Category: United Nations

  • SPECIAL REPORT: By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News

    West Papuan independence advocate Octo Mote is in Aotearoa New Zealand to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than 60 years.

    Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.

    He spoke at a West Papua seminar at the Māngere Mountain Education Centre tonight.

    ULMWP president Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of hectares of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.

    The struggle for West Papuans
    “Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation [Indonesia],” Mote says.

    “The greatest challenge we are facing right now is that we are facing the colonial power who lives next to us.”

    If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered “separatists”, Mote says, regardless of whether they are journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.

    “When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [the Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote says.

    Mote is a former journalist and says that while he was working he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.

    “We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he says.

    The ‘ecocide’ of West Papua
    The ecology in West Papua iss being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote says Indonesia wants to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.

    He says he is trying to educate the world that defending West Papua means defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.

    West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and it is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.

    Mote says the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders are trying to stop, would greatly impact on the small island countries in the Pacific, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

    Mote also says their customary council in West Papua has already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land the council says that by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who need to migrate from their home islands.

    In 2021, West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) to recognise ecocide as a crime.

    Support from local Indonesians
    Mote says there are Indonesians who support the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He says there are both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.

    “There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities among those who are also victims of the capitalist investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the Omnibus Law.”

    The so-called Omnibus Law was passed in 2020 as part of outgoing President Joko Widodo’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested against because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.

    Mote says there has been an “awakening”, especially among the younger generations who are more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.

    The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia
    “The [former colonial nation] Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote says.

    The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 in disputed circumstances but the ULMWP calls it an “invasion”.

    From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.

    The US government urged the Dutch government to give West Papua to Indonesia in an attempt to appease the communist-friendly Indonesian government as part of a US drive to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

    The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.

    The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua would be entitled to an act of self-determination.

    The ‘act of no choice’
    This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.

    Mote says they witnessed “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right to self-determination”.

    The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.

    Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this was not a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.

    Pacific support at UN General Assembly
    Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Forum Leaders summit in Tonga last week and he has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.

    “In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote says.

    Mote says there was a focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.

    The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote says it is achievable. In 2018, Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.

    They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.

    ULMWP vice-president Octo Mote
    ULMWP vice-president Octo Mote . . . in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government “accountable” for its actions in West Papua. Image: Poster screenshot

    What needs to be done
    He says that in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also says outgoing President Widodo should be held accountable for his “involvement”.

    Mote says New Zealand is the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleges Australia always backs Indonesian policies.

    He says he is looking to New Zealand to speak up about the atrocities taking place in West Papua and is particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.

    The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.

    “New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said at the time.

    “There is much more we can and should be doing together.”

    Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 10 press freedom and human rights organizations in a letter to the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel to investigate and help provide accountability for the murder of Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah, who was killed by Israeli forces in south Lebanon on October 13, 2023, and for the killings of other journalists.

    Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Abdallah’s killing, CPJ joined a September 11 letter urging the commission to conduct its own inquiry into Israel’s October 13 attack. The organizations also called for the commission to investigate accusations of war crimes against journalists as part of its inquiry into possible war crimes committed since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, and to recognize the “alarming numbers” of journalists killed in the war and the media’s crucial role in documenting conflict.  

    The letter also asked the commission to publicly identify the military unit involved in the attack on the journalists and send formal requests for information to the governments of Israel, Lebanon, and the United States, given that one of the survivors of the attack, Dylan Collins, is a U.S. citizen.

    You can read the full letter here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Once again, the Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) strongly denounces the latest attempts by the U.S. to push for yet another UN military occupation of Haiti. We condemn this action and the relentless assaults on Haitian self-determination by the US and its criminal allies. We also urge Caribbean and Latin American governments to stand in solidarity with Haiti – just as they have stood with one another against violations of national sovereignty in Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, etc. – as the Haitian people continue to bear the brunt of U.S. imperial policies and actions in the region.

    On September 5th and 6th, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Blinken met with members of the US- and CARICOM-imposed “presidential council” and the illegitimate Prime Minister of Haiti to discuss support for the Kenyan and U.S. occupation forces currently present in the country.

    On September 5, 2024, a group of Haitian and Dominican organizations released a statement denouncing Blinken’s visit to the island (English translation here). The statement titled, “Repudiation of the Presence of the Representative of Yankee Imperialism in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” declared:

    “This interventionist visit will bring no good to the Haitian people, nor to the Dominican people. Rather, it will seek to consolidate the neocolonial domination imposed on Haiti since the first U.S. military occupation (1915-1934) and on the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). In fact, Blinken’s only mission is to protect the interests of imperialism in Haiti and those of Haiti’s small, repugnant elite class. He will do the same in the Dominican Republic.”

    Soon after Blinken’s departure from the island, Western media revealed the true U.S. objective of his visit: transforming the illegal, unpopular, and inept U.S.-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission of 400 Kenyan police officers into a full-scale UN occupation (cynically referred to as a “peacekeeping operation.”). This was further confirmed by reports that the UN Security Council is considering a resolution to deploy a military force to Haiti.

    BAP’s position has been consistent and unwavering: we support Haitian self-determination. We will continue to struggle against foreign invasion and occupation of the country. Since 2021, we have advocated against U.S. imperial machinations in Haiti, including the continuing renewal of the mandate of the UN office in Haiti (BINUH), which Haitian people see as an occupation force, and the establishment of the MSS. BAP challenged the narrative of “gang violence” as a pretext for occupation and argued that it is the U.S.’s own puppets and Haitian oligarchs that are arming young men in Haiti. We warned that the MSS was a temporary cover for a more permanent military occupation of Haiti through proxies, and with the blessing of the UN. And we continue to remind people of the brutal repercussions of the two decades-long 2004 UN intervention and occupation of Haiti.

    In solidarity with Haitian and Dominican organizations opposing U.S. imperialism, and in defense of Haitian self-determination and sovereignty, the Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace demands an end to the current occupation of Haiti, calling for the closure of the BINUH office in Haiti, and the removal of Kenyan and U.S. militarized police from the country. We also demand that the UNSC cease its interference in Haitian affairs on behalf of the U.S.

    We urge people of conscience around the world to help stop another UN invasion of Haiti and, we also warn leaders of the Caribbean and Latin America – who have either remained silent or are actively participating in the U.S. usurpation of Haitian sovereignty  – that if Haiti is not free from U.S. bullying and imperial control, no other country in the region will be free.

    DEFEND HAITIAN SOVEREIGNTY!

    U.S. OUT OF HAITI AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC!

    END THE U.S./EU/NATO AXIS OF DOMINATION!

    The post BAP Condemns U.S. Plans for Yet Another UN Military Occupation of Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Dismal’ lack of progress leaves women and girls facing litany of abuses – with no country on track to achieve equality

    More than 850 million women and girls are living in countries rated as “very poor” for gender equality, says a new report, subjecting them to a litany of potential restrictions and abuses, including forced pregnancies, childhood marriage and bans from secondary education.

    The SDG Gender Index, published today by a coalition of NGOs, found that no country has, so far, achieved the promise of gender equality envisioned by the UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals (SDGs).

    Between 2019 and 2022, nearly 40% of countries – home to more than 1 billion women and girls – stagnated or declined on gender equality.

    Continue reading…

  • An independent United Nations expert warned Monday that “Israel’s genocidal violence risks leaking out of Gaza and into the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole” as Western governments, corporations, and other institutions keep up their support for the Israeli military, which stands accused of grave war crimes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Francesca Albanese, the U.N.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Actually, I limit my exposure to daily media considerably. My experience as a journalist, when there was still some conventional meaning assignable to that term, began in school. I had become the news editor of the school paper. Whereas previously the monthly student production was devoted to athletic events and other entertainments, I introduced reporting on issues both in the school and those off the school grounds that nonetheless were relevant for pupils and the routines to which we were all subject. My model in those days was The Economist, still published in the UK and reasonably free from cant. Our school paper received several prizes from the journalism school at the state university that I would later attend. There, I tried to write for the university paper. However the closer one got to the ambitious professionals, the less interest in substance was to be found. The pinnacle of my experience was a two-year tour as an accredited freelance journalist in the UN Headquarters, New York. That was back in the ancient 80s when the regime over which Ronald Reagan nominally presided made its ownership of the United Nations more explicit than it had been since using it to cover its war against Korea (and China). I attended innumerable press conferences including those held by such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi, Roland Dumas and some figures from states that receive less attention.

    It was the year when then New Zealand prime minister David Lange accused France of state terrorism before the entire General Assembly—a speech French foreign minister Dumas told me he had not heard. 1985 was a jubilee in which the United Nations organisation celebrated that it had reached 45 years of age. Heads of state and government accumulated in the East Side nest donated by the Rockefeller dynasty to house that august preserver of the world’s peace and prosperity—as the United States defined. There was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic. The CIA was still waging counter-insurgency throughout Central America and all was Right in the world. That is to the extent one still could imagine what Left meant.

    Through accident or design, I travelled to Brazil the following year and studied the process of apparent return to civilian rule after the 1964 military coup the US initiated. In 1989, I drove to Berlin for a common weekend visit only to find that by 10 November the last meaningful preservative of Eastern European sovereignty was to be removed. In 1991, I was again surprised. I had booked my flight to South Africa before the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s release. What I witnessed in the first half of that year was prescient. Twenty years later, the book I wrote about that experience has been re-published. Whether it will get any more notice today is anyone’s guess.

    In other words, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy proximity to noteworthy political personalities, remarkable historical events, and those whose ostensible task was to report on them for many years. As I have said to my sporting friends, I prefer observant participation to the spectacles. My cricketing skills are minimal. Yet I would rather play than just watch. Of course I am no politician, “playing” for me is personal observation, not following what others tell me is important.

    This year the war commenced among the imperial powers of the Western peninsula of Eurasia, led by the British Empire and its vassals, has been waged for more than a century, 120 years to be precise. In his 1947 book, The Future in Perspective, German historian Sigmun Neumann called the era 1914-1945 the “second Thirty Years War”. Perhaps we should call the era in which we live the “second Hundred Years War”. That would still only cover a small part of the events of the past century. Given the present situation the most comprehensive designation I can imagine is the “second Fourth Crusade”.

    In 2001, the latent policies that had shaped the previous ten decades of malice and belligerence were articulated in the language most closely resembling the decrees of Innocent III. By 2020 those policies had become manifest in every aspect of Western political, military, economic and social practice. The Global War on Terror was successfully transformed from an episodic campaign against brown people associated with Islam to a general campaign to reduce the world’s population and subordinate the East, beginning with the successor to Orthodoxy in the Christian world. An incident in Wuhan in 2019 was exploited to create conditions for an expanded version of the Opium Wars against China—a war concealed by duplicity and hypocrisy that puts the Arrow incident to shame.

