albert II, the monarch of Monaco, presented an award to the actor Michael Douglas. The program said the Ivanovs,  listed as a “crown sponsor,”  paid $100,000 for their table. Blood Mineral When Sudan’s gold boom kicked off over a decade ago, many Sudanese families built their futures around it, storing jewelry at home or in banks for a rainy day. Now, they rely on it to survive. Ten days into the war, Al Fatih Hashim sped through the chaotic streets of the capital, Khartoum, and held his breath through checkpoints manned by plunderous fighters. The car carried his fearful parents and siblings, their hastily-packed clothes — and bags of hidden gold. Mr. Hashim had stashed the family’s wedding jewelry in a hidden compartment under the back seat, and even inside the fuel tank, he said, adding: “It was our insurance policy.” The ruse worked. After weeks, the family made it to Egypt, where the gold funds their precarious new lives as refugees. “We had to live from the gold,” he said. “So many other families have done the same.” Even before the conflict, gold was so essential that it soared to 70 percent of the country’s exports, helping to make up for the oil revenues Sudan lost after the secession of South Sudan in 2011.   A store selling gold jewelry at the main gold market in the Sudanese capital in 2022.Credit ...Abdulmonam Eassa for The New York Times War vaporized that wealth. Gold has been looted from homes, seized at checkpoints or stolen from banks, sometimes by fighters using metal detectors to ferret it out. But the generals and their foreign allies dominate the trade. Russian officials have streamed to Port Sudan this year, offering weapons to Sudan’s army in exchange for a naval port on the Red Sea. They also want to mine: Sudan’s minerals minister met a Russian delegation in September. But even if the war’s foreign sponsors walked away, the gold trade is so lucrative that the belligerents could finance the conflict on their own, experts say. In the first year of war alone, Sudanese officials say, the nation produced over  50 tons of gold  — more than during the previous 12 months of peace. One solution could be pressuring the buyers. Classifying Sudanese gold as a “conflict mineral” could require companies to keep Sudanese gold out of their products. Similar concerns over “blood diamonds” from West Africa led to a U.N.-backed certification system two decades ago. But gold, which is often melted and mixed, can be hard to trace. And with gold prices recently smashing records, the incentives for war keep growing. “Our country is cursed by gold,” Duaa Tariq, a volunteer aid worker, said from her home in war-torn Khartoum. “Gold created armed groups and made some people rich,” continued Ms. Tariq, 32, an art curator who now serves meals in a food kitchen and helps victims of sexual assault. “But for most of us, it only brought trouble and war.”   A looted home in Omdurman, the western part of Sudan’s capital, in April.Credit ...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times   Reporting was contributed by Anatoly Kurmanaev in Berlin; Malachy Browne in Limerick, Ireland; Abdalrahman Altayeb in Port Sudan, Sudan; Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt in Washington; Jack Begg and William K. Rashbaum in New York; and Mohamed Elhadi in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Declan Walsh  is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.  More about Declan Walsh A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 12, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fever for Gold Drives Both Sides in Sudan’s War.   Copyright 2024 The New York Times Company   Comment by Greta Hudson Valley NY Dec. 11 I am so grateful that the NYT offers us such excellent reporting from around the world. This story is riveting -- I read (and had to re-read) some sections very slowly and carefully, trying to absorb all the information. Thanks to Declan Walsh and all the other reporters involved. Oh, and that is one stunning photo of Gen. Hamdan, taken by Walsh himself! I pored over the details, including the covers on the little plates of treats (to keep off the flies?) on the table in front of the warlord.   Comment by CJ Oakland, CA Dec. 11 "President Biden has been careful not to publicly criticize a wealthy Gulf nation that is an ally on Iran and Israel — infuriating many Sudanese." US complicity is an angle that needs to be pursued. UAE is a "special ally" of the US and Israel and sends UAE billions in weapons. The US registered jet can easily be confiscated by the authorities and the charter company raided by the FBI. Why hasn't it been? Because the US looks the other way. The charter company may be associated with the CIA, which is standard operating procedure. So when the US talks about the atrocities happening in Sudan, remember that it plays a direct role in enabling the UAE, and creating and maintaining chaos in the developing world.

GENEVA/BOGOTA - Enforced disappearance remains a horrific reality across Colombia, with tens of thousands of victims unaccounted for and families left in despair despite decades of efforts to end this crime. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) concluded its visit to the country today by highlighting systemic shortcomings, including fragmented legal frameworks, institutional inefficiencies, and a lack of clarity about the actual number of disappeared persons. A delegation set up by the Committee visited Colombia from 21 November to 5 December. During its mission, the delegation met with 80 authorities, including the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General, the Ombudsman, victims, and civil society organizations in Bogotá, Cali, Cúcuta, Medellín, Santa Marta and Villavicencio. The delegation visited five detention centres and accompanied operations in cemeteries overflowed with unidentified bodies, and in a crematorium. “Although enforced disappearances started in Colombia around the 1940s, they are not just a crime of the past. They continue to occur daily across the country in diverse circumstances,” said the delegation. The delegation’s preliminary findings painted a grim picture. Enforced disappearance spans all age groups and demographics, affecting children and adolescents, social leaders, migrants, journalists, demobilised combatants, and teachers, among others. Cases of forced recruitment, human trafficking, forced displacement and migration, as well as disappearances linked to social protests, are particularly alarming. Families of disappeared people often face insurmountable barriers when seeking help due to the complex legal and institutional framework. One victim shared the frustration with the delegation, “We don’t know where to turn. We lack the information and knowledge necessary to exercise our rights. The authorities frequently provide confused answers, and it appears that they do not want to discuss our situation. We’re tossed between institutions, with no end in sight.” The institutional landscape is highly fragmented, with overlapping mandates and ineffective coordination. Entities like the National Search Commission, the National Search System, and the Unit for the Search for Disappeared Persons for example, share duplicated mandates. It is estimated that