russiainsider--2019-12-09--WW2 War Crimes of Churchill and the Americans Were Far Worse Than Hitler's

Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more."  Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality.  "... the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.  This article serves to introduce readers to the third and final Installment of Ron Unz’s “Understanding World War II” series.  When we want to demonize someone the worst epithet we can think of is to call him a Nazi or compare the person to Hitler, as Hillary Clinton did when she declared Russia’s President Putin “the new Hitler.” This ingrained habit comes from the influence of the massive anti-German World War II propaganda. Revisionist historians who have actually dug up the buried evidence and examined it have made a case that whatever the Nazi crimes, they were rivaled, if not exceeded, by those of Churchill and the Americans.  Unz, a prolific reader with a knack for tying things together reviews some of the true history in what follows. To condition yourself for the coming shock, keep in mind that the same Hitler that is said to have hated Jews and systematically gassed and burnt them, had 150,000 half-and quarter-Jews serving in his armies, “mostly as combat officers, and these included at least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, with another dozen quarter Jews holding those same high ranks.  The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.”  When truth-tellers rattle our cages, we get upset over having our comfortable make-believe world disturbed and shout invectives. Rather than condemn the messanger, the more mature response would be to condemn those who lied to us and institutionalized false history into our consciousness. Keep in mind that the few who tell you the truth pay a high price for doing so; therefore, you should refrain from adding your invective to the copious amount heaped on them by the Establishment.  Think about it. Which is your true friend, the one who tells you the truth, or the one who controls the explanations you receive in order to advance his own agenda?  I again state my admiration of Ron Unz. He is Jewish. He is highly intelligent. He is a Harvard graduate. He is an entrepreneur who made himself a multi-millionaire. He could have held his fire and risen to the top of the establishment. Instead, he chose to tell us the truth. Ron Unz is the person who should be President. Unlike Trump, Unz would know how to staff a government that would put truth and morality back in charge of our future.  Here is Ron Unz weighing for us the historical evidence on who was the worst war criminal. The emphasis is added:  For most present-day Americans, the primary image associated with Hitler and his German regime is the horrendous scale of the war-crimes that they supposedly committed during the global conflict that they are alleged to have unleashed. But in one of his lectures, Irving made the rather telling observation that the relative scale of such World War II crimes and especially their evidentiary base might not necessarily point in the direction of implicating the Germans.  Although Hollywood and those in its thrall have endlessly cited the findings of the Nuremberg Tribunals as the final word on Nazi barbarism, even a cursory examination of those proceedings raises enormous skepticism.  As time passed, historians gradually acknowledged that some of the most shocking and lurid pieces of evidence used to secure worldwide condemnation of the defendants—the human lampshades and bars of soap, the shrunken heads—were entirely fraudulent.  The Soviets were determined to prosecute the Nazis for the Katyn Forest massacre of the captured Polish officer corps even though the Western Allies were convinced that Stalin had actually been responsible, a belief eventually confirmed by Gorbachev and the newly-opened Soviet archives. If the Germans had actually done so many horrible things, one wonders why the prosecution would have bothered including such fabricated and false charges.  And over the decades, considerable evidence has accumulated that the Gas Chambers and the Jewish Holocaust—the central elements of today’s Nazi “Black Legend”—were just as fictional as all those other items.  The Germans were notoriously meticulous record-keepers, embracing orderly bureaucracy like no other people, and nearly all their archives were captured at the end of the war. Under these circumstances, it seems rather odd that there are virtually no traces of the plans or directives associated with the monstrous crimes that their leadership supposedly ordered committed in such massively industrial fashion. Instead, the entirety of the evidence seems to consist of a tiny quantity of rather doubtful documentary material, the dubious interpretations of certain phrases, and various German confessions, often obtained under brutal torture.  Given his crucial wartime role in Military Intelligence, John Beaty [The Iron Curtain Over America] was particularly harsh in his denunciation of the proceedings, and the numerous top American generals who endorsed his book add considerably to the weight of his verdict:  By contrast, Irving notes that if the Allies had instead been in the dock at Nuremberg, the evidence of their guilt would have been absolutely overwhelming. After all, it was Churchill who began the illegal terror-bombing of cities, a strategy deliberately intended to provoke German retaliation and which eventually led to the death of a million or more European civilians.  Late in the war, military reversals had even persuaded the British leader to order similarly illegal poison gas attacks against German cities, along with the initiation of even more horrific biological warfare involving anthrax bombs. Irving located these signed directives in the British archives, although Churchill was later persuaded to countermand them before they were carried out. By contrast, German archival material demonstrates that Hitler had repeatedly ruled out any first use of such illegal weapons under any circumstances, even though Germany’s far deadlier arsenal might have turned the tide of the war in its favor.  Although long forgotten today, Freda Utley was a mid-century journalist of some prominence. Born an Englishwoman, she had married a Jewish Communist and moved to Soviet Russia, then fled to America after her husband fell in one of Stalin’s purges.  Although hardly sympathetic to the defeated Nazis, she strongly shared Beaty’s view of the monstrous perversion of justice at Nuremberg and her first-hand account of the months spent in Occupied Germany is eye-opening in its description of the horrific suffering imposed upon the prostrate population even years after the end of the war. Moreover:  The population movement certainly seems to have represented the largest ethnic-cleansing in the history of the world, and if the Germany had ever done anything even remotely similar during its years of European victories and conquests, the visually-gripping scenes of such an enormous flood of desperate, trudging refugees would surely have become a centerpiece of numerous World War II movies of the last seventy years. But since nothing like that ever happened, Hollywood screenwriters lost a tremendous opportunity.  I think perhaps the most plausible explanation for the widespread promotion of a multitude of largely fictional German war-crimes at Nuremberg was to the camouflage and obscure the very real ones actually committed by the Allies.      Other related indicators may be found in the extreme tone of some of the American publications of the period, even those produced well before our country even entered the war. For example:  Surely any such similar book published in Hitler’s Germany that advocated the extermination of all Jews or Slavs would have been a centerpiece at Nuremberg, and any newspaper reviewers who had treated it favorably would probably have stood in the dock for “crimes against humanity.”  Meanwhile, the terrible nature of the Pacific War fought in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor is suggested by a 1944 issue of Life magazine that carried the photo of a young American woman with the skull of a Japanese soldier her boyfriend had sent her as a war souvenir. If any Nazi magazines ever featured similar images, I doubt the Allies would have had any need to fabricate ridiculous stories of human lampshades or soap.  And remarkably enough, that grotesque scene actually provides a reasonably accurate indication of the savage atrocities that were regularly committed during the brutal fighting of the Pacific Theater. These unpleasant facts were fully set forth in War Without Mercy, an award-winning 1986 volume by eminent American historian John W. Dower that received glowing accolades by leading scholars and public intellectuals.  The unfortunate truth is that Americans typically massacred Japanese who sought to surrender or who had even already been taken as prisoners, with the result that only a small slice—during some years merely a tiny sliver—of Japanese troops defeated in battle ever survived.  The traditional excuse publicly offered for the virtual absence of any Japanese POWs was that their Bushido code made surrender unthinkable, yet when the Soviets defeated Japanese armies in 1945, they had no difficulty capturing over a million prisoners. Indeed, since interrogating prisoners was important for intelligence purposes, late in the war U.S. commanders began offering rewards such as ice cream to their troops for bringing some surrendering Japanese in alive rather than killing them in the field.  American GIs also regularly committed remarkably savage atrocities. Dead or wounded Japanese frequently had their gold teeth knocked out and taken as war-booty, and their ears were often cut-off and kept as souvenirs, as was also sometimes the case with their skulls. Meanwhile, Dower notes the absence of any evidence suggesting similar behavior on the other side.  The American media generally portrayed the Japanese as vermin fit for eradication, and numerous public statements by high-ranking American military leaders explicitly claimed that the bulk of the entire Japanese population would probably need to be exterminated in order to bring the war to a successful conclusion. Comparing such thoroughly-documented facts with the rather tenuous accusations usually leveled against Nazi political or military leaders is quite revealing.      During the late 1980s evidence of other deep wartime secrets suddenly came to light.  While visiting France during 1986 in preparation for an unrelated book, a Canadian writer named James Bacque stumbled upon clues suggesting that one of the most terrible secrets of post-war Germany had long remained completely hidden, and he soon embarked upon extensive research into the subject, finally publishing Other Losses in 1989. Based upon very considerable evidence, including government records, personal interviews, and recorded eyewitness testimony, he argued that after the end of the war, the Americans had starved to death as many as a million German POWs, seemingly as a deliberate act of policy, a war crime that would surely rank among the greatest in history. For decades, Western propagandists had relentlessly barraged the Soviets with claims that they were keeping back a million or more “missing” German POWs as slave-laborers in their Gulag, while the Soviets had endlessly denied these accusations. According to Bacque, the Soviets had been telling the truth all along, and the missing soldiers had been among the enormous numbers who had fled westward near the end of the war, seeking what they assumed would be far better treatment at the hands of the advancing Anglo-American armies. But instead, they were denied all normal legal protections, and confined under horrible conditions where they rapidly perished of hunger, illness, and exposure. Without attempting to summarize Bacque’s extensive accumulation of supporting material, a few of his factual elements are worth mentioning. At the close of hostilities, the American government employed circuitous legal reasoning to argue that the many millions of German troops that they had captured should not be considered “prisoners of war” and therefore were not covered by the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Soon afterward, attempts by the International Red Cross to provide food shipments to the enormous Allied prison camps were repeatedly rejected, and notices were posted throughout the nearby German towns and villages that any civilian who attempted to smuggle food to the desperate POWs might be shot on sight. These undeniable historical facts do seem to suggest certain dark possibilities. Although initially released by an obscure publisher, Bacque’s book soon became a sensation and an international best-seller. He paints Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as the central culprit behind the tragedy, noting the far lower POW losses in areas outside his control, and suggests that as a highly