    The journalism to which so much reference is made—as to its virtues and failings—is scarcely able to imagine, let alone report, the era in which we live. Journalism as it has been taught and imitated dwells on the immediate or the fiction of the immediate to be exact. With the contraction of memory and the dissolution of the traditional forms of time and space, the journalist responds by limiting the scope of an already truncated perceptual scheme.

    Although the war being waged by Ukraine against Russia is based on consistent Western policies and methods, the bulk of the discussion and the reporting that feeds it focusses either on the battlefield (now called battlespace in military jargon) or on the relationships between Russia and Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation, the Russian government stated that one of its key objectives is the de-Nazification of Ukraine. The journalistic response in the West has been mainly to ignore the substance upon which this aim is based. Of course there are references among the reasonably sane to the embarrassing or criminal inclusion of formations in the Ukrainian military that are “neo-Nazi”, the most notorious of these is the Azov Division/ Battalion. Although the US/ NATO spokespersons assert that these are not neo-Nazi elements, it has been necessary to downplay the appearance of NS insignia (not foreign to elements of US Forces either) in order to retain this fiction. A recent RIAS video, obtained from Italian journalists embedded in the Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk, shows a Ukrainian soldier wearing a fatigue cap with an NS badge. Shocked attention is given to the SS runes on the cap — see screenshot below.

    To illustrate how the journalistic microscope functions, the shock is focused on the rune “bacillus”. However the petri dish in which this bacillus was found is largely ignored. The SS runes may catch the superficially informed as formally objectionable national socialist (NS) symbols that make a good cause look bad. For those that oppose the war they may see this as proof that the Ukrainian regime is unscrupulous, willing to use anyone to fight its war. From this follow conclusions like, the NS symbols should be prohibited and purged (without addressing why they are worn in the first place) or the Ukrainian war is wrong because it is being fought by neo-Nazis.

    If the microscope is abandoned and higher magnification is applied, then we find a curious confirmation of the foregoing description of continuous war against the East. First of all, the cap badge the soldier is wearing is that of the SS-Leibstandart “Adolf Hitler”. This formation was an element of the II SS Panzer Gruppe, commanded by Paul Hausser, which waged the 1943 battle of Kursk in which the German Wehrmacht and SS paramilitary divisions were defeated. The Azov Battalion/ Division adopted the standard of the Waffen SS-Division “Das Reich” (also once under Hausser’s command). This could be interpreted as evidence that the vanguard of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is essentially composed of the reconstituted Waffen-SS. The organisation, training and operational deployment of these units is entirely consistent with the manner in which the Waffen-SS was created and deployed in the war against the Soviet Union, a war that only ended with latter’s dissolution.

    These are not neo-Nazi formations. They are fascist units created by the same forces that armed and deployed German military might against the Soviet Union in 1941. They were created from the legacy of the SS units rescued and conserved by the Anglo-American Empire since 1944. Seen in this way these insignia are the inheritance of the regimental history they claim as their own. The British Imperial Government and the United States Government both organized the rescue of at least 1,000 paramilitary men of the Waffen-SS Division Galizia in Italy. With the services of the Gehlen Org (the precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Federal Germany’s CIA franchise) and the ODESSA, Waffen-SS officers and men were provided with all manner of escape to safe havens, e.g. in North and South America. Officially the SS was declared to be a criminal organisation under the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. Even the display of insignia associated with the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and its infrastructure was made a crime. Occasionally, conspicuous trials were held, when unavoidable, to preserve the myth of Western innocence in the creation of the NS regime and conceal its complicity in Operation Barbarossa.

    SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Waffen-SS Generaloberst (deemed by the NSDAP regime equivalent to general officer rank in the regular army) Paul Hausser, in his capacity as spokesman for the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (HIAG), a benevolent organisation (and lobby) devoted to the promoting the interests of Waffen-SS veterans, pled until his death in 1972 for the rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS; that they be treated on a par with the Wehrmacht veterans. Regular soldiers retained their pension and other benefits. These were denied to members of the Waffen-SS because in the view of the established military they were not soldiers and their organisation had been declared criminal as a whole. The law was cynically applied like much of so-called “de-Nazification” since civil servants who obtained “Persilscheine”, certificates of de-Nazification named after the leading laundry detergent Persil, were not only retained in office but continued their careers, even if they had been NSDAP members. German journalist Bernt Engelmann in his Roman à clef, Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and his 1975 Schwarzbuch: Strauß, Kohl und Co. and 1986 Schwarzbuch. Das Kohl & Co-Komplott, traced the careful erection of West Germany’s regime by the US intelligence services using first generation NSDAP functionaries like Franz-Joseph Strauss and second-generation fascists nurtured by the Heidelberg SS clique around Fritz Ries, including Hans-Martin Schleyer, e.g., the galleon figure for the final assault on the Soviet Union, Helmut Kohl. The first years of this story, including the Gladio terrorist operations of the early 1980s, were dramatized by GDR television in the series Das Unsichtbare Visier in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until the 1990s that the BBC aired a documentary showing that most of the European “left-wing terrorism”, including the Bologna railway station bombing and the murder of Aldo Moro, were under the direction of the NATO Gladio operation, based on the structures imported from the Gehlen Org. None of this is ever even mentioned when trying to explain the curiously self-destructive policies of the current Berlin government.

    Hausser’s central argument, for which he also published in 1953 the book Waffen-SS im Einsatz (the Waffen-SS in battle) and in 1966 Soldaten wie andere auch (Soldiers like any other), was that the Waffen-SS was a true multi-national force which had honourably served in the defence of “European ideals.” Hausser’s personal defence was no doubt related to the fact that he had been a regular army officer prior to joining the SS. Until the end of the GDR and the Soviet Union, Hausser’s books and all those who followed in his train were attacked officially and in the German mass media for “historical revisionism”. In fact, as late as 1995, the so-called “Wehrmachtausstellung” produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, caused a major scandal in military circles with documentary evidence to punch a huge hole in the “clean” Wehrmacht myth. It was also accused of incorrect attribution and captioning of photographs however the essential message was never fully rebutted. If the Waffen-SS was the vanguard of the West’s war of annihilation in the East, the Wehrmacht as a force was necessary for that war to be waged with due ferocity. While until 1990 historical revisionism was the technical term for defending the war in the East (against the Soviet Union), Hausser’s version of history has become the official doctrine of Berlin and Brussels. Today’s Ukrainian Armed Forces are praised as a multi-national force defending Europe. If one listens to any high imperial official, especially Mr Stoltenberg and Ms von der Leyne (NATO and EU, i.e. military and civil households of the Anglo-American Empire), the Ukrainian Armed Forces, commanded nominally from Kiev, are fighting “Europe’s fight”. HM’s Canadian Government in Ottawa even applauded the prior service of a Waffen-SS veteran because he too had been fighting for such ideals as a young man in SS paramilitary uniform. The barely implied declaration is that Russia is not Europe and certainly has no European “ideals”.

    Since the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals in western Eurasia are fully committed to Ukraine, it can be no surprise therefore that they are also fully committed to the IDF slaughter and conquest of Palestine, in absolute defence of European “ideals”. The declared “war of annihilation” (how else can one characterize the boldly proclaimed objectives of the Tel Aviv regime?) underway since 2023 is merely the “sacred right of self-defence”—with which no other state in the region is endowed. It takes enormous strains of the intellect not to compare the rhetoric today with that in NSDAP-ruled Germany from 1939 until 1945. However, the legions of scribes and megaphone operators in journalism assembled are obviously up to the task. Would anyone dare to compare the more than fifty standing ovations the head of that regime received in a joint session of the US Congress with the news reel footage of Reichstag sessions? Would anyone even understand such a comparison were it made?

    Two of the great propaganda slanders of the past hundred years are that the leader of the Soviet Union started the war to expand communism throughout the world—provoking the defensive-offensive response of the West through (its proxy) the National Socialist regime in Germany. Another version of that slander is that Stalin and Hitler were essentially the same, intending to divide the European peninsula between them. The other is that the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, represented the nascent Arab war against Jews. These and other fabrications or distortions of the historical record are in part preserved by the overwhelming control of the world’s mass media and educational/ indoctrination system by the Anglo-American (in widest sense of that term) Establishment. The Establishment history of the past century either exaggerates casualties/ fatalities on its own side or minimises/ ignores them on the side of the victims of Western aggression. One only has to consider the Normandy farce and the refusal of “Western allies” to commemorate the Russian victory over the fascist invasion—not incursion. (Here note that journalists report about the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine but not about the Ukrainian “incursion”.)

    The Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of Western (Nazi) invasion at a cost of more than 20 million dead plus untold destruction, rightly demanded war crimes trials in London. Britain and the US reluctantly conceded. However in Nuremberg the Soviet Union had to be content with the trial of NS officials for crimes against Jews and not war crimes against the citizens of the Soviet Union. By 1967, everyone in the world knew the number “six million”, while scarcely anyone knew about the 20 million plus in the Soviet Union. This omission was so egregious that after a major, prime time 26-episode British documentary about the war between 1941 and 1945, entitled World at War (1973), with narration by Lawrence Olivier, had been broadcast throughout the English-speaking West with almost no mention of the Eastern front, massive protest by the Soviet Union forced the production and broadcast in 1978 of The Unknown War, another twenty episodes, narrated by Bruce Lancaster, to show where the war was really fought and won (episode 7 describes the Battle of Kursk). At least twenty million deaths in China were not counted at all. In a little country like Portugal a typical bookstore has more books on display about the Western theatre of that war, in which Portugal was neutral, and the NSDAP than books about its own national history.

    To this day the only casualties that are universally recognized from that phase of the “second Hundred Years War” are six million non-combatant forced labourers in the occupied East—where the war was fiercest. That fundamental disproportionality is also an essential part of the overall distortion and deception (along with a variety of serious commercial and criminal enforcement penalties) which prevents the daily journalist and his readership from seeing the “second Fourth Crusade” being waged from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Aden. It prevents them from recognizing the age in which we live and the conditions that have made it what it is.

    In an article titled, “The Crusade is Over” (The Unz Review, 7 September 2023), Laurent Guyénot argues that the Christian crusade constituted an innovation. He writes:

    The Crusade introduced a new way of individual salvation: penitential warfare. God, speaking through His vicar on earth, now granted full remission of sins (thence a place in Heaven) to whoever would swear to travel to the Holy Land and kill infidels or be killed by them. According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1135, “the pope urged all who could bear arms to fight against the enemies of God, and on God’s authority he absolved all the penitent from all their since from the hour they took the Lord’s cross”.

