Southeast Asia
Burma

Flooding deepens dire rights situation in Burma

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported that over 570,000 people are displaced in Burma’s Rakhine state due to ongoing conflict between the Myanmar Armed Forces and the rebel Arakan Army, adding to the over 3 million people displaced across the country. Worsening the humanitarian situation, Burma has been hit by severe flooding since early September. Torrential monsoon rains and the remnants of Typhoon Yagi have affected an estimated 1 million people across 70 of the country’s 330 townships, causing significant damage to crops, farmland and livestock. According to UNOCHA, this has further exacerbated the vulnerabilities of conflict-affected communities. Humanitarian responses face significant challenges, including blocked supply routes, communication blackouts, and restricted access to rural areas. (Map: PCL)

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 247 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)