|
Home
>>
Analysis
>>
Blog
A bi-weekly audio series and podcast service, hosted by Committee on Conscience Project Director Bridget Conley-Zilkic, that brings you the voices of human rights defenders, experts, advocates, and government officials. Vital voices addressing one of humanity's most vital issues. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent those of the Museum.
Page 5 of 26 pages « First < 3 4 5 6 7 > Last »
4/27/07
|
Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935, edited by Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg. McDonald traveled to Germany in 1932 and in 1933 became League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He sought aid from the international community to resettle outside the Reich Jews and others persecuted there. This diary shows McDonald shuttling back and forth among key political and financial authorities in the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Latin America, and the Vatican; all the time meticulously recording his insights into their thoughts and motives. Frustrated by the lack of support for his work, McDonald resigned in protest in December 1935 (David Klevan).
Burundi: Children Behind Bars Suffer Abuse, Human Rights Watch Report. Children in Burundi who find themselves in conflict with the law face serious abuses in a criminal justice system that treats them as adults (Jackie Scutari).
"The Wars of Sudan", by Alex de Waal in The Nation, March 19, 2007 (Bridget Conley-Zilkic).
Darfur: Assault on Survival--A Call for Security, Justice, and Restitution, by John Heffernan (Kadian Pow).
Several books I have been reading over the past couple of weeks:
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. Named one of the "Best Books of 2006" by Washington Post Book World.
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, by Peter G. Peterson.
The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- And Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, by Peter Beinart.
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright. Recent Pulitzer Prize winner in the general-nonfiction category. An interesting and informative account of the events leading up to the formation of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, looking into the personal lives of both counter-terrorism authorities in the US and founders of Jihadist ideology and Al-Qaeda.
(Max Wilson)
|
|
|
4/26/07
4/20/07
|
"The Pope and Islam" by Jane Kramer, author of The New Yorker's "Letter from Europe" series for more than twenty years (John Heffernan).
War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, by Doris Bergen. In examining one of the defining events of the 20th century, Doris Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts (Kadian Pow).
The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, by Carlos Fuentes. The Los Angeles Times says: "Drawing expertly on five centuries of the cultural history of Europe and the Americas, Fuentes seeks to capture the spirit of the new, vibrant, and enduring civilization [in the New World] that began in Spain." (Bridget Conley-Zilkic)
A Darfurian Plan for Peace: Local Perspectives on a Global Responsibility, by Adeeb Yousif, human rights activist for Sudan Social Development Organization (SUDO). (Jackie Scutari)
Be sure to listen to Adeeb's interview with Bridget Conley-Zilkic from December 28, 2006.
|
|
|
4/19/07
4/18/07
|
 Earlier this week, Sudanese President Bashir ostensibly agreed to the second of three phases in deploying a hybrid UN-AU force to protect civilians in Darfur. This so-called "heavy support" package would provide much needed assistance to an African Union force that increasingly cannot protect itself, much less civilians. Any optimism about this "step forward" has to be tempered by the fact that Bashir agreed to this phase months ago, then dragged his feet before reneging altogether. So he in effect is re-agreeing after unconscionable delay. One wonders how long it will be before the package is fully deployed. And Bashir continues to reject completely the most important, third phase of the deployment, which would increase the number of troops on the ground to protect civilians to around 20,000.
In any event, a stark reminder (if one were needed) of the worthlessness of Sudanese government promises and its contempt for the UN Security Council is provided by a confidential UN report that was leaked to the New York Times on Tuesday. As the Times summarizes: A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft. The report also documents the use of white aircraft to bomb villages. You may recall that the promise to stop bombing people from airplanes painted white was a supposed "step forward" earlier this year. In a few hours, President Bush will address Darfur at the Holocaust Museum. Undoubtedly, this week's step forward was meant to influence what he says. What should be clear beyond any doubt is that in Bashir's dance of death and deceit, every apparent step forward is usually followed by one or more steps back.
(Photo of Sudanese government plane disguised as UN plane from Interim Report of UN Panel of Experts.)
|
|
|
4/13/07
4/12/07
4/10/07
|
UN refugee official Matthew Conway described for the BBC his visit to two Chadian villages that were attacked on March 31: It was shocking, apocalyptic - a scene of utter desolation and destruction. Attacks like this happen repeatedly, but the scale of this one and the ferocity of it was startling - even to those of us who have been here for some time. These were fairly large villages and clearly relatively prosperous: rich agricultural fields; neatly assembled houses and they were more or less completely destroyed in these attacks. Hundreds upon hundreds of homes had been burned to the ground, and a small fire was still burning in one section of Tiero village.