if one of these units initiates a search process with a plan to coordinate with all other agencies, it would have to coordinate with around 60 other national and territorial authorities. To make the situation worse, these institutions often work in silos, leaving victims caught in bureaucratic dead ends. Officials admitted that coordination meetings, while numerous, rarely result in concrete action. “We meet, and we meet more,” one official told the delegation. “But there are so many roundtables that we’re left with two options: not to go, or not to do our basic work.” The absence of a centralized and reliable registry of disappeared individuals compounds the problem. Figures reported to the Committee range from 98,000 to 200,000. The discrepancies between institutional records make it impossible to determine the true scope. Fear of reprisals and lack of confidence in the authorities further discourage reporting, particularly in areas controlled by armed groups and organized crime. Victims from marginalized communities, such as migrants, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and LGBTQ+ individuals, face additional geographical language and other discriminatory obstacles. Thousands of unidentified bodies lie in poorly managed cemeteries or storage facilities, such as a hangar at Bogotá airport where around 20,000 unidentified bodies are currently stored. The Committee called for immediate and concrete actions, emphasising that strengthening coordination between existing institutions is a critical first step. “Rationalising mandates, reducing bureaucratic overlap, and fostering collaboration are essential to making the system work for victims rather than against them,” said the delegation, adding that, “It is not about creating more institutions or laws but about articulating and strengthening the ones that already exist.” Sufficient funding and specialized staffing are urgently needed. The Committee also underscored the need to tackle impunity. “Accountability mechanisms must be strengthened to ensure that officials and institutions are held responsible for their actions—or inaction,” the delegation said. They highlighted the commitment and professionalism of some officials to address enforced disappearance. This level of dedication must become the standard. “Families of the disappeared deserve clarity, justice, and accountability. Every disappeared person represents a family waiting for answers, a community torn apart, and a society grappling with unresolved pain,” the delegation said. The Committee has shared its preliminary findings with Colombia and will publish a full public report in April 2025. The CED delegation was composed of Carmen Rosa Villa Quintana, member and former chair of the Committee, Juan Pablo Albán Alencastro, Rapporteur of the Committee, Albane Prophette-Pallasco, Secretary of the Committee, and Carla Villarreal Lopez, Human Rights Officer. Copyright © United Nations. All rights reserved.

Six-year jail sentence imposed on Nezir Mehmetaj for war crimes against non-Serbs in a Kosovo village in 1999 condemned by the speaker of Kosovo's parliament – who calls the charges 'invented and arbitrary'. Milica Stojanovic and Perparim Isufi, December 6, 2024 Belgrade Higher Court. Photo: BIRN Belgrade’s Higher Court sentenced Nezir Mehmetaj, a Kosovo Albanian, to six years in prison for war crimes against civilians in the village of Rudice in Klina municipality in Kosovo in June and July 1999. Mehmetaj has been in custody in Serbia for almost five years and the court said his custody would be extended until he starts serving the sentence. Glauk Konjufca, speaker of Kosovo’s parliament, condemned the charges as “invented and arbitrary”. “The old mentality of Serbia, which has committed genocide in Kosovo, cannot produce anything new besides covering up crimes on one side and inventing them on the other side,” Konjufca said in a Facebook post. “I strongly condemn this injustice and ask the international community to increase pressure on Serbia over this injustice and in support of human rights,” he added. Serbia’s War Crimes Prosecution sought a 15-year prison sentence. The defence claimed the Prosecution did not prove the indictment and said all the prosecution’s witnesses were indirect, “hearsay” witnesses who only heard about the charges in the indictment from others. According to the indictment, Mehmetaj participated in killing five members of the Dasic family in mid-June 1999, and then in the killings of two other people, Jelaj Ramadan and Zorka Siljakovic, at the end of that month. The indictment claimed he was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, at the time. Mehmetaj and other unnamed KLA members also looted and burned ten houses in the village in July 1999, all of them belonging to non-Albanians, the indictment said. He is further accused of harassing members of the Roma and Egyptian community in Rudice. In July 1999, he reportedly by force brought six or seven Roma and Egyptian teens to his house in the village, forced them to dig a pit for an hour and then opened fire in their direction. They fled in fear and later left the village and never returned. Mehmetaj denied all the charges. At the opening of the trial in 2021 , he said he was born in Rudice but had left Kosovo in 1987 to work in Switzerland. He said he only returned to visit his family once a year but did not return to Kosovo during the war until it had ended, in September 1999. “I came to Kosovo for the first time [after the war] in September 1999 via Albania, I bought a car in Durres, took my mother, sisters and brother and went with them to the village of Rudice,” Mehmetaj told the court. He was arrested in January 2020 at the Merdare border crossing between Serbia and Kosovo, on a Serbian warrant. He has been in custody ever since. The verdict can be appealed. Copyright BIRN 2015

Sokol Bashota hails suspension of prosecution investigations into him after his testimony at trial of ex-president Hashim Thaci as a victory for him – and for the 'purity' of the Kosovo Liberation Army's war. Xhorxhina Bami, December 5, 2024 Sokol Bashota testifying in court on December 4, 2024. Photo: Kosovo Specialist Chambers/Livestream. Sokol Bashota, a former member of the General Staff of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, welcomed a halt to Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office investigations into him after he finished a week of testimony in the war crimes trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three others in The Hague on Thursday. Bashota, also a former mayor of Kline/Klina and a former MP for the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK, recalled that the Hague-based Specialist Prosecutor’s Office started questioning him in 2019. “After five years of investigations, on November 19, 2024, I was officially notified that all the investigations against me have been halted,” Bashota wrote on Facebook after he finished his testimony. “The suspension of the investigations against me is not only my victory but also a triumph of the purity of the war of the Kosovo Liberation Army,” he added. During his testimony, which started on November 28, 2024 , Bashota told the court that even after the KLA was structured and the