genocide

Iraq

Armenia recognizes Yazidi genocide

Waheed Mandoo Hammo, prime minister of Ezidikhan, the self-declared autonomous homeland of the Yazidi people in northern Iraq, issued a statement expressing his nation's appreciation and gratitude in a letter to Armenia's Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan after the Armenian National Assembly approved a resolution recognizing the Yazidi Genocide of 2014. Armenia is the first UN member state to formally recognize as genocide the mass killings and enslavement of Yazidis by "Islamic State" forces after their seizure of the Sinjar area in August 2014. Hammo's statement recalled the sheltering of Armenian refugees by the Yazidis during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1917. (Photo: Istanbul march commemorating second anniversary of Yazidi Genocide, August 2016, via VOA)

Southeast Asia

Aung San Suu Kyi to face genocide charges?

UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein raised the possibility that Burma's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi could face international genocide charges over the military campaign targeting the Rohingya Muslim people. "For obvious reasons, if you're planning to commit genocide you don't commit it to paper and you don't provide instructions," he told BBC News. "The thresholds for proof are high. But it wouldn't surprise me in the future if a court were to make such a finding on the basis of what we see." (Photo: IRIN)

Southern Cone

Argentina: 48 ex-officers sentenced in ‘dirty war’

An Argentine judicial panel sentenced 29 former officials to life in prison, and 19 to between 8-25 years for murder and torture during the military junta's 1976-1983 "Dirty War." The sentencing concluded a five-year trial and represented Argentina's largest verdict to date for crimes against humanity. Collectively, the 48 defendants were charged with the deaths of 789 victims. The crimes were mostly committed at the notorious Higher Naval Mechanics School (ESMA).

Africa

Zimbabwe: new leader implicated in massacres

The swearing in of Zimbabwe's new President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa is being hailed as opening a new era for the country that had been ruled by Robert Mugabe from independence in 1980 until his dramatic downfall this week. But some are demanding accountability over Mnangagwa's role in ethnic massacres against the country's Ndebele minority people in the 1980s.

Europe

Ratko Mladic guilty in Bosnia genocide

Former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladi? was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, for crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict from 1992 to 1996. Mladi? was found guilty of two counts of genocide and five counts of crimes against humanity, including persecution, extermination, deportation and inhuman acts.

Syria

Russia vetoes Syria chemwar investigation —again

The Russian Federation vetoed a measure before the UN Security Council that would have extended the mandate of a panel investigating the use of chemical weapons in Syria for 30 days. The UNSC had established the Joint Investigative Mechanism with a two-year mandate following the use of chemical weapons in Syria in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Syria

Conviction in Syrian regime war crime —at last

For the first time, after six years of war and escalating atrocities, a member of the Syrian regime’s military has been convicted of a war crime—a low-level soldier now in Sweden as a refugee, and tried in that country’s courts. Yet there have been several convictions of Syrian rebel and ISIS fighters in European courts. This gross imbalance in convictions persists despite the fact that Assad has killed far more Syrians than ISIS or any other “terrorist” outfit in the country.

Iraq

Yazidis: UN resolution on genocide insufficient

Leaders of Ezidikhan, the newly declared Yazidi autonomous zone in northern Iraq, are protesting that a UN Security Council resolution calling for an investigation into possible genocide by ISIS doesn't go far enough. Yazidi authorities are calling for the scope of the investigation to be widened to include non-ISIS actors also complicit in the genocide—presumably including the Turkish state.

Europe

Moscow stonewalls on fate of Holocaust hero

A Moscow district court rejected a lawsuit by relatives of Raoul Wallenberg, seeking to access uncensored documents concerning his death in Soviet captivity. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II. Soviet forces detained Wallenberg in 1945, supposedly for espionage. He was reported to have died two years later in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka Prison.

Africa

Nigeria: Biafra headed for new genocide?

Up to 20 were reported killed when Nigerian army troops raided the home of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The raid follows deadly clashes between Igbo IPOB militants and ethnic Hausa and Fulani residents in several areas across Nigeria's southeast. President Buhari accuses the IPOB of a "deliberate and sinister agenda to provoke soldiers into killing innocent people."

The Amazon

Brazil: massacre of ‘uncontacted’ group reported

Prosecutors in Brazil have opened an investigation after reports that illegal gold-miners on a remote Amazon river massacred members of an "uncontacted" indigenous band. Two gold-miners have been arrested in the case. The killings allegedly took place last month in the Vale do Javari Indigenous Territory, known as the "Uncontacted Frontier," as it shelters more isolated peoples than anywhere else on Earth.