ambitious “political general” of German-American ancestry, he may have been under intense pressure to demonstrate his “harshness” toward the defeated Wehrmacht foe. Furthermore, once the Cold War ended and the Soviet Archives were open to scholars, their contents seem to have strongly validated Bacque’s thesis. He notes that although the archives do contain explicit evidence of such long-denied atrocities as Stalin’s Katyn Forest massacre of Poland’s officer corps, they show absolutely no signs of any million missing German POWs, who instead had very likely ended their lives in the starvation and illness of Eisenhower’s death camps. Bacque points out that the German government has issued severe legal threats against anyone seeking to investigate the likely sites of the mass graves that might hold the remains of those long-dead POWs, and in an updated edition, he also mentions Germany’s enactment of harsh new laws meting out heavy prison sentences to anyone who merely questions the official narrative of World War II. Bacque’s discussion of the new evidence of the Kremlin archives constitutes a relatively small portion of his 1997 sequel, Crimes and Mercies, which centered around an even more explosive analysis, and also became an international best-seller. As described above, first-hand observers of post-war Germany in 1947 and 1948 such as Gollanz and Utley, had directly reported on the horrific conditions they discovered, and stated that for years official food rations for the entire population had been comparable to that of the inmates of Nazi concentration camps and sometimes far lower, leading to the widespread malnutrition and illness they witnessed all around them. They also noted the destruction of most of Germany’s pre-war housing stock and the severe overcrowding produced by the influx of so many millions of pitiful ethnic German refugees expelled from other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. But these visitors lacked any access to solid population statistics, and could only speculate upon the enormous human death toll that hunger and illness had already inflicted, and which would surely continue if policies were not quickly changed. Years of archival research by Bacque attempt to answer this question, and the conclusion he provides is certainly not a pleasant one. Both the Allied military government and the later German civilian authorities seem to have made a concerted effort to hide or obscure the true scale of the calamity visited upon German civilians during the years 1945-1950, and the official mortality statistics found in government reports are simply too fantastical to possibly be correct, although they became the basis for the subsequent histories of that period. Bacque notes that these figures suggest that the death rate during the terrible conditions of 1947, long remembered as the “Hunger Year” (Hungerjahr) and vividly described in Gollancz’s account, was actually lower than that of the prosperous Germany of the late 1960s. Furthermore, private reports by American officials, mortality rates from individual localities, and other strong evidence demonstrate that these long-accepted aggregate numbers were essentially fictional. Instead, Bacque attempts to provide more realistic estimates based upon an examination of the population totals of the various German censuses together with the recorded influx of the huge number of German refugees. Based upon this simple analysis, he makes a reasonably strong case that the excess German deaths during that period amounted to at least around 10 million, and possibly many millions more. Furthermore, he provides substantial evidence that the starvation was either deliberate or at least enormously worsened by American government resistance to overseas food relief efforts. Perhaps these numbers should not be so totally surprising given that the official Morgenthau Plan had envisioned the elimination of around 20 million Germans, and as Bacque demonstrates, top American leaders quietly agreed to continue that policy in practice even while they renounced it in theory. Assuming these numbers are even remotely correct, the implications are quite remarkable. The toll of the human catastrophe experienced in post-war Germany would certainly rank among the greatest in modern peacetime history, far exceeding the deaths that occurred during the Ukrainian Famine of the early 1930s and possibly even approaching the wholly unintentional losses during Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1959-61. Furthermore, the post-war German losses would vastly outrank either of these other unfortunate events in percentage terms and this would remain true even if the Bacque’s estimates are considerably reduced. Yet I doubt if even a small fraction of one percent of Americans are today aware of this enormous human calamity. Presumably memories are much stronger in Germany itself, but given the growing legal crackdown on discordant views in that unfortunate country, I suspect that anyone who discusses the topic too energetically risks immediate imprisonment. To a considerable extent, this historical ignorance has been heavily fostered by our governments, often using underhanded or even nefarious means. Just like in the old decaying USSR, much of the current political legitimacy of today’s American government and its various European vassal-states is founded upon a particular narrative history of World War II, and challenging that narrative might produce dire political consequences. Bacque credibly relates some of the apparent efforts to dissuade any major newspaper or magazine from running articles discussing the startling findings of his first book, thereby imposing a “blackout” aimed at absolutely minimizing any media coverage. Such measures seem to have been quite effective, since until eight or nine years ago, I’m not sure I had ever heard a word of these shocking ideas, and I have certainly never seen them seriously discussed in any of the numerous newspapers or magazines that I have carefully read over the last three decades. Even illegal means were employed to hinder the efforts of this solitary, determined scholar. At times, Bacque’s phone-lines were tapped, his mail intercepted, and his research materials surreptitiously copied, while his access to some official archives was blocked. Some of the elderly eyewitnesses who personally corroborated his analysis received threatening notes and had their property vandalized. In his Foreword to this 1997 book, De Zayas, the eminent international human rights attorney, praised Bacque’s ground-breaking research, and hoped that it would soon lead to a major scholarly debate aimed at reassessing the true facts of these historical events that had taken place a half-century earlier. But in his update to the 2007 edition, he expressed some outrage that no such discussion ever occurred, and instead the German government merely passed a series of harsh laws mandating prison sentences for anyone who substantially disputed the settled narrative of World War II and its immediate aftermath, perhaps by overly focusing on the suffering of German civilians. Although both of Bacque’s books became international best-sellers, the near-complete absence of any secondary media coverage ensured that they never entered public awareness with anything more than a pinprick. Another important factor is the tremendously disproportionate reach of print and electronic media. A best-seller may be read by many tens of thousands of people, but a successful film might reach tens of millions, and so long as Hollywood churns out endless movies denouncing Germany’s atrocities but not a single one on the other side, the true facts of that history are hardly likely to gain much traction. I strongly suspect that far more people today believe in the real-life existence of Batman and Spiderman than are even aware of the Bacque Hypothesis.  Many of the elements presented above were drawn from my previous articles published over the last year or so, but I believe there is some value in providing this same material in unified form rather than only separately, even if the total length necessarily becomes quite considerable.  World War II dominates our twentieth century landscape like a colossus, and still casts huge shadows across our modern world. That global conflict has probably been the subject of far more sustained coverage, whether in print or electronic media, than any other event in human history. So if we encounter a small handful of highly anomalous items that seem to directly contradict such an ocean of enormously detailed and long-accepted information, there is a natural tendency to dismiss these few outliers as implausible or even delusional.  But once the total number of such discordant seemingly yet well-documented elements becomes sufficiently large, we must take them more seriously, and perhaps eventually concede that most of them are probably correct. As was suggested in a quote widely if doubtfully attributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all of its own.”  I am hardly the first individual to gradually become aware of this sweeping and cohesive counter-narrative of the Second World War, and a few months ago I happened to read Germany’s War, published in 2014 by amateur historian John Wear.  Drawing from sources that substantially overlap with the ones I have discussed, his conclusions are reasonably similar to my own, but presented in a book length form that includes some 1,200 exact source references. So those interested in a much more detailed exposition of these same issues can read it and decide for themselves.  When intellectual freedom is under attack, challenging an officially enshrined mythology may become legally perilous. I have seen claims that thousands of individuals who hold heterodox opinions about various aspects of the history of World War II are today imprisoned across Europe on the basis of those beliefs. If so, that total is probably far higher than the number of ideological dissidents who had suffered a similar fate in the decaying Soviet Bloc countries of the 1980s.      World War II ended nearly three generations ago, and few of its adult survivors still walk the earth. From one perspective the true facts of that conflict and whether or not they actually contradict our traditional beliefs might appear rather irrelevant. Tearing down the statues of some long-dead historical figures and replacing them with the statues of others hardly seems of much practical value.  But if we gradually conclude that the story that all of us have been told during our entire lifetimes is substantially false and perhaps largely inverted, the implications for our understanding of the world are enormous. Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in some cases their works have sold in the millions.  Yet this important material has been almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance. As I pointed out several years ago in my original American Pravda article:  Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood.  We must also recognize that many of the fundamental ideas that dominate our present-day world were founded upon a particular understanding of that wartime history, and if there seems good reason to believe that narrative is substantially false, perhaps we should begin questioning the framework of beliefs erected upon it.  George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s and discovered that the true facts in Spain were radically different from what he had been led to believe by the British media of his day. In 1948 these past experiences together with the rapidly congealing “official history” of the Second World War may have been uppermost in his mind when he published his classic novel 1984, which famously declared that “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”  Indeed, as I noted last year this observation has never been more true than when we consider some of the historical assumptions that govern the politics of today’s world, and the likelihood that they are entirely misleading:  Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West. Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD. Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe. Today’s American Neocons are just as heavily Jewish as were the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, and they have greatly benefited from the political immunity provided by this totally bizarre inversion of historical reality. Partly as a consequence of their media-fabricated victimhood status, they have managed to seize control over much of our political system, especially our foreign policy, and have spent the last few years doing their utmost to foment an absolutely insane war with nuclear-armed Russia. If they do manage to achieve that unfortunate goal, they will surely outdo the very impressive human body-count racked up by their ethnic ancestors, perhaps even by an order-of-magnitude or more. • American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-great-purge-of-the-1940s/