General Staff was formed, the KLA’s Operational Zones elected their own commanders and had much control over their areas. “After the structuring, the General Staff only confirmed their names as zone commanders,” Bashota told the court. The defence in the Thaci trial is seeking to prove that the KLA did not have a rigid command structure like a normal army, and so the defendants were not responsible for crimes were committed by lower-ranking fighters. According to Bashota, before the General Staff was formed, another structure operated, of which Thaci was not a member. Bashota told the court that former KLA commander Bislim Zyrapi and other career military officers decided to start structuring the KLA because groups were operating separately and without “control”. But he said problems with fighters on the ground continued nonetheless, and one such case was the July 1998 attack on Rahovec/Orohovac. The indictment against Thaci and three others claims that, “in mid-July 1998, KLA units attacked Rahovec/Orahovac and its surrounding villages, during which Serb civilians were abducted and later detained, mistreated, and killed.” But Bashota told the court that the Operational Zones, not the General Staff, decided on the attack on Rahovec/Orohovac. “It was a very big mistake,” he said. “We were not prepared to enter and attack a place where civilians reside because of the high scale of risk to the citizens, and we did not dare to take such a decision in urban areas,” he added. “It had its own consequences. We had big losses there and it was a miscoordination of the soldiers in that area,” he continued. Thaci and three other defendants, Jakup Krasniqi, Rexhep Selimi and Kadri Veseli, are accused of having individual and command responsibility for crimes committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and Albania, including 102 murders. The crimes were allegedly committed between at least March 1998 and September 1999, during and just after the war in Kosovo. The defendants have pleaded not guilty. The Specialist Chambers are part of Kosovo’s judicial system but are located in The Hague and staffed by internationals, established under pressure from the country’s Western allies who believed Kosovo’s own justice system was not robust enough to try KLA cases and protect witnesses from intimidation. However, many Kosovo Albanians believe the court is ethnically biased and denigrates the KLA’s just war against Serbian repression. Copyright BIRN 2015

Unseen Ukraine Series #2: RussianPersecution against Crimean Tatars by the Genocide Watch Ukraine Task Force Russian troops in Crimea. credit: The Atlantic Council Russia has persecuted the Crimean Tatar population since the eighteenth century. Crimean Tatars are an ethnic minority in Ukraine. Most Tatars are practicing Sunni Muslims, . Once numbering over 5 million, this Turkic- speaking population has resided in Russia and lived on the Crimean Peninsula since the 12th century. Since Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin has weaponized “Extremism” and “Terrorism” laws to persecute the Tatars. Russia has outlawed traditional Tatar governing bodies. In 2014, 173 of 243 political prisoners prosecuted in occupied Crimea were representatives of the Tatars. In 2016 the Russian Supreme Court banned the Mejlis, the highest representative body of the Crimean Tatars, as an “extremist organization.” This ban coincided with a demographic shift in Crimea following the 2014 Russian invasion. The ethnic Russian population in Crimea increased to over 60 percent, while the Crimean Tatar population fell from 12 to 10 percent. Crimean authorities explicitly stated their intention to increase the population in the region by 2.4 million, with the additional population coming from mainland Russian “migration.” After the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow intensified its campaign to “make the homeland uninhabitable” for Crimean Tatars through arrests, torture, and imprisonment. There is no due process in the Crimean justice system.Arrests are made based on anonymous witness testimony. Defense lawyers are subject to harassment, fines, and arbitrary detention.Those charged are often transferred without formal convictions to high-security prisons or penal colonies. These prisons have extreme overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and poor-quality food. Religious literature like the Qur’an is routinely seized, a sign of official Islamophobia. Ninety percent of Crimean Tatar language media have been forced to stop broadcasting. In September 2022, Crimean Tatar men feared conscription into the Russian army, prompting over 10,000 to flee. Since April 2023, Russian citizenship has been forcibly imposed on all inhabitants. Those who refuse are subjected to confiscation of property, expulsion, or torture. According to former Polish foreign minister Anna Fotyga, the deprivation of political, cultural, and historical rights of the Tatars has resulted in a genocidal situation resembling that of the 1944 deportations, when Stalin ordered all Crimeans expelled from the peninsula based on false accusations of Nazi collaboration. Russia has enacted its current repression of Crimean Tatars through forced emigration, political repression, systematic discrimination, enforced disappearances, and torture. Despite Putin’s propaganda promise to protect diverse national traditions, Russia has suppressed Tatar culture and waged a sustained campaign of repression, promoting its historic Russian imperialist ideology. Russkii Mir (“Russian World”) posits that Ukraine, Crimea, and other former Soviet states rightfully belong within the Russian civilization. Genocide Watch considers Russia’s classification of Crimean Tatar culture as “terrorist” and “extremist” to be Stage 1: Classification , Stage 2: Symbolization , Stage 3 Discrimination, and S tage 4: Dehumanization. Crimean Tatar political and civil society groups are banned, Crimean-language education is prohibited, Tatar social media are blocked. The Russian occupation is characterized by targeted disappearances, political harassment, and arbitrary detention, constituting the crimes against humanity of Stage 8: Persecution. Russia denies its persecution of Tatars, indicating Stage 10: Denial. Genocide Watch recommends: The UN, EU, US,, and NATO should condemn Russia’s occupation of Crimea and demand that Russia return Crimea to Ukrainian control. They should demand that Russia immediately end its systematic discrimination and persecution of Crimean Tatars; The EU and UN should establish an independent international commission to investigate Russian crimes against humanity in Crimea. Magnitzky sanctions should be imposed on Russian security and governmental officials responsible for human rights violations. The sanctions should go beyond asset freezes and travel bans to measures that restrict their access to global financial networks, technology, and resources. Sanctions should be imposed on Russian businesses in Crimea. Future peace negotiations must include Crimean Tatar Mejlis representatives. The EU, US, UK, and UN should demand the release of Crimeans detained on political charges, including journalists, religious leaders, and civil society leaders opposed to Russian occupation.

