fortruss--2019-08-28--27th Anniversary Since the Massacre of Serbian Civilians in Kukavica near Rogatica VIDEO

27th Anniversary Since the Massacre of Serbian Civilians in Kukavica near Rogatica (VIDEO)  By Grey Carter – In Kukavice village near Rogatica, yesterday was marked 27 years since the crimes committed against Serbian civilians by Bosnian Muslims, members of so-called Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina on August 27, 1992.  In the attack on a column of Serbian civilians, involving about 1,000 elderly people, women and children on tractors and passenger vehicles, Bosnian Muslim extremists killed 26 and injured 80 Serbs.  The Rogatica Mayor Milorad Jagodic called this a monstrous crime as among the victims are a child of 11 and 82 years old man.  “That was a column of innocent people who were looking for refuge and salvation,” Jagodić emphasized, recalling that in the verdict, the four indictees charged with this crime stated that they didn’t know that there were civilians in the column but soldiers.  Jagodić hopes that the High court would be reasonable and recognize that the perpetrators are devoted to denying everything that has happened so that those who committed the crime will be adequately punished.  Such a crime could not be organized by four people, so it’s necessary to find and punish those who gave the order and knew that the column would pass.  Veljko Lasica, one of the victims of crimes against Serb civilians in the Kukavica village who survived, points out that it was a difficult time when people had to leave their homes and whole past lives, as the column started from the village of Jabuka to Rogatica. In these hard moments, the Muslim extremists found an opportunity to attack the sad column in the canyon near Mesić and all their bestiality and rage exposed at the entrance to Kukavica.  “I was in the car when they started to shoot. There was no way back. I was aware that the only way to survive was to go on.  There were blasts and flash everywhere. I saw and I see the criminals (so-called Bosnian Muslim army members) attacking the column; an unprotected group of people… nobody was armed since there were only elderly men, women and children.  As we reached the canyon I heard the sound of breaking glass;  somebody screams, some head falls down, smashed;  somebody’s wounded. But we go further. My daughter screams.  I was wounded in my leg.  There was even more hell to survive – the vehicles in flames and people captured inside turned into living flames, under heavy Muslim shelling; the road was covered with massacred corpses.”  He stressed that the perpetrators have not yet been punished.  Bus driver Ranko Ikonić recalls the driving a civilian bus called “Dubrava” with 60 seats and 120 people and women holding their children in the lap… killed.  And the criminals who were acquitted because the Trial Chamber adopted their version according to which they didn’t know that there were civilians and that they knew it was a military column.  “I had to go through the ambush, 14 of my family members were killed and 60 wounded. ,, How can there be a military column with an ancient Zastava750  and Yugo 45 vehicles!? Without a single tank or howitzer?  They were well aware that the column was entirely civilian; they were shooting from 10 meters distance but did not manage to recognize anyone, “says Ikonic.  According to the reports of War crimes by Ministry of Interior of RS in 2006 and amended in 2012,  the suspect for this crime are Aziz Susa, Muhamed Sisic, Izet Hadzic, Tarik Sisic, Aganović Aziz, Emir Drakovac, Zahid Alic, Salko Alic.  However, despite all the evidence, the Court of Bosnia i Hercegovina acquitted on March 7 former members of the so-called BiH Army Muhamed Šišić, Aziz Šuša and Tarik Šišić, charged with crimes against Serb civilians in Rogatica and Foča.  There was a short video the criminals recorded from the crime scene and the sequences allegedly were used in the film by Bosnian Muslim Danis Tanovic’s “No Man’s Land” movie.  In order to kill the victims again, some of the so-called humanitarians are struggling to make different footage of killed Serbs and use these images in their dirty propaganda as Muslim victims.  “So the Sarajevo director Danis Tanovic in his movie No Man’s Land depicted these recordings of crimes in the village of Kukavica, and that’s when something unimaginable, gruesome happens –  Tanovic presents these Serb civilians massacred by Muslims,  as Muslim civilians massacred by Serbs! The Muslim crime he portrays as Serbian crime AGAINST the Muslims.  And, furthermore, he received a prestigious prize – the Oscar!  So it’s just another filthy game played by Muslim Sarajevo; on the other side, that was extremely painful as Serbs recognized their beloved ones, their cars and their tractors in the film. ”  No one ever investigates nor spoke to the Serb survivors, neither wanted to hear the other side and what really happened on that 28. August 1992. And the Oscar was there to ‘cement’ one of the filthiest perversions ever.  Someday, mankind will be ashamed and these day’s Oscars, Nobel’s will be considered as marks of immorality and shame.


democracynow--2019-11-18--Massacre in Cochabamba: Anti-Indigenous Violence Escalates as Mass Protests Denounce Coup in Bolivia

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to the coup in Bolivia, where at least 23 people have died amidst escalating violence since President Evo Morales resigned at the demand of the military last week. Growing unrest quickly turned to violent chaos on Friday outside Cochabamba when military forces opened fire on indigenous pro-Morales protesters, killing at least nine people, injuring more than a hundred. The violence began soon after thousands of protesters — many indigenous coca leaf growers — gathered for a peaceful march in the town of Sacaba and then attempted to cross a military checkpoint into Cochabamba. This is a demonstrator in Sacaba.  AMY GOODMAN: The massacre came one day after self-proclaimed President Jeanine Áñez issued a decree protecting the military from prosecution for violent acts. Amid this escalating violence and reports of widespread anti-indigenous racism, protesters are demanding the resignation of Áñez, a right-wing Bolivian legislator who named herself president at a legislative session without quorum last week. She then swore in a new Cabinet with no indigenous members. She has since added indigenous people to her Cabinet under pressure. Áñez has previously called indigenous communities “Satanic” and has declared her presidency will bring the Bible back to Bolivia. She said last week that exiled socialist President Evo Morales, who fled to Mexico after he was deposed by the military on Sunday, his home sacked, would not be allowed to compete in a new round of elections, and he would face prosecution if he returned to Bolivia. Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous president. Bolivia has a majority-indigenous population. On Sunday, U.N. special envoy Jean Arnault called for talks between Jeanine Áñez and leaders of Morales’s political party MAS — that’s Movement Toward Socialism. A date hasn’t been set.  For more, we go directly to Cochabamba, just where the massacre took place. We’re joined by Kathryn Ledebur via Democracy Now! video stream. She’s the director of the Andean Information Network, researcher, activist, analyst, with over two decades of experience in Bolivia.  Kathryn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you describe what you understand took place on Friday?  KATHRYN LEDEBUR: Well, we went, and we investigated the event. We were there Friday night. It’s very clear — we did over 30 interviews with the Harvard Human Rights Clinic — that protesters had been banned. Anyone from the Chapare tropical area had been blocked from entering Cochabamba, searched at gunpoint. And so they attempted to march peacefully. All witnesses state that they had taken their surgical masks off — people are wearing surgical masks because there’s a great deal of tear gas — that they were unarmed, that they were marching peacefully, that the military and police combined forces, fired tear gas and, as they were escaping, fired from bridges, fired directly at them, fired from a helicopter. We have photos of the helicopter with the snipers, people with gunshot wounds at the top of their head, in the forehead, people shot directly in the heart. This is a gross use of excessive use of force. It’s targeting indigenous people. It really is a clear sign of a military brutal dictatorship.  AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip from a rally in Cochabamba over the weekend. Here a man is denouncing the Bolivia media’s lack of coverage of military and police violence against the pro-Morales indigenous protesters.  AMY GOODMAN: And this is a woman at the funeral of one of the nine confirmed victims, after the Bolivian military forces opened fire at the indigenous pro-Morales protesters in the town of Sacaba on Friday.  AMY GOODMAN: So, Kathryn Ledebur, take us through this weekend. You have the horror of the massacre on Friday. How was the military armed?  KATHRYN LEDEBUR: The military was armed — we didn’t see any injuries from rubber pellets, but we found at the site of the massacre, during our investigation Friday night, hundreds of tear gas canisters, U.S.-issued tear gas, two different kinds, and hundreds of spent military bullets. It’s interesting to note that the self-proclaimed Bolivian government claims that coca growers were armed and that they had firearms. That is patently false. I’ve worked with the coca growers for over 20 years. Some of them have Chaco War muskets that they use to hunt animals. There was only one kind of bullet. It was a military-issued bullet. I think the forensic medical reports will come out today and confirm that.  AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the massacre coming one day after the self-proclaimed President Jeanine Áñez issued this decree protecting the military from prosecution for violent acts? And then tell us exactly who Áñez is.  KATHRYN LEDEBUR: This decree — and this is very important to note — in periods, very undemocratic periods and periods of great violence in Bolivia, that this is a supreme decree that’s issued, that’s not public. It’s not published in the listing of decrees. And so it’s something that was passed without public knowledge. And then the movement for excessive use of force, and now their targeting MAS senators for sedition, is something that’s very shocking. It’s important to note that the Inter-American Human RightsCommission has called this licensed-to-kill, guaranteed-impunity decree a profound violation of human rights. It’s the kind of systematic step to smother democracy, to smother alternative voices. You have to understand that coca grower radio stations, that their Facebook pages, that other community radios have been burned, shut down, their frequency blocked. And so, what we’re seeing is a silencing, that’s systematic, of indigenous people and their rights in this process, and that all of the affected people in the massacre highlighted that focus against them as indigenous people.  Jeanine Áñez is a senator. She was the second secretary — the second vice president of the Senate, and no constitutional right in the line of succession at all. This self-proclaimed senator from the lowland Beni region is focused on the extreme right, an extreme form of Christianity. Her tweets, that have been verified, although they’ve been erased, point to mocking indigenous people, mocking indigenous religions, very discriminatory things, as have her other ministers said. And this Cabinet and this focus is not behaving as a traditional — a transitional government should. We had a transitional government in 2005. They’re supposed to call elections, not change policy. I think it’s very dramatic that Áñez’s first act as self-proclaimed president was to name a new military high command. And now the military — the day after Morales resigned, the military has been out on the streets, and we have seen indigenous people killed and hundreds of indigenous people shot with live ammunition.  AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk more about the people who have filled the vacuum since Morales was forced out, now in Mexico? For example, can you talk about Luis Fernando Camacho, part of a group of people, fiercely anti-indigenous, a fundamentalist Christian, a pro-fascist — for example, Luis Fernando Camacho?  KATHRYN LEDEBUR: I think it’s important to note that in the electoral process — and, you know, the opposition, although it was not united, the main candidate was Carlos Mesa, who was supposed to be a centrist opposition leader. Camacho was never a candidate. But Camacho, increasingly in the past few weeks, has begun to drive the discourse of the opposition. And you see these centrist leaders folding into this far-right extreme approach. It’s important to know that Camacho, a Santa Cruz leader, got his start as leader of the Santa Cruz Youth League. This is an organization that uses the Nazi salute in their meetings. This is something that’s terrifying. He then became president of the Pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee. He was elected by less than 250 people. You see a charismatic Christian gloss on a message of hate, a laying of hands on opposition leaders, statements that God has granted Mesa the right to be president, and a virtual control of Santa Cruz, where citizens are forced to obtain from this committee, that has no legal right, to get the permission to go from one place to the next and permission to actually go to the airport. This is a terrifying situation. And [inaudible] this coup, pitched in, been submitted, and people’s fundamental rights and due process and human rights have been smothered in a period of a week is really quite terrifying and something the international community needs to attend to.  AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to turn to the exiled Bolivian President Evo Morales speaking to The Washington Post Friday about one of the reasons he was forced to resign.  AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President Morales speaking from Mexico. And he also said, in an interview with Al Jazeera, that if he was allowed to go back, he would not seek to run in the next elections, but he wants to finish the last two months of his term. Kathryn, we just have 30 seconds. Your response and what you see happening going forward? There you are in Cochabamba, the site, the area of the massacre that just took place.  KATHRYN LEDEBUR: You know, it’s not clear. At this rate, I would say, if there is not urgent dialogue and more democratic behavior on the part of the right, we’re going to see escalating violence, the tensions of opposition leaders, and the opposition acting on the violent threats they have made against MAS supporters, human rights defenders and journalists.  AMY GOODMAN: Kathryn Ledebur, we thank you for being with us, director of the Andean Information Network, speaking to us from Cochabamba. She’s a researcher, an activist and analyst, has been in Bolivia for more than 20 years.  When we come back, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has halted the execution of Rodney Reed. He was scheduled to die Wednesday. We’ll speak with Rodney’s family and his lawyer. Stay with us.