Evidence collected so far indicates it was a two-pronged attack - very well co-ordinated and premeditated. It happened at first light so the villagers were caught totally unawares. Some of the men would have been at mosque for morning prayers. From one direction came the so-called Janjaweed militia on horseback and camelback - whether these were Janjaweed from Sudan or Chad, it is hard to know. It appears that they consisted of a mix of various ethnicities, not solely Arab, and in some cases the assailants were known to the villagers. The other prong of the attack appears to have been led by an unknown faction of Chadian rebels. They were wearing military uniforms, were very well armed and arrived in vehicles.
Sadly, I don't think we're ever going to know the exact number of those who died as people fled in different directions. Estimates now put the death toll at between 200 to 400. A lot of bodies were buried in common graves simply as a necessity because of decomposition occurring in the intense heat. These communal graves are scattered in all different directions mainly along the roadside where people were killed and then buried by their kin who were able to get back there. Many who survived the initial attack, died in subsequent days from exhaustion and dehydration. Along the route to the villages abandoned belongings can be seen of those who collapsed. People displaced by other raids had been living in the villages alongside local residents. Tiero had a combined population of 4,000 and Marena of about 3,500. The total number of Chadian civilians displaced from their homes now numbers around 140,000. The continued metastisizing of the violence beyond Khartoum's genocidal assault against certain ethnic groups in Darfur means that both the scale of human destruction and the difficulty of establishing peace and security are increasing apace.
|
|
|
4/10/07
|
 If you were heading over to the UN to see the exhibit on the Rwanda genocide put up by our friends at Aegis Trust, hold your horses. The exhibit was dismantled even before it was opened because Turkey objected to the assertion in a background section that “following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey,” Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, “urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes.” Note that the exhibit apparently does not label the massacres of Armenians as genocide; rather it implies a causal relationship between the violence and Raphael Lemkin's ultimate coining of the word "genocide." That happens to be, however inconvenient it is for the Turkish government, the truth. As explained elsewhere on our website, Lemkin's memoirs "detail early exposure to the history of Ottoman attacks against Armenians (which most scholars believe constitute genocide), anti-Semitic pogroms, and other histories of group-targeted violence as key to forming his beliefs about the need for legal protection of groups. " (Hat tip: K.M.)
(Photo of Raphael Lemkin)
|
|
|
4/10/07
|
 The Holocaust Memorial Museum joined with Google today to launch an unprecedented online mapping initiative using Google Earth technology. Photographs, eyewitness testimony and other information are combined with high-resolution satellite imagery to show the scope of destruction in Darfur in a new and immediate way. Check it out.
|
|
|
4/09/07
|
 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon marked the 13th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwanda genocide with what seems to me to be, even by UN standards, a remarkably formulaic, cliche ridden statement, the essence of which is that we should "never forget" and "never stop working to prevent another genocide." No reference to preventing genocide in any particular place, of course, and especially no reference to the whatchamacallit in Darfur. He did say that he intended to make the currently part-time position of Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide into a full time gig (his one example of fulfilling the stated imperative to do "more, much more"). Meanwhile, Monday's LA Times had a summary of the rough seas that Ban has been sailing in his first three months in office. Money quote: On his recent trip to the Middle East, he was stonewalled by the Iranian foreign minister, snubbed by the Palestinian finance minister, misaddressed by the prime ministers of Israel and Lebanon, and shaken by a mortar shell's near-miss in Baghdad. Back home, a mutiny against his first major reform left him similarly shaken and humbled. . . . [S]o far, his cryptic decision-making style at home and his why-can't-we-all-just-get-along approach abroad has diplomats wondering how effective the new secretary-general will be. Not surprisingly, Darfur provides a particularly incisive case study in futility for the new SG: When he met Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir in January, the secretary-general said he looked him in the eye and told him it was unacceptable for the violence to continue in Darfur and that he must live up to his agreement to allow peacekeepers into the western region.
"I made this case as hard as I could. He made his personal commitment to me that he will implement this agreement," Ban said.
A few weeks later, Bashir wrote a letter to Ban gutting his previous commitments to accept the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force. A lesser diplomat might have felt, I don't know, angered by such treatment. But Ban didn't let it faze him. He persevered and apparently got Bashir to say (maybe "personally commit"?) that he would accept 20,000 AU troops, but not under UN command. Bashir knows full well that the AU doesn't have anywhere near that number of troops to provide and that without substantial international participation there can be no effective civilian protection. Bashir knows that, but Ban apparently does not. "I think we broke the stalemate," he said.