A rare look inside a region still reckoning with the toll of war crimes, even as new conflicts roil the nation. By Alexis Okeowo Alexis Okeowo spent almost two weeks in Ethiopia for this article, visiting Amhara, Tigray and other areas with limited access to foreign journalists. Before war broke out in Ethiopia, in late 2020, Mehari could take the bus home from her work as a doctor at a public hospital in Axum, a town in the country’s northern region Tigray. But then fighting between its ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and Ethiopia’s federal government shut down public transportation, and Mehari was forced to walk 40 minutes between home and the hospital. After federal troops took the town and imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, Mehari would leave the hospital at the last possible moment, staying as long as she could to care for her patients. “I had to run from work to home almost every day,” she recalled. She was afraid soldiers would find her alone after curfew. “Maybe being killed could be the easiest thing that happens to you,” she said. Mehari, who was 25, lived with friends at the time and worked in her hospital’s department of internal medicine. “I was on duty the day the war broke out,” she told me earlier this year, when we met in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital. “In the middle of the night, there was a blackout, and patients started coming. It was shocking. At my age, I’ve never seen war, so it was my first time seeing somebody who’s been hit by a bullet.” She was used to treating the victims of traffic accidents. The stories her patients told her of relatives and neighbors killed by soldiers and airstrikes, of fleeing the violence in their villages and seeking refuge in Axum, were “too much to process,” she said. “It was chaos. It wasn’t clear at first what was going on.” It was the beginning of a civil war. Ethiopia is a vast and diverse country, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups, many of which want some degree of autonomy. The current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was elected in 2018 on a wave of optimism following nearly three decades of repressive minority dominance by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the ruling coalition. (The Tigrayan ethnic group makes up only 6 percent of Ethiopia’s population.) Under its leadership, the country had economic growth, but the T.P.L.F. brutally suppressed political opposition and free speech, leading to festering resentment among Ethiopians from other ethnic groups. Abiy, who is Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been historically underrepresented in national leadership, removed Tigrayans from their government posts and later referred to the T.P.L.F. as a “cancer” and as “weeds” that needed to be eradicated. Tigray’s leaders balked at ceding power. After they held regional parliamentary elections in 2020, in defiance of Abiy’s orders, Abiy severed relations with the state. The T.P.L.F. then attacked an Ethiopian military camp in Tigray, claiming it was a pre-emptive strike before the federal government’s planned invasion. Abiy immediately sent more troops into Tigray. Only a year earlier, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for normalizing long-hostile relations with Eritrea, on Tigray’s northern border. Now the Ethiopian government was able to enlist the help of Eritrean troops, as well as thousands of fighters from the security forces of other Ethiopian states. The efforts to weaken the T.P.L.F. extended to the Tigrayans as a people. Radio stations were no longer banned from broadcasting hate speech directed at them. Fighters and civilians alike were labeled “junta” by people in the federal government and Ethiopians of other ethnicities. Tigrayans were regarded as traitorous, unwilling to participate in the hopeful and unified country of Abiy’s promises. The resulting civil war would last for two years and lead to accusations of war crimes against both sides. Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented rape and mass summary executions of civilians by the T.P.L.F. The Ethiopian government has been accused of mass rape and extrajudicial killings and detentions in Tigray. But while both sides have been accused of crimes, their atrocities differ in scale. The U.S. State Department has described “ethnic cleansing” in Tigray. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops destroyed fields, crops and grain stores while the government imposed a communications blackout and blocked humanitarian aid. Ninety percent of Tigray’s population faced famine, according to the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2021. As Mark Lowcock, a former U.N. relief coordinator, has said, the Ethiopian government “basically wanted to starve the Tigrayans into submission or out of existence.” A study by Kiros Berhane, a biostatistician at Columbia University, found that more than 100,000 women in Tigray may have been raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and their allies. “When they raped them, they told them that they came to destroy their wombs so that Tigrayan women will not give birth to Tigrayan children,” Yirgalem Gebretsadkan, who heads the research center on gender-based violence for the Tigray government’s Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide, told me. More than 80 percent of the women who reported being raped told the commission they had been gang-raped. Eritrean soldiers who were H.I.V.-positive were ordered to rape H.I.V.-negative women. Boys and men were raped, too. Some 600,000 people have been killed in the conflict and millions more have been displaced from their homes. Both sides agreed to stop fighting in 2022. As part of the peace deal, the Tigray Defense Forces were required to surrender their arms and send 270,000 fighters to makeshift rehabilitation camps, which were supposed to help reintegrate them into society. But those forces have said they will not fully disarm until Eritrean forces withdraw. Two years on, Abiy has yet to ask them to leave parts of western Tigray, an indication, perhaps, that he does not trust Tigrayan leadership to keep the peace. During most of the war, the federal government didn’t allow foreign journalists to enter Tigray. Afterward, the world seems mostly to have forgotten about what happened there. But earlier this year, the photographer Malin Fezehai and I, together with an Ethiopian guide and translator, visited Tigray to witness a crisis that never really ended. And in the neighboring state of Amhara we saw a new and related war breaking out. Militants there, like those in other nearby states, had eagerly joined the conflict to support Abiy, but now they were unsatisfied with the peace deal. As war raged in and around Axum — once part of a trading empire dating back to the first century A.D. and a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its obelisks, royal tombs and palace ruins — Mehari was reassigned to her hospital’s emergency room. Though she loved her work there, she no longer felt capable as she watched patients end up in septic shock, dying of curable conditions. And she found it hard to endure her own vulnerability. The town was shelled indiscriminately by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. A good friend, a fellow doctor, was killed by the federal military. “At some point, whatever is happening, you’re going to be a victim of it,” Mehari told me. “The waiting for it was intolerable.” So she handed off her duties and, with a friend, took a bus to eastern Tigray. There she joined the Tigray Defense Forces, learned how to use a gun and went to work as a medic. As a member of the medical teams, which had to carry the wounded on stretchers through active battlefields, she watched as people she had grown up with