globalresearch--2019-02-14--The Ameriya Shelter in West Baghdad The 1991 St Valentines Day Massacre

The Ameriya Shelter in West Baghdad: The 1991 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

This article was originally published on February 13, 2007, in commemoration of the Ameriya Shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq.  It is sixteen years since the Ameriyah Shelter in west Baghdad was bombed, incinerating all but eight, inside. Figures for the souls lost, still vary from four hundred and five to over twelve hundred, the registration book was incinerated along with those who had sought refuge, women,children, students and on occasion, the very old. The men stayed out to make room for those whom they wished protection – and to rescue others from the ongoing carpet bombing. The Shelter was only used over night.  The shelter had been built to withstand a possible nuclear attack, during the eight year, western driven, Iran-Iraq war. Walls three metres thick with the roof reinforced by the near indestructable steel ‘mesh’ used to support four or six lane road bridges. The only vulnerable point was the ventilation shaft. Iraq had chosen a Finnish company to build shelters throughout Baghdad, selecting the company because of perceived Finnish neutrality and commercial integrity. The company, reportedly passed the plans to the US prior to the 1991 onslaught.  I visited the Shelter just months after the bombing. We were a group from various countries and arrived in the early, sparkling sunlight. So unscathed was the building from the outside, that we had not realised where we were, talking and laughing under a sky still painted with dawn’s translucent trails and myriad shades of orange and ochre.  Iraqi reads holds a 1000 cranes peace offering at the Al-Amiriyah bomb shelter in Baghdad where 408 people died after two bombs destroyed it in 1991. Three days after the bombing the U.S. government apologized for bombing the shelter which protected families. (Photo by Paul Kitagaki Jr./Seattle Post-Intelligencer For News story by Larry Johnson)  Entering, there was a stunned silence. The smell of burning flesh still overwhelmed. I found myself tiptoeing through the blackened interior, under the melted piping, tiptoeing through the screams. There were sooted plastic flowers laid in dark corners, pathetic scraps of bloodied gauze. The only light was from the near perfect spherical entry point of the missiles, illuminating below, the great crater where they fell, the jagged remains of the centimetres thick steel mesh, hanging, a ‘surgical strike’ indeed, as a knife through butter – against women and children.  The Shelter, as during the Iran-Iraq war and in 1991, had been a safe haven in abnormal times. With electricity bombed, the huge generators allowed the children brief childhood normality: watching television, playing video games, reading, playing, homework – and the bombs could not be heard. The rows of bunk beds were a treat, with a rush to get the top bunk, a joyous eyrie of escape and escapism.  There were two vast floors, the top for sleeping, studying, socialising, sharing meals, the lower had showers, kitchens, a medical centre. When the bombs fell, the heat incinerated those on the top floor – and the vast water tank on the lower floor heated to bursting – boiling those showering, or chatting whilst cooking the evening meal, or those whose ailments were being treated and the medical staff.  The breast high ‘scum’ on the walls, was the flesh of those who perished. On the upper floor is the seared ‘shadow’ of a mother, holding her baby. Hiroshima revisited. I could bear the screams no longer and fled out and in to the sunlight. Noticing a small, blackened, brass plaque on the wall, I asked a Jordanian friend what it read. He struggled with the translation for a moment, the: ‘It is like when there is a crisis and civilian people try to help ..’ ‘Civil Defence?’ I asked : ‘Yes, yes, it says Civil Defence Shelter No:24.’  America had, of course, claimed it was a Command Centre for Saddam Hussein’s government. A lie, as ever, of enormity. Further, the U.S. had satellites watching everything (which continued through the embargo years, as now, clearly visible, blinking away like vast stars, floating, rotating.) A consistent comment over numerous interviews in the area and Baghdad, about the Shelter horror, that first visit and over subsequent years, was that for three days before, a satellite had been rotating over the district.Thus it would have recorded women and children entering it at dusk and leaving at dawn. That night there would have been a particular procession and it was the eve of the festival of Eid and with no means of cooking at home for the fast breaking, women took their food to prepare in the kitchens and their festive gifts, to wrap under the lights.  When the fire engines arrived, the rescuers could hear the screams, until they began to fade away – but the great metre thick steel door, with airline type handles to seal it from the inside for safety, was glowing like a furnace, then as it melted, re-sealed itself. Dante, revisited. To have poured water from gaping missile hole in the roof, would have subjected those inside to boiling steam. The fire chief, the toughest of men, who had seen the unimaginable and directed rescues over many years, faltered as he said, of the remains they finally brought out: ‘We thought we were bringing out only children and wondered why they were there alone – then we realised the (adult) bodies had (contracted) to child size with the intensity of the heat.’  Anwar, then eighteen and a student ran to help, with a friend with whom he was staying, nearby. When talking of that night, he too faltered and stilled, then gestured with his hands, saying: ‘The peoples, the bodies, they had gone so small – like this ..’ There is a haunting tale told by Umm Rheda (mother of Rheda) who left the shelter temporarily to take some preparations home. Whilst she was away, the bombs fell her children were incinerated, with Rheda, her eldest daughter. When all the emergency services experts, the army which was drafted in, had failed to open the door, she begged and screamed to try. It opened: ‘Rheda opened it for me’, she says. The fire chief confirmed that Umm Rheda opened the door.  The Shelter, over time, became a shrine, the bereaved, visitors brought momentos, pictures of the dead, the babies, the mischevious, the young mothers, the earnest students, stared from the walls. The floor was cleaned and polished, but the skin, the shadows, the seared walls and the screams remained. Until 2003, this was a unique U.S. wickedness. Another was an early act of their invading troops : to storm it (with their boots on of course) and search this sacred, sobbing site, for weapons. And now courtesy again, of the U.S.A., all Iraq is Al Ameriyah.  Three days before the Shelter bombing, Dick Cheney, now Vice President and General Colin Powell (designated a ‘dove’ by the George W. Bush Administration) visited the US Air base at Khamis Mushat, Saudia Arabia (slogan: ‘bombs are us’ and ‘we live so others may die.’) After a pep talk to troops, they both signed two thousand pound bombs: ‘To Saddam with fond regards’, wrote Cheney (‘A General’s War’, General Bernard Traynor and Michael Gordon, Little Brown, p.324.)  When the Shelter was bombed, frantic calls followed incase the bombs might have been involved in this massacre. Cheney’s bomb apparently fell on northern Iraq, dropped by a Major Wes Wyrich. What souls Powell’s decimated, is seemingly unknown.  The Ameriyah Shelter was bombed on the night of 13th/14th February: the celebration of Eid, St. Valentine’s Day and the anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden. When I put this to a U.S. General and remarked on the ‘coincidence’, he looked me in the eye and said: ‘Kinda neat, eh?’  Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.