    This idea survived even in the Protestant deviation. The Church militant hymn, The Son of God goes forth to war is just one gory example.

    When the Global War on Terror was proclaimed, the rechristening of the second Hundred Years War as the second Fourth Crusade, penitential warfare needed no mention. On the contrary, the justification offered by all those who preached the crusade was that something or some people embodying “radical Islam” or “Islamists” had sworn to fight the West to the death. A powerful propaganda strategy has always been to accuse the target of the acts, omissions, or policies one is covertly pursuing. Thus the target is seen as the author of the very aggression launched against him.

    Negotiation, both overt and covert, can be used to amplify this drama of guilt and enmity as the target is deceived into acts he believes will end hostilities, which are then shaped to enhance them. Analyst-participants like Scott Ritter—to mention someone everyone probably recognises—have been eyewitness to these deceits, even if late in recognizing them. With such overwhelming control over the world propaganda media for a century now, it is almost impossible for targets to expose the deceptions to which they have been subject. The few journalists who notice and try to report them are no better situated to alter the signal to noise ratio in favour of the defence.

    Details reported may help to correct errors of fact. However, without a fundamental orientation, including a critical, cultural historical point of view—one that necessarily extends beyond the horizon of daily news or even intensive analysis—it is very easy to remain a captive of marketing and info-fashion. New things—newly reported or learned—excite but without context obstruct rather than promote information. Joseph Weizenbaum, in his continued critique of AI before he died, insisted on the distinction between data and information. Information is the product of judgement. Data can be anything. Weizenbaum insisted that judgement can and ought only to be exercised by humans—not machines. Journalism functions as a soft machine. It generates data and packages it so that it appears without judgement or is saturated with judgements. Transfats were developed to enhance the shelf life of processed foods. Transfacts enhance the credibility of processed synthetic data. Like a drug it induces a kind of euphoria (dysphoria) called “being informed”. The actual exercise of judgement requires a level of sobriety that standard journalism—regardless of ideological orientation—was not designed to sustain.

    A great many terms used in reporting or discussing what happened, happens or may happen in our world are unanalysed. “Interests” is perhaps one of the worst but there are many others. To illustrate just how useless this term is consider the following substitution: “the person whom one has seized in the process of setting fire to one’s home, or perhaps with a douse of petrol to one’s self, was merely pursuing his interests.” This is not an absurd use. Another version of this is that a person who engages in a cash transaction on a public thoroughfare and is robbed in the process must expect that there are people who have an interest in theft where they believe it is possible. It is only the occasional enforcement of the criminal code that makes it probably safe to say that these kinds of “interest” are generally termed “criminal” and subject to punishment. However, once the word is applied to corporate or state entities, these actions are beyond judgement. The same applies to such terms as “right of self-defence” or “national security”. This shorthand is readily absorbed as a mark of sophistication when it is really a screen to obscure activities from scrutiny.

    While the objective blockade of Gaza that has been in place for two decades, only to be intensified by the centrally managed mass murder of the population that commenced October 2023, is occasionally mentioned, the compulsion to produce “news” leads to notices of IDF homicidal attacks on every form of food, medical or other relief to the besieged as if these were weather reports. A recent report that the WHO, a private-public partnership (euphemism for fascist parastatal), will launch an experimental polio inoculation campaign on the IDF’s targets of annihilation ought to remind people of the use to which Africans have been put by pharmaments manufacturers with misanthropic funds, or even the medical experiments conducted against captives during the war in the 20th century. Alas, not even the enormous fallout from the 2021-22 global injection terror is compared.

    Journalists swim in a cesspool with just enough water to distort their vision, especially their sense of distance. The “news” demands the appearance of unique data, unusual events or angles. Supposedly repetition is bad for the “news”. What is really meant is that “news” is based on titillation, combining voyeurism, desire, fear and what the Germans call Schadensfreude (enjoying when others are injured, a kind of abstract vengefulness). Of course, repetition is essential to the effect of the “news”. Redundancy in signalling serves to amplify a message as well as to squelch noise (undesired signals/ messages). The inability to accurately assess distance and engage critically is also aggravated by the addiction to unanalysed jargon, sometimes due to the journalist’s ignorance or laziness, but also because of infection with the culture of the powerful and their agents. This culture is transmitted not only by education but also by the rewards and punishments, the seduction and promotion, as both Philip Agee and the late Udo Ulfkotte explained, when one belongs to the scrivener guild at court. The economic and social privilege that accrues when one has been permitted into anterooms of power is hard to dismiss. The proximity to authority lends the charisma of authority. Even the opposition scribe can become complicit in this spectacle, out of vanity or because his benefits accrue (even if the ultimate sources are concealed). That is part of the power of pageantry and the miracle of philanthropy. Salvation is promised if one is willing to take up the cross or pay someone else to do so. The warriors have always had their chroniclers. At the end of the day all we have on which to base our judgements—and judgements we must make—are the legacies, the chronicles and the wasteland.

    The post War Diary: An Appreciation of Legacies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.

    In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.

    It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.

    “You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.

    My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.

    Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.

    In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”

    Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?

    Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.

    How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.

    When we can, we must act.

    We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.

    From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.

    We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.

    We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.

    Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.

    And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.

    Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.

    We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.

    The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.

    It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.

    As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”

    We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/

    • A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/

    The post Hanging On with Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Committee to Protect Journalists has submitted a report on the state of press freedom and journalist safety in Iraq and semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council ahead of its January to February 2025 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session.

    The U.N. mechanism is a peer review of each member state’s human rights record. It takes place every 4 ½ years and includes reports on progress made since the previous review cycle and recommendations on how a country can better fulfill its human rights obligations.

    CPJ’s submission, together with the MENA Rights Group, a Geneva-based advocacy organization, and the local human rights groups Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq and Community Peacemaker Teams Iraq, shows that journalists face threats, online harassment, physical violence, and civil and criminal lawsuits.

    The submission notes an escalating crackdown on civic space in Iraq where crimes against journalists are rarely investigated, fueling a cycle of violence against the press, while public officials have voiced anti-press rhetoric and attempted to limit access to information.

    Iraq is ranked 6th in CPJ’s Global Impunity Index 2023, with 17 unsolved murders of journalists, and is one of the few countries to have been on the Index every year since its inception in 2007.

    CPJ’s UPR submission on Iraq is available in English here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Mexico City, August 27, 2024—Nicaragua has escalated its persecution of critical voices since 2018, pushing freedom of expression to a nearly nonexistent state, according to a joint submission to the United Nations by the Committee to Protect Journalists and eight other journalism and human rights groups.

    The submission, prepared for Nicaragua’s Universal Periodic Review in 2024, documents the government’s use of various tactics to silence journalists, including media shutdowns, property confiscations, and the suppression of independent reporting. The report highlights how press freedom has been systematically dismantled during the 2019-2023 review cycle.

    The coalition of organizations aims to bring these ongoing violations of free expression and access to information to the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. The submission’s findings are based on data collected and analyzed by the signatory groups, emphasizing that these abuses continue without consequence.

    Read the full submission here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New vice and virtue restrictions offer ‘a distressing vision of Afghanistan’s future’, says UN

    New Taliban laws that prohibit women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes have been condemned by the UN and met with horror by human rights groups.

    The Taliban published a host of new “vice and virtue” laws last week, approved by their supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, which state that women must completely veil their bodies – including their faces – in thick clothing at all times in public to avoid leading men into temptation and vice.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Human rights investigators say ‘escalating’ crackdown has seen 23 deaths and over 100 children and teens detained

    United Nations human rights investigators have urged Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, to halt the “fierce repression” being perpetrated by his security forces after last month’s allegedly stolen presidential election.

    In a statement published two weeks after the 28 July vote, the UN’s fact-finding mission to Venezuela condemned Maduro’s “escalating” crackdown, during which more than 100 children and teens have been detained. The UN investigators said they had recorded 23 deaths, the vast majority caused by gunfire and nearly all young men.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Cybercrime — the malicious hacking of computer networks, systems, and data — threatens people’s rights and livelihoods, and governments need to work together to do more to address it. But the cybercrime treaty sitting before the United Nations for adoption, presumably by August 9, could instead facilitate government repression. By expanding government surveillance to investigate crimes…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?

    Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”

    It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential. The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace. Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations. And the International Criminal Court―created as an afterthought nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”

    But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.

    The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked. UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community. Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development. A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world. UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public health, poverty, and climate change.

    Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace. Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction. To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.

    But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict. In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations. Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status.

    Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking. Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security.

    Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.

    Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.

    Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well. But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto. In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.

    Global governance could also be improved through other measures. They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).

    It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law. Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza. In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.

    Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world. And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue. After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.

    The post Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Resolve Tibet Legislation: Correspondence to Secretary of State Blinken

    Image:: wikimediacommons

    We have today issued to Secretary of State Blinken, the Government and State Department, a communication regarding the recently passed Resolve Tibet legislation. We have a number of serious questions about issues it poses. This document has been presented, in part, to serve as a public record and to hold to account those who are duty bound to apply the provisions of this law.

    The correspondence can be read and/or downloaded here: https://tibettruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/resolvetibetcommunication.pdf

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • São Paulo, July 29, 2024—Marking the second anniversary of Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora’s detention, the Committee to Protect Journalists renews its calls for President Bernardo Arévalo’s administration to free Zamora without further delay.

    “For two years now, José Rubén Zamora has been behind bars in horrific conditions, despite a court order for a retrial,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator. “This disgraceful travesty of justice suggests a breakdown in the country’s rule of law and punitive retaliation against independent journalists. Zamora must be freed immediately.”  

    Zamora, 67, remains in pretrial isolation in conditions at Mariscal Zavala military jail in Guatemala City that his lawyers say amount to torture. Their urgent appeal to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment said that this included deprivation of light and water, aggressive and humiliating treatment, unsanitary conditions, and limited access to medical care.

    The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has declared his imprisonment to be in violation of international law, and a February report by TrialWatch concluded that there were breaches of both international and regional fair-trial standards, and that Zamora’s prosecution and conviction are likely retaliation for his journalism.

    Zamora, president of the now defunct elPeriódico newspaper, received a six-year prison sentence on money laundering charges in June 2023. An appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023, but numerous delays have prevented the start of the court-ordered retrial.