died right in front of her. “I just turned 26 when I joined,” she said, “and many of them were younger than me.” Mehari didn’t think she would survive the war. But having done so, she told me, she still didn’t feel comfortable outside Tigray, in Ethiopia at large. (Because she fears retribution, I have used her middle name. For the same reason, I have used first names or nicknames to protect the identities of others in this article.) Things have seemed to only get worse. “It’s not over,” she said. “It has to be over for everyone, if all of us are going to feel at peace. We are still vulnerable, unprotected. The war hasn’t finalized, so somehow we are still in it. And I am still in it.” Mekelle is a city of 500,000 people, located high above sea level. The capital is busy and modern, home to the sprawling Mekelle University as well as cafes, hotels and bookshops. Just outside the city, near the airport, we visited a refugee camp, a ramshackle place of tin-roof structures and flimsier tents of thick, white tarp. It was located in a big construction lot, with sand and stacks of bricks everywhere. Dirt devils swirled in the distance. The mood was desolate. The people I met there had once worked as lawyers, teachers and civil servants; they now begged for food. They were all from the town of Ab’ala, just over Tigray’s border in the mostly Muslim state of Afar. Ab’ala had been ethnically mixed: Almost 70 percent of its people were Tigrayan Christians; the rest were Muslim Afars. In December 2021, several thousand Tigrayans in Ab’ala suddenly had to flee their homes when their Afar neighbors turned on them and killed hundreds of people. The refugees told me that Afar residents went around town marking the houses that had Tigrayans living in them. Roving civilian militias, working with the Afar Special Forces, then went to these houses, killing Tigrayans and looting their possessions. Tigrayan churches were set on fire. “It was like hell — there were heavy artillery sounds, there were mortar sounds,” an elderly man named Hailu told me. “They killed my cousin with his two family members. I barely escaped, jumping over their dead bodies.” He said he had come to Mekelle with nothing. “Everything there — our grain, cattle and mule carts — we don’t know their whereabouts.” A 55-year-old doctor named Hagos, whose eyes frequently teared up, told me he was at home in Ab’ala with his wife and children when intruders came, seven of them, with guns and machetes. “You can’t describe the shock,” he said. Until that day, he said, Christian Tigrayans and Muslim Afars lived side by side: “We farmed together, we were working together, and we were together at funerals and weddings.” Hagos recognized some of the intruders. Even the local police seemed to be helping as the group forced him outside. As his abductors led him away, past dead bodies on the street, they ran into an Afar man he knew. “He asked them where they were taking me, and they replied, ‘We are going to kill him,’ ” Hagos recalled. “He argued with them, and I survived.” Hagos and his wife and their six children ended up in a detention camp in Semera, Afar’s capital. They were detained there for nine months. He said the guards beat them and gave them barely any food; a package of biscuits had to last for days. “You don’t know whether you are alive or not,” he said. “You don’t think anything.” Eventually, after aid organizations pressured the Ethiopian government over the camp’s conditions, many of the detainees were released. Their relief at returning home to Ab’ala was short-lived. “After we were there for four days,” Hagos said, “they started killing. They started it again.” He and his family sought refuge in Mekelle. More than a year after the war’s end, he was too afraid to return home, unable to stop thinking about “the things they have done to us.” The people who did those things still moved around freely. Another man told me, “Our killers come to Mekelle and go as they please.” The Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide estimates that more than 500 Tigrayans were killed in Ab’ala, as well as the surrounding area and Semera, based on interviews with survivors and the number of bodies found. In Ab’ala, bodies were abandoned on the streets, in bushes, in empty houses and in mass graves. They were eaten by dogs. Surprisingly, we found Tigrayans still living in Ab’ala. The town, at the base of the Ethiopian Highlands, is vulnerable below the mountains that loom over it, where Tigrayan snipers were once stationed. Its main roads are lined with small businesses, cafes with plastic stools and stalls and vendors, but on some of their doors and walls, pro-Afar and pro-T.P.L.F. graffiti still lingered. Kahsay, who is 50 and has family at the refugee camp in Mekelle, told me that he and his children expected to be killed during the violence in Ab’ala. “My friend who is Muslim, he was a good person, he got me out,” he said. Kahsay and his wife were sent to the detention camp in Semera for nine months, after which they returned to Ab’ala, despite its dangers. He was back at work, but he felt numb — his brother had been one of the victims of the violence in December 2021, taken from Kahsay’s house and executed. Kahsay saw men who participated in the killings on the street: “No one can touch them. They became rich, they bought cars.” While we were talking at a cafe, a 23-year-old woman named Berkti was listening to us and crying. A Tigrayan, she had been in Ab’ala during the killings. Three men had come to her house, she said, and beat her with a gun, then raped four of her female relatives; Berkti knew all three men. They killed her uncle in front of her and stole her savings. Berkti had also been sent to the camp in Semera. She came back to Ab’ala after being unable to find a living elsewhere. But she regularly saw around town the men who beat her and tried to rape her. “I cry when I see anyone,” she said. Afar residents told me they were not the perpetrators of such violence. They claimed to be victims of the Tigrayans. Ali, a 45-year-old civil servant who is ethnic Afar, said that once the Tigrayan forces entered Ab’ala after the original massacre, they burned one of his family houses and then looted his possessions. “They slaughtered the Afar people,” Ali went on, visibly upset. He  estimated that dozens were killed in revenge. “They burned Afar houses and religious places.” Ali denied that townspeople had participated in the violence against Tigrayans. “The killers are not from us,” he said. They came from other parts of Afar, he said, and they had been motivated by grudges against the former Tigrayan-led national government. A local religious leader and businessman named Mohammed also told me that the killers were not from Ab’ala. Both men claimed that more Afars had been killed than Tigrayans. “We are not like before,” Ali said. “There is a lot of tension.” Mohammed added, “There are still dead bodies everywhere.” As tends to be the way in Ethiopia, as one conflict wound down, another began. In 2022, the Ethiopian government, apparently wary of the power of the militias that Abiy used to help fight the war in Tigray, began arresting thousands of people in Amhara. In the spring of 2023, it tried to force regional special police forces to disband and to be integrated into the national security forces. Armed groups in Amhara resisted. Now the federal government is actively fighting a powerful militia in Amhara, known as Fano. When we visited, much of the recent fighting between the federal government and Fano had taken place outside the town of Lalibela, in Ethiopia’s highlands. A site of pilgrimage, Lalibela is famous for its huge ancient churches carved into red volcanic rock. Most of the residents, who number 20,000, depend on tourism. But the tens of thousands of international tourists who used to