globalresearch--2019-09-19--Massive Loss of Life Genocide Warnings in Three African Countries

Massive Loss of Life, Genocide Warnings in Three African Countries

These genocide warnings concern current threats to the peoples of Cameroon1, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. Beyond the primary concern for all the people in national groups, a pattern is emerging globally which should remind North Americans of past genocides against native American peoples: the masses of people forced from their homelands, the refugee camps which are meant to both save and contain the displaced, the senseless killing of civilians, the slaughter by hunger, arms and disease which lower the population numbers, and the relentless attack on native cultures to incapacitate the will to resist. The inability to recognize genocide at home limits the ability to understand other contemporary genocides in progress.  After a massive loss of life in Rwanda, Libya, and Ivory Coast where the old leadership was removed by war and these were wars won by forces with Euro-American support, there’s an increased sensitivity to the early warnings of war such as destabilization. These population losses in Africa have followed the extreme example presented by the destruction of Iraq and its infrastructure by bombs and missiles. The process of replacing uncooperative government leaders with tractable puppets was and is a disaster for each person of the millions displaced, forced into exile, in mourning for all those lost whether to armed violence, or sickness and hunger.  In areas of Africa with increasingly high numbers of displaced persons we’re likely to find the covert hand of colonialism reasserting its need for corporate profits. The current news from Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi, lends insight into how and why genocides do occur or could occur., while the challenge of understanding is to stop them.  Concerned with the increasing violence and repression in Cameroon the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michele Bachelet visited the country last May to meet with government ministers, opposition leaders, and Cameroon’s President Biya who assured full cooperation with the UN on issues of Human Rights.  To summarize the situation: 20% of the French speaking country is Anglophone, and the sparse public services are particularly diminished for the English-speaking areas. A portion of Anglophone leaders support secession of an English speaking region, of an Anglophone state, Ambazonia, abutting Nigeria. Not far from the inland portion of Ambazonia, in Nigeria, begins Boko Haram territory. Since about 2009 Boko Haram, a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, worked northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and Chad.  A Boko Haram military tactic was and is, reprisal, answering occasional military defeats with wiping out rural Christian villages in Cameroon. In Cameroon the government responded with an ongoing low intensity conflict to protect the area’s Muslim and Christian population. Cameroon’s forces became veterans of war against a military known for atrocities and kidnapping young women and entire schools.  In 2015 Boko Haram pledged allegiance to a larger Sunni Muslim fundamentalist group, ISIS, known for its atrocities in Syria and Iraq.  In 2016 Cameroon’s Anglophone lawyers whose rights were not well-respected, chose to go on strike. The nonviolent strike was joined by Anglophone teachers and students. Responding with military force and arrests the government imprisoned a number of lawyers to try for treason, which led to more violence. When forced to extremes the struggle for Anglophone rights made people choose sides. The result suggests it’s better not to force language struggles to extremes.  In 2017 Ambazonia declared itself a separate Anglophone country which initiated its own defense forces, militias etc. The region’s educational system was / is periodically shut down with threats effected against those who try to teach or attend school. The Cameroon government’s police stations are burned, government police dismembered, government forces engaged. Human rights violations by government forces were / are brutal and recurring. The separatist Ambazonian leader, Julius Sisiku Ayuk Tabe was recently sentenced to life in prison which occasioned more violence and military reprisal. About half a million people have left their homes in Cameroon.  On August 26th 2019, Lawyers Rights Watch Canada3 with the support of two human rights NGOs, presented a statement4 to the United Nations Human Rights Council noting crimes by Cameroon’s government against the country’s Anglophone minority, as well as responsive “violent acts” against the government. The statement requests international concern and encourages international action to prevent “further mass atrocities.” It asks the Government of Cameroon to end its violence and investigate the human rights abuses. The statement relies on and furthers the evidence and guide supplied by the report, “Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe: Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity,”5 authored by the two NGOs supporting the statement.  What can be said for Paul Biya’s dictatorial democracy and rule for 36 years, is that in 2018 he was supported by 70% of the voters (Anglophone parties refused to vote). UN News reports “Cameroon is also hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Central African Republic and Nigeria,”6 And Paul Biya has allowed Cameroon to survive without the epidemics, starvation, aggressions, war, massacres or genocide, which have tormented many African countries since their Independences from colonial rule in the 1960s.  Until 2016 found the government’s military forces suddenly engaged on two fronts – against ISIS in the far North and Anglophone militias in the West. Few journalists or reports mention both fronts in the same article and for example, LRWC’s multi NGO statement to the Human Rights Council addresses only the Anglophone problem. This is also true of the NGO jointly authored “Report.” Neither mentions that the country is engaged in a war.  There is no mention at all in the LRWC statement or the “Report,” of Northern Cameroon’s Christian communities. When these are targeted by Boko Haram / ISIS they’re wiped out. Fulani tribesmen are also blamed for the attacks. With last July’s attacks on villages 1100 additional families were displaced.7 A Bible translator was killed, his wife’s left hand cut off. The rainy season until October makes it hard for government troops to deploy to villages. Christian sources note that across the border in Nigeria “Tens of thousands have died over the last 20 years.”8 Last November in Bamenda 80 students were kidnapped from the Presbyterian school, not by ISIS but Ambazonian separatists.9 Generally the region’s Muslims and Christians get along. In mid-August Bishop George Nkuo of Kumbo in the northwest made a plea to end the conflict and within hours two priests were kidnapped.10  The U.S. which provided military aid to Cameroon’s fight against ISIS has reacted to reports of the military’s human rights violations by withdrawing aid. The rights violations against Anglophones receive international coverage. Cameroon is only twenty percent Anglophone so Anglophone and Ambazonian leaders have encouraged intervention by outside forces.  Is Anglophone strategy to initiate conflict that would require outside intervention? This pattern of gaining outside support and cutting in foreign interests was followed in Cote d’Ivoire and led to the current head of state Alassane Ouattara ‘s victory. The Christian group revolutionary leader was replaced with a Muslim group’s former World Bank employee and friend of France’s Nicholas Sarkozy more friendly to French business interests.  Since LRWC, CHRDA and RWCHR are lobbying the UN Human Rights Council to encourage intervention in Cameroon, shouldn’t we know more about them?  Lawyers Rights Watch Canada affirms the rights of lawyers globally and addresses points of international law. Logically it would have to address Anglophone lawyers’ evidence of their government’s persecution.  LRWC is joined by the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa (CHRDA)11 with offices in Cameroon and the U.S. CHRDA was founded in 2017 by the Cameroon Anglophone attorney, Felix Agbor Anyior Nkongo, who has studied at universities in Cameroon, Nigeria, the U.S. (Notre Dame), Brussells and Leipzig. He has worked in human rights for the U.N.. When imprisoned for treason during the 2016 lawyers’ strike in Cameroon, the Ontario Bar and the U.S. RFK Human Rights NGO and his former professor at Notre Dame among others, protested until he was released. An eloquent lobbyist for the Anglophone cause in Cameroon his NGO encourages “democracy” for all African peoples. He’s among the original lawyers who misjudged the regime’s response which resulted in Cameroon’s 2016 destabilization.  The third NGO presenting the UN with encouragement to intervene is the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) founded by former Canadian Minister of Parliament / Minister of Justice, expert on international law, Professor Irwin Cotler. Both Cotler and Nkongo introduce the “Report” on Cameroon.  With its roots in WWII’s Holocaust of European Jewry RWCHR is a heavy hitter for human rights. And like many Canadian human rights NGOs it is…sanctified. But it takes political rather than moral stands. For example this NGO has declared the BDS movement anti-Semitic and it generally supports Israel politically. According to Wikipedia RWCHR recently advised Canada’s government that Venezuela’s President Maduro is responsible for war crimes. RWCHR attempted to persuade European Parliament to take the Venezuelan government to International Criminal Court. RWCHR is providing legal representation for Venezuela’s opposition leader, Leopoldo Eduardo López Mendoza. And the NGO was very supportive in the referral of Venezuela to the International Criminal Court made by members of the Organization of American States. In any case, RWCHR’s position aligns with U.S. and Canadian government policy in the attempt to take over a sovereign nation, Venezuela. The NGO is apparently not against aggressive Euro-American takeover of a sovereign state.  To consider Cameroon then, the media haven’t noticed that the Boko Haram / ISIS attacks on Cameroon complement the interests of the Ambazonia secessionists, and vice versa. Both destabilize the State and so encourage outside intervention. A supplier of Ambazonian arms is found to be an Anglophone leader (Marshall Foncha, chair of the Ambazonia Military Council) living in the United States12. Other Ambazonian arms are sourced from English speaking Nigeria. Boko Haram / ISIS is said to steal its sometimes advanced weaponry from Nigerian military and security forces. But there’s also verified evidence that ISIS is supported in Yemen by both the U.S. and Israel.13 Is Boko Haram /ISIS at the service of foreign interests in the destabilization of Nigeria and Cameroon?  Why did the leaders of the Anglophone movement initiate strikes and secession at a time when the country’s resources were strained by refugees, and when villagers of Cameroon were beng massacred by foreign forces? The more uncompromising Anglophone leadership is, the more inevitable the armed conflict in a country where 41% of the population has malaria14 and Médecins Sans Frontières has warned of a cholera epidemic in the north.15  On September 10th President Biya ordered his government to start a “national dialogue” to resolve the language conflict and he asked foreign nations to stop Cameroon’s diaspora from furthering the violence which is increasing in his country.16  Neo-colonial inroads in the Democratic Republic of Congo are seen in the overt resource exploitation of the country’s East and terrible cost in human lives and displaced people, refugees and exiles. Death toll from the First and Second Congo Wars (1996-2003) could be as high as 6.2 million people. UNHCR the UN Refugee Agency in 2017 estimated 4.5 million displaced people within the country and in 2019, 856,043 hosted in other African countries.  