rferl--2019-03-20--UN Court Rejects Karadzics Appeal Against Genocide War Crimes Convictions

UN Court Rejects Karadzic's Appeal Against Genocide, War Crimes Convictions

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- An international appeals court at The Hague has rejected former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's appeals against his convictions of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1990s, and has extended his 40-year sentence to life in prison.  However, the court rejected an appeal by prosecutors to overturn Karadzic's earlier acquittal on a second genocide charge related to the killings of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992 in the territory of Republika Srpska.  The ruling is the final judgment on Karadzic's role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, his orchestration of a nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, and war crimes committed in 20 Bosnian municipalities for which Karadzic was convicted in 2016.  The 73-year-old Karadzic was convicted of genocide in 2016 and initially sentenced to 40 years in prison for the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.  He was also found guilty of leading a campaign of ethnic cleansing that forced Croats and Muslims out of Serb-claimed areas of Bosnia during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war -- including the siege of Sarajevo that resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000 people, about half of whom were civilians.  A lawyer for Karadzic, Goran Petronijevic, and politicians in the ethnic Serb-dominated Republika Srpska -- one of the two entities that make up Bosnia -- called the appeals ruling a "political" decision. The United States and the European Union urged all sides to respect the ruling and work toward reconciliation.  SPECIAL REPORT: The Faces Of Srebrenica (click to view)  The March 20 ruling on Karadzic's appeals was issued by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), a United Nations court that is dealing with cases left over from the now-defunct trial court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  Reading out the appeals court’s decision, Judge Vagn Joensen said Karadzic's sentence was increased to life imprisonment because "the 40-year sentence inadequately reflect[ed] the extraordinary gravity of Karadzic's crime as well as his central and instrumental participation in four joint criminal enterprises."  Joensen said Karadzic failed to refute the ICTY's conclusions about his intent to commit genocide.  The court ruled that the ICTY was correct to conclude that Karadzic participated in the Srebrenica massacre because he was in constant contact with people on the ground.  It said Karadzic also failed to prove that the trial court was mistaken when it concluded he was guilty of taking part in a joint criminal enterprise to terrorize the population of Sarajevo.  Regarding war crimes in 20 Bosnian towns and cities for which Karadzic was convicted, Joensen said Karadzic also failed to prove the trial court reached the wrong conclusions in its verdict.  Joensen said Karadzic simply listed "his own disagreements with the trial chamber" in his appeal.  Murat Tahirovic, the president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, told RFE/RL's correspondent at The Hague court that members of his organization were pleased with the court's ruling but also disappointed the prosecutors' appeal for a conviction on a second charge of genocide was rejected.  "He got a life sentence, life in prison," Tahirovic said. "Unfortunately, a genocide conviction for crimes in other municipalities has not been adjudicated. But in a nutshell, we got what we feel he must be judged for. And he received that verdict. Those are the facts that will remain."  Zeljko Komsic, the Croatian member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, told RFE/RL in Sarajevo that Karadzic's final verdict "presents partial satisfaction" to the relatives of genocide victims.  "Unfortunately, this verdict won't replace the pain and the trauma they survive," Komsic said. "Today, before everything, we have to keep in our minds the survivors and the families of genocide victims."  The Bosniak member of Bosnia's presidency, Sefik Dzaferovic, said that justice had been reached, but only partially.  "It hasn't been confirmed that the genocide, except in Srebrenica, happened in seven other municipalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The absence of legal qualification for genocide in Prijedor, Sanski Most, Kljuc, Vlasenica, Bratunac, Zvornik, Foca, as well as for the whole of Bosnia does not diminish the responsibility of the...perpetrators and the gravity of the crime."  Nemin Niksic, leader of Bosnia's Social Democratic Party, welcomed the court's ruling as "a major event for Bosnia and all its citizens, especially for the families of victims of aggression, genocide and other war crimes committed in Bosnia."  However, the ethnic Serbian member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, Milorad Dodik, warned that the judgment won't help reconciliation in the country.  "Republika Srpska for a long time has not had confidence in The Hague tribunal, and Radovan Karadzic's life sentence is a confirmation of that," he said.  A spokesman for Dodik's Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) denounced a "political falsification" of history.  In Zagreb, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic told the daily newspaper Vecernji List that "the verdict cannot give back the lives of tens of thousands of victims and alleviate the pain of their families and survivors. But it must serve as a permanent warning."  The U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo welcomed the verdict, saying that it "represents an important step toward holding to account those individuals responsible for the tremendous suffering of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while providing some sense of justice and closure to victims and their families."  It urged "all parties to respect the court's verdict, and rededicate themselves to the continued reconciliation and peaceful coexistence."  A spokeswoman for the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said that the bloc expected all leaders in the region to "refrain from any statements or actions casting doubt on the independence or the impartiality of the adjudication process."  "Reconciliation requires an honest and factual assessment of the past, coming from within societies and bringing together all parties to the conflict," the spokeswoman said in a statement.  Valentin Inzko, the high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, said that a judge's ruling "can't return the loved ones to the survivors, but it can offer them a certain dose of moral satisfaction."  "Confirming individual responsibility, and not the collective guilt, the judicial decision should bring relief to all honest people," said Inzko, who oversees the civilian implementation of the 1995 Dayton agreement that ended the Bosnian war.


theguardianuk--2019-03-20--Radovan Karadzic faces final verdict in Bosnia war crimes case

Radovan Karadžić faces final verdict in Bosnia war crimes case

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić will hear the final judgment on his role in the bloody conflict that tore his country apart a quarter of a century ago.  In one of the last remaining cases from the break-up of Yugoslavia, UN judges in The Hague will rule on Karadžić’s appeal against his 2016 conviction for genocide and war crimes, and his 40-year sentence.  Karadžić, 73, once the most powerful Bosnian Serb political figure, was notorious for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the worst bloodletting on European soil since the second world war.  About 100,000 people eventually died and 2.2 million others were left homeless in the brutal three-year war that pitted Muslims, Serbs and Croats against each other.  “I think this verdict is historical for justice,” said Munira Subašić of the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica, adding that they wanted Karadžić to get a full life sentence.  She said: “If Karadžić does not get what he deserves it means that there is no justice in this world and that it is possible to commit crimes without risking penalties.”  The ruling is due to start at 1pm GMT at the UN’s international residual mechanism for criminal tribunals, which deals with cases left over from now-defunct courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  Karadžić’s case still bitterly divides the country he helped drive to war, with widows of Srebrenica hoping he dies in prison even as Bosnian Serbs have honoured him with a university dorm in his name.  The decision also comes at a crucial time for international courts as they come under attack from quarters including the administration of the US president, Donald Trump, and are reeling after a series of mistrials.  Karadžić’s lawyer, Peter Robinson, said his client “fervently believed that the trial chamber judgment was wrong and the product of an unfair trial”. Robinson described Karadžić as “an optimistic person by nature.”  In 2016, Karadžić was found guilty on 10 counts including orchestrating a nearly four-year siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where more than 10,000 people died in a campaign of sniping and shelling, according to prosecutors.  He was also found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian enclave, which was supposed to be under UN protection, and buried their bodies in mass graves.  Karadžić, a poet and psychiatrist turned ruthless political leader, has appealed against the sentence on 50 grounds and accused judges of conducting a “political trial” against him.  He represented himself at his trial, with Robinson’s assistance.  Prosecutors, however, said Karadžić and others including his military alter ego, the former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladić, wanted to “permanently remove Muslims and Croats” from territory claimed by Bosnian Serbs at the time.  United Nations prosecutors also asked judges to reverse his acquittal on a second charge of genocide in Bosnia’s municipalities and hand him a life sentence.  Mladić, 76, dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, is currently appealing against a life sentence on similar charges. He has previously refused to testify at Karadžić’s trial, calling the UN tribunal “satanic”.  The former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Karadžić’s long-time patron during the war, was on trial in The Hague until his death in 2006.