    On May 15, 2024, a Guatemalan court ordered that the journalist be released to house arrest to await trial. However, authorities kept him in jail, as bail applications remained pending in two other cases. On June 26, an appeals court revoked the lower court’s order for his conditional release.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the country that rules it. That story and its episodes is what is commonly known as history. Sometimes it is taught generally. At some point a distinction may be made between local or national history and the greater odyssey know as world history. In the Anglo-American educational tradition established by Matthew Arnold and John Dewey, the aim of school instruction is to instill in the pupil or student a sense of virtue and national pride capable of sustaining citizenship and duty to the State (euphemistically described as democracy in the US).

    History is first and foremost a moral subject, as opposed to a scientific investigation, something like catechism or homilies at mass. The graduate should have imbibed enough of the national theodicy to continue to judge the affairs of which he learns in a manner consistent with the national ideals. The pupil is carefully shielded from that contentious atmosphere otherwise known as historical scholarship, lest it interfere with indoctrination. If history is written by the victors, the first place they celebrate is in the history books used in formal education.

    When in the wake of 1989, many scholars claimed the “end of history” had arrived, they also meant the end to any necessity of contemplating other ways to explain the events constituting the American Empire. However, in 1865, the victors in the civil war aka as the war between the States and among the vanquished the “war of Northern aggression”, the history books were written to explain and justify the defeat of the southern states, the destruction of their economy, and the military occupation of their territory. In the campaign to expand US power into the western peninsula of Eurasia in 1917, the history books had to be re-written to make all the immigrants from belligerent countries into sanitized Americans who could then be recruited to invade the lands of their forefathers bearing moral superiority. After 1945, the history of the hostilities formally declared on 7 December 1941 was revised to obscure the support for fascism and highlight the perennial battle against communism. When the US continued its efforts to control the Asian mainland after the defeat of Japan, the government found itself compelled to end Jim Crow. The reaction to this intrusion into the social order established to reconcile North and South was the introduction of “sub-national history” in the former Confederacy, reviving the rebuttals of abolitionism and industrial expansionism that had been the formal motives for the attacks on Southern sovereignty. Even after the so-called Civil Rights Era had ended, a South Carolinian was taught quasi-national history more intensively than national or world history combined. Memory of a war that had ended more than a century ago constituted the essence of South Carolinian identity for those who attended school.

    Bruce Cumings, in his works recounting and analysing the war whose beginning in Korea is dated in 1951, has written that “civil wars do not start, they come.” His definitive two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War establishes that the core of the conflict was a civil war in the Korean nation. As such the enduring conflict whose greatest violence exploded between 1951 and 1953, arose in Korean society and with the defeat of Imperial Japan exploded in the vacuum created by that brief cessation of foreign domination. That is the Korean War which continues to this day, the war unknown in the US because US national history does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations, especially those populated by brown, yellow or red peoples. Professor Cumings also wrote that the Korean War has been erroneously called the “forgotten war” when it should be called the “unknown war”.

    Of course the thousands of US soldiers, sailors and airmen who participated in the wholesale slaughter of Koreans and the wanton destruction of at least half of the peninsula did not forget the war, even if they reluctantly discussed it. Nor have the Koreans who survived the heaviest saturation bombing campaign ever conducted (until Vietnam) forget the war.

    Already during the active combat operations, journalist I.F. Stone was able to establish the US government’s policy of concealing the war from the public at large. In his Hidden History of the Korean War (review), Stone relied solely on official pronouncements and the reporting by the mainstream media to show how what was known about the war was consistently kept as unknown as possible. Needless to say once the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteer Army had forced the US war machine, operating behind a UN fig leaf, to accept a stalemate, the hiding continued.

    Not only was the civil war character of the Korean conflict denied—and hence the Korean authority to resolve the internal domestic disputes—the actual role of the US as a party to war against all of Korea was hidden by the claim that US Forces were merely commanding UN troops. Hence the active imperial objectives of the US government (and the interests it represents) were never officially recognized and or negotiated. Neither the Korean state constituted by the US nor that constituted by Koreans in the north were able to dispute the legitimacy of the US as an invader of their country.

    So the Korean War is unknown in two senses. The essentially Korean nature of the civil war is denied and, therefore, untaught. The US invasion of Korea in 1945, as part of its manifest destiny to control China through Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, is completely obscured or distorted by an utterly false implied analogy with the occupation of Germany.

    In recent years there have been some attempts to at least show the extent of US barbarism in Korea. In fact everything Americans had come to hear about their war against the Vietnamese had been practiced full throttle in Korea. The virtue of telling a history of the Korean War might be to demonstrate the patterns in US warfare against target countries. It might show that the myths of US wars for freedom have always been just that. That knowledge might lead to a more critical view and consideration of contemporary lies and concealment by government, armed or civilian. Recounting US atrocities can be instructive. However, without adequate context, pupils are left with shock and awe but little to ripen their understanding. Since the task of history instruction remains unchanged, exposures such as the massacres perpetrated by US troops remain anecdotes, even if very brutal ones. In contrast, an examination of the origins of civil war in other countries, like Korea, not only acknowledges that other countries have histories independent of the United States. It also permits consideration of such questions as “what would have happened had the British successfully intervened on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War?” That could lead to recognition why Britain was actually considered an enemy of the US until 1917?

    While it may often be impossible to identify the beginning of something, it is therefore crucial to examine the end of it. The Korean War has not ended, either for Koreans still deprived of their 1000-year-old sovereignty, which Americans helped Japan end in the beginning of the last century. It has also not ended for the US which pretends it is not a formal belligerent whose intervention in the peninsula was driven by grand strategic goals in East Asia, goals the pursuit of which it has yet to abandon. In the nearly century of endless wars waged by the US throughout the world, the refusal to acknowledge either starts or finishes is part of the policy of deniability. No one attacked by the US or NATO or some American force wearing “UN Blue” can ever openly claim its rights to self-determination or self-defence under the UN Charter because those attacks are extra-legal, extra-territorial, and extra-vicious. If history instruction is to contain more than national apologetics and catechism, then it might start with viewing the nation among the community of nations. The gaps that need to be filled are those which comprise international law, aka the law of nations, and the international humanitarian law adopted with the UN Charter, as a ratified treaty binding elements of US law. Then one could begin to ask pupils and students to reflect on the conduct of their government in accordance with international standards rather than parochial rules fabricated in foreign policy think tanks or departmental committee rooms. Then the massacres and carpet bombing of Korea would not be mere shock and awe anecdotes but the point of departure for investigating the content of a truly moral and responsible role for the US in the world.

    The post Does the End Matter? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A revelation — in order to liberate Palestinians from a century of oppression and prevent their genocide, Jews must liberate themselves from centuries of conditioning that trained them to pose as perpetual victims while victimizing others. This is happening and too slowly; progressive Jews are wrestling with reacting to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people without crippling the Jewish community. Almost entirely anti-Zionist in the 19th century, Zionist advances have enticed the Jewish community to split between Zionists and anti-Zionists. The former have gained control of a community that never had a higher hierarchy. Jew is preceded by an adjective ─ Zionist or non-Zionist. Those with the former adjective have witnessed pockets of hatred against their deliberate deceptions and corrosive actions. Concurrent with Jewish genocide of the Palestinians, hatred of Jews has swelled universally, appearing in Africa and Asia, where relatively few Jewish communities now exist.

    The Jews during Zionism’s formation did not believe in or trust Zionism.
    Reform Judaism’s Declaration of Principles: 1885 Pittsburgh Conference stated,

    We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.

    Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia ─ 1.7 million to America, 500,000 to Western Europe, almost 300,000 to other nations, and only 30,000 – 50,000 to Palestine. Of the latter, 15,000 returned to Russia. Jews rejected Zionism from its outset.

    Despite rejection, Zionist supporters managed to skew Western governments’ policies to favor their mission. A worldwide propaganda machine obscures Identification of Israel as a criminal state that willfully murders Palestinians, steals their lands, has ethnically cleansed them, buried their villages under rubble, and destroyed their history and heritage. Quick to use the expression ‘Holocaust denial” on anyone who questions aspects of the Holocaust, the Zionists impressed upon the Jews the use of “denial” for anything that smacks of Jewish malfeasance, and includes the greatest malfeasance, the act of genocide. Charges of malfeasance by Jews are converted into anti-Semitism, truth becomes denied, anger of Jews against a manufactured hostile world is internalized, and bitterness against hostile Jews is intensified. The Zionists have used debts as collateral, turning valid charges against them into sympathy for their cause.

    Start with the beginning of Zionism.
    Although antipathy toward Jews and Judaism remained strong in Christian Europe, physical attacks on western European Jews, after a brief episode of the 1819-1826 Hep-Hep riots in Germany, were relatively few.

    Often mentioned is the Dreyfus case, where a Jewish military officer in the 1896 French army was twice sentenced and later pardoned for giving military secrets to the Germans. Highlighted as an example of anti-Semitism in a French military, “rife with anti-Semitism,” and psychologically extended to the French populace, the Dreyfus case circulated for a century in American media, whose audience had no relation to the French incident (why?), giving the Dreyfus case a life of its own, and making it seem that there was not one Dreyfus but thousands. The Zionists needed a Dreyfus to substantiate their mission for all time, refusing to recognize that the Dreyfus case contradicted the Zionist mission; being an isolated case, it proved Jews could integrate into European institutions and receive equal justice.

    Was the French military rife with anti-Semitism? According to Piers Paul, The Dreyfus Affair. p. 83, “The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.” Only five African-American officers in the much larger US army in WWII. Why not emphasize the opposite of what the Zionists proffered; French Jews received equal and eventual justice. After the French Revolution, physical attacks on Jews rarely occurred in France.

    Imperial Russia was another European community that the Zionists accused of serious anti-Semitism, exaggerating the damage done to Jewish communities in a multi-ethnic nation ravaged with ethnic disturbances. They used a special term, “pogroms,” to characterize attacks on Jews. Note that prejudice to other ethnicities does not qualify for a special term, such as “anti-Semitism,” nor does violence against any of them.

    A lack of communications in Russia during the 19th century, a tendency to create sensational news, and a willingness to accept rumors make it difficult to ascertain the extent of attacks on Russia’s Jewish community. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, a reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is a more objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work can be found here.

    Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. In Odessa, Greeks and Jews, two rival ethnic and economic communities, lived side by side. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.

    After Alexander II became Tsar in 1855, he lessened anti-Jewish edicts, rescinded forced conscription, allowed Jews to attend universities, and permitted Jewish emigration from the Pale. His assassination in 1881 prompted Tsar Alexander III to reverse his father’s actions. Because some Jews were involved in Russia’s revolutionary party, Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), which organized the assassination, the assassination acted as a catalyst for a wave of attacks on Jews during 1881-83.