Currently18 the DRC is suffering an Ebola epidemic which continues the depopulation of a resource rich region. The epidemic demands cooperation with countries which are otherwise stripping the country’s resources and with the United Nations World Health Organization. WHO has become entirely necessary globally to counter epidemics, plagues and biological warfare. It also provides and distributes pharmaceuticals.  As the number of Ebola cases passes 3000 (2000 deaths) two new pharmaceutical treatments for Ebola are being applied in the Congo without massive pre-testing: REGN-EB3 and mAb114. These are proving at least 90% effective on application19. Fears of the lack of containment of Ebola in the city of Goma were eased by the announcement of success in the trials of new drugs. The new drugs use monoclonal antibodies to directly attack the Ebola virus. Testing of two less successful drugs was dropped. The difference in fatalities among various drug testing programs may have added to the anxiety of those withholding their trust in the doctors administering products of different pharmaceutical companies. Uganda is testing another drug (Jansen pharmaceuticals) on 685 Ugandans and expects the results to show them how long the drug’s effectiveness will last. A follow-up study for those receiving anti-Ebola medication during the West African epidemic in 2013-2016 found an abnormally high rate of subsequent kidney disease, re-hospitalization and death.20  As of September the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention has 30 responders working in the DRC. The CDC is overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) which is providing the pharmaceutical producer Merck 23 million dollars (in addition to the 176 million already invested in the inoculative drug), toward doses of an Ebola vaccine it hopes will obtain licensing.21  Unlike the Ebola epidemic the efforts to combat measles have received only 2.5 million dollars of the 8.9 million required.22 In the world’s largest outbreak of measles currently, from January through August 2019, the disease killed 2700 children in the DRC, among the 145,000 infected. Médecins Sans Frontières has been able to vaccinate 474,863 children.  Faced with terrifying biological challenges endangered countries could become entirely reliant on the Euro-American pharmaceutical companies which can provide the cures, or lose portions of their populations.  The purpose of the Euro-American corporations is profit. Curative drugs and vaccines can be extremely expensive or withheld. Historically, disease (smallpox and tuberculosis) was used in North America in the genocide of North Americans. Slow to admit the practice of genocide at home, North Americans are reluctant to question the possibilities of contemporary application.  Corporate and government agency transparency is necessary. Information about contemporary U.S. biological warfare and disease experiments rarely reaches the public. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention monitored the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from 1957 until 1972 when a whistleblower exposed it to the newspapers. The experiment studied impoverished African American sharecroppers with syphilis who weren’t told they had the disease and were denied treatment. During the Vietnam war the U.S. Army experimented with release of bacteria in the New York City subways as one of 239 biological warfare experiments nationally in its covert testing from 1949 to 1969.  Ebola was first recognized in 1976, in South Sudan and in the same year, in the Congo Belge / Zaire / DRC. It is a hemorrhagic fever virus extremely similar to the Marburg virus and the CDC considers both Category A Bioterrorism Agents. The Marburg virus first appeared in a Marburg German laboratory in 1967.23  The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Burundi has issued a report25 which states conditions exist in Burundi which lead to genocide. Conditions weren’t good last year and are worse now. As many as 400,000 have fled into exile.The UN has suspected the possibility of genocide occurring in Burundi for several years now. The Government of Burundi doesn’t agree.  In a health emergency not noted by the world’s press the Voice of America reported in 2017 that according to the WHO in 2016, 73 percent of Burundians were affected by malaria.26 Others say at least half the 11 million population of Burundi has malaria which is the leading cause of death. The disease is usually countered with pharmaceuticals but Burundi is the 2nd poorest country in the world.  The Voice of America blames Burundi’s violence and unrest on President Nkurunziza’s decision in 2015 to run for a third term which may have countered the country’s constitutional law. A similar instance of President Kagame’s third term in Rwanda didn’t bother the U.S.. Burundi’s government tends to blame the unrest on Kagame and Tutsi controlled Rwanda. Hutu controlled Burundi shows a Hutu / Tutsi ratio of 85% / 15%. Rwanda thinks Burundi is hiding Hutu participants in Rwanda’s genocide.  Burundi’s government isn’t convinced by the UN’s good intentions and has denied UN investigators access. Burundi does have a history of events which could be defined as tribal warfare, civil wars, or genocides. If the incipient divisions are forced to extremes as they were in Rwanda it would likely be caused by exterior destabilization.  It could be argued that outside pressures forced the destabilization of Rwanda to the point of genocide in 1994. These should be noted by any monitoring of Burundi. Both Rwanda and Burundi of similar culture and language have dealt with the simplicities of tribal difference for over 500 years. One could argue that the responsibility for any contemporary genocide could only rest with “First World” interference, supplying armaments and taking sides to its own advantage. Burundi’s national language is African, Kirundi.  US / UN support for the Kagame Tutsi government’s official narrative of the Rwandan Genocide has both ignored and denied the genocide of Hutu during the recognized genocide of Tutsi at Kagame’s takeover of Rwanda, to the point of imprisoning those who have attempted to memorialize Hutu victims.  The UN report on Burundi includes without specifically identifying covert programs, the threat of foreign attempts to intervene in the country’s politics and elections. With elections approaching next year the foreign media has stepped up its attacks on the present government. The BBC and Voice of America are no longer licensed to operate in Burundi. Since 2015 the European Union and US have applied selective sanctions to the country so Burundi has closed down all foreign NGOs. The Anglican Church of Burundi at work in the region since the 1930s is still able to provide its health, educational, environmental, community and religious services and programs.  International pressure for intervention in Burundi began as early as November 2016.27 By January 11, 2017 Night’s Lantern notes:28 : “the government cabinet Minister of the Environment has been assassinated. This continues a lethal back and forth between the government and its opposition, which threatens the region with a lapse into violence. Euro-American policies suggest military intervention to preclude the possibility of a genocide (see previous), an intervention likely to lead to corporatization of the country’s assets. This is a strong factor encouraging a genocide. Calls for intervention have coincided with major mining contracts gained by Russian and Chinese companies. Destabilization is encouraged by the privatization of Burundi’s coffee industry at the insistence of the World Bank; private interests have delayed delivery of pesticides and fertilizers; the crop and industry have been damaged. The Parliament of Burundi has had to place controls on international NGO’s in Burundi who are considered to support rebels against Burundi’s President Nikurunziza. Burundi has also withdrawn from the International Criminal Court so the Euro-American human rights industry is not well disposed toward President Nikurunziza and any non-African reporting on Burundi should require multiple verification. The attempt to wrest political power from African leaders who are uncooperative with US/NATO corporate takeovers is familiar.”  Night’s Lantern has noted Burundi’s people as a national group under genocide warning since 2015. The UN report’s conclusion places an additional genocide warning for the people. To avoid interference by corporate interests Burundi’s government will have to be angelic in resisting attempts to subvert it. If the society continues to break down and a genocide is initiated will it be Burundians who are responsible?  Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.  1 Although a Francophone country, “La république du Cameroun,” Western institutions, media and NGOs insist on the English spelling -“Cameroon.”  2 The author’s previous considerations of Cameroon are linked from Night’s Lantern “Genocide warnings,” http://www.nightslantern.ca/02.htm#cam.  3 To maintain transparency: although not involved with its response to this issue the author is a non-lawyer member of LRWC and supports many of LRWC’s statements and position papers for the Human Rights Council.  4 “Human rights Catastrophe in Cameroon.” “Written statement* submitted by Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status,” A/HRC/42/Ngo/1, Aug. 21, 2019. Human Rights Council 42nd Session 9-27September 2019.  5 “Cameroon’s Unfolding Catastrophe” Evidence of Human Rights Violations and Crimes against Humanity,” June 3, 2019, Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa & Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.  6 “Cameroon: Clear ‘window of opportunity’ to solve crises rooted in violence – Bachelet,” May 6, 2019, UN News.  8 “Nigeria is the biggest killing ground of Christians today,” current / Sept. 14, 2019, Persecution.  9 “The political conflict in Cameroon threatens the freedom of Christians,” Jonatán Soriano, Dec. 5, 2018, Evangelical Focus.  10 “Cameroon bishop: ‘I am not safe; after speaking out against conflict,” Crux staff, Aug. 20, 2019, Crux.  11 This should not be confused with the United Nations Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Central Africa (CHRDCA) – headquartered in Cameroon’s capital, which is the regional office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.  12 “Cameroon’s Separatist Movement Is Going International,” Gareth Browne, May 13, 2019, Foreign Policy.  13 “The Smoking Gun in the Islamic State Conspiracy: Documents Prove US Arming Islamic State,” Gearóid Ó Colmáin, Sept. 5, 2019, American Herald Tribune.  16 “Cameroon: Biya Orders Immediate Dialogue to Solve Cameroon’s Problems,” Moki Edwin Kindzeka, Sept. 11, 2019, Voice of America.  17 The author’s previous considerations of the Democratic Republic of Congo are linked from Night’s Lantern “Genocide Warnings,” http://www.nightslantern.ca/02.htm#co  19 “New Ebola Drugs Show Exciting Promise With Up to 90 Percent Cure Rate,” Global Information Network, Aug. 14, 2019, Black Agenda Report.  20 “Ebola survivors may face increased risk of death after hospitalization,” Chris Galford, Sept. 6, 2019, Home Preparedness News.  24 The author’s previous considerations of Burundi are linked from Night’s Lantern “Genocide Warnings,” http://www.nightslantern.ca/02.htm#bu.  25 “Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi,” A/HRC/42/49. Aug. 6, 2019. Human Rights Council Forty-second session 9-27 September 2019.