visit every year are mostly gone. Fano refused to give up its arms following the peace deal between the Ethiopian government and the T.P.L.F. An Ethiopian senior official accused them of trying to overthrow the government — and, indeed, some Fano fighters told me they were trying to do just that. Many of them felt betrayed by the Tigray peace agreement and by a government that had promised them that if they fought against the T.P.L.F., they would be given land to expand their territory and more influence in the nation’s leadership. Our first day in Amhara, as we were driving north of Lalibela, we happened upon a Fano checkpoint. The militia members who pulled us over greeted us warmly after they recognized our driver, who was from the local community. When we asked to talk with them, they invited us to a bar across the road. Uniformed fighters poured into the outdoor seating space. They were communicating through walkie-talkies because the federal government had cut cell service. At one point, some of them flagged down two approaching passenger buses. Several people got off and started excitedly taking selfies with the militants, asking them to hold up their guns and the Amhara state flag — evidence of the immense support for Fano in the area. After the flurry of picture-taking, the passengers got back on the buses. As they did, the fighters asked them for donations. Most of the Fano fighters at the bar were young; this was their first experience of war. Two women, named Fenta and Lasta, joined me behind the bar in a small room with a single chair and a mattress on the ground, where we sat and talked. They were shy but certain, and they behaved like sisters. Lasta, who wore three delicate earrings in one ear, was 18, and Fenta, with curly hair cropped short, thought she was 19 but wasn’t sure of her age. Fenta said being a guerrilla fighter was the first time she had felt free in a long time. “I was forced into marriage with someone I don’t like,” she told me. Her uncle had arranged the ceremony several years earlier, and Fenta, whose mother was dead, had agreed to it in order to be able to take care of her younger sisters. After three years, Fenta left her husband, with whom she shared some cattle and farm produce. “I sold it all and gave the money to my aunt, who is looking after my younger sisters,” she said. “Then I immediately joined Fano.” She believed that the government was “working to pull apart and weaken Amhara.” She continued: “They made us fight with Tigray. They are like us. Young people, like us.” Lasta had finished her final year of high school but decided against taking the leaving exam. “My school results were good,” she said. But she was pessimistic about her chances of success. “There is no peace in the country,” she explained. The women believed their Amharan identity and their religion — they were Orthodox Christians who carried with them into battle pages from the Book of David in small lockets — were under threat. Both of them held their guns as they talked. “I am not trying to brag, but mostly the enemy soldiers are the ones dying a lot,” Lasta said, referring to the federal government’s troops. “They don’t fight and they run away. They are always nervous and fearful. They are big in numbers, but they are not effective. They just shoot blindly,” she said. “Some of the enemy soldiers are Amharas. They don’t want to fight us.” During one battle, Fenta was shot in the stomach, she said, and rolled down a hill: “I didn’t even feel the wound because I was furious.” The leader of their division, Wagnew Aderaw, estimated that more than a thousand government soldiers had surrendered to Fano. Aderaw, who is in his 50s, had been a police officer and then business owner working in transport and construction before he joined Fano. Soft-spoken, with salt-and-pepper hair, he was married and had two children in the fight; another lived in England. “Ever since the current government took power, there have been killings and massacres targeting the ethnic Amhara,” he said, referring to the war against the T.P.L.F., among other conflicts. “And now its army is invading our province. The army retaliates in places where we don’t have control.” He went on to tell me that “mothers are being raped. Daughters are being raped. Children were a victim of mortar and heavy artillery attacks. I have never seen this kind of cruelty in my life.” Fano didn’t have a “secession agenda,” he said. But, he went on, “when power is taken by others outside Amhara, which is the pillar of Ethiopia, they tend to promote the supremacy of their ethnic group at the expense of other ethnic groups.” Fano had to fight for survival. Aderaw estimated that there were 15,000 to 20,000 Fano militants in the area. “One thing I can tell you is that all the people of Amhara are Fanos,” he said. “The people of Amhara are 100 percent with us.” (Outside experts note that the government still has supporters in the state.) He added that “the children are warriors, and they are skillful fighters, and they are fully dedicated.” A 21-year-old fighter named Mekdes, whose gun nearly dwarfed her, said her family supported her decision to join the militia. Aderaw sent a comrade to fetch one of their prisoners, a baby-faced government soldier named Leta. “I surrendered myself voluntarily,” Leta, who was 22 and from the state of Oromia, told me. “I heard they don’t kill you if you surrender.” Several Fano militants watched him carefully, with smiles on their faces. Leta said he was “tired and fed up” of serving in the military after a year and a half, going without enough food and suffering in the intense heat. He had sent money back to his family in Oromia and eventually hoped to make his way to Addis Ababa to find work. I asked him where he got the money. “I sold my gun,” he said. The Fano militants laughed. The unrest persists — out of the world’s sight, for the most part. As Laetitia Bader, the deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said earlier this year, “Foreign governments and international organizations have sought to return to ‘business as usual’ with the Ethiopian government despite the absence of normality on the ground.” Much of Tigray is experiencing a hunger crisis, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. The federal government, meanwhile, is obstructing outside efforts to uncover the extent of the human-rights abuses that occurred during the civil war. A recent report from the New Lines Institute, an American think tank, cited evidence that both sides in the conflict had committed war crimes; members of Ethiopia’s and Eritrea’s militaries and the Amhara Special Forces also appeared to have committed acts of genocide against Tigrayans. In May, Tigray’s leaders announced plans to return hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to territories that Amhara fighters captured during the civil war, a provision of the 2022 peace deal. Some Amhara leaders say those plans could lead to war between the two regions. In July, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that more than 2,000 civilians had already died in Amhara this year amid the fighting between Fano and the Ethiopian military. The conflict extends to other countries too. Experts have found mounting evidence that the United Arab Emirates has been providing military support to Abiy, as well as providing arms to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group in Sudan, where civil war has turned the country into a battlefield. (The U.A.E. denies this.) “Abiy’s big error, and the error of those who so uncritically welcomed him, was not to see that Ethiopia is a very breakable vessel, and that you need to balance all of these political, economic and ethnic factors to keep it going,” Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and an expert on the Horn of Africa, says. “He