    Typically, the pogroms of this period originated in large cities, and then spread to surrounding villages, traveling along means of communication such as rivers and railroads. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons. In the course of more than 250 individual events, millions of rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed. The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.

    Note that this was one large “pogrom,” which emanated from one incident that touched the Russian nerve, was directed mainly against Jewish property, did not have government support, and faded out. “Michael Aronson has sought to refute the long-standing belief that the regime of Alexander III actively conspired to lead the Russian masses into savage riots against the Jews. In Aronson’s view the pogroms were spontaneous, by which he means not that they happened without cause, but that they happened largely without prior planning or organization.”

    Missing from references to the attacks on the Jewish population is that the Tsars inherited Jewish and other populations after the 1791-1795 partitions of Poland and sought means to integrate the new ethnicities into a Russian way of life. Nevertheless, in Tsarist Russia, the principal population to which Zionism should have had appeal, there is no evidence that a massive number of Jews accepted Zionism.

    Unwaveringly secularist in its beliefs, the Russian Bund discarded the idea of a Holy Land and a sacred tongue. Its language was Yiddish, spoken by millions of Jews throughout the Pale. This was also the source of the organization’s four principles: socialism, secularism, Yiddish, and doyikayt or localness. The latter concept was encapsulated in the Bund slogan: “There, where we live, that is our country.” The Bund disapproved greatly of Zionism and considered the idea of emigrating to Palestine to be political escapism.

    Imperial Russia contained several minorities that economically contested and attacked one another. Economic rivalry was the leading cause of attacks on Jews. From Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 87, Issue 1, January 2020.

    Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms—mob violence against the Jewish minority—broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions.

    Violation of any human life can not be underestimated or ignored; Jews suffered in the 19th century Russian Empire, and so did almost everyone else, including native Russians. Placed in context — location, time, comparison of the fate and life of Jews to other minorities, and internal and external factors that favored the Jews — the reasons for Zionists to behave as the rescuer of their co-religionists is dubious.

    For others, also not of the Russian Orthodox faith, persecution was magnitudes worse. From Balfour Project:

    The Moscow Patriarchate presided over the state religion and other believers were generally disadvantaged, often persecuted, or sometimes driven from Russian lands. The non-Orthodox were despised as unbelievers and thousands of Catholics were deported to Siberia in the mid-19th century. At the same time, around half a million Muslims were driven from the Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, Iran or further afield. At the south-eastern border of the Pale of Settlement began the lands of the Circassians, a mostly Muslim group who had lived since the 14th century along the northern Black Sea coast from Sochi and eastwards into the Caucasus mountains. A long war of attrition ended in the genocide of 1865. According to official Russian statistics, the population was reduced by 97 per cent. At least 200,000, and possibly several hundred thousand people died through ethnic cleansing, hunger, epidemics and bitterly cold weather.

    Compared to other ethnicities ─ Native American, slaved Africans, Chinese, Irish, and Catholic in the U.S., and Chinese, Indian, and African during the age of Imperialism, the persecution and distress of European Jews was insignificant. Yet, the Zionists made it appear that Jews were the most suffering people in the world and the world believed it.

    Despite the overwhelming verbal and physical rejection of Zionism by worldwide Jewry, a small group of conspirators managed to convince the British government to issue the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which is not an official or legal instrument. It is not even a Declaration. It is a letter from Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, which has a phrase, “declaration of sympathy,” from which it was given the more lofty description of declaration. Who are these two guys?

    Arthur James Balfour, known as Lord Balfour, served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905 and as foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919,

    Lionel Walter Rothschild was a British zoologist from the wealthy Rothschild banking family, who served as a Conservative member of Parliament from 1899 to 1910. He was sympathetic to the Zionist cause and had an eminent position in the Anglo-Jewish community.

    The letter:

    Why was the letter issued, what did it exactly mean, and why did it have impact? Acceptable answers have not been supplied. One clue is from Minutes of British War Cabinet Meetings

    Meeting No. 245, Minute No. 18, 4 October 1917: 4 October 1917: “… [Balfour] stated that the German Government were making great efforts to capture the sympathy of the Zionist Movement.”

    Meeting No. 261, Minute No. 12, 31 October 1917
    With reference to War Cabinet 245, Minute 18, the War Cabinet had before them a note by the Secretary, and also a memorandum by Lord Curzon on the subject of the Zionist movement. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs stated that he gathered that everyone was now agreed that, from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.

    World leaders failed to recognize the ominous outcomes of their San Remo Peace Conference and the newly formed League of Nations, which created a new international order that sliced the Middle East for the major European powers. Both approved establishment of a Jewish presence in the British Mandate in accord with the Balfour Letter. Despite these achievements, progress for obtaining a central headquarters for Zionism went slowly until US immigration laws and persecution of German Jews renewed Zionist life.

    The year 1924 was fortuitous for the Zionists. The US Immigration Act closed the doors to mass Jewish immigration from East European nations and the Act steered Jews to migrate to Palestine. By 1931, Palestine housed 175,000 Jews. The economic depression slowed the migration. The rise of Nazi Germany reinvigorated it.

    After the Nazis began their rule, they slowly froze Jewish assets. Although not proven, a principal reason for Germany slowly freezing Jewish assets and engaging in its own boycott of Jewish enterprises was the boycott of German goods, which was organized by Jewish groups in the United States as a response to the confined and sporadic violence and harassment by Nazi Party members against Jews in early 1933. Zionists saw the frozen assets as a means to bring Jews to the British Mandate.

    By the Ha’avara Transfer Agreement with Nazi Germany, the Zionists used German Jewish assets, including bank deposits to purchase German products that were exported to the Jewish-owned Ha’avara Company in Tel-Aviv. A portion of the money from the sales of the goods went to the emigrants, who could leave Germany and regain assets after arrival in Palestine and in an amount corresponding to their deposits in German banks. The Zionists enabled the Nazi regime to circumvent the international boycott campaign that its policies had provoked. The Zionist movement, which had become the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany, was able to transfer about 53,000 Jews to Palestine. Again, the Zionists turned catastrophe to the Jews into an opportunity for themselves.

    Zionist luck, if that is the proper word for gaining from calamities to others, continued. Revelations of the Holocaust and the plight of Jewish refugees after World War II gained worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause. About 136,000 displaced Jews came to Palestine, mostly out of desperation and without intention to remain. The Cold War provided the most decisive benefit for Zionism ─ Soviet Union support for an Israeli state drove the United States to compete for Zionist attention. Votes from both nations, bribes, and arm twisting provided a narrow victory for United Nations Declaration 181 and the Zionists established their state.

    Because neither state had official names at that time, designations as Arab and Jewish states were used to map out contours of land where the major portions of the ethnicities would live. President Truman recognized the Jewish state, which became Israel just before he approved recognition. The U.S. president failed to observe that, although the state was bi-national, a small Zionist group took control of all apparatus of the new state and did that without consulting Palestinian leadership.

    The UN did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states ─ a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and another mostly Palestinian state composed of about 70 percent who were native to the area (400,000 Palestinians), a small contingent of foreign Jews that had come as Zionists to live permanently in Palestine (200,000), and another larger contingent of foreign Jews (300,000) that arrived for expediency and not with original intentions of remaining in the British Mandate.  The Mandate was only a way station for Jews caught in the tragedies during the 1930s and World War II. If neither cataclysm occurred, would these Jews have gone to the Mandate? Without them, how many Jews would have been there in 1947?

    David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill- equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleansed the area of Palestinians and established Israel.

    The Zionists turned lying, cheating, and deceiving into an accepted ethnic cleansing. During the next years, they continued the lies, cheats, and deceptions to steal more land and oppress Palestinians. Taking advantage of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, the Zionist Jews have embarked on a genocide of the Palestinian people, masking it as a defense of their land against a force that has no offensive power to conquer anything.

    The Zionists made the struggle (which they engineered) a zero-sum game of “us” or “them.” The “us” is those who steal the land and the patrimony and the lives of “them.” They forced the Jews into a choice, reasoning that the powers in control will favor “us.” This poses a difficulty for Jews who will not support genocide and, therefore, cannot support “us,” and fear that for the Palestinians to survive the Jews in Israel will not survive. A different look — if the Jews liberate themselves from the conditioned grip that Zionism has on them and differentiate between a liberated Jew and a Zionist Jew, the liberated Jews will lose their paranoid fear and the Zionist Jews will lose their power, which is based upon creating paranoia and fear in fellow Jews.

    Unfortunately, the liberation of the Jews is not foreseen and the decimation of innocents will occur — a replay of the story of Purim, “when having obtained royal permission to strike their enemies, including women and children, the Jews kill over seventy-five thousand people! Esther then further seeks permission for another day of massacre.”

    Unleashed from subjugation and drowned with power, they seek another day of massacre. Is Joshua, who slew the inhabitants of Jericho, eradicated the Canaanites, and is a hero in Jewish mythology, a clue to the mentality of leaders of the Jewish people? Do the horrors visited upon the Gazans, purposeful and wanton killings and massacres beyond credulity, carry Joshua to modern times and tell a cautious story of the Zionist Jews?

    The post The Liberation of the Jews first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The international court of justice, the UN’s top court, has ruled that Israel’s settlement policies and use of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territories violate international law. The ICJ said: ‘The transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention’

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • PANG Media

    The PANG media team at this month’s Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji caught up with independent journalist, author and educator Dr David Robie and questioned him on his views about decolonisation in the Pacific.

    Dr Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and deputy chair of Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), a co-organiser of the conference, shared his experience on reporting on Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua’s fight for freedom.

    He speaks from his 40 years of journalism in the Pacific saying the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum need to step up pressure on France and Indonesia to decolonise.

    PACIFIC MEDIA CONFERENCE 4-6 JULY 2024
    PACIFIC MEDIA CONFERENCE 4-6 JULY 2024

    This interview was conducted at the end of the conference, on July 6, and a week before the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders called for France to allow a joint United Nations-MSG mission to New Caledonia to assess the political situation and propose solutions for the ongoing crisis.

    The leaders of the subregional bloc — from Fiji, FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia), Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — met in Tokyo on the sidelines of the 10th Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM10), to specifically talk about New Caledonia.

    They included Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka, PNG’s James Marape, Solomon Islands’ Jeremiah Manele, and Vanuatu’s Charlot Salwai.

    In his interview with PANG (Pacific Network on Globalisation), Dr Robie also draws parallels with the liberation struggle in Palestine, which he says has become a global symbol for justice and freedom everywhere.

    Asia Pacific Media Report's Dr David Robie
    Asia Pacific Media Report’s Dr David Robie . . . The people see the flags of Kanaky, West Papua and Palestine as symbolic of the struggles against repression and injustice all over the world.