newsweek--2019-01-07--CBS Sisi Interview President Denies Ordering Massacre in Footage Egypt Tried to Block

CBS Sisi Interview: President Denies Ordering Massacre in Footage Egypt Tried to Block

Egypt’s government attempted to block a CBS interview in which the nation’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, denied responsibility for a 2013 massacre that killed at least 800 people, according to the network.  During CBS’s airing of its flagship 60 Minutes show, Sunday, the Egyptian leader told Scott Pelly that as the military consolidated power over five years ago, “some measures to restore security” were required. However, Sisi denied that the Egyptian security forces had systematically killed their political opposition under his direction.  After the interview, Sisi’s discussion of the notorious Rabaa massacre, as well as Egypt’s continuing ground war against the Islamists in the country’s restive Sinai peninsula, were deemed by the government to be too sensitive to air.  "The 60 Minutes team was contacted by the Egyptian ambassador shortly after and told the interview could not be aired," CBS said in a statement.  It was not clear which sections of the interview the Egyptian government was unhappy with. CBS aired the rare interview with the Egyptian president anyway, promoting the footage as "the interview Egypt's government doesn't want on TV," on its website.  Egypt’s 2013 Rabaa massacre is seen as one of the darkest chapters in the country’s recent history. At least 800 supporters of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, were killed as they took part in anti-military sit-ins in the country’s capital.  According to the international NGO Human Rights Watch at Rabaa, "using armored personnel carriers, bulldozers, ground forces and snipers, police and army personnel attacked the protest encampment with hundreds killed by bullets to their heads, necks and chests."  In the 60 Minutes interview, Sisi refuted the Human Rights Watch report as “not true.” He also claimed police personnel at the time had been “trying to open peaceful corridors for the people to go safely to their homes.”  Since the 2014 presidential elections, which Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood was banned from participating in, Sisi has struggled to deal with entrenched economic and security issues in Egypt.  Despite receiving nearly one and a half billion dollars in aid each year from the U.S., the Middle East’s most populous nation has failed to curb an Islamist insurgency backed by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Sisi, who has jailed 60,000 of his political opponents, was re-elected in 2018 in a vote viewed by the international community as rigged. He received 97 precent of the vote after jailing one of his primary political opponents.


npr--2019-07-19--Dutch Troops Were 10 Liable In Srebrenica Massacre Supreme Court Says

Dutch Troops Were 10% Liable In Srebrenica Massacre, Supreme Court Says  The Netherlands' Supreme Court has affirmed that the country's troops are partly to blame for the deaths of 350 Muslim men and boys after the fall of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. But in a break with an earlier ruling, the court lowered the Dutch liability for the massacre to 10%, from 30%.  "The Dutch State bears very limited liability in the 'Mothers of Srebenica' case," the Supreme Court said as it announced the ruling.  The Mothers of Srebenica is an umbrella group formed by families and loved ones who say Dutch U.N. peacekeeping troops didn't do everything they could to prevent the Muslim men and boys from being slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs led by Ratko Mladic, the "butcher of Bosnia" who was convicted of genocide and war crimes in 2017.  A U.N. war crimes tribunal found Mladic guilty of "masterminding the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Europe's worst massacre since World War II," NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.  The case centers on the deadly days after Srebrenica fell on July 11, 1995, when Bosnian Serb troops entered the city and some 25,000 refugees sought refuge with a Dutch battalion called Dutchbat III, in what was deemed a "minimum safe area" away from hostilities.  At the time, both the U.N. and the Netherlands agreed that the refugees and peacekeepers must be evacuated. But the families say the Dutch force failed in two key respects: by cooperating with Mladic's force to allow refugees to be taken to buses through a narrow sluice that made it easy to separate males from the crowd and, toward the end of the evacuation, by not offering 350 men and boys a chance to stay in the Dutch compound.  In an earlier ruling, the Hague Court of Appeal had largely agreed with the families on those points, saying that the "group of refugees was denied a 30 percent chance of avoiding abuse and execution," as the Supreme Court said.  But in its own ruling Friday, the Supreme Court, or Hoge Raad, said it "estimates that the male refugees had a 10 percent chance of escaping from the Bosnian Serbs, had they been offered the choice to remain in the compound."  The high court split with the Court of Appeal on how the main evacuation was handled, saying, "The fate of the refugees would not have been changed had Dutchbat stopped cooperating, because the Bosnian Serbs would have continued the evacuation in some other way."  Suggesting that the peacekeepers were right to cooperate with the hostile force outside its compound, the court said, "Dutchbat's choice to continue providing guidance in order to prevent women and children from being trampled was not wrongful."  As for the fate of the 350 male Muslims — who had remained in the Dutch camp without being seen by the Bosnian Serb force — the Supreme Court said the chance they would have escaped with their lives had they been given the choice to stay "was slim, but not negligible."  Mladic's fighters likely would have discovered the men and boys during an inspection of the compound their fate would have been sealed, the court said. It added, "The chance of Dutchbat receiving effective support from the international community was slim."  As a result, the court said, the state's liability is "limited to 10 percent of the damages suffered by the surviving relatives of these 350 male refugees," and those survivors may now seek compensation from the Netherlands.  "The claimants are likely to get only a few thousand euros in compensation" NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports. "But the ruling could set an international legal precedent for states' liability when their troops take part in peacekeeping missions."  The high court ruled that the Dutch peacekeepers' actions before the evacuation order were free from liability because they were operating under U.N. authority. But after the decision was made to evacuate, the court said, the Netherlands "exercised effective control over Dutchbat's conduct and Dutchbat's actions were attributable to the State."