Last week, after five AU soldiers were killed in Darfur and with attacks on AU forces on the rise, AU Commission head Alpha Oumar Konare warned that "it has become imperative and unavoidable, in the present circumstances, to speedily implement the [hybrid UN-AU] approach to the peacekeeping operation in Darfur." This week, a parade of diplomats -- including Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, Chinese envoy Zai Jun and South African President Thabo Mbeki -- is passing through Khartoum to push for the deployment of a hybrid force. So far, though, Khartoum's defiance has been without consequence for the Sudanese government.
(Photo of Ban Ki-Moon © UN.)
|
|
|
4/09/07
|
 As discussed in my recent interview with law professor Diane Orentlicher, the International Court of Justice in The Hague in February handed down its decision in a long-pending case in which the government of Bosnia accused the government of Serbia of responsibility for genocide during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia. I won't rehash the details again, but Diane observed that the ICJ's judgment absolving the Serbian government for genocide or complicity in genocide was "perplexing," characterized by the recounting of a large amount of evidence but relatively little legal analysis of that evidence's significance. Rather the Court basically relied on decisions made by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the context of individual criminal cases. Now, a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times focuses on the fact that the ICJ did not have before it potentially significant records concerning high level deliberations held during the war in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Serbian authorities specifically withheld this evidence from the ICJ, which refused Bosnian requests that it demand the information be turned over: Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. . . . “It’s a question that nags loudly,” Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. “Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference.” A crucial issue in the ICJ case was the amount of control that Belgrade exercised over the Bosnian Serbs, and lawyers who have seen the withheld evidence told the Times that it "reveals in new and vivid detail how Belgrade financed and supplied the war in Bosnia, and how the Bosnian Serb army, though officially separate after 1992, remained virtually an extension of the Yugoslav Army. They said the archives showed in verbatim records and summaries of meetings that Serbian forces, including secret police, played a role in the takeover of Srebrenica and in the preparation of the massacre there."
One explanation offered by observers for the Court's refusal to ask for the evidence is that it did not want to be embarrassed by a Serbian refusal to provide the information. It is difficult to see how Serbian defiance would have been more embarrassing for the Court than the current situation, where it is exposed as having not even tried to obtain highly relevant information before rendering judgment on state responsibility for mass murder.
The, shall we say, elliptical legal reasoning of the ICJ's decision was already destined to make even more vexing the difficult question of what constitutes genocide as defined in international law. Even worse to learn that the judgment was rendered after a conscious decision not to obtain all the relevant facts.
(Photo of Peace Palace in The Hague, seat of the ICJ.)
|
|
|
4/06/07
|
Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, Taming Intractable Conflicts: Mediation in the Hardest Cases (Matt Levinger).
Executive Summary: “Understanding Conflict and Building Peace," published by International Alert, a UK based peacebuilding organization (Jackie Scutari).
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Jerry Fowler).
Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War, by Stacy Sullivan (Bridget Conley-Zilkic).
"Seeing Around Corners", by Jonathan Rauch from the April 2002 issue of The Atlantic. The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail — but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work (David Klevan).
|
|
|
4/05/07
|
The State Department said on Thursday that its number 2 official, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, will travel to Libya, Chad and Sudan itself next week to discuss Darfur. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack says that Negroponte "is going to encourage Khartoum to give the green light to the AU/U.N. hybrid package." One would like to think that "encourage" is something of an understatement used for effect, but probably not. McCormack ventured that he is "sure" that Negroponte will have "a direct conversation with the Sudanese leadership over where they stand vis-a-vis the international system." Then he got so bold as to allow that he "would not bet against the United States as well as others taking additional steps" if the Sudanese don't shape up. Yes, but would he bet on additional steps? Or is the point that he just is not a betting man?
This trip comes as the much discussed "Plan B" hangs fire. WaPo's Jackson Diehl reported last week that "President Bush's anger rocked the Oval Office when aides presented him with" what they had come up with after months of suggesting that Khartoum would be in big trouble for its continuing defiance. Raising his voice, he demanded that his special envoy for Darfur, Andrew Natsios, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley come up with something stronger. But in response to a new US-UK determination to seek sanctions from the Security Council, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked for more time for negotiations. That's understandable. After all, he apparently has only been lied to once by Sudanese President Bashir during his first three months in office. No reason why he should see, shall we say, a pattern.
|
|
|
 Plans&ResourceType=BLOG_VOGP&ResourceId=VOGP)
4/05/07
Page 5 of 26 pages « First < 3 4 5 6 7 > Last »
|
|