    “I should mention Palestine as well because essentially it’s settler colonisation.

    “What we’ve seen in the massive protests over the last nine months and so on there has been a huge realisation in many countries around the world that colonisation is still here after thinking, or assuming, that had gone some years ago.

    “So you’ll see in a lot of protests — we have protests across Aotearoa New Zealand every week —  that the flags of Kanaky, West Papua and Palestine fly together.

    “The people see these as symbolic of the repression and injustice all over the world.”


    PANG Media talk to Dr David Robie on decolonisation.  Video: PANG Media


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This month on 11th July 2024, the UN commemorated the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995 with official statements and speeches by dignitaries, memorial services, moments of silence and designating a day for remembering what has been called the greatest atrocity in modern Europe.

    What is ironic, however, is the fact that the world comes together to remember Srebrenica in the midst of another harrowing genocide — one that is live-streamed straight into every waking moment, all over the world. Ten months into the nightmarish bloodbath in Gaza that has cost nearly 40,000 lives, world leaders are still haranguing over the events of October 7, still unsure and half-hearted towards the urgent and pressing need to enforce a cease-fire to end an unimaginably horrific war, most victims of which have been children.

    Alija Izetbegovich, the iconic Muslim leader of Bosnia during the Bosnian war and Srebrenica massacre, had once said, “Do not forget this genocide. If you forget it, another will happen…” The words bear premonition as they echo the age-old cliche that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

    Here we stand, remembering a genocide while having unleashed another one thirty years on, with the bloody tide showing no signs of abating — as if human lives were like the flies that the wanton boys kill for sport.

    To learn the right lessons from Srebrenica, one must revisit in 1992, the Muslim majority republic of Bosnia immediately after it seceded from Communist Yugoslavia as a result of a popular referendum. Bosnia’s Orthodox Christian Serb minority, however, refused to accept this and began a rebellion. Given how well-armed Serbia was as an ally of powerful erstwhile Communist Russia, what started as ethno-religious strife quickly flared up into a war against which Bosnia was nearly defenceless. Several appeals for help by Alija Izetbegovic resulted in no more than humanitarian assistance from the Arab-Muslim world. Izetbegovic feared a genocide, given the violence displayed by the Serb forces under Ratko Mladic, known as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. Mladic, as the commander of the army of Republika Sprska (the self declared Serb autonomous zone inside Bosnia), had earlier threatened: “You Muslims cannot defend yourselves if a civil war breaks out.”

    Bosnia’s countless appeals ultimately led to the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces in the area. Not surprisingly, the UN forces proved utterly ineffectual as the Serb army carried on its atrocities with over 100,000 Muslim Bosniaks killed.

    Serb violence against the Bosniaks was neither isolated from context nor sudden. It climaxed after centuries of endemic structural violence built on nationalist Islamophobic narratives rife in the region.  When Mladic began the genocidal operation in Srebrenica, he said on camera while addressing his troops, “This is the time to take revenge on the Turkish rabble and return Srebrenica to the Serbs…” The reference to Bosniaks as “Turks” reeks of ethnocentric hate deeply embedded in a prejudicial understanding of history. Serbia had been under Ottoman rule for three centuries, and the reference to ethnic Bosniak Muslims as “Turks” aims to build on the Islamophobic nationalist narrative of victimhood by Turkish-Muslim rulers centuries ago.

    As the Bosnian war raged on from 1992 to 1995 with terrible atrocities including the blockade of Sarajevo which prevented fuel, food and water to the area, rapes and mass murders, UN peacekeepers from Netherlands were unable to halt the violence. They were outgunned and outnumbered, and could neither expect the scale of the violence nor were they equipped or even really willing to take decisive action against it. As late as in 2022, twenty-seven years after the Srebrenica genocide, the Dutch government acknowledged partial complicity of its peacekeepers in Bosnia and offered “apology for not taking effective action to stop the “Srebrenica genocide” — too little, too late.

    During the war, Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia had been designated as a “safe zone” where hundreds of thousands were sheltering. However, when the international community warned of action against Republika Srpska and Serbia, driven by a misdirected vengeance, the Serb leadership decided to violate the safe zone and besieged Srebrenica. As the Dutch peacekeepers looked on, Bosniak men and women were segregated, and all men including minor boys, were herded together and shot fatally, their bodies huddled together and thrown into mass graves.

    The horrific reality of the war crimes later surfaced, and it was established after investigations that in July 1995, a massacre of 8,372 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces over just three days had been systematically committed — known now in the annals of history as the “Srebrenica Genocide”.

    Some months later, as the world came to know of the horrors that had been unleashed, there was an attempt by the Serb leadership to cover up the evidence. The mass graves of 8,372 Muslims were bulldozed and whatever remained of the bodies was scattered in unmarked areas all over the region. To this day, search for human remains continues in Srebrenica. Some 1,200 of those who went missing in July 1995 have still not been identified or given the dignity of a proper funeral and burial.

    While the Dayton Accords of 1996 enforced a ceasefire after what the Bosniaks had endured, peace in the region is still tenuous. Tensions are rife as the Serb Autonomous Zone inside Bosnia continues with its ultraconservative nationalism and ethnic prejudice, refusing to acknowledge what was done to the Bosniaks from 1992-1995 as a genocide. The current UN Peace Representative for Bosnia — Hans Christian Schmidt– has warned earlier this year that ethnic tensions between Bosnia and the autonomous Serb community remain dangerously high still, and the possibility of internecine violence once again cannot be ruled out.

    There are some clear parallels between the Bosnian genocide three decades ago and the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza in 2023-24. Like the Serbs, Israelis justify their actions on the narrative of historical victimhood. They present their victim as the perpetrator, stereotyping through Islamophobic propaganda that makes you believe Muslim Palestinian children are fair targets as potential “Islamist terrorists” and “jihadists” in the making. Like in the case of Bosnia, the world was never moved to decisive action to end the bloodbath until too late. Not surprisingly, the victims in both cases happen to be Muslims. While Serbia had been armed to the teeth by its mentor Soviet Russia, Israel has been heavily armed by the US, Germany, UK and other Western allies that continue to send military supplies to the Zionist state. In both cases, the population against whom these lethal weapons are unleashed is extremely vulnerable, unarmed and defenceless. In both Bosnia and now in Palestine, the UN proved a complete failure. And perhaps most poignantly, in both cases the Muslim world failed to stand up and act together, other than sending some humanitarian supplies for the victims.

    Yet there are aspects in which the Gaza genocide emerges as a unique and unprecedented case in point. Gaza’s suffering has been long and historic, since the Nakba of 1948, and the world has continued to ignore its plight. Gaza has for years been under severe blockade, with many observers describing it as an “open air prison.” Israel, on the other hand, seen as the Middle East’s only beacon of democracy with Western liberal values and culture is considered as the West’s only reliable ally in the volatile region — the ‘blue-eyed boy’ of the Western world. It enjoys tremendous influence and solid support from its Western benefactors, even after having committed gross defiant violations of human rights and international law. The ongoing siege and death toll in Gaza is more protracted, and the scale of devastation far greater,  surpassing anything we may have witnessed in modern history.

    Bosnia found some solace with the trial of Serb war criminals at The Hague, as a result of which 21 perpetrators of the genocide were pronounced guilty- including Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Republika Sprska leader Radovan Karadzic and Serb army commander Ratko Mladic. The case for Palestine, on the other hand, given the global power and influence of the Zionist lobby, has found no echo in the corridors of power, and any wholesale transparent accountability for the genocidal far right Israeli regime seems to be a remote possibility.

    This is precisely why the global commemoration of the Bosnian genocide seems meaningless when the UN and the international community have proven so utterly spineless in the case of Gaza. Remembering and honouring Srebrenica means learning its lessons and promising “Never Again”. With humanity abysmally failing to show any resolve to end Israel’s relentless and brutal assault on Palestine, carefully crafted words for Srebrenica from high podiums ring hollow indeed.

    The post Remembering a Genocide in the Midst of Another first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Mexico City, July 18, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists supports the urgent appeal filed to UN officials by an international legal team on behalf of Guatemalan investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora, who the appeal says has been wrongfully imprisoned since 2022 and held in conditions “that amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

    The appeal, sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says Zamora, age 67, has been deprived of light, water, and sleep, subjected to “sadistic humiliation ceremonies,” unnecessary restraints, and “has been detained in unsanitary conditions that pose a danger to his physical health and well-being.”

    “Jose Rubén Zamora’s treatment in prison and pre-trial detention is appalling and constitutes a grave violation of international human rights standards,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s Program Director. “The international community must act urgently to ensure his immediate release.”

    The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention recently declared Zamora’s imprisonment arbitrary and in violation of international law. Likewise, a February report from TrialWatch gave a failing grade to Zamora’s legal proceedings, citing numerous breaches of fair-trial standards.

    The UN working group asked Guatemalan authorities to report within six months on Zamora’s release status, any compensation or reparations, the results of the investigation into his rights violations, and whether Guatemala enacted legislative amendments or practical changes to align with international obligations.

    Zamora, president of elPeriódico newspaper, was sentenced to six years in prison in June 2023 on money laundering charges, but an appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023 and ordered a retrial. However, numerous delays have prolonged the new trial in 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • Beatriz González (Colombia), Señor presidente, qué honor estar con usted en este momento histórico (‘Mr President, What an Honour to Be with You in This Historic Moment’), 1987.

    There are times in life when you want to set aside complexity and return to the essence of things. Last week, I was on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, travelling from Isla Grande to the mainland of Colombia, when it began to rain heavily. Though our boat was modest, we were in minimal danger with Ever de la Rosa Morales, a leader of the Afro-Colombian community on the twenty-seven Rosario Islands (located off the coast of Cartagena), at the helm. During the downpour, a range of human emotions swept through me, from fear to exhilaration. The rain was linked to Hurricane Beryl, a storm that struck Jamaica at a Category Four level (the highest the country has experienced) and then moved toward Mexico with a more muted ferocity.

    The Haitian poet Frankétienne sings of the ‘dialect of lunatic hurricanes’, the ‘folly of colliding winds’, and the ‘hysteria of the roaring sea’. These are fitting phrases to describe the way we experience the power of nature, a power that has redoubled as a result of the damage inflicted upon it by capitalism. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report suggests that the North Atlantic has almost certainly experienced stronger and more frequent hurricanes since the 1970s. Scientists say that long-term greenhouse gas emissions have led to warmer ocean waters, which pick up more moisture and energy and lead to both stronger winds and more rainfall.