theindependent--2019-11-09--'Terminator' warlord jailed for life for Congo war crimes

The International Criminal Court passed its highest ever sentence, sending a Congolese warlord known as “The Terminator” to prison for 30 years for crimes including murder, rape and sexual slavery.  Bosco Ntaganda was found guilty in July of 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role as a military commander in atrocities during a bloody ethnic conflict in a mineral-rich region of Congo between 2002 and 2003.  Ntaganda showed no emotion as presiding judge Robert Fremr passed sentences ranging from eight years to 30 years for individual crimes and an overarching sentence of 30 years.  The court's maximum sentence is 30 years, although judges also have the discretion to impose a life sentence.  Lawyers representing victims in the case had called for a life term.  Mr Fremr said despite the gravity of the crimes and Ntaganda's culpability, his convictions “do not warrant a sentence of life imprisonment”.  “Bosco Ntaganda's 30-year sentence sends a strong message that even people considered untouchable may one day be held to account,” Ms Sawyer said.  Jolino Makelele, a spokesman for the government in Democratic Republic of Congo, said: “We think that justice was done for the victims.”  Ntaganda, who has insisted he is innocent, became a symbol of widespread impunity in Africa in the seven-odd years between first being indicted by the global court and finally turning himself in in 2013 as his power base fell apart.  Physicians for Human Rights said the sentencing set an important precedent.  But Karen Naimer, who directs the group's program on sexual violence in conflict zones, added that “international and local prosecution efforts must be dramatically strengthened if we are to curb the rampant impunity for mass atrocities we see in the DRC and elsewhere around the world”.  Judges at Ntaganda's trial said he was guilty as a direct perpetrator of a murder and as an indirect co-perpetrator of a string of crimes including murders, rapes of men and women, a massacre in a banana field and of enlisting and using child soldiers.  Child soldiers also were raped by Ntaganda's troops and forced into sexual slavery, leaving them with lasting physical and psychological scars.  Ntaganda himself used child soldiers as bodyguards.  “Some individuals who survived or witnessed the murders and attempted murders that Mr. Ntaganda was convicted of still bear permanent scars, both physical and psychological, including long-term memory loss, neurological disturbances and extensive physical scarring,” Mr Fremr said.  Ntaganda testified for weeks in his own defence, saying he wanted to put the record straight about his reputation as a ruthless military leader.  He was the deputy chief of staff and commander of operations for rebel group the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo.  The force's leader, Thomas Lubanga, was convicted by the ICC in 2012 of using child soldiers. He is serving a 14-year prison sentence.  Ntaganda earned a higher sentence because he was convicted of far more crimes.  He has already launched an appeal against his convictions and has 30 days to appeal against his sentence.  In their unanimous 117-page ruling, the three judges said they could find no mitigating factors that warranted reducing Ntaganda's sentence.  But they found plenty of aggravating circumstances, identifying in the murder convictions the “particular cruelty” of several crimes, the “defencelessness of some of the victims” and the fact that Ntaganda, as a high-ranking commander, personally murdered a man in front of his subordinates.  Xavier Macky, executive director of the human rights group Justice Plus in Bunia, Congo, said he wants victims to receive compensation.  “This sentence will help heal not only survivors but those who lost their loved ones during the atrocities of Bosco Ntaganda,” Mr Macky said.  Under the court's rules, victims can apply for reparations. The court said in a statement that “issues related to the procedure for victims' reparations will be addressed in due course”.  The Hague-based court was set up to prosecute atrocities around the world where national authorities are unable or unwilling to hold trials.  It has faced opposition and criticism, most notably from the US, which is not a member state of the court.  President Donald Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, last year said the US wouldn't cooperate with the court, adding that “for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us”.


theindependent--2019-11-14--Rohingya crisis: War crimes court approves investigation into deportation of Muslims from Myanmar

International Criminal Court judges have approved a request from prosecutors to open an investigation into crimes against humanity committed against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority.  More than 730,000 Rohingya have fled across the border into Bangladesh since a crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017, which UN investigators have said was carried out with “genocidal intent”.  Judges at the ICC granted prosecutors the permission to examine acts that could qualify as crimes against humanity, such as deportation, and persecution on the grounds of ethnicity and/or religion.  However, the accusation of genocide, while within the jurisdiction of the court, will not be investigated by the ICC, a body that is not supported by Myanmar.  Chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda will now begin the formal investigation and said she will conduct an independent and impartial investigation. She had asked judges for permission to investigate in July.  “This is a significant development, sending a positive signal to the victims of atrocity crimes in Myanmar and elsewhere ... My investigation will seek to uncover the truth,” she said.  A spokesperson for the Rohingya community in Britain welcomed the decision while a human rights expert said it was a “significant move”.  “It is the first time that Rohingya victims will actually get to potentially see individuals responsible for those brutal crimes held to account,” Param-Preet Singh, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent.  “Now that the ICC prosecutor has been given the authority to investigate, she can actually start the process of gathering evidence and building cases identifying those responsible,” Ms Singh said. The next step after the investigation is completed is to ask for arrest warrants and move things along before the court.  “The decision today is important because now she has tools at her disposal to formally investigate and gather and preserve evidence and actually build the case which she didn’t have before.  “There’s a lot of information already in the public domain in terms of satellite imagery, reports by organisations like Human Rights Watch and others, so in terms of context and background that’s part of the reason why she asked for an investigation.”  She said the judges would now speak to victims and work to figure out who was responsible.  Ms Singh said: “What’s really interesting about the decision is that the judges said that the investigation relates not just to the crime of deportation from 2017, but also it could include any crime, including future crimes.”  She said although Myanmar had benefited from the international community “looking the other way to the atrocities it’s committed”, the decision would give victims “hope that the architects of the crime of deportation could be held to account”.  Although Buddhist majority Myanmar is not a member of the ICC, Bangladesh is, meaning the court has jurisdiction to examine alleged crimes that partially took place there.  The decision comes days after Gambia filed before the International Court of Justice, on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, accusing Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya.  The ICC seeks to convict individuals responsible for crimes, such as deportation, while the International Court of Justice (ICJ) settles disputes between nations, such as those concerning genocide.  A spokesperson for Rohingya people in Britain said the community celebrated the news.  “Everyone wants the perpetrators to be brought to justice,” Nijam Uddin Muhammed, general secretary of the British Rohingya Community, said.  “That is our last hope. If they get off without any accountability, in the future none of the world leaders will think before they do bad things to their own people.  “When the Rwanda genocide happened people said no more. But it’s still happening in the 21st century to the Rohingya people, to my people.  “So if the International Criminal Court bring people to justice and give them punishment then the other world leaders will take a lesson from this and they will think a hundred times before they do anything bad to their own people.”  Mr Muhammed called on the UK government to support the ICC case.  “I am really surprised by the silence of the UK, because they should take charge,” he said. “I am hopeful that the UK government will fully support and help in this procedure to bring the perpetrators to justice.”  He said members of the Rohingya community wanted to return to Myanmar: “If they are held accountable, then my people want to go back. If we get full citizenship, we will go voluntarily. But we need safety and security there.”  Rohingya face discrimination in Myanmar, where they are regarded as having illegally immigrated from Bangladesh, even though many families have lived in the country for generations. Most are denied citizenship and basic civil rights.  Rohingya refugees say they fled an ethnic cleansing campaign which saw soldiers and Buddhist civilians massacre families, burn hundreds of villages and carry out gang rapes.  Earlier this year, a two-year United Nations fact-finding mission said Myanmar’s counterinsurgency campaign in 2017 included “genocidal acts”.  The mission said it had a confidential list of more than 100 people suspected of involvement in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to six generals it had already named a year ago.  The list is likely to form a key part of evidence for the ICC’s investigation.  Myanmar’s government and military have consistently denied violating human rights and committing genocide, claiming its operations were justified in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.