occupydemocrats--2019-09-19--30 innocent Afghan farmers were killed and 40 injured in US bombing massacre

30 innocent Afghan farmers were killed and 40 injured in U.S. bombing massacre

As tensions dramatically escalate in the Middle East and the United States begins to build yet another coalition for conflict in the Middle East, the grim death toll of the wars we’re already fighting continues to grow at a horrifying rate.  Afghan officials have announced that a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province meant to hit an alleged IS hideout instead murdered 30 civilians and injured 40 more.  The victims were pine nut farmers sleeping in tents after a hard day’s work. “The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” mourned tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul to Reuters. “Some of us managed to escape, some were injured, but many were killed.”  A spokesman for the United States’ Afghanistan coalition dismissed the reports, saying that “we are aware of allegations of the death of non-combatants and are working with local officials to determine the facts” and went on to somehow blame the Taliban for the deaths: “We are fighting in a complex environment against those who intentionally kill and hide behind civilians, as well as use dishonest claims of noncombatant casualties as propaganda weapon.”  It is unlikely that any responsibility of wrongdoing will be ever be taken for this attack; the Pentagon is notorious for under-reporting and misrepresenting the number of civilians that die in the endless barrage of bombs it pummels Muslim nations around the world with.  Under President Trump, the death toll of innocents has skyrocketed as the Commander-in-Chief’s callous disregard for human life is adopted by his underlings. Looser rules of engagement and a dramatic uptick in bombing runs have led to the United States killing more people than the Taliban in the first half of 2019.  Civilian casualty monitoring group AirWars reports that the Trump administration’s bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria killed 6,000 civilians in 2017 alone and killed anywhere between 8,148 and 13,097 innocents over the past five years as a whole. Since 2009, the war in Afghanistan has killed over 16,000 civilians and wounded 30,000 more.  The fact that this massacre — likely the deadliest bombing since a 2017 airstrike on Mosul killed 200 people — will get nothing but meager media coverage and almost certainly no acknowledgment from the military, the government or either side of our political establishment is yet another repulsive reminder about how normalized and desensitized we have become to the mass murder of innocent people of color by the American imperial machine.  The refusal of the mainstream media and political leadership of either party to challenge or even acknowledge the slaughter being carried out in our name is an affront to human rights and to the values that the United States is supposed to stand for. The American failure to recognize and mourn the lives of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and Afghans killed by our bombs contributes to their dehumanization and feeds into right-wing Islamophobic tropes that paint all Muslims as terrorists who deserve their deaths.  Through three Democratic debates, there has not been one question about the killing of civilians by the United States military. Foreign policy is barely mentioned, and when it is, the questions are always couched in terms of “national security,” demanding to know which candidate will be the most hawkish in their confrontation with the threats that the military-industrial complex has laid out for us. Perhaps foreign policy questions don’t get the ratings that clashes over healthcare might, but literally thousands of lives hang in the balance and the refusal to take them seriously is unforgivable.  But nothing shows how little Americans value the lives of Muslims overseas more than the contrast between the performative temper tantrum thrown by both conservatives and liberals last week at President Trump’s invitation of the Taliban to peace talks at Camp David and the collective silence that will greet the news that 70 sleeping workers have had their bodies torn apart in a hellish whirlwind of superheated metal shards, all paid for by the taxpayer.  Original reporting by Ahmad Sultan and Abdul Qadir Sediqi at Reuters.  Add your name to tell the House to fulfill its constitutional obligation: Launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump!


rferl--2019-01-15--Kosovars Remember 1999 Racak Massacre

Kosovars Remember 1999 Racak Massacre

Thousands of people have gathered in the southern Kosovo village of Racak to mark 20 years since 45 ethnic Albanians were massacred by Serbian forces in an act that sparked international anger.  The killings were one of the factors that prompted NATO to launch an air campaign to end Kosovo's 1998-99 war.  Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's government at the time claimed that the dead were all members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) killed in combat with state security forces. The dead included a 12-year-old boy.  Top government officials, including Kosovar Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, and others gathered on January 15 at the cemetery in Racak, 32 kilometers south of the capital, Pristina.  Haradinaj, himself a former UCK fighter, said that the "pain, blood, and sacrifice of the people are not lost."  More than 10,000 were killed in the war, and some 1,650 are still unaccounted for. Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence isn't recognized by Serbia.  This week, a special international court on war crimes during and after the war began questioning members of the UCK -- as well as Kosovo's ethnic Serbs -- over alleged crimes against Serbian prisoners.


rferl--2019-07-29--86 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 where held in a detention camp in 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, of whom 250 women and 100 children, in the region after taking it over in April 1992.      Six-hundred fifty people are still missing.      In January 2018, prosecutors in Bosnia-Herzegovina said German 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.


russiainsider--2019-10-02--Israeli Massacres A Brief and Shocking History

Israeli Massacres: A Brief and Shocking History

It would be nice to think that, as an Israeli officer once put it, “This time we went too far” — that the killings of 17 unarmed protesters in Gaza by Israeli riflers across a security fence on Friday would cause the world to sanction Israel for its conduct. But if you look over Israel’s history, you find that the massacre has been a ready tool in the Israeli war-chest; and Israelis have not been prosecuted for carrying them out. Indeed, a couple of those responsible later became prime minister!  Here, largely from my own memory, is a rapidly-assembled list of massacres, defined by Webster’s as the killing of a “number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty” (and yes, a couple precede the birth of the state).  1946. Zionist militias blow up the south wing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, most of them civilians, in order to protest British rule of Palestine.  1948. Zionist militias kill over 100 civilians in the village of Deir Yassin, which is on the road to Jerusalem. The action helps clear the road for the military advance on Jerusalem and scares thousands of other Palestinians who flee their villages. The name Deir Yassin becomes a rallying cry for Palestinians for decades to come though no one is punished. An officer with responsibility for the massacre, Menachem Begin, became Israeli prime minister 29 years later.  1948. During the expulsion of Palestinians from the central Israeli city of Lydda, more than 100 men are rounded up and held in a mosque and later massacred (according to Reja-e Busailah’s new book and others). The episode terrifies thousands of other Palestinians who seek refuge in the West Bank.  1948. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed by Israeli forces in Al Dawayima village, west of Hebron. Many are killed in barbarous manner; the crime is swept under the rug for decades.  1953. Israeli troops led by Ariel Sharon raid the village of Qibya in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and kill 69 people, most of them women and children, in retaliation for a cross-border raid that killed three Israelis. (The massacre is memorialized in Nathan Englander’s latest novel as one that solidifies Sharon’s reputation as an officer who will exact swift and awful revenge on those who harm Jews, thereby assuring his rise.)  1956. Israeli forces gun down farmers in Kfar Qasim returning from the fields who are unaware that the village had been placed under a strict curfew by the Israeli government earlier that day. Forty-eight Palestinian citizens of Israel are killed, many women and children.  1956. Israeli forces kill 275 Palestinians in Gaza in the midst of the Suez Crisis. The massacre is documented by Joe Sacco in Footnotes in Gaza.  1967. Israeli forces are said to have killed scores of Egyptian army prisoners in the Sinai during the 1967 War. Some say 100s.  1970. Israel killed 46 Egyptian children and wounded 50 others during an air raid on a primary school in the village of Bahr el-Baqar, Egypt. Known as the Bahr el-Baqar Massacre, the assault completely destroyed the school and was part of the Priha (Blossoms) Operations during the War of Attrition.  1982. The Sabra and Shatilla massacres of Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps are carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militias. But the Israel Defense Forces had control of the area and Ariel Sharon allows the militias to go into the camps. Somewhere between several hundred and 3000 Palestinians are murdered. Sharon, who died in 2014, escaped punishment for war crimes; in fact, he became an Israeli prime minister.  1996. The first Qana massacre takes place when Israeli missiles strike a UN compound in southern Lebanon where many civilians have gathered seeking refuge during clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. Over 100 civilians are killed. “Israel was universally condemned, and the United States intervened to extricate its ally from the quagmire,” Avi Shlaim writes in The Iron Wall.  2006. The second Qana massacre takes place during the Lebanon war when Israeli missiles strike a building in a village outside Qana, killing 36 civilians, including 16 children. The strike is initially defended as a response to the firing of Katyusha rockets at Israel from civilian areas.  2008-2009. During Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza following exchanges of rocket/missile attacks in months before, more than 1400 Palestinians are killed over 22 days, most of them civilians. Many die as at Qana, when they flee their homes to UN compounds and schools, hoping to be safe. The massacre brings international condemnation, including by the Goldstone Report to the UN Human Rights Council alleging war crimes; but the United States does its utmost under President Obama to defend Israel from all charges, and no one is brought to the bar.  2012.  During eight days of “Pillar of Clouds,” Israel kills 160 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. The offensive boosts Netanyahu in the polls and seems timed to torpedo Palestine’s historic UN bid for statehood.  2014. Another Israeli onslaught on Gaza, this one lasting 51 days, kills upwards of 2200 Palestinians, most of them civilians. The massacre is famous for sniper killings of unarmed people and for the killings of entire families, 89 according to some authorities, typically wiped out in their homes by a missile strike. In one instance, 20 members of one family are killed. The international condemnation is again toothless.