    On Isla Grande, where pirates used to stash their loot and where Africans escaping enslavement fled over five hundred years ago, residents held an assembly in early July to discuss the need for an electricity plant that would benefit the islanders. The assembly is part of a long struggle that ultimately allowed them to remain on these islands, despite the Colombian oligarchy’s attempt to evict them in 1984, and succeeded in removing the rich owner of the best land on Isla Grande, upon which they built the town of Orika through a process called minga (community solidarity). Their Community Action Board (Junta de Acción Comunal), which led the struggle to defend their land, is now called the Community Council of the Rosario Islands (Consejo Comunitario de las Islas del Rosario). Part of that council held the assembly, an example of the permanent minga.

    The island is knit together by this spirit of minga and by the mangroves, which preserve the habitat from the rising waters. The assembled residents know that they must expand their electricity capacity, not only to promote eco-tourism, but also for their own use. But how can they generate electricity on these small islands?

    On the day of the rains, Colombian President Gustavo Petro visited the town of Sabanalarga (Atlántico) to inaugurate the Colombia Solar Forest, a complex of five solar parks with a capacity of 100 megawatts. This park is set to benefit 400,000 Colombians and cut annual CO2 emissions by 110,212 tonnes, which is equivalent to 4.3 million car trips from Barranquilla to Cartagena. At this event, Petro called on mayors in the Colombian Caribbean to build ten-megawatt solar farms for each municipality, reduce electricity rates, decarbonise the economy, and promote sustainable development. This is perhaps the most concrete solution for the islands to date, whose coastlines are being eroded by the rising waters.


    Marisa Darasavath (Lao People’s Democratic Republic), Oil Painting #7, 2013.

    As Petro spoke in Sabanalarga, I thought about his speech to the United Nations last year, where he pleaded for world leaders to honour the ‘crisis of life’ and fix our problems together rather than ‘waste time killing one another’. In that speech, Petro lyrically described the situation in 2070, forty-six years from now. In that year, he said, Colombia’s lush forests will become deserts and ‘people will go north, no longer attracted by the sequins of wealth, but by something simpler and more vital: water’. ‘Billions’, he said, ‘will defy armies and change the Earth’ as they travel to find the remaining sources of water.

    Such a dystopia must be prevented. To do so, Petro said, at the very minimum sufficient funding must be provided for the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established by a treaty in 2015. While the entire process of developing these SDGs was fraught with problems, including how they disarticulate issues that are inextricably connected (poverty and water, for instance), their existence and acceptance by world governments provides an opportunity to insist that they be taken seriously. On 8 July, the United Nations Economic and Social Council opened the 2024 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which will last for ten days. The gap between the funds pledged to meet the SDGs and the actual amount provided to implement the programme in developing countries is now $4 trillion per year (up from $2.5 trillion in 2019). Without sufficient funding, it is unlikely that this forum will have any meaningful outcome.


    Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisia), Les Joueuses de Cartes (‘Card Players’), 1973.

    In anticipation of the forum, the UN released the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024, which shows that only ‘minimal or moderate’ progress has been made toward nearly half of the seventeen targets, and more than a third have either stalled or regressed. While the first sustainable development goal is to eradicate poverty, for instance, the report notes that ‘the global extreme poverty rate increased in 2020 for the first time in decades’, and that by 2030, at least 590 million people will be in extreme poverty and fewer than one in three countries will halve national poverty. Similarly, while the second goal is to end hunger, in 2022 one in ten people faced hunger, 2.4 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure, and 148 million children under the age of five suffered from stunting. These two goals, ending poverty and ending hunger, are perhaps the ones with the highest global consensus. And yet, we are nowhere near meeting even a modest interpretation of these goals. Ending poverty and hunger would also assist in the fifth SDG, gender equality, since it would reduce the increased burden of care work placed mostly on women, who largely bear the weight of austerity policies.

    There is, as President Petro said, a ‘crisis of life’. We seem to favour death over life. Each year, we spend more and more on the global military. As of 2022, this number was $2.87 trillion – nearly the amount needed to finance all seventeen SDGs for one year. It is strange how the advocates of a planet at war claim that they are realistic, while those who want a planet of peace are seen as idealists; yet, in fact, those who want a planet of war are exterminators, while those of us who advocate for a planet of peace are the only possible realists. Reality demands peace over war, spending our precious resources to solve our common problems – such as climate change, poverty, hunger, and illiteracy – above all else.

    In September 2023, a month before the current genocidal assault against Gaza began, Petro called for the UN to sponsor two peace conferences, one for Ukraine and one for Palestine. If there can be peace in these two hotspots, Petro said, ‘they would teach us to make peace in all regions of the planet’. This perfectly reasonable suggestion was ignored then and is ignored now. Nonetheless, this did not stop Petro from organising a massive Latin American concert for peace in Palestine in early July.


    Rosângela Rennó (Brasil), from the series Rio-Montevideo, 2016.

    There is madness in our choices. The revenues of the top five arms dealers in 2022 alone (all domiciled in the United States) were around $276 billion, a number that should be a standing rebuke to humanity. Israel has dropped roughly 13,050 MK-84 ‘dumb bombs’ on Gaza, which have an explosive capacity of 2,000 pounds (around 900 kgs) per bomb. Each of these bombs costs $16,000, meaning that the bombs already dropped have cost over $200 million in total. It is strange that the very governments that supply Israel with these bombs and that give it political cover (including the US) then turn around and fund the UN to dismantle unexploded dumb bombs from Gaza during the pause between bombings. Meanwhile, aid for relief and development in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (which includes Gaza) has not exceeded hundreds of millions – in a good year. More spent on weapons, less spent on life – the ugliness of our humanity needs to be transformed.


    Mohamed Sulaiman (Western Sahara), Red Liberty, 2014.

    The young artist Mohamed Sulaiman grew up in Algeria, at the Smara Refugee Camp of the displaced peoples of Western Sahara. After studying at Algeria’s University of Batna, Sulaiman returned to the camp to make art based on calligraphy traditions that use the oral histories of the Saharawi people as well as poems of contemporary Arab writers. In 2016, Sulaiman founded the Motif Art Studio, built from recycled materials to resemble traditional desert homes. In his studio, which opened in 2017, Sulaiman hangs Red Liberty, which carries a line from the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932): ‘Red freedom has a door, knocked on by every bloodstained hand’. The line comes from ‘The Plight of Damascus’, a poem that reflects on the French destruction of Damascus in 1916 as revenge for the Arab revolt. The poem encapsulates not only the ugliness of the war, but also the promise of a future:

    Homelands have a hand that has alreadylent a favour
    and to which all free people owe a debt.

    The bloodstained hand is the hand of those before us who struggled to build a better world, many of whom perished in that struggle. To them, and future generations, we owe a debt. We must turn this ‘crisis of life’ into an opportunity to ‘live far from the apocalypse and times of extinction,’ as Petro said last year; ‘A beautiful horizon [is coming] amidst the storm and darkness of today, a horizon that tastes like hope’.

    The post Building a Planet of Peace Is the Only Realistic Thing to Do first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Crown prince criticised ‘bad laws’ for Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s death sentence months before second conviction

    Fresh questions have been raised about the suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia after the brother of a man facing the death penalty for tweeting to 10 followers was handed a 20-year sentence for largely innocuous tweets.

    The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had said Mohammed al-Ghamdi was a victim of “bad laws” after being sentenced to death, yet the crown prince permitted the same laws to be used to sentence Ghamdi’s younger brother, Asaad al-Ghamdi.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Crown prince criticised ‘bad laws’ for Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s death sentence months before second conviction

    Fresh questions have been raised about the suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia after the brother of a man facing the death penalty for tweeting to 10 followers was handed a 20-year sentence for largely innocuous tweets.

    The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had said Mohammed al-Ghamdi was a victim of “bad laws” after being sentenced to death, yet the crown prince permitted the same laws to be used to sentence Ghamdi’s younger brother, Asaad al-Ghamdi.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Mexico City, July 2, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s Monday declaration that the continued imprisonment of Guatemalan investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora is arbitrary and in violation of international law. CPJ echoes the group’s call for Zamora’s immediate release.

    “The U.N. Working Group’s acknowledgment of José Rubén Zamora’s arbitrary detention highlights that he has been consistently denied a fair trial, and there is no justification for his ongoing imprisonment,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, from São Paulo. “Zamora’s prosecution was a retaliatory measure for his investigative reporting on government corruption, and he has faced an abusive judicial process driven by individuals also accused of corruption. His imprisonment has been unjust from the start.”

    Zamora, the president of elPeriódico newspaper, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in June 2023 on money laundering charges widely condemned as retaliation for his journalism. An appeals court overturned Zamora’s conviction in October 2023 and ordered a retrial, but numerous delays have been imposed. He has been in detention since his July 2022 arrest.

    A February report by the global monitoring group TrialWatch assigned a failing grade to Zamora’s legal proceedings, citing numerous breaches of international and regional fair-trial standards.

    Monday’s opinion, endorsed by four international experts from the working group, examined the judicial process and the broader context of Zamora’s case, including prosecutors’ public statements, and recommended that Guatemalan authorities immediately release Zamora and compensate him.

    The opinion highlighted the “widespread concern within the international community about the criminalization and prosecution of judges, prosecutors, journalists (including Mr. Zamora’s case), and human rights defenders in the context of the fight against corruption in Guatemala.” This included a pattern of investigating and criminalizing Zamora’s lawyers, the opinion said.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Economic growth allows the few to grow ever-wealthier. Ending poverty and environmental catastrophe demands fresh thinking

    Economic growth will bring prosperity to all. This is the mantra that guides the decision-making of the vast majority of politicians, economists and even human rights bodies.

    Yet the reality – as detailed in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council this month – shows that while poverty eradication has historically been promised through the “trickling down” or “redistribution” of wealth, economic growth largely “gushes up” to a privileged few.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • This event, organized on the occasion of the 56th session of the Human Rights Council and of the 28th Working Group of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention, as part of the Geneva Roadmap 40/11 series, provides a platform for experience sharing around with different protection mechanisms.

    About this Session

    Today, some specific instruments, such as the Aarhus Convention, regional processes and mechanisms are playing a growing and rapidly transforming role for environmental defenders in terms of new standards, collaborative efforts and plans. Yet, how effective are these instruments, processes and mechanisms in supporting and protecting environmental defenders in different parts of the world? What are the lessons in terms of the relevance and effectiveness of regional human rights and environmental protection mechanisms? How can ongoing experiences by civil society organizations and defenders help shape new and strengthened regional approaches? There is wide recognition of the different situations across regions as well as relevant lessons from ongoing initiatives.