theonion--2019-02-14--Elliott Abrams Defends War Crimes As Happening Back In The 80s When Everyone Was Doing It

Elliott Abrams Defends War Crimes As Happening Back In The ’80s When Everyone Was Doing It

WASHINGTON—Explaining to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that it was a totally acceptable practice at the time, Elliott Abrams defended Wednesday the war crimes he committed in Latin America by pointing out that it was just something everyone was doing back in the ’80s. “You’ve got to understand that running roughshod over universally accepted notions of basic human rights was simply how things were done in those days,” said Abrams, who explained that during his years in the Reagan administration, supporting the massacre of an entire village of helpless civilians and then heading out to a bar to celebrate with your buddies was just what you did. “All of us were into that stuff. You’d find a military force friendly to American business interests, get them to slaughter anyone who wasn’t, and then dismiss the victims as communist guerillas. People were doing it all the time. It certainly didn’t stop anyone from letting me be assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Hell, I knew people who would make fun of you if you hadn’t committed a war crime or two.” Abrams went on to wax nostalgic about all the crazy late nights he spent with Lt. Col. Oliver North funneling money to right-wing terrorist groups in Nicaragua.

The Onion on Politics, shared by The Onion to The Onion


fortruss--2019-08-03--Ukrainians leaving the Army en masse

Ukrainians leaving the Army en masse

KIEV – Of the total number of soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine whose contracts with the Ukrainian army expire this year, only one-fifth is ready to renew their contract. This was announced by the head of the press service of the People’s Police Department of the LPR (Lugansk People’s Republic), Yakov Osadchy.  “Soldiers are leaving the Ukrainian army en masse. Since the start of this year only, 9,386 people left the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. According to the former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nikolai Dumenko, 81 percent of those who quit refused to sign a new contract,” he said and added that compared to last year, this figure is 30% higher.  Earlier, ex-Chief of Staff Armed Forces of Ukraine Zaman said that the Ukrainian army is experiencing serious problems with understaffing. Armed Forces of Ukraine have to deal with alcoholics, drug addicts or generally desperate people who have nothing to look forward in life and can only run around with a gun.  Since the beginning of the war in the Donbass, more than 800 Ukrainian soldiers have committed suicide in the so-called “ATO” zone (zone of operations against Donbass forces). In 2018 only, Kiev lost 370 troops due to rampage, alcoholism, insubordination, and suicides. This amounts to two combat battalions lost in non-combat situations.  It is becoming clear that Ukrainians themselves don’t see the point of this bloody war with their Donbass brethren. The atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops were mostly done by Neo-Nazi battalions such as “Azov”, “Right Sector”, “Aidar” and others. Ukrainian artillery crews are told they are shelling enemy soldiers, but what they are really doing is killing civilians. This has to stop if Ukrainians are to ever make peace with the people of Donbass. It’s high time to remove the Western puppets from power and liberate both Ukraine and Dobass from the claws of the outsiders whose only goal is to do as much damage as possible.


fortruss--2019-08-06--MAJOR US Rolls in MASSIVE 200 truck convoy to Arm Kurds in Iraq

MAJOR: U.S Rolls in MASSIVE 200 truck convoy to Arm Kurds in Iraq

IRAQ – [SANA/FRN] – In a new breach of the international laws and conventions, the US brought a  convoy of hundreds of trucks and military vehicles affiliated to the so-called “International Coalition” to  al-Qamishli City in support for Qasad separatist militias which besiege locals and attack them and steal oil in the eastern region.  These moves follow an ongoing strategy on the part of the US to partition Iraq and Syria in order to create a Kurdistan, with support from Israel. Despite a parallel armed conflict between Turkey and Syria, all warrings parties agree on the undesirability of a Kurdish entity, which would operate as a direct proxy for US interests – a staging ground and permanent base for US occupation in the area.  Local and media sources said that a new convoy of 200 trucks loaded with logistic aid and military vehicles affiliated to the US-led coalition entered al-Qamishli coming via the illegitimate crossing of Semalka which links Hasaka province with northern Iraq in support of the Kurdish protection units and Qasad militia which work on rapidly developing relations with Israel in different domains.  Israel aims to link up with Kurdish forces in order to secure valuable water, mineral, and natural resources which it has sought to obtain full control over since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein resulting from the US invasion of Iraq.  In statements to SANA reporter, a number of locals affirmed that the illegitimate US presence in the province serves the US interests, indicating that Washington through the support which it provides for the separatist militias seeks to prolong the war and to preserve the situation of instability and chaos, in addition to providing a cover for stealing the resources of the country.  The locals referred to the crimes committed by the so-called “International Coalition” against civilians in the provinces of Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, Raqqa and Aleppo which claimed the lives of thousands and injured others.


newyorkpost--2019-05-05--Netanyahu orders massive strikes against militants in Gaza

Netanyahu orders ‘massive strikes’ against militants in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered “massive strikes” against Hamas militants and the Islamic Jihad in Gaza as cross-border fighting continued into a third day Sunday – marking the deadliest clashes since 2014.  Netanyahu, speaking at a security cabinet meeting on Sunday, directed military leaders to reinforce tanks, artillery and infantry forces around the Gaza Strip.  “Hamas bears responsibility not only for its own attacks and actions but also those by Islamic Jihad, for which it pays a very high price,” said Netanyahu, who also serves as defense minister.  Militant groups in Gaza have launched at least 600 rockets and mortars at towns and villages in southern Israel since Friday, Israel’s military said, noting that its Iron Dome anti-missile system has intercepted more than 150 of them.  In retaliation, Israel has pounded more than 260 targets belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the Gaza Strip.  Officials in Gaza said 16 people, including five civilians, have been killed in the bombardment since Friday.  In Israel, authorities said Moshe Agadi, a 58-year-old father of four, was killed when shrapnel struck him in the chest in the southern town of Ashkelon.  A 49-year-old man was killed when a rocket slammed into a factory in Ashkelon, a man died when his vehicle was hit by a Kornet anti-tank missile near the border with Gaza and a 35-year-old man was killed when a rocket hit his car in Ashdod.  They were the first rocket-related deaths in Israel since the 2014 war when 73 people were killed.  According to the United Nations, more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the 50 days of fighting.


breitbart--2019-10-16--Erdogan Forgets Armenian Genocide: 'Turkey Has Never Committed Any Civilian Massacre'