russiainsider--2019-10-02--Israeli Massacres: A Brief and Shocking History

It would be nice to think that, as an Israeli officer once put it, “This time we went too far” — that the killings of 17 unarmed protesters in Gaza by Israeli riflers across a security fence on Friday would cause the world to sanction Israel for its conduct. But if you look over Israel’s history, you find that the massacre has been a ready tool in the Israeli war-chest; and Israelis have not been prosecuted for carrying them out. Indeed, a couple of those responsible later became prime minister!  Here, largely from my own memory, is a rapidly-assembled list of massacres, defined by Webster’s as the killing of a “number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty” (and yes, a couple precede the birth of the state).  1946. Zionist militias blow up the south wing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, most of them civilians, in order to protest British rule of Palestine.  1948. Zionist militias kill over 100 civilians in the village of Deir Yassin, which is on the road to Jerusalem. The action helps clear the road for the military advance on Jerusalem and scares thousands of other Palestinians who flee their villages. The name Deir Yassin becomes a rallying cry for Palestinians for decades to come though no one is punished. An officer with responsibility for the massacre, Menachem Begin, became Israeli prime minister 29 years later.  1948. During the expulsion of Palestinians from the central Israeli city of Lydda, more than 100 men are rounded up and held in a mosque and later massacred (according to Reja-e Busailah’s new book and others). The episode terrifies thousands of other Palestinians who seek refuge in the West Bank.  1948. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed by Israeli forces in Al Dawayima village, west of Hebron. Many are killed in barbarous manner; the crime is swept under the rug for decades.  1953. Israeli troops led by Ariel Sharon raid the village of Qibya in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and kill 69 people, most of them women and children, in retaliation for a cross-border raid that killed three Israelis. (The massacre is memorialized in Nathan Englander’s latest novel as one that solidifies Sharon’s reputation as an officer who will exact swift and awful revenge on those who harm Jews, thereby assuring his rise.)  1956. Israeli forces gun down farmers in Kfar Qasim returning from the fields who are unaware that the village had been placed under a strict curfew by the Israeli government earlier that day. Forty-eight Palestinian citizens of Israel are killed, many women and children.  1956. Israeli forces kill 275 Palestinians in Gaza in the midst of the Suez Crisis. The massacre is documented by Joe Sacco in Footnotes in Gaza.  1967. Israeli forces are said to have killed scores of Egyptian army prisoners in the Sinai during the 1967 War. Some say 100s.  1970. Israel killed 46 Egyptian children and wounded 50 others during an air raid on a primary school in the village of Bahr el-Baqar, Egypt. Known as the Bahr el-Baqar Massacre, the assault completely destroyed the school and was part of the Priha (Blossoms) Operations during the War of Attrition.  1982. The Sabra and Shatilla massacres of Palestinians in Beirut refugee camps are carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militias. But the Israel Defense Forces had control of the area and Ariel Sharon allows the militias to go into the camps. Somewhere between several hundred and 3000 Palestinians are murdered. Sharon, who died in 2014, escaped punishment for war crimes; in fact, he became an Israeli prime minister.  1996. The first Qana massacre takes place when Israeli missiles strike a UN compound in southern Lebanon where many civilians have gathered seeking refuge during clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. Over 100 civilians are killed. “Israel was universally condemned, and the United States intervened to extricate its ally from the quagmire,” Avi Shlaim writes in The Iron Wall.  2006. The second Qana massacre takes place during the Lebanon war when Israeli missiles strike a building in a village outside Qana, killing 36 civilians, including 16 children. The strike is initially defended as a response to the firing of Katyusha rockets at Israel from civilian areas.  2008-2009. During Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza following exchanges of rocket/missile attacks in months before, more than 1400 Palestinians are killed over 22 days, most of them civilians. Many die as at Qana, when they flee their homes to UN compounds and schools, hoping to be safe. The massacre brings international condemnation, including by the Goldstone Report to the UN Human Rights Council alleging war crimes; but the United States does its utmost under President Obama to defend Israel from all charges, and no one is brought to the bar.  2012. During eight days of “Pillar of Clouds,” Israel kills 160 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. The offensive boosts Netanyahu in the polls and seems timed to torpedo Palestine’s historic UN bid for statehood.  2014. Another Israeli onslaught on Gaza, this one lasting 51 days, kills upwards of 2200 Palestinians, most of them civilians. The massacre is famous for sniper killings of unarmed people and for the killings of entire families, 89 according to some authorities, typically wiped out in their homes by a missile strike. In one instance, 20 members of one family are killed. The international condemnation is again toothless.


sottnet--2019-02-25--Israel is concealing 300000 documents involving Palestinian massacres

Israel is concealing 300,000 documents involving Palestinian massacres

a report says.According to the +972 Magazine, Israel's "State Archives" declassified secret documents last summer, but some 300,000 documents, which antedate the 1948 establishment of the regime, remained classified.the report by Israeli Jewish journalist Asaf Shalev said."There were many people who were concerned about the opening of this catalog," Israel's "State Archivist" Yaacov Lozowick was quoted by the website as saying in a statement accompanying the release.Files on the two most notorious Israeli massacres ofare among the hidden documents, the website said.-- the first day of the Suez war -- when Israeli forces killed residents of the village who returned from their nearby agricultural lands.Deir Yassin has long remained a symbol of Israeli violence against Palestinians due to the particularly gruesome nature of the 1948 slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the tiny village.was led by the Irgun militia group, whose head was future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with support from fellow Zionist militiamen affiliated with Haganah and Lehi groups.According to the report,to scare Palestinians in the hope that the terror would lead to an Arab exodus.Around 750,000 Palestinians took refuge abroad in the face of the massacres - most notorious among them the one in Deir Yassin.


theguardianuk--2019-07-23--The Karida massacre fears of a new era of tribal violence in Papua New Guinea

