From our Daily Report:

Planet Watch
UN

Call for UN convention on crimes against humanity

Amnesty International called on the United Nations General Assembly to commence negotiations on a global treaty to prevent and punish crimes against humanity. Although specific crimes such as genocide are covered under international law, there is no general convention regarding crimes against humanity, despite their illegality under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Unlike global treaties such the Genocide Convention, which obligate state parties to prevent and punish specific crimes within their territory, the Rome Statute only empowers the International Criminal Court to investigate and prosecute the crimes listed in the statute, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Amnesty International secretary general Agnes Callamard stressed the urgent need for the convention, stating that it “would impose obligations on states not only to criminalize and punish crimes against humanity, but also to prevent them.” (Photo: United Nations Photo via Flickr)

Palestine
Mawasi

UN: Israeli attacks on medical facilities are war crimes

A UN report documented Israeli attacks on healthcare facilities and medical personnel in the Gaza Strip in violation of international human rights law, calling the attacks war crimes and crimes against humanity. Citing the World Health Organization, the report states that between October 7, 2023 and July 30, 2024, Israel engaged in “498 attacks on health care facilities in the Gaza Strip,” with 747 people killed, 969 injured, and 110 facilities affected. The report—written by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel—also condemned Israeli treatment of detainees, citing instances of abuse, torture, sexual assault, and arbitrary detention. (Photo: Mohamed Solaimane/TNH)

Africa
M23

Rwanda, DRC at odds over M23 deal

Prospects for quelling the renewed M23 insurgency in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have hit a snag after more recriminations between the Congolese government and Rwanda, which is supporting the rebels with troops and weapons. The two countries participated in talks in late August as part of a long-running Angolan meditation effort, but disagreements have since arisen. Kigali charges that Kinshasa refused to sign a deal that would have seen Rwanda withdraw from the DRC after Congolese efforts to neutralize the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a DRC-based militia founded by exiled Rwandan Hutus behind the 1994 genocide against Tutsis. The M23 conflict reignited in late 2021, and has displaced around 1.7 million people, according to the UN. (Photo of M23 fighters: MONUSCO Photos via Wikimedia Commons)

Europe
tolstoy

Podcast: Tolstoy would shit II

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state’s propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual “deviance.” Following alarming reports of “concentration camps” for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined “traditional marriage,” while a “gay propaganda law” imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The “LGBT movement” has been designated a “terrorist organization”; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as “deviant content.” Yet the venerable littĂ©rateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).

Palestine
ICC

Report finds Israeli criminal interference with ICC investigation

A joint media report has led Dutch prosecutors to consider a criminal case concerning claims that Israeli intelligence officials have interfered with the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into alleged crimes in occupied Palestine. The Guardian newspaper and the Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call jointly investigated what they allege are nine years of illegal surveillance and intimidation of the ICC prosecutor’s office since a preliminary inquiry was opened into the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2015. Twenty complainants, predominantly Palestinians, have filed a criminal complaint requesting the Dutch prosecution service investigate the allegations of interference. The complainants’ lawyers said in the filing that “Israel’s many attempts to influence, sabotage and stop the investigation constitute a direct violation of their [the clients’] right to justice.” (Photo: OSeveno/WikiMedia)

North Africa
libya

Libya: pressure on Haftar’s forces over ‘disappeared’

Amnesty International urged the self-proclaimed Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) to reveal the whereabouts of former defense minister al-Mahdi al-Barghathi and 18 of his relatives and supporters who were abducted in Benghazi, the principal LAAF stronghold, one year ago. Al-Barghathi, who served as minister of defense from 2016 to 2018, strongly condemned the LAAF offensive on Tripoli from April 2019 to October 2020. On Oct. 7, 2023, after his return to his hometown of Benghazi, he and 38 of his family and supporters were abducted by LAAF followers. Some of them have been released, and six are reported dead, including al-Barghathi’s son. But the fate of the other 19 remain unknown. There are suspicions that some of them may have been extrajudicially executed. Al-Barghathi himself has also been reported to be dead. However, his family has never received his body, and demands that the LAAF disclose the burial site and identify his remains through DNA testing. (Map: Perry-Castañeda Library)