Islamist Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan falsely claimed Turkey had never “carried out any civilian massacres” in an attempt to assure the world that Ankara is not attempting ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds on Wednesday.  The founding of modern Turkey was defined by the genocide of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians that began in 1915; the Turkish government has yet to recognize the genocide and regularly claims that the Christian civilians were actually war combatants, providing no evidence. Some have gone so far as to blame the Armenians for their own massacre.  Erdogan launched “Operation Peace Spring” last week, which Turkish officials have admitted is intended to eradicate the ethnic Kurdish presence in Rojava, or Syrian Kurdistan, to create a “safe zone” for the return of some of the four million mostly Arab refugees currently in Turkey. Kurdish officials in Rojava say the displacement of the indigenous Kurdish population is akin to ethnic cleansing.  Many Kurds and others, in the region and abroad, have blamed President Donald Trump for “Operation Peace Spring,” as Trump announced he would relocate troops in Rojava to other areas of Syria given the lack of an Islamic State threat in the region currently. Trump is only legally authorized to use military action against al-Qaeda and its affiliates as per the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) Congress passed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The Islamic State is an offshoot of al-Qaeda formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.  Erdogan, departing Azerbaijan for a summit visit there, attempted to assure the world that Turkey would attempt genocide against the Kurdish people by pointing to Turkey’s history – which, he failed to note, includes modern history’s first genocide.  “Turkey has never committed any civilian massacre in its history and it never will. Our religion and culture would never allow to do it,” Erdogan alleged, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency. “If you’re looking for civilian massacres, look at Afghanistan, Myanmar’s Rakhine state, Upper Karabakh, and Bosnia,” where Muslims were slaughtered late in the last century and in this one, Erdogan said. “If you want to see civilian massacres, look at Cyprus before Turkey’s intervention, look at Palestine just under your nose, where the Muslims are deliberately killed in the streets.”  Erdogan excluded the mass internment of Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang, China – where many are being murdered, forcibly sterilized, or cut open for their vital organs – from his list of alleged genocides against Muslims around the world. Chinese media have previously quoted him supporting the concentration camps.  Erdogan insisted once again that the Turkish military is fighting “terrorists” in Rojava, not “Syrians.” Ankara regularly refers to all Kurds as “terrorists” and has arrested dozens of Kurdish politicians and allies from the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) for unsubstantiated accusations of “terrorism.”  The Turkish president also rejected any attempt to dialogue with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the largely Kurdish militia that allied with the United States to destroy the physical Islamic State centered in Raqqa.  “The Republic of Turkey never in its history sat down at a table with terrorist groups. We are not looking for a mediator for that,” he said.  Erdogan’s claim that the Turks have never perpetrated a civilian massacre ignores the murder of 75 percent of the Armenian population existing in 1915, about 1.5 million people. Another nearly million Christians of Assyrian and Greek descent were massacred in the process of creating a “Turkish” state. Referring to the Armenian genocide as a “genocide” is illegal in Turkey.  Turkish officials typically claim that the killings either never occurred, were much less numerous than historians claim, or that the Armenians committed genocide against themselves. During the internationally observed anniversary of the Armenian genocide this year, Erdogan instead argued that the killings and relocation of millions of Armenians out of their homes in Turkey was “reasonable.”  “The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters, who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” Erdogan said. “The doors of our archives are wide open to all seeking the truth.”  Erdogan has for months discussed a similar relocation plan of Kurds out of Syria.  “We are aiming in the first phase to create safe zones where four million Syrians who now live in our country can return,” Erdogan said in January. The “safe zone” would be in Rojava, created by the removal of the SDF and Kurdish civilians to allow for the establishment of a Syrian Arab population there. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) NGO called the plan “demographic change” at the time.  Gulnur Aybet, a senior Erdogan adviser, confirmed this week that the two objectives in “Operation Peace Spring” are the removal of indigenous Kurdish populations, which she referred to as a “terrorist group,” and “the return of about one to two million Syrian refugees,” most of which are of Arab descent.  Tens of thousands of Kurds in Europe protested this weekend against “ethnic cleansing” in the service of “jihad,” their interpretation of Erdogan’s plan. Erdogan is an openly Islamist leader who publicly supports the Muslim Brotherhood.  In response to “Operation Peace Spring,” President Trump announced this week that he had prepared an executive order increasing Turkish steel tariffs to 50 percent and personally targeting Turkish officials committing human rights crimes.  “The Order will authorize a broad range of consequences, including financial sanctions, the blocking of property, and barring entry into the United States,”the president said.  “Our goal is clear. We’re not worried about any sanctions,” Erdoğan responded on Tuesday.


renegadetribune--2019-09-22--The Price of Freedom US Drone Massacres Dozens of Afghan Farmers as They Slept

The Price of “Freedom”? US Drone Massacres Dozens of Afghan Farmers as They Slept

Jalalabad, Afghanistan — Imagine for a moment that you had just finished a long day’s work with two hundred other farmers. You were settling down to relax for the night, when out of nowhere, Hellfire missiles rain down from drones in the sky and blow up dozens of your coworkers, maiming and tearing limbs from dozens more. Imagine if this happened inside the United States. Imagine the reaction from politicians and the US war machine looking to right this wrong.  Would you, as an American citizen sit idly back and accept the excuse given by the country who carried out that attack? Would you accept the wholesale slaughter of your fellow citizens by the dozen if the country who led the attack said it was a mistake and we did it to “help” you? What if it was one of your children killed in the attack? Or your brother, sister, father, mother, or grand parent? Would you simply accept that this slaughter was a mistake and the “help” you are receiving from this country is worth it?  Well, that is exactly what the United States is asking Afghanistan to do right now after a drone strike Wednesday night slaughtered 30 innocent civilian farmers as they rested from a long day’s work picking pine nuts. The attack also left 40 others maimed and mangled.  “The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.  According to Reuters, a survivor of the drone strike said about 200 laborers were sleeping in five tents pitched near the farm when the attack happened.  “Some of us managed to escape, some were injured but many were killed,” said Juma Gul, a resident of northeastern Kunar province who had traveled along with laborers to harvest and shell pine nuts this week.  Naturally, the US is responding to the situation with a canned response and refusing to accept responsibility.  “U.S. forces conducted a drone strike against Da’esh (IS) terrorists in Nangarhar,” said Colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “We are aware of allegations of the death of non-combatants and are working with local officials to determine the facts.”  Residents of the Nangarhar province spoke publicly Thursday and demanded the U.S. take responsibility for this murder.  “Such mistakes cannot be justified. American forces must realize (they) will never win the war by killing innocent civilians,” said Javed Mansur, a resident of Jalalabad city.  This slaughter comes on the heels of a rather disturbing report released by the United Nations in April detailing how in the first part of 2019, US forces and their allies killed more civilians than the Taliban and other terrorist groups.  According to the most recent UN data, Afghan civilians were killed in greater numbers by NATO and pro-government security forces in the first three months of 2019 than by armed militants. Half of those slaughtered by allied troops were women and children.  In spite of countless drone bombs raining down from the skies, Hellfire and Tomahawk missiles flattening buildings, and mass graves filled with collateral damage, the US has absolutely nothing to show for it except physically and psychologically damaged veterans and a massive trillion dollar debt.  The Congressional Research Service, for example, concluded in 2015 that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost U.S. taxpayers $1.6 trillion. However, according to a report from TIME magazine last year, that number is a gross underestimate.  As TFTP previously reported, according to an analysis from the “Costs of War Project” from Brown University’s Watson Institute, by the end of 2018, the U.S. War on Terror cost America taxpayers more than $5.6 trillion, which is an average of $23,386 per taxpayer.  As The Nation noted, that estimate does not include several factors such as “the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably—in these years, almost uniquely—bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called ‘national security.’”  After 18 years, there is no sign that the War on Terror is ending anytime soon, but surely the United States is finally close to defeating Al Qaeda—right?  Unfortunately, the opposite is true. A report from the Los Angeles Times noted that in 2018, “Al Qaeda may be stronger than ever,” and instead of destroying the group, “U.S. policies in the Mideast appear to have encouraged its spread.”  While Al Qaeda may have started out as a small terrorist group, it has now grown into a massive network that is flourishing in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Libya—all countries where the U.S. has actively carried out bombing campaigns in recent years. Coincidence? Not at all.  Ask yourself this question, how many future terrorists did the United States create yesterday? Do you think that the children of those slain by a decade of bombing and constant threats of drone strikes will simply forget about the atrocities inflicted upon them? Do you think that the parents who watched their babies blown apart by predator drones, or the hospital workers who watched as US bombs rained down from the sky — will just turn the other cheek?  In reality, the US War on Terror has had the opposite effect on “fighting terrorists.” It is creating them. For the last 18 years, the US has actually been planting a garden in which a million Osama Bin Ladens would grow.  The truth is that since 9/11, the US and their NATO allies have fostered a breeding ground for extremist and fundamentalist groups. As Americans have sat back and said nothing over the last two decades, the military industrial complex was sowing the seeds for perpetual war, which left unchecked will inevitably lead to the demise of the American empire or total human annihilation—whichever comes first.


rferl--2019-07-29--Eighty-Six Muslim Victims of Prijedor Massacre Laid To Rest in Bosnia

A funeral was held on July 27 for 86 Muslim victims of a massacre in the northwestern city of Prijedor by Bosnian Serb forces in the early 1990s during the Bosnian war.      Hundreds assembled to pay their respect to the victims who were found in 2017 in a mass grave in a mountainous region of central Bosnia.      The victims were mostly male and many teenagers. They were part of a group of more than 200 mostly Bosnian Muslim civilians as well as several Catholic Croats who were held in a detention camp in the Prijedor region.      They were told they would be part of a prisoner exchange on August, 21, 1992.      They were executed instead after disembarking a bus and told to line up on the edge of a cliff.      So far, 181 victims of the massacre have been identified.      Serb forces killed about 3,200 people, including 250 women and 100 children, in the region after taking it over in April 1992.      At least 650 people are still missing.      In January 2018, prosecutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina said German had authorities arrested Milorad Obradovic, a former member of Bosnian Serb forces, on suspicion of committing war crimes.      Obradovic was accused of participating in the detention of some 120 Bosnian Muslim civilians near Prijedor in July 1992 before they were massacred.      Another suspect in the same case, Slobodan Knezevic, was arrested in Montenegro in December 2017.      Bosnia's 1992-95 war resulted in the death of an estimated 100,000 people and the displacement of some 2.6 million more.      As part of the 1995 Dayton accords that mostly ended the violence, Bosnia was broken into two constituent states: a Muslim-Croat federation and the Republika Srpska.


rferl--2019-08-31--Taliban Launch Massive Attack On Afghan City Of Kunduz Amid Peace Talks