thought he could promise everything to everybody.” Abiy won’t be delivering on any promises of accountability. All sides — Abiy, the T.P.L.F., Fano, the people and militias of other involved states — deny guilt and claim to be victims, and Abiy’s government has failed to take the lead in redressing injustices. “What has happened remains fundamentally unaddressed by the Ethiopian government and certainly the Eritrean government,” Steven Ratner, a member of the United Nations International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, says. “There’s still no process in place to deal with the victims, whether that’s some kind of reparations or psychosocial support, whether it’s apologies or acknowledgment or any accountability by the forces of what they did.” And while it may be unrealistic to expect an unrepentant government responsible for abuses to publicly hold itself to account, Ethiopian leadership could take other crucial steps, like demanding the Eritrean military fully withdraw from Tigray. “The conflict isn’t over,” Ratner says. “There’s still Eritrean troops there, there’s still ongoing violations of human rights.” In September, the White House announced that it would be extending sanctions against Ethiopia because of the ongoing “emergency,” an action that gives the U.S. government the authority to impose punitive measures on individuals and entities from Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the regional government in Amhara. Days after leaving Amhara, I received a message on WhatsApp from an unknown British number. It took a while before I realized I was messaging with Wagnew Aderaw’s son, Bereket, who lives in England. He had emigrated as a refugee and now attends school there. He told me that he helped raise money, with donations from people in the Amhara diaspora in Britain, to send to his father, the Amhara community and Fano militants every few months. Bereket had watched his father go from working in local law-enforcement, to joining the war in Tigray, to now helping lead the Amhara rebellion. “It’s the one thing that is haunting me every day,” he said. “He’s been fighting his whole life.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

THE BANYAMULENGE: A COMMUNITY PREY TO ARRESTS AND VIOLENCE IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC) by Innocent Nteziryayo Under human rights law and most liberal constitutions, everyone has the right to be free from arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of liberty. Everyone accused of an offense is guaranteed the right to have his or her case heard by an independent and impartial court of law that may decide on the lawfulness or arbitrariness of detention. Article 16 (1) and 17 of the Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as amended by Law N°11/002 of January 20, 2011, revising certain articles of the Constitution of the DRC of February 18, 2006, clearly states: "The human person is sacred and Individual liberty is guaranteed.” The provision echoes Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights providing that “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and by such procedures established by law”. International law requires that anyone who is arrested be informed, at the time of arrest, of the reasons for the arrest, promptly informed of any charges brought against them, and brought promptly before a competent court to determine whether the arrest was lawful. Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”. The Human Rights Committee has interpreted the requirement of being promptly brought before a judge to mean a few days after the arrest, with 48 hours being sufficient. The Committee has also stated that the individual has the right to legal assistance by the counsel of their choice in the hearing that ensues and in subsequent hearings where the judge assesses the legality of detention. Arbitrary and illegal detention refers to the unlawful arrest or imprisonment of individuals without following the legal procedures for arrest and detention. It occurs when people are deprived of their liberty and free movement unlawfully or by force. According to Wole Soyinka, "A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigerness; it jumps on its prey”. The true meaning of Soyinka's metaphor becomes apparent when applied to the DRC's struggle with the rule of law. A tiger's power lies in its quiet but assured ability to act when necessary, jumping on its prey without announcing itself. In the case of the DRC, we see the opposite reality. The state often claims to have perfect written laws guaranteeing human rights but fails to implement them effectively, particularly regarding arbitrary arrest and unlawful detention. The phenomenon of arbitrary arrests and unlawful detention in the DRC is rampant. The practice has become insidious in targeting members of specific communities, as illustrated in the annexed table documenting the illegal arrests and unlawful detentions of members of the Banyamulenge community in the DRC. As George Orwell said in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”. All citizens in the DRC suffer from the dysfunction of the state, but some citizens collectively face specific challenges not shared with others. These include the Banyamulenge of South Kivu and the Tutsi of North Kivu. Members of these communities are targeted because of who they are. This article presents a detailed overview of the current situation of Banyamulenge prisoners, highlighting the ongoing abuse of power by the DRC public authorities through illegal arrests and unlawful detentions. It has been documented that civilians and soldiers from the Banyamulenge community of South Kivu and the Tutsi community of North Kivu are often arrested because of their physical appearance and ethnicity. They are frequently accused of “participating in insurgent movements, treason “and violation of orders without being brought before judicial authorities to formally face charges. The Banyamulenge, a Tutsi community residing primarily in the Hauts Plateaux of South Kivu, along with the Tutsi community of North Kivu, have faced long-standing discrimination and violence in the DRC equal to genocide. This was confirmed by Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the United Nations Secretary General's Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, particularly in her statements dated November 11, 2024, and November 30, 2022. Read the full report here: Innocent Nteziryayo  is a founding and active member of Collectif des Avocats des Parties Civiles, a group acting in support of victims of human rights violations in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and representing them in judicial processes. He is the coordinator of the Gatumba Justice Project, advocating for justice on behalf of Gatumba genocide survivors. He also formerly worked as a public prosecutor in Rwanda. As an advocate, he is interested in justice for human rights violations against minority communities. Innocent Nteziryayo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and Anthropology with Gender Studies from the University of Hull in the UK (2016-2019). He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Legal Practice from ILPD in Rwanda (2009) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Law from UNILAK, in Rwanda (2003-2007). NB: This report has been produced by an external researcher and activist and is not an official Genocide Watch publication. It does not represent research conducted internally and directly by Genocide Watch staff. Genocide Watch supports and promotes efforts by other actors to investigate, document, and bring attention to the plight of persecuted communities such as the Banyamulenge of DR Congo. The report has been reviewed by several academics, and it may be subject to further updates.