The Amazon
Amazon

Amazon wildfires release record greenhouse emissions

The Amazon rainforest has seen a record-setting wildfire season this year, fueled by an historic drought and scorching temperatures. In Brazil, the cumulative total estimated carbon emissions from the fires so far in 2024 has reached 183 megatons, according to Europe’s Copernicus atmospheric monitoring service—equivalent to the total annual emissions of the Netherlands. The unprecedented fires come even as overall deforestation (defined as the permanent conversion of forest for another use, such as logging, mining or farming) has dropped in Brazil since President Luiz InĂĄcio “Lula” da Silva took office in January 2023. Fires now account for a much higher proportion of forest loss. (Photo: Marizilda Cruppe/Greenpeace via Mongabay)

Syria
Qamishli

HRW protests child recruitment by Syrian Kurdish militia

Human Rights Watch (HRW) raised concerns over the forcible recruitment of children into a youth group associated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), through which they are directed into armed activity. HRW interviewed multiple families whose children were taken by the Revolutionary Youth Movement of Syria. The report revealed that in the vast majority of cases, the families’ teenaged son or daughter “simply left home one day, and never returned.” Investigations revealed that members of the SDF often recruited children via social media or phone. Typically, recruitment took place by promising youth educational, cultural or vocational opportunities, constituting “covert recruitment.” (Photo: January 2022 protest against child recruitment in Qamishli. Credit: IKHRW)

Planet Watch
anthropocene

Ranting against the apocalypse II

With Lebanon under bombardment and the world awaiting Israel’s response to the Iranian missile attacks on its territory, fears mount that Iran’s nuclear facilities could be targeted—which, in addition to being an environmental disaster in its own right, could represent the crossing of a moral threshold toward the use of nuclear weapons. So two theaters of the world conflict—the Middle East and Ukraine—now constitute a looming nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the other horsemen of the apocalypse continue their relentless advance—climate change, cyber-based disinformation and the ultimate replacement of humanity by artificial intelligence. In Episode 246 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks for glimmers of hope in emerging signs of human resistance—such as the East Coast dockworkers’ strike, which is demanding a ban on all automation at the ports. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon. (Photo: CounterVortex)

Africa
Chagos

UK to transfer sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius

The UK announced that it will transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, now ruled as the British Indian Ocean Territory, to Mauritius after more than two centuries of control. A joint statement issued by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Mauritian counterpart Pravind Jugnauth hails the accord as an “historic political agreement on the exercise of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.” The UK-US military base on the archipelago’s principal island of Diego Garcia will remain operational for an initial period of 99 years to ensure its continued “vital role in regional and global security.” The UK will be “authorised to exercise the sovereign rights of Mauritius” on Diego Garcia. The decision follows two years of negotiations over the future of the islands between the two nations. (Map: Republic of Mauritius)

Iraq
Tishreen

Iraq: no justice five years after Tishreen protests

Amnesty International highlighted the failure of successive Iraqi governments to ensure justice, truth and reparation for the lethal crackdown on the 2019 Tishreen (October) protests. A new report reveals ongoing impunity five years after nationwide demonstrations that led to hundreds of deaths and disappearances, and thousands of injuries among the protesters. The Tishreen demonstrations, which began Oct. 1, 2019, saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis taking to the streets to demand jobs, improved public services, and an end to government corruption. Amnesty found that they were met with “serious human rights violations and crimes under international law…including the excessive and unlawful use of lethal force by anti-riot police, counterterrorism forces and members of Popular Mobilization Units.” According to Amnesty’s analysis of information from Iraqi courts, out of 2,700 criminal investigations opened, only 10 arrest warrants have been issued against suspected perpetrators, and a mere seven convictions have been handed down. (Photo: JURIST)

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Featured Stories

REVOLUTION 9

In a brief memoir written for Canada’s Skunk magazine, CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis “smoke-ins” —and won a landmark Supreme Court ruling for free speech. The Yippie clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street, the hub for all these activities, has long since succumbed to the gentrification of the East Village, but it survived long enough to provide inspiration to a new generation of radical youth during Occupy Wall Street.