Taliban Launch 'Massive' Attack On Afghan City Of Kunduz Amid Peace Talks

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan -- Taliban militants have launched a major attack on one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, despite holding talks with the United States aimed at ending the country’s nearly 18-year conflict.      Afghan officials said Taliban militants attacked the strategically important northern city of Kunduz from different directions early on August 31, killing at least 15 people and wounding 75.      The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said Afghan security forces had repelled the attack in some parts of the city, while other officials said that more than 30 militants had been killed.      Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in a Twitter post called the attack "large-scale," while the police spokesman in Kunduz Province reportedly said the attack was "massive" and involved "intense" battles.      Provincial council member Ghulam Rabani Rabani told AP that after Afghan security forces had tried for hours to push the militants from the center of Kunduz, a suicide bomber struck at the city's main intersection. The news agency quoted Interior Ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi as saying 10 people were killed and five wounded in the attack.      Presidential spokesman Sediq Seddiqi told reporters the attack was "completely against the peace talks" taking place between the United States and the Taliban. Expectations that a breakthrough in the talks might lead to a peace deal, including a timetable for the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops, had been on the rise.      The U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is involved in the negotiations, tweeted that he had "raised the Kunduz attack in talks today, telling the Taliban that violence like this must stop."  Khalilzad added that General Scott Miller, who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan, had arrived in Kunduz to assist Afghan forces in defending the city.      In a separate tweet, Khalilzad said that "ultimately, war will only end when all sides agree it must end." But he added that "I am confident we are on the only practical path to reducing violence and achieving peace."  Despite the violence, Khalilzad on September 1 tweeted again, saying that U.S. and Taliban negotiators are "at the threshold of an agreement" as they concluded their latest round of talks.  "We are at the threshold of an agreement that will reduce violence and open the door for Afghans to sit together to negotiate an honorable and sustainable peace," he wrote.      He added that he would be traveling to Kabul later in the day to consult with government officials there.  Kunduz briefly fell to the Taliban in 2015 and has come under attack several times since then.      Pockets of fighting were reported in parts of the city, and a provincial council member, Ghulam Rabani Rabani, told the AP news agency that Taliban militants had control of the city hospital.      The militants took hospital patients as hostages, Defense Ministry spokesman Rohullah Ahmadzai told reporters in Kabul. He did not say how many.      "We could very easily attack, but we don't want civilian casualties," he said.      The Afghan Interior Ministry said at least 34 Taliban fighters were killed in ground and air operations in three areas of Kunduz city and clearance operations were under way.  Electricity and most telephone services were cut, and residents were sheltering in their houses, making it difficult to gain a complete picture of the fighting.  "There is no water and electricity. There is nothing. The situation in Kunduz is very worrying,” one local man, Shah Rasool, told RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan.  U.S. President Donald Trump said on August 30 that the United States had good negotiations going on with the Taliban but had not yet reached a deal.      A day earlier, Trump said that the United States will continue to maintain a force in Afghanistan even after any deal is agreed.      The Taliban has long demanded a complete pullout of all foreign forces from the country.      About 20,000 foreign troops, most of them American, are now in Afghanistan as part of a U.S.-led NATO mission to train, assist, and advise Afghan forces. Some U.S. forces carry out counterterrorism operations.


theantimedia--2019-09-23--Wedding Party Bombing US Forces Have Massacred 70 Afghan Civilians in 1 Week

Wedding Party Bombing: US Forces Have Massacred 70 Afghan Civilians in 1 Week

(CD) — Dozens of Afghan civilians are dead, local officials said Monday, following operations carried out late Sunday by U.S. and Afghan forces targeting al Qaida fighters.  The incident in the southern province of Helmand, which came just days after a U.S. drone strike killed at least 30 farm workers in eastern Nangarhar province, highlights the fragile situation for civilians as the U.S. enters its 19th year of war in Afghanistan.  Details on exactly how many people were killed and who was responsible for the Sunday attacks remain unclear, a fact attributed at least in part to the area being under Taliban control. The U.S. has blamed the “majority of the deaths” on al Qaida. U.S. and Afghan officials say they’re investigating.  Omar Zwak, a spokesman for the Helmand governor, said an undetermined number of civilians were killed after an explosion at an insurgent weapons depot that had been targeted by government forces late Sunday. But Haji Attaullah Afghan, head of the provincial council in Helmand, said a two-vehicle wedding convoy was fired upon by military helicopters, and that civilians were killed in both vehicles.  According to provincial council member Abdul Majid Akhundzada, at least 40 civilians, including many women and children, were killed, CBS News reported.  Josh Jacques, a spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan told Stars and Stripes that “we did conduct targeted precision strikes against barricaded terrorists firing on Afghan and U.S. forces,” and said the operation was to target militants presenting “an imminent threat.”  “The locals are trapped in a war between the Taliban and the U.S. and Afghan forces,” one local resident told CBS News. “We told the Taliban, ‘don’t settle foreign militants near our houses,’ we told the Afghan government, ‘don’t target us if militants live in the middle of our houses, that is not our wish or our fault. We can’t stop anyone. Don’t kill us.'”  Such pleas follow evidence that civilians have good reason to be fearful of violence.  The Times noted that “[v]iolence has surged in Afghanistan since months of peace negotiations between the United States and the Taliban were aborted on Sept. 7.”  And, earlier this year, the United Nations said that U.S.-backed forces killed more Afghan civilians than the Taliban and other armed anti-government groups did in the first three months of 2019.  This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial policy.  Since you’re here… …We have a small favor to ask. Fewer and fewer people are seeing Anti-Media articles as social media sites crack down on us, and advertising revenues across the board are quickly declining. However, unlike many news organizations, we haven’t put up a paywall because we value open and accessible journalism over profit — but at this point, we’re barely even breaking even. Hopefully, you can see why we need to ask for your help. Anti-Media’s independent journalism and analysis takes substantial time, resources, and effort to produce, but we do it because we believe in our message and hope you do, too. If everyone who reads our reporting and finds value in it helps fund it, our future can be much more secure. For as little as $1 and a minute of your time, you can support Anti-Media. Thank you. Click here to support us


thesun--2019-04-04--Syrian regime begins bombing last rebel enclave of Idlib killing 17 civilians including kids amid

Syrian regime ‘begins bombing last rebel enclave of Idlib killing 17 civilians including kids’ amid fears of Aleppo-style mass-slaughter

FORCES battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad are boxed into their last enclave amid fears of an Aleppo-style bloodbath among trapped civilians.  Syrian government forces have been shelling and bombing Idlib, in the northwest of the war torn country, with at least 17 civilians killed over the past 24 hours, a war monitoring group said today.  The government forces' artillery fire targeted several locations and about half of those killed were under 18 years old, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.  The area is home to millions of refugees who fled the rebel held city of Aleppo, which was last year reduced to rubble by warplanes from Russia, which is backing the dictator's regime.  The eight year civil war has killed nearly 400,000 people, according to estimates, in scenes reminiscent of the urban devastation of World War 2.  It also echoes the siege of Aleppo in 2016 and 2017 whereby thousands died as beautiful buildings which stood proud for centuries were reduced to dust and rubble by hundreds of air raids.  The area had been subject to a ceasefire agreement struck in September between Russia and Turkey to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.  Moscow is the government's strongest ally while Turkey backs some rebel groups.  The northwest, including Idlib province and parts of Hama and Aleppo provinces, is home to about three million people, half of whom have already been internally displaced, the United Nations says.  Early this year, the jihadist groups in the northwest seized most of the enclave from other rebel factions. Turkish-backed insurgents hold an adjacent enclave in northern Aleppo province where there is no active fighting with the government.  Last week the human rights organisation Amnesty International highlighted six incidents where blood banks, clinics and bakeries had been destroyed in air raids and artillery attacks.  Lynn Maalouf, Middle East Research Director at Amnesty International, said: “Eight years into the crisis, the Syrian government continues to show utter disregard for the laws of war and the lives of civilians.  “Deliberate attacks on civilians and on civilian objects, including hospitals and other medical facilities, and indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians are war crimes.  “Russia and Turkey, as the key backers of the parties to the conflict, should heed the warning of the UN and ensure that the imminent offensive on Idlib prioritises the protection of civilians and does not exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.”  For the latest news on this story keep checking back at Sun Online.  Thesun.co.uk is your go to destination for the best celebrity news, football news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures and must-see video.  Download our fantastic, new and improved free App for the best ever Sun Online experience. For iPhone click here, for Android click here.  Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thesun and follow us from our main Twitter account at @TheSun.


dailybeast--2019-12-10--Judgment Day’s Coming for U.S.-Backed Troops Who Slaughtered Men, Women, and So Many Children at El