    On the occasion of both the 56th Session of the UN Human Rights Council and of the 28th Working Group of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention, on access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters, this event will aim to gather views from various stakeholders on the question: “How are environmental defenders protected in the regions?”

    Geneva Roadmap 40/11 Series

    Five years ago, on 21 March 2019, the Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 40/11 – Recognizing the contribution of environmental human rights defenders to the enjoyment of human rights, environmental protection and sustainable development – without a vote.

    Following the adoption of the resolution, platforms, coalitions and networks of defenders met in February 2020 to launch the Geneva Roadmap 40/11 to foster the implementation of this Resolution.

    Building on previous Geneva Roadmap 40/11 efforts in relation to global human rights mechanisms, this year’s events organized by the University of Geneva, Earthjustice, the International Service for Human Rights, with the support of the Geneva Environment Network, will focus on the protection mechanisms provided at the regional level for environmental defenders.

    To attend on-line, register with: https://ungeneva.webex.com/webappng/sites/ungeneva/meeting/register/3e557712421b4e8ead22641b4d3bab74?ticket=4832534b000000078514d3e000931fd016c9cc18835becb6ccd518f1a5e9a6bf63a5563f32a1a932&timestamp=1719521373667&RGID=r18b54211d7fc07219656ed6fdab82df1

    https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/events/how-are-environmental-defenders-protected-in-the-regions-geneva-roadmap-40-11/#scroll-nav__3

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • By Stefan Armbruster, Victor Mambor and BenarNews staff

    An unheralded visit to Indonesia’s Papuan provinces by a leading Pacific diplomat has drawn criticism for undermining a push for a United Nations human rights mission to the region where pro-independence fighters have fought Indonesian rule for decades.

    The Melanesian Spearhead Group’s Director-General, Leonard Louma, has not responded to BenarNews’ questions about the brief visit. It occurred just days after the most recent clash between Indonesian forces and the Papuan resistance, which resulted in four deaths and hundreds of civilians fleeing their homes in Paniai regency in Central Papua province.

    Indonesia has capitalised on the visit earlier this month to portray its governance of the contested Melanesian territory, generally referred to as West Papua in the Pacific, in a positive light.

    State news agency Antara said Louma had declared Papua to be in a “stable and conducive” condition.

    A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people.”

    The Indonesian government’s sponsorship of the visit is “another attempt to downplay a global call, including from the MSG, to allow the UN Human Rights Commission to visit and assess human rights conditions in Papua,” said Hipo Wangge, an Indonesian foreign policy researcher at Australian National University.

    “It’s also another attempt to neutralise regional concern over deep-seated discrimination against Papuans,” he told BenarNews.

    UN human rights rebuff
    For several years, Indonesia has rebuffed a request from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to carry out an independent fact-finding mission in Papua.

    The Pacific Islands Forum, a regional organisation of 18 nations, has called on Indonesia since 2019 to allow the mission to go ahead.

    20230821 MSG DG Louma.png
    MSG Director-General Leonard Louma at the opening of the 22nd MSG Leaders’ Summit foreign ministers’ meeting in Port Vila on 21 August 2023. Image: Kelvin Anthony/RNZ Pacific

    The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — whose members are Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia’s Kanak independence movement FLNKS — has made similar appeals.

    It is unclear whether the comments attributed to Louma by Antara and an Indonesian government statement are his own words. The Antara article, published last week on June 19, in English and Indonesian, is more or less identical to a statement released by Indonesia’s Ministry of Information and Communications.

    An insurgency has simmered in Papua since the early 1960s when Indonesian forces invaded the region, which had remained under a separate Dutch administration following Indonesia’s 1945 declaration of independence from the Netherlands.

    Indonesia argues its incorporation of the mineral rich territory was rightful under international law because it was part of the Dutch East Indies empire that is the basis for Indonesia’s modern borders.

    Papuans, culturally and ethnically distinct from the rest of Indonesia, say they were denied the right to decide their own future and are now marginalised in their own land. Indonesian control was formalised in 1969 with a UN-supervised referendum restricted to little more than 1000 Papuan voters.

    Arrived from PNG
    The Indonesian statement said Louma, his executive adviser Christopher Nisbert and members of their entourage arrived on June 17 at the Skouw-Wutung border crossing after traveling overland from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.

    They were met by an Indonesian diplomat and then traveled to Jayapura accompanied by Indonesian officials.

    On June 19 they took part in a conference organised by Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was purportedly to address security concerns in Melanesia.

    Yones Douw, a Papuan human rights activist based in Paniai, said a properly conducted visit by the Melanesian Spearhead Group should have had wide public notice and involved meetings with churches, customary leaders, journalists and civil society organisations, including the independence movement.

    “This visit is just like a thief — in secret. I suspect that the comments submitted to the mass media were the language of the Indonesian government, not on behalf of the MSG,” he told BenarNews.

    000_34YV43T.jpg
    Soldiers from the Indonesian Army’s 112th Raider Infantry Battalion sing during a ceremony at a military base in Japakeh, Aceh province, on 25 June 2024 before their deployment to Papua province. Image: BenarNews/Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP

    “This way can damage the togetherness or unity of the Melanesian people,” he said.

    The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), an independence movement umbrella organisation, said it should have been notified of the visit because it has observer status at the MSG. Indonesia is an associate member.

    ‘A surreptitious visit’
    “We were not notified by the MSG Secretariat. This is a surreptitious visit initiated by the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” said Markus Haluk, the ULMWP’s executive secretary.

    “We will file a protest,” he told the MSG’s chair, Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai.

    Indonesia, over several years, has stepped up its efforts to neutralise Pacific support for the West Papuan independence movement, particularly among Melanesian nations that have ethnic and cultural links to Papuans living under Indonesian rule.

    It has had success in ending direct criticism from Pacific island governments — many of which had used the UN General Assembly as a forum to air their concerns about human rights abuses — but grassroots support for Papuan self-determination remains strong.

    Wangge, the ANU researcher, said the Indonesian government had been particularly active with Melanesian nations since Louma became director-general of the MSG’s secretariat in 2022.

    At the same time it had avoided addressing ongoing reports of abuses in the Papuan provinces, he said, and militarisation of the region.

    Indonesia’s military offered a rare apology to Papuans in March after video emerged of soldiers repeatedly slashing an indigenous man with a bayonet while he was forced to stand in a water-filled drum.

    Regional security meetings
    Among the initiatives, Indonesian police have facilitated regional security meetings, the Indonesian foreign ministry established an Indonesia-Pacific Development Forum, fisheries training has been provided, and the foreign ministry is providing diplomacy training for young diplomats from Melanesian countries and the MSG’s secretariat.

    There was nothing to show, Wangge said, from the MSG’s appointment last year of Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape as special envoys to Indonesia on West Papua.

    The two leaders met Indonesian President Joko Widodo, whose second five-year term finishes in October, at a global summit in San Francisco in November.

    Following the meeting, there was no agenda to facilitate a dialogue over West Papua, he said.

    Marape is due in Indonesia mid-July for an official state visit.

    “One thing is clear: the Indonesian government will buy more time by initiating more made-up efforts to cover pressing problems in West Papua,” Wangge said.

    Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Special rapporteurs working for UN warn famine is imminent and over 25 million people need urgent help

    Human rights experts working for the United Nations have accused Sudan’s warring parties of using starvation as a war weapon, amid mounting warnings of imminent famine in the African country.

    Sudan plunged into chaos in April last year when simmering tensions between the country’s military and a notorious paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • 19 June 2024: in a ground-breaking initiative, civil society organisations worldwide have united to produce an authoritative articulation of the international legal framework for the protection of human rights defenders.

    Following a year-long project involving consultations with human rights defenders, a coalition of 18 international (full list below) and regional human rights organisations released the Declaration +25, a landmark document systematising relevant developments in regional and international human rights law and standards of the last 25 years.

    The principles contained in the two documents together represent a baseline for the protection and promotion of human rights defenders while addressing their enduring and evolving needs.

    https://ishr.ch/25-years-un-declaration-on-human-rights-defenders/

    To download: https://ishr.ch/defenders-toolbox/resources/declaration-25

    ‘The 1998 Declaration was a turning point in human rights history,’ the coalition of 18 international and regional human rights groups said today, ‘it recognised the importance and legitimacy of human rights defenders, and the need to protect the right to defend human rights.’

    However, the Declaration has never been fully implemented or enforced, and human rights defenders have had to adapt their work to rising issues such as the climate crisis, racism, discrimination, the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights, but also to new threats – including digital surveillance, and different forms of stigmatisation, and criminalisation.

    ‘With grassroots and frontline activists’ lived experiences and concerns at its heart, the Declaration + 25 will help tackle the current challenges faced by human rights defenders. It will also be a major step towards fulfilling the promise of the 1998 Declaration: enshrining in law the protection of human rights defenders around the world.’

    The project commenced in 2023 with the coalition conducting online and in person consultations with defenders to identify the key issues they face in the defence of human rights that were not fully addressed by the 1998 Declaration, and analyse developments in international and regional contexts and jurisprudence.

    Over 700 human rights defenders from all regions of the world took part in these consultations, which, along with inputs from legal and human rights experts and civil society organisations, fed into the Declaration + 25. The document was adopted unanimously at a two-day experts’ meeting in Bangkok, Thailand in April 2024. The result is a call to action to governments, multilateral organisations, businesses, and civil society to protect human rights defenders and their activities.

    ‘People everywhere have the right to defend human rights and unite to achieve justice for all, and States have an obligation under international law to protect those exercising that right, and ensure they can work freely and safely,’ the 18 rights groups emphasised.

    ‘The Declaration +25 is a powerful new tool and reminder of the existing standards and principles that States, corporations and society at large must implement to protect and enable human rights defenders across the world for the years to come.’

    The Declaration+25 was formally launched on Wednesday 19 June at a side event in Geneva, on the margins of  the 56th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. [https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/06/08/launch-of-the-hrd-declaration25/]


    List of participating organisations: 

    • Amnesty International 
    • Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) 
    • CIVICUS 
    • Defend Defenders 
    • FIDH 
    • FORUM-ASIA 
    • Front Line Defenders 
    • Gulf Centre for Human Rights 
    • ICNL 
    • ILGA World 
    • IM Defensoras 
    • International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) 
    • OMCT 
    • Peace Brigades International 
    • Protect Defenders 
    • Protection International 
    • The Regional Coalition for WHRDs in South-West Asia and North Africa (known as WHRDMENA) 
    • Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights

    https://ishr.ch/latest-updates/civil-society-unveils-new-supplement-of-un-declaration-protecting-human-rights-defenders

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.