Admiral Francisco Cubides attends his appointment ceremony as the new Commander in Chief of the Colombian Military Forces, at the Jose Maria Cordova Military Cadet School in Bogota, Colombia July 9, 2024. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights BOGOTA, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Colombia's illegal armed groups have taken advantage of the government's pursuit of peace to strengthen themselves militarily and economically, the commander of the country's armed forces said on Monday. The government of President Gustavo Petro has since 2022 pursued peace negotiations with leftist guerrillas and criminal gangs founded by former right-wing paramilitaries, in a bid to end Colombia's internal conflict. Six decades of fighting in the Andean country has killed at least 450,000 people. "They don't genuinely demonstrate a will for peace, they're always targeting the population while exerting more control over activities like drug-trafficking and illicit mining, so we have to go after them," Admiral Francisco Cubides said in an interview with Reuters. "The government has always been open to talks but these groups have taken advantage of this generosity," he added. The government, which has pushed peace efforts including bilateral ceasefires with leftist rebels the National Liberation Army (ELN), two dissident factions of the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the Clan del Golfo crime gang, continues working to cement deals even as fighting restarts and some groups have splintered, making negotiations more difficult. So far this year, Colombia's military has confiscated 560 tonnes of cocaine, a major source of income for armed groups, Cubides said. The groups and their support networks number more than 20,000 people, he said, adding that in some parts of Colombia they fight each other but in other regions form alliances to produce cocaine and mine gold. "It's a complex network of crime that the military and the police are attacking with a view to imposing greater control," Cubides said. The FARC dissident faction until recently known as the Segunda Marquetalia is the one that profits most from drug trafficking, while crime gang the Clan del Golfo mostly controls illegal mining, he added. Some of the groups, particularly the dissident FARC, insist they fight for social justice and for communities abandoned by the state, something Cubides dismisses. "Today, these groups have lost their ideology and are totally dedicated to their livelihoods and supporting illegal economies," Cubides said. Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta Writing by Oliver Griffin Editing by Peter Graff. © 2024 Reuters. All rights reserved

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte speaks in Bulacan province, Philippines, on June 12, 2021. © 2021 AP Photo/Aaron Favila (Manila) –  Philippine authorities should fully investigate and appropriately prosecute new revelations of extrajudicial killings involving former and current officials during the previous administration of Rodrigo Duterte, Human Rights Watch said today. Since August 2024, the Philippine House of Representatives have held joint hearings that have examined extrajudicial killings in the “war on drugs” and whether money from drugs and illegal gambling were used by the Duterte administration to finance killings by the police. Witnesses to the hearings have testified to killings allegedly ordered by government officials, including at least four murders by the  former head of the country’s lottery office and a current commissioner of the National Police Commission. “The revelations of the Philippine congressional hearings on extrajudicial killings are downright horrifying,” said  Bryony Lau , deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Philippine prosecutors should investigate the allegations and file appropriate charges against those responsible no matter their former or current position or rank.” In a hearing on September 27, a  witness alleged that Royina Garma, a former colonel in the Philippine National Police and CEO of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, which runs the country’s  lottery directly under the Office of the President, had ordered the  murder of Wesley Barayuga , the charity’s board secretary. Barayuga had been  slated to testify about  anomalies in the lottery office allegedly committed by Garma. Police Lt. Col. Santie Mendoza , an anti-narcotics officer, testified that a superior in the police, Col. Edilberto Leonardo, ordered him in 2019 to plan and execute the plot against Barayuga, claiming that Barayuga was involved in illegal drugs. Mendoza alleged that Leonardo was carrying out an order from Garma. At that time,  “drug war” killings by the police numbered in the thousands, with most victims accused of involvement in illegal drugs. Mendoza claimed that he had no choice and so arranged for an associate who in turn hired the gunman who carried out  the murder in July 2020 . Mendoza testified that Garma had provided the vehicle Barayuga used and then relayed to Leonardo the details about the truck, which Leonardo then passed onto Mendoza and then the gunman. Garma and Leonardo  denied the allegations during the hearing. Garma is a known  close associate of Duterte from the time that he served as mayor of Davao City. She was a commander of police units there, and both she and Leonardo were  implicated in the so-called  Davao death squad , which was linked to many illegal killings of suspected criminals by the local police. She was later appointed police chief of the central Philippine city of Cebu despite  opposition by the mayor . As Cebu police chief, Garma enforced Duterte’s  “war on drugs”  campaign that has killed hundreds in that city since 2016. Human Rights Watch documented some of the killings there while Garma was police chief. In 2019, Garma retired early from the Phlippine National Police to become general manager and chief executive officer of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office. It was reported during the hearing that while Barayuga served as the office’s board secretary, he allegedly learned about corruption allegations against Garma. Congressman Johnny Pimentel said at the hearing that Barayuga was about to expose Garma’s alleged corruption before he was killed. A number of allegations of wrongdoing were made against Garma during the hearings. In August, two witnesses testified that Garma had ordered the  2016 murder of three alleged Chinese druglords detained at the Davao Prison and Penal Farm. Garma allegedly tasked her boyfriend,  Senior Police Officer 4 Arthur Narsolis , to carry out the murders. Bureau of Corrections Senior Superintendent Gerardo Padilla testified that then-President Duterte called to “ congratulate ” him on the killings of the three men, which Duterte referred to as “a bloodbath.” The hearings also revealed the Duterte administration’s misuse of so-called drug watch lists to eliminate political enemies, among them  local officials .  Jed Mabilog , former mayor of  Iloilo City , testified in September that he was forced to flee the country in August 2017 and sought asylum in the United States for fear of his life after Duterte included him on the list. In the case of Barayuga, his name was added to the “drug watch list” after the murder to justify the killing, Mendoza said at the hearings last week. Accountability for “drug war” killings has been insignificant: only four cases out of thousands have resulted in court convictions. The current administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has not taken significant measures to address the lack of prosecutions. The International Criminal Court is  investigating extrajudicial killings that occurred when the Philippines was still a party to the Rome Statute until March 2019 when a withdrawal ordered by Duterte took effect. “The Marcos administration needs to address the congressional testimony implicating senior officials in the police and other government agencies,” Lau said. “The Philippines’ international partners need to impress upon President Marcos that bringing past abuses to light won’t end them unless there is genuine justice.”