The Karida massacre: fears of a new era of tribal violence in Papua New Guinea

The pictures that came out of a remote highlands village in Papua New Guinea two weeks ago were not, at first glance, particularly graphic: bulging cocoons of blue mosquito nets hanging from wooden poles propped along a roadside.  But the story they told was gruesome.  The nets, said the health worker in Karida village who supplied them, held the remains of 10 women, six children and two unborn babies, all hacked to death with machetes sometime before dawn on 8 July. The health worker told the Guardian they had not been able to work out which body parts belonged to which person.  The slaughter, which occurred in the mountains of Hela province, about 600 kilometres north west of the PNG capital of Port Moresby, followed the killing of three women and four men in a neighbouring village the day before.  The photographs showed the remains being watched over by a pair of elderly women waving branches – fending off flies in the tropical heat. This small rite of respect required immense courage. The killings scattered hundreds of terrified people into the surrounding bush, where many remain today.  “I am so worried about my women,” says Janet Koriama, president of the Hela Council of Women over the phone from the local capital of Tari, having just spent a night near the scene of the massacre. “Families have lost everything,” says Koriama – their food gardens, shelter, clothes. Last Wednesday, Koriama says another woman was killed “and one had her hand cut off while looking for food to feed their hungry children”.  Koriama is desperately trying to enlist defence forces to bring around 2,000 women and children displaced by tribal fighting into shelters she’s coordinating with local churches. But reports indicate that while soldiers have been deployed as promised by prime minister James Marape, who is also the local MP for the area, their mission is focused on capturing the killers, dead or alive.  Even if they succeed, this will be of little comfort to Koriama and other local leaders fearful about what this massacre signals. While tribal conflict is deep rooted in Hela, they describe what happened in Karida village as unprecedented in lore or memory.  “This, I have never seen in my life,” bereft local chief Hokoko Minape told PNG journalist Scott Waide.  Police Minister Bryan Kramer declared his concern that the killings “changed everything … that it will become the new trend”.  Close observers of events in Hela are similarly appalled, but rather less surprised. The killings follow years of escalating violence in a landscape untouched by Europeans only 85 years ago, but which is today the powerhouse of the nation’s resources economy.  Australian National University anthropologist Dr Chris Ballard, who has spent many years living with and researching the area’s dominant Huli population, agrees with local observations that the massacre falls outside even the eroded rules of tribal warfare. Before European contact, these constraints “managed fighting quite effectively,” he says.  “Even in the worst cases of warfare where entire clans were forced off their territory, casualties were pretty minimal and they were almost always fighting men.” Given dense webs of social connection and strict requirements around paying compensation for deaths, random killing were considered “truly dumb”.  “Nobody was interested in mass death. The cost of having to fork out pigs for compensation for death placed limits on what people were prepared to even envisage.”  Today locals live in constant fear and Hela is a virtual no-go zone to outsiders despite the fact that the recent atrocities played out barely 30 kilometres, as the helicopter flies, from the fortified compounds that are the heart of the nation’s largest resources project, the $US19 billion Exxon-Mobil led PNGLNG (Liquefied Natural Gas).  There is widespread distress in the highlands over unrealised promises around this enterprise and explosive anger at the failure of royalties to flow to landowners in the gas fields despite five years of operations. The Huli, famous for their elaborate wigs and face paint, are also fearsome fighters. Sharing, caring and loving, says Janet Koriama – just don’t take what is ours.  The maelstrom of the LNG fallout, old enmities, new jealousies, deteriorating basic services and, last year, a devastating 7.5 magnitude earthquake, underwrites a spiralling social emergency in which tribal fighting has razed villages, closed schools, displaced communities and caused an unknown toll of casualties.  The old rules constraining warfare have broken down in recent decades, , Ballard says. By 2008 – when the PNGLNG building phase was at its height – Medecins Sans Frontieres installed a surgical team at Tari Hospital because casualties from tribal and family violence were equivalent to a war zone. Janet Koriama says traditional protections for women have eroded notably over the lifetime of the LNG project.  Peter Botten, PNG resources veteran and longtime chief executive of Oil Search – the junior partner in the PNGLNG – has argued that blaming resources projects for rising violence in the highlands is too simplistic. He points to myriad changes, from the arrival of mobile phones to rollercoaster modernisation, but says most fights are still about women and pigs. Koriama says that the massacre at Karida is linked to a four-year war which began over a girl and which has now amassed a body count of 80.  A spokeperson for Exxon-Mobil said the recent killings “occurred outside of our operational areas”. Ballard argues that while there may not be straight lines of connection between fallout from the gas project and specific outbreaks of fighting, it’s impossible to disentangle the two.  “It is part of the story, part of the landscape. The politics of the LNG, and the ramping up of political rivalries, has certainly augmented the flow of weaponry into the Tari area.”  Tensions in Hela are underwritten by a massive arsenal of high-powered guns, many trafficked across the border from West Papua.  “Warfare and conflict kind of tailed off in the early days of the project, and everyone just kind of hung back and went, ‘well, maybe this is the promised land’,” says Ballard. “And now that nothing’s flowed, nothing’s changed in people’s circumstances and if anything services have contracted even further, there’s a profound disenchantment. That general mood certainly would contribute to conflict.”  “There is a history to this fight [around Tari] which also needs better understanding so as to map a way forward,” says Dr Fiona Hukula, senior research fellow and leader of the Building Safer Communities program at the PNG National Research Institute.  Data is patchy, but violence against women in PNG in various forms – family, social, tribal – is among some of the highest rates in the world. Reports of the torture and murder of women accused of sorcery also appear regularly in local media.  “What is lacking is enforcement. This to me is a key hindrance to really seeing change in terms of sending a strong message about violence against women and violence in general,” says Hukula. “Having said this, it is extremely difficult to police rural and remote PNG due to lack of resources and geographical constraints. This is where the role of village courts and community leadership is vital in local dispute resolution.”  One of the continuing tensions in Hela is that specialist police squads are assigned to secure the PNGLNG facilities. “We currently have only 40 police for the whole province,” said Hela Provincial Administrator, William Bando, in the aftermath of the massacre. “Our Tari-based MS9 [police mobile squad] were taken by Exxon-Mobil to provide security, while our people are dying.”


thesun--2019-02-02--Ex-Nazi SS officer involved in massacre of 86 French men and boys says he had RIGHT to shoot them

AN EX-NAZI SS officer who was involved in the massacre of 86 French men and boys during the Second World War has said he had the right shoot them.  Karl Münter, 96, insisted in an interview that the victims deserved to be shot and that he doesn’t regret participating in the war crimes.  He said: “If I arrest the men I’m responsible for them. And if they run away I have the right to shoot them.”  Münter was sentenced to death in absentia by France in 1949 - long after he returned home to Germany.  The verdict means nothing now after the French statute of limitations expired and EU citizens cannot be prosecuted for crimes they have already been convicted of in another country.  But German prosecutors are investigating him on suspicion of hate speech over the comments he made during the television interview with NDR’s Panorama that aired in December 2018.  It was his first interview about his time in the SS and on top his comments regarding the massacre he also disputed the fact that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.  He maintained that he did not fire his weapon and that he was only present at the brutal killings that took place in the village of Ascq, near Lille on April 1, 1944.  When asked if he had an regrets he said: “No, not at all!  Münter added: “And the matter of the Jews that is attributed to (Hitler)... be careful.  “There weren't millions of Jews (in Germany) at the time, that's already been disproved.  “This number - six million - is not correct.”  These comments amounting to Holocaust denial caused outrage in Germany as prosecutors are investigating them as an incitement to hatred.  Germany’s Volksverhetzung law, ('incitement of the masses'/'incitement to hatred') can be applied to trials relating to Holocaust denial.  If Münter is found guilty, he could face up to five years in prison.  Münter was part of the SS 12th Panzer Division, which was notoriously responsible for a number of war crimes.  On the night of the massacre, men and boys ranging from ages 15 to 75 were dragged on to the railway tracks, lined up and shot.  Nazis claimed the victims were “terrorists” to justify the slaying.  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. You can WhatsApp us on 07810 791 502. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yours.


veteranstoday--2019-01-30--UK deliberately hushing WWI massacre of Iranians

[ Editor’s Note: I had not heard of this story to date, but it came as no surprise. During the war colonialist troops dealt with natives in the manner of the day, by order of requisition.  The strong took from the weak to keep the fighting forces in the field, including Britain shipping foodstuffs to the Russians who were hard pressed at the time.  WWI was a huge killer, and whatever colonialist crimes were committed on the downtrodden were repaid with the post war flu epidemic that killed the rich and the poor indiscriminately.  The death toll was higher than the huge combat losses. But as we learn to today, myself anyway, the Brits did a “clean up” on their participation, which in their defense, the droughts in Iran at the time was also a major factor… Jim W. Dean ]  Jim's Editor’s Notes are solely crowdfunded via PayPal   Jim's work includes research, field trips, Heritage TV Legacy archiving & more. Thanks for helping. Click to donate >>  A political analyst  from London believes it has been a deliberate policy of the British government and the mainstream media in the West to keep silent about the massacre of millions of Iranians during the First World War.  Rodney Shakespeare said in an interview with the Press TV that Britain has always tried to depict the mass killing of Jews by the Nazi Germany in the Second World War as the most notorious tragedy of the last century, adding that other incidents such as the massacre of the Iranians has always been hushed.  “Yes there was the mass killing of Jews, but a greater number … probably about eight to 10 million, was the killing of Iranians by the British in the two years 1917 to 1919, and the figure … is more than the roughly six million Jews killed by the Nazis,” he said.  “That Iranian devastation is not mentioned today … and whilst there are continuing remainders of one mass killing, that of Jews, there is silence about the other, the killing of Iranians,” he added.  Shakespeare said it is a policy of the British Foreign Office and the Zionist-controlled media to uphold that “disgraceful silence” about the mass killing of the Iranians during the First World War.  The expert said Western powers like Britain are still involved in mass murder of civilians in various parts of the world or continue to keep silent about such incidents despite their consistent propaganda on human rights  He said the mass exodus and killing of Muslims in Myanmar and Yemen were two clear examples of such hypocrite policy.  “The West’s continued lecturing of others about human rights and the like does not sit well with the gruesome record of mass killing,” said Shakespeare.