Judgment Day’s Coming for U.S.-Backed Troops Who Slaughtered Men, Women, and So Many Children at El Mozote

LOS QUEBRACHOS, El Salvador—The helicopters were the first sign of danger. They arrived carrying troops to the mountainous region of Morazán in northeast El Salvador on Dec. 10, 1981. José Amparo Martínez, 30 at the time, knew why they were there. “They came to kill,” Martínez said.  Martínez, his wife, and four kids fled to the hills. They trekked through ridges and ravines while rounds of gunfire echoed in the distance. “The massacre lasted three days,” Martínez said. “They grabbed women, children and elderly people, anyone who didn’t leave. And they killed them.” When the gunfire died down and it seemed the soldiers had left, Martínez returned to find his parents dead. Six of his immediate family members were killed in those three days. The survivors fled to Honduras.  The El Mozote massacre, named for one of the towns where it was carried out, claimed almost a thousand lives—the most brutal single episode of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war that ended in 1992. At the time, the Reagan administration was sending millions to the Salvadoran military and training soldiers in the name of fighting communism. Decades after the conflict ended, the El Mozote massacre is one of the most emblematic cases of human rights abuses carried out with support from the U.S. government that has yet to see justice. Now, 38 years later, convictions for Salvadoran military officers may finally be within reach. An ongoing trial against 17 high-level military officers has made important progress recently and a verdict seems near. Victims hope it will be the first step towards accountability for all those involved—the officers who ordered the massacre and the U.S. government.  “ What I want is reparations for the damage from both the Salvadoran and U.S. governments, ” said Martínez, who is part of an association of victims and survivors of the massacre. “ Because they didn ’ t care about ordering them to kill all those kids and women and elderly. ”  By the time the helicopters touched down in December 1981 in Morazán, the region was already heavily patrolled by the Salvadoran military because of a nearby guerrilla camp called La Guacamaya. The country was in the early years of a civil war between an armed guerrilla insurgency and the Salvadoran military.  The Cold War had turned this small Central American nation roughly the size of Massachusetts into a battleground in the U.S. fight to contain the spread of communism. The Reagan administration was sending $1 million a day to El Salvador. Only Egypt and Israel were receiving more U.S. aid. Salvadoran troops received counter-insurgency training at the controversial School of the Americas, which later was revealed to include lessons on torture, extortion and execution.  That December, the Salvadoran government launched an offensive called Operation Rescue (Operación Rescate) that they called an “anti-guerrilla” action. The Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained at the School of the Americas, was dispatched to Morazán. Its commander, Domingo Monterrosa, was a favorite of U.S advisers for his adoption of cruel counterinsurgency tactics which earned him a reputation as one of El Salvador's most brutal commanders. What happened next is considered one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history.  Soldiers arrived in the area on Dec. 10 with the goal of wiping out the guerrillas in the area. They began interrogating villagers: Where are the guerrillas? Have you been helping them? Or worse yet, are you one of them? The next day, soldiers rounded up women, children and elderly people in the small, mountainous town of El Mozote, home to about 20 families. They locked most women and children in the convent. They locked others in houses. The men were tortured and executed. The soldiers open fired on the convent with machine guns, killing mainly women and children. When they finished, they burned the houses. The soldiers used the same tactics to execute peasants in other nearby villages over the course of three days. Only a few were able to flee or hide.  “ Only ashes were left, ” said Pedro Martínez, an 84-year-old survivor (no relation to José Amparo Martínez). “ We ’ re only alive because we were able to hide where they couldn ’ t see us. ”  An official government list of victims published decades later counted 978 killed. More than half were minors, 250 were younger than six.  Word of the massacre soon spread through radio reports. Sofía Romero had fled El Mozote for a nearby city shortly before the massacre because a group of soldiers had raped her and threatened to kill her. Her parents and some of her siblings stayed behind. She thought of them when she heard the news on the radio. Worried, she took the bus to check on them. As she got close, others who had heard of the massacre convinced her not to enter the town. But she met two men who had been there who confirmed her worst fear. “ They said there were no more people there, ” said Romero, now 57. “ I started to cry and cry and cry. ”  Reporters from The Washington Post and the New York Times went to investigate the heinous crimes and soon published victims’ reports of the massacre. In response, the US ambassador then sent two officials to investigate. They reached a different conclusion.  “Civilians did die during Operation Rescate, but no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone,” Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Thomas Enders told Congress in February 1982.  Enders disputed the body count based on the estimated population of the village, ignoring the fact that reports said the massacre occurred in multiple towns. Cables released in the 1990s confirm that the U.S. embassy did in fact know about the El Mozote massacre and many other human rights abuses in El Salvador. But the Reagan administration did not want to reveal this information to lawmakers so that Congress would continue sending money to the Salvadoran government.  “Look, it was an American-trained battalion. The United States was supporting the Salvadoran government,” said former New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner, one of the first reporters to cover the story. “It’s not really an issue of if the United States knew it at the time or knew it 24 hours later. They knew it.”  Still, for years, the Salvadoran military and U.S. officials cast doubt over victims ’ accounts of the massacre, portraying the deaths as the result of a clash between guerrillas and troops. But widespread disbelief in their story didn ’ t stop survivors from seeking justice.  “ You consider what has happened and you see it as an obligation to speak, ” said José Amparo Martínez. “ When they kill your parents and your family, you become outraged. ”  The first group of survivors came forward in 1990 to open a case against Salvadoran military officers, a risky move that could have cost them their lives with the civil war still raging around them.  “At that time, there wasn’t any judicial independence,” said Ovidio Mauricio González, a lawyer with human rights legal group Tutela Legal, who has worked on the case since the beginning.  In January 1992, guerrilla rebels finally signed a peace accord agreement with the Salvadoran government to end 12 years of fighting that left more than 75,000 dead. Victims hoped justice would soon come.  But shortly after, the Salvadoran Congress passed an amnesty law that prevented prosecution for crimes carried out during the civil war. Justice seemed out of reach in El Salvador.  “Supposedly it was a closed case. We kept pressuring so that they would investigate the people who carried out these acts, but they never wanted to,” said Mauricio González. “There was nothing we could do in terms of the criminal prosecution [in El Salvador].”  So victims took their case to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. They won. In 2012, the court issued a sentence that confirmed the victims’ accounts of events and ordered the Salvadoran state to investigate the massacre and provide reparations for victims.  That same year, then-President Mauricio Funes, the first person elected to the presidency as part of the party formed by guerrillas, traveled to El Mozote on the 20th anniversary of the peace accords to issue a public apology for the massacre.  “I’m convinced that the best way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the peace accords is advancing with recognition of the truth,” he said in a speech in El Mozote.  Even with this public apology, the fight for justice was not over yet. In 2016, the country ’ s Supreme Court voted to overturn the amnesty law in a historic ruling. For the first time in decades, justice was within arm ’ s reach.  Lawyers for the victims petitioned to reopen the case, which is currently ongoing. Seventeen military officers stand trial for a dozen crimes, including rape, murder, torture and forced disappearance.  Nearly 50 victims and survivors have testified before the court. After more than two years, the case reached a breakthrough recently. In early November, two former soldiers testified that the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion killed innocent women, children and elderly civilians on orders from high-level military officers, including Monterrosa, the U.S. golden boy and commander of the Atlacatl Battalion who was killed by a guerrilla-set bomb in his helicopter in 1984. Monterrosa remains a controversial figure in El Salvador, revered by some and despised by many others. In June 2019, the newly inaugurated president, Nayib Bukele, ordered Monterrosa's name be removed from a military building, once again sparking the debate on whether his military career was filled with merits or atrocities.  The testimony was the first time anyone from the military testified in favor of the victims.  “It’s clear that these types of action came from higher orders and that the Atlacatl Battalion carried out orders from the state,” David Morales, a lawyer for the human rights organization Cristosal, said to reporters outside the court room in November.  Diplomatic correspondence from U.S. embassy officials shows that the U.S. now recognizes the victims’ version of events at El Mozote: a massacre of unarmed peasants rather than a confrontation between the army and guerrillas. Former U.S. ambassador Jean Manes wrote in a cable that she considers the El Mozote trial to be a “test case for civil war accountability” and "barometer for the ability of the Salvadoran justice system to tackle its complex history and stubbornly entrenched impunity.”  But the U.S. still has not taken responsibility for its role in the massacre or other human rights abuses during El Salvador ’ s civil war. The U.S. embassy in El Salvador did not respond to a request for a direct comment by the time of publication.  Now, victims eagerly await a verdict. Many survivors well into their eighties are racing against the clock. “I’m almost ready to leave this world,” said 84-year-old Pedro Martínez as he listed off his ailments including high blood pressure and arthritis. “They want to erase history, but we just want justice.”