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paramilitaries

CHIQUITA TO PAY FOR PARAMILITARY TERROR IN COLOMBIA

In 2007, Chiquita—one of the world’s largest banana producers—admitted that for years it had been knowingly paying a Colombian terrorist organization to protect its operations in the country. The consequence was predictably violent, resulting in thousands of murders, disappearances, and acts of torture. This week, nearly two decades later, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay upwards of $38 million in damages in the first of multiple waves of wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman explores the factors that drove the multinational to make these payments, the consequences, and the legal impact.

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EZLN

THE NEW ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Uri Gordon of the British anarchist journal Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime radical journalist in New York City, for insight into this change and its significance. Weinberg’s book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has reported widely from South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex. In this interview, he explores new pressures in the encroachment of narco-paramilitaries on their territories as a factor prompting the Zapatistas’ current re-organization, and how it actually represents a further localization and decentralization of the movement.

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Siberia Pipeline

GAS INTRIGUES, ECOLOGY AND THE UKRAINE WAR

Over the past decades, Russia has sought to expand natural gas exports, necessitating construction of pipelines to Europe and China. In addition to profits for the Russian state, fossil fuel exports are a valuable tool for Moscow’s geopolitical ambitions. Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, the economic and political stakes have skyrocketed. Russia”s green movements had previously been able to mobilize effective campaigns, winning concessions on pipeline routes through natural areas. Since 2014, however, they have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny from the Russian government, with organizations branded “undesirable” or declared “foreign agents.” Control of pipelines routes through Ukraine itself are also a goad of the Russian war effort. Eugene Simonov and Jennifer Castner of the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group demonstrate how war fever and militarization threaten resources and ecology across the Russian Federation as well as in Ukraine.

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Ukraine tribunal

UKRAINE’S DIFFICULT PATH TO JUSTICE

This August, Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv hosted a large international conference entitled “Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine: Justice to be Served.” The conference was aimed at reinvigorating global efforts to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine—a crime which cannot be prosecuted under the current jurisdictional regime of the International Criminal Court. Many in Ukraine believe that justice can be served only when a fully-fledged international special tribunal for the crime of aggression is created. However, some of Ukraine’s most powerful allies endorse a “hybrid” tribunal, such as those created for Sierra Leone and Cambodia—which would rely in large part on Ukrainian national law and raise questions about the reach of jurisdiction. Despite optimistic expectations at the beginning of the year, disagreements between Ukraine and its allies have left some wondering: in the end, will justice indeed be served? International law scholars Mariia Lazareva of Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National University and Erik Kucherenko of Oxford provide an analysis for Jurist.

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Gaza attack

GAZA’S SHOCK ATTACK: UNVEILING THE CONTEXT

The shock attack from the Gaza Strip has terrified Israelis, and the government appears to be preparing a massive retaliation. But writing for Israel’s independent +972 Magazine, Haggai Matar insists that the current horror must bring home the overwhelming context. Contrary to what many Israelis are saying, this is not a “unilateral” or “unprovoked” attack. The dread Israelis feel now is a sliver of what Palestinians have experienced daily under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. In recent months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been marching for “democracy and equality” across the country, with many even saying they would refuse military service because of this government’s authoritarian turn. What those protestors and reserve soldiers need to understand—especially now, as many of them announce they will halt their protests to join the new war on Gaza—is that Palestinians have been struggling for those same demands for decades, facing an Israel that to them is already, and has always been, completely authoritarian.

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Crimean Tatars

CRIMEA: UKRAINE’S OTHER NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE

Many would-be “peacemakers” on the political right as well as on the political left have “very helpfully” suggested that Ukraine should give up some territories, which they describe as “Russian-speaking,” in order to appease the aggressor. When these self-styled “peacemakers” lay out exactly how Ukraine should be unmade piece by piece, Crimea is always the first territory mentioned. Crimea is, we are told, the most “Russian speaking” region in Ukraine, and voted for union with Russia in 2014. In an analysis for CounterVortex, Kyiv-born writer and activist Yevgeny Lerner debunks both these claims. Not only was the 2014 referendum illegitimate, but the “Russian speaking” majority in the region was effected through generations of ethnic cleansing of its indigenous inhabitants: the Crimean Tatars. The struggle of the Crimean Tatar people for land recovery and territorial autonomy is now unified with the general struggle of Ukraine for national survival against Russian aggression.

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kharkiv

UKRAINE: DEBUNKING RUSSIA’S WAR PROPAGANDA

In a special analysis for CounterVortex, Bill Weinberg debunks Vladimir Putin’s “de-Nazification” propaganda for his invasion of Ukraine, a paramount example of the ultra-cynical phenomenon of paradoxical fascist pseudo-anti-fascism. The Ukrainian state that he demonizes as “Nazi” has been experiencing a democratic renewal since the Maidan Revolution, as Russia has descended into autocratic dictatorship. Putin’s stated justifications for the Ukraine war are either paranoid delusions or outright lies. His real objectives are to rebuild the Russian Empire, re-establish the Russian dictatorship, and exterminate Ukraine as a cultural and political entity. These are the open aims of Alexander Dugin, the intellectual mastermind of Putin’s revanchist imperial project, and the political heir of Ivan Ilyin, the 20th century theorist of “Russian Fascism.”

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Kosovo-Serbs

RUSSIA’S STRATEGY TO DESTABILIZE THE BALKANS: IT’S WORKING

Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is emboldening Russia’s ally Serbia to press its claims on Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008. As ethnic Serbs launch violent protests in Kosovo, Serbian officials are threatening to launch a campaign to “de-nazify” the Balkans. Meanwhile, leaders of the autonomous Bosnian Serb Republic have announced their intention to secede from Bosnia & Herzegovina. The wars in the states to emerge from the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s were an early harbinger of the current conflagration in Ukraine. Now, in a grim historical cycle, the war in Ukraine could re-ignite the wars in the Balkans. Nicholas Velazquez, in an analysis for Geopolitical Monitor, sees an intentional Moscow design to destabilize the region.

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mariupol ruins

RUSSIAN GENOCIDE OF THE UKRAINIAN NATION

Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine has sparked a strong international reaction, with most states referring to the actions of the Russian army as war crimes. A number of parliaments and heads of state have recognized that yet another international crime—genocide—is being committed by the occupation’s troops. Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, was the first to pass a resolution in March, strongly condemning “acts of genocide
committed on the territory of sovereign Ukraine by the Russian Federation armed forces, together with its allies, at the behest of military commanders being under the direct authority of President Vladimir Putin.” Since then, especially after the infamous Bucha massacre, other parliaments have joined Poland in condemning Russia’s actions as genocide, including those of Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Canada, Czechia and Ireland. However, the International Criminal Court investigation has been slow to examine charges of genocide, and any binding action by the UN against Russia is effectively blocked by its veto on the Security Council. The dilemma is explored by Ukrainian law student Nastya Moyseyenko in a commentary for Jurist.

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Crimea protest

CRIMEA: LEGACY OF THE DEPORTATION

May 18 is commemorated as a memorial day for the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people. On that day in 1944, Joseph Stalin began a mass deportation of the entire population of Crimean Tatars who survived the German occupation of the peninsula. Over 200,000 Tatars, baselessly accused of collaborating with the Nazis, were packed in railroad cattle-cars and sent to remote locations in Central Asia and Siberia. Over 46 percent of the Crimean Tatar people perished during the first two years of the exile due to harsh conditions. Only in 1989 did the USSR condemn the deportation, after which the indigenous people of Crimea started returning to their homeland. The deportation was recognized as a genocide by Ukraine in 2015, and later by Latvia, Lithuania and Canada. In a commentary for Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Olena Makarenko notes that today, thousands of Crimean Tatars have been forced once again to leave the Crimean Peninsula due to the Russian occupation of 2014; hundreds of those who stayed are persecuted.

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witches

APOLOGY TO THE ‘WITCHES’: WHY NOW?

Scotland and Catalonia have issued formal apologies for the burning of thousands of women as “witches” between the 15th and 18th centuries. An apology for a crime committed hundreds of years ago, with the victims and perpetrators alike both long dead, may seem like an empty exercise. However, the contemporary world still sees periodic frenzies of “witchcraft” hysteria, with women and the least powerful in society “tried” and lynched—especially in rural areas of Africa and Asia. Last year, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution sponsored by Cameroon calling for “Elimination of harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks.” New York area neo-pagan practitioner and commentator Carole Linda Gonzalez argues that, in this light, the new apologies are all too relevant.

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